Vanishing Twins

by Leah Dieterich

  “That’s a rat,” he said. “Only thing that could get in there. No way a squirrel could.”

  “So what can we do about it?” Eric said.

  “I can fog up there. That’ll kill anything.”

  “But won’t it smell once it’s dead?” I asked. That almost seemed worse.

  “Not really.”

  I looked at Eric, waiting for affirmation, but got none.

  “I’ll give you a call,” I said. “To schedule.”

  I couldn’t believe Eric was willing to leave me alone with a rat in the ceiling. What if it got into the wall? What if it found a way into one of the cabinets and popped out while I was cooking?

  “I don’t want all those nasty chemicals in the house,” he said. “Maybe it’ll go away, and if it doesn’t, you have the guy’s card.”

  Eric’s father came to pick him up the next morning. They strapped their bikes to the roof rack, and I went back inside as they drove off and stood in the middle of the living room, listening. I didn’t hear the rat, but I was uneasy. I wasn’t used to quiet.

  I had to create some noise. I called my mother and told her about the rat and Eric leaving and my being afraid to be alone. Could I spend the night at a friend’s house? she wondered. No, I said. Though I had a couple of friends, they were more like colleagues, no one I knew well enough to admit how terrorized I was by this invisible thing. I didn’t have an Alex anymore. I had only an Eric.

  My mother offered to put me up in a hotel. I sheepishly took her up on it. The offer was there, after all, and it seemed wasteful not to make use of it. I silently vowed to never tell any future friends about it. I assumed very few people would be interested in my less-than-confident self.

  There was a hotel across the street from my apartment where my parents had stayed for my graduation, so I walked over and checked in. There is something comforting about being alone at a hotel, because there’s always someone on duty at the front desk if anything goes wrong. Autonomy and security all in one.

  I put my overnight bag on the bed and my wedding invitation supplies on the desk. I sat down and began embossing our logo on the paper. The embosser had a long metal handle to provide leverage, but the card stock was so thick I had to stand up and use my entire body weight and both hands each time I made an impression. It was boring, repetitive work, and I liked that. It allowed me to accomplish without having to think. I’d quit the restaurant because Eric had offered to support me while I focused on my internship. I’d seen that some of the other interns whose parents supported them were able to get a lot more work done. This time I happily accepted Eric’s help. I loved spending the entire day concepting with my fellow interns, problem-solving, writing, and cracking jokes, but it was exhausting in a different way than the restaurant had been.

  I flipped on the television to find something to accompany the work. ESPN was showing a cheerleading competition. I had looked down on cheerleading in high school (the forced peppiness, the cheering for sports), but I loved these televised competitions. Ready? Okay! one of the girls yelled. Techno music rattled the speakers as they moved into formation, nodding rhythmically at the audience with their shellacked ponytails and permanently raised eyebrows. Stripped of the pretext of a sporting event, the cheerleaders seemed to be encouraging me, letting me know it was okay to feel their energy in my body, the desire to be part of their pack, to move in sync with them.

  I embossed in time with their cheers. Slide, position, press, remove. Slide, position, press, remove. An hour went by. My hands were sore and I turned them over and noticed that the handle of the embosser had made a deep red indentation in the center of each palm.

  The competition was over, and golf was coming up next. I turned off the TV and felt embarrassed. I was a silly girl in a hotel across the street from her apartment, making wedding invitations and watching competitive cheerleading, all because she was afraid of an unseen rat. Even though my palms were sore, I embossed until I fell asleep.

  The next morning, I went home. Sun streamed through the sliding glass door, creating a glowing rectangle on the carpet. I poured a bowl of cereal and sat in the rectangle, listening for the rat. I heard nothing. The sun warmed the carpet and it felt good. I stayed there for a long time.

  Our wedding took place at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, in a small gallery with white walls and black floors, much like the one I’d peered into at age thirteen, imagining myself as the artist, painting the floor with my hair.

  Eric’s aunt officiated and read the passage from The Alchemist Eric had given me when we met, six years earlier. Everyone said the wedding was beautiful. It was the first one I’d ever been to, so I didn’t have a point of comparison.

  I realize now that I didn’t get married. We got married. Eric and I shied away from the “I do” of Western marriage tradition. We’d read about the Hindu marriage ceremony, which featured seven steps done shoulder to shoulder instead of face-to-face, and decided to do a version of that.

  Let us take the first step to provide for our household a nourishing and pure diet, avoiding those foods injurious to healthy living.

  Let us take the second step to develop physical, mental, and spiritual powers.

  Let us take the third step to increase our wealth by righteous means and proper use.

  Let us take the fourth step to acquire knowledge, happiness, and harmony by mutual love and trust.

  Let us take the fifth step so that we are blessed with strong, virtuous, and heroic children.

  Let us take the sixth step for self-restraint and longevity.

  Let us take the seventh step and be true companions and remain lifelong partners by this wedlock.

  We didn’t have a sit-down dinner; we served only hors d’oeuvres, keeping people standing and hungry. We chose a jazz band instead of a DJ—no contemporary songs, and we expected everyone to dance.

