Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories

by Pearlman, Edith

  Ten years. The concert hall was packed. The soprano, now an international star, had been raised in Dea’s neighborhood; as girls they had been friends. Dea received a pair of tenth-row tickets. Luc chose to stay home with the children—there were three now—so Dea invited a fellow artisan, a young man whose abstract weldings were not yet famous.

  Alain and Isabella were also in the orchestra section, a few rows behind and to the right of Dea and her companion. Alain had an excellent view of neck, ear, sometimes nose, a part of her brow. Her hair had been cropped. The soprano sang a program of familiar arias and love songs. She sang them to Dea—that’s what he thought; she sang them on Alain’s behalf.

  Dea and her youthful escort stayed seated during the intermission. Alain and Isabella greeted friends in the lobby and drank champagne. Little sandwiches of smoked carp were particularly tasty. The second half of the program was Lieder. How varied she was, the soprano; how many strings she had to her larynx. He said that to Isabella—through her, really.

  After the last “Brava,” after the final encore, the members of the audience stood, slipped past each other, murmured … Dea turned. Ten years had added a single thrilling line to each of her cheeks. He sucked in his stomach. Their eyes met for several seconds.

  My handsome companion is a friend only … That was all she wanted to say. She had much to boast of, though. She had become a master weaver. She taught at the crafts school. Her baskets, mostly handbags, were sought after by rich women, by tourists. She was working on an oval one at present—and the next day she returned to it, frowning, separating staves fiercely, choosing canes of conflicting colors, overlapping them, slewing and flitching. She made the lid of twined and strapped latticework, infiltrated with hexagonal weavings. It was a mad design. It would never catch on. It might not even sell, though her name smoked into the base was usually a guarantee.

  That afternoon Alain took his daughter to the racetrack. She was twenty-six now, already divorced. He let her choose the horses. She chose according to the filly’s name, or the name of the sire, or the name of the dam, or the color of the jockey’s silks. Half-asleep, she watched the races on television in the clubhouse. Alain, leaning forward in his outdoor seat, followed each contest from start to finish. He panted, gasped, swore. They drove home with a small bundle of winnings.

  AGAIN TEN YEARS PASSED. Another new president had just been elected. The inauguration took place in the Great Park, on a platform surrounded by flowers and facing a thousand folding gilded seats. On the platform sat the country’s one Nobel laureate, several former presidents, the new president, and all the ministers, Alain included, though he would soon retire and receive the usual medals. There were four young cadets holding flags, one cadet from each branch of the military service. Dea’s son, now serving in the air force, had been selected for this honor guard, perhaps because of his excellent school record, perhaps because of his unusual height. The families of everyone on the platform sat in the first, golden rows.

  The oldest of the former presidents was very old indeed. He sat shrunken in his chair at the front of the platform, canes across his lap. Alain sat just behind him. Dea faced them from her aisle seat seven rows back. She shifted her body, and now she could see clearly the monkey face and diminished torso of the man whose current lifetime had lasted so long, and she could see, above his face, his face. Those remembered shoulders. Alain, for his part, could see the dark hair, the glasses, the long neck. Dea took off her glasses, hoping that their eyes might meet: But no, they were too far from each other. Nevertheless, they maintained a pseudo-gaze until the ex-president shuddered, and the long-sighted Dea guessed that he was foolishly about to rise. She rose. The president raised his rump and the canes rolled down his thighs and dropped to the dais and then to the ground. Dea strode forward. The old man stood and tottered and she saw that his crotch was wet. Alain slid out of his chair and caught the ancient figure beginning to fall and lifted him and held him in his arms like a dead child and watched Dea advancing and now their eyes did meet, but he was obliged to turn away in order to lay the ex-president across four chairs that had hastily been vacated. Alain bent down and opened the old man’s shirt and loosened his belt. “I’m a doctor,” said a fellow who had leaped onto the dais, and slipped his practiced hand underneath the shirt. The ex-president opened his eyes. Ambulance men appeared and policemen quieted the crowd (the four cadets stood without moving) and Alain, relieved of responsibility, straightened up in time to see Dea resume her seat. Luc raised his eyebrows at his wife. “CPR,” she explained. The old man wasn’t dead and thanks to Alain he wasn’t hurt. “I faint sometimes,” he insisted, “it’s nothing.” The ambulance took him to the hospital anyway. The inauguration went peaceably on. Afterward, Alain went to a grand dinner. During the meal he felt a roiling in his gut, ruining his appetite. Isabella shot him glances of easy compassion. She was still blond, still admired, still faithful.

