Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (24 page)

“Miss Gordon, do you know what you want from me?”

Anne couldn’t find any words. She was still crying. It no longer mattered if tears were running down her face. Though it was doubtful that anything would be achieved, there was actually a little bit of comfort in her sense that it felt safe to do or say anything while she was here.

“I think about death all the time,” Anne whispered.

Over the course of that hour, and the next two, Dr. Van Loeb elicited from Anne a rudimentary history, a sense of Anne’s cast of characters, and some tentative identification of what
she called Anne’s “conflicts.” Anne managed not to cry continuously by the third hour. At the beginning of the fourth meeting Dr. Van Loeb proposed that Anne would be well suited to psychoanalysis. They discussed fees. They agreed that they would begin in the third week of July, after Dr. Van Loeb returned from a month in the U.S.

Today, letting herself into Dr. Van Loeb’s waiting room after those four weeks had passed, Anne fought the urge to bolt. All momentum for this dubious enterprise had been lost. Harriet’s presence had changed everything. Anne had gone too far to turn back. She had kept this appointment only because she hadn’t canceled it. Well, maybe because she wanted to see Dr. Van Loeb one more time.

The room was familiar, yet Anne felt that she was seeing it through different eyes. Anne hadn’t told Harriet about the appointments with Dr. Van Loeb, though she had mentioned the lecture several times. It wasn’t that Harriet would disapprove or misunderstand. The risk, Anne thought, was that Harriet would understand too well.

The noise machine hummed under the sofa. Anne breathed in the familiar air and stood facing the van Eyck reproduction. Surfaces. It was all surfaces. And light. The couple loomed large in the room, larger than life. The way they touched made Anne think of the way Harriet talked about Benedict. There was a future for them, Anne thought. But not for me.

Dr. Van Loeb opened her door precisely on the hour. She didn’t greet Anne with more than half a syllable before turning away. Anne followed her, thinking ruefully, How was your trip to the States, Dr. Van Loeb? … Oh, my month was fine, thank you, I’ve done quite well to survive this far, considering that I’m falling apart even as we speak. Oh, Dr. Van Loeb, offer me a cup of tea. Help me. Hold me.

A pale blue paper napkin was spread on a pillow at one end of the couch on the far side of the room. Anne had barely noticed this couch at her previous appointments, as she and Dr. Van Loeb had sat in armchairs nearer to the door. Now Dr. Van Loeb was already sitting in a small upholstered rocking chair at the head of the couch. Anne realized with a stab of panic that she was supposed to lie down now. It was too late, she didn’t know how to tell Dr. Van Loeb that this was her last appointment, that she had changed her mind. It
would seem like a sudden decision brought on by the anxiety of the moment. She would have to go through with the hour.

Anne lay down slowly, feeling ridiculous and fraudulent, feeling Dr. Van Loeb’s eyes on her. She had glimpsed a blank writing pad in Dr. Van Loeb’s hand. Anne lay there. She heard the sound of a pen scratching on paper. What could Dr. Van Loeb be writing when nothing had been said? A minute passed. What was one supposed to do with one’s hands? Anne closed her eyes. She wished for sleep, oblivion.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” Anne said finally in a strangled voice. May I go now?

“Just say what comes to mind. The only rule. Dreams, fantasies, whatever comes to mind.” Dr. Van Loeb’s voice sounded different, floating facelessly. Anne wanted to sit up and turn to see her. Instead, she flattened herself obediently on the couch and clasped her hands, like a body laid to rest, and tried to think of something to say.

Finally: “ ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.’ ”

Long silence.

“I beg your pardon?” Dr. Van Loeb said at last, sounding reluctant to speak first. This can’t be the way it’s supposed to work.

“The second Mrs. de Winter. You know,
Rebecca.
”

“What comes to mind?”

Anne was startled that this was taken as a legitimate association, and she now felt a little foolish about her clever opening gambit. But maybe all roads lead to the unconscious, in the end. “I think,” she said slowly, giving it some thought, “that Rebecca was a lesbian. Mrs. Danvers was in love with her, don’t you think? But Rebecca was a monster, too.”

