Saul and Patsy
Table of Contents
SHOTS FIRED AT HOLBEIN REACTOR Iraqi Terrorists Suspected
For Lewis Baxter and John Thayer Baxter
I very much wanted to manage in that first movement without using trombones, and tried to. . .
But . . . I must confess to you that I am a profoundly melancholy man, that black wings flap incessantly above us . . . no—I must have my trombones.
—JOHANNES BRAHMS,
in a letter to Vincenz Lachner
Michigan seems like a dream to me now.
—PAUL SIMON,
“America”
Acclaim for Charles Baxter’s
SAUL
and
PATSY
“A tale of generations at war and the troubled underside of placid Midwestern life . . . abounding in irony and wit, and reminiscent of Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow.”
—
San Francisco Chronicle
“Baxter reminds us that there is no regional monopoly on virtue and understanding, and no easy comforts for either self-appointed worldsavers or smug populists. And for all those hard lessons, Baxter also manages to deliver Saul and Patsy into something astonishingly close to a happy ending. Such indeed is the glory of love—and of fully realized fiction.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“One of our most gifted writers.”
—
Chicago Tribune
“Thoughts sprawl delightfully, insanely, worryingly and sometimes brilliantly from Saul. . . . Funny and grown-up and generous.”
—
The New York Times Book Review
“Charles Baxter’s novel
Saul and Patsy
is what it appears to be—a love story. But underneath its placid surface broils biting social commentary, a tale of lost teenagers adrift in a culture with no moral center.”
—
The Oregonian
“
Saul and Patsy
[is] a penetrating, surprisingly funny meditation on the dynamics of community belonging and acceptance.”
—
The New York Times
“[Baxter] weaves magic into everyday life as if it were mere coincidence. Clark Kent is to Superman as Charles Baxter is to his writing.”
—
Los Angeles Times
“It is rare that a novel, even a good one, manages to evoke contemporary life without being self-conscious about it. But that is what Baxter achieves here.”
—
The New Yorker
“Watch out for the ‘quiet Midwestern’ tag on [Baxter’s] writing: That’s the iceberg you will strike. There is nothing simple in his universe, and nothing solely on the surface. Baxter’s intelligence and humor are submerged, and dangerous. You know—something like yours.”
—
Detroit Free Press
“Baxter . . . make[s] the mundane seem marvelous, the everyday seem extraordinary. . . . A clever and empathetic writer.”
—
The Capital Times
“On almost every page at least one sentence would make me stop and shake my head in amazement and wonder.”
—Logan Browning,
Houston Chronicle
“Both hilarious and poignant.”
—
The Dallas Morning News
“Baxter defies the laws of publishing gravity: He went up and has yet to come down. . . . Baxter’s new novel is just as bright and fully imagined, just as energetic as anything that came before.”
—
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Brilliantly exploring the emotional intricacies of a young marriage, Charles Baxter’s latest novel,
Saul and Patsy,
uncannily exposes the least flattering side of human desire while celebrating the inexplicable power that love has over our lives.”
—
Rocky Mountain News
“Baxter’s store of figurative language and rich, apt description is essentially boundless, and he draws generously from it for all the characters.”
—
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“More proof that Baxter is one of the best novelists anywhere. Every line packs a double punch—what it apparently means and what it
really
means.”
—
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Part One
One
About a year after they had rented the farmhouse with loose brown aluminum siding on Whitefeather Road, Saul began glaring out the west window after dinner into the unappeasable darkness that pressed against the glass, as if he were angry at the flat uncultivated farmland for being farmland instead of glass and cement. “No sane Jew,” he said, “ever lived on a dirt road.” Patsy reminded him of Poland, Russia, and the nineteenth century. Then she pointed down at the Scrabble board and told him to play. To spite her, he spelled out “axiom” over a triple-word score, for forty-two points. “That was totally different,” Saul said, shaking his head. “Completely different. That was when everyone but the landowners lived on dirt roads. It was a democracy of dirt roads, the nineteenth century.” Patsy was clutching her bottle of root beer with one hand and arranging the letters on her slate with the other. Her legs were crossed in the chair, and the bottle was positioned against the instep of her right foot. She looked up at him and smiled. He couldn’t help it. He smiled back. She was so beautiful, she could make him copy her gestures without his meaning to.
“We’re not landowners either,” she said. “We’re renters. Oh, I forgot to tell you. I had to go into the basement this afternoon for a screwdriver, and I noticed that there’s a mouse in the trap downstairs.”
