Support may be too tender a word for what I was offering Eric. Perhaps all I was doing was covering expenses. And it wasn’t as though the money came with no strings attached. For one thing, I’d asked for the open relationship.
I thought I could trade this freedom I’d given him to pursue an artistic career for my own freedom to pursue a sexual relationship with another person. I wanted an artistic career too, but as long as I worked full-time to support the development of Eric’s, I didn’t see how I could have my own. We couldn’t both quit our jobs and be artists at the same time, I reasoned. So while I was the one working, I thought it was only fair that he do something of equal sacrifice for me. If we couldn’t have sameness, then I wanted evenness. I wanted fairness. I wanted balance.
But what was on the scales, really? Money versus bodies? It is impossible to compare the two. They are different systems of measurement, like weight and mass.
Are you sure he’s not using you? The answer was no. But was I sure I wasn’t using him? As a mother, a father, an anchor, a life preserver, a safety net, a doormat? I did not know.
In a folder on my computer desktop I kept two photographs of Ethan and me sitting side by side in a giant twin stroller. In one picture, we’re pretending to fight with each other. He pulls my hair and I smash his face with my hand. In the other, we’re pretending to sleep.
The Manstroller was a prop for a commercial we wrote for a mini fast-food sandwich. Our spot involved two grown men in business suits being pushed in the stroller.
“Good job on that presentation today,” the one guy says. The other guy smiles, accepting the compliment, but in a flash, his mood changes. He screws his face up and whines, “I’m hunnngggrrryyy.” The crying is contagious, and the other man starts too. The nanny pushing the stroller talks to them in the voice people reserve for babies and pets.
“Awwww. You’re hungry?” she says. “Here’s your snack.” She hands each of them the sandwich. A voice-over says, “Grown-ups need snacks too,” and describes the product while we cut away to a close-up of it.
Ethan and I were proud of this commercial. We loved the giant stroller prop, and on set we thought the performances were hilarious. But once the commercial started running on TV, it wasn’t so well received.
“Did you guys do that one with the guys in the stroller?” friends would ask, in a way that said I hope not. It turns out that listening to adults cry like babies is funnier in theory than in practice.
Even though people hated the spot, we didn’t care. To Ethan and me, it was worth it for the photo of us acting like babies in the Manstroller. We were tired of being the breadwinners of our families, the grown-ups, the caretakers, and jealous that our spouses could experiment—art for Eric, an organic baby food delivery service for Ethan’s wife, with the safety net of our steady paychecks.
The Manstroller prop cost almost thirty thousand dollars to fabricate—more than the price of either of our cars. It felt good to waste someone else’s money, since we had to be so careful with our own.
I spent most of my time with Ethan. Nine, sometimes ten hours a day, five days a week, in the same physical space. We talked about everything: the drugs he’d done before getting sober, our sex lives, our families, our finances, though we never told each other how much money we made. Ethan had made a rule of this. “Money does weird things to relationships,” he said. I assumed he was referring to the dissolution of his last work partnership. I was fine being secretive or vague about how much we made; growing up on the East Coast had prepared me well for that.
At work, we used instant messages to talk to each other, so no one could hear our conversations over the cubicle walls. When we needed more privacy, we went to the only place within walking distance of the office: Swingers, a diner waitressed by tattooed girls in pleated miniskirts and combat boots. A place stuck in a ’90s version of the ’50s.
Ethan became the best friend I never chose; my brother, my arranged marriage. We grew into each other, finding ways to fit the holes the other had. While he was tactful about money, he wasn’t about much else. He offended people with badly chosen words and hasty emails. He was efficient, though, and incredibly detailed-oriented about his work. He made to-do lists and used his calendar. I was distractible and prone to procrastination, but I was also considerate and diplomatic. I could smooth things over with our colleagues when he’d wrinkled them.
One day I came across a catalog I’d purchased at the Louvre when I’d visited my friend in Paris before Eric and I were married. I’d bought the book to share with Eric, but now that we’d been to the Louvre together, it seemed like a pointless thing to own. Before I put it in a Salvation Army pile, I flipped through the pages and came across a painting by Théodore Chassériau called The Two Sisters. Painted in 1843, it depicts the artist’s two sisters, Adèle and Aline, posed with their arms linked. Despite their identical hairstyles and gold and crimson dresses, the sisters were not twins. They were thirty-three and twenty-one when they posed for the portrait.
I was enchanted by this painting. The rich colors, the brunette women, the way their outfits and poses twinned them. I wanted to re-create this picture with Jimena, to commemorate our perverse sisterhood, but I needed Eric’s camera and some instruction. I explained the idea to him and asked whether he could teach me to use the camera. He was busy with a project and said he would teach me at the end of the semester. “For now, it’ll be easier if I just take the pictures for you,” he said.
I was relieved that he could finally be included in our relationship, even in a nonsexual way. We drank whiskey on Jimena’s patio overlooking the canyon and I was excited to share the view with him.
