by Hilton Als
And if I were not SL’s younger brother, what was I? I could not bear to be alone knowing he was in the room. I sucked his figurative toe because its sweat acted as a kind of poultice on my tongue; I would say who I was if he would not take it away from me, that sandy-colored digit, as stimulating as anything, curling up at the tip as his flat foot tapped the day away as he waited for me as he stood in his house, braver than any memory.
In his house, we tell each other stories largely unencumbered by the sound of other people’s fear that surrounds us in New York. Or so we wanted to believe. Upon moving in, our neighbors phoned the police. It must have looked strange: two colored gentlemen moving furniture into a house. As a result, we become more isolated. Our isolation—like all isolation—breeds a certain amount of discontent, and it takes the form of questions about who we are, as twins and not. Twinship, SL says, is the archetype for closeness; it is also the archetype for difference: in one’s other half, one sees both who one is and who one isn’t. Here we are on Wuthering Heights. Our neighbors eat bitter black bread and look bitter when they see us coming. The rain falls. The birds fall in the rain.
Most days, or most nights in SL’s house, it is I who asks SL to tell me a movie story. He loves movies so, maybe he’ll love me so. But why is it that when he tells a movie story, or any kind of story at all, he tells it from the point of view of the eye and heart that is following the white girl in the tale? Does he identify with them? Feel “like” them next to my not–Liz Taylor skin and crinkly pubes? How can I change his mind—get him to see me—when, like the rest of us, he is a slave in relation to his overbearing past, shackled to these memories that he has not shared with me but I know just the same because we’re twins: young white girls rolling their stockings down on a beach in Corsica, near the Bosphorus, and SL, shunned because of his color or being profoundly without family, sitting nearby, barely aware of his body, other than his eyes, which are filled with such longing. They’re the same eyes that find such pathos whenever Laura Nyro sat down at the piano, or humor and concern when Sigourney Weaver fought off aliens, especially in suburban Connecticut, or familiarity when Nico stood flickering in an Andy Warhol film, disassociated from and connected to her child as she cut her bangs, later to amuse SL ruefully when Nico delivered her rendition of “Deutschland Über Alles,” in her own way, what a strange song for a colored boy to know by heart. In Europe, SL became a white woman. He felt no separation between himself and the women rolling their stockings down. When I knew him, we both stopped dead in our tracks when we saw the Benetton ad that showed an albino African girl standing in a group with black Africans who didn’t have that issue. SL identified with that ad for his reasons, and I identified with it for my own.
SL would sometimes leave me alone in his house when he had to work, that is, deal with freelance graphic-design jobs. When he returns after a day or two, he usually brings a gift—photographs, a book—that’s very much in keeping with the generosity he exhibited when we met fifteen or twenty years ago. He also brings stories. About one new movie, or the next. Like the books and photographs he shares with me, the parts of the movie stories he tells make indirect reference to us, and our story, and then the whole world is not otherwise.
But around 2006 SL became less available to the telling. For several years before that I could feel him becoming an I. And like a photographic negative in reverse, I watched as he began to fade away from our image bit by bit. He’d spend less time listening to me laugh while standing under a door frame smoking a cigarette in the rain; he became less present to the anxiety I have around writing; he wouldn’t touch those hyacinths for days. The truth is what I imagine: he’s met a woman who would benefit from his touch. That same woman will be welcoming to me socially. She will look on my friendship with SL with great admiration. She will be pale-skinned and blush, charmingly, when I make some not-at-all-veiled reference to how loving and difficult SL can be, a shared joke of love. She will have worked with SL on some project, maybe she’s an art director, or a stylist, that’s how they met. She will have noticed SL for a while before he began giving her books and photographs. She will phone me, not exactly with SL’s permission, but he will not resist our going around together, this is his dream of love, me and a woman loving him, and our loving each other, and that will happen for a little while, but then she will become annoyed by the way I can make SL laugh, and she will eventually be vexed by my ability to listen to her everlasting love for him, and how that love has created a hole in her heart, why does he need other people, wasn’t she enough, the implication being that I was other people, another “we” altogether, a foreign body that was something less and something more than her white body, which would not see as such, in any case, only the shape of her wounded love. She will wonder, before long, what he sees in me. She will make scenes on any public occasion that I host—a birthday party, say—because that means she’s passionate about him. She will hire me to do some freelance work for her, but that has nothing to do with what I can or cannot do; it’s just an opportunity for her to tell me what to do, to criticize my work and denigrate me in the process, because it’s one way to attach my we with SL. But he will go home with her, despite or because of her movie drama. He will kneel and wash her feet despite or because of her movie bloodletting. He will try to open her flesh by beating at the door of it with his flesh, just like the movie guy who kisses the movie girl. And he will be all in love because he’s done this before, with any number of white girls. But the difference in 2012 is, I’m not central to it.
