Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories Read online

  I STAYED IN THE CHAIR near the elevator even after the Chinese man left my daughter.

  I wasn’t afraid anymore. I was glad I hadn’t said anything to Billie, though. You can’t let the baseball cap she wears fool you. She takes everything hard.

  TESS’S NEXT-TO-LAST VISITOR is the counsel, so much taller than the cleaning person that his pale hair grazes a mobile. He has drafted the preliminary statement to the court, he silently informs the now sleeping child. He doesn’t touch her, and his stance is not reverential like the cleaning person’s, but reflective. His thoughts are not in the interrogative mood, but the mildly threatening conditional: If we are to continue to save you, why, someone must be made responsible. Responsible in a financial sense is of course what he means.

  THE TALL GUY pushed the elevator button over and over and it finally came.

  I went into the room.

  She looked okay, sleeping on her side, though when I lifted the blanket and undid a couple of snaps I saw that she still had the diaper rash. Her skin just burned itself off sometimes because she didn’t crawl or even roll, just lay there in her stuff. She might turn over someday, one of them said. She’d never eat and drink and she was deaf and she was impaired but really she knew me always.

  I put the blanket back on. I watched her ear for a while. All those windings and curves. My little girl’s little ear.

  I got the toy she liked best from the windowsill. The red floppy dog. They always forgot it. I put it in a corner of the crib. Then I unscrewed the end of the heart tube from the aqua clothespin and I slipped it under the blanket so the blood would pool quiet and invisible like a monthly until there would be no more left.

  FIDELITY

  WHEN OLD VICTOR CULLEN, housebound, his sight dimming fast, filed a report from his bed with the invented dateline of Ataraku, Japan, his editor at World Enough, elderly himself but with mental and physical gears fully engaged, didn’t know what to do. So he did what he’d always done: edited the piece (never much work except for those damned ellipses), corrected the galleys, checked the blues. With the help of the art director—also Victor Cullen’s friend and colleague—he fooled around with photographs of Matsushima and Tsuwano and Aomori and came up with convincing composites. An impoverished young artist who happened to be Japanese was let in on the mischief. She did a fine wash drawing of an imaginary Shinto temple. The editor sent the proofs up to Godolphin, the town Victor and Nora Cullen had moved to twenty years ago, no, twenty-one; leaving New York, no, forsaking New York. Godolphin was just outside of Boston. Their daughter practiced medicine there.

  Nora telephoned right away.

  “Greg,” she said softly. “This Ataraku … it doesn’t—”

  “I know,” he said, cutting her short; her voice still had the power to liquefy him. “It’s okay. Victor’s fans adore whatever he writes.”

  That much was true—the magazine’s readers never tired of praising the keen eye and ear, the turns of phrase, the research. Every Victor Cullen contribution to World Enough inspired enthusiastic letters to the editor—letters in longhand, letters pecked on derelict typewriters, letters composed on word processors, and nowadays e-mail. “Ataraku: An Edgy Serenity” reaped the usual harvest.

  It had been a prank, Greg figured: the prank of a furious old monarch, assisted by loyal retainers. King Victor. Maybe he’ll rest now.

  Almost immediately came Stwyth, Wales, whose entire population was named Pugh.

  After Stwyth came Mossfontein, South Africa: such extravagant gardens.

  Greg, in his third-floor office, edited Stwyth and Mossfontein and gave them pride of place in consecutive issues. The publishers on the twentieth floor published them. Did anyone in that suite even read the rag? World Enough made money; that was all the conglomerate wanted to know. World Enough had always made money despite its refusal to take ads from hotels, airlines, cruise ships, and package tours. Instead, whisky distillers, cigar makers, purveyors of tweeds and cashmeres willingly bought space; also antique booksellers and rug dealers and, increasingly, retirement communities and facilities for assisted living.

