Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (5 page)

Henry Gordon radiates a sadness that Victor does not. Henry seems dried out and given up. Victor has a comparatively throbbing vitality of sorts, and a pretty hard shell. But Anne’s virtual obsession with her father has never seemed to me to be based on the real Henry Gordon so much as on some fantasy of a man who never was. Or hasn’t been in a long time. Since I’ve known Anne, when she talks about her father, it often sounds to me as though she’s talking about a father she should have had, the Henry who would have been, had Anne’s mother lived.

Have I told you how she died? It’s almost like a joke, some cosmic practical joke on Henry. The Gordon family was living in
Hastings-on-Hudson then. I’ve seen the house; Anne and I drove up there once. It’s a pleasant, three-story frame house with a porch, pale blue, though Anne says it used to be white, in the sort of neighborhood that’s perfect for trick or treat. You know: The houses are close together on narrow lots, there are swing sets in the backyards. Everybody barbecues; kids play ball in the streets.

Anne has lost touch with everyone she knew then and seemed puzzled at my suggestion that it was possible some of the people who lived there fifteen years ago might still live there. She didn’t want to see inside the house, though I was hoping that we would. I offered to be the brave one to ring the bell, but she just shook her head no.

We sat in the car and looked at the house and the street for a while, and then Anne said she wanted to leave, so we did, though we had borrowed the gallery van solely for this trip. We spent the rest of the afternoon at the Cloisters, and the house was never mentioned.

You’ve seen the portrait I took of Anne that day: you know, the one where she’s sitting in a car, leaning her head against the window, with her eyes closed? The house is just behind her, but you don’t see it because the glass reflects the far side of her face instead.

One hot June afternoon, when Anne was in the final week of seventh grade at Fieldston, Anne’s mother played tennis with three friends, went shopping, came home, put away her groceries, and decided to take a shower. In the shower, Elizabeth Byers Gordon stepped on a sliver of soap and lost her balance. Her head hit the grab bar and she was knocked unconscious. Her body blocked the drain. She never regained consciousness, and she drowned in the few inches of water that collected in the shower stall.

Anne came in from school and heard the water running, but thought nothing of it. It was not unusual for Anne’s mother
to shower after gardening or tennis. Anne helped herself to a snack and sat at the kitchen table doing homework.

A tapping sound in the front hallway caught Anne’s attention, and she went to see what it was. Water was dripping from the ceiling. Anne ran upstairs, calling to her mother to turn off the shower because they had a leak. When she got to the bathroom door, water was beginning to flow out onto the bedroom carpet. It was too late. Anne will never know if her mother was still alive while she sat at the kitchen table eating cookies.

So that was that. It was the following year that Anne was sent off to the fancy Swiss boarding school and Henry fled to his lifeless little house in Jersey City.

So I don’t see it, Anne’s insistence that Henry and Victor have so many bonds. And Anne thinks that she herself is just like Henry. There’s an intense link there, though not a classic Electra deal at all—Henry’s not the least bit seductive, and Anne doesn’t so much want Henry as she seems to want to
be
Henry. So how does that add up? Does that mean she thinks she’s just like Victor?

And there’s something in the air. I mean, it’s their chemistry when they’re together, Anne and Victor. When we’re all together. It’s creepy. I feel as though my presence completes a current that runs through everything, but I can’t identify what that is. I feel as though
I’m
being used, as though I’m the mirror they need in order to watch themselves.

So I see I’ve begun to write something: I’m not sure what. It’s not quite a journal. I’m using you, O Benedict Mine: you are my You. By the end of the month here, one way or another, I will either have written an accounting, of sorts, of these days in Geneva and what goes on here and what mental rummagings I’ve managed, or I will have chucked it completely in a fit
of frustration. So maybe when you meet my flight on the first of August I will shyly offer you this dog-eared notebook that contains the secrets of my universe. Or maybe not. I’m not sure at this moment which would be preferable.

Noon, That’s my cue. L.y. & l.y.

Well, Benedict,

A trout with its tail in its mouth. On a plate. Before me. It’s called
truite au bleu
, and Victor insisted that I must have it, that it was my obligation as a visitor to Geneva to have it, and so I did, but disconcerting as that was—do you know they boil them alive?—it paled beside the disconcertingness of attempting to dine in public with Anne and Victor.

