The Solitary Twin

by Harry Mathews

  Andreas had time to go home and have a refreshing nap. With Berenice he then went back into town to keep their appointment at the Hunting Horn with Wicheria.

  She was waiting at the bar. She waved to them as they walked in, as if there could be any doubt that she was the one they were looking for. Berenice immediately allowed herself the pleasure of detailing her appearance: high-heeled black patent-leather sandals; a flounced red taffeta skirt, half-calf length; a broad belt of green snake skin; a loose muslin blouse of softer red; on her arms silver bracelets that slid and clinked when she moved; no rings; red-currant pendants on her ears; long thick auburn hair, with an occasional curl (not smoldering red as reported). When she stood up and walked smiling toward them they felt nothing so much as a pleasure in being alive, which Wicheria seemed to confirm with her first words, “The Captain told me you were the hottest couple in town.”

  Knowing there would be much talking in store, she had secured a relatively quiet corner table for them. At Wicheria’s suggestion, they ordered plain fare and good wine. She quickly brought up the subject of the twins and asked Berenice and Andreas how they had become interested in them and what they’d learned about them since they’d arrived in town. The couple answered her questions concisely and cheerfully, not hiding their disappointment at their dinner with Paul.

  Wicheria: “Paul couldn’t possibly accept your offer as ‘not impossible.’ There’s no way he could even dream of saying yes to it. That’s not only because he has a thorny side.

  “This is what I think. The two of them are playing one game, the same game. Or putting on one and the same act. One act with two sides to it. Or two actors — for instance: one sort of sweet, one sort of tough, sweet John, tough Paul, John gets affection, Paul gets respect, together they get both. Or at least that’s their plan. I said this is what I think, but I bet you nobody in this place knows them like I do. I have to tell you one other thing. I never talk about Paul to John or John to Paul. And if I did — and if Andreas you did — it’s not John or Paul who could tell you what’s going down between them, only the two of them could do it. I’m not even sure if they sat down one day and laid out the rules, or the thing just evolved, seeing what worked and what didn’t. No matter how they set the game up, they had it down perfect when they moved here, arriving on separate dates, going straight to separate lodgings, drinking in different neighborhoods. Just managing the logistics proves they’d planned it together. You know they’ve never even been seen in the same space, not ever. Although there’ve been quite a few almosts.”

  Andreas: “But what’s the point? What do they get out of it?” “Whatever they get they get it as a pair. I’m totally sure each of them knows what the other’s been up to.” Berenice: “What makes you so sure?” “Lots of wiseacres make a point of telling each twin ‘what he may not have heard.’ Then when I talk to either of them he’ll say that he knows these things already — ‘Oh, you should ask my brother John about that’ or ‘That’s Paul’s department.’” Berenice: “You mean they communicate?” “It sure looks that way.” “But how?” “I dunno. Invisible ink? Encryption? I long to get a look inside their Macs, but I almost never get a chance. They both always insist on my place.” Andreas: “What’s that mean?”

  Wicheria: “Are you up for a confession? Real intimate?” The couple made it clear they were. “OK. I’ve had affairs with both of them. I’m having affairs with both of them. Very laid back. No strings, no expectations. I love going to bed with them, they’re different but each fun in his own way. Mostly they’re true to form — gentle John likes to make things last forever, steely Paul comes on like a bullet train. Now hear this: Paul likes (read: insists on) making love with the lights out, and I don’t mean down: out. And why? He doesn’t want me to see his body, he’s so shy. Sweetie-pie John has to have all the lights on so he can be sure of seeing my body, otherwise he can’t make it. It’s fine by me either way, but it’s not behavior I’d have expected. To get back to my point: what they’ve done is combine their similarities — what twins are supposed to have — with absolutely separate ways of living. Taking them together, that makes for a whole, or maybe not a whole but a very full life, here in this one place and time. That way it makes some kind of sense — not just in my bed, either.”

