Vanishing Twins

by Leah Dieterich

  We paid our two hundred pesos and were given a brochure about the houses and allowed to wander through them on our own. We began in the white one, Diego’s. The bottom floor housed his studio, where a few of his paintings and drawings were arranged with easels and paintbrushes to approximate the way it looked when he was working there. We walked up the narrow staircase, which turned two right angles in only about twenty steps, to the second floor. We passed a modest twin bed that seemed impossibly small for a man of his size, and we went out the door onto a rooftop terrace.

  Maribel got a phone call. I didn’t try to understand her conversation. Instead, I ventured out onto the bridge and stopped in the middle, between Diego’s and Frida’s houses. I was only two stories up, but I imagined myself thirty-five thousand feet in the air, unable to see the ground below. I was on a flight between New York and Los Angeles, between Eric’s and my apartments. I felt neither blue nor white, sad nor pure. I felt hopeful.

  It seemed that all the buildings in Mexico City had these rooftop terraces. Maribel had taken me to a late-afternoon party at the home of an artist she’d worked for, who was called Diego, like Diego Rivera, and we sat around smoking cigarettes and drinking Victoria beer with a group of their friends. Diego’s children ran around, tracking soil between the potted cacti and succulents that littered the terrace. When we left that evening, after the sun had gone down, Diego walked us downstairs and out onto the street. He kissed me once on the cheek. “Mucho gusto,” he said.

  “Mucho gusto.” I parroted this phrase when people said it to me, understanding that it was the proper thing to say after meeting someone in Mexico.

  “Your girl is hot,” Diego said in Spanish as he kissed Maribel on the cheek, assuming I wouldn’t understand.

  “Mm-hm,” she said to him, with a little shake of the head and a roll of the eyes. One corner of her mouth turned up, but I couldn’t decipher this tick. Was it about me? About him? About them? About us? I decided it meant, “She’s not my girl, Diego.”

  “Diego and his wife have an open relationship,” Maribel told me later.

  “Does she sleep with other people?” I asked, thinking of Frida Kahlo and her affairs with women.

  “I’m not sure,” Maribel said, “but Diego and I . . . there’s a history there.”

  Which one was Diego’s wife? I wondered. Who was the mother of those children running around on the roof that afternoon? The wife of the man who had slept with Maribel. I believe she was at the house when we visited that afternoon, but she is not reliably there in my memory of it. I don’t remember meeting her, or if I did, she wasn’t introduced as his wife. She could have been the woman with long brown hair, parted in the center. She could have been the woman wearing the hippie dress. She could have been the woman Maribel embraced when we came into the house, but Maribel embraced a lot of people. She kissed a lot of people on one cheek, the way Mexicans do, not twice, like the French or Spanish, and she introduced me to all of them. The names washed over me the way they do when you know you won’t need to recall them.

  I remember a woman on the roof who was beautiful and serene, if a bit aloof. This could have been her. She did not talk to us after the initial greeting. There were a few clusters of people on the roof that afternoon, and she was not in ours. Maribel and I talked with friends of hers I’d already met, girls she grew up with in Mexico City: a fellow photographer, a jewelry designer, a psychology student. I watched the woman who might have been Diego’s wife as she sat and smoked with a group of older people—they weren’t that much older than we were, but enough to make a difference—and her children came and went to her. She was the anchor to their tiny ships, which drifted away on various missions to collect bottle caps and cigarette butts. When they returned to her, she accepted them with one arm, without even looking down, with no break in the conversation. It was a gesture so automatic it could have seemed cold, but it didn’t. I longed to go to her as well, but I did not.

  “What does Diego’s wife do?” I remember asking Maribel as we smoked on the roof that afternoon. I remember five answers she may have given:

  She’s an artist as well.

  She’s a photographer.

  She’s a writer.

  She takes care of the kids.

  She does a bunch of things.

  I have no idea which of these it was.

  Is it too hard for one relationship to sustain two artists? Was that what made Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo’s relationship so tumultuous? What about the other Diego and his phantom wife? Was their relationship also a competition for personal and artistic recognition?

  Three more things about Diego and Frida:

  Diego had a twin who died when he was two years old.

  Diego and Frida divorced in 1939, but remarried a year later in San Francisco, while he was working for the Golden Gate International Exhibition. They remained together until Frida’s death in 1954.

  Diego indicated that when he died, he wished for their ashes to be commingled. This wish was not honored. He was buried instead in the Rotunda of Famous Men.

  I had to hire a Spanish-speaking writer because most of our clients needed ads in both languages. It was oddly difficult to find this person. Much of advertising relies on humor, but it often doesn’t communicate across language and my Spanish wasn’t quite good enough to get the nuance of jokes. I found a writer who’d made lots of Spanish ads but had also written, produced, and starred in an English-language web series about trying to meet his celebrity crush, a hot girl I’d seen in a few movies.

