But you’re getting so much better! they said. Who knows what you’ll do next year!
It didn’t matter what they said. I wanted to leave on my own terms. Many dancers’ careers are ended by injury, and I didn’t want my physical body to dictate my career path. Nor did I want these crumbs of praise from my teachers to be the thing I kept coming back for.
I’d transcended the corps de ballet for a moment, and I didn’t want to return to it. I felt exhilarated by my decision, the way ripping off a scab can feel good. The sting of your own doing. And that was how I left the body.
I had to choose a new major before I left for the summer. I considered nutritional science because I was intimately familiar with the calorie and fat content of most foods, but when I found out I’d have to take chemistry and physics, I reconsidered. My only other interest was writing, so, at Indiana, my options were English or journalism. One afternoon I pulled the clunky beige dorm-room phone onto my twin bed and called my mom for advice.
“What are you going to do with a degree in English?” she said. “Do journalism. It’s a career.” At that time, it was.
I’m gonna put black paper over those mirrors, my mother would say when she caught me looking at myself. She always told me I was beautiful, but she also told me I shouldn’t be preoccupied with my appearance. It’s narcissistic, she said when I asked what was wrong with wanting to look at myself.
We ascribe all vanity to Narcissus, looking at his reflection in the water, as though others throughout history haven’t been interested in looking at themselves.
In Greek mythology, Narcissus is believed to have fallen in love with his own reflection, but the second-century Greek geographer Pausanias proposed a different explanation: Narcissus had had a twin sister who died. He had been in love with her, and gazed at his own reflection to remind himself of her.
Every winter my mother grows paperwhites on her sun porch. Small snow-white blossoms atop long, graceful stalks. Their Latin name is Narcissus papyraceus, like fetus papyraceus, the vanishing twin. They are both “parchment-like” but the fetus papyraceus is a complete narrative, a short but entire life compressed into a single page. The paperwhites are like tiny blank sheets of paper. One year she gave me some as a gift, but I couldn’t make them grow.
“You have to meet Eric,” a ballet friend from high school told me over the phone. “You would love each other.” She was living in Colorado for the summer with her brother. Eric was their roommate.
“You’re exactly the same,” she said. “Artistic, smart, driven.” I was flattered. “You’re also both obsessed with your diets,” she said. I wasn’t sure if this was a compliment.
She built him up in such a way that I couldn’t imagine he’d be real. She told me he’d taught himself to write code during his last semester of college, even though he wasn’t a computer science major. She showed me his picture and said he’d done some modeling. He’d raced road bikes too, Tour de France–style. “He’s also the nicest person you’ll ever meet,” she said. It was too much. I didn’t believe one person could contain all these things.
A week after school ended, I flew to Denver, instead of home to Connecticut.
Would I know when I saw him? Would we finish each other’s sentences? Have moles in the same places?
Inside the apartment, the afternoon light was fading. We heard a key in the lock, and when the door opened, there was Eric, with his tan forearms and champagne-colored hair. Even the blue of his eyes was somehow golden.
He had my posture—straight-backed, as though he were being pulled by the crown of his head, skyward.
My friend and her brother got off the couch to hug him, and I stood up too. He extended his hand to shake mine, and the hem of his T-shirt sleeve hung away from his body near the tricep. I wanted to stick my finger between the fabric and the skin to see if I could do so without touching either.
There was still snow on the ground in Rocky Mountain National Park even though it was May, but we hiked in our sneakers because that was all we’d brought. Halfway up the mountain, I thought it would be fun to throw a snowball at my friend’s brother, whom I’d had a crush on in high school. I gathered a handful of snow, packed it into my palm, turned around, and threw it with all my might.
The snowball had barely left my fingertips when it hit Eric squarely in the face. He had been right behind me and had managed to turn his head at the last minute. His cheek was red and icy.
“That’s quite an arm you’ve got on you,” he said.
“I . . . don’t have great aim,” I said. “And I’m a lefty, so there was never a baseball glove that fit me in school, so . . .”
“I’m a lefty too,” he said.
The others were a few paces behind us. We kept hiking and when we got to the top, we all stood shoulder to shoulder looking down into the valley. I wanted to look at Eric’s face and was glad I had a reason to.
“Lemme see,” I said. He turned his face so I could see the red mark, but he kept his eyes on me.
We drank around the fire. Eric and I shotgunned beers, a trick I’d learned during my year in the Midwest. We both knew all the words to “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” and we rapped them with awkward bravado. When it got later and colder, our friends brushed their teeth and retired to the tent, while Eric and I went to his car to listen to music. He played me things I hadn’t heard: At the Drive-In, Digable Planets. We talked about our families, and while there were differences—his father was a teacher and mine a doctor; his mother went back to work (nights at a restaurant) when he was two and mine stayed home with us—there was one striking similarity: Both our parents had been married for twenty-five years. Most of our friends’ parents were divorced.
