Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

Having finished with the windows, he extended the ladder, climbed up to the roof line, and emptied the gutters of their leaves. October, days until Halloween, autumn days, the days of the harvest and of uncurable sadness. Before going up the ladder’s rungs, he’d been unable to find a pair of work gloves in the garage or the basement or the pantry. Perhaps no one here really worked. Therefore, he would have to do the job bare-handed. The leaves gave to the flesh of his hands a smell of vegetative mold — Madagascar. His hands smelled the way Madagascar would certainly smell when you arrived on the cruise ship into the harbor of Madagascar’s seaport. . Toamasina. He made fists of both hands and brought them to his nostrils and inhaled the smell of that harbor, of the men and women working there, beads of their sweat falling onto the docks of that island kingdom. He felt transported. He would stay in Toamasina as long as he wished.

At the bottom of the ladder were the used paper towels scattered here and there. He gathered them up one by one and went inside, wiping his shoes first, before he dropped the towels into the garbage bag in the kitchen, the little perfect garbage can in the little perfect kitchen.

He washed the dishes in the kitchen sink. The light seemed to be everywhere.

His brother and sister-in-law had no idea how the world worked. They had no idea what people could do to you. And did do to you. One small misstep, one stumble, and the jackals were upon you. Protected and insular in their storybook house, his brother and sister-in-law eased themselves from day to day with no glimmer at all of the steady-state diminishments of everyday life — until the jackals had picked the body down to the bone and you were no longer able to cry out.

He found the vacuum cleaner in a closet off the laundry room and did a quick once-over of the living-room carpet. Then he went upstairs. In the guest room, he stripped the bed. He took off his clothes and masturbated into a wad of Kleenex. The relief lasted for ten seconds, fifteen at the most. He clothed himself again. After folding the sheets and pillowcases into perfect squares, he bent down to where his suitcase was. He took out his wallet and stared at the picture of the woman — Lis — he had said he was engaged to.

He didn’t know who this woman was. He could imagine , but that wasn’t quite the same thing. He had found the photograph in a camera store in San Francisco, just off the J Church line, which he would ride when he got tired of riding on BART. It had been inside a frame on sale for $17.99. The cost of the frame wasn’t too much to pay for a woman to be engaged to, even if you were broke. Standing there in the store, Howie had conjured up for himself the pleasantly surprised expressions that would appear on Saul and Patsy’s faces when he told them that he would be married within a matter of months. He had thought the pictured woman pretty, so he bought the frame, with her inside it. In this way, he had captured her. The clerk said that if he wished, he could keep the photograph, which was of a former employee of the shop.

Howie looked around for a piece of paper. A pencil, a pen, the necessities.

Dear Saul & Patsy,

I made a call back home this morning and it turns out that I must return immediately. I know this seems terribly strange but it’s just the way things have developed. At least you now know about my engagement, and at least I got to see the beautiful Emmy. I’ll talk to you about the $2 mil later.

Love, Howie

ps: I did the dishes and cleaned your gutters and the windows.

Howie put the note on Saul and Patsy’s bed. Outside he noticed that the sun had not moved for a couple of hours, nailed to its quadrant. A violent stillness inhabited the air, punctuated by an occasional striking sound of jug corks popping. He had had the strangest feeling last night that Saul and Patsy and Emmy were shadows on the wall, their shadow-voices echoing inside his own voices. Their shadows somehow exceeded his own and were stronger than his. They knew so little about what the world was coming to that they had become stronger than he was, thriving, as it were, on their own ignorance, the powerful bullying force of their innocence.

He touched the quilt on his brother and sister-in-law’s bed and shouted quickly.

The sound of his shouting roiled through the empty upstairs rooms. What you did alone, what you did by yourself when no one was looking or listening, was acceptable, because whatever you did unobserved. . well, it hadn’t really happened, except to you, and was consequently unimaginable and meaningless to others, and would never be spoken of.

He returned to the bedroom in which he had slept, closed up his suitcase, and started down the stairs. The lie about the two million dollars was harmless and beautiful, in its way, as some lies could be, fragrant and radiant: he had wanted to see their reactions — to be in charge of their reactions — and to make his brother and sister-in-law happy for a few days. What was the harm in that? Saul and Patsy, innocent and happy, like a married couple in a sentimental MGM Technicolor musical from the late 1940s directed by Vincente Minnelli, echoing his happiness for a few months, for a year or two, before all the money flew away again, like a great flock of migratory birds, and the happiness dispersed with it too, and the euphoria, as ephemeral in their departures as they had been in their arrivals. The money, utterly magical, half-imaginary, until you no longer had it, first congealed and then evaporated.

There are a lot of me’s out there, he had said, and meant it.

Strange, that Patsy hadn’t wanted what he had offered her. The money. Well, now she wouldn’t get it.

He took his car keys from a table in the front hallway, put them into his right hand, holding his suitcase handle in his left hand. He thought of going through Saul and Patsy’s things — their drawers, their secret places — then thought better of it. They wouldn’t have any secret places, no corners, no crimes, no disfigurements, no open wounds, no abscesses. Secret places and open wounds — well, that was what he himself had. Secret places were his stock-in-trade, the living stash. He lived in them. But here, in Five Oaks, everything was out in the open under the admonitory glare of the sun.

He carried the suitcase to the car and loaded it into the trunk. After getting in behind the wheel, he started the engine, which roared satisfyingly to life. He wondered where he would drive, how long his available money would hold out, and then the credit, how long the credit would hold out, how long people would believe him. Perhaps he would go back home, to bankruptcy court and the dates they had set, the settlements, the agreements, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc. He tightened his hand on the steering wheel and thought of how he would call his brother in a month or so to announce, ever so sadly, the cancellation of his engagement to the beautiful Phyllis. Phyllis! Jesus, people were easy to fool, at least in the short term. Phyllis! It was a name like “Petunia” or “Esmeralda.” It stank of the whimsical-imaginary. Maybe Saul would ask about the two million, and then again maybe he wouldn’t. The subject just wouldn’t come up. Perhaps, instead, he would see the trees leafing out, see the flowers blooming and wilting in his front yard, and the grass growing and mowed down, growing and mowed down in his plot of ground, his little patch of American real estate. The great pageant of life here in the Midwest in its cycles of growth leading to the harvest, waxing and waning just like the moon, would present themselves to Saul and to his storybook family, and Saul would read those cycles as students of the classics might read an epic. In the distance Saul’s family might see Howie himself on the horizon waxing and waning like the moon. They might see the colossal mysteries of success and failure, and they would observe human beings, in passing, squashed by the marketplace, like bugs. More likely, however, they would see none of that. They would just trudge to work, to school, to day care, to the job, to retirement, to the cemetery, like little imaginary people on a little imaginary stage.