  Berenice: “At least it’s conceivable. I’ll have to think about it.” Andreas: “Me, too. In the meantime, since you’ve been so frank about yourself, Wicheria —” “People also call me Witchy, for speed —” “OK, Witchy, could you tell us more about how you became the way you are, how you came here, for instance, how you learned to be so ‘laid back’ about sex at only, what are you, twenty-one, twenty-two?” “Close. Plus one.” “So?” “You don’t want to hear my whole story.” Berenice: “Oh yes, we do. We’re very into stories, life stories especially, you have no idea.” “That’s pretty weird. OK. My relaxed attitude about sex was the direct outcome of my tragic childhood.”

  They were then regaled with their first hearing of Wicheria’s laugh — bass clarinet to clarinet to softened high flute. She then shook her head, rather solemnly. “It may not have been tragic, I’m not sure what ‘tragic’ means, but it was sad enough. Still, as you must have noticed, I recovered. My last name is Bentwick — maybe five people here know that, and four of them are town clerks. Maybe for starters I should talk about the Bentwick dynasty. It’s not irrelevant, it was relevant from the start, as you’ll see.

  “The start means Paul Bentwick, born in 1830 in Maastricht into a family of money changers.

  “He was my great-great-grandfather. He left Holland at the age of seventeen after first ‘lightening his father’s overburdened hoard’ of one hundred pounds sterling. He sailed to New Zealand where he invested his cash in a flock of eight hundred sheep. He managed his investment so well that ten years later the flock numbered over thirty-eight thousand. Over those years he made what he called ‘retail’ sales to cover his expenses (grazing rights in those days cost a few pennies an acre). These sales were yearly offloadings strictly kept to a running average of 5 percent of the steadily growing flock. That came to about eight thousand animals in the ten years. He sold his holdings in 1857 for close to half a million pounds and arrived in America soon afterwards. He settled first in northern New England, then in Boston, finally New York City.

  “You may be wondering how I know all this. If you’re a Bentwick child, you get it drilled into you before you learn how to read. On Christmas Eve each of us was given a quiz on family history; if you failed, no presents.

  “Paul Bentwick kept up his New Zealand connections. He was a friend of Samuel Butler’s, who made his fortune the way Paul had, and he was one of the consortium that bought up the land we’re living on. Also the tracts of hinterland beyond. And that superintended the creation of our nifty little town.” (Andreas: “New Bentwick! At last I know why.”)

  “In 1859 Paul married Mary Gifford, the daughter of an old whaling family he’d frequented with his family on a summer vacation in Fairhaven, Massachussetts. The following year they had a son, the first John Bentwick, my great-grandfather. In 1862 Mary’s sister, Abbie, married Henry H. Rogers. Henry was on his way to becoming a key man in John D. Rockefel­ler’s fabulous development of Standard Oil. The two families had remained close. In early 1881, John Bentwick was about to turn twenty-one. In homage to his majority, Henry Rogers told him in strictest confidence that Rockefeller was about to launch a new corporate entity: the Standard Oil Trust. John’s parents had for the same occasion allotted him a decent sum; on the day that Standard Oil Trust made its public offering on the New York Stock Exchange, John bought five thousand shares. It proved to be the inside tip of all times. For once the expression ‘an embarrassment of riches’ rang true; John was soon spreading his bonanza to others, publicly and privately.

  “So his son, my grandfather, the second John Bentwick, born in 1903, had a substantial stake with which to play financial games. They
were something he enjoyed and was fairly adept at. He inherited his father’s seat on the Stock Exchange — a position that gave him privileged access to information, incoming and outgoing. During the fall of 1929 he got wind of a spate of urgent messages from the Parisian headquarters of the Banque Saint-Phalle to its American branch. These messages contained increasingly emphatic instructions to sell all of its holdings on the New York Exchange without delay. The last of these messages was delivered on the Thursday preceding Black Tuesday; like the previous ones, it was ignored by the American Saint-Phalle directors.

  “It was not ignored by John Bentwick. He had independently researched the few leads provided by the French bank and come to the conclusion that their decision was justified. In the few days between making his own heretical choice and the disaster of October 29, he liquidated the totality of the Bentwick family investments, buying government bonds in their place. The operation could not be effected without informing all the Bentwicks concerned. At a family conclave in his New York house on a Saturday evening, an animated discussion climaxed in a proposal to have my grandfather confined to a lunatic asylum. But by the following Wednesday his vindication had already begun.

