Saul and Patsy

by Charles Baxter

  For a moment what Gordy’s aunt has said does not register on Patsy at all. Then it does. “What feelings were those? And you mean to say,” pointing at the box, “those are Gordy’s clothes?”

  “Not all the clothes he owned. Just some of them. That’s what I’m telling you,” Brenda says, repeating her confusing ironic bow, a failed gesture of respect, followed by a long inhale. Brenda’s eyes are watering now, and the grief no longer seems to be feigned, though perhaps the tears simply follow the irritating effect of the smoke. Patsy wonders what her grief is based on, if that’s what it is, and where she gets it from. How does a person mourn someone like Gordy Himmelman? Out of what tenderness could it possibly arise? You don’t tear your hair and beat your breast after the demise of a kid like that. Do you? Some questions she does not dare to ask.

  And now Saul in his pajamas appears behind Patsy, carrying the cuckoo clock bellows in his left hand. He squeezes it, and a cuckoo’s call rises from his fingers. Life, Patsy thinks, is more dreamlike than any dream. “You’re in your pajamas,” Brenda says. “You sick?”

  “Yes,” Saul says without interest. “I am. You?”

  “No, not me, not yet. Okay, I’ll stay away from you. Right here is my distance. Well, like I was saying to your wife there, those’re some of his clothes.” She points down to the box, before she pulls up the top flap and reaches in. “A few of his shirts, and a couple pair of pants, and socks. I would like for you to have them.” She lifts up a pair of blue jeans for display. Ash from her cigarette falls on them. “A remembrance gift.” Dark stains decorate the jeans where the ash has not touched them.

  “We can’t take them,” Saul says. “They’re Gordy’s.”

  “Not anymore, they ain’t. Sure, you can take them. He was right about your size.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Well, I’m certainly not taking them back,” she says with sudden coldness. “You can do with them what you want, you and your wife, give them away to Goodwill if that’s what you’d like to do, use them as rags. Don’t even have to bring them into the house if you don’t want to, leave ’em out here. I just can’t keep them around,” she barks out, almost as a scream. “But,” she then says, taking a deep breath as if to compose herself, “now that’s taken care of, there’s another thing I was having to ask you about, on a related matter. I haven’t seen the boy’s father in a couple years. Maybe you know. I tried him in Wyoming and then in Colorado. They never heard of him in either place. I’ve tried everywhere. Police have, too. Vanished from the face of the earth, Rufus has. God, that man was a pure worthless piece of worthlessness. Oh, well. There’s the matter of the expense related to the cremation, and now I’ve got to take care of that by myself as the next of kin.” She peers around Patsy toward Saul, in his pajamas. “And I just can’t.”

  “I think I understand,” Saul says. “You want some financial help.” Patsy feels herself physically leaving this scene. She is not going to be here. Let Saul take care of it, she thinks, the money. Let him be the Last American Humanist. Let him exercise his compassion. That’s his sideline. He’s good at that. But she is not going to let him spend their money, including the portion that she herself has earned. Not here. Not now.

  “Not in so many words,” Gordy’s aunt says, putting the soiled blue jeans back into the box, after carefully folding them. “What I’m asking is whether you can help out. A contribution. It’s not like we can start a community-wide fund for him. People don’t care for a suicide. That’s not a cause they empty their pockets for.”

  “How much?” Saul asks, glancing at Patsy, who seems to be gazing off at the horizon, having somehow managed strategically to space out. She doesn’t seem to be here anymore. No help from her, the professional loan officer. Not a dime for the dead boy’s tribute.

  “Whatever you can spare,” Brenda half-whispers. “For the cremation. Or the box?”

  “All right,” he whispers back, in sympathy. “You take a check?”

  “Whatever you can spare,” Brenda repeats, her eyes filling with tears. “For that poor boy.”

  “Make sure it’s your checkbook, honey,” Patsy says, awakening. “Not the joint one.”