  Dea dined in a faux-rustic restaurant with Luc and their two younger children—the oldest, the cadet, had to continue holding his flag at the state dinner. Then parents and children went home. Everyone but Dea exhaustedly went to bed.

  The complicated basket she had made on the day after the soprano’s concert had become a splendid success. Now people begged for her creations. Fruit bowls, hods, wine totes, charming round overnight bags—she made them for film stars, television personalities, the wives of industrialists. She had woven a cradle for the granddaughter of the King of Sweden. She accepted as students only weavers already proficient. She was, according to the minister of culture, a national treasure. The house she lived in with Luc and the children had grown taller by a story, and the garden was improved, and the pharmacy had acquired granite counters, and the workroom was all glass now.

  Tonight she did not turn to her current project—a woven jewelry case, seventeen little drawers moving as smoothly as if lubricated—but to a private matter, a sculpture slightly bigger than life-size. She had been working on it for years. That fibrous vegetable material, thickly woven, can be made to resemble naked flesh seems unlikely; but under Dea’s hands this happened. Two standing figures melted into one. The slenderer of the two figures rested its head on the broader shoulders of the other figure, and atop the inclined head the hair was caught in a knot and sprayed outward.

  Alain left the inaugural banquet early. A brief rain had slick-ened the streets. He walked atop his own reflection until he came to a warehouse. A car followed him, like the tram that night in Muñez. At the warehouse he gave a password, entered, sat down with some men—some roughly dressed, some finely, all smoking, all flush with cash. They played for a throbbing hour; cards were all the world. Alain won big twice—once on a straight, once on a bluff. A scarred player gave him a murderous stare. Then the men from the car came in with their guns raised and arrested everybody except Alain. He turned over his winnings to one of them. Oh, these necessary stings.

  ANOTHER DECADE and then some—thirteen years. The glass workshop was now a playroom for grandchildren—the cadet had become a captain and a father. After the Museum of Modern Art bought the untitled sculpture, Dea withdrew from her students, finished current commissions but refused new ones, and enrolled in the Academy of Pharmacy. She had not forgotten the science she’d mastered as a schoolgirl. She needed only a year of training to qualify, to join her ailing husband as partner.

  One day during the rainy season, Luc upstairs in bed with a worsening cough, a blind customer suggested that Dea turn on the lamps. “I can feel darkness, like flannel,” he said as he tapped out with his cane. So she flipped three switches and then a fourth, and blew a fuse, and had to climb down to the basement where the fuse box lurked. While there she heard the two tones of the bell that meant the opening of the shop door. “One moment,” she called, and climbed back up, grunting a little on her arthritic knee.

  His hair was still abundant. Or, rather, it seemed abundant—but her clever eye saw that it was abundant anew, after a bout o
f baldness. Below this second growth his custard brow looked less like flesh than the statue now in the museum. His blue eyes had faded to mauve, the color of the tunnel’s vault when the train’s lights had gone out. His lips had thinned. Under the handsome suit his chest had caved in.

  So he was dying, thirty years late.

  “Alain,” she said, breaking the long silence.

  “Dea,” he said, his voice cracking.

  “Alain, my own … some other lifetime. I promise.”

  He nodded. She too inclined her head, and closed her eyes. She heard again the double tone of the bell.

  AT THE MUÑEZ HOTEL so long ago the room given to Alain was larger than Dea’s. In silent agreement they had selected hers. It was square and white, and had a single narrow bed against the wall. The window looked out on the deserted avenue. He bathed first, then she; then, naked, they met in the middle of the room, and embraced as if they meant to weld themselves into one being. His strong arm around her back fixed her body to his. Her head rested on his shoulder. Standing that way, they told each other of their lives until then. They abandoned reticence, even courtesy: They kept interrupting each other.

