Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (26 page)

“You aren’t listening. Harriet—please just listen for a minute.” Benedict drained the icy dregs of his espresso, then reached over for Harriet’s and licked out her cup, which had some sugary sludge in the bottom.

“Would you like another? They cost about a hundred dollars.”

“No. Listen: Anne is involved with this toeless Auschwitz person, and that is her choice. His wife either knows and doesn’t care, or doesn’t care to know. What would you be doing, really, to rat on them?”

Benedict sat back, looking reasonable and logical. Harriet felt with her whole being the sense of what he had just said. It was almost a physical sensation, as if a seal had been broken. She suddenly felt less certain of what she knew or thought she knew.

“So, Benedict”—when at a loss, Harriet could always look for logic—“I still don’t understand why Anne sent you the notebook.”

“Maybe so I would know what was going on, and going on in your head as well. I mean, I’ve never even met Anne, and we both love you madly. Really. Maybe she’s trying to lay a claim on you in some way. Maybe she’s trying to lay a claim on me in some way through you. It isn’t just about this Victor
screwing her, or getting into her knickers or whatever they would call it.”

“They would call it the greatest love human history has ever seen,” Harriet said dryly.

“Or not seen. I don’t really know what it’s about. I agree, it might be a cry for help. I’m just not sure what kind of help Anne could use. Do you realize what a mess of a person you’ve described in your own funny, original way? Sometimes you strike me as fantastically observant without being as perceptive as you might be.”

Harriet sat for a moment thinking, twiddling with a spoon, something Gay had told her starting at about age six that ladies never do. Ladies never put milk in their coffee in the evening. Ladies breakfast on wood, lunch on lace, and dine on damask. Since getting here, she hadn’t wanted to admit to herself that if Anne wasn’t unnervingly transformed from their Eighth Street days, then she, Harriet, had been somewhat mistaken about who Anne was in the first place.

And she hadn’t really thought through the consequences of communicating with Annamarie. Had she expected Anne to leave her job and return to New York with her the following week? And what then? Harriet couldn’t imagine resuming the life they had shared, pre-Benedict. Harriet assumed, though nothing was worked out, that her future lay, somewhere and somehow, with Benedict.

She thought about Anne moving back to New York, and it suddenly loomed as an oppressively bad idea. The Geneva Anne didn’t even seem like someone she would want to get to know, let alone take on as a caseload of one. And had she considered the wrath of Victor? Was he capable of violence? And what if he got divorced from Annamarie—what if he actually wanted to marry Anne? That would be, to use a Gay Gibson expression, out of the fire and into the frying pan. So why had Harriet been so certain that action of any kind was called for?
Now she couldn’t remember why she had felt so compelled to rush into battle.

Benedict reached across the table and took her hand in his. “This isn’t an entirely new story for you, is it?” he asked. She shook her head, tears welling up suddenly. The waiter arrived with their check on a saucer, the slip of paper weighted down with a five-franc coin.

“Do they tip the customers here, or what?” Benedict asked, fumbling in his pocket for money with one hand while squinting at the check with the other. “Do they make their sevens and ones like this to throw you off the track of the total?”

“I know. It seems so obscure and dramatic to write numbers that way. I guess I’ve gotten used to it.” Harriet sniffled and wiped her face with her napkin. “I think the money is to prime the pump.” She picked up the coin and studied it. “The guy in the hood is sort of butch, don’t you think? Here, I’ve got dough.” They stood up to go. Harriet felt suddenly self-conscious, unused to company, to the luxury of male company of her own. She looked at her watch.

“Well, Benedict, the coast being clear, what would you say to heading back to the Hot Sheet Hotel?”

“Do you think they’ll have figured out that I’m here?”

“Depends.” Harriet tried to imagine Anne and Victor coming into the freshly vacated flat every day, their routine, the details of which she did and didn’t like to think about. It was like pressing a bruise. “I don’t know why they would look in the closet, unless Victor always checks closets on the lookout for the Gestapo.”

“You’re very hard on the man,” Benedict said after a moment. He put his arm around her and squeezed her shoulder to temper the remark. They waited for an ancient Peugeot driven by a nun to chug past them, then crossed the cobbled street. It was a breezy summer afternoon in a European city. “He did survive something we can’t really imagine.”

“Which gives him license to behave outside the rules of civilization now,” Harriet retorted.

