Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear Read Online Free

in this L-shaped room; Our Lady of the Perpetual Milk Crate has reformed. Anne has a table with two chairs; that’s where I am now. There is a high chest of drawers, with a large mirror over it, and the bed, or should I say The Bed. It’s very low and modern, the only expensive item in the place. Victor has a bad back—Victor has many infirmities—so when Anne arrived, she spent all her money on it. She doesn’t seem to notice how impersonal the place is. Or maybe she likes the ambience of a hospital room. It does have that feeling of a place where some sort of procedures are performed on the human body. Which I guess you could say is the case.
    The ceiling is so high that I think the room may be taller than it is wide. It’s like being at the bottom of a box. The scale is so odd, in fact, that when I look at the very tall doors in their very tall doorframes, I feel diminished and am reminded of being a child in my room, looking up at the tops of doors and wondering what the top of my head might look like from up there on the lintel.
    The only good light is here at the table, where I can see the blank shuttered faces of those other apartments. If I duck down, I can see a little slice of Swiss sky; I guess that’s the allotment that comes with the flat.
    Yesterday I had lunch in a café around the corner, and when the waiter offered me a dish of extra little pickles—two had come with my ham sandwich—I accepted. Then the bill came and I saw that I had been charged four francs for
“cornichonssupplémentaires.”
So the Swiss are a pickle-counting people, and I must remember to count my pickles before they go down the hatch. (Did I really eat six? I wonder.)
    When I faxed Anne my flight information last week, I added, WILL YOU BAKE A CAKE? (Now that she knew I was coming.) But I always forget how charmingly unknowing of popular culture this girl is, how much she missed by going to school abroad, by having a European father and, after seventh grade, a deceased mother, and she had never heard of the song—she thinks that maybe she has heard of Jimmy Durante, but she’s probably got Will Durant, or Asher B. Durand, in mind—and so she went out and bought a cake (a dense poppy-seed one from a Viennese bakery of which Victor approves) because, as I have said, she has no oven. Just a very literal mind.
    I do love her though, and I am cross with myself for my impatience with this strange new mistress-person. Anne of Cleavage. It makes me doubt what I thought I knew. What did I know? Who was that in New York with whom I shared those two rooms on Eighth Street for a year and a half? We were practically living in each other’s pockets, and maybe I mistook a mutual love of so many books and movies and a million other things for something else. Have I told you that we once sat through
The Philadelphia Story
twice when it was shown at the Modern? We both know most of the good lines. We both used to want to be Katharine Hepburn. If Tracy Lord had had a best friend, the George Kittredge alliance would never have got so out of hand.
    Anne used to have a certain kind of rational, if not practical, approach to life. But this new Anne seems to have no good sense, and no good sense of herself. I want to shake her, slap her, wake her up from this fugue state. And then I’m impatient with my impatience.
    She also has no good records. I just got up for a stretch anda prowl, and I see nothing worthwhile except for the Django Reinhardt album I gave her for her birthday last year, which she doesn’t seem to have opened. Too much Rachmaninoff, way too much. Also odd books: very
affettato
fiction (
The Name of the Rose
, an unread-looking Pynchon, dog-eared Du Maurier, and strange quantities of Ann Beattie and Paul Theroux), three different How to Improve books (sex life, complexion, thighs), and, of course, your basic, up-to-date Survivor Guilt Library:
The Abandonment of the Jews, Holocaust Testimonies
, the
Annotated Diary of Anne