Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

Saul had driven by Gordy’s home a couple of times and had seen a desperate barking dog chained to a stake in the front yard. Often Gordy came to school wearing a T-shirt spotted with blood. His boots were scuffed from objects he had kicked or that had simply fallen haplessly into his path. On his face were two rashes, one from acne, the other from blankness. Girls avoided him. His eyes, on those occasions when they met Saul’s, were cold and lunar. If you were dying on the side of the road in a rainstorm, Saul thought, Gordy’s eyes would pass over you and continue on, after you died, to the next interesting sight.

Sometimes Gordy would begin to stare at Saul at the beginning of class and not stop until the class was finally over. The contours of Gordy’s fixation were unknowable, Saul had decided.

Politically and socially and ideologically, Saul had once felt pity and compassion and generosity toward the wretched of the earth. He still did, when he considered them as a class, and only when they appeared as individuals did they sometimes alarm him. He suspected that Gordy hated him in a final, visceral manner, above or below argument.

Gordy’s friend Bob Pawlak was a dog-killer and a cat-killer, he claimed. He shot them with his 410, he said. Perhaps it was just talk. In a moment of intimacy he had bragged to Saul about killing cats, and his laughter, describing how he went about it, was not quite under control. His smile was the meanest one Saul had ever seen on an ex-child, a smile also visible on the face of Bob’s father, Bob Pawlak, Sr., who once came in, unbelievably, for a parent conference. About his boy, Bob Sr. agreed that Bob Jr. was a hell-raiser, but, then, so was he. He shook his dismayed and proud parental head, decorated with gin blossoms.

Saul could hardly stand to look at Gordy and Bob. But Gordy was not afraid to look at Saul. As was his habit, he stared and stared. There were no windows in the room where he taught them, and no fan, and after half an hour of everyone’s mingled breathing, the air in the room was foul enough to kill a canary.

Earlier in the week Saul had given the kids pictures clipped from magazines. They were supposed to write one-sentence stories to accompany each picture. For these high schoolers, the task would be a challenge. Now, before school started, his mind still on Patsy and Mary Esther, Saul began to read yesterday’s sentences. Gordy and Bob had as usual not written anything. Gordy had torn his picture to bits, and Bob had shredded and eaten his. But the other students had made their brave attempts.

It is dangerous to dive into a pool of water without the nolige of the depth because if it is salow you could hit your head that might creat unconsheness and drowding.

Quite serprisingly the boy finds among the presents rapings which are now discarded a model air plan.

Two sentences, each one requiring ten minutes’ work. Saul stared at them, word by word, feeling himself stumbling in a cognitive limp. What was the next lesson? Where did one start? The sentences were like glimpses into the shattered mind of God.

Like the hourse a cow is an animal and the human race feasts on its meat and diary which form the bulky hornd animal.

The cold blooded crecher the bird will lay an egg and in a piriod of time a new bird will brake out of it as a storm of burth.

Saul looked up from his desk at the sputtering overhead lights and the grimy acoustic tile. It was in the storm of birth — mouths of babes, etc. — that he himself was currently being tossed.

He looked down at the floor again and spotted a piece of paper with the words “your a kick” close to the wastebasket. Finally, a nice compliment! He tossed it away.

Saul’s mother had been visiting. When Saul arrived at home, carrying the Five Oaks News-Chronicle, Delia met him at the door and gave him a kiss on the cheek, leaving lipstick and perfume on him, like a claim check. She had more scents than a cougar. This was the fourth day of a projected six-day visit. She had been cooking meals, helping out with the housework, and taking care of Mary Esther whenever Patsy flagged or needed to nap. Delia did not like the name “Mary Esther” and much preferred “Emmy.” Whenever his mother called her grandchild “Emmy,” Saul felt himself getting slowly but steadily irritated at his mother’s assumption that he and Patsy were disqualified from naming their own daughter themselves, that they would do it incorrectly.

The house, which had once smelled of Saul and Patsy, and the sweet-sour loamy smells of parenting and babyhood, now smelled pungently of Delia’s perfume, a fragrance with the power of an air-raid siren. What was the point? Why did a new grandmother have to wear so much perfume? Well, Saul thought, the question answers itself. His mother had given birth to him when she was twenty-one. She was now in her forties, and still, she thought, a player.

Delia was tall, with brilliant red hair, and restless. Bracelets rang noisily on her wrists, and she favored large clumpy necklaces of amber. She had long elegant fingers tipped with brilliant blood-red nail polish. She had a dominatrix side, he thought uncharitably. Saul, who liked Richard Strauss’s operas and once played trombone in one of the Northwestern University student pit orchestras, sometimes referred to his mother as “the Marschallin” and thought that Eleanor Steber could do a good job of playing her. Moving around the house like a woman who meant business no matter what she was doing, she had missed her calling, Saul claimed in bed to Patsy. She should have been a full-time aristocrat running a palace, planning masked balls, arranging other people’s affairs. She aspired to a certain level of domesticated depravity. Just watching her tired him out and gave him headaches. Always tanned and fit, she had a personal trainer at a health club in Bethesda, and Saul was always dismayed by how good-looking his mother was, how disconcertingly sexy. No middle-aged woman needed to be that beautiful, he thought, especially when the beauty is fading just enough to give it warmth, and that woman is your mother, and your father has died young, and your mother has gone on to have a succession of boyfriends, and. . and. .

His mother took his hand. He wondered if he had a streak of misogyny. Probably only in regard to his mother. Other women did not inspire it.

“Emmy was a little angel today,” the Marschallin said, nodding toward the living room, where Mary Esther was sleeping in Patsy’s arms. Patsy raised her face toward Saul. “How was work?” his mother asked, keeping her voice down. “How was school?”

The question made him feel like a child. Delia had that effect on him. Saul removed his hand from his mother’s and pursed his lips in Patsy’s direction. He took out a handkerchief to wipe off his mother’s lipstick from his face. But he could feel its imprint there, worming its way through the skin toward his brain. “Work was fine. Someone left me a note. They said I was a kick.”

“That’s nice,” Delia said dubiously. “A kick? In what sense?”

“In the sense that. . oh, you know. A party. That’s a real kick. Fun.”

Very quietly, from her chair, Patsy said, “Nobody uses that word that way anymore.” Having gathered her blond hair back in a ponytail, she gazed down at Mary Esther and touched the baby’s own perfect feathery hair. Patsy’s beauty was fuller and more human, Saul thought, than his mother’s. It was actionable. You wanted to mate with her. His wife’s beauty made him happy and crazy, and his mother’s beauty just made him crazy, period. Maybe menopause would calm his mother down, but he doubted it.

“They don’t? Sure they do,” Saul said.

“Not in a learning-disabilities class, they don’t.” Patsy shook her head. “You can bet your bottom dollar that they don’t use expressions like that.”