“Hello? Bart?”
“Hi there, sweetheart!” I shouted. “Well, I’m here!”
“Oh, I’m happy you called,” she said. “That was nice of you.”
“Yep,” I said. “The flight was easy, Joe met me at the airport, and here I am.”
“Did you see that girl yet?”
“Heck, no,” I said. “I just got here. Joe has the doctor’s phone number, so I’ll call him next and see what I’m supposed to do.”
“What’s the weather there?”
“Hot,” I said, telling her what this morning’s Times had told me, with its national weather map. “Hotter than New York. I bet it’s a hundred.”
“Really? That must be awful.”
“Well, it’s air-conditioned where I am, and Joe’s car is air-conditioned, so it isn’t too bad. Boy, it’s funny, you know? It’s only noon here.”
“You’re probably suffering jet lag,” she said.
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“You know,” she said, “Art’s really mad about you going away.”
My, how news can travel fast. I said, “Art is? What for?”
“He told Liz he was going to throw you out of the business because you came to help but then you didn’t do anything, and now you’ve run out on him.”
“Well, that dirty rat,” I said, with honest outrage. “He told me himself I should take a few days off, while he was doing that auditing business.”
“All I know is what Liz told me.”
“Well,” I said, “I’ll get back there in a day or two, and straighten things out with that brother of mine.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be involved in that business of his anyway,” she said. “Wouldn’t it make more sense if you were my business manager, with a salary and everything?”
“You mean, live on you?” I sounded really boy scout when I said that.
“Of course not. I have a business manager now, so you’d just take his place.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, that might be all right. Though I don’t like the idea of getting somebody else fired for no reason at all.”
“Well, he could still be my lawyer, but you’d be my business manager, that’s all.”
“Lawyer? You mean Volpinex?”
“Oh, no, he’s not my lawyer. I have somebody of my own.”
Which was good news. I said, “But your man is lawyer and business manager both?”
“It’s always been more convenient that way.”
“Well, I think it would probably be better management to have two different people for those two different jobs.”
“There, you see? You’re already talking like my business manager.”
I laughed boyishly. “I guess I am,” I said.
WHEN WE CAME IN from the beach, around six o’clock, I said to Liz, “Well, what do you want to do tonight?”
“I don’t know about you,” she said, “but I’ve got a date.”
“Ha ha,” I said. “Anybody I know?”
“Ernie Volpinex,” she said, and headed for the stairs.
I frowned after her. “Wait a minute, wait a minute. Is that on the level?”
She turned on the second step and looked at me. “Have I ever lied to you?” Then she started up again.
“Hold on, there,” I said, and followed as far as the foot of the stairs. When she turned to look down at me without curiosity, I said, “We’re supposed to be engaged, aren’t we?”
“Clause seven,” she said. The sexual nonexclusivity clause.
“So you’re going out with Volpinex.”
“That’s right”
“I see,” I said, controlling my sudden anger, and stepped a pace back from the stairs.
Her lip curled a bit. “I’m sure you do,” she said, and went on up to the second floor.
So. I detected Volpinex’s fine Mediterranean hand in that, goading Liz to test my obedience to the contract. The bastard was going to be an ongoing pain in the ass, was he? Or in the side.
Had he told Liz yet how he’d squashed me? She’d noticed my bruises last night and I’d just muttered something about an accident, but Volpinex would go into more detail than that. I take badly to humiliation, and that was the weapon he was turning against me.
What could I do to him? Wandering out to the kitchen, making myself a drink, I tried to think of some way to get back at him, make him lay off.
“I could kill him,” I muttered aloud, surprising myself as much for the thought as for voicing it out loud in an empty room.
Kill him? No, that was merely one of those extravagant thoughts we all have sometimes. But what else was there? Carrying my drink out to the back deck and the late afternoon sun, I sat in a sling chair and brooded over the problem of Attorney Volpinex. I sipped at my drink and sopped up the last of the sun and after a while I snoozed.
When I awoke it was twilight, and the mosquitoes were growing interested. I went inside to a dark house and switched on some lights. Liz had gone, without saying anything, and Betty was having dinner with family friends. I had the house to myself.
So I got sloshed, which I very rarely do, and watched bad comedy on the living room television set until I passed out. I awoke around eleven with a splitting headache and an urgent desire to become sober; an hour later I was on my fifth cup of coffee and was watching The Ladykillers when Betty came in, looking cute but dated in her white frock. “Hi, there,” she said. “All alone?”
“Liz had a conference with her lawyer.”
“Oh, dear,” she said, and sat on the other end of the sofa, half-turned toward me, her face and knees all giving me sympathetic study. “I know she’s my sister,” she said, “but I must admit she can be a trial sometimes.”
“And a judgment others.” On screen, Herbert Lom dispatched Cecil Parker on the cottage roof with Parker’s own cane. Trundle trundle trundle down the tile.
Betty continued to study my profile. “I’ve never seen you like this,” she said. “You know, quiet and serious.”
Quiet and serious. I frowned at the television screen, unable to think of an answer to that, and suddenly realized I was being quiet and serious.
“It’s strange about twins, isn’t it?” she said.
