Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories

by Pearlman, Edith

15 This is perhaps the place to correct the woman’s mistakes. My mother was not a saint. She didn’t do anything to end wars or cool the globe or rescue the homeless. When a pie crust crumbled she told it to fuck itself [sic]. She was very nearsighted and didn’t sew, and even wearing her eyeglasses, she blinked a lot, which because she was so tall made her look like a confused giraffe, but not a saint. Tina is not a slattern, just disorganized. She’s twenty-three. She was eighteen when she met my father and got pregnant with Tollie. While she was staying in the North End with her Friend, she thought about her life here and came to the conclusion that its pluses outweighed its minuses. My father is not a tyrant. He’s absentminded and preoccupied with biostatistical research and sometimes gets quite irritable, but he’s turning over a new leaf. My brother is on the spectrum. I love him very much even when he stares silently into his thoughts, maybe especially then.

  16 Baksheesh means free but for the purpose of sweetening the deal.

  17 1871–1914

  ELDER JINKS

  GRACE AND GUSTAVE WERE MARRIED in August, in Gustave’s home—a squat, brown-shingled house whose deep front porch darkened the downstairs rooms. The house lot had ample space for a side garden. But there were only rhododendrons and azaleas, hugging the building, and a single apple tree stranded in the middle of the lawn. Every May, Gustave dragged lawn chairs from the garage to the apple tree and placed them side by side by side. When Grace had first seen this array, in July, she was reminded of a nursing home, though she wouldn’t say anything so hurtful to Gustave—a man easily bruised, which you could tell from the way he flushed when he took a wrong turn, say, or forgot a proper name. So she simply crossed the grass and moved one of the chaises so that it angled against another, and then adjusted the angle. “They’re snuggling now.” The third chair she overturned. Gustave later righted it.

  They had met in June in front of a pair of foxes who made their own reluctant home at Bosky’s Wild Animal Preserve, on Cape Cod. Gustave was visiting his sister in her rented cottage. Grace had driven in from western Massachusetts with her pal Henrietta. The two women were camping in the state park.

  “You’re living in a tent?” Gustave inquired on that fateful afternoon. “You look as fresh as a flower.”

  “Which flower?” Grace was a passionate amateur gardener as well as a passionate amateur actress and cook and hostess. Had she ever practiced a profession? Yes, long ago; she’d been a second-grade teacher until her own children came along to claim her attention.

  “Which flower? A hydrangea,” Gustave answered, surprised at his own exhilaration. “Your eyes,” he explained, further surprised, this time at his rising desire.

  Her tilted eyes were indeed a violet blue. Her skin was only slightly lined. Her gray hair was clasped by a hinged comb that didn’t completely contain its abundance. Her figure was not firm, but what could you expect.

  “I’m Grace,” she said.

  “I’m Gustave,” he said. He took an impulsive breath. “I’d like to get to know you.”

  She smiled. “And I you.”

  GRACE WAS EMPLOYING a rhetorical locution popular in her Northampton crowd—eclipsis: the omission of words easily supplied. Gustave, after a pause, silently supplied them. Then he bowed. (His late mother was Paris-born; he honored her Gallic manners even though—except for five years teaching in a Rouen lycée—he had lived his entire life in the wedge of Boston called Godolphin.)

  Grace hoped that this small man bending like a headwaiter would now brush her fingers with his mustache—but no. Instead he informed her that he was a professor. His subject was the history of science. Her eyes widened—a practiced maneuver, though also sincere. Back in Northampton, her friends (there were scores of them) included weavers, therapists, advocates of holistic medicine, singers. And of course professors. But the history of science, the fact that science even had a history—somehow it had escaped her notice. Copernicus? Oh, Newton, and Einstein, yes, and Watson and what’s his name. “Crick,” she triumphantly produced, cocking her head in the flirtatious way …

  “Is your neck bothering you?”

  … that Hal Karsh had hinted was no longer becoming. She straightened her head and shook hands like a lady.

  GUSTAVE HAD WRITTEN a biography of Michael Faraday, a famous scientist in the nineteenth century, though unknown to Grace. When he talked about this uneducated bookbinder inspired by his own intuition, Gustave’s slight pomposity melted into affection. When he mentioned his dead wife he displayed a thinner affection, but he had apparently been a widower a long time.

