Saul and Patsy

by Charles Baxter

  Part Four

  Twenty-five

  At certain times, particularly on the days when she was working at the Baltimore food bank—it didn’t take much more than a certain cast of light in the office or the connected warehouse to cause her to be plunged into these moments of thoughtfulness—Delia would involuntarily remember her late husband, Saul and Howie’s father, and a picture of him would rise up in her mind, usually a random mental snapshot in which her husband was getting dressed for work, knotting his tie or making an effort to get the lint off his suit before he kissed her goodbye and left the house for the firm where he labored as a patent lawyer, and at such moments it occurred to her that now, twenty years after his death, she thought of him more than she ever had when they were married, a marriage that at the time had felt more like a business arrangement than a real marriage, lacking as it did much of any real passion on either side, or so she thought. They were both ready to get married when they had met as seniors at the university and a year later had married each other out of convenience more than anything else, though she had pretended to be crazy about him with her friends and family for the sake of appearances, and because she thought she should.

  With many women she knew, especially the divorcées, the memory of the husband just faded out through an act of will. Men left behind their objects; women left behind the memory of their looks.

  But with Delia the process had been different. You could sometimes love someone, as it turned out, after that person was gone, though not before. One of life’s larger ironies, its habit of making what was absent, visible. That was what had happened to her, and this odd recognition had followed lately from the fling she had had with that boy, the young man who had worked on her yard. Perhaps this paradox was commonplace, but she doubted it. The death, the absence of her husband, sweetened the memory of the life. Sweetened it almost intolerably. In life her husband might have been, well, exasperating and bound by habit and, on occasion, repulsive: now and then he would rub his scalp, for example, then examine his fingertips for dandruff, and, if there happened to be any dandruff there near the fingernails, he would, if he thought no one was watching, slyly slip the fingertips close to his nose, for a smell. Awful. In life, it was a disgusting habit. But now, long after his death, picturing it, Delia felt tender toward it, and him. It pierced her. The gesture made her see the child in him, which, all day long, he was at pains to conceal.

  Another odd feature of her long-dead husband’s remnants, her memory of him, was that whenever she thought of him, her thoughts were accompanied by no name. In death he had seemingly lost the name he had had in life. He had turned into a man, into him, into the images she possessed of him, and his smells, and his gestures, his curiosities as a human being and as her companion, and the ways—pokey and tentative—he had touched her as a lover and husband who, truth be told, did not linger much over the niceties but who sometimes cooked for her and brought her breakfast in bed on Sunday mornings, all these images and smells added up to the memory of the man she had married and had known. She recognized that he had been utterly faithful to her because women as a gender and group and class simply did not occupy his thoughts very much. Somehow, you could detect his obliviousness to other women just by looking at him—he did not have a roving eye. As an adult man, his thoughts had turned completely to the schematics of providing for her and their two children, without, really, much conversation at the dinner table except for expediencies and plans, and then, one day, he was gone, before the conversations might really have started. He wanted, more than anything else, to be a utility-husband and a professional at business, and then he was professionally dead, slumped over the steering wheel, blocking traffic. His life had appeared to have had no purpose except as a husband and father and a lawyer. Nevertheless, he had helped to ease Delia through this life by being her companion and being, in his way, considerate and thoughtful. Now, in death, he had lost his name, though she said it from time to time when she was by herself, mostly in order to preserve it, so that someone here on Earth would still say it: Norman. A plain old name. But he wasn’t Norman anymore. He was those images he had left behind, and their accompanying gestures, and the associated scents, and he was also the father of the two children he had, with her, helped to bring into the world. He had become real once he became imaginary.

  Working in the food bank, she wondered sometimes what it felt like to have a coronary thrombosis, whether you even knew what had hit you before you were out of this life, gone.

