Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (27 page)

Well, here he was, his shining armor consisting of very American-looking khaki pants, a button-down, red-striped shirt, a slightly scruffy blue blazer, and most American of all, thick socks and brown loafers. He dropped a necktie over the back of a chair as he came forward to meet her.

“When did you leave your tennis camp?” Anne asked in an attempt to simulate polite conversation, still standing like
a guest in her own flat, every corner of which seemed to be permeated by a conspiratorial atmosphere of connectedness between Benedict and Harriet.

“Two days after I got Harriet’s notebook,” Benedict replied coolly and evenly, keeping his eyes on her face, curious to see her response.

“Benedict calls a spade a shovel,” Harriet interjected. She poked him in the back to make him stop, or at least slow down. “Hey, why are we standing here? You must be wiped out after the day it sounded like you were having. Are you okay? Do you want me to make some tea?” Harriet could hear herself nattering to fill the space.

“Your eyes are so blue,” Anne heard herself saying as she let Harriet steer her into a chair. “Harriet never told me you had such blue eyes.”

“Whatever,” Benedict said.

“Knock it off,” Harriet said crossly, and gave him a little kick.

“I’m sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry,” said Anne, putting her head down on the cool table. Harriet thought Anne sounded as though she were talking to herself. Harriet and Benedict looked at each other over Anne’s head. Harriet thought Anne looked like someone kneeling before a chopping block.

“You’re sorry about …?” Harriet prompted gently.

Anne raised her head and gazed at the wall. She spoke as if she were dictating, in a monotone. “Everything, I suppose. Taking your notebook like that. Ruining your time here. Being rude today on the phone. Being the very bad person that I am …” Anne trailed off.

“Life doesn’t have to be an Iris Murdoch novel, Anne,” said Benedict after they had all been silent for a moment. “Nobody is really keeping track of bad and good like that in real life. We’re not all on a quest for goodness.”

“But they are! We should be!” Anne cried out. “I keep track! You don’t understand. I am
not a nice person.
”

“Yes, you are,” said Harriet. “Hold on. Victor’s not a nice person, but you really are.”

“No,” Anne said in a faraway voice. She seemed quite definite about this. “I’m a monster.” She had tuned them out completely.

“Earth to Anne, come in please,” intoned Harriet in an attempt to salvage the situation. “Hey—we have dinner rezzies at a place with a name like the Laughing Mushroom that was recommended in one of my guides.”

“Surely not,” said Anne in a more normal voice. She turned to look at Harriet. What a wonderful face. She couldn’t bear Harriet’s look of concern a moment longer. “It’s Geneva. Are you sure it isn’t called the Calculating Mushroom?”

Benedict raised his eyebrows at Harriet, and Anne glanced his way and caught him, and they all laughed, and the tension in the room began to dissipate, like a morning fog burning off in suddenly strong sunlight.

Anne’s desk was covered with little pink telephone message slips, though she was only ten minutes late for work this morning. Miss Trout had an irritating habit of organizing Anne’s messages as though she were laying out a game of solitaire. Anne had asked her just to stack them in one place by the telephone, but this was apparently not a change of habit Miss Trout was prepared to undergo. She had stood patiently at the door to Anne’s windowless cubicle, listening to Anne rant on about her message slips while looking down, pushing wisps of limp hair ineffectively behind her ear, and chewing the ends of her blue-framed eyeglasses. Her pale moonface, which was covered with a spray of freckles, had an innocent-schoolgirl look that was deceptive. Miss Trout did not like Anne.

Anne knew that Victor played to good advantage Miss Trout’s slavish secretarial devotion in exchange for the very occasional lingering hand on her shoulder or passing caress of her surprisingly well-formed bottom. Miss Trout had referred more than once to the sole occasion nearly two years ago when she and Victor had worked late one night on a report and they had eaten sandwiches together at a conference table.

Miss Trout had nodded that she understood Anne’s wish
about the messages, but apparently the nod had not been meant to convey any intention on her part to change her ways. Anne suspected that Miss Trout was onto her affair with Victor; she suspected that Miss Trout deliberately spread the messages across her desk as a pink reproach, a silent but effective announcement to anyone happening by Anne’s office that she had been away from her desk for a very long time, and who knew where?

“Damn Sonya Trout. Damn the spotted creature,” Anne muttered as she swept the slips into a pile, then pulled out her chair and sat down at the desk before idly shuffling through them. Most of the messages were from the day before, when the Wednesday meeting with four field directors from the UAE had run through the afternoon and she hadn’t come back to her desk before leaving for the day. Two were encomia about an American expatriate square-dancing group run by Mormons, who had tracked her down as an American living in Geneva; these she crumpled into the wastebasket at her feet.

Dr. Van Loeb had called again. Anne studied the message for a long moment. With regret, she finally tore it into tiny pieces and sprinkled them on top of the square-dancing messages.

One message was from her father, who had called to say he was going to Orlando for a week in case she was looking for him. There was a telephone number for his hotel. Anne was annoyed that he hadn’t made an effort to catch her at home, and she didn’t care for the irritating widow who lived down the street with whom she knew he would be traveling.

Florida in July? Orlando? She cringed at the idea that Selma Glass might have a visit to Disney World on the agenda. Anne had read more than enough about Disney World. A silly Canadian secretary with whom Anne once found herself eating lunch in the UGP cafeteria—when Victor was unexpectedly
requisitioned to entertain some sheikh and was unavailable for the usual luncheon activities—had actually gone there on her honeymoon.

