Saul and Patsy (30 page)

Twenty-six

The strands of toilet paper—were they like a set of icicles? or delicate traceries on a canvas? or thin cirrus clouds? or the white strings of misaligned protein molecules collecting in the wasting brain hemispheres of an Alzheimer patient?—the white strands of toilet paper hung down from the branches of Saul and Patsy’s tree in the front yard: ugly, and malice-begotten, and, finally, defeating all comparison. It was just toilet paper thrown into the tree. Patsy, seeing it there while stepping outside to get the morning paper, called out, “Saul! Goddamn it, Saul. Get out of bed and come see what they’ve done to us this time!”

After a few moments, during which Patsy watched a robin’s attempt to fly between the tree’s branches and the dangling toilet paper, Saul came shuffling onto the front stoop, rubbing his face violently with both hands. He put his palm on Patsy’s shoulder for balance as he lifted his left foot to scratch his right leg near the knee. Gazing at the tree, he said, with what seemed to be a tremendous effort at remaining calm, “Blue sky today. You know, I’ve really
got
to quit my job. Yeah,” he said, agreeing with himself, and nodding, “today is the perfect day for it, a blue-sky quitting day.” He breathed his stale dream-breath on her. “Today I quit.” Another pause. “I am no longer an educator. Today I am an un-educator.”

Patsy glanced at her husband, sizing him up. Hard to think of what else he would do with himself if he wasn’t in a classroom. Nor could she imagine what the world would welcome from him. Unemployment, maybe: the world would be happy to have Saul in no occupation whatsoever.

“Look,” he said, pointing. “They’ve painted the lawn blue.” She followed his pointing finger as directed. Yes, indeed, the little troop of local thugs had found some blue house paint and had poured it over their grass in no particular pattern. Vandal action painting alfresco. A blue lawn— she had never wanted such a thing or heard of it, except in a book she had once read. “He had come a long way to this blue lawn”—it was the only phrase she could remember from whatever book it was. Well,
she
had come a long way to
this
blue lawn, but this time the blue lawn wasn’t a metaphor but an object of the adolescent devils of the community, still excitable boys and girls, still intent on destruction.

Saul shuffled back into the house, fingering his nose. In the early morning he sometimes reminded her of a grumpy old man, coughing, as spiky as a pincushion, plagued with odd odors, opinionated and rather unclean.

You didn’t get rid of a contagion by blessing and burying its unquiet spirit, Patsy thought, as she went back inside to help Emmy get up and get dressed, and Theo diapered and fed. She had told him so and she was right. The unquiet spirits once stirred to action stayed stirred until they could manage some blood-spilling mayhem. Then they cooled down. Or else: they never would cool down. In the myths people lived by, devils stayed hot forever, perpetually fevered and licked by flames.

He wasn’t about to go to medical school or law school—Patsy understood
that,
at least. He had an abiding distaste for doctors as a class, and an equal distrust of lawyers—like bottleflies at the scene of illness and trouble. He didn’t want to turn himself into either one and had said so. In any case, his family on both sides was overpopulated with dermatologists and radiologists and litigators and patent attorneys and estate planners. They were all formidably short-tempered and quite well-off; Howie, of course, was the exception. Their topics of conversation often seemed to be limited to their golf games and their investment portfolios. A few waxed eloquent about their remodeled kitchens and their trips to Cancún. Saul had one uncle who could talk learnedly for an hour about his Sub-Zero refrigerator and his Vulcan gas stove. This mania for appliances was attached to both the men and the women. Their professions had addled them and reduced their sympathetic imaginations to small vestigial stumps.

No, Patsy thought, as she roused Emmy and helped her into her day-care outfit, whatever Saul decided to do with his adulthood, he would not go into one of those professions.

Soon after he had showered and shaved, taken Theo out of his crib and into his high chair in the kitchen, Saul called the superintendent of schools and then the principal, to let them know he wouldn’t be coming in today, or, for that matter, ever. He was resigning. Vermilya and Kabelá
both tried to argue with Saul, to persuade him to return to his job. He genially refused. They assumed, they both said, that this resignation was a joke of some sort, a grandstanding gesture, a “stunt” (Vermilya), an “opening move from Mr. Don Quixote” (Kabelá
), because if it was meant seriously, it was unprofessional and, Vermilya said—probably by accident—grounds for dismissal. Besides, schoolteachers never resigned voluntarily, Kabelá
informed him in his nasal voice. Saul was sitting on the living-room sofa listening to Kabelá
, the telephone cradled on his shoulder. In the kitchen, Patsy was spooning baby food into Theo while Emmy ate her cereal. Kabelá
continued with his theories about schoolteachers.
They didn’t have the nerve for actual unemployment. Nor
could they exist in the real world, with authentic jobs. This was why they taught: to
evade both employment and unemployment.
This was exactly the sort of person Saul was, Kabelá
continued: a teacher, unfit for the rigors of competition out there in the dog-eat-dog American business scene. Saul wasn’t doing, therefore, what he said he was doing.

“Zoltan, you knucklehead,” Saul said, “this is counterproductive argumentation you’re engaged in.”

“Come on, Saul,” Kabelá
pleaded. “As a friend, I’m advising you: stop with the quitting. We need you down here. We can all understand why you would want to do this, but—”

“No,” he said. “I can’t do it anymore. My heart wouldn’t be in it. I’ve got that kid’s blood to think about, and besides, I need to do something else. When I’ve thought about it, I’ll let you know what I’m going to do. Goodbye, Zoltan. You’re a good guy—and I know this’ll inconvenience you and everything, and I’m sorry about that.”

“I won’t ever write you a recommendation,” Zoltan said. “You’ll be unrecommended.”

“Okay,” Saul said happily, before he hung up. He liked the idea of being unrecommendable.

That day, on her way home from work—the newly unemployed Saul had taken Theo and picked up Emmy in their recently purchased used car— Patsy found herself at the Valu-Rite checkout line, with a pile of Bartlett pears, three grapefruit, a small bag of apples, and a bottle of cheap domestic champagne from the U.S.A., penny-pinching budget bubbles. She planned to celebrate Saul’s unemployment that evening with the booze and fresh fruit. Going unemployed was one of the braver actions he had ever taken. It was as if he had borrowed a leaf from Howie’s book; perhaps there was a correspondence in the two brothers’ genetic infrastructure that gave them a tropism toward indolence, lassitude, laziness, apathy, lusterlessness, acedia, disinterest. Then again, perhaps not.

“Uh, miss?” the checkout clerk said. “Your credit card?”

“Yes?” Patsy asked.

The clerk was a short, mostly pretty young woman with blond hair, a hard, narrow, birdlike face, and turquoise fingernail polish. She had, however, minimum-wage bags under her eyes, the result of working long hours for low pay and few benefits. She was, Patsy guessed, gradually going to fat: frustration-eating would soon be having its effects on her. She probably had a boyfriend who sometimes hit her where it didn’t show.