Saul and Patsy

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.”

“‘Vitriolic,’” Saul said. “And you could get certified, too. Or you could insinuate yourself into a bureaucracy and reorganize it. You’re so lovable, everybody just does what you ask them to do, without thinking. Boston is full of deadwood. God knows, you can reorganize deadwood. It’s been proved.” He waited. “You could do whatever you wanted to, if we moved out of here. What do you want to do, Patsy?”

“Finger-exercise composer,” Patsy said. “Six letters, last letter Y and first letter C.”

“Czerny.”

“Boston, huh?” She gazed at the sky. “It’s sort of hard to get teaching jobs there, isn’t it? Oh, and, by the way, what am I going to do if you start teaching? I don’t want to teach.”

“That’s what I was just asking you. You’re not listening to me. What do you want to do?” Patsy had had half-a-dozen majors before she settled for a double major in dance-performance and English.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what I want to do.” She studied the sky. “I’d like to go work in a bank, actually.” Another pause. “In the mortgage department.”

The statement was so unlike her, Saul smiled. One of her dry, shifty, ironical asides whose subtext you had to go in search of. Then he realized that perhaps she meant it, and he studied her face for aspersions, but Patsy, who was vehement about privacy issues, did not give herself away.

Saul had found, in his landlord’s shed, a ladder that was long enough to get him up to the roof of the house on Whitefeather Road. He’d been exploring Mr. Munger’s shed while Patsy was out getting groceries, and when she returned, he was sitting on the south peak with his legs dangling over the edge. Patsy put the grocery bags down on the driveway. “I won’t scream,” she said. “But I do have some questions.”

“Good,” he said.

“Saul, be truthful. Why are you sitting on the roof of our house?”

“Thinking,” he shouted. “Looking at the horizon.” He smiled down at her. “At the view. You are so beautiful. You’re the only beautiful sight here to see.”

“Thanks, but there’s no view,” she said. “Including me. I’m not a view. Nothing to see except what’s here. You need hills for variety, and we don’t have that.”

“Well, I was just hoping for a little variety — you know, a break. Maybe a show of some sort. I thought maybe I’d see something. An incline, a knoll, a mound would all have been fine. I’m not asking for an alp.”

“Well, you won’t get one. You won’t get one of any of them. No hills, honey. Remember? We agreed. No hills out here. Just drainage ditches. Come down from the roof, Saul, before you fall and kill yourself.”

“Patsy,” he asked, “how’d we end up here?”

“Times were hard,” she said, quoting the Wizard of Oz, “so we took the job.” She watched him. “That is, you took the job. Remember? It was the stupid crusade. Against stupidity, I mean. It was all your idea. I came along for the ride.” She gazed at him with a deliberately cool expression. “First I come along for the ride, and then you do.”

“Oh, right. Look at this,” he said despairingly, pointing at the land around their house. “You know, I think we made a terrible mistake, but I’m not blaming anybody. Including myself. All I see up here is dirt roads and farmers reading The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.”

“Saul,” she said, “they watch television now. They listen to police scanners. Also, it’s too early in your stay here for paranoia. They don’t have opinions about Jews, least of all you. Please come down. I’ve got to take those groceries in, and I could use your help. And please don’t break your neck. I’d have to supply more of the backbone for both of us.”

“It’s not Boston,” he said, edging toward the ladder. “And it’s not Chicago. It’s not Omaha. It’s this other thing. My brother warned me about this, and even my mother warned me. It’s this place smack out in the middle of nowhere, and now it has us in its grip.” One of the shingles loosened and slid to the gutter. The ladder trembled as he began to make his way down. “It’s scary up there, honey. It’s a view for adults. Not for kids. Kids couldn’t handle it.” He looked straight into her eyes.

“I hope—” she said, pausing.

“That you don’t go nuts out here? Me too. Me too.”

“Why should I go nuts?” she asked. “I like it here. Would you please help me with those groceries?”

Rung by rung he lowered himself and took the remaining grocery bags out of the car in a double embrace. He kept his eyes on Patsy as she carried her two bags toward the back door before propping them against the wall in order to free one hand to turn the doorknob. The house was never locked; there was no one to lock it against. Saul admired her physical agility as she went inside, and in any case rarely found fault with her. He loved his wife profoundly; it had become the theme to his life, his antidote to everything else. Sometimes, just watching her carrying in the groceries or making dinner, he thought his heart would break out of sheer happiness in her presence. He believed that nothing else in his life would equal his love for Patsy. Still, he thought she was being a little smug about how much she liked it here. She could be snobby about her populism.

Their nearest neighbor, Mrs. O’Neill, looked so much like Thelma Ritter in Rear Window that Saul and Patsy smirked at each other when she introduced herself at their door one Friday afternoon, peering inside as she asked them for a bottle of molasses that she might borrow for a batch of her cookies. Mrs. O’Neill’s curiosity about them was greedy but harmless, Saul thought. It was curiosity bred out of loneliness. As soon as Patsy found the bottle, Mrs. O’Neill invited them over to sample the cookies she had already made, and those that she would make with the molasses she was borrowing. Saul couldn’t decide whether Mrs. O’Neill’s nosiness was part of the community’s nosiness, or whether she was just nosy for herself alone. When Saul and Patsy pulled into her driveway, her garage door began to go up, even though Mrs. O’Neill had arrived before they had and her car was already inside. An iron coach-and-horse weather-vane stood on an iron stalk atop the garage’s cupola. Mrs. O’Neill stood near the geranium-surrounded flagpole, holding on to a push-button signal box, her eyes squinched.

“I’m garage-poor,” she said, pressing the button again to make the door go down. “But I never could resist a toy.” She offered the garage-door opener to Saul, who pressed the button. The door began to open again. “I said to myself, well, I need the gadget because I’m a single lady out here — the safety feature — but even that doesn’t explain the curtains.” Mrs. O’Neill’s garage had windows at the sides, with lace curtains. “I spent hours on those curtains. Imagine!” She gave out a self-deprecatory little laugh. “Curtains for a garage!”

“A good garage is important,” Patsy said, and immediately Saul smiled.

“That’s exactly it,” Mrs. O’Neill said, picking a bug off Patsy’s shoulder. “I’ll tell you what it was, since you’ll discover it soon enough. A project. I needed a project. Making curtains kept me awake during the daylight hours. Now you, Saul, you trot inside that garage and look at that gizmo in case you want to build one yourself, while Patsy and I go inside and have a few moments of girl-talk in the kitchen.”

Mrs. O’Neill grabbed Patsy’s arm and pulled her toward the back door of the house.

Saul walked in a lackadaisical fashion toward Mrs. O’Neill’s sheltered and curtained Buick, feeling that, as an adult, he need not follow instructions from a character like her. At least, he did not need to follow them to the letter. A steady wind from the unplowed fields to the south blew into the garage. The interior smelled of raw lumber and fresh paint, along with the fainter but more dense odor of overheated electrical wiring. Saul looked up — as instructed — at Mrs. O’Neill’s new garage-door opener. Unmechanical to a fault, he was unable to guess what structural-dynamic principles were involved in lifting a garage door up a set of tracks. With his head tilted back, he saw the company name on the side of the motor. He felt suddenly dizzy. He inhaled quickly and leaned his arm against Mrs. O’Neill’s car. He glanced out through the door and saw his own car, and then, beyond it, the horizon line of the Saginaw Valley, the semi-skyline of Five Oaks over there in the distance, and gold-brown topsoil whipped and scattered in spirals. He sat down on the bumper and put his head in his hands.

What was he doing here? What was he doing anywhere?

From the house came the sound of singing: Mrs. O’Neill’s voice— Patsy didn’t sing — a choir-loft soprano, a thin Irish upper register, without resonance or depth but as piercing as a factory whistle. Saul listened, the skin on the back of his neck slowly beginning to prickle. “Mi chiamano Mimi,” she was singing, “il perchè non so. Sola, mi fo il pranzo da me stesa.” She sang half the aria, the sound careening out of the house and dispersing in the yard. Saul felt his own mouth opening. A bird fluttered into the garage, changed course in an instant, and flew out, alighting at the top of Mrs. O’Neill’s flagpole. Saul wanted the garage door shut. He pressed the button. When he opened the door a minute later, Patsy was standing in front of it on the driveway, a plate of cookies in her hand.

“Aren’t you funny,” she said.

“She sings.” They looked at each other. “Where is she?”

“Yes, she sings. Still in the house. I noticed she had some opera records, and she said that she and her late lamented husband Earl used to listen to the Texaco broadcasts. She sings in church, as you can imagine.”

“Yeah, I guessed.”

“Anyway, she has all these records and CDs and she managed to learn some of the words. That was a demo she gave me. Want some of these cookies?”

“Of course. Dumb question.” He reached out and grabbed four off the plate. “I eat cookies while I’m deciding whether I’m going to eat any cookies.”

“She had some uncertainties about you.”

“About me? Uncertainties?”

“That’s why she wanted you to inspect her garage.”

“Oh.”

“She thought it was safe to ask me. Woman to woman.”

“What sort of questions did she have?”

“Oh, friendly questions, I think, or at least you could assume they were friendly.”

“Such as?”

“Does Saul eat cookies? Or is that against his religion?”

“Do Jews eat cookies.”

“That’s right. ‘Does he go to a temple?’ ‘Does he mind living here among us?’ She asked if we were rich. She asked if I was one of you.” Patsy bit into a cookie and wiped the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand.

“What’d you tell her?”

“I said I was once an Episcopalian, sort of, but now I was your wife.”

“And what did she say to that?”

“She said she was glad that you liked cookies.”

“There she is.”

Patsy turned around as Mrs. O’Neill leaned out of the back door to wave them both inside. “I won’t sing anymore,” she shouted. “You two lovebirds can come in now. It’s safe.”

Through the summer they visited Mrs. O’Neill every two weeks for Sunday-afternoon picnics in the shade of her maple tree. Patsy found a Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday job as a bank teller, a job that required very little training. They played Scrabble and Jeopardy, Trivial Pursuit and chess, and they listened to all their records and CDs at least twice. Patsy suggested that they travel north to explore the Upper Peninsula, but Saul said that travel was dangerous in those locales. When Patsy asked what dangers he was possibly talking about, he said that of course the Department of Natural Resources had kept the problem under wraps but that he, Saul, knew. . things. She could not budge him. He just didn’t want to go anywhere.

They had an oddball marriage, and they both knew it. Their love for each other had created a magic circle around themselves that outsiders could not penetrate. No one who had ever met them knew what made the two of them tick; the whole arrangement looked mildly fraudulent, a Hallmark Card sort of thing. Saul’s mother, Delia, had had an unremarkable marriage and as a still-youthful widow could be gamely witty on the subject of matrimony. Her opinion was that marriage was a practical economic arrangement demanded by the raising of children. In her view, Saul was a fanatical husband, close to unpresentable when he was around Patsy. He should recognize this devotedness of his as a social problem. People who stay in that kind of love once they’re married are a burden to others, Saul’s mother intimated. They should learn to tone themselves down. They don’t mean to show off, but the show-offing happens anyway with the gestures and the endearments and the icky glances. In this regard, Saul and Patsy also perplexed their other relatives and friends, who sometimes wanted to know their secret and at other times just wanted to get away from them, quickly.

Because he loved Patsy so much, Saul was constantly disappointed with the rest of the world. It didn’t measure up. Having moved to Five Oaks, mingling with the Cossacks, Saul could feel his disappointment beginning to fester. Why couldn’t the world be more like Patsy? The rest of the world — especially where they had found themselves, here in the Midwest — presented itself as both bland and coarse. Intelligence and attention were wasted on it, he thought. It occurred to him sometimes that Patsy did not want to be loved the way he was loving her, that he was bedeviling her, but he did his best to put that thought out of his mind.

With all the time they had before school began, Saul and Patsy made love frequently as an antidote to their boredom, Patsy having decided that they should try it in every room in the house. One afternoon late in the month they spread out a blanket in the backyard, out of sight of the road, and worked up what Saul called love sweat. Patsy claimed she had never made love outdoors before and said she liked it, it was like going to the midway at the state fair, except for the grass on her bare back — they had crawled away from the blanket. She worried about ants, for which she had a repugnance. She said she liked looking into the sky and thought it would be neat to gaze at a cloud while coming. They waited for the perfect cloud, and then Saul watched her as she came. True to her word, she kept her eyes wide open, focused, on the distance.

Two

Saul having his hair cut: Five Oaks’s north-side barbershop contained four chairs, a black-and-white television set on a wheeled table, a set of old magazines, and one barber with a permanently downcast expression. An antique barber pole twirled listlessly outside the front door. The barbershop looked more like a bookie joint than a genuine barbershop. When Saul sat down in the chair, the barber, whose name was Harold, tucked his cover cloth under Saul’s collar and whistled between his teeth. “Don’t see hair like yours much around here,” he said. “It’s almost kinky, wouldn’t you say?” The barber looked young but acted old.

Saul said yes, it was almost kinky, and what he basically wanted was a trim.

The barber set to work, sneaking looks at Days of Our Lives, which appeared in a pointillist quilt of snow and interference on the television set. Saul closed his eyes but opened them five minutes later, feeling the barber’s hand resting peacefully on his shoulder, the scissors motionless in his hair. “Say,” Saul said, nudging the barber’s stomach with his elbow. “Are we awake here? Harold? Hello?”

The barber inhaled, exhaled, snorted, and said sure, of course he was awake. The scissors started up again, their tips scraping Saul’s scalp. “Could be I did doze off there a minute,” the barber said. “But it’s only the third. . no, fourth time I’ve ever done that in this particular shop. I can sleep standing up, you see. Learned it in the army. Like a horse. The truth is, I have my troubles. I have woman trouble. It keeps me up part of the night, thinking about it. The soaps usually keep me awake. Are you from around here? We don’t see hair like yours too much in this town. It’s hard to cut.”

“We just moved here,” Saul said, to explain.

“From New York City, I’ll bet,” the barber, Harold, said. “They see hair like yours a lot in New York City, I hear.” He shook his head, as if to shake off his dreams. “But I imagine they have insomnia there, too. By the way, do you ever play basketball?”

Once classes at the high school had started, Saul’s route took him down Whitefeather Road for two miles before he turned left onto County Road E. On County Road E he pressed the car’s cruise-control button and removed his foot from the accelerator for the six-mile straightaway. There were no curves to the road; there never had been. With his foot off the accelerator, he ate his breakfast of Patsy’s muffins washed down with low-caffeine cola while he shaved with his electric razor and listened to the car’s tape deck, his early-morning music friend, Thelonious Monk, whose attitude toward daylight was offhand, smart, and antirural.

Three miles down County Road E and half a mile before it intersected with Bailey — Fraser Road was the morning’s bad news, standing on two legs on an average of three days a week. This bad news wore a hat and a jacket, sported gray socks and thick glasses — on some days he looked like the barber’s brother — and he stared at Saul with a mean, hateful expression.

The first few times Saul passed him, he waved. Saul didn’t expect a counterwave, and he didn’t get it. Like a sentry, the man stood glaring, an unwobbling pivot, his arms down at his sides. At last, in October, Saul slowed down on a Tuesday, and on the next day he stopped. Saul leaned out and said, “You want to say hello? Here’s your opportunity. The name’s Saul. Howdy.”

His greeting was returned with a blank look. Slowly, carefully, Saul lifted the finger to him and then hit the accelerator.

Saul to Patsy at dinner: “There’s this ghoul standing in his yard every morning giving me the Big Stare, and he’s got this hat nailed to his skull, and what I think is, he’s on to me, the schmuck hates Jews. Have I mentioned him? I have? He wants me out. One of these days he’s going to hoist a rifle and get me between the eyes.”

“You’re paranoid.” They were in the dining room and had been listening to Nielsen’s Four Temperaments Symphony, the anger movement. Choler spilled out of the speakers. It was not dinner music but an antidote to the rest of the day. Nielsen or Mingus, that was the choice.

“I’ve got a right to be paranoid,” Saul said angrily. “History encourages it. Plus, the man hates me. And for no reason: he doesn’t know me. I bet he’s a colonel in a Minuteman cadre. Or some militia or other. I’m going to get the Jewish Defense League on his case. They’ll blow him out of his yard straight into Lake Huron.”

Patsy stood up. “I’ll call Mrs. O’Neill.”

“You’d better not.” Saul looked alarmed. “What if she’s part of this conspiracy? She’d tip the rest of them off.”

Patsy shrugged. In five minutes she was back.

“Well?” While they ate, they had also been playing Scrabble, and when she was out of the room, Saul had traded two of his bad letters for better ones.

“Mrs. O’Neill says his name is Bart Connell.”

“A rabid anti-Semite.”

“Not exactly. He has Alzheimer’s. He lives with his daughter. They don’t let him stray out of the yard — we’re talking category-three dementia, living on his own private planet. He used to wander off onto the road. He flew bombing missions during the Second World War. Then he worked as a mechanic at a Ford dealership. Could fix anything. Now he can’t, quote, figure out how to put a key to a keyhole. Shame on you, Saul. He’s a plain good man with all his mind gone.”

Saul sulked.

“And put those two letters back,” she said. “I saw what you did.”

Saul’s students were younger than he remembered students were supposed to be for high school. Some were intelligent; others were not. How Saul performed in class didn’t seem to make that much difference one way or another. Those who were stupid stayed stupid, stubbornly. Some he inspired with an interest in American history, or with writing, or public speech. The work was hard, the preparations for his classes longer and more grueling than he had expected, the grading onerous, and the rewards only occasional, and he found himself now and then losing his train of thought from the effect of so many youthful eyes watching him, all those students wondering what he would do next. In the back of his classroom, the losers — those with learning deficiencies and antisocial habits — fell asleep or chewed gum or laughed inappropriately or wrote their illiterate little notes. Saul felt he should do something about them, and one of these days he would think of what that something would be. The mean-spirited, learning-disabled lost souls: he would attend to them sooner or later.

The Five Oaks School District was close to bankruptcy, and in his classrooms the fluorescent lights flickered or burned out and were not replaced. There was always a shortage of chalk, and the windows leaked. The district had pink-slipped its remedial-reading teacher the previous year.

In the teachers’ lounge, the talk was of their children, or health insurance, or places to go on vacation in July, or what had been on television the night before, or gossip. Sometimes Saul joined in. He often thought he was observing them and himself from a distance.

Now and then in his classrooms he watched, with sympathy and irritation, the boys and girls falling in love with each other.

One weekend evening in the late fall, an old blues guitarist whose music both Saul and Patsy liked was advertised as playing on the following Saturday night at Holbein College. The campus was on the other side of Five Oaks, about twenty minutes away. He would be performing in an auditorium in the campus student center, the ad said, and the event was open to the public, with tickets on sale at the door. The next weekend, Saul and Patsy dressed in the most drab-and-ratty clothes they still owned, to disguise themselves as postadolescent but preadult, and drove over to the campus one hour early, hoping that the concert hadn’t been sold out.

They parked in a visitors’ parking lot and walked hand in hand to the front entrance. It was a mild, cool evening with a hint of rain in the distance. Students called to each other and tossed Frisbees on the lawns. In the student union, undergraduates in the latest complicated fashions, with faces fitted out with contemporary distastes and forms of earnestness, walked past them in the foyer, paying no attention to them, transfixed with themselves alone. They were beautiful but wanted to be admired for their minds, of all things. Saul stopped to inhale.

“God,” he said. “I miss it. I miss being on a campus. I miss not being an adult, quite yet. I miss being twenty. I miss that stink.”

Patsy studied him. “Yeah,” she said, “you do have that nostalgia thing going on. Come on, Saul. Enough about you. I’m hungry. Let’s get me a bag of potato chips.” After buying the tickets — the concert was far from being sold out, the blues having little purchase here at Holbein College— they walked down the student union hallway to an alcove where some vending machines stood. On one of the vending machines, the dispenser of individually bagged snack foods, someone had taped a warning sign:

OUT OF ORDURE

“God, I miss it,” Saul said. “Cleverness. Verbal agility. I wonder if a French major put that up,” Saul said. “Et pourtant vous serez semblable à cette ordure—”

“For Christ’s sake, Saul,” Patsy said, giving him a peeved look. “I know the poem.” She softened quickly. “You used to recite it to me, remember? To freak me out with Baudelaire?”

“Yeah, I was just being nostalgic. Just as you say.” They stood there and watched the students parading by, accessorized with their preoccupations, and Saul glanced over at Patsy and saw instantly that she had outgrown the glamour of youth, the metallic sheen of immaturity and total enraptured self-mindedness. She had been glad to get out into the world where she lived now; he had not. Involuntarily, he put his hand over his heart.

All through the concert he noticed from his wife’s stillness and concentration that, in fact, he understood the blues much better than she did. The old black guy up on the stage, with his gray hair and pressed pants and shoes spotted with flecks of mud, sang and played his heart out. Saul didn’t have to think about the music to get it; for him, no effort at translation was necessary.

Also, he was beginning to suffer from insomnia, just like Harold, the barber. During the day while teaching his classes, he would feel drowsy, but when his head fell onto the pillow, he would sleep for an hour and then wake with the sensation that a movie-premiere arc-light was shining in his face. Along his legs and his chest there fluttered a distinct feeling of insects. This sensation made Saul want to jump out of his skin, leave his body behind like an ill-fitting pair of pajamas. At these times, still in his cocoon-body, he lay there thinking that the meaning of a serious career and of adulthood generally had escaped him. In the middle of the night, life did not seem to be the trifling joke he once thought it might be, nor were its problems merely academic ones. Devils lurked. At such times he would take Patsy, awake or asleep, into his arms. He wanted to admit that he had made a terrible mistake and that they were suffering the consequences of his misjudgments.

