Saul and Patsy

by Charles Baxter

  “He was a strange boy,” Brenda Bagley said.

  Patsy changed Mary Esther’s diaper in the car, in the front seat, throwing the old diaper into a baggie and tying it closed. Then she put her daughter into the child seat in the back, and after starting the car, she turned on the radio and headed home. Because the radio was broken, no sounds came out of it.

  How was it? You weren’t in there for very long.

  Well, Patsy thought, under her breath, you know how it was, you have your nerve, you lived there.

  I was just kinda wondering what you thought of it.

  It bothered me, Patsy thought. I couldn’t breathe in there, the big TV and the cigarette smoke and everything.

  I couldn’t breathe in there, either. How’d you like the

  walls? Didja like the pictures I put up?

  They were okay. You must’ve read a lot of comic books. But I was surprised: no computers. No computer games. I guess your aunt could never afford one. Gordy, why did you kill yourself with that gun? In our yard? While we were looking? Would you just please explain that to me? I really, really need to know the answers to those questions. If you’re going to hang around with us, you could at least do me the favor of telling me why you did all that. To yourself. And to us.

  But no new words descended into her brain, emerging from the backseat, where it was now very quiet, with Mary Esther sleeping. The car advanced through pool after pool of buttery light cast from the lamp posts, and Patsy took a route circling the downtown area. She felt a vague movement in her uterus and also noticed that she was feeling distinct emotions, as if they were hands slipping out of the gloves that usually held them. She passed by a green sign on the outskirts announcing Five Oaks as a sister city of Nikone, Japan, and of Tübingen, Germany. But those cities were ancient and historically identifiable, and this one had almost no history at all and very few identifying marks. It was on the map, but in no other respect was it on the map. Patsy tightened her hold on the steering wheel. The local pride in anonymity ate away at everything. It devoured lives and turned the inhabitants into ghosts both before and then after their deaths. Resignation was the great local spiritual specialty, resignation and a fleeting recklessness, a feverishly hypnotic and prideful death-in-life. All the Himmel kids were acute cultural critics, she decided. They had a point. If the city of Five Oaks had any true siblings, they wouldn’t have names like Rheims or Pisa. They would be the close relatives with names like Terre Haute or Duluth or Flint or Grand Forks or Davenport or Burlington or Scranton or Kenosha—cities you had heard of but couldn’t quite picture, cities that called nothing in particular to mind except for an eagerness to be larger and more prosperous than they were, and an all-consuming late-stage boosterism that was mostly insecurity and worry masked by bluster. The wolves were never far from the door in cities like these, and sometimes the wolves got in. The churches tried, with varying success, to keep people calm when the members of the congregation felt like screaming. Five Oaks would always be the sort of place you had to apologize for whenever visitors from out of town—from larger towns, real cities—arrived at the airport on their little turboprop commuter planes, shaken up and curious about what had brought them there.

  Or else: you lived here for years and you found you liked it, and you stopped apologizing, and visitors noticed that, too.

  They had to get out before they were destroyed. She would not let her son be born in a place like this. Plans were being hatched to turn Saul into a scapegoat. She would get Theo and Emmy out of here before desperation took hold of them, desperation and alligator malice, meanness and the liquefaction of the soul.

  Sooner or later, wandering is done.

  When she arrived at the house, she carried the sleeping Emmy over one shoulder and the diaper-bag over the other into the foyer. She noticed a black BMW parked in front. What was it doing here? Her arms and shoulders were getting muscular and her biceps in particular were swelling from the effort of carrying Emmy and the stroller around. The minute she came inside, she said, “Saul! The scapegoating has started! We have to move! We have to move out of this place!” She smiled at herself as she prepared herself to sing—what was it?—the Animals, a tragically hip band before it was tragically hip to be tragically hip, but softly, so as not to wake Emmy. “We gotta get out of this place! If it’s the last thing we ever do!”

  From the kitchen came Saul, accompanied by the most handsome man she had ever seen in real life, Saul’s brother, Howie, who gave Patsy a raised-eyebrow greeting and an all-purpose wave that was more a shrug than a genuine wave. Being beautiful, he could be a minimalist in his gestures. Big hugs were too much trouble, too much strain on the equipment, and were uncool, besides, especially with a lady carrying a toddler. A surprise visit! Well, that was Howie’s style, to appear without an invitation and to leave at about the time you had become used to him and felt a bit of warmth toward him. You fell for him, and he’d be out of there. He had had a ban on intimacy—well, maybe he had changed. But this was his way of enforcing the ban, these surprises, as if he lived across town and could drop in for coffee now and then.

