Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (31 page)

“Come back in two minutes,” Harriet called after her, “or we’re coming after you.”

“Don’t worry, I can do this.” Then Anne gestured a throwing motion, and then she threw the ring. It arced through the air, and Benedict reached up and caught it.

In front of the restaurant, Anne crossed the empty street and stood with Victor next to the Citroën, which gleamed in the dark. She put her arms around him, and they embraced. They kissed. She felt like a scientist in a laboratory as she explored the moment from a distance. As his tongue probed her mouth, she invited old familiar feelings to surge, to take over; she waited for the rush of heat, but none of it happened. Victor didn’t seem to notice. The experiment was an interesting failure. Anne felt the last piece click into place.

“Shall you escape with me now?” Victor inquired. “We could go back to the flat. We would have enough time.” He took her wrist and guided her hand down the front of his trousers and pressed it there, where she could feel the pullulating evidence of his interest.

“No, I think not. We haven’t sorted out the sleeping arrangements or anything. It would be terribly rude if I were just to take off now,” Anne said lightly, extricating her hand.

Victor snorted. “You can hardly be rude enough to someone like that gangster your friend Harriet has produced.”

“Benedict, you mean. Look, Victor, are we on for tomorrow?”
Anne pressed herself against him. I really am getting to be like Henry, she thought in disgust.

“Mais, oui, ma chérie,”
murmured Victor.

“Usual time?” Anne persisted. “I might not get a chance to see you at the office in the morning. I’ve got those Saudis coming with their damned complaints.”

“Yes, yes,” Victor agreed, impatient, irritated, but still drawn to her.

“Until then. Ciao,” and Anne quickly crossed the street, hugging herself against the chill of the evening air, and hurried back inside the restaurant before Victor could say another word.

When she reached the table, Benedict and Harriet looked relieved.

“You had another thirty seconds on the clock,” Harriet told her, “and then we were coming to rescue you.”

“Funny, Victor was trying to rescue me from you,” Anne said.

“Well, that’s what we were going to rescue you from,” Harriet said, and they all laughed. Benedict held out Anne’s ring to her, and she slipped it back on her finger, feeling its warmth from his hand. Harriet thought of Victor driving home to his family, and then she thought about Annamarie’s voice, and the children, and she wondered if she would ever tell Anne about the aborted telephone call. Someday we will all laugh about this, she thought, but she was wrong.

“What
are
you going to do?” Harriet asked when they were lying in the dark, falling asleep. Anne had insisted on giving Harriet and Benedict the bed. They had argued about it the whole way home from the restaurant. They had made a nest of blankets for Anne on the floor beside them, Harriet pointing out all the while that if sleeping on the floor was to be done,
then she and Benedict ought to be the ones to do it. Lying on the floor, Anne fought the sudden urge to get into bed between them. She squeezed her eyes shut so tightly she saw swirling sparks. They reminded Anne of magnified dust particles—microscopy. Random motes. It all seemed so random.

“It’s really amazing that we met, any of us, isn’t it?” Anne said into the darkness. “I mean, what are the odds of anyone meeting anyone else?”

“Oh, the stealthy convergence of human lots,” Benedict intoned. Harriet giggled. There was a rustling of bedcovers. Anne wondered what they were doing.

“No converging of human lots, please, with a third party present,” she chirped in a flawless simulation of cheery wit. It was quiet in the room then. After a long while, when Anne thought Harriet and Benedict had fallen asleep, Harriet repeated softly, “What are you going to do?”

The question hung in the darkness unanswered.

Victor had let himself out while she was still getting dressed. He had a meeting and was already late. Business as usual, only more so. Victor seemed relieved that Anne wasn’t going to make any more scenes, and in fact she had been unusually passionate this afternoon. Anne imagined Victor descending the stairs, pleased with himself for his vitality, feeling quite the fellow. From the few stray remarks that had been dropped about her predecessors, Anne had concluded that Victor regarded his relationships with young women as something akin to a finishing school, a learning process from which all involved shared the benefits.

