Duet

by gay walley

“It’s my pride and joy. A patient’s family bought it very inexpensively and he bequeathed it to me.”

  “Ah,” she said. Dr Dazin was standing, a tall man, about sixty she figured and he was studying her. He wore glasses, a rather fashionable dark green suit, and seemed athletic. “I’m delighted to meet you,” he said. “I am always partial to patients who notice my treasures. Why don’t we sit down?”

  He put his long legs up on the stool in front of his chair.

  “So?” he asked, smiling, watching her carefully. “Tell me. What’s on your mind?”

  “Well,” she said. She began taking off her coat. She was sitting across from him. “Well, I met a man I like, love, you know.”

  “Yes, I know. ” He was still smiling. “That’s great although with “like” you have loneliness, with “love” you have anger.”

  “Well it’s not exactly that.”

  “That’s good then. No anger. So what is it?” His eyes became very intense now and, that, she liked, too. Okay, he was up to it. In fact, Duet noticed that Dr. Dazin did not seem to blink very often.

  “Well, my grandmother is Viennese. A Jew. She was in Austria in a hospital camp, as a child, and –“

  “A hospital camp? Which one?“

  “It’s not on the radar, apparently. Too small. They did experiments with children.”

  He nodded, listening carefully, not showing what he felt. Duet realized that a lot of what these shrinks listen to they consider fantasy. He was probably gauging her truthfulness right now. “How old was your grandmother,” he interrupted her, “when she was in the camp?”

  “A child. Not sure,” she said.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “She just now is opening up about all this, she is ill, terminally so she’s begun to let her guard down. Apparently she was saved by a doctor back then and --

  “Is your grandmother lucid?” he interrupted.

  “Yes. She has pancreatic cancer, is in pain, but …she’s all there.” Duet did not add, ‘As much as she’s ever been. “ To continue, her parents went to Auschwitz and … I don’t know… my grandmother did not raise my mother, she has been…an oddball.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Do you think this hospital could be a figment of her imagination? Given she never gave a name to it.”

  “Well,” Duet said. “The outcome of it is not a figment of her imagination.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “At this hospital in the Austrian countryside apparently they did experiments with the children. She was in the area of twins, duplications, manipulations of dna…”

  “And she knew this as a child?” he asked skeptically.

  Duet, in a way, liked what he was doing. She had the odd feeling that he might reveal something to her that was even more important than what she had learned from Daisy. He might have a different key to Daisy and even to her own anatomy. Maybe he knows how to fix me.

  “Well she knew the tests and I guess she did know that much –“ Duet answered, confused. She was aware she sounded befuddled. Why had there been so much silence in her family? Daisy and Michelle. Daisy period. Duet and Michelle.

  The analyst kept looking at her, compassionately, encouraging her to talk.

  Duet decided to take more control. “Maybe if I tell you the whole story, we can back construct –“

  He nodded. But was it necessary to talk about her body?

  “This man, I am going to live with, well, it turns out, according to my grandmother, he is the grandson of the doctor who imprisoned my grandmother as a child –“

  Now, he leaned forward. “The grandson. Now that is quite a coincidence.”

  “Yes.”

  “Your boyfriend is German?”

  “Extraction.”

  “And you’re sure your grandmother is not making all this up?”

  “No,” Duet said firmly. “Because I believe her.”

  “You might believe the feeling of all this, but perhaps not the facts. A camp no one has heard of. The coincidence of your meeting and then falling in love with the grandson of the doctor who tortured her is actually more than novelistic… It’s quite a deus ex machina… Your grandmother may not want you to fall in love. May be sabotaging it for reasons we don’t know yet. People, Duet, come up with all kinds of stories to distract themselves from the real pain of their lives.”

  “Doctor Dazin, I have proof that her dna was tampered with.”

  “What proof is that?”

  “It is a bit graphic, so prepare yourself –“

  “Okay.”

  “Maybe,” she said, “I will write it down for you and pass it in a note.”

  “Whatever you want.”

  She took out a pen, one that Oskar had given her for her birthday and seeing the pen suddenly drew her toward Oskar. So what if his grandfather was a monster? He’s not. She wrote out, “I have two vaginas” and passed the note to the analyst. He leaned forward to receive it and sat back in his chair to read it. Then he waited a second before he responded.

  This was beginning to be funny, she thought. His not having an expression was so obvious. Then she found herself laughing a bit because she now realized he might not believe her about her configuration either. All of this was made up to him. He thinks she is crazy, a New York double nymphomaniac, or worse.

  He shifted himself in his chair, thinking.

  “Are you shocked?”she asked.

  “Anything is possible,” he said. “You know, the mother of Romulus and Remus had three breasts. Before I was an analyst, I studied archeology and anthropology. And I think in some neoplasticene age there were women of your design. I am not sure. But I think there have been some studies of cave hieroglyphics with horizontal figure 8s” (and here he drew a picture and held it up to her while continuing speaking )…

  (show drawing)

  “….which at one time was considered the representation of infinity. But that horizontal glyph of the figure 8 may have represented two vaginas. Could have been,” he said, “a strain of double vagina women who survived from prehistoric times.”

