Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (7 page)

The people at the next table ordered fussily and precisely, with much mutual consulting, and their menus were folded away one by one until the waiter bustled off with news of their choices for the kitchen.

I asked our waiter for Victor’s untouched steak to be wrapped so we could take it home. The waiter sneered and ordered a busboy to do it. Anne declined salad, cheese, a sweet, and coffee, and I didn’t argue, although I would have liked coffee. The waiter shrugged and deposited the already totaled check on our table, showing that he had expected as much.

Anne paid. I had credit cards and cash, which I offered,
but she didn’t want to talk about it. The busboy returned with the steak wrapped in foil, which had been fashioned sarcastically into the shape of a swan, with the neck forming a sort of handle.

We got up to leave. I said, “What about—” and Anne shushed me so furiously that I felt slapped, humiliated. We left the courtyard. As we turned out of the restaurant entrance, and Anne stalked past the empty spot where the Citroën had been parked, I realized we were taking the bus back. Damn. I had been looking forward to the comfort of a car ride after dinner.

We filed along in uncompanionable silence, which was disturbed now and again by the rush of passing cars. It was even weirder to be traipsing along this road at night in near darkness. Cars sometimes slowed in an alarming way. I felt eyes appraising us. I was following Anne, as before, and could not decipher those shoulders, that stride. I felt like a child, with my party-favor swan.

I thought, too, of Victor, driving alone in his Citroën. I try to feel something like sympathy for him, but I don’t. I try to see him through Anne’s eyes—I want to, but I can’t.

The bus stop was lit by a solitary streetlamp. It felt futile to wait there, long after any bus might come along, but Anne assured me that they ran hourly.

“What do you suppose Victor is going to do about dinner?” I finally asked, wanting to ask something, not that Victor’s alimentary requirements were high on my list of concerns.

“That’s his Axminster, don’t you think?”

“Do you think the woman recognized you?”

“I don’t see how she could have, as she’s never seen me.”

“Where do you suppose Annamarie thinks Victor is tonight?”

“I haven’t the foggiest. I never think about that.”

“Don’t you think you ought to, from time to time?”

There was the longest, most uncomfortable silence. Like a mirage, our bus came into view.

Oh, Benedict.

Is this what love is, what love makes people do? On the one hand: would you hide under a table for me? On the other hand: why the hell would you need to? Maybe I’m just smug because I’ve got you, and, compared to this, ours is a simple life. Sometimes, for admittedly brief interludes, I persuade myself that it’s all romantic, and European, and I’m a gauche American with naive ideas about how the world is.

But no. This is awful. I could leave before my stay is up, but Anne wants me here; she’s made so many cryptic remarks about how important this visit is to her. Maybe I’m supposed to bear witness to this glorious erotic connection. Maybe I’m supposed to pass judgment. (Ignatz Mouse
wanted
to go to jail, remember. Am I here to see the flung brick and play Offissa Pup?)

And then there’s you, whom I miss very much. How is life, I wonder at every other moment, at the most uncompetitive tennis camp in New England? (Sorry, I seem to be repeating myself again. Frog goes into a bank. Gay always said, “Once, a wit; twice, a half-wit.”)

If you think I sound confused about Anne and Victor, you’re right. I don’t know which I fear more: feeling I might have to do something or feeling I can’t do anything. And which would be worse? Do I just want to punish Victor? Could the unfathomable Annamarie possibly be grateful for a note, a telephone call, or would that be a betrayal of Anne, despite its being for the best? And would it be for the best?

I’ve got to go, but one more thing. I’ve been thinking about the dwarf. He was
so
angry. “Fuck you, lady,” wasn’t all he
said. I had never heard the word
cunt
before. (“What a
nice
man,” Gay had said, charmingly, while we had our coffee milk shakes.) But his fury was a reasonable response, I suppose, to being rescued when you don’t need to be rescued at all. But maybe he was in danger. I’ve never thought of that possibility until right now. Maybe she did the right thing. What do you think?

