Saul and Patsy (6 page)

He waited. “What? What is it?”

“You’re like men. You’re a man and you’re like them. You want to be everything. You want to have endless endless potential. But then you grow up. In spite of yourself. And you’re one thing. Your body is, anyway. It’s trapped in
this
life. You have to say goodbye to the dreams of everything.” She waited. “You don’t want to do that one little bit, do you?”

“Dreams of everything.”

“Yes.” She rolled over so that she could look at him in the dark. “Don’t pretend that you don’t understand. You want to be a whole roomful of people, Saul. That’s kid stuff.” She let her head drop so that her hair brushed against him.

“What about you?”

“What about me? I’m not a problem the way you’re a problem. I don’t want to be anything else,” she said sleepily, beginning to rub his back. “I do want a better job at the bank, I’ll tell you that. But I sure as hell don’t have to be a great person. I just want to do a little of this and a little of that as long as I can make some serious money.” She waited. “You know. To get by. For that trip to Finland.”

“What’s wrong with ambitions?” he asked. “You could be great at something.”

Her hand moved into his hair, tickling him. “Being great is too tiring, Saul, and it’s boring. Look at the great ambition people. They’re wrecking the earth, aren’t they. They’re leaving it in bits and scraps. Look at the Lord of Misrule, our current president.” She concentrated on him in the dark. “Saul,” she said.

“Your diaphragm’s not on.”

“I know.”

“But.”

“So?”

“Well, what if?”

“What if? You’d be a father, that’s what if.” She had turned him so that she was right up against him, her breasts pressing him, challenging him.

“No,” he said. He drew back. “Not yet. Let me figure this out on my own. There’d be no future.”

“For the baby?”

“No. For me.” He waited, trying to figure out how to say this. “I’d have to be one person forever. Does that make sense?”

“From you, it does.” She pulled herself slightly away from him. They rearranged themselves.

The following Saturday he drove into Five Oaks for a haircut. When his hair was so long that it made the back of his neck itch, he went to Harold, the barber, and had it trimmed back. Saul liked Harold and his pensive mannerisms, even though Harold was a pale Lutheran, and a terrible barber. Harold made up for it with his occasional affability, and he happened to be in the same bowling league with Saul and sometimes played basketball at the same times that Saul did. Many of the men in Five Oaks looked slightly peculiar and asymmetrical, thanks to Harold. The last time Saul had come in, Harold had been deep in a conversation with a woman who was accusing him of things; Saul couldn’t tell exactly what Harold was being accused of, but it sounded like a lover’s quarrel, and Saul liked that. Anyone else’s troubles diminished his own.

By coincidence, the same woman was back again in the barbershop with her son, whose hair Harold was cutting when Saul passed by the ancient barber pole before he rang the bell over the door as he entered. To pass the time and achieve a moment’s invisibility, he picked up a newspaper from the next chair over and read the morning’s headlines.

SHOTS FIRED AT HOLBEIN REACTOR Iraqi Terrorists Suspected

Somebody was always shooting at something. Shielded by his paper, Saul heard the woman whispering instructions to Harold, and Harold’s faint, exasperated “Louise, I can do this.” Saul pretended to read the article. The shots, it turned out, had been harmless. Even though there had been no damage, some sort of investigation was going on. Saul thought Iraqis could do better than this.

There was more whispering, which Saul tried not to hear. After the woman had paid for her son’s haircut and left, Saul sat himself down in Harold’s chair.

“Hey, Saul,” Harold said, covering him with the white cloth. “You always come in when she does. How do you do that?”

“Beats me. Her name Louise?”

“That’s right. The usual trim, Saul?”

“The usual. Torture by Mr. Harold of Paris. Harold, this time try to keep it the same length on both sides, okay?”

“I try, Saul. It’s just that your hair’s so curly.”

