On our last evening in Paris, we took a bottle of wine down to the Seine and drank. I told him that I wanted him and Elena to meet while we were in London. I didn’t want to feel I was hiding one from the other.
“I’ll meet her,” he said. “But if I’m being honest with myself, I don’t want you to stay with her.”
I didn’t want to push my luck. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s see how it goes.”
It seemed strange that when we were in the same city, it didn’t matter what I did with someone else, so long as Eric and I spent the night together. Like my arrangement with Jimena. On some level, I did understand; at night there’s little to distract you from your thoughts and worries, and knowing someone is not there is much more disturbing when they are close than when they are far away. This was why it had been easier while he was at the residency, and why I looked forward to the time when we’d be in different cities.
In the morning we took the train under the English Channel. We both slept most of the way, which made it easy not to talk about our plans. A few hours later we checked into the hotel, and I was relieved at how lovely it was. In the room, Eric sat on a chair instead of the bed while I stood.
“So, what should I do?” I said, even though I knew what he wanted. “She’s been expecting me to stay and I feel bad changing my plans.”
“You know how I feel,” he said, “but you can do what you want.”
“I kind of want to go.”
“Then go,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
I asked again, emphasizing the word sure. He gave me the same answer. I asked again and again, hoping that at some point I’d hear no, but I didn’t. Instead, each time I heard yes, I tried to convince myself that it meant something different.
Yes, I’m okay spending the night alone while you have sex with your lover.
Yes, I’m okay with you having a relationship with someone else.
Yes, I will stay married to you even though it is hurting me.
I put a change of underwear in my purse and walked out the door. What if this is it? I thought, replaying the image of my hand, stuffing the pair of black cotton underwear into my bag. What if this is the final gesture of our relationship? I felt helpless at its improvisational quality. I hadn’t planned it. I hadn’t choreographed it. It felt undignified.
A blush of shame colored my face while my feet moved on the sidewalk in time to my heart. Like the aggressive thumping of a timpani, it emanated from my orchestra pit and filled the theater of my body. It had never beat this hard before, not after a ballet performance, not even a solo.
I had been pushing Eric for so long. Pushing, but also pulling away. I’d tested his patience, his love, his loyalty and self-respect, and I could sense, without him saying so, that he was making a vow to himself that this would be the last time he just stayed.
The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott says that a child must destroy her mother and the mother must survive that destruction in order for them to have a healthy relationship.
A vanished twin does not survive its sibling’s destruction. It disappears. I wondered if Eric would do the same.
I descended into the Underground and imagined Elena’s flat. I knew she lived on the top floor of a tall building in one of the South London tower blocks called council estates. I had seen the view from her window many times, in the photographs and time-lapse videos she’d sent me, but I wanted to see it for myself. To feel the vertigo.
Elena was waiting as I came up the escalator at her tube stop. “Call him,” she said. “Let him know you’re here and okay.”
I was surprised that he answered and even more surprised at his tone. It seemed lighter than I’d expected, but maybe I had a way of filtering out the things I didn’t want to hear. I said I would return the next day, so we could spend our last night together at the hotel. I wouldn’t want to miss the train to Heathrow, I joked. “I should hope not,” he said.
I don’t remember sex with Elena, though I know we had it. What I do remember are the creaking sounds her sofa made. We pictured ourselves on a sailboat, adrift at sea—the creaks were the rigging; the ropes groaning under the tensions. We lay side by side, rocking back and forth, playing the sofa like an instrument while she recorded the sounds on a device she kept in her bag, to use for animations.
In the evening we took a bath, and I let her shave my legs. She did not cut me.
The next morning I texted Eric to let him know when I’d be back and asked again if he would meet Elena. He agreed. She suggested a dive bar that was a short walk from our hotel.
We arrived first and sat inside on the dirty sofas. I was nervous. I wanted so badly for him to like her and bless our relationship, as impossible as I knew that might be.
Elena was nervous too, and went outside to smoke. She’d already smoked three spliffs that day, to calm her nerves, I assumed, but then I realized I didn’t really know how much she smoked when she was in Europe and hash was readily available. I had only known her vacation self: the traveler, the guest.
I began to worry that she and Eric would meet outside, but she returned to the sofa moments before he came through the front door. I walked to meet him, and we hugged and kissed quickly on the lips. Elena appeared at my side, and I introduced them. Moments later, a friend of hers also appeared. She hadn’t mentioned this invitation, and it reminded me of how she’d brought a friend the first time she met me. She needed a buffer, I realized. Perhaps she was not as confident as I’d thought.
We walked next door for dinner. Everyone was cordial, but no one felt the need to linger once we were finished. When we parted ways, Eric suggested we walk Elena to the tube—a gesture that surprised me.
“Well?” I asked, as soon as she had disappeared down the stairs at the station. “What do you think?”
He remarked on how mellow she was (probably the hash), how soft-spoken. He said he was glad they had met, and that he was somehow less worried about her than he’d been when she was just an image or an idea.
