The Other Adonis

by Frank Deford

  “The subject isn’t coffee, Joc,” he said, sitting on the counter. “Go on, tell me what the hell you’re up to, following Nina all over Manhattan.”

  “No, first you tell me. How do you know about me?”

  “Dumb luck. You’re going to get a letter from Nina. God knows why, but she wants to meet you—and I made her give me the name of the nutty woman. And lo and behold…” He waved to her.

  Jocelyn blew on her Tanzanian. “I’m afraid you don’t know the half of it, Hugh. I also broke into her office—twice.”

  “Broke in? Are you out of your mind?”

  Jocelyn shrugged. “So, how did she know it was me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Honestly?”

  “Honestly. And Nina doesn’t know I know you, either. So, okay, now can we start at the beginning?”

  Jocelyn mulled that request, then hoisted herself up on the bend of the counter, so that she sat catty-cornered from him. “All right, I believe in reincarnation.”

  “I certainly know that. God knows, we discussed the matter enough.”

  “Yeah, but how long’s that been since we were going out? Three, four years? I was a novice then, Hugh. Absolute naïf. But I’ve really studied reincarnation since then, and I’ve come across the most incredible teachers. Their name is Mironov—Sergei and Ludmilla. He’s an Orthodox priest in Russia, she’s his wife. They live in a little town somewhere up near St. Petersburg.”

  “How’d you find them?”

  Jocelyn shrugged. “The Internet, of course.”

  “Ahh: www-dot-reincarnation-dot-org.”

  “Don’t be a wiseass, Hugh. That’s especially unbecoming of someone whose life’s work is faith.” He dropped his head in apology. “Of course, I know: reincarnation in the West is more philosophy than religion—exactly the opposite of the way it is in the East.” She sighed. “But when Sergei was denied the right to preach during the Communist years, he and Ludmilla spent much of their time studying. They came to believe, Hugh, that the soul is reincarnated in other bodies. And is this really so much to accept? Think of how complicated the process is to build a baby. Well, if a baby can be born with a brain and eyes—and all the rest—why can’t a soul be put in there, too? Sergei and Ludmilla believe all this, you understand, as devout Christians. They’re not kooks. They follow Jesus’ teachings no less than you do.”

  “And you, Joc?”

  “Well, you’ll be pleased to learn, Hugh, that the Mironovs have really brought me back into the fold. And my beliefs may not be all that unconventional. Sergei has found a lot of research indicating that some of the early Christian prophets espoused reincarnation, but that any references to that were simply expunged from what became the one true Bible. And the big Jewish honchos were delighted to second the motion.”

  Hugh started to interrupt, but Jocelyn plowed on. “I know. I know. That’s old hat. But trust me: Sergei and Ludmilla have taken things much further. Wait here.”

  She jumped off the counter, returning with pictures of the Mironovs that showed a rather ordinary looking Russian couple—he bearded, she babushka-ed. Jocelyn also held up a ream of papers, which, at a glance, all seemed to have been written in Russian. “This is the heart of their work.”

  “You can read Cyrillic now?”

  She shook her head. “But I’ve had it read to me. And now I’m ready to arrange for a full translation—and publication!” Her face beamed. But then, Jocelyn had always been such a grand romantic that sometimes it could even leave her vulnerable. “This is so important, Hugh—so beautiful!” And now, brimming with ardor, she stood even closer, looking down on him, where he sat on the Formica. In her enthusiasm, Jocelyn could be quite intimidating. Rather formally, then, she asked, “What is the most we humans can aspire to, Hugh?”

  Confused, unprepared, he wondered at first if it wasn’t some kind of trick question. But that wasn’t Jocelyn’s style, so finally, he ventured the obvious. “Love,” he declared.

  “Of course,” said Jocelyn. But Hugh wasn’t off the hook yet. “So, what is the greatest love?” As he paused to respond, Jocelyn barged ahead. “Love your neighbor, of course, is wonderful,” she told him. “And love God. No argument. But also, both your neighbor and God can be awfully abstract, can’t they?”

