21
IT WAS AN IDYLLIC sort of dream, an early forties movie about an island paradise where everybody wore sarongs and flowers in their hair, drank from conch shells and lay on green banks of moss under canopies of palm leaves.
I wondered what I was doing here. I was standing in the shallow water of the blue bay with cameras draped around my neck, a notepad in hand. I was wearing a straw hat, big sunglasses and bermuda shorts. The islanders laughed at me, collecting on the beach to point and wave.
Then their spokesperson, their queen, came to greet me, walking quickly and with shy dignity over the sand. She had very black hair and a red and gold sarong around her hips. The film orchestra began to play the overture from “South Pacific.” It was Zee and she welcomed me, saying “The Revolution has begun.” I noticed that she had a carbine over her shoulder and was now dressed in camouflage and khaki.
Fortunately I was dressed the same by this time, though I didn’t have a gun, just my cameras. They were funny cameras, Polaroids, that kept spitting out pictures even when I thought I wasn’t taking any. They were mostly action shots, of combat and death; some had people’s faces—significant portraits of people I knew but didn’t quite recognize.
We were climbing a mountain in the jungle. There were bright parrots in the lianas and the climb was very steep. Zee was leading the way, telling me about the customs and history of her people. I was very moved, I knew they were right to do anything they could to get their country back.
Then I realized that we were climbing a volcano. Zee was gone, everyone was gone, there was only me, with my cameras, again in my bermuda shorts and straw hat and glasses. There was a silence and then I heard it. The volcano was fizzing, it was hissing and spurting. It was mad, it was enraged, it was going to blow and cascade hot lava down on me. The light was suddenly blinding.
I woke to broad daylight and the sound of Hadley’s espresso maker. She was bent over something at the table by the window. When I put on my glasses I saw that she was writing intently in a notebook. Her hair looked silvery in the morning light, pushed behind her ears. She was wearing a sort of discount store kimono that came only to mid-thigh. Her legs were bony and bare; her feet were enormous.
“I hope you’re putting it all down,” I called across the room. “Every single detail.”
Hadley looked over and laughed, pretended to read: “Dear Diary, my orgasm last night measured 7.8 on the Richter Scale. And to think, Miss Pam had never been with a woman before!”
“Well, you’ll never be able to say that again.”
“Uh-uhn!” Hadley closed her journal and got up to fetch two cups. I wondered what she’d really been writing. I never kept a journal myself. I got up a little self-consciously, searched for my clothes, dressed and sat down at the table across from her.
Mornings after great passion can go two ways, at least in my experience. Either you remain connected, can’t keep from touching each other, from continuing to want—or else you’re embarrassed and constrained, wondering, ‘What did I see in this person? Was that really us last night?’
I had a sudden sinking feeling that ours might be a morning like the latter. Hadley was quiet, her bright turquoise eyes preoccupied. She touched me on the arm as she poured my coffee, but didn’t sit down.
“Got to go to the bathroom,” she said. “Back in a minute.”
I waited, anxiously, convinced now that this was going to turn strange. What did I know about her anyway? Nothing. What if she were involved with someone else? What if she’d had second thoughts about me, decided I was too straight, too stupid, too…something.
I sipped my coffee and stared at her notebook, square on the table. Had she left it there on purpose, so that I could read it for myself: “June 10. Made a terrible mistake last night…”
Well, I wouldn’t. She’d have to tell me herself. Or I’d just leave, yes, maybe I should leave right now, before she got back. No, say good-bye at least…Good-bye Hadley, thanks for everything…
I heard the toilet flush downstairs and suddenly grabbed the notebook, flipped it open and read, “I’m in love, I can’t help it.” slammed it shut and was standing next to a hanging on the wall when Hadley came in.
I turned to her with a beaming face. “Tell me about your mother, Hadley.”