They were walking up a steep hill; they passed the corner pharmacy, in the window of which were several versions of the men’s bathing trunks Victor had worn that day at the lake. The cat lay sprawled on top of a row of Dr. Scholl’s wooden sandals that were stacked up in pairs like children’s blocks. Neither of them spoke for several minutes. Harriet and Benedict, still holding hands, bumped together, first accidentally and then again intentionally, as they turned down the narrow lane that came out on Anne’s street.

When they emerged and headed in the direction of the flat, an aproned butcher across the street recognized Harriet and waved as he hosed down the sidewalk in front of his shop. A few days earlier, when she had taken a series of self-portraits in the reflection of the shop window, through which were visible a dramatic array of pigs’ heads, the butcher, Harriet realized, had been pleased and proud to think she was photographing him at his labors.

“I
can
imagine it,” insisted Harriet. “Has it ever occurred to you that some of the people who survived the Holocaust might not be very nice? Not every child was Anne Frank.”

“Look, Harriet, Anne Frank wasn’t even Anne Frank, I know that. I just wonder if you could cut him some slack. Anyway. I look forward to meeting your friend Anne, and her partially evil consort.”

When they got back to the flat, Benedict was suddenly exhausted and told Harriet he needed to sleep. Harriet pondered the etiquette of bed linens for a moment and decided she would deal with it later. The sheets on the bed were those she and Anne had slept in the past few nights, though Harriet suspected that they had already been stripped off and reapplied
since she and Benedict had been out. Anne never tucked in corners as neatly as she, Harriet, had been taught to do by Tex that summer at camp. (Harriet could never understand why people called them hospital corners. In hospitals, the beds weren’t tucked in at all, only along the bottom, as though a team of doctors might arrive at any moment to view the patient’s body with such urgency that the bedclothes should be ready to be flung back at a moment’s notice.)

They dropped their clothes on the floor and crawled into the bed—“This really is a good mattress; I must remember to thank poor old Victor for his bad back,” said Benedict sleepily—and cuddled together like spoons.

Five minutes of this and Benedict was revived.

“I’m not sleepy anymore,” he announced in a whisper to the back of Harriet’s neck.

“Good, because I’m vibrating like a tuning fork,” said Harriet, reaching for him.

It was after four in the afternoon, and the golden light that lay across the floor seemed to flow from some very old tradition.

“Look, they don’t have old sunlight like that in America,” Harriet pointed out to Benedict, who had come out of the bathroom clean and damp, wearing a towel around his waist. One of the things Harriet loved about this man was his universal competence, his ability to do things like wrap a towel around himself so it looked terrific and stayed up.

Harriet was waiting for Anne to answer the telephone in her office. It honked in sets of twos. She covered the mouthpiece and whispered, “If you want grapes, there are some in the fridge.”

Benedict wandered into the kitchen. Anne picked up her line.

“Anne Gordon.”

“Harriet Rose. Pleasetomeetcha.” Harriet never found office phone calls with Anne relaxing, but couldn’t resist mocking Anne’s officious tone. It was like trying to distract someone who was in the middle of saying her lines in a play.

“Yes.”

“Not alone, are we?” Harriet thought Anne sounded even more strained than she usually was when they had occasion to speak during the day.

“Precisely so. What can I do for you?”

Benedict came out of the kitchen with a quizzical look, holding up a rolled-up, dried-out tube of liver paste.

Harriet waved him off and turned away. “I have some rather astonishing news, Anne. Benedict is here.”

“Yes, I see.”

“So, I wanted to let you know, and we were hoping you, or you and Victor, could come out to dinner with us. I didn’t know if there were any plans afoot for this evening.”

“Yes, well, thank you for that information. I should be able to attend the meeting.”

“Christ, Anne, who’ve you got in the office with you, Yasir Arafat?”

Silence.

“Well, I’ll make a reservation for just the three of us someplace, okeydokey? Eight o’clock? Anne? I’ll expect you sometime after six here, then? Right?”

Anne uttered a muffled, “Fine then,” and hung up.

Harriet was still holding the phone in her hand when Benedict circled around her with the liver paste suspended betwixt thumb and forefinger.

“Don’t tell me this is the Anne Gordon quotidian comestible.”

“Actually, it is.” Harriet felt a wave of guilt for mocking Anne, though she had to admit it was irresistible. “She has
it on those little circles of pumpernickel that are like chewing tobacco. You know, they’re not exactly food, they’re provisions. They never get stale, she says. I’ve always thought that might be because they were never edible in the first place.”

