Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (34 page)

“No slashing!” Leo shouted. “The racket is not a saber.”

A July Monday, a turquoise sky. Nancy, at net, frowned. Leo lobbed a high one. Nancy held her racket stiff above her head, like a protest sign. The ball struck its face and ran down its neck. Leo joined her at net. During the winter a mild paunch had developed above his belt. His right knee bore a familiar scar.

“Not bad. Work on the angle,” he said.

“Okay,” she said. “See you Wednesday.”

That night at dinner, Phoebe said, “I hear he’s loose.”

“What do you mean, loose?” Laurette snapped. “
Débauché
or incontinent?”

“Unbuttoned,” Phoebe answered. “Last year he kept to himself. This year he’s been seen with every bit of fluff in town. Are you aware that he used to teach Art History? And then loafed in Europe for several years? And is at last attending medical school? He’s thirty.”

“Thirty-one,” Nancy said. “He’s relaxed, is all.”

“His eyes are like lozenges,” panted Laurette.

Nancy began to arrive early for her lessons. Her costume didn’t change, though—baggy seersucker shorts and a T-shirt. Brown hook-on lenses covered her everyday specs. She carried the news-paper. It became their custom to take a break halfway through the session, sitting side by side on a whitened bench. Leo, who’d grown fond of certain localities during his six months abroad, talked about his favorites. At a certain London hotel, where the tapestries are faded and the linen a wreck, you can feel heir to all that is gentle. Courtyards in Delphi are chalk by day, flame and cinnamon in the twilight. One hesitates to visit the Palais-Royal, yet behind that cold colonnade can be found an ice-cream parlor and a Romanian upholsterer.

“You love to travel,” Nancy accused.

“Sure.”

“People should stay put.”

“Should they? You, too, might like to explore new places.”

“Maybe the Dolomites,” she mumbled.

Leo wore a battered felt hat, the hat of a peddler’s pony. His amber eye reminded her of decongestant. She yearned to paint his throat.

“Let’s go to the movies!” Laurette kept suggesting.

“Let’s!” Nancy swooned the moment she sat down, watched the flick laxly, was always convinced that from this syncope she would emerge altered. Next to movies she liked best to be reading on the porch. By August she had abandoned detective fiction in favor of the fat, lazy novel.

Sometimes she biked into town and moped at the library. Long windows opened onto sprinkled grass. One day at about five thirty she looked up from her book and saw Leo on the far side of the lawn. Beside him stood a young woman lavishly dressed. In the street was his Renault. Leo examined a parking meter, his thumb over the coin slot, his chin on his chest—the meter had contracted something serious. His companion sucked in her stomach. Presently they walked on. Nancy left the library and pedaled toward home. As usual, she paused at a large rock just off the road, near the country club. This boulder overlooked Leo’s home for the season, a one-room cabin that Nancy had mentally furnished with cot, braided rug, and, on a hook, the nag’s hat … She stood watch for a while, then mounted her bike and churned home.

I miss you
, wrote Cynthia.
What are your plans now?

Nancy lay on the glider like a corpse. A straw hat, a boater, rested on her brow.
Sir Charles Grandison
guarded her crotch. Flies buzzed on the ceiling. It was eleven o’clock on a Monday, the first morning of Laurette’s vacation. Laurette stalked onto the porch, wearing a housecoat and a headdress of rollers.

“Nan, I’m going to New York in a couple of weeks. Come along. We’ll stay in a nice hotel.”

“Okay.”

Laurette sat down near the rail and presented her face to the sun. “We’ll have a ball,” she declared. “We’ll get you an autumn outfit—a velvet pantsuit, maybe. Wherever did you pick up that hat?”

“In a charity ward. Will you badger the salespeople?”

“Yep.” Laurette closed her eyes. “Though comedy is my true thing. My ex-husband chose me because I was droll.”

Nancy remembered him, a chemist with an off-center mouth. He had married again, fathered four sons. “Why did you give him the gate?” she asked.

“Thought I could do better.” The woman raised her head and blinked. Sunlight illumined her orange hair. “Do I really—”

“Like sisters,” Nancy assured her.