  What on earth was he talking about? Now she shifted in her chair. Was he crazy? She glanced at his picture with distaste.

  “Penultimate women, goddesses of fertility and the erotic,” he added.

  He’s definitely crazy. Obviously, nobody can hear this and respond sanely, she thought.

  He seemed to be on a roll though. “There is a very thin line between miracle and monstrosity, you know. As there is only a thin line between genius and bad taste.”

  “That may be true,” she said, “it is nice to hypothesize. But my world is reduced to hammer like-reality in the inescapability of my particular anatomy. At the end of the day, this is not prehistoric times. This is now and this is my life and my grandmother was tortured by Nazis tinkering with her chromosomes. Those women in pre-history, if they did exist, are gone. I am not. There is no exit from my situation.”

  And she knew if Oskar was here he would have made some pun about “If there aren’t two exits, it’s not particularly safe, ” or he’d say something stupid about two entrances, and she shuddered, as she tried to push that thought away. She bent forward toward the doctor, “ I know it all sounds bizarre. Believe me living with it has been -- but I am telling you the truth. If this fact can be true, so can the others about my grandmother and about my boyfriend.”

  He said nothing for a minute. She could see him deciding whether or not to go along with her. “Let us say that what you say is true. Then,” he said, “what is it you want to discuss with me?”

  “If the man I love is the grandson, how can I ethically live with him?”

  “In the strangest of all strangest chances, that he is the grandson and not your grandmother imagining it, then what’s wrong with loving him? He didn’t torture your grandmother. All I know is that everyone in this story you have told me has suffered more than I can say, even to be in the midst of such a surreal story (and here he pointed to the M
ax Ernst painting of a labyrinth), suffered in ways that perhaps none of you are truly admitting to. Even your young man has gone through tragedy in ways we do not know of, if this is indeed his family. So love him. Why not? You could even bring him here with you to discuss this.”

  “He doesn’t know I am here.”

  “He knows about your unusual situation?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then he certainly will be able to take any additional revelations, if any. It will help him to understand the way you are. Your grandmother too may be searching for a reason to explain why you are the way you are.”

  “No, “Duet said, getting up. “I don’t think so.”

  Dr Dazin stood up, opening his calendar. “So when would you like to come in again?”

  She stood there. “Let me think about it and call you back.”

  “Whatever you wish,” and he smiled, unsure of what he felt about this young woman.

  And she picked up her coat and walked out, not sure what she thought of this tall, graphically-oriented doctor.

  Twenty six:

  That night she had dinner with Oskar at his apartment in the sky. Through the windows she could see the city lights sparkling like a million specks of starlight as Ravel’s Three Sonatas for Violin played softly on the sound system. He liked dinner to be elegant, with two sets of silver cutlery he must have selected with his former wife or one of his girlfriends and two cut-glass goblets, one for water, one for wine, and the food came out in beautiful French serving dishes, prepared by the young Belgian girl he had living there. She cooked his meals in return for free accommodation, while she went to school. A rather ingenius plan, Duet thought. He had been doing it for years.

  Naturally she wondered if sleeping with Oskar was part of the Belgian girl’s duties de manoir, but she put the idea away. If it was, it was. Anything is possible, as Oskar tended to interject into his conversation, not to mention the Belgians were notorious for saying everything in life is negotiable. The way Duet dealt with this new particular fear was not to indulge in much time thinking about it.

  Paula constantly asked her, “Why don’t you ask him questions?”

  Duet didn’t know why she didn’t ask him questions. She wanted to find out the answers herself by quotidian observation. She didn’t believe in direct questioning. She thought truth was more fluid, and that no one knows answers anyway. Anyway, maybe that was more about her having had a life of not wanting to be asked questions. And yet intimacy involved knowing. She was going to have to break out of her chrysalis.

  After dinner Duet and Oskar went and sat by the fireplace. He made a fire, out of fragrant mixed hard wood, which she loved, and they sipped some port. She liked to sit with her back to the fire to warm herself. The warmth made her feel secure.

  She felt happy with him. She had realized something at the shrink’s. That she had a disfigurement, yes, but hers was physical. But Oskar had some internal disfigurement of his own. The shrink was right. She had a sense whatever was bothering him was equally as dramatic. Now she began to want to understand where his evasions and his lack of warmth were rooted. She began to study his obsession with having the perfect body, the perfect clothes. The sins of the father are visited on the next three generations, Genesis says.

  She lifted her face toward him as the night wore on quietly, smiled as gently as she could, and said, “Well, you met my crazy family. I even showed you that crazy drawing of horizontal 8s that the shrink drew. “

  “Yes,” Oskar laughed, “That was incredible. I loved it.”

  “So tell me one thing about your growing up. You never mention it.”

  “Do you know how many galaxies, planets, are out there?” he said, changing the subject. “We are of such unimportance that it is absolutely boggling. We are not worth thinking about. Consider me more of an alien than an earthling.”

  Well, there’s a deflection, she thought.

  “What do you mean an alien?” she asked.

  “I am sent here to do spy work on earth women.”

  “And how is your research going?” she asked.

  “I am still working on it.”

