Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories

by Pearlman, Edith

  And then, within the house, more greetings. Beauteous Sophia. Emaciated Fox. Thea, exhausted.

  THEA AND GAIL had a long-established hideout. About two hours later—Fox asleep in his room, Max napping in his and Gail’s, the boyfriend gone, Sophia and Hebe shopping for groceries, like mortals—the women found each other there. The room had been a pantry once and perhaps a meat larder before that. No heat reached it. Though the afternoon was not especially cold and a thin layer of snow was shrinking in the sun, their little place retained the iciness of the previous months. Gail wore her parka, Thea her grand-mother’s patched sable.

  “He looks awful, doesn’t he,” Thea said.

  “Yes,” Gail agreed. Fox’s hair had turned the color of spume. His skin was nearly as transparent as the weak bulb hanging above their two sorrowful heads. He had joined them for lunch that afternoon without participating in it. He was kept alive on some canned medicinal nutrient to which he attributed his frequent vomiting. Treatments and their sequelae were what was killing him, he said; the disease itself had vanished, he claimed. “I’m cured and dead,” he said, in helpless fury. The sound of his vomiting—Gail had heard it twice—was not the cascade of a drunk; it was a prolonged, unproductive gagging.

  “I brought fancy chocolates. What was I thinking?” mourned Gail.

  “Hebe has already swallowed the entire box. Pa likes high-tasting stuff like spiced crab cakes, runny cheese, and smoked meats. He adores bacon. So for a while Ma made bacon every morning and Pa ate it and pretty soon he chucked it up. Finally she wouldn’t make it anymore and they started to have those fights they adore, shouting made-up footnotes at each other, Pa quoting from something medical—”

  “A digestive tract.”

  Thea managed a weak smile. “—and Ma invoking British novels, all those gentlemen gouty from port and pork. Also she quoted Deuteronomy—”

  “Leviticus. ‘And the swine, though he divide the hoof, and be clovenfooted, yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean to you.’ ”

  “Whatever. Then Ma started making the bacon in the middle of the afternoon, while he’s sleeping, like now. It’s a drugged sleep, bacon won’t wake him, the house burning to the ground wouldn’t wake him. So he started getting up in the middle of the night to fry it himself.”

  “You could just not buy it.”

  “Oh dear, Gail, do you think swine is unclean?”

  “Of course not. The pig is fastidious if given the opportunity.”

  “Oh good,” said Thea. “Anyway, Pa yells that gout is one of the few conditions he doesn’t have, and that Old Testament restrictions don’t apply to Whitelaws. There’s not a Yid in his lineage—sorry, Gail, it’s the word he used.”

  “There’s a Yid in everybody’s lineage,” Gail said, evenly.

  “ ‘Ergo,’ he goes on to say, bacon must be good for him. And Aunt Hebe is always his ally. She swears that bacon alone sustains her existence. What a useless existence it is … Oh, don’t listen to me, I love her.”

  “Darling.”

  Gail was sitting on a high stool and Thea on a lower one, and it was an easy matter for Thea to lay her cheek against Gail’s denimed thigh. They remained in this position for a while. Then Thea raised her head again. “Now I lock the bacon in the trunk of my car. So Pa goes without. But the fight isn’t over. They won’t stop fighting until he’s dead.” She swallowed. “He won’t die while a fight is on.”

  “Then bacon is keeping him alive,” said Gail.

  DINNER, COOKED BY THEA and her mother, consisted of chicken, salad, and wine for everybody but Fox, who again ate nothing and drank only his thick green medicinal liquid. Thea’s boyfriend returned. Hebe and Max gabbed about politics. Fox said nothing, focusing on the battle within. Sophia’s lordly attention, too, was elsewhere. She insisted on cleaning up without assistance. Fox went upstairs to vomit, and didn’t come down. The sea beat hard on the rocks. “I will take a walk in the perilous dark,” Hebe announced. The boyfriend left. Gail and Max and Thea sat reading in the living room. Hebe came home and told them she was safe. “Surprising: I am so prone to mishap.” The sea beat even harder on the rocks.

  GAIL AWOKE in the middle of the night. She had forgotten to pack her Valium. Max was lightly snoring. It would be unkind to wake him, and for what purpose, anyway? She could tiptoe downstairs and into Fox’s room, rummage around in his pharmacopoeia until she found something that induced sleep. So what if she laid her hands on a lethal medicament. To awaken a dying man would be worse than unkind.