Pen scratching. Silence.

“Do you feel that you are a monster for loving Harriet?” Dr. Van Loeb’s voice seemed to come from inside Anne’s head. Anne felt her face flush. She wished she hadn’t told Dr. Van Loeb as much as she had. Again she fought the impulse to sit up and turn around so she could see Dr. Van Loeb’s face.

“Yes,” she whispered.

Neither of them spoke. Anne could hear the distant sound of an ambulance or police siren. Dir-ty, dir-ty, dir-ty. It came nearer, then faded.

“Can you say what you are thinking?” Dr. Van Loeb prompted.

No. Anne scrambled up a slippery mental slope and finally found a toehold.

“Can Queen Victoria eat cold apple pie?”

“?” Dr. Van Loeb made a Dutch-sounding interrogatory noise in her throat.

“I said, can Queen Victoria eat cold apple pie? It’s the seven hills of Rome—Capitoline, Quirinal, Viminal, Esqualine, Caelian, Aventine, and Palatine. I learned it at school.”

“And what comes to mind?”

“There are seven candleholders in the
Arnolfini
candelabra. You know, in the waiting room. I think that’s why I thought of it. Seven sacraments. Seven deadly sins. Seven league boots.” You want free association, you get free association. “Seven sisters. Seven brides for seven brothers,” Anne rattled on. “Seventh heaven. Seven sleepers. Secret Seven. Seven seas. Seven wonders of the world. I’ve always liked the seven hills of
Rome. I’ve always liked Queen Victoria, too. And apple pie, for that matter.” Anne began to cry.

“Do you feel that in your present circumstances you are being made to eat cold apple pie?”

“Like Eve in the Garden do you mean?”

Silence. Pen scratching. Anne lay with closed eyes. She rubbed her tears with the back of her left hand. Her watch face felt cool on her forehead, and she kept her wrist there.

“Sometimes,” Dr. Van Loeb said quietly, “forbidden fruit is indigestible.”

Anne thought about this for a moment. Which forbidden fruit? Victor? Or Harriet? She wanted to ask, but there were no words. She rubbed her nose furiously with the back of her hand, then stopped when she remembered a Harriet theory about never rubbing your nose at job interviews. Something to do with it being a body-language signal of guilt.

Anne opened her eyes. She hadn’t moved her hand, and the face of her watch was in front of her left eye, too close to read. She didn’t want to check the time in an obvious way, so she tilted her wrist back just a fraction.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, Dr. Van Loeb’s face came into focus an inch from her own, reflected in the watch crystal. Shocked, knowing that she was breaking a cardinal rule, Anne couldn’t resist looking.

Dr. Van Loeb began to speak again. “You are obviously very anxious on the couch. That is natural.”

Anne couldn’t bear to keep looking at Dr. Van Loeb’s face and turned her wrist a fraction until all she could see was an unexpected hand waving in the air.

“You have many pressing issues that are a source of worry for you. Perhaps we have moved too quickly to the couch. Do you want to consider returning to the chairs, so we can sit together for a while longer?”

Anne moved her wrist again and Dr. Van Loeb came back into view. Her face had an animation and liveliness that Anne had never seen before, when viewed this way. It was so intimate. Now Anne understood to what extent Dr. Van Loeb had concealed herself behind a neutral facade in their face-to-face meetings—and even at the lecture.

Dr. Van Loeb had finished what she was saying, and the sound of a question hung in the air. Anne hadn’t been listening. She looked up at the ceiling for a moment and sighed, knowing the time had come to explain to this good woman with whom she didn’t quite dare connect that she had changed her mind and was never coming back.

When Anne shifted her gaze back to the watch face for one last look, she saw there something extraordinary. Dr. Van Loeb’s kind face was creased with loving concern. As she looked down at Anne with a tender intensity not quite like anything Anne could remember ever having known, their eyes met in the reflection for an instant.

An unbearable instant. The deeply focused look was overwhelming. Anne jumped to her feet, snatching up her handbag from the carpet beside her, and rushed to the door. She turned back to see Dr. Van Loeb still sitting there, watching her, the writing pad in her lap. The look on the doctor’s face was gone, replaced by the careful blankness again.