  She was going to have to do her own deducing. He had shown her some photo albums and, in them, were only photos of he and his son. No women. She wondered if his women were the ones taking the photos. But why hadn’t he said, “Let’s have a photo of us.” Maybe he had torn them out when the relationship broke up. But he wasn’t vindictive in that way. No family shots of his childhood. What did that mean?

  “You have to admit Duet that you are not a perfect specimen,” he said, very aware that right now he was stripping away her feeling she had a right to know anything. She was marred, flawed.” I am doing my research on your inventive, particular genus of womanhood and sending my reports back.”

  She sipped her drink. That clinical coldness could have been his grandfather in Berlin talking. She looked at him and his eyes betrayed nothing. In Oskar’s chess mind-game, he always won in four moves; Capablanca would have been stunned.

  That night in bed, they made love, just because for some reason, in bed, he held the power. His desire to be not known seemed to trump even her own desire. When she was with him, she abdicated. Even out of bed, she did. She let him control the conversation, often the activity. A blow job? No problem. Sex without him kissing or holding her? No problem. After he had come in her mouth, she lay there and thought, He could have been his grandfather doing that.

  What was more shocking, was she was not getting up and leaving him. It was even more curious than that. She was thinking of moving in with him because the fact was, she discovered, she liked being overcome by someone. Was that in her dna now too?

  A week later she moved in her belongings. He already had a piano so she left her upright in her old apartment. She sold all her books. She came with very little, except her dogs. She had agreed it would be she who would walk them. But she saw, she saw that he was slowly forming his own relationship with them. To Be and Not to Be were very interested in him. They would listen for him as he got off the elevator after work, meet him at the door to great excitement, wait by his bathroom when he took a shower and shaved. Ran to tell him they were back after they returned from walking with her.

  Three weeks later, she began to feel that she lived there. At night, she and Oskar had dinner and talked about her work or his or read or watched a movie. It never mattered what they spoke about. Sometimes they took a walk with the dogs (he now was falling under their doting spell, like witchcraft), or saw a film one of them wanted to see, or went to hear some music. She was slowly getting used to being with someone. She was sure that he would reveal himself some day. He was starting to muse in front of her, starting to not be quick to hide his feelings.

  He was at work but sometimes he came home earlier. This particular afternoon, the buzzer rang and the concierge said, “Mr Tremba is here.”

  “Okay send him up,” she said, playing along. “I’ll vouch for him.”

  She opened the door, smiling, “Mr Tremba,” she said ceremoniously, expecting Oskar, and there stood an older man, in a Homburg hat, a German looking older man, white hair, tall, elegant, courtly. “Hello,” he said. “I am Oskar’s father, Dr. Kurt Tremba. They were incorrect downstairs. Oskar, I am afraid, is not expecting me.”

  “Come in, come in.”

  “I did not tell Oskar I was coming because…I thought it might be better to surprise him. Are you his wife?”

  “No – he is divorced –“

  At this point the two shepherds had had enough of being ignored and were barking and circling Oskar’s father. “Shepherds,” he said to himself. “Surprising.”

  “They’re mine,” she said. Oskar’s father bent down and began petting them and that made her happy. She had this erroneous belief that if a person liked dogs, they must have a big heart. Her father’s response to that was, “Hitler liked dogs.”

  Dr. Tremba sat down immediately on a chair near the door. �
��Forgive me,” he said. “The walk through Kennedy is a hike.” Then he added, “He was married?”

  “Yes, you have a grandson.” To Be and Not To Be, knowing they were not being talked about, turned and went to their toys.

  Dr. Tremba was still catching his breath.“Forgive me, I am tired. I could not sleep last night so anxious about this trip. And I do not find planes comfortable.”

  “Yes, yes, may I get you something to eat – drink?”

  “No it is only afternoon. “

  “Oskar has room here. Would you like to take a nap?”

  “That is an excellent idea. Thank you.” He stood up, and then asked as an afterthought, “How old is my grandson?”

  “Seventeen. It was a young marriage of Oskar’s.”

  “You know in times past that was not so young,” he said. “But I agree it is young.”

  “May I ask,” she said, “may I ask where you are coming from?”

  “Does Oskar speak of nothing to anyone?”

  She smiled meekly. She did not want to hurt his feelings. She half expected him to say “I am here from Jupiter” because she had no idea what he was going to say next.

  “No, I didn’t think so,” his father answered himself. “Well we are to blame for that. He is going to be very shocked I am here.”

  “Yes?” she tried to sound neutral.

  “We all have not spoken since he was not more than a boy.”

  “I will call him,” she interrupted, “and tell him you have come. We will have dinner together or maybe you two should do it alone. Oskar has a wonderful cook here –“

  “He has done well for himself,” Oskar’s father answered surveying the sumptuousness of the penthouse apartment.

  She, in turn, studied Dr. Tremba’s uprightness, his eyes for signs of kindness. They gave very little away.

  “Yes. He is very intelligent,” she answered.” You must know that.”

  “I do know that,” he said. “Our family were all very intelligent.” There was no trace of conceit in his statement, merely a factual remark like commenting on the weather.