After all, his brother, Howie, the entrepreneur, was on the West Coast, making West Coast money in various start-ups, fledgling technology and software projects of which Saul understood nothing. Howie was younger than Saul and already a millionaire, or so he claimed. Saul’s impression was that West Coast businesses were like West Coast football: you threw the ball up into the air and sort of expected someone to catch it, and usually someone did. Howie did not hesitate to call now and then to announce his various successes in vague incomprehensible detail. Then Saul’s mother, Delia, would call to talk about Howie’s successes to Saul, repeating the vague incomprehensible details at greater length and fuller incomprehensibility. Being an older brother whose idealism had resulted in a high school teaching job — this made Saul feel, during his bouts of insomnia at three in the morning, in his rented house, with midwestern farmland outside, as if he had been bested, outdone and undone. Sounds came up from the basement. Dream hounds bayed. Never again would he and his wife live in the fully human world. He had brought his wife out to this godforsaken place. The trouble with Patsy was that she said she liked it fine in Five Oaks. She could be sanctimonious about her adaptability. All he could do was hold on to her and wait for the hours to pass.

If anything should happen to her, he thought, he would surely die.

He climbed to the roof of the house to correct quizzes and tests. Staring out over the fields, he felt his attention disperse into the landscape, floating gradually into the topsoil, like pollen. Then he would look down and underline a sentence fragment in green ink.

Saul’s mother, Delia, had lost her husband, Saul’s father, Norman, to a premature heart attack some years ago, when Howie had been eight years old and Saul ten. In a traffic jam outside Baltimore, Norman Bernstein had died quietly and submissively inside his Buick, his head slumped over the wheel, his car clogging the already clogged arterial-highway. Thinking of this, Saul sometimes imagined his father’s coronary thrombosis producing a traffic thrombosis, blocking the flow of vehicles for hours. His self-effacing father would have hated his own death for its public-nuisance value. He would have preferred to die in a private manner that would have bothered no one.

As for Delia, Saul’s mother had had a wild youth, Saul had understood from one or two family friends who had reported that she had been a real “firecracker,” but he also inferred from her indifferent manner of talking about her husband that the marriage had been a convenience of sorts, a way of starting a family with a reliable man, a means of avoiding loneliness; and his father’s death, while certainly a shock, had not plunged her into mind-numbing grief. She had traded passion for reliability, and when a reliable man dies, he leaves behind a sufficiently huge sum of life-insurance money to take care of everybody, and Saul’s father had done exactly that. Saul missed his dull, sweet, and reliable father the way a child misses a favorite dog, but every time he tried to speak to his mother (who was still, after all, in her mid-forties) about his dad, she listened carefully but did not participate in his sorrow, perhaps on principle.

Musing about his mother, Saul recognized that she missed high school (not college, as he did) and the grand passions more than she missed her husband, who had been, in romance, a utility player. There was still an out-of-control quality to her emotions, an uncapped heat coming from her furnace heart that Saul was afraid of, both for her and himself. In her marriage, his mother had been undermatched. She was ready for a wonderful midlife crisis, and Saul was bracing himself for it.

Whenever she called, she disparaged the Midwest, and Saul’s career choice, though she was careful never to criticize Patsy, or Saul and Patsy’s unseemly love for each other. She would praise, incomprehensibly, Saul’s brother, and always refer to Howie’s good looks and his parade of girlfriends — Saul suspected his brother had boyfriends as well — and his income. It was as if Saul and Patsy’s marriage, with its crazy love, was an error in taste or judgment; it lacked the interesting variety to be found in Howie’s succession of bedmates. It lacked anecdotal value. If Saul would only return to Baltimore, his mother intimated, perhaps she could set him straight.

“Ma,” he said. “We’re staying here.” Any suggestion from his mother, no matter how sensible, had to be rejected, simply because it came from her.

“Staying? Staying for what? For how long?”

“For as long as it takes.”

“As long as what takes? Honey, you’ll never have a normal life as long as you live there.”

“What’s normal? Explain that to me.”

“Ah, now you’re setting one of your traps. I know your tricks. You want me to say restaurants and concerts and good movies and book-stores, but I won’t.”

“They have some of those things here.”

“I didn’t say it!” She waited. “Think of Howie’s wonderful life, out there in San Francisco. I worry about you, living on that dirt road. I don’t like dirt roads. I don’t like the people who live on them—”

“—You’ve never known anybody who lived on a dirt road, except those people, the Friedkins, who lived in that sixty-thousand-square-foot house out in that suburb where they—”

“—Let me finish. I’m not talking about the Friedkins. I’m talking about you. Earning such a lousy salary. Don’t think I don’t admire your wonderful idealism. Everyone in the family admires your wonderful idealism, Saul, you know that. But it’s like you’ve fallen into a. . cave.”

“Like a bear,” Saul said, thoughtfully. “A bear in a cave. Now, that could be true.”

“So move out. Find an urban cave this time.”

“Don’t want to. I’m starting to like it here.”

“What’s to like? Dirt? Fields? Sheep?”

“They don’t have sheep here. No, I’ll tell you what there is to like about it, which you would discover if you ever came to visit.”

“What?”

“The indifference. Ma, I never lived with indifference before.”

“Indifference?” she roared, and jingled her bracelets. He could smell her perfume over the phone. “You value indifference? Have you gone crazy?”

“You never gave me a moment of it. You never left me alone.” Saul felt himself getting angry. “You were always kissing me.” Actually, now that he thought about it, the kissing had occurred before his father died. After his father died, she stopped with the kissing. Some psychic economy had gone to work on her. He was careful not to say that his father had always been the recipient of Delia’s genial and friendly indifference. She wasn’t cold, just cool to him. Even as a boy, Saul knew that his father was not a passionate man, that his thermostat was set lower than his mother’s — even Saul as a boy could see that his parents’ marriage lacked something. Nevertheless, Saul’s father had managed to thrive on his wife’s indifference, until he died; in death he had finally achieved a greater indifference than hers.

“Indifference is a terrible thing, kiddo,” Delia was saying. “Awful. Cold. Cold at the heart.”

“How would you know? You’ve never lived with it,” Saul said, knowing that he was saying the-thing-which-was-not. “Imagine people not caring that much what you do. Imagine people leaving you alone.”

“You’re describing a nightmare.”

“Now you’re guessing. When did people ever leave you alone? When did they ever leave me alone? Never. That’s when.”

“Saulie, let’s not fight.” She sighed dramatically. “Furthermore, if you’re baiting me to talk about Norman, I won’t. Maybe you should move to another city. If only you were in Detroit. You have relatives in Detroit.”

“Exactly what Harold says. You been talking to him?”

“Who’s Harold?”

“He’s my barber. He says people look like me in Detroit. Or New York, I forget which.”

“Last time I talked to Patsy,” Saul’s mother said, changing the subject, “a couple of weeks back, she said you’d joined a bowling league.” Delia waited. “You, bowling? Jews don’t bowl.”

“Another eleventh commandment!” Saul protested. “Besides, what do you know about Jews?”

“I’m Jewish. That’s all I have to know about it. And I know you’re Jewish, and you’re trying to aggravate me.”

Saul felt his breathing passages getting clogged. He gasped for air. “Ma,” he said, “you’re giving me asthma. Let’s not discuss this.”

“Have you been to a doctor?” He replied with silence. “For your breathing, go to a doctor. Honey,” she said, “what am I going to say to my friends about you?”

“You can say Saul and Patsy are getting comfortable in Michigan.”

“All right, Saul. I give up. You want me to say that, that’s what I’ll say. Pour your life down the drain, if that’s your ambition. I accept it.” She sighed, a two-note sigh. “But let me tell you something, my friend. It’s not a normal life you’re leading out there.”

“Okay, Ma. I’ll bite. What kind of a life is it?”

“It’s nothing, and that’s my last word on the subject. You’re living in nothingness. It’ll eat you up. As anyone with a brain in his head would tell you. But I won’t interfere. Maybe nothingness suits you.”

“Oh, I thrive on it. It is my mother’s milk.”

There was a long pause.

“All right, be sarcastic,” she said. “I can tell we aren’t making progress. Goodbye, honey. I’ll call again in two weeks.” She made artificial and insincere kissing noises on the mouthpiece.

“Bye, Ma.” Saul hung up the telephone in the kitchen and walked into the living room, where Patsy was watching the Sunday-afternoon movie, From Here to Eternity. “Take off your clothes,” he said. “We’re going to mess around.”

She kept her eyes on the screen. “Not now. I don’t want to right now. At least not until this scene is over.” She glanced up at him. “Did the Marschallin call, sweetheart? You must’ve just talked to her.”

Saul waited impatiently until the movie was over.

In the April tournament held at the Aqua Bowl, Saul scored 201, 194, and 132, and at the party afterward at Mad Dog Bettermine’s summer house on the Tittabawassee River, he was exultant. Everyone had been told to bring a favorite CD to the party, and Saul, in an ironic mood that then gave way to earnestness, had brought Etta James singing Billie Holiday.

Mad Dog taught shop class and coached the wrestling team. No one had ever seen him button a collar around his own neck. For the party, his statuesque girlfriend Karla had prepared two huge casseroles, one with tuna and the other with chicken, and in the back room Mad Dog was busy rolling joints packed with the most powerful Colombian — grown, Mad Dog claimed, in the wet upper altitudes — that money could buy. Around the room on bookshelves were Mad Dog’s Lionel trains, including a complete model of the Twentieth Century Limited with baggage car, lounge, Pullman sleepers, diner, coaches, and engines. The track had been laid on top of a little red carpet. Sitting on a blue beanbag chair, Saul asked, his voice thickening with smoke, why Mad Dog didn’t run his trains on a layout but had set them up on a bookshelf display instead.

“These trains,” Mad Dog announced, “are too good to run.” He inhaled and inhaled and inhaled. “They’re classics,” he gasped. He slipped his fingers inside his shirt and started to scratch.

Saul nodded. He was wearing his bowling shirt with his name patch sewed on in front. In the next room, also thick with smoke, Patsy was dancing with Toby Finch, a fat man, as his name suggested, who taught social studies. On the other side of the room various people were tossing money on the floor as an incentive to someone to run down to the Tittebawasee River and jump into it. The money would be collected whether the daredevil wore clothes or not.

An hour later, Saul’s Etta James CD was playing, and Saul himself was standing upright in the middle of the living room, a bottle of Chablis in one hand, a cigarette in the other (he was not a smoker, but he was smoking — Saul insisted he could not be identified by the acts he occasionally performed). He was singing loudly, an unpracticed baritone. There was some muted applause and encouragement as Mad Dog appeared at one side of the room with another joint, and Toby appeared at the other, his clothes soaking wet. He was demanding cash.

“You needed a witness!” Mad Dog said. “For all we know, you went out there and wet yourself down with a garden hose.”

“It’s not connected,” Toby said. “I tried it.”

“Well, you got wet once,” Saul said. “Get wet again. What’s the difference? We’ll watch you this time.”

“Yeah,” Mad Dog said. “That’s right. We’ll watch you jump in.”

The entire party left the house and stumbled down the hillside steps, Mad Dog shushing them, until they reached the river. Half of them stood in a clump on Mad Dog’s dock, while the rest gathered in the weeds and high grass just behind a small patch of sand. Toby was standing at the end of the dock, complaining of friends who doubted one’s word, friends who had not taken his measure as a man and as vice-president of the Five Oaks teachers’ union.

As he talked, Patsy nudged Saul in the ribs. “What about the current?” she whispered. “What about the current in the damn river?”

Saul offered the bottle of Chablis to Patsy. She shook her head. “I asked you about the current.”

Just as Toby jumped in, Saul said, “If he can survive the cold, he can survive the current.” Upon hitting the water, Toby’s bulk threw up a splash in all directions, wetting down those spectators on the dock. Patsy felt several drops of water in her eyes, and as she wiped them away, she said, “Where is he? Where’s Toby?”

“He’s there.” Saul pointed. “Look.”

Toby stood waist deep in the Tittebawasee River, bowing to a broken round of applause. The lower buttons of his shirt had loosened, and the rolls of fat around his midsection glowed porcelain white in the darkness. Someone threw him a dollar bill, which floated in front of him and then began drifting downstream.

“I was worried,” Patsy said, turning back toward the hillside. “I thought he might drown or something.”

Back in the house, someone had put on a band called The School of Velocity, and then someone else played Magnetic Fields. There was an argument about what time it was. Toby was stuffing his soaked trousers with dollar bills scattered on the floor near the kitchen, and then Saul was demonstrating how to do the tango with Patsy, and as they time-stepped across the living room, they knocked over an ashtray. People were applauding and laughing; someone — Mad Dog said it was Karla — was throwing up in the bathroom, and then the CD player was playing a rap artist, Dr. Dogg E.

Then it was two o’clock, and Saul and Patsy were at the door, Patsy’s hand on Mad Dog’s shoulder.

“Mad Dog,” Patsy said, “you are one hundred and seventy pounds of brain death.”

Mad Dog held up his index finger. “One hundred seventy-five pounds.” He laughed. “Don’t knock brain death until you’ve tried it.”

“I’ve tried it,” Saul said, searching the darkness for their car. “And I love it. Thanks, buddy. Tell Karla thanks, when she’s cooled down. Great hot dish. Great party. See you Monday.”

The two of them staggered off toward the unappeasable dark. Mud stuck to the soles of their shoes. At the car, Saul fiddled with his keys, trying to get at least one of them into the door lock. “You know, Patsy,” he said, “I do love this place sometimes. I love these people.”

“I know,” Patsy said, leaning against the car, waiting for him, her eyes already closed. “I know.”

And then they were in the car, strapped in, and the car was heading south on State Highway 14, and Patsy was asleep beside Saul. Saul leaned back and pressed the cruise-control button. He did not even realize that he was shutting his eyes. How drowsy he suddenly felt! It was the effect of the insomnia. It turned waking life into a dream. He was dreaming of Patsy, sleeping within arm’s reach: Patsy, whom he loved all the way down to the root. If anything happened to her, he would surely die. He thought of his mother. Then he was dreaming of Mrs. O’Neill, carrying a gigantic plate of chocolate chip cookies. And Bart Connell and the barber, Harold, asleep on their feet. Then he thought of an aging African-American man with a goatee playing the guitar and singing the blues on an otherwise empty stage, in a single spotlight, to a sparse, unbluesy audience at Holbein College. He loved that man, the blues and the dignity. The two red taillights of Saul and Patsy’s car went around a corner that wasn’t there; then one of them moved up directly above the other. It came down again hard, on the wrong side, and began blinking.

Three

A smell of spilled gasoline: when Saul opened his eyes, he was still strapped in behind his lap-and-shoulder belt, but the car he sat in was upside down and in a field of some sort. The car’s headlights illuminated a sky of dirt, and, in the distance, a tree growing downward from that same sky. Perhaps he had awakened out of sleep into another dream. “Patsy?” he said, turning with difficulty toward his wife strapped in on the passenger side, her hair hanging down from her scalp, but, from Saul’s perspective, standing up. She was still sleeping; she was always a sound sleeper; she could sleep upside down and was doing so now. The car’s radio was playing Ray Charles’s “Unchain My Heart,” and Saul said aloud, “You know, I’ve always liked that song.” His voice was thick from beer, Chablis — whatever they had had to drink — and cigarettes, and he knew from the smell of the beer that this was no dream because he had never been able to imagine concrete details like that. No: he had fallen asleep at the wheel, driven off the road, and rolled the car. Here he was now, awake but unsober. At least this road was remote and unpatrolled. A thought passed through him in an unpleasant slow-motion way that the car was upended and that the ignition was still on. He switched it off and felt intelligent for three seconds until the lap belt began to hurt him and he felt stupid again. No ignition, no Ray Charles. His mind, which had eased itself into oblivion for Mad Dog’s party, returned to a sort of homeroom anxiety, as it moved slowly down a dark narrow alley-way cluttered with alcohol, fatigue, and the first onset of shock. Probably the car would blow up, and the only satisfaction his mother would receive from this accident would come years from now, when she would tell people, at the point when they were all through reminiscing about Saul, “I told him not to drink. I told him about drinking and driving. But he never listened to me. Never.”

“Patsy.” He reached out and gave her a little shake.

“What?” She opened her eyes.

“Wake up. I rolled the car. Patsy, we’ve got to get out of here.”

“Why, Saul?” She looked at him with displeasure.

“Because we have to. Patsy, we’re not at home. We’re in the car. And we’re upside down. Come on, honey, wake up. Please. This is serious.”

“I am awake.” She blinked, twisted her head, then looked calm. Her opal earring glittered in the light of the dashboard. The earring made Saul think of stability and a possible future life, if only he would normalize himself. Patsy smiled. Saul thought that this smile had something to do with guardian angels who, judging from the evidence, flew invisibly around her head, beaming down benevolence. “Well, Saul,” she said, turning to look at him carefully, “are you all right?”

“Yes, yes, I’m not hurt at all.”

“Good. Well. Neither am I, I don’t think.” She reached tentatively toward the ceiling. “This isn’t fun. Did you do this, Saul?”

“Yes, I did. How do we get out of here?”

“Let’s see,” she said, speaking calmly, in her usual tone. “What I think you do is, you release your seat belt, stick your arms straight up, then lower yourself slowly so you don’t break your neck. Then you crawl out the window, the higher one. That would be yours.”

“Okay.” He held his arm up, then unfastened the clasp and felt himself dropping onto the car’s ceiling. He pulled himself toward the side window. When he was outside, he leaned over, back in, and extended his hand to Patsy to help her out.

As she emerged through the window, she was smiling. Disasters didn’t appear to have the power to alienate her from life. “Haven’t you ever rolled a car before, Saul? I have. Or one of my boyfriends did, years ago.” She was breathing rapidly. She dragged herself out, dusted her jeans, and strolled a few feet beyond the car’s tire tracks in the mud, as if nothing much had happened. “Beautiful night,” she said. “Look at those stars.” For a moment he thought she was dissociating.

“Jeez, Patsy,” Saul said, jumping down close to where she stood, “this is no time for being cosmic.” Then he gazed up. She was right: the sky was pillowed with stars. She took his hand.

“Are you really okay?” she asked. “My God, feel that. You’re shaking like a leaf. You must be in shock.” She wrapped her arms around him and held him fast for half a minute. “There,” she said, “now that’s better.” She studied him. “You’re still drunk. What a mess you are.”

“We’re not kids anymore,” Saul said. “We can’t get drunk all the time at parties and roll cars. We’ll get killed. We could have died.”

“But we didn’t.”

“We could have.”

“All right. Yes. I know. You can die in your sleep. You can die watching television.” She observed him in the dark, as if she were spying on him. “I wish I had been driving. It’s so warm, a spring night, I think I would have been singing along to the radio to stay awake. ‘Unchain My Heart’—I would have been singing along to Ray Charles and I would have stayed awake and we’d be home by now.” She leaned over. “Smell the soil? It’s loamy. You know, Saul, you should turn the car’s headlights off. Save the battery.”

“Patsy, the car is wrecked! Look at it.”

“Don’t be silly.” She studied the car with equanimity, one hand raised to her face, the other hand cradling her elbow. Patsy’s equanimity was otherworldly and constant. The combination of her beauty and her persistent unexplainable interest in Saul was puzzling to him. “Saul, that car is fine. We might be driving it tomorrow. The roof will have a dent, that’s all. The car turned over softly and slowly. It’s hardly hurt. What we have to do now is get to a house and call someone to help us. We could walk across this field, or we could just take the road back to Mad Dog’s. I’m sure they’re still going strong.”

“Patsy, I can’t think. My brain has seized up.”

“Well,” she said, taking his hand, “I happen to like these stars, and that looks like a nice field, and I’d rather stay away from Highway 14 this time of night, what with the drunks on the road and all.” She gave him a tug on his sleeve, and he almost fell. “There you are,” she said. “Come on.”

As Saul walked across the field, hearing the slurp of his shoes in the spring mud, he saw the red blinking light of a radio tower in the distance, the only remotely friendly sight anywhere beneath the horizon. Just when he thought he had been accepted among these Midwesterners, not just as a Jew but as himself, his car had turned over. Oblivion had almost swallowed him, as his mother had predicted it might. That he was here at all was a sign, he thought, that his life was disordered after all, abandoned to chaos among rural Gentiles, connoisseurs of rifles, violence, and piety. He smelled manure nearby, and somewhere behind him he thought he heard the predatory wingbeat of a bat or an owl. First the Gentiles, then the Gnostics.

He had thought he was a missionary, bringing education and the higher enlightenments to rural, benighted adolescents, but somehow the conversion had gone the other way, and now here he was, acting like them: going to parties, getting drunk, falling asleep, rolling his car. It was the sort of accident Christians had. He felt obscurely that he had given up personal complexity and become simple in the midwestern style, like those girls who worked at the drugstore arranging greeting cards. They were so straightforward that two seconds before they did anything, like give change, you could see every gesture coming. He was becoming like that. As a personality, Saul had once prided himself on being interesting, almost Byzantine, a challenge to any therapist. But having joined the school bowling league, he couldn’t seem to concentrate on Schopenhauer on those days when, at odds and ashamed of himself, he took the battered Signet Classic of The World as Will and Idea down from the shelf and glowered at the indecipherable lines he had highlighted with yellow Magic Marker in college. When he did understand, the philosopher seemed no longer profound, but merely a disappointed idealist with an ungainly prose style.

“Saul?”