  The bandleader’s wife was a champion ballroom dancer and teacher. Every Sunday for a month we drove to the untouched 1960s apartment complex where they lived and learned a choreographed first dance to one of our favorite jazz standards: “In a Sentimental Mood” from A John Coltrane Retrospective: The ¡mpulse! Years. Impulse with an upside-down exclamation point.

  In the past, Eric had declined when asked to dance in public, but for our wedding he wanted to dance with me in front of everyone. “You’re a ballerina. You deserve a proper first dance,” he said. “But I need some help.”

  The teacher choreographed a basic routine that was meant to look unchoreographed. Once we knew the steps, I felt him relax. He twirled me and dipped me. The teacher put her hand on his back and encouraged him to soften even more. He moved his hips and loosened his grip. After we finished, she hugged us.

  On the day of the wedding, she taught the rest of the guests too. She gave a swing-dancing lesson and all eighty of us followed along.

  My favorite photo from the wedding: Eric and I holding one hand, our arms extended at shoulder height, pulling in opposite directions, gazing at each other from a distance. In the background, the adoring faces of everyone we know.

  Another favorite: my dad, who also never dances, hands above his head in the air during our lesson, looking like a flamenco dancer.

  Before we moved to California, we went on a honeymoon in France with money given to us by our wedding guests. On the train from London to Paris, I searched my French/English dictionary for words with œ in them. After cœur and sœur, I came across mœurs, the French word for mores. I couldn’t remember the exact definition of mores, and with no access to an English dictionary, I had to speculate. I knew that mores were social things, codes, rules of some kind.

  Monogamy is a mœur, I thought. An agreed-upon social code. An expectation of marriage. The word upset me. I loved Eric, sitting beside me on the train. He was my other half, my twin soul. But I didn’t feel like having sex as much as I had in the beginning, and if I could only have sex with him for the rest of my life, did tha
t mean I’d stop having it altogether?

  The word mœurs was like monogamy itself—œ was the couple at the center of the word, surrounded by m, u, r, and s—murs—the French word for walls.

  There was a jeweler next to the flat where we were staying in Paris, and that night it ended up in my dream. I dreamed that I purchased two necklaces, each one a gold letter hanging from a delicate chain. One was an o, and the other an e. I hid them in my suitcase and planned to wear mine the next morning. I’d wait for Eric to ask about it, and then, instead of explaining, I’d pull the other one out of my jeans pocket and hold it up for him to see. Then I’d stand behind him and put it around his neck the way the man does to the woman in ads. Even though Eric had never worn a necklace, I thought he might like this one. We were in Paris after all, and I thought it would remind him of the cyclists he’d grown up idolizing, the Tour de France riders who kissed their crucifixes after winning a stage.

  I snuck the white box into the bathroom to put mine on, but when I opened it, I saw that the o and the e were no longer separate. They had fused, like the ligature, with the gold chains still attached to the top of each letter. I turned them over in my hand, dumbfounded. How could this have happened? It was summer, I reasoned, and there was no air-conditioning in our rented flat, but surely it couldn’t have been hot enough in my suitcase to melt gold.

  I knew I couldn’t give it to him. I put them back in the box in my suitcase and hoped that when I got back to the States, they would magically detach from each other, that the spell would be broken.

  We settled into a rental in West LA. A beige box on a street with one palm tree. I wondered how it would fare in a big earthquake, although it had no doubt been through many. I didn’t have a job yet, but Eric had sold the condo in Boulder, so we had a bit of money to live on. He was immersed in school, so I spent most of my days at home alone, sending emails to creative directors and recruiters at ad agencies, looking at job postings and casting calls for music-video backup dancers on Craigslist, wondering if I was in good enough shape to audition.

  When the Santa Ana winds came, the palm fronds sailed down, hitting the ground outside our bedroom window like percussion—a maraca or a tambourine being set down between songs. I didn’t know the Santa Anas were the Santa Anas then. I just thought it was windy. It wasn’t until a few years later, when someone introduced me to Joan Didion’s work, that I understood they were a thing. She writes of the unsettling energy that accompanies the winds: “The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever is in the air.”

  Now that I understand the Santa Anas, and, along with Mercury in retrograde, the Saturn return, and other New Agey Californian phenomena, I am happy to have them to blame for bad things that happen and bad things I do. But even then, before I had ever called myself an Angeleno, I had begun to realize that even if it was seventy-two degrees and sunny most of the year, there was still weather.

  Our apartment felt fragile. The walls of the two-story 1960s-era building were thin and lacked insulation. The windows were horizontal glass slats louvered to allow for ventilation. Jalousie windows, they were called. French for jealousy. We weren’t sure what windows had to do with jealousy.

  The jalousie windows were different from the thick glass windows of our winterized condo in Boulder. In LA, there was no way to seal ourselves off. The sea air had rusted the hinges on the louvers so they wouldn’t completely open or close. We lay in bed at night freezing while our parents in Connecticut and Colorado scoffed at us when we told them we were cold.