  Victor next filed a story from Akmed, a Nile village, though the envelope bore the familiar Godolphin postmark. Young Katsuko, the artist, drew the ruins outside Akmed with the precision of Piranesi. The art director, back in the office after hip surgery, spread out on Greg’s desk photographs of Egyptians from bygone issues. “They’re not all Egyptians,” he admitted. “Some are Jordanians. This one’s an Afghan.” Such wisdom in those seamed faces, Greg thought—they’d glow on the page. The art director cleared his throat. “Are we paying Victor the usual?”

  “No. More.”

  “Good. I don’t like to think of Nora scrimping,” he said, not meeting Greg’s eyes. “The daughter’s divorced now, can’t help much.”

  “THE EXUBERANT CASTLE OF LUBASZ,” Victor’s latest smoothly began, “is our temporary abode; it lies twenty kilometers from Budapest. In our bedroom an extraordinary armoire …”

  Greg and the art director studied the new piece. They arranged and shot interiors to fit Victor’s prose. Greg’s own armoire carved with bearded cherubim was pressed into service. Victor had reported that the genitalia of the cherubim were as long as their beards. One would think he’d actually seen this unrestrained bit of furniture. But Victor had never laid eyes on the thing, had he; Greg found it on Third Avenue after the Cullens left town.

  Nora must have described the armoire. Greg squinted at the galleys and then through them; he saw Victor propped in a bed trying to imagine the work of a Hungarian craftsmen. “Well, Greg has this sort of closet under the skylight,” Nora might have indiscreetly remarked. She was eighty now; slippage was to be expected.

  “Does he really,” Victor would have drawled. Then, snapping, “And how do you happen to know that?”

  TWO DECADES AGO, on a September morning—Greg still recalled the stinging clarity of that fall day—she had trundled by early-morning train from Boston to Manhattan. Her handbag was stuffed with designs for fabric. The appointment with the vice president of the fabric company lasted an hour; then, flushed with success, she hurried down Madison and arrived at the restaurant further flushed, eyes shining. “They bought three, Greg. And they want some more silly beasts for children’s curtains—kangaroos, wombats. This commission comes in so handy. How are you?”

  They were both nearing sixty then. For so long he had played the role of neighbor and friend, guest at the feasts, editor of the articles. And on the rare occasions that Victor traveled alone on assignment, Greg escorted Nora to this concert and that party, expecting nothing more than to kiss the silken cheekbone and then return to his cramped apartment and its priceless view of the sky. But now they lived in different cities: a different convention obtained.

  “How am I, Nora? I am dying for love of you.”

  “A knightly compliment,” she said, and picked up the menu. “What on earth is Arctic char?”

  “Not a compliment. I mean it.”

  Her startled gaze rose from the menu but paused before meeting his. She stared at his necktie, or at the tip of his goatee, maybe he should shave it off …

  “Look at me, Nora.”

  She still didn’t meet his eyes. But alarm was slowly fading from her face, and a soft acceptance replaced it. And his heart leaped like one of her kangaroos.

  “Look at me,” he pleaded.

  “I don’t dare.”

  Those three words were the closest to an admission of love he would ever hear. They were enough. During the next five years, until the onset of Victor’s illness, she arrived once a season, like a quarterly dividend. They spent the afternoon in his not-quite-wide-enough bed. The sky told them when it was time to leave for her train—a merciless five o’clock sky, royal in December, slate in March, turquoise in June, cornflower in September.

  THE ARMOIRE WITH THE BEARDED CHERUBIM that had kept them company in Greg’s skylighted room was not in fact Hungarian. It was Albanian. As
he edited “The Castle of Lubasz” Greg worried about this discrepancy, as if someone might peek through the small lie and discern the larger one. But suppose some indulgent readers did spot the falsehood? They’d only smile, and continue to buy enough whisky, cashmere throws, first editions, signed etchings, and retirement condominiums to keep advertisers happy; they’d continue to write appreciative letters to the editor. They weren’t going anywhere, were they?—for if they did shiver with wander-lust, any other travel magazine, full of Galápagos tips and Parisian hideaways and Middle East excavations, would serve them better. The World Enough demographic ideal was content to sit in a leather chair islanded on a Persian rug, and smoke a cigar and read.