“Right, right.” Saul saw his reflection in the mirror and closed his eyes as a reflex. He felt like asking Harold, the Lutheran, a moral question. “Harold,” he said, “do you ever wonder where your thoughts come from? I mean, do we own our thoughts, or do they come from somewhere else, or what? For example, you can’t always control your thoughts or your impulses, can you? So, whose thoughts are those, anyway, the ones you can’t control? And another thing. Are you happy? Be honest.”

The scissors stopped clipping. “Gosh, Saul, are you okay? What drugs have you been taking lately?”

“No drugs. Just tell me: Are your thoughts always yours? That’s what I need to know.”

The barber looked into the mirror opposite them. Saul saw Harold’s plain features. “All right,” Harold said. “I’ll answer your question.” Then, with what Saul took to be great sadness, the barber said, “I don’t have many thoughts. And when I do, they’re all mine.”

“Okay,” Saul said. “I’m sorry. I was just asking.” He tried to slump down in his chair, but the barber said, “Sit up straight, Saul.” Saul did.

Days later, Saul is asleep. He knows this. He knows he is asleep next to Patsy. He knows it is night, that cradle of dreams, but Earth’s mad lovelorn companion, the moon, is shining stainless-steel beams across the bed, and Saul is dreaming of being in a car that cannot stop rolling over, an endless flip of metal, and this time Patsy is not belted in, and something horrible must be happening to her, judging from the blur of her head. She is being hurt terribly thanks to the way he has driven the car, the mad way, the un-American way, and now she is walking across a bridge made of moonlight, and she falls. The door, Saul’s door, is being kept open for Elijah, but Elijah does not come in. How will we recognize him? Saul’s mind is not in Saul’s head; it is above him, above his yarmulke, above his prayer shawl, his tallis. When was Saul ever Orthodox? Only in dreams. Patsy is hurt, she lies in a ditch,
and he has done
this damage to her.
Deer and doubt mix with the milky roar of mild lust on the Scrabble board. And here behind the barber chair is Giovanni d’Amato, sage of Cincinnati, saying, “You shouldn’t flunk people out of school if you’re going to get drunk and roll cars.” The sage is using his scissors to cut away Saul’s clothes. Saul the child is speaking to Saul the grown-up: “You’ll never figure it out,” and when Saul the adult asks, “What?” the child says, “Adulthood. Any of it.” And then he says, “Saul, you’re pregnant.”

Saul woke and looked over at Patsy, still asleep. He groaned audibly with relief that she hadn’t been hurt. What an annoying dream. He had never even owned a tallis or known anyone who had one. His parents had been relentlessly secular. After putting on his shirt, jeans, and boots, he went downstairs, and, after taking the keys off the kitchen table, he went outside.

The motorcycle felt quiet and powerful underneath him as he accelerated down Whitefeather Road. He had ridden a motorcycle briefly in college—until a small embarrassing accident—and the process all came back to him now. This one, Patsy’s new machine, painted pink and blue, 250 cc’s, was easy to shift, and the machine gave him the impression that he was floating, or, better yet, was flowing down the archways of dark, stunted Michigan trees. His eyes watered, and bugs hit him in the face as he speeded up. He felt the rear wheel slip on the dirt. He didn’t know what he was doing out here and he didn’t care. He had no helmet. He was illegal.

He turned left onto Highway 14, and then County Road H, also dirt, and he downshifted, feeling the tight, close gears meshing, and he let the clutch out, slowing him down. On the road the cycle’s headlight was like a cone leading him forward, away from himself, toward a possibility more inviting and dangerous. In the grip of spiritual longing, a person goes anywhere, traveling over the speed limit. The night was warm, but none of the summer stars was visible. Behind the clouds the stars were even now rushing away in the infinity of expanding space. Saul felt like an astral body himself. He too would rush away into emptiness. In the green light of the speedometer he saw that he was doing a respectable fifty. Up ahead the wintry white eyes of a possum glanced toward him before the animal waddled into the high grass near the road. Saul wanted to be lost but knew he could not be. He knew exactly where he was: fields, forest, fields. He knew each one, and he knew whom they belonged to, he had been here that long.