After the alcohol had loosened us up, Eric got out the camera and I posed Jimena and myself like the sisters, shoulder to shoulder, with linked arms. We didn’t have identical dresses, but we imitated the body positions and expressions as best we could.
As he snapped the photos and later developed the film, I realized that I’d placed him in the role of my brother.
Isn’t he jealous? Isn’t he upset? everyone asked, with their words and their skeptical faces.
I assume if he was, he would tell me, I said. I’ve given him every opportunity to do so.
In truth, I didn’t want to press him, lest he tell me something I didn’t want to hear. I thought giving him space to react would be better, but I underestimated how much we both feared disagreement.
We liked discord in music—Stravinsky, and Ornette Coleman, the death metal he’d loved since high school—but we liked harmony everywhere else. Like nouns and verbs in romance languages, we insisted upon agreement.
“Where’s the conflict?” my boss asked after Ethan and I presented him a script for a thirty-second commercial for a chicken sandwich. “Without conflict there is no story,” he said. “Try again.”
Where’s the conflict? I mimicked to Ethan when we were alone. If I had a fucking dime for every time I heard that. I was frustrated, but I knew he was right.
Where’s the conflict? friends asked about my relationship with Eric. They didn’t believe there could be none.
I was upset that day because there had finally been some. I’d cut my hair from a feminine bob into a floppy Mohawk-mullet. It was something I could have never had as a ballerina.
Eric hated it. He didn’t say so outright, but I could tell by the way he avoided complimenting it. And so I pressed on this issue. “It’s a lesbian haircut,” he said, and accused me of cutting it for Jimena.
“I cut it for myself!” I yelled. This didn’t satisfy him, which I took to mean that doing something for myself wasn’t the goal. I needed to do it for him or for us. I didn’t realize then that my inability to bear his dislike meant I was complicit in this goal.
Jimena did like my new haircut, but she’d liked my old one too. There was no conflict with her, and I liked that. It felt peaceful to float in her ocean of acceptance rather than having to pass through the str
aits of Eric’s.
There are two milestones in ballet training. One is graduating from soft leather ballet slippers to satin-ribboned pointe shoes. The other is dancing with a man. There was a class specifically devoted to learning this skill, and it was called Partnering. You didn’t get to take this class until you were about fifteen or sixteen. You had to master all the moves on your own before you were allowed to do them with another person. Since there were fewer boys than girls, each boy had to partner multiple girls—raising the girl’s entire body above his head, as if dead-lifting at the gym, or holding her extended fingers over her head as she spun on one leg like a top. Even though you were being supported or held in one way or another by the man, it didn’t make the moves any easier than doing them on your own. In fact, it sometimes made it harder—your partner could knock you off balance. Your partner could make you fall. When you were dancing alone, you had only yourself to blame. This is why you had to be experienced before you could take Partnering. You had to master yourself before someone else could master you.
Eric spent a lot of time writing code, a cryptic language I didn’t understand.
“Why do you love programming so much?” I asked.
“There’s always a right and wrong answer,” he said.
For his thesis show, he created an installation of colored threads, each attached to a motor in the ceiling in the gallery and weighted with a small metal washer at the bottom.
He programmed motion sensors to detect when people entered the space, making the motors spin, spiraling each of the threads into wispy tornadoes that bounced their washers up and down like yo-yos. The threads moved so fast they didn’t read as lines anymore; they blurred and took shape.
At the opening, I watched from afar as people walked into the piece. I loved seeing their faces as the strings came alive. He had found a way to translate code, his secret language, into something embodied. Something that danced.
Eric was accepted to a prestigious art residency in the Maine woods. It sounded like summer camp, with cabins on a lake, communal dining, and individual studios for each of the fifty artists. The residency was three months long, and he’d been chosen from among thousands of applicants. I was proud of him, but looking ahead to my own summer—endless hours in the office, a two-week family vacation—it was difficult not to be jealous. Plus, I’d heard things.
The residency had an orgiastic reputation. “Would you be okay if I fooled around with other people during the summer?” Eric said. “You know, if it comes up.”
It’s finally happening, I thought. Jealousy tripped my insides, oddly indecipherable from the butterflies I’d gotten when we first met. “Of course,” I said. “It’s only fair.” He asked how I felt and I said, “A little jealous. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want you to do it.”
My relationship with Jimena had ended abruptly when a friend came to stay with her for a few months while he looked for his own place in LA. Even though she wouldn’t admit it, I knew she hoped they’d evolve from roommates into a couple.
I wasn’t sure if I was jealous of Eric being with other people, or being with other people when I didn’t have anyone to be with, or jealous I wasn’t going to an artist residency, a bacchanalian summer camp. Maybe it was all of these.
Eric said he wanted some ground rules, but I brushed his request aside, saying we should talk about things as they came up. In truth, I didn’t want to give him ground rules because I worried if something was off-limits for him, it would be off-limits for me too. “Maybe no sex,” I said. “Of the penis-in-vagina variety.”
Maybe was my favorite word back then. It allowed me to live in yes and no at the same time.
Aside from one conversation in the car, Eric and I didn’t talk about our arrangement during the remaining weeks before he left for Maine. We moved around the periphery of our apartment, avoiding something invisible in the middle of the room.
