Vanishing Twins

by Leah Dieterich

  “Are they contagious?” I asked, wondering who I’d gotten them from and who I might have given them to.

  “Not really,” he said, and explained that shingles was the chicken pox virus, which I’d had when I was five, lying dormant in my body and deciding to reawaken in a particular nerve. My shingles could give chicken pox to someone who hadn’t had them, but I couldn’t give shingles to anyone. You could only get shingles from yourself.

  I was concerned that it would be more than twenty-four hours before I could get a doctor’s appointment so he prescribed me the Valtrex on his own and I took the first pill that evening.

  I was glad I did because hours later the pain in my ribs was much worse, eclipsing the “spider bite,” which was definitely not a spider bite, but just the first of the shingles lesions. Smaller ones cropped up underneath my right rib. After examining me the next day, my doctor said I was lucky to have already taken the first dose of medication.

  “What does the pain feel like?” she asked me.

  “Like someone is stabbing me with little knives from inside my body.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “That is young for shingles, but if you’re under a lot of stress, it is possible to get them at any age. Are you under a lot of stress right now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “The usual amount, I guess.”

  On the internet I find a Japanese myth that says if star-crossed lovers commit double suicide, they get reincarnated as twins, but I can’t find a citation. I also can’t figure out if the rebirth as twins is a punishment or a reward.

  I saw Elena in 2-D before I saw her in 3-D. A flattened image. Alex had broken up with her girlfriend and invited me to an LGBT film festival, and we each chose a program to see. I picked a documentary about bisexual invisibility, and she chose a collection of lesbian short films. We just wanted to watch ourselves, I guess. Or we wanted to watch to see if we saw ourselves. Like standing in front of a filmic full-length mirror.

  Elena’s film was the first of the shorts program. It was an animated collage that mixed drawing, painting, photography, and film. The main character was a young girl growing up in a small Spanish town, with a squiggly line inside her belly that was giving her pain. She didn’t have any friends, and her classmates called her marimacho (Spanish for dyke). This slur appeared as letters on the screen. It was a silent film, punctuated by moments of despair—when she wanted to play with the boys but wasn’t allowed to, when she was made to wear a dress and didn’t want to. Later, a series of black dots appeared on a white background and an invisible pen connected them, drawing the outline of her new adult body, curvy with breasts. Her short black hair sat on top of her head, like the dot of a Spanish upside-down exclamation point, saying, ¡I don’t want this!

  Then, instead of a body, she was just an expectant face in a board game, the one where the object is to make pairs. A hand flipped up the tile next to her and it was a woman. They smiled at each other, thinking they’d won, but the match was no good, because the game only counted male-female couples.

  Again, her animated form floated in the ether of a white background. Now she was boyish, in a hoodie and jeans. The squiggly line in her belly grew bigger and knottier and she tried to compact it with her hands to keep it inside. The sound of static filled the auditorium. Finally she reached deep into the mess of the knot and pulled it out like a splinter. The tangle was gone, her abdomen flat and empty. Everything was quiet, and I took my hands away from my ears. She watched the limp lines she’d pulled from inside her lying dead on the ground. Then they rose into the air and flew away like the birds we all drew as children. She turned and walked away from the camera, and I wanted to follow her. But it was over.

  As the credits rolled, her name came up. Elena. That was it, no second name. Singular and self-assured. I applauded alongside everyone else in the darkness, acutely aware of the chair I was sitting on, of my hands touching each other. There was heat in my face. I had a crush on a cartoon. How silly was that? But really, this wasn’t the first time I’d swooned for a two-dimensional heroine. As an eight-year-old, I’d watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit hundreds of times, just to see Jessica Rabbit slink around, pouting a Billie Holliday song. She’d turned me on.

  “I am Elena and I come from Galicia,” she said during the Q&A after the films. Her accent filled the auditorium, amplified by the microphone in her hand. I hung on the lisp she made when she said “Galicia.” She sounded like a child.

  Elena looked exactly like her avatar in the film, high-contrast and luminescent. Her pale skin glowed against her orange tank top, and a flounce of wavy black hair slouched off the top of her head, exposing her ears, her chin, her neck. My own ears were obscured behind the feathery shag that hung past my shoulders. I ached for her naked ears to touch mine, and the weight of my hair to evaporate.

  Eric called from Maine. “You’ll never guess who I was dancing with last night,” he said.

  “You were dancing?” I said. The last time he’d danced was at our wedding.

  “Yeah, I love dancing now. Anyway, it was Janine Antoni! She’s a visiting artist this summer and she came in last night. She pulled up in a convertible and offered me a ride to the costume party in the fresco barn. She was dressed like Frida Kahlo.”

  Janine Antoni was the performance artist I’d told Eric about when we first met, ten years earlier. I couldn’t believe he was in her car, in the presence of that hair she had used to paint the floor. It’s not fair, I thought. It should be me in that car. But did I want to be the driver or the passenger?

  I miss performing, I’d often say. But maybe my definition of performance was too narrow. Maybe I was already performing without knowing it.

