Vanishing Twins

by Leah Dieterich

  We walked up to the front door and he swung it open, letting go of the handle, leaving room for me to glide in front of him. Inside, men and women hurried from one place to another, talking loudly and laughing.

  “Wait here,” he said, motioning to a bench in the foyer, and I sat down, feeling just outside the energy of this new family I’d soon be part of. No one looked at me; no one knew of my imminent joining. I heard David’s voice again and stood up.

  As soon as I crossed the threshold I saw Ethan, blue eyes shining, hand extended. It was rough and clammy; the grip was firm. I shook it, meeting his eyes as I’d been taught, and then looked down at our joined hands; our shirt cuffs. His was pink with white pinstripes. His jeans were blue. Their frayed ends grazed his checkered Vans.

  Someone else in the room piped up, “You guys call each other this morning to coordinate outfits?” We all laughed.

  “Nice to finally meet you,” Ethan said, and I agreed, nodding my head too many times. His voice was high and lilting. He’s gay, I thought. But he has a wife.

  I was hungry already and wondered where we’d go for lunch. I wondered whether we liked the same food. The same music. Without having met them yet, I already felt different from everyone in the office. The girls all dressed up, the frat boys with backward caps, the volume of their voices signaling their confidence.

  Even though I’d just met Ethan, I sensed there was something we shared, something that prompted my boss to put us together. I vowed to find out what it was.

  I had to be at work before Eric had to be at school, so I always got up first. I made us smoothies for breakfast, and squatted down to look at the cups at eye level, making sure they were filled the same amount.

  Occasionally I tried to feed him more. He’d often say he didn’t need it, but sometimes after a meal, he’d go through the cabinets or the fridge, looking for something else.

  He was taller than I was and weighed more, but he was so thin I could wrap my fingers around his ankle. How are there bones in there? I’d ask.

  I was thin too, but something always told me I should be thinner. In ballet, the man needs to be able to lift the woman. Never the other way around. If the woman is too big, the man can’t lift her. And if he can’t lift her, she doesn’t get to play the role—the Sugar Plum Fairy, the Snow Queen, the Black Swan, the Woman.

  Lots of couples call each other babe or baby. Eric and I used those terms frequently, along with more unique pet names. But somewhere along the way I started referring to him as the Baby, and while the definite article made him my most important baby and, at least then, my only baby, the privilege of the was not sexy. It seemed innocent on the surface, though, and he played into it; his new role as the caretaken.

  In the beginning, I’d been the baby. He taught me how to write a check and pay a bill. He supported me during my internship—things a parent might have done. Now it was his turn to be young.

  We had begun to regress sexually too. We gave our genitals pet names and personalities and became ventriloquists. Eric’s penis sounded like Beavis from Beavis and Butt-Head. He liked meat, red meat specifically, and was disappointed in Eric (whom he called Dad) for being a vegetarian. He liked big American trucks and longed to be adopted by a local Ford dealer, Big Mike Naughton, who appeared in TV commercials. I don’t remember anything my pussy said. I can hear her voice, high and breathy, but I don’t remember her having an opinion. I don’t remember her wanting anything. She just deflected his advances like the cat being chased in the cartoon by Pepé Le Pew.

  We had to stop this, I knew. We had to kill these characters. Even though we didn’t talk in these voices when we had sex, it was impossible not to hear them. We needed to kill the Baby too.

  Until this point, I’d never really critiqued our relationship. I didn’t know the difference between critiquing and criticizing. I worried that pointing out a problem or removing a behavior would be like pulling the two of hearts out of a house of cards. I worried Eric would think I’d gone cold, but when I brought it up, he thanked me and agreed it was probably for the best.

  Eric had desires undisturbed by the personification of our genitals. He wanted my feet. He wanted them bare. He wanted them sheathed. He wanted me to use them like hands and mouths.

  Even though I had a far more intimate relationship with my feet than most people, I’d never considered them objects of desire. I was ashamed of them. As he was, for wanting them.

  They were uglier than “normal” people’s feet. By fifteen, I had bunions, which were always red and hot and refused to fit into strappy sandals. I developed a stress fracture in the talus, a foot bone I’d never heard of until diagnosed. I pronated, which meant my arches were falling, so the orthopedist made me custom orthotics, which thankfully fit into the clunky Doc Martens I wore in the ’90s.

  All dancers have ugly feet by conventional standards, so I didn’t feel bad about their veiny-ness, their black toenails or blisters. But I didn’t feel good about them either. They were not good feet, as far as dancers were concerned. They weren’t flexible enough. They didn’t have high arches. They were not feet anyone would have been jealous of.

  Good feet were a thing. They were a distinguishing factor and a hallmark of success. Oh, she has good feet, we’d say. Sadly, they were not something you could will. You were born with them or not. You could work on your feet, and those of us who needed to did, but it didn’t do much good. We sat on the dirty floor of the studio in our pale pink tights, before we put our pointe shoes on, and stretched each other’s feet. One girl would extend her legs in front of her, pointing her toes toward the ground, while the other knelt facing her and pressed down on the toes with all her weight to see if they could kiss the floor. Mine never did. I wanted Melissa’s feet. I wanted Carolyn’s feet. They were stellar. When they were en pointe, their feet glowed like smoldering embers. Legs rising like smoke.

