Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (35 page)

“T
ELL ME ABOUT YOURSELF
,” Marlene chattered to this Rafferty fellow. The wedding was going to her head, as all weddings did. There was nothing majestic about the suburban parish church, but the late September day was beautiful, and the bride, Marlene’s cousin’s daughter, was certainly pretty—she resembled Marlene’s grandmother. The groom was a salesman for the Raffertys. He was handsome in an untrustworthy way: hair too abundant, eyes too calculating, smile erupting with teeth. He might have passed for a young Kennedy. His name, however, was O’Riordan.

Somehow during the reception Marlene had become separated from her husband and their children. At these family affairs Paul and the kids always looked so interesting, or just so Jewish, that they got snapped up like savories. So she had begun to move alone through the receiving line, like a widow—no: like a maiden. Then this Hugh Rafferty materialized at her side. Marlene kissed the bride, Peggy Ann, and told the groom she hoped he’d be very happy. Hugh did the same. They drifted together into the swirl, and Hugh grabbed two champagnes from a passing tray.

“Tell me about yourself.” Not the most sophisticated of openings. But sophistication would leave this man cold—she knew that just by looking at him. She knew, too, that he had been gently bred and properly educated (Harvard, it turned out); he was respectful and observant; his wife was the sort who gets things done (she was director of publicity at a local college, he told Marlene with pride); he loved his many kids. He sailed and skied and played tennis, but a paunch was rising anyway.

His eyes were bright blue and his smile was the turned-up kind that children put on cookies. She meant to slip away as she often did at parties, fearful that she was restraining people ambitious to be elsewhere. But Hugh pleasantly stood fast, telling Marlene about himself. He managed the family lumber business and lived on the South Shore. He was the third generation to do both; love of work and pleasure in home were strong in him. His smile must once have haunted the dreams of virgins …

“You were at Wellesley?” he said. “You’d think we’d have met.”

“I was a fireman’s daughter, on scholarship, from Detroit. It’s my mother’s relatives at this wedding, though she’s gone, so’s my father. My sisters are scattered,” she babbled.

Paul came up. Marlene introduced the men, then said to her husband, “You’ve been a trooper with Aunt Tess. I was watching you. Is it her gout this time?”

“It’s her gums.”

“Are you a dentist?” Hugh asked.

“I’m a radiologist.”

“It’s all the same to Aunt Tess,” Marlene said, and they laughed, and then Hugh excused himself, shaking hands first.

That should have been that. Meeting again seemed unlikely—Hugh halfway to the Cape, Marlene near to town; his crowd rich, hers high-minded. If O’Riordan were to take an ax to Peggy Ann, they might see each other at the funeral, or the trial. Otherwise, no.

They saw each other five days later. Marlene’s avocation—she was an amateur biographer—sometimes took her to the Boston Public Library. Hugh’s work demanded his presence at the company’s Prudential Center office twice a week. He was headed there at quarter past twelve that Thursday; she was about to enter the library.

“Hello!” he called.

The usual flurries. And then—he so easily might not have said it—“Have you had lunch yet?”

“I … don’t have lunch, usually.”

“Then you can’t have had it yet. Have it with me.”

Once in a while at a college party some tall handsome boy, caught by her alert face, had danced with her … She walked next to Hugh, along Boylston Street, along Clarendon. She wished her friends could see her.

They talked easily. Neither liked to worry a subject to death. They passed up wine and shared a dessert. Afterward they retraced their steps. At the entrance to the library she turned and shook hands.

“Thank you very much,” she said, looking up at him. “You’ve reminded me of the pleasures of having lunch.”

“Let me do it again,” he said relinquishing her hand and putting his own in his pocket. Don’t make too much of this, his attitude said.

“I’m here every Thursday,” she lied.

“Next Thursday, then? Tell me where you usually work.”

“I drift from section to section,” she said. “I could arrange to be in bound periodicals. Near
Fortune
, say.”

