Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

Her name was no more Louanne than his was Édouard Vuillard. She’d snatched it from some country singer she’d seen on TV the morning she arrived from Moscow. “All right, Louanne. Please call me …” He hesitated. Senator?

“I’ll call you Mr. Francis, Mr. Morrison. Mr. Francis, aren’t you sort of American history in your own person. You’re an embodiment.” She was two steps below him. Her raised face was flushed. He saw dandruff in the parting of her dull hair, weasel-brown. “I mean, serving as a lawmaker all those years — you’ve only just retired, my uncle told me. And your ancestors were Pilgrims. Didn’t they sail on one of those ships?”

“The Pinta .”

“I thought it had another name. Mr. Francis, could I come to you for instruction? I would consider it a weighty favor,” she added in an imperious tone.

He backed up a stair. “Oh, my dear, you see, my hobby, looking at paintings, it takes up much of my now freed time. I am a museum trustee, too; I serve on the Acquisitions Committee—”

“Once a week, I could come once a week.”

How long had she been planning this attack?

“We get out at noon on Wednesdays,” she said. “It’s the afternoon the teachers go to meetings.” She moved up a stair and threw her backpack beside her feet. He wouldn’t be able to descend without leaping over the pack. “You may assign texts,” she continued. “I will read them. I am thorough.”

He knew she was thorough. She was a thorough housekeeper. On Saturday mornings her aunt left the apartment door open, as did Francis, honoring the unbuttoned quality of the day. He had seen Louanne vacuuming on her knees, reaching her wand far underneath the sofa. She was thoroughly plain — ungroomed, un-adorned, her wardrobe limited to jeans and denim jackets — as if she’d made it her mission to complete what nature had begun.

“You may give quizzes,” she offered.

He had never seen her with a schoolmate. She was thoroughly friendless … And did his retirement really promise to be thoroughly fulfilling? Did he have so many friends?

“Instruction?” he said. “Wednesday afternoons? I will consider it a privilege.”

And so had begun their modest tutorial, six months earlier, conducted mostly in Francis’s living room — they were sitting there today, a cloudy March Wednesday — and sometimes at the museum and sometimes at a nearby pond. They didn’t adhere strictly to the original curriculum — the Constitution, the colonial period — but drifted into art and nature and even pedagogy.

“I disapprove of yes-or-no questions. Your essay answer is very good,” he said one day, handing her back a test she’d shown him. She’d earned a B-plus.

“What wrong with yes-or-no? Either you remember something or you don’t, and if you don’t you’ve got a 50 percent chance …”

“A test is a teaching device. It should encourage the student to consider the uncategorical, the ambiguous.”

She grumbled a little at that. “I never give my clients tests. They’d throw them back at me.” Her clients, three lawyers who’d answered an ad she’d placed in the paper, were perfecting their conversational Russian, which was already excellent.

Sometimes Francis and Louanne strayed into the area of personal history. “You have never married,” she remarked one afternoon, with comradely spurning of tact. “Perhaps you prefer men.”

“I like women and I like men, both at arm’s length.” He even liked homely outspoken schoolgirls with an odd attachment to a motherland in ruins.

On a different occasion, pausing near the pond, she’d told him she planned to go back to Russia after high school. “And would not you also return to the country of your birthing?” she demanded of his raised eyebrows.

“Birth,” he said; she’d asked him to correct her errors. “I was born here,” he said, unable to keep pride out of his voice.

“Then exile is unknown to you.”

“Terra incognita,” he admitted, but she had no Latin, and he was obliged to explain the phrase.

Today, while a sudden sun turned Francis’s pale green room paler, they were worrying the subject of representative government. “Didn’t you ever lose an election?” she asked. “In those whole four decades?” She took off her glasses to clean them, revealing the ice blue eyes, the colorless lashes. She put her glasses back on.

“No, I never lost. But sometimes my opponents were obviously unfit,” he said. “The Republicans liked to put up somebody, even if the somebody had no experience, no convictions, no sense of the principles of government.”

“But people voted for you also when your opponent was not an asshole. People wanted you. Why?”

“I identify with the commonwealth,” he ventured. Then, recognizing eagerness in the almost-imperceptible ripple of her stiff face and the shifting angle of her glasses, he continued. “I see the commonwealth as an extension of myself — its public gardens my flower patch, its public libraries my bookshelves, its police my bodyguard, its ball team my …” He glanced at the seventeenth-century map of Massachusetts over the sofa: a retirement gift from his colleagues.

“Please don’t stop.”

“… its ball team my sandlot, its state hospitals my mad aunt.” He was quoting himself, the curse of old age. But she didn’t know that. “I believe that the family, variously defined, defined sometimes as one solitary celibate, is both the paradigm and the ward of the state. I believe that …” Now he did stop. “Louanne … I think that’s enough for now.”

“No, please! Tell me about your first senate running.”

“Race. We’ll take that up another day.”

“All right. And another day, we’ll go again to the museum.”

“Yes.”

“Which day?”

Francis looked at his watch. “This day.”

THEY GAZED AT THE VUILLARD FIRST, as always. The artist’s mother sits in profile at a table, cutting out fabric — the fabric a kind of plaid, her dress a kind of check, the wallpaper dotted with pears. A cupboard is rough country wood. The lamps are unlit and there is no window, but light from an unseen source catches Mme Vuillard’s nape, her bun, her ear, the side of her jaw, her spectacles; it catches, too, a brass bowl, and half of a covered dish. The light comes from behind the painter, or from the painter, or from the man and girl now standing in front of the work. “How natural it all looks,” he said; he’d said it before. “But a painting is an artificial work”—this was a new topic. “ ‘It calls for as much cunning as the commission of a crime.’ ”

She was silent.

“Those are not my words,” he admitted.

“The words of Monsieur Vuillard?”

“The words of Monsieur Degas.”

“Also a bachelor who lived with his mother?”

“No, he had a more … active life.”

They moved away. The girl did not care for paintings of bourgeois characters in their parlors any more than she cared for workers’ posters — he knew that because he knew what she did care for: frontal Holy Families, coy Annunciations. Someday, an angel might appear to her, too, announcing not love, nothing so ambitious, but perhaps, at last, friendship.

They strolled and looked; then, in the museum’s café, they drank tea. Francis ordered ice cream, Louanne a napoleon. “I need its strength,” she explained. She was off to meet her clients, now demanding to be taught slang.

“They are up to no good,” Francis predicted. “Profiteers.”

“I think so, too,” she said with indifference. “Though they are rich already.” She usually conducted the class at their office, but sometimes at the home of one of the clients, an Italianate villa in a western suburb. She had to take two buses to get there, but she always got sent home in a taxi.