She came over and gave me a long kiss. She had brushed her teeth. “Mmmm. Well. That’s from Iran, where she was living when she met my father. She’d graduated in archeology, from Barnard, and was on a dig. It was before the war, late thirties. My father was from an oil family in Texas; they’d sent him over to check out the fields in Iran. I gather it was love at first sight. So my mother became a housewife in Houston. And my father went on making money and drinking. She was bored, bored, bored, and in the early sixties, when I was in high school, couldn’t stand it anymore. She found out about some group, some organization where upper middle-class, educated, frustrated people like herself could pay lots of money to go on research expeditions to observe the flora and fauna of the Galapagos or chart the social customs of small French villages or dig around in Turkey. So my mother went to Turkey to help excavate something, and loved it, came back and started taking classes at the university for a graduate degree in archeology. She went again to Turkey the next summer, and finished her degree and went again the next summer and somehow never came back. They got divorced, which gave my father an even better excuse to drink, not that he needed one by that time.”
“Do you see her very often?”
“Now and then. I’ve visited her in a couple of places. It’s really been amazing to see the change. She was always a very competent person, running a big house, entertaining, all that kind of thing, but she was always a little cold and detached, bored, uninspired. Suddenly, seeing her supervise a dig in Turkey, wearing this straw hat and khaki shorts, and seeing her passion and how everyone paid attention to her and respected her—it was really amazing.
“But we’re not really close. She doesn’t understand my sexuality—in spite of the fact that she couldn’t deal with my father and probably hasn’t had sex herself for twenty years and sort of gives the impression that she has no time for men—she just doesn’t admit the possibility of putting energy into human relationships, especially with other women. It’s a form of wasting time, I suppose. And then, she’s been disappointed in my career, I mean, that I don’t have one. And I had all the breaks. Went to Sarah Lawrence. Studied economics, of all things…”
Hadley had gradually turned away from the Persian wall hanging and had gone back to the table. She poured herself a cup of coffee and her finger tapped gently at the notebook. “I always had the impression that to have a career you had to have something cold, very cold about you. And it was that coldness I could never muster. I always was too sympathetic, too…I don’t know. I mean, it was fine, it was great for her to break away. She’d taken care of my father for years. But he was left without anyone all of a sudden. I felt responsible.”
She pushed her hair behind her ears again. “When she was doing all the beginning stuff, going to graduate school, I was still in high school. Then I went to college. It didn’t take me more than one semester to realize I was a lesbian. It made sense. It was wonderful. I wasn’t at all concerned about what to do in life after I made that discovery. I was beginning to feel for the first time, that’s all I wanted to do. Then my mother left my father and he was all alone and I just went back there. Stayed eight years. In my father’s house. In Houston.”
I went over and put my arms around her neck. We remained like that for a moment, then she said, “Well, let’s not get into all that right now. Tell me about yourself.” She suddenly laughed and turned to me, pushed me into the chair next to her and cuddled close. “Tell me what it’s like to be a twin, for instance. Did you use to play tricks when you were growing up?”
“Oh, of course, especially when we were really young, in grade school, and looked more alike. And later, too, in junior high, we’d sometimes take
each other’s tests. Penny was good in math and I was better at English. We either got bored or guilty about it after a while—Penny sitting through two algebra tests, me writing two English papers. And anyway, when you get older your interests separate. I remember in high school especially we had some serious fights. We’d try to find ways to act extremely different from each other, then we’d resent each other’s behavior. I remember that whenever Penny went out with any especially repulsive guys that I hated it. I felt it reflected on me.”
“Were you each other’s best friend?”
“I suppose, in some ways. There was this underlying loyalty. You didn’t gossip about your twin the way you would have about someone else. But otherwise, she had her friends, I had mine. After high school we each moved out and lived with different people. That was the most distant time…I missed her. But we were determined to separate ourselves. Actually, a lot of it came from other people—all the time, saying, ‘Isn’t it cute?’ “Twins, oh darling!’ It was debilitating enough to be raised as a little girl in the fifties and sixties, but there’s something about twins that really brings out the insipid worst in most people.”