Anne had watched him in the mirror on her closet door as she took her dress off its hanger. He straightened his tie and smoothed his hair, looking in the mirror over her dresser. He was going bald, gray wings of hair flared at his temples, his nose showed signs of developing the slight red bulbousness that presages old age, and yet, and yet, there was still something attractive about him to Anne—in a repulsive sort of way. He was a man the way a lizard is a lizard, Anne thought. D. H. Lawrence.
Pensées.
Pansies. Victor Marks had a lizardlike vitality, an awareness, an aliveness.

He had picked up the bundle of old photographs that Harriet seemed to be using in some way these days in her reflected portraits, and the brittle rubber band that held them together had broken in his hands.

“Who are these people?”

Anne hadn’t answered him, hadn’t turned from the closet, and Victor had flipped through all the photographs before laying them down carelessly. He had kissed her on the back of the neck and walked out a moment later without another word between them, typically neither angry nor concerned, just distracted and in a bit of a rush, now that the sex was over.

Anne washed her cereal bowl from breakfast, jammy plates and coffee cups from Harriet and Benedict’s breakfast, which had taken place after she left for work that morning, and Victor’s just-used teacup and plate. (She had fed him the usual liver paste on rounds of pumpernickel when he said he was hungry.) She did the washing up under running water, not bothering with the dishpan, an uncharacteristic squandering of her hot-water supply. When the dishes were drying in the rack, she wiped out the sink and folded the red-checked dish towel into a neat, damp square, which she left in the middle of the tiny kitchen counter.

She brushed her teeth at the bathroom sink. The two other toothbrushes leaning companionably together in the tooth mug next to hers gave Anne a fleeting sense of warmth on this day when she felt an icy glaze forming on her skin. Their happiness was like a bubble, so perfectly formed, so complete, so impossible to get inside. She liked the sight of Harriet’s books and small duffel bag on the chair under the window. Benedict’s bag in the hallway. Benedict’s shaving things. They made her feel a little less alone. She felt very bad about Harriet.

An hour earlier, when Anne came into the empty flat a few minutes ahead of Victor (Harriet and Benedict having
departed for a day of exploring the galleries and looking at the meager art in Geneva museums), she had been greeted by the sight of a bunch of roses, roses that were her favorite shade of coral, filling the bidet. For an instant she thought it was a gallant gesture on the part of Victor, but then she was disappointed to recognize Harriet’s writing on the note left on the table, which read, “You need a vase! I’m using the blue pitcher: sorry. Will rectify later. L.y. & l.y.—H. and B.”

Anne had held the note to her lips for a moment before crumpling it in a ball and throwing it away before Victor’s arrival. Let him wonder about the roses a little bit, she thought. (Victor had in fact raised his eyebrows when he saw the roses in the bathroom, but he had said nothing.)

Feeling comforted by Harriet’s things, Anne realized that Harriet’s presence was something she had always relied on—as long as she had known Harriet—to keep herself from herself. Since coming to Geneva, Anne had found it even more desperately necessary to avoid being alone with herself.

Once, in early spring, Anne borrowed Victor’s Citroën in order to save delivery charges on the table for her flat. In an unpleasant warehouse district somewhere on the outskirts of the city, near the airport, she had taken a wrong turn and been stuck in a narrow alley, surrounded by huge trucks, with the table hanging out the back of the open car, the trunk lid bobbing because Anne’s ineffective knots had come loose. Barely able to manage shifting gears under the best of circumstances, Anne had been near tears when a nasty truck driver had gestured obscenely and shouted at her that she was a stupid bitch and needed to reverse all the way back up the street, immediately.

This she had done, terrified of backing into another car or a lamppost, attracting attention, damaging the table, damaging Victor’s car. She had survived the moment by conjuring
up Harriet, imagining Harriet beside her in the front seat, making witty remarks and offering clever, useful advice about when to turn the wheel and how much clearance she had as they slowly careered backward, the Citroën’s reverse gear grinding in protest.

Anne examined her skin under the glare of the bathroom light, then wiped the mirror of a few dried white specks she thought at first were on her face and not the glass. Over everything lay a sheen of inevitability.

Not why, but why not.

