Saul and Patsy (7 page)

Four

Saul, Patsy thought, was like one of those pastries you couldn’t get enough of at first—you’d gorge on them. And then, it seemed, once you’d had enough of them, you wanted to get rid of that addiction, but you couldn’t, there was no way to stop. You were always going to have those jelly doughnuts in your life because you had once craved them. Slowly but surely, they would put weight on you.

Mornings, on her way down to the mortgage department at the bank, where she had become—at last—an assistant loan officer (she admitted to herself, and to no one else, that she liked to be around places where money was—it even had a smell to it she liked), she would pass by school-bus stops and nursery schools. Sometimes, on lunch breaks, she would park the car near the curbs and watch the little people, three- and four-year-olds, holding hands or holding on to delicate ropes to keep them all together as they progressed down the sidewalks. She loved seeing children lined up in their school clothes and backpacks, waiting for the bus. They yelled at each other. They fell into the dirt and mud. They were beautiful.

A week after her baby was due, she would drive around on her lunch hour just looking for children, hoping her labor would start out of sympathy. And on a Tuesday, as she sat parked across the street from a play-ground, watching a softball game, her water broke. On the way to the hospital that evening, she remembered to thank the moon, which had been shining in the daytime sky above the playing field, though it was invisible by nightfall, having gone on its lunatic way.

The labor room: between contractions and the blips of the fetal monitor, she was dimly aware of Saul. He had donned his green hospital scrubs. They hadn’t let him wear his Detroit Tigers baseball cap (too unsanitary), but he was holding her hand and his eyes were anxious with nervous energy as he sat at her bedside. He thought he was coaching her. But he kept miscounting the breaths, and she had to correct him.

After two hours of that, she was moved into the huge circular incandescence of the delivery room. She felt as if she were about to expel her entire body outward in a floorflood. With her hair soaked with sweat and sticking to the back of her neck, she could feel the unsteady universe sputtering out for an instant into two flattened dimensions. Everything she saw was painted on a flat surface in front of her, and she felt herself screaming self-consciously, as if she were screaming performatively when she was both screaming and doing something else, the serious work. Then she swore—she had learned to swear like a man from her father, who was only eloquent when he cursed—and she loosened her hand from Saul’s—his touch maddened her—and swore again. She looked at Saul with a deep hatred. He had gotten her into this mess, and now he was dumbly watching her trying to get herself out. Terrible, unforgivable words, slightly out of her control, came out of her mouth directed toward Saul. Wrath, bitterness, and then some screeching. The seconds blew themselves up into hours, with time seizing up, thickening and slowing as if the river of it had turned to offal, ordure, and slush.

“Okay, here’s the head. One last push, please.”

Patsy backstroked through the pain. Then the baby presented herself in a mess of blood and fleshy wrappings. After the cord was cut, Patsy heard her husband say from a great distance, “She’s beautiful. Uh, Patsy, you didn’t
really
mean those things you said about me, did you? When you were screaming? Those curses?” Oh, the hell with Saul.
Where was her
baby?
They were giving her an Apgar test. Typical of Saul, Patsy thought, as she began to recover herself, to worry about what somebody was saying about him at the moment of his daughter’s birth. I see that you’re having a baby—but what about
me
? Enough about you—you’re just giving birth. Anyway, Saul always stole scenes. It was in his nature.

“Where’s my baby?”

“Here,” the nurse said. The world had rematerialized and accordioned out into three dimensions again. The baby fit perfectly into the crook of Patsy’s arm, and she was, Patsy thought, perfect in every respect, beautiful beyond thought. She touched her delicate chin. How strange it was to have a daughter so new that she didn’t have a name! It was the beginning of the world for her, before the invention of language. And she looked like Patsy’s grandmother Ella, lovable and ancient and irritable, a fan of murder mysteries and a smoker of cigarettes, who picked wild strawberries and fed them to her dogs. But, no: she wasn’t Grandmother Ella, she was herself. The nurse’s smile and her daughter’s impatient expression made a sunspot near Patsy’s heart, and the huge overhead delivery-room light went out, like a sigh.