“It’s too late. I, I can’t do this. I’m sorry,” Anne choked out before she fled. As she closed the door behind her, she knew she would never come back. How could she? What Dr. Van Loeb offered, Anne didn’t deserve, couldn’t accept.

I am so much more like Henry than I knew, she thought as she walked the few blocks to her flat. Harriet would be there, expecting the usual mutual debriefings. Then they would
go eat dinner. Harriet would chalk up Anne’s mood, if she noticed it, to some Victor contretemps.

The chance, if there was a chance, is lost—it is much too late. I am just like Henry, Anne thought again, pausing in front of an old-fashioned dry-goods shop she had discovered when she was first needing things for her flat: coat hangers, dish towels, a toilet brush. I keep going and no one notices that I am already dead inside, no longer real.

I want to make images that seem like memories, thought Harriet, framing herself in Anne’s mirror. Not a bad opening for the catalog essay, she noted as she changed her mind about the shutter speed. Stop posing, she scolded herself, reaching out with one hand to shift the blue pitcher of wilted carnations on Anne’s bureau a few inches back. Stop watching yourself. She realigned Anne’s hairbrush (in which sprouted a few of Anne’s long blond hairs), and the pile of black-and-white snapshots, that mysterious deck of photographs she had found in the attic long ago.

Harriet focused the camera again and then carefully lowered it to her chest. Picture this. This pitcher. Her Girl Scout counselor at overnight camp, a probable lesbian called Tex, had noticed Harriet’s interest in photography (Harriet had her first camera that summer, a cheap point-and-shoot with which she went around pointing and shooting), but whenever Tex called photographs “pitchers,” Harriet had inwardly cringed, having been specifically enjoined from making that error in pronunciation by her grandmother, who was phobic about such dreadfully unattractive speaking habits. Gay had, in her amusing but persuasive way, deputized Harriet as a member of the pronunciation posse.

That summer, Harriet, twelve, had been both vigilant and contemptuous on each occasion that Tex said “pitcher” for picture, or when her tentmate, a boring girl from New Jersey called Karen Feldman who spoke with a lisp, boasted about her mother’s subscription to a fashion magazine she called
Vogga.

Now, as she studied her composition with satisfaction, she mentally captioned it
Picture: Pitcher
and then immediately wondered if Tex would have pronounced it
Pitcher: Pitcher
, and then wondered if Nolan Ryan would ever consent to sit for her for a portrait that might include in its composition a similar vessel, because in that case Tex could call the result,
Pitcher: Pitcher With a Pitcher.

Poor Tex. Harriet hadn’t thought about her in a long time. After that summer, Tex had written to Harriet from the University of Iowa, where she was in her last year of working toward a degree in library science, whatever that was. Harriet, in sixth grade, had momentarily imagined library shelves full of books interspersed with racks of test tubes and Erlenmeyer flasks. (Harriet had discovered Erlenmeyer flasks in science class that year, still loved to draw Erlenmeyer flasks, and even now would often doodle interlocking sets of Erlenmeyer flasks while speaking on the telephone.)

The letter, so full of unstated longing and admiration, was three pages of chatter about courses, a new kitten Tex had named Lone Pine in honor of their unit at Camp Claverack, and descriptions of Tex’s plans for the following summer, when she intended to return to Claverack where she hoped she would be Harriet’s counselor again. “Have you taken any pictures lately???” the letter ended. She had signed off with a troubling and uncharacteristic “Love Ya, Tex.” Harriet never answered the letter, and Tex never wrote to her again, and as it happened, Harriet didn’t go back to Girl Scout camp the following summer.

Harriet took the picture, changed the shutter speed and the aperture setting, focused again, lowered the camera, and cradling the camera between her breasts, took another picture. She stared unsmiling into the mirror both times, seeing herself for the moment as the camera would see her, as a stranger attending her show in the fall would see her. She wondered if Tex ever went to New York, ever went to photography galleries. What was Tex’s real name? Probably something like Sue-Ellen.