In many cultures, seeing a person’s doppelgänger is bad luck. It means they might be in danger or become ill. Seeing your own doppelgänger is worse. An omen of death.
Despite our talk of being less careful with each other, Eric and I mostly went back to our old routines. On weekends, we shared an order of French toast at the café up the street. We went to art openings and museum shows. We revisited an old hobby and made it new. Fixed-gear and single-speed bikes had become popular and I was attracted to their style, the colorful vintage road-bike frames like the one my dad had ridden all those years, retrofit with fewer gears and narrow, flat handlebars. Eric was happy I was finally riding a bike.
We spent a lot of time working on our bikes that year, tweaking them, adding components. Different grips, colorful anodized aluminum cranksets, chains and wheels ordered from Japan. We did it together but we made them our own. Eric used clipless pedals, but I wore my regular shoes and slipped into toe clips, little cages that didn’t lock. Because of this, I almost never fell.
I loved the freedom of it, skirting past traffic, weaving between cars. I rode my bike to work every day. It only took fifteen minutes. It was easier to share one car now that we had other forms of transportation. We didn’t have to do everything together or leave each other stranded anymore.
Eric got a studio with someone from the residency and was home less often. Still, I had to hide the fact that I was in constant contact with Elena. It wasn’t that difficult. Even when Eric was home, we were always both on our computers. But I know he could sense I was somewhere else, existing in limbo.
In addition to our endless Skype chat and selfies that detailed the minutiae of our day, Elena and I sent pictures of the full moon, and told each other when our periods arrived each month. They were short notes in both cases—with the moon, it was just the subject line, La Luna, and a photo of the moon in the body of the email. With the period, it was the word sangrando (bleeding), if we were in the middle of it, or la sangre viene (the blood comes), if it was imminent. I liked this phrase. The blood comes. The blood cometh. It felt grand and Shakespearean, public and important, instead of the way I used to see my period. Nagging and personal.
This cycle of bleeding had always seemed a nuisance to me. I felt that men were lucky they didn’t have to endure it. When I exercised too much or ate too little and my period stopped for a few months, I saw it as a blessing. I had transcended this curse of femininity.
I was intrigued by Elena’s embrace of her period and the way she encouraged mine. It had been her masculine exterior that had attracted me in the first place, but even with my new boyish look, she was making me see the particular magic, the cosmic importance, of being female. I decided to devote myself to worshipping these monthly occurrences with her.
Ethan and I each bought deep V-neck T-shirts, which were popular for men that season. They were so deep they reached the bottom of our sternums and touched the pointy piece of cartilage called the xiphoid process, a body part I feared. When we learned CPR in high school, they warned us not to push on the xiphoid process, saying it could break off, puncture various organs, and cause internal hemorrhaging.
When I wore the V-neck with my short hair and baggy jeans, I felt like a pretty boy.
The deep V-neck drew attention to our nipples, mine and Ethan’s. They were hidden away, just inches from the diagonal band of ribbed jersey, and they frequently hardened under the air-conditioning that was pumped into our office. One day I saw him put on a thin black nylon jacket, so thin it could fold up into the size of a wallet. I asked where he got it and he told me.
“You should get one,” he said. “Mine is a small, but they had an extra-small too.” I went to the store at lunchtime and bought one. Back at the office, we zipped them up in sync and our nipples relaxed.
Even though we closed the doors of our office to keep the heat in, they did not give us full privacy. The doors were glass, and from the outside our uniforms must have given the appearance of a united front, an impenetrable fortress of us-ness. But from the inside, where our body heat commingled, and where we spent many rambling hours concepting, but also digressing into conversations about our relationships, our sex lives, and bathroom habits, the zippers on our identical jackets and the buttons on our identical jeans kept our bodies to ourselves.
That winter, the agency sent Ethan and me to Australia for three weeks. We were shooting a series of commercials there because the Australian dollar was weak, and we could get more for our money. More special effects, nonunion actors, and two tons of candy sprinkles we made fall from the sky like rain to illustrate the coverage of our client’s internet signal. We were accompanied by an account manager and a producer, and we got to fly business class and stay in a hotel right on the water. My room was two levels, and larger than my apartment in LA.
A wall was all that separated us. In the wall was a door, and the door had a lock, and we kept it locked. When we needed to work on something, we’d meet downstairs at the restaurant or bar, or go out for a walk to find a coffee shop nearby. He didn’t even peek his head into my room when he came by to pick me up. I always tried to look into his, to see what he left on the floor, on chairs, how he lived in a space that looked exactly the same as mine.
It was a relief to not have to hide my communication with Elena from Eric. I was nine hours ahead of Elena and seventeen ahead of Eric, and because of that our chats never conflicted. Elena was still seeing the Russian, but they didn’t live together, so it was easy for her to carry on our constant conversation.
In the morning on my first day, I wrote to her on Skype before she went to bed. I’m off to work at a café, I said.
Come mucho, she typed, and I almost mistook the Spanish word come for the English one.
