Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

He did none of those things. Instead he reached his hand across the table and gently pulled the nose, the nose with the little bump.

They lingered over their lunch and then walked the length of Fifth Avenue. Walking, she hardly limped at all.

“I don’t do sports,” she told him. “Steps are sometimes difficult,” she added mildly.

They discussed, oh, the Empire State Building and the dock strike and hizzoner: the idle conversation of two friends who have met after a long silence, and who may or may not meet again. At the subway entrance on Eighth Street they paused. He took both her hands and swung them, first side to side, then overhead. London Bridge is falling down. Then he let them go.

“This afternoon has been …, ” she began.

“Yes,” he said.

She clumped down the stairs. He stood at the top, watching her grow smaller. Soon she would turn. He’d watch until then … “Pardon,” said a woman in a hat, edging past him, rushing downward, blocking his last view of the girl.

THAT THURSDAY THEY did a takeoff of On the Town —they couldn’t make fun of the war, but dancing sailors were fair game. A movie tapster danced with them, another guy on his way down. But the spoof was too short. Three minutes to go before the good-night monologue, signaled the Brigadier. So Happy said “Sweet Georgia,” under his breath — they’d done that number together on the circuit a dozen years earlier, feet don’t forget. It was a Nicholas Brothers routine. So what? — they’d never claimed originality, Happy stole most of his jokes. The Brigadier said “Georgia” to the orchestra, and then she hooked the Hollywood fellow off the stage, and there they were, Joss and Happy, dancing, just dancing. Happy flapped into the wings thirty seconds before the finish, to get out of the sailor suit and into the tux. Joss kept cramp-rolling. He felt Mamie’s eyes on him and his on hers. He double-timed into a leap, why not, and he kicked midair, heels meeting, and dropped onto his feet and then slid down slantwise, perfect, thigh taking the weight, and now he was horizontal. The camera’s lens lowered, smoothly following him; those guys were getting better. Elbow on floor and chin on palm and body stretched out and one leg raised, foot amiably twitching, Joss grinned. Yes: grinned.

“What made you smile? They’ll get rid of you,” Mary griped an hour later.

He touched her hair. So dry, you’d think one of her cigarettes would set it on fire. “I was smiling at you,” he said.

“PREDICTABLE,” said Judith da Costa.

“Oh … hopeful,” said her husband, Justin, in his determinedly tolerant way.

“Neither,” said Harry Savitsky, not looking for trouble exactly; looking for engagement perhaps; really looking for the door, but the evening had just begun.

Harry’s wife, Lucienne, uncharacteristically said nothing. She was listening to the tune: a mournful bit from Liszt.

What these four diners were evaluating was a violinist, partly his performance, partly his presence. The new restaurant — Harry and Lucienne had suggested it — called itself the Hussar, and presented piroshki and goulash in a Gypsy atmosphere. The chef was rumored to be twenty-six years old. The Hussar was taking a big chance on the chef, on the fiddler, on the location, and apparently on the help; one busboy had already dropped a pitcher of water.

“It’s tense here, in the dining room,” Judith remarked.

“In the kitchen — don’t ask,” Harry said.

In some accommodating neighborhood in Paris, a restaurant like the Hussar might catch on. In Paris … but this was not Paris. It was Godolphin, a town that was really a western wedge of Boston; Godolphin, home to Harry and Lucienne Savitsky, retired high school teachers; Godolphin, not so much out of fashion as beyond its reach.

One might say the same of Harry. His preferred haberdashery was the army/navy surplus store downtown. Lucienne, however, was genuinely Parisian (she had spent the first four years of her life there, never mind that the city was occupied, never mind that she was hardly ever taken out of the apartment) and she had a French-woman’s flair for color and line. As a schoolgirl in Buenos Aires, as a young working woman in 1950s Boston, she had been known for dressing well on very little money, and she and her brother had managed to support their widowed mother, too. But Lucienne was well over sixty now, and perhaps this turquoise dress she’d bought for a friend’s grandson’s bar mitzvah was too bright for the present company. Perhaps it was also too tight for what Lucienne called her few extra pounds and what Harry called her blessed corpulence. He was a fatty himself.

In the da Costas’ disciplined presence Harry was always a little embarrassed about their appetites, his and Lucienne’s. Certainly they had nothing else to be ashamed of: not a thing! They were well educated, as high school teachers had had to be in their day (she’d taught French, he chemistry). Lucienne spoke three languages, four if you counted Yiddish. Harry conversed only in Brooklyn English, but he understood Lucienne in all of her tongues. They subscribed to the New Yorker and Science and American Heritage.

These da Costas, though — they were very tall, they were very thin. Judith, with her pewter hair and dark clothing, could have passed for a British governess. Justin was equally daunting: a high brow and a lean nose and thin lips always forming meaningful expressions. But there were moments when Justin glanced at Judith while speaking, and a spasm of anxiety crossed his face, entangling itself with the meaningful expressions. Then Justin and Harry briefly became allies: two younger brothers who’d been caught smoking. One morning at breakfast Harry had described this occasional feeling of kinship to his wife. Lucienne looked at him for a while, then got up and went around the table and kissed him.

PAPRIKA BREADSTICKS! The waiter’s young hand shook as he lowered the basket. Judith took none; Justin took one but didn’t bite; Lucienne took one and began to munch; Harry took one and then parked another behind his ear.

“Ha,” Judith said, mirthlessly.

“Ha-ha,” Justin said.

Lucienne looked at Harry, and sighed, and smiled — her wide motherly smile, reminding him of the purpose of this annual evening out. He removed the breadstick, brushing possible crumbs from his shoulder. “What do you hear from our kids?” he said to Justin.

“Our kids love it out there in Santa Fe. I don’t share their taste for the high and dry,” Justin said with an elegant shrug.

“You’re a Yankee from way back,” Harry said.

The da Costas, as Harry well knew, were an old Portuguese-Dutch family who had begun assimilating the minute they arrived in the New World — in 1800, something like that — and had intermarried whenever an Episcopalian would have them. Fifty years ago Justin had studied medicine for the purpose of learning psychiatry. His practice still flourished. He saw patients in a free-standing office, previously a stable, behind their home, previously a farmhouse, the whole compound fifteen miles north of Boston. Judith had designed all the conversions. The windows of Justin’s consulting room faced a soothing stand of birches.

The Savitskys had visited the da Costas once, three years ago, the night before Miriam Savitsky’s wedding to Jotham da Costa. At that party they discovered that there were backyards in Greater Boston through which rabbits ran, into which deer tripped; that people in the mental-health professions did not drink hard liquor (Justin managed to unearth a bottle of Scotch from a recess under the sink); and that the severe Judith was the daughter of a New Jersey pharmacist. The pharmacist was there on the lawn, in a deck chair: aged and garrulous. Harry and his new son-in-law’s grandfather talked for a while about synthetic serotonin. The old man had died three months ago, in January.