by Erika Rummel
“And how did you find out?” David asked.
At the beach, with the afternoon sun shining from the southwest and glinting off the water. She was sitting in the sand, on a beachtowel with a shell and crab pattern, watching Jerry as he slipped the surfboard into the water, pitched forward on it, paddling, heading out toward the surf, where a dozen guys were rocking up and down in the swell. She watched them bobbing, taking stock of the surf, deciding the wave didn’t have it, letting it pass. Another swell approached, and suddenly everyone was up. Jerry made his move. He was riding the face of the incoming wave, riding over the foam top, continuing sideways, the spray from the wave in his back. She felt a rush, her heart pounding to the beauty of the surf, to the beauty of Jerry’s body. She was watching him with possessive pride as he came in, triumphant. She smiled. He smiled back with a radiant, love-ya look, and then she realized that he was looking past her. His eyes had moved on and settled somewhere behind her head. She turned, and looked up at a young man, G.I. Joe perfect, bare-chested, wetsuit peeled down to his hips, flapping against pumped-up thigh muscles. She saw the answering smile, the gaze holding steady. In that moment she knew. The memory was imprinted on her mind, together with the pattern of the beach towel on which she was sitting, the position of her fingers at that moment, splayed over a yellow crab on a sky-blue background. The shock turned it into a whirlpool, giving her vertigo, reeling her into a void.
“He came out to me, but not all at once. At first, he was skittish,” she said. “Once I understood, once I was sure he was gay, we split up. He didn’t come out publicly, not while his father was alive. After his death, he no longer cared who knew he was gay, but he did care who knew of his former life, when he had played straight. He wanted to shake all witnesses, cut us all adrift. I didn’t see him for some years. When I ran into him again, a year ago, he wore layers of clothes, corduroy jacket over sweater over woollen shirt.But he couldn’t camouflage his illness. I saw he was rail-thin. At first, I thought he had gone on another yoga binge, then I saw his eyes and knew.”
Jerry’s eyes had turned merciless. There were jags of anger and longing in them, as if he had run out of patience and wanted his due from the world now. He looked haggard, bone-weary from the hard work of dying. His voice, too, had changed, was stripped of modality, flattened. His shoulders sagged under an unseen burden.
“There was something jarring about his eyes, like broken glass,” she said.
Jerry had waved to her and said hello in a smoky croak. The rough pull of his breath was like a beggar’s plea for a handout of air, the currency of life. He was such a wretched sight, she teared up. Are you crying for me or for yourself? he asked. For both of us, she said.
“Was Nancy at the funeral?” David asked.
“No, she didn’t go. She never got over Jerry being gay.”
I can’t go, Nancy said in her breathy voice. I can’t stand looking at those friends of his! I’d rather remember him the way he was, she said and broke off, leaving the unpleasant bits unsaid. And Laura, too, wanted to do away with the unpleasant bits. She wanted to remember Jerry the way he was before AIDS ravaged him. The way he looked in a snapshot taken at a party, wearing a blue shirt and a seersucker jacket. Tasselled loafers. No socks. He was sitting in a caned chair, one leg flung over the arm of the chair, fussing with the garnish of a Mojito, a sprig of mint floating on an ice cube.
“Let’s not talk about funerals,” she said to David.
They had moved to the green sofa after dinner. David was running a finger along the edge of the coffee table as if rubbing a magic lantern to conjure up a life-sized version of Jerry. She put out her hand to stop his hand and the memories. Somewhere between getting up from the table and leaning back on the green leather sofa, she realized that she didn’t want to share David with anyone. Not with Jerry. Not with Cereta.
The cocktail napkins sat on the table, crumpled paper teepees beside plates of half-eaten food. David hadn’t bothered to clear the table when they moved to the sofa. There was silence between them at last. They sank into post-dinner laziness. He made no move to turn on the lights even though the sun had gone down and the room had turned a dusty mauve that gave an antique patina to his face. In the sparse light of the candles, he looked at her with dilated pupils, like a junkie.
