by Mike Allen
“What a strange coincidence,” I say as soon as my tongue and lips start working again. “My name’s John Sudmore, too. I didn’t realize there were two of us here in Lampitt.”
I chuckle with self-conscious naturalism.
“Is this some kind of telemarketing stunt?” says the other John Sudmore. He sounds suspicious, but more interested than displeased.
“No, it’s not,” I assure him. “I’ve dialed the wrong number. I was meaning to call a friend of mine and I made a mistake. Silly of me.” I know I’m beginning to burble. I don’t have to look at Mrs. Baldeen to know that I’ve kindled her attention. “I must have dialed Bill’s number a thousand times, but . . . or maybe it’s a foulup in the network, not my fault at all.”
It’s not enough to assuage the other John Sudmore’s suspicions. “You’re not trying to sell me anything?”
I’m just about to answer this when down the line I hear an infant wail in the background. Then there’s that distinctive sound of someone moving the telephone receiver away from their face to couch it on their shoulder.
“Hey, Jus!” calls the other John Sudmore. “Can you get Maggie to cool it? I’m trying to speak on the phone here. Some fruitcake, I think, but . . .”
There’s a response from the distance. I’m not able to make out many of the words the woman says, but I gather the unseen child Maggie has bumped her knee on the table-leg. This is not what makes my body tense up, however.
And now the crazy theory my mind desperately constructed to explain how there could be another John Sudmore living in Lampitt—even though I knew there wasn’t, because in a town this size we’d already have been aware of each other—and how his voice could, by coincidence, be so like my own, and how our telephone numbers might be almost the same, and how . . . This house of cards I’ve built out of steadily more improbable coincidences comes tumbling down.
What shocks me out of that fool’s dream is that I recognize the woman’s voice, too.
And her name.
Jus.
Short for Justine.
Justine Parland.
I could credit the existence of another John Sudmore, even if it meant twisting my mind around to believe something I knew to be untrue, but I cannot accept that he might have married Jus Parland.
* * *
I throw my mind back twenty years—no, let me see, it must be twenty-one.
I was fifteen when a new girl arrived in the school. Her family had just moved the thirty miles out of Manhattan to live in Lampitt. Her dad, Mr. Parland, would still commute into town every weekday to where he worked as a stockbroker or something infinitely tedious like that, but Justine and her mom and her quite maddening kid brother David would enjoy the benefits of living in semi-rural Jersey while, incidentally, Mr. Parland would pay about half the mortgage for a sprawling five-bedroomed house in four acres that he’d been paying for a cramped apartment on 48th Street.
I discovered all of this and quite a lot more because Jus—she soon told me she preferred the contraction to her full name—because Jus and I were seated next to each other in her first class, which happened to be math, and I made a point of welcoming her to the school as we packed up our books to move on to literature. I was very shy back then—still am, although meeting so many of the public every day in the library has gone some way towards curing my timidity—and in the normal course my reticence would probably have won out, but I conquered it and spoke to her, smiled even, because during the math class I’d been taking occasional peeks at her face as she leaned forward, earnestly taking notes, and during those glances I’d grown up a little.
Before the start of that class, if you’d sat me in front of an easel and given me a brush and asked me to paint my ideal of womanhood—and assuming I could actually draw or paint, which I couldn’t and can’t—I’d have put on the canvas some anatomically impossible creature composed of masses of tumbling blonde hair, breasts that strained at a skimpily revealing garment and that demanded to be called not “breasts” but “tits,” lips that pouted like a baseball mitt, pants that seemed to have been sprayed on and whose zipper was beginning slowly to unpeel its two halves, and eyes of purest blue that, with stark animal lust and yet a virginal romantic eloquence, spoke the plain and simple message: “John Sudmore, you paragon among superstuds, there is nothing in the world that I desire more than to get hot and heavy with you in the back of a Merc.” I had never in fact met a girl who even remotely resembled my paradigm, but I knew that somewhere she must exist. She was probably called Elektra, although Tabitha would do, or . . . To be honest, I wasn’t much concerned about the name so long as she was someone all the other guys would be insanely jealous about.
