Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (42 page)

“You could pass for a Renoir girl,” Henry said. “Beautiful.”

The large circular hotel lobby was beautiful too, in an austere way, all brown plush and rosewood. In the smoking room, a nickel rested in an ashtray. Smoking was not a crime here. “Come, darling,” said Henry.

“O my darling, O my darling,” she sang, and put the coin in her pocket.

A corridor of glassy stores led away from the lobby: window after window of tempting things—leather bags, jade elephants, a pyramid of face creams. “That substance promises the return of an eighteen-year-old complexion,” Dorothy read aloud through the window. “Complete with blackheads,” he promised. Antique books, men’s accessories, luggage, timepieces. A tiny place called Silk. “There’s a security guard,” Henry remarked. “Oh, look at that chess set.”

But Dorothy had dropped his arm. She was lingering at the doorway of Silk: scarves, shawls, handkerchiefs, even gloves, even belts. She floated in. “Are your worms kept in humane conditions?” she asked the saleswoman.

“Madame?”

“I’d like so much to see the scarf in the window, the one where blues shade into one another—yes, that one,” and the saleswoman cupped the item in her hands as if it were a baby and then laid it on the glass case as if it were a baby’s blanket. She from her side and Dorothy from hers marveled at the colors of the chiffon. The woman seemed sincere, but of course she could not feel the power of the blues, the way they called forth Dorothy’s seemly life: the ink of the river at night seen from under a canoe, the ocean’s mauve at sundown; the blue-green of shore reeds, the silver of spray. The brightness of Henry’s young eyes and the cloudiness of his aged ones. The printed morphos on their granddaughters’ pajamas. Her bridesmaids’ gowns had been robin’s egg blue; here was that shade repeated exactly in this fluid fabric. Here were the veins on her hands. Here was the sapphire of the Paris sky at evening. Here was the blue-purple shadow of one statue’s head on another’s paler back in that storage room at the top of the art museum. Here was the cobalt ring of the glaucoma probe. Here was the blue-gray ash that covered the nickel in her pocket. Last was the lilac of her bedroom at dawn.

“How much?” said Henry from the doorway.

“Five hundred dollars,” said the saleswoman.

“Well, well,” he stammered. “I’ve got some fine cuff links.”

“They don’t barter here, darling,” Dorothy said, confidently. She walked toward him, throwing the scarf over her shoulder as if to demonstrate its versatility. She waggled her finger. As if he had received directions, he turned sideways and she nodded and slid past him and began to walk very fast toward the lobby.

“What?—Madame!—shit.” The saleswoman came out from behind the case apparently hoping also to slide by Henry. But he had turned again within the doorway. His hands gripped its silvered glass jambs. His legs were apart on the silvered glass threshold. “Do not pass,” he intoned. The saleswoman ran back to the case and pushed a button somewhere behind it and picked up a glass telephone receiver that had lain unseen on its glass cradle. Henry began to stroll. Dorothy was loping ahead, the scarf bunched over her shoulder, again like a baby. Henry sped up. Security tramped after him, though not too fast—an incident of thievery would be poor public relations. Dorothy reached the lobby. Henry had almost caught up with the graceful sprite, her bun loosening, the scarf now floating from her hand. She wheeled suddenly, and they collided, breast to breast and heart to heart. Mouth met mouth. The scarf fell to the floor.

Some people in the lobby looked up, as indifferent as aristocrats. The Silk saleswoman edged past security, dropped to her knees and crawled to the scarf and pressed it to her heart. Then she stood up and walked away. Security remembered something he had to do, and vanished. Henry and Dorothy unstuck themselves from each other and left the hotel hand in hand and hailed a cab.

The cab drove them to a dockside restaurant. There they looked at the harbor water shivering under the cold October sky. They looked at peaceful gulls and gulls in agitated flight. They looked at one another. They talked placidly and at length about things past, and not at all about things to come.

