Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (11 page)

Victor snickered and said, “My back has survived worse.”
He turned from me and took Anne’s arm, and they began to walk again in the direction of her flat. I followed them, feeling as disoriented as one does when walking away from some nauseating ride at a carnival.

Over his shoulder, he said to me, “It would be a diversion, you see? Then she could not suspect Anne.”

I ran a few steps to draw even with their procession of two. Victor had Anne’s left arm twined through his right, with his left hand locked on her wrist.

“So, you mean, she knows you have affairs, but she doesn’t know with whom?” I don’t know why it seemed so important to me to pin this down.

“Something like that,” he said dismissively, now bored.

“You’re a very selfish man,” I heard myself saying.

“Don’t,” I heard Anne saying. I dropped back a few paces behind them again. I stalked along behind them, but my outrage grew, and after a moment I shouted after them, “Victor, don’t you have a conscience?”

“Perhaps my conscience isn’t cut of material that suits you,” he replied over his shoulder.

“Items from the Lillian Hellman Catalog,” murmured Anne, a reference to an old joke between us that was an interesting and unexpected signal that this was still Anne, in there somewhere. It made me think of the way one of the Iranian hostages would make cryptic references to Evelyn Waugh characters as if they were relatives, on his videotaped statements, knowing it would go right over his captors’ heads.

We were almost at the apartment. The empty streets were shiny and wet, though it hadn’t rained. A taxi roared up the hill in a low gear and passed us; its exhaust stink hung in the air, smelling of European cities. I wanted to go home.

We reached the entrance to Anne’s courtyard, and they paused beside the arched entrance passage so I could catch up with them.

“We’re going to walk awhile longer—why don’t you go on up?” This, from Victor, was more of an instruction than a suggestion. Anne looked into some unknown middle distance. I stood still, wanting to catch her eye, but Victor turned her away and together they glided into the evening; I was alone.

Benedict, maybe I should have followed them. As it was, I paced frantically for more than an hour, made a cup of tea, forgot it until it was tepid, made another on which I burned my mouth, wrote some of this to you, and wondered if I should check out some of the nearest cafés and bistros. I didn’t want to leave, though, in case Anne came back.

I kept looking at the telephone but had no idea whom to call. The police? (Hello? I’d like to report a suspicion of sadomasochistic activity somewhere under cover of darkness?) Anne’s father in New Jersey? (Hello? Henry Goldfarb, I mean, Gordon? It’s about your daughter and your oldest, closest friend whose life you saved, or was it the other way around?) Annamarie? (Hello, Mrs. Marks? We haven’t met but I’ve been wondering: How did your husband explain his sunburn to you that day you took the children to the beach? We have a lot to talk about.)

I heard Anne’s key in the door and suddenly worried that Victor was with her, but she was alone. She came in, shut the door, put down her bag, sank into one of the wooden chairs, and dropped her horsehair wrap slowly onto the floor, as if she had forgotten that I would be here, as if she didn’t realize that I was here.

“So?”

She looked up at me then. Her face was terribly blotched and almost pulpy looking; her mouth looked bruised.

“What?” As I asked, I realized I knew. I went to stand behind her chair. She began to cry, harsh, racking sobs.

“Where did he take you?”

“The park.” Anne continued to cry, silently now, to shake with sobs. Her jaw was clenched. She hunched over, her head down, and gripped her hair with both hands, her elbows on the table; I felt that I ought to put my arms around her or at least pat her shoulder, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch her. Images of Victor’s spurting penis in her mouth sprang, unbidden, to mind. The doctors should have amputated.

Now it’s the next morning. Anne emerged from the bathroom last night, got into bed, and either went straight to sleep or fell into a catatonic stupor; in any case, she was clearly unprepared to talk to me about it. I lay there most of the night thinking and listening to her breathe.

