“Birth,” he said; she’d asked him to correct her errors. “I was born here,” he said, unable to keep pride out of his voice.
“Then exile is unknown to you.”
“Terra incognita,” he admitted, but she had no Latin, and he was obliged to explain the phrase.
Today, while a sudden sun turned Francis’s pale green room paler, they were worrying the subject of representative government. “Didn’t you ever lose an election?” she asked. “In those whole four decades?” She took off her glasses to clean them, revealing the ice blue eyes, the colorless lashes. She put her glasses back on.
“No, I never lost. But sometimes my opponents were obviously unfit,” he said. “The Republicans liked to put up somebody, even if the somebody had no experience, no convictions, no sense of the principles of government.”
“But people voted for you also when your opponent was not an asshole. People wanted you. Why?”
“I identify with the commonwealth,” he ventured. Then, recognizing eagerness in the almost-imperceptible ripple of her stiff face and the shifting angle of her glasses, he continued. “I see the commonwealth as an extension of myself — its public gardens my flower patch, its public libraries my bookshelves, its police my bodyguard, its ball team my …” He glanced at the seventeenth-century map of Massachusetts over the sofa: a retirement gift from his colleagues.
“Please don’t stop.”
“… its ball team my sandlot, its state hospitals my mad aunt.” He was quoting himself, the curse of old age. But she didn’t know that. “I believe that the family, variously defined, defined sometimes as one solitary celibate, is both the paradigm and the ward of the state. I believe that …” Now he did stop. “Louanne … I think that’s enough for now.”
“No, please! Tell me about your first senate running.”
“Race. We’ll take that up another day.”
“All right. And another day, we’ll go again to the museum.”
“Yes.”
“Which day?”
Francis looked at his watch. “This day.”
THEY GAZED AT THE VUILLARD FIRST, as always. The artist’s mother sits in profile at a table, cutting out fabric — the fabric a kind of plaid, her dress a kind of check, the wallpaper dotted with pears. A cupboard is rough country wood. The lamps are unlit and there is no window, but light from an unseen source catches Mme Vuillard’s nape, her bun, her ear, the side of her jaw, her spectacles; it catches, too, a brass bowl, and half of a covered dish. The light comes from behind the painter, or from the painter, or from the man and girl now standing in front of the work. “How natural it all looks,” he said; he’d said it before. “But a painting is an artificial work”—this was a new topic. “ ‘It calls for as much cunning as the commission of a crime.’ ”
She was silent.
“Those are not my words,” he admitted.
“The words of Monsieur Vuillard?”
“The words of Monsieur Degas.”
“Also a bachelor who lived with his mother?”
“No, he had a more … active life.”
They moved away. The girl did not care for paintings of bourgeois characters in their parlors any more than she cared for workers’ posters — he knew that because he knew what she did care for: frontal Holy Families, coy Annunciations. Someday, an angel might appear to her, too, announcing not love, nothing so ambitious, but perhaps, at last, friendship.
They strolled and looked; then, in the museum’s café, they drank tea. Francis ordered ice cream, Louanne a napoleon. “I need its strength,” she explained. She was off to meet her clients, now demanding to be taught slang.
“They are up to no good,” Francis predicted. “Profiteers.”
“I think so, too,” she said with indifference. “Though they are rich already.” She usually conducted the class at their office, but sometimes at the home of one of the clients, an Italianate villa in a western suburb. She had to take two buses to get there, but she always got sent home in a taxi.
“They want to be richer,” Francis told her.
“Doesn’t every citizen?”
They said good-bye under an elm tree. Their small figures were probably distorted by the hunch of their backpacks, Francis thought: they could be mistaken for garden sculptures. Louanne headed downtown to the office of her dubious clients. Francis crossed a city park, ghostly purple in the early twilight. “My backyard,” he exulted.
Yet there were many things they did not have in common, the retired legislator and the sojourner. Language facility, for instance — Louanne spoke Russian, German, English, and rudimentary French; Francis, despite his schoolboy Latin and Greek, was monolingual. Health, for another example — his shortness was merely hereditary, and his heart condition, discovered by lab tests, gave him little discomfort; she, on the other hand, was stunted, and her eyes would need corrective lenses for the rest of her life, and her aunt knew nothing about nutrition. And politics — the elder Zerubins distrusted all forms of socialism, even the mild redistributive tendency of the Democratic Party. They had voted Republican since naturalizing. As for Louanne, she sneered at the presumption of equality. “So everyone has been given the right to higher education by some deity,” she sneered. “And so teachers in slum schools give out A’s for rap lyrics, and two-year colleges teach how to sell advertising on television. Democracy!” She would have welcomed the return of the Romanovs.
Still, how comfortable he had become at their Saturday dinners. The beef and barley stew, discs of fat decorating the surface. The salad — potatoes in sour cream, a chopped scallion the meal’s one green vegetable. A figgy dessert that you ate with a spoon. The dyed aunt, her sequined sweater one size too small. The bald, jowly uncle. The niece. The overhead chandelier casting a rancid light. A wheezing, arthritic dog. The paintings: offerings of magical events in primary colors, all by the hand of a single untalented émigré. A religious reminder: the Giotto Madonna and Child, its gilt frame matching the halos. Francis thought of his beloved Vuillard; and he moved this worthy family from its beige apartment hung with faux Chagalls and one terrible reproduction of a masterpiece into a room of patterns, sunlit through blinds. Everything would be tactile: the mustache of the man, the over-lipsticked mouth of the woman, the spot of gravy on the denim cuff of the girl who was teaching herself to use her left hand. “For what purpose?” she said, echoing Francis’s question. “I want to be ambiguous.”
He didn’t correct her, partly because others were present, partly because she had perhaps said exactly what she meant. In her left hand the fork waved, wavered, and sometimes overturned.
Afterward uncle and niece played chess, and Mrs. Zerubin did needlework, and Francis and the dog watched the fire. How satisfying domestic life was when you could shut the door on it at the end of the evening and cross the hall and then shut a second door, your own.
ANOTHER WEDNESDAY: April now. They discussed love of money. “De Tocqueville noted it almost two centuries ago,” he said.
“You do not love money, Mr. Francis.”
“Well, you see, I have never felt poor. And I don’t care about … oh, fine clothes, or travel, or haute cuisine. And who needs an automobile in this intimate city?”
“So what do you care about? What are your transcendent values?”
She was proud of the phrase; her smirk told him so. Well, if he had to name something: the relative importance of honesty, the primary importance of loyalty … “Truth,” he heard himself lying.
She sighed. “What besides truth?”
“Beauty,” he helplessly admitted.
“Personal beauty?”
He nodded: it was a yes-or-no question.
Her jaw hardened.