Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

Gustave’s upright piano could have used a tuning. Grace had meant to call someone, but she had been too busy putting in chrysanthemums and ordering bulbs and trying to revive her high school French. The foursome made music anyway. Lee and Lee, the couple who brought Hal, had brought their fiddles, too. Grace rummaged in a box of stuff not yet unpacked and found her recorder. Later she brewed chili. They raided Gustave’s cave . They finally fell into bed — Lee and Lee in the spare room, Hal on the floor in Gustave’s study, Grace, still dressed, on the marital bed. Then on Saturday they drove to Walden Pond and to the North Shore, and on Saturday night Cambridge friends came across the river. This time Grace made minestrone, in a different pan — the crock encrusted with chili still rested on the counter.

Hal wondered what Grace was doing in a gloomy house in a town that allowed no overnight parking. Such a regulation indicated a punitive atmosphere. And this husband so abruptly acquired — who was he, anyway? “She picked him up in a zoo, in front of a lynx,” Lee and Lee told him. He hoped they were exercising their artistic habit of distortion. Hal loved Grace, with the love of an indulged younger brother, or a ragtag colleague — years ago he and she had taught at the same experimental grade school, the one that demanded dedication from its faculty but didn’t care about degrees. (Hal did have a master’s, but Grace had neglected to go to college.) Hal thought Grace was looking beautiful but unsettled. Did her new spouse share her taste for illicit substances, did he know of her occasional need to decamp without warning? She always came back … When Hal had mentioned that the Cambridge folks would bring grass, Grace’s eyes danced. Well, nowadays it was less easy to get here. In Barcelona you could pick it up at your tobacconist, though sometimes the stuff was filthy …

This batch was fine. They all talked as they smoked; and recited poetry; and after a while played Charades. It was like the old times, he thought. He wished Henrietta had come along, too. “I have no use for that fussbudget she married,” Henrietta had snapped. But the fussbudget was in Chicago.

IT WAS LIKE THE OLD TIMES, Grace, too, was thinking. And how clever they all were at the game; how particularly clever in this round, Lee and Lee standing naked back to back while she, fully clothed, traversed the living room floor on her belly. Odd that no one had yet guessed “New Deal.” Odd, too, that no one was talking, though a few moments earlier there had been such merry laughter; and Hal, that man of parts, had put two of his fingers into his mouth and whistled. At Lee? Or at Lee? In silence Grace slithered toward the hall and saw, at eye level, a pair of polished shoes. Pressed trousers rose above the shoes. She raised her head, as an eel never could — perhaps she now resembled a worm, ruining the tableau. The belt around the trousers was Gustave’s — yes, she had given it to him; it had a copper buckle resembling a sun-burst within which bulged an oval turquoise. When it was hanging from his belt rack among lengths of black and brown leather with discreet matching buckles, the thing looked like a deity, Lord of the closet. Now, above dark pants, below striped shirt, it looked like a sartorial error, a misalliance …

Scrambling to her feet, she found herself staring at Gustave’s shirt. Where was his jacket? Oh, the night was warm, he must have taken it off before silently entering the house fifteen hours before he was expected. Her gaze slid sideways. Yes, he had placed — not thrown — his jacket on the hall chair; he had placed — not dropped — his briefcase next to that chair. She looked again at her husband. His exposed shirt bore a large stain in a rough triangular shape — the shape, she divined, of a wedge of tart. She touched it with a trembling forefinger.

“That tender little gift of yours — it leaked,” he said.

He surveyed his living room. That naked couple had attended his wedding, had drunk his champagne. A pair of know-it-alls. Their names rhymed. The other creatures he had never seen before. A skinny fellow with graying bangs advanced toward him.

“Gustave, I want you to meet—,” Grace began.

“Ask these people to leave,” he said in a growl she had never before heard.

They seeped away like spilled pudding … Lee and Lee, first, dressed in each other’s clothing, clutching their overnight cases and instruments, kissing Hal on the rush toward their car and its overnight parking tickets. They didn’t kiss Grace. The Cambridge crowd didn’t kiss anybody. But Hal — he stood his ground. He was a head taller than Gustave. He extended a hand. “I’m—”

“Good-bye.”

“Listen here—”

“Get out!”

He got out, with his satchel in his left hand and, in the curve of his right arm, Grace. At the last minute she turned as if to look at Gustave, to plead with him, maybe — but it was only to snatch up her pocketbook from the hall table. Next to the pocketbook she saw a cone of flowers. Sweet peas, baby’s breath, a single gerbera. An unimaginative bouquet; he must have picked it up ready-made at the airport stall.

GUSTAVE CLIMBED THE STAIRS. The guests had apparently cavorted mostly on the first floor; except for the two unmade beds in the spare room, the only sign of their occupation were towels like puddles on the bathroom tiles. He went into his study and his eye flew to the bookcase where, in manuscript, between thick bindings, stood his biography of Faraday, still in search of a publisher. No one had stolen it. On the carpet lay a book — open, facedown. He leaned over and identified it as a Spanish grammar. He kicked it.

Downstairs again, he heated some minestrone — he had not eaten anything since his abrupt decision to abandon that boring conference and come home early. The soup was tasty. He looked for a joint — how sweet the house still smelled — but the crowd had apparently sucked their whole stash. He did find, in one corner, a recorder, but he couldn’t smoke that. He put all the plates and glasses into the dishwasher. He tried to scrub the remains of chili from a pot, then left it to soak. He vacuumed. Then he went upstairs again and undressed, and, leaving his clothes on the floor — these gypsy ways were catching — slipped into Grace’s side of the bed. With a sigh he recognized as an old man’s, he flopped onto his back. His thoughts — which were uncharitable — did not keep him from falling asleep.

But a few hours later he found himself awake. He got up and went through the house again. He threw the Spanish grammar into the trash bag he had stuffed earlier and lugged the thing out to the garage, knowing that anyone who saw him in his striped pajamas under the floodlight at three o’clock in the morning would take him for a madman. So what. Their neighbors considered them a cute couple; he had overheard that demeaning epithet at the fish market. He’d rather be crazy than cute. He relocked the garage and returned to the house. And surely he had been deranged to marry a woman because of her alluring eyes. He’d mistaken a frolicsome manner for lasting charm. She was merely frivolous, and the minute she was left unsupervised … He stomped into the living room. That rose-colored garment in progress now shared its chair with a wine bottle, good vineyard, good year … empty. He’d like to rip the knitting out. The yarn would remain whorled; he’d wind it loosely into a one big whorl. When she came back she’d find a replica of Faraday’s induction coil, pink. Come back? She could come back to collect her clothing and her paella pan and the bulbs she kept meaning to plant. He picked up the sweater. It would fit a ten-year-old. Insulting color, insulting size … he went back to bed and lay there.