Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

“Sure, sure.” He didn’t know what either variety looked like. Flowers seemed so irrelevant to everything.

“Where did the Cayuse Indians live, Saul?”

“Oregon, I think.”

“What do you think about a motorcycle? For little trips into town. For those small occasions when I have to get away from you.”

“Sounds okay to me. But they aren’t exactly safe, you know. People get killed on motorcycles.”

“Those people aren’t careful. I’ll be careful. I’ll wear a helmet. I just want to do it. Imagine a girl — me — on one of those machines. Makes you feel good, doesn’t it? A motorcycle girl in Michigan. The car’s silly for small trips. Besides, I want to visit my friends in town.”

It was true: Patsy already had many friends around Five Oaks, friends that Saul didn’t have. She could be vain about it, her ability to adapt to anything — after all, she was married to him. Now she stood up, dropped her trowel, and put her weight on Saul’s shoes and leaned herself into him. The visor of her cap bumped into his forehead. But she embraced him for only a moment. There wouldn’t be any big, long love thing, not just now. “Want to help, Saul? Give me a hand putting the rest of these flowers in?”

“Not right now, Patsy, I don’t think so.”

“What’s the matter? You’re looking peckish.”

“Peckish? I don’t know.”

“You are in a state.”

“I guess I might be.”

“What is it this time? Our recent brush with death? The McPhees? My incredible impatience about getting another job?”

“What about the McPhees?” he asked. She had probably guessed.

“Well, they were so cute, the two of them. So sweet. And so young, too. Plus their baby. And I know you, Saul, and I know what you thought. You thought: What have these two got that I don’t have?”

She had guessed. She usually did. It was unfair. He stepped backward. “Yes,” he said, “you’re right. What do they have? And why don’t I have it? I’m happy with you, but I—”

“Jesus. You can’t be like them because you can’t, Saul. You fret. That’s your hobby. It’s how you stay occupied. You’ve heard about spots? About how a person can’t change them? Well, I like your spots. I like how you’re a professional worrier. And you always know about things like the Cayuse Indians. I’m not like that. And I don’t want to be married to somebody like me. I’d put myself to sleep. But you’re perfect. You’re an early-warning system. You bark and growl at life. You’re my dog. You do see that, don’t you?”

“Yes.” He nodded.

After he had kissed her and returned to the house, he took the matchbook he had pocketed at the McPhees’ up to his study. At his desk, with a pair of scissors, he cut off the flap of the matches, filled in his name and address, and wrote a check for six dollars to the Wisdom Foundation, located at a post office box number in Cincinnati, Ohio. Just to make sure, he enclosed a letter.

Dear Sirs,

Enclosed please find a check for six dollars for your SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE. Also included is my name and address, written on the back of this book of matches. You will also find them typed at the bottom of this letter. Thank you. I look forward, very much, to reading the secrets.

Sincerely,

Saul Bernstein

He examined the letter, wondering if the last sentence might sound too skeptical, too. . something. But he decided to leave it there. He took the letter, carefully stamped — he put commemorative stamps on all his important mail — out to the mailbox and lifted the little red flag.

He thought: I am no longer a serious person. My great-grandfather read the Torah, my grandfather read Spinoza and Heine and books on immunology, and here I am, writing off for this.

On his trips into town, Saul began to take the long route past the McPhees’ house, slowing down when he was close to their yard. Each time that he found himself within a mile of their farm, he felt his stomach knotting up in anxiety and sick curiosity. He recognized himself twisting in the coils of something like envy, yet not envy exactly, but a more biblical emotion, harder to define, like covetousness. Driving past in the evenings, he occasionally saw them outside, Emory mowing or clipping, their baby strapped on his back, Anne up on a ladder doing something to the windows, or out in the garden like Patsy, planting. They could have been anybody, except that, for Saul, they gave off a disturbing aura of unreflective happiness, which meant that they could have been anybody except Saul.

The road was sufficiently far away from their house and from the shed flaking with paint so that they wouldn’t see him. His car was just another car unless you looked closely and saw the dented roof and Saul inside it. But on a particular Friday, in early June, several hours after work, he drove past their property and spied Emory in the front yard, in the gold twilight, pushing his wife, sitting in the swing. Emory, the ex — football player, had on his face a solemnly contented expression. The baby blithered in a stroller close by. His wife was in a white T-shirt and jeans, and Emory himself wore jeans but no shirt. She was probably proud of her breasts and he was probably proud of his shoulders. Anne held on to the ropes of the swing. Her hair flew up as she rose, and Saul, who took this all in in a few seconds, could hear her cries of delight from his car. Taking his surreptitious glances, he almost drove off the road again. Of course they were children, he knew that, but their youth wasn’t the problem as such. No: they gave off a terrible steady-state glow. They had the blank moronic shimmer of angels. They were glistering. It was intolerable.

They lived smack in the middle of reality and never gave it a minute’s thought. They’d never felt like actors. They’d never been sick with knowingness. The long tunnel of their thoughts had never swallowed them. They’d never had sleepless nights, the urgent, wordless, unexplainable wrestling matches with the shadowy bands of soul-thieves. They were just a couple of Midwesterners.

Goddamn it, Saul thought. Everybody gets to be happy except me. Saul heard Anne’s cries. The sun was sweating all over his forehead. He felt faint and Jewish, as usual. He turned on the radio. It happened to be tuned to a religion station, and some choir was singing “When Jesus Wept.”

“It’s your play, Saul.”

“I know, I know.”

“What’s the matter? You got some bad letters?”

“Duh. The worst. The worst letters I’ve ever had.”

“You always say that. You whine and complain. You’re such a whiner, Saul, you even whine in bed. You were complaining that time just before you spelled out ‘axiom’ over that triple word score and got all those points last year. You do this act when we play Scrabble and then you always beat me.” Patsy was sitting cross-legged in her chair, as she liked to do, with a root beer bottle positioned against her instep, as she arranged and rearranged the letters on her slate.

Saul examined the board. The only word he could think of spelling out was “paint,” but the word made him think of Emory McPhee. The hand of fate again, playing tricks on him. Glancing down at the words on the board, he thought he saw that same hand at work, spelling out some invisible story.

Saul always treated Scrabble boards as if they were fortune-telling equipment, with the order of the words creating a narrative. Patsy had started with “moon,” and he had added “beam” onto it. When she hung a “mild” from the moonbeam, he spiced it up with “lust,” but she had responded to his interest in sex with “murky,” hanging the word from that same moonbeam. “Mild” and “murky” came close to how he felt. His mother, Delia, had said so on the phone yesterday. “Saul, darling,” she had said, “you’re sounding rather dark and mysterious lately. What’s gotten into you?” He had not told her about the accident.