Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

Saul nodded. “And it’s not that he’s married, right?”

“Well,” she said, “no. Just that he’s very young. Anyway, anyway. You keep driving. Drive home and I’ll make you dinner, and then you can go back to your friends. Maybe I’ll say something about him and maybe I won’t. But first let me say this, honey. I’m really glad you came. And of course I do know why,” she said, looking radiantly pleased all of a sudden. She tapped his right knee, like a chum.

“Why?”

“Don’t be coy, Saul.”

“I’m not being coy.”

“Of course you are. It’s so nice, your doing this.”

“Doing what?”

“Coming to see me. Today .”

“What about today?” Saul asked.

“Are you waiting for the right moment?” his mother asked. “Any moment is the right moment.”

“To do what?”

“To wish me a happy birthday!” She smiled at him and put her hand on his leg.

Great Leaping Jesus. Jesus on His Throne in Ohio. He gasped for a breath. Saul calculated the date and realized that — yes — it was indeed his mother’s birthday today. Maybe he really did need a therapist, one to accompany him everywhere he went from here to the grave, and possibly beyond. Another prank played by the unconscious, one of the many. Imagine the planning, the care, the indecency, the deceit . Where was dignity? Nowhere on this Earth. Perhaps in Israel. Maybe he would move there; his mother would never follow him — she had a thing about Palestinians — and his unconscious would band together with the other unconsciouses running amuck in Jerusalem and the Occupied Territories. Looking in the rearview mirror, as if he were being swallowed by what was behind him, Saul was horrified, as ever, by the terrible ironies of which life was so fond. But he was driving, and in Maryland traffic, so he could not express his horror safely and honorably. He would have to bottle it up and put it with all the other demented preserves in the basement and then wait for it to explode. He kept his hands on the wheel. The FBI would be here any minute now.

“Well, yes, exactly,” he said with pretended calm. “Happy birthday, Mom!”

“Thank you. Don’t pretend you forgot .” She smiled and touched her hand to her hair. “Don’t you dare pretend that your visit here was accidental. I’m so touched that you made the trip to see me on my birthday. Especially at this time in your life.”

“Actually,” Saul said, “I want to stop at a flower shop. Or somewhere. Right now.”

“Oh, you don’t have to get me anything, cupcake. It’s enough that you were so thoughtful to come see me.”

“Please don’t call me that cupcake thing, Ma. No, I want to.”

He turned the car into another strip mall with a flower shop. He quickly bought some cut roses and came running out to the car with them.

“Happy birthday,” he said, shoving the flowers in her direction through the passenger-side window. She smiled, sat up, and put them into her lap.

“You’re so thoughtful,” his mother said, with sweet, dignified, middle-aged irony. “I’ll be lucky if Howie even remembers to phone.”

When they returned to the house, Saul spied a pickup truck two houses away, and, out in front, a scrawny young man mowing the lawn, an ordinary guy, Saul thought, wearing a T-shirt and a cap with the visor turned backward. When he glanced at his mother, she gave him an almost imperceptible nod. Saul thought that if this guy had appeared in one of his classes, he wouldn’t have given him a second look.

After a quiet dinner with his mother, and his return to his friends the next morning, Saul took the train up to New York. The cheapest hotel he could find was close to Gramercy Park, and for his first day he walked around Manhattan. The wonderful ruined glorious old city. He particularly enjoyed getting lost in Chinatown and Little Italy, the tangle of ethnicity and streets in the lower part of Manhattan, where every place you turned from midmorning to the middle of the night you smelled food cooking, scalding cooking oil mixed with the overripe background odor of garbage, and he enjoyed the heat that rose from the pavement, the way it went through your body like an X-ray, the flesh porously absorbing it, how there was no stopping it and no cooling off. Everyone became hot, everyone became the heat. Particularly around West Broadway, the city streets felt abandoned by serious persons in the summer, nothing but human castoffs and scruffy kids filling up the sidewalk space and yelling all day and night. He felt right at home. In the East Village he sat on a park bench soiled with dried pigeon dung and ate an ice cream cone. He watched everyone pass by, and he was perfectly happy.

On the second afternoon, a Thursday, following a trip uptown, he had disembarked from the Lexington Avenue local at Grand Central and was headed down the underground tunnel in the direction of the shuttle to Times Square. He had an out-of-towner’s pride in his mastery of the New York City subway system and never consulted a map. And he loved the subway itself: the noise, the electric-iron smell, the occasional glimpses of rats, the whackos riding the trains, the sweat of flushed bodies in proximity to one another, the ads in Spanish advocating safe sex. For him the subway was an urban ideal. On the subway, Saul felt very tall, and very blond, and very handsome, at least in comparison to everyone else. The most intricate stations — Times Square, Grand Central— were monuments of human ingenuity and engineering. Saul was more impressed by the ceiling of Grand Central Terminal than he had been by man’s journey to the moon, and he suspected that the entire New York subway system was now beyond what human beings were capable of. Not the technology, but the willpower, the ideal of the public good.

Halfway through the tunnel he heard music. On the other side, close to where the shuttle trains were, stood a band, a typical subway assemblage of musicians, in this case of Peruvian Indians playing music from the Andes. The music reverberated through the narrow subterranean passage; he had heard the music before he had seen the five men performing on their charangos and mandolins and guitars and sikus. It sounded like high-altitude mountain music, harmonies and rhythms and chord changes conceived in the upper atmospheres and brought down to the metal and concrete below ground level. He approached the band. They had CDs for sale; the label said that their name was Ch’uwa Yacu. He even loved the sound of that, without having any idea of how to pronounce it. Saul felt himself drawn up into the music, absorbed by it, as he had been by the heat off the sidewalks. He tossed a five-dollar bill into the musicians’ open guitar case.

When he looked up, on the other side of the small crowd, wedged in near the back, he saw Gordy Himmelman behind what seemed to be a slight curtain of gauze, his eyes wide open and staring. Gordy, a hayseed ghost out of his element, was looking first at the musicians and then back at Saul, full in the face, and his mouth was gaping dark with distracted amazement. But of course it wasn’t Gordy. It was just anybody’s boy.

He was offering himself to me for adoption, Saul thought. He was a stray dog. That’s why he stood out there on the lawn. But I didn’t want to. I couldn’t take him.

Saul waited for a moment, and then it came: what he had been anticipating, the breaking-open, and, very quietly, so as not to disturb the other listeners, he unobtrusively boarded the shuttle to Times Square, his shoulders shaking. He didn’t know how long he sat there, once he got on, though he did remember to put on his dark glasses. Tears streamed quietly from under the lenses down his cheeks and onto his shirt. The shuttle took him to its destination, and then took him back to Grand Central, and then returned to Times Square. Everyone ignored him. They came and left, came and left. He simply lost track of the time as he was ferried from one place to the other.