Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

“I don’t know,” Patsy said automatically. “What can you do?” Then she realized belatedly that it was not a question she should parrot back to Delia.

“You can’t do anything,” Delia said obligingly. Then her voice dropped an octave. “Are you alone? Well, I mean, can you keep a secret?”

“Sure.” Patsy looked down at her feet, at the polish flaking off her toenails.

“Don’t tell Saul. It’ll upset him. I just have to tell somebody, and it’s obvious I can’t tell my friends just now. . well, it’s not that you’re convenient, Patsy, I’m not saying that. You know I love you, don’t you? I got so lucky, having a daughter-in-law like you.” Delia said these words distantly, and without inflection.

“Delia, what’s going on?” Patsy felt herself clutching the phone tightly.

“Well, it’s this way. You’re young, you’ll understand this, I think. I need to say this to somebody.” Delia waited and took an audible breath. “I have a new boyfriend,” she announced. “But I haven’t told Saul, or anybody.” Patsy waited for her to continue speaking, but she didn’t, as if she had faltered momentarily. “Well, one friend, but that’s it.”

“Delia,” Patsy said with whispered enthusiasm, “that’s great! Congratulations. Who is it?”

“See, that’s the thing.”

Patsy waited. “The thing. Okay,” she said.

“All right. He’s quite young,” Delia said. “He’s younger than I am. Quite a bit younger. Actually, he’s younger than you are. Actually, he’s almost eighteen. But, no, the truth is that he’s seventeen. I don’t want to mislead you. He’s seventeen.” Her voice, in announcing this fact, was worldly and neutral, uninvolved in what it was saying.

“Isn’t that illegal?”

“No, I don’t think so. I think it’s quite legal. Though I haven’t checked. But here’s the icing on my particular cake. He’s the yard boy. His name is Jimmy. Jimmy the yard boy. What a cliché! I hired him to come over here to fix up the yard and to do some gardening, and he was unusually kind and considerate, absolutely not what I was expecting at all, of course, from a young man that age. You don’t expect young men to be kind and considerate. Usually they’re awful. And, I don’t know, mostly as a joke, a nothing, I made a little play for him, and now. . Patsy, you won’t tell Saul, will you?”

“No, I won’t tell Saul.” Patsy considered this for a moment, what she would say next. After all, she was speaking to the Marschallin. The Marschallin had finally gotten her young man. “Is it a French novel or is it an American novel?”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Well, if it was an American novel, you’d have an affair with him, and you’d both feel soiled and degraded, and then he’d tell his parents, and his mother would file a suit against you, and somebody would be shot dead after a few months, you know, out of pure rage, and then there would be church-lady morals and a big mess to clean up with the litigation. If it was a French novel, though, you two would both have a perfectly good time, and he would be grateful to you and, you know, tireless, and you would teach him a thing or two about sex and the ways of love, and he’d remember you happily for a few years, have other girlfriends more his age who would all love him for his boldness and attentiveness and expertise, and then he’d get married and settle down.”

“It’s actually more like the French version,” Delia said, a bit dryly. “So far.”

“Well, good for you,” Patsy said.

“But you know, in these matters, nothing is as simple as all that. I go through the house,” Delia resumed, “muttering his name, and I think of his parents and whether they’ll ever find out, and then I think, well, in a few weeks he’ll start school again, and it’ll be all over.” She waited. “It will be over, and no harm will have come to anybody, as long as he doesn’t tell anyone. He says he hasn’t. And that’s how it’s supposed to work. But sometimes it’s more complicated.”

Delia stopped talking.

“Don’t tell me you’re pregnant,” Patsy said. Mary Esther’s cries upstairs were getting a bit louder now. Where was Saul?

“Oh, no, I’m not pregnant. I had my tubes tied a long time ago, and besides, I’m. . no, it’s not that, believe me.”

“Well, what is it?” Patsy thought she knew what Delia would say, but she didn’t want to anticipate it.

“See, the little complication is, I love him,” Delia said, her voice still absolutely neutral, even a bit cold. “Just a little bit. Of course it’s completely ridiculous. I mean, he’s only a boy. This is like something middle-aged men do, with their proclivity for college girls. But I do love him. Patsy, he brings in little bouquets of flowers that he’s picked. A boy does this! He brings them in for me, and we put them in water together. And you should see his smile. I don’t think I’ve ever had a smile like that from a grown man. Men don’t smile like that spontaneously. They forget how. He smiles at me and my insides just knot up, because he’s so happy to see me.” Delia’s voice continued in its uninflected way.

“Count your blessings,” Patsy instructed her mother-in-law, using the phrase she had just been thinking of. Delia was right, of course: Saul had forgotten how to smile, except to produce a result. “Does he love you?”

“Of course not. He’s just a kid. And I’m just a middle-aged woman he. . sometimes sleeps with. I’m a diversion. He doesn’t know from love. But he’s so devoted, and so sweet, and so kind — Patsy, he compliments me on my body, can you believe that? — and of course there’s his skin, and his body, which is gorgeous, and his smile, that it doesn’t matter that he doesn’t love me, because he might as well love me, considering the way he treats me. Somehow I missed all this before, when I was an actual girl. Know what I mean? I thought when you were my age, you stopped doing foolishness like this. I thought women stopped falling in love, at least comme ça. ”

“Well, I guess not.”

There was a long pause, and Patsy could tell from the noises at the other end that Delia was blowing her nose, though tentatively. “Of course he has a little girlfriend, too.”

“Of course.”

“But he says that it isn’t as good with her as with me.” She waited. “Maybe he’s being nice. It’s his way, being nice. He’d say it even if he didn’t mean it.”

Patsy looked through the window and saw Gordy Himmelman sitting out on the front lawn. Like the proverbial bad penny, he kept turning up. What did he want this time? He had reappeared again, the poor zombie. He had been doing this for about a year now. It was his first anniversary. He was just sitting there, looking skyward. He wanted someone to pay attention to him. In this way, he was like everybody else.

“Delia, I don’t think you have any rights in this matter. You can’t be jealous. You just have a fling with him this summer and then let him go back to school in the fall.”

“No, you’re right, of course.”

There was a pause of several seconds.

“What?” Patsy asked.

“Well, sometimes I go to bed and I think, This seventeen-year-old is the love of my life. Which is quite silly, but that’s what I think. Don’t tell Saul I said that. Saul’s father was a good-enough man, all things considered. He was a hard worker. He worked himself to death. But a lover he wasn’t. I was married to him, and still he never noticed me except sometimes over breakfast when I brought him his coffee. As a provider, of course, I can’t complain about him.”

“Delia, you shouldn’t be romanticizing. Summer’s going to be over, and you’ll have to get your life back.”