Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

They had met in June in front of a pair of foxes who made their own reluctant home at Bosky’s Wild Animal Preserve, on Cape Cod. Gustave was visiting his sister in her rented cottage. Grace had driven in from western Massachusetts with her pal Henrietta. The two women were camping in the state park.

“You’re living in a tent?” Gustave inquired on that fateful afternoon. “You look as fresh as a flower.”

“Which flower?” Grace was a passionate amateur gardener as well as a passionate amateur actress and cook and hostess. Had she ever practiced a profession? Yes, long ago; she’d been a second-grade teacher until her own children came along to claim her attention.

“Which flower? A hydrangea,” Gustave answered, surprised at his own exhilaration. “Your eyes,” he explained, further surprised, this time at his rising desire.

Her tilted eyes were indeed a violet blue. Her skin was only slightly lined. Her gray hair was clasped by a hinged comb that didn’t completely contain its abundance. Her figure was not firm, but what could you expect.

“I’m Grace,” she said.

“I’m Gustave,” he said. He took an impulsive breath. “I’d like to get to know you.”

She smiled. “And I you.”

GRACE WAS EMPLOYING a rhetorical locution popular in her Northampton crowd — eclipsis: the omission of words easily supplied. Gustave, after a pause, silently supplied them. Then he bowed. (His late mother was Paris-born; he honored her Gallic manners even though — except for five years teaching in a Rouen lycée — he had lived his entire life in the wedge of Boston called Godolphin.)

Grace hoped that this small man bending like a headwaiter would now brush her fingers with his mustache — but no. Instead he informed her that he was a professor. His subject was the history of science. Her eyes widened — a practiced maneuver, though also sincere. Back in Northampton, her friends (there were scores of them) included weavers, therapists, advocates of holistic medicine, singers. And of course professors. But the history of science, the fact that science even had a history — somehow it had escaped her notice. Copernicus? Oh, Newton, and Einstein, yes, and Watson and what’s his name. “Crick,” she triumphantly produced, cocking her head in the flirtatious way …

“Is your neck bothering you?”

… that Hal Karsh had hinted was no longer becoming. She straightened her head and shook hands like a lady.

GUSTAVE HAD WRITTEN a biography of Michael Faraday, a famous scientist in the nineteenth century, though unknown to Grace. When he talked about this uneducated bookbinder inspired by his own intuition, Gustave’s slight pomposity melted into affection. When he mentioned his dead wife he displayed a thinner affection, but he had apparently been a widower a long time.

In Northampton, Grace volunteered at a shelter, tending children who only irregularly went to school. “Neglected kids, all but abandoned by their mothers,” she said, “mothers themselves abandoned by the kids’ fathers.” Gustave winced. When she went on to describe the necessity of getting onto the floor with these youngsters, instructor and pupils both cross-legged on scabby linoleum, Gustave watched her playfulness deepen into sympathy. She’d constructed an indoor window box high up in the makeshift basement schoolroom; she taught the life cycle of the daffodil, “its biography, so to speak,” including some falsities that Gustave gently pointed out. Grace nodded in gratitude. “I never actually studied botany in my university,” she confessed. The University of Wichita, she specified; later she would mention the University of Wyoming, but perhaps he had misheard one or the other — he’d always been vague about the West.

A LAWYER FRIEND of Gustave’s performed the wedding ceremony in the dark living room. Afterward Grace sipped champagne under the apple tree with Gustave’s sister. “Oh, Grace, how peaceable you look. You’ll glide above his little tantrums.”

“What?” Grace said, trying to turn toward her new sister-in-law but unable to move her head on her shoulders. A Godolphin hair-dresser had advised the severe French twist that was pulling cruelly at her nape; Henrietta had urged the white tulle sombrero; Grace herself had selected the dress, hydrangea blue and only one size too small. Her grandchildren, who with their parents had taken the red-eye from San Francisco, marveled at the transformation of their tatterdemalion Gammy — but where had her hair gone to? “What?” said the stiffened Grace again; but Gustave’s sister forbore to elaborate, just as she had failed to mention that Gustave’s first wife, who had died last January in Rouen, had divorced him decades ago, influenced by a French pharmacist she’d fallen in love with.

Gustave and Grace honeymooned in Paris, indulging themselves mightily — a hotel with a courtyard, starred restaurants, a day in Giverny, another in Versailles. They even attended a lecture on the new uses of benzene — Gustave interested in the subject; Grace, with little French and less science, interested in the somber crowd assembled at the Pasteur Institute. They both loved the new promenade and the new musée , and they sat in Sainte-Chapelle for two hours listening to a concert performed on old instruments — two recorders and a lute and a viola da gamba. That was the most blissful afternoon. Gustave put the disarray of their hotel room out of his mind, and also the sometimes fatiguing jubilation with which Grace greeted each new venture. Grace dismissed her own irritation at Gustave’s habit of worrying about every dish on the menu — did it matter how much cream, how much butter, we all had to die of something. Light streamed through the radiant window, turning into gold his trim mustache, her untidy chignon.

AND NOW IT WAS SEPTEMBER, and classes had begun. Gustave taught Physics for Poets on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at nine, The Uses of Chemistry those same days at ten. He taught a graduate seminar in the philosophy of science on Thursday evenings. The first two weeks the seminar met in the usual drafty classroom. But then Grace suggested … Gustave demurred … she persisted … he surrendered. And so on the third week the seminar met in the brown-shingled house. Grace baked two apple tarts and served them with warm currant jelly. The students relived last Saturday’s football game. Gustave — who, like Grace, professed a hatred of football — quietly allowed the conversation to continue until everyone had finished the treat, then turned the talk to Archimedes. Grace sat in a corner of the living room, knitting. The next day marked their first separation since the wedding. Gustave had a conference in Chicago. He’d take a cab to the airport right after The Uses of Chemistry. Early that morning he’d packed necessary clothing in one half of his briefcase. While he was reading the newspaper she slipped in a wedge of apple tart, wrapped in tinfoil. After they kissed at the doorway his eye wandered to the corner she had occupied on the previous evening. The chair was still strewn with knitting books and balls of yarn and the garment she was working on, no doubt a sweater for him. She’d already made him a gray one. This wool was rose. His gaze returned to his smiling wife. “See you on Sunday,” he said.

“Oh, I’ll miss you.”

She did miss him, immediately. She would have continued to miss him if she had not been invaded, half an hour later, by two old Northampton friends bearing Hal Karsh. Hal was visiting from his current perch in Barcelona. He would return to Spain on Sunday. Hal — master of the broken villanelle, inventor of the thirteen-line sonnet; and oh, that poetic hair brushing his eyebrows, hair still mostly brown though he was only eight years younger than Grace. Those long fingers, adept at pen and piano but not at keyboard — the word processor was death to composition, he’d tell you, and tell you why, too, at length, anywhere, even in bed.