Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

But now she had indeed become terrified. His long straight hair, held back by a headband; his brown back; his buttocks taut within iridescent trunks. Like many Parisian teenagers, she found older men sexy. She planned to marry someone mature and experienced. She planned to teach in the Sorbonne like her father and his father. She’d continue pencil sketching. Young men were a necessary feature of her life plan. She knew she would soon surrender to one, but this littermate? His shoulders, so bony …

They stopped in a clearing. An old stone fireplace, stumps, an abundance of pine needles. He turned to her.

“Will you, Angelica Laurentovna?” His voice was grave. Had he embraced her she would have spun away. But so respectful a request …

“Yes,” she said, her terror melting.

She stepped out of her bathing suit. His eyes widened. He flipped his trunks off, flung them onto a branch. She lay down. Needles stabbed her back, her nape. He knelt, she spread, this was how, wasn’t it; and he entered her like a … chemist, she thought, someone intent on transferring liquid from beaker to vessel without accident. He frowned. Helplessly she whimpered. He looked at her with hungry eyes, merde , his desire was more painful than the pain, at last thank God he closed those ochi grayski . He thrust once, twice, and all of a sudden it was over. His head slammed onto the pine needles. “God,” he said. “Angelica, sorry, too soon,” he said.

Poor boy, his first time, too. She turned wet eyes toward his burrowing head.

“Did it hurt a lot?” he mumbled.

“Yes.”

“It won’t next time, I promise.”

IT NEVER HURT AGAIN. What a strange boiled stalk he had. It grew from fleshy mauve pads. Veins ran along it. It wore an opaque cloak during the few days each month they dubbed terafacient, though that their issue would be monstrous was not at all certain. “I think there has to be generations of inbreeding,” Angelica said one night.

“We share approximately one-eighth of our genes,” he said, spent, garrulous, his familiar nose pointing toward the bedroom ceiling. “But that’s only statistical. We could share as many as half, our mothers could be as alike as twins, you never know, everything is chance.”

“No, fate.”

“And that hap of yours — whatever happened to hap?”

“Shh, not so loud. Our fate was decided long ago,” she insisted. “Before dinosaurs, even before Jews.”

They didn’t return to the clearing in the pines. They met here instead, in Angelica’s bedroom. Its furnishings had been flung upward by generations of Gran’s forebears who never gave anything away, who never moved out of New England, who never had to flee to a new land with the family’s assets distributed about the person of the youngest child. Beside the bed a copper pheasant stood in a brass bowl on top of a skeletal night table. The deep reds and greens of the darkening wallpaper had run into each other and become one rich color. A glass-fronted bookcase held medical textbooks. “They belonged to my great-uncle Jim,” their grandmother had said. “Good old Jim. Never too drunk to make a house call.”

The windows on the third floor were shaped like lozenges, with smaller lozenges their panes. These windows opened outward on a hinge. Their screens had been made to order a hundred years earlier, and were now full of holes. “Ridiculous diamond windows,” Gran grumbled. “Maybe a century ago somebody anticipated my alliance with a great Antwerp house.”

“I thought they thought you’d hook up with some inferior primate.”

“My parents feared I might marry a monkey, yes. And maybe I did.” Gramp had a monkey’s long upper lip and wide nostrils. A tall, well-dressed monkey, an organ grinder’s handsome pal. He and Gran were reputed to have had youthful arguments that involved broken crockery. But Gran’s remark was said softly. This plain stick of a woman loved her playful husband. He loved her in return. Their love brought the three daughters back to the inconvenient summer house. “We are replicating an ancestral passion,” Angelica told Toby.

“Any excuse will do,” he said, and grinned.

In Angelica’s nighttime room, she and Toby, black marble statues, rubbed each other into life. The medical books were obscured behind the discolored glass, but the young lovers knew the titles by heart, knew even their order on the shelves. Principles of Otolaryngology, Textbook of Ophthalmology, Advances in Epidemiology … “Which epidemics back then, do you think?” Angelica murmured into Toby’s shoulder.

“Influenza, rheumatic fever, Jew hating.”

Angelica looked past him at the copper pheasant in the brass bowl on her night table. “Rheumatic fever isn’t communicable.”

In one of the Antwerp graves lay a little boy who had died of rheumatic fever: Jacob, a year older than Gramp, his constant playmate. “So many decades ago … and I think of Jacob every day,” Gramp had said in his monkey’s grating voice. “Siblings can be closer than spouses.”

Angelica wondered if the pheasant could ever be separated from the bowl. “Some people are struck down early,” she said. The old truth seemed like new wisdom.

“Little Jacob? Yes. Not the Nazi boot: a bacterium. Hap, dear girl.”

ON THE FOURTH THURSDAY in August the youngest grandchild at last deigned to speak the language she had long understood, and demanded, in grammatical English, to be taken with the other kids to a traveling carnival. She came back happy, with cotton candy in her hair and vomit on her clothing. “Loop the Loop, it was a mistake,” her father confessed. She wisely refused dinner and allowed herself to be bathed by Angelica and put to bed by her mother. By chance one of Gramp’s business pals turned up and took the child’s place at the table. He was a Broadway angel; he saw the house as a stage set and the family as the cast of a three-act comedy and he said so at such annoying length that Gran put him on kitchen duty. Twice during the evening he draped his long arm around Angelica’s shoulders.

“I’d like to give him a karate chopakoff,” said Toby, much later, and he sliced the air with his flat, rigid hand and knocked the copper pheasant to the floor. The brass bowl shuddered for a while, as if thinking things over; then it fell, too. The rickety night table, deprived of purpose, collapsed. “Stop!” yelled Angelica’s brother from the boys’ room on the other side of Myrrh’s. He was subject to nightmares, and the three crashes might have had nothing to do with his cry.

Shortly after midnight Angelica awoke to a different sound. Was it the wind in the pines, telling of autumn and separation? No: it was a large object being dragged along uncarpeted flooring. She heard grunts, also, and unpleasant words. Then she heard bumps. It was a crate, wasn’t it, perhaps with a frightened girl inside … It was a large wooden trough … After all, it was something ordinary, a suitcase, and it had reached the back stairs. It tumbled down.

Toby slept. Angelica pulled on shorts and a T-shirt and sped down the back stairs herself. She opened the door to the second floor’s landing with its exquisitely carved railing. Myrrh was making her way down the rightmost branch of the grand staircase. She had her luggage in temporary control. What an old-fashioned valise it was, a hardened oblong with a chevron. It must have been elegant, once. Myrrh wore a yellow coat and a glazed brown hat, the outfit resembling a vile custard dessert she was in the habit of preparing. Her soliloquy had become louder. She reached the broad middle part of the staircase where the two large branches converged. She kicked her suitcase. It crashed into the front hall.

Gran came out of the kitchen. Smoking, still in her daytime costume of pants and sweater, she looked up at her relative. “Myrrh,” she said. “What.”