Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (3 page)

Yet she appears to do her job perfectly well, and she seems to be making a fortune at this so-called profession (annually, about ninety g’s, at which don’t sneeze), which is just as well because she is giving away the best years of her life, and meanwhile a tiny cup of admittedly excellent coffee costs four dollars in a café here. Victor is her boss at UGP, you see. Have I said that? I’m not sure I’m explaining this very well. I’m just trying to sort it out myself.

He’s the head of the division, or something. He created the job for her after they slept together in his hotel room in New York that fateful winter night. He sat on the edge of the bed and calculated and formulated and ruminated and made her a job offer on the spot. I remember her coming in at around four in the morning, after dinner out with “Daddy’s old friend from Auschwitz,” but naive me thought they had stayed up talking about the potato. I never connected her decision to go to Geneva, to take a mysterious job for an oil cartel, with the soon-forgotten (by me) events of that night—her hot date with an old, balding, Hungarian refugee.

And Anne can play her cards pretty close to the vest, when I think back on all the heartfelt conversations we had about her decision to leave New York, leave that which we call the art world, bail out of our apartment, move to Geneva. It never occurred to me to cross-examine her about how exactly she came to be offered this high-powered job while cutting the occasional mat, scrubbing carrots, and ordering Eastern European takeout at Shippen Gallery.

I knew that it wasn’t the first time they had met; Anne had told me before he came to get her that night that she remembered
meeting him once when she was ten and he came for dinner, in Hastings-on-Hudson. He hadn’t seen Anne’s father since the war ended, and both men wept and hugged each other and spoke (in what Anne insists is some obscure variation of a Yiddish dialect from the Austro-Hungarian Empire that they both know) about many dead people.

Victor has since told Anne, and Anne told me just this morning, that what he most clearly recalls about that night fifteen years ago is going into the kitchen where Anne was helping her mother do the washing up. Victor chummily put his hand on Elizabeth’s shoulder, which caused fierce little Anne to brandish a paring knife in his direction. He thinks this is a funny story, according to Anne, and says it was the moment he fell in love with her. Isn’t it romantic?

Anne’s apartment—she always calls it the flat—is small, but somehow even in the dark you would know where you are; it’s totally Swiss. I cannot forget for one moment that I am in Switzerland; whenever I raise my head, something Swiss-ly efficient strikes me, like the tiny little kitchen across from where I sit. It’s in an alcove, a sort of open closet, and has no oven and looks like the sort of stewardess-packed kitchen on a Boeing 757 that you glimpse on your way to the toilet.

This is the perfect very grown-up and very modern mistress’s apartment. It faces out onto an anonymous courtyard. Everybody’s shutters are closed but ours. Who are those people in the other flats? KGB agents, smugglers, characters from Françoise Sagan novels? It’s a third-floor walk-up; there are clean but grimly institutional stairs of gritty marble. Every time I’ve been up or down them an elderly woman all in black has been on her knees washing them. There is an elevator, which I have used once, the day I arrived. I may be the only person to have used it since the War. (Oh, yes, Switzerland. What war? Well, you know what I mean.) It creaked up the three stories in about twice the time it would have taken me
to walk with my two suitcases. I was already confused about which floor I wanted because in America when we say first floor we mean it. Then I cut my hand rather badly on the folding gate contraption, and I arrived at Anne’s door with blood dripping in a trail behind me down the dim marble hallway. When I went out with Anne to get milk for the tea an hour after I had come in, there was no trace of it.

There is very little furniture in this L-shaped room; Our Lady of the Perpetual Milk Crate has reformed. Anne has a table with two chairs; that’s where I am now. There is a high chest of drawers, with a large mirror over it, and the bed, or should I say The Bed. It’s very low and modern, the only expensive item in the place. Victor has a bad back—Victor has many infirmities—so when Anne arrived, she spent all her money on it. She doesn’t seem to notice how impersonal the place is. Or maybe she likes the ambience of a hospital room. It does have that feeling of a place where some sort of procedures are performed on the human body. Which I guess you could say is the case.

