Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (30 page)

Their coffee was served.

“Where
is
Harriet?” Benedict said, slightly anxious.

Harriet had really needed to use the bathroom, and she had also wanted to be by herself for a moment. As Anne’s situation
began to sink in, she had begun to boil with rage at Victor. She emptied her bladder, which was a relief, having not been able to find the right moment to leave the table before now. She washed and dried her hands, studied her face in the cracked mirror over the sink, and wished she had brought along her camera to take a fractured self-portrait in the bathroom, as the light was rather weird and the striped wallpaper made her think of Matisse.

On the wall just behind her was a framed antique circus poster that reflected in the mirror and reminded Harriet of something. It was sinister, like a Max Beckmann. There was a ringmaster in a top hat, a seal with a ball on its nose, an elephant, a lion behind bars, and a tumbling clown. She remembered: the circus-parade night-light of her childhood. On the way out, the sight of a pay telephone stopped Harriet in her tracks.

With a plan that had been half-forming into inevitability in some part of her mind for days, she looked up Victor Marks in the directory. He was there, which somehow surprised her. He seemed like the unlisted type, just as a matter of principle, as it would make life more complicated. She dug out a coin and dropped it into the slot of the telephone. Harriet had kept a finger on the line of the directory page, and now she dialed his number. Her hands had gone slightly cold and damp. She
would
do this.

Telephones don’t ring in Europe the way they do in America, Harriet observed with irritation. They honk and bleat significantly, like their damned police and ambulance sirens. Everything always sounds like a dire emergency here, like an air raid warning. I’ve been here too long.

“Hello?” The accented voice must be Annamarie. Harriet was startled that the woman had answered in English, but then remembered that Annamarie was Polish, and French or English were the common languages of the household. And
Victor wanted Lucien, Otto, and Minerva to speak perfect English, Anne had told her, so they could get into good American universities.

“Hello? Is somebody there?” Harriet could hear classical music in the background, and children’s voices. She suddenly didn’t know what she wanted to say. The half-rehearsed sentences were gone. Her voice dried up in the back of her throat. She had nothing to say. She was somehow content just to hear Annamarie’s voice.

“Hello? Hello? Look, if this is a joke, I am hanging up now. If this is a bad connection and you can hear me, I cannot hear you.” There was a burst of noise and Harriet could hear a child’s excited voice asking, “Mummy, Mummy, is it Daddy?” and Annamarie must have taken the telephone receiver and pressed it to her bosom for a moment, because Harriet thought she could hear the thump of a heartbeat along with a muffled, “No, sweetheart, I told you, Daddy will be home soon. This is a bad connection, or a prank.” Then, Annamarie was back on the line, saying politely, “If I cannot hear you and you are trying to reach the Marks residence, please call back, but only if that is the case.” Annamarie hung up.

Harriet put the receiver back on the hook carefully. She felt suddenly unburdened, as if she had achieved something. Having heard Annamarie’s voice, having heard that little fragment of family life in the apartment, Harriet realized that these were real people, not just ideas, not just characters in her head, but actual people, with beating hearts. And something about Annamarie’s voice told Harriet that this woman knew exactly what she was doing, that she was eminently capable and didn’t need the sort of aid Harriet could offer, now, or ever.

When Harriet returned to the table, her espresso cup was empty. She looked at it in exaggerated disappointment.

“We drank it because it was getting cold. We assumed you had died. Here, I’ll order you another,” Benedict said. He automatically stood as she pulled out her chair to sit.

“My, my,” Anne murmured. “We do have manners.” She turned to Harriet and said, “Based on everything I know of her, Gay would have adored Benedict.”

“I think so,” Harriet agreed, touched by the observation. It made her think of stories she had heard from Ruth about Gay’s lack of love for Harriet’s father. Simon Rose: Jewish, from a poor family in Brooklyn, devoid of “breeding” or blue blood. (It seemed ironic to Harriet that Benedict came from—had more or less fled—the world Gay most highly valued, the world of those who were socially registered, the world that knew instinctively how to center perfectly acceptances with pleasure of kind invitations to attend. The acceptance world.)

