Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (39 page)

II.

“S
OMEONE IN YOUR LARGER COHORT
has to die first,” Max had mentioned early on. “To start the avalanche.” In the first decades there were the accidents, the horrific early cancers, the suicides. And there were deaths of children, other people’s children, thank God, but Gail was never without fear for her own boy. Luckily, the Whitelaw daughter and the Chernoff son turned into healthy adolescents and then healthy young adults—nobody nowadays considered male homosexuality an affliction, not out loud, anyway.

After a while came diseases predictable by any actuary. Somehow Fox and Sophia and Max and Gail avoided them. They couldn’t avoid growing old, though. The men did it in differing ways. Neither stayed fit—neither had been fit to begin with—but Fox at least was naturally skinny. Max steadily gained weight—that was natural, too, or at least familial, or at least not pathological (he pointed out to Gail); extra flesh, his grandmother had assured him, is protection against various ills. A statistical analysis published in the
Journal of the American Geriatrics Society
supported this unlikely truth. Max’s narrow shoulders contracted through the years and his broad hips broadened. When, naked after lovemaking (an activity increasingly rare in their age group, studies show, while other studies show also that both members of an aging couple like to pretend that their partners are movie stars during the business), he walked from bed to bathroom, Gail sometimes imagined that she was watching the retreat of a satiated woman. But when he returned after the scrubbing he considered necessary—Gail would have lain around in sweat and jism until morning—with his member shrunken and a smile stretching his bushy mustache, he looked male again. Her man.

A few ailments did afflict them. Gail’s fibroids required a hysterectomy. Max had to have a hernia repaired. Various antidepressants gave Fox various side effects like constipation and patchy hair loss. But Sophia—she was never sick. And her gaunt attractiveness mutated into blinding beauty: the excellent bones and good teeth; the unlined skin that had never known a moisturizer; the pale hair, only slightly faded, bundled loosely at her nape. She still climbed, skied, went scuba diving. When she returned, frequently, to her Maine home, Hebe joined her. The Goddess of Youth had developed crow’s-feet like everybody else, and her little teeth were yellowing. Sometimes the Chernoffs were invited for a weekend. They’d find Hebe chattering at Fox. They’d find Sophia atop an un-trustworthy ladder, rewiring the porch lantern, or mounted on one of the gables as if it were a pony, shingling the roof. She had a boy’s daring and a man’s competence and a woman’s grace. She seemed to be at the beginning of a very long life. Gail found herself jealous, or was it desirous?

Back home: “Sophia will bury the rest of us,” Gail predicted to Max.

“Somebody has to be the last.”

Sophia wouldn’t be the last, she’d be the exception; but Gail kept this more precise insight to herself until she could share it with young Thea Whitelaw. One summer, Thea, working on her masters in teaching at Harvard, stayed with the Chernoffs between apartments. “Your mother may live for centuries,” said Gail.

“Oh, she will,” said Thea. “She’s part cetacean. Cetus is Latin, from the Greek
k
tos
…”

“Sea monster, yes. We grade-school teachers haul around a lot of facts. Pseudo-erudition.” Gail spoke in a stern voice—pseudo-stern. She had grown close to this young woman, dark eyes like a rain cloud, brown hair in one thick braid.

S
OMEONE IN THE SMALLER
cohort has to die first, too.

One of those usually curable carcinomas sought out Fox. But in his case … not so curable. Still, several years went by: treatments, time off, new treatments, everyone knows the drill.

There had been no Whitelaw-Chernoff visits since the diagnosis. Fox’s therapy took a lot of time. And the Chernoffs’ son now lived in Savannah; his parents tended to travel south when they traveled at all. Max’s weight hampered him a bit. Gail was frequently fatigued. Her eyelids had become pleated, but the rest of her face, she knew, was still lively, still pretty: the tilted chin, hers by right; the tilted nose, hers by rhinoplasty. She was glad they had sold their house and moved into a condo. Its kitchen had all the latest devices, and granite countertops, too. She didn’t care if she never cooked another meal, but she liked laying palms and then cheek on the cool stone.

