Saul and Patsy (5 page)

He thought: I am no longer a serious person. My great-grandfather read the Torah, my grandfather read Spinoza and Heine and books on immunology, and here I am, writing off for this.

On his trips into town, Saul began to take the long route past the McPhees’ house, slowing down when he was close to their yard. Each time that he found himself within a mile of their farm, he felt his stomach knotting up in anxiety and sick curiosity. He recognized himself twisting in the coils of something like envy, yet not envy exactly, but a more biblical emotion, harder to define, like covetousness. Driving past in the evenings, he occasionally saw them outside, Emory mowing or clipping, their baby strapped on his back, Anne up on a ladder doing something to the windows, or out in the garden like Patsy, planting. They could have been anybody, except that, for Saul, they gave off a disturbing aura of unreflective happiness, which meant that they could have been anybody except Saul.

The road was sufficiently far away from their house and from the shed flaking with paint so that they wouldn’t see him. His car was just another car unless you looked closely and saw the dented roof and Saul inside it. But on a particular Friday, in early June, several hours after work, he drove past their property and spied Emory in the front yard, in the gold twilight, pushing his wife, sitting in the swing. Emory, the ex–football player, had on his face a solemnly contented expression. The baby blithered in a stroller close by. His wife was in a white T-shirt and jeans, and Emory himself wore jeans but no shirt. She was probably proud of her breasts and he was probably proud of his shoulders. Anne held on to the ropes of the swing. Her hair flew up as she rose, and Saul, who took this all in in a few seconds, could hear her cries of delight from his car. Taking his surreptitious glances, he almost drove off the road again. Of course they were children, he knew that, but their youth wasn’t the problem as such. No: they gave off a terrible steady-state glow. They had the blank moronic shimmer of angels. They were glistering. It was intolerable.

They lived smack in the middle of reality and never gave it a minute’s thought. They’d never felt like actors. They’d never been sick with knowingness. The long tunnel of their thoughts had never swallowed them. They’d never had sleepless nights, the urgent, wordless, unexplainable wrestling matches with the shadowy bands of soul-thieves. They were just a couple of Midwesterners.

Goddamn it, Saul thought. Everybody gets to be happy except me. Saul heard Anne’s cries. The sun was sweating all over his forehead. He felt faint and Jewish, as usual. He turned on the radio. It happened to be tuned to a religion station, and some choir was singing “When Jesus Wept.”

“It’s your play, Saul.”

“I know, I know.”

“What’s the matter? You got some bad letters?”

“Duh. The worst. The worst letters I’ve ever had.”

“You always say that. You whine and complain. You’re such a whiner, Saul, you even whine in bed. You were complaining that time just before you spelled out ‘axiom’ over that triple word score and got all those points last year. You do this
act
when we play Scrabble and then you always beat me.” Patsy was sitting cross-legged in her chair, as she liked to do, with a root beer bottle positioned against her instep, as she arranged and rearranged the letters on her slate.

Saul examined the board. The only word he could think of spelling out was “paint,” but the word made him think of Emory McPhee. The hand of fate again, playing tricks on him. Glancing down at the words on the board, he thought he saw that same hand at work, spelling out some invisible story.

Saul always treated Scrabble boards as if they were fortune-telling equipment, with the order of the words creating a narrative. Patsy had started with “moon,” and he had added “beam” onto it. When she hung a “mild” from the moonbeam, he spiced it up with “lust,” but she had responded to his interest in sex with “murky,” hanging the word from that same moonbeam. “Mild” and “murky” came close to how he felt. His mother, Delia, had said so on the phone yesterday. “Saul, darling,” she had said, “you’re sounding rather
dark
and
mysterious
lately. What’s gotten into you?” He had not told her about the accident.

“I’m okay, Ma,” he had said. “I’m just working some things through.”

“You’re leaving Five Oaks?” she had asked hopefully.

“No, Ma,” he had said. “This town suits me.”

“All that mud, Saul,” she had said, dubious as always about the soil and people who made large claims for it. “All those farms,” she added vaguely. “The slush. The snow. The
fur.
”

“Saul,” Patsy said. “Wake up.” She shook him. “You’re wool-gathering.”

“Just thinking about my mother,” he said. He looked up at Patsy. “What are all those deer doing on our Scrabble board?” he asked. “Give me a swig of your root beer.”

“No,” she said, before she handed it to him. He appreciated the golden color of the fine hairs on her arm in the lamplight. “Sweetheart, I think I saw some, as a matter of fact,” she said. “I thought I saw, what would you call it, a herd of deer, far in back, beyond the property line, a few nights ago. If you ever go back up to the roof, honey, give a look around. You might see them.”

“Right, right.” He couldn’t put all five of his letters for “paint” on the Scrabble board. He removed the T. Pain. He held the four letters for pain in his hand, and he added them to the final T in “lust.”

“Funny how ‘pain’ and ‘lust’ give you ‘paint,’” Patsy said. “Sort of makes me think of the McPhees and the heady smell of turpentine.”

They glanced at each other, and he tried to smile. A fly was buzzing around the bulb in the lampshade. He was thinking of Patsy’s new expensive blue motorcycle out back, shiny and powerful and dangerous to ride. The salesman had said it could go from zero to fifty in less than six seconds. The hand of fate was ready to give him a good slapping around. It had announced itself. Saul felt a groan coming on. He looked at Patsy with helpless love.

“Oh, Saul,” she said. “Honey.
Shit.
You always get this way during these games. You always do.” He saw her smiling in the reflection of his love for her. “You’re so cute,” she said, with a tone of patience that might soon run out.