“Fine. At about one?”

So it began—Thursday lunches. They feasted at taverns and went hungry at salad bars. They ate raw fish wrapped in seaweed. One Thursday when Hugh was in a hurry they sat at a doughnut counter. The next week he insisted on several courses at the Ritz.

At Christmastime they took an enforced break while Hugh and his family went south. In February, Marlene had a week-long flu; that Thursday morning, trembling, she called his office.

“Mr. Rafferty, please,” she said to the secretary, who sounded gorgeous. “Ms. Winokaur calling.”

“Marlene?” he said when he picked up. She had never before heard his voice on the telephone. Her bowels turned to water; but that was probably the flu. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, when she told him she was too ill to come out. “Feel better.” His voice was frank and unashamed. Anyone hearing the conversation would have assumed that they were merely two friends canceling a luncheon appointment.

And were they anything else? Their weekly meetings couldn’t be more blameless if some Sister made them a threesome. They were as public as statues. They talked about politics, basketball, first communions they had lived through, the lives she investigated, the trees he loved. They talked about the few people they knew in common (the young O’Riordans were expecting a baby already). They were like college boy and college girl on that outmoded, rule-bound thing: a date. But dates were only the beginning, weren’t they—the slow beginning of a series that became hurried, became precipitous, came to a head, and ended in either a broken heart or a ceremony in a stone church. “How did I get here?” more than one panicky bride had said to Marlene. How did
we
get here? Marlene wondered now. Where are we going?

On the first warm Thursday in May, they bought a bag of pretzels and ate them on the bank of the Charles. They sat on Hugh’s raincoat. He loosened his tie. Hundreds of men all over the city were loosening their ties in the spring warmth. Yet she had to look away until she felt her flush recede.

They spent most summer Thursdays picnicking on the river or watching swan boats in the public garden. If it rained they sat at a sidewalk café under an umbrella. Their vacations happened to coincide—temporally, not geographically; the Raffertys went camping in Wyoming, the Winokaurs exchanged houses with a family in Hampstead. September found them both back in town. It was almost a year since they’d first met.

The Thursday after vacation, they took a noontime cruise on the harbor. The boat was crowded and noisy. The ladies’ room was out of order. Hugh spilled coffee on Marlene’s skirt. He apologized, but his annoyance seemed directed at her.

“Sorry to be in your way,” she said stiffly.

“Hey!”

And the boat returned so late that they had to take a cab across town. She huddled in the backseat corner and watched his profile. Many a college romance had not survived the summer vacation. As if you could call this romance!
How did we get here?
she echoed herself.
Where are we going? Suppose Paul found out?

Suppose Paul found out what? She and Hugh had never kissed. They had never held hands. Once his knuckles had burned hers as he handed a menu across the table. Once, on the riverbank, he had flipped over onto his stomach beside her and she had placed her hand briefly on his blue-and-white striped back. He’d shuddered and turned his face away …

“Would you like to visit a hotel together?” he was saying now.

Her skirt was still soaked with coffee. “Are you inviting me or the cab driver?”

So he had to look at her. He was unsmiling, and his face flamed like a boy’s.

“Yes,” she said. “I would. I would.”

They knew where to go. Twice they had lunched in the lobby café at the Orlando, a lively salesman’s hotel, and they watched couples without luggage—handsome, well-dressed couples—checking in.

“Next Thursday, then,” Hugh said.

“Next Thursday,” Marlene agreed.

She had never stopped loving Paul. During the week that followed she loved him tenderly, gratefully—loved his short, muscular body, his preoccupied manner, his kindness to their children. One love had nothing to do with the other. Paul was the man she would contentedly grow old with. But though she and Hugh were both past forty, theirs was the brief happy fling of youth. Everything proved it: their indifference to the future, their bright, news-of-the-week conversation. He was her boyfriend. She was his girl.