  “A game of chance—no thrill like it, not even …, ” he said. “Win or lose,” he said.

  “My parents wanted me to become a doctor,” she said.

  “I must go wherever it glows—casinos, track, lottery.”

  “I was willing to study medicine. But I changed my mind, like little Ella today. I found my vocation. My fingers, the cane, they were meant for each other.”

  “Cock fights in alleys, dice near dumps. Some fool knifed and left for—”

  “The suitors who weren’t terrified of my height, they were terrified of my passion. Only Luc, such a kindly man …”

  “—dead.” Dawn lightened the room. An early tram slid by outside their window. “I am responsible to my—”

  “I am responsible to my—”

  “—family,” he whispered.

  “—family,” she moaned.

  “—country.”

  “—hands.”

  He gave her that last word. He gave her his love. He would think of her almost every day for the rest of his life. Only his presence would he withhold.

  They loosened their grip on each other then, and found their way to their only bed.

  ON JUNIUS BRIDGE

  I.

  THE FIRST BRIDGE was made of stone. An ogre lived beneath it, the village people claimed—they were woodcutters and farmers, bred on fables. The stooped, bearded ogre, true to his kind, hungered for children. An eighteenth-century drawing of the bridge showed him crouched beneath the keystone with a sack. Miss Huk owned that drawing and displayed it near the entrance of her mountainside inn. She displayed, also, a photograph of the bridge, early twentieth century, grainy and unconvincing. It, too, through some trick of reeds and mist, seemed to reveal an ogre.

  The stone bridge had arched over the narrow river separating the mountains from the farmlands around the town of Sklar. The Russians had planned to run a railway up into the mountains, the easier to deforest them. There had also been a plan to widen the road that wound from village to higher village. So Junius Bridge was torn down stone by stone. An iron structure—also called Junius—took its place. This Junius was flat, with side railings consisting of Z after Z: ZZZZ … The ogre went elsewhere during the construction of the iron bridge; at least that’s what people told each other. Maybe he joined the Socialists. But he returned when the new Junius was completed, and he was said to live under it still, sleeping on one of the trestles, annoying youngsters making love on the riverbank with his high-pitched sorrowings.

  The railway was never built and the road never widened.

  MR. AND MRS. ALBRECHT and their son had crossed Junius Bridge five days ago. They’d spent those days among the mountains, driving from village to village. When they came downhill again and arrived at the inn, Miss Huk immediately suggested liquids in various forms—baths for them all, soup for them all, hot rum for the robust parents, hot milk for the elfin boy. She made these unasked-for recommendations from her seat at the registration desk in the large open space that served as reception area, common parlor, recital room whenever Andrei deigned to play: a place where the fire was always lit and pines stood guard on the other side of long windows. She knew that her authority would not be resented. It was the authority of the insignificant.

  She was thin. Eyes, skin, hair, sweater, skirt, stockings, boots: all were the gray of leaf mold. A sharp nose poked out of a narrow face. She wore spectacles. Her voice was exceedingly soft.

  “Thank you,” Robertson Albrecht said now to Miss Huk’s suggestions. “Though my wife prefers white wine.”

  “Yes,” said Christine Albrecht. She had amber eyes and a wide rosy mouth, and there was a reddish tinge to her hair, as if the unmanageable stuff had been rouged.

  “Chilled?” Miss Huk said to the American billionaire, to his ravishing woman.

  “Chilled, oh, yes,” Mrs. Albrecht said.

  As if those light syllables were the command he was awaiting, the handyman bent toward the luggage. Despite narrow shoulders and womanly hips, he could lift the heaviest loads. With the child’s satchel stowed under one arm and the father’s briefcase under the other, he picked up the two suitcases and started upstairs. There were men who would not tolerate their briefcases being commandeered; Miss Huk had met several such tycoons. Robertson Albrecht didn’t seem to care. Instead he turned to look at the room. Though thick-torsoed, he gave an impression of soldierly fitness. He took in (Miss Huk, attentive to his profile, noted shifts in the angle of the sparse lashes) the massive stone fireplace; the carpet whose complicated pattern could only be guessed, since its various greens were almost indistinguishable from one another; the carved benches flanking the fireplace in grim opposition; the upholstered chairs. The boy, on hands and knees, was behind one of the chairs, betrayed by a thin ankle in a rumpled sock, and a sneaker. The couple had now both turned their backs on Miss Huk to watch their child—to watch the chair which almost concealed him. Miss Huk glanced upward. The corner of a suitcase disappeared from the broad landing.

