Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

Once they moved to their new house in The Uplands, however, they thought they were finally rid of him. It wasn’t as if they had moved in order to ditch him, but they were sure that the new location would put an end to his visits.

Yet somehow Gordy, who had dropped out of high school by this time, found out where they had moved to, and one Saturday morning in November, there he was again, standing under the large tree, the linden, that the developers had spared in their yard. In his characteristic way, Gordy was staring at the house, then at the sky, then at the ground, then at the house again. Their local acned Bartleby. He hadn’t come on his bicycle; The Uplands happened to be on the Five Oaks city busline route. Saul thought of calling the police to complain of Gordy as a trespasser, and then he imagined being laughed at for his complaint. He would have to take action himself.

He strolled out to the front yard. “You found us,” he said.

Gordy nodded.

“How did you manage to do that?” Saul inquired.

“I seen your car in the driveway,” Gordy informed him. “That white Chevy. That I rode in.” Saul went back into the house and left Gordy outside. He was not about to invite him in, what with the new floors, and the carpeting, and the carefully placed furniture. He wasn’t about to ask him to do anything.

At times Patsy would rise in the morning and walk into the nursery, only to find Mary Esther standing in her crib and, with a rapt expression, gazing through the window at the young man on the autumn lawn. Was he shivering? Patsy thought that they should call the police and have Gordy arrested for trespassing and stalking and harassment and just for making a general nuisance of himself — Gordy’s visits bothered and upset her — but Saul disagreed, saying that if they ignored him, he would gradually go away, and besides, if they had him arrested, he would still eventually find his way back. What were they going to do, get a court injunction, or call Gordy’s aunt again? No, Saul claimed, despite what he had once thought about Gordy — his mindlessness, his blank stares, the episode with the gun — he would cause them no trouble. Gordy meant them no harm, it seemed. He was just loitering without intent. It was an emotional thing with him. Sooner or later he would give it up.

Gradually they forgot about him even when he was there, the way you forget about your shadow. When they did remember to take notice of him, they would give him cookies, which he would sometimes eat.

As fall turned into winter, and Emmy gained weight and began to make herself crawl and achieved her first moves to an upright position, time seemed to pass more rapidly than Saul and Patsy had thought it would. Their jobs and their new house and their daughter took all their attention, and the presence of Gordy now and then on their front lawn gradually became an accepted part of their lives, a feature they recognized, anomalous though it was, as a given. Gordy Himmelman stood blankly on Saul and Patsy’s lawn, wearing his raffish visored cap. When they were working in front, raking leaves, he would shadow them and sometimes, if he could, help them out. “Every couple has something freakish in their lives that they have to accept,” Patsy said one evening at dinner, looking out at Gordy, standing there in the driveway as night fell and snow drifted slowly down. “He’s ours.”

Saul even began to think of Gordy as a sentry. On certain days he imagined Gordy as an unemployed bodyguard. At times, when winter’s grip had loosened and the snows began to melt and the mud appeared, Saul would check the yard, and if Gordy was not there — Gordy, the faithful zombie, their own private security service, Sergeant Bartleby, the last creation of Dr. Frankenstein — Saul felt a strange furtive disappointment.

But it wasn’t as if they were going to sanction this strange behavior. Gordy could stand out there facing the house — in the sunshine, or the rain, or the snow, or the mud — but they were not about to invite him in, or ask him again, or again, or again, why he was there. You didn’t have conversations over extended periods of time with someone like Gordy Himmelman about motivations. He wasn’t smart enough to have reasons for doing what he did. If he did have reasons, by now he would have revealed them. Or they would have appeared on his face: it would have taken on an expression of yearning, or resentment, or rage.

But his face, through the fall and then on through the winter, and then on to spring and early summer, remained as blank as ever. His eyes, as always, were distant and lunar. There was nothing to be done about him.

On Sunday mornings, if Mary Esther didn’t stir, Saul and Patsy slept late. Usually Patsy awakened first. She would lie in bed watching the leaves of the linden shivering in the hot mottled summer air outside their bedroom window. Above her, hanging from the ceiling light fixture, a cardboard bird mobile turned slowly in the vestigial breezes. She gazed at it, vaguely admiring its equilibrium, its spiritless motion. Or she would examine Saul, wrestling with his angels as he muttered words that were all vowels — Hawaiian words, now that it was summertime and he was no longer dragging himself across the Arctic — and when she watched him and listened to his unintelligible garble, she tried to concentrate her attention on how it was she had married him, those steps of gradual womanly acknowledgment that had taken her toward him.

They had both been performers in those undergraduate days, Saul a musician and she a dancer, and they kept running into each other in the rehearsal halls.

She had really met him after a dance production of The Unnamable. She was one of the two dancers, and the production took place in a performance space with all of the seats on the north side. It was originally going to be staged in pitch dark — Patsy as a very young woman was interested in invisible performances — but the other dancer insisted on two black lights and a single candle with a metallic shade. Patsy finally conceded the point. Offstage, a woman read excerpts from the Beckett text, and Patsy danced to it: preoccupied but nevertheless formal movements engaged in at extreme slow motion, right at the borderline of stasis. She had worked for weeks on nearly imperceptible body movements, stillness-dancing. It had been a challenge because such dancing excited her and quieted her at the same time, as yoga did. A fourth woman, a composer of aleatory sounds, though post-Cage in style, created amplified background audio using sand in Dixie Cups, and with rubber bands, Slinkies, and a watering can with ball bearings inside.

Patsy had wished to give the impression that if you took your eyes away from her for even a moment, she would not look the same the next time you saw her: her body under the influence of the spoken text had become illusionary, metamorphic, even metastatic: she aimed herself at the audience and opened her bare arms to them, replicating the gestures of a night-blooming cereus, or a youthful prostitute under a streetlight, or a cancer, or Eurydice.

All four women were after a certain tone: they wanted the production to be both impossibly brainy and also, and inevitably, so erotic as to risk accusations of obscenity. If it seemed unbearably pretentious, well, that was a risk they would take.

After the third performance — all the tickets were free because the Beckett estate wouldn’t give them permission for the adaptation — Saul reintroduced himself to her outside the green room and began talking at great length about her performance. He had the piercing brown eyes of a repentant gangster, though he was gaunt in other respects, except for his thick peasant’s hands. He was highly excited by the text (“self-incriminated language,” he called it, “oxidizing in your ear”) and the sounds (“lyrical aural insults, with no bottom to them”), but most of all, it seemed, he was excited by Patsy. “You were moving but you weren’t moving,” he said, “the words were moving your body,” demonstrating that he had got it, that it hadn’t slipped past him. “It was psychokinetic,” he said, “and phonemic-kinetic,” which was going a bit far. They were talking in the hallway, Patsy holding her knapsack, the hour was getting late, and then Saul blurted out, “I kept imagining what it would be like to be partnered with you,” and then he blushed under his beard, self-astonished. Patsy smiled. So it would be like this, from now on? The blurting of truth in the wee hours?