Charles Baxter: Saul and Patsy

On his left were the wooden shelves once meant for storing preserves. On these shelves, mason jars, empty and gathering dust, now lined up unevenly. Saul and Patsy’s landlord, Mr. Munger, a retired farmer and unsuccessful freelance preacher who had a fitful temper, had thrown their lids together into an angry heap on a lower shelf. The washtubs were on Saul’s right, and in front of him, four feet away, was the sprung mousetrap. The mouse had been pressed flat by the trap, and its tiny yellow incisors were showing at the sides of its mouth, just as Patsy had said.

He loved her, but she could be manipulative when it came to getting him to do household chores that she didn’t want to do. Maybe, out of his sight, she was exchanging her letter tiles.

Saul grunted, loosened the spring, and picked up the mouse by the tail, which felt like cold rubber. His fingers brushed against the animal’s downy fur, soft as milkweed pods. Being, on a miniature scale, had once been inhabited there. With his other hand he held the flashlight. He heard other mice scratching in the basement corners. Why kill mice if there were always going to be more of them? After climbing the stairs and opening the back door, he set the flashlight down: the cool air and the darkness made his flesh prickle. Still holding the tiny pilgrim, he took four steps into the backyard. Feeling a scant moment of desolation, nothing more than a breeze of feeling, he threw the mouse toward the field, its body arcing over the tiny figure on the horizon of a distant radio transmitting tower, one pulsing red light at its tip. Saul took a deep breath. The blankness of the midwestern landscape excited him. There was a sensual loneliness here that belonged to him now, that was truly his. He thought that fate had perhaps turned him into one of those characters in Russian literature abandoned to haphazard fortune and solitude on the steppes.

Nothing out there seemed friendly except the lights on the horizon, and they were too far away to be of any help.

He walked into the living room, where Patsy was wrapped in a blanket. “Good news and bad news,” Saul said, tilting his head. “The good news is that I threw out the mouse. The bad news is that it, she, was pregnant. Maybe that’s good news. You decide. By the way, I see that you’ve wrapped yourself in a blanket. Now why is that? Too cold in here?”

She had dimmed the light, turning the three-way bulb to its lowest wattage. She wasn’t sitting in the chair anymore. She was lying on the sofa, the root beer nowhere in sight. With a grand gesture she parted the blanket: she had taken off her clothes except for her underwear, and just above her breasts she had placed six Scrabble letters:

HI SAUL

“Nine points,” he said, settling himself down next to her, breathing in her odor, a clear celery-like smell, although tonight it seemed to be mixed with ether. He picked the letters off her skin with his teeth and one by one gently spat them down onto the rug.

“I guess it’s good news,” Patsy said, “that we don’t have all those baby mice in a mouse nursery down there.” She kissed him.

“Um,” Saul said. “This was what was in it for me?”

“Plain old married love,” Patsy said, helping him take his jeans off. Then she lifted up her pelvis as he removed her underwear. “Plain old married love is only what it is.”

He moved down next to her as she unbuttoned his shirt. He said, “Sometimes I think you’ll go to any length to avoid losing in Scrabble. I think it’s a character weakness on your part. Neurotic rigidity. David Shapiro talks about this in his book on neurotic styles. Check it out. It’s a loser’s trick. I spelled out ‘axiom’ and you saw the end of your possibilities.”

“It’s not a trick,” she said, absentmindedly stroking his thighs, while he pointed his index finger and pretended to write with it across her breasts and then down across her abdomen. “Hey,” she said, “what’re you writing with that finger?”

“‘I love Patsy,’” he said. “I’m not writing it, I’m printing it.”

“Why?”

“Make it more readable.”

“‘I love Patsy,’” she said. “Seventeen points.”

“Sixteen. And it depends where it’s placed.”

“A V is worth four.” His eyes were closed. With one hand he was caressing her right breast, and with the other he wrote other words with imaginative lettering across her hips. “I don’t remember making love in this room before. Especially not with the shades up.” She stretched to kiss his face and to tease her tongue briefly into his mouth. Then she trailed her finger across his back. “I can do that, too.” She traced the letters with her finger just under his shoulders.

“That was an I,” Saul said.

“Yes.”

“‘I love Saul’?” he asked. “Is that what you’re writing?”

“You’re so conceited. So self-centered.”

“The curtains are parted,” he said. “The neighbors will see.”

“We don’t have neighbors. This is the rural middle of American nowhere. Always has been.”

“People will drive by on Whitefeather Road and see us having sex on the sofa.” He waited. “They might be shocked.”

“We’re married,” she said.

He laughed. “You’re wicked, Patsy.”

“You keep using old adjectives,” she said, sliding her hands up the sides of his chest. “Old blah-blah adjectives that no one uses anymore. That’s a habit you should swear off. Let those people watch us. They might learn something.” She slithered down to kiss the scar on his knee, then moved up. “The only thing I mind about sex,” she said after another minute, “and I’ve said this before, is that it cuts down on the small talk.”

“We talk a lot,” Saul said, positioning himself next to her and finally entering her. He grunted, then said, “I think we talk more than most people. No, I’m sure of it. We’ve always jabbered. Most people don’t talk this much, men especially.” He was making genial moves inside her. “Of course, it’s hard to tell. I mean, who does surveys?”

“Oh, Saul,” she said. “You know, I’m glad I know you. Out here in the wilds a girl needs a pal, she really does. You’re my pal, Saul. You are. I love you.”

“It’s true,” he said. “We’re buddies. Bosom buddies.” He kissed a breast. On an impulse, he twisted slightly so that he could reach over to the card table behind him and scoop up a handful of Scrabble letters from the playing board.

“Aren’t you too cute. What’re you doing?” she asked.

“I’m going to baptize you,” he said, slowly dropping the tiled letters on her face and shoulders and breasts. “I’m going to baptize you in The Word.”

“God,” she said, as a P and an E fell into her hair, “to think that I wanted to distract you with a mouse caught in a trap.”

Saul had been hired eighteen months earlier to teach American history, journalism, and speech in the Five Oaks High School. In its general appearance and in its particulars, however, Five Oaks, Michigan, was not what he and Patsy had had in mind. They had planned to settle down in Boston, or, in the worst-case scenario, the north side of Chicago, a good place for a young married couple. They had been working at office jobs in Evanston at the time after graduating from Northwestern, and one day, driving home along the lake, Saul seemed to have a seizure of frustration. He began to shout about the supervision and the random surveillance, how he couldn’t breathe or open his office window. “Budget projections for a bus company,” he said, “is no longer meaningful work, and it turns out that it never was. ” He rambled on about getting certified for secondary school because he needed to contribute to what he called “the great project of undoing the dumbness that’s been done.”