Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

“Yes, yes, I’m not hurt at all.”

“Good. Well. Neither am I, I don’t think.” She reached tentatively toward the ceiling. “This isn’t fun. Did you do this, Saul?”

“Yes, I did. How do we get out of here?”

“Let’s see,” she said, speaking calmly, in her usual tone. “What I think you do is, you release your seat belt, stick your arms straight up, then lower yourself slowly so you don’t break your neck. Then you crawl out the window, the higher one. That would be yours.”

“Okay.” He held his arm up, then unfastened the clasp and felt himself dropping onto the car’s ceiling. He pulled himself toward the side window. When he was outside, he leaned over, back in, and extended his hand to Patsy to help her out.

As she emerged through the window, she was smiling. Disasters didn’t appear to have the power to alienate her from life. “Haven’t you ever rolled a car before, Saul? I have. Or one of my boyfriends did, years ago.” She was breathing rapidly. She dragged herself out, dusted her jeans, and strolled a few feet beyond the car’s tire tracks in the mud, as if nothing much had happened. “Beautiful night,” she said. “Look at those stars.” For a moment he thought she was dissociating.

“Jeez, Patsy,” Saul said, jumping down close to where she stood, “this is no time for being cosmic.” Then he gazed up. She was right: the sky was pillowed with stars. She took his hand.

“Are you really okay?” she asked. “My God, feel that. You’re shaking like a leaf. You must be in shock.” She wrapped her arms around him and held him fast for half a minute. “There,” she said, “now that’s better.” She studied him. “You’re still drunk. What a mess you are.”

“We’re not kids anymore,” Saul said. “We can’t get drunk all the time at parties and roll cars. We’ll get killed. We could have died.”

“But we didn’t.”

“We could have.”

“All right. Yes. I know. You can die in your sleep. You can die watching television.” She observed him in the dark, as if she were spying on him. “I wish I had been driving. It’s so warm, a spring night, I think I would have been singing along to the radio to stay awake. ‘Unchain My Heart’—I would have been singing along to Ray Charles and I would have stayed awake and we’d be home by now.” She leaned over. “Smell the soil? It’s loamy. You know, Saul, you should turn the car’s headlights off. Save the battery.”

“Patsy, the car is wrecked ! Look at it.”

“Don’t be silly.” She studied the car with equanimity, one hand raised to her face, the other hand cradling her elbow. Patsy’s equanimity was otherworldly and constant. The combination of her beauty and her persistent unexplainable interest in Saul was puzzling to him. “Saul, that car is fine. We might be driving it tomorrow. The roof will have a dent, that’s all. The car turned over softly and slowly. It’s hardly hurt. What we have to do now is get to a house and call someone to help us. We could walk across this field, or we could just take the road back to Mad Dog’s. I’m sure they’re still going strong.”

“Patsy, I can’t think. My brain has seized up.”

“Well,” she said, taking his hand, “I happen to like these stars, and that looks like a nice field, and I’d rather stay away from Highway 14 this time of night, what with the drunks on the road and all.” She gave him a tug on his sleeve, and he almost fell. “There you are,” she said. “Come on.”

As Saul walked across the field, hearing the slurp of his shoes in the spring mud, he saw the red blinking light of a radio tower in the distance, the only remotely friendly sight anywhere beneath the horizon. Just when he thought he had been accepted among these Midwesterners, not just as a Jew but as himself, his car had turned over. Oblivion had almost swallowed him, as his mother had predicted it might. That he was here at all was a sign, he thought, that his life was disordered after all, abandoned to chaos among rural Gentiles, connoisseurs of rifles, violence, and piety. He smelled manure nearby, and somewhere behind him he thought he heard the predatory wingbeat of a bat or an owl. First the Gentiles, then the Gnostics.

He had thought he was a missionary, bringing education and the higher enlightenments to rural, benighted adolescents, but somehow the conversion had gone the other way, and now here he was, acting like them: going to parties, getting drunk, falling asleep, rolling his car. It was the sort of accident Christians had. He felt obscurely that he had given up personal complexity and become simple in the midwestern style, like those girls who worked at the drugstore arranging greeting cards. They were so straightforward that two seconds before they did anything, like give change, you could see every gesture coming. He was becoming like that. As a personality, Saul had once prided himself on being interesting, almost Byzantine, a challenge to any therapist. But having joined the school bowling league, he couldn’t seem to concentrate on Schopenhauer on those days when, at odds and ashamed of himself, he took the battered Signet Classic of The World as Will and Idea down from the shelf and glowered at the indecipherable lines he had highlighted with yellow Magic Marker in college. When he did understand, the philosopher seemed no longer profound, but merely a disappointed idealist with an ungainly prose style.

“Saul?”

“What?”

“I’ve been talking to you. Did you hear me?”

“Guess not. I was lost in thought.” He stumbled against a bush. He couldn’t see much, and he reached out for Patsy’s hand. “I was thinking about girls in drugstores and Schopenhauer and the reasons why we ever came to this place.”

“Jesus. I wish to Christ that you would listen to me sometimes. If you had been listening to me, you wouldn’t have stumbled into that bush. That’s what I was warning you about.”

“Thanks. Where are we?”

“We’re going down into this little gully, and when we get up on the other side, we’ll be right near that farmhouse. What’s the matter?”

He turned around and saw, across the field, the headlights of his car shining on the upturned dirt; he saw the Chevy’s four tires facing the air; and he thought of his new jovial recklessness and of how he had almost killed himself and his wife. He said nothing because he was beginning to feel soul-sick, a state of spiritual dizziness, and also because he had forgotten to turn off the headlights. He was possessed by disequilibrium. He felt the urge to giggle, and was horrified by himself. He had a sudden marionette feeling.

“Saul! You’re drifting off again. What is it this time?”

“Puppets.”

“Puppets?”

“Yeah. You know — the way they don’t have a center of gravity. Uh, Kleist. . What I mean is. The way they look. .”

“Watch out for that stump.”

He saw it in time to avoid it. “Patsy, how do you live in the world? This is a serious question.”

“Stop it, Saul. You’ve been to a party. You’re tired. Don’t get metaphysical on me. Please. It’s two in the morning. You live in the world by knocking on the door of that farmhouse, that’s what you do. You ring the doorbell.”

They walked up past a shed whose flaking red door was hanging open, and they crossed the pitted driveway onto a small front yard with an evenly mowed lawn. A tire swing, pendulating slowly, hung down from a tree branch. Saul couldn’t see much of the house in the dark, but as they crossed the driveway, kicking a few stones, they heard the bark of a dog from inside the house, a low bark from a big dog: a farm dog with a name like Trixie.

“Anti-Semites,” Saul said.