Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (28 page)

“O
TTO BELIEVES
that young people should be introduced to alcohol early,” Mamie said to Joss across the booth, and then she said to the waiter who was inquiring about drinks, “Kir, please.”

“What?”

“White wine with a splash of cassis.”

“Forget the cassis, Mamie,” Joss said. “Draft for me,” he said to the waiter. Perhaps Cassidy’s had been a mistake. He wondered if he could be arrested for plying a minor. He didn’t know her age exactly; that would be his defense. He did know she was in tenth grade, the prosecution would point out. The waiter served the drinks.

“Otto?” Joss inquired.

“He lives in the next apartment. From Vienna. The University of Chicago is the only true American university, Otto says. All the others imitate European ones. So I want to go to Chicago.” She sipped her wine, leaving lipstick on the glass. She had much to learn about cosmetics. “Is your daughter in college?” she asked.

“Thanks,” Joss said to the waiter, who had brought their specials, both plates on one forearm. “She’s in boarding school,” he said to Mamie: the practiced lie. “Your penmanship is excellent.”

“Oh, cursive. I practiced a lot when I was young.”

“And your writing, too.”

“I go to a private day school”—and she named it. “On scholarship. We are required to wear a uniform.” She fingered her pleated skirt.

“Ladies in green.”

“Rich bitches.” A bold smile. “So ignorant!
National Velvet
is their idea of a masterpiece.”

Mamie came from a large, loose, wisecracking family. “Happy Bloom could be one of my uncles,” she said. The men were sales representatives, the women salesladies, an optimistic crowd tolerating in its midst members who were chess players and members who were racetrack habitués and members who were fat and thin and good-natured and morose and peculiar—“My great-aunt walks the length of Manhattan every day”—and even Republican. She loved movies and gin rummy and novels. She had a very high IQ—“That just means I’m good at IQ tests,” she said with offhand sincerity—and because of her intelligence she’d been sent to the green school. “The uniform—it’s equalizing, that’s good; it’s a costume, that’s good too …”

“Mamie,” he said.
Enough babble
, he meant. He leaned across his corned beef. “Why these letters. Why to me.”

She reddened. It was not beautifying.

“A bit of fun?” he asked, helpfully.

“At first. I thought, hey, he’ll answer …”

“There was no return address.”

“Answer another way, get Happy Bloom to mention ladies, or green. Some trick. But then, I don’t know, I didn’t need an answer anymore. I just wanted you to read the words, to wonder. When you look out of the screen with that face, it’s like a carving, you’re looking for me, you’re looking at me …”

“Yes,” he soothed, thinking of the camera’s red bulb, the thing they had to look at.

“At school, they all have boyfriends.” She was all at once lonely and forty, and nothing had ever happened to her and nothing would. “I love your silence,” she said after a while.

“My silence—it’s imposed.”

“Everybody at home talks all the time. I love the way you dance.”

“The silent character—Bloom made it for me.”

“I love the way you fall down.”

He had mastered the technique young, while still at the Jesuits’. He had gone to every circus, every vaudeville show. He studied clowns and acrobats. And in the first troupe and then the second he spent seasons watching, imitating, getting it right. He practiced on the wire, he practiced with the tumblers. Never broke a bone. Learned how not to take the impact on the back of the head or the base of the spine or the elbows or the knees. Knew which muscles to tighten, which to relax …

She said: “You make me want to fall, but with my, you know, I can’t.” She paused. “I
have
fallen,” she confessed. She took off her glasses. Her little eyes softened. Would she ever be pretty? “Actually, I have fallen in love,” she said. “With you,” she added, in case he’d missed her drift.

There were several things he could do at this juncture, and he considered each one of them. He could award her an intent, sorrowful look, he knew which one to use; and from this and her flustered response there would develop, during future meetings, a kind of affection. Stranger romances had flourished. When she turned twenty he would be … Or he could talk smart: prattle tediously about the Irish in America, his hard boyhood, the Jesuit fathers, the early jobs, the indifference of the public, the disappointing trajectory of his life. Bore her to fidgets, push her calf love out the swinging doors … Or he could offer to introduce her to Paolo, what a pair … Or he could pretend to get drunk and stumble out of Cassidy’s leaving her to pay their bill. She probably had a couple of fives tucked into that orthopedic shoe.