I love you for sentimental reasons—

I haven’t done a lick of work in days. I think about taking pictures all the time. Isn’t
taking pictures
an odd phrase? Such a good one. I take my pictures as much as I make them. I seize them. One never talks about taking a painting. I suppose this is the endlessly rehashed argument about the relationship of photography to art, one that better minds than mine have attempted to sort out. Sometimes I wish I could draw as well as I see, I mean really see. In any event, I haven’t been able to see at all.

I mean, there’s something wrong with my Leica. My mirror mechanism is jammed. It’s supposed to flop up and down and it’s stuck in the up position, blocking light from the viewfinder. Probably a piece of dirt in a strategic location. Anyway, I’ve taken the camera to a place that seemed like the Mayo Clinic of the camera world. That was yesterday’s noontime diversion.

But I haven’t been able to see in other ways as well. The restaurant lunacy of a few days ago upset me in ways I don’t think I realized at the time. The sheer tension of it, the craziness of it, is something that Anne seems to thrive on; the entire romance, I think, gets its energy from moments like that. Where would they be without the ducking and the separate elevator rides and the skulking into restaurants where F of
the F’s might be dining? And I hate my dawning sense that the excitement provided by the chanciness of daily living is absolutely essential for Victor, but in an inverted way. I mean to say: there’s something sadistic there, some desire to see Anne squirm.

And I have begun to notice something else, or the absence of something else: Anne
really
doesn’t seem to have any friends here. She doesn’t want to get too close to the people at UGP because that would make for complications if they found out about Victor—but surely this is a pretty shopworn secret? People in offices invariably know about these things—and she doesn’t have an opportunity to meet people anywhere else. Her life revolves completely around the office and Victor, and her evenings are spent all alone by the telephone.

And then there are those nights when Victor has gone out on the town with his wife, while Anne baby-sat the children. She has confessed to me that the moment Lucien, Otto, and Minerva were all tucked in, the first time, she prowled around and snooped maniacally. Apparently, Annamarie is a brilliant cook, plays the piano, and spoons culture into the children in large doses. Otto takes sackbut lessons. That first night, Victor tried to pay Anne, but she wouldn’t take his money. Annamarie insisted, though, and finally stuffed the bills into Anne’s jacket pocket.

So Anne’s life revolves entirely around the people at UGP. There’s a woman who works there called, fabulously, Sonya Trout, and Anne can be quite funny, in the old, familiar, and slightly wicked way, when she talks about her. Miss Trout is veddy, veddy British and sounds as though she could be played by Maggie Smith. She’s a secretarial wonder, which is why Victor tolerates her. She’s compulsive and wields a sharp Tipp-Ex brush, whiting-out offending errors wherever she goes. She has the annoying habit of applying it with extra care to Anne’s correspondence.

Apparently, Miss Trout is the office snoop, and she has taken a blue-ribbon scunner to Anne, because our Miss Trout has carried a spinsterish smoldering torch for Victor over the years, and she knows perfectly well what goes on with those two at the luncheon hour. Apparently, I’m to blame, in part, because of an innocent mistake I made a couple of months ago, as follows:

When Anne left New York—did I ever tell you that she drew for me an elaborate and hilarious stock certificate that represented a 50% share in our household feline? Poor little Bask. Unlike his littermate, he was aptly named, the way he sits around. Doze was the manic one. He used to tear up and down the apartment in a frenzy for no apparent reason. Once I found him sitting on top of the Con Edison meter, which you may recall is mounted way up in the corner, near the ceiling, above the refrigerator. He was actually Anne’s, and Bask was actually mine, but when Doze died, we agreed in a retroactive sort of unspoken contract that both kittens had belonged to both of us all along. I’ve never told you about what happened.

What a horrible day. It was about a year ago. It was a Friday, late afternoon, and Anne had gone directly from work to visit her father in New Jersey for the night. Having been out and about since the morning, I came into the apartment with the charming, unreliable, possibly sociopathic Jack Richardson—
that
was already quite a mess, but I must say he was sweet to me on this particular occasion, and I was glad of his company—and there was the window screen hanging crazily in the kitchen window, there was a crying Bask on the sill, there was Doze, nowhere, gone, gone, gone.

