Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (4 page)

I just took out the little red-striped-shirt portrait of you that I took two weeks ago. Oh, Benedict. Getting sentimental over you.

Noon: Love you and leave you—

I just realized the date—no big deal here—and picture you at the most uncompetitive tennis camp in New England, surrounded by rich children in tennis whites scarfing down hot dogs while you sweat over the grill. Luckies. They are sunburned and demanding. You are sunburned and patient. There is red clay staining your sneakers and the left pocket of your shorts. You wish you could have a beer. A camper with a bee sting cries. Smoke gets in your eyes.

Benedict, do you remember everything? Absolutely everything that ever happened to you? In the exact words people used? I do, or at least I believe I do. It is only with you that I forget things, such as whether or not I have told you a joke already. (Frog goes into a bank. Did I really tell you that joke three times? That’s because I was dazed, able to let go. Very rare.)

Certain experiences have a perpetual effect; if you drop a pebble into water, the outward ripples continue for a long time. Maybe they continue forever.

Do you have dreams of falling that seem like memories?

When you said you wanted to marry me, the night before I flew, I felt a rush of love for you and a kind of gratitude you cannot imagine. (You’ve got what gets me.) But I also felt a pang. I felt like a fraud. I had won you, fooled you, persuaded
you the way I persuade the viewer with my photographs. Because I knew that you don’t really know who I am, or you couldn’t possibly want to marry me.

I was thinking about this yesterday afternoon when I was killing time at a sidewalk café, eating expensive coffee ice cream because it was the only thing I could think to order in my nonexistent French. And I realized that I have sold you a bill of goods—have sold it to myself—that I am one of the world’s most honest and open and direct people.

Memories beset her brooding brain.

Last night Anne and I went out for a walk, and she led me to an open-air flower market in the Place du Molard, which, owing to the long summer days, was going full tilt at nine o’clock. Anne hunted down the vendor who had sold Victor an important bouquet of roses a couple of months ago, and then Anne proudly pointed them out to me, roses of just the same hue. I was made to admire them as if the very shade of pink transmits the significance of it all. What could I say? They’re a deep, somewhat labial color, they give off a wonderful fruity fragrance, and I gather they cost fifty dollars a bunch.

I had my camera along, and I took two pictures about which I have great hopes: One was of the rose vendor, an old woman wearing a straw hat of the sort you expect to see on someone you would call Dobbin and to whom you might offer lumps of sugar. She even had copious whiskers, but did not look as though she would take kindly to being stroked on the nose. She was bending over a huge bucket of water, getting ready to fill it with some bouquets she had been assembling, and the picture I took captures her face and its reflection in the surface of the water, with her hands in the frame. She probably assumed I was photographing her flowers. On her hands were these odd gloves that matched only in that on both the fingers were missing—I suppose they were to protect her palms from the thorns. She was armed with this little stubby knife with
which she stripped the thorns off every stem, very quickly, like a cardsharp dealing out a stacked deck, faster than the eye could see. The intensity of her movements I found mesmerizing. I wish I could concentrate like that on anything, anything at all. The light was ancient, molten, golden.

The other picture was of Anne. She doesn’t know I took it, thanks to the Harriet Rose Method of Surreptitious Portraiture. (Put the camera up to your eye while facing in a different direction, turn slowly and appear to be interested in potential shots of entirely distant subjects, take the picture, don’t advance the film, and don’t take the camera away from your eye until you’ve turned again, at which time you are gazing into the middle distance.)

Anne was looking into the shop window of the drugstore on the corner near her flat, where a big old cat was stretched out among the toothbrushes, shaving things, hideous rubber items for personal uses I cannot begin to contemplate, soaps, nailbrushes, virtuous wooden sandals, unguents and emollients, vomit trays, syringes, hair dyes, and sundry other useful Swiss products. I framed her reflection so that her face and the cat’s face were overlapped. It was a lucky happenstance of reflection and position. What I saw looked very much like a composite made with two separate images. I think I really have something. She thought I was merely taking a snapshot of the cat.