She made up the bed with fresh sheets. The used sheets, still warm to the touch in places, still damp in places, she stuffed into the trash under the kitchen sink. The small white hand towel (Victor always preferred a small towel deployed precisely beneath them to absorb the moisture), a rather elegant one, with a delicate scalloped edge, she washed out in the sink and hung up to dry. It was Harriet’s. Anne had taken it when she left New York, despite embarrassment both at her petty thievery and at her need to have some talisman of Harriet.

She smoothed the bedspread in place—not as perfectly as Harriet might have done—and knelt beside the bed, her hands folded in front of her for a moment. She felt momentum gathering.

Once, when she was little, her parents had taken her to play with some children of friends of the family, somewhere on Staten Island. They had found a heavy, straight-sided cardboard barrel in a dump, and all afternoon the children had taken turns rolling down a hill inside it, out of sight of the grown-ups.

If you braced your arms and legs, it was exhilarating, you were in control, turning magical cartwheels all the way down. If you just sat in the barrel and didn’t prepare for what lay ahead, as the barrel picked up speed you were thrown around
until you were completely battered and limp, broken into pieces by the time the barrel careened into a parked car at the bottom.

Poor soul.

Benedict.

He would see Harriet through.

It
was
brilliant timing, actually, to summon him in the way she had.

Love you and leave you.

Under the neatly made bed was a plastic carrier bag, for which Anne groped, on her knees. She had pushed it quite far under, and she finally had to lie prone on the floor next to the low bed in order to reach it, her shoulder just fitting the narrow gap between the bed frame and the cold wooden floor.

She drew out of the bag a coil of blue nylon cord, the same sort that people used to hang up their washing in poorer neighborhoods. Anne didn’t know why she had never seen any laundry lines in her courtyard, but she had sensed from the first day she moved into the building that hanging her laundry out the window on a line would somehow contravene the prevailing customs. While she missed the fresh-air smell of line-dried laundry, she had developed a makeshift method for drying hand laundry by draping it in haphazard clumps around the bathtub and bidet.

In the basement of the building there was a gloomy little room equipped with a washing machine, though no dryer, and if one remembered to amass enough single-franc coins in advance, it was possible to do one’s wash. Anne indulged in having her sheets expensively processed at the laundry down the street; they were returned to her in three days’ time, pristine and smashed perfectly flat, wrapped in brown paper.

But where, Anne wondered, did other people dry their laundry? Another of Geneva’s unsolved mysteries, like the way
nobody ever even seems to think of stealing from the city’s open newsstands. Anne hadn’t been able to stop thinking, from the first day, about the way everyone in Geneva seemed to honor the system of those newsstands. Just before Harriet’s arrival she finally began to take newspapers and magazines. She did it every day now, though she often deposited them unread on café tables just a block or two later. No one seemed to notice or care. Another rule broken.

Not why now, but why not before now. Long overdue, really. When you borrow time, sooner or later you have to give it back.

There were no ceiling fixtures in Anne’s flat, just an expanse of unblemished, white plaster, but a sturdy brass hook screwed high up on the back of the bathroom door would do. It would do. She could do this.

She was overdue at the office now.

Anne took one end of the cord and let the rest drop in open loops at her feet. She had bought too much, but had never been good at guessing lengths and distances of things, in feet or meters, and it was the amount, she supposed, that the helpful man in the little dry-goods shop down the street had assumed she would need for a clothesline when she purchased it, the afternoon she fled Dr. Van Loeb’s office. She placed the little crumpled receipt from the carrier bag on the table and weighted it with her gold ring. Let no one think this was an impulsive decision.

She knotted the end around the hook and, mindful of the table fiasco, tied three or four additional square knots to secure it there. Left over right and right over left. Such a good Girl Scout after all. When she and Harriet first met at the Shippen Gallery—an occasion Harriet insisted had something to do
with a bunch of carrots Anne was washing in the sink in the back room, and Anne remembered distinctly as an introduction to Gloria’s newest acquisition, a brilliant young photographer, at an opening for a show of photographs by mental patients (they agreed about the opening, but Harriet was certain they had already met by then)—their shared Girl Scout histories had been a source of instant early rapport.