I felt a desire I’d never felt before, rooted in gratitude and bewilderment. We went directly to bed when we got home. It was different from our normal routine, more modern than ballet. Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. I felt beautiful with my concave back and bent legs. No pristine satin between us, no tights, just bare feet. I didn’t feel like I was doing him a favor. I wanted to honor his desires because he was still there after I’d pursued mine.
Later, he told me that I was more giving and less inhibited than I’d ever been. He remembered every dirty thing I said that night.
It took him longer to tell me that what he remembers most from the trip is that he was so distraught while wandering around London in the grip of an icy panic that he stepped off a curb looking the wrong direction and was nearly hit by a double-decker bus. He said it was the closest he’d ever come to death.
I picked up A Lover’s Discourse from one of the front tables at a bookstore in LA. It was the first book of fragments I’d read, and I was moved by the way these bits of wisdom added up to such a profound and complete description of the experience of being in love.
Barthes sees only two possible roles in a love relationship: the beloved (the one who leaves) and the lover (the one who awaits the other’s return).
I knew how to be the one who left. My twin in the womb. Ballet. Eric.
But I was tired of being the beloved. The lover seemed like a better role. A lover can yearn. And without yearning, there is no satisfaction in the eventual connection, the grasp of the hand. If I wanted to be the lover, I’d need to put down roots and be still, like a plant.
That’s what I did when Eric moved to New York for the Whitney. I grew roots right down through the carpet of our second-floor apartment, to the carport and the concrete below. It wasn’t easy, though. I couldn’t sleep the night before. I had heart palpitations as I drove him to the airport, stage fright. We wore our own clothes,
but we had traded costumes. In this evening’s performance, a voice over a loudspeaker said to an audience sitting quietly in their theater seats, the role of the beloved will be played by Eric.
It was then that I became the lover.
I had to work while Elena was visiting, but she was happy to stay home and cook for me. She wanted to be my housewife, she said. I was surprised to hear her use that phrase.
We instant-messaged while I was at work. I tried on your white trousers and your black dress, she wrote, adding a blushing-face emoticon. She said she liked them. I liked that she was curious about being me.
She didn’t mind when I spoke to Eric on the phone. She knew it was important for me to try to keep the balance. She spoke to her girlfriend occasionally on Skype, but never when I was around. Her girlfriend was seeing someone else in London and things were falling apart.
In the mornings, she rode Eric’s bike with me to work, and interviewed the day laborers who waited on the street corner near my office. She was thinking about her next film.
We’d kiss quickly before I got to the parking lot. I didn’t want my colleagues to think I was cheating on Eric. No one except Ethan knew about the open relationship.
Her cousin was getting married up in the sequoias, so we took a road trip there. In the woods, we took hundreds of photographs of ourselves. I’m hard-pressed to tell who is who in the photos we took of each other from behind, standing on a rock, overlooking some rapids. Topless in our underwear, our short hair dark with river water.
We went to her cousin’s wedding dressed very much alike: she in a black tank top and pants, me in a black dress and boots. We untagged ourselves when photos were posted online.
She decided to extend her trip for a third week and I could tell Eric was not pleased when I told him on the phone.
I’d heard immersion was the best way to learn a language, so while she was staying with me, I’d asked that she speak only Spanish. But it wasn’t just language. I wanted to immerse myself in her.
We conversed in rudimentary sentences, and I’d watch her mouth and mimic her, making th sounds for c’s and z’s as they do in Spain, even though it felt wrong, like a speech impediment. I watched her face as I spoke, to see whether the words I chose made sense, changing them midstream if her eyes squinted or she opened her mouth to correct me. When she spoke too quickly, her Spanish sounded like gibberish, and nothing in her face helped me decode it. I’d follow her eyeline to a chair, or to my wristwatch sitting on the bedside table, trying to find meaning in the objects she settled on.
“Something about my watch?”
“I’m not always talking about what I’m looking at,” she’d say.
The words snapped me like a rubber band. She was getting impatient with me, her student. And I was impatient too. I wanted our needs to be magically understood and met. I wanted us to be fluent in each other.
In The Psychology of Twinship, the psychologist Ricardo Ainslie says that our desire for simple, automatic relationships, for sameness, is a desire to return to the relationship we had with our mother in the womb. He calls it symbiotic return.
“It’s what we all look for in partners . . . [we] wish to return to a symbiotic relationship—that is, a relationship characterized by a lack of self-other differentiation in which one’s needs are magically understood and met.”
The original symbiotic relationship is between mother and child, but Ainslie suggests that, with twins, it can also be between baby and baby.
“There’s an experience of self and other as being one . . . A complete closeness. A sense of immersion in another person that feels whole and complete and almost ideally satisfying.”
Almost ideally satisfying. This troubles me. If diving headfirst into the pool of another person and sinking deep to their depths can yield only an “almost ideal” satisfaction, where can you find something total and absolute?
