by Julia Scott
He taught me what to think about love, how it felt, what one should be willing to do for it, and when he suddenly fled Seattle a month before this costume ball, my world changed, lost depth; I was a man without a sense of smell. Without his bright arrogance, I had only stretches of long gray days, but I learned not to judge them on their length, their grayness or their same cloth patterns in the sky.
So I stood alone on that dance floor at the costume party, dressed as only half a pantomime ox (the latter half, if you have to know), blinded intermittently by the blue reflections of the mirror ball, the strobes, the flashing jewelry, staring at the gaggles of Donna Annas lifting their skirts trying to win a dance.
And I tried not to be me. I closed my eyes and tried to remember what he’d taught me, how to charm a person into your life. I missed him, and tried to be him.
I was making a little progress in the corner, behind the taxidermy diorama of an antelope outstripping a wolf. The lady I was talking with had the same costume as all the others, but after my eyes adjusted to the light and I saw through her veil, I could tell she had small, careful eyes and a face the shape of a strawberry. My mother always said that face-shape says everything about a person. Strawberries, she told me once, were the most susceptible to flattery.
“What a lovely costume,” I said.
She smiled and put the rose fan to her lips. Her blond hair was curled over and over itself along her forehead so that she looked nineteenth century, some kind of grown-up Little Woman, which made her seem so lovely to me. In period costume, this was all so much easier. Her fan was at her lips and unfolded to reveal beds of red and white roses and a small rip in the fabric. She snapped it closed again and I saw her lips readying a glossy question.
“You’re not Galen Darling, are you?”
A strange moment. I’ll never be able to describe it to you unless you’ve been a twin. To be called by your twin’s name isn’t at all like being mistaken. Your reaction is not “That isn’t me” but rather “You’re seeing the wrong side.”
Add to that how handsome my brother was, how he could move beyond our common genetics and outstrip me in any mirror, in any admirer’s gaze. And, of course, his wickedness. I wondered for a moment if this lady knew that he was gay. I took a bold approach.
“No,” I said. “I’m his twin. He’s in Montana with his boyfriend.” In many senses a lie, a made-up thing, and I was so terrible with lies. Perhaps I even blushed. The lady’s expression, though, didn’t change. Instead, she made my heart ache by smiling and (perhaps this is the imagination of memory) heaving a sigh which made her dress shift just slightly down on her breast. There were little freckles on the white skin there, and I had an urge to bob for them like apples.
She said, “I thought so. You’re Johnny Darling.”
“Johnny Caesar Cicero Darling,” I said, raising myself proudly.
“I’ve been dying to talk to you,” and these words came from low in her throat as she dipped forward and only a glint of green eye flashed under her mascara.
They say the corner lobes of our brains stand ready for telepathy. My mother (who knows such things) has been feeling and examining our heads (I mean mine and my twin brother Galen’s) almost all our lives. She says that his telepathic lobes are smaller than mine, but mine are completely out of use, whereas he has sparked his to near-full power. So imagine these two lobes of mine, sitting benignly beneath my skull like steel spheres of a Frankenstein generator, beginning to arc electricity between them as we two (the Spanish lady and I) stared at each other.
And I could see her eyes dilating erotically. You all know when someone’s pupils dilate it means they are attracted, possibly could fall in love with you—an important clue to all be charmers. It is the eye trying to see better what it desires, and we can’t control it. We also do this with chocolate. Side note: after learning this, I used to look for this dilation everywhere. For a short period, for instance, I thought everyone in my ophthalmologist’s office was in love with me. When I realized it was only the eye drops, I fell into a brief depression.
DAVE EGGERS
WOMAN AND CLOWN
DAVE EGGERS is the author of eight books, most recently The Circle. Eggers is the founder and editor of McSweeney’s Publishing.
I’m sorry that this is a painting, but I figured it would be a good time to shake things up in this book. And this painting is too funny to avoid.
I did this painting in high school, at the Evanston Community Center. They had classes there at night, and a portrait artist taught the class. I was among mostly older people, and everyone was very kind to me, and the teacher, whose name I can’t remember but who was a burly man who painted very good and traditional portraits, could not have been nicer.
The class met at night, and every week we would have a model. For one or two weeks, the model was the woman you see in the foreground. She was nude in the traditional art-class manner, and I tried to render her faithfully. But when I was finished, I saw that I’d messed up the composition, leaving a huge negative void in the upper right.
No problem. The next week there was a different model, a man, and for some reason he was wearing clothing. Not just clothing, but some kind of clown shirt. This was the first time a model in one of the classes had worn a clown shirt.
I was sixteen, so forgive me if I thought the solution to this conundrum—unbalanced composition, man-in-clown-shirt—was to put the clown-man in the background, sitting on what would eventually look like a bed. I have no idea how I thought this would all fall together in any narrative sense. But looking at the painting now I can’t believe I wasn’t arrested at the time, or sent to some kind of Freudian scared-straight boot camp for would-be adolescent deviants.