Since I got here, I keep having the feeling that I must have missed the first act. I still can’t get used to Anne’s transformation from my slobby, lovable roommate to this unknowable, chic, jaded woman: someone I would see in a restaurant and never know personally.

To get to dinner, Anne and I took a bus to the outskirts of Geneva, then walked for nearly a mile along a somewhat barren avenue where, believe me, nobody ordinarily walks. Anne had to walk in front of me because the traffic was so alarmingly close that walking together would have been dangerous. As it was, I thought that it was dangerous. We picked our way along the shoulder of this road that was like a suburban Riverside Drive. Cars would rush past us, and I would feel the force of air pushing me, pulling me. Anne’s skirt would swirl up. She has great legs. Walking a few paces behind her afforded me the same view that strangers in passing cars were getting.

There was something oddly seductive about her; she has a new walk that somehow exaggerates her femaleness in an almost cartoonish way. Is this how a mistress walks? She has very high-heeled strappy sandals. (You’d call them “catch-me-fuck-me shoes.”) She walks very fast. I felt as though, compared to her, I was a sexless companion, like a dog or an old nanny, lumbering along faithfully behind her, steady as she goes. And I was wearing the blue sundress you like, which you always point out looks so good with a bit of a tan. And let me tell you, I have quite a lot more tan than I meant to, because of yesterday’s bizarre lake adventure.

Yesterday: Victor turned up unexpectedly, as Sundays are usually his family day when Anne does things like bleach her mustache and (very painfully) wax her thighs. Anne had, in fact, spoken of such activities, but was, luckily, languishing over a piece of toast instead of engaging in either pursuit when the downstairs buzzer sounded with Victor’s specially coded three shorts and one long. (Mrs. Beethoven: “What, Ludwig, me inspire you? Ha ha ha haaa!”)

Victor had been set free, he explained after an awfully long, silent greeting at the door, from which I kept my gaze tactfully averted while he and Anne did whatever it is that they do, with more passion than anyone else has ever experienced in the history of humankind. Annamarie had taken the children—let’s not forget Lucien, Otto, and Minerva—to the beach. As everyone apparently knows, Victor does not like going to the beach, for reasons that will be revealed presently.

Anne, who can be maddeningly passive in her dealings with Victor (how can this be Anne, the least accommodating person I have ever known; just try to argue with her about the pronunciation of
forte
or
banal
, just try to get her to go in the main entrance of the Metropolitan instead of her beloved Eighty-first Street side entrance for the cognoscenti), surprised me when she began to pout about how
she
never gets to go
to the beach, how she should have rung up Annamarie (she has dinner there from time to time and has baby-sat for them on three occasions) and finagled an invitation to join them if she had only known. (What beach, you might well ask. Some lakeside resort or other, with sandy beaches.)

I think she surprised Victor, too. He thought, perhaps, that he was calling her bluff when he said, “Oh, very well then, we go to the beach. Get your things. A towel. I cannot swim, though, because I have no swimming costume.”

He sat at Anne’s table with his hands placed palms up before him, as though he were old and weary and unable to do anything but acquiesce.

“We can buy you a suit at the chemist’s on the corner—I’ve seen them there,” Anne said. Victor looked helplessly at me. I didn’t know what he wanted me to say.

“You two should go,” I began.

“No!” they chorused together.

“I take so much of Anne’s time from you, and you are her closest friend—it wouldn’t be right to keep her for the whole Sunday,” Victor said.

“There isn’t much privacy at a beach anyway,” Anne pointed out, as if this were a practical observation. (They weren’t going to fuck anyway? Something about this remark highlighted the illicit point of this whole alliance. It felt loaded with some sort of beyond-obvious sexual je ne sais quoi I haven’t grasped yet.)

So, Victor’s swim togs were acquired, and we were all heading off in his white Citroën toward some beach. What if we were to run into Victor’s family, I inquired mildly from the backseat. I never know if it’s okay to bring them up or not.

“We go to France,” Victor says over his shoulder as he drives too fast down an access ramp and onto a highway without pausing, which causes the BMW closing in behind us in the near lane to swerve around the Citroën with a blaring horn and an obscene gesture from the driver.

