Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

Dear Mr. Hoyle,

What an article, that one in the Post, telling secrets, all about Happy Bloom’s writers, and the people who have quit, and the ones who have stayed. And the rehearsals in the Hotel Pamona. Fans will be hanging around the Pamona all day now, won’t they?

The rehearsal site had been known for months. Fans already hung around. But unwigged and un-made-up and bespectacled, Happy Bloom was as anonymous in a New York hotel as he was in his Brooklyn house of worship. At five o’clock he whisked unnoticed through the side door, a revolving one.

I myself will be in the lobby of the Pamona next Monday, April 13th, at noon.

The Lady in Green

ON SATURDAY:

“Lunch? Monday? Out?” screamed Happy.

“Can’t be helped,” Joss said. “You fellows work on the patter number — I’m not in it.”

And then Happy, in one of his turnarounds, said, “My dentist is threatening me like the gestapo, all my gums are falling out. Okay, everybody goes out to lunch on Monday. Paolo will kill himself when he doesn’t find us. Don’t bother to come back until Tuesday morning. My dentist will bless you, Hoyle … But we start at eight on Monday, not nine,” he yelled.

Monday they did start at eight, and at quarter of twelve the gang skedaddled, kids on holiday. Only Joss was left.

He straightened his tie and adjusted his blazer in front of the big mirror. First position, second, third … He grasped the barre and raised his right leg, high. It might be a good bit: mournful male balletomane. Would it be funnier in whiteface? Suppose he played a bum trying to play Ghiselle? A church bell rang. He was so sallow. Still on one foot, he let go of the barre and pinched his cheeks; he had seen Mary do that twenty years ago. He resumed his normal stance, left the room, shut the door and locked it.

He rode the elevator to the lobby.

The elevator doors parted. He stepped out.

On a chair beside a palm, facing not the elevators but the registration desk, sat a female in glasses. The forest green of her jacket and pleated skirt hinted more at uniform than suit. Her legs were bare. Her ankles were warmed by bobby socks. She looked about fourteen years old.

Joss walked slowly forward. She had a bony nose with a little bump. Her dark hair was curly and thin. She was probably Jewish or one of those hybrids. He looked at the feet again. One laced shoe had a thickened sole and heel.

Her age had angered him, and now her defect turned anger into fury. It was a familiar tumble. Whenever one of his brothers showed up at the door — just a loan, Joss, something to tide me over — he was only vexed. But: I have kids , Joss — when he heard that he wanted to kill the jerk, and then he wanted the jerk to kill him.

He paused, waiting for his rage to peak and subside. Meanwhile the girl took off her glasses. He walked forward again. He slipped behind her chair and placed his hands over her eyes. Unstartled — she had perhaps sensed his approach — she placed her hands over his. For a few moments they maintained this playful pose. Then he slid his avuncular hands from beneath hers. He glided around to the front of the chair and stood looking down at his correspondent.

“I am Jocelyn Hoyle,” he said.

“I am Mamie Winn.” Her gaze didn’t falter. Her small round eyes were a flat brown. She put on her glasses again.

“You haven’t had lunch, I hope,” he said. “Tell me you haven’t had lunch.”

“OTTO BELIEVES that young people should be introduced to alcohol early,” Mamie said to Joss across the booth, and then she said to the waiter who was inquiring about drinks, “Kir, please.”

“What?”

“White wine with a splash of cassis.”

“Forget the cassis, Mamie,” Joss said. “Draft for me,” he said to the waiter. Perhaps Cassidy’s had been a mistake. He wondered if he could be arrested for plying a minor. He didn’t know her age exactly; that would be his defense. He did know she was in tenth grade, the prosecution would point out. The waiter served the drinks.

“Otto?” Joss inquired.

“He lives in the next apartment. From Vienna. The University of Chicago is the only true American university, Otto says. All the others imitate European ones. So I want to go to Chicago.” She sipped her wine, leaving lipstick on the glass. She had much to learn about cosmetics. “Is your daughter in college?” she asked.

“Thanks,” Joss said to the waiter, who had brought their specials, both plates on one forearm. “She’s in boarding school,” he said to Mamie: the practiced lie. “Your penmanship is excellent.”

“Oh, cursive. I practiced a lot when I was young.”

“And your writing, too.”

“I go to a private day school”—and she named it. “On scholarship. We are required to wear a uniform.” She fingered her pleated skirt.

“Ladies in green.”

“Rich bitches.” A bold smile. “So ignorant! National Velvet is their idea of a masterpiece.”

Mamie came from a large, loose, wisecracking family. “Happy Bloom could be one of my uncles,” she said. The men were sales representatives, the women salesladies, an optimistic crowd tolerating in its midst members who were chess players and members who were racetrack habitués and members who were fat and thin and good-natured and morose and peculiar—“My great-aunt walks the length of Manhattan every day”—and even Republican. She loved movies and gin rummy and novels. She had a very high IQ—“That just means I’m good at IQ tests,” she said with offhand sincerity — and because of her intelligence she’d been sent to the green school. “The uniform — it’s equalizing, that’s good; it’s a costume, that’s good too …”

“Mamie,” he said. Enough babble , he meant. He leaned across his corned beef. “Why these letters. Why to me.”

She reddened. It was not beautifying.

“A bit of fun?” he asked, helpfully.

“At first. I thought, hey, he’ll answer …”

“There was no return address.”

“Answer another way, get Happy Bloom to mention ladies, or green. Some trick. But then, I don’t know, I didn’t need an answer anymore. I just wanted you to read the words, to wonder. When you look out of the screen with that face, it’s like a carving, you’re looking for me, you’re looking at me …”

“Yes,” he soothed, thinking of the camera’s red bulb, the thing they had to look at.

“At school, they all have boyfriends.” She was all at once lonely and forty, and nothing had ever happened to her and nothing would. “I love your silence,” she said after a while.

“My silence — it’s imposed.”

“Everybody at home talks all the time. I love the way you dance.”

“The silent character — Bloom made it for me.”

“I love the way you fall down.”

He had mastered the technique young, while still at the Jesuits’. He had gone to every circus, every vaudeville show. He studied clowns and acrobats. And in the first troupe and then the second he spent seasons watching, imitating, getting it right. He practiced on the wire, he practiced with the tumblers. Never broke a bone. Learned how not to take the impact on the back of the head or the base of the spine or the elbows or the knees. Knew which muscles to tighten, which to relax …

She said: “You make me want to fall, but with my, you know, I can’t.” She paused. “I have fallen,” she confessed. She took off her glasses. Her little eyes softened. Would she ever be pretty? “Actually, I have fallen in love,” she said. “With you,” she added, in case he’d missed her drift.

There were several things he could do at this juncture, and he considered each one of them. He could award her an intent, sorrowful look, he knew which one to use; and from this and her flustered response there would develop, during future meetings, a kind of affection. Stranger romances had flourished. When she turned twenty he would be … Or he could talk smart: prattle tediously about the Irish in America, his hard boyhood, the Jesuit fathers, the early jobs, the indifference of the public, the disappointing trajectory of his life. Bore her to fidgets, push her calf love out the swinging doors … Or he could offer to introduce her to Paolo, what a pair … Or he could pretend to get drunk and stumble out of Cassidy’s leaving her to pay their bill. She probably had a couple of fives tucked into that orthopedic shoe.