by John Updike
The necking place. The spatial feeling of the spot—with a tall bank of earth on one side, freshly bulldozed then and still rather raw and scraggly now, and a lower rise on the other side, deep green from the time when this had been a hillside hayfield—was unaltered, uncorrupted, sexy. In his excitement the actor braked; the interviewer glanced over, worried. “Amazing,” said the actor, spacing his syllables, back in performance. “I wonder if it’s still used.”
“I see a few beer bottles,” said the interviewer uneasily.
“You don’t understand what a lovely surprise this is. For a space like this to last, in modern America. The cops used to check it out once in a while and shine a flashlight in the windows.” The little unpaved road that generations of furtive, love-craving cars had worn into the earth continued for a few yards between the two sheltering grassy shoulders and then dipped down to rejoin a side street called Button. Button led into Maple, Maple crossed the avenue, and two more blocks took you into Sycamore; Ermajean used to live at the corner of Sycamore and Pierce. A kind of hazy warmth, as when he would show up after midnight at Smoky’s diner, had been laid across the actor’s face. Without his realizing it, the little Japanese car had under his hands driven itself along the remembered route, into that inviting red realm of the two-family brick houses in rows. The car had come to the corner of Pierce and Sycamore, to the big house whose retaining walls were ornamented with mossy concrete balls and whose side entrance was a set of steps with an iron railing he had often grasped; he softly braked. She would come down those very steps for a date, all starchy and perfumed and hopeful, though what had he had to offer her but a second-run movie and an ice-cream soda afterwards? As she hurried across the street to the old Chrysler with the patched fender, her pastel dress would be flattened against her thighs by her hurrying, by the soft wind she made in her haste to be with him.
“My girl friend used to live here,” he confessed to his interviewer.
“You had only one?”
“Well, yes. How many do you recommend? I thought I was lucky to have even one. She was a grade behind me at school, and after I graduated I lost track of her. Married, I suppose, somewhere.” The actor was incredulous that the interviewer could be blind to the glory around them, the railings and retaining walls and little laplike lawns of these solid, unchanging homes, rows that at any moment might release Ermajean, racing lightly toward them with her hair in barrettes and her round young legs tipped by the kind of open-toed white heels women in Hollywood comedies wore—Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell. The actor felt swamped by love; he was physically sickened, to think that such a scene had once been real, and that a self of his had been there to play a part.
His foot eased the clutch back in, and the car moved off reluctantly. “Let me show you some more of the town,” he offered. “There’s a quarry where we used to ice-skate. And a playground. A block from here, where they put the new annex on the town hall, there used to be the strangest little structure, like something out of Disneyland, a sort of stone tower where you paid your water bills.”
Ermajean loved butter-pecan ice cream, he remembered, in a vanilla soda, and always debated with him whether she should have onion on her hamburger. If he would, she would. And her skin—all of his life since, he had been dealing with women who were doctoring their skins—vitamin-E cream, pancake makeup, moisturizers. Ermajean’s skin had been utterly neutral in shade, neutral and natural, tinted by nothing, pure trusting female skin beneath her pastel clothes. The actor’s face felt hot; he wanted to cruise forever through this half of town, the car dipping in a kind of obeisance at every intersection.
The interviewer cleared his throat and said, “I think maybe I’ve seen enough. This is only for a sidebar, you know.”
“Wait. How about coming with me to my old luncheonette and having a bite to eat? How about some butter-pecan ice cream?”
The other man laughed, stiffly, as when commanded to laugh before. “And then there’s a time problem,” he said. “If I don’t get this in tonight, your show won’t still be around.”
“That’s O.K. The luncheonette is a flower shop now anyway. Please, don’t put my old girl friend’s name in the article.”
“You never mentioned it.”
“Ermajean Willis. E-r-m-a-j-e-a-n. Isn’t that a wonderful funky name?”
“Maybe it’d be easier if I drove now.”
“No. Keep your pencil out. You son of a bitch, I’m going to tell you the names of every family that used to live in this entire block.”
