Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories

by Pearlman, Edith

  “What wrong with yes-or-no? Either you remember something or you don’t, and if you don’t you’ve got a 50 percent chance …”

  “A test is a teaching device. It should encourage the student to consider the uncategorical, the ambiguous.”

  She grumbled a little at that. “I never give my clients tests. They’d throw them back at me.” Her clients, three lawyers who’d answered an ad she’d placed in the paper, were perfecting their conversational Russian, which was already excellent.

  Sometimes Francis and Louanne strayed into the area of personal history. “You have never married,” she remarked one afternoon, with comradely spurning of tact. “Perhaps you prefer men.”

  “I like women and I like men, both at arm’s length.” He even liked homely outspoken schoolgirls with an odd attachment to a motherland in ruins.

  On a different occasion, pausing near the pond, she’d told him she planned to go back to Russia after high school. “And would not you also return to the country of your birthing?” she demanded of his raised eyebrows.

  “Birth,” he said; she’d asked him to correct her errors. “I was born here,” he said, unable to keep pride out of his voice.

  “Then exile is unknown to you.”

  “Terra incognita,” he admitted, but she had no Latin, and he was obliged to explain the phrase.

  Today, while a sudden sun turned Francis’s pale green room paler, they were worrying the subject of representative government. “Didn’t you ever lose an election?” she asked. “In those whole four decades?” She took off her glasses to clean them, revealing the ice blue eyes, the colorless lashes. She put her glasses back on.

  “No, I never lost. But sometimes my opponents were obviously unfit,” he said. “The Republicans liked to put up somebody, even if the somebody had no experience, no convictions, no sense of the principles of government.”

  “But people voted for you also when your opponent was not an asshole. People wanted you. Why?”

  “I identify with the commonwealth,” he ventured. Then, recognizing eagerness in the almost-imperceptible ripple of her stiff face and the shifting angle of her glasses, he continued. “I see the commonwealth as an extension of myself—its public gardens my flower patch, its public libraries my bookshelves, its police my bodyguard, its ball team my …” He glanced at the seventeenth-century map of Massachusetts over the sofa: a retirement gift from his colleagues.

  “Please don’t stop.”

  “… its ball team my sandlot, its state hospitals my mad aunt.” He was quoting himself, the curse of old age. But she didn’t know that. “I believe that the family, variously defined, defined sometimes as one solitary celibate, is both the paradigm and the ward of the state. I believe that …” Now he did stop. “Louanne … I think that’s enough for now.”

  “No, please! Tell me about your first senate running.”

  “Race. We’ll take that up another day.”

  “All right. And another day, we’ll go again to the museum.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which day?”

  Francis looked at his watch. “This day.”

  THEY GAZED AT THE VUILLARD FIRST, as always. The artist’s mother sits in profile at a table, cutting out fabric—the fabric a kind of plaid, her dress a kind of check, the wallpaper dotted with pears. A cupboard is rough country wood. The lamps are unlit and there is no window, but light from an unseen source catches Mme Vuillard’s nape, her bun, her ear, the side of her jaw, her spectacles; it catches, too, a brass bowl, and half of a covered dish. The light comes from behind the painter, or from the painter, or from the man and girl now standing in front of the work. “How natural it all looks,” he said; he’d said it before. “But a painting is an artificial work”—this was a new topic. “ ‘It calls for as much cunning as the commission of a crime.’ ”

  She was silent.

  “Those are not my words,” he admitted.

  “The words of Monsieur Vuillard?”

  “The words of Monsieur Degas.”

  “Also a bachelor who lived with his mother?”

  “No, he had a more … active life.”

  They moved away. The girl did not care for paintings of bourgeois characters in their parlors any more than she cared for workers’ posters—he knew that because he knew what she did care for: frontal Holy Families, coy Annunciations. Someday, an angel might appear to her, too, announcing not love, nothing so ambitious, but perhaps, at last, friendship.

  They strolled and looked; then, in the museum’s café, they drank tea. Francis ordered ice cream, Louanne a napoleon. “I need its strength,” she explained. She was off to meet her clients, now demanding to be taught slang.

