Following her advice, he called ahead to a few friends and then packed several days’ worth of clean clothes. He didn’t like to fly because airport terminals and their long receding concourses reminded him of gigantic vacuum-cleaner hoses sucking him and everyone else into nullity. He preferred taking the train.
At the doors of the Detroit Amtrak station he leaned into the car and kissed Patsy and Mary Esther goodbye. He took the train to Washington on a coach ticket he had bought on the Web. He arrived at Union Station three hours late. For two nights he stayed with a couple he knew, Buzz Henselt and his girlfriend, Sarah. The two of them lived in a walkup near Cleveland Heights in the District and were doing moderately well— Sarah worked for a writers-in-the-schools project, and Buzz, who was good at budget analysis, had landed a job in the Department of Transportation — but Saul realized that he was in a fog and wasn’t keeping up his end of the conversation, particularly when Buzz and Sarah asked him about himself and Patsy and Mary Esther. All he could say was, “Oh, we’re fine,” before lapsing into silence and staring at their Edward Hopper poster (the house, not the nighthawks) framed on the living-room wall, or the Ralston Crawford poster in the dining room. He realized that his presence there was a puzzle to them. He was an inexplicable and unsatisfying guest. He wasn’t terribly interested in them anymore and answered their questions as if he were talking about someone else or taking a quiz, and, no, as it turned out, he didn’t want to go to the National Gallery.
He slept on a cot in their study, close enough to the computer so that he could hear its internal fan whirring all night in sleep mode, almost covering the sounds of Buzz and Sarah’s snoring and snorts and conversations in the next room. Still childless, they hadn’t yet learned how to muffle themselves. In the corner, Buzz and Sarah’s African gray parrot, Jack, muttered and scrabbled about in his cage. The bird had acquired a fiendish expertise for imitating ringing telephones and dripping faucets, and in moments of bravado would imitate Sarah’s asthma wheeze, allergy-related coughing, and gasps during intercourse. “Shut up,” Saul would say, and within hours the bird started to answer, “Shut up.”
At breakfast, Buzz asked Saul whether there wasn’t something he— Saul — wanted to talk about, and Saul shook his head. “I’m sort of in this box, and I can’t exactly open it up, but I’m okay,” he said. “That’s all. It’s not serious. Don’t worry about me.” He went back to his bagel and the sports page. He didn’t mention Gordy Himmelman, feeling that it would be an imposition. Too long living in the Midwest had made him a practitioner of self-effacing obtuse cheerfulness, he realized.
Finally, after calling to make sure she’d be there, he borrowed Buzz and Sarah’s car and drove over to Bethesda to his mother’s house. He had grown up in this house and was happy to think of it as no longer his, or as home, or as a place where he would willingly stay for more than a few hours at a time. Standing on the sidewalk, Saul inspected the lawn and the front garden: they were carefully tended, the edges of the grass properly clipped, the lilac at the side of the house perfectly trimmed, the geranium in its pot on the front stoop well-watered. Pansies filled the flower bed. Somebody was indeed taking care of his mother, or of her lawn, lush and green as it was — prodigal and green and carnal, in its second adolescence, pubic, procreative. After he rang the doorbell, the door opened, and his mother presented herself. “Ah, the weary traveler. You like it?” his mother asked, glancing around at nothing in particular. That was Delia: she had always asked him questions that were too vague to answer.
Saul smiled at her and shrugged. “Very much.” Carrying his overnight bag, he ambled up to her and hugged her.
On close inspection, he could see that something had indeed happened to her. Delia was not herself anymore. She had been divested of her affectations and stripped of her usual ornaments. He had prepared himself for more of her mustard-gas perfume, more girlishness, a bonanza of bracelets and amber necklaces, but she wasn’t wearing any bracelets or necklaces, she had stopped dyeing her hair, and she had done away with the bloody-looking fingernail polish. She just stood there, wearing a new simplicity. She was almost elegant. “Sweetie,” she said, patting him on the cheek. “It’s good to see you. I’m so sorry about that boy. Put your suitcase inside in the foyer and let’s go to the supermarket. We need some groceries for dinner.”
Behind the wheel of his mother’s Camry, negotiating traffic, his newly remodeled mother beside him, Saul suddenly remembered why he disliked the suburbs and had developed an affection for dusty, luckless midwestern cities tucked away inside the folds of the map. The drivers here in suburban Maryland were cunning and ruthless. They engaged in savage tailgating. They were overachieving supervisors in their professional lives and now they were doing their best to overachieve behind the wheel. They wore their successes on their huge muscular sheet-metal fenders. Darwinian, emotionally Republican even if they were registered Democrats, they had acquired German sedans or American SUVs that looked like staff cars for Rommel, or they had huge spotless V-8 pickup trucks with nothing, ever, in the cargo bed — that would spoil the effect, like a suntan that ended at the shirt collar — and most of them drove with one hand, the other hand on their cell phones relaying news to the home-front on how the battle was going. Domestic life in the suburbs, simple trips to the mall, had shifted to a war footing, the drivers so high and mighty behind the wheel that they looked down on any sedan inhabited by civilians.
At the green light, when Saul failed to accelerate immediately, the woman behind him, driving a burgundy F-250, honked at him, and Saul flashed her the finger and began yelling helplessly and with great enraged enthusiasm. She zoomed past him in the left lane, lowered the passenger-side electric window, shouted “Dickhead!” at him, and raced forward. On her truck’s bumper there was a diversity-rainbow sticker. She was very beautiful. He couldn’t chase her: he was driving his mother, his ancient enemy, to the supermarket. Besides, they were underdefended in the Camry, the sort of car driven by worker bees.
“I wish you’d calm down, Saul,” his mother said a few minutes later, after he had flipped the bird to another driver who had first tailgated him and then cut him off. They entered the parking lot for the supermarket, and Saul began the desperate search for a spot. “You’re awfully tense this morning.” She patted him on the knee. “Why don’t you park over there?” She pointed to a space. Saul ignored her. He parked one row farther off, in an opening that he had found for himself. “I see you’ve acquired a bit of road rage,” Delia said, after he stopped and put on the emergency brake with a furious gesture. “I don’t remember that in you before. Don’t go blaming me for that.”
“Oh, I would never blame you for anything,” Saul lied, dropping the keys into the pocket of his leather jacket. “It’s the drivers here. And when did I ever have any equanimity? Well, come on.”
He walked slightly behind her to the doors of the market and noticed how his mother’s physical movements had taken on a pensiveness that she’d never displayed before. It wasn’t an effect of aging; it was the consequence of seriousness, of something profound that had happened to her and had taken root. She most likely couldn’t discuss it with him. Having secrets apparently gave people dignity. Watching her, he felt amazement: his mother had acquired an inner life. She had warmed up. And all from a boy lover. He took her arm as gently as he could, and she smiled at him. “Hi, Saul,” she said, stepping up to the curb, as if he had just arrived. “How are you?”