Free Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear by Katharine Weber

off.
    He turned toward me. We stood there then, facing each other. Victor had on a ribbed undershirt, which was stained by a faint intarsia of sweat. The sight of it tucked into his suit trousers made him look unexpectedly like an old man. There were wisps of gray hairs on his speckled shoulders. And ofcourse, on his left forearm, there was the obscene embroidery of his number.
    I imagined him as a brave, cocky, scared boy, standing not in an undershirt and suit pants and shiny black wing tips but naked, in a room with many other men, Anne’s father among them, each waiting for his turn to be numbered. Now I was looking at the same skin.
    He held out the shirt to me in a gesture I didn’t understand. I stood facing him, my back to the doorless, ridiculous miniature kitchen. I took an involuntary step backward. Victor smiled. Our eyes were locked in a mutual gaze of enormous incomprehensible significance. Maybe he understood what was going on, I sure didn’t. What
were
we doing here? Behind Victor the sun was splashing on the shuttered windows across the courtyard. Were other people sleeping? Already at work? I felt as though Victor and I were the only two living, breathing souls in the building. I wondered if anyone would hear me if I screamed. I wondered how loud I could scream. All of this took place in less time than it has taken to tell it.
    He held out the shirt again. I put out my hand as much to ward him off as to take the shirt.
    “Do you know how to sew?” he asked.
    After a moment’s pause, I began to blither. “Not really. I’ve never been very good at sewing. Or very interested in it, either.” I was unfreezing, picking up momentum. “I’ve always been a failure at things involving thread and string. I hated macramé at camp. I was terrible at cat’s cradle. I couldn’t braid those lanyard things to save myself. I would make a terrible sailor.”
    Victor eyed me with the unblinking scrutiny of a lizard. He couldn’t have understood half of what I was talking about. “I have lost a button,” he said.
    So, Benedict. I got out Anne’s sewing box—a round Mexican tin box I gave her last year for Valentine’s Day with heart-shapedcookies inside—and handed him a spool of white thread and a needle and, taking a leaf from his book, said nothing. Consequently, I had the slight satisfaction of watching him sew on his own damned button. He sat in a chair, turned now to catch the light from the window, and he quietly bit the thread and tied the knot, and in the most civilized, Gandhi-like way, he humbly sewed the button back onto the shirt.
    It was one of the smaller collar buttons. Was this really why he had come? Maybe it had dropped off when he was removing his necktie, and he had caught it in his hand. Maybe he pulled it off to save face when he saw the look on mine. I do not know.
    Victor never did explain why he had shown up. Surely he didn’t expect me to think it was to see if I could sew his button. I forgot to offer him anything to eat or drink. We never spoke of Anne. When he was finished with his task, he bit the end of the thread, handed me the needle with a wisp of thread trailing from it, put his clothes back on, and left.
    I looked at the clock and realized that it was half-past eleven. I wondered if Victor would go all the way back across town to the office to meet Anne, or if he had other things to do, or if perhaps he wasn’t meeting Anne in the flat today. I was in a sudden panic to get out of there.
    The air was surprisingly hotter than it had been until now, and still. The sky was a washed-out blue. People on the street looked tired. I bought a newspaper at one of those curious newsstands whereon the newspapers just sit, unguarded, and people pay for them on the honor system. In New York, a newsstand like that would be picked clean in ten minutes, don’t you think? I aimed for one of my most recent discoveries in sidewalk cafés. The cafés in the Vieille Ville each have a distinct