Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

THE REMISSION LASTED several months. Then one day they read of a luxury hotel opening downtown, and within it a number of high-end boutiques.

“Let’s look it over,” Henry said. “For old time’s sake.”

“ ‘That old gang of mine,’ ” she sang. “Henry, can we declare our criminal career a success?”

“Some of it was cruel.”

“Crewel, also broidered,” she said, employing the new tangential, illogical speech she had recently developed. “ ‘By the pricking of my thumbs,’ ” she continued. Quotations floated through her conversation as if dislodged from the walls of her brain. She often forgot where she’d put things.

“My pocketbook?” she’d cry.

And Henry would tell her he’d found it in the freezer.

On a Thursday afternoon they broke their date for a movie and early-bird special with the Halperins, and went downtown instead, offering as excuse a meeting with their financial advisor — an imaginary personage. They got dressed up for the expedition, and Henry wore his favorite vest, a fiery red. He had acquired it in a busy men’s store simply by taking off his raincoat, putting on the vest, resuming his raincoat, and walking out. Dorothy’s hair was in a loose bun these days. She wore a long flowered skirt and snug black jacket, both of which she had purchased some years ago.

“You could pass for a Renoir girl,” Henry said. “Beautiful.”

The large circular hotel lobby was beautiful too, in an austere way, all brown plush and rosewood. In the smoking room, a nickel rested in an ashtray. Smoking was not a crime here. “Come, darling,” said Henry.

“O my darling, O my darling,” she sang, and put the coin in her pocket.

A corridor of glassy stores led away from the lobby: window after window of tempting things — leather bags, jade elephants, a pyramid of face creams. “That substance promises the return of an eighteen-year-old complexion,” Dorothy read aloud through the window. “Complete with blackheads,” he promised. Antique books, men’s accessories, luggage, timepieces. A tiny place called Silk. “There’s a security guard,” Henry remarked. “Oh, look at that chess set.”

But Dorothy had dropped his arm. She was lingering at the doorway of Silk: scarves, shawls, handkerchiefs, even gloves, even belts. She floated in. “Are your worms kept in humane conditions?” she asked the saleswoman.

“Madame?”

“I’d like so much to see the scarf in the window, the one where blues shade into one another — yes, that one,” and the saleswoman cupped the item in her hands as if it were a baby and then laid it on the glass case as if it were a baby’s blanket. She from her side and Dorothy from hers marveled at the colors of the chiffon. The woman seemed sincere, but of course she could not feel the power of the blues, the way they called forth Dorothy’s seemly life: the ink of the river at night seen from under a canoe, the ocean’s mauve at sundown; the blue-green of shore reeds, the silver of spray. The brightness of Henry’s young eyes and the cloudiness of his aged ones. The printed morphos on their granddaughters’ pajamas. Her bridesmaids’ gowns had been robin’s egg blue; here was that shade repeated exactly in this fluid fabric. Here were the veins on her hands. Here was the sapphire of the Paris sky at evening. Here was the blue-purple shadow of one statue’s head on another’s paler back in that storage room at the top of the art museum. Here was the cobalt ring of the glaucoma probe. Here was the blue-gray ash that covered the nickel in her pocket. Last was the lilac of her bedroom at dawn.

“How much?” said Henry from the doorway.

“Five hundred dollars,” said the saleswoman.

“Well, well,” he stammered. “I’ve got some fine cuff links.”

“They don’t barter here, darling,” Dorothy said, confidently. She walked toward him, throwing the scarf over her shoulder as if to demonstrate its versatility. She waggled her finger. As if he had received directions, he turned sideways and she nodded and slid past him and began to walk very fast toward the lobby.

“What? — Madame! — shit.” The saleswoman came out from behind the case apparently hoping also to slide by Henry. But he had turned again within the doorway. His hands gripped its silvered glass jambs. His legs were apart on the silvered glass threshold. “Do not pass,” he intoned. The saleswoman ran back to the case and pushed a button somewhere behind it and picked up a glass telephone receiver that had lain unseen on its glass cradle. Henry began to stroll. Dorothy was loping ahead, the scarf bunched over her shoulder, again like a baby. Henry sped up. Security tramped after him, though not too fast — an incident of thievery would be poor public relations. Dorothy reached the lobby. Henry had almost caught up with the graceful sprite, her bun loosening, the scarf now floating from her hand. She wheeled suddenly, and they collided, breast to breast and heart to heart. Mouth met mouth. The scarf fell to the floor.

Some people in the lobby looked up, as indifferent as aristocrats. The Silk saleswoman edged past security, dropped to her knees and crawled to the scarf and pressed it to her heart. Then she stood up and walked away. Security remembered something he had to do, and vanished. Henry and Dorothy unstuck themselves from each other and left the hotel hand in hand and hailed a cab.

The cab drove them to a dockside restaurant. There they looked at the harbor water shivering under the cold October sky. They looked at peaceful gulls and gulls in agitated flight. They looked at one another. They talked placidly and at length about things past, and not at all about things to come.

HAD HE EVER SEEN SUCH unappealing trams? Aqua marine, with azalea swirls. But: “Beauty is secondary,” Alain reassured the mayor of Muñez. “My wife would find something to praise.”

And so she would, the generous Isabella. Isabella was blond, and had been educated in the United States — she spoke English even better than he. For all that, she was unmistakably of their country, this coarse little Central American nation. The huge brown eyes told you that much, the curve of the calf, the noticeable clothes. “I am just this side of vulgar,” she liked to tease.

“Beauty is secondary,” Alain said again. Secondary to engineering — the trams were well constructed. Secondary to trade — they were part of an important deal with far-off Japan. Secondary to the governance of the country that he loved immoderately.

The mayor sighed with relief. “Your perspicacity — I gambled on it,” risking a sort of wordplay, for Alain was minister of gaming. Through the years he had become confidante and advisor to almost everybody in government — his colleagues could rely on his discretion and good sense, and his lack of personal ambition let them take all the bows. Today he had come from the capital to inspect the trams on behalf of the minister of transportation.

Now he shook hands with the mayor, and, with grace surprising in a man his size, swung aboard a tram setting off down the broad central avenue. “Smooth,” he called to the mayor from a window, and turned away perhaps a moment too soon. He hoped he’d never have to deal with this lout again, but of course he would: Dealing with louts was part of his caretaker’s job …

Halfway to the train station, he got off and entered a café for a glass of wine and a slice of the local pâté, compounded of anchovies and hog liver. And another slice. During a conference he often thrust something into his mouth to avoid taking the last word. At home he raided the refrigerator. The family housekeeper knew which nights he woke up hungry, though Isabella slept through his absence from their bed. So perhaps he could be considered overweight … not if you asked his staff, who associated appetite with kindliness; and not if you asked the public, who didn’t recognize his rarely photographed face so couldn’t comment on his physique; and not if you asked his tailor, scrupulously silent as he enlarged another garment; but decidedly if you asked his daughter, who called him “Fatty.” Isabella, though, appreciated the extra flesh around Alain’s middle — she liked to finger it, even knead it, during lovemaking — just as she appreciated his bright blue eyes and thick hair. She might flirt with others, but always in the energetic, meaningless way of a woman true to her man. Alain was faithful, too.