I got my first real tattoo the day after I turned eighteen, also without my parents’ knowledge. It was a rune, an ancient Scandinavian symbol for prosperity, which looked a bit like an uppercase F. It was on my lower back, hidden below the waistband of my jeans. I didn’t fully understand the word prosperity at the time; I thought it meant well-being in a general sense. I was embarrassed later when I realized it meant wealth. My mother would have been even more upset about the tattoo had she known this. She had always taught me that to openly desire money was tacky and shallow. This was an easy position to have when my father was a doctor and we were comfortable financially. During my first week of college, I got another tattoo below the rune: a Celtic triskelion representing the three forms of woman—maiden, mother, and crone.
Tattoos done with black ink turn blue in the skin as they heal. Like bruises, they are visual proof of pain you’ve endured. They prompt questions about their provenance. I envied people whose tattoos were less discreet; people who had the courage to wear their pain more openly.
Eric didn’t have tattoos and didn’t want them, so I stopped getting them when we started dating, confusing my own body with his.
I hadn’t really liked the journalism classes I’d taken in Indiana. In particular I didn’t like going out alone to interview people for stories for the school newspaper. In Colorado, the journalism school offered an advertising major, and I liked these classes immediately. You didn’t have to talk to strangers. You could call to them with quippy headlines and flashy visuals. And in advertising, you always had a partner.
In the 1950s and 1960s, an agency called Doyle Dane Bernbach was the first to put copywriters and art directors in teams of two. In the past, copywriters had written headlines and taglines, and art directors designed visuals to accompany them. Bill Bernbach’s fraternal twin pairs worked together from the beginning of the process, which allowed the visuals and the words to work in tandem. In class we studied the first ad made this way. It was for the Volkswagen Beetle and is considered to be one of the greatest ads of all time. The tiny car floats in the upper lefthand corner of an otherwise blank page. At the bottom, a two-word headline: “Think small.”
I spent the summer between my junior and senior year looking at Eames shell chairs on eBay. The shell chairs were some of the first pieces of furniture to be mass-produced. When they were introduced in the 1950s, they were cheap and egalitarian—a solution to the postwar housing boom—but now they had become collector’s items and commanded a very high price. The originals were made of fiberglass and came in an array of sunny colors, most of which were now faded with age. I favored the DSS, the stacking shell. Besides stacking, the chairs could be connected at the side to create a chain, a long row, or a linked circle. Monday through Friday, I watched auctions for them, waiting for the right moment to bid. I knew about shock mounts, tags that indicated different production runs, Zenith versus Herman Miller, which colors were rare, how to spot a fake. I treated it like my job because my actual job was so boring.
I’d gotten a marketing internship at the tech company where Eric worked. Though I preferred my copywriting and art direction classes, corporate marketing internships paid, whereas creative internships at advertising agencies did not. I called my mother when I got the job, proud to tell her about the seventeen dollars an hour I’d be making. She congratulated me and said that because of the windfall, I’d be able to support myself for the summer.
I remember this conversation less as a dialogue and more as an image: me sitting on the floor of our bedroom in front of the flimsy full-length mirror, watching myself cry, phone in one hand, trying to convince her to at least pay my rent. I knew how spoiled I was acting, but the emotions still came, indifferent to my shame.
Eric had soothed me by promising that if I needed money, he could chip in extra for rent. I was pleased to find out as the summer went on that I didn’t need it. He had been out of college for a couple of years and had made just enough money to buy a condo. Though it looked like a 1970s ski chalet with ugly carpet and wood paneling, we wanted to furnish it with modern furniture. The Eames chairs were the only mid-century items we could afford.
Toward the end of the summer, I finally won an auction for a large lot of twelve chairs. We rented a truck to pick them up. We had only wanted four chairs, but we couldn’t afford to get four in mint condition. Most of the twelve chairs were damaged in some way; we thought if we could rehabilitate them and sell half, the chairs we kept would essentially be free. We ordered replacements for the ones missing feet from the manufacturer in Michigan. Some needed their broken feet extracted like teeth before they were fitted with new ones. Once repaired, we sent them off two by two to auction winners, mainly in Japan. I wanted to keep the pretty colors, but those were the most valuable, so I sacrificed them to the furniture gods, keeping two gray, an ochre, and a flawless red one for myself. Or, for us.
When referring to a couple one adds an s: the Smiths, the Kennedys, the Washingtons. Eames already seems plural.
Besides their furniture, I became fascinated with Charles and Ray as a couple, with the many facets of their partnership: lovers, oddly dressed design duo, filmmakers, utopian thinkers. One article makes note of the fact that they do not have individual Wikipedia pages, only a joint one. It also tells me that they died ten years apart to the day. Ray survived Charles by a decade. Her own power of ten.
“There’s no I in Eames” is the title of a Guardian review of a book about Eames furniture. The book, by Marilyn Neuhart, aims to demythologize the Eames oeuvre as the work of twin geniuses. The rest of the office (including Neuhart and her husband) deserve the credit, she says. In this takedown, her descriptions of Ray are downright mean-spirited, claiming that Ray was not at all an equal partner in the design of Eames furniture and was “determinedly irrational, arbitrary, petulant and by turns, childlike and childish. She was also willfully eccentric, intensely undemocratic, and she made her own rules for herself and for everyone around her.”