He did none of those things. Instead he reached his hand across the table and gently pulled the nose, the nose with the little bump.

They lingered over their lunch and then walked the length of Fifth Avenue. Walking, she hardly limped at all.

“I don’t do sports,” she told him. “Steps are sometimes difficult,” she added mildly.

They discussed, oh, the Empire State Building and the dock strike and hizzoner: the idle conversation of two friends who have met after a long silence, and who may or may not meet again. At the subway entrance on Eighth Street they paused. He took both her hands and swung them, first side to side, then overhead. London Bridge is falling down. Then he let them go.

“This afternoon has been …, ” she began.

“Yes,” he said.

She clumped down the stairs. He stood at the top, watching her grow smaller. Soon she would turn. He’d watch until then … “Pardon,” said a woman in a hat, edging past him, rushing downward, blocking his last view of the girl.

T
HAT
T
HURSDAY THEY
did a takeoff of
On the Town
—they couldn’t make fun of the war, but dancing sailors were fair game. A movie tapster danced with them, another guy on his way down. But the spoof was too short. Three minutes to go before the good-night monologue, signaled the Brigadier. So Happy said “Sweet Georgia,” under his breath—they’d done that number together on the circuit a dozen years earlier, feet don’t forget. It was a Nicholas Brothers routine. So what?—they’d never claimed originality, Happy stole most of his jokes. The Brigadier said “Georgia” to the orchestra, and then she hooked the Hollywood fellow off the stage, and there they were, Joss and Happy, dancing, just dancing. Happy flapped into the wings thirty seconds before the finish, to get out of the sailor suit and into the tux. Joss kept cramp-rolling. He felt Mamie’s eyes on him and his on hers. He double-timed into a leap, why not, and he kicked midair, heels meeting, and dropped onto his feet and then slid down slantwise, perfect, thigh taking the weight, and now he was horizontal. The camera’s lens lowered, smoothly following him; those guys were getting better. Elbow on floor and chin on palm and body stretched out and one leg raised, foot amiably twitching, Joss grinned. Yes: grinned.

“What made you smile? They’ll get rid of you,” Mary griped an hour later.

He touched her hair. So dry, you’d think one of her cigarettes would set it on fire. “I was smiling at you,” he said.

“P
REDICTABLE
,” said Judith da Costa.

“Oh … hopeful,” said her husband, Justin, in his determinedly tolerant way.

“Neither,” said Harry Savitsky, not looking for trouble exactly; looking for engagement perhaps; really looking for the door, but the evening had just begun.

Harry’s wife, Lucienne, uncharacteristically said nothing. She was listening to the tune: a mournful bit from Liszt.

What these four diners were evaluating was a violinist, partly his performance, partly his presence. The new restaurant—Harry and Lucienne had suggested it—called itself the Hussar, and presented piroshki and goulash in a Gypsy atmosphere. The chef was rumored to be twenty-six years old. The Hussar was taking a big chance on the chef, on the fiddler, on the location, and apparently on the help; one busboy had already dropped a pitcher of water.

“It’s tense here, in the dining room,” Judith remarked.

“In the kitchen—don’t ask,” Harry said.

In some accommodating neighborhood in Paris, a restaurant like the Hussar might catch on. In Paris … but this was not Paris. It was Godolphin, a town that was really a western wedge of Boston; Godolphin, home to Harry and Lucienne Savitsky, retired high school teachers; Godolphin, not so much out of fashion as beyond its reach.