I thought about the first time she saw me naked. “You’re so esskinny,” she had said, as we lay side by side in her cousin’s bed and she drew her finger across the canyon of my abdomen, up the rim of my hip bone.
Ya comí la cena y estoy taaaaaan llena, she typed. I knew that she was talking about herself as a whole, that she was so full, not just her stomach. In Spanish it is llena for her, and lleno for her stomach, because el estómago is masculine. She hadn’t needed to modify esskinny for me because it’s not a Spanish word. In English, we don’t care about the gender of words. Just bodies.
Ethan and I couldn’t stand the thought of going three weeks without riding our bikes, and since work was paying for it, we’d bought airline cases and brought them to Sydney. Still slightly jet-lagged, we set out in search of a café the production company had recommended for breakfast.
Riding in a city is difficult. Riding in a city you don’t know is even more so, and riding in a city where they drive on the other side of the road was a challenge we hadn’t anticipated. We arrived at the café after a harrowing ride, our V-neck T-shirts drenched in sweat from the Southern Hemisphere November sun. We hadn’t spoken during the ride. I’d just followed him and tried not to die.
“Whoa,” I said, as I locked my bike to a parking meter.
“I know,” he agreed. “That was insane.”
We hugged, and something about it felt different. It was the same hug we frequently exchanged, when things were going badly at work, or when we pulled up in front of Swingers on a Monday morning to work over breakfast, but imbedded in it was the intimacy and danger of traveling together in a foreign country. That was something I’d only done with my husband.
We ordered a celebratory breakfast, grateful for our expense account, and for not having gotten ourselves killed on our bikes. The spell was broken, and he was once again just my colleague, my annoying little brother. I ate the toast he’d slathered with Vegemite and abandoned after I told him he should probably taste it first to see if he liked it.
Eight hours later, I found an email in my inbox. It was a photo of Elena’s breakfast, shot from above. A single fried egg on a piece of toast. The bubbly white was free-form and wild within t
he right angles of the toast, and in the center of it all were two perfect yolks, next to each other. They stared back at me, a pair of eyes, a pair of breasts, two marigold suns. She was having twins for breakfast.
During our second week in Sydney, Eric went to Art Basel in Miami with friends from the residency. Like the residency, Art Basel had a debauched reputation, but with more collectors than artists, more swimming pools than lakes, more cocaine than whiskey. The first night, he’d gotten into a private party where a band we both loved performed for a couple of hundred people. The second night, he’d made out with a painter who’d just gotten out of a long-term relationship with a famous film director.
On the third night, he called and said, “We’re going to Dubai! I just won a raffle!” I didn’t understand. Music and street noise made it hard to hear his voice. “An all-expenses-paid trip for two to the art fair in Dubai!”
I couldn’t recall ever having won a raffle, and certainly not for something so extravagant. I was jealous of his luck until I realized he was asking me to come along. By we he meant us. The luck was ours.
At the end of a long day of shooting, Ethan and I got an email saying the hamburger client had killed a spot they’d previously approved, and we needed to come up with new ideas by the end of the LA business day. We’d already had dinner, and it was late, so Ethan invited me to his room to work.
I got a cocktail from the hotel bar and took it back to his room. I settled on the carpet, leaning against an upholstered chair while Ethan sat back against the pillows at the headboard of the unmade bed. This was how it happened, that coworkers began affairs with each other. I wondered whether we would have considered it a long time ago if Ethan had been single, in the office late at night after everyone had gone home. Work relationships were the opposite of most romances. Instead of starting out passionately and becoming companionate, they work in reverse. The more you’re around the coworker, the more you flirt with them or fantasize about them, mostly out of boredom or necessity. I’d often wondered whether being in a relationship with someone who was bisexual, like Ethan, would have felt different than being in a relationship with Eric. Or Elena, even.
I took a drink of my Manhattan and it tasted strange. The bartender had asked if I wanted it dry, sweet, or perfect. No one had ever asked me how I wanted my Manhattan. “I guess perfect,” I said. “That’d be sort of right down the middle, right?”
He said it would be.
I didn’t know he meant sweet and dry vermouth. You never put dry vermouth in a Manhattan, that much I knew for sure. It tasted terrible but I drank it anyway.
Ethan and I pitched each other ideas for commercials. We prefaced every idea with This may be stupid, but . . . Eventually we’d written enough scripts that we decided we could be done.
“What’s Eric up to?” he asked.
“He’s at this art thing in Miami,” I said, “making out with some girl, and sharing a cheap hotel room with ten other people. It’s like spring break.”
“Aren’t you jealous?” he said. “I am!” He’d said that about the residency as well, and the open relationship.
I was, of course, but I wouldn’t admit it. I didn’t want to be a cliché character. I was still determined to transcend the role of the Average Woman, the Jealous Woman. “It’s not like I’m not having fun too,” I said, and shrugged.
