Saul and Patsy

by Charles Baxter

  Saul woke and looked over at Patsy, still asleep. He groaned audibly with relief that she hadn’t been hurt. What an annoying dream. He had never even owned a tallis or known anyone who had one. His parents had been relentlessly secular. After putting on his shirt, jeans, and boots, he went downstairs, and, after taking the keys off the kitchen table, he went outside.

  The motorcycle felt quiet and powerful underneath him as he accelerated down Whitefeather Road. He had ridden a motorcycle briefly in college—until a small embarrassing accident—and the process all came back to him now. This one, Patsy’s new machine, painted pink and blue, 250 cc’s, was easy to shift, and the machine gave him the impression that he was floating, or, better yet, was flowing down the archways of dark, stunted Michigan trees. His eyes watered, and bugs hit him in the face as he speeded up. He felt the rear wheel slip on the dirt. He didn’t know what he was doing out here and he didn’t care. He had no helmet. He was illegal.

  He turned left onto Highway 14, and then County Road H, also dirt, and he downshifted, feeling the tight, close gears meshing, and he let the clutch out, slowing him down. On the road the cycle’s headlight was like a cone leading him forward, away from himself, toward a possibility more inviting and dangerous. In the grip of spiritual longing, a person goes anywhere, traveling over the speed limit. The night was warm, but none of the summer stars was visible. Behind the clouds the stars were even now rushing away in the infinity of expanding space. Saul felt like an astral body himself. He too would rush away into emptiness. In the green light of the speedometer he saw that he was doing a respectable fifty. Up ahead the wintry white eyes of a possum glanced toward him before the animal waddled into the high grass near the road. Saul wanted to be lost but knew he could not be. He knew exactly where he was: fields, forest, fields. He knew each one, and he knew whom they belonged to, he had been here that long.

  And of course he knew where he was going: he was headed toward the McPhees’, that damnable house of happiness, that castle of light, where everyone, man, woman, and child, would be sleeping soundly, the sleep of the happy and just and thoughtless. Saul felt blank, gripped by obsession, simultaneously vacant and full of shame.

  He looked at his watch. It was past midnight. Their house would be dark.

  But it was not. On the road beyond their driveway, Saul slowed down and then shut off the engine, holding on tightly to the handlebars as he stared like the prowler he was, toward the second-floor windows, from which sounds emerged. From where he was spying, Saul could see Anne sitting in a rocking chair by the window with their baby. The baby was crying, screaming. Saul could hear it from the road. And in the background, back and forth, Saul could see Emory McPhee pacing, the all-night walk of the helpless father. An infant with colic, a rocking mother, a pacing father, screams of infant misery, and now the two of them, Anne and Emory, beginning to shout at each other over what to do.

  Saul turned his motorcycle around, pushed it down the road, then started the engine. He felt better. He could have gone to their front door and welcomed them as the official greeter of ordinary disharmony. I was always as real as they were, Saul thought. I always was.

  On the left, the broken fences bordering the farmland quavered up and down and seemed to start bouncing, visually, as he accelerated. The lines on the telephone poles jumped nervously as he passed them until they had the rapid and nervous movements of pens on graph paper making an erratic heartbeat. Rain—he hadn’t known it was going to rain, no one had told him—began falling, getting into his eyes and dropping with cold precision on the backs of his hands. He felt the cloth of his shirt getting soaked and sticking to his shoulders. The rain was persistent and serious. He felt the tires of Patsy’s motorcycle slipping on the mud, nudging the rear end of the bike off, slightly, thoughtfully, toward the left side. Then the road joined up with the highway, where the traction improved, but the rain was falling more heavily now, soaking him so he could hardly see. He came to a bridge, slowed the bike, and huddled in its shelter for a moment, until the rain seemed to let up, and he set out again. Accelerate, clutch, shift. He wanted to get home to Patsy. He wanted to dry his hair and get into bed next to her. He couldn’t think of anything else he wanted.

