Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (29 page)

At dinner with Harriet and Benedict, Anne skillfully deflected the talk away from herself by interviewing Benedict about his life. On the walk to the restaurant (which was in an out-of-the-way financial neighborhood in a part of Geneva even Anne had never explored before; the restaurant’s name turned out to be Le Champignon Outré) Anne noticed that Benedict
didn’t so much walk as lope. He was so distinctly American in every movement he made. Harriet and Benedict walked close together, holding hands, and Anne tried to stay abreast of them, but kept having to drop back because the sidewalk was too narrow in places. It crossed her mind that this was the way Harriet must have felt all month when out with her and Victor. As they reached the restaurant, Harriet stopped at the alleyway beside the front door, to talk to a ginger tomcat who was sitting imperiously atop a rubbish barrel.

“Handsome puss,” she told him admiringly, and he butted his head up under her hand appreciatively.

“Has Harriet told you her racist theory of cat personalities?” Anne asked Benedict.

“Harriet has told me many of her theories, but I might have missed that one.”

Harriet was annoyed that Anne was putting her on the spot in this way, demanding a performance and at the same time demonstrating to Benedict her own closer ties to Harriet. She obliged, however, with a summarized version: “Ginger cats like this fellow are the most reckless. Black-and-whites are dumb. Gray tigers have the highest IQs. Persians are gay. Siamese are schizophrenic. And so on.”

“Mrkgnao,”
said the cat.

“Doze was certainly reckless,” Benedict said after another moment. Harriet continued to stroke the cat, who had begun to purr.

“Doze was mine, you know,” Anne said.

“That’s not true!” Harriet argued. “They were both yours and mine together.”

“Whatever you say,” said Anne.

Harriet thought of a moment in Central Park, years ago, when she and Adam had been taken by Gay to watch the seals. They had just bought two identical green balloons, and Gay was standing still, holding them, the string wrapped around
her gloved hand, while both children, who were sitting on a park bench, finished up their ice cream cones. (Gay loved ice cream, but would never have dreamed of eating ice cream with her hands and thought ice cream cones were only for children in any case. At Gay’s, ice cream was served on a plate and eaten with a fork and spoon.)

One balloon suddenly exploded with a bang. “Look, Harriet,” Adam had screamed out, ice cream smeared around his mouth and dripping down his chin, “Your balloon popped!”

Benedict’s bony hands—dusted with fine golden hairs and sprinkled with freckles like some wonderful spice—as Anne studied them discreetly at the table, were beautiful to watch in motion. The way he held his water glass, the way he sipped from it. He kept touching Harriet briefly, lightly. From the moment Anne had come into the flat a couple of hours before, she had felt that the sum of Harriet and Benedict together was a solid, substantial thing, an object, like a gold ingot. Her romance with Victor—whatever it was, whatever it was to be called, her affair, her passionate connection to the man—now felt tenuous, faintly ridiculous, artificial, insubstantial.

I am bleeding to death and nobody has noticed, Anne thought. The blood is invisible, but I feel lighter and lighter as it drains from me. Soon I will be gone. Her headache had settled in for the night, and it throbbed behind one eye, but she didn’t care; it was a punishment Anne welcomed. I am getting to be like Henry, she thought once again, as she did now several times a day.

During drinks, she extracted from Benedict his basic life story: Benedict grew up in a small Massachusetts college town, his father an American-history professor, his mother a frustrated cellist who had given up a promising career in order to provide her husband and three children with a wonderful
life and homemade bread in their Victorian farmhouse. Benedict was the youngest, an afterthought, he discovered during an adolescent conversation with his father about the perils of unprotected sex.

“You were a train whistle in the night,” his father had said. “A most delightful surprise, however,” he had added hastily and somewhat unconvincingly. Benedict had been named for Benedict Arnold, a remote ancestor on his father’s side, through marriage. Benedict’s father’s doctoral thesis was a consideration of that cousin, Margaret Shippen, Mrs. Benedict Arnold, and her relationship to Major André.

Harriet interrupted here to point out the coincidence of her being represented by the Shippen Gallery, and Benedict said that he had often wondered if Gloria Shippen was a distant cousin.