The Other
HANK ARNOLD met Priscilla Hunter at college in the Fifties, and the fact that she was a twin seemed to matter as little as the fact that she had been raised as an Episcopalian and he as a Baptist. How blissfully little did seem to matter in the Fifties! Politics, religion, class—all beside the point. Young lives then, once Eisenhower had settled for a draw in Korea and McCarthy had self-destructed like a fairy-tale goblin, seemed to be composed of timeless simplicities and old verities, of weather and works of art on opposite sides of a museum wall, of ancient professors, arrogant and scarcely audible from within the security of their tenure, lecturing from yellowing notes upon Dante and Kant while in the tall windows at their backs sunlight filtered through the feathery leaves of overarching elms. In those days Harvard Yard was innocent of Dutch elm disease. And in those days a large and not laughable sexual territory existed within the borders of virginity, where physical parts were fed to the partner a few at a time, beginning with the lips and hands. Strangely, Hank and Priscilla had been traversing this territory for several weeks before she confided to him that she was an identical twin. One of her breasts, clothed in an angora sweater and the underlying stiffness of a brassiere, was held in his hand at the time. Their faces were so close together that he could smell the mentholated tobacco in the breath of her confession. “Henry, I ought to tell you. I have a sister who looks just like me.” Priscilla seemed to think it slightly shameful, and in fact it was an exciting idea.
Her twin, the other, was named Susan, and attended the University of Chicago, though she, too, had been admitted to Radcliffe. Their parents—two Minneapolis lawyers, the father a specialist in corporation law and the mother in divorce and legal-aid work—had always encouraged the girls to be different; they had dressed them in different clothes from the start and had sent them to different private schools at an early age. A myth had been fostered in the family that Priscilla was the “artistic” one and Susan the more “practical” and “scientific,” though to the twins themselves their interests and attitudes seemed close to identical. As children, they had succumbed simultaneously to the same diseases—chicken pox, mumps—and even when sent to different summer camps had a way, their conversations in September revealed, of undergoing the same trials and initiations. They learned to swim the same week, in widely separated lakes, and had let themselves be necked with in different forests. They fell in love with the same movie star (Montgomery Clift), had the same favorite song (“Two Loves Have I,” as sung by Frankie Laine), and preferred the same Everly brother (Don, the darker and slicker-looking). Hank asked Priscilla if she missed her twin. She said, “No,” but to have said otherwise might have been insulting, for she was lying entangled with him, mussed and overheated, in his fifth-floor room, with its single dormer window, in Winthrop House.
Hank was an only child, with a widowed mother, and asked, “What does it feel like, having a twin?”
Priscilla made a thoughtful mouth; prim little creases appeared in her pursed upper lip. “Nice,” she answered, after a long pause that had dried the amorous moisture from her eyes. They were brown eyes, a delicious candy color, darker than caramel but paler than Hershey’s kisses. “You have a backup, seeing the same things you do. A kind of insurance policy, in a funny way.”
“Even when you’re sent to different schools and all that?”
“That doesn’t matter so much, it turns out. Suzie and I always knew we weren’t the other and
were going to have to lead different lives. It’s just that when I’m with her there’s so much less explaining to do. Maybe that’s why I’m not much good at explaining things.” She added, a bit challengingly, “Sorry.” Her face was still pink from the soft struggle they had been having on his bed.
“You’re good enough,” Hank said, and dropped the subject, for it had interrupted this slow journey they were making into one another. She had, Priscilla, a lovely athletic figure, long-muscled and hippy and with wide sloping shoulders, yet narrowed to a fine boniness at the ankles and wrists. His pleasure at seeing her undressed disconcerted her, at first, in its intensity, and time passed before she could accept it as her due and, still a virgin, coolly give him, in his room, in the narrow space between his iron frame bed and standard oak desk, little one-woman “parades.” Though they could not, for all those good Fifties reasons (pregnancy, the social worth of female chastity), make love, he had talked her into this piece of display. She held her chin up bravely and slowly turned in mock-model style, showing all sides of herself; the sight was so glorious Hank could scarcely stand it and had to lower his eyes, and then saw how her bare feet, fresh from chilly boots and rimmed in pink, looked as they slowly pivoted on the oval rug of braided rags his mother had given him, to make his room more “cozy.” When his minute of drinking in Priscilla was up, she would scramble, suddenly blushing and laughing at herself, into bed beside him, under rough blue blankets that Harvard issued in those days as if to soldiers or monks. They would try to read from the same book; they were taking a course together—Philosophy 10, “Idealism from Plato to Whitehead.”