—D.E.
RICK MOODY
THREE REFLECTIONS
RICK MOODY is the author of five novels, three collections of stories, a memoir, and, most recently, a collection of essays, On Celestial Music. He has also released two solo albums (Rick Moody and One Ring Zero and The Darkness of Good), and three albums with the Wingdale Community Singers, the latest of which is Night, Sleep, Death, released in 2013.
“Three Reflections” was the second story by me featured in a student publication while I was at Brown University. I am guessing that the writer of this monstrosity is twenty-one years old. The year was probably 1983. I was in a seminar with John Hawkes, in those days, which also included my friend Jeff Eugenides and several other writers who went on to produce great work.
The vibe in the Brown writing program was very experimental. For example, I’d also studied there with Robert Coover and Angela Carter, both of whom were just as uncompromising as Hawkes. (I suppose my story’s patently unnecessary epigraph from Angela Carter is owing to her considerable influence on me.)
In truth, I can’t tell you that much about “Three Reflections,” for the simple reason that every time I attempt to reread it, I am made so depressed by its vagueness, obscurity, lack of drama, and labored voice that I want, as the kids say, to cut myself.
This refusal to reread it is apparently consistent, because if I remember correctly, the friend editing the Issues Fiction Supplement, in which it appeared, had to proofread the piece for me, because I couldn’t bear to do it myself. That is, I refused to proofread my own story. Not a good way to begin a career.
I would tell you that I danced around the block with joy at the second appearance of my name in print, but that was not my style in those days when I was mostly busy trying to develop a full-blown drinking problem. I was probably despondent at the story’s failures even then. I think the theme of the double and the mirrors in the piece (I’m reconstructing from memory!) have to do with a preoccupation with Nabokov and Borges, much on my radar then. And that is to my credit, I suppose.
To summarize, I was a mostly talentless, unfocused, self-centered student writer, who lucked into some of
the best professors of the period, as well as some of the best classmates. If anything came of it, I’m sure it had mostly to do with the company I kept. Because, on the evidence of this, I don’t seem to have much of a gift.
—R.M.
Three Reflections
FREDERICK MOODY
“Out of these pieces of inimical indifference I intend to represent the desolate smile of Winter which as you have gathered, is the smile I wear.”
—Angela Carter
Was it the search for my twin which left me with this paralysis? It’s not the twitching, numb sort—although old age has threatened to bring more of that, in knuckles and various sockets and tendons—but a different kind. It is a warm insatiable stasis, like sitting on a crowded train between two large men bent on doing harm. I am sleepy and at the same time awake. I am a jogger in place.
My twin, you see, kept turning up. This is not to be taken lightly or set aside, in the manner of my husband. It is not as he claimed that in my senility (my detractors have called it senility!) I mistook my own reflection for the fleeting image of her. On two or three occasions such a confusion took place, but philosophically speaking if this were the only possibility the locus of sightings would necessarily be the bathroom. Or the hall of mirrors, or the department store fitting room. Whichever. There has been, however, undeniable evidence of her presence in open, public places. There was none of the indecision of the bathroom sightings. There was careful observation, which may not be confused with senility.
The only solution which accounts for all possibilities is that although we separated before adulthood, by mutual agreement, my twin lived nearby the whole time, without my consent, and without my best interests at heart.
[ . . . ]
I remember my husband coming home as usual. He was blind, and he was bitter, and the two competed for his attentions. Dressed in his long gray tweed overcoat, he would return every afternoon at five-thirty from his job at the university for the blind. He had trouble with the doorbell out front, and so I used to meet him on the front step to help him in. If I forgot or was late, he would shout emphatically or sometimes just whack at the door with his cane though he knew well enough where the bell was.
“Miranda,” he said, “I’m home.” This, in the manner of all his remarks, was delivered flatly.
“I can see that,” I said.
“How was your day?” he said, waiting for me to show him in. I pushed the door open and he went to the library, off the hall to the left, to sit in his armchair.
“As days go, Dear,” I said, “my day was wonderful.”
“What did you do?”
“I stayed here in the house. I straightened out some things, putting them back in their correct places. Other things I must have disturbed slightly.”
“Ah, good. That sounds good. Did you think of me? I thought of you once, while I was handing out tests in class.”
This kind of closing to the day started me thinking, about the repetition of things.
She turned up at the most unfortunate times, random times. Once about thirty years before, I was out dancing with a young man named Rudy. He was tall, fair, so thin there seemed little place for his gender; he wore a navy blue pinstripe suit. I was in black, and he held me around the waist with his long arms, smiling mysteriously. Now and again Rudy would kiss me, and I would kiss back with force, but I wanted more to shout: the jig was up, to hell with all of that! The blind husband was at home listening to the victrola, not the least bit worried over my disappearance.