She wore a new dress—silk, with a dropped waist. It was the color of Hugh’s eyes. She looked beautiful, she hoped … even though her cheeks were a little too round and her slate-colored eyes disappeared when she laughed. Her headful of curls was in fashion. At a distance she could pass for a femme fatale.

And it was at a distance that they saw each other, that next Thursday. She was standing at the rear of the lobby when he came through the revolving door. The lobby café separated them. He made his way among the tables, lumbering a bit, bigger than most men, handsomer than all. The smile curved. It curved, it curved … but falsely; she could tell that at once. “You don’t have to,” she said, under her breath. Then his face was close to hers, so close that she could have kissed him, and who would have thought anything of that?—two old friends kissing, people did it all the time, Paul was always complaining that women he hardly knew embraced him at parties like tango dancers. She said it again. “You don’t have to. Dear.”

“I cannot,” he told her.

She probably could have talked him into it. “I’ve put on my diaphragm,” she could have said, and he would have understood that by that act she had already betrayed her marriage. Or she could have allowed her eyes to fill with chagrined tears. Or her enthusiasm, her delight, might have carried him along. But she didn’t use those wiles.

“You don’t have to,” she said for the third time. “Although,” she couldn’t help adding, “everybody else does.”

He took her arm and led her toward a table. “We’re not everybody else,” he said.

No, they were not everybody else, she thought while pretending to eat her salad. Everybody else—in Boston, in Paris, in Tel Aviv; Protestants, Catholics, Jews; black and white, young and old and rich and poor—everybody else played by today’s rules. Young O’Riordan would turn up in this hotel within a decade. And Marlene’s children, when the time came; and Hugh’s children … Everybody else was up-to-date. But she and Hugh were throwbacks. They were bound to the code of their youth—self-denial and honor and fidelity—an inconvenient code that would keep them, she realized with a pang, forever chaste, and forever in love.

F
OR HIS FORTIETH BIRTHDAY
my father was given a pair of binoculars. His medical colleagues teamed up on the present. He was neither a bird-watcher nor a sports fan, so the glasses just lay on his dresser like a trophy.

They didn’t tempt me at first. I had already been disappointed by his ophthalmoscope, which didn’t magnify a thing. (I also didn’t like the coin-operated telescope on our Connecticut city’s twenty-four-story building, the tallest in New England; as soon as I managed to focus on something through the telescope, my nickel ran out.) But one December afternoon, wandering in an aimless, childish way around my parents’ bedroom, I picked up the binoculars, took them to a window that looked out on the street, and directed them toward a leafless tree. I saw a brown blur, so I fiddled with the wheels on the instrument. Now the tree was hyper-clear, making my eyes ache. Finally, after more fiddling, I saw the tree plain and even vaguely menacing, like my great-uncle at the last family party who had leaned so close to me that his tie swayed in front of my eyes. But when I thoughtlessly reached out to touch the tree’s bark, I touched instead the windowpane.

The side window in my parents’ room, like the windows of the other bedrooms in our end-of-the-row house, looked out at the second-floor apartment next door, also brick, where the Simons lived.

With the aid of the binoculars, I projected myself into the Simons’ living room. Their fireplace was as dark as a cave. On the mantel crouched a humpbacked clock. In one of the two chairs flanking the hearth sat Mrs. Simon herself, her gray head bent. She was crocheting. I could not see the pattern of the work, nor the pattern on her dress, but I could see that her green chair wore a lace antimacassar and that a flared lamp on a table cast its glow on a pile of magazines. There was no television, of course—only rich show-offs had televisions then.

I went into my own bedroom. From there I inspected the Simons’ dining room. An empty silver bowl occupied pride of place on the table. Perhaps Mr. Simon’s colleagues had given it to him when
he
turned forty. I went into my sister’s bedroom. From her window I peered at the Simons’ little kitchen. Two cups and two saucers lay on the drainboard. A calendar hung on the wall, but no matter how much I fiddled with the wheels of the binoculars I could not make out the Simons’ appointments.