Anne has absolutely zero understanding of photography, mine or anyone else’s. Her idea of art is Titian. Full stop. We’ve never really talked about my work, I mean about the deeper issues, but she’s a loyal friend full of enthusiasm, encouragement, respect even, despite that void. She was terribly excited by my good reviews and all. I was really touched that she called, even though it was the middle of the night, thrilled out of her mind about that interview from the
Boston Globe
running in the
International Herald Tribune.
She still talks about
it. But to her it’s like a game, I think. She would love me if I did magazine illustration, if I worked with an air gun, if I painted by numbers. She doesn’t know the difference between Brassai and Avedon. It doesn’t matter to her. For someone so attuned to nuances of personal appearance, she’s weirdly unvisual, now that I think about it. Well, if anything, it frees me to work with her around, as she doesn’t have the least interest in or comprehension of what I’m up to. I can do as I please: it’s like speaking a foreign language in front of the children.

I used to take pictures of Anne in New York all the time. You’ve seen a lot of them. Hell, I’ve
sold
almost as many pictures of Anne as self-portraits. Some of those studies even
felt
like self-portraits. She was always so obliging, yet completely without understanding of what I was doing.

After the flower market, we went for ice cream down at the lake—my second of the day; I’ve got to watch that I don’t eat ice cream incessantly here, as it’s so good and my French is so bad—and walked along eating our cones. Anne is capable of walking miles; that’s one thing unchanged about her. Did I tell you that once we walked from the World Trade Center, where we’d gone, cornily, for the view, all the way up to Columbia University, to hear a lecture on the role of the photographer in South American literature? Then there was the insanely cold day when we walked from the Brooklyn side of the Brooklyn Bridge all the way up to the Carnegie Cinema on Fiftyseventh Street so we could see the Tati film
Playtime.

I fail to understand how Victor can possibly keep up with her; he seems a hundred years old, and not a young hundred, either. She’s always been so walkative, so full of energy and enthusiasms, and she’s always had a sense of adventure—I suppose that’s a tune that’s unchanged, though it’s transposed and now playing in a minor key with ominous diminished fifths. But the mysterious new Anne has made this worrisome alliance with a charter member of Hypochondriacs Anonymous—an
organization that could never hold meetings, for fear of infectious disease—and she’s beginning to develop her own complaints as well, with headaches, and matching back pain, and otherworldly, mistressy discomforts of the “indoor plumbing” ilk, as she says. She’s probably taken up douching.

Oh, I’m making Anne sound dreadful, and she’s not. She was the most important person in my life before I met you. You’re the two most important people in my life now.

We talk. We talk and talk, yet there’s a veil, a screen. Anne is very curious about you, very reserved on the subject, almost jealous, I think. I don’t think she has made any friends here, other than a few office acquaintances. You know, she had very few friends in New York, and she hasn’t kept in touch with her one or two boarding-school chums. The only one she’s ever talked about at length was a girl called Keggie Barnes who was born on a ferry crossing between England and Ireland. Keggie smoked Player’s and wore a deerstalker cap to class and signed all her letters and notes “Love you and leave you,” which is where Anne got it, which is where I got it. The other Keggie habit Anne has retained is the ladylike
merde
for all occasions. But Anne hasn’t been in touch with Keggie since I’ve known her and has no idea if she ended up raising horses in Ireland or what.

And I don’t know much about Anne’s past love life, either. Other than a sordid thing with her French professor at Bennington, who was her first, I think, I’m not sure Anne has had the usual run of affairs. She has always referred to various people with whom she has done things or gone places, but never with a clear sense of a romantic connotation. I am certain that I’ve not met any old flames. She was always producing Friends of the Family, but they were inevitably elderly, and from someplace foreign, like Prague, or Cincinnati.

