by Laurel Brett
* * *
Monday morning, when I arrived at Sarah Lawrence, even in my agitated state I was delighted by the charm of the small campus. The Tudor architecture gave the impression of a bucolic English village, in Surrey, perhaps. The school had the reputation of being the most expensive in the country.
Signs directed me to Bates, the gracious Tudor structure that housed the painting studios, among other things. I walked past a circle of protesters, young women who sat in a ring with signs that read, Hey, hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?
They must be here every day, even in summer—any day classes meet, I concluded. Now that was dedication. I still sat on the fence about Vietnam and was continually surprised by the vehemence of the war’s opponents.
Inside the building, I found the large studio. There were canvases everywhere, and a small knot of students gathered around a posing model. I saw with a start that the model was Daphne. She reclined on a couch like the one in the painting, only this one was green velvet. Her rosy skin, pink frock, and glinting red hair contrasted strongly with the deep, verdant fabric. The natural light caught all the electric highlights in her hair.
I recognized Green from a Life spread I’d seen on him. He stood in front of the class in a studied attire, mannered, down to the robin’s-egg-blue scarf that he had knotted at his throat. His leonine head was large and imposing, with thick masses of gray hair worn longer than was usual for men in their fifties. There was a romantic, almost Byronic look to him. When he moved over to one of the young artists to instruct her, I saw that he walked with a limp, and upon further investigation I saw that he was clubfooted with one very large black platform shoe, the match for an ordinary one.
Clearly, he had painted Daphne. I didn’t expect that. I had believed her performance at the Forester Gallery. Both her shock and her dismay had seemed genuine. I felt betrayed and duped. No one noticed me. The professor was intent on his teaching duties, and Daphne was concentrating on holding her pose. Finally, she looked up, and with a startled expression called out, “Garrett, what are you doing here? It’s so nice to see you.”
“You know me, right?” I asked, just making sure.
“Of course I do,” she replied, staring at me as if I had three heads. “But what are you doing here?”
“Looking for you,” I admitted.
“Really?”
I had just seen her three days before, and yet it felt as if an eternity had passed. The two separate realities—Daphne claiming she had never met Galen Green and running out of the gallery in dismay, and this scene of a model in front of Green and his students—just did not fit together at all. I felt almost dizzy at the incongruity. I wouldn’t have been able to explain it, but even though she seemed to be Daphne, she also seemed to be someone else. I didn’t feel the same way around her as I did with my Schrödinger girl. So this is Capgras syndrome, I thought, when someone seems like an impostor. I had studied it, but I had never experienced it. She appeared to be a totally different person. Her hair was twisted into a sleek chignon at the nape of her neck, perhaps so students could sketch her creamy shoulders. I missed her wild, free mane.
“You are ogling me strangely, Garrett. Don’t you recognize me?”
Of course I did. I would have picked her out as Daphne anywhere, but she was so different from the girl I thought I knew. Perhaps it was the influence of Galen Green.
“Of course I recognize you,” I answered. “Ogling you? Isn’t everyone in here staring at you?” She didn’t blush at all. “Let’s go talk,” I suggested.
“Sure,” she said, “but I can’t leave the class in the lurch.”
“Go,” the artist said. “We’ve done enough for the day. They have plenty to work with.” He stretched out a large paw and said, “I’m Galen. You must be Garrett. Daphne told me about you.” He was a commanding man who controlled the situation and at the same time suggested that he only had everyone else’s interests at heart. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he was sinister, but I didn’t trust him.
“Should we go to the cafeteria here or the coffee shop in town?” I imagined sitting across from her while she ate a grilled cheese sandwich. Or maybe not. I didn’t think this elegant girl would order grilled cheese.
“Don’t be silly,” she replied. “We’ll go to Galen’s house, a very cozy home conducive to a chat.” She walked over to the artist and spoke to him quietly for a moment, kissed him on the cheek, and then returned. She walked behind a screen and emerged dressed in a pale-blue summer dress and heeled sandals. Galen casually waved as we exited the studio together.