  In Northampton, Grace volunteered at a shelter, tending children who only irregularly went to school. “Neglected kids, all but abandoned by their mothers,” she said, “mothers themselves abandoned by the kids’ fathers.” Gustave winced. When she went on to describe the necessity of getting onto the floor with these youngsters, instructor and pupils both cross-legged on scabby linoleum, Gustave watched her playfulness deepen into sympathy. She’d constructed an indoor window box high up in the makeshift basement schoolroom; she taught the life cycle of the daffodil, “its biography, so to speak,” including some falsities that Gustave gently pointed out. Grace nodded in gratitude. “I never actually studied botany in my university,” she confessed. The University of Wichita, she specified; later she would mention the University of Wyoming, but perhaps he had misheard one or the other—he’d always been vague about the West.

  A LAWYER FRIEND of Gustave’s performed the wedding ceremony in the dark living room. Afterward Grace sipped champagne under the apple tree with Gustave’s sister. “Oh, Grace, how peaceable you look. You’ll glide above his little tantrums.”

  “What?” Grace said, trying to turn toward her new sister-in-law but unable to move her head on her shoulders. A Godolphin hair-dresser had advised the severe French twist that was pulling cruelly at her nape; Henrietta had urged the white tulle sombrero; Grace herself had selected the dress, hydrangea blue and only one size too small. Her grandchildren, who with their parents had taken the red-eye from San Francisco, marveled at the transformation of their tatterdemalion Gammy—but where had her hair gone to? “What?” said the stiffened Grace again; but Gustave’s sister forbore to elaborate, just as she had failed to mention that Gustave’s first wife, who had died last January in Rouen, had divorced him decades ago, influenced by a French pharmacist she’d fallen in love with.

  Gustave and Grace honeymooned in Paris, indulging themselves mightily—a hotel with a courtyard, starred restaurants, a day in Giverny, another in Versailles. They even attended a lecture on the new uses of benzene—Gustave interested in the subject; Grace, with little French and less science, interested in the somber crowd assembled at the Pasteur Institute. They both loved the new promenade and the new musée, and they sat in Sainte-Chapelle for two hours listening to a concert performed on old instruments—two recorders and a lute and a viola da gamba. That was the most blissful afternoon. Gustave put the disarray of their hotel room out of his mind, and also the sometimes fatiguing jubilation with which Grace greeted each new venture. Grace dismissed her own irritation at Gustave’s habit of worrying about every dish on the menu—did it matter how much cream, how much butter, we all had to die of something. Light streamed through the radiant window, turning into gold his trim mustache, her untidy chignon.

  AND NOW IT WAS SEPTEMBER, and classes had begun. Gustave taught Physics for Poets on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at nine, The Uses of Chemistry those same days at ten. He taught a graduate seminar in the philosophy of science on Thursday evenings. The first two weeks the seminar met in the usual drafty classroom. But then Grace suggested … Gustave demurred … she persisted … he surrendered. And so on the third week the seminar met in the brown-shingled house. Grace baked two apple tarts and served them with warm currant jelly. The students relived last Saturday’s football game. Gustave—who, like Grace, professed a hatred of football—quietly allowed the conversation to continue until everyone had finished th
e treat, then turned the talk to Archimedes. Grace sat in a corner of the living room, knitting. The next day marked their first separation since the wedding. Gustave had a conference in Chicago. He’d take a cab to the airport right after The Uses of Chemistry. Early that morning he’d packed necessary clothing in one half of his briefcase. While he was reading the newspaper she slipped in a wedge of apple tart, wrapped in tinfoil. After they kissed at the doorway his eye wandered to the corner she had occupied on the previous evening. The chair was still strewn with knitting books and balls of yarn and the garment she was working on, no doubt a sweater for him. She’d already made him a gray one. This wool was rose. His gaze returned to his smiling wife. “See you on Sunday,” he said.

  “Oh, I’ll miss you.”

