Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (6 page)

“Here’s one,” I said, holding the shell out to him over Anne’s head. She had lain back down on her towel and was squeezing her eyes tight shut. Nobody moved. My arm was still extended over Anne. Her back heaved, and I realized she was suppressing sobs. Victor’s head was still turned away. His voice was weirdly disembodied.

“Don’t you have them ready for me?” he said languidly. I still didn’t get it.

He rolled over and sat up.

“Anne is now upset with both of us,” he announced. “She is upset with you for bringing up a bad subject. You did not know. She is upset with me for playing my little game with you. Isn’t that right?”

Victor patted the top of Anne’s head and stroked her shoulders. Something about her tears obviously pleased him. He was now sitting up in the same doll-like position as the topless woman on my right. I saw his feet.

Benedict, I know human flesh cannot melt, but what I saw looked like melted stubs. Victor has no toes. They froze off at Auschwitz. The Allied doctors wanted to amputate his feet, but he wouldn’t let them. (Anne told me this when Victor went to get us cold drinks a little while later.)

The Pobble grinned at me. He saw me seeing his feet. I did not like his delight in my discomfort, in Anne’s anguish.

“I’m sorry,” I said, meeting his gaze.

“Of course you are,” he said, rather nastily, I thought.

“Of course you wouldn’t like to swim,” sobbed Anne. “I didn’t think.”

“Of course you didn’t, my pet,” said Victor, smiling a cold smile.

We had been at the lake for about an hour, and we stayed there, more or less in silence, for another hour. It felt necessary to sit there so that it wouldn’t have been the upsetting discussion that made us leave, even though I doubt that I was the only one who felt like bolting for the Citroën. While Victor fetched Perriers with straws, and the Belgian mocha biscuits that he considers superior to all other forms of cookie life, Anne told me the story of Victor’s toes, gazing out at the lake the whole time. I found myself imagining their sex life being somehow profoundly affected by this absence. What does he have her do to make up for it? As Victor struggled across the sand carrying the mineral water and the biscuits, I had to avoid studying his gait. He had put on his shoes and socks for the short walk. I wondered if his shoes had special toe-weights that helped him walk. The sight of his fingers gripping the necks of the Perrier bottles was mildly surprising. I wondered if his toes had looked like his fingers. I curled and uncurled my own toes uncontrollably.

The drive back to Geneva was mostly silent. We all three of us had terrible sunburns.

“Merde,”
muttered Anne when she was through studying herself in Victor’s rearview mirror. (I was relieved when she was finished, as I thought he might want to have the use of it on the highway.) “In the office tomorrow, how do we explain matching sunburns?”

“I went to the beach with my family, and you went to a different beach with your visiting friend,” Victor answered. “Thousands of people went to the beach today. Why worry about the coincidence of it?”

What a shit, I thought. A charming shit. With a sunburn. And no toes.

I’m sorry, Benedict, how did we get here? Right: Anne and I were walking along the side of the road on our way to the trout restaurant, she with her skirt flying and her sexy legs, I with my sunburn and in the blue dress you like. Anne had just reported over her shoulder that we were nearly there when a car skidded onto the gravel in front of us, giving me a serious scare. It was Victor’s white Citroën.

“Would you like a ride?”

Anne played it as if he were a stranger. “No, thanks anyway.
Merci, non.
”

Victor waggled his eyebrows at me. I shrugged.

“Very well, ladies. Ciao.” He drove off. I could see his taillight flash about a quarter mile up the road, and then the Citroën turned right and was lost from sight.

“It’s better to arrive separately, in case anyone’s there,” she said over her shoulder.

“Anyone?”

“Any friend of Annamarie’s. Any friend of the family.”

“You’re a friend of the family.”

“Don’t be dense,” she said reprovingly. “It would be a disaster.”
She lingered over the word
disaster
the way some people savor the words
foie gras.

Although the Citroën had been in the parking lot for ten minutes by the time we approached the maître d’s pulpit, Victor was nowhere in evidence.

“We have a reservation for three?” Anne said in French. “The name is Goldfarb.”