  “They are up to no good,” Francis predicted. “Profiteers.”

  “I think so, too,” she said with indifference. “Though they are rich already.” She usually conducted the class at their office, but sometimes at the home of one of the clients, an Italianate villa in a western suburb. She had to take two buses to get there, but she always got sent home in a taxi.

  “They want to be richer,” Francis told her.

  “Doesn’t every citizen?”

  They said good-bye under an elm tree. Their small figures were probably distorted by the hunch of their backpacks, Francis thought: they could be mistaken for garden sculptures. Louanne headed downtown to the office of her dubious clients. Francis crossed a city park, ghostly purple in the early twilight. “My backyard,” he exulted.

  Yet there were many things they did not have in common, the retired legislator and the sojourner. Language facility, for instance—Louanne spoke Russian, German, English, and rudimentary French; Francis, despite his schoolboy Latin and Greek, was monolingual. Health, for another example—his shortness was merely hereditary, and his heart condition, discovered by lab tests, gave him little discomfort; she, on the other hand, was stunted, and her eyes would need corrective lenses for the rest of her life, and her aunt knew nothing about nutrition. And politics—the elder Zerubins distrusted all forms of socialism, even the mild redistributive tendency of the Democratic Party. They had voted Republican since naturalizing. As for Louanne, she sneered at the presumption of equality. “So everyone has been given the right to higher education by some deity,” she sneered. “And so teachers in slum schools give out A’s for rap lyrics, and two-year colleges teach how to sell advertising on television. Democracy!” She would have welcomed the return of the Romanovs.

  Still, how comfortable he had become at their Saturday dinners. The beef and barley stew, discs of fat decorating the surface. The salad—potatoes in sour cream, a chopped scallion the meal’s one green vegetable. A figgy dessert that you ate with a spoon. The dyed aunt, her sequined sweater one size too small. The bald, jowly uncle. The niece. The overhead chandelier casting a rancid light. A wheezing, arthritic dog. The paintings: offerings of magical events in primary colors, all by the hand of a single untalented émigré. A religious reminder: the Giotto Madonna and Child, its gilt frame matching the halos. Francis thought of his beloved Vuillard; and he moved this worthy family from its beige apartment hung with faux Chagalls and one terrible reproduction of a masterpiece into a room of patterns, sunlit through blinds. Everything would be tactile: the mustache of the man, the over-lipsticked mouth of the woman, the spot of gravy on the denim cuff of the girl who was teaching herself to use her left hand. “For what purpose?” she said, echoing Francis’s question. “I want to be ambiguous.”

  He didn’t correct her, partly because others were present, partly because she had perhaps said exactly what she meant. In her left hand the fork waved, wavered, and sometimes overturned.

  Afterward uncle and niece played chess, and Mrs. Zerubin did needlework, and Francis and the dog watched the fire. How satisfying domestic life was when you could shut the door on it at the end of the evening and cross the hall and then shut a second door, your own.

  ANOTHER WEDNESDAY: April now. They discussed love of money. “De Tocq
ueville noted it almost two centuries ago,” he said.

  “You do not love money, Mr. Francis.”

  “Well, you see, I have never felt poor. And I don’t care about … oh, fine clothes, or travel, or haute cuisine. And who needs an automobile in this intimate city?”

  “So what do you care about? What are your transcendent values?”

  She was proud of the phrase; her smirk told him so. Well, if he had to name something: the relative importance of honesty, the primary importance of loyalty … “Truth,” he heard himself lying.

  She sighed. “What besides truth?”

  “Beauty,” he helplessly admitted.

  “Personal beauty?”

  He nodded: it was a yes-or-no question.

  Her jaw hardened.

  “And the beauty of a sycamore,” he said, “and of a receding city street, and of a work of art, of course you know that.” And the beauty of solitude, he silently added.

  “And the beauty of a diamond? I could get you a diamond,” she said. “My aunt’s cousin Kolya, the rascals he knows …”

  “Jewels don’t interest me.” How had he allowed this interrogation to begin? “Civility, that’s another of my transcendent values, and also—”

  “Beauty,” she repeated. “I could get you that.”