When I was done with my Manhattan, I took a bite of an apricot I’d bought at the grocery store earlier in the week. I’d never had a fresh apricot before—I was used to seeing them dried like leather or embalmed in jam. Sadly, it was bland and boring, neither sweet nor bitter. I guess I could say it was perfect too, though it didn’t look it. One side had bruises, and I wondered if I’d made them. Normally I would have thrown it away, but that night, I decided to eat it, bruises and all. I’d had it with so-called perfection.
They were the best bites of any fruit I’d ever had. I vowed never again to avoid the hurt parts of things.
“I got into the Whitney,” Eric told me when we were back in LA. A strange phrase without context. He meant the Whitney Independent Study Program, a one-year residency for artists, curators, and art historians, affiliated with the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
The museum is usually called the Whitney, the way the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the Met, but it’s funny to say the before what is typically a woman’s first name. The Whitney, as though it’s a person, but a person so important she requires the before her name to differentiate her from all other Whitneys. Not just any Whitney. The Whitney.
“They only accept twelve people a year,” he said. “What should I do?”
“You should go,” I said. I didn’t say we. He agreed.
I’d just gotten a raise and promotion at work. Ethan and I were creative directors now, and I didn’t want to have to start all over again at an agency in New York. I’d already uprooted myself twice for Eric, and I’d been happy to do it. This time I wanted to stay put and grow. I wanted to branch out. The three months we’d spent apart in the summer while he was in Maine felt like just the beginning. I needed the distance. Without it, I felt too enmeshed in the fabric of our relationship. It had been the backdrop to my entire world for so long.
We agreed it could be good for us, that we could use the time apart to grow, but we refused to call it a separation. We’ll just live separately for a year, we said, like it was nothing.
Whenever Eric had success, I felt particularly aware of the success I hadn’t had. I hadn’t danced the part of Odette/Odile. I hadn’t completed my short story collection. I’d made a short film, but not a feature.
I think I believed there was a finite amount of success any couple could have at any given moment. If Eric was having a lot of success, the amount available to me was diminished, the same way the more viable twin fetus crowds out the weaker one.
Eric was more viable now. I feared his success would flatten me.
I also wanted Eric to go to the Whitney because I wanted to go to the Elena. The Whitney had chosen him, and I felt special when I was with her, that she had chosen me.
But I couldn’t go to the Elena, not for any long period of time, anyway. I had a full-time job, and if Eric was going to live in New York for a year, we were going to double our expenses, and it would be up to me to keep our joint bank account full. Elena would have to come to me.
Eric agreed to this, that she could stay with me for the first two weeks he was gone, to ease the transition. Perhaps he felt guilty about the growth he was undergoing, about leaving me behind.
In the waning months before Eric’s departure, we went on the free trip to Dubai. I researched social codes for travelers, and learned that foreign women did not have to cover their heads, but that modest dress was required. Knowing that our hotel also featured a water park called Wild Wadi, I purchased the first one-piece bathing suit I’d bought in years. Public displays of affection are strictly prohibited, one website said, even between a husband and wife.
Though other Western women had their heads uncovered, I was the only woman with short hair. This was certainly not a good place to be a gay person, I assumed, so I was surprised, when we visited the gold souk, the spice souk, the fish market, and the canals, to see Middle Eastern men holding hands with each other. Is Dubai a Middle East gay haven? I wondered. I knew it was more lax than some of its neighbors, allowing alcohol to be served in hotels to attract foreign tourism.
Since the time zone was exactly twelve hours ahead of Los Angeles, our circadian rhythms were completely off for the four days we were there. Eric had always been a better sleeper than I was, but even he was struggling. At night, he lay in bed and tried to sleep, but I stayed up, dimming my computer screen so as not to disturb him, and messaged Elena photos we’d taken that day. I’m sure he knew what I was doing, but he said nothing. We were both delirious.
I googled “men holding hands in Dubai” and found a number of images to confirm what I’d seen that day. I
also found an article in the New York Times with an image of George W. Bush holding hands with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.
“Americans may raise an eyebrow at men holding hands, but in the Arab world, affection among men is common, and without sexual connotation,” the article said. “Holding hands is the warmest expression of affection between men. It’s a sign of solidarity and kinship.”
I whispered Eric’s name in the dark to tell him my discovery, but he didn’t answer.
Since our free flight home from Dubai required a stop in London, we decided to spend our own money to stop first in Paris for three days and take the Chunnel to London to catch our plane home.
I was looking forward to revisiting the place of our honeymoon, to speak French and sit in cafés, but I couldn’t bear the thought of stopping in London without seeing Elena. It had been a year of daily communication and I wanted more than just words and images. I wanted to feel and touch her to know she was real, to locate her in her own space.
Eric begrudgingly agreed to spend two extra nights in London before returning to LA. I spent a lot of time looking for an affordable hotel near the art galleries I hoped would distract him while I was with Elena. I thought if the hotel was comfortable enough, perhaps he wouldn’t mind if I spent one of the nights with her.
Vanishing Twins Page 10
