Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (10 page)

So, Benedict. That’s who you’re dealing with: Harriet Rose, faulty to a fault. And while we’re on the subject of assistance that turns out to be interference, or vice versa, there’s another olive in this jar: the family next door, on Rutland Close, the Antlers. I did something that I will try to tell you about someday; I will never know if I rescued them or destroyed them. Maybe it was both.

Sometimes it’s all laughable and unphotographable. Sometimes I can hardly bear it.

Oh, Benedict:

Walking on the streets in the Vieille Ville I find myself hearing the tones and structures of conversations between people, minus the content, because I don’t know the languages spoken all around me. I don’t always even recognize the language. So I am free to make up what they might be talking about. Two old men in impeccable gray banker’s suits, walking slowly ahead of me down the Rue de la Cité, speaking Swiss German (I think), were, perhaps, discussing investments. Maybe they were art dealers. But maybe they were in real estate. Or watches. Maybe they were very elegant criminals, on their way to lunch with Claus von Bulöw.

I found myself thinking about a moment with my father when I was about five years old. When I was little, my father took me with him, probably three or four times, on Saturday mornings when he had work to do at his office during the Christmas rush. (The irony of Simon Rose being in the Christmas-light business didn’t dawn on me until an incredulous high-school teacher pointed it out.) On this occasion, when we were walking along the side street to the parking lot—this was in Long Island City, near enough to the Chiclets factory to smell the peppermint fumes—he began talking to me in a way I didn’t understand. I was holding his hand,
and ahead of us on the sidewalk were two old men in dark coats and round, broad-brimmed hats, and my father began to speak to me in an insanely repetitive sort of question-and-answer dialogue in a tone I couldn’t comprehend.

It took me a few panicked moments to understand that my father wasn’t quoting something I was supposed to recognize, and he hadn’t gone mad and begun speaking two-part nonsense to me; he was parroting the Yiddish conversation taking place a few paces ahead of us. This Talmudic enlightenment/mockery was a typical communication from my father, mine to do with as I would and could. A little Simon Rose
Jew
d’esprit.

Last night, early evening, though still daylight, Anne and I were walking down by the lake, eating ice cream yet again, and ostensibly seeing the
Jet d’eau
, an enormous, pointless fountain. This has always been a difference between us, my ability to wander aimlessly in contrast to Anne’s need for systematic sightseeing goals. In New York, it was bad enough. We would be walking in the Village and she would start haring about, trying to find the house where Washington Irving spent the weekend, or Edith Wharton first menstruated. But in Geneva, she’s gone wild and insists on visitations to places where empresses were assassinated in the nineteenth century and so forth. Voltaire seems to have done something on every street corner. (It was Voltaire who said of Geneva, “There, one calculates, but never laughs.”)

So we were walking along the lake, enjoying being two people in Geneva eating ice cream cones on a summer evening. Anne was telling funny stories about the secretary at UGP, the demonic Miss Trout. (Do you remember the old sanitary-napkin advertisements? Anne has a fantasy advertisement starring Miss Trout, who stands in her slip gazing dreamily into a
glowing copying machine. The caption reads, “Tipp-Ex … because.”)

Though funny, I’ve heard it all before, and I wasn’t paying strict attention. I missed completely the shift to a somewhat nervous undertone with which she started to describe aspects of her sex life with Victor. For Anne to talk about sex in an intimate way is so out of character that I hardly realized it was happening, and I missed the beginning of it.

I had been thinking about the way conversation sounds, and about the way people communicate, if that doesn’t sound pretentious, when I caught a glimpse of a little dark-haired girl walking alone almost alongside us. She couldn’t have been more than eight. I couldn’t get over how much she looked like me, like pictures taken when I was little, I mean. Her hair was bobbed in a pixieish style that was subtly European, though I couldn’t tell you why, but something about her struck me—I just couldn’t get over her resemblance to my eight-year-old self.

I began to wonder, crazily, if she were possibly related to me in some way. She looked like a cross between the child in those snapshots, Ellen—my half sister, though it feels strange and false to write the words—and me. I was imagining that she was listening to our conversation in English, a language she probably didn’t know, and perhaps might not even recognize, and I was just about to point her out to Anne when I tuned back in and caught the tail end of Anne’s confession.

