Duet

by gay walley

  “I’m a cliché,” Duet said, “two dogs to match my name. I’m going to call them To Be and Not to Be.”

  Marsha laughed and that night Duet was overwhelmed as two small shepherds irrevocably bound themselves into her heart, while munching their way through her shoes, her underwear and the legs of her coffee table.

  Twelve:

  Her days went along, now pulled between these two dogs who completely owned her heart and her every free minute. She had to hire a dog walker, a young man who went to film school at NYU, who gave her constant advice on disciplining them. It seemed when she was slapping one snout, the other one was watching curiously. They followed her from room to room getting under feet which was both annoying and totally enchanting. They were a constant theatre, full of pratfalls, antics and emotional pulls.

  Chuck, the dog walker, took it upon himself to be in charge of their schooling since she didn’t have time. She gave him keys to her apartment. She had checked his references. She noticed that he came over more and more to pick up the dogs, talk about the dogs, simply be with the dogs. Duet assumed he was smitten. With To Be and Not to Be. Who wouldn’t be?

  It was not unusual for her to get out of the bathtub and see Chuck in the other room sitting on the couch throwing a ball from one to the other just before the two dogs ran to her and began biting the towel wrapped around her. She had to fight them to keep the towel on.

  The dog walker said, “We need to set up mirrors in a certain way so they can see themselves.”

  “I never heard of that,” Duet said suspiciously.

  “I learned it at the trainer’s.”

  She looked at him. He was just a kid. Maybe these film students just look at things creatively, Duet thought. He stood there explaining to her the logic of the dogs feeling part of a pack with a mirror in the bedroom and she listened, trying to understand, furtively staring at Chuck, with his ring of apartment keys for all the dogs he took out, and thought my god the organization of walking eight dogs at once.

  She had once seen him on the street with six dogs on leashes, with To Be and Not to Be stopping pedestrian traffic because they were the youngest, cutest, and friskiest. The two puppies loved to have people bend down and nuzzle them. They were turning into performers, she thought, and she knew Chuck was particularly proud of them since he felt he was raising them himself.

  Chuck started leaving her books on Shakespeare. “At least these dogs must be helping your schoolwork,” Duet said ironically. “Will your thesis be on the eight paws hidden in Hamlet’s soliloquy?”*

  Sometimes he would walk in and she would be sitting on the couch with her legs up, reading a book. She quickly brought her legs down.

  “Why didn’t you call them Rocky 1 and Rocky 2?” he asked.

  She just looked at him and didn’t answer. She commended herself for not liking younger guys.

  Paula finally made a trip to her apartment to meet Duet’s new family and, of course, she met Chuck. Sometimes Duet felt like she was living with him.

  Chuck left with the dogs while Duet and Paula sat down in her living room. “Careful of the dog hair,” Duet said.

  “He’s cute.”

  “Which one?”

  “The dog walker, you idiot,” Paula said.

  “He’s twelve,” Duet said.

  “No, he’s not. He’s about nineteen. Perfect for me.”

  “I thought you were against incest. I see you’re looking for the young brother again.”

  Paula said, “I didn’t know you were so Freudian….”

  Duet answered, “Forget it. He’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer.”

  However, Chuck loved being around the two women, as much as the two dogs. When he returned, he sat down, even without being invited. Duet was used to this by now.

  “Why is that mirror tilted in your bedroom?” Paula asked. “To make you look thinner?”

  “No, Chuck put it up. It’s some kind of kooky dog therapy of his” and that was when Chuck went into a convoluted description of why dogs like to look at themselves, like babies do.

  “Interesting,” Paula said.

  Which was why Duet almost turned to Paula when she got a note in the mail from Chuck, asking her for $25,000 not to tell the newspapers. “I know your secret,” Chuck wrote. He had made his discovery, she assumed, when he had seen her with her legs up. Or God knows. “The Post could really go to town,” his note said. “The viral possibilities are beyond our imagination…”

  She stared at the typewritten note. She couldn’t even ask someone what to do because she didn’t want to talk about it. Why does she now have to deal with this?

  Oskar. Oskar was a lawyer before he was a financier. He would know how to retaliate. True, he had dropped her but still they had not had some terrible blow out. She emailed him that she had a legal question of a personal nature. Would he meet her at Almond’s to talk about it?

  “Of course,” he said and the next night she came to Almond’s with the letter in hand.

  The first thing Oskar said, after ordering his Dewars and reading the letter, was “I hope you have found a new dog walker.”

  She nodded. “A grey haired lady in the neighborhood.”

  Oskar sat back. “As the film line goes, What’s the best way to make money as a writer? “

  She looked at him, confused. What has that got to do with anything?

  “Ransom notes,” he said. “The answer is ransom notes.”

  “Not with me it isn’t,” she said.

  Then he got serious.“And your keys, where are they?”

  “He still has them.”

  “I’ll write him a threatening legal letter about the keys and defamation of character and anything else I can throw in, listing the number of years in jail he’ll spend for doing such a thing.”

  She smiled, relaxing.

  “And ,” he said, “I’ll express mail and register it.”