  “What do you mean, Louanne? You have already brought beauty into my life.” He withstood her glare. “The beauty of … your extraordinary young mind, and of our conversations.”

  “Yah,” she spat.

  THREE WEDNESDAYS LATER she came in carrying, by its strong handles, a big brown bag. Her expression was portentous, as if in imitation of an announcing angel. She lowered the bag with officious care and pulled out something surrounded by a narrow frame. She set it on the floor so that it leaned against the grass-cloth wall.

  It was perhaps twelve by eighteen inches. It was Vuillard’s mother again, seen full face—an older face, shadowed: a face that might bend over a grandchild’s cradle, say, or the sickbed of an invalid. Broad brow, kindly eyes, and an upper lip that resembled a gentle awning. What she was bending over was a glass vase filled with flowers, mostly daisies, but also anemones and irises. The background was only a suggestion of wallpaper.

  The painting was signed.

  “I saw it weeks ago,” Louanne said, shrugging out of her navy peacoat. “In that house. It was in some sort of guest bedroom just to the side of the bathroom. I went to pee and I opened that door—it’s always closed—and I put on the light and I saw it.”

  “Louanne,” in a whisper.

  “I wasn’t surprised—the house is full of stuff like this. They’re loaded, those thugs. They buy stuff to wash money, you know that, Mr. Francis. In Russia they get more loaded, like you said.”

  “… as you said.”

  “As. So I took it. Yesterday. Because the guy’s wife has left him, and he’s going to Moscow tomorrow, and no one will know it’s missing for weeks, and then he’ll think she—”

  “Louanne,” he said, still breathless.

  “It wasn’t just hanging there for anyone to grab, don’t think that,” she said. “There was this security clasp I had to figure out. And getting the bag—that was no picnicking, either. I had to buy a scarf at Bloomie’s, and ask for the bag from the bitch saleswoman, and then return the scarf the next day and keep the bag.”

  “Louanne.” It seemed to be all he could say. His chest hurt.

  She stood before him, sturdy as a guard, not quite his height. “What?”

  Personal property, it’s a right, he thought. Thieving, it’s a crime, he thought. There’s a social compact, he thought.

  But she knew all that. She had memorized ethical principles the way she might have memorized the rules for rolling out pastry—stuff she would recite but never practice. And he would not rebuke her. Loyalty was what counted most; he’d told her that, or meant to.

  “Aren’t you going to say anything?” she said, hands on hips.

  “Thank you,” he managed.

  HE HUNG THE PAINTING, the following Tuesday—it had taken him that long to decide where. He’d thought first of hanging it in the bedroom—no one else went in there except the cleaning woman. He thought of his small study: roses on the carpet, lilies on the wallpaper, books, a flame-stitch armchair, and cockatooed draperies almost concealing the single narrow window. He considered the kitchen and the bathroom and the communal hall between his apartment and hers; he considered the back stairway, whose steps wore rubber treads. He considered his clothes closet.

  In the end he hung it in the living room, over the fireplace. The portrait of his great-grandfather (attorney general of the commonwealth, 1875–1880) was relegated to the bedroom, replacing the mirror, which itself went into the back of the clothes closet, appearing to double his thrifty wardrobe.

  His great-grandfather, bearded, one hand resting on the laws of the commonwealth, had thrown his noble gaze across the room at the early map of Massachusetts. Portrait and map had provided an axis of honor. The Vuillard corrupted the room.

  “Attractive,” said a former colleague who’d come over for some advice. “New?”

  “Relocated,” Francis said, holding his breath. The conversation turned to the present governor, such a dimwit.

  “Oooh, Mr. Morrison,” said the cleaning woman.

  “Nice,” said the man who came to fix a leak in the bathtub, but he seemed to be referring to the apartment in general.

  Louanne’s glasses glinted at the painting on her first few visits after the bestowal; then they didn’t. She was writing a paper on the Electoral College. Discussions of that valuable, antiquated procedure occupied their sessions. At the Zerubins’ they talked about dogs and baseball.