  She had loved, in a very different manner, having an adolescent boy lover because now she knew what that experience was like to go through, once you were a full-grown adult. She had gotten it out of her system (again). Really, the whole experience had been an exercise in nostalgia, at being in high school one more time, and being desired. And loved, a little. It was a wonder to her that the boy had wanted her at all, even for a few weeks. The experience had left a few traces for which she was grateful—it was as if life had arranged something like a cookout for her at the top of a mountain—but now, back to her normal routines, working during the day and going back to the house at night and fixing dinner for herself and pouring her nightly glass of Merlot, she was newly reconciled, first, to herself, and, second, to the idea that she might meet someone else, someone more her age, or she might not, ever, and anyway the meeting or not-meeting would not make much of a difference, one way or another. She was through with the belief that having a relationship, or relationships generally, would in any way validate her life. She liked living alone.

  She had wanted to convey this truth to her son Saul. She didn’t feel jealous of Patsy, but she just didn’t appreciate the way they had been married to each other and still were married to each other. He was—for this behavior of his there was an old word that no one used anymore—uxorious. They were always touching each other and telling each other how much they loved each other, and they did this routine in public, and it got tiresome after a while. Delia especially didn’t like to see her son doting over his wife. She would have liked it better if they had been able to take their love for each other for granted, as if it were permanent and assured, and, similarly, she would have liked it if he could keep some of his emotions to himself. He should make certain adult assumptions, as everyone did, and then get on with things.

  Delia had never heard a man say “I love you” as often as Saul said it to his wife, in front of her, Delia—in front of everybody. Delia supposed that some women liked that. They became used to the sweet talk and expected it as if it were their birthright. But you didn’t cast out that phrase in public where everyone could hear it.

  Saul doted on his wife, he doted on their children, he had doted over that boy who shot himself, and he was a sentimentalist, but that was how he was, how he always had been, ever since his father had died. He was a doter. He doted. How close this was to “dotage”! The etymology of the words—Delia as a Scrabble player took pride in her knowledge of words—must be related. She would look it up. She blamed herself for the way Saul had turned out. She had told him to be careful of his baby brother, to take care of him, noting his fragility; and some element had changed in Saul thereafter. He had become, in a sense that was difficult to pinpoint, a caretaker. He took care of things. A person shouldn’t live like that. Caretakers were servants.

  Well, Delia thought, laughing inwardly as she did an inventory of cartons of soup, she should talk. He came by it honestly. If only he would leave that dreadful little city snuggled away in Michigan! But he seemed to like it. Still, it was no place for a Jew; big cities had all the advantages. The doctors were more expert, the concerts had more adventurous programs, the friends conversed more freely, and you could get a few of the amenities, including the New York Times delivered to your doorstep every morning—you didn’t go around in a cloud of unknowing.

  And then Delia let her thoughts drift to her other son, to Howie, who had moved, first to Oakland and then to Moraga and then to Berkeley and then ba
ck to Oakland, and who seemed, just now, to have a steady job, working, as he said, “in retail,” though he still occasionally called her and asked for a bit of money (he called these loans “investments”), the scamp, and because Delia liked having a purpose in Howie’s life, she could never refuse him. He had grown used to having money around and missed it terribly when it was no longer there. It wouldn’t end well, Delia feared, it wouldn’t end well at all, but once they had emerged into their own lives, your children’s fragility was theirs and not yours. Handsome Howie, her bankrupt baby. Who was so attractive that his looks had been his fate in life but who seemed to love . . . well, anyone? Who knew?

  The thought of her younger son disturbed her, so she called up images of her grandchildren, Mary Esther, and the baby, Theo, who had been born with a handsome face but also a birthmark on his arm, an odd disfigurement in the shape of the state of Vermont. But it was tucked away where no one could see, thank God, and he’d been born with ten fingers and ten toes, and Delia had been there two weeks after he was born, and, my goodness, he was such a quiet and intelligent-looking child. His sister was already developing a mouth on her. She said, when she saw her little brother, that she wanted to throw him into the wastebasket.

  She had watched Saul dressing Emmy in her snowsuit. As a father, he exhibited great tenderness, which had a touch of vanity in it, but even so . . .

