by Laurel Brett
We chatted in an easy way until the waiter served our lunches. All the waiters at Katz’s were about a thousand years old and acted like they were doing us a favor by allowing us to eat in their restaurant. Jerry had ordered pastrami on rye, Katz’s specialty that arrived with a huge pickle, and kasha varnishkes. Mine was a corned-beef sandwich, a pickle, and a knish. We slathered on the bright yellow mustard in unison. He drank a celery tonic, and I a cream soda, which both came in brown bottles. Later on, he had a Bloody Mary, but I just nursed my cream soda.
He peppered his conversation with Yiddishisms more than he usually did. I knew what he was doing; he was inviting me into the Jewish culture that had spawned psychoanalysis, so I would leave behind my ingrained WASP reticence and midcentury American male stoicism. My normal detached rationalism would not help me open up to Jerry. I needed to leave my disdain for self-revelation behind. I concluded that he must be an effective therapist.
As we began to eat, I ventured, “Well, I met her—” when he interjected, “No, first we eat. Then we talk.”
He ordered coffee and cheesecake to finish the meal, but I had only coffee. I couldn’t imagine where he had room in his wiry frame for all that food. The cheesecake would have sunk like a stone in my stomach. Maybe I was just nervous.
“Where to now?” I asked, as I saw him motion for the bill and I retrieved my wallet. I had thought to talk there, but even after the lunch crunch, the colorful patrons engaged in boisterous conversation as well as serious eating made a focused conversation a challenge. I glanced around as people laughed, told stories, and gestured vigorously. The mustard glistened on the overstuffed sandwiches and the ancient waiters shuffled between tables. Although the place had once been the stomping grounds of mostly Eastern European Jews, it now teemed with people of all descriptions—Indians, African Americans, Chinese Americans, WASPS, and, of course, Jews. The huge trays the waiters carried and the constant noise of them entering and exiting the kitchen didn’t create the intimacy we needed. But this had been Jerry’s neighborhood, and he knew of a small coffee shop a few blocks away. I followed him out of Katz’s to a quiet corner table. We ordered more coffee, and he began.
“So what seems to be the problem?” He sipped his coffee. “There’s a girl?”
“I met her in April.”
His eyes showed no judgment, just interest. I told the story of our encounters, straining to remember every detail. I stressed my protective instincts toward Daphne. My other focus concerned the confusion I felt from this ontological dilemma I had uncovered and how crazy I knew I sounded with this bizarre experience that defied ordinary reality. The situation that this girl presented was just impossible! Jerry didn’t react to the weirdness of the events. He showed no emotion as he listened to me. He considered for a moment, and then spoke.
“Hmm. Let me ask you this: does Helena come into all this in any way?”
Helena was my ex-wife whom I rarely talked about with anyone, though Jerry was an exception. But I still didn’t like him bringing her up.
“Helena? What does she have to do with this?”
“Don’t play dumb.”
Helena and I had gotten married because she was pregnant. It happened in college when we were both twenty. Neither of us had had any plans to marry at that point, but you just didn’t leave a girl pregnant then. It simply was not the right thing to do.
She was a slim, pale young woman with long, flat, flaxen hair. She played the flute and wanted to be a professional musician. She was studying music education at Ithaca College, in the same town as Cornell, because her parents insisted that she have a “backup” career as a teacher. She was a companionable, easygoing girl. Her pale eyes often seemed to be observing something far away. We got along fine, but it was no grand passion. I could have done worse, though both of us saw the pregnancy as putting a monkey wrench in all our plans. We were, however, both determined to finish college after the baby was born.
It was a very difficult pregnancy, and the baby was stillborn, the umbilical cord wrapped tightly around her neck. Even though neither of us had wanted a baby, we were both in shock. Unsurprisingly, Helena took it especially hard and left school to live with her folks for a while. When she returned, both of us saw that all there was between us was sadness, and together we decided to split up. We never said a cross word to each other.
“You think my feelings for Daphne are related to Helena? To Amy?” Helena had insisted that we name the child.
“Don’t you?”
“No. I hadn’t thought about Amy at all. I met Daphne in the most random manner. She’s fun to talk to. Jeez. Freudians make something of everything.” I felt very uncomfortable and regretted my decision to talk to Jerry. This was not what I wanted to discuss.
He said, “I know you don’t like going over this ground, but you did say you had a fatherly interest in Daphne. You also admitted that you are now obsessed with her.”
“Them,” I interjected, but he ignored me.
“You had a stillborn daughter sixteen years ago, and you have never been able to have another serious relationship. And you’re sure none of this is related?”
When put that way, I could see he had a point, but I pretended he didn’t. “Can we come back to this?” I requested.
“Okay. So you want to talk about this girl. How old did you say she was?”
“Sixteen.”
“Why did you call me?” he asked mildly. “You don’t think she’s part of some conspiracy, do you?”
Since the 888-page Warren Commission Report concluded that a lone shooter killed Kennedy, conspiracy theories abounded. I recognized Jerry’s strategy. He was working to rule out the possibility that I was paranoid and delusional.