So the first thing I heard her say was, “Sometimes I don’t come.” Having missed the preamble, I tried to scroll backward for the sounds of her words, the way you can tell the time by counting up the number of bell tolls you’ve heard but to which you’ve not paid close attention from the start. But Anne, who ordinarily transmits so elegantly with her BBC–Tammy Grimes enunciation, was here talking in such a soft, mumbly rush, I just hadn’t heard it all. And I could hardly say,
“Sorry, I was just indulging myself in fantasies that the little girl over there might by some preposterous twist of fate be a long-lost relative. What was that you were saying about being nonorgasmic?”

“Victor says it’s because I worry about it too much,” she concluded.

“Do you?” I tried to sound as though I knew for sure what we were talking about. I guess I did.

“I worry that it hurts Victor’s feelings—it makes him feel that he’s not attractive enough to me.” Anne eyed me for a moment while she crunched the end of her cone. She pushed a straggle of hair out of her face. She suddenly looked not so much beautiful as pathetic to me. She looked very young and at the same time haggard, and I was overwhelmed by how hard she works at all this. “He thinks you’re very attractive, I think,” she added, as if this were significant to the discussion. She looked away. She looked embarrassed.

I looked around, hoping the right answers might be nailed to a tree. The streetlamps had come on, though the evening was still bright. It was getting chilly, and the little girl had disappeared. The park was filling up with a different kind of people, and some sort of brass band had begun to play in a pavilion we had passed. Whose idea was this relentless and everlasting Scott Joplin craze, anyway?

“You don’t seem very happy,” I observed, feeling silly for being so American and direct with Anne, she who had become so European and complicated.

“What I require is the proper squire?” she said scornfully. But then she burst into tears.

I put my arms around her, tentatively, what with all the chains and scarves and makeup. We used to hug all the time in Eighth Street days, we even held hands walking around the streets, though it always seemed to me that Anne rather liked
the effect—that she rather liked imagining the assumption on the part of passersby that we were a couple.

In any case, here we rarely touch at all; it’s been as if she were reserved for Victor in all ways. And sleeping in the same bed as we do has led to a kind of exaggerated respect for personal space. My God, she’s become thin and bony. She felt incredibly insubstantial as we stood there by the lake and she sobbed on my shoulder.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she murmured in my ear. I could feel her tears trickling down my neck.

“Look,” I began. How to begin? “Is this what you want? This whole life? Being somebody’s mistress? Or is this only a mood, a brief interlude?”

“Yes. No. Oh, I don’t know.” She straightened up and peeled herself away from me. I gave her a crumpled Kleenex from the pocket of my cardigan, and she snuffled into it.

“For someone who claims to be doing what she wants, you seem tortured,” I said, feeling unkind in my directness.

“It’s simple for you, you’ve got this Benedict.”

(Well, true.)

“Anne, do you love him?”

“It’s got to be love,” she began, and then our eyes met and we both laughed. Us again.

“Feels like tonsillitis,” she whispered a little sadly. (Oh, A for effort! This touched me. When we met, Anne thought Rodgers and Hart were the guys who did the six-o’clock news.)

“Well, you’re not going to meet a nice, unmarried member of your own peer group this way,” I blundered, killing the moment. Worse, I continued, in a terrible mock Freudian accent, “Und vy do you suppose you are attracted to a man who so closely resembles your fadder, Miss Gordon?”

“Incest is relative, is that your point? Thank you very much for the profound insights,” she snapped.

I felt myself becoming impatient back: “Look, you’re telling me that you don’t get much pleasure out of all this ‘luncheon’ sex with him, you seem agonized, and I really don’t understand what goes on here. Do you?”

“I know we love each other, in a way. We need each other.”

“Tell me his wife doesn’t understand him, Anne.”

“She doesn’t! You’re so cynical! He never meant to marry anyone. He was trapped into marrying Annamarie in order to get her a visa. He felt sorry for her.”

(Right. He thought three children and twenty years of marriage might cheer her up. Very considerate.)