“Nazi!” hisses Victor, who speeds up.

Anne puts her hand on his arm and we drop back. “He had Stuttgart plates,” she explains to me, turning her head so she can see me. I feel as though I’m out with somebody’s parents.

I didn’t have my passport with me, but Victor assured me that no one would check at the border, and he was right; we were waved through, Victor’s white Citroën looking like an ambulance racing toward the scene of an accident. I’m in another country, I thought. I’m in France.

The lake was near the border, and we were there in minutes. For someone who doesn’t swim, Victor seemed surprisingly well-informed about the whereabouts of this beach, where the parking lot was located, where to change, where the cold-drinks stand was. Curious.

We changed in a wooden shack. Victor went in after we came out (I feeling particularly thigh-conscious in my old black bathing suit; Anne looking terrific in a black bikini I would never have known her to wear in her former life) and emerged wearing his new swim trunks, his office-y white, button-down shirt open. The swim trunks were an imitation Hawaiian print that was like canned laughter. He was wearing his dark socks and thick-soled leather shoes. His legs were somehow pathetic and birdlike. The rest of him seems more commanding and intense. I felt embarrassed for him when I glanced at his hairless shins.

We aligned ourselves on the sand with Anne between us. Victor took off his shoes and socks, and his shirt, which he folded into a fussy square for a pillow. Victor and Anne lay facedown on their towels, with fingers linked. They both faced away from me. I think their eyes were closed. I had the feeling that all the other people there knew what they wanted to do. I felt alone. I missed you, I wanted to have someone with me, too, so I wouldn’t be the third wheel, and I hadn’t brought a book. Damn. I sat up on my towel.

Nobody was swimming. It wasn’t very hot. Only a few other people were around; no children at all. A woman several yards from us was sunbathing with the top of her suit pulled down to her waist. The woman sat very upright, partially facing in our direction in order to sun herself, with her legs straight out in front of her. I imagined her turning, like a plant, as the sun moved in the sky; isn’t that called tropism? (You would say my obsessive need to know just the right word is
de trop-
ism.) She was not a bad-looking woman, maybe midforties, and in clothes she might have been rather chic. The posture emphasized her potbelly, and her nipples looked like a second pair of eyes staring at me. I regretted the decision to leave my camera in the flat. I felt her glaring at me and realized I had been staring. I was glad I had left my camera in the flat. There were no reflections here; even the lake surface was scumbled by a constant wind. I turned my head away.

I began to dig in the dry sand with one hand. I scrabbled out a rather large ditch that described the arc my arm could swing through freely without my changing position. I felt something under my fingers. It was a white plastic tampon applicator.

“A beach whistle,” I observed to Anne, who had turned her head my way. She wrinkled her nose in distaste. I buried it near my feet, where I wouldn’t disturb it again. Victor, who every now and then says something unexpectedly pleasant or ordinary (perhaps these remarks are indicative of the way he must behave in his other life), had announced in the parking lot, the way he might alert his children to an interesting aspect of their environment, that the fine, white sand here is renewed periodically with truckloads from the south coast of France.

I wondered now if they strained it for impurities. Either these beachgoers were unusually tidy or the French comb this beach regularly, because there was very little interesting detritus. I would have expected to find Gauloise butts galore. I felt
the edge of a shell as I was reinserting the tampon applicator in the sand. I examined the shell. It was nearly flat, somewhat oval, a thin, yellow bit of translucency. It reminded me of the sort I used to find on the beach that summer I was six, the first summer after my brother died, when I spent two months with my mother and grandmother in Cornwall; it’s a kind of shell I hadn’t seen since.

“Toenail, anyone?” I said, offering my find to Anne.

“Shut
up
, will you?” she said to me with surprising intensity. Was this a No Talking beach? I had no idea what the problem was.

“Yes, please, I would like a toenail,” came Victor’s voice. I had thought he was asleep. His head was still turned away. “Hello. I ordered the toenail. Make that ten. Could you deliver them right away?” This wasn’t Victor’s style, that I knew of. Maybe he kidded around much more with Anne when I wasn’t there. I was momentarily confused.