Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (2 page)

I wouldn’t say that Gay was affected, exactly. Is it an affectation if the things you say and do run deep, through and through? But you know, even though I ended up living with Gay for most of a year, I was never completely at my ease with her, I never felt that I knew her, not really. Maybe that’s why I soaked up what I could, mimicked her as a way of trying to figure her out.

After our milk shakes that afternoon, we went, as always, to the Park and watched the seals catch those silvery fish flung by keepers, one fish after another; life could be so sardine-y and simple. I always wanted this moment to last forever; it never did. The disappointed seals would slide into the watery murk and swim in urgent revolutions. Ritually, the disappointed child would feed greasy peanuts to squirrels, feeling guilty for eating some.

We would laugh at our reflections in the glass of the monkey house and make monkey faces. (This was always a thrill, as Gay was at other times quite perfectly ladylike.) Then we would hunt for a balloon man so we could buy my requisite
green balloon, and then we would walk back to Sutton Place. So it was on the way back, I guess, that I darted and she clutched. She had to rescue somebody. I had to let her rescue somebody. I had those fingerprints for a long time. I regretted their fading away; I liked them.

So here I am. Anne worries me. Imperial, imperious, imperative. Still the Anne Gordon of Eighth Street days, but not. Wan, thin, pale as a graduate student who hasn’t emerged from library stacks to find out the season. She has developed something far beyond her old queerly tentative self that I suppose you might call a style. But you wouldn’t call it a style; I’m not sure what you would call it. Tootsishness. Isn’t that one of your words? A toots on wheels, you might say if you passed her on the street. Her new look seems to derive from scarves and boots and sunglasses in the hair and eyeliner and I don’t know what else. She’s frighteningly accessorized.

Anne’s arms, for instance, are racked with silver bangles. At first I thought she was wearing Slinkies on her wrists. She didn’t know what a Slinky was, though, when I suggested this. You probably think women should wear one bracelet per wrist. Which makes me think of that day when you stroked my arm for an hour and described all the muscles and nerves under the skin. I hadn’t noticed my arm in years. Not since I was little and used to lick the sun-salt from my arms at the beach when I lay on a towel waiting for the hour to be up after lunch. But I had never seen my own arm through another’s eyes, loved my own arm. The anatomy lesson of Dr. Thorne. Was it three or four hours? (I discovered that evening, in the bathroom mirror, that my face was pinked from the sun. For the next couple of days, people kept asking me if I had gone to Vermont for spring skiing.)

We sprawled on that rock in Central Park and talked all
afternoon, and we weren’t touching except for that one place where your fingertips brushed up and down on the inside of my left arm. That tiny electrical point of connection, those molecules of skin touching. I wanted that moment to last forever. It was only the second time we were together. We had never even kissed. I embarrass myself even now when I think of it. (The smile you are smiling you were smiling then.)

Anne has acquired an edge that was not there in New York. She is even more impossibly affected than she used to be, with her Lauren-Bacall-as-Alistair-Cooke delivery, always amusing in light of her Westchester origins, although she did, inexplicably, go to that hoity-toity Swiss boarding school. Thus her immunity to whole chunks of popular culture.

She loves old movies, for instance, has an uncanny memory for entire scenes, especially the Bogart-Bacall or Tracy-Hepburn ones, and yet she simply has never heard, or never noticed, the music of that vintage you’d think she would also love. The music we love. Anne’s not literally tone-deaf, but she claims that she just can’t remember a tune, not even for five minutes, not even while the song is being sung.

At a Shippen Gallery opening someone once tried to get everyone to sing “Button Up Your Overcoat”—I don’t remember quite why, though I’m sure it made sense at the time—and Anne just wouldn’t do it. Reluctantly, she mouthed the words, but no sound came out.

I’ve tried to fill in some of the lacunae. On Eighth Street, I would endure Anne’s schmaltzy Chopin, and Anne would listen as best she could to my Lee Wiley records. Remedial Show Tunes 101. She had got to the point where she was really taken with some lyrics, though she was still comparatively immune to the music itself; Anne still seemed unable to hear the connection between words and music. It’s a curious deficiency. Now, with Victor, she’s probably done some backsliding into Viennese waltzes and I’ll have to start over.