Studying Justine rather than quadratic equations, however, I realized I never would meet Elektra or Tabitha. More than this: I didn’t want to any more. It wasn’t that my fifteen-year-old self was instantly enamoured of my new classmate—not at all, I don’t think—but that for the first time I began to understand there was more to the attractiveness of girls than physical stereotypes and availability, more than sex or the apparent promise of it.
Justine’s hair wasn’t a froth of gold. It was straight, quite long, and its colour was either mousy or bronze depending on how the sunlight caught it. She used her left hand, always her left, to push back her hair behind her prettily shaped ears whenever it fell forward—something it did often—over her cheek, which had the faintest down of transparent, cobweb-fine hairs on it. Her fingers were slender, the nails raggedly chewed. Her nose was quite thin, and a little too long. Her eyes were brown, and when she glanced up at me to catch me hastily looking away I could see they were lit by intelligence—a quality whose possibility had never even entered my head during my secret masturbatory sessions with the specter of Elektra or Tabitha. Her mouth was small, her lips thin. So fascinated was I by the discovery that, even though she was so far from my template, she nevertheless drew me, that I didn’t notice how far her breasts pushed out the front of her blouse, although I was well aware they were there.
And she was easy to smile at, and to talk to, as we gathered up our books.
When the lunch break arrived she cut through the crowds of other kids to stick out her hand.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Jus. If you’re not eating your sandwiches with anyone else . . . ?”
“John,” I said, moving over on the low wall even though there was no one else for yards around. We knew each other’s names, of course, from when Mr. Dorrigan had introduced Jus around the class, but it seemed necessary to exchange them personally.
And so we sat and we talked for half an hour or so in the sunshine as we ate, and this time I confess I did check out the size of her breasts (small but definitely in attendance, so far as I could make out through the blouse and the bra, my perceptions heightened to X-ray status by the fact that I was fifteen, male and omniscient) even though they didn’t seem especially significant by comparison with the sound of her voice, the animation of her face, the laughter in her eyes, her unassumed articulacy.
We were born to be friends. We both knew it. The Australian Aborigines have the traditional belief that a complete human being comprises two parts that are split before birth, that we spend our lives seeking the other part to make ourselves whole again, and that only the lucky succeed in doing so. Jus and I recognized, only a minute or two into that half-hour, that we were among the lucky.
The curious thing is that I can’t now remember much of what we talked about during this most important half-hour of my life beyond the mere data of our existences: our names, our family members, our potted histories. I know we covered our hopes and dreams as well, but the details of what we said then are lost to me. It was as if neither of us had to make a conscious effort to remember them because we knew them all already. This wasn’t an exploratory conversation: it was just a passage of reminder, a reassurance that nothing had changed since the last time.
* * *
We were, of course, in
separable after that, we two halves of the same person: all through school and beyond. Yet what we’d probably both assumed from the outset would be the route-map of our future wasn’t followed by the reality. I know that I expected after that first lunch together that we’d travel along the familiar pathways: sweethearts, lovers, marriage. This wasn’t the way it went, though, over the years. Oh, sure, there was so much physical rightness between the two of us you almost felt it was a bubble around us you could tap your fingers on; and we could hardly go out on so many dates together, or be visiting so often in each other’s homes, or go on so many long hikes just the two of us, without there having been some reasonably steamy sessions—kissing, hugging, touching. Her breasts proved indeed to be small, two delicious little apples, so much prettier than any I ever saw in skin mags—which I never in fact got much into, although there were always plenty around at school—or at the movies. But somehow all our love and our passion never developed into full-scale sex; the occasional voyages of discovery we made together were just that—two dear friends helping each other out by sharing what they didn’t have in common so they’d both know what to expect when it was some stranger’s body they were doing the actual sex thing with.
