Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (8 page)

I considered telephoning Anne at her office and mentioning that Victor was coming to see me, but I knew that it would be troublemaking. Maybe Victor wanted to talk to me about Anne, about their relationship. Why else would he want to see me? I gathered that Anne didn’t know about the visit, but I had no way of knowing. God, these people make everything complicated. I tidied up the flat, and myself. I got nervous. I considered leaving the flat. Let Victor find it empty, let him be inconvenienced. Then I began to feel jumpy. Victor must have a key. Was he going to buzz me from the lobby, or would he let himself into the apartment? I locked the bathroom door when I went to pee, in case he showed up at that moment.

He must have used a key downstairs, but he did knock quietly on the door when he arrived, exactly fifteen minutes late. I
backed away from him before there was any chance of a handshake or something worse.

“Am I interrupting you? I am sorry to keep you from your work,” he said in a tone conveying doubt that I could possibly have work of any kind. He was wearing a seersucker suit, which made me think of the moment in
Sophie’s Choice
when Sophie calls Stingo’s suit a cocksucker. Victor’s English is better than that, though almost too precise and very accented. (According to Anne, he doesn’t think he has an accent at all and was irritated when she once referred to it.) But everything Victor says seems so weighted, so heavy, like certain kinds of terrible pastry.

He pulled out one of the chairs from the table and turned it so that it faced the bed. It looked like a practiced gesture. Next, he took off his jacket and draped it over the back of the chair. I stood there, meaning to make an insincere offer of coffee or tea, but found that I was able to make only a slight squeak as Victor slid the knot down his necktie and took that off, too, laying it carefully over a shoulder of his jacket.

It suddenly struck me that I was watching a routine, that this was how Victor undresses with Anne when they come here at lunchtime. I was in an absolute panic: I had no idea what to think. He unbuttoned the cuffs of his white shirt, then began to undo the front buttons, starting at the top, silent all the while. He worked his way down the placket, as deliberate and precise as if he were alone. I could only watch—and wish that his shirt had more buttons. When his shirt was fully unbuttoned, he took it off.

He turned toward me. We stood there then, facing each other. Victor had on a ribbed undershirt, which was stained by a faint intarsia of sweat. The sight of it tucked into his suit trousers made him look unexpectedly like an old man. There were wisps of gray hairs on his speckled shoulders. And of
course, on his left forearm, there was the obscene embroidery of his number.

I imagined him as a brave, cocky, scared boy, standing not in an undershirt and suit pants and shiny black wing tips but naked, in a room with many other men, Anne’s father among them, each waiting for his turn to be numbered. Now I was looking at the same skin.

He held out the shirt to me in a gesture I didn’t understand. I stood facing him, my back to the doorless, ridiculous miniature kitchen. I took an involuntary step backward. Victor smiled. Our eyes were locked in a mutual gaze of enormous incomprehensible significance. Maybe he understood what was going on, I sure didn’t. What
were
we doing here? Behind Victor the sun was splashing on the shuttered windows across the courtyard. Were other people sleeping? Already at work? I felt as though Victor and I were the only two living, breathing souls in the building. I wondered if anyone would hear me if I screamed. I wondered how loud I could scream. All of this took place in less time than it has taken to tell it.

He held out the shirt again. I put out my hand as much to ward him off as to take the shirt.

“Do you know how to sew?” he asked.

After a moment’s pause, I began to blither. “Not really. I’ve never been very good at sewing. Or very interested in it, either.” I was unfreezing, picking up momentum. “I’ve always been a failure at things involving thread and string. I hated macramé at camp. I was terrible at cat’s cradle. I couldn’t braid those lanyard things to save myself. I would make a terrible sailor.”

Victor eyed me with the unblinking scrutiny of a lizard. He couldn’t have understood half of what I was talking about. “I have lost a button,” he said.

So, Benedict. I got out Anne’s sewing box—a round Mexican tin box I gave her last year for Valentine’s Day with heart-shaped
cookies inside—and handed him a spool of white thread and a needle and, taking a leaf from his book, said nothing. Consequently, I had the slight satisfaction of watching him sew on his own damned button. He sat in a chair, turned now to catch the light from the window, and he quietly bit the thread and tied the knot, and in the most civilized, Gandhi-like way, he humbly sewed the button back onto the shirt.