“It’s probably why we met,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever admitted to you that I crashed your opening that night. I wandered in the door basically because the name Shippen has always intrigued me.”

“Well, whatever. We would have met sooner or later,” said Harriet.

“Probably so,” Benedict agreed, gazing at Harriet fondly.

Anne watched them look at each other and remarked, “In certain cultures, there is a belief that when people look into each other’s eyes, their souls travel out of their bodies and meet halfway, to join together.”

“What if a bus were to come along between them just then?” Harriet inquired brightly.

Benedict laughed, and Anne smiled briefly. There was a self-conscious lull, and then Anne asked Benedict another question about his family. Benedict’s two sisters were married and had children. They lived in towns not too far from the Thorne ancestral manse. Benedict was the only one really to leave, which he had done by going off to New York to study
painting at the Studio School, on Eighth Street. Anne, Harriet, and Benedict reckoned that they just missed overlapping on Eighth Street.

By the time Harriet and Anne were living in the apartment just a block away from the Studio School, the apartment Harriet shared now only with Bask (who was staying at Gloria Shippen’s for the month), Benedict had finished school and had moved away from the Village to the sunny top floor of a brownstone way out west on West End Avenue, where he lived now, the tenant of an eccentric picture framer who was occasionally willing to take art in lieu of rent money.

They had sorted out their parallel time lines to this point when the waiter came back for the third time to see if they were ready to order. They decided to share a fondue and a big salad, and Benedict selected a spicy Alsatian wine, though not, Harriet and Anne were separately relieved to note, a Gewürztraminer. Harriet’s and Anne’s eyes met, and they both grinned.

“You two, no private jokes,” Benedict complained good-naturedly.

“I think that all I have done in Geneva is eat in restaurants,” Harriet said.

“It may be the only meaningful activity here, actually.” Anne returned to Benedict’s life story. “Are your parents living happily ever after, then?”

Harriet and Benedict exchanged unhappy looks. “No, God no,” Benedict said after a moment. “My dad had an affair with a student two years ago, and he and my mother are still in the middle of a stupid divorce.”

Harriet was uneasy, knowing that this was a sad subject for Benedict. He had believed in his happy golden childhood, and in his wonderful family, and this turn of events had been grindingly horrible for him. Telling her about it the first time, he had wept in her arms.

Anne flushed, thinking of her college affair with the married
professor. She had been desperate for him to divorce his wife. She had even planted incriminating evidence in his coat pockets, twice, in the form of incendiary love notes full of explicit references that she hoped would be discovered by his wife, but nothing had ever resulted. The affair had ended when he went off without warning for a sabbatical year in France. Here I am again, Anne was startled to realize, repeating history.

“Does your father still see the student?” Anne asked.

“No, that ended badly, and then he got involved with my mother’s best friend. Now they’ve broken up, but he’s going out with someone else, I think. I don’t know. I’m not in touch with him at the moment.”

“From worse to bad, then,” Anne said, feeling sorry for the student who had pried him loose, only to lose out to another woman.

“Well, my mother is pretty depressed, as you can imagine. She’s gone to work in the public library now. Look, can we get off this subject?” Benedict’s mouth was turned down at the corners, and Anne thought he looked as though he might cry. What a sweet soul. Harriet had taken his hand and was squeezing it.

“Speaking of marital infidelity and betrayal,” Harriet said brightly, “what’s up with Victor? Where is he? I do want Benedict to meet him.”

“I’m sure you do,” Anne replied. The waiter brought their fondue just then, and for a while they dealt mainly with strategies for dunking the bread in the molten cheese without losing it. They all three burned their mouths in the first few minutes, despite mutual avowals and warnings to avoid doing precisely this.

“The Old World evolutionary forerunner to pizza mouth,” Benedict pronounced ruefully.

“To love and friendship,” Harriet said suddenly, picking up her wineglass. Benedict and Anne picked up their glasses.
They held them up together, clinked simultaneously, and drank. Anne burst into tears.

Benedict and Harriet exchanged puzzled glances. Anne looked up and said, through her tears, “Stop giving each other secret looks.” She wiped her face with her dinner napkin and slowly folded it into a neat square in front of her. After a long pause, Anne quietly said, “I’m all right now,” having swallowed back down her anguish.