  Delia realized that she had lost count, by virtue of her daydreaming, and returned to her work. As she did, she heard the sound of two cars colliding out on the street. Immediately she looked up and saw through the doorway a man in a threadbare suit getting out of his car dazedly. In front of him, a teenager, a girl, sat behind the wheel of her car, on her face a broad staring smile, of shock. Her car’s windshield had cracked in a spiderweb pattern where her head had struck it, and blood was beginning to ooze down from her forehead toward her self-sustaining grin. In slow motion, her hands lifted themselves to her face, to feel it, to detect if it was still there. Delia dropped what she was doing to rush out to the street, to try to help, to murmur some consolation to the threadbare man and the smiling bleeding girl.

  Twenty-six

  The strands of toilet paper—were they like a set of icicles? or delicate traceries on a canvas? or thin cirrus clouds? or the white strings of misaligned protein molecules collecting in the wasting brain hemispheres of an Alzheimer patient?—the white strands of toilet paper hung down from the branches of Saul and Patsy’s tree in the front yard: ugly, and malice-begotten, and, finally, defeating all comparison. It was just toilet paper thrown into the tree. Patsy, seeing it there while stepping outside to get the morning paper, called out, “Saul! Goddamn it, Saul. Get out of bed and come see what they’ve done to us this time!”

  After a few moments, during which Patsy watched a robin’s attempt to fly between the tree’s branches and the dangling toilet paper, Saul came shuffling onto the front stoop, rubbing his face violently with both hands. He put his palm on Patsy’s shoulder for balance as he lifted his left foot to scratch his right leg near the knee. Gazing at the tree, he said, with what seemed to be a tremendous effort at remaining calm, “Blue sky today. You know, I’ve really got to quit my job. Yeah,” he said, agreeing with himself, and nodding, “today is the perfect day for it, a blue-sky quitting day.” He breathed his stale dream-breath on her. “Today I quit.” Another pause. “I am no longer an educator. Today I am an un-educator.”

  Patsy glanced at her husband, sizing him up. Hard to think of what else he would do with himself if he wasn’t in a classroom. Nor could she imagine what the world would welcome from him. Unemployment, maybe: the world would be happy to have Saul in no occupation whatsoever.

  “Look,” he said, pointing. “They’ve painted the lawn blue.” She followed his pointing finger as directed. Yes, indeed, the little troop of local thugs had found some blue house paint and had poured it over their grass in no particular pattern. Vandal action painting alfresco. A blue lawn— she had never wanted such a thing or heard of it, except in a book she had once read. “He had come a long way to this blue lawn”—it was the only phrase she could remember from whatever book it was. Well, she had come a long way to this blue lawn, but this time the blue lawn wasn’t a metaphor but an object of the adolescent devils of the community, still excitable boys and girls, still intent on destruction.

  Saul shuffled back into the house, fingering his nose. In the early morning he sometimes reminded her of a grumpy old man, coughing, as spiky as a pincushion, plagued with odd odors, opinionated and rather unclean.

  You didn’t get rid of a contagion by blessing and burying its unquiet spirit, Patsy thought, as she went back inside to help Emmy get up and get dressed, and Theo diapered and fed. She had told him so and she was right. The unquiet spirits once stirred to action stayed stirred until they could manage some blood-spilling mayhem. Then they cooled down. Or else: they never would cool down. In the myths people lived by, devils stayed hot forever, perpetually fevered and licked by flames.

  He wasn’t about to go to medical school or law school—Patsy understood that, at least. He had an abiding distaste for doctors as a class, and an equal distrust of lawyers—like bottleflies at the scene of illness and trouble. He didn’t want to turn himself into either one and had said so. In any case, his family on both sides was overpopulated with dermatologists and radiologists and litigators and patent attorneys and estate planners. They were all formidably short-tempered and quite well-off; Howie, of course, was the exception. Their topics of conversation often seemed to be limited to their golf games and their investment portfolios. A few waxed eloquent about their remodeled kitchens and their trips to Cancún. Saul had one uncle who could talk learnedly for an hour about his Sub-Zero refrigerator and his Vulcan gas stove. This mania for appliances was attached to both the men and the women. Their professions had addled them and reduced their sympathetic imaginations to small vestigial stumps.