He must have hurled himself at the window screen, which was one of those cheap inserts you buy at a hardware store; maybe there had been a bird on the ledge. Could a cat intentionally commit suicide? When the screen gave way, he had fallen the three stories, had landed at the bottom of the air
shaft, and had lain there for hours, mewing, his back broken. The odd, reclusive character who lives in the basement apartment in my building, whom Anne and I always called the Woman of a Certain Age, heard the crying and took him to a vet on Twelfth Street, who at first refused to treat an anonymous cat with a broken back. The Woman of a Certain Age, whose name is actually Florence Tirone, didn’t have any money, but in explaining all this, she described how, in desperation, she was able to barter two tickets to Radio City Music Hall in exchange for having Doze put to sleep. (It turns out she used to be a Rockette.)

It was the best she could do, not knowing who owned the cat, having no idea from which apartment window this pathetic scrap of bloody orange fur had plummeted. I know she meant to save him from his misery, and it was a brave and compassionate thing she did, getting him into a cardboard box and carrying him four blocks to the vet. But I have always wondered if Doze could have been mended, had I been there. (While Doze lay dying in the rubbish, what was I doing? Taking pictures in Tompkins Square. Buying film on Fourteenth Street. Throwing myself at an irresistible thirty-five-year-old cad. Eating a languorous lunch at Buffalo Roadhouse. Wasting time looking at Irish pottery on Bleecker Street.) If Florence Tirone had offered six tickets instead of two. If I had agreed with Anne about the other apartment we almost rented first on Gay Street, which was on the ground floor. Something.

I cried for hours that night. Jack tried to cheer me up by making waffles. I ate my waffle with tears dripping into the puddle of syrup. The waffles were overpowered by cardamom (Jack admitted to me that the top had fallen off the spice jar), a flavor I have despised ever since.

Where was I? Right: when Anne left New York. She gave me nine airmail envelopes, stamped and addressed to a “Mlle. S. Trout” at a Geneva address. The return address, I later realized,
was fictitious: a Greek restaurant on Waverly Place. I was instructed to mail these from time to time over the following months, until they were gone. She offered no explanation, other than to say that it was a favor for a friend; the implication at the time was that it vaguely had something to do with somebody’s child’s interest in international postmarks, a stamp collection.

Over the next three months I did this, contributing my own variation on the theme by making a point of mailing them from diverse New York locations. One was even postmarked Staten Island—a commemoration of my last, sorrowful encounter with Jack Richardson. We rode the ferry back and forth, twice, while agreeing that it was Over. It had been too hot not to cool down. It had been over since the moment it began, but I’m a slow learner. When I got down to the final envelope, which I mailed from the mailbox on the corner of Eighth Street and Second Avenue, so it would have a different zip code from the one I had mailed at Waverly Place and Christopher Street, without giving it too much thought, I jotted on the back, “Last one!”

Well. The letters were a beard. Anne had been writing to Victor, in the months between their New York encounter and her move to Geneva, using the ever-helpful Miss Trout as a letter drop. The envelopes left with me had been designed to throw Miss Trout off the trail, as it would have been too obvious that Anne was Victor’s New York correspondent if the flow of letters stopped the moment she arrived in Geneva. Pretty clever, those two.
Your
faithful correspondent, on the other hand, can be pretty naive, sometimes. Victor was not amused at what I had written on that final letter. Hardly the thing for the envelope containing a Dear John letter, which I suppose is what he would have indicated to Miss Trout. (And probably Victor had been all set to reap the secretarial benefits of her sympathy. Though whether La Trout noticed
or commented on the words on the envelope isn’t clear. Is anything clear?)

I have asked Anne if she has gotten to know other people at UGP, Miss Trout aside. Her reply, and I quote: “That’s one of the reasons I came here: I like living where I don’t know anybody.”

A mysterious episode: This morning, around ten, the telephone rang. Anne was at work, and I was just back from a walk to the laundry place and the little grocery shop where I buy milk, the
International Herald Tribune
, delicious little crunchy breakfast rolls, herring, the world’s most expensive Tampax, etc. I thought it would be Anne or a wrong number, but it was Victor. I thought he somehow thought Anne was still at home, but I was wrong, he wanted to speak to me. Would I be free in twenty minutes? Feeling confused and somehow disloyal to Anne, I said I would be. He said he was on his way.