Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

“What were you doing when it happened?” she asked.

“I was standing in front of the bedroom window,” Saul said, “listening to my wife tell me about my mother’s affair with the yard boy.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Traci McMahoney said. She dropped the microphone again. “Can we start over? Let’s start over. You don’t need to go into details like that. It’s distracting to the viewers. Let’s start over. And let’s try to stay on-message. This’ll be the second take. This is all on tape anyway. We’ll do some editing. Thank God this isn’t an on-the-air breaking-news report.”

Once again she did an introduction. Today, she said, The Uplands has been a scene of tragedy, in what appears to be a suicide by a Five Oaks boy, Gordon Himmelman. Boy, man. Which was he? This time they ran through the same questions one after the other, but Saul remembered not to mention his mother and not to say anything about shitbirds or kikes.

“Had he threatened anyone else?” she asked.

“Gordy? No. Well, I don’t think so.”

“Do you know where he got the gun?”

“From his aunt, I think. I believe she had hidden it, and he found it.”

“Wouldn’t you consider this a tragedy?”

“Sort of,” Saul said.

“Could you expand on that?”

“Well, I don’t think Gordy ever stopped to consider what he did. He just did things. He didn’t think about what he was doing. He just did them, mindlessly. I don’t know if you could call that a tragedy or not. It just happened. It was. .” Saul struggled to find an adjective. “It was tidal. ”

“Wouldn’t you say it’s a tragedy every time a young life is snuffed out?”

“Probably,” Saul said. “Depends on what you mean by ‘tragedy.’” Traci McMahoney frowned again. “If you mean a story of a great man brought low by circumstances related to his character, resulting in events that cause a purging of pity and fear, then no.”

Her frown was growing permanent. “So what you’re saying is, this is another meaningless tragedy, uh, story of violence among our young people.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say it’s meaningless, ” Saul told her. “It’s rare for something to be meaningless.”

“Would you care to expand on that?”

“It’s not meaningless if there are guns everywhere. If a weird unhappy kid can get a gun anytime he wants one, then it’s not meaningless. It means that there are too many guns around.”

Traci McMahoney smiled. “Too many guns?”

“This whole country is gun crazy,” Saul said. “From the president on down.”

“Well, you can save that for the Editorial Moment,” Traci McMahoney said, grimacing. “On Sunday night just before sign-off. What about Gordon Himmelman?”

“What about him?”

“Do you feel that you failed him somehow? That the system failed him?”

“Failed him? Me? Who knows? But I doubt it.”

“I mean, do you think you could have stopped him?”

“How?”

“Counseling. More one-on-one. Aggressive intervention. Mentoring.”

“Boys like Gordy Himmelman don’t usually take to counseling. Besides, I wasn’t his parent. He did have this air of abandonment, I’ll say that. He was like the creature set loose by Dr. Frankenstein.” It had come right out of his mouth. He didn’t mean to say it, but he had said it anyway. “You ignore them and they turn into monsters.”

“A monster? No, I won’t follow that up. I could, but I won’t. Is there a chance that this wasn’t a suicide? Could it have been an accident? Why did he come over to your house with a loaded gun?”

“It wasn’t an accident,” Saul said. “He had the gun barrel pointed inside his mouth. Maybe he wanted to impress us.”

There was a long beat during which Traci McMahoney tried to think of a question. “So, in conclusion, why do you think he did it? Do you have an explanation for this terrible trage—,uh, event?”

“Yeah. Too many guns, too much television, not enough reading, a crazy violence-prone culture, and a kid, I mean an okay kid with lousy parenting, probably, or nonparenting, and he needed cognitive help, so you get this dumb bloodfest, this Americana suicide, right? I mean, is there really a big enigma? I don’t see a big enigma here. Maybe the only big enigma is that he didn’t wait to go charging into the school lunch-room next fall spraying bullets. Small favors, and all that. You’ve got to be careful not to sentimentalize when something like this happens.”