  “My father, Duff Bentwick, born in 1942, took little interest in business matters. But even he managed to make his contribution to the Bentwicks’ wealth. When André Malraux was indicted for stealing Khmer art at Angkor Wat in the 1930s, Malraux managed to sequester a considerable part of his sculptures with a partner. This partner later died without indicating their whereabouts. Traveling in Europe after World War II, Duff Bentwick came across this trove in the storeroom of an Italian dealer who had no idea of their nature. Duff managed to buy them for a minute fraction of their value. He then set them aside for several years to ‘decant,’ as he put it, meaning to lose all trace of their provenance. He finally sold them in the early fifties and made his own small fortune. But his story doesn’t end there.

  “Duff’s older brother, the third John Bentwick and present heir, was born in 1940. This John is alive and flourishing. He claims, with some justice, to be first and foremost a philanthropist. ‘Someone,’ he says, ‘has to repay society for my forbears’ ill-gotten gains.’ He can’t resist adding, ‘To which I contribute my share. Whenever I give a million dollars to a noble cause, its sponsors shower me with invaluable tips. My insider trading hasn’t just paid for your schools and doctors. It’s paid for every damn pair of those crazy shoes you love to buy.’

  “You see, John has been my guardian since I turned fifteen.

  “My mother died of leukemia when I was nine. Duff and I were bereft. Each of us in a way that was of no help to the other. When he looked at me, he saw her. When I looked at him, I saw not-her. Was there no love between us? Maybe, but we didn’t have the right vocabularies for it. I screamed at him. The screams meant, why are you alive and not her? His response was pale silent faces, which could have meant, I agree with you. She’d been beautiful and tender. He was beautiful, too; he got colder by the day. He’d long before been made a major in the US Army reserve. When we invaded Iraq, he’d finagled and operated and maybe even bribed some fellow officer to be recalled to active duty, in spite of his age.

  “The Bentwicks ganged up on him in horror, to no avail. He was killed in the second battle of Falluja, in 2004, by a roadside bomb. His friends and relatives went wild asking why? why? I knew why. So did the third John Bentwick. So did Duff: he wanted out. His beautiful tender wife had deserted him. His shrew of a daughter hated him. He got what he wanted. He asked John Bentwick to take care of me.

  “John was up for that. But it took him two years to become my guardian. John had a bum reputation in some quarters. He’d never married. He was conspicuously not gay. But he’d had numerous affairs, some of them notorious. That means with newsworthy married women. At sixty-four he showed no sign of slowing down. He’d never held a job where his responsibility had been tested. His philanthropy didn’t count for much — ‘with his money, it’s the least he can do.’ His backing of legitimate causes, like the right to free speech for everybody, made him an easy target: he was defending neo-Nazis, racists, and other sickies. Putting an adolescent girl in the hands of such a man was unwise.

  “My father had packed me away in a prestigious Protestant boarding school when he went off to war. My teachers, the headmaster, even a few of its trustees all thought I was such a great student and human being that I should be left to their care. I should definitely not be confided to a dissolute millionaire. The dissolute millionaire by the way had been paying for my schooling and all my living expenses since my father died. There was no objection to that, naturally. Also naturally, nobody asked the girl at issue what she wanted.

  “Actually I might have been pretty confused about what to answer. I hadn’t yet seen that much of John. But the other Bentwicks rallied round. They convinced the world that being adopted by John Bentwick would be any child’s dream. At worst he’d make her life a grand party. He’d certainly never corrupt her, and if he tried, the Bentwicks would be on him like a pack of bloodhounds. Practically every adult family member called on the representatives of the guardian ad litem until they convinced them of John Bentwick’s honorableness. The family court judge only had to add his seal of approval. So the Bentwick family put an end to public debate about me. On my fifteenth birthday I became the ward of my uncle.