“What’s up?” Harriet asked.

“Oh, I’ve had a bit of unpleasant news at UGP,” Anne said lightly.

“Are they in trouble? Is an international oil cartel looking for you because you missed a decimal point? Have you embezzled from the Kuwaitis? Have you been a spy for the State Department? Do you need to enter the Witness Protection Program?” Harriet began one of her freewheeling tangents.

Benedict nudged her. “Let Anne explain,” he said gently.

“Victor has been promoted. He’s going to head up the Cairo office,” Anne said in an even tone.

“Oh.” Harriet studied Anne’s unrevealing face for a signal. “So, what does this mean for you? Are you off to Cairo?”

“Possibly, but if I do go, it wouldn’t be for months. Meanwhile, I’m going to be left at UGP in a rather awkward position, once Victor leaves. People there know that I wasn’t exactly brought in for my great expertise with international oil markets.” Anne seemed to grow more tired-looking by the moment, as she spoke. She pressed the heel of a hand to her left eye.

“What, exactly, does a barrel of oil look like, anyway?” Harriet asked. “I’ve always wondered. I mean, do they actually have big barrels lined up that they roll down a gangplank, or is it an imaginary, theoretical sort of measurement?”

“I haven’t the foggiest,” Anne said. “I’ve never thought about it.”

“So when does Victor leave for Cairo?” Benedict asked. He put his hand on Harriet’s arm to keep her from going off the tracks again.

“Quite soon. Weeks. Days, maybe,” was Anne’s clipped reply. “As soon as his wife makes the arrangements. For the children.”

“You poor soul,” said Benedict. His pity made Anne feel close to tears again, and she fought them back.

“Oh, my god,” Harriet said as Anne’s situation dawned on her. “And you just found this out today?”

Anne nodded miserably, a tight smile playing on her face. The waiter came and asked if they wanted a sweet, which they didn’t, or coffee, which they did.

Harriet rose from the table. “I shall return,” she announced with a forced laugh. “But I
must
get to the loo.”

Anne and Benedict sat in silence for a moment, both of them watching Harriet’s back as she crossed the restaurant and then turned out of sight to follow a sign that indicated toilets were down a steep flight of stairs.

“She’s very happy,” Anne observed. “You’re both very happy. Are you going to get married?”

“Don’t you think that would be a good idea?” Benedict asked.

“I do, actually, and I’m not a great believer in the institution. I was prepared to despise you, but I don’t. I think you’re perfect for each other. I really do. You possess each other. You provide a kind of ballast that she needs, and you’re both madly in love.”

“You’re very generous. I mean that. Your blessing, or approval, or whatever it is, it means a lot to me. I thought you were a nut case, from Harriet’s descriptions, to which, thanks to you, I was treated in one toxic dose.”

“The notebook.”

“Yes. I’m still not sure why you sent it. Though I’m glad to
be here. I had worked up quite a scenario in my mind’s eye, you know. You can do that when you’re far away from a situation, and you feel helpless.”

“What sort of scenario?”

“Oh, I had you in a suicidal agony, things like that. Here’s our coffee, no, it’s not ours, it’s for those people. What’s taking Harriet so long, I wonder. I hope she found the bathroom and didn’t fall down a hole somewhere.”

“I was once in a restaurant near Lausanne, with my father, when he came to visit me at boarding school,” recalled Anne. “A big fat Italian woman who had been sitting at the next table got up and left, though her sweater was still on the chair, and she didn’t come back. Her lunch was served, and it just sat there. No one seemed to think much about it.

“All during our lunch, I could hear a woman’s voice calling,
‘Aiuto! Aiuto!’
but not knowing Italian, I thought I was hearing a mother calling her little boy named Aiuto. It must have been an hour before someone noticed that the fat Italian woman had somehow locked herself into the bathroom, and she was calling for help all that time.
Aiuto
means ‘help,’ in Italian. I didn’t know.”

“Well, there’s no reason you would.”

“No, I suppose not. But I felt terribly guilty about it. And I just couldn’t believe that not one person in that restaurant knew Italian, knew she was calling for help.”

“And that’s why you have returned to Switzerland. Drawn back by your love of the warmth and generosity of the Swiss people.”