“Of course she looks like Patsy. They could be sisters.”
“Saul, what makes you say that?”
“Look at her hair. Look at her smile. That expression on her face.” Look at her benevolence, he wanted to say, but didn’t, because no one ever said things like that, except sentimentalists.
“Are you telling me that I searched around until I found someone like your wife?”
“No,” Saul backpedaled, “I’m not telling you that.”
“Because she doesn’t look like Patsy at all.” Howie sat up like a guard who has heard an alarm go off. “She looks completely like herself.”
“Sure. Of course.”
“I know,” Howie said, “we’ll ask Patsy, once she gets home.” He stood up and stretched, as if he had reached the inevitable crossroad and had made the correct turn. “Let Patsy decide whether Lis looks like her.” He leaned backward. “You asked what she’s like.”
“Yes,” Saul said. “I did.”
“She works with me. . with us. At eFlea.” In one of his phone calls, Howie had informed Saul that he currently was one of the partners in an online flea market, positioned to compete with eBay. “She’s smart and beautiful.” Then, after a long beat, Howie said, “She reads the encyclopedia to relax. On New Year’s Eve we both made resolutions, and I made her resolve to go on exactly as she had been in the past. And she did. She resolved to go on being the way she was. We met when. . well, she came to me when I was coking up and drinking too much and screwing everything in sight, and she sort of fixed me up with herself. I was a mess, all glue and shards.” Howie waited. “The Great Chain of Misbehavior, with me at the bottom, buried in all that cash I had made and was losing. There are a lot of me’s out there,” he said, apparently meaning the West Coast. “You know,” Howie said, warming to the subject, “my character doesn’t exactly fill me up. My character only goes out partway to my edges. But Lis’s character goes out all the way to her fingertips. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes,” Saul said, because he himself could have said it about Patsy.
“Anyway,” Howie said, “I had to come out here and ask you to be my best man, and also, before Lis and I are married, to give you what I want to give you.”
“What’s that?”
“About two million dollars,” Howie said.
“That’s a lot of money,” Saul said, in a blank, not registering at all what his brother had said.
“Well, it’s in equities from various companies out there I’ve bought into, and you can’t sell them, as I’ll explain to you tomorrow, because that would be illegal. It’s all paper wealth. Is there any more wine in there, in the kitchen?”
“Yes,” Saul said, so numb that he felt that he might have had a stroke. “Come with me.”
When they were in the kitchen, the front door opened, and Patsy came in the house with a noisy bustle, and she sang out, “Saul! The scapegoating has started! We have to move! We have to move out of this place.” Then she began singing. “We gotta get out of this place! If it’s the last thing we ever do!”
He and Howie came out of the kitchen, and when Patsy saw Saul’s brother, she said, “Oh, Howie.” She kissed him. “So that was your BMW. What a nice surprise. Sorry you caught me singing.” They gave each other brotherly-sisterly kisses — Saul watched them do it.
“Love,” Howie said, unwrapping his charm before her, smiling. “You can sing anytime.”
Howie picked up Emmy, and he made kissing noises as he looked in her brown eyes. He kissed his niece on the cheek, and in return she smiled at him broadly, which she had never done so rapidly with a stranger before.
“She’s very solid,” said Howie, once so fragile himself.
Seventeen
“What a beautiful woman,” Patsy said, holding Howie’s photograph of his fiancée. She and Saul, tag-teaming, had taken Emmy upstairs, changed her into a fresh diaper and her pink pajamas, sung to her, and watched her fall asleep. Now they were together in the living room, the three of them drinking white wine and examining the picture of Howie’s Lis.
“Saul thinks she looks like you,” Howie said, glancing at Patsy. He was slurring his words a bit. “I said she didn’t.”
“She doesn’t look at all like me. Her hair is different from mine, for one thing.”
“She certainly does look like you,” Saul muttered crossly, staring at his wife, as if he were the final authority on all questions of resemblance.
“You guys. No, she’s not a bit like me. The only female in the world who looks a lot like me,” Patsy said, “is my daughter. Howie, you’re a lucky man. When’s the wedding date?”
“Next summer.” He then lowered himself from his chair onto the floor. There, on the floor, he continued his side of the conversation as he performed stretch exercises. He said he was stiff from the day’s drive. “We’re going to be married in Golden Gate Park. Lis wants to honeymoon in Hawaii, and she’s found a place on Maui where you can walk and go on excursions if you want to, or you can just stay right there, and it’s still Paradise. There are plans, and more plans, and more plans after that, about this wedding. You don’t even want to know about all these plans. I can’t keep track of them all. I never knew getting married was so complicated. It’s like managing a merger. Strategy and paperwork.”
Patsy and Saul glanced at each other.
“But the main thing is, Saul, you have to be my best man, and the other main thing is how beautiful Emmy is.” As if under silent orders for a fixed routine, he then sat down and did a runner’s stretch on the other side of the coffee table, with one leg behind him and one in front. “What a beautiful daughter. You two are so lucky. Except for living in Five Oaks.”
“Well, there’s another one coming,” Patsy said, patting herself, ignoring his remark about their very wonderful city. She explained to Howie that this one was a boy and that the due date was May thirteenth.
Howie stood up, holding his arms entangled with each other in front and then behind him, wrenching them from side to side for flexibility.
“Hey, congratulations. Or do you withhold congratulations until the baby is born? Patsy,” he said, “there’s one thing I have to ask about. When you came home, you said the scapegoating had started. What did you mean?”
He lowered himself to the floor. While he did several push-ups, Patsy told him about Gordy Himmelman’s suicide. Saul sat in his chair, watching his brother’s exercises without commenting on them or on the Gordy Himmelman story that Patsy was telling. Public calesthenics had seemingly turned into acceptable social behavior. The only time Saul allowed himself a reaction occurred when Patsy reported that she had talked to Anne McPhee and then had driven over to Brenda Bagley’s house. Saul’s face took on a raised-eyebrow attentiveness. Howie’s reaction was minimal, though he had a peevish expression as he listened and exercised, as if the story were a mind pollutant.
“You do have to get out of this place,” Howie told them tonelessly, finishing his last push-up and taking a breather in a sitting position, his hands on his hips.
“Nothing doing,” Saul said. “I’m staying. I have to. I’m on a mission. We are.”
“And what would that mission be?” He took on an expression of petulance.
“I don’t know,” Saul explained. “In due time, the mission will reveal itself.”