Under the cascading hot water, he cleans himself dutifully, dragging the washcloth layered with the antibacterial gold soap across his chest and arms and face, and at first his mind is pleasingly blank, until he thinks haphazardly, first of Gordy Himmelman, then of his mother and her teenaged boyfriend. He considers them as he washes his arms, doing his best to set up police crime-scene yellow tape around his imaginings, exiling them, forgetting them, ignoring them. It is like trying to ignore the enraged African elephant charging toward its victim. The unconscious never takes a vacation. Despite his regrets about the matter, his mother is a passionate woman. Gordy Himmelman, his mother—what choice does anyone have in the thoughts he is given to think? Still, he feels shame-soiled. He rinses himself off, pulls aside the shower curtain, and grabs a towel. This morning he will not bother to shave. Let the Saul-face be unfinished today.
In the kitchen, the phone is still off the hook, the hand-piece dangling down on its stretched coil wire from the wall-mounted phone to the floor. His daughter in her yellow-backed high chair with the teddy-bear headrest sits contentedly surrounded by the spatterings of breakfast, and she smiles when her father enters the room. “Hi, Princess,” he says, kissing her on the top of her head. Her hair is so delicate and fine, smelling of stardust and spun gold, Saul feels a sensual pleasure touching his lips to it.
She is so extravagantly new. Half of her is from him. The other half is from his wife. But the half and half add up to something entirely original. The husband remembers to kiss his wife also on the top of her head. “Good morning, Patsy,” he says to the woman he neglected to make love to half an hour earlier. For just a moment, he touches the tip of his tongue to her hair. She lifts her face to him, a smear of food on her cheek. “Oh, yes. Good morning, sweetheart,” she replies. She gives off a faint scent of dry saltine crackers and milk. The smile she has for him is quick, as is the kiss she gives him. “I love you,” she says, and after her husband tells her he loves her, he cleans her cheek with his index finger before sitting down at the table in front of the coffee cup she has placed there for him (cream, no sugar). Wearing a T-shirt and his pajama bottoms, he opens the paper. Perhaps it will be an ordinary day after all the extraordinariness of the previous day.
But, no: there on the goddamn fucking front page is a picture of his goddamn fucking front yard. In a separate column the editors have inserted a school picture of Gordy Himmelman, sporting a flattop. The boy looks dense and clueless and lunar and mean. He has the appearance of a convict-in-training. Leaning back in his chair, the husband considers the view out the kitchen window at this boy and the represented yard— his angle is different from that of the camera—and past it, to Whitefeather Road, when he notices that a car has slowed down so that its three occupants can point at the linden tree, where the blood is, though not on their side. The wife notes that her husband is observing some phenomenon or other, calculates the angle of his observation, and regards the scene outside the window. Gordy Himmelman, the deceased, stands vacantly out there. He is a little less dead this time than he was before.
“Gawkers,” she says calmly.
“Rubberneckers,” he says.
Patsy reaches out and grasps his hand. She caresses her husband’s knuckles and says she’s making some eggs for herself, would he like some, too? Scrambled? Yes, he would. She rises—she is still in her nightgown and slippers—and cracks four eggs into a frypan, adds some garlic powder, onion salt, some butter, a dash of milk, dash of Tabasco, paprika as it is dished up, a formula her husband likes and that she has learned from him. He prefers his scrambled eggs slightly runny, not . . . dried out. She wouldn’t like eggs cooked this way if she weren’t married to Saul. As she stands at the stove, her husband tells her that she is beautiful. He is good at this: he always compliments her spontaneously and with an air of sincerity and rarely with the hope of reward.
As she is mixing the ingredients in the frypan, before turning the burner on a low-medium heat, she says, “I wonder if there’ll be a funeral,” and her husband says, “I doubt it. He’s not dead enough to bury.”
It is fourteen minutes past eight.