She felt the gentle pressure of his palm as he took her hand. She turned to him. Their lips touched as if by accident. A sudden smile caught fire, and she laughed. She saw her path clear when he put his arms around her. The past receded through a tunnel, looking small and far away. The present came in view, like a mirage: David’s arm around her shoulder, the almost accidental kiss, the smile. She had to pace herself, take it in slowly, deliberately, or the present might remain a shimmering mirage and never congeal into anything solid.
“Let’s read Brecht,” she said. “That’s what you said to me on the phone. ‘We can always read Brecht.’”
“We can if you feel like it, but I think we’re done with the rehab, the mental gymnastics. You’ve recovered your memory. The words are back, the pitch, the rhythm. We don’t need Brecht, do we?Unless you are missing the cloud, so white, so far away.”
“The cloud?” she said, uneasily. Was this a quote?
“The cloud that reminded you of the painting in your grandfather’s study. Herbstwald.”
He paused as if waiting for an explanation, an answer to a test question. At least that’s what it sounded like, but she didn’t know what he was after. When had they talked about the Liebermann painting? In what context?
“At the time I thought you were confused,” he said. “I didn’t realize that you meant Leo Auerperg. That you thought of him as your grandfather. Who owns that painting now, by the way?”
“Nancy,” she said, keeping it short. She wanted to steer away from the contentious subject, but David was stuck on it. How much does he know about the dispute, she wondered.
“I googled the painting,” he said, “and discovered that it was up for sale. In fact, I went to the auction house in Vienna where it was supposed to be sold. That’s where I saw the woman who looked like you.”
He waited. She realized he expected her to repeat her denial, to tell him again what she had told him on the phone: No, you were mistaken. That wasn’t me. But she couldn’t do it. She was afraid to step on quicksand and be sucked into a bottomless pit of lies.
“I’m here now,” she said. “Isn’t that good enough?”
He pressed her close. “Good enough,” he said and kissed her. It was a natural movement, as if they had done it before, weeks earlier. Perhaps they had. She stiffened as their lips touched, conscious that she did not know how far they had gone. In the chaos of the past, the unknown past, his kiss felt right, but a tiny doubt remained. What kind of love was this? Another move in an endless series of replacements? Anya exchanged for a father, Cereta exchanged for Jerry, Jerry exchanged for David? Metamorphoses, stretching in a long line, from Vienna and the blanket tent to the backseat of a car, and now to David’s bedroom.
Stop thinking, she told herself, as she followed him upstairs. She desperately wanted to live in the moment, to see David’s bedroom for what it was, not an object of comparison with bedrooms she had slept in or the generic beds of TV commercials or hotel rooms with crisp white sheets. Keep your eyes open, she told herself. Look. It’s a lived-in, slept-in bed with indentations made by David’s body and a too plump pillow which will give you a crick in the neck. A bed with a story not yet told, with a past that was unimportant because together we will invest it with a new story and transform it into our bed. A shared memory was building up at this very moment, as they undressed, suddenly awkward, lovers on a long diet of self-pleasuring suddenly confronted with the need to work out the old-fashioned man-woman thing. They were lying side-by-side, looking up at the ceiling, searching their brains for a synthetic imagination to bring their bodies together. She turned to him
tentatively, felt the flicker of his tongue, the definition of his cock, his fingers on her breasts, the taste of licked skin. She pulled back in sudden fright, but he clung to her. A feint of yields and lunges brought them together in a rhythmic delight she did not want to end, and she startled herself with a cry of ecstasy. But too soon the dusky heedless pleasure dissolved, and her thoughts were back. She could not shut them out. They were like sunlight seeping through closed shutters, stealing through the narrow interstices between the slats. I am alright, she told herself — I didn’t mention Cereta to him. But if she was alright, why did her skin feel too tight, why was she fighting the urge to get up and escape? She closed her eyes and willed herself to stay beside David, making her presence felt a little longer, and David gratefully enveloped her in his arms. His hand passed over her cheek, slipping down to her chin, tracing the contours with his fingertips.