When Simon Rose proposed to her daughter, Gay was appalled. Ruth, the styleless, drab antithesis of her mother (whose friends discussed endlessly the astonishing near-impossibility of Ruth being Gay Gibson’s daughter), who had never before been the object of anyone’s affections, listened stoically to Gay’s harangues.

“You can’t just marry him, my dear. He is the only man who has ever asked you out. Surely you’re not going to marry your calling list of one?” Gay hated to lose control, hated to lose, period. Years earlier she had been caught off guard when Graham Gibson divorced her to marry a younger, richer socialite from Grosse Pointe, and she had forever after seen to it that she was the first one out the door from all subsequent marriages and affairs. She regretted her inattentiveness to the issue of finding Ruth a husband, and now it was too late. And Simon Rose, of all people. “He’s no one, he’s nothing.”

Ruth knew that wasn’t so; Simon Rose was everything that Gay disliked in a man: not particularly tall, not suave, not overtly witty or chivalrous, and not particularly attentive to
her. He was, in fact, the first man Ruth had ever encountered in her nearly thirty years in the background of the life of the glamorous Gay Gibson who seemed to prefer her to her mother. He was also the smartest man she had ever met.

“What did Gay think of your father?” asked Anne.

Harriet gave her a look. Anne did still have the knack for intercepting her wavelengths.

“She didn’t approve of the marriage for all the obvious reasons. But then, I think he sort of grew on her.” Harriet thought a moment. “I’ve never really understood my parents’ marriage. I grew up believing that Adam—the way he was, and then his death—both drove them apart and held them together. But that might not be fair to either one of them.”

Anne thought of her own parents’ marriage, as she remembered it, and then she thought of Ruth Rose, whose subdued presence was so unlike the cheerful midwestern heartiness she remembered of her own mother.

“There was never a particular moment when my father left,” Harriet continued. “He just never came back. And I guess I’ve always wondered if I was somehow responsible, if there was something I could have done, or something I did. And then when my mother got worse, and worse, I felt responsible for her, too, and guilty at my relief when she was finally in the hospital and not my problem anymore.”

“Harriet,” Benedict broke in, “you don’t have to assume that everything that has ever happened has been your fault. It’s sort of adorable, but it’s also sort of narcissistic.”

“Oh, but that’s just the point! Don’t you see? That’s why marriage is something I worry about. I mess things up. I make mistakes.”

Anne twisted the thin gold ring off her finger and held it out to Benedict. He took it, not quite understanding her intention, and studied the ring.

“My father’s parents were murdered by the Nazis,” Anne
said in a low voice. “This was his mother’s wedding ring. A neighbor of theirs took it from her body before the Nazis came back to loot the apartment and dispose of the corpses.”

“How do you come to have it now?” asked Harriet, intrigued, having never seen the ring before Geneva. She had noticed it the first day and had assumed it had something to do with Victor; perhaps it was useful when they checked into hotels. Did they ever check into hotels?

“After the War, when my father went back, looking for family, he happened to meet the son of the neighbor, and he was given the ring. It’s the only thing left that was his mother’s.”

Benedict passed the ring over to Harriet, who held it gently in the palm of her hand as though it were a tiny living specimen.

“Do you suppose the neighbor took it for safekeeping, or was he just stealing a gold ring?” Anne didn’t answer, and sensing that Anne thought the question tactless, Harriet shifted her focus.

“When did your father give it to you?” Harriet had often tried unsuccessfully to imagine Anne’s father at the beginning of what was meant to be living happily ever after, but the Henry Gordon she knew was old and desiccated and defeated.

“It was my parents’ wedding ring. He never gave it to me. I took it from my mother’s finger before she was buried.” Anne looked at Benedict, and then at Harriet. They stared back at her. Harriet stopped turning the ring between her fingers.