We climbed into my car, with Daphne giving directions. Galen lived in a large stone house that stood out among the wooden and brick homes of the area. It was a fitting residence for an artist; its stone facade and manicured gardens evoked Provence.
As we entered we were flooded with a riot of sunlight from massive windows. The house was decorated in an eclectic style and the living room was elegant, striking, and cozy all at the same time. She sat on a bittersweet-orange sofa, not the red divan of the portrait, and I faced her on a paisley chair. The light emphasized the warm tones of her skin.
“So,” I said.
“Don’t be so serious,” she countered. “Garrett, nothing is wrong.”
“Are you sure?” I queried.
“Of course I am.” She sat perfectly composed, with good posture, comfortable in her surroundings. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” she said. “Make yourself at home.”
She came back fifteen minutes later carrying a large, heavy tray.
“Let me help you with that,” I said, rising. She allowed me to relieve her of the tray, which I set down on a large, tufted leather ottoman between us. On a red lacquered tray of Chinese design, she had placed a white china teapot, two white mugs, a plate of sliced apples, a wheel of brie, and some beautifully arranged sesame crackers.
“I couldn’t fit the milk and sugar. How do you take your tea?”
“Plain will be fine,” I said. And I added after a pause, “I wanted to find out about a girl in a portrait I saw at the Forester Gallery.”
“Ah, you’ve seen it then,” she said, appearing pleased.
“Of course. You were with me.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, genuinely puzzled. “I haven’t seen you since our first meeting, but I have thought of you so many times. Especially when I see the Schrödinger book or think about physics. If you’d taken me up on my proposal I wouldn’t have met Galen.”
I don’t know what I’d expected, but the circumstances were growing ever more strange. Either this girl had amnesia, was a great actress, or someone else had been with me at the Forester Gallery.
“Let me get this straight: the painting is of you?”
“Of course.”
“I saw the resemblance immediately. I must admit I was surprised.”
“Of course you were.” She giggled, reminding me of the adolescent I had met just two months before. “Me too! Can you believe it? I’m a muse.”
“You’re sure we didn’t meet up on Friday and go to the gallery together?”
“Are you okay?” she asked. “No, I was in Boston last weekend with Galen. He gave a lecture at the Museum of Fine Arts. They have a restaurant there with tables among the paintings. We had dinner there yesterday and came back just last night.”
I wanted to say something, but what could I say? Prove it?
She was ahead of me. She crossed the room to reach a small cream-colored antique desk. Sitting right on top was a photograph that she retrieved.
“This is from Friday,” she said, and held out a black-and-white Polaroid image of herself in the Public Garden with the sign for the swan boats behind her. Someone had written Daphne, Boston Public Garden, 6/16/67. This was the same day I was with the other Daphne at the Forester Gallery.
The other Daphne? What was I thinking? Had I accepted the strange idea that these two Daphnes were really two different girls? That could
n’t be right. The photograph and its date were very odd, though. Clearly the girl couldn’t be in two places at the same time. I was certain of that physical principle. The snapshot wouldn’t have been definitive proof in a court of law, but Daphne, this Daphne, couldn’t have known that I would be coming to Sarah Lawrence, so why would she have a snapshot ready and dated to perpetrate a hoax? She had nothing to gain from me. Obviously, these girls weren’t unknown twins or random doubles because this Daphne had known me on sight. My head was reeling. For the moment, I could only conclude that Daphne existed as both one and two people. I couldn’t help but notice the similarities to the Schrödinger experiment. Only a cosmic coincidence would bring this girl to me while we were both reading the popularized physics book with the two beautiful cats on its cover.
My conclusions seemed logical, but insane. I knew that most disinterested bystanders would have said that Daphne was acting out an elaborate ruse, but my gut told me that both girls were sincere—that I was dealing with a phenomenon I didn’t yet understand. I’ll admit I was spooked, and the little hairs along my forearms were standing on end as I suppressed a shiver. I tried to keep steady in the face of my own confusion. I shifted my attention to her current life. That she would be posing for a famous painter in his fifties surprised and unsettled me, almost as much as the bigger mystery surrounding her.