  Greg stopped worrying.

  The final envelope, rather flat, was on his desk the day the Cul-lens’ daughter called from Godolphin. “They’re gone,” she said, and halted. “Both,” she said.

  Icy tongs gripped his vocal cords. After a while, “Both?” he managed.

  “They died twelve hours apart. She probably swallowed something, Uncle Greg.” There was a prolonged sniff. “Even though I was here, and my kids …”

  They talked some more and then hung up. Greg opened the envelope.

  Azula

  The kingdom of Azula is shaped like a circle, not a perfect one, for its volcano juts westward as well as upward, but, rather, a circle with a bulge. Azula is completely surrounded by a river. The river was thought to be a lake until a current was discovered, flowing counterclockwise. The water reflects the sky—our sky, a faithful and steady blue.

  Azula was established in 1678 by a land grant from Rudolfo the Fifth to a rogue musician. The country flourished under the musician’s rule. Now it is nearly deserted. But the mosaics on the floor of the royal mansion have hardly faded since the days of glory. Beetles in constant motion add to the complicated mystery of the tiles … In our cobwebbed suite, ecru draperies droop, like flesh from an old elbow … There is no roof. The nearby hospital for incurables is considerably decayed—the veranda on its second story should not be stepped on, as Nora discovered almost to her destruction. Two cured lepers inhabit the place.

  In fact, Azula is a haven for couples: crows, who mate for life, dwell in noisy twosomes in our ruined rafters; and we are served by a man and woman lawfully married; and a pair of cassowaries occupy the courtyard. Their flightless majesties resemble huge pillows whose feathers have burst through their casings. Necks curve seductively; faces ardently woo.

  Amenities? A plank for a toilet, a bucket for a shower, an unvarying diet of fish and root vegetables, ragged shrimp nets for sheets. And the blessed absence of needles, conversation, trays, periodicals, grandchildren, and enemas.

  Here we wait, beetles below and crows above and cassowaries without. The lepers tend the garden. The female servant cooks and the male servant fishes. And Nora and I swim and dine and embrace, ah, my lovely; my lined darling … Get that clever artist to draw the author’s beauteous spouse; forget my battered mug.

  Soon the volcano will erupt or the earth crack open; or perhaps one hot afternoon we will simply fail to emerge from the river, will sink into that blue that never changes, unlike the fitful New York sky you and she watched those afternoons Greg you bastard.

  No, no, Greg silently screamed. I was a paladin. I kept her happy for you, Victor you fool.

  HIS PENCIL WAS TWIRLING between his fingers as if it had a will of its own.

  Victor you fool, his mind kept repeating as if it, too, acted without his control. Nora my dearest. He moaned helplessly.

  His fingers tightened; the pencil stopped twirling. “Rudolfo” would not do: a name out of operettas and Christmas ditties. Call the king “Godolpho.” And the river—can its end really be its beginning, or … He felt rather than saw the art director shamble in.

  For the contributors’ page, Greg gave Katsuko a studio photograph of Nora to work from. The art director added a snapshot from his own wallet. When Katsuko submitted the finished drawing, she remarked in that uninflected way of hers that she wished she had known the subject. Greg looked at the picture, and there in brown ink on cream paper was Nora: the playful mouth, the luminous irises, even the slight pleating of the lids. One eyebrow lifted, the lips parted, Oh, Greg, sometimes I have to escape from his intensity, I get scorched, you are so cool, darling, like a winding-sheet.

  To illustrate “Azula” the collaborators ignored World Enough’s extensive files. Instead they performed a rare misdemeanor: they rifled the expense account. They flew to Cairns to photograph cassowaries. They went to Istanbul to hunt down mosaics. They found a leper hospital in Jerusalem.

