Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (25 page)

Harriet opened Anne’s closet and moved the door back and forth until the mirror on the inside was angled properly. She stepped back to the dresser to where she had been standing and turned around. In the closet-mirror reflection she saw herself, the dresser behind her, the flowers, the objects on the dresser, and reflected in the mirror over the dresser, her own back, and the reflection of this reflection. The morning light lay like a layer of transparent film over every surface. She framed it, focused, and made several more exposures. In each picture her hands were on the camera in front of her as though it were an exposed organ of her body.

The doorbell was ringing. Harriet couldn’t imagine who it could be and entertained the transient concern that Victor had come back with more buttons missing. She stood frozen on the spot, the camera dangling from the strap around her neck, deciding not to answer the door, deciding to answer the door. The buzzer sounded again. It wasn’t in any particular pattern, not Victor’s ring for Anne. Then Harriet heard an impatient Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits, and she broke free of her indecision, crossing the room toward the door while doubting her sudden impulse—it couldn’t be—but surely no Swiss postal worker would ring the bell like that; it was probably forbidden under the regulations. She fumbled the door open.

Benedict filled the doorway. He put down his old beat-up suitcase and slung his jacket over a shoulder. “I thought I might find you here,” he said, and grinned.

“Moholy Nagy!” Harriet cried out, and then stood there, gaping. She could actually feel her mouth hanging open, one of Gay’s top-ten despised habits. She closed her mouth and swallowed.

“I know. Do you think I could come in, sweetie?”

“Jiminy H. Creepers, Benedict! Don’t do this to a person!” She flung the door open wide so hard that it banged against the wall.

“A very grown-up, modern flat, indeed,” Benedict said, kicking the door closed behind him and looking around curiously.

He parked his bag by the door and draped his jacket over the back of a chair.

“What?”

“I was agreeing with you about Anne’s apartment. God, I’ve missed you.”

Benedict circled his arms around her tenderly, gracefully. They kissed briefly, shyly. Harriet had dressed somewhat oddly for the pictures and was self-conscious about being found this way, like a child doing dress-up. She looked good, though, in an antique paisley skirt and a skinny, clingy black shirt. Anne’s new persona, or whatever it was, was actually beginning to have an osmotic effect on Harriet. She relaxed into Benedict’s chest and breathed in his smell: laundry soap, sweat, airplane, and underneath it, that true essence of Benedict she had only smelled elsewhere, once, on a newborn baby: a gingery, apricotty sweetness. She began to cry.

“Why the tears? If it’s me after that flight, I promise I’ll take a shower.” Benedict pushed her back gently in order to lift her camera strap off over her head. He placed the camera on the
table, and then folded her into his arms again, murmuring, “This is where you belong.”

Harriet wiped her nose along his tattersall sleeve.

“I don’t really know why I’m crying,” she began. “But you won’t be able to take a shower, actually, just a sort of squatty rinse. But you’re not smelly, you never are.” Harriet leaned back to look up into Benedict’s lapis blue eyes.

“Hey—too much sun.” She traced his sun-weathered hairline with a fingertip. He had the sort of tan that sunburns turn into, and his terrier eyebrows were bleached nearly white. He looked good, though tired. His nose was peeling. His hair was slightly too long. Until now, Harriet had always thought Benedict looked prematurely old for his twenty-eight years, in a weatherbeaten, Steve McQueen–ish sort of way, owing mostly to the cumulative effects of years of summer sun on his fair complexion. He had tiny crinkles around his eyes when he smiled. But compared to the dryness, the brittleness, of Victor, Benedict seemed buoyant, boyish.

“Now that I’m beginning to believe that you’re really here, and that you aren’t a Fig Newton of my imagination, I’m getting worried,” Harriet said. “What happened to Highland Lake Tennis Camp? Or are you here with such horrific bad news to tell me that you had to do it in person? What on earth are you doing here?”

“No bad news, don’t worry. Sorry, I certainly didn’t mean to scare you—I didn’t think of that. Christ, no, nothing’s wrong. I quit, and it’s all worked out with the Hodgsons. They knew they had me on borrowed time this summer anyway. I told them the truth—that I had made a mistake letting them talk me into coming back this summer, that I was burnt out and impatient with the campers, that I needed to pursue my painting, pursue you. I’m going to go back after Labor Day and paint the cabins, as penance. In their Quakerish way, I think
they drove a hard bargain, actually. It’s rained a record-breaking amount this month, and the courts were unplayable a lot of the time. Two other counselors can take over my art program. They were slightly overstaffed this year anyway, so my going was actually helpful to them.”