At twenty-three minutes past ten, the wife finally puts the phone back on the hook, and within thirty seconds, it rings. She decides that she won’t answer it, no matter who the caller might be. But her decisions have little to do with what she actually does. In any case, a ringing telephone can sometimes sound like a command or a scream following any domestic catastrophe. That is how it sounds now. Her husband is still in his pajamas, eating a midmorning bowl of cereal, Emmy on his shoulder asleep and drooling. When she answers the phone, their daughter startles into wakefulness. The caller is Patsy’s friend Julie Dusenberg, asking if there’s anything she can do. Food? Aid and comfort? She and Patsy talk for a while, and after the call ends and Patsy puts the receiver back down, the phone rings again, more insistently this time, louder, like a heavier knock on the door. This time, the caller is one of Saul’s former students, Jeffrey Yonkey, wanting to say how sorry he is about the whole Gordy Himmelman thing. Patsy, surprised by the call, thanks him for his trouble, hangs up, and once again the phone starts to ring. The phone, today, is the other baby, crying and carrying on. There is nothing to do to quiet this baby except to talk softly to it.
Patsy picks up the receiver, and a voice says, “Hi, it’s Gordy.”
She waits to see whether the prankster has any other ideas of what to say or how to extend a cold and sadistic antic mischief using the voice of a day-old suicide, and because he doesn’t, because he’s a cruel and unimaginative juvenile, a long, slow, uneasy silence reigns until she delicately places her finger on the receiver hook, disconnecting him. Then she releases it. A faint dial tone hums into the air from the hanging phone. From the radio on the other side of the room, tuned to the local NPR affiliate, a waltz drifts absentmindedly into the air. What would it be? Ah, “The Merry Widow.” Franz Lehar. Now the baby is wide awake, and Saul has finished his cereal.
“I don’t like waltz music,” Patsy says, shaking her head. “Too much butter. Too much cholesterol. It’s just too . . . Viennese.”
“Who was that?” he asks, nodding in the direction of the telephone. He has moved into the living room and is holding Mary Esther’s arms up, so that she can practice her lurch-walking. She can stand on her own. So she is not a baby after all, but a toddler.
“Julie Dusenberg first. Then Jeffrey Yonkey. And then a crank caller,” Patsy tells him. “You want some more coffee? Should I brew up a new pot?”
“What’d he want, the crank caller?” He half-turns toward her, gives her a look from a half-closed eye, playing the role of the inspector.
“He was a . . . crank. Cranks don’t want anything,” she says.
“They want your attention,” Saul says. “What’d this one want?” He scoops his daughter up into his arms and twirls her around. The movement is festive, but the effect is one of great sadness.
“Some kid,” Patsy tells him. “Said he was Gordy.”
“More,” Emmy seems to say, making her parents smile.
Saul, for some reason, doesn’t seem particularly surprised. “Oh. Gordy. What’d he want?”
“Saul, I just told you.” She takes a long sip of her tea. “It was a pretender. He didn’t want anything. Said his name and then stopped. Oh.” She straightens up and smiles. “He asked us how we were doing.”
“That’s not like him. Gordy always wanted something. He never bothered to ask us how we were doing. He was too sullen for that.”
“Gordy’s dead, honey. He shot himself. Remember? This was . . . what I told you. An imposter. Just a kid.”
“Yup.”
“Come on, Saul. Let’s not get all creepy about this.”
“I’m not. I’m not being creepy. Besides, I’m not the one who called.” He gives her one of his odd housebroken smiles. These particular smiles always take the breath out of her. Nothing with Saul is unconditional when he is under stress; you alw
ays have to be slightly on your guard with him.
“It was just some kid,” Patsy says. “Some kid-who-was-not-Gordy. One of your disgruntled students. You know,” she says, “the woods are full of rural levity today.”
“I didn’t notice you laughing. Did you smile? Did you laugh?”
These are not friendly questions. They have a coldness that startles her. Maybe they should have made love after all. He feels her as she approaches him from behind, reaching around his chest, leaning her head against his back, standing there, just holding on, wanting him to anchor her. “Sometimes I think you’re the last humanist,” she mutters. “Sometimes I wonder how we’ll ever get on with things with you around.”
“Why do you say that?” He waits for a moment, then adds an endearment. “Honey?” There is a slight charge of irony, a sourness, to this, of love drained out of the endearment and bitterness poured in.
