Charles Baxter: Saul and Patsy

“Ma,” he said. “We’re staying here.” Any suggestion from his mother, no matter how sensible, had to be rejected, simply because it came from her.

“Staying? Staying for what? For how long?”

“For as long as it takes.”

“As long as what takes? Honey, you’ll never have a normal life as long as you live there.”

“What’s normal? Explain that to me.”

“Ah, now you’re setting one of your traps. I know your tricks. You want me to say restaurants and concerts and good movies and book-stores, but I won’t.”

“They have some of those things here.”

“I didn’t say it!” She waited. “Think of Howie’s wonderful life, out there in San Francisco. I worry about you, living on that dirt road. I don’t like dirt roads. I don’t like the people who live on them—”

“—You’ve never known anybody who lived on a dirt road, except those people, the Friedkins, who lived in that sixty-thousand-square-foot house out in that suburb where they—”

“—Let me finish. I’m not talking about the Friedkins. I’m talking about you. Earning such a lousy salary. Don’t think I don’t admire your wonderful idealism. Everyone in the family admires your wonderful idealism, Saul, you know that. But it’s like you’ve fallen into a. . cave. ”

“Like a bear,” Saul said, thoughtfully. “A bear in a cave. Now, that could be true.”

“So move out. Find an urban cave this time.”

“Don’t want to. I’m starting to like it here.”

“What’s to like? Dirt? Fields? Sheep?”

“They don’t have sheep here. No, I’ll tell you what there is to like about it, which you would discover if you ever came to visit.”

“What?”

“The indifference. Ma, I never lived with indifference before.”

“Indifference?” she roared, and jingled her bracelets. He could smell her perfume over the phone. “You value indifference? Have you gone crazy?”

“You never gave me a moment of it. You never left me alone.” Saul felt himself getting angry. “You were always kissing me.” Actually, now that he thought about it, the kissing had occurred before his father died. After his father died, she stopped with the kissing. Some psychic economy had gone to work on her. He was careful not to say that his father had always been the recipient of Delia’s genial and friendly indifference. She wasn’t cold, just cool to him. Even as a boy, Saul knew that his father was not a passionate man, that his thermostat was set lower than his mother’s — even Saul as a boy could see that his parents’ marriage lacked something. Nevertheless, Saul’s father had managed to thrive on his wife’s indifference, until he died; in death he had finally achieved a greater indifference than hers.

“Indifference is a terrible thing, kiddo,” Delia was saying. “Awful. Cold. Cold at the heart.”

“How would you know? You’ve never lived with it,” Saul said, knowing that he was saying the-thing-which-was-not. “Imagine people not caring that much what you do. Imagine people leaving you alone. ”

“You’re describing a nightmare.”

“Now you’re guessing. When did people ever leave you alone? When did they ever leave me alone? Never. That’s when.”

“Saulie, let’s not fight.” She sighed dramatically. “Furthermore, if you’re baiting me to talk about Norman, I won’t. Maybe you should move to another city. If only you were in Detroit. You have relatives in Detroit.”

“Exactly what Harold says. You been talking to him?”

“Who’s Harold?”

“He’s my barber. He says people look like me in Detroit. Or New York, I forget which.”

“Last time I talked to Patsy,” Saul’s mother said, changing the subject, “a couple of weeks back, she said you’d joined a bowling league.” Delia waited. “You, bowling? Jews don’t bowl.”

“Another eleventh commandment!” Saul protested. “Besides, what do you know about Jews?”

“I’m Jewish. That’s all I have to know about it. And I know you’re Jewish, and you’re trying to aggravate me.”

Saul felt his breathing passages getting clogged. He gasped for air. “Ma,” he said, “you’re giving me asthma. Let’s not discuss this.”

“Have you been to a doctor?” He replied with silence. “For your breathing, go to a doctor. Honey,” she said, “what am I going to say to my friends about you?”

“You can say Saul and Patsy are getting comfortable in Michigan.”

“All right, Saul. I give up. You want me to say that, that’s what I’ll say. Pour your life down the drain, if that’s your ambition. I accept it.” She sighed, a two-note sigh. “But let me tell you something, my friend. It’s not a normal life you’re leading out there.”

“Okay, Ma. I’ll bite. What kind of a life is it?”

“It’s nothing, and that’s my last word on the subject. You’re living in nothingness. It’ll eat you up. As anyone with a brain in his head would tell you. But I won’t interfere. Maybe nothingness suits you.”

“Oh, I thrive on it. It is my mother’s milk.”

There was a long pause.

“All right, be sarcastic,” she said. “I can tell we aren’t making progress. Goodbye, honey. I’ll call again in two weeks.” She made artificial and insincere kissing noises on the mouthpiece.

“Bye, Ma.” Saul hung up the telephone in the kitchen and walked into the living room, where Patsy was watching the Sunday-afternoon movie, From Here to Eternity. “Take off your clothes,” he said. “We’re going to mess around.”

She kept her eyes on the screen. “Not now. I don’t want to right now. At least not until this scene is over.” She glanced up at him. “Did the Marschallin call, sweetheart? You must’ve just talked to her.”

Saul waited impatiently until the movie was over.

In the April tournament held at the Aqua Bowl, Saul scored 201, 194, and 132, and at the party afterward at Mad Dog Bettermine’s summer house on the Tittabawassee River, he was exultant. Everyone had been told to bring a favorite CD to the party, and Saul, in an ironic mood that then gave way to earnestness, had brought Etta James singing Billie Holiday.

Mad Dog taught shop class and coached the wrestling team. No one had ever seen him button a collar around his own neck. For the party, his statuesque girlfriend Karla had prepared two huge casseroles, one with tuna and the other with chicken, and in the back room Mad Dog was busy rolling joints packed with the most powerful Colombian — grown, Mad Dog claimed, in the wet upper altitudes — that money could buy. Around the room on bookshelves were Mad Dog’s Lionel trains, including a complete model of the Twentieth Century Limited with baggage car, lounge, Pullman sleepers, diner, coaches, and engines. The track had been laid on top of a little red carpet. Sitting on a blue beanbag chair, Saul asked, his voice thickening with smoke, why Mad Dog didn’t run his trains on a layout but had set them up on a bookshelf display instead.

“These trains,” Mad Dog announced, “are too good to run.” He inhaled and inhaled and inhaled. “They’re classics,” he gasped. He slipped his fingers inside his shirt and started to scratch.

Saul nodded. He was wearing his bowling shirt with his name patch sewed on in front. In the next room, also thick with smoke, Patsy was dancing with Toby Finch, a fat man, as his name suggested, who taught social studies. On the other side of the room various people were tossing money on the floor as an incentive to someone to run down to the Tittebawasee River and jump into it. The money would be collected whether the daredevil wore clothes or not.