Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear Read Online Free Page A

Frank, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Children Without Childhoods, Nazi Doctors, Wartime Lies, Sophie’s Choice, The Painted Bird
, and every book by Primo Levi. (I wonder if I could make money with a Holocaust Book Club. You bet. People would be too guilty to return any of the monthly selections.)
    Oh, maybe I’m just jealous of Victor and feel left out, relegated to a more distant role in Anne’s life. And Anne knows me well enough to discern my lack of enthusiasm for him. (The Gay Gibson term for my response to Victor is
modified rapture.
) For all I know I made Anne feel left out in my letters to her about you. But this is more than the dislocation and adjustment between the best of friends, each of whom thinks she has met the love of her life. Something about this makes me uneasy.
    But I’m rambling. Maybe life doesn’t have to be as complicated as I always seem to think it is. So. Please forgive these platitudes. Benedict: you are my You. This month ahead of me is more than a little bit alarming, and not just because of Anne, and this peculiar situation with Victor. I am, because
of you, squaring off to account for myself, in some ways for the first time. You showed me the way. You make me see that I really have to think about my photographs. Your relationshipto your painting is so solid; you have incredibly high standards for your own work. You make me want to assess and revise everything in my work. You make me realize how much of my work isn’t good enough, how tempted I am to coast. I worry that you are too confident, not in yourself but in me. This is hard to say: You don’t know the half of it, dearie. Maybe you don’t even know the quarter of it.
    So I’m in Geneva, city of watches and illicit romance, the measly grant from the Swift Foundation covering my plane tickets, and, if I’m lucky, maybe one good meal out with Anne while I’m here, but it’s nice work if I can get it. Gloria tells me that the prestige of winning a Swift is worth far more than I realize. I certainly hope so. Meanwhile, I’m stewing over several ideas for some groups of pictures. And I do have the commitment from Gloria for a small back-room show at Shippen in late winter.
    I mean to take a lot of pictures based on reflections in shop windows. This is perhaps too neat a sequel to my self-portrait series, but what can I say? Does it strike you as too pandering, too commercial, too expected, too Harriet Rose? It will be more subtle than it sounds, I promise.
    So here’s hoping for an astonishing month, Benedict. It seems wrong that I have gone away from you right now. But this trip was arranged for several weeks before we met, as I keep reminding you in order to remind myself that I haven’t just flown the coop, that you’re real and you’ll be there.
    You’ve become part of me, you’re inside me all the time. When I think of you, I think about the future in a different way than I ever did before. The important things are starting to be clear to me, some for the first time. I feel balances shifting, in good ways, in major ways.
    With you I can begin to care, and to stop caring. I mean: there is a freedom, for the first time, to think about the sensibility in my work in a pure way.
    There’s a song stuck in my head. Remember the night we drank rusty nails and listened to the entire score for “Of Thee I Sing”? I had never really paid attention to the words before. Now I can’t stop thinking about Mr. and Mrs. Wintergreen, at the beginning of “Who Cares?”:
    Who cares what the public chatters?
    Love’s the only thing that matters.
    I miss you in all ways. I passed a walled garden yesterday on my way back from my pickle lunch, and I could hear a tennis game, and it made me think of you in that New Hampshire air teaching tennis to overprivileged monsters.
    Do you know, the first person scares me, Benedict. The very photographs for which I am known, the pictures that put me squarely in the middle of the Brat Pack for better or