“Okay.”
He searches her face before speaking. “Oh, I felt surprise, maybe, but that’s different. Here’s a dopey kid whose aunt has a gun and who stands and stands in our front yard without ever telling us what he wanted from us. And, by the way, why were you shocked? You’re the person who worked up the conviction that he was not like us, a nonhuman. That’s the height of sophistication, if you ask me, calling him a nonperson. That was really worldly of you. That was positively European.”
“Okay, Saul,” Patsy says. “Before we have a real fight, let me ask you a question. Between grief and indifference, what is there? There isn’t anything. Show me the typical half-sob and maybe I’ll sort of believe you.”
“Actually, it’s called sadness, Patsy. In English, that’s the word they have available between grief and indifference. And someday I’ll show you a half-sob. Just not now.” He puts his hands inside another pair of the boy’s pockets and removes some small torn bits of paper. “Hey, Patsy, you just don’t feel it. Modest grief is not there for you. You’re more a creature of black and white. What’s this?”
The papers are nested, one inside the other, like puzzle parts. They seem to have been sections of a larger sheet of paper that has been ripped inexpertly. Saul puts them down on the floor in an attempt to reassemble them, five small pieces that together form a blue-lined page of school notebook paper, three punched holes on the left side. Outdoors, the wind starts up, and the lights flicker, but only for a moment. The papers tremble on the floor. They appear to be animated by the breathing of the world soul. Something is scrawled on them, and Saul bends down to make out the phrases, Gordy’s modest scrawled leavings.
She did it
they toad the car
mad in america!!!!
“I taught him to write, so he could write this,” Saul says. “I taught him language, so he could curse. I wonder what this ‘she did it’ business is all about.” He turns the papers over and reassembles them. On the reverse side there are only four words.
no fear
exxxtrabila
tyemeszeemer
“Oh, right. No fear.” Saul shrugs. “And ‘exxxtrabila’—where d’you suppose he learned that word?”
The now-working cuckoo clock ticks from the wall. Patsy looks at the paper. “From the other polyglots, that’s who. He watched a lot of TV. No real clues here, though,” she says. “The kid didn’t have a lick of sense.”
“You know what I think?” Saul asks. His face takes on an animated stare. “I think the aunt was abusing him. That Brenda Bagley woman. That’s what ‘she did it’ means. She was abusing him. So he shot himself. Mystery solved.”
“Come on, Saul. Let’s not do the abuse narrative.” Just then, the phone rings. It is the twentieth call of the day, probably another kind friend offering help. Saul gets up to answer it.
“Hi,” the voice says. “It’s Gordy. How’re you doin’?” The voice does not sound at all like Gordy but like a grown man imitating a boy.
“Just fine, Gordy,” Saul replies. “And how’re you?”
“You’re lying,” the voice says. “You’re not fine at all.”
“This isn’t Gordy. Who am I talking to? Who is this?”
“Yes, it is. I just learned German. They teach all the dead buggers German. It’s the universal language back here. You have to learn German in the afterlife. Didn’t you know that? You can learn it here in a few hours.” The voice laughs, with its bizarre inflections. “It’s real easy learning German when you’re dead because it’s like a mind-thing that happens. It’s like boom, and then you speak it. See, German solved all my problems.” The speaker is laughing heartily. “You’ll learn it, too, when you’re dead. Which could be any time now.”
Ah, Saul thinks, a militia guy, a trailer-park fascist.
“You know,” Saul says, “it’s late, my man, and I’m tired. It’s been a long day, and I think I’ll hang up on you now.”
“Don’t you hang up on me, you fucking Jew. With that boy’s blood on your dirty Jew hands, you—”
“Wow,” Saul says, putting the receiver down. “Wow, wow, wow.” He stands for a moment, trying to find some object on which to rest his gaze. At last he sees Patsy and studies her. His hand is trembling with anger. “Maybe,” he says, “we should get a gun ourselves.”
“Shocked?” Patsy asks, gazing back at him.
Late that night Patsy discovers that she is alone in bed. When her legs sweep across the sheeted mattress, nothing meets them but cotton and air. Where is Saul this time? An unpleasant, ill-meaning summer wind blows against the house, causing the bedsheet to ruffle and the Chapstick to roll off Saul’s dresser. On the wall, the photograph of Patsy’s parents trembles in time to the rattles of the windowframes. Nothing in this house seems to be built solidly, to be able to withstand the onrushes of fate and wind, except Patsy. Saul has a tendency to be blown over, wherever he is. Where is he?
Walking down the hall past Mary Esther’s room, she finds him hunched over in the spare bedroom. He is bent over his desk. Grit touches the bottoms of Patsy’s bare feet. When she glances down, she sees that he is reading some story or other by Mishima.
“Come to bed, Saul,” Patsy orders him. “Come to bed, my love.”
She takes his hand with one of her hands and clicks off the desk lamp with the other. She draws him back to the bedroom. “No, wait a minute,” she says. “Brush your teeth first. I want to make love to you after you’ve brushed your teeth. I like your mouth when it tastes of toothpaste.”
Saul shuffles into the bathroom, and Patsy follows him, standing behind him with her head on his back as he raises the toothpaste tube, unscrews the cap, and covers the toothbrush with the candied goo, the morning-taste of it. She rubs the flat of her hands over his chest, one of her predictably effective arousal techniques, time-tested. Then she lowers her hand into his pajamas and takes hold of him, a familiar gesture, almost by rote, this preparatory ritual, their cure for the rest of the world. As he brushes his teeth, she feels him slowly becoming hard. The taming of passion into married ceremony has a sweet-and-sour taste for her, passion made manageable and harmless and almost comic, the forest fire reduced to the size of a Franklin stove. Whatever the great passions might be, they are not exemplified by married couples, who have nothing but their day-long familiarities and private languages and their ordinary love to bind them together. The wind outside continues to rattle the windowframes, and now the telephone is ringing again, senselessly. With Patsy’s hand still holding on to him, Saul rinses his mouth out, puts the toothbrush away, and carefully screws the cap back onto the toothpaste tube. Then he turns around and kisses her, a kiss full of desperate friendliness and unsurprise, same old tongue, same old teeth. Saul is willfully half-smiling as he kisses Patsy. It is as if she has caught him in an affair, and now something about themselves as a couple has to be proved, or proved again.
She can almost always make him forget himself and remember her. She has been naked for him so often by now that nakedness has nearly lost its original meaning between the two of them. Sure enough, his mouth tastes of toothpaste. Sure enough, his mouth fits on hers in the usual way. The taste, on top of the Saul-taste, is amusingly discordant, like a bear that has been taught to ride a bicycle and use mouthwash, but the domesticity of it energizes her because he has tamed himself for her. He has renounced being someone else for being her husband, and that renunciation makes up for his anger and his sentimentality. So in addition to her usual nakedness, she will be more naked to him than usual, a disavowal to the indifference they both felt for each other this morning and which (she has kept this secret from him) has shadowed her all day like a bad, unforgettable, and prophetic dream of the death of love between them. This dreadful, sickly, mean-spirited day, one of the worst of her life — it has to be forgotten, it has to be purged.