  “Well…”

  “You know they can. You know that, as a human being, the greatest expression, the fullness of spirit, can only be achieved by loving one other person. And likewise attaining the love of that one other. That’s the hardest, Hugh.”

  She slammed the Mironov papers with the back of her hand, indicating where this judgment came from. Hugh didn’t dispute her, only said, “Go on. I’m listening. I always listen to you, Joc.”

  “Even when you think I’m full of shit.”

  “Even when I think you’re full of shit.”

  “Do you now?”

  “Go on.”

  “We simply cannot achieve completeness as a human being without participating in the totality of a living relationship. A woman”—she touched her chest—“with a man.” She touched his. “One male with one female. No abstraction. No: I love God. Or: I love my neighbor. Why, I even love my bad neighbors in Serbia who rape and murder at will. No, no, to fulfill your life as a person on Earth, you must find that one other person. Sergei and Ludmilla, for example, know they’ve achieved the ultimate, but it looks like I’ll have to come back, because I’ve never found that one man that I can form a whole loving life with.”

  “This information is not going to go down easy with the Pope,” Hugh observed.

  “Hey, didn’t I tell you about not being a wiseass?” But this time Jocelyn laughed easily as she poured the rest of the coffee into his cup. “I’ll make another pot,” she assured him. “I have some wonderful Jamaica Blue Mountain.”

  “No, this’ll be enough,” Hugh answered. “But, you know, I would love to sit in an actual chair.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say so?” Jocelyn exclaimed, and she led him into the living room—parlor? Jocelyn had decorated each room in her apartment in a different fashion. This one was Victorian, filled with bric-a-brac and doilies; her studio was art deco; her bedroom Scandinavian modern; her bathroom done up like a ladies room at a 1940s-style supper club (you had to see it). Now, as soon as they had plunked themselves down together on the old-fashioned divan, Jocelyn went on again. “One of the first things that Sergei discovered is that there are certain couples who find each other in one life, who are absolutely made for one another, but who are then pulled apart.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh come on, Hugh, is there no poetry left in your soul? For all the same reasons that troubadours have always had jobs. Death. Ironic circumstance. The wrong class in a class society. The wrong religion. One or the other already married to someone else. Whatever. So, Sergei—no, actually this was Ludmilla—came up with a name for these lovers.” She flipped through the papers till she found the right Cyrillic words. “Double Ones.”

  “Double Ones?”

  “Yeah, I like that.” She grinned smugly. “In fact, the last time I broke into Nina’s office, I left her a note, and I signed it like that—but in Cyrillic: Double Ones.”

  Hugh only shook his head, more in amazement than disapproval. “Jocelyn, you do know that the police put people in jail for that sort of thing?”

  “Of course I know, sweet-pea,” she said matter of factly, “but then, I’ve never been obsessed before.”

  In her apartment, Nina went over the final elements of her strategy for trying to take Constance back in time. She wrote down a few key words that she might employ to trigger her regressive memory. Nina hoped that Constance could resurface in the past without any prodding, because she recognized that the more “hints” she gave her, the more that critics might argue that Nina had sim
ply led Constance on.

  So, she decided, that if she had to suggest something, first it would be a fairly neutral item. She settled on the Schelde River, by which Antwerp lay. “Does the Schelde River mean anything?” Then Antwerp itself. Then peacocks and greyhounds—because Rubens kept many of both on his estate. If Constance’s memory still was not jogged, then would Nina get more specific. She decided, at that point, that she would mention the name of Helena, Rubens’s wife. Then, if necessary: 1635, the year.

  Nina wrote all this down, in descending order. If none of these various clues bore fruit, only then would she play her last card. Only then, finally, would she utter to Constance this one last word: Ollie.

  Hugh patted Jocelyn’s leg with understanding, almost avuncularly. “Okay, I get the picture, Joc, but help me some more with these Double Ones.”

  “Well, Sergei suspects that if Double Ones somehow manage to encounter each other, their souls can connect. The way he expresses it is that a soul is like a wireless message or maybe now—to bring the technology up-to-date—a byte in cyberspace. They’re searching for bodies to inhabit, so—who knows?—maybe that special love from one of the Double Ones signals the soul of the other. Sergei doesn’t pretend to know the spirit world, Hugh. He’s not some kind of mystic. He’s just…wise.”