  Eric liked tights and stockings, but I’d put mine away before we met. And outside the ballet world, tights required skirts, which didn’t feel like me. But I tried. I wanted his desire to be my desire. I bought vintage panty hose with seams up the back and opaque toes and heels, sheer black versions of the pale pink ones I’d worn onstage. I couldn’t get myself to wear them.

  I didn’t want this mismatch in our desire to drive a wedge between us, so I bought nylon ankle socks in brilliant colors: aqua with thin white stripes, kelly green with pin-dots, and a solid 1970s mustard yellow. I bunched them up into a ring and slipped them over my pointed toes. I wore them when we had sex. It was the least I could do. It was the most I could do. I was good at performing, and he was an appreciative audience and stage.

  Though I tried to deny it, our differing desires troubled my notions of twinship, of coupledom. But more troubling was the fact that I desired something our specific pairing could not fulfill. I still thought about my Giselle and her Sun-Li, their fingers and hands. I thought about partnering Sophia onstage against the backdrop of the moon, and those nights in the dorm with Alex. They felt like beginnings that would never have endings, and the frustration of these unfinished narratives fueled my desire.

  Some nights I closed my eyes and was back on the twin bed in my college dorm room, in a flu-induced fever of love for Atwood. A Handmaid’s Tale teaching me the danger of complacency. “Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub, you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.”

  I began listening to self-help books about marriage. One book talked about desire needing distance. The author used the bridge as a metaphor. You have to cross a bridge to your partner, she said, implying that desire flowed beneath it. If there is no distance, there is no need for a bridge.

  What this bridge looks like is probably unimportant. It could be heavily engineered, the kind people get master’s degrees to learn how to build. It could be a tree limb, spanning a river, that you’d walk unsteadily on, arms out like a gymnast. It could be a rope swing you hang on to tightly, and if y
ou don’t make it to the other side, at least you’re back on solid ground where you started.

  Before we could build this bridge, we needed to grow the distance.

  Sometimes conjoined twins are surgically separated. It’s typically done very soon after birth; otherwise, they don’t survive.

  Eric and I had been together for six years. I’d have to separate us verbally.

  “I want to sleep with a woman,” I said. “But I don’t want to lose you.”

  “I don’t want to lose you, either,” he said.

  Maybe we could find someone to experiment with together, we decided. Sex seemed like a pleasurable way to begin a painful procedure. These words were just the beginning, a tacit agreement, a release form.

  I assumed that merging my body with another person’s body would help me to decouple from Eric. We didn’t discuss anesthesia, the odds of recovery. We didn’t know how much it would hurt.

  We kept our eye out for girls we both found attractive, girls who were tall and thin with long, dark hair and dark eyes—my twin, essentially. This narrowed the field, but it was Eric’s type, he said, and he wasn’t really interested in looking beyond it. She also had to be single and interested in sleeping with a couple; a tall order.

  There was an account girl at my office who seemed to fit the bill. She had just broken up with her boyfriend and wanted to let loose. She was tired of her businessperson persona and excited to befriend me, one of the creatives. She came to our apartment and drank whiskey with us and touched my thigh when she talked to me. One night we were at a bar together, and when she got up to go to the bathroom, I looked to Eric for approval before following her. I pushed her up against the dirty graffitied wall next to the towel dispenser and there was electricity in the wrongness of it. But the kiss itself was awkward—our teeth clacked together and the rhythm wasn’t right. It was nothing like Eric and my kisses, but I held out hope that when the three of us were together, it might be better.

  I never found out. A few weeks later, she began dating a man and declined my advances. She wanted to be a couple, not to sleep with one.

  “Maybe I need to pursue this on my own, at first,” I said to Eric. “Then slowly introduce whomever I meet to the idea of being with both of us.”

  “Coupledom is a sustained resistance to the intrusion of third parties. The couple needs to sustain the third parties in order to go on resisting them,” says Adam Phillips in Monogamy.

  It seems paradoxical, this sustaining and resisting. The conventional wisdom is to banish third parties so that we don’t have to resist them.

  “The faithful keep an eye on the enemy,” Phillips says. “After all, what would they do together if no one else was there? How would they know what to do? Two’s company. Three’s a couple.”

  The first girl was Jimena. She was six years older than I was, but somehow she felt like a little sister—partly because I was so much more sexually experienced. She had never had a long-term boyfriend, or girlfriend. She was also seven inches shorter; hence, everything about her was smaller. Her feet, her hands, her fingernails, her mouth.

  She did have two things larger than mine: her breasts and her long, black mane of Peruvian hair, which she kept hidden away in a tight bun at the nape of her neck. Walking beside her, I felt masculine in a way I never had before. I ditched my graceful ballerina walk and adjusted the way I carried my body to suit its new role as the larger person—the seducer and protector.

  I met Jimena at a reading for a self-help book targeted at “straight girls” who wanted to have sex with women. This was a genius tactic for getting women with internalized homophobia to embrace their same-sex desire without having to label it as gay. Jimena and I both thought of ourselves this way, straight but interested in women, so that was the first thing we had in common.