Even as I write these words, I worry that you won’t like her, that it doesn’t even sound as though
I
like her very much. I adore Anne. And—outside of family—I have never felt as loved by anyone, until there was you. We are so alike and unalike at the same time. And, though I feel these changes in her that I can’t quite pin down, we always used to enjoy our samenesses and differences, if you know what I mean.

How can I describe a friendship in more precise terms? You’ve heard so much, but in bits and pieces. It’s much more than mutual eccentricities and passions for cultural artifacts. We can—or used to be able to—finish each other’s sentences. We just
knew
each other as women can, as men so rarely do, at least heterosexual ones.

Anne’s a terrifically loyal friend, one of the smartest people I know, and she’s not just interesting, she has that rarer capacity of being interest
ed.
And she has a very droll side that unbuttons at unexpected moments, though those moments don’t usually survive in the telling. One of the things I mean to say is that she’s not like anybody else. A teacher at l’Ecole Prétentieuse, or whatever it was called, apparently used to habitually say to her,
“Mademoiselle Gordon, vous êtes une drôle d’originale!”

That’s why Anne in Geneva is such a puzzle to me. I don’t feel that I know what’s going on with this person with whom I used to feel almost telepathically connected. For instance: Benedict, what do you call the meal you eat in the middle of the day? Same here: lunch. One of the most beautiful words in the English language,
n’est-ce pas?
I could swear my old pal and roommate Anne used to call it lunch, too. We used to eat it together sometimes and it never went by any other name. (Certainly not the dreaded b-----, though if it was late enough, we called it “lupper.”) Nowadays she calls it luncheon, as it must be known among the Geneva intelligentsia. But she doesn’t
seem to eat it, oh, no, not our Anne, because during the luncheon hour she is consorting with her married lover.

Even in New York days, when she worked at Shippen, she didn’t exactly always eat lunch in the manner of a normal person, I admit. Unless you call an entire bunch of raw carrots a normal lunch. She did it to save money for going to the movies, she told me. Gloria pays her people slave wages, I know, but still. The first time I ever laid eyes on Anne, she was in that little back workroom scrubbing away at a bunch of carrots over the sink in the corner where the coffee things are. Gloria was showing me the gallery; we were at the nerve-wracking point when she was thinking of putting me in a group show, and I was grateful for the distraction when Gloria introduced me to this odd creature, so angular and Vermeerish at the same time. I was particularly struck by her unusual voice. I didn’t know if I liked it or hated it, but I wanted to hear more. We shook hands, and her hand was wet because of the carrots, and she apologized too much about that. I developed an instant sort of crush on her; she fascinated me.

Once, before Anne left, I met Victor. She and I were roommates by then; it was about six months before she actually left New York to come here. This falls under the Had I But Known category of meeting people. Just as we figure you probably encountered Anne in the course of your own gallery wanderings in those prehistoric days before you and I met, but didn’t know to pay attention. (I still can’t believe I’ve known you only—what?—three months.)

I wish you knew Anne. I wish you could help me figure out what is going on here. When you wandered through shows at Shippen, you probably passed within a few feet of her, when she was filing invoices, or she was stashed away in the back
washing carrots and making telephone calls in various languages. You would be more likely to have chatted up the more visible woman who worked at the front desk there, named Marjorie Something, also known as Our Favorite Anti-Semite. (“A nice fellow,” she would sniff about some client, “although one of the Chosen, I believe.”)

So I met him a long time ago, as it turns out. Victor Marks, I mean, speaking of the Chosen. Anne’s nonlunch date. But at the time I could swear he was represented to me as yet another mere Friend of the Family, an enormous category of humanity known to Anne that seems to embrace half the Eastern European refugee population of the greater New York area. He came to Eighth Street to take Anne out to dinner one night early last winter. I only vaguely remember the evening, and vaguely remember him as some old guy in a blazer standing in our hallway, winded after three flights of stairs. It didn’t occur to me to notice him. It didn’t occur to me in all these months that
that
was Victor.

