Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (32 page)

How had it come into the conversation? Gloria Shippen had referred to someone at the
New York Times
getting “brownie points” for writing a review of a show by a mediocre artist whose paintings some Sulzberger was rumored to collect. Harriet had remarked to Anne, once Gloria had rushed away to greet a client, that of course the phrase had nothing at all to do with Girl Scout Brownies; the expression was derived from brownnosing. Anne had never heard that expression, though, she offered, she had been a Girl Scout, briefly, in Hastings-on-Hudson, before she went off to a Swiss boarding school after her mother died.

Anne and Harriet had talked about why they both felt like misfits in the Girl Scouts, and then Harriet told a long, funny story about a girl from Great Neck, Karen something, whose hairbrush had fallen down the camp latrine but she still wanted it back, because it was made with genuine boar bristles. The other people in the original conversation had fled long before this point.

Such tall doors, Harriet had observed that first morning in the flat, when she came in from the airport and Anne had been up for hours, pacing and arranging poppy-seed cake on a plate. Was it only three weeks ago? Such high ceilings. It makes you feel small and insignificant, doesn’t it? Harriet had asked.

Yes.

Harriet’s grandmother, the mildly famous Gay Gibson,
whom Anne had heard of because she was often referred to briefly in other people’s memoirs of New York life, had lived in an apartment on Sutton Place with impressively high ceilings. The first time Harriet brought Anne to meet Gay, it had not been a total success. Anne had started off with a panicky reference to those various footnotes about Gay that she had read, and Gay had replied dryly, “That’s me—always the footnote, never the foot,” and Anne hadn’t been sure if she should laugh, and then when she did laugh—Harriet had chuckled—it came out as a nervous chirp, too late.

Harriet then told Gay about photographing Anne at the Central Park Zoo, where Harriet had spent so many childhood afternoons with Gay. Anne had obligingly posed against the glass in the monkey house, but she had been completely unable to make the funny monkey face that Harriet required, though Harriet demonstrated it for her innumerable times. Anne was desperate to please Harriet—she would have done anything to please Harriet—but she just couldn’t get it. They had both been a little testy with one another by the time they were walking to Gay’s. Harriet, Anne had begun to notice, had no idea of the effect she had on other people sometimes.

Tea had been served in pretty little pink and gold cups, along with stale Pepperidge Farm cookies, by an elderly and perhaps slightly inebriated maid in a green uniform who grumpily shoved the tea tray onto the table in front of them as if to say, “Here’s your goddamned tea!”

Anne had been treated to a series of funny, brittle stories about Harriet’s forebears. One among them, an Avery on her mother’s father’s mother’s side, or something like that, had ridden for the pony express. But he had been on the wrong side of the law. Gay, who was having a “good day” as she teetered on the cusp of senility, had recounted all this while gazing steadily at Anne in her bright, birdlike way. He eventually
came to his end, Gay explained, having settled into the comfortable grooves of this well-worn story, “when a platform gave way at a public event.”

Seeing Anne’s blank look, Gay had added a well-rehearsed “He was a horse thief, you see.” Still nothing. Disappointed, Gay pursed her lips and sipped her tea, leaving Harriet to explain, “They hanged him. He was hanged.”

Anne carried one of her chairs over to the bathroom doorway and stood on it. So far, so good. She stepped down and around the chair, pushed open the bathroom door, and gathered up in her arms the tangle of cord that hung down onto the floor. She heaved it all up in the air, like a child throwing confetti against the wind. Some of it caught on the top of the door, but the rest of it came down on the same side again.

“Merde,”
she muttered. “Shit.” She pulled the door open wider, and it stuck and dragged on a snarled loop. She yanked the cord free, and the bundle that had hooked on the top corner of the door fell down on her head. She sobbed a frustrated laugh and dragged the chair around the door into the bathroom.

Anne twisted the rope around her wrist and down to her elbow and then back again several times. She bound it into a short hank, wrapping the final spiral slowly and carefully. How did people know how to make this particular sort of knot? She figured it out. It wasn’t particularly difficult. Neatness doesn’t count. This isn’t going to be nice. Not the Lily Bart now-I-lay-me-down-to-sleep way. A private event. A private disgrace.

She stood on the chair and pitched the now-compact bundle of cord over the door. The weight of the cord on the other side pulled it down, and it was all gone except the knot around the hook and the length that ran away up and over the top of
the door. She dragged the chair around to the other side of the door and pulled the door closed, squeezing the rope over the top of the door. The loop of rope at the end of the knot was more than high enough off the floor.

How could she do this?

How could she not do this?

No note.

Harriet looked over at Benedict, who lay on a chaise with his book tented on his chest, too sleepy and comfortable in the sunlight to read.

“Listen,” she said, “are you sleeping? Listen to this: ‘Parallax is the apparent difference in the position or direction of an object caused when the observer’s position is changed.’ I like that. I think I’m going to use it. It’s amazing what wisdom lurks in a set of poorly translated instructions for a camera.”

“Use it in your statement for the show, or use it to think about the recent events in your life?”

Harriet put the camera manual down and got up from her chaise to sit on the end of Benedict’s.

“Move over.” He shifted his legs and she picked up his feet and put them in her lap. She put one hand lightly on his ankles and neither of them spoke for a long time. The late-afternoon light glinted on the Mediterranean water; one minute the sea was sparkling, emerald, and luminous, and a moment later it was flat, metallic, opaque. Harriet couldn’t figure out when it happened. She couldn’t see the changing light, she could only see that it had changed.

They had come to Amalfi, to this former monastery perched elegantly on the side of a cliff, ten days before, a week after the funeral.