  She did miss him, immediately. She would have continued to miss him if she had not been invaded, half an hour later, by two old Northampton friends bearing Hal Karsh. Hal was visiting from his current perch in Barcelona. He would return to Spain on Sunday. Hal—master of the broken villanelle, inventor of the thirteen-line sonnet; and oh, that poetic hair brushing his eyebrows, hair still mostly brown though he was only eight years younger than Grace. Those long fingers, adept at pen and piano but not at keyboard—the word processor was death to composition, he’d tell you, and tell you why, too, at length, anywhere, even in bed.

  Gustave’s upright piano could have used a tuning. Grace had meant to call someone, but she had been too busy putting in chrysanthemums and ordering bulbs and trying to revive her high school French. The foursome made music anyway. Lee and Lee, the couple who brought Hal, had brought their fiddles, too. Grace rummaged in a box of stuff not yet unpacked and found her recorder. Later she brewed chili. They raided Gustave’s cave. They finally fell into bed—Lee and Lee in the spare room, Hal on the floor in Gustave’s study, Grace, still dressed, on the marital bed. Then on Saturday they drove to Walden Pond and to the North Shore, and on Saturday night Cambridge friends came across the river. This time Grace made minestrone, in a different pan—the crock encrusted with chili still rested on the counter.

  Hal wondered what Grace was doing in a gloomy house in a town that allowed no overnight parking. Such a regulation indicated a punitive atmosphere. And this husband so abruptly acquired—who was he, anyway? “She picked him up in a zoo, in front of a lynx,” Lee and Lee told him. He hoped they were exercising their artistic habit of distortion. Hal loved Grace, with the love of an indulged younger brother, or a ragtag colleague—years ago he and she had taught at the same experimental grade school, the one that demanded dedication from its faculty but didn’t care about degrees. (Hal did have a master’s, but Grace had neglected to go to college.) Hal thought Grace was looking beautiful but unsettled. Did her new spouse share her taste for illicit substances, did he know of her occasional need to decamp without warning? She always came back … When Hal had mentioned that the Cambridge folks would bring grass, Grace’s eyes danced. Well, nowadays it was less easy to get here. In Barcelona you could pick it up at your tobacconist, though sometimes the stuff was filthy …

  This batch was fine. They all talked as they smoked; and recited poetry; and after a while played Charades. It was like the old times, he thought. He wished Henrietta had come along, too. “I have no use for that fussbudget she married,” Henrietta had snapped. But the fussbudget was in Chicago.

  IT WAS LIKE THE OLD TIMES, Grace, too, was thinking. And how clever they all were at the game; how particularly clever in this round, Lee and Lee standing naked back to back while she, fully clothed, traversed the living room floor on her belly. Odd that no one had yet guessed “New Deal.” Odd, too, that no one was talking, though a few moments earlier there had been such merry laughter; and Hal, that man of parts, had put two of his fingers into his mouth and whistled. At Lee? Or at Lee? In silence Grace slithered toward the hall and saw, at eye level, a pair of polished shoes. Pressed trousers rose above the shoes. She raised her head, as an eel never could—perhaps she now resembled a worm, ruining the tableau. The belt around the trousers was Gustave’s—yes, she had given it to him; it had a copper buckle resembling a sun-burst within which bulged an oval turquoise. When it was hanging from his belt rack among lengths of black and brown leather with discreet matching buckles, the thing looked like a deity, Lord of the closet. Now, above dark pants, below striped shirt, it looked like a sartorial error, a misalliance …

  Scrambling to her feet, she found herself staring at Gustave’s shirt. Where was his jacket? Oh, the night was warm, he must have taken it off before silently entering the house fifteen hours before he was expected. Her gaze slid sideways. Yes, he had placed—not thrown—his jacket on the hall chair; he had placed—not dropped—his briefcase next to that chair. She looked again at her husband. His exposed shirt bore a large stain in a rough triangular shape—the shape, she divined, of a wedge of tart. She touched it with a trembling forefinger.

  “That tender little gift of yours—it leaked,” he said.

  He surveyed his living room. That naked couple had attended his wedding, had drunk his champagne. A pair of know-it-alls. Their names rhymed. The other creatures he had never seen before. A skinny fellow with graying bangs advanced toward him.

  “Gustave, I want you to meet—,” Grace began.

  “Ask these people to leave,” he said in a growl she had never before heard.