“What?”

“I’ve been talking to you. Did you hear me?”

“Guess not. I was lost in thought.” He stumbled against a bush. He couldn’t see much, and he reached out for Patsy’s hand. “I was thinking about girls in drugstores and Schopenhauer and the reasons why we ever came to this place.”

“Jesus. I wish to Christ that you would listen to me sometimes. If you had been listening to me, you wouldn’t have stumbled into that bush. That’s what I was warning you about.”

“Thanks. Where are we?”

“We’re going down into this little gully, and when we get up on the other side, we’ll be right near that farmhouse. What’s the matter?”

He turned around and saw, across the field, the headlights of his car shining on the upturned dirt; he saw the Chevy’s four tires facing the air; and he thought of his new jovial recklessness and of how he had almost killed himself and his wife. He said nothing because he was beginning to feel soul-sick, a state of spiritual dizziness, and also because he had forgotten to turn off the headlights. He was possessed by disequilibrium. He felt the urge to giggle, and was horrified by himself. He had a sudden marionette feeling.

“Saul! You’re drifting off again. What is it this time?”

“Puppets.”

“Puppets?”

“Yeah. You know — the way they don’t have a center of gravity. Uh, Kleist. . What I mean is. The way they look. .”

“Watch out for that stump.”

He saw it in time to avoid it. “Patsy, how do you live in the world? This is a serious question.”

“Stop it, Saul. You’ve been to a party. You’re tired. Don’t get metaphysical on me. Please. It’s two in the morning. You live in the world by knocking on the door of that farmhouse, that’s what you do. You ring the doorbell.”

They walked up past a shed whose flaking red door was hanging open, and they crossed the pitted driveway onto a small front yard with an evenly mowed lawn. A tire swing, pendulating slowly, hung down from a tree branch. Saul couldn’t see much of the house in the dark, but as they crossed the driveway, kicking a few stones, they heard the bark of a dog from inside the house, a low bark from a big dog: a farm dog with a name like Trixie.

“Anti-Semites,” Saul said.

“Just ring the bell.”

After a moment, the porch light went on, yellow, probably a bug light, Saul thought; and then under the oddly colored glare a very young woman appeared, pale blond hair and skin, very pretty, but under the effect of the bulb looking a bit jaundiced. With her fists she was rubbing her eyes with sleepiness. She wore a bathrobe decorated with huge blue flowers. Saul and Patsy explained themselves and their predicament— Saul was sure he had seen this young woman before — and she invited them in to use the phone. When they entered, the dog — old, with a gray muzzle — growled from under the living-room table but did not bother to get up. After Patsy and the woman, whose name was Anne, began talking, it developed that they had met before in the bank where Patsy worked as a teller. They leaned toward each other. Their voices quickly rose in the transfiguration of friendliness as they disappeared into the kitchen. They seemed suddenly chipper and cheery to Saul, as if a new party had started. He had the impression that women enjoyed being friendly, whereas for men it was an effort. At least it was an effort for him. He heard Patsy dialing a number on an old rotary phone, laughing and whispering as she did so.

He was left alone in the living room. Having nothing else to do, he looked around: high ceilings and elaborate wainscoting, lamps, table, rug, dog, calendar, the usual crucifix on the wall above the TV. There was something about the room that bothered him, and it took a moment before he knew what it was. It felt like a museum of earlier American feelings. Not a single ironic sentence had ever been spoken here. Everything in the room was sincere, everything except himself. In the midst of all this midwestern earnestness, he was the one thing wrong. What was he doing here? What was he doing anywhere? He was accustomed to asking himself such questions.

Mad Dog’s party now seemed to be months, or years, ago.

“Mr. Bernstein?”

Saul turned around and saw the man of the house, who at first glance still seemed to be a boy, standing at the bottom of the stairs. He had his arms crossed, and he wore a sleepy but alert look on his face. He had on boxer shorts and a T-shirt, and Saul recognized, underneath the brown hair and the beard, a student from last year, Emory. . something. Emory McPhee. That was it. A good-looking, solid kid. He had married this woman, Anne, last year, both of them barely eighteen years old, and moved out to this place. That was it. That was who they were. He had heard that Emory had become a housepainter.

“Emory,” Saul said. The boy was stocky — he had played varsity football starting in his sophomore year — and he looked at Saul now with sleepy inquisitiveness. “Emory, my wife and I have had an accident, over there, on the other side of your field.”

“What kind of accident, Mr. Bernstein? Are you okay?”

“We drove off the road.” Saul waited, his hands in his pockets. Then he said the rest of it. “The car turned over on us. But I think we’re all right.”

“Wow,” Emory said. “You’re lucky you weren’t hurt. That’s amazing. Good thing it wasn’t worse.”

“Well, yes, but the car was going slow.” Saul always sounded stupid to himself late at night. The boy’s bland, blue-eyed gaze stayed on him now, not moving, genial but inquisitorial, and Saul thought of all the people who had hated school, never liked even a minute of it except maybe the sports, and maintained a low-level suspicion of teachers for the rest of their lives. They voted down school-bond issues. They didn’t even like to buy pencils.

“How’d you go off the road?”

“I fell asleep, Emory. We’d been to a party at Mr. Bettermine’s and I fell asleep at the wheel. Never happened to me before.”

“Wow,” Emory said again, but slowly this time, with no real surprise or inflection in his voice. He shrugged his shoulders, then bent down as if he were doing calisthenics. Saul knew that his own breath smelled of beer, so there was no point in going into that. “Do you want a cup of coffee? I’d offer you a beer, but we don’t have it.” Besides, you’ve already had one too many.

Saul tried to smile, an effort. “I don’t think so, Emory. Not tonight.” He looked down at the floor, at his socks — he had taken off his muddy shoes — and saw an ashtray filled with cigarette butts. “But I would like a cigarette, if you could spare one.”

“Sure.” The boy reached down and offered the pack in Saul’s direction. “Didn’t know you smoked. Didn’t know you had any vices at all.” He smiled. “Until now.”

They exchanged a look. “I’m like everybody else,” Saul said. “Sometimes the right thing just gets loose from me and I don’t do it.” He picked up a book of matches. He would have to watch his sentences: that one hadn’t made any sense. On the outside of the matchbook was an advertisement.

SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE

***see inside***

Saul put the matchbook into his pocket after lighting up.

“Were you drunk?” the boy asked suddenly.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Teachers shouldn’t drink,” Emory said. “That’s my belief.”

“Well, maybe not.”

Saul inhaled from the cigarette, and Emory came closer toward him and sat down on the floor. He gave off the smell of turpentine, and he had two or three tiny flecks of white paint in his hair close to his ear. He rubbed at his boy’s beard again. “Do you remember me from school?”

Saul leaned back. He tried to think. “Sure, of course I do. You sat in the back and you played with a ballpoint pen. You used to sketch the other kids in the class. Once when we were doing the First World War, you said it didn’t make any sense no matter how much you read about it. I remember your report on the League of Nations. You stared out the window a lot. You sat near Annie in my class, and you passed notes to her.”

“I didn’t think you’d notice that much about me. Or remember.” Emory whistled toward the dog, who thumped her tail and waddled over toward Emory’s lap. “I wasn’t very good. I thought it was a waste of time, no offense. I wanted to get married, that’s all. I wanted to get married to Anne, and I wanted to be outside, not stuck inside, doing something, making a living, earning money. The thing is, I’m different now.” He stood up, as if he were about to demonstrate how different he had become or had thought of something important to say.

“How are you different?”

“I’m real happy,” Emory said, looking toward the kitchen. “I bet you don’t believe that. I bet you think: Here’s this kid and his wife and baby, out here, ignorant as a couple of plain pigs, and how could they be happy? But it’s weird. You can’t tell about anything.” He was looking away from Saul. “Schools tell you that people like me aren’t supposed to be happy or. . what’s that word you used in class all the time? ‘Fulfilled’? Yeah, that’s it.” He sneered at Saul so quickly that it was like a flashbulb popping. “We’re not supposed to be that. But we’re doing okay. But then I’m not trying to tell you anything.”

“I know, Emory. I know that.” Saul raised his hand to his scalp and touched his bald spot.

“Hell,” Emory said, apparently building up steam, “you could work all your life to be as happy as Anne and me, and you might not do it. People. . they try to be happy. They work at it. But it doesn’t always take.” He laughed. “I shouldn’t be talking to you this way, Mr. Bernstein, and I wouldn’t be, except it’s the middle of the night, and I’m saying stuff. You know, I respected you. But now here you are, in my living room, and I remember the grades you gave me, all those D’s, like you thought I’d never do anything in life except fail. But you can’t hurt me now because I’m not in school anymore. So I apologize. See, I apologize for messing up in school and I forgive you for flunking me out.”

Emory held out his hand, and Saul stood up and took it, thinking that he might be making a mistake.

“You shouldn’t flunk people out of school,” Emory said, “if you’re going to get drunk and roll cars.”

Saul held on to Emory’s hand and tried to grip hard and diligently in return. “I didn’t get drunk, Emory. I fell asleep. And you didn’t flunk out. You dropped out.”

Emory released his hand. “Well, I don’t care,” he said. “I was sleeping when you came to our door. I don’t go to parties anymore because I have to get up and work. I sleep because I’m married and working. I can’t see anything outside of that.”

Saul suddenly wanted Patsy back in this room, so that they could go. Who the hell did this boy think he was, anyway?

“Well, none of this is nothing,” Emory said at last. “I don’t blame you for anything at all. Maybe you did me a favor. I had to do something in my life, so I rented this farm. I’m reading up on horticulture.” He pronounced the word carefully and proudly. “You want to sleep on the floor, you can, or on the sofa there. And there’s a spare bed upstairs, you want it.”

“Sorry about the bother,” Saul said.

“No trouble.”

“I appreciate it.”

“Forget it.” Emory patted the dog.

“But thanks.”

“Sure.”

The two men looked at each other for a moment, and Saul had one of his momentary envy-shocks: he looked at this man, this boy — he couldn’t decide which he was — his hair standing up, and he thought: Whatever else he is, this kid is real. Emory was living in the real. Saul felt himself floating up out of the unreal and rapidly sinking back into it, the lagoon of self-consciousness and irony.

In a kind of desperation, Saul looked at the wall, where someone had hung a picture of a horse with a woman beside it, drawn in pencil, and framed in a cheap dime-store frame. The woman was probably Anne. She looked approximately like her. “Nice picture.”

“I drew it.”

“You have real talent, Emory,” Saul said, insincerely examining the details. “You could be an artist.”

“I am an artist,” Emory said, staring at his old teacher. He picked at a scab on his calf. He turned his back to Saul. “I could draw from when I was a kid.” A baby’s cry came from upstairs. Emory looked at the ceiling, then exhaled.

“What kind of horse is that?” Saul asked, in what he vowed silently would be his final effort at politeness this evening. “Is that any kind of horse in particular?”

Emory was going back up the stairs. Then he faced Saul. “Every horse is some horse in particular, Mr. Bernstein. There aren’t any horses in general. You can sleep there on the sofa if you want to. Good night.”

“Good night.”

Whatever had happened to the God of the Old Testament, Saul wondered, looking at Emory’s crucifix, the God that had chosen Israel above the other nations? Why had He allowed this scene to take place and why had He allowed Emory McPhee, this dropout, to make him feel like a putz? The Red Sea had not parted for Saul in a long time, in any sense; he felt he had about as much clout with God as, perhaps, a sparrow did. The whole evening had been a joke at Saul’s expense. He heard God laughing, a sound like surf on rocks.

When Patsy and Anne came out of the kitchen, announcing that an all-night towing service was on its way and would probably have the car turned over and running in about half an hour, Saul smiled as if everything would be exactly as fine as they claimed. Anne and Patsy were laughing. The flowers on Anne’s bathrobe were laughing. God was, even now, laughing and enjoying the joke. Feeling like a zombie, and not laughing himself, but wearing the smile of the classically undead, Saul hooked his hand into Patsy’s and went back outside. Some nights, he knew, had a way of not ending. This would be one.

“How was Emory?” Patsy asked.

“Emory? Oh, Emory was fine,” Saul told her.

On the days following, Saul began to be obsessed with happiness, an unhealthy obsession, he knew, but he couldn’t get rid of it. On some days he could not get out of bed to go to work without groaning and reaching for his hair, as if to drag himself up bodily for the working day.

Prior to his accident and his meeting with Emory McPhee, Saul had managed to forget about happiness, a state that had once bothered him for its general inaccessibility. Now he believed that, compared to others, he was, except for his marriage, actually and truly unhappy, especially since his mind insisted on thinking about the problem, poring over it, ragging him on and on. It was like the discontent of adolescence, the discontent with situations, but this was larger, the discontent with being itself, a psychic itch with nowhere to scratch. This was like Schopenhauer arriving at the door with a big suitcase, settling down for a long stay in the brain.

Patsy wasn’t ordinary for many reasons, but also because she loved Saul. Nevertheless, she was happy, like a character in Chekhov who can’t help but proclaim a satisfaction with life every few minutes. She did want a better job, and, in some sense, a different life. Early in the summer he stole glances at her as she turned the pansies over in their pots, tamping them out and planting them in the flower beds near the front walk. Blue sky, aggressive sun. She was squatting down in her shorts, wearing one of Saul’s old flannel shirts flecked with dirt and the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Her hair fell backward down her shoulders. From the front window he watched her and studied her hands, those slender fingers doing their work. Helplessly, his eyes took in the clothed outlines of his wife. He was hers. That was that. She liked being a woman. She liked it in a way that, Saul now knew, he himself did not like being a man. There was the guilt, for one thing, for the manly hobbies of war and the thoroughgoing destruction of the earth. Patriarchy, carnage, rape, pleasurable bloodletting, fanatic greed, and bloodsport: Saul would admit a gender responsibility for all these if anyone asked him to acknowledge it, though no one ever did.

Patsy wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, saw Saul, and waved at him, turning her head slightly, tilting it, as she did whenever she caught sight of him. She smiled, a smile he had gladly given his life away for, a look of radiant intelligence. She was into the real, too; she didn’t ponder it, she just planted flowers, if that was what she wanted to do. Beyond her was the driveway and their Chevrolet with its bashed-in roof. Her smile faded. It always did when she noticed him studying her.

Saul turned from the window — it was Saturday morning — and tried to think for a moment of what to do next. Taking a Detroit Tigers cap off the front-hall hat rack, he went outside and with great care put it, from behind and unannounced, on Patsy’s head. “Save you from sunburn,” he said when she turned around and looked at him. “Save you from heat-stroke.”

“I want a motorcycle,” Patsy said. “I’ve been thinking about it. We don’t need another car, but I do want a motorcycle. I always have. Women can ride motorcycles, Saul, don’t deny it. Oh, and another thing.” She dropped one hand into the dirt and balanced herself on it. “This morning I was trying to think of where the Cayuse Indians lived, and I couldn’t remember, and we don’t have an encyclopedia to check. We need that.” She put her hand over her eyes, to shade them. “Saul, why are you looking like that? Are you in a state?”

“No, I’m not in a state.”

“Yes, you are. Damn it, I have to break out sometimes. I’ve just got to. I’ll die here otherwise. A motorcycle would do wonders for both of us, Saul. A small one, not one of those hogs. Do you like my petunias? Should I have some purple over there? Maybe this is too much red and white. What would you think of some dianthus right there?” She pointed with her trowel. “Or maybe some sweet william?”

“Sure, sure.” He didn’t know what either variety looked like. Flowers seemed so irrelevant to everything.

“Where did the Cayuse Indians live, Saul?”

“Oregon, I think.”

“What do you think about a motorcycle? For little trips into town. For those small occasions when I have to get away from you.”

“Sounds okay to me. But they aren’t exactly safe, you know. People get killed on motorcycles.”

“Those people aren’t careful. I’ll be careful. I’ll wear a helmet. I just want to do it. Imagine a girl — me — on one of those machines. Makes you feel good, doesn’t it? A motorcycle girl in Michigan. The car’s silly for small trips. Besides, I want to visit my friends in town.”

It was true: Patsy already had many friends around Five Oaks, friends that Saul didn’t have. She could be vain about it, her ability to adapt to anything — after all, she was married to him. Now she stood up, dropped her trowel, and put her weight on Saul’s shoes and leaned herself into him. The visor of her cap bumped into his forehead. But she embraced him for only a moment. There wouldn’t be any big, long love thing, not just now. “Want to help, Saul? Give me a hand putting the rest of these flowers in?”

“Not right now, Patsy, I don’t think so.”

“What’s the matter? You’re looking peckish.”

“Peckish? I don’t know.”

“You are in a state.”

“I guess I might be.”

“What is it this time? Our recent brush with death? The McPhees? My incredible impatience about getting another job?”

“What about the McPhees?” he asked. She had probably guessed.

“Well, they were so cute, the two of them. So sweet. And so young, too. Plus their baby. And I know you, Saul, and I know what you thought. You thought: What have these two got that I don’t have?”

She had guessed. She usually did. It was unfair. He stepped backward. “Yes,” he said, “you’re right. What do they have? And why don’t I have it? I’m happy with you, but I—”

“Jesus. You can’t be like them because you can’t, Saul. You fret. That’s your hobby. It’s how you stay occupied. You’ve heard about spots? About how a person can’t change them? Well, I like your spots. I like how you’re a professional worrier. And you always know about things like the Cayuse Indians. I’m not like that. And I don’t want to be married to somebody like me. I’d put myself to sleep. But you’re perfect. You’re an early-warning system. You bark and growl at life. You’re my dog. You do see that, don’t you?”

“Yes.” He nodded.

After he had kissed her and returned to the house, he took the matchbook he had pocketed at the McPhees’ up to his study. At his desk, with a pair of scissors, he cut off the flap of the matches, filled in his name and address, and wrote a check for six dollars to the Wisdom Foundation, located at a post office box number in Cincinnati, Ohio. Just to make sure, he enclosed a letter.

Dear Sirs,

Enclosed please find a check for six dollars for your SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE. Also included is my name and address, written on the back of this book of matches. You will also find them typed at the bottom of this letter. Thank you. I look forward, very much, to reading the secrets.

Sincerely,

Saul Bernstein

He examined the letter, wondering if the last sentence might sound too skeptical, too. . something. But he decided to leave it there. He took the letter, carefully stamped — he put commemorative stamps on all his important mail — out to the mailbox and lifted the little red flag.

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.”

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.”

“I know.” He felt as though he heard someone wailing softly in the next room. Still he continued. “Patsy,” he said, “the window. We should stand by the window.”

“Why?”

“To try it.” He disentangled himself from her, stood, and brought her over to the window. He opened it so that the droplets of rain blew in over them. “Now,” he said. There was a bit of lightning, and he lifted her. She held on, arms clasped behind his neck. He felt as though a thousand eyes, but not human eyes, were looking in on them with tender indifference. They were and were not interested. They would and would not care. Finally they would turn away, as they tended to turn away from all human things, in time. Saul felt Patsy tremble, a slight shivering along her back, a rising in tension before release. More rain came in, spattering lightly on his arm. He felt Patsy’s mouth passing by his hair, recently cut by Harold. She was panting in time with his own breathing, and for a split second he understood it all. He understood everything, the secret to the universe. Then, after an instant, he lost it. Having lost the secret, forgotten it, he felt the usual onset of the ordinary, of everything else, with Patsy around him, the two of them in their own familiar rhythms. He would not admit to anyone that he had known the secret of the universe for a split second. That part of his life was hidden away and would always be, the part that makes a person draw in the breath quickly in surprise and stare at the curtains in the morning upon awakening.

Four

Saul, Patsy thought, was like one of those pastries you couldn’t get enough of at first — you’d gorge on them. And then, it seemed, once you’d had enough of them, you wanted to get rid of that addiction, but you couldn’t, there was no way to stop. You were always going to have those jelly doughnuts in your life because you had once craved them. Slowly but surely, they would put weight on you.

Mornings, on her way down to the mortgage department at the bank, where she had become — at last — an assistant loan officer (she admitted to herself, and to no one else, that she liked to be around places where money was — it even had a smell to it she liked), she would pass by school-bus stops and nursery schools. Sometimes, on lunch breaks, she would park the car near the curbs and watch the little people, three- and four-year-olds, holding hands or holding on to delicate ropes to keep them all together as they progressed down the sidewalks. She loved seeing children lined up in their school clothes and backpacks, waiting for the bus. They yelled at each other. They fell into the dirt and mud. They were beautiful.

A week after her baby was due, she would drive around on her lunch hour just looking for children, hoping her labor would start out of sympathy. And on a Tuesday, as she sat parked across the street from a play-ground, watching a softball game, her water broke. On the way to the hospital that evening, she remembered to thank the moon, which had been shining in the daytime sky above the playing field, though it was invisible by nightfall, having gone on its lunatic way.

The labor room: between contractions and the blips of the fetal monitor, she was dimly aware of Saul. He had donned his green hospital scrubs. They hadn’t let him wear his Detroit Tigers baseball cap (too unsanitary), but he was holding her hand and his eyes were anxious with nervous energy as he sat at her bedside. He thought he was coaching her. But he kept miscounting the breaths, and she had to correct him.