* * *
In all those years in the house I used to wonder: If a man touched me in the way that I imagined SL touched white women, would I die? A friend told me once that his first brush with intimacy during the height of the dying epoch was with an older man who would rub my friend’s facial cheek with his own while saying, I like you. No kissing. I like you. No close hearts. I like you. No grabbing. I like you. No shared saliva. I like you. That was the way it was not just for my friend, but for so many people, including myself: love not fully expressed physically wasn’t true love; they wouldn’t die if you didn’t touch them. Before, I touched SL through white girls. And I got him back, always, because I offered what they could not: love that was free of their quest for “liberation,” and thus egoless. Or so it seemed. After a few months away in that world of women, SL would come back to our play, and the cast of characters in our village, the backdrop of sea spray. But by 2006, neither of us verbalized what we felt: my I, and his you, and the ever-widening gulf in our twinship. Look at that empty door frame, look at that unhappy hyacinth. But I cannot look at the days SL spends away as those days. That is, I cannot see them for what they are, and what I am now: unjoined, without pattern, some meaning, a series of questions, untwinned. I cannot look at myself as myself and not see him, or the feeling of him, not SL, but the first we, and feel our unjoining because of death, but he couldn’t help it and SL can, he couldn’t help his jawline becoming sharper above the checked shirt that was disappearing him, I didn’t want to look, I couldn’t help it.
But SL wasn’t dead. He was with a white woman. How could I compete and keep him near me forever? By becoming a white girl, too? And what kind? One white girl we loved: Adèle Hugo. We so loved Isabelle Adjani’s portrayal of her in François Truffaut’s 1975 film The Story of Adele H. Born in 1830, Adèle was the youngest daughter of Adèle and Victor Hugo. Hugo’s other daughter, and his favorite of the two, was named Léopoldine; she was Adèle’s elder by some six years. (The Hugos also had three boys, one of whom, Leopold, died in infancy.) In 1843, when Léopoldine was boating on the Seine in Villequier with her new husband, Charles Vacquerie, the couple’s boat capsized, and they were drowned. Victor Hugo mourned his daughter’s loss for the rest of his life; in fact, as a result of that loss, he became interested in the occult, séances and the like: he wanted to contact Léopoldine in the beyond, often consulting with Madame Delphine de Girardin, Hugo’s “spiritist.” Adèle woul
d follow suit, eventually believing that Léopoldine was a kind of twin; the young girl would sit at the “table” in whatever room or house she lived in and call on her dead sister’s spirit. Adèle could love the dead because of what they meant to her imagination. How did I love my dead? Did my love for them cut me off from the living? Adèle could not love her fiancé because he was not absent enough. Was I the same with SL? In her famous diary, Adèle wrote about her fiancé:
August 21 Auguste left me. He said to me: I’ve decided that I’m not like you; I don’t use my self-love to not love; I use it to love. I’m the one who loves more. For eight years, I—me, a man of genius—used my genius to make you love me. I failed. I’m giving it up for lost; Pygmalion had only one love, his marble statue; Galatea, me, I had more to do: I had you to love. I’m not the one leaving you; it’s you who’s leaving me.
