Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (49 page)

“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.”

T
HEY GAZED AT THE
V
UILLARD 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.

“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.

A
NOTHER
W
EDNESDAY
: 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.

T
HREE
W
EDNESDAYS 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.