Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

“I’ll stay until the adoption is final,” Lex said late that night, after Jaime had finally gone to bed. “That’s another six months. Afterwards …” He shrugged his thin shoulders. “I won’t go to Chicago, that’s for sure. I don’t want to be in the same city as Ron.” Ron was his ex-lover. “Perhaps Jaime and I will come back to Boston.”

Robert nodded. “There’s a bilingual program in the schools.”

“Spare us.” Lex rolled his eyes. “We’ll continue to talk Spanish at home,” he went on. “Jaime will pick up English at school, in play-grounds — as immigrant children have done for generations.”

He can hardly speak his own language , Robert didn’t say. He can’t count. He doesn’t know colors. “How old is he? Seven, you wrote? He’s … small.”

“We use the evidence of bones and teeth,” said Lex. “Central Americans are smaller than North Americans, and those with a lot of Indian blood, like Jaime, are the shortest. I’ll invent a birth date when I apply for his passport. I’m going to say he’s five. He’s about three emotionally — a deprived three. No one ever sent him to school. When I first met him at the local orphanage a year ago he didn’t talk at all. He’s matured considerably since being with me.”

Robert felt weary, as if jet lag had claimed him after all.

And so he had gone to bed, in the narrow room off the kitchen. His window faced an inner courtyard just big enough for a clothesline, a sink, and a single tree that bore hard citrus fruits. There the parrots hid.

After Sunday, Robert was on his own for a few days. Lex was working, and Jaime attended day care. Robert awoke each morning to the sounds of the two at their breakfast. He figured out most of what they were saying. Jaime repeated the breakfast menu, the few chores, the routine of the day care center. Then he repeated them again, and again. Between repetitions Robert heard the rustle of the newspaper and the slur of rubber wheels along a linoleum floor. Jaime was playing with his small toy car. He supplied the motor with his own throat. “Oom!” Twenty-five years earlier, Robert and Betsy had shared the Globe while, at their feet, two charming toddlers rummaged in a pile of Legos. Jaime wasn’t ready for Legos, Lex had explained. He wasn’t ready even for the starter set Robert had brought as a gift. Jaime didn’t get the idea of construction. He had probably never seen toys before the orphanage found him — maybe he’d played with a couple of spoons, or filled an old shoe with dirt. Maureen, Robert remembered with satisfaction and guilt, could already erect elaborate towers.

Before leaving for work, Lex always knocked on Robert’s half-open door.

“Entra!” Robert practiced.

Lex would then say something about the day ahead. Would Robert like to visit the university? Lex could give him a library pass. If he wandered into the outdoor market, would he please pick up a pineapple? Jaime, still on the floor with his murmuring car, poked his head between Lex’s knees and then raised it, his little golden face between the denimed legs solemn, or perhaps only uncomprehending.

When they were gone Robert heaved himself out of bed. He boiled bottled water for tea and ate three plain crackers. Despite this abstemious caution he invariably passed several loose stools and a quantity of brownish water. “Nothing to worry about as long as there’s no blood,” Lex had told him after the first episode, the second night of the stay. Lex’s voice had been reassuring but his lips were prissy; and Robert, standing outside the bathroom with his belt unbuckled, raised a defiant chin like a child who had soiled his pants.

But the morning diarrhea always left him feeling better, as if he had explosively asserted himself in these austere surroundings. He next read the front page of the newspaper, using the dictionary often. Then he took a shower in cold water and shaved in cold water and got dressed. He stuffed his fanny pack with map, dictionary, currency, and flask. He wore it frontwards: a tummy pack. After putting on sunglasses and a canvas cap, he left the house.

He had arrived on a Saturday; by the end of Wednesday, the day before, he had tramped all over the city. He had wandered into the barrios. He refused Chiclets and Valium peddled by street vendors. He stumbled upon a small archaeological museum tended by some devoted women. There he learned that the great-beaked toucan was considered an incarnation of the devil.

And he stared at the windowless edifice within which members of the National Assembly, according to the new popular insult, farted their disagreements. He traveled by bus to two hot, dusty towns. Both had museums of martyrs. Back in the capital, he had spent late Wednesday afternoon at the huge outdoor market. Pick-pockets roamed the place, he had heard. He kept his fingers lightly on his canvas pack.

He bought Betsy a necklace of black coral. Though he loved and admired her, he missed her very little. Her absence this trip had not been a matter of dissension — they had farted no disagreements. There were reasons for her not coming: Lex himself had been home recently; his house here had only a single guest bed; and this not altogether regular situation — a young man becoming a father to a young boy — seemed to demand the presence of an unaccompanied older man, the older man, the grandfather.

Grandfather! To a child whose whole being seemed at odds with itself — the eyes soft, even tender; the mouth, with its widely spaced teeth, slack; the body taut, subject to occasional spasms. Yet he would become part of the family, a Katz. Jaime Katz. What would Robert’s grandfather, a rather sallow person himself, have made of such a development? He recalled Zayde Chaim shawled in silk on the Days of Awe … and it was at that moment, standing in the market, his hand on his canvas belly, that he remembered what day it was. The day before the day before Yom Kippur. In twenty-six hours, Kol Nidre would be sung.

Now, on Thursday morning, the embassy answered Lex’s inquiry: to its knowledge there was no community of Jews in the city, in the country. Lex hung up. “They have one Jewish staff member. She goes home to Texas for the holidays.”

“We’ve struck out.”

“I’m sorry,” Lex said, and stood up. “I have to go to work. About tonight … I had forgotten Yom Kippur … a few people from the organization are supposed to come for dinner.”

“Let them come,” Robert said. “I’m not such a worshipper, you know. I don’t fast. At your bar mitzvah I had to retool my Hebrew, and even then it wasn’t so hot.”

“Jaime?” Lex called into the bedroom. “Rápido, por favor.” He turned again to his father. “You worked over those syllables like a diamond cutter. Betsy used the transliteration.”

“She’d never studied Hebrew.”

“But you were heroic. For my sake.” He bowed his head.

“I wish I could do it again with my high school Spanish,” said Robert, hot with embarrassment.

Lex raised his head. “For his sake,” he said, indicating with what seemed to Robert a faggy lift of one shoulder the child in the bedroom. A vat of lava bubbled in Robert’s intestines; he managed to contain it. How reckless he’d been to eat that fruit. Jaime was taking his sweet time putting on his backpack. The shabbiest barrio kid in this mess of a country had a backpack. “Vámonos!” Lex said at last.

Jaime came running. Lex went outside to warm up the Jeep. Jaime turned in the doorway and waved a silent good-bye to Robert — he had yet to call him by name. Farewell here was signified by a beckoning gesture. The motion startled Robert every time; it startled him now. He took a step forward, as if the child were really summoning him. Then he halted, hissing. This place! An invitation to come closer was made in an equally ass-backward manner: wrist limp, you wagged the back of your hand at the person you wanted, as if shaking him off.