  Howie was wearing a perfectly tailored shirt and trousers, rather colorless, so that he appeared to mimic the monotextured heroes in 1940s films—the young John Garfield, only better-looking in the post-humanist style. He had left his shoes at the door, and for some reason Patsy noticed the high arch of his foot inside the sock.

  The brothers walked together in a similar style of locomotion, and though Howie was the handsome one with jaw-dropping good looks, Saul was the more lovable, the man with whom you’d want to spend your life. For Howie’s beauty you would pay the price of a lifetime of sorrow, and all the varieties of rage. Eventually you would have to go to church to get rid of him.

  “Oh, Howie,” she said, and kissed him. “So that was your BMW. What a nice surprise. Sorry you caught me singing.”

  “Patsy.” He kissed her back. Cool professional lips. A slight, low-voltage tingling. “Love, you can sing anytime.”

  Sixteen

  Saul had been working at his desk, correcting student assignments and watching the sky for signs of the four horsemen of the apocalypse when a black BMW pulled into the driveway. Its headlights went dark; the smooth, muffled engine quieted. Saul did not move, and the driver did not get out of the car. Observing the bug-spattered headlights and grille, and the stationary, immobilized driver, half-hidden behind the tinted windows in the gathering dusk, Saul made a mental checklist:

  The unannounced visitor was certainly Howie, his brother. In one of his previous phone calls, Howie had proudly mentioned his black BMW, which he called “The Avenger.” No one around here had a car like that, and certainly not with (Saul now noticed) California plates.

  Howie hadn’t called ahead, nor had he in any way intimated that he would be dropping in. He had always favored surprise visits. For this one, he would have had to drive about 1,700 miles, give or take a few hundred here or there, from Palo Alto to Five Oaks. Such a trip was a feat of determination and willpower in the service of a strange, perhaps insanely prolonged, spontaneity. The distance and the effort involved in crossing it did not mean that Howie’s stay would be a lengthy one. He might be gone by tomorrow afternoon.

  He would, no doubt, surprise in other ways as well. Howie always had multiple astonishments ready for whatever audience he could command. He liked lifting people up and then keeping them off balance, using his charm as a weapon, part of his latter-day Gatsbyish acrobat approach to things.

  How had he found Saul and Patsy’s new residence? He just had. Bystanders tended to give information willingly, greedily, to Howie. The charm, the charisma, did the trick every time.

  First Gordy Himmelman’s death this past summer, and now this.

  No, that was wrong: he loved his brother.

  Nevertheless.

  Saul still wasn’t moving. He wouldn’t budge. No budging, not a bit of it. He wasn’t going to move until Howie did. As the gue
st, Howie was supposed to get out of the car and ring the doorbell before the noises of greeting fell on him like so much rain.

  They hadn’t said a word to each other, and already they had a standoff. Because Halloween was three nights away, Saul half-expected Howie to remove himself from the BMW dressed in a costume—that of an ordinary man, a role he had never successfully played. But no: he probably wouldn’t get out of his trophy car until Saul came running downstairs, came charging out the front door, his arms wide, his face joyously radiant with the startled welcome, the glee, the sheer human pleasure of being in his brother’s company again after so long an absence, now that Howie had deigned to visit without warning.

  Maybe he, Saul, should dress up in a costume himself, the Gordy Himmelman clothes piled on the floor in his closet. That would surprise Howie.

  But no. That, Saul thought, was what he—Saul—would not do. He would not rush downstairs. He would not dress up, or down. He wouldn’t give his brother the satisfaction.

  Half of any manipulative strategy had to do with how you arrived and how you departed.

  The German motor ticked quietly as it cooled. This standoff was like several others the two brothers had had. Howie wasn’t passive so much as immobile, a Don Juan of stillness: he liked everyone to come to him so that he might gain the advantage of not making the first move. This was the dubious legacy of a childhood marked by illness and indisposition and the death of a parent. He had been born one month premature, a blue baby—incubated—and as an infant he was jaundiced and scrawny and tearful. One of Saul’s first memories was of his mother carrying the misbegotten Howie around the house on a pale-blue goosedown pillow, as if any sudden move might break him. Soon after his birth, Howie had proved to be allergic to breast milk—the metaphoric implications of this were not lost on him as an adult—and he continued to be lactose intolerant. He had suffered from anemia, earaches, uncommon food and substance allergies (carpeting made him sneeze, cats made him choke, he might die if he ate a peanut, and he could not mow a lawn), and repeated bouts of childhood flu and bronchial troubles had kept him in bed for weeks. He had had multiple strep infections and one incidence in middle school of rheumatic fever. In high school he came down with pneumonia and missed classes for a month.