I turned away from Alex Guinness’s manic smile. “What’s strange?”
“They’re so alike, and yet they’re so different.”
Ah hah—profundity. It had been a while since I’d been Art in Betty’s presence, and with my other problems to think about it was hard to reach for the right responses. Bart, of course, would simply have agreed with her yin-yang statement by adding a platitude of his own, but what would Art say?
Wonderful. I’d forgotten how to make believe I was Art.
In the meantime, Betty had filled my silence with more words of her own. “Like Liz and me,” she said. “I know we look alike, but inside we’re so different it’s hard to believe sometimes that we’re even related.”
“I’ll go along with that,” I said. Discreet mayhem continued on the television screen.
“I bet it’s the same with you and Bart,” she said, and when I glanced at her again there was some sort of tiny glint in her eye. And was that the ghost of a playful smile manifesting itself around her lips?
And what have we here? My curiosity piqued and my interest aroused, I said, “You think we’re that different?”
“Well, I don’t really know, do I?” Now it was her turn to look at the television screen, and the expression of innocence glued to her face was about as realistic as a Dacron wig.
“You’ve seen us both,” I said.
A sidelong look. “Not the same way.”
I reached out my left hand and used my forefinger to tap a knee. “You interested in a scientific experiment?”
She faced me, the innocent look tilted askew by a crooked grin. “Whatever do you mean?”
“I’d like to know if you’re really different,” I said.
“I’m sure you’d just be disappointed,” she
said, but the open smiling mouth and the sparkling eyes were saying, Come and get it, come and get it.
So I went and got it.
SUDDENLY, IN THE MIDDLE of the proceeding, the thought came to me, I am cuckolding myself! This was so startling that for a minute I wasn’t at all sure it would be physically possible to go on. However, I rallied, and I don’t think Betty noticed the slight sag in my narrative.
But the thought did not go away. God knows I’ve applied the horns to other men’s brows, and I’ve always suspected the existence of some antlers of my own from my marriage to Lydia, so I know the appropriate state of mind for each of the potential roles, but what was I to think when playing both roles at once? Has such a thing ever happened before? Maybe somewhere in the Decameron, but what about real life?
As to Betty, this little bitch was supposed to be the good sister. Married four days, and straight into bed with another man, by God. Well, maybe not exactly another man, but certainly not her husband. Or in any case she didn’t know it was her husband.
Just what sin was this, anyway? She was trying to commit adultery, God knows, but in truth she wasn’t succeeding. On the other hand, she didn’t know that. Was it a sin of intent? Can a sin that involves an action be a sin of intent?
And just who was I, in all this? For the first time, the twin brothers did both exist, simultaneously and in the same corpus, both thinking away at top speed. I was both sinned against and sinning, in identical proportions.
And as if that weren’t enough, not only was Betty wildly different from her sister, a fact I’d already known, she was also very different from the Betty who slept with Bart. This Betty was rather more demanding, more vocal, and more readily satisfied. What madness was I into here? Doesn’t anybody have a solid reliable personality you can count on?
Betty, who as Bart’s bride always followed sex with a relaxed and boneless dreaminess, turned out in this version to be a toucher and a commenter and a nibbler, darting this way and that on my chest like a kitten on a shag rug. She consoled me for my rib bruises—I did my usual muttering about an accident, when asked—and complimented me on my belly button, which she apparently found of abiding interest.
So did I. Some of her other activities were also interesting, and soon we were at it again.
After that one, Betty loomed over my supine body, resting her forearms on my chest and smiling down at my face as she said, “Isn’t it amazing?”
“Amazing,” I agreed, though I had no idea what she was talking about. Perhaps just twin-ness, the idea of distinction within identity.
“Sometimes I wonder about you two,” she said, grinning knowingly at me.
“You do?”
“Yes,” she said, and then she chilled my blood. “I’ve never seen you both at the same time,” she said, and laughed at her idea. “Wouldn’t that just be too awful? Then you’d be Bart, and you’d know everything.”
“I don’t think I’d like that,” I said. “I’d rather be me.”
“Mmm, you.” She kissed my chest, while I searched frantically for a change of subject. But she switched all by herself, lifting her head again to say, “Well? Is there any difference?”
“Vive la difference,” I told her, stroking her cheek. And then, since a certain curiosity on my part would surely be considered normal at this point, I said, “What about me? Am I different?”
She was smirking, grinning, giggling at me. “Close your eyes,” she said, “and I’ll tell you.”
So I closed my eyes. I felt her leaning down over me, I felt the warmth of her breath in the cavern of my left ear and the trembling of her lips around my earlobe. “YOU’RE BETTER,” she whispered.
WAS THAT A THOUGHTful look in Betty’s eye when she saw me off at the ferry? Was she remembering last night’s joke, about never having seen the two of us together? Would that thought return to her? “See you soon,” I said, as the ferry started away from the dock.
Standing there in the sunlight in her white tennis shorts and yellow-and-white striped blouse, she smiled through her frown and called, “See you.” And was her frown caused only by the sunlight?
Too many problems. I went into the cabin to sit down and try to think, and they all kept crowding in on me.
