“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.