I, you, me, us, words let alone concepts I struggled with as well. Did SL have his own we? Was I his Auguste, or was he mine? In the midst of her rejecting Auguste in favor of the unattainable, Adèle Hugo wrote:
August 27 The spirits’ advice has helped me; my good humor has prevailed, miraculously. Yet my heart was in despair. The spirits told me: Drink; I drank. And when I told them: I won’t have the courage to kiss him, they answered: Kissing makes love. Indeed, throughout the night I felt a happiness without a name; I loved him. His foot on mine awoke a thousand desires in my blood.
Lessons of the Heart: Kissing makes love.
I did not kiss SL but that which was not my body—my spirit—did. Did he feel it? Did my kissing help continue to make our love? Would my kissing make the love that would make him stay? I was Adèle. But before I could manage that transformation—would I end up as she did? Living for a time in Barbados, searching for a love she could not see when it passed her on the street because it was so solidly in her imagination what did reality have to do with it? So tristes, so tristes—SL and I had many years of unrealized kisses folded into conversation.
* * *
In our home that is his body I said something like this once: I have always thought of twinship, by birth or choice, as a kind of marriage: another metaphor that sustains some of us. And as metaphors go, marriage—twins joined by a ring and flesh—has always been attractive to me, the pomp and circumstance, the illusion veil and orange blossom, the rice landing on sanctioned heads like a hard rain as I and I become we, if they weren’t born that way.
Call me what you like, but I cannot marry myself; there is no story there. If I lift my illusion veil—but just for a moment—and put away the songs I’ve planned to play at my nuptials, songs such as the Talking Heads’ “Thank You for Sending Me an Angel” (“Oh, baby, you can walk...just like me! With a little practice, you can...talk just like me!”) and Hole’s “She Walks on Me” (“We look the same! We talk the same! We are the same! We are the same!”)—if I stop all that, I can see that any such celebration is completely driven by my writerly self, like so many things. I need an audience to tell me how my love story is playing.
SL abhors weddings, all that “O thou / to whom from whom, / without whom nothing” stuff Marianne Moore eviscerates in her great poem “Marriage.” SL is bemused by all the conventions I cling to, like dopey trimmings on a Christmas tree. What SL believes: no wedding ring can cast a golden light on anyone’s we. No we is without friction. The exchange that takes place between I and thou is essentially private—like the intuitive language of twins. Like the vivid language marriage-crazy Nijinsky employs in his 1919 Diary to describe life with his first wife, his first twin, the ballet impresario Diaghilev:
Diaghilev has two false front teeth. I noticed this because when he is nervous he touches them with his tongue. They move, and I can see them...I began to hate him quite openly, and once I pushed him on a street in Paris. I pushed him because I wanted to show him that I was not afraid of him. Diaghilev hit me with his cane because I wanted to leave him. He felt that I wanted to go away, and therefore he ran after me. I half ran, half walked. I was afraid of being noticed...I felt a pain in my leg and pushed Diaghilev.
I pushed him only slightly because I felt not anger against Diaghilev but tears. I wept. Diaghilev scolded me...I could no longer control myself and began to walk slowly. Diaghilev too began to walk slowly. We both walked slowly...I was walking. He was walking. We went, and we arrived. We lived together for a long time.
Like dancers, none of us gets over that figure we see in the practice mirror: ourselves. Choosing your twin gives you that reflection forever—or as long as it lasts. Perhaps SL will leave me for one reason or another, but he will never go away: I see myself in him and he in me, except that for him our twinship is essentially private and silent. So how do I justify putting our we-ness out in the world by writing about it? I can’t. It’s something I’ve always done; SL accepts this in me: half living life so I can get down to really living it by writing about it. I wrote about my first kiss more fully than I lived it. I wouldn’t know what I looked like in relation to SL, my twin, if I didn’t describe it on the page.