The ceiling is so high that I think the room may be taller than it is wide. It’s like being at the bottom of a box. The scale is so odd, in fact, that when I look at the very tall doors in their very tall doorframes, I feel diminished and am reminded of being a child in my room, looking up at the tops of doors and wondering what the top of my head might look like from up there on the lintel.

The only good light is here at the table, where I can see the blank shuttered faces of those other apartments. If I duck down, I can see a little slice of Swiss sky; I guess that’s the allotment that comes with the flat.

Yesterday I had lunch in a café around the corner, and when the waiter offered me a dish of extra little pickles—two had come with my ham sandwich—I accepted. Then the bill came and I saw that I had been charged four francs for
“cornichons
supplémentaires.”
So the Swiss are a pickle-counting people, and I must remember to count my pickles before they go down the hatch. (Did I really eat six? I wonder.)

When I faxed Anne my flight information last week, I added, WILL YOU BAKE A CAKE? (Now that she knew I was coming.) But I always forget how charmingly unknowing of popular culture this girl is, how much she missed by going to school abroad, by having a European father and, after seventh grade, a deceased mother, and she had never heard of the song—she thinks that maybe she has heard of Jimmy Durante, but she’s probably got Will Durant, or Asher B. Durand, in mind—and so she went out and bought a cake (a dense poppy-seed one from a Viennese bakery of which Victor approves) because, as I have said, she has no oven. Just a very literal mind.

I do love her though, and I am cross with myself for my impatience with this strange new mistress-person. Anne of Cleavage. It makes me doubt what I thought I knew. What did I know? Who was that in New York with whom I shared those two rooms on Eighth Street for a year and a half? We were practically living in each other’s pockets, and maybe I mistook a mutual love of so many books and movies and a million other things for something else. Have I told you that we once sat through
The Philadelphia Story
twice when it was shown at the Modern? We both know most of the good lines. We both used to want to be Katharine Hepburn. If Tracy Lord had had a best friend, the George Kittredge alliance would never have got so out of hand.

Anne used to have a certain kind of rational, if not practical, approach to life. But this new Anne seems to have no good sense, and no good sense of herself. I want to shake her, slap her, wake her up from this fugue state. And then I’m impatient with my impatience.

She also has no good records. I just got up for a stretch and
a prowl, and I see nothing worthwhile except for the Django Reinhardt album I gave her for her birthday last year, which she doesn’t seem to have opened. Too much Rachmaninoff, way too much. Also odd books: very
affettato
fiction (
The Name of the Rose
, an unread-looking Pynchon, dog-eared Du Maurier, and strange quantities of Ann Beattie and Paul Theroux), three different How to Improve books (sex life, complexion, thighs), and, of course, your basic, up-to-date Survivor Guilt Library:
The Abandonment of the Jews, Holocaust Testimonies
, the
Annotated Diary of Anne Frank, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Children Without Childhoods, Nazi Doctors, Wartime Lies, Sophie’s Choice, The Painted Bird
, and every book by Primo Levi. (I wonder if I could make money with a Holocaust Book Club. You bet. People would be too guilty to return any of the monthly selections.)

Oh, maybe I’m just jealous of Victor and feel left out, relegated to a more distant role in Anne’s life. And Anne knows me well enough to discern my lack of enthusiasm for him. (The Gay Gibson term for my response to Victor is
modified rapture.
) For all I know I made Anne feel left out in my letters to her about you. But this is more than the dislocation and adjustment between the best of friends, each of whom thinks she has met the love of her life. Something about this makes me uneasy.

But I’m rambling. Maybe life doesn’t have to be as complicated as I always seem to think it is. So. Please forgive these platitudes. Benedict: you are my You. This month ahead of me is more than a little bit alarming, and not just because of Anne, and this peculiar situation with Victor. I am, because
of you, squaring off to account for myself, in some ways for the first time. You showed me the way. You make me see that I really have to think about my photographs. Your relationship
to your painting is so solid; you have incredibly high standards for your own work. You make me want to assess and revise everything in my work. You make me realize how much of my work isn’t good enough, how tempted I am to coast. I worry that you are too confident, not in yourself but in me. This is hard to say: You don’t know the half of it, dearie. Maybe you don’t even know the quarter of it.