  A few hundred feet from his own driveway, he looked through the rain, only a drizzle now, and he saw, looking back at him, their eyes lit by his headlamp, the deer he had seen before, closer now, crossing his yard. But this time, there was another, a last deer, one he hadn’t seen before, behind the others, slightly smaller, as if reduced somehow. It was an albino. In the darkness and rain it moved in a haze of whiteness. Seeing it, Saul thought: Oh my God, I’m about to die. The deer had stopped, momentarily frozen in the light. The albino’s eyes—it was a doe—were pink, and its fur was as white as linen. The animal flicked its tail, nervously hypnotized. Its terrible pink eyes, blank as neutron stars, stared at him. Saul turned off the engine and the headlight. Now in the dark two brown deer bounded toward the west, but the albino stood still, staring in Saul’s direction, a purposeful stare. He gripped the handlebars so hard that his forearms began to knot into a cramp. The animal was a sign of some kind, he was sure. Only a fool would think otherwise. He felt a moment of dread pass through his body as the deer now turned her eyes away from his and began to walk off into the night. He saw her disappear behind a maple tree in his backyard, but he couldn’t follow her beyond that. He was trembling now. Shivering spasms began at his wet shoulders and passed down into his chest toward his legs. The dread he had felt before was turning rapidly into pure spiritual fright. Alternating waves of chill and heat rushed up and down his body. He remembered to get off the road. He pushed the motorcycle into the garage, kicking down its stand. He crossed the yard and reached the back door. The rain picked up again and sprayed into him as the wind carried it. In his mind’s eye he saw the deer looking back at him. He had been judged, and the judgment was that he, Saul, was only and always himself, now and onward into infinity. His boots were wet. They stank of wet leather. Outside the back door on the lawn he took the boots off, then his wet shirt and his jeans. It occurred to him to stand there naked. With no clothes on he stood in the rain and the dark before he fell to his knees. He wasn’t praying. He didn’t know what he was doing. Something was filling him up. It felt like the spirit, but the spirit of what, he didn’t know. He lay down on the grass. One sob tore through him, and then it was over.

  He felt like getting up and running out into the field in back of the house, but he knew he couldn’t break through the wall of his self-consciousness enough to do that. In the rain, which no longer felt cold, he sensed that he was entering a condition that had nothing to do with happiness because it was so far beyond it. All he was sure about was that he was empty before and now was filled, filled with both fullness and emptiness. These emotions didn’t quite make sense, but he didn’t care. The emptiness was sweet. He could live with it. He hurried into the house and dried off his hair in the dark downstairs bathroom. Quickly he toweled himself down and then rushed up the stairs. There was a secret, after all. In fact there were probably a lot of secrets, but there was one he now knew.

  He entered their bedroom. Rain fingernailed against the window glass. Patsy lay in bed in almost complete darkness, wearing one of Saul’s T-shirts. Her arms were up above her head. He could see that she was watching him.

  “Where were you?”

  “I went out for a ride on your motorcycle. I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Saul, it’s raining. Why are you naked?”

  “It’s raining now. Not when I started.”

  “Why are you standing there? You don’t have any clothes on.”

  “I saw something. I can’t tell you. I think I’m not supposed to tell you what I saw. It was an animal. It was a private animal. Patsy, I took off my clothes and lay down on the lawn in the rain, and it didn’t feel weird, it felt like just what I should do.”

  “Saul, what is this about? I need some idea right now.”

/>   “I’m not sure.”

  “Try. Try to say.”

  “I think I’m pregnant.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I think it means that whoever I am, I’m not alone with myself.”

  “I don’t understand that.”

  “I know.”

  “Come to bed, Saul. Get in under the sheet.”

  He climbed in and put his leg over hers.

  “I can’t quite get used to you,” she said. “You’re quite a mess of metaphors, Saul, you know that.”

  “Yes.”

  “A man being pregnant.” She put her hand familiarly on his thigh. “I wonder what that portends.”

  “It’s a feeling, Patsy. It’s a secret. Men have secrets, too.”