  God, it was good to have someone take care of issues. She took a sip of her old fashioned.

  “Why on earth,” Oskar said, sitting back, “would you get two dogs?”

  “I don’t know. I was lonely and I’ve given up on men. You people just don’t know what to do with me. Look at you, even…”

  Oskar looked around the room nervously. “Well Duet, it wasn’t your configuration. That was quite challenging and certainly made life more interesting. I had no problem with it. No, it was more to do with I’ve reached the stage in life where I don’t want the emotional problems of a woman.”

  Nonsense, she thought. If I was prettier. If I was normal.

  “It’s not you,” he continued. “I just like being left alone. I don’t want a traditional relationship. I don’t have a need for anyone.”

  The waiter came and she thought, I’m glad he’s my lawyer but my god, how cold can you get?

  They had a pleasant evening, though, companionable. She felt that underneath all his posturing against romance he did like her. Finally, she said she would walk home, which felt like a waste of a walk since she didn’t have two leashes and two dancing magicians at the end of them. She was just walking by herself.

  She got to her apartment and the door was open. She opened it trepidatiously (was Chuck now going to add murder to blackmail?) and of course the two dogs came to meet her. “Hello, hello,” she said, stroking their soft ears. They were jumping all over her and that would be the last she would ever see of wearing white clothing. Then the dogs turned around and raced into the living room which meant they were showing her something.

  ”Marsha let me in,” she heard from a male voice.

  “David, you terrified me. Don’t ever do that… What do you mean Marsha let you in?”

  “Apparently you had told her about me and –“

  “You charmed her,” Duet said, shaking her head, annoyed about his just coming over like this. What if she had been with a man? Was it so obvious she wouldn’t be? And what if he’d been the dogwalker?

  “How did
the dogs respond to you?” she asked, amazed that he had settled himself in so naturally, lying there on the couch, as if he lived there.

  “They’re not attack dogs. They were laughing and playing with me within seconds.”

  Not reassuring.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “What do you think I’m doing here?” he replied, taking a pull on his cigar.

  And what annoyed her even more was she found herself missing Oskar. That’s ridiculous, she told herself. Oskar is not interested. Her blackberry buzzed.

  Oskar! “Maybe we should try an exploratory dinner again. Even if you do have one brain and two--”

  She typed back. “Agreed.” Send.

  She looked over and David had co-opted her tv remote and was already watching golf on her couch. He was fixated. She and the dogs went off to the kitchen and the three returned to the living room where she handed David a vodka.

  “Thanks.”

  She smiled. She had to admit it was warming to have him around. Now she had three dogs. She sat down on the other couch and realized that David, with his time in prison, and god knows what else, maybe was damaged in his way as much as she was. He too did not want anyone to see his true configuration.

  But the trouble was two damages don’t make a right. But one man who loves you can make a right, she thought.

  She went and sat down behind him. “You are so strange,” she said, smiling at him.

  “Why?”

  “Turning up here. What if I’d been with a man?”

  “I would just kill him.”

  She turned away. She hated these nonsensical answers. He reached for her and said, “How’s work going?”

  “Funny,” she said, “I was just thinking about that.”

  “What?”

  “They keep changing everything I write. If I take a chance and say something interesting or unusual, they change it back to what’s tried and true.”

  “Duet, you’re not traditional in any way. That’s the problem.” He barely looked at her, riveted to the golf channel, but he did put his hand out to hold her arm.

  “I get scared they’ll fire me because they don’t like what I write sometimes.” She didn’t find herself warming to his arm.

  “You’re a hard worker and get things done. That’s of value too,” he said.

  “Not if they don’t like it.”

  “Ah honey,” he reached for her again, “don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.”

  It sounded nice but the truth was he never had taken care of her. He had given her expensive gifts in the old days but she had always struggled by herself. “I guess it’s just wounds to the ego,” she said. “I should just get the work done and not care what they think of me. As long as I’m doing what they want.”

  He was relighting his cigar and she watched that fish gill sucking in.

  “You don’t have that problem,” she continued. “Your clients always love what you build.”

  “I’ve had my struggles with clients. Some people are harder to work for than others. And writing articles and press releases like you do is subjective. “ He turned to the piano, “Play some of the music you’re writing based on Mahler.”

  “Do you know his work?” she asked.

  “No, but that doesn’t matter.”

  She sat down and began playing. And she could hear the subtleties she had put into the variations and she forgot her worries about work. When she had finished he said, “That’s fantastic. I got chills in parts. That’s what you should focus on.”

  She left the piano stool and came and sat next to him. “You’re so great the way you listen to me. I wish you had enough money so I could just write music.”

  “I do too honey but this economy did me in.”

  “Yeah,” she said, but she also knew she wasn’t really the type to go live with him and have to ask him for anything. Somehow she could not see herself doing that. There was almost a necessary element to being independent if you wanted to be creative. As if all of you belonged to yourself. She wasn’t sure.

  “You worry too much,” he said. “All women do.”

  “I wonder why,” she said sarcastically.

  “You all think too much, analyze,” he laughed.