  “Okay, so what’s this got to do with Nina?”

  “Bucky,” was all Jocelyn said.

  “I’m sorry. Bucky?”

  “You really don’t know anything, do you?”

  Hugh shook his head. “That’s what I told you.”

  “Well, Bucky appears to be the quintessential Double One, who, by chance, dropped into my lap.” Jocelyn chuckled. “Bad imagery. The first time he dropped into my lap. The second time into my faith.” Jocelyn pulled her long legs up onto the divan, gripped them with both arms, and lay her chin on her knees. She began to talk. She started by explaining who Bucky was, how they met. “It was really quite wonderful, Hugh. I made him feel mature. He made me feel immature.” She paused, grinning at the memory. “Once he did tell me about his total fixation with another woman. That hurt me, but it was spooky enough that I understood how he had to tell someone.” And thereupon, Jocelyn related all that Bucky had told her about Constance, when they had chanced upon each other in Philadelphia.

  “Double Ones,” Hugh piped up—but this time without any flippancy.

  “Clearly. Only, of course, I didn’t know anything about Double Ones then. And anyway, Bucky and I were winding down. He’d met a younger woman, and he’d marry her, so we lost track of each other.”

  “How long are we talking about?”

  “Oh, a long time, Hugh. Maybe fifteen years. Then one night we ran into each other again, so we had a couple of lunches—strictly innocent. But, at some point in there I mentioned my interest in reincarnation. I promise you, I wasn’t proselytizing.” Jocelyn pursed her lips. “No reference to Double Ones, to how deeply I believed. Just mentioned it in passing. It was like I’d told him I’d joined a bowling league.” Hugh nodded, taking it all in—quite fascinated, really. “But it obviously all registered with Bucky, and one evening a few months ago—I can tell you exactly: March the twelfth—he called me in an absolute panic and said he had to see me.” That, as Jocelyn explained, was the day that Bucky had first happened upon Venus and Adonis.

  “I went back up to the Metropolitan with him the next day, and it was positively frightening. He was breathing hard, shaking—literally. I mean, he held onto me for dear life. And, Hugh, I knew this guy. He’d been like a lover and a son to me—if that doesn’t sound too inappropriate—and I’d never seen anything like this from him. Scratch that: I’d never seen anything like this from anybody.”

  “So, you mentioned Double Ones to him.”

  “Oh no. Never. I realized right away that Bucky could be the key to unearthing secrets. I wanted to keep him pure and untainted. Like, that’s why, when he asked if I knew a psychiatrist who could hypnotize him, I didn’t recommend somebody I knew who believed in reincarnation.”

  “Ah, so that’s where Nina enters the picture.”

  Jocelyn leaned over and patted Hugh’s arm. “You have no idea how regularly her name would just happen to come up.” Hugh ducked his head, embarrassed. Jocelyn went on. “Enough about my broken heart. Back to Topic A. And here’s a coincidence.” She leaned forward again, picking the Russian papers off the table. “Sergei and Ludmilla have compiled a list of well-known people in history who are almost surely Double Ones.”

  “Like who?”

  “Like don’t be nosy. Like I’m saving that for the book. Who the hell ever heard of Sergei and Ludmilla, up there in darkest Russia? Or some guy named Bucky? But a bunch of big names will get people into the tent. And nowhere in history are there more obvious Double Ones than Peter Paul Rubens himself and his second wife, Helena. Classic Double Ones. Rubens was, essentially, painting pictures of her years before she actually entered his life. She was only sixteen when he married her, and he was almost your age.”

  “This is love? Some rich old goat and a baby-fat blondie?”

  “Your sarcasm is getting the better of you again. And, Hugh, I can’t speak for Peter Paul Rubens, but I’ll tell you this. When I stood in that Rubens gallery with Bucky and he said he was looking at himself in a painting and he can feel Constance up there too—sense her, sense them both as Venus and Adonis—well, I mean, I knew, Hugh. I knew. It was eerie.”