But I didn’t shout. I drank. And I enjoyed being the belle of his ball, the femme fatale. He took my hands in his and I spun under and around and fainted dead away from drunkenness.
I came to in Rudy’s arms; he was carrying me to a table against the wall. The room was applauding.
“Oh, don’t worry,” said Rudy. “They took it for a dance move. You can’t misstep, can you? I’ve never seen anything like it! It’s as if you had more than two feet. That’s it! You have three feet! Perhaps even four!”
I told him he was too kind, and I didn’t stop him when I felt his roughened cheeks beneath my chin, at my neck. As the spinning slowed, though, I pushed his face away, and watched the crowd in the dance hall. I watched as one woman was lifted high by supporting hands at her pelvis, high above the crowd, spun in ballet style, around the head of a handsome, tall man. He carried her in that position straight through the crowd, not twenty feet from me, and out the door.
It was my twin.
“What is she doing here?” I whispered.
“What do you mean?” said Rudy.
“What’s she doing here?”
“Calm,” he said. He started in on my neck again. “Never mind. Never mind, little puppet.”
[ . . . ]
She had blonde hair like mine, probably gone silver. But she was right-handed while I am the opposite. Is it correct to assume than that the now slack right side of my face, where the tic has set in, is matched by an equal and opposite tic in the left side of her face? Is my simultaneous desire for and antipathy toward her matched by an opposite set of sentiments? Isn’t it because of her that I am reduced to all of this?
I asked all these questions at one time or another.
[ . . . ]
He cut his mutton daintily. We were silent a while. It was just past sunset. In the library, the phonograph sawed away at a chamber music record of his.
“I think,” he said, “that I’d like to put some flowers out in front. In a little box perhaps.”
“I think that’s lovely,” I said. “But what’s your interest in flowers?”
“What do you mean by that?” he said, dabbing at the corner of his mouth with a napkin. “I can enjoy the idea of flowers, can’t I? There isn’t, it’s true, much of an actual flower for me, but the idea remains, anyway. I’d like to be reminded of that idea.”
I reached for my wine. “But I’ll have to water them, or else watch them die.”
“Luck of the draw,” he said. “Materiality is gotten at a high price.”
I served him some more.
“Although I suppose,” he said. “I suppose you could fib about the flowers. You could say that you had the flower box built and then forget all about it, as I probably will, or you could describe to me, in literary detail our fictional pansies and petunias without lifting a finger. The effect would be the same for me.”
“My god,” I said. “Flowers live and die for you in seconds. Would you mind doing the dishes for me that way?”
“Dear,” he said, “you underestimate your imaginative powers.”
[ . . . ]
I pushed my little shopping cart across the electronic mat that opened the electronic door. There was a synthetic ripping sound and a door opened, while another slid shut behind me. I rolled my cart forward.
Entering, through the adjacent glass doors, in a pink raincoat and scarf, it was her. I tried to go back through the “out” door, but it wouldn’t give, and by the time I had abandoned my cart and run to the entrance, she had snuck inside and ducked around the check-cashing center.
A blue car pulled up in front of my shopping cart. A heavy man, in an old maroon sweater with patches on the elbows, got out, and started putting my bags in the trunk.
“Excuse me,” I said, out of breath.
“You phone for a cab?”
“Well, no, I was about to, though. How did you know? And how did you know those were my bags, before I even got here?”
He looked at me.
“How did you know?”
He put the last bag in the trunk, and walked around to the driver’s seat.
“You want a cab?” he said, over the roof. “I’m a cab.”
“Do you have a message for me?” I shouted at last. “Do you have a message for me from my twin?”
“Message nothing,” said the maroon sweater. “Your husband called I guess. Some guy. Said to get you and your groceries. Said to say he would probably be late. I thought if you didn’t come out I’d take the goddamn groceries myself.”
With that, he jumped in, and gunned the engine. With that, I sat in that back, feeling a bit weaker.
[ . . . ]
At six, I lit the candles for dinner. I didn’t worry that he was late, but merely hoped that he was lost in a flattering place. Not out drinking with the other blind professors, or chatting with some remedial student, but perhaps standing on a corner listening to a classical trio.
When I opened the door at sunset to turn on the porch light, he was lying on his side on the front step. For I don’t know how long.
I took him right to bed. He didn’t look so well. I took his sunglasses off and wiped his forehead. The eyes were reddish and they rolled about independently.
“What shall I do?”
“I don’t care,” he said. “I’m going to sleep.” I lifted him to his feet, and half-dragged him up the stairs to the bedroom. “Oh, by the way,” he said, partway up, “did you get the cab?”
“Quiet,” I said.
I slipped into my nightgown and got into bed. In a minute he was sleeping soundly, and even as I held tight as I could, it was like lying against nothing at all. There wasn’t much to separate that calm from his death.