H
AD HE EVER SEEN SUCH
unappealing trams? Aqua marine, with azalea swirls. But: “Beauty is secondary,” Alain reassured the mayor of Muñez. “My wife would find something to praise.”

And so she would, the generous Isabella. Isabella was blond, and had been educated in the United States—she spoke English even better than he. For all that, she was unmistakably of their country, this coarse little Central American nation. The huge brown eyes told you that much, the curve of the calf, the noticeable clothes. “I am just this side of vulgar,” she liked to tease.

“Beauty is secondary,” Alain said again. Secondary to engineering—the trams were well constructed. Secondary to trade—they were part of an important deal with far-off Japan. Secondary to the governance of the country that he loved immoderately.

The mayor sighed with relief. “Your perspicacity—I gambled on it,” risking a sort of wordplay, for Alain was minister of gaming. Through the years he had become confidante and advisor to almost everybody in government—his colleagues could rely on his discretion and good sense, and his lack of personal ambition let them take all the bows. Today he had come from the capital to inspect the trams on behalf of the minister of transportation.

Now he shook hands with the mayor, and, with grace surprising in a man his size, swung aboard a tram setting off down the broad central avenue. “Smooth,” he called to the mayor from a window, and turned away perhaps a moment too soon. He hoped he’d never have to deal with this lout again, but of course he would: Dealing with louts was part of his caretaker’s job …

Halfway to the train station, he got off and entered a café for a glass of wine and a slice of the local pâté, compounded of anchovies and hog liver. And another slice. During a conference he often thrust something into his mouth to avoid taking the last word. At home he raided the refrigerator. The family housekeeper knew which nights he woke up hungry, though Isabella slept through his absence from their bed. So perhaps he could be considered overweight … not if you asked his staff, who associated appetite with kindliness; and not if you asked the public, who didn’t recognize his rarely photographed face so couldn’t comment on his physique; and not if you asked his tailor, scrupulously silent as he enlarged another garment; but decidedly if you asked his daughter, who called him “Fatty.” Isabella, though, appreciated the extra flesh around Alain’s middle—she liked to finger it, even knead it, during lovemaking—just as she appreciated his bright blue eyes and thick hair. She might flirt with others, but always in the energetic, meaningless way of a woman true to her man. Alain was faithful, too.

The waiter stood ready to stuff another slice of pâté into his customer’s arteries. “No, thanks,” said Alain, smiling. He paid the bill and climbed a narrow staircase to a casino of the exact size—six tables—permitted everywhere except on the coast. There, big resorts flourished, drawing tourists from all over the world.

The draperies in the dim room were closed against the afternoon sun, giving the honest place the atmosphere of a thieves’ den. The croupiers wore ill-fitting tuxedos and the manager’s eyes glided every which way as if on the lookout for police. In fact he had strabismus. Alain bought an amount of chips equivalent to a week’s salary. His companions at the roulette table had the peaceable look of habitués. He played black until he won a few times; then 13 through 24 until he was sitting behind two silos of chips. He ran his finger up them, down them … He bet again: on his wife’s age at their marriage, 22; what a lighthearted loving girl Isabella had been then, still was, despite the decades, despite the death of their son at birth, not often mentioned between them, but sometimes. He did not bet on the boy’s age, which was always zero; and anyway zeros belonged to the house. He bet on the age of their bold daughter, 16; on the factors of his own age, 9 and 5. The darling ball ran, stopped, spun, popped out of its trough, grew still. When he had tripled his stake he quit.

And now he was eager to get home. He walked to the train station. He bought a ticket and boarded the late-afternoon express. The train was sleek and silvered. But Alain and the minister of transportation had persuaded the railroad to give passenger cars an old-fashioned design: a corridor down one side and compartments seating six on the other. Brass fixtures, mahogany panels, conductors wearing high-visored hats and double-breasted jackets—the whole first-class works, though there was just one class of ticket. He took a seat by the window—the train was only half full on this late-afternoon run. When it moved out of the station and turned slightly, revealing its gleaming curve, he leaned forward like a schoolboy and banged his forehead on the window.