“When did he paint the picture?” I asked.
“He began it the day after we met and finished it a month later, just in time for the show at the Forester.”
“That was fast work,” I remarked. She didn’t reply. Nothing was making sense. How could all this happen so fast? “Will you be returning to Long Island today?” I continued my interrogation.
“No, Garrett,” she answered quietly. “I live here now, with Galen. Surely you guessed that.”
Surely I had, but I didn’t want to believe it. “How did this happen?”
She laughed merrily. “We met by chance at lunch in the Russian Tea Room. I went back to the city the day after we met, on the Saturday, and decided to take myself to the Russian Tea Room because I’d read about it. I was planning to go the day I met you, but I decided to have lunch with you instead. It’s right near that Bookmasters. I was going to go but I stopped in to buy a book first, and there you were.”
There I was. She told me this story of sitting at one of the cherry-red leather banquettes. She had ordered chicken Kiev. Practically everyone does there, unless they order borscht or salmon. Galen told her that she was beautiful and asked her to his table just before the food arrived. Daphne was thrilled to meet him. She followed art and knew who he was. He was eating borscht, and she voiced an observation about the sour cream floating like boats on a red pond, slowly dissolving into creamy pink water. Charmed, he followed up on her nautical imagery; he asked her to go sail a toy boat on the pond by the boathouse in Central Park. I concluded that he was a smooth customer. That was a far cry from the dinky coffee shop we went to, or the ice cream truck in the park. But I had taken her to the art gallery, I reminded myself. Wait a minute. Why was I becoming competitive with Green? I didn’t like the old fart romancing Daphne. That was it.
She told me that the two spent a perfect spring afternoon launching their toy boats and regaling each other with stories of their lives. She also engaged him with her precocious and passionate ideas about literature, psychology, and physics. He talked about his painting and his travels.
I understood that when Daphne met Galen she already knew what she wanted—she wanted to be whisked out of her life by an older man. For god’s sake, she had asked me! He said that all he wanted was a model, so when her parents, busy, harried, distant, and puzzled by their odd and brainy daughter, met the famous Galen, they were happy to have Daphne pose for him. Things had just evolved from there. She was appropriately reticent about their intimate life. She had ventured to Sarah Lawrence on weekends to pose for her portrait, and when she finished her finals and Regents exams, she had moved to Bronxville full-time. She had only been there for a week.
“But Daphne,” I said at the end of her story, “you’re just a kid, and he’s a dirty old man. Your parents can’t possibly be okay with this. And what about your future? This is crazy. Will you get married?”
“First of all, I am not a kid. I am sixteen.” She said this as if she had said that she was thirty. “My future is all arranged. I’m completing my GED degree and will start Sarah Lawrence in September. I want to study art history. As for getting married, now that’s crazy. I’m too young for that. Trust me, Garrett, I am very happy. No one is taking advantage of anyone.”
I could tell she was remembering the day she had asked me to be her rescuer. Her paramour? It all smacked of Europe in an earlier century. Or Lolita, that Nabokov novel that had become all the rage, which I had never gotten around to reading.
I remembered that moment too, and I would still make the same decision. If her parents had agreed to this situation, there really wasn’t anything for me to say. It was all so Elvis and Priscilla, but Elvis had always claimed that the girl he’d met in Germany lived with him platonically until past her eighteenth birthday. I had no way of knowing that wasn’t true here too.
Daphne had announced her desire to be plucked out of her life the day we’d met, and the next day she had been. That much was clear. But it wasn’t clear who the Schrödinger girl was. I had gone over the prosaic explanations for these girls in my head, but none fit. The fact that Galen’s Daphne knew me kept upending logical deductions about identical twins. And the photograph proved she was somewhere else when I knew she’d been with me, destroying the sensible conclusion that she was one girl. As a behaviorist I wanted a neat and simple explanation for all phenomena.
