Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

Saul was horrified. Be careful of Howie. He’s very fragile.

Howie stood up quickly, seemingly unhurt, and out of relief at seeing that his brother was still in one piece, Saul began to laugh. His laughter provoked Howie to fury. Enraged, he danced a little dance of humiliation and wrath on the sidewalk before he stomped a plastic water container, his baseball cap, his Robocop wraparound sunglasses, and his uncapped tube of sunblock, which squirted orgasmically over the pavement. Saul only laughed harder, knowing he shouldn’t but unable to stop. As he did, Howie walked over to Saul and waited for him to control himself. Howie’s face was bright red.

“Someday in the future we can laugh about this,” Howie said, “but right now I swear to God that if you keep laughing, I’m going to fucking kill you.”

Saul composed himself, wiped the tears off his face, and helped Howie collect his things. From the experience he learned two facts about his brother and himself: first, that Howie feared being the object of ridicule — lethally — especially in moments of vulnerability; and, second, that he himself feared Howie’s ire at such moments, not for himself but for his brother’s sake. He had seen a pool of bitter sediment in Howie’s eyes, which spoke of old grievances and all the memories of illnesses that had brought forth both welcome and unwelcome responses.

They found an old hotel near Lincoln Park to stay in — they would be flying home in two days and would ship the bicycles back — and after taking showers they walked around the Loop, making their way down to the Art Institute to see the Seurats. That evening, when the weather was still humid and unsettled, they strolled through Lincoln Park. There were crowds of other young people like themselves, walking and talking and eyeing one another. Within sight of the lake, they were standing near a water fountain when an attractive young woman wearing jeans and a Chicago Cubs T-shirt and holding a sketch pad began speaking to Howie. Howie carried with him a wounded look that women apparently found irresistible. Addressing the sky in a tone of cool, hip indifference, she remarked on the weather, and Saul’s brother said something in return, equally cool and hip, speaking of the clouds in a way that suggested that he, too, was indifferent to the weather, being from out of town and not subject to these particular clouds. She asked where he lived and he told her. Baltimore! she said, with admiration, touching Howie’s arm. He had bicycled here? Amazing. She had never been to Baltimore. No? Well, the row houses, he said, came right down to the water in the harbor. Where are you staying? she asked. Howie named the hotel. They introduced themselves: Howie, Voltaine. Yes, the name: her parents had been hippies in Vancouver; she herself was a Canadian citizen, and when she was a girl her mother had sung “Mellow Yellow” to her and her sister Saffron night after night, year after year, as a lullaby. Now she was a student here in Chicago at the Art Institute. Howie didn’t say anything about his occupations or his age; it didn’t seem necessary. Nor did he bother to introduce his brother. Saul was standing a few feet away, lost in bemusement and pride in his brother’s social skills, though feeling like an encumbrance himself. In disbelief, from his safe distance, Saul detected Chanel No. 5 emanating from Voltaine, an expensive scent his mother sometimes wore when she hadn’t applied the mustard gas. Voltaine, for some reason, hadn’t noticed him. Girls didn’t turn their heads when Saul walked past. Howie was the one who got them riled up and confused. Instead of introducing himself, Saul just watched his brother and this woman, and he took deep breaths of Voltaine’s perfume. Howie had given Saul a semidetached look, as if something was on the tip of his tongue that he would not say. Voltaine and Howie proceeded to sit down on a bench quite close to each other, and as the light faded, she removed the cover of her sketch pad and outlined his face on paper using pencil and charcoal, including in her drawing the scrapes on his forehead from his bicycle accident. After ten minutes of small talk between the two, Howie finally got around to pointing toward Saul, who smiled, nodded, and belatedly shook hands with Voltaine. He hadn’t been able to decide whether he should return to the hotel or lurk in the middle distance. Voltaine continued to pencil in details of Howie on her sketch pad, but by then it was getting so dark that Saul couldn’t make out what his brother looked like in Voltaine’s version of him.

Out of politeness, she asked Saul if he would like her to sketch him, and, out of politeness, he said no.

When she finished the portrait of Howie, she showed him what she had done, kissed him on the cheek, and wished them both good night. The brothers asked her if she would like to go somewhere for a beer, but she said she couldn’t, she had to get back home. Saul was relieved that he would be seeing no more of this scented hippies’ child.

At two in the morning, the phone in the hotel room rang. Saul answered. Voltaine, of course, and she wanted to speak to Howie, she said, just a small matter of business, nothing important. Saul passed the receiver over to his brother in the other bed. Howie sat up, alert. He then turned off the light and crawled under his sheet and blanket to talk. His voice, from under the covers, was muffled and laughing and flirtatious and thickly sexual. Well, they were kids, after all, though Howie was only two years younger than Saul himself, the designated adult. Saul went into the bathroom to piss, and when he returned, Howie was still on the phone there under the covers, very quietly attending to business. “Do you want me to leave the room?” Saul asked his brother. Receiving no answer, and knowing he had been heard, he tucked himself back into bed and tried to sleep. He counted sheep in the dark to the background of his brother’s unintelligible rumbling, and he imagined long, dull historical accounts of the Treaty of Versailles to help himself doze off. None of it worked. He went down the names of the states alphabetically, trying to remember each state capital. That didn’t work either, though he did get as far as Helena. His brother talked for what seemed like an hour. In the dark, after hanging up, Howie said only six words: “This sure is a friendly town.”

The next day, no mention was made of the phone call. As far as Saul knew, his brother never saw or heard from Voltaine again.

Where was Patsy? She had been delayed getting her refill of Dorylaeum, it seemed, and now Saul would have to start their dinner. He clomped downstairs, feeling muddy and doomstruck as he always did whenever Patsy arrived home late.

He peered in the refrigerator. Baby food — ground lamb, sweet potatoes, mashed peas, and leftover oatmeal (leftover oatmeal? whose idea was that ? perhaps Patsy would eat it herself, late at night, watching the paid commercial programming) — resided in recesses of the refrigerator close to a package of hamburger, salad fixings, and a jar of nameless forgotten food cobwebbed with mold. Saul and Patsy were busy parents and sometimes for days or even weeks forgot certain sectors of the refrigerator. Terrible neglected substances, green and gray and almost alive again inside their Tupperware containers, were visible in the back of the lower shelf. He threw the jar, unopened, into the garbage.

Howie still waiting, waiting, waiting in the car. .

Saul removed the fresh greens and made a salad for Patsy and himself. He contemplated what ingredients they had on hand and decided to make an omelette. Therefore: he opened a bottle of white wine (“the white whine” Patsy sometimes called it, and sometimes called him under its influence), helped himself to a glass, and pulled out a mixing bowl from the cupboard and a cutting board for the vegetables. After chopping the onions and the mushrooms and the tomatoes, he dropped them into the bowl, and he—