“You’re missing my point, Anne. I’m asking how you feel, not about the rationale.” By now, I felt as though Anne was responding to me with the warmth she would have for her incompetent lawyer, visiting her on death row.

She looked out at the breeze-pleated lake. It was darker and colder, and she shivered and hugged herself. Most of her new getups are witchy outfits of sheer black God knows what, and they don’t look warm. She was wearing a skirt thing and a blouse thing, but words fail to capture the complication of layers arranged on those bones. She had a shawl thing, too, that was mostly open-work knots of I don’t know what—horsehair.

I put my arm around her shoulder and squeezed her, probably a little too heartily. We stood together for a moment looking out at
Jet d’eau
spray blowing in a Disney-esque illuminated sheet. I was about to ask her if she would seriously consider coming back to the States with me at the end of the month when a hand clapped down hard on my shoulder and startled the life out of me; it was Victor.

“Am I intruding on an intimate moment between old friends?” He insinuated himself between us and in doing so levered my arm up and away from Anne.

Neither of us answered him for a moment too long.

“So. Maybe a
very
intimate moment between old friends.” He dropped his hand from my shoulder and in doing so gave me an almost imperceptible push away. “Yes, it’s clearly quite a friendship. I hadn’t realized. This is very interesting, my darling.” He stood close behind Anne with his arms circling her, and with his eyes on me, he began to nibble along the side of her neck. She looked at me with imploring eyes I couldn’t read.

They give me the creeps, Benedict.

After another long, awkward silence, with nothing else to do, the three of us began to walk back toward the Vieille Ville. Nobody talked. The two of them were in a close lockstep, while I kept feeling as though I were constantly moving either too fast or too slow; however I paced myself, I kept having to pause and drop back or skip along to keep up. At one point, when I stopped to adjust my sandal strap, they got so far ahead of me that I had to run to catch up. And afraid of a disaster, Miss Clavel ran fast and faster.

We were going at a brisk pace up a steepish street lined with galleries and antique shops only a couple of blocks from the flat when Victor stopped—we all stopped—and said, “So, what is the plan?”

I wasn’t sure whom he was addressing at first. Anne said nothing and seemed suddenly transfixed by the very bad imitation Nicolas De Staël painting of boats that was ostentatiously displayed on an easel in the window of a gallery.

“The plan for the night, the plan for tomorrow, the plan for the rest of our lives?” I realized as I spoke that Victor was so agitated and humorless that he probably thought I was mocking him.

“Let’s start with tonight,” he said, smiling/glaring at me. (Just watch those icicles form.)

“Don’t. Please don’t,” Anne whispered.

“Look,” Victor said to me, taking me by the sleeve and
walking us a few feet beyond Anne, who remained transfixed by the gallery window.

“What is your agenda for Anne?” He spoke to me as though these were his opening remarks at a business meeting.

“I’m not sure I know what you mean. I don’t have an agenda for Anne. I don’t have an agenda.”

“Everyone has an agenda,” Victor explained wearily to me. “Of course you do. We all want to make other people agree with us, we want others to be more like ourselves. That’s perfectly natural. What do you want for Anne? What is your plan?”

“If I have what you call an agenda for Anne, I suppose it would be to see her be her best self. How’s that?”

“Then we have the same agenda for Anne. But we do not agree about the things her life should consist of. For instance, you do not approve of me, do you?” He didn’t wait for an answer to this and went on, “I, on the other hand, approve very much of you, both as a friend for Anne and because you interest me very much.” His grip tightened on my arm. I didn’t like it.

“Victor, what would happen if your wife, or a friend of Annamarie’s, were to come along right now? How would you explain being here with Anne, with me?”

“That would actually be useful,” he said, intrigued by the possibilities. “You see, I would then do this”—at which he seized me in a parody of a romantic embrace and kissed me on the mouth.

He had the foul breath (with a veneer of peppermint) that I guess I always assumed would go with his yellow teeth. I had unkind thoughts about the absence of flossing materials at Auschwitz. The skin of his face was strangely cold. I shoved him away, harder than necessary. Anne, looking terrified, stood frozen and murmured, “His back.”