Someone took Patsy’s hand, the other hand, the one not cradling the baby. Who else but Saul, unsteady but upright, wanting some part of her? Cold sweat dripped down his forehead. He kissed Patsy through his face mask, a sterile forgiving kiss, feeling of paper that landed on her cheek, and he informed her that they were parents now. He touched his daughter on her forehead, a blessing. As he said it, his eyes expressed excitement and terror. He would be one of those men unready for fatherhood but full of intermittent, wild, undirected enthusiasm for it. “Hi, Mom,” he said. He apologized for worrying about Patsy’s opinion of him, and Patsy apologized for what she had said about Saul during her labor. Releasing her hand from Saul’s, Patsy raised it and caressed his face. “Oh, don’t worry,” the nurse said, apparently referring to Patsy’s verbal abusiveness, and from behind him, she patted Saul on the back, as if he had been some sort of good dog, a retriever.

They named their daughter Mary Esther Carlson-Bernstein, a string of words that Patsy thought awkward and ungainly but, once she had said it and attached it to her daughter, somehow fine.

But Saul didn’t seem so pleased with it. While making dinner a week later, one of his improvised stir-fries that made use of fresh ingredients to combine with and camouflage the leftovers, Saul said that he had been having second thoughts: Mary Esther, he said, was burdened with a lot of name, maybe too much Christianity and Judaism mixed in there for comfort. “Whose comfort?” Patsy asked, from her chair in the kitchen, wondering about how Saul was managing. Standing in front of the stove, listening selectively, Saul ignored the question. Possibly another name would be better, he went on, uninterruptable. Jayne, maybe, or Liz. Direct, futuristic American monosyllables. Bottom-line names. Or maybe they could combine the M of Mary and the E of Esther to make Emmy.

As he muttered and chopped carrots and broccoli before dropping the bamboo shoots and water chestnuts and some other unidentifiables into the pan, Patsy could see that he was so tired that he was only half-awake. His monologue wasn’t meant to make any sense; it was meant to fill time, to get his thoughts out of his head and into the room, and then into Patsy’s head. He spoke words the way a ventilator blew out air. Of course he didn’t plan on renaming his daughter after naming her the first time; he said only crazy people did that, loading down their children with aliases. His socks didn’t match, his jeans were beltless, and his hair had gone back to wildness, sprigs and sections hanging down over his eyes, his ears, his neck. He was a mess. Still quite handsome, though, in his way, and very lovable, though he tired you out, being the way he was.

The night before, between feedings—feedings for the baby, not for Saul, who had become, in a way that Patsy couldn’t quite pinpoint, slightly more baby-like himself—Saul had confessed that he didn’t know if he could manage it,
it
being the long haul of fatherhood. But that had just been Saul-talk. Right now, Mary Esther was sleeping upstairs. Fingering the pages of her magazine, Patsy leaned back in the alcove, still in her bathrobe, watching her husband prepare dinner. She liked watching him. She breathed in and out, her lungs as dependable in their way as her husband. She was still sore everywhere and took pleasure in not moving; she liked staying put and watching the ceiling or the cars outside on the road, or the spectacle of Saul, cooking. Long stretches of bland ordinariness staged anywhere in the house soothed her. Ordinary life seemed to be full of a previously hidden grace as long as she didn’t have to get up very far to meet it. She had already done that by giving birth to Mary Esther. You couldn’t get much closer to life than that. Feeling her breasts engorged, still feeling familiar pains all over herself in her most private places, she wondered what she had done with the breast pump and when the diaper guy would deliver the new batch.

Bending down toward the pan, stolid and dutiful and husbandly, Saul sniffed, added some peanut oil, stirred again, and after a minute he ladled out dinner onto Patsy’s plate. The food gave off a damp tropical aroma. Then with that habit he had of reading her thoughts and rewording them—a habit that amazed Patsy and irritated her in equal measures—he turned toward her and said, “You left the breast pump upstairs.” And then: “Hey, you think I’m sleepwalking. But I’m not. I’m conscious. I only
look
like a zombie.” He smiled at her with a full-fledged zombie smile, the right side of his mouth going up, the undead left side staying right where it was. “You smell of ether,” he said, unkindly.

If he can read my thoughts, she thought, where’s my privacy? But there wasn’t any privacy anyway, not when you gave birth in front of strangers and brought out a breast anytime the baby wanted it.

