Saul and Patsy

by Charles Baxter

  “‘Vitriolic,’” Saul said. “And you could get certified, too. Or you could insinuate yourself into a bureaucracy and reorganize it. You’re so lovable, everybody just does what you ask them to do, without thinking. Boston is full of deadwood. God knows, you can reorganize deadwood. It’s been proved.” He waited. “You could do whatever you wanted to, if we moved out of here. What do you want to do, Patsy?”

  “Finger-exercise composer,” Patsy said. “Six letters, last letter Y and first letter C.”

  “Czerny.”

  “Boston, huh?” She gazed at the sky. “It’s sort of hard to get teaching jobs there, isn’t it? Oh, and, by the way, what am I going to do if you start teaching? I don’t want to teach.”

  “That’s what I was just asking you. You’re not listening to me. What do you want to do?” Patsy had had half-a-dozen majors before she settled for a double major in dance-performance and English.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what I want to do.” She studied the sky. “I’d like to go work in a bank, actually.” Another pause. “In the mortgage department.”

  The statement was so unlike her, Saul smiled. One of her dry, shifty, ironical asides whose subtext you had to go in search of. Then he realized that perhaps she meant it, and he studied her face for aspersions, but Patsy, who was vehement about privacy issues, did not give herself away.

  Saul had found, in his landlord’s shed, a ladder that was long enough to get him up to the roof of the house on Whitefeather Road. He’d been exploring Mr. Munger’s shed while Patsy was out getting groceries, and when she returned, he was sitting on the south peak with his legs dangling over the edge. Patsy put the grocery bags down on the driveway. “I won’t scream,” she said. “But I do have some questions.”

  “Good,” he said.

  “Saul, be truthful. Why are you sitting on the roof of our house?”

  “Thinking,” he shouted. “Looking at the horizon.” He smiled down at her. “At the view. You are so beautiful. You’re the only beautiful sight here to see.”

  “Thanks, but there’s no view,” she said. “Including me. I’m not a view. Nothing to see except what’s here. You need hills for variety, and we don’t have that.”

  “Well, I was just hoping for a little variety—you know, a break. Maybe a show of some sort. I thought maybe I’d see something. An incline, a knoll, a mound would all have been fine. I’m not asking for an alp.”

  “Well, you won’t get one. You won’t get one of any of them. No hills, honey. Remember? We agreed. No hills out here. Just drainage ditches. Come down from the roof, Saul, before you fall and kill yourself.”

  “Patsy,” he asked, “how’d we end up here?”

  “Times were hard,” she said, quoting the Wizard of Oz, “so we took the job.” She watched him. “That is, you took the job. Remember? It was the stupid crusade. Against stupidity, I mean. It was all your idea. I came along for the ride.” She gazed at him with a deliberately cool expression. “First I come along for the ride, and then you do.”

  “Oh, right. Look at this,” he said despairingly, pointing at the land around their house. “You know, I think we made a terrible mistake, but I’m not blaming anybody. Including myself. All I see up here is dirt roads and farmers reading The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.”

  “Saul,” she said, “they watch television now. They listen to police scanners. Also, it’s too early in your stay here for paranoia. They don’t have opinions about Jews, least of all you. Please come down. I’ve got to take those groceries in, and I could use your help. And please don’t break your neck. I’d have to supply more of the backbone for both of us.”

  “It’s not Boston,” he said, edging toward the ladder. “And it’s not Chicago. It’s not Omaha. It’s this other thing. My brother warned me about this, and even my mother warned me. It’s this place smack out in the middle of nowhere, and now it has us in its grip.” One of the shingles loosened and slid to the gutter. The ladder trembled as he began to make his way down. “It’s scary up there, honey. It’s a view for adults. Not for kids. Kids couldn’t handle it.” He looked straight into her eyes.

  “I hope—” she said, pausing.

  “That you don’t go nuts out here? Me too. Me too.”

  “Why should I go nuts?” she asked. “I like it here. Would you please help me with those groceries?”