“Is it dead?”
“Oh, sure.” She nodded. “It looks
quite
dead. You know—smashed back, slightly open mouth, and bulging eyes. I’ll spare you the full description. You’ll see the whole scene soon enough when you go down there—I didn’t want to throw it out myself.”
“I did the dishes,” Saul complained, sitting up, running his fingers through his hair.
“I
could
throw the mouse out,” Patsy said, leaning back, taking a swig and giving him another obliging smile. “I can now, and I could have then.” She straightened her leg and placed her foot against his ankle, and she raised her eyebrows as an ironic courtesy. “But the truth is, those little critters give me the whimwhams, and I’d rather not. I’d rather you did it, Saul. Just, you know, as a favor to me. You do it, my man, and there might be something in it for you.”
“What? What would be in it for me?”
“The trick in negotiations,” she said, “is not to make promises too soon. Why don’t you just do it as a favor to me? A sort of little gratuitous act of kindness? One of them guys?”
He stood up, shaking the letters on the Scrabble board, and clomped in his white socks to the kitchen, where the flashlight was stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet that was so weak that the flashlight kept sliding down to the floor, though it was only halfway there now. “I didn’t say you had to do it
instantly,
” Patsy shouted. “This very minute. You could wait until the game is over.”
“Well, if you didn’t want it thrown out now, you shouldn’t have mentioned it. Besides, I can’t concentrate,” Saul said, half to himself as he flicked the flashlight off and on, “thinking about that dead mouse.” The batteries were so low that the light from the bulb was foggy and brown. He opened the door to the basement, fanning stale air, and stared down the steps into the darkness that smelled of must and heating oil. He didn’t like the basement. At night, in bed, he thought he heard crying from down there, ancestral accusations. “You’ll do anything to beat me at Scrabble,” Saul said aloud to himself. “This is gamesmanship, honey. Don’t tell me otherwise.”
He snapped on the wall switch, and the shadows of the steps saw-toothed themselves in front of him. “I
really
don’t like this,” he said, walking down the stairs, a sliver from the banister leaping into the heel of his hand. “This is not my idea of a good time.” He heard Patsy say something consoling and inaudible.
On his left were the wooden shelves once meant for storing preserves. On these shelves, mason jars, empty and gathering dust, now lined up unevenly. Saul and Patsy’s landlord, Mr. Munger, a retired farmer and unsuccessful freelance preacher who had a fitful temper, had thrown their lids together into an angry heap on a lower shelf. The washtubs were on Saul’s right, and in front of him, four feet away, was the sprung mousetrap. The mouse had been pressed flat by the trap, and its tiny yellow incisors were showing at the sides of its mouth, just as Patsy had said.
He loved her, but she could be manipulative when it came to getting him to do household chores that she didn’t want to do. Maybe, out of his sight, she was exchanging her letter tiles.
Saul grunted, loosened the spring, and picked up the mouse by the tail, which felt like cold rubber. His fingers brushed against the animal’s downy fur, soft as milkweed pods. Being, on a miniature scale, had once been inhabited there. With his other hand he held the flashlight. He heard other mice scratching in the basement corners. Why kill mice if there were always going to be more of them? After climbing the stairs and opening the back door, he set the flashlight down: the cool air and the darkness made his flesh prickle. Still holding the tiny pilgrim, he took four steps into the backyard. Feeling a scant moment of desolation, nothing more than a breeze of feeling, he threw the mouse toward the field, its body arcing over the tiny figure on the horizon of a distant radio transmitting tower, one pulsing red light at its tip. Saul took a deep breath. The blankness of the midwestern landscape excited him. There was a sensual loneliness here that belonged to him now, that was truly his. He thought that fate had perhaps turned him into one of those characters in Russian literature abandoned to haphazard fortune and solitude on the steppes.
Nothing out there seemed friendly except the lights on the horizon, and they were too far away to be of any help.
He walked into the living room, where Patsy was wrapped in a blanket. “Good news and bad news,” Saul said, tilting his head. “The good news is that I threw out the mouse. The bad news is that it, she, was pregnant. Maybe that’s good news. You decide. By the way, I see that you’ve wrapped yourself in a blanket. Now why is that? Too cold in here?”