“Because,” she says, “here’s this kid. He’s stupid. He’s mean to you. He writes you terrible, illiterate notes. He doesn’t like you. He knocks over your beehives. But he shows up here like a little thug with his handgun, and then you take him home. And then for months and months he hangs around our yard, staring at us like the boy outside the bakery window with his nose pressed against the glass. And finally he shoots himself for no particular reason except he’s got his hands on a firearm again. So all day yesterday we try to explain what there’s no explanation for. And there’s nobody on the planet who’ll grieve, Saul, except for you. So you try to do it. You really do make the effort. Credit where credit is due. For a worthless no-account illiterate ignorant anti-Semitic kid, you go the full charitable nine yards. The sadness, the remorse. That’s why. Only the last humanist would do that. Everybody else, really, Saul, I’m not kidding, would be glad to see him gone. Well, not glad, but, you know.”
“I don’t know about the anti-Semitism part,” Saul says. He stops what he is doing to rub his scalp. Mary Esther sits down abruptly, experimentally, on the floor. Patsy sits down next to the two of them. “He was human, Patsy, carbon-based just like ourselves, and he wasn’t an anti-Semite, because that was too complicated for him. He was here, and then he was here, and then he was here again and again and again full of that negative energy of his, and now he’s gone, but he’s still here, and the thing is, they don’t go away unless you grieve them.” After turning around, he runs his hands tenderly through her hair. “And even then sometimes they don’t. Oh, Patsy. You are so beautiful. I know I keep saying that, but it’s true.”
She smiles at his compliment as if he means it. He’s only saying it, however, because they didn’t make love and this is a reparation. “See, I don’t think that’s it,” she tells him, still smiling. “This is where grieving shades over into the morbid.”
“Morbid? Patsy,” he says, “all this happened yesterday. He killed himself yesterday morning. God forgive us, we had a party last night. Morbid goes on and on. Morbid is for years. He hasn’t even had twenty-four hours to be dead in. One day, is all I’m saying. Give me one day. He would have given us one day.” Saul stops. He does not know what he meant by his last sentence.
“Okay, right. But you’re treating him as if he was somebody, Saul. He wasn’t.”
“Oh, he wasn’t?”
“Nope. He wasn’t anybody much at all. It’s just sentimental to say he was somebody. That’s what we’re talking about. That’s what we’ve been talking about all this time. Sentimentality.”
The word hangs in the air, radiating its contempt, Saul thinks, for himself. In order to protect himself, Saul thinks: The word despises me, but it got loose from Patsy, who could not have meant it.
After taking off her slippers, he begins to massage her feet. He has always had a thing for her feet, which are slender but strong. He addresses the Patsy he loves, not the Patsy who just used the word “sentimentality” against him. “Well, I think he was somebody. I don’t know what kind of somebody he was, and I don’t think anybody knew, but he was that, at least. On the list where it says ‘Somebody,’ Gordy Himmelman gets included.”
“Saul,” she says, leaning back and closing her eyes as he massages her, “wake up. We’re in contemporary times now. And the kids they’re making, Saul, I’m telling you, the kids they’ve got in the schools, they’re not somebody anymore.” Lowering her gaze, she gives him her perfectly reasonable smile and her voice-of-realism voice. Somebody around here, she thinks, has to save Saul from his errant compassion; it endangers their family.
“They’re not?”
“No, honey, they aren’t. I hate to say it, but it’s true. They’re facsimiles, these kids, American-made humanoids. All-American McHumans. Why d’you think they call them zombies? This is why the nations rage against us. This whole country has a robot-thing going with its kids. Jesus Christ, you’re being mushy. These kids aren’t anybody! If they were, they wouldn’t call you on the phone or come into the front yard and then shoot themselves for no purpose at all in the world.” She waits. “They’d have a reason.”
“Well, if he wasn’t anybody, Patsy, then it’s perfectly all right for him to kill himself.” He smiles winsomely, a counterattack smile to her previous smile.
“That’s not what I’m saying,” she says, her voice going metallic.
“And . . . if he’s not human, it’s all right for someone else to kill him. If he’s nobody, then anybody can kill him, legally, you know? And all the nonhuman kids like him.”
“Saul, you’re deliberately misrepresenting me.”
“And if these kids aren’t human, then who is? Who gets a right to be human? The dopes? The droolers? The ones who slur their words and live under bridges with the bums and the trolls? The Gypsies? The Jews? The Arabs? The Mormons? Who gets to be human? Who gets to live? Show me the qualifications, Patsy, since you’re such a goddamn expert on what it is to be human.”