  Rung by rung he lowered himself and took the remaining grocery bags out of the car in a double embrace. He kept his eyes on Patsy as she carried her two bags toward the back door before propping them against the wall in order to free one hand to turn the doorknob. The house was never locked; there was no one to lock it against. Saul admired her physical agility as she went inside, and in any case rarely found fault with her. He loved his wife profoundly; it had become the theme to his life, his antidote to everything else. Sometimes, just watching her carrying in the groceries or making dinner, he thought his heart would break out of sheer happiness in her presence. He believed that nothing else in his life would equal his love for Patsy. Still, he thought she was being a little smug about how much she liked it here. She could be snobby about her populism.

  Their nearest neighbor, Mrs. O’Neill, looked so much like Thelma Ritter in Rear Window that Saul and Patsy smirked at each other when she introduced herself at their door one Friday afternoon, peering inside as she asked them for a bottle of molasses that she might borrow for a batch of her cookies. Mrs. O’Neill’s curiosity about them was greedy but harmless, Saul thought. It was curiosity bred out of loneliness. As soon as Patsy found the bottle, Mrs. O’Neill invited them over to sample the cookies she had already made, and those that she would make with the molasses she was borrowing. Saul couldn’t decide whether Mrs. O’Neill’s nosiness was part of the community’s nosiness, or whether she was just nosy for herself alone. When Saul and Patsy pulled into her driveway, her garage door began to go up, even though Mrs. O’Neill had arrived before they had and her car was already inside. An iron coach-and-horse weather-vane stood on an iron stalk atop the garage’s cupola. Mrs. O’Neill stood near the geranium-surrounded flagpole, holding on to a push-button signal box, her eyes squinched.

  “I’m garage-poor,” she said, pressing the button again to make the door go down. “But I never could resist a toy.” She offered the garage-door opener to Saul, who pressed the button. The door began to open again. “I said to myself, well, I need the gadget because I’m a single lady out here—the safety feature—but even that doesn’t explain the curtains.” Mrs. O’Neill’s garage had windows at the sides, with lace curtains. “I spent hours on those curtains. Imagine!” She gave out a self-deprecatory little laugh. “Curtains for a garage!”

  “A good garage is important,” Patsy said, and immediately Saul smiled.

  “That’s exactly it,” Mrs. O’Neill said, picking a bug off Patsy’s shoulder. “I’ll tell you what it was, since you’ll discover it soon enough. A project. I needed a project. Making curtains kept me awake during the daylight hours. Now you, Saul, you trot inside that garage and look at that gizmo in case you want to build one yourself, while Patsy and I go inside and have a few moments of girl-talk in the kitchen.”

  Mrs. O’Neill grabbed Patsy’s arm and pulled her toward the back door of the house.

  Saul walked in a lackadaisical fashion toward Mrs. O’Neill’s sheltered and curtained Buick, feeling that, as an adult, he need not follow instructions from a character like her. At least, he did not need to follow them to the letter. A steady wind from the unplowed fields to the south blew into the garage. The interior smelled of raw lumber and fresh paint, along with the fainter but more dense odor of overheated electrical wiring. Saul looked up—as instructed—at Mrs. O’Neill’s new garage-door opener. Unmechanical to a fault, he was unable to guess what structural-dynamic principles were involved in lifting a garage door up a set of tracks. With his head tilted back, he saw the company name on the side of the motor. He felt suddenly dizzy. He i
nhaled quickly and leaned his arm against Mrs. O’Neill’s car. He glanced out through the door and saw his own car, and then, beyond it, the horizon line of the Saginaw Valley, the semi-skyline of Five Oaks over there in the distance, and gold-brown topsoil whipped and scattered in spirals. He sat down on the bumper and put his head in his hands.

  What was he doing here? What was he doing anywhere?

  From the house came the sound of singing: Mrs. O’Neill’s voice— Patsy didn’t sing—a choir-loft soprano, a thin Irish upper register, without resonance or depth but as piercing as a factory whistle. Saul listened, the skin on the back of his neck slowly beginning to prickle. “Mi chiamano Mimi,” she was singing, “il perchè non so. Sola, mi fo il pranzo da me stesa.” She sang half the aria, the sound careening out of the house and dispersing in the yard. Saul felt his own mouth opening. A bird fluttered into the garage, changed course in an instant, and flew out, alighting at the top of Mrs. O’Neill’s flagpole. Saul wanted the garage door shut. He pressed the button. When he opened the door a minute later, Patsy was standing in front of it on the driveway, a plate of cookies in her hand.