Once she had told him that she was a twin, Hank could not forget it, or quite forgive her. The monstrous idea flirted at the back of his head that she was half a person; there was something withheld, something hollow-backed and tinny about the figure she cut in his mind even as their courtship proceeded smoothly toward marriage. He wanted to become a lawyer; she was doubly the daughter of lawyers and in all things ideal, given the inevitable small differences between two individuals. She had been raised rather rich and he rather poor. Hank’s drab and pious upbringing embarrassed him. He had felt indignantly drowned on that absurd day when, dressed in a sleazy white gown, he had submitted to the shock of immersion, the scandal of being tipped backward and all the way under by the murderous firm hands of a minister wearing hip waders; whereas Priscilla kept in her room, like a girlhood Teddy bear, the gold-stamped prayer book given her upon confirmation, and sometimes she carried it, in white-gloved hands, to services at the old wooden gray Episcopal church across from Cambridge Common. Both young people were for Stevenson in 1956, but she seemed secretly pleased when Eisenhower won again, whereas Hank had wished Henry Wallace were still running. He wanted to become a lawyer for a perverse reason: to avenge his father. His father, not yet fifty when he died of Hodgkin’s disease, in the days before chemotherapy, had been an auto mechanic who had borrowed heavily to open a garage of his own, and it had been lawyers—lawyers for the bank and other creditors—who had briskly, with perfect legality, administered the financial debacle and thwarted the dying man’s attempts to divert money to his survivors.
None of this at the time seemed to matter; what mattered was Priscilla’s beauty and Hank’s ardor and gratitude and her cool appraisal of the future value of his gratitude as she dazzlingly, with a silver poise faintly resembling cruelty, displayed herself to him. The fact of her being a twin put a halo around her form, a shimmer of duplication, a suggestion, curiously platonic, that there was, somewhere else, unseen, another version of this reality, this body.
Priscilla’s parents lived in Saint Paul, in a big, cream-colored, many-dormered house a few blocks from the gorge holding the Mississippi, which was not especially wide this far north. Though Hank several times travelled there to display himself, in his best clothes, to his prospective in-laws, he did not meet Susan until the wedding. She had always been away—on a package tour of Europe or waitressing in southern California, a part of the world where she had been led by some of her racier University of Chicago friends. When Hank met her at last, she had come from Malibu Beach to be Priscilla’s maid of honor. Though it was early June and cool in Minnesota, she had a surfer’s deep tan and a fluffy haircut short as a boy’s. A stranger to the family might not have spotted her, amid the welter of siblings and cousins, as the bride’s twin. But Hank had been long alerted, and as he clasped her thin feminine hand the current of identity stunned him to wordlessness. Her face was Priscilla’s down to the protruding, determined cut of her upper lip and the slightly sad droop of the lashes at the outside corners of her eyes. In a sense, he had seen her undressed. He reddened, and imagined that Susan did, though her manner with him was instantly ironical—bantering and languid in perhaps the West Coast manner. Enclosed within Priscilla’s known body, the coolness of a stranger seemed rude, even hostile. Hank noted what seemed to be a ray or two less of caramel in Susan’s irises, a smoother consistency of chocolate. These darker eyes made her seem more passionate, more impudent and flitting, as she moved through her old home with none of a bride’s responsibilities. And she was, Hank estimated, appraising Susan through the social flurry, distinctly bigger, if only by a centimeter and an ounce.
