At two-fifteen, Saul was lying in bed with Patsy. “I can’t sleep,” he said.
“I know.” She opened and shut her mouth quickly, realized that the nighttime epigram she was about to utter was not particularly clever, and was in the wrong key, besides.
They lay there together. It was a warm night, and they touched each other lightly, back to back.
“Do you feel it?” Saul asked. “He hasn’t gone away.”
“What do you mean?”
Saul looked up toward the ceiling in exasperation. “He’s still here,” he said. “Can’t you tell?”
Yes, of course she could tell. Yes, indeed. He still was. It would take more than a bullet to put an end to him, but she would be careful not to say so.
Eleven
A day begins, sunny, the hint of a breeze, a relief from the stillness of the day before. The baby — really, her infancy is over, and the world is registering on her in complex patterns of light and sound — the baby is standing in her crib uttering greet-the-world noises, vocalizations. She practices her scat-singing. In the bedroom across the hall, her parents ponder the possibility of making love — the husband, who has not slept, staring at the ceiling, and the wife, who has slept very well indeed but who has a headache from a beer she drank just before she went to bed, studying the bedside clock, though she already knows the time. The encounter, if it happens, would be quick. This does not have to be said. No profound emotions would be exchanged, no virtuoso gestures; it would be like coughing: a relief for the moment, an analgesic against other urges and irritations. But after one or two tentative caresses on the arm, the back, the buttocks, they move away from each other. The spaces between them could be measured in millimeters, infinitesimal spaces expressing an inexpressible failure of desire. Neither one wants to hurt the other’s feelings, and they both take great care to be physically tactful. Arising out of the drudgery of sleep, the wife (Patsy) is preoccupied with her dreams, her daughter in the next room, and a slight and casual indifference to her husband’s body, an indifference that is new to her, and the husband (Saul) is preoccupied with death. He is, to use an antique word, heartsick. Morning sex will not cure it. Sex, today, would make it worse.
The measure of this particular marriage is that each one knows the other’s thoughts. Day after day, the possibility of a private language between them is established and maintained. No private language, the wife thinks, no marriage.
The wife tosses aside the sheet and marches into the bathroom. She splashes water on her face. Then she brushes her teeth, enjoying the taste, like candied goo, of the toothpaste, a sunrise taste. After rinsing her mouth out and watching the water swirl down the drain that is beginning to be clogged with her husband’s beard stubble, she searches in the medicine cabinet for the aspirin, pushing aside the antidepressants to get at it. She takes two caplets, then lowers her cupped hands to the running water. As she drinks the water, she notices that her toenails will soon need clipping. She looks at her face in the mirror and thinks of the word “haggard,” because that is what she expected to be but is not. She looks pretty great, all things considered. Her eyes glow with intelligence and clarity, the dream-life and the headache fading out of them now that she is standing up. Her beauty — and she can recognize this — originates from her eyes. It flows out from there. The rest of her body is secondary, a problem in geometry, a dancer’s problem.
Back in the bedroom, she stretches her clasped arms and twists her head back and forth to loosen the neck muscles. She lowers herself to the floor to perform her leg-raises, sit-ups, and more stretch exercises before she stands and walks over to the phone. She calls a special number at the bank to say she will not be coming in to work. Family emergency. Of course everyone at the bank will already know about Gordy Himmelman’s death. In fact, the secretary to whom she speaks passes on her sympathies. Patsy hardly needs to call. After hanging up, she pads into the nursery to greet Mary Esther, nuzzle her, change her, and take her down to the kitchen for breakfast. Her daughter screech-sings happily when she first sees her mother.
As Patsy’s mother used to say, following any event contaminated by sorrow, “Life goes on.”
The husband hears his wife’s light footsteps as she descends the stairs. Before he rises, he leans over to sniff her pillow to detect her mood. The smell on the pillow is businesslike, a female version of getting-on-with-things. How does he know this, how does he know he isn’t imagining, right there on the borders of psychopathology, his wife’s climates and thoughts? He shrugs to himself. He just does. He’s married to her. Slowly he pushes the sheet aside and stands up. He lumbers with effort — he feels like a circus bear — past the dresser, festooned with framed pictures of his daughter, past the rickety wooden chair on which he throws his clothes at night. He ambles in front of the window, pushes aside the curtains, and raises the windowshade. He lingers there, idly rearranging his penis inside his pajamas as he looks out at the linden tree and the lawn.
From the kitchen he hears his wife and daughter making noises. The wife is weaning the daughter, a difficult process for both of them. Food is being spooned into the daughter’s mouth, and this same food, projectile-spat, has appeared on the floor and the high chair. The husband at the window notices that his early-morning thoughts are in the passive voice. He is permitted to use the passive voice when he is sleepy.
The boy, Gordy Himmelman, is not there, outside, but he shoots himself anyway, randomly, airily, imaginatively, bringing himself back so that he can go away again. There he is, and isn’t, now, pointing the gun into himself and firing. Insubstantial bits of brains and skull fly up against the bark of the linden tree. How calm it is. How it goes on, destruction, into its own afterlife. Still, this life, his own, Saul’s, must be lived somehow. Saul shuffles into the bathroom for his shower, rubbing his eyes violently with the flat of his hand.
Under the cascading hot water, he cleans himself dutifully, dragging the washcloth layered with the antibacterial gold soap across his chest and arms and face, and at first his mind is pleasingly blank, until he thinks haphazardly, first of Gordy Himmelman, then of his mother and her teenaged boyfriend. He considers them as he washes his arms, doing his best to set up police crime-scene yellow tape around his imaginings, exiling them, forgetting them, ignoring them. It is like trying to ignore the enraged African elephant charging toward its victim. The unconscious never takes a vacation. Despite his regrets about the matter, his mother is a passionate woman. Gordy Himmelman, his mother—what choice does anyone have in the thoughts he is given to think? Still, he feels shame-soiled. He rinses himself off, pulls aside the shower curtain, and grabs a towel. This morning he will not bother to shave. Let the Saul-face be unfinished today.
In the kitchen, the phone is still off the hook, the hand-piece dangling down on its stretched coil wire from the wall-mounted phone to the floor. His daughter in her yellow-backed high chair with the teddy-bear headrest sits contentedly surrounded by the spatterings of breakfast, and she smiles when her father enters the room. “Hi, Princess,” he says, kissing her on the top of her head. Her hair is so delicate and fine, smelling of stardust and spun gold, Saul feels a sensual pleasure touching his lips to it.
She is so extravagantly new. Half of her is from him. The other half is from his wife. But the half and half add up to something entirely original. The husband remembers to kiss his wife also on the top of her head. “Good morning, Patsy,” he says to the woman he neglected to make love to half an hour earlier. For just a moment, he touches the tip of his tongue to her hair. She lifts her face to him, a smear of food on her cheek. “Oh, yes. Good morning, sweetheart,” she replies. She gives off a faint scent of dry saltine crackers and milk. The smile she has for him is quick, as is the kiss she gives him. “I love you,” she says, and after her husband tells her he loves her, he cleans her cheek with his index finger before sitting down at the table in front of the coffee cup she has placed there for him (cream, no sugar). Wearing a T-shirt and his pajama bottoms, he opens the paper. Perhaps it will be an ordinary day after all the extraordinariness of the previous day.