After two hours of that, she was moved into the huge circular incandescence of the delivery room. She felt as if she were about to expel her entire body outward in a floorflood. With her hair soaked with sweat and sticking to the back of her neck, she could feel the unsteady universe sputtering out for an instant into two flattened dimensions. Everything she saw was painted on a flat surface in front of her, and she felt herself screaming self-consciously, as if she were screaming performatively when she was both screaming and doing something else, the serious work. Then she swore — she had learned to swear like a man from her father, who was only eloquent when he cursed — and she loosened her hand from Saul’s — his touch maddened her — and swore again. She looked at Saul with a deep hatred. He had gotten her into this mess, and now he was dumbly watching her trying to get herself out. Terrible, unforgivable words, slightly out of her control, came out of her mouth directed toward Saul. Wrath, bitterness, and then some screeching. The seconds blew themselves up into hours, with time seizing up, thickening and slowing as if the river of it had turned to offal, ordure, and slush.

“Okay, here’s the head. One last push, please.”

Patsy backstroked through the pain. Then the baby presented herself in a mess of blood and fleshy wrappings. After the cord was cut, Patsy heard her husband say from a great distance, “She’s beautiful. Uh, Patsy, you didn’t really mean those things you said about me, did you? When you were screaming? Those curses?” Oh, the hell with Saul. Where was her baby? They were giving her an Apgar test. Typical of Saul, Patsy thought, as she began to recover herself, to worry about what somebody was saying about him at the moment of his daughter’s birth. I see that you’re having a baby — but what about me? Enough about you — you’re just giving birth. Anyway, Saul always stole scenes. It was in his nature.

“Where’s my baby?”

“Here,” the nurse said. The world had rematerialized and accordioned out into three dimensions again. The baby fit perfectly into the crook of Patsy’s arm, and she was, Patsy thought, perfect in every respect, beautiful beyond thought. She touched her delicate chin. How strange it was to have a daughter so new that she didn’t have a name! It was the beginning of the world for her, before the invention of language. And she looked like Patsy’s grandmother Ella, lovable and ancient and irritable, a fan of murder mysteries and a smoker of cigarettes, who picked wild strawberries and fed them to her dogs. But, no: she wasn’t Grandmother Ella, she was herself. The nurse’s smile and her daughter’s impatient expression made a sunspot near Patsy’s heart, and the huge overhead delivery-room light went out, like a sigh.

Someone took Patsy’s hand, the other hand, the one not cradling the baby. Who else but Saul, unsteady but upright, wanting some part of her? Cold sweat dripped down his forehead. He kissed Patsy through his face mask, a sterile forgiving kiss, feeling of paper that landed on her cheek, and he informed her that they were parents now. He touched his daughter on her forehead, a blessing. As he said it, his eyes expressed excitement and terror. He would be one of those men unready for fatherhood but full of intermittent, wild, undirected enthusiasm for it. “Hi, Mom,” he said. He apologized for worrying about Patsy’s opinion of him, and Patsy apologized for what she had said about Saul during her labor. Releasing her hand from Saul’s, Patsy raised it and caressed his face. “Oh, don’t worry,” the nurse said, apparently referring to Patsy’s verbal abusiveness, and from behind him, she patted Saul on the back, as if he had been some sort of good dog, a retriever.

They named their daughter Mary Esther Carlson-Bernstein, a string of words that Patsy thought awkward and ungainly but, once she had said it and attached it to her daughter, somehow fine.

But Saul didn’t seem so pleased with it. While making dinner a week later, one of his improvised stir-fries that made use of fresh ingredients to combine with and camouflage the leftovers, Saul said that he had been having second thoughts: Mary Esther, he said, was burdened with a lot of name, maybe too much Christianity and Judaism mixed in there for comfort. “Whose comfort?” Patsy asked, from her chair in the kitchen, wondering about how Saul was managing. Standing in front of the stove, listening selectively, Saul ignored the question. Possibly another name would be better, he went on, uninterruptable. Jayne, maybe, or Liz. Direct, futuristic American monosyllables. Bottom-line names. Or maybe they could combine the M of Mary and the E of Esther to make Emmy.

As he muttered and chopped carrots and broccoli before dropping the bamboo shoots and water chestnuts and some other unidentifiables into the pan, Patsy could see that he was so tired that he was only half-awake. His monologue wasn’t meant to make any sense; it was meant to fill time, to get his thoughts out of his head and into the room, and then into Patsy’s head. He spoke words the way a ventilator blew out air. Of course he didn’t plan on renaming his daughter after naming her the first time; he said only crazy people did that, loading down their children with aliases. His socks didn’t match, his jeans were beltless, and his hair had gone back to wildness, sprigs and sections hanging down over his eyes, his ears, his neck. He was a mess. Still quite handsome, though, in his way, and very lovable, though he tired you out, being the way he was.

The night before, between feedings — feedings for the baby, not for Saul, who had become, in a way that Patsy couldn’t quite pinpoint, slightly more baby-like himself — Saul had confessed that he didn’t know if he could manage it, it being the long haul of fatherhood. But that had just been Saul-talk. Right now, Mary Esther was sleeping upstairs. Fingering the pages of her magazine, Patsy leaned back in the alcove, still in her bathrobe, watching her husband prepare dinner. She liked watching him. She breathed in and out, her lungs as dependable in their way as her husband. She was still sore everywhere and took pleasure in not moving; she liked staying put and watching the ceiling or the cars outside on the road, or the spectacle of Saul, cooking. Long stretches of bland ordinariness staged anywhere in the house soothed her. Ordinary life seemed to be full of a previously hidden grace as long as she didn’t have to get up very far to meet it. She had already done that by giving birth to Mary Esther. You couldn’t get much closer to life than that. Feeling her breasts engorged, still feeling familiar pains all over herself in her most private places, she wondered what she had done with the breast pump and when the diaper guy would deliver the new batch.

Bending down toward the pan, stolid and dutiful and husbandly, Saul sniffed, added some peanut oil, stirred again, and after a minute he ladled out dinner onto Patsy’s plate. The food gave off a damp tropical aroma. Then with that habit he had of reading her thoughts and rewording them — a habit that amazed Patsy and irritated her in equal measures — he turned toward her and said, “You left the breast pump upstairs.” And then: “Hey, you think I’m sleepwalking. But I’m not. I’m conscious. I only look like a zombie.” He smiled at her with a full-fledged zombie smile, the right side of his mouth going up, the undead left side staying right where it was. “You smell of ether,” he said, unkindly.

If he can read my thoughts, she thought, where’s my privacy? But there wasn’t any privacy anyway, not when you gave birth in front of strangers and brought out a breast anytime the baby wanted it.

For the last nine months, Saul had glimpsed the albino deer, always at a distance, on the fringes of the property that he and Patsy rented. After work or on weekends, he had walked across the unfarmed fields up to the next property line, marked by rusting fence posts, or, past the fields, into the neighboring woods of silver maple and scrub oak, hoping to get a sight of the animal and to find out why it was pestering him. It had only revealed itself, however, when he had not been looking for it, and it had this out-of-the-corner-of-the-eye trick that made Saul feel as if the deer had a project of some sort, like converting him to Catholicism or explaining fatherhood to him. Once it had stood grazing near a stump and was visible until he looked directly at it. Then it disappeared with one instantaneous leap into the underbrush. Here, there, gone. It gave him the shivers, this hallucinatory beast with pink eyes and white fur.

Out on his walks, or while jogging, searching the ground for clues, Saul went into emotional reveries, which Patsy had characterized as manic-depressive fits, a phrase that Saul hated. He missed the old pre-therapeutic words like “sorrow” and “exuberance” and “forbearance.” Just now he was a bit short of forbearance. What was he doing out here taking these walks? The sky lately was habitually overcast, like a patient in need of therapy. There were no hills worth mentioning. You couldn’t eat the berries that grew here because if you did, you would sicken. The streams and creeks hardly flowed at all because the ground was so flat that the water became indecisive. Yes, semirural Michigan (things were changing: there was a new outlet mall two miles away, they had paved Whitefeather Road and were beginning to put up stoplights, and condos were being built in a hurry) was a blank slate, but he felt right at home in it, just like that freak of nature, that deer. Maybe everywhere was a blank slate. And now he had a daughter, right here, to care for. A daughter! The fungal smell of wood rot in the culverts strengthened him, he believed, made him a better man, perhaps a better father, or at least made him think of words that nobody used anymore, such as “rue.”

Clouds, mud, wind. Joy and woe, mad happiness and rue lived side by side in Saul with very few emotions in between. Even his gloom was thick with lyric intensity, like a brass band playing a funeral march all day and having a good time doing it. No longer a figure in a Russian novel, he imagined all winter that he lived stranded in an ink drawing by a Chinese artist who lived in the Midwest. He himself was the suggested figure in the lower-right-hand corner. Colors — the bright happy colors— were for elsewhere, for those suspicious characters who comported themselves in California or Florida, who couldn’t face up to cloudy days, who required sports cars and perpetual sunlight and suntans to get through the day.

Wearing his Northwestern University gym clothes, he liked to jog after work alongside the drainage ditch, where he could watch a microwave transmission tower being constructed two miles away. He heard noises of construction, the distant sounds of heavy machinery. From a spidery oak tree, a crow cawed, announcing rain. Near the highway on a Sunday morning two weeks after Mary Esther was born, he had spotted a soiled Ben Franklin half-dollar next to a tossed-away beer can and picked it up. It had been his lucky day. But all the days were lucky, recently. He reminded himself to give thanks to somebody or something. He would start with Patsy.

He made his way back to the house, mud chuckling underneath his boots, Ben Franklin in his pocket, the first fifty cents of Mary Esther’s college fund. He had a secret he had not told Patsy, though she probably knew it: he did not think that he had any clue to being a parent. Not one. His father had died before he might have shown him the fatherhood tricks — all Saul could remember was his father making scrambled eggs for the family on Saturday mornings. Saul’s mother, Delia, had not tried to find a substitute for the boys once their father was gone. Perhaps Saul would fail at fatherhood and they would take his daughter away from him on grounds of parental incompetency. He did not love being a parent, though he loved his daughter with a newfound intensity close to hysteria. To him, fatherhood was one long unrevisable bourgeois script full of long-expected plot turns and predictable blow-ups in the third act, but that was the script he had been handed, and now he was in the play.

Love, rage, and tenderness disabled him in the chairs in which he sat, miming calm, holding Mary Esther. What was the matter with him? He loved his daughter. It was himself he had a problem with. He just didn’t know what the problem was, although his therapist in Chicago had once told him that he suffered from “pointless remorse” and “inappropriate longings.” His typical despairs were beginning to look like luxuries to him. He could be a despair junkie and a virtuoso of fretfulness but probably not anymore, not with a daughter around. Somehow he would have to discard his friends, the long-term discontents, those houses of metaphysical yearnings where he had once made his home. Probably he couldn’t go over to Holbein College anymore on weekends and pretend to be a student. He came in and thanked Patsy with a kiss. But that night, when Patsy was fast asleep, Saul knelt on the landing and beat his fists on the stairs, but softly, so as not to awaken anybody.

On the morning when Mary Esther was celebrating her birthday — she was four weeks old — they sat at the breakfast table with the sun, in a rare appearance, blazing in through the east window and reflecting off the butter knife. With one hand, Patsy fed herself corn flakes. With the other hand she held Mary Esther, who was nursing. Patsy was also glancing down at the morning paper on the table and was talking to Saul about his upcoming birthday, what color shirt to get him. She chewed her corn flakes thoughtfully and only reacted when Mary Esther sucked too hard. It hurt, and it showed on Patsy’s face. A deep brown, she said. You’d look good in that. It’d show off your eyes.

Listening, Saul watched them both, rattled by the domestic sensuality of their pairing, and his spirit shook with wild, bruised, jealous love. He felt pointless and redundant, a citizen of the tiny principality of irony. His heart, that trapped bird, flapped in its cage. Patsy’s breast belonged to him, he thought, not to Mary Esther, even though she could make better use of it than he could. He was ashamed of being jealous of his baby daughter, and he squirmed in his chair as he finished his oatmeal. Actually, he realized, Patsy’s breast belonged to Patsy. Behind Patsy the kitchen spice rack displayed its orderly contents. Everything in the house was orderly, thanks to Patsy, everything except Saul. A delivery truck rumbled by on Whitefeather Road. He felt specifically his shallow and approximate condition. In broad daylight, night enfolded him.

He went off to work feeling superfluous and ecstatic and horny, his body glowing with its fatherly confusions.

That semester, Saul had been pulled from one section of American history and had been reassigned to remedial English for learning-disabled students in the high school. “Anyone can teach English,” his principal, Zoltan Kabelá, liked to say. “It’s our mother tongue.” Zoltan, speaking for the school, had claimed that the economic times being what they were, the district could not afford a full-time specialist in remedial education, and because Saul had been a persistent advocate of the rights of the learning-disabled at school meetings and elsewhere, and because, he suspected, Zoltan Kabelá did not like him, he had been assigned a group of seven kids in remedial writing, and they all met in a converted storage room at the back of the school at eight-thirty, following the second bell.

Five of them were pleasant and sweet-tempered and bewildered (by life, by Saul, by most of what happened to them day after day, the confusing pageant of getting dressed, taking the bus, and telling time), but two of them appeared to hate the class and, very convincingly, Saul himself, their hatred occasionally focused to a fine point on him. They sat, these two, as far away from him as possible, near the back wall close to the brooms, whispering to each other and smiling with energetic young-adolescent malevolence at him. Saul had tried everything with them— jokes, praise, discipline — but nothing had worked to increase the boys’ interest in reading or to lower their scorn for education, and he had arrived at a state of strong, steady uneasiness, a feeling that soon they would try to enact some awfulness upon him, a terrible dangerous prank. He could feel it coming.

He thought of the two boys, Gordy Himmelman and Bob Pawlak, as the Child Cossacks. They belonged in Central Asia somewhere. However, interesting hatred could arise anywhere. Gordy apparently had no parents, just an aunt. His mother had died in a house fire, and his father had gone west and stayed there and had gradually disappeared. No one knew where he was; he had not been heard from in years. Gordy lived with his aunt in a manufactured home on the north side of town. Marly Albertson, the school social worker assigned to Gordy, said the situation out there at Brenda Bagley’s house — Brenda Bagley was Gordy’s aunt— was like a museum of creepiness and warned him not to ask about it if he didn’t want to know. Saul had met Brenda once. She had an unattractiveness so painful to look upon that you felt guilty of rubbernecking if you glanced at her twice. When she came in for a conference, her facial complexion looked scaly, and she sat down with the slow elaborate courtesy of working people out of their element in a classroom, the unease of the uninvited. She gave the appearance of knowing that she was not wanted anywhere she happened to be. She had said almost nothing for the fifteen minutes during which Saul described Gordy’s failings. She appeared to be broken down by hard work — she was a waitress at the Fleetwood— and she nodded dumbly at everything Saul told her, as if his desolate words were no more than what she had expected, wounds on top of wounds.

Saul had driven by Gordy’s home a couple of times and had seen a desperate barking dog chained to a stake in the front yard. Often Gordy came to school wearing a T-shirt spotted with blood. His boots were scuffed from objects he had kicked or that had simply fallen haplessly into his path. On his face were two rashes, one from acne, the other from blankness. Girls avoided him. His eyes, on those occasions when they met Saul’s, were cold and lunar. If you were dying on the side of the road in a rainstorm, Saul thought, Gordy’s eyes would pass over you and continue on, after you died, to the next interesting sight.

Sometimes Gordy would begin to stare at Saul at the beginning of class and not stop until the class was finally over. The contours of Gordy’s fixation were unknowable, Saul had decided.

Politically and socially and ideologically, Saul had once felt pity and compassion and generosity toward the wretched of the earth. He still did, when he considered them as a class, and only when they appeared as individuals did they sometimes alarm him. He suspected that Gordy hated him in a final, visceral manner, above or below argument.

Gordy’s friend Bob Pawlak was a dog-killer and a cat-killer, he claimed. He shot them with his 410, he said. Perhaps it was just talk. In a moment of intimacy he had bragged to Saul about killing cats, and his laughter, describing how he went about it, was not quite under control. His smile was the meanest one Saul had ever seen on an ex-child, a smile also visible on the face of Bob’s father, Bob Pawlak, Sr., who once came in, unbelievably, for a parent conference. About his boy, Bob Sr. agreed that Bob Jr. was a hell-raiser, but, then, so was he. He shook his dismayed and proud parental head, decorated with gin blossoms.

Saul could hardly stand to look at Gordy and Bob. But Gordy was not afraid to look at Saul. As was his habit, he stared and stared. There were no windows in the room where he taught them, and no fan, and after half an hour of everyone’s mingled breathing, the air in the room was foul enough to kill a canary.

Earlier in the week Saul had given the kids pictures clipped from magazines. They were supposed to write one-sentence stories to accompany each picture. For these high schoolers, the task would be a challenge. Now, before school started, his mind still on Patsy and Mary Esther, Saul began to read yesterday’s sentences. Gordy and Bob had as usual not written anything. Gordy had torn his picture to bits, and Bob had shredded and eaten his. But the other students had made their brave attempts.

It is dangerous to dive into a pool of water without the nolige of the depth because if it is salow you could hit your head that might creat unconsheness and drowding.

Quite serprisingly the boy finds among the presents rapings which are now discarded a model air plan.

Two sentences, each one requiring ten minutes’ work. Saul stared at them, word by word, feeling himself stumbling in a cognitive limp. What was the next lesson? Where did one start? The sentences were like glimpses into the shattered mind of God.

Like the hourse a cow is an animal and the human race feasts on its meat and diary which form the bulky hornd animal.

The cold blooded crecher the bird will lay an egg and in a piriod of time a new bird will brake out of it as a storm of burth.

Saul looked up from his desk at the sputtering overhead lights and the grimy acoustic tile. It was in the storm of birth — mouths of babes, etc. — that he himself was currently being tossed.

He looked down at the floor again and spotted a piece of paper with the words “your a kick” close to the wastebasket. Finally, a nice compliment! He tossed it away.

Saul’s mother had been visiting. When Saul arrived at home, carrying the Five Oaks News-Chronicle, Delia met him at the door and gave him a kiss on the cheek, leaving lipstick and perfume on him, like a claim check. She had more scents than a cougar. This was the fourth day of a projected six-day visit. She had been cooking meals, helping out with the housework, and taking care of Mary Esther whenever Patsy flagged or needed to nap. Delia did not like the name “Mary Esther” and much preferred “Emmy.” Whenever his mother called her grandchild “Emmy,” Saul felt himself getting slowly but steadily irritated at his mother’s assumption that he and Patsy were disqualified from naming their own daughter themselves, that they would do it incorrectly.

The house, which had once smelled of Saul and Patsy, and the sweet-sour loamy smells of parenting and babyhood, now smelled pungently of Delia’s perfume, a fragrance with the power of an air-raid siren. What was the point? Why did a new grandmother have to wear so much perfume? Well, Saul thought, the question answers itself. His mother had given birth to him when she was twenty-one. She was now in her forties, and still, she thought, a player.

Delia was tall, with brilliant red hair, and restless. Bracelets rang noisily on her wrists, and she favored large clumpy necklaces of amber. She had long elegant fingers tipped with brilliant blood-red nail polish. She had a dominatrix side, he thought uncharitably. Saul, who liked Richard Strauss’s operas and once played trombone in one of the Northwestern University student pit orchestras, sometimes referred to his mother as “the Marschallin” and thought that Eleanor Steber could do a good job of playing her. Moving around the house like a woman who meant business no matter what she was doing, she had missed her calling, Saul claimed in bed to Patsy. She should have been a full-time aristocrat running a palace, planning masked balls, arranging other people’s affairs. She aspired to a certain level of domesticated depravity. Just watching her tired him out and gave him headaches. Always tanned and fit, she had a personal trainer at a health club in Bethesda, and Saul was always dismayed by how good-looking his mother was, how disconcertingly sexy. No middle-aged woman needed to be that beautiful, he thought, especially when the beauty is fading just enough to give it warmth, and that woman is your mother, and your father has died young, and your mother has gone on to have a succession of boyfriends, and. . and. .

His mother took his hand. He wondered if he had a streak of misogyny. Probably only in regard to his mother. Other women did not inspire it.

“Emmy was a little angel today,” the Marschallin said, nodding toward the living room, where Mary Esther was sleeping in Patsy’s arms. Patsy raised her face toward Saul. “How was work?” his mother asked, keeping her voice down. “How was school?”

The question made him feel like a child. Delia had that effect on him. Saul removed his hand from his mother’s and pursed his lips in Patsy’s direction. He took out a handkerchief to wipe off his mother’s lipstick from his face. But he could feel its imprint there, worming its way through the skin toward his brain. “Work was fine. Someone left me a note. They said I was a kick.”

“That’s nice,” Delia said dubiously. “A kick? In what sense?”

“In the sense that. . oh, you know. A party. That’s a real kick. Fun.”

Very quietly, from her chair, Patsy said, “Nobody uses that word that way anymore.” Having gathered her blond hair back in a ponytail, she gazed down at Mary Esther and touched the baby’s own perfect feathery hair. Patsy’s beauty was fuller and more human, Saul thought, than his mother’s. It was actionable. You wanted to mate with her. His wife’s beauty made him happy and crazy, and his mother’s beauty just made him crazy, period. Maybe menopause would calm his mother down, but he doubted it.

“They don’t? Sure they do,” Saul said.

“Not in a learning-disabilities class, they don’t.” Patsy shook her head. “You can bet your bottom dollar that they don’t use expressions like that.”

“I agree with Patsy,” Delia announced with a huge smile. “We have womanly solidarity here.”

