Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

“They want to be richer,” Francis told her.

“Doesn’t every citizen?”

They said good-bye under an elm tree. Their small figures were probably distorted by the hunch of their backpacks, Francis thought: they could be mistaken for garden sculptures. Louanne headed downtown to the office of her dubious clients. Francis crossed a city park, ghostly purple in the early twilight. “My backyard,” he exulted.

Yet there were many things they did not have in common, the retired legislator and the sojourner. Language facility, for instance — Louanne spoke Russian, German, English, and rudimentary French; Francis, despite his schoolboy Latin and Greek, was monolingual. Health, for another example — his shortness was merely hereditary, and his heart condition, discovered by lab tests, gave him little discomfort; she, on the other hand, was stunted, and her eyes would need corrective lenses for the rest of her life, and her aunt knew nothing about nutrition. And politics — the elder Zerubins distrusted all forms of socialism, even the mild redistributive tendency of the Democratic Party. They had voted Republican since naturalizing. As for Louanne, she sneered at the presumption of equality. “So everyone has been given the right to higher education by some deity,” she sneered. “And so teachers in slum schools give out A’s for rap lyrics, and two-year colleges teach how to sell advertising on television. Democracy!” She would have welcomed the return of the Romanovs.

Still, how comfortable he had become at their Saturday dinners. The beef and barley stew, discs of fat decorating the surface. The salad — potatoes in sour cream, a chopped scallion the meal’s one green vegetable. A figgy dessert that you ate with a spoon. The dyed aunt, her sequined sweater one size too small. The bald, jowly uncle. The niece. The overhead chandelier casting a rancid light. A wheezing, arthritic dog. The paintings: offerings of magical events in primary colors, all by the hand of a single untalented émigré. A religious reminder: the Giotto Madonna and Child, its gilt frame matching the halos. Francis thought of his beloved Vuillard; and he moved this worthy family from its beige apartment hung with faux Chagalls and one terrible reproduction of a masterpiece into a room of patterns, sunlit through blinds. Everything would be tactile: the mustache of the man, the over-lipsticked mouth of the woman, the spot of gravy on the denim cuff of the girl who was teaching herself to use her left hand. “For what purpose?” she said, echoing Francis’s question. “I want to be ambiguous.”

He didn’t correct her, partly because others were present, partly because she had perhaps said exactly what she meant. In her left hand the fork waved, wavered, and sometimes overturned.

Afterward uncle and niece played chess, and Mrs. Zerubin did needlework, and Francis and the dog watched the fire. How satisfying domestic life was when you could shut the door on it at the end of the evening and cross the hall and then shut a second door, your own.

ANOTHER WEDNESDAY: April now. They discussed love of money. “De Tocqueville noted it almost two centuries ago,” he said.

“You do not love money, Mr. Francis.”

“Well, you see, I have never felt poor. And I don’t care about … oh, fine clothes, or travel, or haute cuisine. And who needs an automobile in this intimate city?”

“So what do you care about? What are your transcendent values?”

She was proud of the phrase; her smirk told him so. Well, if he had to name something: the relative importance of honesty, the primary importance of loyalty … “Truth,” he heard himself lying.

She sighed. “What besides truth?”

“Beauty,” he helplessly admitted.

“Personal beauty?”

He nodded: it was a yes-or-no question.

Her jaw hardened.

“And the beauty of a sycamore,” he said, “and of a receding city street, and of a work of art, of course you know that.” And the beauty of solitude, he silently added.

“And the beauty of a diamond? I could get you a diamond,” she said. “My aunt’s cousin Kolya, the rascals he knows …”

“Jewels don’t interest me.” How had he allowed this interrogation to begin? “Civility, that’s another of my transcendent values, and also—”

“Beauty,” she repeated. “I could get you that.”

“What do you mean, Louanne? You have already brought beauty into my life.” He withstood her glare. “The beauty of … your extraordinary young mind, and of our conversations.”

“Yah,” she spat.

THREE WEDNESDAYS LATER she came in carrying, by its strong handles, a big brown bag. Her expression was portentous, as if in imitation of an announcing angel. She lowered the bag with officious care and pulled out something surrounded by a narrow frame. She set it on the floor so that it leaned against the grass-cloth wall.

It was perhaps twelve by eighteen inches. It was Vuillard’s mother again, seen full face — an older face, shadowed: a face that might bend over a grandchild’s cradle, say, or the sickbed of an invalid. Broad brow, kindly eyes, and an upper lip that resembled a gentle awning. What she was bending over was a glass vase filled with flowers, mostly daisies, but also anemones and irises. The background was only a suggestion of wallpaper.

The painting was signed.

“I saw it weeks ago,” Louanne said, shrugging out of her navy peacoat. “In that house. It was in some sort of guest bedroom just to the side of the bathroom. I went to pee and I opened that door — it’s always closed — and I put on the light and I saw it.”

“Louanne,” in a whisper.

“I wasn’t surprised — the house is full of stuff like this. They’re loaded, those thugs. They buy stuff to wash money, you know that, Mr. Francis. In Russia they get more loaded, like you said.”

“… as you said.”

“As. So I took it. Yesterday. Because the guy’s wife has left him, and he’s going to Moscow tomorrow, and no one will know it’s missing for weeks, and then he’ll think she—”

“Louanne,” he said, still breathless.

“It wasn’t just hanging there for anyone to grab, don’t think that,” she said. “There was this security clasp I had to figure out. And getting the bag — that was no picnicking, either. I had to buy a scarf at Bloomie’s, and ask for the bag from the bitch saleswoman, and then return the scarf the next day and keep the bag.”

“Louanne.” It seemed to be all he could say. His chest hurt.

She stood before him, sturdy as a guard, not quite his height. “What?”

Personal property, it’s a right , he thought. Thieving, it’s a crime , he thought. There’s a social compact , he thought.

But she knew all that. She had memorized ethical principles the way she might have memorized the rules for rolling out pastry — stuff she would recite but never practice. And he would not rebuke her. Loyalty was what counted most; he’d told her that, or meant to.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” she said, hands on hips.

“Thank you,” he managed.

HE HUNG THE PAINTING, the following Tuesday — it had taken him that long to decide where. He’d thought first of hanging it in the bedroom — no one else went in there except the cleaning woman. He thought of his small study: roses on the carpet, lilies on the wallpaper, books, a flame-stitch armchair, and cockatooed draperies almost concealing the single narrow window. He considered the kitchen and the bathroom and the communal hall between his apartment and hers; he considered the back stairway, whose steps wore rubber treads. He considered his clothes closet.

In the end he hung it in the living room, over the fireplace. The portrait of his great-grandfather (attorney general of the commonwealth, 1875–1880) was relegated to the bedroom, replacing the mirror, which itself went into the back of the clothes closet, appearing to double his thrifty wardrobe.