Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

The books had warned him about the loud buzzing sound of angry bees, but for the first few days Saul never heard it. Something about Saul seemed to keep the bees occupied and unirritated. He was stung twice, once on the wrist and once on the back of the neck, but the pain was pointed and directed and so focused that he could manage it. It was unfocused pain that he couldn’t stand.

Out at the back of the property, a quarter-mile away from the house, the hives and the bees wouldn’t bother anyone, he thought. “Just don’t bring them in here,” Patsy told him, glancing through one of his apiary books. “Not that they’d come. I just want them and me to have a little distance between us, is all.” She smiled with uncertainty. “Bees, Saul? Honey? You are quite an amazing literalist.”

“I am? I thought they were metaphors.”

“Literal metaphors,” she corrected him. “Just don’t buy a herd of cows. We can get milk at the store.”

And then one night, balancing his checkbook at his desk, with Mary Esther half-asleep in the crook of his left arm, Saul felt a moment of calm peacefulness, the rarest of all his emotions, and he remembered for that instant exactly what it was like to be in that blessed condition. He hadn’t felt that way for at least eighteen months. Under his desk lamp, with his daughter drooling on his Northwestern University sweatshirt, he sat forward, waiting. A presence made itself felt behind him. When he turned around, he saw Patsy in worn jeans and a T-shirt watching him from the doorway. Her arms were folded, and her breasts were outlined perfectly beneath the cloth. No bra, God save us, he thought, no bra, her nipples visible like the floodlights of heaven across the river. She was holding on her face a tentative expression of sly playfulness. She would be able to do the erotic thing, but it might sometimes be an effort, but she was there again, and she was ready. Saul could see her working at it. He would have to help her out. He would have to pitch in. She couldn’t do this by herself because. . because she didn’t feel like it.

“Well, aren’t you something?” he said. “Kind of sleek-looking.”

“Aren’t I something? Yes, I am. Just look at me.”

“Come here, babe,” he said.

“‘Babe’? We don’t have to do endearments. How about if you come over here?”

“No, you first. I gotta put the baby down. I’ve got the baby here.”

“Ah, yes. Saul and the baby.” She came into the room, her bare feet whisking against the wood floor, and she put her arms around him so that the baby wasn’t also embraced, and she pressed herself against him strategically and stealthily.

“Put Mary Esther into her crib,” she whispered. She clicked off the desk lamp.

As they made love, Saul thought of the bees, of procreation, and citizenship. Already, he thought, those insects— Apis mellifera —were proving to be a kind of solution.

Spring moved into summer, and in the distance the outlet mall was completed, with a new cineplex going up nearby, and the microwave tower constructed. Saul bought a new computer. Just before school ended, he told his students about the bees and the hives. Pride escaped from his face, radiating it; he could feel it bathing his students with its unwholesome glow. When he explained how honey was extracted from the frames, he glanced at Gordy Himmelman and saw a look of what he took to be dumb animal malice directed back at him. What was the big deal? Saul wondered before he turned away. The kid hated Saul anyway. A bit more hatred would be salt on top of salt.

One night in early June, Patsy was headed upstairs, looking for the Snugli, which she thought she had forgotten in Mary Esther’s room, when she heard Saul’s voice coming from behind the door. She stopped on the landing, her hand on the banister. At first she thought he might be singing to the baby, but, no, Saul was not singing. He was sitting in there — well, he was probably sitting, Saul didn’t like to stand when he spoke — talking to his daughter, and Patsy heard him finishing a sentence: “. . was never very happy.”

Patsy moved closer to the door.

“Who explains?” Saul was saying, apparently to his daughter. “No one does.”

Saul went on talking to Mary Esther, filling her in on his mother and several other mysterious phenomena. What did he think he was doing, discussing this ephemera with an infant? “I should sing you a song,” he announced, interrupting his train of thought. “That’s what parents do. It’s in all the books. Maybe I’ll do Zorastro’s aria. Or ‘Pigeons on the Grass, Alas.’ You might like that.”

To get away from Saul’s sitcom vocalizing, Patsy retreated to the window for a breath of air. Looking out, she saw someone standing on the front lawn, bathed in moonlight, staring in the direction of the house. He was thin and ugly and scruffy, and he looked a bit like a shadowy clod, but a dangerous shadowy clod, and the hairs on the back of her neck stood up.

“Saul,” she said. Then, more loudly, “Saul, there’s someone out on the lawn.”

He joined her at the window. “I can’t see him,” he said. “Oh, yeah, there.” He shouted, “Hello? Can I help you?”

The boy turned around. He got on a bike and raced away down the driveway and onto Whitefeather Road.

Saul did not move, his hands planted on the windowsill. “Well, I’ll be damned. It’s Gordy Himmelman,” he groaned. “That little bastard has come onto our property. I’m getting on the phone.”

“Saul, why’d he come here ? What’d you do to him?” She held her arms against her chest. “What does he have against us?”

“I was his teacher. And we’re Jewish,” Saul said. “And to top it all off, we’re parents. He never had any. I showed those kids the baby pictures and he had a psychotic break. Big mistake. He’s not used to being psychotic. Somebody must have found Gordy in a barrel of brine. He was not of woman born.” He tried to smile. “I’m kidding, sort of.”

“Do you think he’ll be back?” she asked.

“Oh, yes.” Saul wiped his forehead. “They always come back, those kind. And I’ll be ready when he does.”

It had been a spring and summer of violent weather, and Saul had been reading the Old Testament again, looking for clues. On Thursday, around four in the afternoon, he had finished mowing the front lawn and was sitting on the porch, drinking the last, the final, bottle of Mad Dog’s no-brand beer when he looked to the west and felt a sudden cooling of the air, a shunting of atmosphere from higher to lower. Just above the horizon a mass of clouds began boiling. Clouds that looked like breasts and hand tools — he couldn’t help thinking the way he thought— advanced over him, with other clouds hanging down, pendulous. The wind picked up.

“Patsy,” he called. “Hey, Patsy.”

Something calamitous was happening in the atmosphere. In a moment a voice could easily emerge from the whirlwind. The pressure was dropping so fast that Saul could feel it in his elbows and knees.

“Patsy!” he shouted.

From upstairs he heard her calling back: “What, Saul?”

“Go to the basement,” he said. “Close the upstairs window and take Mary Esther down there. Take a flashlight. Something’s coming. We’re going to get a huge storm.”

Rushing through the house, Saul closed windows and switched off lights, and when he returned to the front door to close it, he saw the tall and emaciated apparition of his student Gordy Himmelman out in the yard, standing fixedly like an emanation from the dirt and stone of the fields. He had returned. Toward Saul he aimed his vacant stare. Flies buzzed around his head. Saul, who could not stop thinking even in moments of critical emergency, was struck into stillness by Gordy’s presence, his authoritative malevolence — or whatever it was — standing there in the just-mown grass. For the first time the thought entered Saul’s mind that he was responsible for Gordy somehow, that he had had a small but important part in his creation, that he had been the minor lab-coated assistant in Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory, attaching the wires behind the Tesla coils. But they’d all collaborated: the volatile ambitious sky and the forlorn backwardness of the fields had together given rise to this human disaster, who, even as Saul watched, yelled toward the house, “Hey, Mr. Bernstein. It’s a storm.” Or maybe he said, “I’m a storm.” Saul didn’t quite hear. Then the boy said, “Go take a look at your bees, shitbird.” In slow motion, he smiled.