“Oh, I hope not,” Saul grumbled, suddenly thirsty for a beer. He wanted to escape from the room and Delia’s presence. There was too much femaleness around all of a sudden. He rushed to the refrigerator for a beer, then returned to the living room so that he could drink it from the bottle in front of his mother. He couldn’t wait until she was gone and Patsy’s relatives arrived. Her parents were sweet and generous and harmless, very fond of Saul. In contrast to his mother, they were not like wild animals in a zoo. He would trade his mother for his mother-in-law anytime. Saul’s mother sat down close to Patsy and threw a large radiant scary smile in her son’s direction.

“Your brother used to use that expression constantly,” she said. “‘Oh, that’s a kick,’ he’d say.” She examined her fingernails. “Your brother loved kicks.”

“Yes, he did,” Saul said. “And he still does.” He had not had a phone call or a letter from Howie in ages. It irked him, Howie’s indifference to Patsy and himself and to Mary Esther’s birth. What Howie did was give birth to money, money, and then more money. “Where is he? The last I heard he was rock climbing in Colorado or someplace.”

“Your handsome brother?” Delia sat up, stretching her long legs wrapped in designer jeans. Then she straightened, somehow displaying herself further, unnecessarily. More of her perfume seemed to seep into the air. It was making Saul light-headed, like pepper-spray. “Howie hasn’t called you? In how long? He promised me he would. Oh, he gave up the rock climbing for a few months. Got it out of his system, I guess. It’s all information technology now. Well, he always did have a head for math. Didn’t I tell you?” Delia looked at Saul as if his ignorance on this subject was his fault. “That friend of his, what’s his name, Gerald Somebody, has got him working in computers and things, some start-up company making programs for instant balance-sheet assessments. Or something digital.” Delia waved her hand abstractedly, conjuring up computers and whirring machinery. “High-speed information flow stuff. He said he’d call. Call you, I mean. I told him about Mary Esther. He seemed interested. I can’t believe Howie hasn’t called you to keep you informed.”

“That’s nice,” Saul said. “‘Interested’ is nice.” He took a swig of the beer. “I’m pleased about the ‘interested’ part.”

“Don’t be so ironical about your brother. He doesn’t have all the feelings about things that you have. He’s not so. .” She searched for the word. “Emotional. He sails along on the surfaces. That’s his gift. Besides, he’s making a lot of money,” Delia reported. “A lot of money, he says, almost by accident. Of course he’s immature, but that’s. . I wish you wouldn’t drink beer right out of the bottle, sweetheart. Not in the living room.” Saul’s mother made a distaste-expression. It reminded Saul of years of distaste-expressions, and he looked away, though it pleased him that she was annoyed.

On New Year’s Eve, he would make a resolution about not being petty with his mother, but not until then.

Saul and his younger brother had never been close. In Saul’s estimation, Howie’s brains and his good looks (he was painfully handsome, everyone said, beautiful, a male version of Delia), and Howie’s efforts to get some distance on their mother had made him simultaneously distant and arrogant, or distantly arrogant. In any case, he was hard to get close to, and his thoughts were often a mystery. Like many extraordinarily good-looking men, he never bothered saying very much. Other people were always trying to talk to him, to make the first move, desperate just to keep him around. Saul’s brother had deep brown eyes, a perfectly symmetrical face with high cheekbones, curly black hair, and perfectly straight posture. His princely appearance was perfect in a way that Saul found unpleasant. People stared at him helplessly. He never shambled anywhere, never had a hair out of place, any clothes looked good on him, and as a result he was always being given special attentions.

Howie had once called Saul, during the period of Saul’s life when Saul was driving a taxicab in Chicago, to report that two women had proposed marriage to him that very week. This was at Princeton, where Howie was a junior, majoring in math and computer science. Howie thought it was hilarious, all these propositions, all these women, and the men, too, who hung around him, and he thought that Saul would also be amused. Popularity was a stitch. He was a lucky guy, Howie was, starting with his looks and going on from there. In any particular room, if Howie had not slept with all of the women, it was just an oversight. Well, Howie played the part of the grasshopper, and Saul played the part of the ant. Except grasshoppers weren’t also supposed to be smart and to make a lot of money. Winter was supposed to come in due course and kill them dead.

“Tell him to call me,” Saul said. “Tell Howie to drop us a line and give us his address. Tell him we’re alive and he’s Uncle Howie now, and his niece would like a nice present from him.”

“I certainly won’t say that. Such a shame,” Delia said mournfully, “that you two don’t get along.”

“Oh, they get along,” Patsy said. “We just don’t hear much from him. By the way,” she said, sitting up, “who was that character in comic books who made money no matter what he did?” Patsy stood up and swayed back and forth for Mary Esther’s sake. Saul noticed that Patsy had circles under her eyes, a recent detail — a fact — about her that had escaped him. His heart surged like a motor racing, revving up its RPMs, all for her sake. “Money fell out of trees for him. Some duck. Some relative of Donald Duck.”

“Gladstone Gander,” Saul said, suppressing a belch. On the subject of comic books, books generally, baseball, music, philosophy, and movies, Saul was Mr. Memory.

“Oh, let’s go outside,” Delia said, staring at Saul’s beer bottle. “For just a moment. For a breath of air. All right, kids? What do you say? It’s getting stuffy in here.”

“It’s your perfume, Mom,” Saul said. “You’re wearing a gallon of it.”

“Not quite a gallon.” She smiled. “More like a half-gallon.” She stood up and strode briskly toward the back door, her bracelets and necklace jangling. Saul and Patsy heard the door slam behind her, and then her muffled voice, softly shouting, “It’s beautiful out here!”

“It can’t be beautiful,” Saul said. “It’s March.” He looked at Patsy. “It’s too cold to take the baby outside,” he said softly. “What is she thinking?” His eyes scanned his wife’s face. “When will we ever make love again, honey? Can you tell me that? I’m dying over here.”

Just then he heard his mother scream, a subtle scream, half-private. For a moment he thought it was because he had propositioned his wife. Collecting himself, Saul rushed out past the kitchen into the mud room, out through the back porch with its snow shovel, sand bucket, and bag of salt, onto the wood steps that descended unevenly to the back lawn, covered here and there with patches of dirty snow.

The air had cleared itself of clouds and overcast, and the moon was back in the sky. Just to the side of the steps, the Marschallin stood in the moonlight, her red hair looking silver gray, just as if she had aged thirty years within the past minute. Then Saul realized it was only the effect of the moonlight, and he said, “Mom, it’s just the moonlight. You’re not that old.”

She turned toward him, stricken. “What’re you talking about? What ever on earth are you talking about, Saul? Look!”

She pointed one of her long fingers, decorated with its red nail polish that in the moonlight also looked gray, and he followed where she indicated to the middle of the field, where the albino deer walked with a slight stagger, an arrow sticking out of its back leg, seemingly blinded and wounded now by Saul’s students, the pimply Cossacks. Still, the deer was alive, as it slowly faded back into the dark. Saul considered his options, all of them vague and transitory: he would have tried to run after it, that animal, somehow take its pain away, but for now he was not equipped with the necessary time and energy and speed for that particular kind of rescue.

Five

For the first two weeks after Mary Esther’s birth, Saul and Patsy’s neighbors and friends had called ahead, following country manners, before bringing over dishes of food. Day in and out, the food had accumulated on the kitchen counter and in the refrigerator: chicken-and-noodle casseroles and Jell-O salads and desserts, baked beans, and one poached salmon cooked by a fellow teacher at the school, a subscriber to Gourmet magazine and an avid watcher of the Food Network.

But Saul could be picky. “Well, it’s certainly not Jew food,” he had said after his friend Hugh Welch left. He picked up Hugh’s donated honey-baked ham before he pretended to pass it, like a football, through the kitchen window. “This is pig meat.”

“Don’t complain,” Patsy said. “You’re doing all this for effect. You like ham as much as I do, and you’re just going for cheap laughs.” She took the ham out of his hand and tried to stuff it into the refrigerator, where there was no room for it. “And I like Hugh, besides.”

“Listen, I’m fully assembled in America, but he’s doing this as an ethnic insult, and I’m not being paranoid. At least I don’t think so.”

“Oh, right. Honey,” she said, “calm down.” She turned around and gave him a square smile, beautiful and radiant but not without analytic substance. “You’re an imposter. I’ve seen you eat ham. Ham and sausage and bacon. You’re just playing to the galleries. I suppose next you’ll be keeping kosher. Besides,” she said, “these are gifts, Saul. I’d really appreciate it if you were grateful to your friends, because they’re my friends, too. Stop being a snob.”

“Sometimes they’re only your friends,” he said.

She gave him a long look. “And sometimes they’re only yours.”

“Okay. You want to divide them? Which ones are yours?” he asked. “Which ones aren’t? Let’s divide them up, Patsy, your friends and my friends, and let’s see who has more. The winner has more friends than the loser. The winner gets to go to the state fair for free.”

He stood near the table, balancing on one leg.

“Honey,” she said, “if you want to have a fight, we’ll fight about something actual when you’re ready to do that. And not until then. Actually, not a damn moment before that.”

They had gazed at each other carefully, as if they were entering a new landscape of embittered matrimony, one they had only heard about but never seen until now.

Harold, Saul’s barber, stared down into the crib and at Mary Esther while the meatloaf he had brought cooled under its tinfoil in the kitchen. With the gray March overcast behind her, Mrs. O’Neill, beaming fixedly on the front stoop with her expression of paralyzed charity, offered them a container of the ginger cookies that, despite her aging and memory loss, she could still remember how to make. She had packed the cookies inside a dusty uncleaned goldfish bowl. But she could still not remember the baby’s name after Saul and Patsy had told her three times, and before she left, she said music from somewhere still went through her head, Puccini and Mozart, but she could not remember whether the hour of the day was morning or afternoon, and she was going to have to move herself into a place where there were nurses and people who helped you eat dinner and told you the time. She would not be able to sing arias from opera, once there; she was sure of that. Emory and Anne McPhee gave Patsy a gallon of homemade potato salad preserved in Tupperware; Anne was pregnant again, she said, and couldn’t stay. Harry and Lucia Edmonds, who had worked with Patsy at the bank, brought over a pair of pink baby pajamas, complete with footies, that Lucia had bought at the new outlet mall. Gary Krochock, their neighbor and their insurance agent, also Jewish, dropped off a box of cigars. Mad Dog Bettermine, who had left his girlfriend at home because, he told Saul over the phone, he didn’t want her to get any big ideas about babies and his own potential for fatherhood, grew unexpectedly abashed at the sight of Mary Esther. Having hauled a case of discount no-name beer onto the front porch, he stood quietly over the crib, wordless from baby-fear, staring at Mary Esther, and he could not move until Patsy picked up Mary Esther and Saul took Mad Dog by the arm and guided him out of the room.

Saul removed him to the small back den, gave him a cigar, and from there the two men retired to the back stoop, lighting up and drinking, belching smoke, somehow unable to make conversation. Mad Dog had an odd expression on his face. Saul would have liked to talk to him but didn’t know how. He would have said that fatherhood was great, terrifying, too, of course, but you could handle the terror by imagining yourself having been invited to a large noisy and sloppy party where all the guests made uproar and messes — this was parenthood. Only he didn’t quite believe it was as festive as all that.

But charity was everywhere. Saul had never seen anything like it. Saul’s mother- and father-in-law, Susan and Dick Carlson, arrived after Saul’s mother had left, and they slept in the living room, Susan on the sofa, Dick in a sleeping bag on the floor, during the three days of their visit. Patsy was their only child. During their time in the house, they cooked and cleaned and talked in whispers, like servants. In their quietness, Saul thought they compared favorably to his mother, but they were eerie in their placid and muted operations. They enjoyed companionable and friendly silences — as Delia did not — interrupted by the occasional and characteristic cry of “Here, let me do that.” They said they loved the baby, and Patsy’s mother held Mary Esther with great tenderness, kissing her on the forehead each time she lifted her up and cradled her in her arms and rocked her.

They were sweet to Saul in an airy and distant way, as if they liked the idea of him a bit more than the actuality, and they took great care to defer to him as long as they were in the house: Where were the spare lightbulbs, they would ask, instead of just looking for them. Saul noticed that they often gazed at his hands when they were speaking to him, as if he were about to break into sign language. They treated him like a lovable Martian — and seemed pleased with themselves for being able to love such a creature. “Just you relax,” they often said to him.

After Patsy’s parents departed, Saul could hardly remember that they had been present in the house at all, they removed the traces of themselves so thoroughly. They left no scent behind; they just vanished. His in-laws took an odd sort of pride, in a Protestant way he couldn’t quite pinpoint, in being nearly invisible. They didn’t want anyone to remember that they had ever been anywhere or had been sighted, like rare birds. Some sort of prideful modesty or humility on their part made them withdraw from the footlights in an effort at self-erasure, and it was rather starchy and New England of them. With their mild, quiet voices and their agreeable manner, they didn’t try to assert claims of ownership over Patsy, as his mother certainly would have over him. He tried to remember their faces, Susan’s hair graying in beautiful streaks and Dick’s halfhearted smile, her reading glasses and his Rolex, but all he managed to keep in his head were bits and pieces of their appearance, as if they had evaporated somehow, keeping their souls unviolated and intact and completely private. That was their selfishness, if you wanted to think ill of them. They had no character that they would share. They were charitable with their actions but gave you nothing of themselves, and when they were gone, they were gone for good. All they left behind was a sterling silver teething cup with Mary Esther’s name engraved on it.

The albino deer had vanished, too. He’d seen no trace of it for days, though he had gone looking for it.

Mary Esther lay in the rickety crib that Saul himself had assembled, following the confusing and contradictory instructions enclosed in the shipping box. Above the crib hung a mobile of cardboard stars and planets. Mary Esther slept and cried and gurgled while the mobile turned slowly in the small breezes caused by the visitors as they bent over the baby.

When Saul’s brother Howie finally called, as Saul knew he would, he asked to speak to Mary Esther right away. “I gotta talk to her. Put her on,” he said. Saul told Howie that the baby was only a baby and couldn’t talk on the phone, but Howie argued and said that she certainly could. At a month old, she should start to learn how to use telecommunications. Saul brought the phone down to the baby’s ear, and Howie said whatever he had to say while Mary Esther appeared to smile, and after a minute or so, Saul took the phone away from his daughter and raised it to his ear to speak to Howie himself, but whatever Howie had had to tell his niece was finished, and the phone line had gone dead.

Having a new baby was like having an affair or having committed a murder, Saul decided, as he patrolled the house: you couldn’t really talk about it. People found it disagreeable whenever you started up about your new child; if they were single or childless, they thought you were boastful and self-centered, and if they had children of their own, they were politely bored by your stories. Oh, yeah. Been there, done that, they said — a phrase Saul had always hated. Women could talk to other young mothers about their children, but men could not. There seemed to be a rule about this. Men could boast about their children but not discuss the intricacies of child care, though perhaps this was all changing. The birth of his daughter felt like the biggest event that had ever happened to him, and he had no one to talk to about it except Patsy, and even she, he thought, was getting bored with him, his husbanding of her. To husband: a dreary transitive verb meaning “to conserve, to save.”

One night when Mary Esther was eight weeks old and the smell of early spring was pouring into the room from the purple lilacs in the driveway, Patsy awakened and found herself alone in bed. Checking the clock, she saw that it was three-thirty. Saul had to be up for work in three hours. From downstairs she heard very faintly the sound of groans and music. The groans weren’t Saul’s. She knew his groans very well. There was always a touch of irony to them. These were different. She put on her bathrobe.

In the living room, sitting in his usual overstuffed chair and wearing his blue jeans and T-shirt, Saul was watching a porn film on the TV, the VCR whirring quietly. His head was propped against his arm as if he were listening attentively to a lecture. He glanced up at Patsy, flashed her a guilty wave with his left hand, then returned his gaze to the movie. On the TV screen, a man and a woman were having showy sex in a curiously grim manner inside a stalled freight elevator. They behaved as if they were under orders. Then Patsy realized that, of course, they were under orders, which was at least one reason why their lovemaking looked so odd.

“What’s this, Saul?”

“Video I rented.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“The store.”

Moans had been dubbed onto the soundtrack, but they did not match the actors’ expressions. The man and the woman did not look at each other. For some reason a green ceramic poodle sat in the opposite corner of the freight elevator. “Not very classy, Saul.”

“Well, no. Why do you suppose Howie didn’t want to talk to me? He didn’t stay on the line. He congratulated me and then said he wanted to speak to the baby. I don’t get it. There’s a lot I don’t get these days.”

“Maybe he’s jealous. Of our having a daughter.”

The woman on the TV set wheezled.

“I doubt it. He’s making all the money, but he doesn’t come to visit and he doesn’t send us a present. It’s strange. . I miss him. I miss everybody. Look at that, Patsy. She hasn’t taken her shoes off. That’s pretty strange. They’re having sex in the freight elevator and her shoes are still on. I guess the boys in the audience don’t like feet.”

Patsy studied the TV screen. Unexpected sadness located her and settled in like a headache. She rested her eyes on the Matisse poster above Saul’s chair: naked people dancing in a ring. In this room the human body was excessively represented, and for a moment Patsy had the feeling that everything in life was probably too much, there was just too much to face down. Eventually you were done in by the altogether.

“Saul,” she said, “you need more friends. People to talk to. Don’t turn into a sitcom sort of guy, one of those typical Americans. I’d hate that.”

“Don’t I know it.” He waited. “I need a purpose, as long as you’re at it.”

“Come upstairs.”

“In a minute, my love, after this part.”

“I don’t like to look at them. My idea of good porno is something else. I guess I don’t even like you looking at them, these two.”

“It’s hell, isn’t it?”

She touched his shoulder. “This is sort of furtive. Not that I’m a prude or anything.”

“Oh, you can see it too, if you want. I’m not hiding it. I still have my jeans on. No jerking off or anything like that. I’m an impartial observer. I’m disinterested. See? I even know the proper definition of that often misused word.” He gave her a flat smile.

“Why are you doing this, Saul? How come you’re watching this?”

“Because I wanted to. Didn’t you read the training manual on me? I do this after my daughter is born. Besides, I wanted a real movie and I got this instead. I was in the video place and I went past the musicals and the action thrillers into the sad, private room where all the X’s were. There I was — me — full of curiosity.”

“Curiosity? About what?”

“Well, we, you and I, used to have fun. We used to get hot. So this. . anyway, it’s like nostalgia, you know? Nostalgia for something. It’s like going into a museum where the exhibits are happy, and behind glass, and you watch the happiness, your nose on the glass, and it isn’t yours, so you watch more of it.”

“This isn’t happiness you’re watching. Jesus, Saul, that’s a big soul error. And furthermore, this isn’t like you. Doesn’t it make you feel like shit or something?”

He sat in his chair, thinking. Then he said, “Oh sure, it does. Very shit-like.” He clicked off the TV set, stood up, and put his arms around Patsy, and they embraced for what seemed to Patsy a long time. Behind Saul on the living-room bookshelf were volumes of history and literature — Saul’s collection of Dashiell Hammett and Samuel Eliot Morison and several volumes of the Loeb Classical Library — and the Scrabble game on the top shelf. They had not played the game for months. “Don’t leave me alone back here,” Patsy said. “Don’t leave me alone, okay?”

“I loved you, Patsy,” he told her, and she shivered at the past tense of the verb. It felt like a decision on his part, a conscious act. It felt like the first step of a trial separation. “You know that. Always have.”

“Not what I’m talking about.”

“I know.”

“It’s just that you don’t get everything now,” she said. “I don’t give it all to you. Mary Esther gets some of it. You need to diversify.”

They stood for a few moments longer, swaying slightly together. They were physically intimate, but it felt to Patsy as if their souls were miles apart, hers in Guatemala and Saul’s in Greenland.

Two nights later, Saul finished diapering Mary Esther and then walked into the upstairs hallway toward the bathroom. He brushed against Patsy, who was heading downstairs. Under the ceiling lights her eyes were shadowed with fatigue. They did not speak, and for ten seconds she was a stranger to him. He could not remember why he had ever married her, and he could not remember having desire for her. She was a young, wearied mother, and she looked temporarily used up. For half a minute, he breathed in the pure air of despondency. After shaking for a moment, he tried to regain his balance in the hallway in front of the open bathroom door, angry and frightened, feeling his wounds opening but bleeding inward rather than outward.

When Saul entered his classroom the next day, Gordy and Bob greeted his arrival with rattled throat noises, sociopathic gargling. On their foreheads they had written MAD IN THE USA, in pencil. “Mad,” or “made” misspelled? Saul didn’t ask. Seated in their broken desks and only vaguely attentive, the other students fidgeted and smiled politely, picking at their frayed clothes uniformly one or two sizes too small.

“Today,” Saul said, “we’re going to pretend that we’re young again. I don’t mean a year or two younger, I mean much younger. We’re going to think about what babies would say if they could talk.”

He reached into his jacket pocket for his seven duplicate photographs of Mary Esther, in which she leaned against the back of the sofa, her stuffed gnome in her lap.

“This is my daughter,” Saul said, passing the photographs out. “Mary Esther.” The four girls in the classroom made peculiar cooing sounds. The boys reacted with squirming nervous laughter, except for Gordy and Bob, who had suddenly turned to stone. “Babies want to say things, right? Except they can’t, not yet. What would she say if she could talk? Write it out on a sheet of paper. Give her some words.”

Saul knew he was testing the Cossacks. He was screwing up their heads with parental love that they themselves had never sampled. For Gordy Himmelman, the idea of an actual father would be the mystery beyond all mysteries. It would make him crazy, and that might be interesting. At the back of the room, Gordy, in all his bewilderment, studied the photograph. His face expressed the staring-nothing with which he was on intimate terms. All his feelings were bricked up; and nothing escaped from him.