It was one of the smaller collar buttons. Was this really why he had come? Maybe it had dropped off when he was removing his necktie, and he had caught it in his hand. Maybe he pulled it off to save face when he saw the look on mine. I do not know.

Victor never did explain why he had shown up. Surely he didn’t expect me to think it was to see if I could sew his button. I forgot to offer him anything to eat or drink. We never spoke of Anne. When he was finished with his task, he bit the end of the thread, handed me the needle with a wisp of thread trailing from it, put his clothes back on, and left.

I looked at the clock and realized that it was half-past eleven. I wondered if Victor would go all the way back across town to the office to meet Anne, or if he had other things to do, or if perhaps he wasn’t meeting Anne in the flat today. I was in a sudden panic to get out of there.

The air was surprisingly hotter than it had been until now, and still. The sky was a washed-out blue. People on the street looked tired. I bought a newspaper at one of those curious newsstands whereon the newspapers just sit, unguarded, and people pay for them on the honor system. In New York, a newsstand like that would be picked clean in ten minutes, don’t you think? I aimed for one of my most recent discoveries in sidewalk cafés. The cafés in the Vieille Ville each have a distinct personality, though I can’t say I could characterize them, exactly. This one is situated alongside a park with big
shady trees, and the air seems to move and the waiters don’t mind when people don’t.

Victor was there. He was sipping an espresso and staring at women who passed by. He was frankly eyeing them, even nannies pushing prams. There was something faintly ridiculous about the sight of him. I stopped to lurk in the aisle of a fruit stall, not wanting him to see me but somehow finding that I wanted to watch him, see what he was up to. The air was fragrant with ripe fruit. Tiny little wasps hovered, drunk on it. My hands felt empty: camera-less.

Victor signaled the waiter with a writing gesture in the air. He paid, stood up very suddenly, drained his little cup as he stood there by the table, then strode off in the direction of Anne’s flat—passing close by the fruit stall—as if on his way to an urgent appointment. Which I guess he was. For some perverse reason, I sat down at his table. The seat was warm from him. Or from the sun. I drank two double espressos—espressi?—and had an overpriced sandwich and moved my chair to keep up with the sun, and sat with my eyes closed for a dozey twenty minutes and intermittently wrote you all this. Now it’s close to two and I’m suddenly exhausted. I think I’ll go back to the flat and take a real nap. Maybe, now that I think about it, I will nap on the floor.

I must try and have a real conversation with Anne this evening. We’re supposed to go hear jazz. (I begin to think Victor knows only waltz music.) I want to write you a real letter in an envelope that goes in the mail. I’m all at sea; can this be love?

Now it’s later, and I’m waiting for Anne to finish organizing her face so we can go to dinner—this evening, I am instructed by the absent Victor, who has conveyed his suggestion through Anne, I must eat
filet de perche
, another fishy specialty of the city, before we go to the jazz place.

On the walk back to the apartment this afternoon—I did actually nap—I found a present for you: three scruffy old issues of
Derri
è
re le Miroir
, which have languished and got sun bleached in the window of a secondhand bookshop that I pass each day.

I woke up from my nap and realized I had dreamed about the summer in Cornwall with Gay and my mother, where Gay insisted that we go, after Adam died and then my father left us. It’s the only time we were ever together, just the three of us, for any extended period of time, and I loved the connected way it felt, the way I could feel people smile at us when we came into the hotel dining room: three generations of Gibson women.

I dreamed about the box-hedge maze in the hotel garden, which in actuality I had adored. I was lost inside it, unable to find my way out, and as I ran down one blind alley after another, the hedge seemed to close in on me, each space I tried seemed to grow narrower, seemed to come to a hopeless point. I woke up in total despair. It’s been hard to shake the mood, it seemed so real, and I felt so unalterably alone. Well, I have to keep reminding myself that I once was lost, but now I’m found.

