Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (34 page)

The air on the terrace was getting chilly, and Harriet was suddenly cold. At the same time she could feel heat radiating from her shoulders; she had got too much sun on the beach during the day. She unfolded Benedict’s arms, which he reluctantly permitted, and stood to go inside.

Far away, down on the beach, two little children of five or six were throwing stones into the water. They were too distant for Harriet to tell if they were boys or girls; all the little children on the Amalfi beach wore the identical sort of colorful little underpants and nothing else. A wave chased them back up onto the sand. They advanced again as the sea retreated. Another wave chased them back, and one of the children, whom Harriet guessed was probably a boy, lost his footing and fell to the wet sand. The wave lapped over him, and as he struggled to get up, he called out joyfully to the other child,
“Aiuto! Aiuto!”
in a high, sweet voice. The second child ran back to him and helped him to his feet, and they joined hands and ran away from the sea together, out of Harriet’s sight.

The heavy crimson bedspread had not yet been turned down; invisible staff came to do that while Harriet and Benedict were at dinner each night. Their bed was an enormous, high, canopied
bower, and the four posts and headboard were swathed in the same rich material as the bedcovering.

The room was an odd mixture of severe and luxurious. The floor was simple wooden planks, but an unusual Persian carpet was beside the bed. Benedict followed Harriet into their room and examined his nose in the round mirror that hung on the wall in a worked-metal frame that looked like an enormous, medieval cog. The mirror was slightly convex, which gave him a funny reflection. He peered at his face.

“I’m burned to a crisp, but nevertheless it’s only love,” he said. “Do you want to shower first? Why don’t you. I’ll try to call this guy from art school, Corrado, at that number in Rome, to see if he can tell me the name of the fish restaurant under the trees.”

When Harriet emerged from the shower, she realized for the first time that she had begun to feel like herself again. She wrapped herself in one of the enormous mottled-green bath towels from the luxurious supply the hotel seemed to replenish twice a day and left the steamy bathroom. She pressed the towel to her face; it was like a myopic seascape, and she thought it was beautiful. The air in the room was cool, and evening light was coming in through the terrace doors. The sun was low on the glistening horizon. Benedict was just hanging up the telephone and turned to face her, saying, “Corrado was home, and the restaurant is called Nanni. He gave me directions.”

“Did he tell you what the fish is called?” Harriet was rubbing her hair dry with a small ivory-white towel she had removed from Anne’s flat. It was actually Harriet’s—it had been one of a set that she had permanently borrowed from Gay’s apartment, at the point when Gay was just beginning
to falter, before Anne left New York—and it matched several others on Eighth Street; it must have got mixed in with Anne’s things by mistake when she packed for Geneva.

“No, I forgot to ask. It’s something like
spiegel
, or
spigola.
It doesn’t matter, we’ll figure it out.”

“I look forward to eating spiggle-fish with you. Just don’t give it that German pronunciation, or they won’t let us have a good table.” Harriet thought for a moment and added, “Or they will: remember the Axis.”

Benedict smiled at Harriet and crossed the room. He reached for her hand. She held it out to him, palm up, as though he were going to read it, tell her about her future.

“Do you know,” Benedict said, “that you have the most wonderful clavicles? Look, and tell me if you don’t agree.” He turned her gently by the hand he still grasped, until she was partially facing the weird convex mirror. “I adore those clavicles.”

“Do you think it’s a sixteenth-century hubcap?” Harriet couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed the mysteries of this mirror until now. Her camera wasn’t loaded, hadn’t been used since that last afternoon with Benedict, before. She wondered where her film was, in which bag.

“You will marry me, won’t you?” Benedict asked her suddenly, anxiously, his other hand raised in an almost religious gesture. “You will live with me and be my love?”

“Oh, I think that would be a good idea,” Harriet said easily. “Soon, don’t you think?”

They gazed at their reflection in the mirror. The entire room radiated out behind them, the glass panes of the terrace doors curving off on one side, and on the other side loomed the bed, gravid with its crimson overstuffing.

Harriet pushed aside with one foot her wood-soled sandals that lay on the bare floor. (She had impulsively bought a pair, the morning of Anne’s funeral, out of the window of the chemist’s
shop where she had gone that day with Anne and Victor to buy Victor’s ridiculous swim trunks. Things bear mute witness to our lives; she had suddenly wanted something from that window.) She said to Benedict, “Don’t trip over those.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Feeney,” Benedict observed, looking at their reflection. “I love you, Harriet.”

“Love’s the only thing that matters,” said Harriet.

K
ATHARINE
W
EBER
is the author of
The Memory of All That, True Confections, Triangle, The Little Women
, and
The Music Lesson.
She lives in Connecticut, Ireland, and Paris with her husband, the cultural historian Nicholas Fox Weber, and is a thesis adviser in the graduate writing program at Columbia University.

K
ATHARINE
W
EBER
is available for select readings and lectures. To inquire about a possible appearance, please contact the Random House Speakers Bureau at
[email protected]
.

A fascinating memoir of an extraordinarily influential American family as well as a consideration of how their stories—with their myriad layers of truth and fiction—have both illuminated and influenced who Katharine Weber is today.

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