When I was a boy, the day my father died on a field in Italy, I spoke at length to his apparition, who sat down on my bed and told me I needed to be the man of the house now and look after my mother. Why do they always tell young boys that? It’s a burden they can never fulfill. But he told me other things too, like how to endure pain and be open to life. I don’t think I learned that lesson at all, and maybe that’s why I chose behaviorism, to encase the world in its neat wrappings. But I never abandoned the memory of that meeting, of seeing him in his uniform, and I never denied its reality either. Maybe the Schrödinger girls and my father’s visit were like those 3-D glasses you wear at the movies, and once in a while we suddenly see a new dimension that was there all along. Maybe.
Chapter Five
* * *
I needed time to process my trip to Bronxville. My brain reeled from the cognitive problems posed by the two Daphnes. They were so different, yet so alike. I decided to name the second girl, the model, Galen’s Daphne, just to keep the two personae straight. If the girl(s) were to be believed, what was happening was impossible. Both Daphnes had lunched with me, but only one Daphne had accompanied me to the Forester Gallery. And the great artist painted only one Daphne. And despite the similarities to his experiment, there was only one cat in the box in Schrödinger’s experiment. How could there be two Daphnes?
I couldn’t make any sense of the conflicting evidence. I thought about the paradox constantly, especially now that summer left me at my leisure. I imagined the fall, when Daphne might be sitting in one of my classes. I always taught the intro psych course, and I pictured her in the first row of the lecture hall, or in the small seminar room, sitting at the table in the upper division course on research methods. I envisioned her in my house, pouring tea from a beautiful teapot. Or eating grilled cheese in the little restaurant near campus. She haunted my dreams as well. Auburn-haired teenagers appeared out of nowhere. After just a week, by Friday, I knew I needed to talk to someone else about her.
I called Jerry, and we agreed to meet the next day, though he had one condition.
“So,” he said, “this is a kind of professional meeting?”
I averred that it was.
“Well,” he replied, “I need some kind of fee, then. You kn
ow Freud insisted that therapy isn’t really worth anything to the patient unless he pays for it.”
“How serendipitous for therapists,” I murmured.
“None of that,” he asserted, his humor and confidence obvious, even across telephone wires.
“Okay,” I conceded. “what is your fee?”
“You couldn’t afford my fee. But I’ll settle for you buying me a deli lunch.”
“Carnegie Deli?” I asked. They served huge, overstuffed Jewish deli sandwiches and had the convenience of being on the West Side near Jerry’s apartment.
“No, bubbeleh,” Jerry replied with the Yiddish endearment he liked to use, “I think we need to get away from the Upper West Side. I’ll meet you at Katz’s Deli at two. I want to avoid the lunch mania. On weekends it’s unbearable.”
Katz’s Deli ruled the Lower East Side on Houston Street, pronounced House-ton Street. If you said it the way you do when talking about Texas, people knew you were a tourist. Actors from the Yiddish theater in its heyday had congregated there, and during World War II, when all the sons of the owners were in the service fighting, they had a slogan, Send a salami to your boy in the army, making the deli a venerable New York institution.
On that Saturday afternoon, the streets of the Lower East Side were bustling with shoppers of all ethnicities drawn by open-air tables of clothes and accessories and by shops offering deep discounts.
Jerry was already seated when I arrived. He was a wiry man, small and quick, with a head of black curls and startling blue eyes, all of which he put to good use in his pursuit of women. He stayed fit by playing racquetball three times a week. He had grown up playing handball in this neighborhood. When we met as undergraduates at Cornell, our New York City roots were one of the commonalities that initially drew us to each other. Of course, half the school was from the city. We also shared our major and sat together in many of our psychology courses. Now his expensive Lacoste shirts said money. There was very little left of the old firebrand who had gone on freedom marches in the South, sitting at the back of the bus, though his beliefs hadn’t changed.