Thea was back in Maine, living in her father’s house. Her mother was sometimes there; Hebe too. Thea was teaching fifth grade. She called one January morning.

“It’s almost over, Gail.”

“What do you mean? Max and your father talked just last week … well, last month … before Christmas. Is Fox in the hospital again?”

“No. He’s limping around, can do just about everything but eat, takes stuff for the pain. I don’t mean he’s dying. I just mean he’s dying.”

The difference between the imminent and the soon: yes. There was also the inevitable, but they all belonged in that group, even cetacean Sophia.

“Come up, please,” said Thea. “Bring music.”

“Well … which music?”

“Beethoven?”

“Oh, too difficult. Max hardly plays now. Some kid stuff, that’s all, for the neighbors’ daughter.” A brat, that little girl: or perhaps Gail hadn’t yet made peace with her own no-grandchildren destiny. “The other morning he did do a marvelous riff on ‘Oh, Mr. Sun,’ ” she admitted.

“What about the variations on the
Magic Flute
thing?”

“
Ein Mädchen
—”

“—
oder Weibchen
. Please don’t tell me I’m pseudo-erudite.”

“Okay,” Gail said, complying with the request, and also agreeing to the program: Beethoven’s Twelve Variations on Mozart’s
A
Maiden or Little Wife
.

III.

B
ANGOR
. The plane banked over pines, over water. Thea’s boyfriend was waiting for them at the airport. They got into his Piper, Max taking the copilot’s seat. This flight took just ten minutes. They landed on an oblong of earth with spruce trees at its margins. And then, in the boyfriend’s Jeep, they drove along a rutted road from island to island, across meager bridges, until they reached the last island in the series, the familiar outcrop with its fifty-odd houses. The easternmost house, brown-shingled like the rest, belonged to Fox. A deep porch wrapped around the three sides of it that faced the fierce sea. Inside were angles, odd windows, nooks, all grown familiar through the years. The music room held a Steinway bought on the occasion of Fox’s birth. In the attic stood a hard double bed. On it Gail and Max would make love as they always did here, as if it were a guestly obligation.

The big main rooms were farthest from the road. Their windows, and the front door, too, opened onto the porch and the sea beyond. The back of the house faced the road. Max and Thea’s boyfriend carried the suitcases under a trellised arch, and disappeared. They’d climb the steps of the porch and enter the house. Gail wrenched herself out of the Jeep. She looked up at the rear of the house, where she saw, in a high window—the back-stairs landing, wasn’t it?—a female form: Thea, carrying two pillows no doubt destined for their marital bed. Thea waved, continued upward. One story below, behind a window with purplish glass, stood Fox. He raised a hand. In the kitchen moved another female figure—Sophia. And in the now-open back doorway, which led into a kitchen of elderly appliances where the family took all its meals, stood little Hebe, hugging her own freckled arms in excitement. “Gail!” piped the Goddess of Youth, and ran down the wooden stairs and threw herself upon the unenthusiastic Gail.

And then, within the house, more greetings. Beauteous Sophia. Emaciated Fox. Thea, exhausted.

T
HEA AND
G
AIL
had a long-established hideout. About two hours later—Fox asleep in his room, Max napping in his and Gail’s, the boyfriend gone, Sophia and Hebe shopping for groceries, like mortals—the women found each other there. The room had been a pantry once and perhaps a meat larder before that. No heat reached it. Though the afternoon was not especially cold and a thin layer of snow was shrinking in the sun, their little place retained the iciness of the previous months. Gail wore her parka, Thea her grand-mother’s patched sable.

“He looks awful, doesn’t he,” Thea said.

