Charles Baxter: Saul and Patsy

They parked in a visitors’ parking lot and walked hand in hand to the front entrance. It was a mild, cool evening with a hint of rain in the distance. Students called to each other and tossed Frisbees on the lawns. In the student union, undergraduates in the latest complicated fashions, with faces fitted out with contemporary distastes and forms of earnestness, walked past them in the foyer, paying no attention to them, transfixed with themselves alone. They were beautiful but wanted to be admired for their minds, of all things. Saul stopped to inhale.

“God,” he said. “I miss it. I miss being on a campus. I miss not being an adult, quite yet. I miss being twenty. I miss that stink.”

Patsy studied him. “Yeah,” she said, “you do have that nostalgia thing going on. Come on, Saul. Enough about you. I’m hungry. Let’s get me a bag of potato chips.” After buying the tickets — the concert was far from being sold out, the blues having little purchase here at Holbein College— they walked down the student union hallway to an alcove where some vending machines stood. On one of the vending machines, the dispenser of individually bagged snack foods, someone had taped a warning sign:

OUT OF ORDURE

“God, I miss it,” Saul said. “Cleverness. Verbal agility. I wonder if a French major put that up,” Saul said. “Et pourtant vous serez semblable à cette ordure—”

“For Christ’s sake, Saul,” Patsy said, giving him a peeved look. “I know the poem.” She softened quickly. “You used to recite it to me, remember? To freak me out with Baudelaire?”

“Yeah, I was just being nostalgic. Just as you say.” They stood there and watched the students parading by, accessorized with their preoccupations, and Saul glanced over at Patsy and saw instantly that she had outgrown the glamour of youth, the metallic sheen of immaturity and total enraptured self-mindedness. She had been glad to get out into the world where she lived now; he had not. Involuntarily, he put his hand over his heart.

All through the concert he noticed from his wife’s stillness and concentration that, in fact, he understood the blues much better than she did. The old black guy up on the stage, with his gray hair and pressed pants and shoes spotted with flecks of mud, sang and played his heart out. Saul didn’t have to think about the music to get it; for him, no effort at translation was necessary.

Also, he was beginning to suffer from insomnia, just like Harold, the barber. During the day while teaching his classes, he would feel drowsy, but when his head fell onto the pillow, he would sleep for an hour and then wake with the sensation that a movie-premiere arc-light was shining in his face. Along his legs and his chest there fluttered a distinct feeling of insects. This sensation made Saul want to jump out of his skin, leave his body behind like an ill-fitting pair of pajamas. At these times, still in his cocoon-body, he lay there thinking that the meaning of a serious career and of adulthood generally had escaped him. In the middle of the night, life did not seem to be the trifling joke he once thought it might be, nor were its problems merely academic ones. Devils lurked. At such times he would take Patsy, awake or asleep, into his arms. He wanted to admit that he had made a terrible mistake and that they were suffering the consequences of his misjudgments.

After all, his brother, Howie, the entrepreneur, was on the West Coast, making West Coast money in various start-ups, fledgling technology and software projects of which Saul understood nothing. Howie was younger than Saul and already a millionaire, or so he claimed. Saul’s impression was that West Coast businesses were like West Coast football: you threw the ball up into the air and sort of expected someone to catch it, and usually someone did. Howie did not hesitate to call now and then to announce his various successes in vague incomprehensible detail. Then Saul’s mother, Delia, would call to talk about Howie’s successes to Saul, repeating the vague incomprehensible details at greater length and fuller incomprehensibility. Being an older brother whose idealism had resulted in a high school teaching job — this made Saul feel, during his bouts of insomnia at three in the morning, in his rented house, with midwestern farmland outside, as if he had been bested, outdone and undone. Sounds came up from the basement. Dream hounds bayed. Never again would he and his wife live in the fully human world. He had brought his wife out to this godforsaken place. The trouble with Patsy was that she said she liked it fine in Five Oaks. She could be sanctimonious about her adaptability. All he could do was hold on to her and wait for the hours to pass.

If anything should happen to her, he thought, he would surely die.

He climbed to the roof of the house to correct quizzes and tests. Staring out over the fields, he felt his attention disperse into the landscape, floating gradually into the topsoil, like pollen. Then he would look down and underline a sentence fragment in green ink.

Saul’s mother, Delia, had lost her husband, Saul’s father, Norman, to a premature heart attack some years ago, when Howie had been eight years old and Saul ten. In a traffic jam outside Baltimore, Norman Bernstein had died quietly and submissively inside his Buick, his head slumped over the wheel, his car clogging the already clogged arterial-highway. Thinking of this, Saul sometimes imagined his father’s coronary thrombosis producing a traffic thrombosis, blocking the flow of vehicles for hours. His self-effacing father would have hated his own death for its public-nuisance value. He would have preferred to die in a private manner that would have bothered no one.

As for Delia, Saul’s mother had had a wild youth, Saul had understood from one or two family friends who had reported that she had been a real “firecracker,” but he also inferred from her indifferent manner of talking about her husband that the marriage had been a convenience of sorts, a way of starting a family with a reliable man, a means of avoiding loneliness; and his father’s death, while certainly a shock, had not plunged her into mind-numbing grief. She had traded passion for reliability, and when a reliable man dies, he leaves behind a sufficiently huge sum of life-insurance money to take care of everybody, and Saul’s father had done exactly that. Saul missed his dull, sweet, and reliable father the way a child misses a favorite dog, but every time he tried to speak to his mother (who was still, after all, in her mid-forties) about his dad, she listened carefully but did not participate in his sorrow, perhaps on principle.

Musing about his mother, Saul recognized that she missed high school (not college, as he did) and the grand passions more than she missed her husband, who had been, in romance, a utility player. There was still an out-of-control quality to her emotions, an uncapped heat coming from her furnace heart that Saul was afraid of, both for her and himself. In her marriage, his mother had been undermatched. She was ready for a wonderful midlife crisis, and Saul was bracing himself for it.

Whenever she called, she disparaged the Midwest, and Saul’s career choice, though she was careful never to criticize Patsy, or Saul and Patsy’s unseemly love for each other. She would praise, incomprehensibly, Saul’s brother, and always refer to Howie’s good looks and his parade of girlfriends — Saul suspected his brother had boyfriends as well — and his income. It was as if Saul and Patsy’s marriage, with its crazy love, was an error in taste or judgment; it lacked the interesting variety to be found in Howie’s succession of bedmates. It lacked anecdotal value. If Saul would only return to Baltimore, his mother intimated, perhaps she could set him straight.