Saul and Patsy Page 8

  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 “i
nappropriate 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.

  On the morning when Mary Esther was celebrating her birthday—she was four weeks old—they sat at the breakfast table with the sun, in a rare appearance, blazing in through the east window and reflecting off the butter knife. With one hand, Patsy fed herself corn flakes. With the other hand she held Mary Esther, who was nursing. Patsy was also glancing down at the morning paper on the table and was talking to Saul about his upcoming birthday, what color shirt to get him. She chewed her corn flakes thoughtfully and only reacted when Mary Esther sucked too hard. It hurt, and it showed on Patsy’s face. A deep brown, she said. You’d look good in that. It’d show off your eyes.

  Listening, Saul watched them both, rattled by the domestic sensuality of their pairing, and his spirit shook with wild, bruised, jealous love. He felt pointless and redundant, a citizen of the tiny principality of irony. His heart, that trapped bird, flapped in its cage. Patsy’s breast belonged to him, he thought, not to Mary Esther, even though she could make better use of it than he could. He was ashamed of being jealous of his baby daughter, and he squirmed in his chair as he finished his oatmeal. Actually, he realized, Patsy’s breast belonged to Patsy. Behind Patsy the kitchen spice rack displayed its orderly contents. Everything in the house was orderly, thanks to Patsy, everything except Saul. A delivery truck rumbled by on Whitefeather Road. He felt specifically his shallow and approximate condition. In broad daylight, night enfolded him.

  He went off to work feeling superfluous and ecstatic and horny, his body glowing with its fatherly confusions.

  That semester, Saul had been pulled from one section of American history and had been reassigned to remedial English for learning-disabled students in the high school. “Anyone can teach English,” his principal, Zoltan Kabelá, liked to say. “It’s our mother tongue.” Zoltan, speaking for the school, had claimed that the economic times being what they were, the district could not afford a full-time specialist in remedial education, and because Saul had been a persistent advocate of the rights of the learning-disabled at school meetings and elsewhere, and because, he suspected, Zoltan Kabelá did not like him, he had been assigned a group of seven kids in remedial writing, and they all met in a converted storage room at the back of the school at eight-thirty, following the second bell.

  Five of them were pleasant and sweet-tempered and bewildered (by life, by Saul, by most of what happened to them day after day, the confusing pageant of getting dressed, taking the bus, and telling time), but two of them appeared to hate the class and, very convincingly, Saul himself, their hatred occasionally focused to a fine point on him. They sat, these two, as far away from him as possible, near the back wall close to the brooms, whispering to each other and smiling with energetic young-adolescent malevolence at him. Saul had tried everything with them— jokes, praise, discipline—but nothing had worked to increase the boys’ interest in reading or to lower their scorn for education, and he had arrived at a state of strong, steady uneasiness, a feeling that soon they would try to enact some awfulness upon him, a terrible dangerous prank. He could feel it coming.

  He thought of the two boys, Gordy Himmelman and Bob Pawlak, as the Child Cossacks. They belonged in Central Asia somewhere. However, interesting hatred could arise anywhere. Gordy apparently had no parents, just an aunt. His mother had died in a house fire, and his father had gone west and stayed there and had gradually disappeared. No one knew where he was; he had not been heard from in years. Gordy lived with his aunt in a manufactured home on the north side of town. Marly Albertson, the school social worker assigned to Gordy, said the situation out there at Brenda Bagley’s house—Brenda Bagley was Gordy’s aunt— was like a museum of creepiness and warned him not to ask about it if he didn’t want to know. Saul had met Brenda once. She had an unattractiveness so painful to look upon that you felt guilty of rubbernecking if you glanced at her twice. When she came in for a conference, her facial complexion looked scaly, and she sat down with the slow elaborate courtesy of working people out of their element in a classroom, the unease of the uninvited. She gave the appearance of knowing that she was not wanted anywhere she happened to be. She had said almost nothing for the fifteen minutes during which Saul described Gordy’s failings. She appeared to be broken down by hard work—she was a waitress at the Fleetwood— and she nodded dumbly at everything Saul told her, as if his desolate words were no more than what she had expected, wounds on top of wounds.

  Saul had driven by Gordy’s home a couple of times and had seen a desperate barking dog chained to a stake in the front yard. Often Gordy came to school wearing a T-shirt spotted with blood. His boots were scuffed from objects he had kicked or that had simply fallen haplessly into his path. On his face were two rashes, one from acne, the other from blankness. Girls avoided him. His eyes, on those occasions when they met Saul’s, were cold and lunar. If you were dying on the side of the road in a rainstorm, Saul thought, Gordy’s eyes would pass over you and continue on, after you died, to the next interesting sight.

  Sometimes Gordy would begin to stare at Saul at the beginning of class and not stop until the class was finally over. The contours of Gordy’s fixation were unknowable, Saul had decided.