We were binary stars orbiting a common point called the center of mass, the center of our respective gravities. This center of mass holds the stars together but maintains their distance. They can neither get closer nor break apart.
During the first couple of weeks, Eric sent group emails to me and his parents: pictures of his cabin, the dock on the lake, images of the work he was making. He sent me separate emails about more private things. He told me about a night when he and a painter were talking about jeans, and she commented on how thin he was, that she could probably wear his, and he hers. Before that, they had been commiserating that, thus far, camp wasn’t as debauched as its reputation, and they decided it was time to change that. They went into his room and traded clothes, their T-shirts and jeans, and then paraded around camp, inspiring the party-planning committee to throw a cross-dressing party later that week. After the novelty of wearing each other’s stuff wore off, they went back to her room, took the items off one by one, and stood kissing in a pile of clothing.
I thought about this when I took off my own clothes. It required imagination, and made me realize how long it had been since I’d fantasized about Eric. I’d gotten so used to thinking of him as mine that I’d stopped thinking of him at all, at least as a sexual being.
I felt relief, as if his actions absolved my relationship with Jimena and evened things out between us. I was comforted by this evenness, but there was discomfort too, especially when Eric talked about her paintings, and how good they were. The competitive ballet dancer came back, the one who wanted the part, who wanted to be the best.
These feelings wrestled each other in a way that felt erotic. If I could keep this balance, I thought, everything would be fine.
Survivors of twin death often feel immense guilt. What they do with that guilt depends on the person, but often it pushes them to become larger than life to prove their worth. Elvis Presley had a stillborn twin.
Don’t be average, a voice says. Be exceptional. I’ve repeated this mantra without actually saying it for as long as I can remember. Before words, I danced it. It is like a beat in my body, the tempo of my pulse.
The average woman, I thought, was jealous and passive: the sappy romantic, the cheated-on. I didn’t question these received ideas; I just acted against them.
If I was average, how could Eric love me? How could he even pick me out of the corps de ballet, the tiny speck I’d been on the fuzzy VHS tapes of my adolescence? I nearly was invisible.
Instead of drifting back into the corps of women, I decided to cast myself as something else: the unfazed, the cool girl. Or not even the girl, as I had begun to disassociate with that term too. “There’s only one girl in the creative department,” someone at the agency had said of me, “and I mean, she’s not really a girl.” As sad as this statement seems now, I took it as the highest compliment.
What was I, if I wasn’t a woman or a girl? A sylph, perhaps? Part of this world, yet also above it? But no, the sylph is too ethereal, too romantic. I would be the automaton of The Rite of Spring. I would be modern. A superior human who wasn’t bogged down by emotions.
Ethan and I were shooting a commercial on a soundstage when I felt a strange itching on my spine a few inches above my waist. I reached my hand around and felt a small raised lump.
“Can you look at it?” I asked Ethan, lifting the back of my sweatshirt. “Is it red?”
“Yeah,” he said, running his finger over it. “It’s like a flat red bump. Maybe a spider bite?”
I didn’t think so because I’d been wearing three layers of clothing all day as it was freezing on the darkened stage. I continued to finger the lump over the next couple of hours until it was time to go home.
By the time I got home, I also had a strange feeling in my ribs, kind of like a stitch in my side, as though I’d run a race or pulled a muscle, even though all I’d done that day was sit. I wanted to call Eric but it was impossible to reach him. There was no cell reception at the residency, and he could only access Wi-Fi in the library where he went once a day.
; I called my father instead, glad to have a reason to speak to him directly. Nearly all of my phone calls home were to my mother, who relayed the salient details of our conversations to him. My relationship with my father had never been incredibly verbal. It was the care he took when examining my lumps and bumps that made me feel loved and connected to him. He once drained an infected wound on my head, a wound I’d gotten after a piano bench leg had given out while I was standing on it, trying to kill a spider. The scab had finally fallen off, but underneath it lay a tender squishy slug, which burst the moment he injected my scalp with novocaine. My mother had acted as scrub nurse, cleaned the puss off my bedroom wallpaper. I remember this scene as a kind of slapstick comedy. It was funny and tender, not gruesome. I had put myself into his hands and he had taken care of me while my mother stood at a certain remove, doing what was necessary. It was the opposite of my parent’s usual roles.
“If you draw a line from the lump on your back to the pain in your ribs, are they at the same latitude, so to speak?” my father asked.
I traced my finger from the spider bite to the rib pain and sure enough, they matched.
“I think you might have shingles,” he said.
Shingles sounded like something you’d get at a hardware store rather than something on your body. I imagined myself in a tube dress of asphalt ones, modeling them on the red carpet in some kind of avant-garde fashion statement.
He told me to get to a doctor as soon as possible because if I took Valtrex within the first seventy-two hours I could shorten the duration of the outbreak. I was mortified. Valtrex and outbreak: these were herpes words. I heard the voiceover from the advertisements for the drug in my head.
Vanishing Twins Page 7