“But now you don’t really look very much alike,” Hadley said, beginning to stroke my leg with her hand. Prickles followed in her wake.
“I know. It’s surprising sometimes. And a little sad. Because it was reassuring in the past to look over and know what you looked like.”
“Maybe this is too personal, but what will Penny say about you getting involved with me?”
I shook my head. “I used to know what she thought about everything, or at least be able to put myself in her position. Now, it’s harder, but we still don’t judge each other much. She’ll understand.”
Hadley was still rubbing my leg. She pretended to yawn. “We had a late night last night—aren’t you tired?”
I forgot that I’d meant to rush off; I forgot that I still had the clippings in my pocket, that I wanted to find out how Zee was and that I wanted to ask her some questions.
I yawned too. “I am, a little…Maybe we’d better lie down again.”
“Good idea.”
22
BY THE TIME I got home it was after noon, and though I felt relaxed I didn’t feel particularly awake. Sam and Jude were still sitting over breakfast at the dining table, reading the paper and eating bran muffins and cheese. Or maybe they were having lunch.
“Just getting in,” Jude asked curiously.
“Mmmm. Where’s Penny?”
“Out back. Working in the garden.”
“Mind if I have one of these? Thanks.”
I went through the kitchen and out the back door. In the morning the garden was partially shaded by a big apple tree, but now it was brilliantly green and sunny. Penny was hoeing in the corner, around the tomatoes and green beans.
“Hi,” I said cheerfully. “Need some help?”
She gave me an unimpressed look. “So where have you been?”
I began to pull weeds by hand around the broccoli. “Give you two guesses.”
“I never would have thought…” she began.
“…that I’d turn out gay?”
“You’re not gay with one…encounter,” she contested. Her hair was sticking straight up and, what with her red bandanna, she looked like a disapproving Bantam. “What I mean is that you hardly know the woman. Besides, the atmosphere’s so hectic now…”
I hadn’t meant to argue; I would have preferred to bask in her approval and share my good fortune over having discovered Hadley, sexuality and feeling of a new kind. I said coolly, “As I recall, you and Doug were in each other’s pants about a minute after you were introduced. So how is this different?”
“But…” Penny said, then sighed and turned back to hoeing. “When it’s B. Violet that caused this whole mess and everything,” she muttered.
I felt like I’d been slapped. “What do you know about it?” I leapt over a row or two of cabbages to confront her. “Why B. Violet more than Best—because they’re lesbian? But you’ve been playing Miss Don’t Get Involved for days. A lot of things have happened this week and you don’t want to know any of them. You’re still part of the collective though; you’ve got to take some responsibility for the mess that Jeremy’s created. You can’t just shove it on to B. Violet. But no, you don’t even want to deal with Zee…”
“Not so loud,” Penny said. “She’ll hear you.”
“What I want to know,” I whispered violently, “is why we never suspected Jeremy of anything. How was it that he fooled us into thinking he was this laid-back, spacey type with no thought in his head except how to get tickets to the Rolling Stones?”
“Look, Pam,” Penny said. “Leave it to the cops. Don’t go around getting mixed up in things. It was one thing at the beginning, but it’s gotten more serious. Look, it’s not you getting involved with Hadley that I mind so much as the idea of the two of you running around playing amateur detective.”
A fleeting picture of myself clinging to Jeremy’s third story window early this morning passed through my mind. I was glad Penny hadn’t been a witness to that.
I said, “How can you—a progressive, a feminist, a leftist—be so certain that the cops will take care of everything? Especially if Jeremy was some kind of informer? For all we know he may have damaged the lives of a lot of people in some way. The cops aren’t going to expose him, Penny. Wake up!”
