Saul and Patsy (31 page)

“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.

Saul offered to write a sample column, full of excellent opinion. He would bloviate.

On the day Saul brought back his first column, the features editor was short on copy and ran the piece on spec, close to the editorial page, where he thought it wouldn’t attract much attention. The column that day was titled “Why Quit? A Manifesto,” and it caused a great deal of furor in Five Oaks, resulting in an increase in circulation and several angry letters.

The angry letters continued and peppered the editorial page—the anti-Semitic ones were discreetly screened—but the bloviator had apparently managed to help keep the newspaper’s circulation on the rise, and Saul was made a permanent fixture of Five Oaks discourse.

Behind the house the pinwheels and toys and flowers and signs began to fade and to grow sodden.

Saul is currently on a campaign to rid the city of WaldChem and its toxic chemical plant, and he has begun to write about factory-farms just outside of town with their relentless pollution of the groundwater.

Patsy sometimes is approached in the bank by people who ask if she is married to that jerk—one person used the word “scum”—who writes for the paper. She usually smiles and points to a laminated letter to the editor she has put up on the wall behind her desk. The print is so small that no one can read it without walking behind her desk, and no one ever does that unless she invites them to do so. When they do read it, they often find it puzzling that she would be proud of her husband’s having inspired such a letter.

To the editor:

I have been a resident of Five Oaks for forty-six years and have had to su fer a
great deal of nonsense in my day but “Saul Bernstein’s” recent column on his
own so-called “personal” view of zoning in the southeast corner of the city just
about beats anything. Whatever gives this blowhard the confidence to criticize the
fine businesspeople in the city who are all for growth and prosperity? You can’t
have an omelet without a few eggs. This bloviator fellow—I believe his name as
printed in the paper is a pseudonym—is an enemy to employment, to business, to
profit, to life liberty and the persuit of happiness and I happen to believe that the
oldstyle tar-and-feathers is too good for him. If he was in charge we would all be
on welfare in a welfare state taking orders from Mr. Big, who would be him. He
writes like he owns the secrets to the universe and I for one am fed up and am
cancelling my subscription to the newspaper. I encourage other likeminded folks
to do the same. No good society was ever made from the likes of him.

Yours sincerely,

Floyd Muscat

Patsy’s heart is gladdened every time she reads Floyd Muscat’s letter. It is always pleasing when a man finds his true vocation, as Saul has, and can inspire fervor in others.

Twenty-seven

One summer day, on his way home from his new job, Saul passed through a recently constructed residential neighborhood close to his own new home on Kingfisher Road. He and Patsy had moved again, for a bit more space. This particular location he was driving by now was where, years ago, he and Patsy had first lived in the rented house with loose brown aluminum siding. All the farmland surrounding it had been leveled and developed into a subdivision. He decided to motor around and snoop. He had about twenty minutes before he needed to get home, but he was curious about housing developments where no trees had yet been planted, how people lived in such places, without shadows, exposed to everything, saturated with sunlight and wide open to the elements.

About three blocks in, on the sidewalk, close to the curb, he saw a girl who seemed to be about ten years old sitting behind a card table, reading a book. Behind her, shadeless, on its narrow lot, the vinyl-sided, two-story house stood, stark with optimism and sanitation. The girl had light red hair in pigtails and a white dress cinched by a red patent-leather belt, and she wore patent-leather black shoes. She sat with her arms crossed, the book flattened on the table in front of her. Her face was not cute but defiant. On the table, along with the book, was a small cardboard box for cash, a lemonade pitcher, a few Dixie Cups, and some oddly shaped objects Saul couldn’t make out from his car. Next to the table, facing the street, was a large cardboard sign with block letters written in thick green ink.