I need to talk to you. I wish there were a telephone for less than emergencies at Highland Lake. Don’t any of those rich kids have cellular phones? Don’t they have to stay in touch with their therapists? Anne is waiting for me by the door, jingling her keys and humming the signature tune from
Peter and the Wolf.
We who are about to dine salute you—

Oh, Dear, Benedict,

Laps of luxury, lapse of judgment, laps in a Swiss swimming pool, thirty-six of them to a mile. (I worked it out from the meter measurements painted on the side of the pool; I needed to know because I can’t think in meters.) I’ve become obsessed with swimming laps. I have my own lane and no one is going to cross my path, and I can just
go
, with none of the usual looking out for the other guy.

Swimming, my mind races. I think all sorts of chlorinated thoughts and wonder if it would be possible to achieve with a camera the effect of looking up through water to the surface. I don’t mean that literally; I know that with the right equipment it is entirely possible to make underwater pictures. What I mean is that I want to figure out how to make pictures that have that sense of looking from the other side, from the other world. How do I generate that removed but not distant sense of being on the other side of the picture? Behind the mirror? How do I bring objects closer than they appear?

I do the breaststroke and pass between the two worlds in synchrony with my breathing, and I think about Swiss nose clips on the bottom of the pool, and Swiss Band-Aids trapped in the filter trough at one end, and when I stop to wipe my fogged-over goggles, I hear a woman calling her child in a
sharp Swiss way that I shut out by going under, pushing off from the side with my hands straight out in front and gliding away, coming up through that mirrory surface and beginning my breaststroke again.

I’ve discovered training paddles here, although they’re an American product. Yesterday, when I first glimpsed them, I thought I was seeing a man wearing Japanese sandals on his hands. You strap them on to your palms and it looks as though you’re holding giant blue plastic playing cards. When I put them on—I bought a pair this morning from the crosspatch woman who takes my three francs admission each day I come to the public pool—I wanted to wave my arms in big, exaggerated motions. I felt as though I could use them to signal a plane coming in for a landing. Swimming with them is wonderful; they’re fins for your hands and you can grab the water and push yourself along with a smug sense of efficiency.

Anne took me here a few days ago, and I’ve been taking myself here every day since. It’s an easy tram ride or an energetic walk from the Vieille Ville down to the lake and on a bit, and I can get a sandwich lunch here, and I can take a shower, which is necessary because of the chlorine in the pool, and also a welcome opportunity because Anne has no shower, only a tublet with one of those telephone handheld showerheads, and she’s only got about five gallons of hot water at a time anyway. I’m beginning to think the Swiss are not as clean as they look.

I lie on a chaise with my towel and book (I’m reading Anne’s copy of
Rebecca
—I keep wanting to sing “On the Road to Manderley”) and sunglasses, and when I get too hot, I swim, and then I come back and lie here some more. I’ve never spent time like this before. I’m alone so much, and my thoughts bounce around in my head, and I wonder if I look as though I’m thinking in English, and I imagine French thought balloons for everyone around me.

I brought the Leica with me today, now that it has been satisfactorily and expensively repaired, though I’m worried about it disappearing when I swim, and about getting it wet. I have the camera stuffed into my bag, under a pile of things. I’ve taken one picture, of a woman looking at herself in a handheld mirror while she applied white ointment to her not unlarge nose. I don’t know why I’m so convinced that she was extremely satisfied by what she saw. As an American, I am perpetually fascinated by the sense of themselves that Swiss women have. Maybe I should include most of Europe; in my experience, women from most Western European countries walk, talk, and look at themselves in the mirror with an enormous amount of confidence that American women lack. Even the tiniest schoolgirls wear their little blue coats with a kind of authority and natural grace that’s breathtaking.

Yesterday, I stopped in a boutique in the Vieille Ville, mostly because of a green-and-white-striped dress in the window that I thought I liked until I got up close to it and discovered that the green stripes were actually intertwined riding crops or something. Too embarrassed to rush out of the shop once I had made this discovery, I was tentatively poking at a few things on the rack when a Swiss woman walked in, strode over to the same rack, and began riffling through the dresses with an incredibly determined and practiced style. (At this point I had become invisible.) No, no, no, no, as each dress was thrust down the rail until one, two were maybes, then, no, no, no again until she was done. I left while she was still in the dressing room; I was utterly vanquished, utterly humbled, well beyond contemplating buying anything for myself ever again.