Saul and Patsy Page 4

  “These trains,” Mad Dog announced, “are too good to run.” He inhaled and inhaled and inhaled. “They’re classics,” he gasped. He slipped his fingers inside his shirt and started to scratch.

  Saul nodded. He was wearing his bowling shirt with his name patch sewed on in front. In the next room, also thick with smoke, Patsy was dancing with Toby Finch, a fat man, as his name suggested, who taught social studies. On the other side of the room various people were tossing money on the floor as an incentive to someone to run down to the Tittebawasee River and jump into it. The money would be collected whether the daredevil wore clothes or not.

  An hour later, Saul’s Etta James CD was playing, and Saul himself was standing upright in the middle of the living room, a bottle of Chablis in one hand, a cigarette in the other (he was not a smoker, but he was smoking—Saul insisted he could not be identified by the acts he occasionally performed). He was singing loudly, an unpracticed baritone. There was some muted applause and encouragement as Mad Dog appeared at one side of the room with another joint, and Toby appeared at the other, his clothes soaking wet. He was demanding cash.

  “You needed a witness!” Mad Dog said. “For all we know, you went out there and wet yourself down with a garden hose.”

  “It’s not connected,” Toby said. “I tried it.”

  “Well, you got wet once,” Saul said. “Get wet again. What’s the difference? We’ll watch you this time.”

  “Yeah,” Mad Dog said. “That’s right. We’ll watch you jump in.”

  The entire party left the house and stumbled down the hillside steps, Mad Dog shushing them, until they reached the river. Half of them stood in a clump on Mad Dog’s dock, while the rest gathered in the weeds and high grass just behind a small patch of sand. Toby was standing at the end of the dock, complaining of friends who doubted one’s word, friends who had not taken his measure as a man and as vice-president of the Five Oaks teachers’ union.

  As he talked, Patsy nudged Saul in the ribs. “What about the current?” she whispered. “What about the current in the damn river?”

  Saul offered the bottle of Chablis to Patsy. She shook her head. “I asked you about the current.”

  Just as Toby jumped in, Saul said, “If he can survive the cold, he can survive the current.” Upon hitting the water, Toby’s bulk threw up a splash in all directions, wetting down those spectators on the dock. Patsy felt several drops of water in her eyes, and as she wiped them away, she said, “Where is he? Where’s Toby?”

  “He’s there.” Saul pointed. “Look.”

  Toby stood waist deep in the Tittebawasee River, bowing to a broken round of applause. The lower buttons of his shirt had loosened, and the rolls of fat around his midsection glowed porcelain white in the darkness. Someone threw him a dollar bill, which floated in front of him and then began drifting downstream.

  “I was worried,” Patsy said, turning back toward the hillside. “I thought he might drown or something.”

  Back in the house, someone had put on a band called The School of Velocity, and then someone else played Magnetic Fields. There was an argument about what time it was. Toby was stuffing his soaked trousers with dollar bills scattered on the floor near the kitchen, and then Saul was demonstrating how to do the tango with Patsy, and as they time-stepped across the living room, they knocked over an ashtray. People were applauding and laughing; someone—Mad Dog said it was Karla—was throwing up in the bathroom, and then the CD player was playing a rap artist, Dr. Dogg E.

  Then it was two o’clock, and Saul and Patsy were at the door, Patsy’s hand on Mad Dog’s shoulder.

  “Mad Dog,” Patsy said, “you are one hundred and seventy pounds of brain death.”

  Mad Dog held up his index finger. “One hundred seventy-five pounds.” He laughed. “Don’t knock brain death until you’ve tried it.”

  “I’ve tried it,” Saul said, searching the darkness for their car. “And I love it. Thanks, buddy. Tell Karla thanks, when she’s cooled down. Great hot dish. Great party. See you Monday.”

  The two of them staggered off toward the unappeasable dark. Mud stuck to the soles of their shoes. At the car, Saul fiddled with his keys, trying to get at least one of them into the door lock. “You know, Patsy,” he said, “I do love this place sometimes. I love these people.”

  “I know,” Patsy said, leaning against the car, waiting for him, her eyes already closed. “I know.”

  And then they were in the car, strapped in, and the car was heading south on State Highway 14, and Patsy was asleep beside Saul. Saul leaned back and pressed the cruise-control button. He did not even realize that he was shutting his eyes. How drowsy he suddenly felt! It was the effect of the insomnia. It turned waking life into a dream. He was dreaming of Patsy, sleeping within arm’s reach: Patsy, whom he loved all the way down to the root. If anything happened to her, he would surely die. He thought of his mother. Then he was dreaming of Mrs. O’Neill, carrying a gigantic plate of chocolate chip cookies. And Bart Connell and the barber, Harold, asleep on their feet. Then he thought of an aging African-American man with a goatee playing the guitar and singing the blues on an otherwise empty stage, in a single spotlight, to a sparse, unbluesy audience at Holbein College. He loved that man, the blues and the dignity. The two red taillights of Saul and Patsy’s car went around a corner that wasn’t there; then one of them moved up directly above the other. It came down again hard, on the wrong side, and began blinking.