  “Coupledom is performance art,” says Phillips. “But how does one learn what to do together? How to be, once again, two bodies in public, consistently together, guardians of each other’s shame . . .”

  There was a sort-of kissing orgy last night, Eric wrote on iChat. A bunch of us went skinny-dipping and everyone was making out. I asked if the painter was involved. No, he said, I was mostly making out with this other girl, but two guys tried to kiss me.

  I was excited by this turn of events. Maybe we’re the same again, I thought.

  Now that I’ve tried it, I can definitely say it’s not my thing.

  I sighed audibly as I sat alone in the living room.

  More than anything, I was jealous of the skinny-dipping. I’d never skinny-dipped before, and I didn’t know whether he had either. It was something that by age twenty-eight, I felt I should have done. We were more uneven than ever.

  I sent Elena a message: I really enjoyed your film at Outfest. Just wanted to let you know.

  She responded: I’m in town for two weeks if you’d like to go for a coffee.

  I’d never felt an attraction to someone so androgynous, so much (as far as I knew from her film) a lesbian. She was someone Eric would certainly not be attracted to, so I wasn’t sure how to talk about it with him, because I only felt comfortable discussing the desires that he shared. With any woman I was interested in, there was still the vague promise of a threesome, but if the woman wasn’t interested in men, the possibility vanished, and with it my ability to be open about it. I thought in a perfect world that Eric and I would share everything—even lovers—and everything would be just and fair and same, and that sameness would keep us together. Elena didn’t seem shareable, but Eric was three thousand miles away, so I didn’t feel as much immediacy about his involvement.

  I was surprised when I walked through the saloon doors of the bar to see Elena sitting with someone else. She rose to greet me and we kissed on each cheek as the Spanish do. She introduced the other woman as Laura. I wondered if Laura was her girlfriend, and if she’d brought her as a statement. I asked how they knew each other, and she said they’d met a few years ago, at a film festival in France.

  “Laura had a very bea
utiful film there,” Elena said. Laura blushed and deflected the compliment in a way that made it obvious she wished they were girlfriends. Elena complimented a film I’d made a few months earlier that she’d seen on my website, and I did as Laura had done. I turned the conversation to Galicia, and mentioned a trip Eric and I had taken to a nearby region to install a show for an artist he was assisting. “So you’re married,” she said.

  “Yes. But he’s away for three months at an art residency in Maine.”

  “What is Maine?” she asked, and Laura explained that it was a state on the East Coast.

  I described the residency: fifty artists in the woods having sex with each other.

  Elena smiled, amused. “So, is he?” she asked. I told her not sex, necessarily, but other things.

  “We’ve had an open relationship for a while,” I said, “but I only date women.”

  “Does he date men, then?” she asked, as others had before. They wanted an analogy, a direct correlation, something that approximated fairness.

  Laura watched in silence as Elena described a girlfriend back in London. A fellow filmmaker, Russian, who was a bit crazy. “It’s bumpy, our relationship,” she said. “She wants it to be open, but I think I’m too jealous.”

  An hour or two later, after we’d parted ways, I got a text. I’m sorry I brought Laura along. I shouldn’t have. Can I see you again?

  The film Elena had complimented was something I’d made while Eric was in grad school. It was based on a correspondence I’d had with a boy in my high school French class. In other classes he was Mike, but in French he was Michel, soft and genderless to the ear. During our junior year, he studied abroad in France, and that was when I became interested in him—when he went away.

  It was a short film, two minutes long, and consisted of overhead shots of a tabletop, messy with French books and stationery, close-ups of a pen scribbling on paper, maps of Paris and New York, and of me reading a letter while reclining in bed, my face obscured by the paper.

  The voice-over was in French, like the letters we’d written. The narrator begins by saying that her French isn’t very good but for the purpose of telling this story, it’s necessary to use. She describes the arc of their pen-pal relationship, the way writing in French allowed them to say things they couldn’t have said in English. It was like wearing a mask; no one could see our eyes or our mouths. It was like our words belonged to someone else.

  The film ends with Michel’s final letter, a confession of love written after he returns home and the two have drifted apart or, rather, maintained the distance they had while he was abroad.

  I suppose you’d like to know if I responded, the narrator says. I didn’t. Like I said at the beginning: I don’t speak French very well.

  Though cycling and ballet both had moments of feverish action, the sprints and petit allegros that pushed you to your physical and emotional limits, Eric and I were really endurance athletes. Our training prepared us for the multiday stage race, the three-act ballet. We’d learned not to dwell on the pain in the middle of one of these, because it would only grow; it would only slow you down. Those who worked through the pain did not get dropped from the peloton, did not get substituted by an understudy waiting in the wings.

  So when we felt the particularly confusing pain of each other’s growth, we did what came naturally to us. We encouraged each other, the way we had done with our teammates and fellow dancers. Our best friends and fiercest competition.

  With text we clapped our hands mechanically and nodded our heads to the beat like cheerleaders. I told him about Elena, that she was Spanish, and liked my work. That’s great, he said. He told me the painter had given him a hand job.