And of course he knew where he was going: he was headed toward the McPhees’, that damnable house of happiness, that castle of light, where everyone, man, woman, and child, would be sleeping soundly, the sleep of the happy and just and thoughtless. Saul felt blank, gripped by obsession, simultaneously vacant and full of shame.

He looked at his watch. It was past midnight. Their house would be dark.

But it was not. On the road beyond their driveway, Saul slowed down and then shut off the engine, holding on tightly to the handlebars as he stared like the prowler he was, toward the second-floor windows, from which sounds emerged. From where he was spying, Saul could see Anne sitting in a rocking chair by the window with their baby. The baby was crying, screaming. Saul could hear it from the road. And in the background, back and forth, Saul could see Emory McPhee pacing, the all-night walk of the helpless father. An infant with colic, a rocking mother, a pacing father, screams of infant misery, and now the two of them, Anne and Emory, beginning to shout at each other over what to do.

Saul turned his motorcycle around, pushed it down the road, then started the engine. He felt better. He could have gone to their front door and welcomed them as the official greeter of ordinary disharmony.
I was
always as real as they were,
Saul thought.
I always was.

On the left, the broken fences bordering the farmland quavered up and down and seemed to start bouncing, visually, as he accelerated. The lines on the telephone poles jumped nervously as he passed them until they had the rapid and nervous movements of pens on graph paper making an erratic heartbeat. Rain—he hadn’t known it was going to rain, no one had told him—began falling, getting into his eyes and dropping with cold precision on the backs of his hands. He felt the cloth of his shirt getting soaked and sticking to his shoulders. The rain was persistent and serious. He felt the tires of Patsy’s motorcycle slipping on the mud, nudging the rear end of the bike off, slightly, thoughtfully, toward the left side. Then the road joined up with the highway, where the traction improved, but the rain was falling more heavily now, soaking him so he could hardly see. He came to a bridge, slowed the bike, and huddled in its shelter for a moment, until the rain seemed to let up, and he set out again. Accelerate, clutch, shift. He wanted to get home to Patsy. He wanted to dry his hair and get into bed next to her. He couldn’t think of anything else he wanted.

A few hundred feet from his own driveway, he looked through the rain, only a drizzle now, and he saw, looking back at him, their eyes lit by his headlamp, the deer he had seen before, closer now, crossing his yard. But this time, there was another, a last deer, one he hadn’t seen before, behind the others, slightly smaller, as if reduced somehow. It was an albino. In the darkness and rain it moved in a haze of whiteness. Seeing it, Saul thought: Oh my God, I’m about to die. The deer had stopped, momentarily frozen in the light. The albino’s eyes—it was a doe—were pink, and its fur was as white as linen. The animal flicked its tail, nervously hypnotized. Its terrible pink eyes, blank as neutron stars, stared at him. Saul turned off the engine and the headlight. Now in the dark two brown deer bounded toward the west, but the albino stood still, staring in Saul’s direction, a purposeful stare. He gripped the handlebars so hard that his forearms began to knot into a cramp. The animal was a sign of some kind, he was sure. Only a fool would think otherwise. He felt a moment of dread pass through his body as the deer now turned her eyes away from his and began to walk off into the night. He saw her disappear behind a maple tree in his backyard, but he couldn’t follow her beyond that. He was trembling now. Shivering spasms began at his wet shoulders and passed down into his chest toward his legs. The dread he had felt before was turning rapidly into pure spiritual fright. Alternating waves of chill and heat rushed up and down his body. He remembered to get off the road. He pushed the motorcycle into the garage, kicking down its stand. He crossed the yard and reached the back door. The rain picked up again and sprayed into him as the wind carried it. In his mind’s eye he saw the deer looking back at him. He had been judged, and the judgment was that he, Saul, was only and always himself, now and onward into infinity. His boots were wet. They stank of wet leather. Outside the back door on the lawn he took the boots off, then his wet shirt and his jeans. It occurred to him to stand there naked. With no clothes on he stood in the rain and the dark before he fell to his knees. He wasn’t praying. He didn’t know what he was doing. Something was filling him up. It felt like the spirit, but the spirit of what, he didn’t know. He lay down on the grass. One sob tore through him, and then it was over.