  No, Patsy thought, as she roused Emmy and helped her into her day-care outfit, whatever Saul decided to do with his adulthood, he would not go into one of those professions.

  Soon after he had showered and shaved, taken Theo out of his crib and into his high chair in the kitchen, Saul called the superintendent of schools and then the principal, to let them know he wouldn’t be coming in today, or, for that matter, ever. He was resigning. Vermilya and Kabelá both tried to argue with Saul, to persuade him to return to his job. He genially refused. They assumed, they both said, that this resignation was a joke of some sort, a grandstanding gesture, a “stunt” (Vermilya), an “opening move from Mr. Don Quixote” (Kabelá), because if it was meant seriously, it was unprofessional and, Vermilya said—probably by accident—grounds for dismissal. Besides, schoolteachers never resigned voluntarily, Kabelá informed him in his nasal voice. Saul was sitting on the living-room sofa listening to Kabelá, the telephone cradled on his shoulder. In the kitchen, Patsy was spooning baby food into Theo while Emmy ate her cereal. Kabelá continued with his theories about schoolteachers. They didn’t have the nerve for actual unemployment. Nor could they exist in the real world, with authentic jobs. This was why they taught: to evade both employment and unemployment. This was exactly the sort of person Saul was, Kabelá continued: a teacher, unfit for the rigors of competition out there in the dog-eat-dog American business scene. Saul wasn’t doing, therefore, what he said he was doing.

  “Zoltan, you knucklehead,” Saul said, “this is counterproductive argumentation you’re engaged in.”

  “Come on, Saul,” Kabelá pleaded. “As a friend, I’m advising you: stop with the quitting. We need you down here. We can all understand why you would want to do this, but—”

  “No,” he said. “I can’t do it anymore. My heart wouldn’t be in it. I’ve got that kid’s blood to think about, and besides, I need to do something else. When I’ve thought about it, I’ll let you know what I’m going to do. Goodbye, Zoltan. You’re a good guy—and I know this’ll inconvenience you and everyth
ing, and I’m sorry about that.”

  “I won’t ever write you a recommendation,” Zoltan said. “You’ll be unrecommended.”

  “Okay,” Saul said happily, before he hung up. He liked the idea of being unrecommendable.

  That day, on her way home from work—the newly unemployed Saul had taken Theo and picked up Emmy in their recently purchased used car— Patsy found herself at the Valu-Rite checkout line, with a pile of Bartlett pears, three grapefruit, a small bag of apples, and a bottle of cheap domestic champagne from the U.S.A., penny-pinching budget bubbles. She planned to celebrate Saul’s unemployment that evening with the booze and fresh fruit. Going unemployed was one of the braver actions he had ever taken. It was as if he had borrowed a leaf from Howie’s book; perhaps there was a correspondence in the two brothers’ genetic infrastructure that gave them a tropism toward indolence, lassitude, laziness, apathy, lusterlessness, acedia, disinterest. Then again, perhaps not.

  “Uh, miss?” the checkout clerk said. “Your credit card?”

  “Yes?” Patsy asked.

  The clerk was a short, mostly pretty young woman with blond hair, a hard, narrow, birdlike face, and turquoise fingernail polish. She had, however, minimum-wage bags under her eyes, the result of working long hours for low pay and few benefits. She was, Patsy guessed, gradually going to fat: frustration-eating would soon be having its effects on her. She probably had a boyfriend who sometimes hit her where it didn’t show.

  “Your credit card didn’t go through,” the clerk said.

  “What?” Patsy stood up straighter, to give herself more stature. She was, after all, a loan officer at the Five Oaks National Bank and Trust. “That’s impossible.”