“Well, that’s all fine, but I still can’t quite believe you’re sitting here. You know, I almost didn’t answer the door.” Harriet put her back against the wall and slid down to a sitting position.

“I was going to call from the airport, but the flight got in so early I didn’t want to wake you, and then when I got out of the taxi on the street, I couldn’t find a pay phone, and it began to seem silly not to just come looking for you. I figured that Anne would be at the office.” Benedict glanced at his watch, which was still on New Hampshire time.

“Almost five
A.M
. my time.” He reset his watch. “By my calculations, that means we have to vacate the love nest within the hour.”

Harriet stared at him. She felt a wave of dislocation she hadn’t experienced since childhood, and an old sense of lostness. It was hard to distinguish the floor from the walls. It was hard to figure out where she left off and the tilting room began. She put her head in her hands to try to slow her racing thoughts. Was anything as it seemed? Was her mind somehow leaking?

“How. Did. You. Know. That.” Harriet spoke with her head still in her hands.

Benedict knelt on the floor in front of her and took her suddenly clammy hand between his. “I am so sorry,” he began, and rubbed her hand between his, as though she had just come in from the cold. Harriet noticed and took comfort in the fact that he was wearing a pair of khakis they had bought at the Yale Co-Op a few months before, when they had driven up to New Haven to see some Fox Talbot photographs at Yale. “I’ve
done this crazy thing of showing up, and you must think I’m playing mind games with you, and I’m not explaining anything very well. Hold on.”

He turned and reached with one hand for his bag, keeping hold of her hand with the other. He dragged the suitcase close and slipped his hand gently out of hers, as though she were so fragile that he didn’t want to risk doing her any more harm. Benedict rummaged for a moment in the outer zipper pocket. He pulled out a thick manila envelope and held it out to her. It was addressed to Mr. Benedict Thorne at Highland Lake Camp in Ardfield, New Hampshire, in thick block printing. Postmarked Geneva just five days before, the envelope was plastered with express-delivery stickers and Swiss postage stamps.

“I got this on Monday. Go ahead, look inside.” Benedict still knelt in front of her, and when Harriet didn’t make a move, he opened the flap and shook out the contents into her lap. Harriet’s spiral notebook flopped out.

“My letters! Your letters. Whatever. How on earth—” Harriet snatched up the envelope and studied it for a moment.

“Benedict—this is Anne’s handwriting, I think. Oh, shit. Oh, Christ. Oh, man oh Manischewitz. I’m so confused my head hurts.”

“Harriet, can you take us to one of those cafés with the expensive pickles and coffee ice cream? We can figure everything out. It’s all going to be okay. But we’ve got to get out of here before Anne and Victor arrive, don’t we, and I’m starved. Aren’t you starved? I’ve never known you not to be starved.”

Benedict said he wanted to sit in the sun, because he was the kind of bone-cold you can be when you’re jet-lagged. He had located one of his old cotton sweaters in his bag, and he was now wearing the sweater under his tatty old summer sport
jacket, but it was a breezy day. Harriet sat at their little table in a chair that she hitched around the table to be closer to him. There weren’t any other empty tables. It was early for lunch, but most of the tables were occupied by newspaper readers drinking coffee, or by pairs of women leaning together, talking avidly, their cups empty, their napkins frankly crumpled on the table. Few American women, thought Harriet, would be capable of the particular self-confidence necessary to occupy café tables indefinitely.

The moment Harriet crossed her legs, Benedict pulled her suspended foot into his lap and hugged it there, like a prized pet, saying, “
Brrr.
Warm me up.”

The waiter, who was accustomed to serving her solitary lunches that she ate with her nose in a book (mostly oblivious to the student romances and intrigues surging all around her), beamed his approval at Harriet. She imagined him thinking the Swiss-waiter equivalent of
Finally landed one.
He wiped away a few crumbs and dropped little Café Clemence menu cards on their table. Never before had he bothered to clean anything for Harriet before she actually ordered, not even disgusting plates of other people’s leftover food in which cigarette butts had been stubbed out.

