Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

“I don’t know about the anti-Semitism part,” Saul says. He stops what he is doing to rub his scalp. Mary Esther sits down abruptly, experimentally, on the floor. Patsy sits down next to the two of them. “He was human, Patsy, carbon-based just like ourselves, and he wasn’t an anti-Semite, because that was too complicated for him. He was here, and then he was here, and then he was here again and again and again full of that negative energy of his, and now he’s gone, but he’s still here, and the thing is, they don’t go away unless you grieve them.” After turning around, he runs his hands tenderly through her hair. “And even then sometimes they don’t. Oh, Patsy. You are so beautiful. I know I keep saying that, but it’s true.”

She smiles at his compliment as if he means it. He’s only saying it, however, because they didn’t make love and this is a reparation. “See, I don’t think that’s it,” she tells him, still smiling. “This is where grieving shades over into the morbid.”

“Morbid? Patsy,” he says, “all this happened yesterday . He killed himself yesterday morning. God forgive us, we had a party last night. Morbid goes on and on. Morbid is for years. He hasn’t even had twenty-four hours to be dead in. One day, is all I’m saying. Give me one day. He would have given us one day.” Saul stops. He does not know what he meant by his last sentence.

“Okay, right. But you’re treating him as if he was somebody, Saul. He wasn’t.”

“Oh, he wasn’t?”

“Nope. He wasn’t anybody much at all. It’s just sentimental to say he was somebody. That’s what we’re talking about. That’s what we’ve been talking about all this time . Sentimentality.”

The word hangs in the air, radiating its contempt, Saul thinks, for himself. In order to protect himself, Saul thinks: The word despises me, but it got loose from Patsy, who could not have meant it.

After taking off her slippers, he begins to massage her feet. He has always had a thing for her feet, which are slender but strong. He addresses the Patsy he loves, not the Patsy who just used the word “sentimentality” against him. “Well, I think he was somebody. I don’t know what kind of somebody he was, and I don’t think anybody knew, but he was that, at least. On the list where it says ‘Somebody,’ Gordy Himmelman gets included.”

“Saul,” she says, leaning back and closing her eyes as he massages her, “wake up. We’re in contemporary times now. And the kids they’re making, Saul, I’m telling you, the kids they’ve got in the schools, they’re not somebody anymore.” Lowering her gaze, she gives him her perfectly reasonable smile and her voice-of-realism voice. Somebody around here, she thinks, has to save Saul from his errant compassion; it endangers their family.

“They’re not?”

“No, honey, they aren’t. I hate to say it, but it’s true. They’re facsimiles, these kids, American-made humanoids. All-American McHumans. Why d’you think they call them zombies ? This is why the nations rage against us. This whole country has a robot-thing going with its kids. Jesus Christ, you’re being mushy. These kids aren’t anybody ! If they were, they wouldn’t call you on the phone or come into the front yard and then shoot themselves for no purpose at all in the world.” She waits. “They’d have a reason.”

“Well, if he wasn’t anybody, Patsy, then it’s perfectly all right for him to kill himself.” He smiles winsomely, a counterattack smile to her previous smile.

“That’s not what I’m saying,” she says, her voice going metallic.

“ And . . if he’s not human, it’s all right for someone else to kill him. If he’s nobody, then anybody can kill him, legally, you know? And all the nonhuman kids like him.”

“Saul, you’re deliberately misrepresenting me.”

“And if these kids aren’t human, then who is? Who gets a right to be human? The dopes? The droolers? The ones who slur their words and live under bridges with the bums and the trolls? The Gypsies? The Jews? The Arabs? The Mormons? Who gets to be human? Who gets to live? Show me the qualifications, Patsy, since you’re such a goddamn expert on what it is to be human.”

“All right, all right, all right,” she says, shrugging, horrified by his sudden rage. “I see your point. Okay, okay.”

“I’m going to take a nap,” he says, but he stays right where he is, unmoving. “I’m tired.”

At ten minutes past three o’clock in the afternoon, Saul is still in his pajamas. Patsy has never seen him stay in his pajamas all afternoon except when he. . no, she has never seen it. Mary Esther is upstairs napping after having crawled all over her father, and Saul now has the parts of a broken cuckoo clock out on the floor. He pretends to repair the little bellows for the cuckoo’s call. Perhaps he is actually repairing it. Mostly he just wool-gathers over there. He has the Brahms Clarinet Quintet on the audio system, always a bad sign — incipient, dangerous, and highly contagious lyrical melancholia, melancholy warbling its autumnal song as if that were the only song there ever was or could be, and Saul, her husband, singing right along with it, every scarily beautiful phrase, music like a virus, infecting the listener with lethal sadness.

And now Patsy hears a car coming up the driveway, and the phone ringing simultaneously. The phone, that teething baby, has been ringing whenever she places the receiver back on the hook. One friend after another, including Harold the barber, offering consolation and help. Out front, the car has stopped. Rushing past the spider plant, Patsy quickly answers the phone, to a voice that says, “Hi, Mrs. Bernstein? Is your Jew husband there?” before she hangs up. Then, quickly, she approaches the door, where Gordy’s aunt, Brenda Bagley, has carried a large box from her car’s trunk and dropped it on the front stoop.

“Ms. Bagley,” Patsy says, shading her eyes against the afternoon sun.

“Well, hi there,” Gordy’s aunt says, tipping her head in what seems at first to be an ironic bow. But the bow isn’t ironic; shyness or anxiety or sheer confusion propel it. Her face, pockmarked and roughened, has a cigarette with a long ash apparently growing out of the side of the mouth. Brenda Bagley projects, in all directions, an energetic look of savage desperation.

She puts her hand, now with the cigarette, to her forehead while she clears her throat, and the hot coal tip comes dangerously close to her hairline. The ash falls gracefully to the stoop. Patsy watches it fall.

“I had to come over here. I’ve felt so bad, and I expect you have, too. Last night I couldn’t sleep, of course. Poor worthless kid, how I miss him. You ever miss a poor worthless kid? I tried calling first but the lines were all busy. So I thought I’d just get in the car and drive past.” She has tried to give her hair a few new curls, as if she knows she will be in the public eye. People will be judging her appearance. Her misapplied drugstore lipstick adds to the general overdetermined effect. She looks like a witch in a fairy tale with a poisoned candy house. Behind the house are frogs in a pen. Seeing Brenda Bagley’s efforts to beautify herself, Patsy has to force back — what are these? — yes: tears. The pathos of Brenda’s unattractiveness gives the woman an insidious power. Against her, Patsy feels all her defenses fading. Ah, Patsy thinks, here is a real expert in unhappiness. Here is the tenured full professor of suffering.

Patsy asks her if she’d like to come in. Please, Patsy adds. Gordy’s aunt shakes her head, exhaling smoke as if her heart were a furnace. “No, I couldn’t do that to you. Not invited, like I am. What awful times,” she says. “I’m just so broken up, I don’t know what to do with myself. Like I say, I’m not company for you or anyone. What I thought was, I should come over here with a gift, this gift box of his things that I gathered from his closet this morning. It’s what I thought of last night, when I couldn’t sleep.”