So I’m in Geneva, city of watches and illicit romance, the measly grant from the Swift Foundation covering my plane tickets, and, if I’m lucky, maybe one good meal out with Anne while I’m here, but it’s nice work if I can get it. Gloria tells me that the prestige of winning a Swift is worth far more than I realize. I certainly hope so. Meanwhile, I’m stewing over several ideas for some groups of pictures. And I do have the commitment from Gloria for a small back-room show at Shippen in late winter.

I mean to take a lot of pictures based on reflections in shop windows. This is perhaps too neat a sequel to my self-portrait series, but what can I say? Does it strike you as too pandering, too commercial, too expected, too Harriet Rose? It will be more subtle than it sounds, I promise.

So here’s hoping for an astonishing month, Benedict. It seems wrong that I have gone away from you right now. But this trip was arranged for several weeks before we met, as I keep reminding you in order to remind myself that I haven’t just flown the coop, that you’re real and you’ll be there.

You’ve become part of me, you’re inside me all the time. When I think of you, I think about the future in a different way than I ever did before. The important things are starting to be clear to me, some for the first time. I feel balances shifting, in good ways, in major ways.

With you I can begin to care, and to stop caring. I mean: there is a freedom, for the first time, to think about the sensibility in my work in a pure way.

There’s a song stuck in my head. Remember the night we drank rusty nails and listened to the entire score for “Of Thee I Sing”? I had never really paid attention to the words before. Now I can’t stop thinking about Mr. and Mrs. Wintergreen, at the beginning of “Who Cares?”:

I miss you in all ways. I passed a walled garden yesterday on my way back from my pickle lunch, and I could hear a tennis game, and it made me think of you in that New Hampshire air teaching tennis to overprivileged monsters.

Do you know, the first person scares me, Benedict. The very photographs for which I am known, the pictures that put me squarely in the middle of the Brat Pack for better or worse, the photos that in a sense made me, those self-portraits: they were torture.

It’s all done with mirrors. And how. Have you ever really looked yourself in the eye? Your self-portraits are so stripped: of course you have. It’s part of what makes you so different from me. I hardly dare to catch my own eye.

Maybe I’ve arrived too soon in my work. The journey, not the arrival, matters and all that. Gloria Shippen chose me for that “3 Under 30” show because of what she called the “authority” of those self-portraits. What Shippen Gallery, what the critics who boosted me along by singling me out for praise, what even those check-writing collectors who suddenly needed to own a Harriet Rose thereafter, what they all don’t know is that any so-called authority lies in the eye of the beholder.

And I count myself as a beholder. I don’t mean to say my work isn’t good. It’s damned good. But time and again, when I was printing those pictures, I would see something in the
darkroom that I hadn’t seen when I was setting up those shots. I take credit for those things, but it makes me uneasy. How can I own those inadvertent plays of light or the random objects that made Sanford Schwartz analyze the Balthus references in my oeuvre, for God’s sake? Before last year I didn’t know I had an oeuvre. (Why does a Frenchman have only one egg for breakfast? Because one egg is
un oeuf.
) Has my life changed because
The New Criterion
loves me? I really don’t know. I really don’t even know with certainty about my own criteria for my work, old or new.

In short, Benedict, my photographs mean more than I knew I meant. Does that make sense? Is this what art is?

I think of my pictures as decisions about what to show, a diagnosis of what’s beneath the skin: a slice, a biopsy. A pathology report. It’s art that scares me.

At the moment, I’m not sure I could ever do another series like those relentless mirror self-portraits. I know too much. By that I mean: I know how little I know. I could never put myself out there again like that. But in this month here I intend to call my own bluff. I mean to sneak up on myself, in those shop windows. I’ll be there, if you know where to look.

But now it’s nearly noon. I’ve got to vacate the love nest. I wish I could hear your voice. I wonder if we have made a mistake, agreeing on this mutual meditative transatlantic silence. I wonder if I have broken the rules, in writing to you this way. I wonder if I will ever have the nerve to show you these letters or journals or whatever they are.