  Then the two exhausted old men took the jumbo back to New York. They arrived early in the morning. At Greg’s apartment they dropped their satchels in the living room and hung their neckties on the cherubim and, in suits and shoes, lay down side by side on the skimpy bed. Steadily they watched a sky streaked with gray and puckered with small clouds. Shortly after noon the streaks and puckers disappeared. A quantity of satin stretched before their eyes like a chivalric banner. “True blue,” Greg said. The art director stood up on the bed and pointed his lens and clicked and clicked.

  IF LOVE WERE ALL

  I.

  “BEFORE YOU CAME HERE—what did you do?” Mrs. Levinger asked during Sonya’s first month in London.

  “Books.”

  “Wrote?”

  “Kept.”

  “Well then. Think of this enterprise as a balance sheet. On balance the children are better off. Don’t you have a handkerchief, Sonya? Take mine.”

  The sort of incident that triggered this exchange—the removal of a child from his cohort by medical personnel—would occur frequently, but Sonya had just witnessed it for the first time: the kindly faces of doctor and nurse; the impassivity of the other children, imperfectly concealing their panic. Many wore cardboard placards, like Broadway sandwich men. london, londres, lond, england, the boards variously said.

  “There is something a little wrong with your chest,” the doctor had told the child, in German.

  “We will make it well,” the nurse said, in French.

  The little boy spoke only Polish and Yiddish. He spoke them one after the other as he was led away. Then he screamed them, one after the other, stiffening his legs so as not to walk. “Mama!” he called as he was lifted up, though his mother was no doubt dead. “Big sister!” he cried as he was carried off, though his big sister, a girl of eight, had fallen to the floor.

  “You will get used to it,” Mrs. Levinger said to Sonya. “Oh dear.”

  SONYA WAS AN AMERICAN in town for the war. For several summers in the recent past she had led a gypsy life on the Rhode Island coast—danced on the beach, shared a one-room house with an aging tenor who loved her to distraction. These facts were a matter of indifference to Mrs. Levinger and the rest of beseiged London … or would have been a matter of indifference if Sonya had broadcast her history. But she said little about herself. When, during the previous year, friends in Providence (her home during the three seasons that weren’t summer) begged to know why she was going abroad, throwing up her jobs (she taught Hebrew at Sunday school and she kept accounts for various small enterprises) … when people posed these questions, Sonya answered, “Because of the hurricane.”

  Her beach house had four slanted walls and an uncertain roof. No electricity, no running water. The hurricane of 1938 had lifted the place from its cement foundation and spun off with it. Not a stick of Sonya’s belongings had ever been recovered—not the wood-burning stove, the chemical toilet, the teapot, the garments hanging on hooks. In the weeks that followed the storm she sat in her hillside Providence apartment and stared at the center of town, also ravaged but gradually repairing itself. But her own life would not be repaired; she was already sliding into unrelieved respectability. Somebody would sooner or later ask her to marry him—despite middle age, despite lack of beauty, somebody sometimes did. The tenor had already proposed. She feared that, no longer
buoyed by her annual summer of freedom, she would weakly say yes.

  She had offered herself instead to the American Joint Distribution Committee, affectionately called the Joint. She went to New York for an interview. The interviewer, an overweight man in shirt-sleeves and a rumpled vest, said, “Good that you speak Hebrew.”

  “I don’t, you know,” Sonya told him. “I have enough biblical Hebrew to teach classes Aleph and Beth.”

  “If you are sent to Palestine your Hebrew will improve,” he said. And, glancing down at her dossier: “You speak French.”

  “I studied French in high school, that’s what it says. Once, in Quebec, I ordered a glass of wine. And Yiddish—I haven’t used it in decades.”

  Their eyes met. “The situation in Europe is desperate,” he said. “Thousands of Polish-German Jews have been expelled by Germany and refused by Poland and are starving and freezing and dying of dysentery in a no-man’s-land between the two countries. Many are children. Several organizations are working together to help—and working together is not, I see you studied Latin as well, our normal modus operandi. Two Jews, three opinions, I’m sure you understand.” He checked his verbal flow with a visible effort. His mouth opened and closed several times but he managed not to speak.