At ten minutes past three o’clock, he rose out of bed to get a glass of water. When he looked out the back window, he saw them: just about where Patsy said they would be, far in the distance beyond the property line—a herd of deer silently passing. He ran downstairs in his underwear and went out through the unlocked back door as quietly as he could. He stood in the yard in the June night, the crickets sounding, the moon dimly outlined behind a thin cloud in the shape of a scimitar. In this gauzy light, the deer, about eight of them, distant animal forms, walked across his neighbor’s field into a stand of woods. He found himself transfixed with the mystery and beauty of it. Hunting animals suddenly made no sense to him. He went back to bed. “I saw the deer,” he said. He didn’t know if Patsy was asleep. During the summer she wore Saul’s T-shirts to bed, and that was all. Like a Crusader portrayed in marble on a coffin lid, Patsy slept on her back with her feet crossed at the ankle; it gave the impression that she had returned from seeing the Holy Land.

Two days later, the letter containing the secrets of the universe came from the Wisdom Foundation in Cincinnati. Saul sat down on the front stoop and tore the letter open. It was six pages long and had been printed out by a computer, with Saul’s name inserted here and there.

Dear
Mr. Bernstein,

Nothing is settled. Everything is still possible. Your thoughts are both yours and someone else’s. Sometimes we say hello to the world and then goodbye, but that is not the end and we say hello again. God is love,
Mr. Bernstein,
denying it only makes us unhappy. Riches are mere appearances.
Our thoughts are more real
than hammers and nails.
We can make others believe us,
Mr.
Bernstein,
if the truth is in us. Buddha and Jesus the Christ and Mohammed agreed about just about everything. Causing pain to others only prolongs our own pain. A free and open heart is the best thing. Live simply. Don’t pretend to know something you don’t have a clue about. You may feel as if you are headed toward some terrible fate,
Mr. Bernstein,
but that may not come to pass. You can avoid it.
Throw your bad thoughts into the mental
wastebasket.
There is a right way and a wrong way to dispose of bad thoughts. Everything about the universe worth knowing is known. What is not known about the universe is not worth knowing. Follow these steps. Remember that trees will always be with us, mice will always be with us, mosquitoes will always be with us. Therefore, avoid mental cleanliness. Never start a sentence with the words “What if everybody . . .”

It went on for several more pages. Saul liked the letter. It sounded like his other grandfather, Isaac, the pious atheist, an exuberant man much given to laughter at appropriate and inappropriate moments, who offered advice as he passed out candy bars and halvah to his grandchildren. This letter from the Wisdom Foundation was signed by someone named Giovanni d’Amato.

Saul looked up. For a moment the terrifying banality of the landscape seemed to dissolve into geometrical patterns of color and light. Taken by surprise, he felt the habitual weight on his heart lifting as if by pulleys, or, better yet, birds of the spirit sent by direct mail from Giovanni d’Amato. He decided to test this happiness and got into the dented car.

He drove toward the McPhees’. The dust on the dirt road whirled up behind him. He thought he would be able to stand their middle-American happiness. Besides, Emory was probably working. No: it was Saturday. They would both be home. He would just drive by, and that would be that. So what if they were happy, these dropouts from school? He was happy, too. He would test his temporary happiness against theirs.

The trees rushed past the car in a kind of chaotic blur.

He pressed down on the accelerator. A solitary cloud, wandering and thick with moisture, straying overhead but not blocking the sun, let down a minute’s worth of vagrant rainbowed shower on Saul’s car. The water droplets, growing larger, bounced on the car’s hood. He turned on the wipers, causing the dust to streak in protractor curves. The rain made Saul’s car smell like a nursery of newborn vegetation. He felt the car drive over something. He hoped it wasn’t an animal, one of those anonymous rodents that squealed and died and disappeared.

Ahead and to the left was the McPhees’.

It looked like something out of an American genre painting, the kind of second-rate canvas hidden in the back of most museums near the elevators. Happiness lived in such houses, where people like Saul had never been permitted. In the bright standing sunshine its Midwestern Gothic acute angles pointed straight up toward heaven, a place where there had been a land rush for centuries and all the stakes had been claimed. Standing there in the bright theatrical sun—the rain had gone off on its way— the house seemed to know something, to be an answer ending with an exclamation point.

Saul crept past the front driveway. His window was open, and, except for the engine, there was no sound, no dog barking. And no sign, either, of Anne or Emory or their baby, at least out here. Nothing on the front porch, nothing in the yard. He
could
stop and say hello. That was permitted. He could thank them for the help they had given him two months before. He hadn’t yet done that. Emory’s pickup was in the driveway, so they were at home.
Happy people don’t go much of anywhere anyway,
Saul thought, backing his car up and parking halfway in on the driveway.

When he reached the backyard, Saul saw a flash of white, on legs, bounding at the far distances of the McPhees’ field into the woods. From this distance it looked like nothing he knew, a trick of the eye. Turning, he saw Anne McPhee sitting in a lawn chair, reading the morning paper, a glass of lemonade nearby, their baby in the playpen in the shade of the house, and Emory, some distance away in a hammock, reading the sports section. Both of them were holding up their newspapers so that their view of him was blocked.

Quietly he crossed their back lawn, then stood in the middle, between them. Emory turned the pages of his paper, then put it down and closed his eyes. Anne went on reading. Saul stood quietly. Only the baby saw him. Saul reached down and picked out of the lawn a sprig of grass. Anne McPhee coughed. The baby was rattling one of its crib toys.

He waited another moment and then walked back to his car. Anne and Emory had not seen him. He felt like a prowler, a spy from God. He also felt now what he had once felt only metaphorically: that he was invisible.

When he was almost home, he remembered, or thought he remembered, that Anne McPhee had been sunning herself and had not been wearing a blouse or a bra. Or was he now imagining this? He couldn’t be sure.

Patsy nudged him in the middle of the night. “I know what it is,” she said.

“What?”

“What’s bothering you.”