  “Whatever you can spare. For that poor boy,” Patsy imitates late that night, in the living room. She needs to be callous. A bit of insensitivity allows her to breathe. She feels, and has for most of the afternoon, as if she had been fitted with a whalebone corset. She needs the relief of standoffishness from the harms that pity leaves on her spirit. “Good god, what a performance. And this is—”

  “They’re not even going to have a funeral, Patsy. They just need a box or something to bury Gordy in. That’s all.”

  “Listen to me.” They’re both sitting on the floor, surrounded by a heap of soiled Gordy-clothing. There are clothes for warm and cold seasons. Flannel shirts, underwear, socks, jeans, corduroys—a mess of dirty stinking fraying fabrics. During the summer the boy had carried with him an odor of hay and old cheese. As the weather turned colder, his aromas mutated and became furry. The December-and-January Gordy had given off the scent of the dogs he probably slept with, and here were the clothes from those months, smelling as if they had come straight from the Humane Society.

  She has raised her hand to his shoulder. It rests there a moment and then rises to his face. “You’re not guilty of anything, sweetie. You did nothing wrong. And what happened yesterday here was shocking, and we have every right to be shocked. . . .”

  “Oh, do you think so?” Saul asks. “I think that adults aren’t shocked. They pretend to be shocked, but they aren’t, not really. It’s a pose.”

  “You weren’t shocked? What would it have taken yesterday to shock you?”

  “Something else. I wasn’t shocked,” Saul insists, running his hands through the pockets of Gordy Himmelman’s trousers. “What were we expecting all those months, anyway? That he would eventually go away? We had gotten accustomed to him. No, yesterday I felt something else.”

  “Okay.”

  He searches her face before speaking. “Oh, I felt surprise, maybe, but that’s different. Here’s a dopey kid whose aunt has a gun and who stands and stands in our front yard without ever telling us what he wanted from us. And, by the way, why were you shocked? You’re the person who worked up the conviction that he was not like us, a nonhuman. That’s the height of sophistication, if you ask me, calling him a nonperson. That was really worldly of you. That was positively European.”

  “Okay, Saul,” Patsy says. “Before we have a real fight, let me ask you a question. Between grief and indifference, what is there? There isn’t anything. Show me the typical half-sob and maybe I’ll sort of believe you.”

  “Actually, it’s called sadness, Patsy. In English, that’s the word they have available between grief and indifference. And someday I’ll show you a half-sob. Just not now.” He puts his hands inside another pair of the boy’s pockets and removes some small torn bits of paper. “Hey, Patsy, you just don’t feel it. Modest grief is not there for you. You’re more a creature of black and white. What’s this?”

  The papers are nested, one inside the other, like puzzle parts. They seem to have been sections of a larger sheet of paper that has been ripped inexpertly. Saul puts them down on the floor in an attempt to reassemble them, five small pieces that together form a blue-lined page of school notebook paper, three punched holes on the left side. Outdoors, the wind starts up, and the lights flicker, but only for a moment. The papers tremble on the floor. They appear to be animated by the breathing of the world soul. Something is scrawled on them, and Saul bends down to make out the phrases, Gordy’s modest scrawled leavings.

  She did it

  they toad the car

  mad in america!!!!

  “I taught him to write, so he could write this,” Saul says. “I taught him language, so he could curse. I wonder what this ‘she did it’ business is all about.” He turns the papers over and reassembles them. On the reverse side the
re are only four words.

  no fear

  exxxtrabila

  tyemeszeemer

  “Oh, right. No fear.” Saul shrugs. “And ‘exxxtrabila’—where d’you suppose he learned that word?”

  The now-working cuckoo clock ticks from the wall. Patsy looks at the paper. “From the other polyglots, that’s who. He watched a lot of TV. No real clues here, though,” she says. “The kid didn’t have a lick of sense.”

  “You know what I think?” Saul asks. His face takes on an animated stare. “I think the aunt was abusing him. That Brenda Bagley woman. That’s what ‘she did it’ means. She was abusing him. So he shot himself. Mystery solved.”

  “Come on, Saul. Let’s not do the abuse narrative.” Just then, the phone rings. It is the twentieth call of the day, probably another kind friend offering help. Saul gets up to answer it.

  “Hi,” the voice says. “It’s Gordy. How’re you doin’?” The voice does not sound at all like Gordy but like a grown man imitating a boy.