  Eerie. That was the same word Nina had used. Hugh couldn’t escape it. Whatever it was, whatever had happened. He knew these two grown-up, intelligent women well, and he knew what different sorts they were, but they both had been profoundly affected in the same manner by this one man, this Bucky, and his bizarre experience.

  But Jocelyn wasn’t finished. “There’s more, Hugh. I couldn’t wait to get home to contact Sergei and Ludmilla,”

  “More?”

  “Sergei’s convinced that it’s almost surely a couple hundred years before a soul returns to earth. It’s no shuttle flight, back-and-forth kinda thing. And now: photographs.” She said that portentously, pointing to her old family portraits on the table.

  “Photographs, what?”

  “Well, very soon now—okay, maybe a century or so from now—the people who return to earth are going to start seeing their former selves in photographs. Obviously, it isn’t going to happen to everybody, but never before have we had our images captured so perfectly—and so widely. And seeing something as intimate as your own face—or that of a person you knew well—that’s bound to register. And bound to confuse. You pick up a book, and there in some innocuous crowd scene, is a person who strikes you, who fazes you. Or you’re watching some historical documentary on television, or—”

  “—you walk into a museum, and—”

  “Exactly! You’re catching on, Hugh. Bucky and his ladylove have, in effect, prefigured the photographic recognition of past existence. Compared to the number of people who’ve been photographed, there’s only been a handful of portrait models through the pre-photography centuries. And Bucky was one.”

  Jocelyn was really excited now. She was flailing her arms. It reminded him of one other occasion when she got so carried away about something that he jammed one of her hats on her head—in order, he told her, to tamp down her brains, as you would a fire. But Hugh sat tight now; he just watched her jump and stomp about. The enthusiasm—the faith!—was extraordinary to observe in action.

  “Oh, it’s hugely important, Hugh. Bucky seeing himself! And Bucky seeing his old love, too. They’re Double Ones, Hugh!” For happy emphasis, she slapped his foot, which lay across his knee, jiggling there. “Don’t you see? These two could independently verify each other’s memories from the past. We’ve never had anything like that before. And they can actually see themselves. Exactly as they were. Rubens was not only a genius. His work w
as the most exact, the most lifelike.”

  “Better than Kodak,” Hugh said.

  “Yes! And get this: Bucky just saw her again. Constance—his Double One from Philadelphia! Absolutely, by chance, after twenty years, they run into each other on a plane.” Jocelyn leaned down and took Hugh by the shoulders. “Don’t you see? We’ve got to get hold of her, bring her here, hypnotize her, too—then show her Venus and Adonis.” Jocelyn let go of his shoulders, but raised her hands to the heavens, beaming. “Suppose, just suppose, she recalls everything Bucky does? Suppose she reacts the same way when she sees the painting? It’s proof, Hugh, proof.”

  “Well…” He was only being politely dubious, but Jocelyn sneered at him anyhow, the way all true believers treat the recalcitrant. Anyway, Hugh was content merely to be evasive. He remembered now how Nina had told him that Constance was coming to New York, and he didn’t want to reveal any of that intelligence.

  No matter. Suddenly, Jocelyn dashed across the room, calling for him to follow. He did. Into her studio, past an easel that sat there empty, to a CD console. A tape was sticking part way out. “Listen,” Jocelyn ordered.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s the tape I stole from Nina’s office.”

  Hugh reached down, grabbing for it. “Jocelyn, you can’t!”

  But too late. Just then, the voice keened: “…owwwllllleeeeeee…”

  He recoiled, the same shocking reaction as Nina, and as Jocelyn, when first they heard it. “My God!” he cried out, the sound scraping his heart. “Who?”

  “That’s Bucky.” Jocelyn flipped off the tape. “Or anyway, that’s the voice Bucky had in 1635. I’m sure.”

  Reflexively, Hugh still covered his ears, as if he were protecting himself from the possibility that that horrific sound could sneak back and assault again. Finally, lowering his hands, he asked, “What’s he saying?”