Charles Baxter: Saul and Patsy

“Zoltan, you knucklehead,” Saul said, “this is counterproductive argumentation you’re engaged in.”

“Come on, Saul,” Kabelá pleaded. “As a friend, I’m advising you: stop with the quitting. We need you down here. We can all understand why you would want to do this, but—”

“No,” he said. “I can’t do it anymore. My heart wouldn’t be in it. I’ve got that kid’s blood to think about, and besides, I need to do something else. When I’ve thought about it, I’ll let you know what I’m going to do. Goodbye, Zoltan. You’re a good guy — and I know this’ll inconvenience you and everything, and I’m sorry about that.”

“I won’t ever write you a recommendation,” Zoltan said. “You’ll be unrecommended.”

“Okay,” Saul said happily, before he hung up. He liked the idea of being unrecommendable.

That day, on her way home from work — the newly unemployed Saul had taken Theo and picked up Emmy in their recently purchased used car— Patsy found herself at the Valu-Rite checkout line, with a pile of Bartlett pears, three grapefruit, a small bag of apples, and a bottle of cheap domestic champagne from the U.S.A., penny-pinching budget bubbles. She planned to celebrate Saul’s unemployment that evening with the booze and fresh fruit. Going unemployed was one of the braver actions he had ever taken. It was as if he had borrowed a leaf from Howie’s book; perhaps there was a correspondence in the two brothers’ genetic infrastructure that gave them a tropism toward indolence, lassitude, laziness, apathy, lusterlessness, acedia, disinterest. Then again, perhaps not.

“Uh, miss?” the checkout clerk said. “Your credit card?”

“Yes?” Patsy asked.

The clerk was a short, mostly pretty young woman with blond hair, a hard, narrow, birdlike face, and turquoise fingernail polish. She had, however, minimum-wage bags under her eyes, the result of working long hours for low pay and few benefits. She was, Patsy guessed, gradually going to fat: frustration-eating would soon be having its effects on her. She probably had a boyfriend who sometimes hit her where it didn’t show.

“Your credit card didn’t go through,” the clerk said.

“What?” Patsy stood up straighter, to give herself more stature. She was, after all, a loan officer at the Five Oaks National Bank and Trust. “That’s impossible.”

The clerk shrugged. “We can try it again.” Patsy ran the card through the reading-strip once more. Again the message came back: Credit Refused.

“I don’t know what the matter is,” Patsy said. “This never happens.” The clerk gazed at her, the smallest ghost of a smile appearing on her face. “Well,” she said, “you could always pay in cash.”

Patsy took her wallet from her purse and opened it. There was no cash inside. Patsy felt herself suddenly reddening. Behind her, three people stood in the checkout line, watching her, shifting their weight from one foot to the other. Patsy seldom bothered with cash anymore except for small purchases like candy and breath mints and gum. But she thought she had stashed a few dollars in there. And where was the two-dollar bill she kept in her wallet permanently, for luck? Also missing, and anyway insufficient for pears and sparkling wine.

“I don’t know what’s gone wrong with the card,” Patsy said.

“Maybe you hit your limit and your credit ran out,” the blond girl said before reddening and putting her hand up in front of her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to say that.”

Patsy looked up at the ceiling and then at the floor. She felt nervous sweat on her back and under her arms, as this strange public humiliation continued. “I don’t suppose you offer credit,” she joked. She reached into the wallet and pulled out a quarter.

“No,” the clerk said, her ghost-smile now, just under the surface of things, turning to visible annoyance, her teeth beginning to show, an animal grimace.

“Do you have a public phone?” Patsy asked.

“Over there,” the clerk said, without gesturing. “Over there, by the doors.”

“Is it okay if I leave my groceries here?”

“Yeah, well — I’ll put them off to the side,” the clerk said. “But I can’t leave them there for long.”

“You won’t have to,” Patsy said. “I’m calling my husband.”

Waiting at the automatic doors for Saul and Emmy, Patsy thought of the enchanted carnal moments she and Saul had had when they first met and first made love as two sensual animals on fire with each other. That ended with the onset of marriage and routine and childbirth and child care and fatigue and day-to-day indifference. But, after all, this was what their marriage had come to: they depended almost blindly upon each other to get each other out of trouble; they were easing each other through this life. About Saul you could always say, He’s dependable . If he said that he’d be at Emmy’s day-care center at three in the afternoon, he would be there. He wouldn’t forget about Theo for a minute. If he said that he would pick up a friend at the airport, he would not forget the date. If you were in trouble, he would drop everything and get you out of trouble if he could; if you were itchy, he would make love to you, and if your back ached, he would rub it. He had once been an educator, until someone died. Now he was in search of an occupation. He was comfortably self-centered, though the caretaker side of him would never go away, and he was probably no woman’s fantasy of a mate, but, sitting near the automatic doors of the Valu-Rite, Patsy waited for him, and at the moment when he walked in, carrying Theo in a front-pack and Emmy on his shoulders, he smiled and waved at his wife, and she almost wept.

In the woods behind their house, a shrine had developed on the site where the ashes of Gordy Himmelman were said to be buried. An underclass of mourners skittered into the woods during the day and early evening and left behind their remembrances: packets of chewing gum, and a standing red-and-silver pinwheel that twirled when the wind caught it, and a carved yellow dog, and a few flowers here and there, and gold and blue ribbons; and a glass piggy bank with pennies inside it halfway up, as far as the pig’s tail, and more toys, including a battery-powered electric car, and several plastic figures of X-men, though the figures were mostly Wolverine, with his fingernails out, ready for combat; and more little flowers pasted onto the nearby trees, and a wooden cross with GORDY, WE MISS YOU written on it. It looked like a Mexican cemetery plot for a child, or a roadside shrine where someone had died in an accident, and day by day, week by week, the toys and decorations and flowers accumulated, and when Patsy walked out to visit it, as she did from time to time, she was at first horrified, then surprised, and then, finally, accustomed to the sudden involuntary appearance of her own tears. The tears had once belonged to Saul, but now they were hers, too.

After first thinking that he would make a good funeral director, a firstclass assistant to Binch, a man he had instantly taken a shine to, Saul told Patsy that the profession was, in fact, too much like being a doctor, though he suspected that the daily sight of corpses going in and out of the funeral home would calm his nerves and bring him spiritual quietude. There was something peaceful about a dead body, Saul informed Patsy. She listened to these opinions without comment.

Finally, at last, he had a good idea: he drove over to the Five Oaks News-Chronicle and offered his services as a columnist, three or four columns a week, to be titled “The Bloviator.” The features editor to whom he applied had never heard of the word and said that they certainly weren’t going to hire Saul as that, or as anything else.