I don’t know how long we sat in the car. I was too infatuated to be tired. I wanted to touch his hand. I wanted to kiss him. But the armrest between us felt insurmountable. Eric said we should go to bed, so we quietly opened and shut his car doors. He found my hand in the darkness to lead me. His hand was warm and soft and firm and I felt a surge of relief. Hands, like kisses, could be bad, and ruin the chemistry. This is the perfect hand, I thought as we walked through the moonless night to the outhouse.
The trickle of my pee cut through the soundless air. I pulled my pants up, knowing Eric was waiting for me. The crotch of my underwear was cold. Wet with excitement.
We only had one tent for the four of us, and Eric and I lay beside our friends, who were either sleeping or pretending to. We began kissing and we did not stop, despite the siblings beside us.
We should have turned away and tried to sleep, but a magnetic energy held our bodies together as one body.
We spent the rest of the trip together. The siblings went about their business. My friend had to register for summer classes, and her brother was looking for a summer job. Eric was looking for a job too. Though he’d only graduated college a week ago, he couldn’t afford not to work, now that he didn’t have student loan money to cover his expenses. Luckily, it was the beginning of the first internet boom and anyone who could make a website could get a job.
One morning, Eric and I were alone in the apartment. After breakfast, he put on a collared shirt and I helped him tie his tie and wished him luck as he went off to an interview. It felt embarrassingly retro, as if I were a housewife sending my husband off to his job. But it was novel too, and I was grateful for a new role to play, now that I no longer had ballerina.
At the end of my trip, Eric took me to the airport and gave me The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. He told me he’d underlined his favorite part. As soon as I was on the plane, I found the passage.
What the boy felt at that moment was that he was in the presence of the only woman in his life, and that, with no need for words, she recognized the same thing . . . When two such people encounter each other, and their eyes meet, the past and the future become unimportant. There is only that moment, and the incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written b
y one hand only. It is the hand that evokes love, and creates a twin soul for every person in the world. Without such love, one’s dreams would have no meaning.
I turned the page back and forth. It smelled musty, like an attic.
I was always looking for other lefties, watching people’s hands when they signed credit card slips at restaurants, threw balls, or cut with scissors. No one else in my family was left-handed, and neither were any of my friends, although this is not that surprising, since only ten percent of the population is left-handed.
“Both kinds of twins, fraternal and identical, have a higher rate of left-handedness,” Lawrence Wright says, “and some scientists . . . have suggested that left-handed singletons may be survivors of a vanished-twin pair.”
A card arrived in the mail from Eric. I opened it in my childhood bedroom and had to slow my eyes down to take in each part of the long rectangle. There was his tiny, almost illegible handwriting, and a collection of drawings he’d done in black ink and filled in with wide architectural markers. One drawing was of the Modular Man, a gestural outline of a man’s body created by the architect Le Corbusier, for scale in designs, and another was the Golden Spiral—a spiral drawn inside a rectangle whose length and height are proportionate to each other at a 3:2 ratio, the golden ratio. The math was sexy, because I didn’t fully grasp it, but also because it was rendered in muted golds and mauves, colors I was surprised a man had chosen.
I’d already sent him a card as well. Mine had a grid of squares I’d painted in watercolor. All but two were gray. We were the two matching red squares, I was trying to say. Everything else seemed drab by comparison.
The next month, Eric came to see me at my parents’ house in Connecticut, where I was living for the summer. Any reservations my mother had had when I told her I’d fallen in love with someone on my one-week trip to Colorado disappeared when she met him. “He never stops smiling,” she said.
Eric hadn’t been to many museums. He’d been to national parks; he’d been to Indian reservations. During the week we spent together in Colorado, he told me about the tiny loom his dad bought him as a kid, and the beadwork he’d done on it. He pointed to a sculpture in the corner of the apartment that he’d made in architecture school—a red sawhorse with a suspension bridge made of piano wire hanging below it.
Eric had never considered majoring in art even though he loved drawing and painting. Like mine, his parents had directed him toward something you can make money at.
We’d lain on the futon in his living room after the first time we’d had sex, while the siblings graciously slept in the bedroom. I told him that in eighth grade, I’d considered becoming a performance artist instead of a dancer, after seeing a piece by Janine Antoni on a museum field trip. I recalled my twelve-year-old self watching a video of her performance, which involved using her head to paint the entire floor of the gallery with black hair dye. There was a video screen at the entrance to the gallery where she’d done the performance and a velvet rope across the doorway to prevent people from walking on the piece. I leaned into the room, my waist on the rope, trying to take it all in. The white walls, the large black strokes covering the wood floor. I would have liked to touch them, to trace my finger along their semicircular arcs, to get down on my knees and bend my head to the floor, to feel how it might have felt to do the performance, hair heavy and dripping, butt in the air, dragging the bucket of hair dye alongside me.
I took Eric to New York City because he’d never been, and suggested we go to the Guggenheim, knowing he’d studied the Frank Lloyd Wright building in architecture school. We didn’t know anything about the exhibition that was going on, only that it featured the work of a video artist from the ’70s and ’80s called Nam June Paik. We walked up and up through the museum, curving ever so slightly to the left, spiraling skyward.