  I cringe a little when I think about it now. If you’re a woman who wants to sleep with other women, you’re not really straight, and clinging to that moniker only perpetuates the binary of straight and gay.

  But calling myself a straight person who wanted to have sex with women allowed me to explore my sexuality without having to rupture my twinship with Eric. I could still be just like him—a straight person who wanted to sleep with women. It let me become more me without becoming less him.

  After the Q&A, Jimena approached me and asked if I was going to have my book signed. I said no. “Are you going home now?” she asked. I told her yes, that I had to get home to my husband. “You’re married?” she said. “Yes,” I said. “But he’s very supportive.”

  We exchanged email addresses and began corresponding daily. She was a graphic designer and liked books. We decided to meet for a drink. She emailed me directions to her house, and they read like this:

  Off Sunset Boulevard, across the street from the Mondrian, is Queens Road. You’re going to take that ALL THE WAY UP. It’s difficult to describe, all I can say is don’t let the road lead you anywhere but STRAIGHT and UP. No veering to the right or left. You’ll cross Hollywood Blvd. Keep heading up. Franklin will first appear on the left but you’ll need to continue past and look for FRANKLIN HILLS estates (sign on the right—looks like a little subdivision). Head up that road (Franklin) till it zigzags and ends at the top. You’ll see 1642 is a white garage. And living adjacent to that garage is me.

  These instructions terrified me. When I moved in with Eric, I’d developed a fear of driving to unfamiliar places alone at night, though I’d never had an issue with it before. It wasn’t until I met Jimena that I got over the fear.

  I gripped the steering wheel as I drove up to see her the first time, turning down the radio, as though too much sound would send me over the cliff. I was afraid of going too quickly and losing control, and also of going too slowly and sliding backward down the hill, grinding the gears of my car and plummeting to my death.

  At the top of the hill, I got a reward. From the patio behind Jimena’s guesthouse, you could see twinkling lights laid out in a grid extending as far as the eye could see. Constellations on the ground. The lights weren’t my only reward. I could try to say it more gracefully, but it wasn’t that graceful.

  It turned out that Jimena and I were both deathly afraid of STDs, so we followed all the precautionary measures. We used Saran Wrap for oral sex, condoms on sex toys, and short black latex gloves when we fingered each other. “I feel like I’m going to the opera,” I’d say when I put them on.

  Our barriers weren’t just physical. I stayed merged with Eric. At home, in the bedroom of our apartment with no view, I crawled on top of him, feeling like a new person. Yes, I thought, I still have it in me.

  I tried all the things I was doing with Jimena on Eric. They were things he and I had done at first, but had stopped doing years ago: kissing forever, undressing each other slowly, leaving our clothes on as long as possible. I asked him to put his fingers inside me the way Jimena did, except rawer, ungloved.

  I introduced Eric to Jimena over drinks at a bar, hoping the three of us would hit it off. We talked about our families, and work, and books. We ate popcorn, drank Manhattans, and went home.

  “She’s sweet,” Eric said. “But she’s not really my type.” This was fine because the next time I saw Jimena, she said that she liked Eric, but the idea of a threesome was too much for her.

  “Is it okay if I keep seeing her?” I asked him in bed that night. He was on top of me, our bodies pressed together, our mouths inches from each other. I pulled at his lower lip with my teeth and ran the soles of my feet up and down his calves. He didn’t say no.

  It was easy to keep my sexuality a secret because I was married to a man. I thought Ethan might be dealing with the same dilemma, and I felt we’d be closer if we could share our queerness.

  We had just finished a meeting at the office of the video-game client and were sitting in my car, not wanting to go back to the agency. When I asked him, without hesitation he said that he had been with men before. He’d been engaged to a
woman at twenty, normal in the rural western town he’d grown up in, but his fiancée had cheated on him, so he’d moved to the East Coast to go to ad school. There he fell in with a group of gay guys who were nice to him. After school he moved to New York and went out every night with the guy he was dating. The G Days, he called them.

  I told him about my arrangement with Eric and about Jimena. “I wish I could do that,” he said, “but I don’t think I could handle my wife being with someone else.”

  It was what everyone said. The assumption was always that both partners would do the same thing. I told him Eric hadn’t been with anyone else yet, so I wasn’t sure how I’d handle it, but was willing to try.

  “Did it feel weird to be with a woman again?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said. “I definitely like women better sexually.”

  What was he doing with a man, then? I asked.

  “I liked getting presents,” he said. “I liked being taken care of. All the expectations are different, since it’s two men. When you’re with a woman, there’s all this pressure to be the one to give them gifts and take care of them. It was nice to have that switch for a while.”

  I felt closer to him. I wondered which of us would take care of the other.

  Whenever I told people I was supporting Eric, they raised an eyebrow. The eyebrow said, Are you sure he’s not using you? I didn’t think so. Eric had supported me after college while I worked on my advertising portfolio, and I didn’t think of that as using him. That support had helped me get a job as soon as we moved to LA—the same job that would later allow me to help him focus on his art. In a way, investing in me was investing in himself.