Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

“Sorry to be in your way,” she said stiffly.

“Hey!”

And the boat returned so late that they had to take a cab across town. She huddled in the backseat corner and watched his profile. Many a college romance had not survived the summer vacation. As if you could call this romance! How did we get here? she echoed herself. Where are we going? Suppose Paul found out?

Suppose Paul found out what? She and Hugh had never kissed. They had never held hands. Once his knuckles had burned hers as he handed a menu across the table. Once, on the riverbank, he had flipped over onto his stomach beside her and she had placed her hand briefly on his blue-and-white striped back. He’d shuddered and turned his face away …

“Would you like to visit a hotel together?” he was saying now.

Her skirt was still soaked with coffee. “Are you inviting me or the cab driver?”

So he had to look at her. He was unsmiling, and his face flamed like a boy’s.

“Yes,” she said. “I would. I would.”

They knew where to go. Twice they had lunched in the lobby café at the Orlando, a lively salesman’s hotel, and they watched couples without luggage — handsome, well-dressed couples — checking in.

“Next Thursday, then,” Hugh said.

“Next Thursday,” Marlene agreed.

She had never stopped loving Paul. During the week that followed she loved him tenderly, gratefully — loved his short, muscular body, his preoccupied manner, his kindness to their children. One love had nothing to do with the other. Paul was the man she would contentedly grow old with. But though she and Hugh were both past forty, theirs was the brief happy fling of youth. Everything proved it: their indifference to the future, their bright, news-of-the-week conversation. He was her boyfriend. She was his girl.

She wore a new dress — silk, with a dropped waist. It was the color of Hugh’s eyes. She looked beautiful, she hoped … even though her cheeks were a little too round and her slate-colored eyes disappeared when she laughed. Her headful of curls was in fashion. At a distance she could pass for a femme fatale.

And it was at a distance that they saw each other, that next Thursday. She was standing at the rear of the lobby when he came through the revolving door. The lobby café separated them. He made his way among the tables, lumbering a bit, bigger than most men, handsomer than all. The smile curved. It curved, it curved … but falsely; she could tell that at once. “You don’t have to,” she said, under her breath. Then his face was close to hers, so close that she could have kissed him, and who would have thought anything of that? — two old friends kissing, people did it all the time, Paul was always complaining that women he hardly knew embraced him at parties like tango dancers. She said it again. “You don’t have to. Dear.”

“I cannot,” he told her.

She probably could have talked him into it. “I’ve put on my diaphragm,” she could have said, and he would have understood that by that act she had already betrayed her marriage. Or she could have allowed her eyes to fill with chagrined tears. Or her enthusiasm, her delight, might have carried him along. But she didn’t use those wiles.

“You don’t have to,” she said for the third time. “Although,” she couldn’t help adding, “everybody else does.”

He took her arm and led her toward a table. “We’re not everybody else,” he said.

No, they were not everybody else, she thought while pretending to eat her salad. Everybody else — in Boston, in Paris, in Tel Aviv; Protestants, Catholics, Jews; black and white, young and old and rich and poor — everybody else played by today’s rules. Young O’Riordan would turn up in this hotel within a decade. And Marlene’s children, when the time came; and Hugh’s children … Everybody else was up-to-date. But she and Hugh were throwbacks. They were bound to the code of their youth — self-denial and honor and fidelity — an inconvenient code that would keep them, she realized with a pang, forever chaste, and forever in love.

FOR HIS FORTIETH BIRTHDAY my father was given a pair of binoculars. His medical colleagues teamed up on the present. He was neither a bird-watcher nor a sports fan, so the glasses just lay on his dresser like a trophy.

They didn’t tempt me at first. I had already been disappointed by his ophthalmoscope, which didn’t magnify a thing. (I also didn’t like the coin-operated telescope on our Connecticut city’s twenty-four-story building, the tallest in New England; as soon as I managed to focus on something through the telescope, my nickel ran out.) But one December afternoon, wandering in an aimless, childish way around my parents’ bedroom, I picked up the binoculars, took them to a window that looked out on the street, and directed them toward a leafless tree. I saw a brown blur, so I fiddled with the wheels on the instrument. Now the tree was hyper-clear, making my eyes ache. Finally, after more fiddling, I saw the tree plain and even vaguely menacing, like my great-uncle at the last family party who had leaned so close to me that his tie swayed in front of my eyes. But when I thoughtlessly reached out to touch the tree’s bark, I touched instead the windowpane.

The side window in my parents’ room, like the windows of the other bedrooms in our end-of-the-row house, looked out at the second-floor apartment next door, also brick, where the Simons lived.

With the aid of the binoculars, I projected myself into the Simons’ living room. Their fireplace was as dark as a cave. On the mantel crouched a humpbacked clock. In one of the two chairs flanking the hearth sat Mrs. Simon herself, her gray head bent. She was crocheting. I could not see the pattern of the work, nor the pattern on her dress, but I could see that her green chair wore a lace antimacassar and that a flared lamp on a table cast its glow on a pile of magazines. There was no television, of course — only rich show-offs had televisions then.

I went into my own bedroom. From there I inspected the Simons’ dining room. An empty silver bowl occupied pride of place on the table. Perhaps Mr. Simon’s colleagues had given it to him when he turned forty. I went into my sister’s bedroom. From her window I peered at the Simons’ little kitchen. Two cups and two saucers lay on the drainboard. A calendar hung on the wall, but no matter how much I fiddled with the wheels of the binoculars I could not make out the Simons’ appointments.

From our last bedroom, reserved for guests, I got a dark glimpse of the Simons’ big bedroom. I knew there was a small bedroom, too, for my friend Elaine lived in an identical apartment down the street. The small bedroom faced the backyard, a skimpy strip of grass and six little garages, one each for the six apartments. I would never get to see that bedroom. The room I did see had a double bed with an afghan at its foot, folded into a perfect right triangle. This application of geometry to daily life gratified my critical ten-year-old self.

DURING THAT MONTH, which included a school vacation, I discovered that Mrs. Simon was a great tidier. Often I would find her in the living room, readjusting an antimacassar or rearranging candy in a dish or polishing the glass door of the bookcase. Serious cleaning was done once a week by a regal mulatto woman, but sometimes Mrs. Simon would stand at the kitchen sink, her stubborn profile lowered, fiercely scrubbing something. Occasionally she lay down in the bedroom. And often she disappeared. Perhaps she was talking on the telephone in the hall, a windowless place my binoculars could not penetrate. Or perhaps she was walking a few blocks to Elm Street, as most of the women in our neighborhood did most days, in order to pick up some fish and vegetables, or a library book. Once in a while I ran into Mrs. Simon on just such an errand. We were the same height — I was a tall child and she a small and somewhat bent woman — and her expression was as steely as her curls. Our eyes met, with no mediating binoculars. “Hello,” I’d whisper, suddenly shy. She never answered.