We were shown to a table in an elegant garden courtyard. It was early by Swiss standards, and we were the first customers of the evening. There were only five or six tables, all covered to the ground with snowy tablecloths, and very widely spaced across the white gravel courtyard. The tables were all big enough to seat eight or ten people. Ours had three place settings at noon, four, and eight.

Anne and I picked up two wineglasses and moved together in the direction of the third. We sat down, leaving a place for Victor between us. This might seem like a small thing, but moments like that are what our friendship thrives on, has thriven on, that in-synch, “two thoughts with but a single mind” kind of instant: commonplace when we were roommates in New York, but so rare since I’ve been here that I made a mental note of it.

A flurry of Bemelmans waiters rushed to rearrange the place settings. (What we had done was very naughty.) There was a stream running by, only a few feet from us, and the noise of it meant that we had to raise our voices slightly to converse, even after our rearrangement.

“So typical,” said Anne. “So Swiss to seat us that way—so we use the table completely—with no thought to conversational distances.”

“Or something. Maybe they don’t like the idea of private conversations,” I suggested. “And who is Goldfarb?”

“I thought you knew.”

“Do I?” Did I?

“It was my father’s father’s name. Daddy changed it.”

“Why?” I never knew this before.

“Anti-Semitism, I suppose.”

I thought of an imperious dowager of Scottish ancestry (and proud of it) called Peggy Gordon. I once heard her say to Gay that she thought half the Gordons in New York were Jews who had changed their names from Goldfarb, Goldstein, and so on. “Why can’t they just change it to Gold?” she had asked plaintively. “It’s shorter and neater, but you can still tell. I would rather expect them to like a nice glittering name like Gold.”

Gay had laughed and offered her more to drink. I thought, from my vantage point in Gay’s bedroom, where I was sorting out all her jewelry on her bedspread—I must have been about ten—that her laugh was not so much with Peggy as at her. There was also my own parentage to consider. I was not only Gay Gibson’s granddaughter, I was Simon Rose’s daughter. I wonder now whether Peggy Gordon ever considered for one second that her words could hurt me, could hurt my feelings. Doubtful. It probably didn’t occur to her that I thought of myself as Jewish. She always fussed over me because I looked so much like a Gibson. I had “the Gibson upper lip.”

Gay was fond of her because they went back a long way and had traveled to Reno together for their first divorces. By the time I was six I knew that the Truckee River ran through Reno, where you went for a divorce. You stood on a bridge and threw your now meaningless wedding ring into that river.

Once, when I was little, the people next door, the Antlers, had a terrible argument, and Mrs. Antler ran out the front door and threw her wedding ring into the bushes in front of their house. I saw her do it. That night I watched from my bedroom window as Mr. and Mrs. Antler together hunted through those bushes, on their knees, with flashlights, for hours.

So Benedict, where I come from there were a lot of wedding rings tossed around. Me, when I have a wedding ring, I don’t intend to take it off. Ever. Just so you know.

Victor sidled into the courtyard just when the waiter was presenting us with menus as big as the bonnet of a small car. Victor joined us, and the waiter nearly knocked off Victor’s reading glasses as he flourished another menu under his nose. We were each hidden from sight behind this menu flotilla. Everything about this place was slightly oversized. Perhaps that signifies luxury. I imagine that we looked, from above, like three giant moths poised for flight.

The voice of Victor insisted that I order the
truite au bleu
, the specialty of the place. Perversely, he spoke English with the
waiter, perhaps to deprive the waiter of the home advantage of his native tongue. He ordered gray sole for Anne, who contributed no audible thoughts of her own about what she would like to eat.

“I will take the steak,” Victor said to the waiter—rather imperiously, I thought. Why did it bother me so?
I will take the steak
, I have no toes, so I will not merely have, as others do, but I will take. I survived Auschwitz, so I can cheat on my wife and I will take the steak.

The waiter plucked away the menus. I cannot begin to enumerate all the ways that I do not like this man. I do not like what Anne has become, is becoming, will become. A spinster with a special feeling for a certain flower stall. A childless woman alone on holidays. A woman with a gray soul.