For the last nine months, Saul had glimpsed the albino deer, always at a distance, on the fringes of the property that he and Patsy rented. After work or on weekends, he had walked across the unfarmed fields up to the next property line, marked by rusting fence posts, or, past the fields, into the neighboring woods of silver maple and scrub oak, hoping to get a sight of the animal and to find out why it was pestering him. It had only revealed itself, however, when he had not been looking for it, and it had this out-of-the-corner-of-the-eye trick that made Saul feel as if the deer had a project of some sort, like converting him to Catholicism or explaining fatherhood to him. Once it had stood grazing near a stump and was visible until he looked directly at it. Then it disappeared with one instantaneous leap into the underbrush. Here, there, gone. It gave him the shivers, this hallucinatory beast with pink eyes and white fur.

Out on his walks, or while jogging, searching the ground for clues, Saul went into emotional reveries, which Patsy had characterized as manic-depressive fits, a phrase that Saul hated. He missed the old pre-therapeutic words like “sorrow” and “exuberance” and “forbearance.” Just now he was a bit short of forbearance. What was he doing out here taking these walks? The sky lately was habitually overcast, like a patient in need of therapy. There were no hills worth mentioning. You couldn’t eat the berries that grew here because if you did, you would sicken. The streams and creeks hardly flowed at all because the ground was so flat that the water became indecisive. Yes, semirural Michigan (things were changing: there was a new outlet mall two miles away, they had paved Whitefeather Road and were beginning to put up stoplights, and condos were being built in a hurry) was a blank slate, but he felt right at home in it, just like that freak of nature, that deer. Maybe everywhere was a blank slate. And now he had a daughter, right here, to care for. A daughter! The fungal smell of wood rot in the culverts strengthened him, he believed, made him a better man, perhaps a better father, or at least made him think of words that nobody used anymore, such as “rue.”

Clouds, mud, wind. Joy and woe, mad happiness and rue lived side by side in Saul with very few emotions in between. Even his gloom was thick with lyric intensity, like a brass band playing a funeral march all day and having a good time doing it. No longer a figure in a Russian novel, he imagined all winter that he lived stranded in an ink drawing by a Chinese artist who lived in the Midwest. He himself was the suggested figure in the lower-right-hand corner. Colors—the bright happy colors— were for elsewhere, for those suspicious characters who comported themselves in California or Florida, who couldn’t face up to cloudy days, who required sports cars and perpetual sunlight and suntans to get through the day.

Wearing his Northwestern University gym clothes, he liked to jog after work alongside the drainage ditch, where he could watch a microwave transmission tower being constructed two miles away. He heard noises of construction, the distant sounds of heavy machinery. From a spidery oak tree, a crow cawed, announcing rain. Near the highway on a Sunday morning two weeks after Mary Esther was born, he had spotted a soiled Ben Franklin half-dollar next to a tossed-away beer can and picked it up. It had been his lucky day. But all the days were lucky, recently. He reminded himself to give thanks to somebody or something. He would start with Patsy.

He made his way back to the house, mud chuckling underneath his boots, Ben Franklin in his pocket, the first fifty cents of Mary Esther’s college fund. He had a secret he had not told Patsy, though she probably knew it: he did not think that he had any clue to being a parent. Not one. His father had died before he might have shown him the fatherhood tricks—all Saul could remember was his father making scrambled eggs for the family on Saturday mornings. Saul’s mother, Delia, had not tried to find a substitute for the boys once their father was gone. Perhaps Saul would fail at fatherhood and they would take his daughter away from him on grounds of parental incompetency. He did not love being a parent, though he loved his daughter with a newfound intensity close to hysteria. To him, fatherhood was one long unrevisable bourgeois script full of long-expected plot turns and predictable blow-ups in the third act, but that was the script he had been handed, and now he was in the play.

Love, rage, and tenderness disabled him in the chairs in which he sat, miming calm, holding Mary Esther. What was the matter with him? He loved his daughter. It was himself he had a problem with. He just didn’t know what the problem was, although his therapist in Chicago had once told him that he suffered from “pointless remorse” and “inappropriate longings.” His typical despairs were beginning to look like luxuries to him. He could be a despair junkie and a virtuoso of fretfulness but probably not anymore, not with a daughter around. Somehow he would have to discard his friends, the long-term discontents, those houses of metaphysical yearnings where he had once made his home. Probably he couldn’t go over to Holbein College anymore on weekends and pretend to be a student. He came in and thanked Patsy with a kiss. But that night, when Patsy was fast asleep, Saul knelt on the landing and beat his fists on the stairs, but softly, so as not to awaken anybody.