His was the zombie point of view.

Nevertheless, he bent down over his desk, pencil in hand.

At the end of the hour, Saul collected the papers, and his students shuffled out into the hallway. Saul had noticed that poor readers did not lift their feet off the floor. You could hear them coming down the hallway from the slide and scrape and squeal of their shoes.

He searched for Gordy Himmelman’s paper. Here it was, mad in America, several lines of scrawled writing.

They thro me up in to the air. Peopl come in when I screem and thro me up in to the air. They stik my face up. They never cacht me.

The next lines were heavily erased.

her + try it out. You ink

Saul held up the paper to read the illegible words, and he saw the word “kick” again, next to the word “lidel.”

His head randomly swimming, Saul held the photographs of his daughter, the little kike thoughtfully misspelled by Gordon Himmelman, before bringing the photos to his chest absentmindedly. From the hallway he heard the sound of lively braying laughter.

That night, Saul, fortified with Mad Dog’s no-brand beer, read the want ads, deeply interested. The want ads were full of trash and leavings, employment opportunities (most of them at Five Oaks’s largest employer, WaldChem, where every job was lethal), and the promise of new lives amid the advertised wreckage of the old. He read the personals like a scholar, checking for verbal nuance. Sitting in his overstuffed chair, he had been scanning the columns when his eye stopped on a singular item.

BEEHIVES FOR SALE — MUST SELL. SHELLS, FRAMES, EXTRACTOR. ALSO INCL. SMOKER AND PROTECTIVE HAT TOOLS AND FACE COVERING. GOOD CONDITION. ANY OFFER CONSIDERED. EAGER TO DEAL. $$$ POTENTIAL. CALL AFTER 7PM. 890-7236.

Saul took Mary Esther out of her pendulum chair and held her as he walked around the house, thick with plans and vision. In the vision, he stood proudly in front of Patsy, holding a jar of honey. Sunlight slithered through its glass and transformed the room itself into pure gold. Sweetness was everywhere. Honey would make all the desires right again between them. The peaceable kingdom would return, and the arrows would fly backward away from their targets and find themselves on the string of the bow as the bow itself was unstrung and put away into its case. Gordy Himmelman, meanwhile, would have erased himself from the planet. He would have caused himself in a feat of Flash Gordon — like magic to dematerialize. In this dream, whose colors resembled those of the porn film, Patsy accepted Saul’s gift. She couldn’t stop smiling at him. She tore off her clothes, his too. She poured the honey over Saul.

It was one of his better daydreams. Gazing at the newspapers and magazines piling up next to the TV set and VCR, as he held and burped Mary Esther, Saul found himself shaking with a kind of excitement. Irony, his constant lifelong faithful sidekick, was asleep, or on vacation, and in its heady absence Saul began to reimagine himself as a money-maker, a beekeeper, a man Patsy could not stop herself from loving. Rescue me, he thought, not sure if the words were his or Patsy’s or just came from that great old song.

He did not accuse Gordy of anti-Semitism, or of anything else. He ignored him, as he ignored Bob Pawlak. At the end of the school year they would all go away and drain down into the earth and the dirt and swill they came from and become one with the stones and the all-embracing sewage. A new principle: Some things you can’t help; some things you can’t save, and you’re better off not trying.

On a fine warm day in April, Saul drove out to the north side of town, where he bought the wooden frames and the other equipment from a laconic man named Gunderson. Gunderson wore overalls and boots. Using the flat of his hand, he rubbed the top of his bald head with a farmer’s gesture of suspicion as he examined Saul’s white shirt, pressed pants, funky two-day growth of beard, and brown leather shoes. “Don’t wear black clothes around these fellas,” Gunderson said, meaning the bees. “Bees hate black. Just hate it. Don’t know why, but they do.” Saul paid him in cash, and Gunderson counted the money after Saul handed it over, wetting his thumb to turn the bills.

With Mad Dog’s pickup, Saul brought it all back to Whitefeather Road. He stored his purchases behind the garage. He took out books on beekeeping from the public library and studied their instructions with care. He made notes on a yellow tablet and calculated hive placement. The bees needed direct sunlight, and water nearby. By phone he bought a colony of bees complete with a queen from an apiary in South Carolina, using his credit card number. He did not think he was being hysterical, though the possibility had occurred to him.

When the bee box arrived at the main post office, he received an angry call from the assistant postal manager telling him to come down and pick up this damn humming thing.

As it turned out, the bees liked Saul. They were more predictable than his students, and they worked harder. He was calm and slow around them and talked to them when he removed them from the shipping box and introduced them into the shells and frames, following the instructions he had learned by heart. The hives and frames sat unsteadily on the platform he had laid down on bricks near two fence posts on the edge of the property. But the structure was, he thought, steady enough for bees. He gorged them on sugar syrup, sprinkling it over them before letting them free, shaking them into the frames. Some of them settled on his gloved hands and were so drowsy that, when he pushed them off, they waterfalled into the hive. When the queen and the other bees were enclosed, he replaced the frames inside the shell, being careful to put a feeder with sugar water nearby, outside the shell.

The books had warned him about the loud buzzing sound of angry bees, but for the first few days Saul never heard it. Something about Saul seemed to keep the bees occupied and unirritated. He was stung twice, once on the wrist and once on the back of the neck, but the pain was pointed and directed and so focused that he could manage it. It was unfocused pain that he couldn’t stand.

Out at the back of the property, a quarter-mile away from the house, the hives and the bees wouldn’t bother anyone, he thought. “Just don’t bring them in here,” Patsy told him, glancing through one of his apiary books. “Not that they’d come. I just want them and me to have a little distance between us, is all.” She smiled with uncertainty. “Bees, Saul? Honey? You are quite an amazing literalist.”

“I am? I thought they were metaphors.”

“Literal metaphors,” she corrected him. “Just don’t buy a herd of cows. We can get milk at the store.”

And then one night, balancing his checkbook at his desk, with Mary Esther half-asleep in the crook of his left arm, Saul felt a moment of calm peacefulness, the rarest of all his emotions, and he remembered for that instant exactly what it was like to be in that blessed condition. He hadn’t felt that way for at least eighteen months. Under his desk lamp, with his daughter drooling on his Northwestern University sweatshirt, he sat forward, waiting. A presence made itself felt behind him. When he turned around, he saw Patsy in worn jeans and a T-shirt watching him from the doorway. Her arms were folded, and her breasts were outlined perfectly beneath the cloth. No bra, God save us, he thought, no bra, her nipples visible like the floodlights of heaven across the river. She was holding on her face a tentative expression of sly playfulness. She would be able to do the erotic thing, but it might sometimes be an effort, but she was there again, and she was ready. Saul could see her working at it. He would have to help her out. He would have to pitch in. She couldn’t do this by herself because. . because she didn’t feel like it.

“Well, aren’t you something?” he said. “Kind of sleek-looking.”

“Aren’t I something? Yes, I am. Just look at me.”

“Come here, babe,” he said.

“‘Babe’? We don’t have to do endearments. How about if you come over here?”

“No, you first. I gotta put the baby down. I’ve got the baby here.”

“Ah, yes. Saul and the baby.” She came into the room, her bare feet whisking against the wood floor, and she put her arms around him so that the baby wasn’t also embraced, and she pressed herself against him strategically and stealthily.

“Put Mary Esther into her crib,” she whispered. She clicked off the desk lamp.

As they made love, Saul thought of the bees, of procreation, and citizenship. Already, he thought, those insects—Apis mellifera—were proving to be a kind of solution.

Spring moved into summer, and in the distance the outlet mall was completed, with a new cineplex going up nearby, and the microwave tower constructed. Saul bought a new computer. Just before school ended, he told his students about the bees and the hives. Pride escaped from his face, radiating it; he could feel it bathing his students with its unwholesome glow. When he explained how honey was extracted from the frames, he glanced at Gordy Himmelman and saw a look of what he took to be dumb animal malice directed back at him. What was the big deal? Saul wondered before he turned away. The kid hated Saul anyway. A bit more hatred would be salt on top of salt.

One night in early June, Patsy was headed upstairs, looking for the Snugli, which she thought she had forgotten in Mary Esther’s room, when she heard Saul’s voice coming from behind the door. She stopped on the landing, her hand on the banister. At first she thought he might be singing to the baby, but, no, Saul was not singing. He was sitting in there — well, he was probably sitting, Saul didn’t like to stand when he spoke — talking to his daughter, and Patsy heard him finishing a sentence: “. . was never very happy.”

Patsy moved closer to the door.

“Who explains?” Saul was saying, apparently to his daughter. “No one does.”

Saul went on talking to Mary Esther, filling her in on his mother and several other mysterious phenomena. What did he think he was doing, discussing this ephemera with an infant? “I should sing you a song,” he announced, interrupting his train of thought. “That’s what parents do. It’s in all the books. Maybe I’ll do Zorastro’s aria. Or ‘Pigeons on the Grass, Alas.’ You might like that.”

To get away from Saul’s sitcom vocalizing, Patsy retreated to the window for a breath of air. Looking out, she saw someone standing on the front lawn, bathed in moonlight, staring in the direction of the house. He was thin and ugly and scruffy, and he looked a bit like a shadowy clod, but a dangerous shadowy clod, and the hairs on the back of her neck stood up.

“Saul,” she said. Then, more loudly, “Saul, there’s someone out on the lawn.”

He joined her at the window. “I can’t see him,” he said. “Oh, yeah, there.” He shouted, “Hello? Can I help you?”

The boy turned around. He got on a bike and raced away down the driveway and onto Whitefeather Road.

Saul did not move, his hands planted on the windowsill. “Well, I’ll be damned. It’s Gordy Himmelman,” he groaned. “That little bastard has come onto our property. I’m getting on the phone.”

“Saul, why’d he come here? What’d you do to him?” She held her arms against her chest. “What does he have against us?”

“I was his teacher. And we’re Jewish,” Saul said. “And to top it all off, we’re parents. He never had any. I showed those kids the baby pictures and he had a psychotic break. Big mistake. He’s not used to being psychotic. Somebody must have found Gordy in a barrel of brine. He was not of woman born.” He tried to smile. “I’m kidding, sort of.”

“Do you think he’ll be back?” she asked.

“Oh, yes.” Saul wiped his forehead. “They always come back, those kind. And I’ll be ready when he does.”

It had been a spring and summer of violent weather, and Saul had been reading the Old Testament again, looking for clues. On Thursday, around four in the afternoon, he had finished mowing the front lawn and was sitting on the porch, drinking the last, the final, bottle of Mad Dog’s no-brand beer when he looked to the west and felt a sudden cooling of the air, a shunting of atmosphere from higher to lower. Just above the horizon a mass of clouds began boiling. Clouds that looked like breasts and hand tools — he couldn’t help thinking the way he thought— advanced over him, with other clouds hanging down, pendulous. The wind picked up.

“Patsy,” he called. “Hey, Patsy.”

Something calamitous was happening in the atmosphere. In a moment a voice could easily emerge from the whirlwind. The pressure was dropping so fast that Saul could feel it in his elbows and knees.

“Patsy!” he shouted.

From upstairs he heard her calling back: “What, Saul?”

“Go to the basement,” he said. “Close the upstairs window and take Mary Esther down there. Take a flashlight. Something’s coming. We’re going to get a huge storm.”

Rushing through the house, Saul closed windows and switched off lights, and when he returned to the front door to close it, he saw the tall and emaciated apparition of his student Gordy Himmelman out in the yard, standing fixedly like an emanation from the dirt and stone of the fields. He had returned. Toward Saul he aimed his vacant stare. Flies buzzed around his head. Saul, who could not stop thinking even in moments of critical emergency, was struck into stillness by Gordy’s presence, his authoritative malevolence — or whatever it was — standing there in the just-mown grass. For the first time the thought entered Saul’s mind that he was responsible for Gordy somehow, that he had had a small but important part in his creation, that he had been the minor lab-coated assistant in Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory, attaching the wires behind the Tesla coils. But they’d all collaborated: the volatile ambitious sky and the forlorn backwardness of the fields had together given rise to this human disaster, who, even as Saul watched, yelled toward the house, “Hey, Mr. Bernstein. It’s a storm.” Or maybe he said, “I’m a storm.” Saul didn’t quite hear. Then the boy said, “Go take a look at your bees, shitbird.” In slow motion, he smiled.

Feeling like a commando, Saul, in whom necessity had created the illusion of speed, caught up to Gordy, who was pumping away on his broken and rusted bicycle, and pulled him off. He threw and kicked the junk Schwinn into the ditch. In the rain that had just started, Saul grabbed Gordy by the shoulders and shook him back and forth. He pressed his thumbs hard enough to bruise. Gordy, violently stinking, smelled of neglect and seepage, and Saul nearly gagged. But he could not stop shaking him; it was like the release of a terrible pressure, a shaking cure. Violence was a sort of joy after all. But he himself was shaking, too. With violent, rapid, horizontal jerking motions, the boy’s head was whipped. His face was level with Saul’s. They were the same height.

Saul wanted to see his eyes. But the eyes were as empty as mirrors.

“Hey, stop it,” Gordy said. “It hurts. You’re hurting. You’re hurting him.”

“Hurting who?” Saul asked. Thunder rolled toward him. He saw himself reflected in Gordy Himmelman’s eyes, a tiny figure backed by lightning. Who, me?

“Stop it, don’t hurt him.” Patsy’s voice, repeating Gordy’s words, snaked into his ear, and he felt her hand on his arm, restraining him. She was there, out in the rain, less frightened of the rain than she was of Saul. The boy had started to sag, seeing the two of them there, his scarecrow arms raised to protect himself, having assumed, probably, that he was about to be killed. There he squatted, the child of attention deficit, at Saul’s feet.

“Stay there,” Saul mumbled. “Stay right there.” Through the rain he began walking, then running, toward his bees. The storm, empty of content, tucked itself toward the east and was being replaced — one patch of firmament after another — by one of those insincere midwestern blue skies.

Mary Esther began to cry and wail as Patsy jogged toward Saul. Gordy Himmelman followed along behind her.

When she was within a hundred feet of Saul’s beehives, Patsy saw that the frames had been knocked over, scattered. Saul lay, face down, where they once stood. He was touching his tongue to the earth momentarily, for a taste.

When he rose, he saw Patsy. “All the bees swarmed,” he said. “They’ve left. They’re gone.”

She held Mary Esther tightly and examined Saul’s face. “How come they didn’t attack him? Didn’t they sting him?”

“Who knows?” Saul spread his arms. “They just didn’t.”

Gordy Himmelman watched them from a hundred yards away, and with his empty gaze he made Patsy think of the albino deer, the one with the arrow in it — half blind, wandering these fields day after day without direction.

“Look,” Saul said, pointed at Mary Esther, who had stopped crying when she saw her father. “Her shoe is untied.” He wiped his face with his sleeve and shook off the dirt from his jeans. Approaching Patsy, he gave off a smell of soil and honey and sweat. Distracted, he tied Mary Esther’s shoe.

His hair soaked with rain, he glanced at Patsy, who, with some difficulty, was keeping her mouth shut. What she loved intermittently about Saul was the vagary of feeling that focused itself into the tiniest actions of human attention, like the tying of this pink shoe. Better to keep her emotions a secret than to talk about them all the time, she thought. It would generate more energy that way. It was a variety of discouraged love that she felt, not the plain unvarnished kind. He finished the knot and kissed them both. Dirt and honey were on his lips, and they came off on Patsy’s.

At a distance of a hundred yards, the boy, Gordy, watched all this, and from her vantage point Patsy saw the boy’s empty expression, those mortuary eyes. She felt certain that he would stick around. They would have to give him something, some form of tribute, because, like it or not, he was following them back, their faithful zombie, made, or mad, in America. She heard his shoes shuffling on the driveway.

Well, maybe we are missionaries, Patsy thought, as she stumbled and Saul held her up. We’re the missionaries they left behind when they took all the religion away. But missionaries for what? On the front porch of the house she could see the empty bottle of Saul’s no-brand beer still standing on the lip of the ledge, and she could see the porch swing slowly rock back and forth, as if someone were still sitting there, waiting for them.

Six

Later that night, several hours after Gordy had left, Saul returned to the toppled wreckage of his beehives. In the damp and still unappeaseable darkness, he carried the frames two at a time into the shed at the back of the yard. His hand-crank extractor was stored in the corner, and he dropped the frames into the barrel one by one, each making a hollow clank. A few of the bees still clung to them, and Saul did his best to shoo them out, but they were angry with him — he could hear it, a distinctly irritated insect murmur — and after being stung several times, he let them stay. He would deal with them later. He didn’t know what to do with the honey on the frames. It would just remain there for now. He felt selfish and proprietary. He didn’t want it himself, but he didn’t want anyone else to get it, either. Milk and honey, the various rewards, all out of his hands. In the corner, a mouse scurried behind a pine board, its paws making fingernail-skittering sounds, and outside, very distantly, came the hooting of an owl. He let the stillness of the evening absorb him, travel through him, like the onset of sleep.

When he was finished, he sat down in the doorway of the shed, caught his breath, and smelled the air off the fields, the generously muddy odor following summer rain on dry soil. Overhead, the familiar stars slipped further and further away.

Several days later, dressed in his jeans and his T-shirt, Saul was standing at the kitchen counter drinking a glass of grapefruit juice and checking Patsy’s dusty African violets on the sill. When he glanced out the kitchen window, he saw Gordy Himmelman planted on the lawn, staring up into the sky impatiently, as if waiting for a hot-air balloon to snatch him up and rescue him. His hands were knitted together. The boy always seemed to be gazing skyward or earthward. He rarely could look out at his own level, at the human scene; Saul had never seen his gaze pointed in that direction, where his prospects seemed to be as dim as he was.

In any case, he was back.

The previous week, the night of the storm, Saul had instructed Gordy to go home and never to return, though he had said it without the necessary anger to make the correct frightening impression. Gordy had seldom listened to him, anyway, in class or out. He had given Saul one of his several blank expressions, like that of someone waiting for a translation. On Gordy, blankness had a certain eloquence. The boy was profoundly blank. Nevertheless, after following Saul around for a few minutes, doglike, he had mounted his rusting bicycle, nodded once, and disappeared down the road as twilight came on and the setting sun bathed him in a misleading post-rainstorm rosy glow. Watching him pedal away, Saul had felt a distinct relief. He was tired of the ragtag unfortunate and the disengaged and the special-needs types who had clustered around him in classrooms and elsewhere, and he was glad to see Gordy bicycling out of his life. He had come to think of himself as an opportunist of misfortune, his own and others’. Somehow, without knowing how the process had been effected, he had taken advantage of the disadvantaged. Now that he had a child of his own, his compassion for other people’s children felt all used up. He was finished with the unlucky and the disabled. No more charity in the service of narcissism. With the bees gone, redemption seemed — what? Unworkable. He was tired of the romance of failure, anyway.

But someone had failed to tell Gordy Himmelman that Saul was through with him, because here he was, loitering on the morning lawn, a sentry dressed in his uniform: soiled jeans and torn shirt. Saul put down his juice glass carefully in a cereal bowl near the kitchen sink and strolled outside to where Gordy was standing. Already the air was unsettled and feverish, though it had rained again in the middle of the night, another brief tantrum of a downpour, and the grass had a warm, damp prickliness, as if Saul were stepping on a horsehair doormat. It was a disagreeable sensation. In the trees the blue jays and crows flapped and screamed. The weather was getting so moody and violent these days: it was the warfare of heaven against earth, the opening of the seven seals.

“So,” Saul said. “Hey, Gordy.” Close up, his former student smelled of roasted pumpkin seeds and brine. He hadn’t shaved, and his boy’s scraggly indecisive peachfuzz facial hair mingled with his acne. He was wearing some sort of metal-and-leather apparatus around his neck, probably a dog collar, with a small broken soundless bell attached. He was chewing something — gum, Saul hoped.

“Hey, Mr. Bernstein.” Gordy nodded at Saul, then looked away quickly, as if he were busy, occupied with many tasks.

“Can I help you with something?”

“Nope,” Gordy said. “Not right now. Maybe later.” Gordy waved. “See ya.”

“Gordy, what’re you doing here?”

There was a long silence, during which Gordy Himmelman studied Saul’s feet. Finally he said, “I came here on my bike.”

“I know that. I mean, what are you doing here?”

“Is this, like, a quiz?” Gordy shrugged and started to laugh, then stopped himself. “Hey, I don’t mean to make no trouble. Ha ha ha ha ha. Not today anyways.”

“No. Right. I’m just asking you why you came.”

“It’s a nice day. Can’t I stand here?” Gordy smiled his odd square smile. He was now surveying the sky again. Once more the birds began their ritual screaming. Saul had the feeling that they were trying to tell him something important, in fact to convey an urgent message, in bird language. In addition, Saul could hear, behind him, Mary Esther’s crying and Patsy’s quiet, soothing, morning endearments.

“Yes, it is a nice day. I guess you can stand there, maybe for a minute. But did you come here to talk to me? Or apologize?” Hearing that word, whose meaning he could not possibly have known, the boy seemed to startle. “Gordy, why did you knock down my beehives?”

For his trouble, Saul got one of Gordy’s sudden deadpan expressions. For a half-second it occurred to Saul that the boy might be lovestruck. Then Gordy said, “A hawk just went by, looked like. That thing you said, I couldn’t help it. It was like an idea I had. Me and Bob. Only Bob wasn’t there.”

“Well, you. . you hate me, right? And didn’t you kill that deer?”

“Well, I dunno. Naw. It’s not like that.” He looked away. He looked at the sky. Nothing up there but sky. Wherever Gordy went, he created a cognitive fog, even in broad daylight.