Early, birds were chirping and gray Swiss light was filtering into the room. Her hateful clock that sounds like a car alarm went off at seven, Anne walked around the flat muttering
Merde
, got dressed in a black-and-white-miniskirt suit, ate a banana (I know, I could hardly believe my eyes), applied makeup, and left for work, all as per usual. I stayed in bed and slept again for a couple of hours, still exhausted after those two or three hours of freeze-dried sleep substitute.

I had a dream about my father this morning, after I went back to sleep. It was in the living room of our house, the way it used to be, when Adam was still alive. My father is crawling around underneath our Christmas tree (the Christmas tree for which, as an annual ritual, he would always bargain, in Yiddish, in his old neighborhood in Brooklyn), and as he goes to plug in the lights, there is a short circuit, which I can somehow anticipate, a sizzling pop, and then he is lying still, under the tree, electrocuted. I reach for his hand, knowing that I risk electrocution as well, and then there’s a dazzling shock, as our hands touch, and then I have a feeling I’m falling, and then
the dream ended. My first waking thought was this: how lucky I am to have fallen into Anne’s bed.

My second waking thought was this: actually, it hasn’t been lucky at all.

Dear Benedict
,

So how the hell are you? It’s incredibly complicated here. And the oddest thing. I can’t find the letter journal I’ve been keeping since I got here. It’s just a spiral notebook. I didn’t think I took it with me when I went to the park yesterday, but it wasn’t in the flat when I got back in the afternoon, and Anne says it wasn’t there when she and Victor came in during the middle of the day.

Maybe I’ve left it on some park bench or in some café. Or at the pool. I could swear it was either in my tote bag or on the table in the flat, and now it’s gone. Pages and pages and pages. I just can’t believe it. I hate losing things; I still pine for my grandmother’s Movado watch with lapis lazuli around the dial. She gave it to me for my twenty-first birthday, as my grandfather had given it to her for her twenty-first birthday, and I loved everything about it, can picture it still. It disappeared last year—I don’t even know quite when—and I searched through my apartment over and over. Perhaps it was swept into the trash by mistake. Perhaps it was stolen. Perhaps it fell off my wrist on the crosstown bus. I will never know. I want it back.

Where is my journal? The most obvious thought is that Anne has it, or has destroyed it, but though I suppose she would be capable of reading it, of taking it, even if she did do that, even if she tore it up page by page—which response she would certainly
consider, if she read it, as I’ve been pretty blunt about all sorts of things—I can’t believe she would lie to me about it when I asked her.

I don’t trust Victor, for a variety of reasons, but his style would be different, somehow, I don’t know; maybe he would invite Anne and me out to a nice restaurant and then read it aloud at the table, in order to create a maximally uncomfortable atmosphere. Devious as he is, I can’t imagine him bothering with something like a notebook, actually.

I even find myself suspecting the old woman in the black dress who is perpetually scrubbing the hallway. She glares at me politely when I come in and out. I feel like pointing out to her that I’m not the one meeting my elderly married lover at lunchtime for a quickie. (The situation here is all in a kerfuffle, as I have said. Much to explain.) But seriously, even if she does have a key, what would she, or anyone else, want with my writing? My camera equipment has seemed more of a risk, and that’s untouched.

Well. I’m frustrated. Apologies for breaking the embargo. What you may have experienced as our agreed-upon thoughtful silence all month was in fact a din, a conflagration of words and thoughts, and even that rarest of commodities, feelings. I’ve been trying so hard to think and feel instead of act, for once. Nothing is really lost, I suppose. What’s gone missing is a marathon Harriet Rose arrogant commentary on the very odd situation here. It’s a mixture of blather and reflection, and though it was addressed to you, it’s really been a way of talking to myself. I’ve been using you as my You, Benedict; Anne Frank had her Dear Kitty. Have I been feeling that imprisoned here, I wonder?

I was writing about my work. And some stray thoughts about Us. And I had put into words some stories that might begin to explain me to you, a little. I have also expressed myself freely on the subject of Anne and Victor; I was wildly careless to leave the notebook around. Did I want them to find it, to read what I wrote? (But I have to trust Anne.) Paging Doctor Freud. (The man who
put the Id in Yid, as my father used to say after every meeting with the school psychologist, who tried to talk to them about Adam.)

