Or else: you lived here for years and you found you liked it, and you stopped apologizing, and visitors noticed that, too.
They had to get out before they were destroyed. She would not let her son be born in a place like this. Plans were being hatched to turn Saul into a scapegoat. She would get Theo and Emmy out of here before desperation took hold of them, desperation and alligator malice, meanness and the liquefaction of the soul.
Sooner or later, wandering is done.
When she arrived at the house, she carried the sleeping Emmy over one shoulder and the diaper-bag over the other into the foyer. She noticed a black BMW parked in front. What was it doing here? Her arms and shoulders were getting muscular and her biceps in particular were swelling from the effort of carrying Emmy and the stroller around. The minute she came inside, she said, “Saul! The scapegoating has started! We have to move! We have to move out of this place!” She smiled at herself as she prepared herself to sing — what was it? — the Animals, a tragically hip band before it was tragically hip to be tragically hip, but softly, so as not to wake Emmy. “We gotta get out of this place! If it’s the last thing we ever do!”
From the kitchen came Saul, accompanied by the most handsome man she had ever seen in real life, Saul’s brother, Howie, who gave Patsy a raised-eyebrow greeting and an all-purpose wave that was more a shrug than a genuine wave. Being beautiful, he could be a minimalist in his gestures. Big hugs were too much trouble, too much strain on the equipment, and were uncool, besides, especially with a lady carrying a toddler. A surprise visit! Well, that was Howie’s style, to appear without an invitation and to leave at about the time you had become used to him and felt a bit of warmth toward him. You fell for him, and he’d be out of there. He had had a ban on intimacy — well, maybe he had changed. But this was his way of enforcing the ban, these surprises, as if he lived across town and could drop in for coffee now and then.
Howie was wearing a perfectly tailored shirt and trousers, rather colorless, so that he appeared to mimic the monotextured heroes in 1940s films — the young John Garfield, only better-looking in the post-humanist style. He had left his shoes at the door, and for some reason Patsy noticed the high arch of his foot inside the sock.
The brothers walked together in a similar style of locomotion, and though Howie was the handsome one with jaw-dropping good looks, Saul was the more lovable, the man with whom you’d want to spend your life. For Howie’s beauty you would pay the price of a lifetime of sorrow, and all the varieties of rage. Eventually you would have to go to church to get rid of him.
“Oh, Howie,” she said, and kissed him. “So that was your BMW. What a nice surprise. Sorry you caught me singing.”
“Patsy.” He kissed her back. Cool professional lips. A slight, low-voltage tingling. “Love, you can sing anytime.”
Sixteen
Saul had been working at his desk, correcting student assignments and watching the sky for signs of the four horsemen of the apocalypse when a black BMW pulled into the driveway. Its headlights went dark; the smooth, muffled engine quieted. Saul did not move, and the driver did not get out of the car. Observing the bug-spattered headlights and grille, and the stationary, immobilized driver, half-hidden behind the tinted windows in the gathering dusk, Saul made a mental checklist:
The unannounced visitor was certainly Howie, his brother. In one of his previous phone calls, Howie had proudly mentioned his black BMW, which he called “The Avenger.” No one around here had a car like that, and certainly not with (Saul now noticed) California plates.
Howie hadn’t called ahead, nor had he in any way intimated that he would be dropping in. He had always favored surprise visits. For this one, he would have had to drive about 1,700 miles, give or take a few hundred here or there, from Palo Alto to Five Oaks. Such a trip was a feat of determination and willpower in the service of a strange, perhaps insanely prolonged, spontaneity. The distance and the effort involved in crossing it did not mean that Howie’s stay would be a lengthy one. He might be gone by tomorrow afternoon.
He would, no doubt, surprise in other ways as well. Howie always had multiple astonishments ready for whatever audience he could command. He liked lifting people up and then keeping them off balance, using his charm as a weapon, part of his latter-day Gatsbyish acrobat approach to things.
How had he found Saul and Patsy’s new residence? He just had. Bystanders tended to give information willingly, greedily, to Howie. The charm, the charisma, did the trick every time.
First Gordy Himmelman’s death this past summer, and now this.
No, that was wrong: he loved his brother.
Nevertheless.
Saul still wasn’t moving. He wouldn’t budge. No budging, not a bit of it. He wasn’t going to move until Howie did. As the guest, Howie was supposed to get out of the car and ring the doorbell before the noises of greeting fell on him like so much rain.
They hadn’t said a word to each other, and already they had a standoff. Because Halloween was three nights away, Saul half-expected Howie to remove himself from the BMW dressed in a costume — that of an ordinary man, a role he had never successfully played. But no: he probably wouldn’t get out of his trophy car until Saul came running downstairs, came charging out the front door, his arms wide, his face joyously radiant with the startled welcome, the glee, the sheer human pleasure of being in his brother’s company again after so long an absence, now that Howie had deigned to visit without warning.
Maybe he, Saul, should dress up in a costume himself, the Gordy Himmelman clothes piled on the floor in his closet. That would surprise Howie.
But no. That, Saul thought, was what he — Saul — would not do. He would not rush downstairs. He would not dress up, or down. He wouldn’t give his brother the satisfaction.
Half of any manipulative strategy had to do with how you arrived and how you departed.
The German motor ticked quietly as it cooled. This standoff was like several others the two brothers had had. Howie wasn’t passive so much as immobile, a Don Juan of stillness: he liked everyone to come to him so that he might gain the advantage of not making the first move. This was the dubious legacy of a childhood marked by illness and indisposition and the death of a parent. He had been born one month premature, a blue baby — incubated — and as an infant he was jaundiced and scrawny and tearful. One of Saul’s first memories was of his mother carrying the misbegotten Howie around the house on a pale-blue goosedown pillow, as if any sudden move might break him. Soon after his birth, Howie had proved to be allergic to breast milk — the metaphoric implications of this were not lost on him as an adult — and he continued to be lactose intolerant. He had suffered from anemia, earaches, uncommon food and substance allergies (carpeting made him sneeze, cats made him choke, he might die if he ate a peanut, and he could not mow a lawn), and repeated bouts of childhood flu and bronchial troubles had kept him in bed for weeks. He had had multiple strep infections and one incidence in middle school of rheumatic fever. In high school he came down with pneumonia and missed classes for a month.