“I thought I saw a scar on your chin,” he said into the darkness. “Isn’t it odd how light and shadow can play tricks on your mind?”
Her eyes fluttered open. “A scar?” she said and remembered when it happened. Summer camp. And to whom it happened. To Cereta, who slept in the upper bunk. She climbed down, missed a step, smacked her chin on the edge of the bed, and started crying. Laura put a protective arm around her sister. She felt the wetness of Cereta’s blood on her fingers, searched for a handkerchief, and pressed it against the cut. Smeared memories. A fog of words. Cereta’s scar.
“It’s strange,” David said. “I remember a scar that doesn’t exist. I follow a woman who looks like you but isn’t you. Am I losing my mind?”
He laughed. She kept very still in his arms, saying nothing, allowing time to elapse before slipping out of his embrace, out of this tricky doppelgänger situation.
In the shower, she luxuriated in being alone with her thoughts, admitting that she was guilty, that there was nothing wrong with David’s mind. The scar existed. She had noticed it herself when she saw Cereta again this summer. It was like seeing herself in a time warp, the woman she might have been, left behind and altered by the East European air. When she picked up her sister at the airport, they no longer looked alike. The scar wasn’t the only distinguishing mark. Cereta looked foreign, even though she had modelled herself after the photo Laura sent her, even though they had the same haircut, the same red highlights, even though they were twins. She still did not look like her double.
Cereta’s English was perfect, and yet Laura found it hard to understand her. It was not so much the words, but what was behind them. A foreign current was running through Cereta’s thoughts. You’d think their identical genetic makeup guaranteed mutual understanding, but perhaps California living had modified Laura’s DNA. Would I understand Cereta better if I had grown up in a small town, she thought, in a house with damp and discoloured walls? If I had lived with anya? Would we be more alike then?
She turned off the shower, turned off Cereta’s voice in her head. But after she had kissed David good night and she was driving home, the voice was back. Her father’s crazy scheme, the lies, the new complications she had brought on herself tonight blew up in her brain like a storm. She wanted to close her mind against the onslaught, shut the door against the flurries, but something caught in the door, refused to be pushed back, flapped in the wind. Unfinished business. The day when she picked up Cereta at the L.A. airport — was it only six weeks ago? It seemed longer because it was more than a matter of earth rotations. It was a shifting of poles.
SIX WEEKS AGO, at the terminal, she and Cereta had embraced and kissed perfunctorily.
“I’ve brought you something,” Cereta said as if she could not wait to get it off her chest, as if she had been given a task that needed discharging at once before she could be at peace and think of anything else. “A message from anya.”
She pulled a folded sheet from her purse. No envelope. An open letter?
“A poem,” Cereta said. “She was pissed off — is that what Americans say? Pissed off because you didn’t come. She wanted to read the poem to you. It is less potent in writing, she said. She was afraid the words would not lift off the page. That’s what she said.” She gave Laura a wan smile as if to apologize for speaking anya’s lines in a language other than her own, as if she was unsure that the translation could match the original.
Laura glanced down at the folded sheet, at the closely spaced writing on the outside. Hungarian words. She puzzled out the meaning of the first line.
Poems are such fragile things, Laura, so easily flattened, so easily… She frowned.
“What does the next word mean?” she said to Cereta. Her knowledge of Hungarian wasn’t up to her mother’s vocabulary . It was a poor, second-hand thing acquired unwillingly, at anya’s insistence. It was a doomed seedling of a language, stunted, and pulled up by the roots when she left Vienna years ago.
Cereta took the sheet of paper from her hand and translated the rest: so easily drowned in ink. I wanted to read the lines of my poem to you, to launch them with my voice, watch them cross the divide, from me to you. You should have come to me, Laura.
“Then comes the poem, but you will need a dictionary to read it,” Cereta said, refolding the page and handing it back to her. “And even with a dictionary, I don’t know if it will make sense to you.”