Things here are enormously complicated. I know I keep saying that. The famous Victor turns out to be a married cad. (Also a lot of other, more complicated things.) Anne is miserable, not herself. I’m in the middle of it all and have begun to feel quite desperate. My work is spotty. This is not the July it was supposed to be. How to begin? Certainly not at the beginning. And not now. Oh, Benedict.

With the promise of a better letter later—
And much, much love
HARRIET

Even before the Antlers moved in, the house next door fascinated Harriet. Looking at it was like looking into your bedroom mirror and seeing everything in the room but yourself, it was that identical to the Roses’ house.

Because the houses on Rutland Close fronted onto a circle, the faces of the houses were slightly tilted together. Every house on the Close was like a reverse image of the house beside it, because all eight houses shared the same somewhat Georgian plan, flip-flopped around the circle. The neighborhood was designed to mimic a certain London suburb, and it was situated, extraordinarily enough, in the middle of Queens. The architecture of the entire cloister ran to large, top-heavy houses on small parcels of pruned lawn and garden. The effect was not unlike that of a fat lady making the best of a narrow theater seat.

This carefully planned mixture of about two hundred houses erected in the 1920s in styles resembling Georgian, Tudor, and the occasional Mediterranean was known as Oxbridge Gardens. Each house was a part of the whole; it was like an elaborate board game with many pieces. The quaintly named narrow, winding streets, graceful closes, and enclosed parks were alleged to have been laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted,
and had been named after Uxbridge, or perhaps after Oxford and Cambridge.

Harriet could remember moving into the house on Rutland Close when she was two. On moving day, a man in dirty overalls was laying the last of the black-and-white linoleum tiles in the front hall, and Harriet had walked across the sticky goo he had troweled down. She remembered clearly the awful feeling of being unable to lift her feet from the floor, and Harriet’s screams had not been because she was worried that the tile man was angry because she had done something wrong, as all the grown-ups assumed. She had screamed and screamed because she thought something was wrong with her legs and she couldn’t walk anymore.

Harriet’s brother Adam’s room was down the hall from hers, and it was painted a gloomy, darkish blue. She didn’t like his room and never went past the threshold if she could help it. She held her breath sometimes when she went by his room on her way to the bathroom they shared. His room smelled because he wet the bed, and there were always unpleasant gritty things in the carpet, things that stuck to the bottom of Harriet’s bare feet. He usually peed all over the toilet seat, too, and Harriet had developed the habit of squatting over the toilet the way her mother had taught her to pee in public bathrooms in department stores.

Although Adam was almost three years older than Harriet, he wasn’t really her big brother, or at least he was different from the other big brothers in the neighborhood, because he had something wrong with him. No one ever actually said this to Harriet, but she could remember only one instant of her life when she didn’t know it. She could recall being pushed in a swing by Adam when she was just a baby, and he had laughed and run underneath the swing, and she had loved the feeling of his hands on her back and the sky tilting toward her.

Harriet’s room was painted a shade of pink that was both too bright and too dark; Harriet hated the way it made her think of the plastic flesh of certain cheap dolls. In the house next door, the matching room that faced her bedroom windows was painted a beige color and belonged to an old lady who was always sick.

Harriet was perpetually reminded that she must be quiet when she played near Mrs. Marshall’s bedroom window. Harriet never understood the point of these instructions, as she was a solitary and silent child who rarely made noise or trouble. It was true that some children did make noise, a great deal of noise, especially groups of little children, especially boys. But to admonish her was silly. It was as if these grown-ups were trying so hard to be considerate of Mrs. Marshall that they didn’t even see Harriet when they said this. It was as if Harriet were just any child. So she would shrug and run outside to play one of her games and try to be as quiet as a large group of noisy children being quiet might somehow manage to be. “Shhh,” she would urge herself from time to time.