I’m depressed by a woman’s desire to reveal Ray as some kind of fraud, as less than half of the Eameses. I’m also strangely encouraged by her account that it was Charles who wanted the public face of the firm to seem like an equal partnership. Perhaps the balance happened in ways the studio employees could not see or understand.
In my gray cubicle at the tech company I studied images of their colorful glass house filled with fuzzy textiles, quirky sculptures, and tumbleweed hung from the ceiling, collected on their honeymoon road trip to Los Angeles. I had no idea then that one day Eric would get to tour this house, but that I would not.
The following summer, after graduation, I got a coveted but unpaid internship at an agency in Boulder and waited tables to make money. There were lots of writer interns, but only two art directors, and one of them was permanently paired with one of the writers. As a team, they won all kinds of awards, and I was convinced it was not just because of their talent, but because they had a solid partnership. The rest of the writers had to fight over the nonpartnered art director, or else cobble our ads together ourselves. The permanent team didn’t have to expend any emotional energy looking for a partner. They could just get to work.
I daydreamed about ballet. I thought about Swan Lake. I’d never had the chance to play Odette/Odile, or perform with Eric in the audience.
One day I showed him a video of a performance from high school. It is a three-minute interlude for four dancers from the first act of Swan Lake, done entirely with their arms crossed in front of their bodies, each girl holding the hand of the dancer on either side, creating a sort of lattice. Our torsos weren’t supposed to move at all, but our lower bodies were very busy. Our heads moved too, but they were always in profile, like presidents on coins, Egyptians on papyrus.
Eric asked me if it was hard to stay together. I told him the key wasn’t the synchronicity of our legs but the way we held hands. If our grip was too tight, we’d bang knees, step on toes. Too loose and someo
ne inevitably fell out of the lattice. When our hands were firm but giving, we were one body, a satin centipede moving back and forth across the stage. The clop, clop, clop of the pointe shoes almost military as we marched in an ecstatic tangle.
The first of the 101 Stories of the Great Ballets is After Eden. It was first presented by the Harkness Ballet at the Broadway Theatre in New York, on November 9, 1967, and starred two dancers, Lone Isaksen and Lawrence Rhodes.
After Eden is a dramatic ballet about Adam and Eve after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. It shows in dance terms, with no narration, something of the agony, regret, defiance, and resignation of the two lovers as they face the fate they had not imagined. In the process, their dependence on each other varies and it is this that makes the drama of the piece: Will they, after what they have come through, be able to stay together?
This is not a romantic ballet. There is no tulle, no white wedding dress looks. Both dancers are dressed in skintight one-piece unitards. They appear nude.
Lone Isaksen’s obituary says she is survived by a son and her husband of forty years, Mr. Lawrence Rhodes.
He won’t fight with me. That’s what I told anyone who asked about my relationship with Eric. We’d lived together for almost four years. Anytime I got riled up—cried, raised my voice—he wouldn’t dish it back to me. So I couldn’t continue. It wasn’t a dance. I was flailing, and he was still.
I decided his was the better way to be. Why did we need to fight? Couples who fought were doomed, I thought. Conflict meant there was something deeply wrong. My parents had been married for almost thirty years and I never saw them fight. I never saw them kiss, either.
Even-keeled is a phrase my mother might have used to describe Eric. She considered it a compliment. He was a ship that would not capsize. In time, I will become this kind of ship, I thought. But, for now, I will anchor myself to him.
There was a meteor shower. That’s how Eric talked me up the mountain. The universe was throwing stuff at us like the snowball I’d thrown at him when we’d met.
He picked me up after my shift at the restaurant and we drove up Flagstaff Mountain to a scenic overlook. There was a small grid of city lights, and a vast darkness stretching toward Wyoming and beyond.
He brought me a salad and I gobbled it up hungrily. “Let’s get out of the car,” he said. “We don’t want to miss it.”
“It might be too cloudy to see,” I said, with a mouthful of lettuce.
“Okay,” he said as he reached under his seat. “I had wanted to get down on one knee, but . . .”
I looked at the small wooden box in the palm of his hand. It was a perfect cube, made of thin plywood veneer, stained a warm cherrywood color. I knew there was a ring inside, but I was fixated on the box. “Did you make this?” I said. He had.
I held it in my hand. It was all right angles, delicate and lightweight. I turned it over to see the paler unstained bottom of the box, nested inside the top.
“There’s something inside, you know.”
I laughed and opened the box. The ring was perfect too.
“It came in this horrible green velvet box. It was so cheap and cliché. I couldn’t give it to you in that.”
We’d been discussing getting engaged for the past six months. Eric was tired of his software job. He wanted to get back to making tangible things, so he had applied to an architecture master’s program in Los Angeles and gotten in. While we were only twenty-three and twenty-six, and felt young to get married, we thought if we were ever going to do it, we might as well do it now: around his family, his college pals, and the friends I’d finally made in Boulder, my fellow interns and waitresses.