  Politically and socially and ideologically, Saul had once felt pity and compassion and generosity toward the wretched of the earth. He still did, when he considered them as a class, and only when they appeared as individuals did they sometimes alarm him. He suspected that Gordy hated him in a final, visceral manner, above or below argument.

  Gordy’s friend Bob Pawlak was a dog-killer and a cat-killer, he claimed. He shot them with his 410, he said. Perhaps it was just talk. In a moment of intimacy he had bragged to Saul about killing cats, and his laughter, describing how he went about it, was not quite under control. His smile was the meanest one Saul had ever seen on an ex-child, a smile also visible on the face of Bob’s father, Bob Pawlak, Sr., who once came in, unbelievably, for a parent conference. About his boy, Bob Sr. agreed that Bob Jr. was a hell-raiser, but, then, so was he. He shook his dismayed and proud parental head, decorated with gin blossoms.

  Saul could hardly stand to look at Gordy and Bob. But Gordy was not afraid to look at Saul. As was his habit, he stared and stared. There were no windows in the room where he taught them, and no fan, and after half an hour of everyone’s mingled breathing, the air in the room was foul enough to kill a canary.

  Earlier in the week Saul had given the kids pictures clipped from magazines. They were supposed to write one-sentence stories to accompany each picture. For these high schoolers, the task would be a challenge. Now, before school started, his mind still on Patsy and Mary Esther, Saul began to read yesterday’s sentences. Gordy and Bob had as usual not written anything. Gordy had torn his picture to bits, and Bob had shredded and eaten his. But the other students had made their brave attempts.

  It is dangerous to dive into a pool of water without the nolige of the depth because if it is salow you could hit your head that might creat unconsheness and drowding.

  Quite serprisingly the boy finds among the presents rapings which are now discarded a model air plan.

  Two sentences, each one requiring ten minutes’ work. Saul stared at them, word by word, feeling himself stumbling in a cognitive limp. What was the next lesson? Where did one start? The sentences were like glimpses into the shattered mind of God.

  Like the hourse a cow is an animal and the human race feasts on its meat and diary which form the b
ulky hornd animal.

  The cold blooded crecher the bird will lay an egg and in a piriod of time a new bird will brake out of it as a storm of burth.

  Saul looked up from his desk at the sputtering overhead lights and the grimy acoustic tile. It was in the storm of birth—mouths of babes, etc.— that he himself was currently being tossed.

  He looked down at the floor again and spotted a piece of paper with the words “your a kick” close to the wastebasket. Finally, a nice compliment! He tossed it away.

  Saul’s mother had been visiting. When Saul arrived at home, carrying the Five Oaks News-Chronicle, Delia met him at the door and gave him a kiss on the cheek, leaving lipstick and perfume on him, like a claim check. She had more scents than a cougar. This was the fourth day of a projected six-day visit. She had been cooking meals, helping out with the housework, and taking care of Mary Esther whenever Patsy flagged or needed to nap. Delia did not like the name “Mary Esther” and much preferred “Emmy.” Whenever his mother called her grandchild “Emmy,” Saul felt himself getting slowly but steadily irritated at his mother’s assumption that he and Patsy were disqualified from naming their own daughter themselves, that they would do it incorrectly.

  The house, which had once smelled of Saul and Patsy, and the sweet-sour loamy smells of parenting and babyhood, now smelled pungently of Delia’s perfume, a fragrance with the power of an air-raid siren. What was the point? Why did a new grandmother have to wear so much perfume? Well, Saul thought, the question answers itself. His mother had given birth to him when she was twenty-one. She was now in her forties, and still, she thought, a player.

  Delia was tall, with brilliant red hair, and restless. Bracelets rang noisily on her wrists, and she favored large clumpy necklaces of amber. She had long elegant fingers tipped with brilliant blood-red nail polish. She had a dominatrix side, he thought uncharitably. Saul, who liked Richard Strauss’s operas and once played trombone in one of the Northwestern University student pit orchestras, sometimes referred to his mother as “the Marschallin” and thought that Eleanor Steber could do a good job of playing her. Moving around the house like a woman who meant business no matter what she was doing, she had missed her calling, Saul claimed in bed to Patsy. She should have been a full-time aristocrat running a palace, planning masked balls, arranging other people’s affairs. She aspired to a certain level of domesticated depravity. Just watching her tired him out and gave him headaches. Always tanned and fit, she had a personal trainer at a health club in Bethesda, and Saul was always dismayed by how good-looking his mother was, how disconcertingly sexy. No middle-aged woman needed to be that beautiful, he thought, especially when the beauty is fading just enough to give it warmth, and that woman is your mother, and your father has died young, and your mother has gone on to have a succession of boyfriends, and . . . and . . .