Saul and Patsy (13 page)

Her nipples were still sore, but the soreness was occasionally pleasing to her. She felt as if her entire body was being used in the way for which it was designed. She had kept this thought to herself. The apocalyptic sun flung itself through the window onto the linoleum floor as Mary Esther shifted in her arms, and Patsy leaned back, hot and tired but happy, though she could feel a spell of weeping coming on, more or less out of nowhere. Mary Esther had been eating well and was past her first siege of colic. She was growing a fine five-month-old baby. What was there to weep about? But there was no logic to crying sometimes; it was simply a visitation. When Patsy turned around, she performed a small inventory of the kitchen: the toaster, the polished white blender, the array of cooking utensils hanging to the side of the stove—spatula, serving spoon, potato masher. She loved to stake her claims by listing humble domestic objects to herself, and doing an inventory calmed her down whenever the tears appeared. Here was the dish drainer, there was the phone, and next to it the small yellow pad of paper for messages, with the blue plastic mechanical pencil nearby. The kitchen utensils liked her and accepted her. She gazed at her daughter, who had fallen asleep, though her lips were still moving, small contractions like kisses.

African violets, refrigerator magnets, photo of Mary Esther, jar for sugar, jar for rice, cookbook, unwashed eggbeater left out on the counter.

But she was tired of renting. She thought they should own a home of their own. Single people and couples came through her office, arranging home loans, and lately they had made her sick with envy.

She wanted another child. Somehow her tears were mixed up with this particular desire. There was a boy out there who wanted to be born. His name was already Theo. Patsy had noticed Saul gazing at her with desire a few minutes ago, and that look had pleased her.

With the softest of all possible motions, she hoisted Mary Esther onto her shoulder, carried her upstairs, and put her into her crib, kissing her on the forehead lightly, because it was so hot. Mary Esther called forth kisses. You kissed her without thinking, the way you breathed in air. Patsy touched her own forehead, gauging the depth of her sweat. Though she liked to sweat, the heat was beginning to get to her. Clothes were an irritation wherever they touched her in this heat, and so, automatically, she took her shoes off in the bedroom and left her blouse unbuttoned. Her wedding ring was an irritant against her skin, but it was who she was, as intimate as her own thoughts. As a dancer, Patsy practiced objectivity about bodies. Before the era of Mary Esther, whenever the warm weather arrived, she and Saul had walked around the house naked whenever they could, creating opportunistic situations for lovemaking, but that had ended. You couldn’t do that in front of a toddler: trauma and bitterness for decades, years of therapy, would result. Still, she would miss it. She would miss her animal-self, the beating of her heart, the feeling of her body, wholly body, fluttering its sleeves, walking through space, through the rooms, all the air on her skin, small eddies and bouquets of air. The pride of it, the power and certainty.

She made the bed and straightened up the baby’s things in the nursery. She collected some of the dirty laundry from the floor, first in her closet and then in Saul’s. Lifting one of his undershirts, she smelled him on it, that scent of vinegar and intelligent anxiety and friendliness. She carried the laundry down to the basement and dropped all the underwear into the washing machine. She could have done her tasks in pitch darkness— she knew where everything was—but on second thought, she flipped the light switch. Then she reached down to the dehumidifier.

She hardly felt anything, really nothing more than a solid blow of electrical current through her body, like a punch after anesthetic, but, as impersonal as it was, it held her for a moment before it threw her to the floor. Her first thought was, “
My baby.
Mary Esther. Don’t let me be dead.” Lying on the basement floor on her back, she saw the branching water pipes, and she heard the water gurgling through them. She saw the floorboards above her, the beams, the inconsequential slats.

She had been hit, she thought, by a small panel truck. A rusty urban truck, the size of a dog kennel, doing its hardscrabble tasks. But what was a truck doing in their basement? Near the laundry tubs? She would have to tell someone about the panel truck in the basement. But that was delirium, that thought—the afterburn of electricity scattering from her bare feet through her arm and then up into her brain. She put her hand to her eyes. The coldness of the basement floor against her back was, second by second, more than she could endure. Why hadn’t Saul ever fixed the damn humidifier? He simply hadn’t. She pushed herself upright and placed her feet, one after the other, on the waiting dirty stairs. They creaked. Wanting to get her blouse buttoned before she passed out or Saul and Harold returned, she made her way through the hallway into the kitchen and then up to the second floor, and she leaned down to pick up the remaining laundry in the bedroom, and when a second fit of dizziness took her, she dropped slowly, in extended slow motion, like a special effect, to a sitting position on the rug. Outside, a bird was singing, roaring hallucinating chirps, a terrible noise, music through saturated cotton.

After propping herself up, Patsy dazedly took off her blouse and put on a T-shirt, the clothes feeling like dream-stuff to her, dream-clothes on her suddenly clammy skin. Very tentatively, she stood up, grasping the windowsill for balance. She was okay. Rather quickly, she felt fine. She knew that it was eighteen minutes after one o’clock without looking at her watch. The electric shock had done that to her. She would never need a watch again in her life. She would always know what time it was. She went into Mary Esther’s room; with the shades drawn, even in this heat, the baby was still sleeping soundly, making tiny baby-snores. When she looked outside through the dusty glass, she saw the Bruckner Buick balloon above the treetops, and, on the front lawn, sitting next to his bicycle, Gordy Himmelman, holding the side of his broken head. Was she hallucinating again? No, he was back. Now he was always back.