  “I never said they didn’t. They love secrets. They have lodges and secret societies and stuff. They have the CIA.”

  “Can we make love now, right this minute? Because I love you. I love you like crazy.”

  “I love you, too, Saul. What if you make me pregnant? It could happen. What if I get knocked up? Is it all right now?”

  “Yeah. What’s the problem?”

  “What will we say, for example?”

  “We’ll say, ‘Saul and Patsy are pregnant.’”

  “Oh, sure we will.”

  “Okay, we won’t say it.” He had thrown the sheet back and was kissing her on the side of her knees.

  “Are you crying? Your face is wet.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’re being so jokey.”

  “That’s how I handle it.”

  “Why are you crying?”

  “Because . . .” He wanted to get this right. “Because there are signs and wonders. What can I tell you? It’s all a feeling. In the morning I’ll deny I said this.”

  “So like a man.” She was kissing him now, but she stopped, as if thinking about his recent sentences. “You want to make me pregnant, too, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not afraid? Of diapers, exhaustion, sullenness? Fatigue, indifference, hostility, silence, boredom, quarrels, rage, infidelity?”

  “No.”

  “You’re a brave man. I’ll give you credit for that. One more little ambassador from the present to the future. That’s what you want.”

  “Sort of.” He moved up and took her fingers one by one into his mouth and bit them tenderly. Patsy had started to hum. She was humming “Unchain My Heart.” Then she opened her mouth and sang quietly, “Unchain my heart, and set me free.”

  “I’ll try, Patsy.”

  “Yes.” A moment later, she said, “This won’t solve anything.”

  “I know.” He felt as though he heard someone wailing softly in the next room. Still he continued. “Patsy,” he said, “the window. We should stand by the window.”

  “Why?”

  “To try it.” He disentangled himself from her, stood, and brought her over to the window. He opened it so that the droplets of rain blew in over them. “Now,” he said. There was a bit of lightning, and he lifted her. She held on, arms clasped behind his neck. He felt as though a thousand eyes, but not human eyes, were looking in on them with tender indifference. They were and were not interested. They would and would not care. Finally they would turn away, as they tended to turn away from all human things, in time. Saul felt Patsy tremble, a slight shivering along her back, a rising in tension before release. More rain came in, spattering lightly on his arm. He felt Patsy’s mouth passing by his hair, recently cut by Harold. She was panting in time with his own breathing, and for a split second he understood it all. He understood everything, the secret to the universe. Then, after an instant, he lost it. Having lost the secret, forgotten it, he felt the usual onset of the ordinary, of everything else, with Patsy around him, the two of them in their own familiar rhythms. He would not admit to anyone that he had known the secret of the universe for a split second. That part of his life was hidden away and would always be, the part that makes a person draw in the breath quickly in surprise and stare at the curtains in the morning upon awakening.

  Four

  Saul, Patsy thought, was like one of those pastries you couldn’t get enough of at first—you’d gorge on them. And then, it seemed, once you’d had enough of them, you wanted to get rid of that addiction, but you couldn’t, there was no way to stop. You were always going to have those jelly doughnuts in your life because you had once craved them. Slowly but surely, they would put weight on you.

  Mornings, on her way down to the mortgage department at the bank, where she had become—at last—an assistant loan officer (she admitted to herself, and to no one else, that she liked to be around places where money was—it even had a smell to it she liked), she would pass by school-bus stops and nursery schools. Sometimes, on lunch breaks, she would park the car near the curbs and watch the little people, three- and four-year-olds, holding hands or holding on to delicate ropes to keep them all together as they progressed down the sidewalks. She loved seeing children lined up in their school clothes and backpacks, waiting for the bus. They yelled at each other. They fell into the dirt and mud. They were beautiful.

  A week after her baby was due, she would drive around on her lunch hour just looking for children, hoping her labor would start out of sympathy. And on a Tuesday, as she sat parked across the street from a play-ground, watching a softball game, her water broke. On the way to the hospital that evening, she remembered to thank the moon, which had been shining in the daytime sky above the playing field, though it was invisible by nightfall, having gone on its lunatic way.