  She got up, and pulled somebody’s oilcloth coat from a hook and put it on. (She’d forgotten to pack her robe, too. Sometimes it seemed that slippery places were forming in her brain.) She walked almost noiselessly down the back stairway and on the second floor switched to the main stairs, whose threadbare carpeting would muffle sound. But still every footfall produced a creak. She stopped, leaned over the banister.

  Moonlight had entered the music room, brushing against disregarded heirlooms, dusting the Steinway with silver.

  Fox and Sophia sat on chairs angled toward the broadest window. Their knees almost touched. Fox wore a striped hospital bathrobe, borrowed or stolen during one of his stays. Sophia was still in her corduroy pants and a ragged flannel shirt. But above their schmattes, what noble heads those aristocrats wore, even the one about to die. What enviable profiles. She tried to listen to the couple’s soft, low conversation—she wasn’t really a guest, after all; she’d been summoned to attend the dying, she had a schoolteacher’s obligation to eavesdrop. But all she could hear were a few syllables that might have been, that should have been, that probably weren’t “love” and “remember” and “afraid.”

  MAX TRIED THE PIANO in the morning. Fox lay on a ratty sofa. The weary Gail, hoping to remain unnoticed, hunched on a chair in the corner of the dim dining room where the family took none of its meals. She held the novel she’d brought, still unreadable. She could see the music room in one direction through an archway, the kitchen in another direction through a narrow door. The piano was in perfect tune. Fox’s old cello case—the one he’d dragged from home to college and back again—stood in one corner.

  Max left the piano and walked through the dining room. He didn’t notice Gail. In the kitchen he poured some coffee and sugared it heavily. Fox now got up from the sofa. He unpacked the cello and inserted its post like a prosthesis. He sat on a stool with the instrument in front of him at an exaggerated slant. The post dug into the Aubusson. Fox was still wearing his sleeping garments and that robe whose stripes Gail had noticed last night. Now she saw that it bore yellow stains.

  Sophia and Thea and Hebe sat on the porch. The weather was still unseasonably mild. Or perhaps seasonably—Gail knew that the Maine coast had experienced balmy winters two years in a row during the nineteenth century and also in 1929, another of the remembered factoids from her days of teaching. The boyfriend had not yet appeared. Gail could not remember his name. Did he remember hers? Was there anyone on earth who remembered 1929 and the daffodils that had perished by Valentine’s Day? Fox drew the bow across the strings. He played a Bach suite, the stuff cellists warm up with. He ignored wife, daughter, and sister-in-law trooping in from the porch. They found Gail immediately. Sophia announced that the girls would skate while the boys practiced.

  “I forgot my skates,” Gail said.

  “I have an extra pair,” Thea said.

  “They’ll be too big.”

  “We’ll stuff them.”

  “With what,” Gail said, following the others to Thea’s car. They drove from island to island until they reached the mainland. There they drove to their favorite pond, black, sprinkled with nubbles of ice like kosher salt. Thea’s skates, with the addition of a pair of mismatched socks she’d snatched from the line, fit Gail as if made for her. Gail thought of the winter she’d taught her young son to skate; for a moment it was as if no time had passed since then, as if he were still that merry little boy and she his delighted mother.r />
  She executed a few turns. Thea and Sophia were waltzing. But the Goddess of Youth was the star. In a long skirt salvaged from a Whitelaw trunk and a tight jacket and a top hat—Fox had worn it to somebody’s inauguration—Hebe twirled, raised one leg and then the other, leaped, landed like a butterfly. Gail, quickly tired, watched her from the edge of the pond. How kind it would be of some real deity to shrink that scrap of a person, transform her into a piece of porcelain, and set her atop a music box to spin forever. “She rents a one-room cottage on a New Hampshire horse farm,” Thea had said. “She comes up to prattle at Pa, takes buses to get here, about seventeen of them.” But now Hebe’s right blade seemed to catch on a protrusion of ice, or perhaps it was a root that had worked itself upward during the thaw, like a child throwing off its blankets. The top hat fell off and rolled in a wide arc toward the center of the pond. Hebe fell flat on her face.