Through the thick blanket of heat, she navigated her way out to where Gordy Himmelman was sitting. She didn’t think he had brought his gun this time. Where the bruises were, he had swelled up. He looked like a cartoon of a man with a toothache, or a boxer after eight rounds. As she approached him, she couldn’t think of what to say or what to do. So she just stood there in front of him.

“Don’t nobody around here ever wear shoes?” Gordy Himmelman asked, not looking up.

Patsy looked down at her feet. “Guess not.” Then she added, “It’s summertime.”

He nodded in agreement. “Okay,” he said pleasantly, pounding the grass with his fist. You
could
convince him with logic.

“Hi,” she replied. She sat down on the lawn next to him. She noticed that he gave off a powerful smell of rotting sugar beets, or vegetables left forgotten in the back of the refrigerator. “I was in the basement,” she said. “Just now. There’s a bad dehumidifier down there, it’s not grounded or something, and the electric shock . . . I was . . . it threw me to the floor. I didn’t know electricity could do that. I was almost . . .” She couldn’t think of the word. It was nineteen minutes past one. Now it was twenty minutes past one.

“Yeah?”

“I was almost . . .”

“Killed?”

“Yes. No. Killed with electricity. But there’s a word . . .”

“Electric-chaired.”

“No, that’s not the word.” She thought she would faint again, so she put her head between her knees. The blood rushed to her brain. “
Electrocuted.
I finally remembered it. Gordy, what are you doing here?”

“Dude.” He shook his head with exasperation. “Everybody keeps asking me that. Can’t I have some company?”

“So what else is happening, besides you?” Patsy asked, interested suddenly in all aspects of life. “You didn’t bring that gun again, did you?”

“She hid it. Hey, I saw a rat on my way over here,” he said. “Crossing the road in broad daylight. That’s what’s new. Homeless, on account of they filled in the dump. It was looking sickly. You ever see a rat dancing in broad daylight?”

No, she never had. They sat out on the lawn for another five minutes, saying nothing, Gordy pulling up little bits of grass, the two of them making small adjustments on the lawn so that they would stay in the shade, until Saul and Harold returned, both of them soaked in sweat and smelling like dogs, and Saul loaded Gordy and his bicycle back into the car and drove him home again, this time without incident. By that time, it was twelve minutes after two.

Seven

During the fall and winter, Mary Esther, whom they often called Emmy now, grew so rapidly and easily that her parents could not always believe their good fortune in having such a child. She was a mild, sweet-tempered baby, given to smiles and careful listening with her eyes wide open and her head slightly tilted in concentration. She only seemed to cry when there was something specific she wanted—food, or a diaper change, or sleep. Her screaming always appeared to have a rational purpose. She did not cry—as Delia informed Saul that he had done—for no particular reason, or for the pleasure of sheer temperamental discharge. When Emmy was eight months old, in November, her verbal sounds already seemed to be on the verge of becoming words, and she looked at her parents with such intelligence and full comprehension that at certain times Saul felt his privacy violated. Through some means that he could not imagine, his daughter had already acquired—he was certain of this—an ability to read his mind.

The house with loose brown aluminum siding was now too small for the three of them. Saul and Patsy were getting in one another’s way. That physical congestion had been a pleasure when they were first married, but now it was not. And the problem with mice in the basement was no longer a pretext for comedy. Besides, they did not want to be renters anymore to a landlord like Mr. Munger, the unsuccessful Pentecostal evangelist whose raptures, it was said, were unconvincing. To make ends meet, he worked as an electrician. He had come to fix the ungrounded humidifier and talked without conviction about Jesus.

During the time that they had been in Five Oaks, the farm fields near their house had been purchased by a developer from Ann Arbor, and on all sides of their rental property, apartments and condos and housing projects were springing up in fields where cows had once grazed and soybeans had been planted. Mr. Munger had not yet sold his property to the developers, but it was just a matter of time before he did. After a week of indecision, Saul and Patsy finally purchased a house on Whitefeather Road two miles closer to downtown than their rental house had been. A two-story economy-sized colonial on a good-sized lot in a development called The Uplands, the house had large front and back yards and a shady tree in front, and with some contributions from Patsy’s parents for the down payment, they had calculated that they could afford it, though just barely. Patsy found it curious, or mortifying, that she, a loan officer at the bank, had had to apply for a loan in exactly the way everyone else did.

They moved in in October. Saul took two personal days off from teaching American history to help Patsy unpack their earthly possessions—the furniture, the kitchen utensils, the posters, the board games, including the Scrabble set—and arrange the house. Patsy herself had taken two days’ leave from the bank branch where she now worked. Emmy’s room on the second floor looked north, where, in the distance, the Wolverine Outlet Mall was still visible, as was the Bruckner Buick plasticene polar bear, which their daughter also loved to see from the car. In the mornings, she would stand up in her crib and gaze out the window at the Bruckner Buick blimp balloon, which was usually observable on clear days to the east of the outlet mall.