  “Be careful of Howie,” his mother always used to say to Saul. “He’s very fragile.”

  After their father’s death—Howie said he could hardly remember him (Saul doubted this) and would never speak of him—Delia seemed to direct the few motherly concerns she had toward Howie in the furtherance of his well-being. Saul she left alone. With Saul, it was hands-off anarcho-laissez-faire parenting all the way. She treated Saul like a wonderful, charming guest or a performer in a rather dull show. But with Howie, the slightest sign of postnasal drip could mean another desperate search of The Merck Manual for symptoms, along with worried consulations with the long-suffering pediatrician, Dr. Greene. Howie had really made his illnesses work. Every time Howie got sick, he somehow came out, personally, in the profit column.

  Sickly children with distant or absent parents have a tendency to become unattractive adolescents, Saul believed: bent-over, whining selfpitiers, autoerotic virtuosi of hypochondria. Unable to make conversation, they give themselves the attention and care they receive from no one else. But something had turned the other way with Howie. Saul watched with disbelief as his little brother gradually acquired a glow from some mysterious source, a light in his eyes that was somehow related to the animal kingdom. The growth hormones that in other boys produced acne, simian proportions, quick tempers, and cantaloupe-shaped heads, produced in Howie an eerie grace and beauty. From his years of illness he also acquired an inner quiet and watchfulness and a finely honed skill at manipulation.

  He had large, liquid eyes—now like a doe, now like an owl.

  In high school, Howie had led around a long trail of girlfriends, not to mention a host of bewildered guys who were friends of his but who also seemed to have fallen under his spell. Saul suspected that his brother would sleep with anything as long as it was beautiful. Howie had become a beauty snob, though he practiced secrecy about his love interests and never explained where he was going or whom he was seeing in his nocturnal prowlings. But he had also become rugged, given to endurance sports like rock climbing and marathon racing and soccer. He fought his sickliness with everything he had, and in the process had evolved into a man in whom contradictory male and female traits were mixed equally, producing a sleek, androgynous charm. He had a weakness for mirrors and stood before them for long periods when he thought no one else was observing him, studying the tough, beautiful mystery of himself.

  Watching Howie grow into manhood was like reading two biographies, one of Teddy Roosevelt and the other of Greta Garbo, going back and forth between the two, getting the personalities mixed up.

  Their father had died of a heart attack while driving to work the year when Howie was eight years old and Saul ten. In the Baltimore funeral home, following the memorial service, there transpired a scene that Saul would always remember whenever he thought of Howie. Howie had been seated on a metal folding chair in the corner, behind a table where the two Bunn-o-Matic coffeemakers were positioned, along with the cream, the sugar, and the Styrofoam cups. Friends and acquaintances of their father milled around the room, bending down to Delia and Saul to offer consolation. Howie refused to talk to anyone. With a manly and stoical expression on his face, Howie sat quietly there in the corner, the tears streaming down his cheeks, unsociable in his grief. He had loved his father, whose death was, Saul thought, a permanent injury for which Howie would never have words. The luster had simply gone out of everything. Later, in the house, when more friends of their parents dropped by, Howie found another corner to sit in, where he would cry inconsolably, then wipe his eyes and stand up and make brave conversation and eat cookies, before sitting down in his corner to cry, inconsolably, again.

  Delia never remarried—out of loyalty, Saul thought, not to her late husband but to Howie.

  Saul and Howie had tried some brother-to-brother male bonding once a few years ago on a long-distance bicycle trip. They had set off from Baltimore and had made it as far as Chicago. They did not speak much about personal matters during their evenings together: each had brought several books to ward off that possibility. They discussed the route, their provisions, the locations where they would camp or the motels where they would stay. Or they would confer about the bicycles, the condition of the gears and the tires.

