Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

“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 thought, 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.

But Saul didn’t seem so pleased with it. While making dinner a week later, one of his improvised stir-fries that made use of fresh ingredients to combine with and camouflage the leftovers, Saul said that he had been having second thoughts: Mary Esther, he said, was burdened with a lot of name, maybe too much Christianity and Judaism mixed in there for comfort. “Whose comfort?” Patsy asked, from her chair in the kitchen, wondering about how Saul was managing. Standing in front of the stove, listening selectively, Saul ignored the question. Possibly another name would be better, he went on, uninterruptable. Jayne, maybe, or Liz. Direct, futuristic American monosyllables. Bottom-line names. Or maybe they could combine the M of Mary and the E of Esther to make Emmy.

As he muttered and chopped carrots and broccoli before dropping the bamboo shoots and water chestnuts and some other unidentifiables into the pan, Patsy could see that he was so tired that he was only half-awake. His monologue wasn’t meant to make any sense; it was meant to fill time, to get his thoughts out of his head and into the room, and then into Patsy’s head. He spoke words the way a ventilator blew out air. Of course he didn’t plan on renaming his daughter after naming her the first time; he said only crazy people did that, loading down their children with aliases. His socks didn’t match, his jeans were beltless, and his hair had gone back to wildness, sprigs and sections hanging down over his eyes, his ears, his neck. He was a mess. Still quite handsome, though, in his way, and very lovable, though he tired you out, being the way he was.

The night before, between feedings — feedings for the baby, not for Saul, who had become, in a way that Patsy couldn’t quite pinpoint, slightly more baby-like himself — Saul had confessed that he didn’t know if he could manage it, it being the long haul of fatherhood. But that had just been Saul-talk. Right now, Mary Esther was sleeping upstairs. Fingering the pages of her magazine, Patsy leaned back in the alcove, still in her bathrobe, watching her husband prepare dinner. She liked watching him. She breathed in and out, her lungs as dependable in their way as her husband. She was still sore everywhere and took pleasure in not moving; she liked staying put and watching the ceiling or the cars outside on the road, or the spectacle of Saul, cooking. Long stretches of bland ordinariness staged anywhere in the house soothed her. Ordinary life seemed to be full of a previously hidden grace as long as she didn’t have to get up very far to meet it. She had already done that by giving birth to Mary Esther. You couldn’t get much closer to life than that. Feeling her breasts engorged, still feeling familiar pains all over herself in her most private places, she wondered what she had done with the breast pump and when the diaper guy would deliver the new batch.

Bending down toward the pan, stolid and dutiful and husbandly, Saul sniffed, added some peanut oil, stirred again, and after a minute he ladled out dinner onto Patsy’s plate. The food gave off a damp tropical aroma. Then with that habit he had of reading her thoughts and rewording them — a habit that amazed Patsy and irritated her in equal measures — he turned toward her and said, “You left the breast pump upstairs.” And then: “Hey, you think I’m sleepwalking. But I’m not. I’m conscious. I only look like a zombie.” He smiled at her with a full-fledged zombie smile, the right side of his mouth going up, the undead left side staying right where it was. “You smell of ether,” he said, unkindly.

If he can read my thoughts, she thought, where’s my privacy? But there wasn’t any privacy anyway, not when you gave birth in front of strangers and brought out a breast anytime the baby wanted it.

For the last nine months, Saul had glimpsed the albino deer, always at a distance, on the fringes of the property that he and Patsy rented. After work or on weekends, he had walked across the unfarmed fields up to the next property line, marked by rusting fence posts, or, past the fields, into the neighboring woods of silver maple and scrub oak, hoping to get a sight of the animal and to find out why it was pestering him. It had only revealed itself, however, when he had not been looking for it, and it had this out-of-the-corner-of-the-eye trick that made Saul feel as if the deer had a project of some sort, like converting him to Catholicism or explaining fatherhood to him. Once it had stood grazing near a stump and was visible until he looked directly at it. Then it disappeared with one instantaneous leap into the underbrush. Here, there, gone. It gave him the shivers, this hallucinatory beast with pink eyes and white fur.

Out on his walks, or while jogging, searching the ground for clues, Saul went into emotional reveries, which Patsy had characterized as manic-depressive fits, a phrase that Saul hated. He missed the old pre-therapeutic words like “sorrow” and “exuberance” and “forbearance.” Just now he was a bit short of forbearance. What was he doing out here taking these walks? The sky lately was habitually overcast, like a patient in need of therapy. There were no hills worth mentioning. You couldn’t eat the berries that grew here because if you did, you would sicken. The streams and creeks hardly flowed at all because the ground was so flat that the water became indecisive. Yes, semirural Michigan (things were changing: there was a new outlet mall two miles away, they had paved Whitefeather Road and were beginning to put up stoplights, and condos were being built in a hurry) was a blank slate, but he felt right at home in it, just like that freak of nature, that deer. Maybe everywhere was a blank slate. And now he had a daughter, right here, to care for. A daughter! The fungal smell of wood rot in the culverts strengthened him, he believed, made him a better man, perhaps a better father, or at least made him think of words that nobody used anymore, such as “rue.”