Read Online Saul and Patsy by Charles Baxter - Free Book Online

embraced him for only a moment. There wouldn’t be any big, long love thing, not just now. “Want to help, Saul? Give me a hand putting the rest of these flowers in?”
    “Not right now, Patsy, I don’t think so.”
    “What’s the matter? You’re looking peckish.”
    “Peckish? I don’t know.”
    “You
are
in a state.”
    “I guess I might be.”
    “What is it this time? Our recent brush with death? The McPhees? My incredible impatience about getting another job?”
    “What about the McPhees?” he asked. She had probably guessed.
    “Well, they were so cute, the two of them. So sweet. And so young, too. Plus their baby. And I know you, Saul, and I know what you thought. You thought: What have these two got that I don’t have?”
    She
had
guessed. She usually did. It was unfair. He stepped backward. “Yes,” he said, “you’re right. What
do
they have? And why don’t I have it? I’m happy with
you,
but I—”
    “Jesus. You can’t be like them because you can’t, Saul. You fret. That’s your hobby. It’s how you stay occupied. You’ve heard about spots? About how a person can’t change them? Well, I
like
your spots. I like how you’re a professional worrier. And you always know about things like the Cayuse Indians. I’m not like that. And I don’t want to be married to somebody like me. I’d put myself to sleep. But you’re perfect. You’re an early-warning system. You bark and growl at life. You’re my dog. You do see that, don’t you?”
    “Yes.” He nodded.
    After he had kissed her and returned to the house, he took the matchbook he had pocketed at the McPhees’ up to his study. At his desk, with a pair of scissors, he cut off the flap of the matches, filled in his name and address, and wrote a check for six dollars to the Wisdom Foundation, located at a post office box number in Cincinnati, Ohio. Just to make sure, he enclosed a letter.
    Dear Sirs,
    Enclosed please find a check for six dollars for your SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE. Also included is my name and address, written on the back of this book of matches. You will also find them typed at the bottom of this letter. Thank you. I look forward, very much, to reading the secrets.
    Sincerely,
    Saul Bernstein
    He examined the letter, wondering if the last sentence might sound too skeptical, too . . . something. But he decided to leave it there. He took the letter, carefully stamped—he put commemorative stamps on all his important mail—out to the mailbox and lifted the little red flag.
    He thought: I am no longer a serious person. My great-grandfather read the Torah, my grandfather read Spinoza and Heine and books on immunology, and here I am, writing off for this.
    On his trips into town, Saul began to take the long route past the McPhees’ house, slowing down when he was close to their yard. Each time that he found himself within a mile of their farm, he felt his stomach knotting up in anxiety and sick curiosity. He recognized himself twisting in the coils of something like envy, yet not envy exactly, but a more biblical emotion, harder to define, like covetousness. Driving past in the evenings, he occasionally saw them outside, Emory mowing or clipping, their baby strapped on his back, Anne up on a ladder doing something to the windows, or out in the garden like Patsy, planting. They could have been anybody, except that, for Saul, they gave off a disturbing aura of unreflective happiness, which meant that they could have been anybody except Saul.
    The road was sufficiently far away from their house and from the shed flaking with paint so that they wouldn’t see him. His car was just another car unless you looked closely and saw the dented roof and Saul inside it. But on a particular Friday, in early June, several hours after work, he drove past their property and spied Emory in the front yard, in the gold twilight, pushing his wife, sitting in the swing. Emory, the ex–football player, had on his face a solemnly contented