“All right, all right, all right,” she says, shrugging, horrified by his sudden rage. “I see your point. Okay, okay.”
“I’m going to take a nap,” he says, but he stays right where he is, unmoving. “I’m tired.”
At ten minutes past three o’clock in the afternoon, Saul is still in his pajamas. Patsy has never seen him stay in his pajamas all afternoon except when he . . . no, she has never seen it. Mary Esther is upstairs napping after having crawled all over her father, and Saul now has the parts of a broken cuckoo clock out on the floor. He pretends to repair the little bellows for the cuckoo’s call. Perhaps he is actually repairing it. Mostly he just wool-gathers over there. He has the Brahms Clarinet Quintet on the audio system, always a bad sign—incipient, dangerous, and highly contagious lyrical melancholia, melancholy warbling its autumnal song as if that were the only song there ever was or could be, and Saul, her husband, singing right along with it, every scarily beautiful phrase, music like a virus, infecting the listener with lethal sadness.
And now Patsy hears a car coming up the driveway, and the phone ringing simultaneously. The phone, that teething baby, has been ringing whenever she places the receiver back on the hook. One friend after another, including Harold the barber, offering consolation and help. Out front, the car has stopped. Rushing past the spider plant, Patsy quickly answers the phone, to a voice that says, “Hi, Mrs. Bernstein? Is your Jew husband there?” before she hangs up. Then, quickly, she approaches the door, where Gordy’s aunt, Brenda Bagley, has carried a large box from her car’s trunk and dropped it on the front stoop.
“Ms. Bagley,” Patsy says, shading her eyes against the afternoon sun.
“Well, hi there,” Gordy’s aunt says, tipping her head in what seems at first to be an ironic bow. But the bow isn’t ironic; shyness or anxiety or sheer confusion propel it. Her face, pockmarked and roughened, has a cigarette with a long ash apparently growing out of the side of the mouth. Brenda Bagley projects, in all directions, an energetic look of savage desperation.
She puts her hand, now with the cigarette, to her forehead while she clears her t
hroat, and the hot coal tip comes dangerously close to her hairline. The ash falls gracefully to the stoop. Patsy watches it fall.
“I had to come over here. I’ve felt so bad, and I expect you have, too. Last night I couldn’t sleep, of course. Poor worthless kid, how I miss him. You ever miss a poor worthless kid? I tried calling first but the lines were all busy. So I thought I’d just get in the car and drive past.” She has tried to give her hair a few new curls, as if she knows she will be in the public eye. People will be judging her appearance. Her misapplied drugstore lipstick adds to the general overdetermined effect. She looks like a witch in a fairy tale with a poisoned candy house. Behind the house are frogs in a pen. Seeing Brenda Bagley’s efforts to beautify herself, Patsy has to force back—what are these?—yes: tears. The pathos of Brenda’s unattractiveness gives the woman an insidious power. Against her, Patsy feels all her defenses fading. Ah, Patsy thinks, here is a real expert in unhappiness. Here is the tenured full professor of suffering.
Patsy asks her if she’d like to come in. Please, Patsy adds. Gordy’s aunt shakes her head, exhaling smoke as if her heart were a furnace. “No, I couldn’t do that to you. Not invited, like I am. What awful times,” she says. “I’m just so broken up, I don’t know what to do with myself. Like I say, I’m not company for you or anyone. What I thought was, I should come over here with a gift, this gift box of his things that I gathered from his closet this morning. It’s what I thought of last night, when I couldn’t sleep.”
“A box?”
“Right. I thought you and your husband would want some of the boy’s clothing, your husband being Gordy’s teacher and all, and considering what happened over here. Gordy had his feelings about you both. He just couldn’t stay away. Never did tell me why.” Something about her facial expression does not match what she is saying; her glance has become shrewd and inquisitorial, almost gleefully full of hatred. She is a woman who knows how to exploit her unattractiveness and unhappiness. She has all the considerable resources of the weak: the rags, the incompetence when dealing with catastrophe, the unendurable face, the incorrect tone, the addictions, the cluelessness, the echoing footsteps out of the ravaged town.
Saul and Patsy Page 18