They decided on grilled marrow bones with toast, the waiter responding with great animation to Benedict’s questions. Harriet had never ordered anything nearly so imaginative. With Benedict here, being so lively and curious about everything, she was mildly ashamed about her dull choices day after day. Why didn’t the range of possibilities so evident to him at all times ever seem to occur to her when she was on her own? Why hadn’t she ever ordered grilled marrow bones? She was beginning to feel put back together.

Benedict began to stroke the side of Harriet’s foot. He unbuckled the sandal strap (Harriet never bothered with the buckle and found this attention somehow touching) and
dropped the sandal under his chair. He stroked her naked foot and she felt a shiver of pleasure go directly from her instep to
there
, and she felt her face go pink. Her toes flexed involuntarily, and she murmured, “Benedict, you can’t do that here.”

“Carpopedal spasm. Look.”

The waiter came with their place settings and Harriet sat up and slid her foot back into the sandal. Before long the waiter returned and grandly unfolded a white linen napkin to reveal the grilled bones nestled within. He poured their mineral waters, indicated the basket of toasted bread, and made a big show of withdrawing discreetly.

While they ate, mostly in companionable silence, Harriet found herself studying Benedict’s face. She knew it as well as she knew any landscape, but the moment she’d seen him in Anne’s doorway, she felt that she had forgotten some essential aspects. Sitting here, she developed a retroactive missing of him that was like an ache.

“Sometimes,” she said, chasing a morsel of marrow around the inside of a bone with a doll-sized fork, “I think I take pictures because I have a fear of forgetting faces.”

“Or a fear that your own face will be forgotten? Not a worry, in your case.” Benedict leaned back and stretched his arms over his head.

He looked at his watch. “So,” he said. “Are they At It right now? I thought of a palindrome for them on the plane: sex at noon taxes.”

“I guess I can’t be annoyed that you read all the letters.”

“Harriet, I suppose you could, but there was no return address, and then I saw that the notebook was in your writing, and it was, after all, addressed to me. Not just the envelope, I mean, the notebook was. By the time I realized that you hadn’t sent me the notebook—when your letter arrived on Tuesday—I had read it all.”

“Amazingly speedy mail service, for once. But you must
have thought it was a bit weird of me to send you the notebook with no explanation, if you thought I sent it.”

“A little. But when I realized that you
hadn’t
sent it was when I got even more concerned. I mean, think about it, Harriet. Why did Anne send your notebook to me?”

“Are we sure it was Anne?” Harriet said a little desperately, hoping for some other explanation. They both waited to speak until a matched pair of noisy motorbikes roared around the square and up the street in the direction of the university. The stink of their exhaust hung in the air.

“Aren’t we? I think so. Where do you think she got the notebook? When you wrote, you said you thought you might have lost it somewhere out and about.”

“That’s true, but the last time I know I can remember seeing it was on the table, in Anne’s apartment. Flat. Whatever.”

Benedict turned his palms up. “Face it, sweetie, your friend Anne is a little, what shall we say, kookamoonis.”

“Is that a diagnosis, doctor?”

“Harriet, don’t be peeved. I don’t know Anne, but I’m here because of you, not her.”

“So, why exactly are you here? I mean, Benedict, I’m truly thrilled to see you, but what is going on? You didn’t bring any painting supplies, did you?”

“Only a little pocket set of watercolors. No, not really. I didn’t come here to paint. Put simply—and I almost tried to explain this to the unctuous creep at Swiss immigration, but then thought better of it on the grounds that he looked as though he would love an excuse to do a body-cavity search—I’m here to rescue you from rescuing Anne.”

“Is that what I’m doing?” Harriet felt flattered and annoyed at the same time.

“Rescuing Anne? It seemed to be what you were headed toward. And I don’t think your friend Anne can be rescued, by you, anyway. I don’t think it’s up to you. I think you could
get in a lot of trouble for your trouble. It sounds as though she’s building up to an awful letdown, to use one of your lines.”

“Thank you, Benedict Thorne. It’s really very grand of you and I am exceedingly grateful that you have gone to all this effort. It’s a wonder I’ve survived all this time without you.” Harriet was now really irritated. The café chair was suddenly flimsy and uncomfortable, and she felt restless. She had the fleeting thought of just getting up and walking away. But she had to ask herself: From Benedict? Or from what he had to say?