After her first word, “Wzzat,” and her second word, “Mama,” her next word was “Dadda.” Her seventh or eighth word was “Gordy.”

Gordy had continued to show up intermittently on Saul and Patsy’s front lawn when they still lived in the rented house with loose brown aluminum siding. At first they were alarmed at his arrivals and would try to get him to go home. After four or five visits, however, they began to get used to him. Sometimes they gave him odd jobs to do, which he would either try to perform or not, depending on his mood and skills. A few times they paid him, and he looked at the money they handed to him with disbelief and incomprehension. He never thanked them or expressed any gratitude.

They had both given up trying to discover the purpose of his visits. After asking him what he wanted or what they could do for him and receiving no comprehensible answer, they didn’t persist. Saul called Brenda Bagley, and if she happened to be at home, she would tell him to send Gordy back if he was being a pest. He wasn’t a pest, exactly, but you couldn’t ask him anymore why he was there, because the question had become metaphysical. It was like trying to ask a dog why it followed you around.

Once they moved to their new house in The Uplands, however, they thought they were finally rid of him. It wasn’t as if they had moved in order to ditch him, but they were sure that the new location would put an end to his visits.

Yet somehow Gordy, who had dropped out of high school by this time, found out where they had moved to, and one Saturday morning in November, there he was again, standing under the large tree, the linden, that the developers had spared in their yard. In his characteristic way, Gordy was staring at the house, then at the sky, then at the ground, then at the house again. Their local acned Bartleby. He hadn’t come on his bicycle; The Uplands happened to be on the Five Oaks city busline route. Saul thought of calling the police to complain of Gordy as a trespasser, and then he imagined being laughed at for his complaint. He would have to take action himself.

He strolled out to the front yard. “You found us,” he said.

Gordy nodded.

“How did you manage to do that?” Saul inquired.

“I seen your car in the driveway,” Gordy informed him. “That white Chevy. That I rode in.” Saul went back into the house and left Gordy outside. He was not about to invite him in, what with the new floors, and the carpeting, and the carefully placed furniture. He wasn’t about to ask him to
do
anything.

At times Patsy would rise in the morning and walk into the nursery, only to find Mary Esther standing in her crib and, with a rapt expression, gazing through the window at the young man on the autumn lawn. Was he shivering? Patsy thought that they
should
call the police and have Gordy arrested for trespassing and stalking and harassment and just for making a general nuisance of himself—Gordy’s visits bothered and upset her—but Saul disagreed, saying that if they ignored him, he would gradually go away, and besides, if they had him arrested, he would still eventually find his way back. What were they going to do, get a court injunction, or call Gordy’s aunt again? No, Saul claimed, despite what he had once thought about Gordy—his mindlessness, his blank stares, the episode with the gun—he would cause them no trouble. Gordy meant them no harm, it seemed. He was just loitering without intent. It was an emotional thing with him. Sooner or later he would give it up.

Gradually they forgot about him even when he was there, the way you forget about your shadow. When they did remember to take notice of him, they would give him cookies, which he would sometimes eat.

As fall turned into winter, and Emmy gained weight and began to make herself crawl and achieved her first moves to an upright position, time seemed to pass more rapidly than Saul and Patsy had thought it would. Their jobs and their new house and their daughter took all their attention, and the presence of Gordy now and then on their front lawn gradually became an accepted part of their lives, a feature they recognized, anomalous though it was, as a given. Gordy Himmelman stood blankly on Saul and Patsy’s lawn, wearing his raffish visored cap. When they were working in front, raking leaves, he would shadow them and sometimes, if he could, help them out. “Every couple has something freakish in their lives that they have to accept,” Patsy said one evening at dinner, looking out at Gordy, standing there in the driveway as night fell and snow drifted slowly down. “He’s ours.”

Saul even began to think of Gordy as a sentry. On certain days he imagined Gordy as an unemployed bodyguard. At times, when winter’s grip had loosened and the snows began to melt and the mud appeared, Saul would check the yard, and if Gordy was not there—Gordy, the faithful zombie, their own private security service, Sergeant Bartleby, the last creation of Dr. Frankenstein—Saul felt a strange furtive disappointment.

But it wasn’t as if they were going to sanction this strange behavior. Gordy could stand out there facing the house—in the sunshine, or the rain, or the snow, or the mud—but they were not about to invite him in, or ask him again, or again, or again, why he was there. You didn’t have conversations over extended periods of time with someone like Gordy Himmelman about motivations. He wasn’t smart enough to have reasons for doing what he did. If he did have reasons, by now he would have revealed them. Or they would have appeared on his face: it would have taken on an expression of yearning, or resentment, or rage.

But his face, through the fall and then on through the winter, and then on to spring and early summer, remained as blank as ever. His eyes, as always, were distant and lunar. There was nothing to be done about him.