  Nowhere could he find news of the theft. The painting had probably been stolen to begin with. He could not identify it in the catalogue raisonné; even under the heading “Privately Held” he could not find Mme Vuillard with Flowers or anything like it. Still, its most recent possessor must have noted its absence by now. Perhaps the Russian mafia was making confident plans to kill him.

  Louanne was still teaching those dirty lawyers. “And the one in the grand house, if he should mention that he’s been robbed?” asked Francis.

  “He hasn’t mentioned.”

  “If he does?”

  “In which language?”

  “Oh … English.”

  “I’ll say: ‘Speak Russian.’

  ” “In Russian, then.”

  “I’ll look sympathetic.” To demonstrate, she slanted her head and pursed the corners of her mouth, an executioner checking the knot on a noose.

  He loved the gift she had given him. As time passed he did not love it less. Nor did he get used to it: the woman’s head so close that her voice could almost be heard; the economy of line and the limited palette; the slight distortion of the angle of the head; the lack of a grand idea. The humble daisies. A humble artist: secondary even in his heyday.

  “Our constitution is more specific than yours, because we do not rely on the judiciary,” she was saying one Wednesday. “Judges were considered an extension of the Little Father, and—”

  “Yes,” Francis said, though he was not certain of the accuracy of her statement. “Louanne, my dear, we must relinquish the painting.”

  Her glasses stared at him.

  “I cherish it,” he went on. “But it is too much for me. I will die of it.”

  “You will die of a heart attack. Isn’t that why you take that powdered stuff?”

  “The Cystadane is to prevent my dying.”

  “To delay it. Anyway, no one ever died from beauty.”

  “Then I will be the first.”

  Silence while she surveyed him. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that her spectacles probably reduced what was before them. “I’ve still got the big brown bag,” she admitted. “But I’ve been teaching those crooks at their office lately. I don’t know when I’ll be at the house again.”

  “We
cannot return it to them, Louanne. It demands a public place. A shared arena, a location where any person, moneyed or penniless, cultured or gross, passionate or indifferent, can benefit from its—”

  “Mr. Francis?”

  He halted. With effortful simplicity he said: “It belongs at the museum.”

  “Oh. So donate it.”

  “Well, no, not with its murky provenance.” He did not want her deported. “We must slip it in.”

  “Like a bomb?”

  “Like a bomb.”

  “My great-great-uncle threw a bomb. They shot him for it. Asshole.”

  She was referring to her relative, he hoped.

  “GOOD MORNING, NICK.”

  “Mr. Morrison, good morning,” the guard said. “Good to see you. Ah … the young lady will have to check her parcel.”

  He had hoped for exactly this: that the Big Brown Bag would prove a distraction, that his familiar backpack, rarely challenged, would not be challenged now, though it wasn’t the familiar one after all. It was new, considerably bigger, still fairly flat though.

  “The young lady is well known to me; she’s carrying her art supplies,” Francis said. “Show him, Louanne.” And Louanne, feigning resentment, pulled out one by one a sketch pad, a sketch board, and pencils bound in their middle by a rubber band, fanning in both directions just as Vuillard’s daisies fanned upward from the mouth of the vase and their stalks downward into the expertly rendered water. Louanne then turned the bag upside down. A paper clip fell onto the floor.

  “She’s going to copy a Rembrandt,” Francis confided. “Drawing a painting, it trains the hand.” The guard had to turn his attention to the visitor behind them. Louanne scraped up her tools.

  They trotted upstairs to the Rembrandts. Louanne put some lines on paper. Then they trotted downstairs again, to the members’ lounge. From there they went to the trustees’ rooms and from there slipped down an out-of-the-way staircase to the basement and then farther, to the basement of the basement. There stood a dozen lockers, a few closed and padlocked, the rest ajar.

  She helped him off with his backpack as if it were an overcoat and she a maid, a maid in a blue denim shirtwaist. He’d never before seen her in a dress. Francis unzipped the pack. Louanne withdrew the item without removing its bubble wrap. Francis slid it gently into a locker and closed the door.