* * *
It’s 2002, and we’re twenty years into our twinship. Little has changed, except for our age. We’re both over forty. Our bodies remain what they always were. SL is thin and I am not. I tried to grow a great beard like his. It didn’t happen. Not that I know what I look like at all—with or without a twin. Over the years we’ve shared, I have tried to see myself, the better to see him. To that end, SL made a gift of the novel Immortality by Milan Kundera (1990). In it, I read: “Without the faith that our face expresses our self, without that basic illusion, that arch-illusion, we cannot live or at least we cannot take life seriously.” In a way, that basic illusion is beyond me. I wrote the following on the corridor walls leading to SL’s great room to describe that feeling:
I have always been one half of a whole. The first Hilton was stillborn. His little wet head and arms and feet were dragged out of a mother who did not want him. That mother was my mother’s closest friend. She told my mother, during her pregnancy, that if her child turned out to be male, she wanted him dead, given how despicable she thought men were, especially her husband. So she willed Hilton’s death. She had named her child Hilton—a boy’s name—even before he was born. Perhaps she’d always wanted a boy to kill.
A year or two after that, my mother gave birth to Hilton again: myself. My mother named me Hilton for her friend’s stillborn baby. The minute I was born, I was not just myself, but the memory of someone else. And I belonged to two women who identified with one another for any number of reasons, my mother and her friend, the one who bore death and the one who bore the rest.
As boys, we went everywhere together, Hilton and I, my ghostly twin, my nearly perfect other half. He was perfect because he never seemed to need anything, even though we grew up in the same family.
We lived in Brooklyn then, in a two-story house in East New York. It was a place of spindly trees. We had four older sisters who dressed like the Pointer Sisters on the cover of their debut album. We knew we’d never get over them, or our younger brother, whom we adored. And our Ma, who raised us all. We never knew what any of those people were talking about when they used I as a pronoun—they were all the same. They were annoyed by anything they perceived as the catalyst for separation. Evil forces from the outside world included: boyfriends, anyone else at all. (They didn’t know I had a twin. They would have resented him.)
Our Ma. We were all the same to her. We were her we, a mass of need always in need of feeding. Standing over a pot of boiling something, waiting for what she called “the last straggler” to straggle in to dinner—our brother Derrick, say—she would call out each of her children’s names, as if naming off all the parts on one body: “Sandra! Diana! Louise! Yvonne! Hilton! Derrick!”—before giving up and giggling and saying, “Whoever you are, whoever I’m calling, come in and eat.”
I was fat and drank so much soda and Kool-Aid, you wouldn’t believe it. By the time I was thirteen, I had enough f
at to make one thin perfect Hilton, so I did. I was the stronger twin. I was a little smug because I had a twin, not unlike Ramona, the smart glutton who invents a thin twin for herself in Jean Stafford’s brilliant 1950 short story “The Echo and the Nemesis.” At the end of the story, after Ramona’s been found out as the mythomaniac and hoarder of food she is by her classmate Sue, Ramona still feels she has reason to gloat. Glittering with malice, she tells Sue she will “never know the divine joy of being twins,” and ends by calling Sue “provincial one.” Sue is a “one” and Ramona is not and a double is more, in every way. Exactly. Exactly. For Hilton and me, knowing each other made us feel exalted. Everyone else was a plebe. We knew so much about so many things! We read about identical twins, two beings split in one egg. We looked at pictures of twins by marriage—our favorite being Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt. We loved pictures of them by the sea, standing close together, split from the same romantic egg, one pretty, one not so pretty. We looked at art books, at the work of Gilbert and George. We read astrology books. We knew how to look at clothes. We knew how to write short stories.
At the end of our thirteenth year, there were many changes outside our control. We moved to an apartment in Crown Heights, among other West Indians who called themselves a we, one political body, proud of their association by birth with former congresswoman Shirley Chisholm. By the time we moved into that apartment, a lot of our sisters had moved into their own homes. Another change was Hilton and I went to a predominately white high school in “the city.” It was the first time we had ever been around white people much, so it was strange to consider our own bodies next to theirs and it made us hate each other for the first time—Hilton and I. If only we could be rid of one another, we would be the one that another one could love. But since there was two of us, there was two of everything no one seemed to want, including, or specifically, our coloredness, our double lovesickness. How strange we must have looked, walking down the street! Like thieves in wait for someone to give up something we could not demand, because we could not speak. Our demand for love felt cruel, even to ourselves; to speak it would be a crime.
