Vanishing Twins

by Leah Dieterich

  “The girl and my husband both gave me an ultimatum. I chose my husband because my heart told me to. My eyes did their own thing. They cried and cried, and I was relieved and angry and guilty and sad.”

  New paragraph.

  “You were divided at that point, working with me during the day and on a secret project at night. It was going to be your ticket out. You stopped saying hi when I came into the office in the morning. You were just busy, I told myself. I was good at making excuses for you. We both started seeing therapists. I stopped trying to reason with you when you said you hated your mother. I just let you hate her. One night when we were having one of those long talks in our office, you reminded me you’d been touched by a babysitter, as though you’d already told me before. I guess you thought you’d already told me everything. I didn’t have time to question you further because you kept talking. You said you realized you were depending on your wife for too much of your happiness. I understood how you felt. ‘It’s too much to expect one person to be your lover, your business partner, your friend, and your mother,’ I told you.

  “ ‘I’ve been thinking about maybe having a glass of wine now and then, at barbecues and stuff,’ you said. ‘Does that scare you?’

  “ ‘Kind of,’ I said. But it was more than that.”

  I was heading toward the finish line. I kept my eyes on the paper.

  “How was it that when we drove back from San Diego in the dark that time, and I put your hand between the V-neck of my shirt and the lace of my bra, that I didn’t get us into an accident? How did I almost think about saying yes to leaving the agency and starting our own? I guess I couldn’t see myself without you.

  “The day you told our boss you were quitting, you left a note on my desk that said, Thank you. It’s meant more to me than you’ll ever know. You thought he was gonna kick you out before you got to see me, but he didn’t, he still had work for you to do. I was late that day, and when I got in, you were there, and the note was on my desk, so I asked if I could read it in front of you. You weren’t really there anymore anyway, you hadn’t been in months. In therapy that week, I had talked about you leaving, but there were no tears. Just words. And the words weren’t even damp or drippy. They were more like a dog pacing back and forth behind a chain-link fence. My therapist asked what I’d miss most about you, and I said, ‘I don’t know, his dependability?’ She frowned and said, ‘Dig deeper.’ ”

  I paused.

  “So, what is the thing you’ll miss most about me?” Ethan said.

  “Well, first you have to actually leave,” I said. “But I’m getting to that.”

  I went back to the page.

  “I didn’t have to dig that deep. It was like playing in the sand at the beach.

  “ ‘He never asked me to be anything,’ I said, tears welling up in my eyes as though I’d raked my hand through the sand at the shore and the seawater immediately filled the hole, creating a little salty pond in the shimmering expanse.

  “ ‘He never asked me to be anything other than who I was.’ The sentence lay there like a faded old beach towel, messy and crumpled. And as I said it, an errant wave of tears came up and soaked it through, and I sat there, wringing it dry until she said our time was up.”

  “Read it again,” Ethan said.

  After a few months of my own therapy, I came out to my mother. And she came out to me. Mine was figurative, hers literal. I was tired of pretending everything was going smoothly with Eric, but to tell her what was going on would mean coming out about my sexuality and also my open relationship. I always thought if I’d been gay, I would have come out to my parents right away and that they would have been supportive. Alex had just come out to her parents and I saw how much happier she was. How much lighter. But it was the open relationship that stopped me. There was no precedent for that. There was no Ellen DeGeneres on the cover of Time magazine.

  I asked my mother to visit me in Los Angeles. She said, “Dad can’t come out, you know. He doesn’t have enough vacation.” I told her I knew that, and that I wanted her to come on her own.

  I’d never seen either of them travel alone, except the times my mother had gone back to Chicago to care for her dying parents. All other travel and vacations were a joint affair. My parents were a unit, and for most of the time I’d been with Eric we’d been a unit too. It had been nearly ten years since I’d spent any time alone with my family.

  It was February, and once my mother had spent a night in our barely insulated apartment, warmed only by portable space heaters, she understood what I’d been talking about.

  “You weren’t kidding,” she said. “It’s freaking cold here.”

  It took me a day or two to find the courage to steer the conversation to a place where it made sense to bring up my situation with Eric, my breakup with Elena. I told her about Alex, and Jimena, the girls at the residency. Once I started talking I didn’t stop.

  She sat down on the edge of the air mattress I’d placed in my living room.

  “It’s okay,” my mom said. “You know I love you no matter what.” These were the same words my father would say to me days later on the phone.

  I laid my head in her lap. I held on to her waist as my tears soaked her pants.

  I could sense she was surprised by my tears, by their force and their wetness. “You know, you don’t have to tell me all this,” she said.

  “I want you to know me,” I sobbed. “I just want you to know me.” I kept saying it. I’d landed on the thing that was true, so there was no point in saying anything else.

  “I do want to know you,” she said. “I do.” She stroked my hair as we sang these lyrics back and forth. The steady movement of her hand was the backbeat of the song, which faded with the light in the windows.

  “Will you do the caterpillars?” I started to say, remembering how she used to smooth my eyebrows as a kid. Before I could finish, she was already doing them.