It was one of the few matters—perhaps the only one, now that I think on it—about which we disagreed. I was as if I’d been born with the knowledge that we’d be lifelong lovers; Jus was as if we’d certainly be together all our lives long, yes, but that what we had between us, the unity, transcended and perhaps even obviated our being lovers at all. “I can’t make love to you, John,” she said more than once. “It’d be like having sex with my brother, or—no, I got that wrong: with myself.”
I agreed with her that the thought of making love with her brother David was pretty horrendous—whiny, stupid, probably liked pulling the wings off flies; not really surprising he was so successful in later life. But that didn’t stop me from pressing my case. We were made for each other. It was inevitable. Why waste time on others, or even just waiting in celibacy? Why not cut straight to the chase? Accept this glorious gift we’d been given, and rejoice in it?
None of my arguments ever prevailed. In a way it didn’t matter; in a way it did. Our love for each other was unaffected. We were still Jus and John, Jusandjohn, Jusnjohn, Jusjohn, the one person with the two different names, the two independently mobile halves of a single organism.
I thought one of the real problems, the real reasons for her resistance, was that her parents approved of me.
And approve of me they certainly did. They were nice people. David Sr. was no conversationalist, having little interest outside stocks and sports, the former for the weekdays and the latter for the weekends and public holidays, all carefully compartmentalized; but he had a geniality that made his tediousness easy to tolerate. Ellen-Anne, her mother—Ellie, as I was soon taught to call her—was quite different. Mercurial, very lovely in a minxy way, sometimes waspish, always curious for new knowledge, always alert for anything of interest, she was one of the most attractive women I’ve ever known. I once in a moment of stark idiocy confessed to Jus that several times, when her mother had casually brushed against me, I’d found myself with an incipient hard-on—an awful thing to admit about somebody’s mother, for chrissake. Jus only laughed; her mother, she said, had that effect on men.
I’m giving the impression that thoughts of sex were near the forefront of our minds all through those years, but that wasn’t the truth of it. Yes, those thoughts were always there; but they were only a sort of darkened backdrop at the rear of the brightly lit stage that was the life we shared together. Often, as we went through high school, I’d get teased by the other guys about it—not so much teased as incredulously interrogated. In the height of summer Jus, like all the other girls, would be wandering around wearing not very much—a brief halter and ultra-short pants that did little to hide the fact that she was young, and female, and lithe. How could I stand it, the boys would earnestly ask me, being near to such unconquered but surely conquerable tracts of exquisite femininity and yet never so much as succumbing to the temptation to indulge in a seemingly accidental grope? I didn’t tell them, of course, that Jus and I were relatively familiar with each other’s bodies, that sometimes we’d lounge around naked together if that was more comfortable, that physical exposure and nudity in themselves don’t matter because it’s the baring of selves to each other that’s what lovemaking’s all about. They were disbelieving enough already; that mental censor I spoke of earlier would have distorted the information so that what they’d have perceived was that Jus and I spent our time alone mindlessly fucking.
I can hear it now: “Well, you know, guys, sometimes we lie around without any clothes on and talk about string theory.”
Yeah. Right. You a faggot?
String theory wasn’t the only thing we discussed. Cosmology was just one of our passionate interests. Pinball was another. Classic mystery novels. Photography. Existentialist philosophy, until in the end we concluded that Sartre had his head in the clouds just as much as anyone else. Music—rock, classical, jazz, exotic. The Surrealist school—art in general, in fact, although we decided ninety per cent of the Abstractionists were just clones producing sub-Pollocks in a factory line somewhere. Microbiology. Menstruation—both in terms of its being one of life’s great tedia and in terms of its relation to the lunar cycle . . . and so we rambled on into biorhythms. Cryogenics. Black-and-white movies, preferably with Edward G. Robinson or Veronica Lake in them. Sunsets. Fantasy fiction, most of which we detested as being Harlequin Romance set in Tolkien Country but some of which we adored. Politics and the corruptibility of the human soul, those two topics being natural bedfellows. The situation in whichever part of the world the situation was in at the time. Sex and, in a world-weary way, its follies. Crossword puzzles. Quantum theory. The history of stupidity. Religion—we were rationalist, and abhorred the efforts of the bigots to impose their nonsense on not just the rest of us but their own children. Love, in all its forms. Tennis—we played, badly, but spectated avidly. How ghastly just about everything was that was shown on MTV, and how little we wanted to be rich and famous . . . although we both knew with an absolute certitude that one day we would be.
