Saul and Patsy

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Praise

  Part One

  Chapter One

  HI SAUL

  Chapter Two

  OUT OF ORDURE

  Chapter Three

  SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE

  SHOTS FIRED AT HOLBEIN REACTOR Iraqi Terrorists Suspected

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part Two

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Part Three

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Part Four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  LEMONADE AND OTHER THINGS BUY SOME

  About the Author

  Also by Charles Baxter

  Copyright Page

  For Lewis Baxter and John Thayer Baxter

  I very much wanted to manage in that first movement without using trombones, and tried to. . .

  But . . . I must confess to you that I am a profoundly melancholy man, that black wings flap incessantly above us . . . no—I must have my trombones.

  —JOHANNES BRAHMS, in a letter to Vincenz Lachner

  Michigan seems like a dream to me now.

  —PAUL SIMON, “America”

  Acclaim for Charles Baxter’s

  SAUL and PATSY

  “A tale of generations at war and the troubled underside of placid Midwestern life . . . abounding in irony and wit, and reminiscent of Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Baxter reminds us that there is no regional monopoly on virtue and understanding, and no easy comforts for either self-appointed worldsavers or smug populists. And for all those hard lessons, Baxter also manages to deliver Saul and Patsy into something astonishingly close to a happy ending. Such indeed is the glory of love—and of fully realized fiction.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “One of our most gifted writers.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Thoughts sprawl delightfully, insanely, worryingly and sometimes brilliantly from Saul. . . . Funny and grown-up and generous.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Charles Baxter’s novel Saul and Patsy is what it appears to be—a love story. But underneath its placid surface broils biting social commentary, a tale of lost teenagers adrift in a culture with no moral center.”

  —The Oregonian

  “Saul and Patsy [is] a penetrating, surprisingly funny meditation on the dynamics of community belonging and acceptance.”

  —The New York Times

  “[Baxter] weaves magic into everyday life as if it were mere coincidence. Clark Kent is to Superman as Charles Baxter is to his writing.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “It is rare that a novel, even a good one, manages to evoke contemporary life without being self-conscious about it. But that is what Baxter achieves here.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Watch out for the ‘quiet Midwestern’ tag on [Baxter’s] writing: That’s the iceberg you will strike. There is nothing simple in his universe, and nothing solely on the surface. Baxter’s intelligence and humor are submerged, and dangerous. You know—something like yours.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “Baxter . . . make[s] the mundane seem marvelous, the everyday seem extraordinary. . . . A clever and empathetic writer.”

  —The Capital Times

  “On almost every page at least one sentence would make me stop and shake my head in amazement and wonder.”

  —Logan Browning, Houston Chronicle

  “Both hilarious and poignant.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “Baxter defies the laws of publishing gravity: He went up and has yet to come down. . . . Baxter’s new novel is just as bright and fully imagined, just as energetic as anything that came before.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Brilliantly exploring the emotional intricacies of a young marriage, Charles Baxter’s latest novel, Saul and Patsy, uncannily exposes the least flattering side of human desire while celebrating the inexplicable power that love has over our lives.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “Baxter’s store of figurative language and rich, apt description is essentially boundless, and he draws generously from it for all the characters.”

  — St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “More proof that Baxter is one of the best novelists anywhere. Every line packs a double punch—what it apparently means and what it really means.”

  —Fort Worth Star-Telegram

  Part One

  One

  About a year after they had rented the farmhouse with loose brown aluminum siding on Whitefeather Road, Saul began glaring out the west window after dinner into the unappeasable darkness that pressed against the glass, as if he were angry at the flat uncultivated farmland for being farmland instead of glass and cement. “No sane Jew,” he said, “ever lived on a dirt road.” Patsy reminded him of Poland, Russia, and the nineteenth century. Then she pointed down at the Scrabble board and told him to play. To spite her, he spelled out “axiom” over a triple-word score, for forty-two points. “That was totally different,” Saul said, shaking his head. “Completely different. That was when everyone but the landowners lived on dirt roads. It was a democracy of dirt roads, the nineteenth century.” Patsy was clutching her bottle of root beer with one hand and arranging the letters on her slate with the other. Her legs were crossed in the chair, and the bottle was positioned against the instep of her right foot. She looked up at him and smiled. He couldn’t help it. He smiled back. She was so beautiful, she could make him copy her gestures without his meaning to.

  “We’re not landowners either,” she said. “We’re renters. Oh, I forgot to tell you. I had to go into the basement this afternoon for a screwdriver, and I noticed that there’s a mouse in the trap downstairs.”

  “Is it dead?”

  “Oh, sure.” She nodded. “It looks quite dead. You know—smashed back, slightly open mouth, and bulging eyes. I’ll spare you the full description. You’ll see the whole scene soon enough when you go down there—I didn’t want to throw it out myself.”

  “I did the dishes,” Saul complained, sitting up, running his fingers through his hair.

