Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

The albino deer had vanished, too. He’d seen no trace of it for days, though he had gone looking for it.

Mary Esther lay in the rickety crib that Saul himself had assembled, following the confusing and contradictory instructions enclosed in the shipping box. Above the crib hung a mobile of cardboard stars and planets. Mary Esther slept and cried and gurgled while the mobile turned slowly in the small breezes caused by the visitors as they bent over the baby.

When Saul’s brother Howie finally called, as Saul knew he would, he asked to speak to Mary Esther right away. “I gotta talk to her. Put her on,” he said. Saul told Howie that the baby was only a baby and couldn’t talk on the phone, but Howie argued and said that she certainly could. At a month old, she should start to learn how to use telecommunications. Saul brought the phone down to the baby’s ear, and Howie said whatever he had to say while Mary Esther appeared to smile, and after a minute or so, Saul took the phone away from his daughter and raised it to his ear to speak to Howie himself, but whatever Howie had had to tell his niece was finished, and the phone line had gone dead.

Having a new baby was like having an affair or having committed a murder, Saul decided, as he patrolled the house: you couldn’t really talk about it. People found it disagreeable whenever you started up about your new child; if they were single or childless, they thought you were boastful and self-centered, and if they had children of their own, they were politely bored by your stories. Oh, yeah. Been there, done that, they said — a phrase Saul had always hated. Women could talk to other young mothers about their children, but men could not. There seemed to be a rule about this. Men could boast about their children but not discuss the intricacies of child care, though perhaps this was all changing. The birth of his daughter felt like the biggest event that had ever happened to him, and he had no one to talk to about it except Patsy, and even she, he thought, was getting bored with him, his husbanding of her. To husband: a dreary transitive verb meaning “to conserve, to save.”

One night when Mary Esther was eight weeks old and the smell of early spring was pouring into the room from the purple lilacs in the driveway, Patsy awakened and found herself alone in bed. Checking the clock, she saw that it was three-thirty. Saul had to be up for work in three hours. From downstairs she heard very faintly the sound of groans and music. The groans weren’t Saul’s. She knew his groans very well. There was always a touch of irony to them. These were different. She put on her bathrobe.

In the living room, sitting in his usual overstuffed chair and wearing his blue jeans and T-shirt, Saul was watching a porn film on the TV, the VCR whirring quietly. His head was propped against his arm as if he were listening attentively to a lecture. He glanced up at Patsy, flashed her a guilty wave with his left hand, then returned his gaze to the movie. On the TV screen, a man and a woman were having showy sex in a curiously grim manner inside a stalled freight elevator. They behaved as if they were under orders. Then Patsy realized that, of course, they were under orders, which was at least one reason why their lovemaking looked so odd.

“What’s this, Saul?”

“Video I rented.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“The store.”

Moans had been dubbed onto the soundtrack, but they did not match the actors’ expressions. The man and the woman did not look at each other. For some reason a green ceramic poodle sat in the opposite corner of the freight elevator. “Not very classy, Saul.”

“Well, no. Why do you suppose Howie didn’t want to talk to me? He didn’t stay on the line. He congratulated me and then said he wanted to speak to the baby. I don’t get it. There’s a lot I don’t get these days.”

“Maybe he’s jealous. Of our having a daughter.”

The woman on the TV set wheezled.

“I doubt it. He’s making all the money, but he doesn’t come to visit and he doesn’t send us a present. It’s strange. . I miss him. I miss everybody. Look at that, Patsy. She hasn’t taken her shoes off. That’s pretty strange. They’re having sex in the freight elevator and her shoes are still on. I guess the boys in the audience don’t like feet.”

Patsy studied the TV screen. Unexpected sadness located her and settled in like a headache. She rested her eyes on the Matisse poster above Saul’s chair: naked people dancing in a ring. In this room the human body was excessively represented, and for a moment Patsy had the feeling that everything in life was probably too much, there was just too much to face down. Eventually you were done in by the altogether.

“Saul,” she said, “you need more friends. People to talk to. Don’t turn into a sitcom sort of guy, one of those typical Americans. I’d hate that.”

“Don’t I know it.” He waited. “I need a purpose, as long as you’re at it.”

“Come upstairs.”

“In a minute, my love, after this part.”

“I don’t like to look at them. My idea of good porno is something else. I guess I don’t even like you looking at them, these two.”

“It’s hell, isn’t it?”

She touched his shoulder. “This is sort of furtive. Not that I’m a prude or anything.”

“Oh, you can see it too, if you want. I’m not hiding it. I still have my jeans on. No jerking off or anything like that. I’m an impartial observer. I’m disinterested. See? I even know the proper definition of that often misused word.” He gave her a flat smile.

“Why are you doing this, Saul? How come you’re watching this?”

“Because I wanted to. Didn’t you read the training manual on me? I do this after my daughter is born. Besides, I wanted a real movie and I got this instead. I was in the video place and I went past the musicals and the action thrillers into the sad, private room where all the X’s were. There I was — me — full of curiosity.”

“Curiosity? About what?”

“Well, we, you and I, used to have fun. We used to get hot. So this. . anyway, it’s like nostalgia, you know? Nostalgia for something. It’s like going into a museum where the exhibits are happy, and behind glass, and you watch the happiness, your nose on the glass, and it isn’t yours, so you watch more of it.”

“This isn’t happiness you’re watching. Jesus, Saul, that’s a big soul error. And furthermore, this isn’t like you. Doesn’t it make you feel like shit or something?”

He sat in his chair, thinking. Then he said, “Oh sure, it does. Very shit-like.” He clicked off the TV set, stood up, and put his arms around Patsy, and they embraced for what seemed to Patsy a long time. Behind Saul on the living-room bookshelf were volumes of history and literature — Saul’s collection of Dashiell Hammett and Samuel Eliot Morison and several volumes of the Loeb Classical Library — and the Scrabble game on the top shelf. They had not played the game for months. “Don’t leave me alone back here,” Patsy said. “Don’t leave me alone, okay?”

“I loved you, Patsy,” he told her, and she shivered at the past tense of the verb. It felt like a decision on his part, a conscious act. It felt like the first step of a trial separation. “You know that. Always have.”

“Not what I’m talking about.”

“I know.”

“It’s just that you don’t get everything now,” she said. “I don’t give it all to you. Mary Esther gets some of it. You need to diversify.”

They stood for a few moments longer, swaying slightly together. They were physically intimate, but it felt to Patsy as if their souls were miles apart, hers in Guatemala and Saul’s in Greenland.