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

personality, though I can’t say I could characterize them, exactly. This one is situated alongside a park with bigshady trees, and the air seems to move and the waiters don’t mind when people don’t.
    Victor was there. He was sipping an espresso and staring at women who passed by. He was frankly eyeing them, even nannies pushing prams. There was something faintly ridiculous about the sight of him. I stopped to lurk in the aisle of a fruit stall, not wanting him to see me but somehow finding that I wanted to watch him, see what he was up to. The air was fragrant with ripe fruit. Tiny little wasps hovered, drunk on it. My hands felt empty: camera-less.
    Victor signaled the waiter with a writing gesture in the air. He paid, stood up very suddenly, drained his little cup as he stood there by the table, then strode off in the direction of Anne’s flat—passing close by the fruit stall—as if on his way to an urgent appointment. Which I guess he was. For some perverse reason, I sat down at his table. The seat was warm from him. Or from the sun. I drank two double espressos—espressi?—and had an overpriced sandwich and moved my chair to keep up with the sun, and sat with my eyes closed for a dozey twenty minutes and intermittently wrote you all this. Now it’s close to two and I’m suddenly exhausted. I think I’ll go back to the flat and take a real nap. Maybe, now that I think about it, I will nap on the floor.
    I must try and have a real conversation with Anne this evening. We’re supposed to go hear jazz. (I begin to think Victor knows only waltz music.) I want to write you a real letter in an envelope that goes in the mail. I’m all at sea; can this be love?
    Now it’s later, and I’m waiting for Anne to finish organizing her face so we can go to dinner—this evening, I am instructed by the absent Victor, who has conveyed his suggestion through Anne, I must eat
filet de perche
, another fishy specialty of the city, before we go to the jazz place.
    On the walk back to the apartment this afternoon—I did actually nap—I found a present for you: three scruffy old issues of
Derri
è
re le Miroir
, which have languished and got sun bleached in the window of a secondhand bookshop that I pass each day.
    I woke up from my nap and realized I had dreamed about the summer in Cornwall with Gay and my mother, where Gay insisted that we go, after Adam died and then my father left us. It’s the only time we were ever together, just the three of us, for any extended period of time, and I loved the connected way it felt, the way I could feel people smile at us when we came into the hotel dining room: three generations of Gibson women.
    I dreamed about the box-hedge maze in the hotel garden, which in actuality I had adored. I was lost inside it, unable to find my way out, and as I ran down one blind alley after another, the hedge seemed to close in on me, each space I tried seemed to grow narrower, seemed to come to a hopeless point. I woke up in total despair. It’s been hard to shake the mood, it seemed so real, and I felt so unalterably alone. Well, I have to keep reminding myself that I once was lost, but now I’m found.
    I need to talk to you. I wish there were a telephone for less than emergencies at Highland Lake. Don’t any of those rich kids have cellular phones? Don’t they have to stay in touch with their therapists? Anne is waiting for me by the door, jingling her keys and humming the signature tune from
Peter and the Wolf.
We who are about to dine salute you—

July 17
    Oh, Dear, Benedict,
    Laps of luxury, lapse of judgment, laps in a Swiss swimming pool, thirty-six of them to a mile. (I worked it out from the meter measurements painted on the side of the pool; I needed to know because I can’t think in meters.) I’ve become obsessed with swimming laps. I have my own lane and no one is going to cross my path, and I can just
go
, with none of the usual looking out for the other guy.
    Swimming, my mind