  He continued to watch the TV, and played with her dogs while she answered emails and worked, and he occasionally interrupted her to ask “And do you know what else Tiger Woods did?” After a half hour, she said she had to take the dogs out, which she did, and this took longer than she wanted it to because she could not stop people from having the pleasure of talking to To Be and Not to Be since the dogs seemed to light up so many hearts. She felt like she was a candy cane nurse on the streets of New York. “Oh look at the puppies,” everyone screamed and bent down to pet the dogs who were happy to give back the attention.

  When she finally got home, David was asleep on the couch. She had wanted to tell him about the former dog walker debacle but she decided not to wake him. Instead, she switched off the tv and went to her bed and left him there. It seemed as if he just wanted a home, like the dogs did. Once again, she began to reflect what ten years in prison might have done to him. He had had to repress his desires there for so long. Maybe he couldn’t reawaken them.

  Reawakening desires, she thought. Now there’s the rub for all of us.

  Thirteen:

  The next day she woke early because she was going to the doctor to see if she could have a child. Did two vaginas mean she had two uteruses that made her violable for twice as many types of cancers, diseases? No, because she only bled from one. So one must be the chlld bearing one. She wasn’t sure. Her mother knew all these answers but Duet, blaming her mother for the way Duet had been born, had never wanted to talk to her about her body. It was funny too because, up to nine years old, Duet had thought she was normal. No one said anything.

  She discovered the difference when she started taking swimming lessons. Her mother had stopped her from taking swimming lessons and so, on her own, Duet had signed up at school.

  It wasn’t that girls stared at each other’s private parts but somehow she could just feel something was different. That was the beginning.

  And then when she was twelve, she began looking at her father’s hidden Playboys and Penthouses. She wanted to get an idea of what a beautiful body looked like and how she should look as she grew up and that’s when she saw. At first these magazines were like the Dead Sea Scrolls – hugely “important” and dramatic to her, yet arcane. Then it dawned on her, they just exhibited the existence of everyday, albeit “airbrushed,” normal life. Which it seemed she was not remotely a part of.

  She tore downstairs. “Mom, am I built differently?”

  Her mother looked up from her legal work. “Differently from what?”

  “Don’t be a lawyer now. Differently than other women. Mom, am I a monster?” she screamed terrified.

  “No. You are not a monster. Yes, you have two vaginas, and most people have one.”

  “Most or all? I saw women in Penthouse and no woman had two.”

  “Why were you looking at Penthouse?”

  That confused Duet for a minute. “I see,” her mother said. “Your father. No, the majority of women have one. I think there are maybe five women in the world who have two, like you.” Which, now that Duet was thinking back about this, probably wasn’t true.

  That afternoon, Duet tore upstairs thinking about throwing herself out a window. How could she live like this? She typed in double vagina into her internet. A site came up “Boxed Set” but that was it. She read the blog and wondered if it was a spoof. How could someone make a joke about this?

  She ran back downstairs. “I need plastic surgery. To be reconstructed.”

  “No you don’t. Listen, nature is full of differences. Often you crack an egg and there are two yolks. You don’t consider the egg insufficient. Actually, quite the contrary.”

  “Mom, that is sick. I am not an egg yolk.”

  Du
et looked helplessly at her dark haired, slender mother whose high cheekbones and wide set eyes reminded everyone of Jackie Kennedy. Except her mother wore enormous glasses all the time. Duet stared at her mother, did she…

  “I didn’t say you were an egg yolk,” her mother said. “ Not everything in nature is identical. So what? You’re not a dwarf and if you were, look at that actress, Helen what’s her name –“

  “Mom, you’re not helping—“

  “Okay, I’m not helping. Duet, you’re fine—“

  “Duet!” she screamed, appalled. “Is that why you called me Duet?”

  “No, it is not.”

  “Oh come on—“

  “Maybe it is a little,” her mother acceded.

  “Why didn’t you get to the point and call me Grotesque? Esque for short?”

  “Duet, calm down. This is not a disaster. This is just how you are made and you are a beautiful girl. Outside and even there.”

  “Easy for you to say, “ Duet shrieked. Then she stared at her mother, eyes widening.” Are you?... are you?...”

  “No,” her mother shook her head.

  “Just me. Oh Great. In the whole world. Just me. Great. You and Dad are perverted.” And then Duet ran upstairs and moped for the next year. Her mother saw psychiatrists and they said all teenagers are self conscious. This was an added burden, unquestionably, the psychiatrists said, wondering if the mother was crazy. Why would anyone make this up about her daughter? The mother obviously needed help, imagining such a strange fantasy. What psychological meaning did it have to dream up two vaginas? Did she feel she was not enough for her husband? Did her husband want two women and she unconsciously knew it? Was her daughter her other vagina?

  “ Watch out for anorexia,” the psychiatrists added, ushering the crazy mother out the door.

  “No,” Duet said,” I do not want to talk to anyone,” when her mother recommended a psychiatrist. She would not go out on dates. And she would not go to the beach which Michelle thought was overkill.

  “People can’t xray through your bathing suit, “ her mother said.