  Three

  A smell of spilled gasoline: when Saul opened his eyes, he was still strapped in behind his lap-and-shoulder belt, but the car he sat in was upside down and in a field of some sort. The car’s headlights illuminated a sky of dirt, and, in the distance, a tree growing downward from that same sky. Perhaps he had awakened out of sleep into another dream. “Patsy?” he said, turning with difficulty toward his wife strapped in on the passenger side, her hair hanging down from her scalp, but, from Saul’s perspective, standing up. She was still sleeping; she was always a sound sleeper; she could sleep upside down and was doing so now. The car’s radio was playing Ray Charles’s “Unchain My Heart,” and Saul said aloud, “You know, I’ve always liked that song.” His voice was thick from beer, Chablis—whatever they had had to drink—and cigarettes, and he knew from the smell of the beer that this was no dream because he had never been able to imagine concrete details like that. No: he had fallen asleep at the wheel, driven off the road, and rolled the car. Here he was now, awake but unsober. At least this road was remote and unpatrolled. A thought passed through him in an unpleasant slow-motion way that the car was upended and that the ignition was still on. He switched it off and felt intelligent for three seconds until the lap belt began to hurt him and he felt stupid again. No ignition, no Ray Charles. His mind, which had eased itself into oblivion for Mad Dog’s party, returned to a sort of homeroom anxiety, as it moved slowly down a dark narrow alley-way cluttered with alcohol, fatigue, and the first onset of shock. Probably the car would blow up, and the only satisfaction his mother would receive from this accident would come years from now, when she would tell people, at the point when they were all through reminiscing about Saul, “I told him not to drink. I told him about drinking and driving. But he never listened to me. Never.”

  “Patsy.” He reached out and gave her a little shake.

  “What?” She opened her eyes.

  “Wake up. I rolled the car. Patsy, we’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Why, Saul?” She looked at him with displeasure.

  “Because we have to. Patsy, we’re not at home. We’re in the car. And we’re upside down. Come on, honey, wake up. Please. This is serious.”

  “I am awake.” She blinked, twisted her head, then looked calm. Her opal earring glittered in the light of the dashboard. The earring made Saul think of stability and a possible future life, if only he would normalize himself. Patsy smiled. Saul thought that this smile had something to do with guardian angels who, judging from the evidence, flew in
visibly around her head, beaming down benevolence. “Well, Saul,” she said, turning to look at him carefully, “are you all right?”

  “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.

  “Just ring the bell.”

  After a moment, the porch light went on, yellow, probably a bug light, Saul thought; and then under the oddly colored glare a very young woman appeared, pale blond hair and skin, very pretty, but under the effect of the bulb looking a bit jaundiced. With her fists she was rubbing her eyes with sleepiness. She wore a bathrobe decorated with huge blue flowers. Saul a
nd Patsy explained themselves and their predicament— Saul was sure he had seen this young woman before—and she invited them in to use the phone. When they entered, the dog—old, with a gray muzzle—growled from under the living-room table but did not bother to get up. After Patsy and the woman, whose name was Anne, began talking, it developed that they had met before in the bank where Patsy worked as a teller. They leaned toward each other. Their voices quickly rose in the transfiguration of friendliness as they disappeared into the kitchen. They seemed suddenly chipper and cheery to Saul, as if a new party had started. He had the impression that women enjoyed being friendly, whereas for men it was an effort. At least it was an effort for him. He heard Patsy dialing a number on an old rotary phone, laughing and whispering as she did so.

  He was left alone in the living room. Having nothing else to do, he looked around: high ceilings and elaborate wainscoting, lamps, table, rug, dog, calendar, the usual crucifix on the wall above the TV. There was something about the room that bothered him, and it took a moment before he knew what it was. It felt like a museum of earlier American feelings. Not a single ironic sentence had ever been spoken here. Everything in the room was sincere, everything except himself. In the midst of all this midwestern earnestness, he was the one thing wrong. What was he doing here? What was he doing anywhere? He was accustomed to asking himself such questions.

  Mad Dog’s party now seemed to be months, or years, ago.

  “Mr. Bernstein?”

  Saul turned around and saw the man of the house, who at first glance still seemed to be a boy, standing at the bottom of the stairs. He had his arms crossed, and he wore a sleepy but alert look on his face. He had on boxer shorts and a T-shirt, and Saul recognized, underneath the brown hair and the beard, a student from last year, Emory . . . something. Emory McPhee. That was it. A good-looking, solid kid. He had married this woman, Anne, last year, both of them barely eighteen years old, and moved out to this place. That was it. That was who they were. He had heard that Emory had become a housepainter.