When Laurette had gone, Nancy peeked again at her other letter.
I love you
, it still said.
I consider that it’s time we
… She stared at the flies for some minutes, during which Mrs. Hasken drifted onto the porch and sat down.

“Would you like the glider, Mother?”

“I don’t think so.” Her face was beautiful despite its extreme thinness. At fifty she had not yet turned gray. She was a woman who had worn hats, hummed tunes, laughed at radio wags. She had endured the illness and decay of the man she loved, and his dying. Alone, she’d attended ballet recitals in drafty barns, clapped at graduations, and waited up for Nancy, lying sideways on a couch whose brocade carved a cruel pattern into her cheek.

“Remember ‘Glow-Worm’?” Nancy asked.

“I don’t think so. That pas de deux?”

“Irma Fellowes pushed me across the stage like a broom.”

“Chubby Irma. She’s married now.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine!” Fingers flew to cheek. “Don’t I look fine?”

No. But Nancy had already spoken with their physician, a belly with a beard.

“High blood pressure,” he’d said. “Under control.”

“Shouldn’t she be on a special diet?” Nancy had asked.

“No. How’s life treating you?” he said.

“So-so.”

“Ha-ha. Lots of chaps blushing you up?”

“Too few.”

“Tsk. Get married, girl,” he advised.

The message was coming through. Marry, said Laurette’s hot eyes—or prepare to wisecrack your way down the years. Marry, warned Phoebe. Or you, too, may play the fool at someone else’s court. “Marry!” Cynthia had wailed, her train a bandage around her arm. “Hey, Nan, get married yourself. Everyone wants to dance with you!” Marry, sighed Mrs. Hasken. Before I withdraw.
Marriage
, said Carl’s letter,
would benefit us both
.

Why not? She was not the sort to set men on fire. She was lanky and ungifted. She was lucky that Carl wanted her. She thought hard about that decent young man, so hard that he appeared before her, scholar, don. To a bunch of small rowdies he might someday be the head. He smiled, nearly destroying her — he had a darling smile. She set him on the rail. Next she conjured up the man she wanted, and after checking him for details—the scar on the knee, the paunch—placed him beside his rival.

Nancy was sure the three of them could find contentment. Wearing knickers and caps, they’d hide out in a cave. Late on a January night they’d spy wolves sliding across the ice. When spring came they’d drift downriver in a homemade raft … She twisted on the glider as if in pain. Young women of twenty-one did not play Huck Finn. They got married, sensibly, or made themselves otherwise useful.

What was up, anyway? Truths ducked their heads whenever she drew near. Also she had begun to suffer from sinusitis. The next morning she rose at five and took a walk in the woods, and the day afterward, also. By the third day of tramping out at dawn she was reliably clearheaded in the morning, enraged by afternoon. She abandoned the sport.

That evening, using some grimy yellow paper, Nancy wrote:
Dear Carl, I can’t, I’m sorry.
Merciful, she stopped there.
Fondly, Nan
, and mailed the thing.

“You don’t look pleased,” Leo said, the next afternoon. No sun, but the fog was scorching. They sat on their bench, Leo wearing his pony’s hat, Nancy her straw one.

“Dysphoria,” mumbled the girl, uncomfortable under his medical gaze. Her chest was abnormally flat, he’d notice; her shoulders too high; the long chin had been designed as a bookmark …

“Hey!”

She roused herself. “Hot,” she explained.

“Too hot for tennis.”

“Much.”

Leo said idly, “Come down to my cabin for a glass of beer.” Whereupon Nancy, in a panic, stammered, “I’m expected at home.”

“Oh.”

“… half a glass. Would be okay. Do you own a half glass?”

“I’ll halve one,” he promised.

A path dived between the trees. Leo led the way. Nancy studied his nape. Soon they were approaching the cabin. She took the last steep run like a novice, arms outstretched, palms prepared to meet a wall. Leo, still ahead of her, opened the door, and she flew past him into the room. She flopped onto the cot and threw her straw hat onto a table. Leo squatted before a refrigerator. Nancy unhooked her Polaroid cheaters. He handed her a mug. She removed her glasses altogether. A blur seated itself in a chair.