Looking out at the water, at the pretty little village below, Harriet felt empty. She tried to get outside herself, to look through her eyes as if they weren’t her own in order to savor the moment. She knew these days were a barely affordable luxury, time out of time, that at the end of the week they would leave this elegant place and drive up to Rome, look at art, and try to find Benedict’s once-experienced rustic restaurant in Ostia that served grilled fish (which Benedict thought had a name like
spiegel
) at big wooden tables under trees. The next day they would fly back to New York, and they would be back in ordinary time, back in their lives.

Harriet moved so she could put her head down against the space under Benedict’s chin, where she could lay her face on the soft heat of his neck, and tucked the rest of herself into place alongside him. She put an arm over him, and he put both arms around her. Harriet sighed and allowed the tears that were always just behind her eyes to spill over. It was a kind of crying she had never done before, not when Gay had finally died, not when word came about her father’s mysterious death in Paris. Harriet had cried tears of rage on countless occasions, she had cried over dead cats, she had cried in anguish for an entire weekend when Jack Richardson had broken off their romance. But she had never cried this way. She actually wondered if she could become dehydrated from it.

Crying seemed to be her default mode. She woke up from deep sleeps with tears saturating her pillow. She cried when something made her think of Anne. She cried when she realized that time had passed and she had not thought of Anne. She cried at the recurring image in her mind of Anne’s body hanging impossibly still on the bathroom door. She cried when she looked at the dinner menu in the restaurant that was part of this hotel, where she and Benedict were intrigued by the Fellini extras who ate dinner around them every night. They had names for some of them: White Suit, Lipstick on
Teeth, Stavisky, Judge Crater, The Executive Secretary, The Collaborationist.

Benedict had been the one to find Anne’s body that day. At the end of the afternoon, both of them tired from walking the streets of Geneva, Harriet had handed him the key to the flat, and they had split up to do a couple of errands. Benedict got there only five minutes or so ahead of Harriet. He had already telephoned for the police and vomited in the kitchen sink. He had waited for Harriet in the hallway outside Anne’s door.

Harriet whistled as she climbed the stairs. (A rule of Gay’s she ignored was the one about whistling girls and cackling hens.) She was a very good whistler and liked to amuse herself by whistling appropriate tunes, so at this instant she was whistling “Stairway to Paradise.”

She saw Benedict in the gloom of the hallway and called out to him as she approached, “Did you have trouble with the key? Sometimes it sticks. Let me.” But then she had seen his face.

Benedict did not want her to see the body.

“I need to,” Harriet said.

“You absolutely do not need to,” Benedict insisted. “I do not want you to see this.”

But then the police had come, and in the confusion that followed, everything happening fast, but in slow motion at the same time, Harriet had indeed seen beyond the door, just for an instant, but it was a sight that remained fixed in her thoughts, like some hideous snapshot that a sadistic lunatic might insist on showing you, over and over.

The funeral was arranged by Harriet. Henry Gordon had been on vacation in Florida; the efficient Miss Trout at UGP had a telephone number for him. He had listened to Harriet in sad silence, and Harriet had the feeling that he was not surprised, and that he was more concerned about her own feelings than anything else. He declined to make the trip to Switzerland, giving no reason, and agreed at the same time that a funeral there made as much sense as a funeral any other place. He was thoughtful and efficient as he provided Harriet with information that she would need and made arrangements to pay for everything. He insisted on wiring her a generous sum of money for her own expenses, as well. This trip to Amalfi was Henry’s gift.

Harriet had no idea if there was a synagogue in Geneva, but in any case, Anne, like Harriet, had been neither fish nor fowl when it came to this sort of thing. “I’m a half-caste woman, and so are you,” Anne had once said to her in New York, around Christmastime. So Harriet made her choice on the basis of aesthetics.

The service was held in a small chapel that was attached to an ancient Calvinist church just two streets away from Anne’s flat. Anne had shown it to Harriet on the second evening Harriet was in Geneva. Anne had loved the unusually severe church facade. Inside, when she stumbled on the uneven flag floor, Anne had muttered,
“Merde,”
and had then giggled, gestured to their surroundings, and whispered, “a lapse in an apse.”

It was almost exactly a year before that Anne and Harriet had wandered into a Catholic church in a slightly seedy neighborhood on the Upper West Side. It was a rainy Saturday afternoon, and they were on their way to a Cary Grant film festival at Columbia, for which they were much too early. Harriet was
then working extensively on a series of available-light portraits, and the dismal church interior was a challenge. They had filled the offering box with coins and a five-dollar bill and had then lit every votive candle that wasn’t already burning.

Harriet had moved Anne this way and that, edging her closer and closer to the candles until she was quite close to the holy blaze. Anne closed her eyes and took on the glow of a Madonna. Framing the first picture, Harriet had been startled to see a shadow of grief in Anne’s face that reminded Harriet of Henry. When she took the camera away from her eye, it was gone, but when she focused a moment later, there it was again.

An elderly priest in an old-fashioned cassock had emerged then and had chattered crossly at them in Spanish, waving his arms in the direction of the candles. He was mollified somewhat when they gestured at him to inspect the collection box, but he had stood there with his arms folded, waiting for them to leave, and so they did. Harriet had taken only the one picture and would later come to think of it as her best portrait of Anne.

Harriet couldn’t bear to stay in Anne’s apartment; that first night, it wasn’t even clear if the police would have permitted it, anyway. Harriet and Benedict stayed in a hotel that was a short walk in the opposite direction from the church. The hotel, thanks to the generosity of Henry Gordon, was quite pleasant, though Harriet later couldn’t remember very much about the place, other than the design of the telephone, on which she spent a lot of time making arrangements. She was dimly aware of the unusually gentle treatment she got from the annoying woman at the front desk, who made a sympathetic clucking sound with her tongue against her teeth every time Harriet came into view.