  The labor room: between contractions and the blips of the fetal monitor, she was dimly aware of Saul. He had donned his green hospital scrubs. They hadn’t let him wear his Detroit Tigers baseball cap (too unsanitary), but he was holding her hand and his eyes were anxious with nervous energy as he sat at her bedside. He thought he was coaching her. But he kept miscounting the breaths, and she had to correct him.

  After two hours of that, she was moved into the huge circular incandescence of the delivery room. She felt as if she were about to expel her entire body outward in a floorflood. With her hair soaked with sweat and sticking to the back of her neck, she could feel the unsteady universe sputtering out for an instant into two flattened dimensions. Everything she saw was painted on a flat surface in front of her, and she felt herself screaming self-consciously, as if she were screaming performatively when she was both screaming and doing something else, the serious work. Then she swore—she had learned to swear like a man from her father, who was only eloquent when he cursed—and she loosened her hand from Saul’s—his touch maddened her—and swore again. She looked at Saul with a deep hatred. He had gotten her into this mess, and now he was dumbly watching her trying to get herself out. Terrible, unforgivable words, slightly out of her control, came out of her mouth directed toward Saul. Wrath, bitterness, and then some screeching. The seconds blew themselves up into hours, with time seizing up, thickening and slowing as if the river of it had turned to offal, ordure, and slush.

  “Okay, here’s the head. One last push, please.”

  Patsy backstroked through the pain. Then the baby presented herself in a mess of blood and fleshy wrappings. After the cord was cut, Patsy heard her husband say from a great distance, “She’s beautiful. Uh, Patsy, you didn’t really mean those things you said about me, did you? When you were screaming? Those curses?” Oh, the hell with Saul. Where was her baby? They were giving her an Apgar test. Typical of Saul, Patsy thought, as she began to recover herself, to worry about what somebody was saying about him at the moment of his daughter’s birth. I see that you’re having a baby—but what about me? Enough about you—you’re just giving birth. Anyway, Saul always stole scenes. It was in his nature.

  “Where’s my baby?”

  “Here,” the nurse said. The world had rematerialized and accordioned out into three dimensions again. The baby fit perfectly into the crook of Patsy’s arm, and she was, Patsy thoug
ht, perfect in every respect, beautiful beyond thought. She touched her delicate chin. How strange it was to have a daughter so new that she didn’t have a name! It was the beginning of the world for her, before the invention of language. And she looked like Patsy’s grandmother Ella, lovable and ancient and irritable, a fan of murder mysteries and a smoker of cigarettes, who picked wild strawberries and fed them to her dogs. But, no: she wasn’t Grandmother Ella, she was herself. The nurse’s smile and her daughter’s impatient expression made a sunspot near Patsy’s heart, and the huge overhead delivery-room light went out, like a sigh.

  Someone took Patsy’s hand, the other hand, the one not cradling the baby. Who else but Saul, unsteady but upright, wanting some part of her? Cold sweat dripped down his forehead. He kissed Patsy through his face mask, a sterile forgiving kiss, feeling of paper that landed on her cheek, and he informed her that they were parents now. He touched his daughter on her forehead, a blessing. As he said it, his eyes expressed excitement and terror. He would be one of those men unready for fatherhood but full of intermittent, wild, undirected enthusiasm for it. “Hi, Mom,” he said. He apologized for worrying about Patsy’s opinion of him, and Patsy apologized for what she had said about Saul during her labor. Releasing her hand from Saul’s, Patsy raised it and caressed his face. “Oh, don’t worry,” the nurse said, apparently referring to Patsy’s verbal abusiveness, and from behind him, she patted Saul on the back, as if he had been some sort of good dog, a retriever.

  They named their daughter Mary Esther Carlson-Bernstein, a string of words that Patsy thought awkward and ungainly but, once she had said it and attached it to her daughter, somehow fine.