  All was quiet. In the large bedroom upstairs and the small one connecting to it the handyman would place suitcases on folding racks, pull open the curtains, and push the windows outward. In the kitchen the cook, half of whose face was purple, was roasting a pig. The walleyed kitchen maid was stewing fruit. The rest of the small staff was busy, too, and the other guests were occupying themselves in their different manners; and Miss Huk sat at the register; and Mr. Albrecht stood beside Mrs. Albrecht, only the upper arms of their jackets touching, as if accidentally.

  The boy was still on his knees. The foot wearing the sock and sneaker moved out of sight. The head appeared on the other side of the chair. Slowly he got to his feet.

  Miss Huk turned her eyes on him. As she expected, he avoided her spectacled gaze. His own eyes were large and silvery. His hair was pale, too. His cheeks were gaunt and his chin pointed. He looked toward but not at his parents—toward Mr. Albrecht’s rubbery features coated in dark skin, toward Mrs. Albrecht’s beautiful face and unremarkable clothing. They both spoke excellent French, Miss Huk had noted. The boy walked forward with a mechanical grace. He stopped eighteen inches away from his mother and father. He was inserting a magnifying glass into its holder; he was dropping the device into the pocket of his khaki short pants: short pants worn, Miss Huk guessed, not in defiance of the snow outside but because he was attached to the garment. Maybe the color, maybe the pockets. “Anthrenus scrophulariae,” Lars now said to the non-space between his parents, the line where their tweed arms just touched.

  “Well, that’s not surprising,” Mr. Albrecht said to his son. Mrs. Albrecht said nothing.

  Miss Huk also said nothing. Those damned carpet beetles, was what she thought.

  WHEN YOU RUN an inn in the foothills of the Mátra Mountains, an inn that boasts nothing in particular—a
thermal spring of course, excellent food and wine of course, forest trails—you’ve got to attract people who have reason to be content with bathing, walking, eating, drinking, reading the books they’ve brought or the ones in the book room behind the stairs. If the inn is more than inn, or less, you are wise to offer something to offset that less or more. Miss Huk did offer something: Andrei.

  “He’s not our resident musician, not at all,” she said a few hours later to the bathed, hydrated Albrechts. “He is a guest here like anybody else, semipermanent like many. He brought the harpsichord—it is his.”

  “By car?” Mrs. Albrecht asked, idly.

  Miss Huk said yes, it is easy to enclose keyboard and strings in padding and of course the legs had been removed. Legs can be stowed in a sack. When Andrei plays for us, she informed the lovely, sorrowful face, he and the handyman carry the thing downstairs. And the kitchen maid carries the legs …

  “In a sack,” Mrs. Albrecht supplied, her eyes seeking the drawing of the bridge and its ogre.

  Her husband said nothing. He was so still—like pudding.

  “Yes, a sack. And then, in this room, near the windows there, the men and the girl reassemble the instrument, whirling the legs into place. They have all three become expert at the maneuver.”

  The kitchenmaid came in and suggested dinner. The gong sounded at the same time. Miss Huk rose, the Albrechts rose, Lars came out from behind his chair and moved slowly forward. “Will you join me at my table?” Miss Huk asked these newest guests. “It is the custom on the first night.”

  Lars paused. There was nothing wrong with his hearing. Reluctance rippled across his features, but he followed his parents into the dining room. Lit only by candles, the room held six tables. Four were quickly occupied. The Belgians took one. The topologist, beaming in his vacuous way, took another. S. and S. took the third table. S. and S. were women who preferred to be addressed by last initials only; too bad they bore the same initial, but the staff managed to oblige. One S. was Scottish, the other Norwegian. Miss Huk and the Albrechts seated themselves at Miss Huk’s table, which stood on a low platform near the window. Beyond the window was the forest: dense, then denser.