“You wake up,” she said, her hair fanning out like a halo of anger. “Just how do you think Best Printing is going to survive if you’re spending all your time playing Nancy Drew? We’ve hardly gotten anything done all week. June and Zee haven’t been in, Elena’s a mess, Jeremy’s dead and you’re pretending like you’re on a leave of absence or something. We were depending on that job from the city we had to turn down. I haven’t known what to tell people who’ve called for bids. Call back next week when things have calmed down? Or next month? Or never? We’ve got to pay our bills, Pam. We can’t afford to just stop. If it hadn’t been for Ray…”
I was about to light into her for her capitalistic attitude—didn’t she realize that one of our collective had been murdered and that meant that our entire political community might be threatened—how could she talk about work, about keeping going—but something in the way her voice had softened and her eyes had turned away slightly at the end of the sentence, gave me pause. A hideous suspicion formed in my mind.
“And where were you last night?” I said roughly, grabbing her shoulder.
Penny jerked away. “Leave me alone. You act like you have some right to him, and it’s been almost a year, Pam. I’ve…cared about Ray for a long time. Besides, what does it matter to you anyway if you’re a lesbian now?”
I was totally enraged, enraged and betrayed. My very own identical twin fucking the man who had broken my heart; it was too much. I didn’t feel one bit like a happy lesbian who has just seen the light. I felt like a scorned and lonely heterosexual woman who’s just about to hit her beloved sister with a hoe.
“I can’t believe it.” I finally found words. “After I told you what a creep he was to me. And what about Zee? She’s his lover. It’s incredibly disgusting to think that while she’s hiding up in our attic you’re messing with her boyfriend.”
“Would you keep your goddamn voice down!” Penny whispered at a screaming pitch. “I told you before, Zee and Ray aren’t lovers anymore.”
“Since when?” I snarled back. “Since last night?”
“Since about a month ago,” came the familiar accent of Zee herself from the attic window above us. She had shoved her head out and was peering down at us. I could see her smiling. “Besides, it wasn’t so serious between us. Do you know, he told me he likes you, Penny. I’m so happy for you.”
I was feeling more and more like a fool. I wanted to say something gallant and superior. Instead I began methodically to crush a small brussels sprout plant under my foot.
Penny was laughing up at the attic window
. “Keep inside, Zee. Who knows who’s watching? Pam’s convinced this is all a dangerous plot.”
Too much. Too fucking much. I turned and walked back through the garden and into the kitchen, up the stairs and into my bedroom. Why had I forgotten to tell Hadley the bitter truth about being the twin of someone who knew how to get under your skin in every possible way, on every possible occasion? As I lay on my bed, wretched memories of past tricks Penny had played on me came vividly to mind. That time in junior high when I’d been so crazy about David What’s His Name and she’d pretended she was me and had gone up one day in front of a whole crowd of his friends and said, ‘Will you go steady with me?’
I should have killed her then. I shouldn’t let it have gotten to this point fifteen years later when she could make my life a living hell. The fact that Hadley had given me so much pleasure last night and this morning too, was immaterial now. Ray and Penny in bed together—it was incestuous, that’s what it was. We might not look alike but we had exactly the same body build…but what if she were a better lover than I? What if Ray thought so?
Yeah, and there had been that time in grade school when Penny and I had both been enamored of the same little girl, a charmer from Morocco or Algeria, with big brown eyes and curly black hair. We had both asked her separately if she wanted to be friends with us. And she had chosen Penny. She had said Penny was nicer!
I wept miserably into my pillow. Oh, no one knew what it was to be a twin, to have someone around all the time who knew your weaknesses and could exploit them. Who was so much like you but better. It was like being compared all the time to your better half. It was hideous. We should never have tried to live together, work together, anything. Most twins lived separate lives, moved to different cities, had families of their own. They didn’t keep jerking into each other like puppets controlled by the same hand.
I cried myself out and slept long and deeply. Once during the afternoon there was a knock at the door; Jude called out that there was a phone call for me.
Murder in the Collective Page 14