She had dimmed the light, turning the three-way bulb to its lowest wattage. She wasn’t sitting in the chair anymore. She was lying on the sofa, the root beer nowhere in sight. With a grand gesture she parted the blanket: she had taken off her clothes except for her underwear, and just above her breasts she had placed six Scrabble letters:
HI SAUL
“Nine points,” he said, settling himself down next to her, breathing in her odor, a clear celery-like smell, although tonight it seemed to be mixed with ether. He picked the letters off her skin with his teeth and one by one gently spat them down onto the rug.
“I guess it’s good news,” Patsy said, “that we don’t have all those baby mice in a mouse nursery down there.” She kissed him.
“Um,” Saul said. “This was what was in it for me?”
“Plain old married love,” Patsy said, helping him take his jeans off. Then she lifted up her pelvis as he removed her underwear. “Plain old married love is only what it is.”
He moved down next to her as she unbuttoned his shirt. He said, “Sometimes I think you’ll go to any length to avoid losing in Scrabble. I think it’s a character weakness on your part. Neurotic rigidity. David Shapiro talks about this in his book on neurotic styles. Check it out. It’s a loser’s trick. I spelled out ‘axiom’ and you saw the end of your possibilities.”
“It’s not a trick,” she said, absentmindedly stroking his thighs, while he pointed his index finger and pretended to write with it across her breasts and then down across her abdomen. “Hey,” she said, “what’re you writing with that finger?”
“‘I love Patsy,’” he said. “I’m not writing it, I’m printing it.”
“Why?”
“Make it more readable.”
“‘I love Patsy,’” she said. “Seventeen points.”
“Sixteen. And it depends where it’s placed.”
“A V is worth four.” His eyes were closed. With one hand he was caressing her right breast, and with the other he wrote other words with imaginative lettering across her hips. “I don’t remember making love in this room before. Especially not with the shades up.” She stretched to kiss his face and to tease her tongue briefly into his mouth. Then she trailed her finger across his back. “I can do that, too.” She traced the letters with her finger just under his shoulders.
“That was an I,” Saul said.
“Yes.”
“‘I love Saul’?” he asked. “Is that what you’re writing?”
“You’re so conceited. So self-centered.”
“The curtains are parted,” he said. “The neighbors will see.”
“We don’t have neighbors. This is the rural middle of American nowhere. Always has been.”
“People will drive by on Whitefeather Road and see us having sex on the sofa.” He waited. “They might be shocked.”
“We’re married,” she said.
He laughed. “You’re wicked, Patsy.”
“You keep using old adjectives,” she said, sliding her hands up the sides of his chest. “Old blah-blah adjectives that no one uses anymore. That’s a habit you should swear off.
Let
those people watch us. They might learn something.” She slithered down to kiss the scar on his knee, then moved up. “The only thing I mind about sex,” she said after another minute, “and I’ve said this before, is that it cuts down on the small talk.”
“We talk a lot,” Saul said, positioning himself next to her and finally entering her. He grunted, then said, “I think we talk more than most people. No, I’m sure of it. We’ve always jabbered. Most people don’t talk this much, men especially.” He was making genial moves inside her. “Of course, it’s hard to tell. I mean, who does surveys?”
“Oh, Saul,” she said. “You know, I’m glad I know you. Out here in the wilds a girl needs a pal, she really does. You’re my pal, Saul. You are. I love you.”
“It’s true,” he said. “We’re buddies. Bosom buddies.” He kissed a breast. On an impulse, he twisted slightly so that he could reach over to the card table behind him and scoop up a handful of Scrabble letters from the playing board.
“Aren’t you too cute. What’re you doing?” she asked.
“I’m going to baptize you,” he said, slowly dropping the tiled letters on her face and shoulders and breasts. “I’m going to baptize you in The Word.”
“God,” she said, as a P and an E fell into her hair, “to think that I wanted to distract you with a mouse caught in a trap.”
Saul had been hired eighteen months earlier to teach American history, journalism, and speech in the Five Oaks High School. In its general appearance and in its particulars, however, Five Oaks, Michigan, was not what he and Patsy had had in mind. They had planned to settle down in Boston, or, in the worst-case scenario, the north side of Chicago, a good place for a young married couple. They had been working at office jobs in Evanston at the time after graduating from Northwestern, and one day, driving home along the lake, Saul seemed to have a seizure of frustration. He began to shout about the supervision and the random surveillance, how he couldn’t breathe or open his office window. “Budget projections for a bus company,” he said, “is no longer meaningful work, and it turns out that it never
was.
” He rambled on about getting certified for secondary school because he needed to contribute to what he called “the great project of undoing the dumbness that’s been done.”