“No, Jerry. I just wanted to know if you think both Daphnes could be the same person, and if they are, is it more likely that she has a split personality, some kind of amnesia, or that she’s a pathological liar? Or are they twins? I wish there were reliable records of all the twins born in 1951. All those twin studies we learned about relied on volunteers. And then of course there’s the myth.”
I had researched the myth of Daphne, which actually was the myth of Daphne and Apollo, in an old Encyclopaedia Britannica that my mother had given me.
“Myth?” Jerry queried.
“Yeah. By Ovid. You know. Apollo and Daphne? Daphne mentioned it and Caroline alluded to it because of her name. I just read a summary. It doesn’t seem very relevant. It’s about Daphne being chased by Apollo and turning into a laurel tree. Do you think Galen Green is Apollo?”
Jerry ignored the question. “Caroline?”
“You know, Caroline. The one you introduced me to. She works at the gallery where we saw the Daphne painting by Green. Remember? Let’s not go off on that tangent.”
He mumbled something about Jungians and their childlike interest in myth and the lack of clinical relevance. So much for the myth. He concluded, “Occam’s razor, kid—the simplest explanation first—which is that, of course, it’s the same person. I can’t say why she is doing this or whether or not she knows she’s spinning out the idea that she is two people. I can’t make a clinical judgment about someone I have never met.”
“Okay,” I acknowledged, downcast. “I just want you to talk me through the possibilities.”
“And you don’t want to talk about your own situation at all? Surely you see that would be more fruitful, because I really can’t say anything about the girl, Daphne, but we can talk about you, right?” He paused, and I did not respond.
So he continued, “I think you have summarized the possibilities, but you don’t have enough information for me to begin to say anything else, except to be careful. Things can get messy very fast with a few of those things you’re talking about. Compulsive lying and multiple personality disorder are two things you should definitely stay away from. You probably should avoid this girl. She might be destructive.”
“I hear you,” I said, though I had no intention of follow
ing his advice, despite having no way of knowing when I might see Daphne again. I didn’t plan on going back to Bronxville anytime soon, and the way the first Daphne, the Ur-Daphne, had run out of the gallery left me no indication of when we might meet up again.
“There’s one more thing,” I suddenly remembered. “When I met Daphne the second time she wondered if we might be living other lives in parallel worlds.”
“Oh boy. What claptrap! It’s the kind of thing teenagers like to think about. Ha ha. I remember a Twilight Zone episode about that. One about an astronaut, two astronauts, actually, who each got misplaced in the other’s reality. But that’s fiction, Garrett. Science fiction.” Jerry paused. “I didn’t figure you for a metaphysical guy. With you it was always what you could see or what you could hear and what you could measure.”
“Things change.”
Jerry brought me back to the particulars of my own life: “You should work through your feelings of sadness and loss about Helena and Amy. I’ve only been telling you this for years. Processing these emotions will help you resolve your obsession with Daphne. Trust me.”
“I wouldn’t say obsession, Jerry.”
“Why don’t you try to speak to her parents? They know how many daughters they have.”
“I’m not sure they do. They could live a parallel existence too. Besides, that would be a kind of betrayal. I promised Daphne I wouldn’t. And I won’t break that promise.”
“Oy vey. It’s worse than I thought.” But he said this very gently and I saw only friendship and concern in his blue eyes. “Are you sure you really want to get to the bottom of this? Because I’m not sure you’re really thinking clearly.”
“Look, Jerry. Even the most unlikely possibility, if it becomes real, is more present than statistical probability. We swim in a sea of improbable events. After all, there is only the most minute probability that we would be born or that the universe would even exist.”
“That’s true,” he said, “but people go crazy every day.”
I had nothing to say to that, so we left it there with questions hanging in the air. Jerry must have been very used to that.
I had parked my car in a garage downtown, but I walked Jerry to the subway. Before parting, I said, “Next time, we talk about you. I monopolized the entire discussion.”
“You bought the sandwiches,” he replied, though his eyes still expressed doubt; he clearly didn’t buy my story. Still, Jerry had always been a friend, and he didn’t press me now. As he turned away, he called, “See you later, kid,” over his shoulder. “I’m here if you need me.”
Chapter Six
* * *
I left the city immediately and drove straight home. Well, that didn’t help at all. I had no idea of my next move. The first question I had to answer was whether or not to tell Daphne, my Daphne, that she had a doppelgänger. I realized that I could have told the second Daphne, Galen’s Daphne, that she was a dead ringer for another girl, or even more to the point, that she was another girl, but I hadn’t. What could I have said beyond explaining that in my world she had gone to the Forester Gallery with me and had been shocked at her own portrait?
I became very preoccupied with my thoughts about Daphne. I read every article I could about Galen’s paintings and was rewarded by learning the name of the town on Long Island his model was from, though no more details about her. She had not given me her phone number, and I still had no number for Ur-Daphne. I could have pressed the young model, but then I would have had to tip my hand about my belief that there were two of her, and I imagined the conversation getting sticky.