  “This prospective patron, this bachelor in the prime of life, proved a gentleman in the grandest sense, such a figure as never (except in a dream or an old-fashioned movie) would have risen before a flustered, anxious girl out of New Hampshire. Where I was concerned, he was an absolute dreamboat. He didn’t pack me off to another school but had me tutored by young men who were as smart as can be and usually cute. He took me out on dates with his lady friends. They were usually ten or fifteen years younger than he was, and they were pretty cute too. He got them to teach me about life. They liked doing that — for one thing I really listened. I heard a different version of the world from the one I’d been told at my oh-so-pious school. I think that’s what John was after; that’s how I started becoming ‘laid back’ about sex. (Did I really say that?)

  “My John took me everywhere he could — that meant lots of places. He’s what they used to call a dilettante. He played the flute so well professional chamber musicians invited him to record with them. He was such a good freehand draughtsman, he could entertain a picnic’s worth of kids sketching their portraits. He was an honorable tennis player. (He had no use for golf, ‘although the cruising isn’t bad,’ he confessed. ) He loved classical ballet. He’d never taken lessons so he made damn sure I did. That was hard, but at least it wasn’t lacrosse. When he ‘took possession of me,’ as he liked to say — incidentally he never made a hint of a pass at me, which sort of pissed me off, since I was mad about him and at eighteen not exactly repulsive — I had turned fifteen. He was living in Boston, and I thought that’s where we would live. But it was to his county home — an old family place in Chatham, on Cape Cod — that he wished us to proceed.

  “I soon learned why. He’d turned it into a refuge for eccentric Bentwicks. Actually there wasn’t any such thing. The Bentwick family was almost a hothouse of eccentricity. Still, some of the residents at Chatham were out on the edge — two unmarried teen-age mothers, two serious alchemists, a fanatic who dedicated his exceptional wits to devising a sure-fire system for playing the horses. (He finally succeeded. The trouble was, his system allowed on average only one chance a month to place a bet — ‘Too boring!’ he concluded.) There were also more predictable characters: two poets, one composer, and one graphic artist, all of whom John considered promising but were too eccentric for any school. All of them were cheerful and seemed to enjoy their privileged freedom. They threw frequent parties that lasted late, where I got to hear all the new groups. They gave me books to read that made my hinges pop.

  “Of course I wasn’t there all the time. John kept taking
me off to gallery openings and dance recitals in New York (and my first opera: Lulu!) and concerts in Boston and Cambridge. On one trip I had my first liaison — I’m almost certain John set it up, but I didn’t dare ask him. Anyway it was a good start. I must have been seventeen.

  “Meanwhile I became a super brilliant student. I scored so high on my SATs I got full scholarship offers from all the best places. I visited a couple of them and was not turned on. John had been full of praise for my scores; but I think he was relieved when I said no thanks to the Ivy League. He said I was learning enough from his renegade cousins and his ambitious tutors. I hope he’s right. I can still take down ace deconstructionists and discuss variations in the cosmic microwave background with any passing cosmologist! And then John took me on longer trips. He’d introduce me to makers and shakers he admired, economists in Chicago, architects in California. I kept learning from all of them. They’d talk to me as soon as they saw I wasn’t another cute chick.

  “The strangest trip of all was to Miami. John knew a businessman there he thought was a real original. He wanted him to move to New Bentwick, yes here, it would be right for him and he for it. He said to me, ‘You keep saying you owe me so much. You say you want to pay me back. So here’s your chance.’ ‘Huh?’ I said. ‘I’ll introduce you. You get into his life any way you want. You overwhelm him — yes, you can. You can take him over. Then you can bring him to New Bentwick to your Uncle John.’ ‘You’re asking me to fuck somebody I haven’t even seen?’ ‘Absolutely not. He’ll be eighty years old next year. Good Lord, I thought you’d never get around to using that word in front of me.’ ‘So what else can I do?’ ‘Dazzle him out of his wits! You’re asking me? You talk shop with astrophysicists, maybe you can teach him gin rummy.’ ‘You know that for you — ’ ‘Yes. And I’m asking you. His name is Schlemkes.’”