“He doesn’t know I have it.” Anne stopped again, and then finished, “I can wear it here because I don’t know anyone.”

No one said anything. Harriet was disturbed by this image of Anne taking the ring. Had her mother’s body been in a coffin? Was it difficult to remove the ring from death-stiffened fingers? How could a child of twelve pull off such a maneuver? Anne had never told her about this, either, and Harriet realized again how little she knew her friend.

The waiter arrived with the new round of coffees and was placing them on the table when Harriet felt a hand on her shoulder, simultaneously saw a hand on Anne’s shoulder out of the corner of her eye, and heard the voice of Victor say, “I apologize that I was delayed until now. This must be the painter.”

Harriet turned her head to gape up at Victor.

“How do you do that?” she asked. “Really. How do you manage to track Anne down and materialize that way? Did you put a little homing device on her bra strap?”

Victor smiled a tight smile and put out his hand to Benedict, who rose in his seat and shook Victor’s hand politely.

“Are you joining us?” Benedict said, clearing his jacket off the fourth chair at the table.

“We can only stay a moment,” Victor said, and lowered himself carefully into the chair. Your back, thought Harriet. We all know about your back, and you really could have sat down more normally, I’m sure. And what’s with the royal “we”?

“We?” said Anne.

“Yes, I thought you and I should go somewhere quiet and talk, tonight,” said Victor.

“This is a quiet place, and I’m already here, talking with Harriet and her fiancé. Feel free to join us.”

Fiancé? thought Harriet.

“Anne, do not punish me for inconveniencing you this afternoon. I am here now. There is not much time. Do come.” Victor appealed to her, and when she didn’t reply, he turned to Harriet and Benedict with a shrug for confirmation of his reasonableness.

Benedict met Victor’s gesture with a shrug of his own, a subtle mimicry that Harriet recognized as an ominous sign that Benedict’s hackles were rising. Benedict sat completely
still. The coffee spoon flipping back and forth in his fingers made Harriet think of a cat’s lashing tail.

“Don’t you think a private talk is in order, my dear?” Victor addressed Anne again.

“Everything with you always has to be private, doesn’t it?” Anne said with irritation.

“I think the word you mean, actually, is clandestine,” chimed in Harriet.

“I do not understand your childish games, Anne,” Victor persisted. “It is not unreasonable for me to want to talk with you tonight. But you prefer to play with me in front of your friends. I cannot let you waste any more of my precious time. I have many urgent plans that require my attention, at home and at UGP. I really shouldn’t even be here now.”

“Where, exactly,
should
you be right now, Victor?” Benedict’s quietly frigid voice brought them up short, and no one said anything for a moment. Harriet had never before seen the indecipherable look that was now on Benedict’s face.

Victor smiled his lizard smile at Harriet, saying, “Ah, yet another asker of questions! You two must enjoy living up to one another’s standards, my dear.”

Benedict’s coffee spoon skittered across the table and landed in Anne’s lap. Anne placed it back on the table. Benedict leaned forward, started to say something to Victor, then stopped. Harriet put her hand over one of his, and he turned his hand over to grasp it. He sat back in his chair, shaking his head.

“You know, you really are an asshole, Victor,” he said, in a tone appropriate for respectful compliments.

Victor lurched to his feet, a look of self-righteous hurt on his face. “Anne, come,” he commanded. “Let me take you away from these unfortunate people at once. They are not your friends.”

Anne stood up. “I’m just walking Victor outside,” she said
to Harriet and Benedict. Victor turned on his heel and left, looking furious. Harriet held out Anne’s ring, and Anne took it. She followed after Victor. Her sweater was still over the back of her chair, and Harriet was relieved to note that Anne hadn’t taken it, or her handbag, with her. Anne turned and looked back at them from the doorway, and Benedict and Harriet waved to her.