“You feel strongly about this,” Traci McMahoney said, in disbelief.

“Yes. I don’t like sentimentality,” Saul said.

“Okay.” She lowered the microphone and nodded at the videocam guy, doing a quick gesture in front of her eyes and a nod indicating a cut. The cameraman lowered the videocam away from his eye before hoisting it backward onto his shoulder, and Saul could see that he was smirking. Then Traci McMahoney turned to Saul once again. “Well, that was mostly unusable. Look,” she said, brilliantly smiling, “I agree with you about a lot of what you said, but you can’t say those things on-camera. That’s editorial-page. That’s not front-page. We’re doing front-page. This is a lead story. You do see the difference.”

“Right.”

“We’re gonna have to do a lot of editing on that. Sorry. You’re kind of a walking outtake.”

“Okay. I was just trying to avoid the usual pieties.”

“The usual pieties. Well, you succeeded. Let me make sure I have this right. You’re Saul Bernstein.” She wrote his name down in a tiny notebook. She licked her lips.

“Yes.”

“Pronounced ‘steen’ or ‘stine’?”

“For TV I don’t care. ‘Steen,’ usually.”

“All right.” She looked up at him, smelling of Tahiti, where he would never go. “You’re very weird.” She paused. “I shouldn’t have said that. I apologize. Really. I apologize to you, profusely. Did I say that? Actually, no, in some sense, I didn’t say that. We’re agreed? All right? I didn’t say that.”

“All right,” Saul said.

“Thank you for your interesting comments.” She turned away. “Where’s the aunt?” she asked. “Is the aunt free, yet?” The cameraman pointed toward Saul and Patsy’s front door, where Brenda was waiting for them to interview her. She had a hand mirror out and was hopelessly fixing her seaweed hair. Everybody was working on the hair today. “Let’s go,” Traci McMahoney said, striding away. “Maybe we can get an aunt segment.”

Saul looked up into the sky as Patsy approached him. He recognized what he was doing as one of Gordy’s habits, staring up into the sky as if something of interest were located there. The day was extremely bright, still beautiful, perhaps, though the sun had disappeared, and no clouds were visible. The sky was like a heat radiator full of steam. “How did I do?” he asked her. Mary Esther was fussy and complaining in Patsy’s arms, and Saul could tell from a pissy odor that her diaper needed changing. She handed Emmy to Saul.

“How did you do?” Patsy leaned back. Saul noticed immediately how much more human she was than Traci McMahoney. Less sexy but more human and more beautiful. Her integrity. Her love for him. Look at her eyes! There was genuine feeling there! “How did you do ?” Now she leaned forward. “Honey. Listen to me. A boy killed himself in our yard this morning, and now, at eight minutes before five o’clock, you’re asking me how you did? I should hit you. Or something. I don’t mean for that woman and the way that you. .”

She couldn’t finish the sentence, because at that moment, which was also a future moment, and a past one as well — time had become indelibly confused somehow — Saul felt himself hit or nudged. Looking up at the upstairs window of his house, he saw (and didn’t see) himself, and Patsy, the two of them naked there, with Mary Esther in Patsy’s arms. He — the Saul of the here and now — was standing where Gordy had been, on the spot where the boy had stood. He did not break out into sobs. No, he wasn’t even crying; no cathartic moment presented itself. After all, it had been a small death, and it was not, in any sense, a tragedy, as he had carefully noted. But it was still a death. And something precious to Saul — he couldn’t even say what it was, and he prided himself on his occasional sensitivities — something precious to him felt, what was the word, trashed. And for that, and maybe even for Gordy Himmelman with a bullet hole at the back of his skull and his blood on the tree in the yard, his body carted away under a sheet, for all those things. . what was the word, those things unloved, a boy who in a single moment hadn’t wanted to live anymore, Saul felt suddenly like an accomplice, even though the expression on his face did not change, and Patsy leaned forward toward him, making an arc over their crying daughter, in common grief.