Anne talks about meeting you and worries that you won’t approve of her. She also keeps threatening to show you one
of my letters to her, in which I seem to have described having met you. And she keeps parroting those lines to me whenever I bring your name into the conversation:

“ ‘I have met a wonderful man: Benedict Thorne is his name. I think we are falling in love. I know I am. He is a painter who teaches tennis in the summers. I like his work, have always liked his work since I first saw it several years ago in a show at Fox. I would like to photograph him naked, but don’t have the courage to ask him. Yet.’ ” She does seem to have it memorized. Maybe our grandchildren will enjoy that. (Oh, look what I just said.)

She talks about Victor compulsively. His reminding her of her father. I don’t see it. She makes much of Victor’s having come from similar circles, though on close examination that’s a stretch, as Anne’s Viennese grandparents on that side were cultured, educated people, both scientists at a university, while in Budapest, Victor’s mother sold secondhand shoes and his father ran a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant. I gather that before the War Victor was a tough, clever child of the streets, a thief, sort of a barrow boy; just those nervy skills were probably what enabled him to survive the concentration camp and keep Henry alive, too.

I was wrong, yesterday, when I said that Victor and Henry had been in a children’s barracks at Auschwitz. Anne and I talked about this last night. According to Anne, there were no children at Auschwitz. At first I thought she was speaking metaphorically, but then I realized she was being literal, as usual: there were no children at Auschwitz. When Anne talks about this, tears roll down her cheeks. In the face of such turmoil, I can’t press to get the story straight, and I’m not sure that I have it right now. As obsessed as Anne is with certain details, she’s vague about others, such as the dates.

This is what I know: Victor has described to Anne the night he arrived at Auschwitz, exhausted, starving, dirty, crammed
into a railroad car with strangers. He had been picked up on the street (I can’t name you the street, or even the city, and I begin to wonder if Victor Marks is even his real name), with a canned ham under his jacket and no proper identity card.

On the platform, Victor was quick to understand the selection process that was dividing the human cargo into two groups. Mothers attended to their terrified children, bent over them, smoothed and tidied their hair in the universal ritual of mothers and children at the end of a journey. No matter how able-bodied they were, how fit to work, these women were being sent, with their children, to join the old, the sick, the crippled. Victor instantly saw why this was happening—keeping the mothers with the children avoided upset, prevented the disruptive noise and alarm of children being separated from their mothers.

Victor was not the only one to figure this out; he watched young men and women handing their babies into the arms of grandparents. Moments later the family would be divided forever, women to the right, men to the left, children and crippled and elderly to the middle, to live, to die. Seeing the group to which all the children were being sent, having a sharp sense of what this meant, Victor ceased being a child at that moment.

He was large for his age, which was fourteen. He announced, boldly, that he was seventeen. He had no identification that would have proved otherwise. Perhaps this was the moment he became Victor Marks. I mean that in every sense. He survived the selection, and all that followed, and spent the rest of the War at Auschwitz, working for several months in the grueling construction of a synthetic rubber factory for I.G. Farben.

Victor met Anne’s father, Henry, that first night. Henry may well have been in the same railroad car; he was certainly on the same train. They happened to stand next to each other during
the selection. They passed through every stage of the process together. Their numbers, therefore, are consecutive. Victor and Henry were assigned to the same bunk. They hadn’t yet spoken to each other, and had to locate together their common tongue, that Yiddish dialect, the scrap of language they would share for almost two years, as they shared a blanket. Henry, who was eighteen, looked young for his age. He was still baby-faced, still had the look of a Talmudic scholar about him. He was in shock, having seen his parents shot in the head in their own sitting room just days before, having seen his sister and her baby dispatched to the other side of the train platform just hours before. Victor appropriated him, Anne says, because he thought that having a buddy of the age he claimed would help him to pass. He nursed Henry through typhus and protected him from the vultures who would steal his ration.

It’s a touching story. But Anne works too hard selling the perfection of her romantic alliance with Victor on the basis that Victor and Henry are linked, fated, re-created by the War as two peas from the same unthinkable pod. (As if the obviousness of that matching in the past should carry some inevitability about her connection with Victor in the present. I’ll say it again: I don’t see it.)