Maybe Selma’s grandchildren were part of the scenario. Anne could picture the unsmiling Henry Gordon stoically experiencing Splash Mountain or whatever it was called. No, she couldn’t picture it. He would wait for them. He would be appalled at the cost of the food, and he would analyze the gluten content of his hamburger bun. He would carry his supply of sadness around with him like a tank of oxygen, and he would take deep breaths from it whenever he felt the need, whenever he felt at risk.

When Anne’s mother died, Henry Gordon gave up. He had made his way to America, changed his name in a burst of cautious yet optimistic ambition, and worked his way up over many years from delivery boy to master baker, despite the ironic flour allergy. He owned and ran three thriving bakeries. He had established a reasonably good life for his young family. His wife, a wholesome, healthy young woman from Ann Arbor, Michigan, by all rights should have lived well into her eighties.

This comfort and prosperity had been achieved despite the sad knowledge that years he should have been learning and studying had been spent in a prison camp, and he would never have the education his parents had intended or the sort of profession they had hoped their only child would have. But when Elizabeth died, he gave up. Henry Gordon had survived Auschwitz but he hadn’t survived the freakish, suburban death of a young wife and mother.

Anne thought her father had been waiting to die ever since. He had researched and organized the excellent Swiss boarding school for Anne, and then he had packed her off, sold the
three bakeries, and retired to an ugly little house in Jersey City, New Jersey. He was fifty-three years old. He had money for the boarding school, he had money for anything he wanted, for two reasons. The bakeries were bought by a giant conglomerate that made a fortune out of Henry’s mother’s strudel recipes, adapted for frozen distribution nationwide. And there were reparation payments from the German government for Henry’s various lost relations.

Sometimes Anne thought he had picked Jersey City because he didn’t know anyone there, for its ugliness (in distinct contrast to the idyllic neighborhood of her early years), out of contempt, out of contempt for himself. She had hated visiting him there in this new living death when she came home from Switzerland on holidays, and when she was at Bennington (where she majored in angst, wearing black, and having an affair with her married, forty-eight-year-old French-literature professor), she hated coming home for the visits that grew shorter and more infrequent. She hated visiting him now.

She wasn’t even sure if she loved him, if love was what they had for each other. Once, soon after the disappointing end of the affair with her professor, Anne had referred to her own deep unhappiness.

“Unhappiness is a stronger bond than happiness, isn’t it?” her father had said to her with a sad smile. “You are very like me, you know.”

His every moment of every day seemed a cynical mockery. He went through all the motions of living. He ate his meals, he read newspapers, he was always neatly dressed, his personal hygiene was impeccable, but Anne knew her father was merely marking time, simulating a life, that he believed it was all for nothing.

When he looked at her, she knew he saw her dead mother in her features. There were no photographs of Elizabeth Byers Gordon around—Henry had destroyed them all, or so he
thought—but Anne had one little dog-eared snapshot that she kept in her jewelry box. She looked at it from time to time. It was startling to realize that she, Anne, was now approximately the age her mother had been at the time of the photograph, a stiff studio portrait taken at an Ann Arbor shopping mall shortly before she and Henry met.

Elizabeth Byers had come to New York for the first time with two college friends, and she had been seated next to him at a stirring performance of
Il Trovatore
at the Metropolitan Opera House. She had never heard opera before. Agreeing to go for coffee with this thin, accented stranger afterward—they had chatted during the intermissions, staying in their seats, her friends abandoning her for the chance to gawk at the crowds on the plaza in front of Lincoln Center—seemed like a continuation of the exciting pageant. It was the most daring thing Elizabeth had ever done.

The last time Anne had seen her father, shortly before she left New York for Geneva, she had taken the train to Newark, where Henry had insisted he would meet her with his car. At the station, she first thought he had forgotten her, but then she had discovered him, finally, sitting in his car out in front. They had driven to his house with minimal conversation, and then he had led her into his gloomy living room and introduced her to Selma Glass, who sat expectantly on his sofa. Selma had offered Anne food as though she were a guest and had later thanked her for coming. Anne wondered how Henry could stand keeping company with this talkative, dull-witted, monkey-faced woman who fancied herself to be Jersey City’s Jewish answer to Gloria Vanderbilt. It seemed another way of punishing himself for having outlived so many people he loved.

Most of the other messages were routine, work-related communications. Clients had to be consulted, reports were due, budgets were in need of figures, audits had to be monitored. Anne was unexpectedly very good at this unlikely job. The one message from today, this morning, was not actually a telephone message, and it was not in Miss Trout’s irritating, feathery ballpoint handwriting, Anne saw, when she reached it. The slip was not signed, but it was written in black fountain pen, in Victor’s distinctive crabbed hand.

“I need to talk to you. Come to my office and see if I am free,” it said.

Anne found him alone at his desk, with curling ledger sheets of comparative quarterly figures laid out in stacks across the surface, and he looked up quickly from his work when she stood in the doorway, as if he had been waiting for her. Victor had a corner office with a window, and it was a real room with a door that closed, not just a partitioned space like Anne’s. He was in his shirtsleeves, and his sleeves were rolled up just a couple of notches. Anne knew just where, up near the elbow on his left forearm, Victor’s number could be found, under the white cotton.

“Ah, Miss Gordon, do come in. Why don’t you shut the door so we have quiet to go over the numbers?” This was for the benefit of any passersby, Anne supposed, though it was an unnecessary charade just now. The hallway was empty, and in any case probably everyone on the floor, if not in the building, knew all about Victor’s protégé, Victor’s piece of ass.

“Here I am,” she said simply, and stood, waiting. How many times had she dreaded a similar summons, only to find that there was either a genuinely urgent question having to do with UGP business, or it was a playful ploy to steal a few intimate moments during the workday? But each time she met with him like this, unexpected dread stirred somewhere inside her.

“How are you?” Victor inquired.