  “Aren’t you funny,” she said.

  “She sings.” They looked at each other. “Where is she?”

  “Yes, she sings. Still in the house. I noticed she had some opera records, and she said that she and her late lamented husband Earl used to listen to the Texaco broadcasts. She sings in church, as you can imagine.”

  “Yeah, I guessed.”

  “Anyway, she has all these records and CDs and she managed to learn some of the words. That was a demo she gave me. Want some of these cookies?”

  “Of course. Dumb question.” He reached out and grabbed four off the plate. “I eat cookies while I’m deciding whether I’m going to eat any cookies.”

  “She had some uncertainties about you.”

  “About me? Uncertainties?”

  “That’s why she wanted you to inspect her garage.”

  “Oh.”

  “She thought it was safe to ask me. Woman to woman.”

  “What sort of questions did she have?”

  “Oh, friendly questions, I think, or at least you could assume they were friendly.”

  “Such as?”

  “Does Saul eat cookies? Or is that against his religion?”

  “Do Jews eat cookies.”

  “That’s right. ‘Does he go to a temple?’ ‘Does he mind living here among us?’ She asked if we were rich. She asked if I was one of you.” Patsy bit into a cookie and wiped the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand.

  “What’d you tell her?”

  “I said I was once an Episcopalian, sort of, but now I was your wife.”

  “And what did she say to that?”

  “She said she was glad that you liked cookies.”

  “There she is.”

  Patsy turned around as Mrs. O’Neill leaned out of the back door to wave them both inside. “I won’t sing anymore,” she shouted. “You two lovebirds can come in now. It’s safe.”

  Through the summer they visited Mrs. O’Neill every two weeks for Sunday-afternoon picnics in the shade of her maple tree. Patsy found a Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday job as a bank teller, a job that required very little training. They played Scrabble and Jeopardy, Trivial Pursuit and chess, and they listened to all their records and CDs at least twice. Patsy suggested that they travel north to explore the Upper Peninsula, but Saul said that travel was dangerous in those locales. When Patsy asked what dangers he was possibly talking about, he said that of course the Department of Natural Resources had kept the problem under wraps but that he, Saul, knew . . . things. She could not budge him. He just didn’t want to go anywhere.

  They had an oddball marriage, and they both knew it. Their love for each other had created a magic circle around themselves that outsiders could not penetrate. No one who had ever met them knew what made the two of them tick; the whole arrangement looked mildly fraudulent, a Hallmark Card sort of thing. Saul’s mother, Delia, had had an unremarkable marriage and as a still-youthful widow could be gamely witty on the subject of matrimony. Her opinion was that marriage was a practical economic arrangement demanded by the raising of children. In her view, Saul was a fanatical husband, close to unpresentable when he was around Patsy. He should recognize this devotedness of his as a social problem. People who stay in that kind of love once they’re married are a burden to others, Saul’s mother intimated. They should learn to tone themselves down. They don’t mean to show off, but the show-offing happens anyway with the gestures and the endearments and the icky glances. In this regard, Saul and Patsy also perplexed their other relatives and friends, who sometimes wanted to know their secret and at other times just wanted to get away from them, quickly.

  Because he loved Patsy so much, Saul was constantly disappointed with the rest of the world. It didn’t measure up. Having moved to Five Oaks, mingling with the Cossacks, Saul could feel his disappointment beginning to fester. Why couldn’t the world be more like Patsy? The rest of the world—especially where they had found themselves, here in the Midwest—presented itself as both bland and coarse. Intelligence and attention were wasted on it, he thought. It occurred to him sometimes that Patsy did not want to be loved the way he was loving her, that he was bedeviling her, but he did his best to put that thought out of his mind.