“Saul,” Patsy said, sitting on the passenger side and working at a week-old Sunday crossword, “you’re underlining your words again.”
“This country is falling into the hands of the
rich
and
stupid,
” Saul grumbled, underlining his words while waving his right hand in an all-purpose gesture at the windshield. “The plutocrats are taking over and keeping everybody ignorant about how things are. The conspiracy of the inane starts in the schools, but it gets big results in business. Everywhere I’ve looked lately I’ve seen a cynic in a position of
tremendous responsibility.
We’re being undermined by rich cynics and common people who have been, forcibly, made stupid. This has got to stop. I’ve got to be a teacher. It’s a political necessity. At least for a few years.”
“There’s
lots
of stupidity out there, Saul,” Patsy said, glancing up at a stoplight. “A big supply. You think you’re going to clear it away? That’s your plan?” She waited. “The light just turned green. Pay attention to the road, please.” She smiled. “‘Drive, he said.’” She reached out and touched him on the cheek. “‘For christ’s sake, look out where you’re going.’”
“Don’t quote Creeley at me. I’m the big man for the job,” Saul said. “This country needs me.”
“Well, of course.” She scratched her hair. “Write an editorial, why don’t you? Nine letters for ‘acidic.’ First letter is V and the fourth one is R.”
“‘Vitriolic,’” Saul said. “And you could get certified, too. Or you could insinuate yourself into a bureaucracy and reorganize it. You’re so lovable, everybody just does what you ask them to do, without thinking. Boston is full of deadwood. God knows, you can reorganize deadwood. It’s been proved.” He waited. “You could do whatever you wanted to, if we moved out of here. What
do
you want to do, Patsy?”
“Finger-exercise composer,” Patsy said. “Six letters, last letter Y and first letter C.”
“Czerny.”
“Boston, huh?” She gazed at the sky. “It’s sort of hard to get teaching jobs there, isn’t it? Oh, and, by the way, what am I going to do if you start teaching? I don’t want to teach.”
“That’s what I was just asking you. You’re not listening to me. What do you want to do?” Patsy had had half-a-dozen majors before she settled for a double major in dance-performance and English.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what I want to do.” She studied the sky. “I’d like to go work in a bank, actually.” Another pause. “In the mortgage department.”
The statement was so unlike her, Saul smiled. One of her dry, shifty, ironical asides whose subtext you had to go in search of. Then he realized that perhaps she meant it, and he studied her face for aspersions, but Patsy, who was vehement about privacy issues, did not give herself away.
Saul had found, in his landlord’s shed, a ladder that was long enough to get him up to the roof of the house on Whitefeather Road. He’d been exploring Mr. Munger’s shed while Patsy was out getting groceries, and when she returned, he was sitting on the south peak with his legs dangling over the edge. Patsy put the grocery bags down on the driveway. “I won’t scream,” she said. “But I do have some questions.”
“Good,” he said.
“Saul, be truthful. Why are you sitting on the roof of our house?”
“Thinking,” he shouted. “Looking at the horizon.” He smiled down at her. “At the view. You are so beautiful. You’re the only beautiful sight here to see.”
“Thanks, but there’s no view,” she said. “Including me. I’m not a view. Nothing to see except what’s here. You need hills for variety, and we don’t have that.”
“Well, I was just hoping for a little variety—you know, a
break.
Maybe a show of some sort. I thought maybe I’d see
something.
An incline, a knoll, a mound would all have been fine. I’m not asking for an alp.”
“Well, you won’t get one. You won’t get one of any of them. No hills, honey. Remember? We agreed. No hills out here. Just drainage ditches. Come down from the roof, Saul, before you fall and kill yourself.”
“Patsy,” he asked, “how’d we end up here?”
“Times were hard,” she said, quoting the Wizard of Oz, “so we took the job.” She watched him. “That is,
you
took the job. Remember? It was the stupid crusade.
Against
stupidity, I mean. It was all your idea. I came along for the ride.” She gazed at him with a deliberately cool expression. “First I come along for the ride, and then you do.”
“Oh, right. Look at this,” he said despairingly, pointing at the land around their house. “You know, I think we made a terrible mistake, but I’m not blaming anybody. Including myself. All I see up here is dirt roads and farmers reading
The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.
”
“Saul,” she said, “they watch television now. They listen to police scanners. Also, it’s too early in your stay here for paranoia. They don’t have opinions about Jews, least of all you. Please come down. I’ve got to take those groceries in, and I could use your help. And please don’t break your neck. I’d have to supply more of the backbone for both of us.”