“You don’t know? Okay. Then what are you doing here?”

“You mean right now?” He gave Saul a goofy how-dumb-do-you-think-I-am expression. “I’m talkin’ to you.”

“Yes. Of course. Certainly. But what I’m asking you is, why did you get on your bicycle and come over here? I really don’t get it. I’m missing something. You. . I thought you hated me. Don’t you? You and Bob Pawlak? I thought you couldn’t stand the sight of me. You called me a shitbird. That’s what you said. A shitbird. I don’t even know what a shitbird is. And then there were the hives. You ruined them. You owe me for them,” Saul said irritably.

“That was only in school. And the rest was just talk. Anyway I never said nothing about hating, not in that way. ’Cause it’s you who hate me. I can tell. Is that your car over there?” With his thumb, Gordy gestured toward Saul’s Chevy. He had been avoiding eye contact. The body shop had made the car look like new after Saul had rolled it all those many months ago.

“Yes.” Saul sighed. “Yes, it is.” He pointed a finger at the boy. “Gordy, if you can’t explain to me what you’re doing here, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“Okay.” The boy nodded. “Okay.” How hard it was to argue with someone when that person didn’t listen to you! Or did listen, but didn’t act on it. It was like being married.

“Gordy, please go home. You’re trespassing. You have to get off my property right now.”

“Okay.” He did not move. “What year is it?” He motioned again at the car with his thumb.

“The car?” Saul felt flustered. “It’s two years old.”

“Still shiny, though. You wash it in soapsuds?”

“That’s not the point.”

Gordy grinned at Saul, the grin of the torturer. Some sort of discoloration had applied itself down through the years to the boy’s teeth. They were rotting in a premature manner. “You must of just washed it, for it to look that clean. You must be proud of it.”

“Hey, Gordy,” Saul said. “I have a great idea. Let’s go for a ride. What d’you say? Let’s go for a ride in my car.”

“Where?”

“Oh, who cares. Let’s just go for a ride.”

“Know what this is?” Gordy reached in under the back of his trousers and pulled out a small shiny handgun, a revolver of some sort, one of the common ones, maybe a.22-caliber. He held it in his palm for Saul’s inspection. He grinned. Saul backed up two steps. He felt prickles on his skin and a sudden animal heat. He wanted to shout aloud at Patsy, to hide herself and Mary Esther. But silence for now might be better, less crisis-making.

“Well, it looks a lot like a gun,” Saul said quietly. Behind him, Mary Esther’s crying had ceased as suddenly as if a conductor had cued it to stop. Calm. Be calm. Saul thought that Patsy must be nursing the baby in the rocking chair upstairs, and he was counting the number of steps to the house and calculating how long it would take him to get there: about twenty-four running strides, approximately fifty seconds, much more time than the little metal duck in the shooting gallery had in its perilous journey from the right-hand side to the left. Saul imagined himself with a target painted on his chest, the same as the duck’s. The rest of Saul’s mind had gone haphazardly bare. He would protect his wife and child. But for now, he would not move. His entire life job was to stop this young man from creating harm. “What kind is it? Is it loaded?”

“That’s right,” Gordy said, suddenly serious. Then he gave himself a little squirrel-shake. “That’s right, it’s a gun. But, no, it ain’t loaded.” He raised it up to the sky and pulled the trigger again and again and again and again and again. After he lowered his arm, he looked directly at Saul. “You wouldn’t like me if I came here with a loaded gun. But, hey. You can shoot the sky all you want, Mr. Bernstein. I just thought I’d show it to you. I thought you’d be interested. You want it? Want to shoot the sky?” His eyebrows went up. “You can pretend to aim at the sun — you know, shoot it out?” He smiled his discolored toothy smile. “Then the earth would go dark.”

“No. Not now. Whose is it?” Saul asked. Somehow, as a survival trick, he felt he should keep Gordy talking. But the question seemed to flummox the boy. So Saul tried another question. “Why did you think I wanted to see it?”

“’Cause everybody wants to see a gun,” Gordy intoned with certainty. “Nobody don’t want to see a gun. A thing can’t get more important than a gun.”

“I agree with you there,” Saul said. Monitoring himself, he noticed how expert he was, how exemplary, at pretending to be calm, when in fact all he really felt was a certain variety of domesticated and internalized cancerous emotional riot. Patsy. Mary Esther. “Hey, Gordy, let’s go for a ride in the car, okay?”

“Okay, I guess. Don’t you need shoes?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Saul said. “I can drive barefoot. I’ve done it before.”

“You sure have a lot of hair on your arms,” Gordy said. “Hairiest man I ever saw. Is that Jew hair?”

“Sure is. Gordy, how about if we get into the car now, right this minute?”

“I was just askin’,” Gordy said, as patient as a turtle. “Okay, let’s do that.”

Gordy pocketed the gun, picked up the rusty bicycle at his feet, and sauntered toward the car. He loaded the bike into the backseat, where it dripped rust over the upholstery. After Saul got in and twisted the key, challenging the car to start, they drove out onto Whitefeather Road. Down the road, three-quarters of a mile away, the old town dump was being filled in. They were going to put a housing development there. Where would the rats go? It was a problem. You couldn’t shoot them all. Even the rats needed somewhere to stay.

Within another mile of the landfill, the farmland quickly morphed into cement and asphalt parking lots outside the Wolverine Outlet Mall and the Happy Village CinePlex 25 and the Bruckner Buick-Honda MotorMart, dominated by the grinning giant white plasticene Bruckner polar bear, an attention-getting device two stories high with its pawful of green plastic cash, an offering to passing motorists, and, floating above the bear but still tethered to it, the Bruckner MotorMart blimp — really just an outsized helium balloon — unmoving in the infernal morning heat. On clear days, the blimp, floating above the trees, was visible from Saul and Patsy’s bedroom window, although both Saul and Patsy tried to avoid looking at it. Now, behind the wheel, with Gordy next to him viewing the sights, the gun pocketed somewhere, Saul felt richly overloaded with anger and bad nerves, but at least he had Gordy in the car, far enough away from the house and from Patsy and Mary Esther so that the kid could do them no harm. He switched on the air conditioner, then remembered that the compressor wasn’t working. The Chevy was a lemon, but Saul was too fatalistic to do anything about its various debilities; and, besides, he identified with the car and its failings. Any car he owned would eventually fall to pieces, simply because he owned it.

It was so hot the sky was almost more white than blue. The sun had some real anger behind it today, a distinctive solar rage.

After opening the window, he saw up ahead a group of middle school girls standing out on the side of the road, waving their arms toward a side drive and holding up signs that said FREE CARWASH! He knew those girls: it was a money-making scheme for the ninth grade, the pretty ones, the Eloi, standing out on the road to attract attention, while the homely ones, the Morlocks, washed the cars and begged for gratuities. It all felt posthumous to him, this morning spectacle, as if Gordy had loaded the pistol and shot him and Saul was driving toward the afterlife, which would be about fifteen miles out of town in a strip mall bordering a dairy farm.

“Look at them,” Gordy said. “Dumb girls. They just spit on the cars they wash.”

At least the gun wasn’t loaded. Two of the girls watched him drive past, with Gordy on the passenger side. They waved with feigned cheerfulness until they saw Gordy, when their expressions were downgraded to surprise and alarm.

Thinking of the gun, Saul considered the prospects following his death. His chances weren’t good. There would be no harps in the afterlife, but instead long moralistic debriefing sessions in classrooms, during which he would have to explain himself and his quirks at length to some querulous Christian saint wearing sandals and a business suit and holding a clipboard. It would be like a substance-abuse clinic, with slogans and checklists and chores and trivial corrections, and a big sign over the main gate: WE WON, YOU LOST. There would be no unconditional forgiveness. Everything would be on a contingency basis. God’s anger would have to be placated with sacrificial offerings, starting with Saul’s irony, which Saul would have to throw away on the eternal spiritual fire, along with his skepticism and his interest in baseball and his Charlie Parker LPs. It would all have to go. The population of souls in Saul’s afterlife would have smiles on their faces, evangelical tent-show grins. Angels would be displaying their navel-less midriffs and grooming their wings with giant pearl combs. They would be dabbing their feet in the river of light. Saul didn’t want to die because the possibility of his having to join the God cult, following the expiration of his body, unnerved him. Perhaps they’d toss him in Limbo, a place full of cubicles and malfunctioning coffeemakers intended to break everyone of the caffeine habit, and of every other habit, for that matter. He would have to take lessons in sanctity and sincerity. There would be odious piety. There would be sensitivity training. They’d start calling him “Paul” instead of “Saul” and he wouldn’t be able to stand it. In Limbo, though, he’d have plenty of company: almost all of the Jews would be there, analyzing the situation. And, then, Patsy would appear on the scene, eventually. She would know how to handle whatever came up.

Unless Heaven happened to be run by Arabs. Perhaps Allah was actually in charge. If so, Saul’s goose was cooked.

“Hey,” Gordy said. “You’re driving to my house. Can I turn on the radio?”

“The FM doesn’t work. Only the AM.”

“Hey,” Gordy said, “this is a real shitty car.” He squirmed in his seat. “Looks ain’t everything. How come you never fix any of it?”

“How come you knocked down my beehives?”

“How come when I ask you a question, you ask me a question?”

“Who wants to know?” Saul asked. Gordy slouched down and put his hand over his face. They drove on in silence.

Saul had motored past Gordy Himmelman’s house on Strewwelpeter Street many times before, so he knew where it was, in a low-rent neighborhood of dying and spindly oak trees behind the parking lot of the new WaldChem processing plant, where as their new sideline they made genetically engineered dehydrated fruit, and when he got to where Gordy lived, some woman was outside smoking a cigarette and hammering at the broken wooden steps leading up to the front door. She wasn’t Gordy’s mother — it was Brenda Bagley, Gordy’s aunt, the waitress who worked in the Fleetwood. She was wearing a faded cotton housedress and sneakers, and when she stood up, she looked like an undersea creature.

Her face was disfigured by years of hard work and stupendous ugliness: her hair hung around her pockmarked cheeks like seaweed around a clam. Her hooded eyes were fatigued and suspicious and sullen; nothing done by human beings could surprise or please her. Behind where she was standing, the house, a white prefab with corrugated steel sides — the kind of house sought out by tornadoes — rested somewhat precariously on concrete blocks, a huge spiderweb satellite TV dish planted next to it on the lawn.

Brenda Bagley watched as Gordy pulled his bicycle out of the back of Saul’s car. Gordy wheeled the bike across the street, and Saul started to wave just before he saw Gordy’s aunt, whose voice was muffled, lift her left hand, the one with the cigarette, across her forehead. After another exchange — Saul couldn’t hear what they were saying — she reversed her grip on the hammer and hit Gordy twice in the face, hard, with the hammer’s wooden handle. She did it so fast, Saul could hardly see her hand moving. She did it like a virtuoso, practiced and instinctual. She did it with considerable force. She hauled back and brought her hand down in a familiar swift arc.

Gordy cried out. Then he fell to his knees and put his hands to his head at the scalp just above the ear. The woman reached back again with the hammer and then seemed to think better of striking the boy a third time. She leaned down, withdrew the gun from Gordy’s back pocket, and lumbered into the house with it. When she came out again, Gordy was making his way up to his feet, and the woman began to shout at him, and Gordy shouted back. They did it casually, as if they were used to the dailiness of violent quarreling.

Saul steered the Chevy over to the shoulder of the road, killed the engine, and hurriedly got out. He jogged across the street and approached the woman, who had by now returned to her work. Gordy was bleeding, a small rivulet of blood trickling down from a bruise near his left ear across his cheek, and he was wiping it with his dirty hand. More blood came oozing out from his scalp, soaking his hair. Then his cursing stopped. As Saul neared them, both the woman and Gordy stared at him, the woman still hammering as she stared, though Gordy had retreated backward toward the house, against which he leaned, holding the side of his bleeding head. Saul had no idea what he himself would say. He hadn’t been invited to this particular gathering. But there was always something to say if you could only think of it.

“Hello,” Saul said.

“You’re the teacher,” the woman said. From inside the home came the sound of a TV set singing and selling. Straightening up, she reached into the pocket of her dress, pulled out an unfiltered cigarette, and lit it. “The reading teacher. I remember you. We met. I sure heard enough about you from him. He says you don’t like him.”

“Saul Bernstein,” he said. “Yes, that’s right. I’m Gordy’s teacher. You and I have had a conference about him.” He paused, thinking about his role in all this. “Ms. Bagley, I was always available for more conferences if you wanted to talk to me. Anyway, he bicycled over to my house this morning, and so I just brought him back.”

“Oh, uh-huh,” the woman said. “Well, like I say, I’ve heard about you lately. Gordy’s been talking about you, now and then.” Saul waited for secondhand praise, but it did not come.

“I couldn’t help but notice. What did you hit him for just now?” Saul asked, nodding in Gordy’s direction. He felt it was best not to ask her how, as the boy’s aunt, she figured she had hitting rights over Gordy. He didn’t know how to do this sort of interview. He didn’t know how to talk to her.

“He needed hitting,” Brenda Bagley said, relying, like one of Tolstoy’s peasants, on simplicity and truth. “He can be a bad boy when he gets an idea into his head. Straw that broke the camel’s back and all that, with me being the camel, y’know.” She smiled briefly at Saul, not a camel but a lobster smile, all teeth and skull. It was horrifying. “I mean, do you think he should be carrying a gun around?”

“I would never hit a child,” Saul told her.

“Oh, you wouldn’t? That’s interesting. What I heard was, you shook him so hard last week, his head just about come off, and his teeth out of his head. He had a headache afterwards.”

“Gordy was on my property. He had knocked my beehives over,” Saul said, in explanation, and his forehead broke out in a sweat. “He’d been prowling and trespassing.” It sounded lame to him even as he said the words. His inadequacy in argumentation startled him.

“Could have been the storm did it. We had terrible winds around here, flung things all over the yard, as you can see.” Saul didn’t dare take his eyes off her. She had some sort of birthmark on her neck, a discoloration in the shape of a tiny football, and the smoke from her cigarette, when she exhaled, surrounded her head like an insulating aura. It was as if her head was smoldering, a peat bog of a head. She tossed the cigarette off into the bushes. “He came over to your house this morning again? Well, he was supposed to stay here,” she said.

“That’s why you hit him?”

“Nope. I hit him because he took my gun with him, stole it out of the house, and headed up on his bicycle to where you live. And even if it wasn’t loaded, which it wasn’t, it scared the death out of me just now that he had done that, that he would think of doing that. He’s got a thick skull, Gordy has. You have to hit him pretty hard to make a single thing register on him.”

“All he wanted to do was show me the gun. That’s really all it was,” Saul said, not certain that it was the whole truth, or that he should bother to excuse this inexcusable boy. “Well,” Saul said, “I guess I had better be going.”

“That’s a good idea.” She nodded. “I like your explanation for it, that he wanted to show you that gun. Well, you can think what you like. I certainly won’t stop you. I’d invite you in for coffee, but you’re not wearing shoes,” the woman said, pointing at Saul’s bare feet. She scowled at his appearance.

“Should we talk again about this? We need to talk about Gordy’s future.”

“That’s a good one,” the woman said, starting to laugh. She reached into her mouth and picked a shred of tobacco off her tongue. “His future.” She laughed with feeling. “Well, I got work to do here, so if you’ll excuse me,” she said, and leaned down to finish the job she had started.

When Saul got back to the house, his barber-friend, Harold, was sitting in the kitchen with Patsy, the two of them drinking coffee, Mary Esther fussing in Patsy’s arms. Harold had come over to steal Saul away to play basketball for an hour; he was dressed in his T-shirt, shorts, and expensive name-brand athletic shoes. Mad Dog and Karla would join them— Karla was a better player than Mad Dog anyway. It was a Saturday-morning ritual. Harold stared at Saul. “What happened to you?” he asked. “You look all messed up.”

Patsy stared at him, too. Saul realized that he must be a sight. “Honey, where’d you go?” she asked, as she lightly bounced Mary Esther twice. “You were out here in the kitchen, and then you were gone, and you didn’t leave a note or anything. I was a little worried.” Her hair filigreed back from her forehead. There was a tiny stain on her blouse from her lactation. Her beauty tore through him like an electric shock, and he felt himself stirring. For a moment, he didn’t even want Harold looking at her. At that moment, she handed the baby to Harold.

Recovering himself, Saul explained about Gordy, about the gun, and the hammer handle to the head. “Funny that she broke the skin,” Harold observed. “Usually you just get a lump raised with a hammer handle.” Both Patsy and Saul examined Harold in the moment that followed, and Harold shrugged. When Saul mentioned Gordy Himmelman’s gun, Patsy inhaled so suddenly that the baby started to wail. Harold passed the baby back to Saul.

“We have to report this to somebody,” she said.

“Report what? To whom? And for what? Possessing a concealed weapon? Trespassing? You can hit your kid all you want in this country. It’s fully legal,” Saul said, bouncing Mary Esther until she quieted. “People do it just to get their excess energy out. Anyway, it wasn’t loaded, and this whole state is sympathetic to concealed weapons.”

“Oh, you don’t want to get mixed up with Brenda Bagley, anyway, that whole crew,” Harold said, scratching himself and standing up to provide a certain inflection to his sentences. As he stood and stretched, he said, “That woman you saw is Gordy’s aunt, as you know. Gordy was the son of common-law Mrs. Himmelman number one, that woman’s sister, that woman you talked to being Brenda, and as for the man of the house, he’s been gone for a couple of years. I knew him — now there was a piece of work. Rufus, his name was, and dumb as a box of rocks, but he did always have girlfriends, and he liked to hurt people. She — Brenda — got custody of the boy, I don’t know, a year ago, at least, long after Rufus disappeared into the depths of Wyoming. It’s complicated. It’s always complicated with people like that.”

“What happened to her? To Gordy’s mother?” Patsy asked.

“Lois? Oh, she died in a house fire.” Harold shrugged again, but there was something behind the shrug, some anger or resentment, and a shake of the head. “They smoke cigarettes twenty-four hours a day, preferably in bed, they drink like fish, they pass out with their cigarettes burning, and bingo, you’ve got yourself a house ablaze, people screaming and what have you.”

“How do you know all this?” Saul asked.

“Saul, I wasn’t always as you see me now,” Harold said. “And I was in school here with those people.” He bent down to stretch, touching his toes. “I’m a townie. I dated some of those women, when we were small.” He waited. “I knew her. I knew the first wife. I knew the one who died in the fire. I dated her.” Harold’s face took on a quick passing melancholy.

“You dated her?” Mary Esther grabbed at Saul’s fingers, making intricate tiny fists.

“Yeah, I dated her before Rufus appeared on the scene. Rufus overcame Lois with his charm. He’s got two other brothers, one named Cash, and the other Kerry. Cash and Kerry — both of them are in prison. The kid, Gordy, wasn’t killed in the fire because he was being baby-sat with the aunt at the time, this Brenda you had your encounter with today. Where Rufus was during that fire, that’s never been completely established, and I don’t like to talk about this, so can we play basketball now?” He glanced down at Saul’s feet. “Want to put on some shoes?”

“It’s too hot to play basketball,” Patsy said. “Are you two guys nuts?”

“Could be,” Harold informed her. “Get some shoes on.” Once Saul was out of the room, Harold turned conspiratorially toward Patsy and, after twisting his head from side to side to loosen the muscles, said in a smilingly hopeful, daydreaming tone, “I’m going to school his ass. Saul can’t play in the heat.”

Patsy watched them go. Men were such bluffers. It was all a bluff. With relief, after the baby’s brief outburst, Patsy opened her blouse and her nursing bra. As she nursed, Mary Esther lifted her tiny, perfect hands so that the palms faced outward onto Patsy’s breast, and it occurred to Patsy that in adults, this same gesture was one of adoration and astonished happiness.

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.

Eight

On Sunday mornings, if Mary Esther didn’t stir, Saul and Patsy slept late. Usually Patsy awakened first. She would lie in bed watching the leaves of the linden shivering in the hot mottled summer air outside their bedroom window. Above her, hanging from the ceiling light fixture, a cardboard bird mobile turned slowly in the vestigial breezes. She gazed at it, vaguely admiring its equilibrium, its spiritless motion. Or she would examine Saul, wrestling with his angels as he muttered words that were all vowels — Hawaiian words, now that it was summertime and he was no longer dragging himself across the Arctic — and when she watched him and listened to his unintelligible garble, she tried to concentrate her attention on how it was she had married him, those steps of gradual womanly acknowledgment that had taken her toward him.

They had both been performers in those undergraduate days, Saul a musician and she a dancer, and they kept running into each other in the rehearsal halls.

She had really met him after a dance production of The Unnamable. She was one of the two dancers, and the production took place in a performance space with all of the seats on the north side. It was originally going to be staged in pitch dark — Patsy as a very young woman was interested in invisible performances — but the other dancer insisted on two black lights and a single candle with a metallic shade. Patsy finally conceded the point. Offstage, a woman read excerpts from the Beckett text, and Patsy danced to it: preoccupied but nevertheless formal movements engaged in at extreme slow motion, right at the borderline of stasis. She had worked for weeks on nearly imperceptible body movements, stillness-dancing. It had been a challenge because such dancing excited her and quieted her at the same time, as yoga did. A fourth woman, a composer of aleatory sounds, though post-Cage in style, created amplified background audio using sand in Dixie Cups, and with rubber bands, Slinkies, and a watering can with ball bearings inside.