“Yes,” Gail agreed. Fox’s hair had turned the color of spume. His skin was nearly as transparent as the weak bulb hanging above their two sorrowful heads. He had joined them for lunch that afternoon without participating in it. He was kept alive on some canned medicinal nutrient to which he attributed his frequent vomiting. Treatments and their sequelae were what was killing him, he said; the disease itself had vanished, he claimed. “I’m cured and dead,” he said, in helpless fury. The sound of his vomiting—Gail had heard it twice—was not the cascade of a drunk; it was a prolonged, unproductive gagging.

“I brought fancy chocolates. What was I thinking?” mourned Gail.

“Hebe has already swallowed the entire box. Pa likes high-tasting stuff like spiced crab cakes, runny cheese, and smoked meats. He adores bacon. So for a while Ma made bacon every morning and Pa ate it and pretty soon he chucked it up. Finally she wouldn’t make it anymore and they started to have those fights they adore, shouting made-up footnotes at each other, Pa quoting from something medical—”

“A digestive tract.”

Thea managed a weak smile. “—and Ma invoking British novels, all those gentlemen gouty from port and pork. Also she quoted Deuteronomy—”

“Leviticus. ‘And the swine, though he divide the hoof, and be clovenfooted, yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean to you.’ ”

“Whatever. Then Ma started making the bacon in the middle of the afternoon, while he’s sleeping, like now. It’s a drugged sleep, bacon won’t wake him, the house burning to the ground wouldn’t wake him. So he started getting up in the middle of the night to fry it himself.”

“You could just not buy it.”

“Oh dear, Gail, do
you
think swine is unclean?”

“Of course not. The pig is fastidious if given the opportunity.”

“Oh good,” said Thea. “Anyway, Pa yells that gout is one of the few conditions he doesn’t have, and that Old Testament restrictions don’t apply to Whitelaws. There’s not a Yid in his lineage—sorry, Gail, it’s the word he used.”

“There’s a Yid in everybody’s lineage,” Gail said, evenly.

“ ‘Ergo,’ he goes on to say, bacon must be good for him. And Aunt Hebe is always his ally. She swears that bacon alone sustains her existence. What a useless existence it is … Oh, don’t listen to me, I love her.”

“Darling.”

Gail was sitting on a high stool and Thea on a lower one, and it was an easy matter for Thea to lay her cheek against Gail’s denimed thigh. They remained in this position for a while. Then Thea raised her head again. “Now I lock the bacon in the trunk of my car. So Pa goes without. But the fight isn’t over. They won’t stop fighting until he’s dead.” She swallowed. “He won’t die while a fight is on.”

“Then bacon is keeping him alive,” said Gail.

D
INNER, COOKED BY
T
HEA
and her mother, consisted of chicken, salad, and wine for everybody but Fox, who again ate nothing and drank only his thick green medicinal liquid. Thea’s boyfriend returned. Hebe and Max gabbed about politics. Fox said nothing, focusing on the battle within. Sophia’s lordly attention, too, was elsewhere. She insisted on cleaning up without assistance. Fox went upstairs to vomit, and didn’t come down. The sea beat hard on the rocks. “I will take a walk in the perilous dark,” Hebe announced. The boyfriend left. Gail and Max and Thea sat reading in the living room. Hebe came home and told them she was safe. “Surprising: I am so prone to mishap.” The sea beat even harder on the rocks.

G
AIL AWOKE
in the middle of the night. She had forgotten to pack her Valium. Max was lightly snoring. It would be unkind to wake him, and for what purpose, anyway? She could tiptoe downstairs and into Fox’s room, rummage around in his pharmacopoeia until she found something that induced sleep. So what if she laid her hands on a lethal medicament. To awaken a dying man would be worse than unkind.

She got up, and pulled somebody’s oilcloth coat from a hook and put it on. (She’d forgotten to pack her robe, too. Sometimes it seemed that slippery places were forming in her brain.) She walked almost noiselessly down the back stairway and on the second floor switched to the main stairs, whose threadbare carpeting would muffle sound. But still every footfall produced a creak. She stopped, leaned over the banister.