  Me: Oooh!

  Eric: But it just . . .

  Me: No good?

  Eric: Yeah, it didn’t work so well.

  I didn’t know it was possible for a hand job not to work. He said it was partly that he’d been drinking too much, but mainly that her technique was not as good as mine. These compliments were key.

  Then we slept together on a yoga mat in my studio, he said, and quickly clarified that he meant actual sleep, not sex. You’re cute, I said. You and your yoga mat.

  The following night Elena invited me to join her at a bar in Hollywood where her cousin, whom she was staying with, was DJing. When I found her inside, it was still early, and the bar was not that crowded. We ordered drinks and leaned our backs against the bar.

  “So what are you doing here?” she said.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I recited the line back to her. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m here to watch my cousin DJ,” she said.

  “So am I,” I said, lying.

  She smiled, waiting for me to find my own line.

  “And to see you,” I said, taking a nervous sip of my drink. This satisfied her.

  I could hardly bear standing beside her. I wanted to eat her up, as people do with babies. I just wanna eat you up! they say, leaning into cribs. But Elena was an adult. A woman, even if it was easy to mistake her for a man.

  She resided so effortlessly between the masculine and the feminine. I wanted to follow her into that space because it didn’t seem written.

  Elena and I drove west. The moon was full, and part of Santa Monica had been shut down for an event on the beach.

  There was trash everywhere. It was legal for that one night to drink in the streets. We didn’t have alcohol with us, but we were already a bit drunk. We grasped each other’s hands as we descended the stairs of the parking garage, turned our heads at the same time, and kissed. Her sour smokiness mixed with the saccharine sweet of my gum. We walked to the pier, past the throngs of people, and sat down in the sand. We were side by side, hip touching hip, shoulder connected to shoulder. She fit her head into the crook of my neck.

  “You smell like books,” she said.

  “What kind of books?” I asked. There are two book smells. One is of old paper, slightly smoky, like the copy of Catcher in the Rye your dad read in high school and still has. The other smell is like cheese. There’s something about the glue they used in kids’ books, at least when I was young, that smelled like cheese to me. Read me a cheesy book, I’d demand at bedtime.

  We sat on the sand and Elena positioned herself behind me, her legs straddling my legs, and wrapped her arms around my waist. In the light of the moon we saw the shapes of the waves coming toward us.

  Eric told me he’d opened the door to his studio and a thin green snake had fallen from the doorjamb, skimming his face. Perhaps the snake was an omen, he wrote, because later, the painter had told him that she couldn’t be physical with him anymore. She had a crumbling relationship at home and had begun to doubt it even more when she compared it to the relationship Eric seemed to have with me. She can’t handle that I’m “happy,” Eric said.

  The quotes scared me. Little eyelashes coyly batting around the word. An ugly truth prettied up by mascara.

  Me: Are you?

  Eric: Of course. Those are her quotes.

  Me: Phew. I got a little worried.

  Eric: I couldn’t be happier, and as disruptive as this is, I’m glad we’re going through it.

  I agreed. I didn’t know exactly what “this” was, but it felt like a passage we had to go through, a narrowing before the expansiveness beyond.

  Offices with doors were rare in the open-plan creative workspace of the agency. It was a large warehouse with chic plywood half-cubicles that discouraged privacy. There were only four offices with actual doors and two had been empty since the account planners who occupied them had resigned. The offices remained empty because there was no one “senior” enough to merit them. Ethan asked if we could have the offices, and after a few days of deliberation, we were told yes.

  That weekend, we went to the agency to move in. Ethan bought a faux leather daybed from the cheapo furniture company we’d first been hired to do ads for, and picked it up in the a
gency’s SUV. We took down large pieces of paper hung on the walls by the previous occupants, displaying charts on market demographics and remnants of brainstorm sessions with phrases like NEW TASTE GRAZERS written in marker.

  It was only after I helped Ethan move the desk away from the wall dividing our offices that I realized it was not solid. It was two giant doors painted white like the wall. I turned the doorknob but it was locked, so I ran out the front door of Ethan’s office and into mine, unlocked the doorknob, and threw the doors open in a dramatic gesture.

  “Hello!” I said.

  “Hello!” he said.

  We never closed those doors again. I propped them open with doorstops, and after just a few days, I’d forgotten they were there. The only reminder that it had ever been “offices” instead of just an office was the double-wide doorframe in the middle of the room, which was just tall enough to curl my fingertips over and hang from when I needed to stretch my back.

  “Ooh,” Ethan would say as I hung there, the bottom of my shirt creeping up over my midriff. I never felt he was being serious. It was more like he was performing the role of a straight man who’d say ooh to my bare midriff.

  While the doors between us remained open, we closed the doors to the rest of the agency more and more frequently. Sometimes it was to keep the heat in. The building had many skylights, and once the sun went down, it got cold almost instantly. We kept the door closed so that the heat we built up couldn’t escape into the polished concrete expanse of the rest of the office.