  Well, not really. “The body will do almost anything to protect its eyes and nose,” Max had once said. “The hands shoot out—a lot of broken wrists happen that way. Only an unconscious person forgets his face. One night in the emergency room I saw …” and he’d gone on to tell her about a drunk whose tumble had resulted in total shattering; he mentioned the bones by name, like friends. Max’s capacious memory had stored everything he’d seen during his internship, before he abandoned the urgency of clinical work. Last night he’d told her that he thought Fox had at most a month to live.

  Hebe lay still. But her face was turned to one side, so her nose probably wasn’t broken. Sister and niece sped in her direction. She pushed herself into a crouch (her wrists weren’t broken, either) and curled into a half-sitting position, legs (also unhurt) swept beneath her. Gail reached the threesome. Thea was kneeling beside her aunt. One side of Hebe’s face had been severely scraped, but there wasn’t much blood. “Okay?” Sophia inquired.

  “We ought to attend to that skin,” said Gail.

  “I was all at once nauseated,” said Hebe. She took Thea’s hand and scrambled to her feet. Gail followed them to the shoreline. She turned her head once and saw Sophia gliding to the middle of the pond to retrieve the top hat, like a gentleman’s gentleman.

  THEY FOUND MAX ALONE at the kitchen table. “Fox is sleeping,” he said. “What happened to you, Hebe? Let me see.” Thea fished keys from her jeans and ran outside again. Gail saw her open the trunk of her car and lift out something wrapped in unyielding white paper. She came in again, threw the keys onto the counter, and opened the package, uncovering a slab of pink, glistening bacon. She sliced the meat and handed the slices to her mother, who was already standing at the old stove, already shifting a big black pan on the burner. The slices curled, puckered, bubbled. The aroma slowly filled the kitchen.

  Gail set the table. Max advised Hebe to wash her face gently in lukewarm water. No emollient was required. Hebe went off to obey. Sophia served the first slices.

  The fragrance grew stronger—the smell of defiance, of sumptuous caloric energy, of treif. Before the rage for standardization, Gail’s fourth-grade class had done happy units on farm animals. Gail had of course prepared thoroughly. The sow is particularly motherly, she learned and then taught her charges; pigs of most breeds are prolific and also efficient at converting grain to flesh. Your pig has a small stomach within his ample frame. His fossil remains, the ur-peccary, were discovered first in China … This may explain the glory of Chinese food, she had silently speculated, though glory could not be explained, any more than life or death or sexual preference could. Once, when her son was about three, they had come across a toy pig in a store, a very small sow, scrupulously realistic. They counted the teats: twelve. “Here is where the milk comes out,” she said. And they hugged each other in sweet remembrance of lactation …

  “Trichinosis,” Hebe said when she came back. “You get it from pigs, don’t you?”

  “You do,” Max said. “Pigs get it from rats, though. But, yes, Hebe, if you eat raw pig meat you may ingest the encysted larvae of a roundworm and get very sick. So we cook bacon thoroughly, and it releases that tranquilizing scent.”

  “No wonder Fox craves it,” Gail said, and suddenly she could no longer open her mouth.

  Hebe said, with unaccustomed earnestness, “Maybe it really is bad for him.” And Gail, lips pressed together, saw that Hebe loved her sister’s husband in her arrested way—that those two sometime housemates must have a fairly good time together: one skating, one fiddling; one talking, one with his fingers in his ears; no need to bother with sex …

  “Bacon’s not bad for Fox,” Max said. “Nothing is bad for him anymore.” For all his lardy softness Max wasn’t a man to cry. But the gentle voice broke and the narrow shoulders slumped and a pudgy hand covered the twitching mustache.

  Sophia kept the slices coming for a while. Finally she stopped. Upstairs, Fox slept his assisted sleep. Thea stacked the dishes. Sophia handed bacon and keys to Gail, who went outside, locked the package in the car trunk, and then, bending, holding on to a stunted pine, threw up. Under her palm the bark felt like a tweed arm. She straightened and returned to the house.

  NIGHT CAME AT LAST. They gathered in the music room after the dinner that everyone but Fox had eaten. To be festive he had poured his noxious nutrient into a champagne glass. He had inspected Hebe’s face. “You will have a splendid bruise in the morning,” he assured his fellow sufferer.