The one other passenger in the compartment, seated opposite, made a sympathetic grimace. She was about thirty, and very tall. He calculated that if you added the length of her legs to the length of her torso to the extraordinary length of her neck to the length of her head she would reach six feet, his own height. Her forehead was narrow and her hair was pulled up into a sort of topknot, as if all that was needed to complete her beauty was a little extra height … He could hear his wife making that sort of wisecrack, though of course out of this woman’s hearing; Isabella was rarely unkind. The woman’s upper lip was constructed of two short peaks. She wore glasses: Their extreme convexity told him she was farsighted. She also wore an ur-dress, sleeveless, waistless, ankle-length, the same coconut color as her skin—perhaps she had dyed one to match the other …

She looked up from her book and awarded him a grave smile. “Minister.”

“Ah … we know each other? Forgive me …”

“I am vice president of the Artisans’ Union. You spoke to us a few years ago … about trust. Priests and doctors must be trustworthy. Gambling masters, too. ‘When a country can trust its croupiers the polity is safe.’ That’s what you said.”

The usual speech, no less sincere for being canned. “Forgive me, I remember you now,” he lied. Perhaps she had been shorter then; perhaps she hadn’t attained her full height until this afternoon. Though it was almost evening, wasn’t it. The sun was already on the other side of the mountain. The fields there would be a melting gold, the hills beyond the fields rosy, and beyond them the capital’s mellow buildings would still be drenched in light. But here the silver of the train reflected a darkening green.

“My name is Dea …, ” she said helpfully. He didn’t catch the surname. He was leaning forward again to watch the glistening locomotive penetrate the mountain—the locomotive, and the first passenger car, and the second. Then others, hidden from him as the train whipped itself straight, slid farther in. Their own car entered the tunnel now—there was a black moment. Then the lamps in the compartment began to glow.

He leaned back. She was reading again. Well, he too could read. He placed palm on briefcase; lists and tables lay within, a book of essays on agricultural reform. He read the book’s lengthy introduction. He read the first essay …

There was a dull noise, heavy and prolonged.

There was a powerful shudder which shook both the strong vehicle and the passengers within.

The train stopped.

In an instant uniformed men were running along the corridors—a dozen Charles de Gaulles. Men in overalls and caps ran after them. Bringing up the rear flapped a frightened old woman dressed in black, one of those ancient widows the country harbored.

Dea took off her glasses. Her eyes were the dark indefinable metal of old coins. “What do you suppose?” she said.

A second black witch flew down the corridor—fleeing disaster, she probably thought, but running toward it in fact.

“I think there has been a cave-in,” Alain said. He wondered how much stone and shale had fallen, and how much damage it had done, and whether anyone had been hurt.

Dea craned her long neck toward the window. The lamps within the train went out. The chalky sides of the tunnel turned a fitful lilac—the tunnel’s own electrical system apparently only weakened, not destroyed.

“Someone will give us a report,” Alain said.

“Yes, Minister. We need only make conversation. I was in Muñez buying materials for my work. I am a weaver.”

“I was in Muñez vetting some trams as a favor to the minister of transportation. I am a dogsbody, by choice.”

She nodded as if she understood, and perhaps she did. “Your first name is French.”

“My mother,” he said, packing into those words a transplanted Parisian yearning all her life for the boulevards. “Yours is … theological.”

“Classical. My father was a schoolteacher. And a soccer coach.”

“Ah … and do you follow our national sport?”

“My husband does.”

They had seen the same recent movie, on which they disagreed. But they shared admiration for Borges, for Dufy. They smiled tolerantly at saint worship and all that. Dea was sure that death was soon followed by rebirth. “We travel through lifetime after lifetime,” she told Alain.

A conductor appeared at their door, speaking not only to them but to the whole car, speaking as if through a megaphone. “A wall has crumbled,” he shouted. A little girl ran up to him and pulled at his jacket. “The train—”