Liz, for instance. She had not come back at all last night, and still hadn’t returned. I’d seen on the schedule that this ferry was leaving just after one o’clock, so at twelve-thirty I told Betty I was going back to the city, and I handed her a sealed envelope containing a note for Liz. “When you’re ready to get married,” the note said, “call me at the office.”
Betty had said, “Do you have to go?” We’d started the day with another sexual encounter, but since then by unspoken mutual consent we’d returned to our previous friendly distant relationship.
“I can’t stay here like a lapdog,” I’d told her, “waiting for Liz to come back whenever she feels like it.”
Betty had sympathized, had agreed, had promised to turn over the note, and now I was on the ferry, a nearly empty Sunday midday ferry, and I was heading back to the city with a full cargo of problems. Liz, and the contract, and Volpinex. Betty and her budding suspicions. My own continuing bewilderment about my attitude toward last night’s fornication.
Ferry to cab, cab to train. On the train I wrote, “If I were twins—we’d want you all to ourselves.” But no, that was the wrong image for Folksy Cards; I crumpled the piece of paper and threw it away.
Manhattan. I couldn’t very well go to the Kerner apartment, so it was the sleeping bag in the office after all. Walking north from Penn Station into the garment district, deserted today, I found myself brooding over and over on the same phrase: “It’s all done with mirrors, it’s all done with mirrors.”
Sure, mirrors. I remembered that bathroom morning at the Kerner apartment when I’d tried to recruit my reflection. Fat chance.
And then it dropped into my head, or popped up, or whatever the right image. John Dickson Carr. Years and years ago in some summer cottage somewhere I’d come across and read a mystery novel by John Dickson Carr, and in it the guy.…
Adaptable? I tried to visualize the whole thing, my outer office, my inner office, the hall door. Why wouldn’t it work? No reason I could think of, not one.
“All right. All right.” I said it aloud, and a twitching moustached old woman festooned with shopping bags looked up from the litter basket she was rifling and backed away from me as though I were the crazy one. I grinned at her, though probably not in a way she found reassuring, and said, “So she wants to see us both at the same time, does she? She’ll see us both at the same time.”
The woman fled, shopping bags aflutter. Cupping my hands around my mouth, I shouted after her, “It’s all done with mirrors!”
A MIRROR IN THE GARMENT district? Easiest thing on earth: I picked one up on the way to the office.
In the same building, in fact. The service elevator doesn’t run on Sundays, and the other elevator doesn’t run ever, so I climbed the stairs, stopping off at the floor below mine to break into Froelich’s Frocks by inserting my Master Charge card between the door and its frame.
Thousands of frocks. Another time, I probably would have picked up something nice for Gloria, but today I had no room in my head for nonessentials. I needed a mirror, approximately seven feet high and two feet wide, and freestanding. Come on, come on; the models have to look at themselves somewhere.
Right. In a rear room where half a dozen mirrors of exactly the right type, freestanding in their own frames. I picked one up, found it weighed a ton, and carried it upstairs anyway. Placed it in position, stepped back, stepped forward, squinted, frowned, studied.
Yes.
WHEN RALPH CALLED at ten o’clock Monday morning, I was still groaning and creaking and waiting for Gloria’s latest dose of Excedrin to start to work. A night in the sleeping bag on the office floor had done very little good for my body, and nothing at all for my disposition. Ralph identified himself, and I said, �
�Now what?”
“You wanted me to find out about your fiancée.” He sounded surprised and hurt at my manner.
“Oh, that’s right. Sorry, Ralph, I had a bad night.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Art. The wedding’s still on, I hope.”
“Not that kind of bad night. What have you got?”
“Well, in the first place,” he said, “there are two Elizabeth Kerners.”
“They’re twins,” I said.
“They’re twins,” he said. “They—Oh. You already knew about that?”
“Right. They spell the name differently. I’m interested in the one with the Z.”
“All right,” he said, and proceeded to tell me things I already knew about the late parents of my girls. The family was as rich as I’d been led to believe, and their business holdings were even more extensive than I’d guessed, in both this country and Canada. There were several collateral branches of the family, uncles and aunts and cousins, but while they tended to have some ownership of Kerner subsidiaries, the controlling interest in the entire empire had been retained by old Albert himself, and had now passed on to his two daughters. “They’re suing one another, you know,” Ralph said.
“Who is?”
“The girls. Elisabeth and Elizabeth.”
“Suing each other? For what?”
“You didn’t know about that?”
“Ralph,” I said, “just answer the question.”
“They’re suing one another for control,” he said. “Their marital status has something to do with that, something in their father’s will. I couldn’t get exact details without seeming too nosy. I’m an attorney, after all, not connected with the case.”
“You’re doing fine, Ralph,” I told him, and he was. “Anything else?”
“The one with the Z—that’s your girl friend?”
“Fiancée.”
“She’s been in some scrapes,” he said doubtfully.
“I’m sure she has.”
“I hope you know what you’re doing, Art.”
I glanced across at the mirror, next to the closed outeroffice door. “I hope so, too,” I said.
Two Much! Page 13