  “Just fine, Gordy,” Saul replies. “And how’re you?”

  “You’re lying,” the voice says. “You’re not fine at all.”

  “This isn’t Gordy. Who am I talking to? Who is this?”

  “Yes, it is. I just learned German. They teach all the dead buggers German. It’s the universal language back here. You have to learn German in the afterlife. Didn’t you know that? You can learn it here in a few hours.” The voice laughs, with its bizarre inflections. “It’s real easy learning German when you’re dead because it’s like a mind-thing that happens. It’s like boom, and then you speak it. See, German solved all my problems.” The speaker is laughing heartily. “You’ll learn it, too, when you’re dead. Which could be any time now.”

  Ah, Saul thinks, a militia guy, a trailer-park fascist.

  “You know,” Saul says, “it’s late, my man, and I’m tired. It’s been a long day, and I think I’ll hang up on you now.”

  “Don’t you hang up on me, you fucking Jew. With that boy’s blood on your dirty Jew hands, you—”

  “Wow,” Saul says, putting the receiver down. “Wow, wow, wow.” He stands for a moment, trying to find some object on which to rest his gaze. At last he sees Patsy and studies her. His hand is trembling with anger. “Maybe,” he says, “we should get a gun ourselves.”

  “Shocked?” Patsy asks, gazing back at him.

  Late that night Patsy discovers that she is alone in bed. When her legs sweep across the sheeted mattress, nothing meets them but cotton and air. Where is Saul this time? An unpleasant, ill-meaning summer wind blows against the house, causing the bedsheet to ruffle and the Chapstick to roll off Saul’s dresser. On the wall, the photograph of Patsy’s parents trembles in time to the rattles of the windowframes. Nothing in this house seems to be built solidly, to be able to withstand the onrushes of fate and wind, except Patsy. Saul has a tendency to be blown over, wherever he is. Where is he?

  Walking down the hall past Mary Esther’s room, she finds him hunched over in the spare bedroom. He is bent over his desk. Grit touches the bottoms of Patsy’s bare feet. When she glances down, she sees that he is reading some story or other by Mishima.

  “Come to bed, Saul,” Patsy orders him. “Come to bed, my love.”

  She takes his hand with one of her hands and clicks off the desk lamp with the other. She draws him back to the bedroom. “No, wait a minute,” she says. “Brush your teeth first. I want to make love to you after you’ve brushed your teeth. I like your mouth when it tastes of toothpaste.”

  Saul shuffles into the bathroom, and Patsy follows him, standing behind him with her head on his back as he raises the toothpaste tube, unscrews the cap, and covers the toothbrush with the candied goo, the morning-taste of it. She rubs the flat of her hands over his chest, one of her predictably effective arousal techniques, time-tested. Then she lowers her hand into his pajamas and takes hold of him, a familiar gesture, almost by rote, this preparatory ritual, their cure for the rest of the world. As he brushes his teeth, she feels him slowly becoming hard. The taming of passion into married ceremony has a sweet-and-sour taste for her, passion made manageable and harmless and almost comic, the forest fire reduced to the size of a Franklin stove. Whatever the great passions might be, they are not exemplified by married couples, who have nothing but their day-long familiarities and private languages and their ordinary love to bind them together. The wind outside continues to rattle the windowframes, and now the telephone is ringing again, senselessly. With Patsy’s hand still holding on to him, Saul rinses his mouth out, puts the toothbrush away, and carefully screws the cap back onto the toothpaste tube. Then he turns around and kisses her, a kiss full of desperate friendliness and unsurprise, same old tongue, same old teeth. Saul is willfully half-smiling as he kisses Patsy. It is as if she has caught him in an affair, and now something about themselves as a couple has to be proved, or proved again.