  When he came for the interview, I felt like I was meeting Ethan again. He was slight of build with dark brown hair and the “gay voice” that had led me to believe Ethan was closeted. And like Ethan, he had a girlfriend who’d be moving to LA with him. I offered him the job, excited at the prospect of using my Spanish on a daily basis with someone other than a lover.

  After months of working together, occasional mentions of male celebrities he drooled over, and performative swoons at certain male actors in our callback sessions, he came out to me. Over iChat, of course. You know I’m bi, right? he said. So am I! I typed back without thinking. Really? he said, and followed it with a paragraph’s worth of alternating question marks and exclamation points.

  I told him I had thought he wasn’t straight, but hadn’t wanted to breach the boss/employee boundary by asking. Bilingual and bisexual, we joked. He was seven or eight years younger than I was, but this revelation melted those years away. He was very comfortable with his sexuality, he said, and planned to come out to the other creatives too. He was frustrated by the invisibility of male bisexuality, upset that gay people saw his relationship with his girlfriend as a way to stay closeted and that straight people assumed his happy, monogamous relationship meant he only liked women. He inspired an immediate urge for imitation. I told him I would come out to the others at work too. The time had never felt right before, but I realized I had to make a time for it to be right.

  We talked more over the following weeks, and found that while we both liked men and women, our bisexualities were much different. He liked the ends of the spectrum, masculine men and girly girls, whereas I was more interested in androgyny. I preferred the term queer, anyway. Bisexuality felt too narrow, too binary, and too sullied for me. He said it worked for him. I liked the fact that we didn’t agree. I felt the warmth of solidarity within the difference of our sameness.

  We both posted on National Coming Out Day, knowing our colleagues would see the updates, and I found that claiming my identity with words was as exhilarating as it was with flesh.

  We all sat at the conference table late one night, listening to my boss rehearse his part of a pitch presentation. “The job of advertising is to persuade people to prefer one brand over another,” he began. I mouthed his words to myself, etched into me as they had become, like a vinyl record. I’d seen this presentation a hundred times, because he told each potential client the same thing: “People
can’t have a preference if they can’t see a difference.”

  The first time I heard this line, I was struck by its truth. How elegant it made the obvious. And unlike so many things, subsequent repetitions did not diminish it.

  In One and the Same, the first book I’d read that mentioned Vanishing Twin Syndrome, Abigail Pogrebin writes of a 1954 study by the psychologist Dorothy Burlingham in which she concludes that mothers can’t connect to their twins until they get to know them apart from each other. “Several mothers have plainly said that it was impossible to love their twins until they had found a difference in them.”

  Eric said he’d made a huge discovery in therapy that revolved around two stories I’d heard before. The first was one his mother frequently told, about how hard it was to wean him. The way she told it, it was he who didn’t want to be weaned, but I always suspected she didn’t want to let him go, either. The second was one he told about locking her out of the car when she tried to drop him off at school so she couldn’t leave him.

  Eric had spent every waking moment of the first three years of his life with his mother in a remote town on the Great Plains where his father had taken a teaching job. This intense period of mother-son togetherness ended abruptly when they moved back to civilization and she began waiting tables at night.

  Three years, blissfully merged in self-imposed isolation. It was the same amount of time Eric and I had spent in a similar state at the beginning of our relationship.

  I never properly separated from her, he said. But recently, I had this strange experience of looking at my reflection in the mirror while I was peeing and these words welled up in me: you have no idea how powerful you are.

  Me: While you were peeing?

  Eric: No, it was after I peed. Haha.

  What he’d experienced was essentially the Mirror Stage, he said, where the child realizes they are independent and not merged. The Mirror Stage usually happens around two to three years old, and of course I had that, he said, but to a very minimal degree. This was the moment it all crystalized, into my own subjectivity, my own desiring body. I was struck by how lovely and profound these words were, the picture they painted: precious gems glinting in the sun, a naked body emitting light.

  The loveliness gave way to bleakness. I was infantilized, he continued. That’s why I just waited for you. I thought if I locked myself away, if I was perfect, you would come back to me.

  I saw a parking lot, a station wagon, tears inside a self-created prison.

  I had suppressed all my own desires, which only made it worse, he said. There had been an architecture professor who was interested in him during the time I’d been seeing Jimena, before his summer in Maine, but he hadn’t let himself flirt with her. I thought it would keep me close to you. Boy was that wrong.

  Me: You should have just flirted with her! Opened the steam valve a bit.

  Eric: I know.

  Me: That’s what we should do in the future.

  Eric: It’s true. There’s nothing wrong with flirting.