  With all the time they had before school began, Saul and Patsy made love frequently as an antidote to their boredom, Patsy having decided that they should try it in every room in the house. One afternoon late in the month they spread out a blanket in the backyard, out of sight of the road, and worked up what Saul called love sweat. Patsy claimed she had never made love outdoors before and said she liked it, it was like going to the midway at the state fair, except for the grass on her bare back—they had crawled away from the blanket. She worried about ants, for which she had a repugnance. She said she liked looking into the sky and thought it would be neat to gaze at a cloud while coming. They waited for the perfect cloud, and then Saul watched her as she came. True to her word, she kept her eyes wide open, focused, on the distance.

  Two

  Saul having his hair cut: Five Oaks’s north-side barbershop contained four chairs, a black-and-white television set on a wheeled table, a set of old magazines, and one barber with a permanently downcast expression. An antique barber pole twirled listlessly outside the front door. The barbershop looked more like a bookie joint than a genuine barbershop. When Saul sat down in the chair, the barber, whose name was Harold, tucked his cover cloth under Saul’s collar and whistled between his teeth. “Don’t see hair like yours much around here,” he said. “It’s almost kinky, wouldn’t you say?” The barber looked young but acted old.

  Saul said yes, it was almost kinky, and what he basically wanted was a trim.

  The barber set to work, sneaking looks at Days of Our Lives, which appeared in a pointillist quilt of snow and interference on the television set. Saul closed his eyes but opened them five minutes later, feeling the barber’s hand resting peacefully on his shoulder, the scissors motionless in his hair. “Say,” Saul said, nudging the barber’s stomach with his elbow. “Are we awake here? Harold? Hello?”

  The barber inhaled, exhaled, snorted, and said sure, of course he was awake. The scissors started up again, their tips scraping Saul’s scalp. “Could be I did doze off there a minute,” the barber said. “But it’s only the third . . . no, fourth time I’ve ever done that in this particular shop. I can sleep standing up, you see. Learned it in the army. Like a horse. The truth is, I have my troubles. I have woman trouble. It keeps me up part of the night, thinking about it. The soaps usually keep me awake. Are you from around here? We don’t see hair like yours too much in this town. It’s hard to cut.”

  “We just moved here,” Saul said, to explain.

  “From New York City, I’ll bet,” the barber, Harold, said. “They see hair like yours a lot in New York City, I hear.” He shook his head, as if to shak
e off his dreams. “But I imagine they have insomnia there, too. By the way, do you ever play basketball?”

  Once classes at the high school had started, Saul’s route took him down Whitefeather Road for two miles before he turned left onto County Road E. On County Road E he pressed the car’s cruise-control button and removed his foot from the accelerator for the six-mile straightaway. There were no curves to the road; there never had been. With his foot off the accelerator, he ate his breakfast of Patsy’s muffins washed down with low-caffeine cola while he shaved with his electric razor and listened to the car’s tape deck, his early-morning music friend, Thelonious Monk, whose attitude toward daylight was offhand, smart, and antirural.

  Three miles down County Road E and half a mile before it intersected with Bailey–Fraser Road was the morning’s bad news, standing on two legs on an average of three days a week. This bad news wore a hat and a jacket, sported gray socks and thick glasses—on some days he looked like the barber’s brother—and he stared at Saul with a mean, hateful expression.

  The first few times Saul passed him, he waved. Saul didn’t expect a counterwave, and he didn’t get it. Like a sentry, the man stood glaring, an unwobbling pivot, his arms down at his sides. At last, in October, Saul slowed down on a Tuesday, and on the next day he stopped. Saul leaned out and said, “You want to say hello? Here’s your opportunity. The name’s Saul. Howdy.”

  His greeting was returned with a blank look. Slowly, carefully, Saul lifted the finger to him and then hit the accelerator.

  Saul to Patsy at dinner: “There’s this ghoul standing in his yard every morning giving me the Big Stare, and he’s got this hat nailed to his skull, and what I think is, he’s on to me, the schmuck hates Jews. Have I mentioned him? I have? He wants me out. One of these days he’s going to hoist a rifle and get me between the eyes.”

  “You’re paranoid.” They were in the dining room and had been listening to Nielsen’s Four Temperaments Symphony, the anger movement. Choler spilled out of the speakers. It was not dinner music but an antidote to the rest of the day. Nielsen or Mingus, that was the choice.