  They seeped away like spilled pudding … Lee and Lee, first, dressed in each other’s clothing, clutching their overnight cases and instruments, kissing Hal on the rush toward their car and its overnight parking tickets. They didn’t kiss Grace. The Cambridge crowd didn’t kiss anybody. But Hal—he stood his ground. He was a head taller than Gustave. He extended a hand. “I’m—”

  “Good-bye.”

  “Listen here—”

  “Get out!”

  He got out, with his satchel in his left hand and, in the curve of his right arm, Grace. At the last minute she turned as if to look at Gustave, to plead with him, maybe—but it was only to snatch up her pocketbook from the hall table. Next to the pocketbook she saw a cone of flowers. Sweet peas, baby’s breath, a single gerbera. An unimaginative bouquet; he must have picked it up ready-made at the airport stall.

  GUSTAVE CLIMBED THE STAIRS. The guests had apparently cavorted mostly on the first floor; except for the two unmade beds in the spare room, the only sign of their occupation were towels like puddles on the bathroom tiles. He went into his study and his eye flew to the bookcase where, in manuscript, between thick bindings, stood his biography of Faraday, still in search of a publisher. No one had stolen it. On the carpet lay a book—open, facedown. He leaned over and identified it as a Spanish grammar. He kicked it.

  Downstairs again, he heated some minestrone—he had not eaten anything since his abrupt decision to abandon that boring conference and come home early. The soup was tasty. He looked for a joint—how sweet the house still smelled—but the crowd had apparently sucked their whole stash. He did find, in one corner, a recorder, but he couldn’t smoke that. He put all the plates and glasses into the dishwasher. He tried to scrub the remains of chili from a pot, then left it to soak. He vacuumed. Then he went upstairs again and undressed, and, leaving his clothes on the floor—these gypsy ways were catching—slipped into Grace’s side of the bed. With a sigh he recognized as an old man’s, he flopped onto his back. His thoughts—which were uncharitable—did not keep him from falling asleep.

  But a few hours later he found himself awake. He got up and went through the house again. He threw the Spanish grammar into the trash bag he had stuffed earlier and lugged the thing out to the garage, knowing that anyone who saw him in his striped pajamas under the floodlight at three o’clock in the morning would take him for a madman. So what. Their neighbors considered them a cute couple; he had overheard that demeaning epithet at the fish market. He’d rather be crazy than cute. He relocked the garage and returned to the house. And surely he had been deranged to marry a woman because of her alluring eyes. He
’d mistaken a frolicsome manner for lasting charm. She was merely frivolous, and the minute she was left unsupervised … He stomped into the living room. That rose-colored garment in progress now shared its chair with a wine bottle, good vineyard, good year … empty. He’d like to rip the knitting out. The yarn would remain whorled; he’d wind it loosely into a one big whorl. When she came back she’d find a replica of Faraday’s induction coil, pink. Come back? She could come back to collect her clothing and her paella pan and the bulbs she kept meaning to plant. He picked up the sweater. It would fit a ten-year-old. Insulting color, insulting size … he went back to bed and lay there.

  GRACE, TOO, WAS AWAKE. The hotel room was dark and malodorous. Hal slept at her side without stirring, without snoring. He had always been a devoted sleeper. He was devoted to whatever brought him pleasure. Under no circumstances would she accompany him to Barcelona, as he had idly suggested last night. (He had also suggested that she buy the drinks at the hotel bar downstairs; she supposed she’d have to pay for the room, too.) Anyway, she had left her passport next to Gustave’s in his top drawer. She hoped he’d send it back to her in Northampton—she had not yet sold her house there, thank goodness, thank Providence, thank Whoever was in charge. She hoped he’d send all her things, without obsessive comment. She wanted no more of him. She wanted no more of Hal, either: it was enough that she had shared his toothbrush last night, and then his bed, and was now sleeping—well, failing to sleep—in one of his unlaundered shirts.

  How hideous to have only yesterday’s lingerie. Unshaved underarms were one thing: grotty underpants quite another. What time did stores open on Sundays? She’d slip out and shop, get a new sweater, maybe—that would pick up her spirits. She remembered the half-finished vest for her granddaughter she’d left on the chair; she hoped Gustave would send that back, too …

  “Amelie …,” muttered Hal.