He felt like getting up and running out into the field in back of the house, but he knew he couldn’t break through the wall of his self-consciousness enough to do that. In the rain, which no longer felt cold, he sensed that he was entering a condition that had nothing to do with happiness because it was so far beyond it. All he was sure about was that he was empty before and now was filled, filled with both fullness and emptiness. These emotions didn’t quite make sense, but he didn’t care. The emptiness was sweet. He could live with it. He hurried into the house and dried off his hair in the dark downstairs bathroom. Quickly he toweled himself down and then rushed up the stairs. There was a secret, after all. In fact there were probably a lot of secrets, but there was one he now knew.

He entered their bedroom. Rain fingernailed against the window glass. Patsy lay in bed in almost complete darkness, wearing one of Saul’s T-shirts. Her arms were up above her head. He could see that she was watching him.

“Where were you?”

“I went out for a ride on your motorcycle. I couldn’t sleep.”

“Saul, it’s
raining.
Why are you naked?”

“It’s raining now. Not when I started.”

“Why are you standing there? You don’t have any clothes on.”

“I saw something. I can’t tell you. I think I’m not supposed to tell you what I saw. It was an animal. It was a private animal. Patsy, I took off my clothes and lay down on the lawn in the rain, and it didn’t feel weird, it felt like just what I should do.”

“Saul, what is this about? I need some idea right now.”

“I’m not sure.”

“Try. Try to say.”

“I think I’m pregnant.”

“What does that mean?”

“I think it means that whoever I am, I’m not alone with myself.”

“I don’t understand that.”

“I know.”

“Come to bed, Saul. Get in under the sheet.”

He climbed in and put his leg over hers.

“I can’t quite get used to you,” she said. “You’re quite a mess of metaphors, Saul, you know that.”

“Yes.”

“A man being pregnant.” She put her hand familiarly on his thigh. “I wonder what that portends.”

“It’s a feeling, Patsy. It’s a secret. Men have secrets, too.”

“I never said they didn’t. They love secrets. They have lodges and secret societies and stuff. They have the CIA.”

“Can we make love now, right this minute? Because I love you. I love you like crazy.”

“I love you, too, Saul. What if you make
me
pregnant? It could happen. What if I get knocked up? Is it all right now?”

“Yeah. What’s the problem?”

“What will we say, for example?”

“We’ll say, ‘Saul and Patsy are pregnant.’”

“Oh, sure we will.”

“Okay, we won’t say it.” He had thrown the sheet back and was kissing her on the side of her knees.

“Are you crying? Your face is wet.”

“Yes.”

“But you’re being so jokey.”

“That’s how I handle it.”

“Why are you crying?”

“Because . . .” He wanted to get this right. “Because there are signs and wonders. What can I tell you? It’s all a feeling. In the morning I’ll deny I said this.”

“So like a man.” She was kissing him now, but she stopped, as if thinking about his recent sentences. “You
want
to make me pregnant, too, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not afraid? Of diapers, exhaustion, sullenness? Fatigue, indifference, hostility, silence, boredom, quarrels, rage, infidelity?”

“No.”

“You’re a brave man. I’ll give you credit for that. One more little ambassador from the present to the future. That’s what you want.”

“Sort of.” He moved up and took her fingers one by one into his mouth and bit them tenderly. Patsy had started to hum. She was humming “Unchain My Heart.” Then she opened her mouth and sang quietly, “Unchain my heart, and set me free.”

“I’ll try, Patsy.”

“Yes.” A moment later, she said, “This won’t solve anything.”