  Beyond the dried eucalyptus situated in a tarnished pitcher on the piano, Max’s face looked metallic—pewter mustache, pressed-tin skin. His eyes seemed like disks of aluminum under their sparse lashes. A stranger walking into the room would have fingered him as the dying man, not Fox, head bent, spindliness concealed by his cello.

  They played. Two old men, their instruments older still but destined for a longer stay on earth. Perhaps the piece had rarely been played so faultily, perhaps never under such circumstances. The Twelve Variations on Papageno’s tune had been written as a salon exercise for amateurs. Gail knew that. She knew that the opus was lesser Beethoven, unambitious Beethoven; she had learned much about music during the long decades of her marriage. Max messed up a passage. If she had been chosen by a man with an interest in modern art, in football, in cooking, she would have learned about those things. She herself had brought to the union a passion for teaching, and also a cigar box of pins and buckles and clips. She’d planned to add to the collection, to sell, to trade. A dolce vibrato by Fox went sour. Gail’s hobby, neither encouraged nor demeaned, had failed to develop. The musicians got through all of the variations in a quarter of an hour.

  The boyfriend clapped. Fox went upstairs to vomit. The boyfriend left. Max stood by the piano, his score under his arm. Hebe trotted up to him, her red face raised, wondering again about Vase-line. Thea and Sophia went around turning out the lights.

  “Leave your face alone,” said Max to Hebe. And to Gail, “You’ll come upstairs soon?”

  She nodded. In fact she followed on his heels. In fact, naked, she was in their hard bed before he was, and she wrapped him in her limbs with a spider’s ardor. At the moment of irreversibility, the wave breaking, she thought not only of Michelle Pfeiffer, tonight’s imagined partner, but of Michelle Pfeiffer wearing that bracelet of diamonds and silver and black enamel that Gail had denied herself. She blinked the trinket away, and its wearer too. Max returned from his ablutions. His naked pear-shaped body glowed in the moonlight; his eyes now looked like worthwhile coins. Mein Mannchen, she thought. My little man.

  SHE SLEPT FOR A FEW HOURS. Then, awake as if she had been smacked, she got up and put on the oilcloth coat and went downstairs, not worrying about noise. The music room was empty. The door to the porch was ajar. Thea was alone out there. She sat on an aluminum chair, her arms resting on the porch’s wooden railing, her head on her arms. With a light scrape Gail dragged another chair toward the young woman and sat down beside her. Thea raised her eyes. Their hands touched.

  What was there to say? That the pair of oddly matched roommates Fox
croft and Maurice had made a reasonable go of the lives they had been given to lead. That if anyone cares to inquire I have done the same. “Helping one man die—it is the work of many persons.” She did say that.

  From within the house they heard a groan—inanimate; the back door had opened. The footsteps of one person sounded on the wooden steps outside the kitchen. Then a little yawn: a car trunk opening—and a little clap: a car trunk closing. The pair of feet, seemingly stronger now, returned to the house, and the back door closed again.

  Thea sat up straight.

  “The car keys—I left them on the counter,” Gail said. “He saw them, at dinner. Your mother saw him see them. I saw her see him see them.”

  There was a sizzle from the kitchen. Soon that heavenly fragrance drifted in. The sizzle grew louder, like fingers snapping a joyous message: it’s cooked, thoroughly. It’s ready to be savored and swallowed and unresentfully disgorged, this sliced back portion of some magnificent pig.

  CAPERS

  PICKING UP LOOSE CHANGE—it was Henry’s idea. An activity—not a crime, not even a misdemeanor. And these days any sport that aroused his enthusiasm was worth playing. It was so easy. The stuff lay all around them. It lurked under the mailboxes and in the corners of the elevator and on the sidewalk. It could be fished from chair cushions at the movies. Dorothy found oily coins in the gutter. She washed them and sometimes polished them. Once, in a diner, two quarters were lying on the counter near Henry and he picked them up. The counterman held out his hand. “Those are mine,” he said. “My tip from the guy before you.” Henry relinquished the money. On her stool Dorothy stared straight ahead. Henry would have kept those quarters—would have stolen them. Stealing was a crime. Yet it was the counterman who looked ashamed … ashamed for Henry, maybe.