Rich and famous together, as Jusjohn.
* * *
As it is, John’s on his own and he’s a Deputy Chief Librarian in a small-town library.
* * *
Of course, we both went to the same college. Our families, who by this time were really just one large family, always assumed it, as did we. There was no question of being able to afford one of the major institutions, but Rembrandt University, while undistinguished, had a highly respectable reputation. It was actually a very good university with a top-notch literature faculty—we’d decided on literature rather than the sciences. The campus was large and in a superb setting; the nearby town of Ilchester was just the right size to accept but not overwhelm us college kids. We both joined a bad campus rock band called The Flaming Ghoulies that reformed every week or two until finally, after a full three months, to the silent but intense relief of everybody it split permanently amid a deluge of accusations and counteraccusations over who’d purloined the lead guitarist’s private half-gallon of rye. (In fact, the rest of us had shared it one hilarious night, but the details got confused.) Jus and I studied together; after the first semester we took an apartment together and our parents acted extremely cool about the whole thing because of course we were Jusjohn and would soon enough be married. They’d have been less cool if they’d known we weren’t sleeping with each other—at least, never in the usual euphemistic sense of the term.
Midway through that first semester I lost my virginity to a girl called, strangely enough, Tabitha; I can’t remember much about her except that her breasts were too big and the wrong shape, not being Jus’s, and that she knew more about Sean Connery than anyone else I’ve ever known, discussing his movie career with greater and greater intensity and louder and louder up to an
d through orgasm—a detail that had Jus, when first told about it, pummelling the floor in gleeful laughter. Over the space of a couple of months I must have slept with Tabitha a dozen times or more, because I could, until I discovered that she was extending the same privilege to several of the other guys, including a chemistry professor, and I began to worry about disease. Jus followed the liaison—it could hardly be called an affair—with fascination; it was the Jusjohn organism’s first experience of physically “going the whole way”, and thus obviously of potent interest to both of us. The Jusjohn organism might not have been so emotionally equable about it all if Tabitha had been more than an educational aid and receptacle, of course.
As I learned when Jus started dating and eventually sleeping with Martin.
This wasn’t a matter of double standards—the “it’s OK for the guy to screw around, but heaven help the girl who does the same” principle. Jus seriously liked Martin. She didn’t talk about their lovemaking when she came back to the apartment, to me, didn’t tell me everything they’d done. The two of them spent a lot more time talking or going around together—all the activities that I regarded as my prerogative, in other words—than they did grappling. And, worse, I could quite understand why she liked him. As I sat at home alone in our apartment nursing a bottle of whatever was on special offer that week at the liquor store I tried to find something—anything—about Martin that I could legitimately detest, and I always failed. I mean, I liked the guy as well.
Despite being liked by both parts of the Jusjohn being—“in their different ways,” as I fastidiously put it to Jus one time—Martin was a casualty of our first long vacation from Rembrandt. I spent much of that vacation reconciling myself to the notion that, although Jus was the other half of me, we didn’t own each other exclusively, that what she did with her body was irrelevant to the fact that we two were one, indivisible, our essences united, that even if she married this guy Martin he would always be an irrelevance in the light of . . . you can fill in all the other rationalizations yourself. Sometimes I voiced them to Jus; sometimes she agreed; sometimes she kept quiet.
