Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (22 page)

Today it was raining. Anne wondered for a guilty moment about what dry place Harriet might have taken herself to this afternoon. Anne’s sozzled umbrella dripped on the stairs, and she knew Victor had preceded her, based on the other drizzle of rainwater that ran in a dotted line across the landing and down the hall in the direction of her flat. She stood outside her door for a moment and wasn’t totally surprised by a fleeting notion to retrace her steps back to the street, where she might find a quiet café and have some lunch. Maybe she
would run across Harriet. Putting her key in the lock, she couldn’t decide which was the greater loss of nerve: retreating, or going ahead in.

“Harriet has certainly made herself at home, I see,” Victor observed, not for the first time, as Anne closed the door behind her, double locked it, and slid the chain across. He emerged from the bathroom, carrying his suit jacket in his arms as if it were a sleeping baby. (Anne knew he kept several small notebooks, assorted pens, his billfold, and various other items of importance filed with precision in his jacket pockets.) He laid the jacket down on a chair, then slid the knot low on his tie so he wouldn’t have to retie it when he put it back on later, lifted the loop of yellow-and-black-patterned silk over his head, and hung it on the bathroom doorknob.

He unbuttoned his white shirt and very carefully draped it on the back of the chair. “Is she writing a novel?” Victor emptied the contents of his pants pockets onto the table. He turned over the facedown spiral-bound notebook that lay in the middle of Anne’s table and leafed through several pages covered in Harriet’s slashy scrawl, at the same time bending over to unfasten and step out of his suit trousers, which he gathered, turned upside down, and held by the cuffs. He slid open the top drawer of Anne’s bureau, placed the trouser cuffs inside, and shut the drawer on them, so his pants would hang flat.

“No, she writes letters to her boyfriend, Benedict.” Anne’s reply was muffled inside the knit dress she was lifting off over her head. She stopped for a moment with her crossed arms raised and trapped inside over her head. It was pleasant in here, alone with herself. She could see Victor through the close black mesh pressed to her face, though he didn’t know it.

“But some of these have dates of last week. Why doesn’t she send them?” Victor, still wearing black socks and droopy underpants, turned his back to her and began turning pages
in Harriet’s notebook again. He had taken out and put on his reading glasses. He reached inside his underpants and absently scratched his bottom. “Look, she has reported all about us. This is very bad. Our day at the beach. Look.” He turned around and was surprised to see Anne standing still, contorted inside her dress.

“Are you stuck? You look like someone in a straitjacket.”

“Or someone in dire straits,” muttered Anne from inside the dress.

“I don’t know what that means. But I can tell you this, it’s very sexy. I like it
very
much. Even though you have been very naughty, taking off your clothing without my permission. Let me.” Taking off his glasses and abandoning them with the notebook on the table, he circled her with his arms and held her tightly. Anne could feel just how much he liked it. Held this way, she was, in fact, bound like someone in a straitjacket. She fought off the urge to fight off Victor. He rubbed against her while pushing her toward the bed. Anne allowed Victor to topple her backward onto the bed and closed her eyes in the shrouded dark.

It was nearly two o’clock, and Victor was brushing his teeth with the special English badger-bristle toothbrush that Anne kept for him in the medicine cabinet. He was late, due back at the UGP offices just then, which meant that Anne would have to be later still, as they never returned to the office together. Anne would also have to explain, should anyone inquire, a complete change of clothing since the morning; the black dress would certainly require a long soapy soak in the bidet before it could be worn again.

“I’m off. Don’t forget the meeting with the Syrian contingent at half past four. Do you think you almost came that time?
Mnn?
”

“Mmmn,”
she replied, standing in front of her open closet door in her underwear, turning away so his perfunctory goodbye kiss grazed the side of her face and her hair. She was impatient for him to leave; her revulsion, now that it had arrived, seemed long overdue.

He put a fingertip under her chin and tipped her face up to meet his.

“Do you tell her about this?” He gestured in the direction of Harriet’s notebook on the table.

“What
this
do you mean?”

“Any of it. All of it. What I like. Your new little problem.”

“Why do you ask?”

“I thought it might be the sort of thing two such close friends might talk about, when they lie together at night.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Do you find her attractive?”

“Harriet? Do you mean do I think she’s an attractive woman, or do you mean am I attracted to her?” Anne felt a jolt of panic, which she tried to ward off. If Victor thought he could pick up those vibrations, had Harriet detected them as well?

He raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “Do you think,” Victor said softly, his fingertip still lifting Anne’s chin, which she found increasingly irritating, “that she would be interested in joining us?”

“For dinner? In bed? Oh, please. Not funny.” Anne pushed Victor’s hand away and turned back toward the closet, where she began flipping through her clothing options. Just leave, Victor, why don’t you. Something very similar to the morning’s black dress, or something completely different?

“Think about it,” Victor said into her hair as he kissed her good-bye for the second time. Anne neither answered nor looked around, and a moment later she heard the door to her flat click shut.

Dressed (a red-and-black-checkered dress with a wide black belt cinched tight on her narrow waist—a bold change that defied questioning, as opposed to a sneaky near-substitution), Anne scouted around the flat before leaving. The small German vibrator with its many attachments was stowed in its black leather pouch, pushed quite far under the low, remade bed, along with the Bon Marché bag of sheets and pillowcases.

Anne tried to remember how Harriet’s notebook had been before Victor began leafing through it. She closed it and put it back on the table. Had it been facedown or faceup? Where had the pen been? On the notebook, or next to it? Until this moment, Anne had never thought to question the contents of Harriet’s journal, or interminable letter to Benedict or whatever it was.