One might say the same of Harry. His preferred haberdashery was the army/navy surplus store downtown. Lucienne, however, was genuinely Parisian (she had spent the first four years of her life there, never mind that the city was occupied, never mind that she was hardly ever taken out of the apartment) and she had a French-woman’s flair for color and line. As a schoolgirl in Buenos Aires, as a young working woman in 1950s Boston, she had been known for dressing well on very little money, and she and her brother had managed to support their widowed mother, too. But Lucienne was well over sixty now, and perhaps this turquoise dress she’d bought for a friend’s grandson’s bar mitzvah was too bright for the present company. Perhaps it was also too tight for what Lucienne called her few extra pounds and what Harry called her blessed corpulence. He was a fatty himself.

In the da Costas’ disciplined presence Harry was always a little embarrassed about their appetites, his and Lucienne’s. Certainly they had nothing else to be ashamed of: not a thing! They were well educated, as high school teachers had had to be in their day (she’d taught French, he chemistry). Lucienne spoke three languages, four if you counted Yiddish. Harry conversed only in Brooklyn English, but he understood Lucienne in all of her tongues. They subscribed to the
New Yorker
and
Science
and
American Heritage.

These da Costas, though—they were
very
tall, they were
very
thin. Judith, with her pewter hair and dark clothing, could have passed for a British governess. Justin was equally daunting: a high brow and a lean nose and thin lips always forming meaningful expressions. But there were moments when Justin glanced at Judith while speaking, and a spasm of anxiety crossed his face, entangling itself with the meaningful expressions. Then Justin and Harry briefly became allies: two younger brothers who’d been caught smoking. One morning at breakfast Harry had described this occasional feeling of kinship to his wife. Lucienne looked at him for a while, then got up and went around the table and kissed him.

P
APRIKA BREADSTICKS
! The waiter’s young hand shook as he lowered the basket. Judith took none; Justin took one but didn’t bite; Lucienne took one and began to munch; Harry took one and then parked another behind his ear.

“Ha,” Judith said, mirthlessly.

“Ha-ha,” Justin said.

Lucienne looked at Harry, and sighed, and smiled—her wide motherly smile, reminding him of the purpose of this annual evening out. He removed the breadstick, brushing possible crumbs from his shoulder. “What do you hear from our kids?” he said to Justin.

“Our kids love it out there in Santa Fe. I don’t share their taste for the high and dry,” Justin said with an elegant shrug.

“You’re a Yankee from way back,” Harry said.

The da Costas, as Harry well knew, were an old Portuguese-Dutch family who had begun assimilating the minute they arrived in the New World—in 1800, something like that—and had intermarried whenever an Episcopalian would have them. Fifty years ago Justin had studied medicine for the purpose of learning psychiatry. His practice still flourished. He saw patients in a free-standing office, previously a stable, behind their home, previously a farmhouse, the whole compound fifteen miles north of Boston. Judith had designed all the conversions. The windows of Justin’s consulting room faced a soothing stand of birches.

The Savitskys had visited the da Costas once, three years ago, the night before Miriam Savitsky’s wedding to Jotham da Costa. At that party they discovered that there were backyards in Greater Boston through which rabbits ran, into which deer tripped; that people in the mental-health professions did not drink hard liquor (Justin managed to unearth a bottle of Scotch from a recess under the sink); and that the severe Judith was the daughter of a New Jersey pharmacist. The pharmacist was there on the lawn, in a deck chair: aged and garrulous. Harry and his new son-in-law’s grandfather talked for a while about synthetic serotonin. The old man had died three months ago, in January.

C
OCKTAILS
! The Hussar did provide Scotch, perhaps knowing no better. The fiddler’s repertoire descended into folk—some Russian melodies. Harry guessed that Lucienne knew their Yiddish lyrics. The da Costas ignored the tunes. They were devotees of early music. To give them their due—and Harry always tried to give them their due—they perhaps did not intend to convey the impression that dining out once a year with the Savitskys was bearable, but only marginally. Have pity, he told himself. Their cosseted coexistence with gentle wildlife must make them uncomfortable with extremes of color, noise, and opinions. And for their underweight Jotham, who still suffered from acne at the age of thirty-seven, they’d probably wanted somebody other than a wide-hipped, dense-haired lawyer with a loud laugh.