“So what’s the word on tonight? From this end it didn’t sound as though Anne was turning handsprings of joy over my presence.” Benedict returned the liver paste to the door of the fridge and helped himself to the promised grapes. He walked around peering at things with the grapes in one hand, popping them into his mouth one at a time.

“No, she wasn’t alone, and couldn’t talk. We’ll find out the story tonight. It will turn out she was surrounded by six zillionaire Kuwaitis or something. But it will just be the three of us. Maybe Victor is actually going to spend the evening chez Marks. Maybe it’s parents’ night at Lucien, Otto, and Minerva’s school.”

“Maybe he’s cheating on Anne,” suggested Benedict, who, having deposited the grape skeleton on the table with a neat collection of grape pips beside it, was now digging through his bag for a change of clothes.

“Even I hadn’t thought of that,” sighed Harriet.

Anne paused outside the door to her flat to pull herself together. The music she had heard floating down the hallway was coming from her own apartment—she didn’t recognize it so it had to be
Django Reinhardt at Le Hot Club of Paris.
Harriet had sent the record to her for her last birthday, and Anne hadn’t had the heart to remind her how little she cared for that sort of music. (She did, however, share with Harriet a stubborn preference for record albums over tapes or CDs, and they had often spent weekend afternoons in the East Village on the track of increasingly rare LPs, Harriet looking for
Teddy Wilson and Lester Young, Anne hunting down Ravel, Debussy, and her passion, Rachmaninoff. (“It’s the zen of the black grooves, knowing you’re looking at the grain of the music. And liner notes!” Harriet had ranted the first time they had met for lunch, instantly endearing herself to Anne.)

Victor out-and-out despised jazz. (“Chaotic” and “vulgar” were his words.) When Anne had agreed, reluctantly, to go to a jazz club in Carouge one night with Harriet earlier in the month, Victor had been appalled. (“Sitting around listening to rhythmic bleating for smug ex-hippies is not entertainment,” he said.)

At the jazz club, Harriet had ordered a
poire
, something to which she said Benedict had introduced her (Anne had then suggested that Harriet should be drinking Benedictine), and Anne had nursed a crème de menthe, having been mildly insulted when their drinks arrived and Harriet informed her happily that the recently deceased Gay, that oracle of social wisdom, had considered crème de menthe to be “a whore’s drink.”

Harriet had recognized nearly every tune the musicians played, sometimes identifying a song after the first few notes. She had rattled on to Anne about which shows the songs were written for, and by whom they were written, and who had been the original performers. Once this would have charmed Anne immeasurably. But Anne had been edgy, aware that she had made Victor cross by spending her evening without him and in this way. When Harriet identified an obscure song by Jerome Kern, Anne had murmured an impatient and belittling, “Who cares?” only to have Harriet sally forth on the history of the Gershwin song “Who Cares?”

As she unlocked her door, Anne realized guiltily that the untouched birthday record had probably still been in its telltale original plastic wrapping.
Merde.
This had been a devastating
day, and she was in no mood to meet this impossibly wonderful Benedict. She had a bad headache and would have preferred to come into an empty flat. It would be so much simpler. Time had run out, the play was drawing to a close.

“Hi, Anne—Anne, this is Benedict, Benedict, this is Anne. You guys. This is great.”

Harriet was wearing makeup? No, she was just sparkling and animated, her eyes bright and her cheeks pink as she stood in Anne’s hallway, gesturing with her hands as if she expected them all to join together in song.

Anne shook Benedict’s hand, and when their eyes met, she was startled by the deep, penetrating blueness of his gaze. She wondered if he had already told Harriet about the notebook, if that was why he was here. It crossed her mind that it might not have reached him, if he was already en route to Geneva. She had no idea if Harriet knew he was coming—would Harriet have baked a cake?—and wondered if she were being ambushed. Mailing him the notebook now seemed more like a dream than a memory. Why had she done it? To stop Harriet in her tracks, to remove Harriet from the scene of this crime, to have this knight in shining armor come and spirit Harriet away to their land of happiness? Or to see if he was as wonderful as Harriet thought, to call the bluff? Perhaps the notebook would reveal to him a Harriet who was not so appealing after all. Or maybe, thought Anne, seeing him now, I was wishing that Benedict would come rescue me.