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.