  Saul had been in charge of the maps, because he claimed he was good at maps. Howie was apathetic about their route. They stayed on back roads day after day and, after three weeks had passed, made their way carefully past the tangle of outlying Chicago neighborhoods toward Lake Michigan, which Howie had never seen. They had been bicycling in the northwest side of the city, avoiding traffic in the early morning, weaving their way through Greektown and heading for Lincoln Park, when Howie braked too suddenly, swerved, and hit the curb in front of a Greek restaurant, the Acropolis. He went flying over the handlebars and landed on the sidewalk, his belongings—which had broken loose from his pack—scattered around him.

  Saul was horrified. Be careful of Howie. He’s very fragile.

  Howie stood up quickly, seemingly unhurt, and out of relief at seeing that his brother was still in one piece, Saul began to laugh. His laughter provoked Howie to fury. Enraged, he danced a little dance of humiliation and wrath on the sidewalk before he stomped a plastic water container, his baseball cap, his Robocop wraparound sunglasses, and his uncapped tube of sunblock, which squirted orgasmically over the pavement. Saul only laughed harder, knowing he shouldn’t but unable to stop. As he did, Howie walked over to Saul and waited for him to control himself. Howie’s face was bright red.

  “Someday in the future we can laugh about this,” Howie said, “but right now I swear to God that if you keep laughing, I’m going to fucking kill you.”

  Saul composed himself, wiped the te
ars off his face, and helped Howie collect his things. From the experience he learned two facts about his brother and himself: first, that Howie feared being the object of ridicule—lethally—especially in moments of vulnerability; and, second, that he himself feared Howie’s ire at such moments, not for himself but for his brother’s sake. He had seen a pool of bitter sediment in Howie’s eyes, which spoke of old grievances and all the memories of illnesses that had brought forth both welcome and unwelcome responses.

  They found an old hotel near Lincoln Park to stay in—they would be flying home in two days and would ship the bicycles back—and after taking showers they walked around the Loop, making their way down to the Art Institute to see the Seurats. That evening, when the weather was still humid and unsettled, they strolled through Lincoln Park. There were crowds of other young people like themselves, walking and talking and eyeing one another. Within sight of the lake, they were standing near a water fountain when an attractive young woman wearing jeans and a Chicago Cubs T-shirt and holding a sketch pad began speaking to Howie. Howie carried with him a wounded look that women apparently found irresistible. Addressing the sky in a tone of cool, hip indifference, she remarked on the weather, and Saul’s brother said something in return, equally cool and hip, speaking of the clouds in a way that suggested that he, too, was indifferent to the weather, being from out of town and not subject to these particular clouds. She asked where he lived and he told her. Baltimore! she said, with admiration, touching Howie’s arm. He had bicycled here? Amazing. She had never been to Baltimore. No? Well, the row houses, he said, came right down to the water in the harbor. Where are you staying? she asked. Howie named the hotel. They introduced themselves: Howie, Voltaine. Yes, the name: her parents had been hippies in Vancouver; she herself was a Canadian citizen, and when she was a girl her mother had sung “Mellow Yellow” to her and her sister Saffron night after night, year after year, as a lullaby. Now she was a student here in Chicago at the Art Institute. Howie didn’t say anything about his occupations or his age; it didn’t seem necessary. Nor did he bother to introduce his brother. Saul was standing a few feet away, lost in bemusement and pride in his brother’s social skills, though feeling like an encumbrance himself. In disbelief, from his safe distance, Saul detected Chanel No. 5 emanating from Voltaine, an expensive scent his mother sometimes wore when she hadn’t applied the mustard gas. Voltaine, for some reason, hadn’t noticed him. Girls didn’t turn their heads when Saul walked past. Howie was the one who got them riled up and confused. Instead of introducing himself, Saul just watched his brother and this woman, and he took deep breaths of Voltaine’s perfume. Howie had given Saul a semidetached look, as if something was on the tip of his tongue that he would not say. Voltaine and Howie proceeded to sit down on a bench quite close to each other, and as the light faded, she removed the cover of her sketch pad and outlined his face on paper using pencil and charcoal, including in her drawing the scrapes on his forehead from his bicycle accident. After ten minutes of small talk between the two, Howie finally got around to pointing toward Saul, who smiled, nodded, and belatedly shook hands with Voltaine. He hadn’t been able to decide whether he should return to the hotel or lurk in the middle distance. Voltaine continued to pencil in details of Howie on her sketch pad, but by then it was getting so dark that Saul couldn’t make out what his brother looked like in Voltaine’s version of him.