Why did I expect that Anne would pay for this meal? In fact, she did end up picking up the check, but not because Victor managed the simple maneuver of looking the other way. No, by the time the check came it was much more complicated than that.

Our starters had been served, consumed, and cleared (duck-liver pâté and vegetable terrine, quite good, actually, though Victor had been unpleasant with the waiter’s suggestion that he might like soup—thoughtless of the waiter not to realize that, having lived on ghastly soup in a concentration camp, Victor is greatly pained when soup possibilities arise in his present life) when another group was seated across from us.

At this point Anne was seated between Victor and me; when Victor was shown to our table, Anne had moved over nearer to me, either despite or in response to Victor’s murmured, “Ah, I shall be a thorn between two roses.” So we had got ourselves into the same configuration as at the beach. I thought I saw Victor looking uncomfortable, but I didn’t think it was in response to anything said (and assumed that a bulletin concerning his fascinatingly sensitive digestive system was soon forthcoming), as our conversation at that juncture was pointless and desultory, mostly about the food. The next time I turned my head, Victor had disappeared.

He had simply vanished. Anne looked quite disturbed.

“What happened to Victor?” I felt, for a brief moment, on the edge of hysteria, like Ingrid Bergman in
Gaslight.
I also had an absurd sense that Anne was about to launch into a complete summary of What Happened to Victor, up to and including the Allied doctors’ wanting to amputate those hideous feet. Was Victor a demon? A golem? I wished I had taken his picture.

“Victor is right here—he’s under the table,” Anne murmured, looking straight ahead, her lips barely moving. Her tension was almost comical. I half expected her to say, “Just act natural.”

“May I ask why?”

“A woman who plays tennis with Annamarie is at that table.”

“Ah. An F of the F.”

“Don’t—this is serious,” Anne ground out at me through clenched teeth. There was a muffled gasp from under our table. In an attempt to kick me, she had kicked Victor.

Our main courses arrived, borne out to the courtyard by three waiters in a procession. Each carried a tray on which was a plate under a silver dome. The domed plates were placed before us. Victor’s was set down at his place. The three waiters looked confused.

“Monsieur?”
one murmured.

“Monsieur had to leave,” Anne replied, in English, so indistinctly that the waiter almost couldn’t hear her over the rushing of the stream. He cupped his hand behind one ear and bent down over her shoulder.

“Is everything all right, mademoiselle?” he asked, also switching to English.

“Oui,”
she answered, cutting off any further discussion.

“You can leave the steak,” I said, figuring that Victor might still want to eat it, somehow. Also, we were going to have to pay for it. Hell, I would take it home and eat it.

The waiters glumly went through their ritual of simultaneous revelation, whisking all three silver domes high into the air after a wordless count to three. Victor’s absence had spoiled it for them.

Now what?

Anne and I ate dinner in total silence. One of her hands was in her lap all through the meal; I realized that she was stroking Victor’s head, or something.

“Look, does this happen a lot?”

She shook her head, giving me reason to believe that it did and that discussion about it was unwelcome at this time. I didn’t know whether to hurry or linger over the food. How were we going to get Victor out of there unseen? I poked at my trout, which stared me down. I ate my potatoes and my
courgette matchsticks done up in a bundle and tied with a string of chive.

My few days in Geneva with Anne had seemed beyond ordinary experience from the start, but this evening was now taking on aspects of a Delvaux. The waiters, the artificial outdoor setting, the imitation of gracious service, the contrived arrangements of food, the deception of Anne’s true love lurking under the tablecloth—nothing seemed real. The food had no taste in my mouth. The wine, a Gewürz, tasted like glass.

Across from us, the waiter was erecting menus in front of the people at the table with Annamarie’s tennis friend, and when he had worked his way around, their view in our direction was completely obscured. Victor must have been on the lookout for this opportunity; he flung the tablecloth up and bolted straight out like a sprinter crouched at the starting block when the gun goes off.

Anne and I sat very still, as if we had agreed in advance to ignore this moment. Without turning my head I saw the edge of Victor’s jacket go by, and I could hear for an instant the crunching of Victor’s shoes on gravel; perhaps I only thought I could hear the Citroën engine turn over. The escape from Stalag 17 was a complete success.