“It’s not Boston,” he said, edging toward the ladder. “And it’s not Chicago. It’s not Omaha. It’s this other thing. My brother warned me about this, and even my
mother
warned me. It’s this place smack out in the middle of nowhere, and now it has us in its grip.” One of the shingles loosened and slid to the gutter. The ladder trembled as he began to make his way down. “It’s scary up there, honey. It’s a view for adults. Not for kids. Kids couldn’t handle it.” He looked straight into her eyes.
“I hope—” she said, pausing.
“That you don’t go nuts out here? Me too. Me too.”
“Why should I go nuts?” she asked. “I like it here. Would you please help me with those groceries?”
Rung by rung he lowered himself and took the remaining grocery bags out of the car in a double embrace. He kept his eyes on Patsy as she carried her two bags toward the back door before propping them against the wall in order to free one hand to turn the doorknob. The house was never locked; there was no one to lock it against. Saul admired her physical agility as she went inside, and in any case rarely found fault with her. He loved his wife profoundly; it had become the theme to his life, his antidote to everything else. Sometimes, just watching her carrying in the groceries or making dinner, he thought his heart would break out of sheer happiness in her presence. He believed that nothing else in his life would equal his love for Patsy. Still, he thought she was being a little smug about how much she liked it here. She could be snobby about her populism.
Their nearest neighbor, Mrs. O’Neill, looked so much like Thelma Ritter in
Rear Window
that Saul and Patsy smirked at each other when she introduced herself at their door one Friday afternoon, peering inside as she asked them for a bottle of molasses that she might borrow for a batch of her cookies. Mrs. O’Neill’s curiosity about them was greedy but harmless, Saul thought. It was curiosity bred out of loneliness. As soon as Patsy found the bottle, Mrs. O’Neill invited them over to sample the cookies she had already made, and those that she would make with the molasses she was borrowing. Saul couldn’t decide whether Mrs. O’Neill’s nosiness was part of the community’s nosiness, or whether she was just nosy for herself alone. When Saul and Patsy pulled into her driveway, her garage door began to go up, even though Mrs. O’Neill had arrived before they had and her car was already inside. An iron coach-and-horse weather-vane stood on an iron stalk atop the garage’s cupola. Mrs. O’Neill stood near the geranium-surrounded flagpole, holding on to a push-button signal box, her eyes squinched.
“I’m garage-poor,” she said, pressing the button again to make the door go down. “But I never could resist a toy.” She offered the garage-door opener to Saul, who pressed the button. The door began to open again. “I said to myself, well, I need the gadget because I’m a single lady out here—the safety feature—but even that doesn’t explain the curtains.” Mrs. O’Neill’s garage had windows at the sides, with lace curtains. “I spent hours on those curtains. Imagine!” She gave out a self-deprecatory little laugh. “Curtains for a garage!”
“A good garage is important,” Patsy said, and immediately Saul smiled.
“That’s exactly it,” Mrs. O’Neill said, picking a bug off Patsy’s shoulder. “I’ll tell you what it was, since you’ll discover it soon enough. A project. I needed a project. Making curtains kept me awake during the daylight hours. Now you, Saul, you trot inside that garage and look at that gizmo in case you want to build one yourself, while Patsy and I go inside and have a few moments of girl-talk in the kitchen.”
Mrs. O’Neill grabbed Patsy’s arm and pulled her toward the back door of the house.
Saul walked in a lackadaisical fashion toward Mrs. O’Neill’s sheltered and curtained Buick, feeling that, as an adult, he need not follow instructions from a character like her. At least, he did not need to follow them to the letter. A steady wind from the unplowed fields to the south blew into the garage. The interior smelled of raw lumber and fresh paint, along with the fainter but more dense odor of overheated electrical wiring. Saul looked up—as instructed—at Mrs. O’Neill’s new garage-door opener. Unmechanical to a fault, he was unable to guess what structural-dynamic principles were involved in lifting a garage door up a set of tracks. With his head tilted back, he saw the company name on the side of the motor. He felt suddenly dizzy. He inhaled quickly and leaned his arm against Mrs. O’Neill’s car. He glanced out through the door and saw his own car, and then, beyond it, the horizon line of the Saginaw Valley, the semi-skyline of Five Oaks over there in the distance, and gold-brown topsoil whipped and scattered in spirals. He sat down on the bumper and put his head in his hands.