  She can almost always make him forget himself and remember her. She has been naked for him so often by now that nakedness has nearly lost its original meaning between the two of them. Sure enough, his mouth tastes of toothpaste. Sure enough, his mouth fits on hers in the usual way. The taste, on top of the Saul-taste, is amusingly discordant, like a bear that has been taught to ride a bicycle and use mouthwash, but the domesticity of it energizes her because he has tamed himself for her. He has renounced being someone else for being her husband, and that renunciation makes up for his anger and his sentimentality. So in addition to her usual nakedness, she will be more naked to him than usual, a disavowal to the indifference they both felt for each other this morning and which (she has kept this secret from him) has shadowed her all day like a bad, unforgettable, and prophetic dream of the death of love between them. This dreadful, sickly, mean-spirited day, one of the worst of her life—it has to be forgotten, it has to be purged.

  She struggles tonight to demonstrate more desire than she actually feels just to cleanse the air, but in that struggle she achieves some measure of the craving she has not had access to for weeks. Pretending to have a missing emotion, sometimes you actually get it. A good actor can evoke the nonexistent. She wills herself to open herself to Saul in ways that feel new to her, and through the fog of his preoccupations, at last he notices: good God, what is she doing? Is she really doing that? Saul, for his part, can’t quite believe how slithery and inviting and emotionally naked she is making herself. She is working a purgation, first on herself, and then on him, snaking her way over him and under him, doing a feverish humming thing for him until, as the windows continue to rattle from the stage-managed wind, at last they both come together within a few seconds of each other, and a minute or so later, still looking at the ceiling, Saul thinks: Maybe we should get a dog, you know, we could use a dog, and Patsy thinks: That was it, that time, I’m going to be pregnant again, a boy, I just know it.

  Twelve

  Gordy hadn’t been suicidal. Still, he had committed suicide. The logic of this confounded everybody.

  The superintendent of schools, Floyd Vermilya, called a meeting of faculty and concerned parents and family members one week after Gordy’s death. The meeting was held in the high school auditorium on a Tuesday night. The season being summer, the hallways smelled of floor cleanser, and no one seemed to know how to get all the proper lights directed to the podium on the stage—Harry Bell, the custodial engineer, was on a fishing trip up north—with the result that Superintendent Vermilya, a pumpkin-faced overweight man with a buzzcut and slit-lens reading glasses perched at the tip of his nose, stood speaking to everyone in semidarkness, as did the psychiatric social worker who had been hired to consult and to give advice about the grieving process. The lights were shining on the rear of the auditorium stage, but the superintendent and the social worker by necessity stood in the front, and the effect was that of a poorly rehearsed show. They were probably kind people who meant well. The problem was, Saul thought, there was no grieving because the grief had no source or origin, as g
rief must. They were disposing of a boy whom nobody liked, who had already disposed of himself. Good intentions didn’t mean much in a struggle with emptiness.

  Patsy, carrying Mary Esther, estimated the crowd at about seventy, but no one except Saul seemed particularly sorrow-stricken, and Saul’s mournfulness was freakish; it was not clearly understood by anyone, including Saul. Everyone else had shown up out of curiosity or dutiful-ness. Gordy Himmelman hadn’t made much of an impression on any of his other teachers, Saul discovered, and when he had, the impressions were unfavorable. He had drifted, unloved and unsought, down the birth canal out of the womb, and then, in school, he had drifted from kindergarten onward and upward to the more challenging grades, where he had made his mark by a more accelerated drift toward failure, the boy being mostly friendless and frictionless, slipping and sliding toward his own death, and hostile to those who wanted to help him. Then he destroyed himself, and here, now, were the undestroyed, convening to talk.

  After stepping up to the ill-lighted podium, the superintendent said that he had spoken to both of the Bernsteins, Saul and his wonderful wife, Patsy, who had witnessed this terrible event, and he had spoken to Gordy Himmelman’s guardian and next of kin, his aunt, Brenda Bagley, who had owned the gun in question. The sheriff’s office had investigated, and the medical examiner was doing an autopsy to check for a possible drug or alcohol component and to rule out any other possible contributing medical causes. Gordy’s behavior had been observed to be erratic. The boy had been a behavioral problem, certainly, with a learning disability, but he was not particularly exceptional in this regard. So far no one, it appeared, was to blame. Besides, he was a dropout from school. “It was extremely fortunate,” the superintendent said, underlining certain phrases by lowering his voice an octave, “that no one else was hurt.” Then he stifled a yawn.