  “I could throw the mouse out,” Patsy said, leaning back, taking a swig and giving him another obliging smile. “I can now, and I could have then.” She straightened her leg and placed her foot against his ankle, and she raised her eyebrows as an ironic courtesy. “But the truth is, those little critters give me the whimwhams, and I’d rather not. I’d rather you did it, Saul. Just, you know, as a favor to me. You do it, my man, and there might be something in it for you.”

  “What? What would be in it for me?”

  “The trick in negotiations,” she said, “is not to make promises too soon. Why don’t you just do it as a favor to me? A sort of little gratuitous act of kindness? One of them guys?”

  He stood up, shaking the letters on the Scrabble board, and clomped in his white socks to the kitchen, where the flashlight was stuck to the refrigerator with
a magnet that was so weak that the flashlight kept sliding down to the floor, though it was only halfway there now. “I didn’t say you had to do it instantly,” Patsy shouted. “This very minute. You could wait until the game is over.”

  “Well, if you didn’t want it thrown out now, you shouldn’t have mentioned it. Besides, I can’t concentrate,” Saul said, half to himself as he flicked the flashlight off and on, “thinking about that dead mouse.” The batteries were so low that the light from the bulb was foggy and brown. He opened the door to the basement, fanning stale air, and stared down the steps into the darkness that smelled of must and heating oil. He didn’t like the basement. At night, in bed, he thought he heard crying from down there, ancestral accusations. “You’ll do anything to beat me at Scrabble,” Saul said aloud to himself. “This is gamesmanship, honey. Don’t tell me otherwise.”

  He snapped on the wall switch, and the shadows of the steps saw-toothed themselves in front of him. “I really don’t like this,” he said, walking down the stairs, a sliver from the banister leaping into the heel of his hand. “This is not my idea of a good time.” He heard Patsy say something consoling and inaudible.

  On his left were the wooden shelves once meant for storing preserves. On these shelves, mason jars, empty and gathering dust, now lined up unevenly. Saul and Patsy’s landlord, Mr. Munger, a retired farmer and unsuccessful freelance preacher who had a fitful temper, had thrown their lids together into an angry heap on a lower shelf. The washtubs were on Saul’s right, and in front of him, four feet away, was the sprung mousetrap. The mouse had been pressed flat by the trap, and its tiny yellow incisors were showing at the sides of its mouth, just as Patsy had said.

  He loved her, but she could be manipulative when it came to getting him to do household chores that she didn’t want to do. Maybe, out of his sight, she was exchanging her letter tiles.

  Saul grunted, loosened the spring, and picked up the mouse by the tail, which felt like cold rubber. His fingers brushed against the animal’s downy fur, soft as milkweed pods. Being, on a miniature scale, had once been inhabited there. With his other hand he held the flashlight. He heard other mice scratching in the basement corners. Why kill mice if there were always going to be more of them? After climbing the stairs and opening the back door, he set the flashlight down: the cool air and the darkness made his flesh prickle. Still holding the tiny pilgrim, he took four steps into the backyard. Feeling a scant moment of desolation, nothing more than a breeze of feeling, he threw the mouse toward the field, its body arcing over the tiny figure on the horizon of a distant radio transmitting tower, one pulsing red light at its tip. Saul took a deep breath. The blankness of the midwestern landscape excited him. There was a sensual loneliness here that belonged to him now, that was truly his. He thought that fate had perhaps turned him into one of those characters in Russian literature abandoned to haphazard fortune and solitude on the steppes.

  Nothing out there seemed friendly except the lights on the horizon, and they were too far away to be of any help.

  He walked into the living room, where Patsy was wrapped in a blanket. “Good news and bad news,” Saul said, tilting his head. “The good news is that I threw out the mouse. The bad news is that it, she, was pregnant. Maybe that’s good news. You decide. By the way, I see that you’ve wrapped yourself in a blanket. Now why is that? Too cold in here?”

  She had dimmed the light, turning the three-way bulb to its lowest wattage. She wasn’t sitting in the chair anymore. She was lying on the sofa, the root beer nowhere in sight. With a grand gesture she parted the blanket: she had taken off her clothes except for her underwear, and just above her breasts she had placed six Scrabble letters:

  HI SAUL

  “Nine points,” he said, settling himself down next to her, breathing in her odor, a clear celery-like smell, although tonight it seemed to be mixed with ether. He picked the letters off her skin with his teeth and one by one gently spat them down onto the rug.

  “I guess it’s good news,” Patsy said, “that we don’t have all those baby mice in a mouse nursery down there.” She kissed him.

  “Um,” Saul said. “This was what was in it for me?”

  “Plain old married love,” Patsy said, helping him take his jeans off. Then she lifted up her pelvis as he removed her underwear. “Plain old married love is only what it is.”

  He moved down next to her as she unbuttoned his shirt. He said, “Sometimes I think you’ll go to any length to avoid losing in Scrabble. I think it’s a character weakness on your part. Neurotic rigidity. David Shapiro talks about this in his book on neurotic styles. Check it out. It’s a loser’s trick. I spelled out ‘axiom’ and you saw the end of your possibilities.”

