Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

Coffee, dates, much talk (because it was Saul), the love attack — he had massaged her feet after her last performance, talking about Schopenhauer as they reclined on her bed, still clothed. “I don’t think Schopenhauer is as pessimistic as people say he is, do you?” Saul asked. She had said she didn’t know. Nor did she want to give him the impression that she would try to find out. She was not going to scamper after his preoccupations just because they were his.

Still, he had the most beautiful skin she had ever seen on a man, and a winsome smile.

One evening in the fall they had met at a campus coffee house, and as he was walking her back to her apartment, a soft rain began to fall. They were both wearing sandals, and they both ambled across the grass, gradually increasing their speed to a jog as they held hands. Patsy had looked over at Saul and saw her own sudden shocked, unprovoked joy on his face.

Then he had called her at two in the morning and played some Charlie Parker for her over the phone. In Saul, love took the form of desperation-to-share. He invited her over to his apartment, where he cooked dinner, played his trombone, and asked her to dance for him. Saul turned all the lights off, and Patsy danced by the light of the streetlight, but there was no aleatoric, arranged sound, just the noise of the cars and the trucks passing by in the street, and so she danced to that, a dance for him, though resisting him as much as she could, a dance about that resistance, about the refusals of nakedness. They made love anyway when she was finished, Patsy still resisting him a little, all her movements initially sullen. She fucked him with sensual resentment; she let him know that she had her needs, too, that he could not apportion all the passions for himself.

She could not tell if he was able to appreciate or even to read the ways that she had made love to him at first, or to notice particularly how she did it, the way that a dancer like her performed sex, slyly, with touches of rhetoric, annoyance, always with an implicit audience watching the subtle errant moves, moves that were only half for herself, the other half for the purposes of visual expression, or even the denial of that need, any need, a statement of freedom: Look, I can play with this desire. And you can’t, exactly.

Living together, movies, dinners, escalating comfort in each other’s company, the unthinkability of not being together, the sense — where had this come from? — that they were setting up a small business together, and finally marriage. Soon, Saul could read all her gestures. That was both a triumph in human terms and a defeat in artistic ones. For consolation, she had someone with whom to discuss all aspects of life. Now here they were, in the Midwest, where everybody’s gestures were immediately readable. At these moments it no longer seemed inevitable that they should have met in the first place, that she should have ever loved him and finally married him. Arbitrary, the meeting, the love, all of it, a trick, after all, of the body she had trained and with which she now excited or soothed him. She might have loved anybody, but it had turned out to be this man, this Saul, a Scrabble player, a teacher. But there was no certainty of logic to it. He lay there now, the father of her daughter, his eyebrows twitching, his breath smelling of corn tassels. A man sleeping in bed in the morning is rarely a prize, it seemed to her at such moments. But she loved him, and her love puzzled her, as if Eros had played a prank on her and she wanted to unravel it. Because: if it had arrived as quickly and as haphazardly as that, it could depart just as fast. It worried her, that their courtship had started with Saul being her audience. She knew she was beautiful as a performer. But as anything else? As a wife ?

Being a wife stalled out the art. Being a mother put a stop to it. And now, she realized, there was some feature about Saul she didn’t get — that she would never get.

“Oh, don’t analyze,” her friend Susan Palmer had once said. “Don’t try to figure out why you love some guy. You’ll only figure out that you shouldn’t. In my experience, guys — well, the grown-up boys I’ve known— don’t stand much scrutiny. They can barely stand up at all. You know what they’re all about, under the microscope? They’re all about their flaws, versus whatever else they’ve got. Their games.”

“No, really,” Patsy said. They were both working as tellers at the bank, and they were on their lunch break, in the back room, over sandwiches. There were no windows, and it felt very private in there. “It’s the biggest thing that ever happened to me. But. It’s a puzzle.”

“ Jesus, Patsy. A puzzle? If you’ve got a blessing, any blessing at all, just count it. Don’t examine it. Are you crazy? Some of us don’t even have what you have.” Susan bit into her sandwich angrily, her eyes tearing up. Patsy didn’t know what Susan was talking about: Susan was married, after all, to a nice guy, the assistant city manager of Five Oaks, a fellow named Wyatt. They had two children. Wyatt’s mom was a little crazy, but so what? They lived model lives. Susan taught gymnastics to kids on weekends. She was beautiful, her gymnast figure still visible under her clothes. She had a trustworthy man sleeping next to her in bed each night. Still, Patsy had violated a rule: you never, ever brag to a coworker about loving your husband. It was bad manners, it was arrogant, and nobody’s business, besides.

But now, two years later, thinking of what Susan had told her, Patsy realized that loving Saul was not, in fact, the biggest event that had ever happened to her. Mary Esther was. Mary Esther had pushed everything and everybody else off the map, and she had turned Saul into a father. It was Mary Esther she thought about, Mary Esther who commanded her repertoire of emotions. Saul, she had discovered, was the means for Mary Esther to come into the world. He was. . the word came to her unpleasantly, an expedient. As if to recoil from this recognition, Patsy began to rub Saul’s back. He slept naked during the summer, and she had just touched his back when the phone rang, downstairs, as if touching his skin had set off a bell elsewhere in the house.

In her nightgown, she ran down the stairs to get it before it woke anybody up, but she heard Mary Esther stirring and whimpering as she rose out of sleep. As soon as Patsy had picked up the phone, even before she heard the voice, she knew — the psychic insights of everyday life — that it was Saul’s mother, Delia.

“Patsy.” Delia’s voice was regimental somehow, feminine-military, without being hard. Patsy didn’t know how she did it. “I hope I didn’t wake you up.”

“No, no. I was up.” Patsy heard Delia’s toaster popping up in the background.

“Yes, I suppose. I mean, I suppose I shouldn’t have called. It’s—”

“Well, it’s not that early.” Without looking at her watch, Patsy knew it was eight thirty-nine.

“Well. Maybe it is in the Midwest. It’s always earlier there. And it isn’t just the time zones that cause that. In the Midwest it’s always last week, compared to here. Is Saul still asleep?”

Patsy glanced up the stairs. Mary Esther was beginning to sing softly, and if she got louder, Saul would eventually arise, dazedly, go into the nursery, and change her. “Yes, I think so. He’s still asleep.”

“Good.”

“Good?”

“Well, I need to talk to someone,” Delia said. “And I was hoping I’d get you. This isn’t the sort of information I should say to Saul. Or to Howie, either. Besides, I never know where Howie is. The last time I called him, I got him on his cell phone, and he was halfway up a mountain, climbing it. Excuse me, but I don’t see the point of climbing a mountain. Why not buy a postcard? Or get someone else to climb it? Well, what can you do with a son like that?”