Saul and Patsy Read Online Free PDF Page A

inhale.
    “God,” he said. “I miss it. I miss being on a campus. I miss not being an adult, quite yet. I miss being twenty. I miss that stink.”
    Patsy studied him. “Yeah,” she said, “you do have that nostalgia thing going on. Come on, Saul. Enough about you. I’m hungry. Let’s get me a bag of potato chips.” After buying the tickets—the concert was far from being sold out, the blues having little purchase here at Holbein College— they walked down the student union hallway to an alcove where some vending machines stood. On one of the vending machines, the dispenser of individually bagged snack foods, someone had taped a warning sign:
    OUT OF ORDURE
    “God, I miss it,” Saul said. “Cleverness. Verbal agility. I wonder if a French major put that up,” Saul said.
“Et pourtant vous serez semblable à cette
ordure—”
    “For Christ’s sake, Saul,” Patsy said, giving him a peeved look. “I know the poem.” She softened quickly. “You used to recite it to me, remember? To freak me out with Baudelaire?”
    “Yeah, I was just being nostalgic. Just as you say.” They stood there and watched the students parading by, accessorized with their preoccupations, and Saul glanced over at Patsy and saw instantly that she had outgrown the glamour of youth, the metallic sheen of immaturity and total enraptured self-mindedness. She had been glad to get out into the world where she lived now; he had not. Involuntarily, he put his hand over his heart.
    All through the concert he noticed from his wife’s stillness and concentration that, in fact, he understood the blues much better than she did. The old black guy up on the stage, with his gray hair and pressed pants and shoes spotted with flecks of mud, sang and played his heart out. Saul didn’t have to think about the music to get it; for him, no effort at translation was necessary.
    Also, he was beginning to suffer from insomnia, just like Harold, the barber. During the day while teaching his classes, he would feel drowsy, but when his head fell onto the pillow, he would sleep for an hour and then wake with the sensation that a movie-premiere arc-light was shining in his face. Along his legs and his chest there fluttered a distinct feeling of insects. This sensation made Saul want to jump out of his skin, leave his body behind like an ill-fitting pair of pajamas. At these times, still in his cocoon-body, he lay there thinking that the meaning of a serious career and of adulthood generally had escaped him. In the middle of the night, life did not seem to be the trifling joke he once thought it might be, nor were its problems merely academic ones. Devils lurked. At such times he would take Patsy, awake or asleep, into his arms. He wanted to admit that he had made a terrible mistake and that they were suffering the consequences of his misjudgments.
    After all, his brother, Howie, the entrepreneur, was on the West Coast, making West Coast money in various start-ups, fledgling technology and software projects of which Saul understood nothing. Howie was younger than Saul and already a millionaire, or so he claimed. Saul’s impression was that West Coast businesses were like West Coast football: you threw the ball up into the air and sort of expected someone to catch it, and usually someone did. Howie did not hesitate to call now and then to announce his various successes in vague incomprehensible detail. Then Saul’s mother, Delia, would call to talk about Howie’s successes to Saul, repeating the vague incomprehensible details at greater length and fuller incomprehensibility. Being an older brother whose idealism had resulted in a high school teaching job—this made Saul feel, during his bouts of insomnia at three in the morning, in his rented house, with midwestern farmland outside, as if he had been bested, outdone and undone. Sounds came up from the basement. Dream hounds bayed. Never again would he and his wife live in the fully human world. He had brought