His impressions, Priscilla told him when they were alone, were wrong: Susan had expected to like him and did, very much. And though she had been the firstborn, she had never been, as often happens, the stronger or heavier. Their heights and weights had always been precisely the same. Priscilla thought that, indeed, Suzie had lost some weight, chasing around with that creepy crowd of beach bums out there. Their parents were up in arms because she had announced her intention to do graduate work in art history at UCLA, where there really wasn’t any art, when there was that entire wonderful Chester Dale collection at the Art Institute, along with everything else in Chicago. Or why not go east, like Priscilla? Their parents had hoped Susan would become a physicist, or at least a psychologist. Hank liked hearing Priscilla, not normally much of an explainer, run on this way about her sister; being near her twin did seem to embolden her, to loosen her tongue. He enjoyed the profusion of an extensive, ambitious family, amid whose many branches his own mother, their guest for the weekend, seemed a wan, doomed graft. The big house was loaded with overstuffed sateen furniture and expensive vacation souvenirs; his mother found a safe corner in a little-used library and worked at a needlepoint footstool cover she had brought with her from North Carolina.
In church, the twins, the one majestic in white tulle and the other rather mousy in mauve taffeta, were vividly distinguishable. Hank, however, standing at the altar in a daze of high Episcopalianism, the musk of incense in his nostrils and a gold-leafed panel of apostles flickering off to the side, had a disquieting thrill of confusion—the mocking-eyed maid of honor might be his intimate from Winthrop House days and the mysterious figure on their father’s arm a woman virtually unknown to him, tanned and crop-haired beneath her veil and garland of florets. Susan’s voice was just a grain or two the huskier, so he knew it was Priscilla who, in a shy, true voice, recited the archaic vows with him. At the reception, amid all the kissing, he kissed his sister-in-law and was surprised by the awkwardly averted, rather stubbornly downcast cheek; Hank had reflexively expected Priscilla’s habituated frontal ease. And when they danced, Susan was stiff in his arms. Yet none of this marred her fascination, the superior authenticity she enjoyed over the actual reality as the wedding night untidily proceeded through champagne and forced cheer to its trite, closeted climax. Susan was with them (her remembered stiffness and silence in his arms, as if she and Hank had had too much to say to dare a word, and her imagined slightly greater size) during the botch of defloration; she excited him, urging him on through Priscilla’s pain. Though he knew he had put an unfortunate crimp in this infant marriage, and had given his long-cherished ardor a bad name, he fell asleep with happy exhaustion; his guilt seemed shifted onto the body of a twin of his own.
Hank was not accepted at Harvard Law School; but good-hearted Yale took him. It was all for the best, for if Cambridge in those years was the path to Washington, New Haven was closer to New York and Wall Street, where the real money was. After a few years in the city, the Arnolds settled in Greenwich and had children—a girl, a boy, and a girl. Having married a San Diego builder of multi-unit dwellings, Susan kept pace with a girl, a boy, and then another boy. This break in symmetry led them both, it seemed, to stop bearing children. Also, the Pill had come along and made birth control irresistible. Kennedy had been shot, and something called rock blasted from the radio however you twisted the dial. The twins, though, had their nests safely made. Susan’s husband was named Jeb Herrera; he claimed descent from one of the old Spanish ranching families of Alta California, but in joking moods asserted that his great-great-grandfather had been a missionary’s illegitimate son. He was a curly-haired, heavy, gracious, enthusiastic man, a bit too proclaimedly, for Hank’s taste, in love with life. His small, even teeth looked piratical, when he smiled through the black curls of his beard. He was one of the first men Hank knew to wear a full beard and to own a computer—a tan metal box taller than a man, a freestanding broom closet that spat paper. Jeb had programmed it to respond to the children’s questions with jokes in printout. His office was a made-over wharf shed where dozens shuffled paper beside canted windows full of the Pacific. None of his employees wore neckties. Though the twins, as they eased into matronhood, might still be mistaken for each other, there was no mistaking the husbands. Susan, it would appear, had the artistic taste, and Priscilla had bet on practicality. Hank had become a specialist in tax law, saw his name enrolled in the list of junior partners on the engraved firm stationery, and forgot about avenging his father.