I read the Laing book Ur-Daphne had given me at the coffee shop. He distinguished between the sane person who was ontologically secure, someone comfortable in his own skin, and someone insecure who had been confused by displaying inauthentic behavior and reactions and had never felt fully alive. That person was often perceived as crazy and devolved into schizophrenia. At thirty-seven I was past the age of a first schizophrenic break, and I certainly didn’t feel crazy. No one at school seemed to notice anything wrong, though I had detected a smoky concern in Jerry’s blue eyes when I talked about Daphne. Maybe I was going crazy. Maybe I had always been crazy. The realest moments of my life were those I could never tell anyone else about, like when my father’s apparition came to me just after he died. I felt real when I was with Daphne too.
I watched Twilight Zone episodes hoping for answers and finally even caught the one Jerry mentioned, featuring two identical astronauts existing in different dimensions. Science fiction played like reality to me. I hadn’t concerned myself with abnormal psych since school, and I certainly hadn’t been interested in Laing and his new sixties approach. He implied that sanity had a social component and was part of a social agreement. Was it possible that I had found a sane spot outside the social agreement? My own little pocket of sanity?
I kept these thoughts to myself for the next several weeks, but in the middle of July I heard from Daphne again. It was a slow summer, and I had spent it reading everything I could about multiple personality disorder, Capgras syndrome, separating twins, anything that would shed light on the two girls. Now I had nothing to do after ditching my research in a dumpster. The Yankees were still playing badly, heading for last place again, and I hadn’t found anything but Daphne to interest me.
I was sitting at my desk at school composing syllabi for the upcoming semester when the department secretary knocked and said she was transferring a call to my extension. When I picked up the receiver I heard the familiar voice.
“Hi, Garrett! What’s new?”
“Hello, Daphne,” I casually replied. “What’s new with you?”
“Not much. I’m not doing much this summer.”
“Which courses are you taking next year?” I asked, to be polite.
“American history, advanced trig, and physics. I’m bored,” she pouted. I could almost hear it over the phone. “And I miss you,” she added. “Can you meet tomorrow?”
“I would love to. The usual place?”
“No. I need to do some research. Meet me at the New York Public Library. I’ll meet you outside by the lions.”
“Two thirty?” I asked.
“Why not?”
“See you,” I said, just as she hung up.
* * *
The next day I approached Bryant Park near the appointed time. The trees stood forth in an exuberance of green that made me exuberant too. I was singing, “I need to laugh, and when the sun is out, I’ve got something I can laugh about. I feel good in a special way. I’m in love and it’s a sunny day. Good day sunshine . . .” The Beatles again.
I walked around to the front of the library. Just then I saw Daphne leaning against the lion on the left, near the entrance to the library, waiting for me as promised. She was defiantly smoking a cigarette. She wore jeans and a combat jacket that she later told me had been purchased at an Army-Navy surplus store in St. Mark’s Square. Her auburn hair was pulled tight into an austere braid that she wore over one shoulder. Her high, laced brown boots were too warm for July. As she smoked, I could see that her fingers were beginning to sport nicotine stains.
“Isn’t it a beautiful day?” I began. Truth be told though, it was hot and humid. But strolling with her just made me happy.
“Uh-huh,” she said in an abstracted way. “Do you want a smoke?”
“No. I don’t smoke. And you shouldn’t either. When did you start?”
But then she snapped out of her sullen mood. She glanced at one of the trees flanking the building. “The tree reminds me of Walt Whitman. Uttering joyous leaves. That’s how he described it. Perfect, don’t you think?”
“I do,” I said, but there was still something different about this smoking girl. And I had never seen Daphne sullen. “What were you researching?” I asked, ever the professor.
“Oh, just something I’m interested in.”
I didn’t understand her evasion.
“Where shall we go?” I
asked.
“Let’s walk through Times Square. I love Times Square.”
“You do? Times Square is just for tourists.”
“Then I’m a tourist,” she said, lighting up another cigarette. “I like the crowds. I like to feel anonymous.”
Times Square, which was just two avenues away, was a bit disreputable. Panhandlers, working girls, girlie shows, and porn shops existed alongside overpriced tourist memorabilia stores. Of course, as we neared it we started to see the neon of the Broadway marquees. I could see how she might like all the excitement.
As we walked through Times Square, Daphne stopped cold.
“What is it?” I asked. People were surging around her, and she was holding up pedestrian traffic.
Wordlessly she pointed to a storefront sign that read: Army Recruitment Office. The recruiting posters plastered to the building were marked by scrawled comments like Fuck you and Go to Hell. She took note of everything and finally said, “I had no idea a recruitment center was here.” She paused. “Have you ever been to a recruitment office?”
“No, I haven’t, though I did have to register for the draft on my eighteenth birthday. Everyone does.”
“What happened?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you go into the service?”
“I was the right age for Korea, but I got a school deferment. I told you that the first day we met. Don’t you remember? By the time I got out of school after my PhD I was too old to be drafted. Then the war ended, but Vietnam hadn’t started up yet.”
“Uh-huh,” she said in a way that managed to imply disapproval. “This is what I do now. In my spare time.”
“What?”