  When are you coming homezo, schmookipoo? I’d ask Eric as he went off to the architecture studio at school, where many of his classmates pulled multiple all-nighters. Around midnight thirty, budzo, he’d say.

  Cryptophasia is a phenomenon where twins develop a language that only the two of them can understand. Many parents feel excluded by this, like tourists in a foreign land, unable to eavesdrop on the conversations around them.

  We were fluent in the language of our own private country.

  We didn’t have a lot of furniture. This was mainly out of frugality, but also because of our lust for minimalism. We were inspired by the Barcelona Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe that we’d seen on a spring break trip to Spain, the apartment by Le Corbusier we’d visited on our honeymoon in Paris, and tours of the Los Angeles Case Study homes (including the Eames House) Eric got to go on with his class. The sofa we’d had in Boulder, a late-’70s hand-me-down from Eric’s parents, did not come with us to LA. It was a boxy, rust-colored love seat with gold trim. It’s got good bones, we said. If only we could reupholster it, it wouldn’t be so bad. But it wasn’t within our budget to reupholster. It wasn’t within our budget to buy anything new, either, since we only liked very expensive, beautiful things.

  Instead of living room furniture, we got a long, used library table to pair with our Eames chairs and put it in the middle of the apartment. It suited us fine. But not having a sofa did foreclose certain kinds of intimacy. There was no curling up next to each other. No snuggling during a movie or TV show, not that we had a TV anyway. We watched movies on our computers or went to the theater. The only place for intimacy was the bedroom, and it expected either sex or sleep.

  Let’s do side by side, I’d say if I wanted Eric to stop spooning me. In the summer it was because I was hot and needed space; other times it was because I was afraid spooning would turn into sex, which I didn’t want but had a hard time denying. When we were side by side, on our backs, we pressed our ankle, knee, and hip bones together and held hands. It was like a lying-down version of the three-legged race in elementary school, but there were no opponents on the field.

  At restaurants I’d slide in next to Eric if there was a bench seat. “We’re lucky,” I’d say. “Since we’re both lefties, we can sit on the same side of the table without bumping arms.”

  “I wanna sit across from you. So I can see you.”

  “I want to be next to you, so I can look out.”

  “I’m having dinner with you. It’s like you’re not there if I don’t see you.”

  “I’m right here,” I said. “Can’t you feel me?”

  Architecture school was not what Eric had thought it would be. It was mind-numbing hours at the computer drawing straight lines; five-hour critiques; the possibility that after graduation you’d spend years designing bathrooms for some established architect, until maybe when you were in your fifties you’d have your own firm and finally build your own building.

  His classmates didn’t mind staying up for days at a time. They adopted the pretentious language of their teachers: rhizomatic, interstitial, constant references to DeLanda and Deleuze.

  In his second semester, Eric took a class in the art department and discovered there was a master’s program for media art. The students were making kinetic sculptures and interactive installations controlled by software. It was an evolution of the kind of work Nam June Paik had been making, which we’d seen at the Guggenheim when we first met. He wanted to transfer.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  I thought about the night we’d spent on his futon in Boulder. His sawhorse sculpture, my performance art story. I thought about our marriage in the gallery, the wall text by the pieces listing the names of the people who made them, the media they used, the year they were created. “You’ve always wanted to be an artist, haven’t you?” I said.

  If he was my twin soul, did I need to ask him this? I could have just asked myself.

  It’s like we’re the same person. We finish each other’s sentences. This is what we’ve been taught to desire and expect of love. But there’s a question underneath that’s never addressed: once you find someone to finish your sentences, do you stop finishing them for yourself?

  I sent my advertising portfolio to every agency in Los Angeles and had a couple of interviews. Eventually I got the call I’d been wa
iting for. I had been chosen. I was the one they wanted. But as it turns out I wasn’t the one. I was one of the two.

  The fatherly voice of my future boss told me my new partner’s name: Ethan. Another E, I thought. He’d done a few years at a big agency in New York, won some awards, then taken a job in San Francisco, working for another prestigious firm. I pictured him with a beard, since it seemed that every man from the northern part of the West Coast had one.

  The voice on the phone said Ethan raced road bikes in his free time. This detail made me reconsider. I knew cyclists. They were skinny and hairless. I thought of the Tour de France, which I’d watched with my father year after year. I’d ridden behind him on the old, unused twelve-speed he’d bought my mom. I thought of Eric, spandex unnaturally bright against the browns and greens of the mountains behind him. I guess I was destined to be with a bike rider, trailing him on some kind of imaginary tandem.

  “Ethan’s wife is eight months pregnant,” the dad voice said, breaking my reverie. This news made him seem mature, masculine. I re-reconsidered the beard. “I’ll take the job,” I said.

  After I hung up, I paced around the apartment and said my new partner’s name under my breath. Ethan. Ethan. I tried our names together and wondered whose would come first when other people said them.

  The morning of my first day, I put on a pale pink buttoned shirt, black jeans, and white Vans. I drove to the office and parked my car. As soon as I shut my car door, I heard that same fatherly voice. I turned and saw the man it belonged to, my new boss, David. He was tall and hearty. His skin was used to the sun.