Even though I’d never been particularly interested in marriage or weddings, I’d drunkenly proposed to Eric a few times in the kitchen of our apartment, sloppily getting down on one knee the way I’d seen men do in movies. He always laughed these proposals off and said he’d propose to me when the time was right. We’d been to jewelry shops together, and I had always liked the small bands with tiny diamonds all the way around. No big center stone that screamed engagement. I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him, but I knew I’d feel self-conscious about having a ring and a wedding when most of my friends weren’t in serious relationships, let alone engaged.
The ring sparkled in the low light inside the car on top of the mountain. I slipped it on my finger. Once I had it on, I couldn’t help but hold out my arm and admire it, the way I’d seen women do. I loved the ring, but I loved the box even more. The box was the symbol of Eric’s love. He had cared enough to build something beautiful and unique to protect our sparkle. Something that was both sturdy and lightweight.
“Yes,” I said. “To all of it. To everything.”
Eric and I joined our first initials with an ampersand. It was the logo for our brand. We used it on everything for the wedding. The save-the-date cards, the invitations, the RSVP envelopes, the ceremony programs, the stickers that closed the cellophane goody bags of teeth-shattering candy almonds.
“I’m kind of seeing this girl,” Alex told me on the phone a few weeks later. She had moved to Los Angeles after graduating from college. I was standing in the kitchen of our condo in Boulder.
“That’s great,” I said, frozen in place. “Have you guys, like . . .”
“Had sex? Yeah.”
“Like, what did you do?”
“She fingered me, I fingered her, we went down on each other—all kinds of things.”
We were accustomed to describing sexual acts in the frankest of terms, joking that we were like a couple of pervy boys when it came to sex and our sense of humor about it. I’d had a number of sexual encounters in college, before I met Eric, with various freshman boys who lived in our dorm, and older boys who had a thing for “the ballerinas.” A group of my ballet friends rotated through three or four of them, or they rotated through us, each of us sleeping with one of them for a semester and then trading. I reported back to Alex in great detail about lumpy sacks and skinny dicks. I’d done cruel but comedic reenactments of their orgasm sounds. She laughed and cringed along with me, but didn’t have any sexual experiences of her own to report during that year. And none the following year, in fact, except the ones I was involved in.
My stomach tightened as I listened to her so casually toss out details of sex with another woman. “That’s great,” I said again. “I’m so happy for you.”
Eric wanted to go on a mountain biking trip with his dad. Their plan was to drive eight hours to Moab, Utah, ride the slick-rock trails, and either camp or stay in a motel. I didn’t want him to leave me at home, but I didn’t want him to invite me, either. I was terrible at mountain biking and not great at roadside motels.
In all the years we’d lived together, we’d been apart only a handful of days. Eric’s parents lived an hour away, so he visited them frequently, and I always went along. We’d all watch the evening news, and his mother would do our laundry and fold the skimpy thong underwear I wore in those days into perfect squares, arranging them neatly on our bed. I always brought Eric with me to visit my parents in Connecticut. I was unable to conceive of family without him.
My resistance to his biking trip wasn’t about being apart. I had traveled by myself to France while we’d lived together, but that had amounted to Eric handing me off at the airport in Denver to an old friend who picked me up at Charles de Gaulle. A relay race transfer, my body the baton. What I was afraid of was being left behind. One in a space meant for two.
Since I’d moved in with Eric, he’d never left me for one night. All 11,680 hours I’d spent in our bed had been beside him. Four years of sleep. I couldn’t conceive of our apartment being just mine, even for one night. What would I do with all that space?
A few days before Eric’s trip, I heard a sound. Tiny footsteps on the ceiling, running back and forth above our bed. I lay on my back, staring into the darkness. I felt as if I were in a ship’s cabin, listening to
a ball roll back and forth across the deck above.
It had to be something. Something in between the ceiling of our place and the floor of the apartment above. We lived next to a creek whose banks were lined with trees, so there was lots of wildlife around.
“It’s gotta be a squirrel,” Eric said.
“How did it get in there?”
“I don’t know, but I’m sure it’ll get out the same way.”
It didn’t. The next day we heard it again. It was above the kitchen in the morning while I made coffee and over the living room as I tried to read after dinner. Whenever I heard the scurrying, I had to stop what I was doing. All I could do was listen.
“Did you hear that?”
“Not really.”
“That. Did you hear that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
I heard it all the time. But I wasn’t crazy. Sometimes he heard it too.
“We have to have someone come and look at it,” I said.
“And do what?”
“Listen to it. Figure out what it is, what to do about it.”
Eric sighed.
I found a name in the phone book. A man came the next day while we were both there. He was probably in his midfifties, short and sturdy. He wore a Dickies jacket with the name of the company embroidered on the left chest, and his name on the right: Mel. The three of us stood quietly in the living room until the sound of the feet moved across the ceiling.
Vanishing Twins Page 4