  I was sorry I’d played his mother in this painful scene in the car. That I’d helped him reenact it. The station wagon became a boat and I heard my own therapist’s voice. It’s so young, she had said of the terror I felt about separating from Eric. She’d compared me to a little tugboat, tethered to the mother ship, so that I could float off on my own but never have to worry about being lost at sea.

  She’d used this image to explain rapprochement, I told him. It’s part of the separation-individuation phase where the child wanders off but keeps looking back to make sure the mother is still there. I should have completed it between fifteen months and two years, but I’ve been repeating it with you.

  Despite the perversity of casting each other in these maternal roles, we were proud of each other, for the work we’d done, and for these revelations. We cried at our screens for a while. I felt relief and joy. I’d never seen Eric cry, really cry, and though I wished he would do it with me, in person, narrating it as it was happening was the next best thing. Like sexting, but with tears.

  Eric had just finished Moby-Dick and sent me his copy. “Tell me when you get to ‘The Squeeze of the Hand,’ ” he said.

  It took me some time. It is chapter 94, and in it, Ishmael describes an ecstatic afternoon spent squeezing lumps out of the sperm that had been harvested from the whale’s hump.

  It was our business to squeeze the lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times sperm was such a favorite cosmetic . . . after having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralize . . . Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze! All the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I my self almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-labourers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much to say,—Oh! My dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

  I found this scene to be incredibly erotic, though no sex is mentioned at all. Eric agreed.

  As the passage continues, Ishmael decides to “lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity”—to take pleasure in simple things, “the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side . . .” The slippery grasp of his fellow sailors’ hands.

  The word lower threatened to depress me so I focused on shift instead, and I replaced Melville’s simple things with my own. The dance, the partner, the pen, the paper, the story.

  When I put away Moby-Dick, I found Eduardo Galeano’s Mirrors, a book Elena had given to me before we broke up. I finally decided to read it. As the subtitle (A Short History of Almost Everyone) suggests, it is a series of creation stories. One in particular caught my attention: the myth of the Egyptian gods Osiris and Isis. They were twins, it said, who began making love in their mother’s womb and married each other as soon as they were born.

  The idea of lovemaking in the womb got me hot. A place that was pre-mœurs, where no one could tell you who or what or how you were supposed to fuck.

  The story of Isis and Osiris felt like Eric’s and mine. We’d brought a primordial relationship out into the world, and tried to keep living it as though we were still in the womb. But our relationship wasn’t a baby anymore. It had grown—six years, seven years, eight years, nine. Living apart had been like sending it to boarding school, allowing it to mature on its own. I sent the passage to Eric.

  In a future edition of 101 Stories of the Great Ballets, I imagine an entry for Twincest. First presented in a Brooklyn bedroom, starring two dancers: me and Eric.

  Twincest is a dramatic ballet about a Parisian twin brother and sister who are in love with each other. As is common in ballet, though the characters are adolescents, they are played by young adults. It is the 1960s, and the twins are on a monthlong family vacation at a farmhouse in the south of France. As the curtain rises, they are in separate twin beds on opposite sides of the room, listening as their parents return home from a night out. We see their parents, jovial and drunk, retire to their room, adjacent to the twins’ room, and after a few moments of attempted seduction, they fall fast asleep. The twins listen; the girl cups her hand to the wall, and once she hears them snoring, she gives her brother a signal. He gets out of bed and crosses the room to join her in hers, lying side by side.

  Since this ballet is about breaking the ultimate rule of sibling-hood, it also breaks the ultimate rule of ballet: silence. The dancers speak to each other.

  “I’m glad we get to share a room,” I say.

  “Me too,�
� he says, caressing my shoulder.

  “I want you to fuck me.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I’ve listened to you fuck your girlfriends through the wall between our bedrooms. It sounds like they love it and I want to try.”

  He kisses me and slides his body over mine. The whispers vibrate against our lips.

  “Are you ready?”

  “Yes.”

  He is inside me, and it feels better than any time he has been inside me in our real lives, because this fucking is new and secret and forbidden. We are performer and audience to each other.

  I come immediately and he does too. It is over. But it is not over. Something has been completed.

  We decided it was time to occupy the same space again. We thought it might be part of the cure. No more carpet, we said. No more beige. We needed wood floors, and no one below us.

  Eric had gotten what he wanted from New York: he’d been offered a solo show at a gallery on the Lower East Side and could make the work for that show in LA, paying less studio rent than he paid in New York. He’d also taken a contract software job in New York, and with this additional income, we had enough for a down payment on a house.

  I found a two-bedroom in the hills of Silver Lake. The sellers were architects, a husband and wife, who had rented half of it during its prior life as a duplex. Eventually, they were able to buy it and turn it into a single-family dwelling. They put in floor-to-ceiling windows to maximize the light and view of the hills, and tore down the wall between the two apartments to make it one open space.