  “It’s not a trick,” she said, absentmindedly stroking his thighs, while he pointed his index finger and pretended to write with it across her breasts and then down across her abdomen. “Hey,” she said, “what’re you writing with that finger?”

  “‘I love Patsy,’” he said. “I’m not writing it, I’m printing it.”

  “Why?”

  “Make it more readable.”

  “‘I love Patsy,’” she said. “Seventeen points.”

  “Sixteen. And it depends where it’s placed.”

  “A V is worth four.” His eyes were closed. With one hand he was caressing her right breast, and with the other he wrote other words with imaginative lettering across her hips. “I don’t remember making love in this room before. Especially not with the shades up.” She stretched to kiss his face and to tease her tongue briefly into his mouth. Then she trailed her finger across his back. “I can do that, too.” She traced the letters with her finger just under his shoulders.

  “That was an I,” Saul said.

  “Yes.”

  “‘I love Saul’?” he asked. “Is that what you’re writing?”

  “You’re so conceited. So self-centered.”

  “The curtains are parted,” he said. “The neighbors will see.”

  “We don’t have neighbors. This is the rural middle of American nowhere. Always has been.”

  “People will drive by on Whitefeather Road and see us having sex on the sofa.” He waited. “They might be shocked.”

  “We’re married,” she said.

  He laughed. “You’re wicked, Patsy.”

  “You keep using old adjectives,” she said, sliding her hands up the sides of his chest. “Old blah-blah adjectives that no one uses anymore. That’s a habit you should swear off. Let those people watch us. They might learn something.” She slithered down to kiss the scar on his knee, then moved up. “The only thing I mind about sex,” she said after another minute, “and I’ve said this before, is that it cuts down on the small talk.”

  “We talk a lot,” Saul said, positioning himself next to her and finally entering her. He grunted, then said, “I think we talk more than most people. No, I’m sure of it. We’ve always jabbered. Most people don’t talk this much, men especially.” He was making genial moves inside her. “Of course, it’s hard to tell. I mean, who does surveys?”

  “Oh, Saul,” she said. “You know, I’m glad I know you. Out here in the wilds a girl needs a pal, she really does. You’re my pal, Saul. You are. I love you.”

  “It’s true,” he said. “We’re buddies. Bosom buddies.” He kissed a breast. On an impulse, he twisted slightly so that he could reach over to the card table behind him and scoop up a handful of Scrabble letters from the playing board.

  “Aren’t you too cute. What’re you doing?” she asked.

  “I’m going to baptize you,” he said, slowly dropping the tiled letters on her face and shoulders and breasts. “I’m going to baptize you in The Word.”

  “God,” she said, as a P and an E fell into her hair, “to think that I wanted to distract you with a mouse caught in a trap.”

  Saul had been hired eighteen months earlier to teach American history, journalism, and speech in the Five Oaks High School. In its general appearance and
in its particulars, however, Five Oaks, Michigan, was not what he and Patsy had had in mind. They had planned to settle down in Boston, or, in the worst-case scenario, the north side of Chicago, a good place for a young married couple. They had been working at office jobs in Evanston at the time after graduating from Northwestern, and one day, driving home along the lake, Saul seemed to have a seizure of frustration. He began to shout about the supervision and the random surveillance, how he couldn’t breathe or open his office window. “Budget projections for a bus company,” he said, “is no longer meaningful work, and it turns out that it never was.” He rambled on about getting certified for secondary school because he needed to contribute to what he called “the great project of undoing the dumbness that’s been done.”

  “Saul,” Patsy said, sitting on the passenger side and working at a week-old Sunday crossword, “you’re underlining your words again.”

  “This country is falling into the hands of the rich and stupid,” Saul grumbled, underlining his words while waving his right hand in an all-purpose gesture at the windshield. “The plutocrats are taking over and keeping everybody ignorant about how things are. The conspiracy of the inane starts in the schools, but it gets big results in business. Everywhere I’ve looked lately I’ve seen a cynic in a position of tremendous responsibility. We’re being undermined by rich cynics and common people who have been, forcibly, made stupid. This has got to stop. I’ve got to be a teacher. It’s a political necessity. At least for a few years.”

  “There’s lots of stupidity out there, Saul,” Patsy said, glancing up at a stoplight. “A big supply. You think you’re going to clear it away? That’s your plan?” She waited. “The light just turned green. Pay attention to the road, please.” She smiled. “‘Drive, he said.’” She reached out and touched him on the cheek. “‘For christ’s sake, look out where you’re going.’”

  “Don’t quote Creeley at me. I’m the big man for the job,” Saul said. “This country needs me.”

  “Well, of course.” She scratched her hair. “Write an editorial, why don’t you? Nine letters for ‘acidic.’ First letter is V and the fourth one is R.”