Charles Baxter: Saul and Patsy

“Saul,” Patsy said, sitting on the passenger side and working at a week-old Sunday crossword, “you’re underlining your words again.”

“This country is falling into the hands of the rich and stupid, ” Saul grumbled, underlining his words while waving his right hand in an all-purpose gesture at the windshield. “The plutocrats are taking over and keeping everybody ignorant about how things are. The conspiracy of the inane starts in the schools, but it gets big results in business. Everywhere I’ve looked lately I’ve seen a cynic in a position of tremendous responsibility. We’re being undermined by rich cynics and common people who have been, forcibly, made stupid. This has got to stop. I’ve got to be a teacher. It’s a political necessity. At least for a few years.”

“There’s lots of stupidity out there, Saul,” Patsy said, glancing up at a stoplight. “A big supply. You think you’re going to clear it away? That’s your plan?” She waited. “The light just turned green. Pay attention to the road, please.” She smiled. “‘Drive, he said.’” She reached out and touched him on the cheek. “‘For christ’s sake, look out where you’re going.’”

“Don’t quote Creeley at me. I’m the big man for the job,” Saul said. “This country needs me.”

“Well, of course.” She scratched her hair. “Write an editorial, why don’t you? Nine letters for ‘acidic.’ First letter is V and the fourth one is R.”

“‘Vitriolic,’” Saul said. “And you could get certified, too. Or you could insinuate yourself into a bureaucracy and reorganize it. You’re so lovable, everybody just does what you ask them to do, without thinking. Boston is full of deadwood. God knows, you can reorganize deadwood. It’s been proved.” He waited. “You could do whatever you wanted to, if we moved out of here. What do you want to do, Patsy?”

“Finger-exercise composer,” Patsy said. “Six letters, last letter Y and first letter C.”

“Czerny.”

“Boston, huh?” She gazed at the sky. “It’s sort of hard to get teaching jobs there, isn’t it? Oh, and, by the way, what am I going to do if you start teaching? I don’t want to teach.”

“That’s what I was just asking you. You’re not listening to me. What do you want to do?” Patsy had had half-a-dozen majors before she settled for a double major in dance-performance and English.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what I want to do.” She studied the sky. “I’d like to go work in a bank, actually.” Another pause. “In the mortgage department.”

The statement was so unlike her, Saul smiled. One of her dry, shifty, ironical asides whose subtext you had to go in search of. Then he realized that perhaps she meant it, and he studied her face for aspersions, but Patsy, who was vehement about privacy issues, did not give herself away.

Saul had found, in his landlord’s shed, a ladder that was long enough to get him up to the roof of the house on Whitefeather Road. He’d been exploring Mr. Munger’s shed while Patsy was out getting groceries, and when she returned, he was sitting on the south peak with his legs dangling over the edge. Patsy put the grocery bags down on the driveway. “I won’t scream,” she said. “But I do have some questions.”

“Good,” he said.

“Saul, be truthful. Why are you sitting on the roof of our house?”

“Thinking,” he shouted. “Looking at the horizon.” He smiled down at her. “At the view. You are so beautiful. You’re the only beautiful sight here to see.”

“Thanks, but there’s no view,” she said. “Including me. I’m not a view. Nothing to see except what’s here. You need hills for variety, and we don’t have that.”

“Well, I was just hoping for a little variety — you know, a break. Maybe a show of some sort. I thought maybe I’d see something. An incline, a knoll, a mound would all have been fine. I’m not asking for an alp.”

“Well, you won’t get one. You won’t get one of any of them. No hills, honey. Remember? We agreed. No hills out here. Just drainage ditches. Come down from the roof, Saul, before you fall and kill yourself.”

“Patsy,” he asked, “how’d we end up here?”

“Times were hard,” she said, quoting the Wizard of Oz, “so we took the job.” She watched him. “That is, you took the job. Remember? It was the stupid crusade. Against stupidity, I mean. It was all your idea. I came along for the ride.” She gazed at him with a deliberately cool expression. “First I come along for the ride, and then you do.”

“Oh, right. Look at this,” he said despairingly, pointing at the land around their house. “You know, I think we made a terrible mistake, but I’m not blaming anybody. Including myself. All I see up here is dirt roads and farmers reading The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. ”

“Saul,” she said, “they watch television now. They listen to police scanners. Also, it’s too early in your stay here for paranoia. They don’t have opinions about Jews, least of all you. Please come down. I’ve got to take those groceries in, and I could use your help. And please don’t break your neck. I’d have to supply more of the backbone for both of us.”

“It’s not Boston,” he said, edging toward the ladder. “And it’s not Chicago. It’s not Omaha. It’s this other thing. My brother warned me about this, and even my mother warned me. It’s this place smack out in the middle of nowhere, and now it has us in its grip.” One of the shingles loosened and slid to the gutter. The ladder trembled as he began to make his way down. “It’s scary up there, honey. It’s a view for adults. Not for kids. Kids couldn’t handle it.” He looked straight into her eyes.

“I hope—” she said, pausing.

“That you don’t go nuts out here? Me too. Me too.”

“Why should I go nuts?” she asked. “I like it here. Would you please help me with those groceries?”

Rung by rung he lowered himself and took the remaining grocery bags out of the car in a double embrace. He kept his eyes on Patsy as she carried her two bags toward the back door before propping them against the wall in order to free one hand to turn the doorknob. The house was never locked; there was no one to lock it against. Saul admired her physical agility as she went inside, and in any case rarely found fault with her. He loved his wife profoundly; it had become the theme to his life, his antidote to everything else. Sometimes, just watching her carrying in the groceries or making dinner, he thought his heart would break out of sheer happiness in her presence. He believed that nothing else in his life would equal his love for Patsy. Still, he thought she was being a little smug about how much she liked it here. She could be snobby about her populism.

Their nearest neighbor, Mrs. O’Neill, looked so much like Thelma Ritter in Rear Window that Saul and Patsy smirked at each other when she introduced herself at their door one Friday afternoon, peering inside as she asked them for a bottle of molasses that she might borrow for a batch of her cookies. Mrs. O’Neill’s curiosity about them was greedy but harmless, Saul thought. It was curiosity bred out of loneliness. As soon as Patsy found the bottle, Mrs. O’Neill invited them over to sample the cookies she had already made, and those that she would make with the molasses she was borrowing. Saul couldn’t decide whether Mrs. O’Neill’s nosiness was part of the community’s nosiness, or whether she was just nosy for herself alone. When Saul and Patsy pulled into her driveway, her garage door began to go up, even though Mrs. O’Neill had arrived before they had and her car was already inside. An iron coach-and-horse weather-vane stood on an iron stalk atop the garage’s cupola. Mrs. O’Neill stood near the geranium-surrounded flagpole, holding on to a push-button signal box, her eyes squinched.