We’d seen paintings and photos in art history classes, and some sculpture too, but this kind of art was new to us. Large sculptures made of old TVs buzzed with an aurora of colors, lava lamp cubes with no stories.
“Thank you for bringing me here,” Eric said. “I came to see the building. I hadn’t even considered there would be something inside it.”
Years later, he told me that this was the moment he decided to become an artist.
He sat on the edge of my bed, the one I’d slept in since I was five years old, and I went to him, putting my hands on his knees and parting them, to fit my body into the V they created.
“I love you,” I said.
We’d only known each other a month. But this I love you was in my mouth, and if I was going to speak, it was the only thing that was going to come out.
“I love you too,” he said.
The ligature œ has a special sound, the “open-mid-front-rounded vowel,” which is something between an uh and an er. In French, you need it to make words like sœur and cœur. Sister and heart. It is taught to schoolchildren as o et e collés—o and e glued together.
I identify with this ligature. I see it and think that’s me, though I realize this is strange. Why not my initials? The monogram that graced my grade-school L.L.Bean backpack?
In French class I had cast myself as Odile, the doppelgänger. The O looking for her E.
I had found him.
Eric and I spent my sophomore year visiting each other while I continued school in Indiana as a journalism student. I had no contact with my former ballerina friends. I spent all my time with Alex and the other girls in my dorm. I didn’t go to any ballet performances, but I still liked to be on display. At parties, I’d find the highest place in the room and climb up to it, gyrating like a go-go girl, safely above the masses. I felt adrift and without purpose.
Eric came to visit me, and one drunken night, Alex and I reenacted our make-out scene with him. We were excited to have a willing male participant, as at that point it was impossible to fathom drawing a straight line between the two of us, to kiss each other without a third point to give shape to our desire. My attraction to Eric was stronger than anything I’d felt before, and the newness and novelty of touching Alex was endlessly intriguing. It was both strange and familiar. Lubricated by a healthy serving of Olde English malt liquor, we triangulated in ecstasy.
Now that ballet wasn’t keeping me in Indiana, I felt little attachment to the place. The pull of my twinship with Eric was stronger, so I asked my parents if I could move in with him after my sophomore year was up. I needed permission because it wasn’t just moving in with him; it was moving across the country and transferring to another school, and I needed their money to do so. On the sun porch of their house, where my mother kept the paperwhites, she told me, “Relationships are more important than anything else. Work comes and goes. People are what’s important.”
In our new shared space—a single bedroom, a double bed—Eric and I became incredibly attached. We had sex every day, as many times as possible. We went to sleep at the same time. Woke together, showered together. Our bodies could never be far from each other.
I’d kiss him goodbye in the doorway before he left for his job at the internet start-up just as I had that morning before his interview. I’d close the door after he left, only to open it again a minute later and run out to the car, hoping to catch him before he pulled out of his parking space. I’d open the door and sit on his lap, kissing him while he laughed. Was my desperation endearing? I’d slyly reach down and lay his seat back, putting us instantly horizontal, and we’d continue kissing and laughing.
By a stroke of luck or administrative oversight, my advanced ballet classes in Indiana had fulfilled all my upper-division humanities requirements in Colorado, so I took a lot of freshman-level classes. All the 101s: Astronomy, Philosophy, and my favorite, a sociology class called Social Construction of Sexuality.
I didn’t make many friends at school. I was so focused on my relationship with Eric that I didn’t have time to invest in others. I studied him. I tried to do the things he did. We bought me a mountain bi
ke and special shoes to clip into the pedals. It was terrifying to be attached to the bike like that. I wasn’t experienced enough to pull my foot out quickly, so I’d tip over, feet still attached to the pedals, helpless. Eric tried to give me pointers; he encouraged me. But my tears and frustration told him I would not continue. When we sold my bike, he stopped riding his too.
We did more of the things we both liked to do: vegan breakfasts at the punk-rock diner, foreign films at the independent cinema. We drove to Denver to see Almodóvar’s Talk to Her, about a female bullfighter and a ballet dancer, both in comas at the same hospital, and the relationship that develops between the two men who visit them.
I don’t remember the plot entirely but I remember a surreal scene, a dream perhaps, where a tiny man inserts himself into a giant woman’s vagina.
I had always wanted tattoos. I drew on my skin constantly as a child—I even tried to give myself a tattoo when I was fourteen or fifteen. It was one of my ballet friends’ ideas. We used sewing pins to scratch a design into our inner heels. Mine was going to be a star. It seemed easier than a heart, which I also wanted. The heart’s curves were too challenging.
I sat on the toilet seat, my foot up on the opposite knee, and drew the shape with a ballpoint pen. I traced the lines with the pin over and over, scratching the first layer of skin until it opened up and bled, at which point I went over the lines with the pen again, mixing the blue ink with the red blood. It took a few days to heal up, but when it did, I had a little tattoo. It only lasted a week or so, until that layer of skin sloughed off. My mother never noticed, as it was hidden under a sock, or a ballet shoe, but I showed it to my friends with pride.
Vanishing Twins Page 3