Patsy had wished to give the impression that if you took your eyes away from her for even a moment, she would not look the same the next time you saw her: her body under the influence of the spoken text had become illusionary, metamorphic, even metastatic: she aimed herself at the audience and opened her bare arms to them, replicating the gestures of a night-blooming cereus, or a youthful prostitute under a streetlight, or a cancer, or Eurydice.

All four women were after a certain tone: they wanted the production to be both impossibly brainy and also, and inevitably, so erotic as to risk accusations of obscenity. If it seemed unbearably pretentious, well, that was a risk they would take.

After the third performance — all the tickets were free because the Beckett estate wouldn’t give them permission for the adaptation — Saul reintroduced himself to her outside the green room and began talking at great length about her performance. He had the piercing brown eyes of a repentant gangster, though he was gaunt in other respects, except for his thick peasant’s hands. He was highly excited by the text (“self-incriminated language,” he called it, “oxidizing in your ear”) and the sounds (“lyrical aural insults, with no bottom to them”), but most of all, it seemed, he was excited by Patsy. “You were moving but you weren’t moving,” he said, “the words were moving your body,” demonstrating that he had got it, that it hadn’t slipped past him. “It was psychokinetic,” he said, “and phonemic-kinetic,” which was going a bit far. They were talking in the hallway, Patsy holding her knapsack, the hour was getting late, and then Saul blurted out, “I kept imagining what it would be like to be partnered with you,” and then he blushed under his beard, self-astonished. Patsy smiled. So it would be like this, from now on? The blurting of truth in the wee hours?

Coffee, dates, much talk (because it was Saul), the love attack — he had massaged her feet after her last performance, talking about Schopenhauer as they reclined on her bed, still clothed. “I don’t think Schopenhauer is as pessimistic as people say he is, do you?” Saul asked. She had said she didn’t know. Nor did she want to give him the impression that she would try to find out. She was not going to scamper after his preoccupations just because they were his.

Still, he had the most beautiful skin she had ever seen on a man, and a winsome smile.

One evening in the fall they had met at a campus coffee house, and as he was walking her back to her apartment, a soft rain began to fall. They were both wearing sandals, and they both ambled across the grass, gradually increasing their speed to a jog as they held hands. Patsy had looked over at Saul and saw her own sudden shocked, unprovoked joy on his face.

Then he had called her at two in the morning and played some Charlie Parker for her over the phone. In Saul, love took the form of desperation-to-share. He invited her over to his apartment, where he cooked dinner, played his trombone, and asked her to dance for him. Saul turned all the lights off, and Patsy danced by the light of the streetlight, but there was no aleatoric, arranged sound, just the noise of the cars and the trucks passing by in the street, and so she danced to that, a dance for him, though resisting him as much as she could, a dance about that resistance, about the refusals of nakedness. They made love anyway when she was finished, Patsy still resisting him a little, all her movements initially sullen. She fucked him with sensual resentment; she let him know that she had her needs, too, that he could not apportion all the passions for himself.

She could not tell if he was able to appreciate or even to read the ways that she had made love to him at first, or to notice particularly how she did it, the way that a dancer like her performed sex, slyly, with touches of rhetoric, annoyance, always with an implicit audience watching the subtle errant moves, moves that were only half for herself, the other half for the purposes of visual expression, or even the denial of that need, any need, a statement of freedom: Look, I can play with this desire. And you can’t, exactly.

Living together, movies, dinners, escalating comfort in each other’s company, the unthinkability of not being together, the sense — where had this come from? — that they were setting up a small business together, and finally marriage. Soon, Saul could read all her gestures. That was both a triumph in human terms and a defeat in artistic ones. For consolation, she had someone with whom to discuss all aspects of life. Now here they were, in the Midwest, where everybody’s gestures were immediately readable. At these moments it no longer seemed inevitable that they should have met in the first place, that she should have ever loved him and finally married him. Arbitrary, the meeting, the love, all of it, a trick, after all, of the body she had trained and with which she now excited or soothed him. She might have loved anybody, but it had turned out to be this man, this Saul, a Scrabble player, a teacher. But there was no certainty of logic to it. He lay there now, the father of her daughter, his eyebrows twitching, his breath smelling of corn tassels. A man sleeping in bed in the morning is rarely a prize, it seemed to her at such moments. But she loved him, and her love puzzled her, as if Eros had played a prank on her and she wanted to unravel it. Because: if it had arrived as quickly and as haphazardly as that, it could depart just as fast. It worried her, that their courtship had started with Saul being her audience. She knew she was beautiful as a performer. But as anything else? As a wife?

Being a wife stalled out the art. Being a mother put a stop to it. And now, she realized, there was some feature about Saul she didn’t get — that she would never get.

“Oh, don’t analyze,” her friend Susan Palmer had once said. “Don’t try to figure out why you love some guy. You’ll only figure out that you shouldn’t. In my experience, guys — well, the grown-up boys I’ve known— don’t stand much scrutiny. They can barely stand up at all. You know what they’re all about, under the microscope? They’re all about their flaws, versus whatever else they’ve got. Their games.”

“No, really,” Patsy said. They were both working as tellers at the bank, and they were on their lunch break, in the back room, over sandwiches. There were no windows, and it felt very private in there. “It’s the biggest thing that ever happened to me. But. It’s a puzzle.”

“Jesus, Patsy. A puzzle? If you’ve got a blessing, any blessing at all, just count it. Don’t examine it. Are you crazy? Some of us don’t even have what you have.” Susan bit into her sandwich angrily, her eyes tearing up. Patsy didn’t know what Susan was talking about: Susan was married, after all, to a nice guy, the assistant city manager of Five Oaks, a fellow named Wyatt. They had two children. Wyatt’s mom was a little crazy, but so what? They lived model lives. Susan taught gymnastics to kids on weekends. She was beautiful, her gymnast figure still visible under her clothes. She had a trustworthy man sleeping next to her in bed each night. Still, Patsy had violated a rule: you never, ever brag to a coworker about loving your husband. It was bad manners, it was arrogant, and nobody’s business, besides.

But now, two years later, thinking of what Susan had told her, Patsy realized that loving Saul was not, in fact, the biggest event that had ever happened to her. Mary Esther was. Mary Esther had pushed everything and everybody else off the map, and she had turned Saul into a father. It was Mary Esther she thought about, Mary Esther who commanded her repertoire of emotions. Saul, she had discovered, was the means for Mary Esther to come into the world. He was. . the word came to her unpleasantly, an expedient. As if to recoil from this recognition, Patsy began to rub Saul’s back. He slept naked during the summer, and she had just touched his back when the phone rang, downstairs, as if touching his skin had set off a bell elsewhere in the house.

In her nightgown, she ran down the stairs to get it before it woke anybody up, but she heard Mary Esther stirring and whimpering as she rose out of sleep. As soon as Patsy had picked up the phone, even before she heard the voice, she knew — the psychic insights of everyday life — that it was Saul’s mother, Delia.

“Patsy.” Delia’s voice was regimental somehow, feminine-military, without being hard. Patsy didn’t know how she did it. “I hope I didn’t wake you up.”

“No, no. I was up.” Patsy heard Delia’s toaster popping up in the background.

“Yes, I suppose. I mean, I suppose I shouldn’t have called. It’s—”

“Well, it’s not that early.” Without looking at her watch, Patsy knew it was eight thirty-nine.

“Well. Maybe it is in the Midwest. It’s always earlier there. And it isn’t just the time zones that cause that. In the Midwest it’s always last week, compared to here. Is Saul still asleep?”

Patsy glanced up the stairs. Mary Esther was beginning to sing softly, and if she got louder, Saul would eventually arise, dazedly, go into the nursery, and change her. “Yes, I think so. He’s still asleep.”

“Good.”

“Good?”

“Well, I need to talk to someone,” Delia said. “And I was hoping I’d get you. This isn’t the sort of information I should say to Saul. Or to Howie, either. Besides, I never know where Howie is. The last time I called him, I got him on his cell phone, and he was halfway up a mountain, climbing it. Excuse me, but I don’t see the point of climbing a mountain. Why not buy a postcard? Or get someone else to climb it? Well, what can you do with a son like that?”

“I don’t know,” Patsy said automatically. “What can you do?” Then she realized belatedly that it was not a question she should parrot back to Delia.

“You can’t do anything,” Delia said obligingly. Then her voice dropped an octave. “Are you alone? Well, I mean, can you keep a secret?”

“Sure.” Patsy looked down at her feet, at the polish flaking off her toenails.

“Don’t tell Saul. It’ll upset him. I just have to tell somebody, and it’s obvious I can’t tell my friends just now. . well, it’s not that you’re convenient, Patsy, I’m not saying that. You know I love you, don’t you? I got so lucky, having a daughter-in-law like you.” Delia said these words distantly, and without inflection.

“Delia, what’s going on?” Patsy felt herself clutching the phone tightly.

“Well, it’s this way. You’re young, you’ll understand this, I think. I need to say this to somebody.” Delia waited and took an audible breath. “I have a new boyfriend,” she announced. “But I haven’t told Saul, or anybody.” Patsy waited for her to continue speaking, but she didn’t, as if she had faltered momentarily. “Well, one friend, but that’s it.”

“Delia,” Patsy said with whispered enthusiasm, “that’s great! Congratulations. Who is it?”

“See, that’s the thing.”

Patsy waited. “The thing. Okay,” she said.

“All right. He’s quite young,” Delia said. “He’s younger than I am. Quite a bit younger. Actually, he’s younger than you are. Actually, he’s almost eighteen. But, no, the truth is that he’s seventeen. I don’t want to mislead you. He’s seventeen.” Her voice, in announcing this fact, was worldly and neutral, uninvolved in what it was saying.

“Isn’t that illegal?”

“No, I don’t think so. I think it’s quite legal. Though I haven’t checked. But here’s the icing on my particular cake. He’s the yard boy. His name is Jimmy. Jimmy the yard boy. What a cliché! I hired him to come over here to fix up the yard and to do some gardening, and he was unusually kind and considerate, absolutely not what I was expecting at all, of course, from a young man that age. You don’t expect young men to be kind and considerate. Usually they’re awful. And, I don’t know, mostly as a joke, a nothing, I made a little play for him, and now. . Patsy, you won’t tell Saul, will you?”

“No, I won’t tell Saul.” Patsy considered this for a moment, what she would say next. After all, she was speaking to the Marschallin. The Marschallin had finally gotten her young man. “Is it a French novel or is it an American novel?”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Well, if it was an American novel, you’d have an affair with him, and you’d both feel soiled and degraded, and then he’d tell his parents, and his mother would file a suit against you, and somebody would be shot dead after a few months, you know, out of pure rage, and then there would be church-lady morals and a big mess to clean up with the litigation. If it was a French novel, though, you two would both have a perfectly good time, and he would be grateful to you and, you know, tireless, and you would teach him a thing or two about sex and the ways of love, and he’d remember you happily for a few years, have other girlfriends more his age who would all love him for his boldness and attentiveness and expertise, and then he’d get married and settle down.”

“It’s actually more like the French version,” Delia said, a bit dryly. “So far.”

“Well, good for you,” Patsy said.

“But you know, in these matters, nothing is as simple as all that. I go through the house,” Delia resumed, “muttering his name, and I think of his parents and whether they’ll ever find out, and then I think, well, in a few weeks he’ll start school again, and it’ll be all over.” She waited. “It will be over, and no harm will have come to anybody, as long as he doesn’t tell anyone. He says he hasn’t. And that’s how it’s supposed to work. But sometimes it’s more complicated.”

Delia stopped talking.

“Don’t tell me you’re pregnant,” Patsy said. Mary Esther’s cries upstairs were getting a bit louder now. Where was Saul?

“Oh, no, I’m not pregnant. I had my tubes tied a long time ago, and besides, I’m. . no, it’s not that, believe me.”

“Well, what is it?” Patsy thought she knew what Delia would say, but she didn’t want to anticipate it.

“See, the little complication is, I love him,” Delia said, her voice still absolutely neutral, even a bit cold. “Just a little bit. Of course it’s completely ridiculous. I mean, he’s only a boy. This is like something middle-aged men do, with their proclivity for college girls. But I do love him. Patsy, he brings in little bouquets of flowers that he’s picked. A boy does this! He brings them in for me, and we put them in water together. And you should see his smile. I don’t think I’ve ever had a smile like that from a grown man. Men don’t smile like that spontaneously. They forget how. He smiles at me and my insides just knot up, because he’s so happy to see me.” Delia’s voice continued in its uninflected way.

“Count your blessings,” Patsy instructed her mother-in-law, using the phrase she had just been thinking of. Delia was right, of course: Saul had forgotten how to smile, except to produce a result. “Does he love you?”

“Of course not. He’s just a kid. And I’m just a middle-aged woman he. . sometimes sleeps with. I’m a diversion. He doesn’t know from love. But he’s so devoted, and so sweet, and so kind — Patsy, he compliments me on my body, can you believe that? — and of course there’s his skin, and his body, which is gorgeous, and his smile, that it doesn’t matter that he doesn’t love me, because he might as well love me, considering the way he treats me. Somehow I missed all this before, when I was an actual girl. Know what I mean? I thought when you were my age, you stopped doing foolishness like this. I thought women stopped falling in love, at least comme ça.”

“Well, I guess not.”

There was a long pause, and Patsy could tell from the noises at the other end that Delia was blowing her nose, though tentatively. “Of course he has a little girlfriend, too.”

“Of course.”

“But he says that it isn’t as good with her as with me.” She waited. “Maybe he’s being nice. It’s his way, being nice. He’d say it even if he didn’t mean it.”

Patsy looked through the window and saw Gordy Himmelman sitting out on the front lawn. Like the proverbial bad penny, he kept turning up. What did he want this time? He had reappeared again, the poor zombie. He had been doing this for about a year now. It was his first anniversary. He was just sitting there, looking skyward. He wanted someone to pay attention to him. In this way, he was like everybody else.

“Delia, I don’t think you have any rights in this matter. You can’t be jealous. You just have a fling with him this summer and then let him go back to school in the fall.”

“No, you’re right, of course.”

There was a pause of several seconds.

“What?” Patsy asked.

“Well, sometimes I go to bed and I think, This seventeen-year-old is the love of my life. Which is quite silly, but that’s what I think. Don’t tell Saul I said that. Saul’s father was a good-enough man, all things considered. He was a hard worker. He worked himself to death. But a lover he wasn’t. I was married to him, and still he never noticed me except sometimes over breakfast when I brought him his coffee. As a provider, of course, I can’t complain about him.”

“Delia, you shouldn’t be romanticizing. Summer’s going to be over, and you’ll have to get your life back.”

“I know,” Delia sighed. Her voice was calm and unearthly. “I’ve had my French novel. So, how’s the baby? How’s little Emmy?”

Patsy crossed her legs at the ankles. She had been thinking of getting a tattoo, a tiny one, of a flower, on her left calf, but now that she was a mom, those thoughts were starting to seem senseless. Besides, tattoos were forms of expression for the inarticulate. She could always say what she meant. “Right now? She’s just woken up. She’s crying a little. Or maybe singing. She’s really not a baby anymore. Not at fifteen months. I think Saul’ll check on her in a minute.” Patsy smiled into the phone. “Her first teeth are in, and she’s still getting cranky. Of course, Saul is still a little jealous of her. He’ll get over it.”

“She’s so adorable. And here I am, a grandmother. It’s a strange thing to have happened to me, Patsy, it’s a strange thing to have happened to a nice Jewish girl, being a grandmother. Well, I don’t know about that ‘nice.’ I was a little wild in high school, you know. Privately. In public I was a nice girl. And then. . I stopped being wild. And then I was respectable when I was married to Norman, right out of high school, and dutiful with him, before he died so young, and then I was a grandmother, and now I stand at the windows watching the shadows in the afternoon and waiting for the sound of Jimmy’s pickup truck.”

“So you’ve started again.”

“Yes. I started again. But it’s not so pleasing when a woman falls in love with a young man that much younger. It’s not becoming in a grandmother. People don’t like it. And I can see why.” She stopped and waited — Patsy thought — for the words to be carried to her, and back out again, in exactly the form she wanted. “You’re right, you know. Once the summer’s over, I’ll give him up. And I will, I really will do that. A gift like that, it’s best not to try to draw it out. You’re right, it’s a fling. And, after all, I’ve been addicted to things before.” She said the last sentence with a weary inflection. “But not like this.”

“Right.”

“You won’t tell Saul, will you? Promise?”

“No. I won’t,” Patsy said.

“Wish me luck.”

“Good luck.”

“Thank you. That was nice. I always wished I had a daughter, Patsy, but now I have you. And it’s better having you than having a real daughter, because I would never have dared to tell her this. Goodbye, dear.”

“Goodbye,” Patsy said. She dropped the phone onto its cradle and sat for a moment waiting, trying to think of what Delia meant by that daughter statement. If she had had a real daughter, Delia had implied, she would have felt ashamed of herself and would never have confessed to having taken a lover, a boy still in high school, because. . why? Because her daughter’s opinion would have mattered to her, and Patsy’s opinion didn’t? Or because she wouldn’t have wanted her daughter to think of her as an example? She tried to fight off the feeling that she was angry, and then she was angry, perspiring with anger, and not fighting it. A slight breeze blew in through the screen, and she closed her eyes to it.

She went back up the stairs and saw Saul standing in front of the window, bouncing Mary Esther and talking to her, long strings of Saul-talk. He had changed her diaper. When Patsy came into the doorway, Saul gave her a steady look. “Who was that? Was that my mother?”

“Yes,” Patsy said. She liked watching her husband hold their daughter. She took pride in Saul’s child-care skills, his intuitive leaps into infancy. Good husbands who were good lovers rarely made good fathers, too, and it was her impression that such men were exceptionally uncommon birds. Apparently Saul hadn’t picked it up from his own father, but he had gotten it from somewhere. It made up for his other relentlessly irritating habits. “She just called to chat. You can call her back any time.” Saul nodded. “Actually, that’s not right,” Patsy said. “I lied. That part about the chat. Your mother has taken a boyfriend,” Patsy said, “an actual boy, this time — in high school.” The words leapt out of her without her having been completely aware that she was saying them. Then they were gone, free of her, broadcast into the air.

Saul’s face immediately broke into its constituent parts, one eyebrow going one way, the other eyebrow going another, the mouth drooping down here, rising there.

Patsy said, rushing ahead of herself, “The Marschallin didn’t want me to tell you, and she said that if I had been her real daughter, she wouldn’t have told me in the first place, but I guess I just broke my promise to her.” Jesus, listen to me, Patsy thought.

Saul went on holding Mary Esther, bouncing her. The baby was hungry and was crying softly now, working up to some real noise. “You shouldn’t have told me, Patsy,” he said, with an odd, disarming calm. “I bet she told all of that to you in confidence.”

“No kidding.” She held her arms out. “Here. Give me the baby.”

As he handed over Mary Esther, Saul appeared to be in a daze. “But you did. I wonder why. You broke a promise to her?” Patsy nodded, even though Saul wasn’t looking at her. “Who is it, this lover?”

“The yard boy.”

“The yard boy. Just like my mother to do that,” Saul said, dispiritedly. Patsy perceived — odd that she hadn’t noticed before — that Saul had no clothes on. She was so used to him by now that his nakedness made absolutely no impression on her except when he was amorous, or when she was. He pulled the window’s curtain aside. The time was eight minutes after nine o’clock, she knew. “We should move to Berlin. That’d serve her right. There’s Gordy, by the way.”

Stepping up close to Saul at the window, Patsy lowered the straps of her nightgown and lifted Mary Esther, who at fifteen months was becoming quite heavy. She brought her daughter to her nipple and, as she did, registered how substantial her daughter was and how soon she would not be nursing her anymore. Really, she wasn’t a baby now. All this breastfeeding would be over in no time at all. She would miss it, miss it like crazy, even with all the pain and soreness. But then there would be another baby, Theo. “What did you say?” she asked. “I was distracted.” Mary Esther was sucking at her greedily.

“I said that Gordy is here.” Patsy thought all at once that they shouldn’t be standing naked at their bedroom window looking out at Gordy Himmelman. Just being visible in their own bedroom, they were inciting him to riot. But her anger, which had not died down from the phone call, kept her there in a frozen tableau with Saul: here was Sunday morning, a day — of all days — when young married couples could lie around naked, make love, feed the baby, read the paper, do anything they wanted to do, indoors or out, and there, on the front lawn, was Gordy Himmelman, their sentry, their guard dog, their zombie, their boy. With his little demands for attention, he was getting tiresome. What Patsy craved was her own attention, hers and Saul’s and Emmy’s, and she lifted her hand, as if to start a dance, a dance of please-go-away. “Sometimes I hate my mother,” Saul said without warning.

Gordy Himmelman turned his gaze toward them. He stared for a long time at Saul and Patsy.

“You shouldn’t hate your mother. She’s only human. And by the way, we shouldn’t be here, exposing ourselves to that ruffian on the lawn,” Patsy said.

“What? What’s his name?” Saul asked. “Her boyfriend.”

“Oh, the boyfriend? His name’s Jimmy,” Patsy said, and at that point Gordy pulled out a gun from his back pocket, grinned momentarily, then opened his mouth, directed the barrel of the gun toward it, and then inside it, and fired. A flower-pattern of Gordy’s blood and brains splashed against the tree trunk behind his head, and he fell backward.

The sound of the gun made the baby startle: her arms flew up to the sides of her face, and she pulled her mouth away from her mother’s breast before looking up into her mother’s eyes for an explanation. A trace of breast milk remained on her lower lip.