  I decided to get another tattoo. My first in eleven years. I didn’t tell my mother because I knew she’d disapprove, as she’d disapproved of the others. Your skin is perfect, she’d always said in protest. Eric discouraged me with the same phrase, but it didn’t matter. That word felt meaningless to me.

  I got the word ÊTRE on the inside of my upper arm. A solid rectangle, like a censor bar, with the word made out of the negative space, as though the ink had been rubbed away like a lotto scratcher.

  It is a particularly sensitive area, the tattoo artist told me. Even tough guys who are covered head to toe wince. She held my skinny little arm between her much larger arm and heavy breast so I wouldn’t flinch while she deposited the ink beneath my skin. There was something maternal about this, and incredibly soothing.

  Être: the infinitive form of to be in French. Before it is conjugated, conjugal. Before it is married to me or you, he/she/it, we, you all, or them.

  I’d been surprised at how encouraging Eric had been when I told him about coming out to my parents, but I still sensed a dissatisfaction in him, so I decided to dig. What are you missing? I asked.

  Embodied experience with you, he wrote, though I’m not even missing it so much, now. But I feel you could live apart like this for the next ten years and be fine with it, and I don’t know that I would be okay with that.

  I don’t need more right now, I wrote. I liked being able to come and go as I pleased, having experiences on my own. I liked being able to write late into the night without feeling guilty.

  Eric: I know . . . It’s true. The freedom I have here has really allowed me to focus on my work.

  Me: So, what’s the problem, then?

  Eric: I’m just stressed because the Whitney is ending in a month and I’m trying to figure out what happens next.

  Me: I know you want to live together again, but how can we have all these things under one roof?

  Eric: We’ll figure it out. We’ll have to.

  Me: I hope so, because if not, it’ll make the relati
onship unbearable.

  Oh, just having our relationship would be murder? he said. Even though they were just words on a screen, I could sense his tone immediately. It was almost like the sentence itself was narrowing its eyes.

  Not murder for me, I tried to explain, murder for the relationship. I didn’t want it to die, and I knew that putting it ahead of everything else made me want to destroy it.

  Now I see the confusion in our language. I think for Eric, just having our relationship meant monogamy, having only one love relationship. For me, just having our relationship meant that our love relationship would be the only thing I had.

  I still faulted monogamy for preventing me from feeling whole on my own. I was protective of my newfound agency and worried that I might kill anything that got in its way.

  When Eric was done with the Whitney, I came for the final group show. During his year in New York, he had abandoned the code-based interactive installations he’d made in grad school and begun to take photographs. In the show, he showed three. The first was a still life of a military drone built out of balsa wood. He’d downloaded the plans from the internet, cut the pieces out by hand, and glued them together like the model airplanes of his youth. The second photo was of the white noise machine in the waiting room of his therapist’s office. The third was a photo he’d taken years before in LA, but never printed. It was a ghostly, Jesus-like face in the carpet of our apartment, an indentation I’d left after doing a headstand. While I admired his prior work, the spinning threads, and how they responded to people in their intelligent, robotic way, I liked this new work better. Though mysterious, it implied a narrative. It was engaging in a more human way.

  That night, we walked home across the Williamsburg Bridge. “How are you feeling about things?” he said.

  “Good,” I said. “Better.” I told him about the pain in my ribs that had returned when he’d met the performance artist and how it had gone away once she had too. We stopped and held each other.

  “I’m happy,” he said. “I want to be with you. But I think I’d like to stay here a little longer.”

  I was surprised at his change of heart. “Really? But I thought you wanted to move back in together.”

  “I do, but I can wait a little longer. I’m scared about moving back to LA right now when things are just starting to happen for me.”

  He said he’d made more friends in the past year in New York than the previous ten in Los Angeles, and felt he was close to getting a gallery to represent him. I didn’t want to take those things away from him, and I was interested in what living apart in a monogamous relationship could be like.

  “Let’s try it,” I said.

  When I stopped speaking to Elena, I also stopped speaking Spanish. I missed it as I missed her. When I rode my bike to work, I repeated certain phrases to feel like I was still having the mundane conversations we had when she was staying with me. ¿Qué quieres hacer? ¿Quieres comer algo? But it wasn’t a conversation, of course. Estoy practicando mi español, I imagined I’d tell her if we spoke again someday. ¿Con quién? she’d ask me, to which I’d reply hablando sola—a phrase she’d taught me that meant talking to myself.

  Whether I was alone or not, I felt like another person when I spoke Spanish. My voice became lower, probably mimicking Elena’s, since the way I learned was by repeating the words and phrases she taught me. Is that what I sound like? people often say when they hear a recording of themselves. It feels separate from the self that made the recording. When I spoke Spanish, I had this experience in real time, the experience of being two people simultaneously.

  I heard Elena’s voice coming out of my mouth, and that was comforting. Sometimes I’d repeat words or phrases I’d heard her say, even if they weren’t accurate. I watched videos of her to feel closer to her speaking voice. Arrorres, I’d say under my breath, trying to roll my r’s.

  I’ll go to Mexico, I thought. The Her me can exist there.

