Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

He couldn’t stand it any longer. Howie’s furious apathy was larger than his own. Saul’s love for his brother couldn’t be much clearer if it were out of the water in the well.

Take care of Howie. He’s very fragile.

Saul washed his hands and put on his shoes before strolling out to Howie’s car. The suspense was killing him. Actually, he adored his brother for no particular reason. His brother being his brother was reason enough. Why should he pretend otherwise? Why should he feign this indifference? If Howie wanted to be indifferent to him, to Saul, fine. Howie was his little brother, always had been, even now, multimillionaire though Howie might be, the money couldn’t protect him from everything. Howie required looking after. Everyone did. Of course, Howie liked suspense — a seducer’s trait — and could handle much more of it than Saul could. By the time he had reached the Avenger, Saul was almost running, desperate to hug his brother, desperate to love him again in person.

There, behind the wheel, was Howie, fast asleep, a tiny trail of drool declining from his mouth. Slumbering though he was, Howie had the appearance of a bleary, worn-out man, a former hobbyist-seducer whose charm, through overuse, had faded on him. He had a piteous gray streak in his beard. Saul knocked on the driver’s-side window, and when Howie awoke, he stared at Saul for a moment in nonrecognition, as if in his sleep he had been inoculated with amnesia.

“Howie,” Saul called to his brother through the glass. “Wake up.”

Howie continued to look blankly at Saul.

“Howie!” Saul cried out. “Buddy. Pal. It’s Saul. Your brother. What’s going on? Get out of the car! Come inside.”

Howie rolled down the window. Speaking like a man coming back to consciousness after general anesthetic, Howie said, “Hey, Saul. I’ve been driving for seventeen hours straight. I got here, and I thought no one was home.” He smiled wanly. “I guess I fell asleep.”

“Come inside,” Saul repeated. “Please.”

Howie opened the car door. When he tried to stand, his knees appeared to give way before Saul grabbed his elbow, and then his arm, helping him back up. Saul hugged his brother fiercely. Howie gave off a smell of exhaustion and breath mints and fast food. Saul supported him by holding him around the shoulders in a brotherly clasp as they proceeded up the front walkway, through the front door, past the foyer, into the kitchen, where he sat his brother down at the dinette table.

“New house,” Howie said, looking around and shaking his head. “New baby, new furniture, new house. New everything.”

“Yeah,” Saul said. “I guess so. Though Emmy isn’t that new. She’s over a year old. And Patsy is pregnant again. You knew that, right?”

“Could I have a glass of water?” Howie asked. “I’m beat.”

“Sure.” After placing the water down in front of Howie, Saul sat beside him and waited while his brother drank. Slowly, his face began to take on its customary qualities, and Howie’s character reappeared in his eyes. “So. Howard. To what do we owe the honor of this visit?” Saul asked.

“I wanted to give you and Patsy and Mary Esther. . do you call her Mary Esther or Emmy? I’ve heard you say both.”

“Well, Emmy, usually,” Saul said.

“I have an announcement. And I wanted to see my little niece, and you, and Patsy, and the new house, and actually the truth is that I wanted to give you some money.”

“ Give us? Money? For what? We don’t need any money.” He waited. Perhaps he was being ungracious. “How much money?”

“I’ll tell you later. It’s sort of a bundle. I need to get rid of it. You’d be doing me a favor. By the way, where is Patsy?”

“Getting a prescription filled. She’ll be back anytime.” Saul touched his brother’s arm. “It’s so good to see you, Howie.”

“Well, yeah.” Howie twisted his head back and forth, loosening the neck muscles. “You, too.” He gazed toward the ceiling. “That was one long drive. I did like Colorado, the Rocky Mountains, but of course everyone does, though I think those mountains are too big, somehow. I like smaller mountains, softer ones, more on the human scale. When I got to Five Oaks, I wasn’t sure I’d find your house, but then I saw some white-haired kids, palely loitering in their front yards, and I thought, ‘This must be where Saul and Patsy live, somewhere around here,’ and I asked, and they directed me to you. Hey. Could you give me some towels? For a shower?”

“Oh, sure,” Saul said. “By the way, how did you like what you saw of our very wonderful city?”

“Five Oaks?” Howie appeared to consider this question, then gave his head a shake. “Five Oaks is the Tübingen of the Midwest, wouldn’t you say?” Saul had forgotten Howie’s habit of rhetorical traps, delivered with a thin smile.

“I might, or I might not.” Saul felt dismayed by how quickly the two of them became quarrelsome. They had skipped the stage when they would both be pleasant and agreeable.

“Those towels, Saul? I’ve got to take a shower.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll go get them.”

Waiting in the kitchen, while the hot water ran in the shower upstairs, Saul thrummed his fingers on the table. He stood up and gazed out the window to see if there were any signs of Patsy. Far in the distance down the subdivision’s main street, out in the semidark, were two bleached-haired kids, two Himmels, yes, palely loitering (that was the phrase), bent over a bag of some kind, conferring. Then they straightened up and stared at his house.

During the past few months, the middle school and high school outsiders and losers and dropouts and freaks and disaffiliated and disinclined and unmotivated and semi-destroyed and embittered kids — it was quite a sizable group — had all turned their hair a sickly blond or white and created a semi-secret cult of the undead with Gordy at its center as inspiration and centerpiece, and Sam Cole associated with him for the beauty part. Saul had heard that they considered Gordy to be still among them, apparitional, and all these albino-haired, blank-eyed kids had taken a particular interest in Saul himself as a focus of their undead attention.

There was, Saul had heard, a dispute among the Himmels about himself. Some considered him an enabler, someone who had made Gordy possible. For others, he was the one who had hastened Gordy’s end. In any case, whether as John the Baptist or as Judas, Saul was on their minds.

When Howie finally came downstairs, wearing a clean shirt and fresh trousers and clean socks, Saul hugged him again and in the living room poured him a glass of wine. They clicked glasses, and out of nowhere, Howie said, “I’m going to get married, Saul. I wanted to tell you in person.”

Saul tried not to act surprised. This was, after all, standard practice for Howie, to say nothing about the person or persons he had been seeing or what he had been doing and then to announce big decisions as done deals. He avoided advice, consultations, and unwanted intimacies this way. He loved to ambush with surprise news, then watch the reaction. Or maybe he just didn’t want to deliver big news over the phone. “Hey, congratulations,” Saul said, trying to think of an alternative way of saying what he was about to say in a non-clichéd form. But the cliché was there in front of him like a roadblock. “So. Who’s,” he asked, “the lucky girl?”

“Her name?” Howie seemed briefly taken aback, stunned by the question. He shut his eyes twice, as if he had been plunged into profound thought. “Her name is Phyllis.”

“Phyllis?” Saul asked, his voice carrying a small current of disbelief. “That’s a name for old people. Nobody is named Phyllis. Not anymore.”