He even
looks
a little bit like “Daddy” (a dour, retired Austrian baker with a flour allergy whom Anne addresses as Henry, who lives alone with his bitter memories in deepest New Jersey), whose life Victor is credited with saving in a children’s barracks (where they shared a bunk) at Auschwitz. Something about a potato.

How long has this been going on? It was only last winter. Anne says Victor is fifty-nine. He looks older to me. He has a wife, who from Anne’s descriptions has got to be the Polish Julie Andrews, and three young children, whose names, if you can believe it, are Lucien, Otto, and Minerva.

So, after four days here, the routine is more or less this: Anne gets up and does things to her hair and walks into the sharp corners of furniture and mutters,
“Merde,”
and leaves at about
eight. (The
merde
habit is a leftover affectation from her New York days, and she needs to fix it because here it is of course not a charming expression in another language.)

I have the flat to myself for the rest of the day, as she had promised in her letters of enticement this last spring, so I can read and write, or go out and take pictures, and otherwise squander time in splendid solitude. But: every day, Anne and Victor come here, to this flat, for what I believe is quaintly called a “nooner.” And here I am.

So of course here I am not, rain or shine, at the appointed hour. This is a bit much, despite all the thick and thin I’ve been through with Anne. For one thing, and it’s a big one: I am sleeping with her in her bed, as there isn’t a couch, and Anne refused to let me sleep on bedding on the floor. It’s a big bed, and I sleep very much on my own side—you know how little I move in my sleep—but I feel like a voyeur; the bed feels crowded. Much is made of ostentatious sheet-changing on my behalf. But: did Anne tell me about Victor when I won the Swift and we made plans for my month in Geneva? She absolutely insisted that I must stay here with her. So I feel a bit boxed in. I suppose I could look for another place to stay, but that would be insulting and impossibly expensive, and I have no idea how to go about doing it. And I’m not here forever, anyway, just until the end of the month. And I return to the thought that Anne wants me right here with her, for reasons I can’t quite grasp that go beyond any discussed or so far discussable reasons.

And: it turns out that the reason she left her job as the only trilingual staff member at Shippen Gallery (essential slot she filled; they’re bereft without someone to translate foreign auction catalogs and place telephone orders at the Czech deli over on Second Avenue) was Victor. Her job at UGP is a piece of cake, a lot of financial paper shuffling and occasional simultaneous interpreting of meetings between the polite and
cold Swiss men in dark suits who run the front office and the hostile and sneering Arabs—known, I regret to say, as “towel heads”—who secretly control everything. This is according to Anne, who has never before had a grasp of or interest in world politics or oil markets.

UGP seems to be an enormous consortium of petroleum investors. I can’t even determine what the initials stand for, and I have no idea what it is or does. The Arabs speak terrible English that’s mostly strange slangy metaphors, and the Swiss speak equally terrible unidiomatic English that’s entirely correct and formal, and it’s their only common language, so Anne has to convey in French whatever she thinks the Arabs mean to say. Meanwhile the Arabs transmit to her in a not particularly gracious polyglot of German, English, Italian, and street slang they pick up here and there.

The Arabs have provided no opposite number for Anne, as is often the custom in these situations, so when these meetings occur, she has to strain to make both sides feel understood as well as feel that they understand. If world oil prices collapse or something, I think it will be safe to assume that Anne was more concerned with the former than the latter.

All the Arabs have three-day beards and funny smells, according to our representative in the field, who is herself obsessed with funny smells because she is convinced that colleagues around the office—there are about fifty other people there, doing something or other with computers and fax machines and telephones—can tell when she and Victor have been At It. (My theory is that she and Victor are At It so regularly that if there is any sort of clue, no one would notice. Come to think of it, Anne is a bit, well, Clorox-y. I assumed it was her deodorant.)

Anne herself seems to spend a lot of time on the phone, pecking away at a computer, or hovering over a fax machine. When Anne showed me around the office yesterday, after
hours, I could hardly believe that she knew what she was doing there, it’s such an alien setting. Anne has always seemed more a member of the quill pen and sealing wax set. Watching her fax a document was like watching someone rehearsing the stage business for a part in a play.