“Have you read it? What’s it about?”
“No idea. It’s cryptic, like all of anya’s writings.”
Laura unfolded the sheet and looked at the title of the poem. “Rape III”? No, that couldn’t be right.
“Rape?” she said. “Is that the meaning of the word?”
“Yes, that’s the title. But rape of the environment or of a person? Is it factual or metaphorical? I cannot tell you.”
Laura read out the first line. “Leopold is a manufacturer of — of what?” She didn’t know the next word.
Cereta supplied the rest of the line: “Waste water treatment.”
“Leopold? Is this about Opa Auerperg?”
“Perhaps, but I no longer even try to understand anya’s poems.”
“Could you translate it for me?” Laura said, as they made their way to the luggage carousel.
“I will write it out for you in English,” Cereta said, “but I doubt it will help you. You should have gone to Hungary and talked to her yourself.”
Laura was coming to the same conclusion. It was a mistake to give in to her misgivings and cancel the trip. You can’t go on denying your mother even if she is a lunatic. Even if you had no words in common. There was touch after all, and gestures more eloquent than words.
“Why didn’t you stick to the original plan?” Cereta said. Her voice was dense with suppressed accusations, as if the whole situation was Laura’s fault. “It was supposed to be an exchange. I come here. You go to Hollókõ. That was the idea, wasn’t it?”
Yes, that was the idea: Laura departs. Cereta arrives. She takes a taxi to Nancy’s place, picks up Laura’s ID from the cabana, and makes her way to Santa Monica Place, the stage of the fake mugging. She is found unconscious on the floor of the public bathroom and taken to the hospital for treatment. It was a crazy scheme.
Still I should have stuck to it and gone to Hungary, Laura thought. What if someone saw the two of them together at the airport? Why run the risk? She knew why. Because she had a shamanic desire to see her double before handing off her identity.
“Yes, it was supposed to be an exchange,” she said to Cereta. “But it wasn’t my idea.”
“You agreed to it.”
“Dad twisted my arm.”
“I’m glad he arranged it. I needed time out.”
“Time out?” Laura said. She tried to keep her outrage down and out of her voice. “I thought it was an emergency, Cereta. Couldn’t you have had time out in Budapest or in Vienna, without putting me at risk?”
They were standing at the carousel, watching the luggage slidin
g down the chute. Cereta looked up surprised. “You used to like making up stories,” she said. “You used to like adventures.”
“Not this kind of adventure. You make it sound as if it were fun. It’s a scam, and I could go to jail for it. I only did it because Dad insisted that you need treatment. He made me believe it was a medical emergency. It had to be done here and now.”
“I need treatment, yes,” Cereta said.
Examinations. Tests. Drugs. The question of who was going to pay for them was on Laura’s mind when her father first raised the subject of bringing Cereta over, but she was reluctant to ask. It seemed mean and insensitive to talk about money when her sister’s health was at stake. And she didn’t want to embarrass her father. Nancy would have offered to pay. She was generous with money, but he was touchy on that point, the fact that Nancy was wealthy, and he was not. Money was briefly mentioned, almost like a slip of the tongue, before he presented her with the “perfect solution” — an exchange. It sounded so innocent when he said it. Cereta needed treatment, Laura had insurance coverage, an exchange would solve all problems. It sounded so ordinary, like an au pair arrangement.
Cereta spotted her bag and picked it off the carousel. She had arrived with one small bag. She needed no luggage, really. Laura’s identity was waiting for her, fully equipped.
They headed across to the garage where Laura had parked her car.
“I need treatment and I needed to get away from anya,” Cereta said.
So that was Cereta’s sickness. She had been playing anya’s slave for too long. She had no more lines of her own. She was no longer herself. She had turned into a ghost and needed to borrow Laura’s persona for a while, go through the necessary larval stage, regrow her soul, emerge and return to Hungary as her newly grown self — Cereta.