But Victor’s words still hung in the air. What
did
Harriet think was going on? What was going on? She really had no intention of reading so much as a sentence in Harriet’s notebook, let alone every single word. But that, finally, was what she did.

Anne was quite late getting back to the office, and she had to walk in on the meeting, which was already under way; she could only hope no one on the staff would ask her where she had been or why she had changed her clothes. Though usually armed with elaborately thought-out explanations to cover her Victor assignations, at the moment Anne had absolutely no idea how she would account for her lateness or wardrobe change.

“Miss Gordon has decided to grace us with her presence after all, I see,” Victor announced when Anne slipped into the room. He looked at her coolly over his reading glasses, which
always slipped down his nose. He was in the middle of summarizing unanticipated losses for these investors, a subject that had been of some concern to him for days. Anne had spent hours agonizing over the wording and the numbers, though the report’s official author was Victor alone. “Will someone show Miss Gordon where we are in the report?”

Anne took her seat and murmured her thanks to the tiny Miss Sreenivasan—whose first name was simply, mysteriously “E.” on all listings—who worked as the assistant to Victor’s opposite number in risk management. Miss Sreenivasan had flipped open the stapled document at Anne’s place and was pointing with her pen to the column of figures under discussion. Anne nodded and then scanned the page in an attempt to look as though she were familiarizing herself with the information.

She tried to focus on the issues of the meeting, but her thoughts kept straying. It seemed to be going well; Anne had developed a strategy for shrouding UGP’s lapses in an impressive array of statistics, and the Syrians seemed puzzled, but not angry, which was ideal. She hoped Harriet would forgive her for what she had done.

Before the appointments with Dr. Van Loeb, Anne had not been familiar with this particular Geneva street, despite its proximity to her own, and despite her proclivity for roaming all over the Vieille Ville. The first time she had encountered Rue de l’Etoile was en route to a shop that sold restaurant supplies, a tiny place in an alley down at the end of the block. Anne had gone there for dishes and glasses in her first organizational burst after finding the flat. After agreeing to the flat Victor had found for her.

She had been suspicious of his wish to locate her so far from the UGP offices—and so far from the Marks family domicile, which was in a suburban development of luxury high-rises near the U.N.—but the Vieille Ville truly was the most desirable part of Geneva.

Now it felt like home, as much as any place ever could. Anne savored the mixture of familiarity and alienation that she felt on every street corner as she walked to her appointment. She took pleasure in that sense of increasing competence one can develop as one becomes adept at the dailiness of life in a totally foreign surrounding.

She relished the way she had come to know Geneva bus schedules. The German delicatessen across from her building had roast chickens after four o’clock, but one needed to
reserve by noon. The dress-shop window changed its display on Thursdays. The elderly cat who lived in the pharmacy was named Endormi.

Getting around this once-alien city, she had written to Harriet only a few weeks before, had become second nature to her. What was the difference, Anne wondered now, striding at her usual brisk pace toward Rue de l’Etoile, between first and second nature? That was the sort of thing Harriet would automatically know, or would make a point of finding out. Whatever it was, Anne doubted that she herself possessed either. Ordinary reactions—behavior, responses, just knowing what to do or say or think or feel—which came easily to other people, so far as Anne had ever observed, weren’t the least bit automatic for her. It was all learned for Anne, like a language everyone else had been born knowing.

The Vieille Ville seemed to fill the same space in Geneva that the Village did in New York.
The
Village, never Greenwich Village, Harriet had instructed Anne in a rather Gay-like tone, early in their friendship. Moving in with Harriet on Eighth Street had felt almost like coming home after what Harriet called the “uptownitude” of East End Avenue, where Anne had been subletting a half-furnished apartment from an elderly Hungarian couple, retired doctors, family friends who spent most of their time in Myrtle Beach.

Dr. Van Loeb. Anne had read her most famous book,
Children Without Childhoods
, at Bennington during sophomore year, because it was on the reading list for a psychology course Anne dropped after one dreadful introductory class. The professor, a sweet young thing from Georgia, was striking both for her glossy beauty (she wore a revealing silk blouse with one of those dismaying power-slut suits) and for her inability to speak intelligently. It was rumored that she was sleeping with someone in the art history department. When Professor Bilkey described the papers she would expect throughout
the term, she sounded to Anne as though she were addressing kindergarten students.

When Professor Bilkey was for the second time pronouncing the word
vignettes
with a hard g, so it sounded like
vig nets
, Anne was gathering up her books. She left before the class was halfway over, convinced that she could learn nothing from such a person.

Anne forgot to return the Van Loeb book, a slender paperback, when she returned the other, more expensive hardcover course books. When, months later,
Children Without Childhoods
surfaced under some Shakespeare paperbacks piled beside Anne’s bed, she read it through in one sitting. It was brilliant. There was something so clear, so penetratingly right about Dr. Van Loeb’s simple sentences. The book was written in English, though Dr. Van Loeb’s first language was Dutch. It had the grace and precision that comes with adopted language, of Anni Albers writing about design, of Hannah Arendt writing about the banality of evil.

Anne had been startled to realize that the subject of the book was the psychology of children who had survived the Holocaust. Why had she never heard about this book? Even when she bought it for the course, something about the cover design, a stylized brick wall, had given Anne the impression that
Children Without Childhoods
was about the plight of children in contemporary urban ghettos or something like that.

Reading it that night was an epiphany of sorts. Anne allowed herself for the first time to think about what was never explicitly explained in her own childhood. Though Henry could be quite matter-of-fact about his experiences and about the facts of world events as they carried him along, he would never speak directly about his feelings.