Elena smoked a lot. In the States she rolled cigarettes with tobacco and pot, since she couldn’t get hash. She always had rolling papers close at hand. Tiny slips of paper; delicate leaves in her pockets, her bag, her mouth. Paperwhites, I thought.
After we met, I’d been struck with the idea that I would write a novella inspired by our relationship, and rolling papers seemed like the perfect thing to write it on. They were sturdy enough to be carried around, but easily disintegrated by fire or saliva. They invited a kind of telling I might not have been capable of on more permanent stock. I told Elena I would give the novella to her to smoke, and then there would be no remnant of it. It would become part of her the way she’d become part of me.
When Eric and I were in Paris before he’d left for New York, I’d looked for an ashtray to use for my project, because they are nearly impossible to find in the States. Initially my search hadn’t yielded anything but souvenir ashtrays with the French flag or a picture of the Eiffel Tower. Then one afternoon, when Eric and I returned to our rented flat, I noticed that the shop next door sold an array of white ceramic objects in every shape and size: salt and pepper shakers, teacups, platters, tart pans, ramekins, tiny pitchers for cream.
Inside I found the perfect ashtray—square and pure white, with space to rest one cigarette on each side. Eric bought a soap dish. It was also white and unblemished. A quiet object. He said he’d been looking for one for some time.
They were like fraternal twins, the soap dish and the ashtray. One a cradle for cigarettes—dirty, sexual objects—and the other for soap—a cleansing tool, a milky weapon of erasure. Maybe Eric and I subconsciously meant to buy these gifts for each other, but instead bought them for ourselves.
As I write it now, it is difficult for me to see the word ashtray and not read it as astray.
“Tengo que decirte,” she said one night. I have to tell you. She paused, waiting for me to prod her along. I could sense in the hush of her voice what she wanted to tell me.
“Que?” I said.
“Que te quiero.”
I was confused by this phrase. I knew that querer was to want. Was she telling me she wanted me? No, she said, she was telling me that she loved me.
I didn’t want to tell her that I loved her. That was something I told Eric and I wanted to keep it sacred. But te quiero was different, I reasoned. The fact that I didn’t quite grasp its meaning or proper usage helped. “Te quiero también,” I said.
Elena and I had matching bruises. They were created one night in bed toward the end of her three-week stay. We had been reading when I asked if she would bite me on the arm, remembering Eric’s story from camp.
“Like, how?” she said.
“Like, just a little,” I said.
We put our books aside. I lay on my back and she propped herself up on her elbow and approached my shoulder. As her mouth covered my deltoid, I felt her teeth touch my skin, digging in lightly. She hesitated.
“More,” I said. “More. More.”
Her mouth was open wide like a snake. She began to clamp down on my arm so slowly I almost couldn’t feel her jaw moving. I could not believe her patience.
“More,” I said when I thought I felt her stop.
She bit down harder, and I waited for the pain I was expecting: a pinching, a burning. But the pain I felt was a kind of claustrophobia. Like her mouth was something I needed to get out of. Instead of saying “Stop,” I pushed her forehead away, and she pulled back, saliva hanging from her mouth in strings, like a vampire.
“No one has ever let me do that to them,” she said.
I smiled. “Let me do it to you.”
I tried to mimic her slowness. It was difficult. She lasted about the same amount of time under my teeth as I had under hers before she pulled her arm away. Our pain thresholds were on par. I felt relieved by the knowledge that I’d never give her more pain than she could take, as long as I never gave her more pain than I could take myself.
We both got bruises from the biting. They were big round circles, like rings around invis
ible planets located beneath our skin. They were blue at first, then purple, then yellow, like old newspapers.
A few days later, she went back to London. When I dropped her off at the airport, we both wore long-sleeved shirts to cover our marks. I didn’t want people thinking I’d been beaten.
I asked an employee at the health food store how to make the bruises fade more quickly. She suggested arnica, and it worked. I was going to Brooklyn to visit Eric in a few days, and I didn’t want him to see the traces of how I’d let Elena hurt me. He and I had never gotten around to biting each other, and I worried the marks I’d let her give me would hurt him too much.
I was excited to see Eric, desperate to reconnect and prove to myself that everything was okay. I tried to kiss him in public but he didn’t want to be affectionate. This surprised me, because when we spoke on the phone, he seemed to miss me so much. But that was when Elena was staying with me, when I wasn’t as available as I normally made myself. I tried not to let his resistance to public displays of affection worry me. Maybe I was used to being with Elena, the way you can’t keep your hands off someone when you’re first together. It was part of the NRE, as I had read it was called in polyamory circles: new relationship energy.
Eric had NRE too, for his new city. It was so much easier to socialize in New York, he said. You could make friends anywhere, even on the train. His was the coolest up-and-coming neighborhood in Brooklyn, and everyone was young, attractive, artsy, bookish. For years, we had longed to live on the hipper Eastside of LA where many of our friends lived, but we were pragmatists. We didn’t want to commute to the Westside for work and school, and could afford not to. I was jealous of his new situation but also defensive about my Los Angeles, where I’d chosen to remain.
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