Charles Baxter: Saul and Patsy

“I’m garage-poor,” she said, pressing the button again to make the door go down. “But I never could resist a toy.” She offered the garage-door opener to Saul, who pressed the button. The door began to open again. “I said to myself, well, I need the gadget because I’m a single lady out here — the safety feature — but even that doesn’t explain the curtains.” Mrs. O’Neill’s garage had windows at the sides, with lace curtains. “I spent hours on those curtains. Imagine!” She gave out a self-deprecatory little laugh. “Curtains for a garage!”

“A good garage is important,” Patsy said, and immediately Saul smiled.

“That’s exactly it,” Mrs. O’Neill said, picking a bug off Patsy’s shoulder. “I’ll tell you what it was, since you’ll discover it soon enough. A project. I needed a project. Making curtains kept me awake during the daylight hours. Now you, Saul, you trot inside that garage and look at that gizmo in case you want to build one yourself, while Patsy and I go inside and have a few moments of girl-talk in the kitchen.”

Mrs. O’Neill grabbed Patsy’s arm and pulled her toward the back door of the house.

Saul walked in a lackadaisical fashion toward Mrs. O’Neill’s sheltered and curtained Buick, feeling that, as an adult, he need not follow instructions from a character like her. At least, he did not need to follow them to the letter. A steady wind from the unplowed fields to the south blew into the garage. The interior smelled of raw lumber and fresh paint, along with the fainter but more dense odor of overheated electrical wiring. Saul looked up — as instructed — at Mrs. O’Neill’s new garage-door opener. Unmechanical to a fault, he was unable to guess what structural-dynamic principles were involved in lifting a garage door up a set of tracks. With his head tilted back, he saw the company name on the side of the motor. He felt suddenly dizzy. He inhaled quickly and leaned his arm against Mrs. O’Neill’s car. He glanced out through the door and saw his own car, and then, beyond it, the horizon line of the Saginaw Valley, the semi-skyline of Five Oaks over there in the distance, and gold-brown topsoil whipped and scattered in spirals. He sat down on the bumper and put his head in his hands.

What was he doing here? What was he doing anywhere?

From the house came the sound of singing: Mrs. O’Neill’s voice— Patsy didn’t sing — a choir-loft soprano, a thin Irish upper register, without resonance or depth but as piercing as a factory whistle. Saul listened, the skin on the back of his neck slowly beginning to prickle. “Mi chiamano Mimi,” she was singing, “il perchè non so. Sola, mi fo il pranzo da me stesa.” She sang half the aria, the sound careening out of the house and dispersing in the yard. Saul felt his own mouth opening. A bird fluttered into the garage, changed course in an instant, and flew out, alighting at the top of Mrs. O’Neill’s flagpole. Saul wanted the garage door shut. He pressed the button. When he opened the door a minute later, Patsy was standing in front of it on the driveway, a plate of cookies in her hand.

“Aren’t you funny,” she said.

“She sings.” They looked at each other. “Where is she?”

“Yes, she sings. Still in the house. I noticed she had some opera records, and she said that she and her late lamented husband Earl used to listen to the Texaco broadcasts. She sings in church, as you can imagine.”

“Yeah, I guessed.”

“Anyway, she has all these records and CDs and she managed to learn some of the words. That was a demo she gave me. Want some of these cookies?”

“Of course. Dumb question.” He reached out and grabbed four off the plate. “I eat cookies while I’m deciding whether I’m going to eat any cookies.”

“She had some uncertainties about you.”

“About me? Uncertainties?”

“That’s why she wanted you to inspect her garage.”

“Oh.”

“She thought it was safe to ask me. Woman to woman.”

“What sort of questions did she have?”

“Oh, friendly questions, I think, or at least you could assume they were friendly.”

“Such as?”

“Does Saul eat cookies? Or is that against his religion?”

“Do Jews eat cookies.”

“That’s right. ‘Does he go to a temple?’ ‘Does he mind living here among us?’ She asked if we were rich. She asked if I was one of you.” Patsy bit into a cookie and wiped the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand.

“What’d you tell her?”

“I said I was once an Episcopalian, sort of, but now I was your wife.”

“And what did she say to that?”

“She said she was glad that you liked cookies.”

“There she is.”

Patsy turned around as Mrs. O’Neill leaned out of the back door to wave them both inside. “I won’t sing anymore,” she shouted. “You two lovebirds can come in now. It’s safe.”

Through the summer they visited Mrs. O’Neill every two weeks for Sunday-afternoon picnics in the shade of her maple tree. Patsy found a Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday job as a bank teller, a job that required very little training. They played Scrabble and Jeopardy, Trivial Pursuit and chess, and they listened to all their records and CDs at least twice. Patsy suggested that they travel north to explore the Upper Peninsula, but Saul said that travel was dangerous in those locales. When Patsy asked what dangers he was possibly talking about, he said that of course the Department of Natural Resources had kept the problem under wraps but that he, Saul, knew. . things. She could not budge him. He just didn’t want to go anywhere.

They had an oddball marriage, and they both knew it. Their love for each other had created a magic circle around themselves that outsiders could not penetrate. No one who had ever met them knew what made the two of them tick; the whole arrangement looked mildly fraudulent, a Hallmark Card sort of thing. Saul’s mother, Delia, had had an unremarkable marriage and as a still-youthful widow could be gamely witty on the subject of matrimony. Her opinion was that marriage was a practical economic arrangement demanded by the raising of children. In her view, Saul was a fanatical husband, close to unpresentable when he was around Patsy. He should recognize this devotedness of his as a social problem. People who stay in that kind of love once they’re married are a burden to others, Saul’s mother intimated. They should learn to tone themselves down. They don’t mean to show off, but the show-offing happens anyway with the gestures and the endearments and the icky glances. In this regard, Saul and Patsy also perplexed their other relatives and friends, who sometimes wanted to know their secret and at other times just wanted to get away from them, quickly.

Because he loved Patsy so much, Saul was constantly disappointed with the rest of the world. It didn’t measure up. Having moved to Five Oaks, mingling with the Cossacks, Saul could feel his disappointment beginning to fester. Why couldn’t the world be more like Patsy? The rest of the world — especially where they had found themselves, here in the Midwest — presented itself as both bland and coarse. Intelligence and attention were wasted on it, he thought. It occurred to him sometimes that Patsy did not want to be loved the way he was loving her, that he was bedeviling her, but he did his best to put that thought out of his mind.

With all the time they had before school began, Saul and Patsy made love frequently as an antidote to their boredom, Patsy having decided that they should try it in every room in the house. One afternoon late in the month they spread out a blanket in the backyard, out of sight of the road, and worked up what Saul called love sweat. Patsy claimed she had never made love outdoors before and said she liked it, it was like going to the midway at the state fair, except for the grass on her bare back — they had crawled away from the blanket. She worried about ants, for which she had a repugnance. She said she liked looking into the sky and thought it would be neat to gaze at a cloud while coming. They waited for the perfect cloud, and then Saul watched her as she came. True to her word, she kept her eyes wide open, focused, on the distance.