“My uncorrected eyesight is 20/400,” Nan opened. “The army would never admit me, except as chaplain. The foreign legion requires reasonable vision, also.”

“Oh.”

“Many important people have been myopic. It correlates with inventiveness and anxiety.” She plucked at the table, found her glasses. Sighted again, she smiled at Leo as if she had outwitted him. “Do you play squash in addition to tennis?” she inquired.

“No. Ping-Pong’s my other sport.”

“Bridge is mine.”

“I prefer poker.”

“Oh yes.”

“Yes.”

Outside, the fog abruptly lifted. Sunlight flashed into the cabin. A yellow diamond fell upon the central oval in the braided rug. Nancy examined the intersection of quadrilateral and ellipse, and reviewed the method for calculating its area. From this exercise she went on to consider certain authors. Oscar Wilde. Thomas Hardy. Shakespeare;
Much Ado
; Beatrice and Benedick and their raillery. Profitable to avoid such nonsense. “We’re alone in your cabin,” she told Leo’s scar. “I’d like to take advantage of the opportunity.”

“Oh?”

“I’m in love with you.”

“Oh. Nancy, I’m old enough to be your—”

“Grandfather. I’ll overlook it. Will you marry me?”

“… no.”

“… I didn’t catch that.”

“No.”

“Unacceptable,” she croaked. “You’re the one I want.”

“Only at the moment,” Leo said, soberly.

“I’m not at all impoverished,” persisted Nan.

“Nancy. Do cut this out.”

“All right,” Nancy said, fast, “then let’s just dwell together. I’ll be your slavey sister. Mend, darn, dish up the stew, rinse out the undies of your paramours …”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

Nancy soared. She felt detached, exalted. To be defeated, she realized, is also to be disburdened. One travels the lighter. Nevertheless … Leo’s cough drop eyes shone. His enormous sneakers were like ocean liners. She longed to embrace his midsection and plunge her nose into his belly. She recalled the arid nights on Carl’s pallet. There might be commerce between men and women that she was as yet ineligible for.

She remained on the cot, in an aggrieved slouch. Stretching one arm she managed to pick up her hat and place it aslant on her head. Then she rammed her fists into the pockets of her shorts. “Care to reconsider?”

“No, puss.”

The boulevardier shrugged. “Then that’s that.”

Leo leaned forward “Hey. Listen. Listening? Fortune favors the brave, Nan. Life won’t find you here. Go somewhere else for a bit. Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong … Hey, sweetheart, don’t cry.”

“… rarely cry. Not crying now.”

He crouched before her, his hands soothing her shoulders. “See the world, girl.”

“Can’t. Have an obligation.”

“Sure. To yourself. Femme up a little. Try Paris.”

“Le haute couture?” she asked, curious.

“La vie. Look at the swans in Zurich. Study the healthy life in Amsterdam. Learn love from Italians, in Rome.”

“I’d hoped to pick up some pointers from you. In Jacobstown,” Nancy said, crustily. Leo, laughing, kissed her twice: hard, cousinly busses. Since a rejected suitor could expect no more, they had to suffice.

At five Nancy biked up to the porch. The women smiled as she swung one leg over the rail. Having decided against rooming with Carl, the girl thought, and having failed with Leo, content your-self with riotous reunions like this one. You may recollect that you have an obligation. Every so often you can chase crazily after the impossible. Diverting! Still astraddle, she endured a vision of herself in the seasons ahead—a dandy’s jacket, a ruffled shirt; praised, indulged; androgynous beyond repair. She blinked the rascal away.

Early the next morning a spare person trousered in denim and stoled in duffel slid out of the Hasken house. On the porch stood three solemn but uncrushed figures. Eyeglasses glinting, Nancy walked steadily. At the bus depot she leaned against the storage boxes. Istanbul? Too thievish. And Zurich was too square. In Amsterdam one could be run down by a bike. She crossed to the counter, bought her ticket, and gazed for a while at the coffee machine. She would make up her mind at Cook’s. Briefly Nan wished she’d enjoyed a more bracing adolescence, wished she’d put to sea before. Then, supporting her duffel bag, she climbed onto the southbound bus.