  I went through customs at Benito Juárez International Airport, and after showing my passport and thanking the customs agent with a gracias, I was instructed to hit a button. It turned green, which meant I was free to go through without having my things examined. I realized as I was passing that I’d said gracias like Elena had taught me, with a th sound for the c instead of an s sound, the way Mexicans did it. I was going to have to unlearn that lisp, but I didn’t want to. Lisping my z’s and c’s made me feel like she was still there, emerging from inside me.

  Maribel from the photo lab waved and opened her arms. After my breakup with Elena, we’d had coffee together a few times. I had a little crush on her, but she had a boyfriend, which I figured was for the best. “Holaaa,” she said, drawing out the a. She was dressed in jeans, with high-top sneakers and a black-and-white bandana tied around her neck. It looked like something an outlaw or gangster might wear. We hopped in a car she’d borrowed from her tío, a tiny silver hatchback called a Volkswagen Polo. It had a fake aftermarket Porsche steering wheel. We spent hours in Mexico City gridlock on the way to her abuela’s house, but there were no lapses in our conversation. Midway through our trip, I said, “Let’s speak Spanish as much as possible.”

  “Pues claro,” she said with a smirk.

  There were bunk beds in the bedroom where Maribel and I stayed, although they weren’t technically bunk beds because there weren’t two of them. There was one lofted bed, and beneath it a floral sofa where I slept. The house was in Coyoacán, which was Frida Kahlo’s neighborhood, Maribel told me.

  “I’ll take you to Casa Azul and you can see where she grew up.” I understood almost everything she said, but I wasn’t quick enough to respond in any complex way. Vale had been my usual response with Elena, a phrase used in Spain for okay or all right. They didn’t use it in Mexico, though. Maribel taught me órale instead.

  The only decoration on the wide expanse of her dingy white bedroom wall was a circular painting of Elvis, about the size of a vinyl record. It had a hole worn in the middle of it, right between his eyebrows. It was a head-and-shoulders portrait, and you could just make out the neckline of a pale blue shirt and the popped collar of an orange wide-lapeled jacket. This was midcareer Elvis, still thin and unbloated, with shaggy hair that flopped over his forehead and feathered out around his jawline.

  I thought it was a strange picture to have, but I never asked Maribel about it—whether she had carried it with her from Los Angeles, or if it had come with the bedroom, a relic of its past inhabitant. Elvis, the surviving twin, kept watch over the two of us, sleeping separately, in a bunk bed and sofa.

  Maribel couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard of Chavela Vargas, the famous Mexican singer of ranchera music.

  We were lying on the couch in her bedroom after a long night of drinking and then driving through red lights. This had terrified me, but she claimed that after a certain hour of the night, if you were a woman, this was police-sanctioned behavior (the red-light-running, not the drinking) to help prevent carjacking.

  “You haven’t heard ‘La Llorona’?” she said. I hadn’t. Maribel said she was a popular character in Latin American mythology, the ghost of a woman who wandered the streets at night, wailing and crying because she regretted killing her children. One version of the story said that she’d drowned the children because the man she was in love with didn’t want them, and the other said she’d been in love with a man who lavished his two children with attention, and that La Llorona had drowned them out of jealousy.

  I wondered if Elena’s friend had been referring to this character when she’d called me Llorarita.

  “Let me find the song for you,” Maribel said. “It’s amazing.” She sat up and opened her computer. I settled back onto the couch while I waited for her to find the song. It was dark outside, and the Christmas lights she had hanging around the top bunk of her bed reminded me of college, or camp. Her legs were spread wide, knees bent at right angles as she leaned forward over the coffee table, a tinge of boyishness colorin
g her posture.

  “Ah, found it,” she said, and pressed play. The recording was old and crackly and so was Chavela’s deep voice. I watched Maribel’s face in profile as Chavela sang.

  The song begins with her singing from the point of view of La Llorona.

  Todos me dicen el negro, Llorona / negro, pero cariñoso . . .

  They call me the black one, Llorona / black but affectionate . . .

  Toward the end of the song, the point of view changes, and she seems to sing to La Llorona.

  Tápame con tu rebozo, Llorona / porque me muero del frío.

  Cover me with your shawl, Llorona / because I’m dying of cold.

  It was as though La Llorona sucked the life out of anyone in her presence. I felt the pain of wanting Maribel to be Elena. The unfairness of it.

  The song was a waltz, and I pictured myself dancing to it with an invisible partner, one hand clasping his or her hand, the other around his or her back. One, two, three, two, two, three . . . until suddenly, it crescendoed and abruptly ended.

  Si ya te he dado la vida, Llorona /¿Qué más quieres? / ¿Quieres más?

  I already gave you my life, Llorona / What more do you want? / You want more?

  Instead of Casa Azul, we went to the houses where Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera lived toward the ends of their lives. They are two unadorned two-story boxes on the same property called Las Casas Gemelas. The Twin Houses. They’re completely separate, but identical in shape and size. The only difference between them is color: one white and the other blue. I assumed correctly that Frida’s was the blue house. This hue could have been an homage to La Casa Azul, the house she grew up in, only a few minutes away, and although she never had a blue period like Picasso, I assigned this color to her because she seemed to be sadder than Diego.