Vanishing Twins

by Leah Dieterich

  I showed Eric pictures of Elena and my time in LA, touristy photos of scenic overlooks and city streets but also domestic tableaus of breakfasts, unmade beds, the contents of her pockets laid out on top of the dresser. I didn’t mean this to be hurtful. Keeping this evidence only for myself seemed secretive and selfish. Surely the guilt I felt was a signal that what I was doing was wrong. But instead of stopping, I decided to share, hoping that lifting the cloak of secrecy would make it right somehow.

  I thought there was an altruism to my sharing—that it would help him feel included. But it only repelled him. I had turned our magnet around.

  I was wearing Elena’s clothes. Tight, low-slung gray jeans from the men’s section that exposed the waistband of my underwear when I lifted the baggy shirt over my head as I changed my clothes before we went to dinner the first night.

  “Is that what you’re wearing?” he asked.

  “Is there a problem? It’s basically the same thing you’re wearing.”

  “That’s the problem,” he said.

  “Fine. I’ll change,” I said. But I didn’t want to change. Neither did he.

  Fall was turning to winter in New York and Eric felt exposed. Having lived in LA for so long, he didn’t have any warm clothes, so we went to a Scandinavian clothing store near his studio where he’d seen a wool jacket he wanted my opinion on. I liked it. I’d only seen Eric in snow jackets in Colorado, and the wool peacoat transformed him into someone else. A steely, Nordic European.

  In the women’s section of the store, a modest black dress caught my eye. Sensible cotton with a slight sheen. It was knee length, with a high neck, long sleeves, and an appliquéd rectangle of ivory lace on the chest. Feminine, but not sexy. It showed nothing. I commented that I liked it, but I meant in an objective aesthetic sense, not necessarily for myself.

  Perhaps I said it out loud to test us. Despite my new look, I could somehow picture myself in this dress, this strange costume. If Eric also liked it, I would buy it and wear it that week in New York and everything would be fine between us.

  He did like it. I too needed warm clothes while visiting, we reasoned, as we brought it to the register. At the last moment, he added an overpriced black sweatshirt that I’d also been eyeing. He looked great in it—it reminded me of a black-and-white photo of him from before we’d met. He was in a baggier sweatshirt with a skateboard logo on the front, his hair cropped close to his head, smiling bigger than I’d seen him smile in any other photo, his blond hair all shine. It had never been that short since we’d been together and I always imagined how it might feel to touch it when I looked at that photo. It seemed like it would be soft. Like a pet.

  Eric and I walked hand in hand down the street, and a woman with wavy black hair stopped him to say hi. “This is my partner,” he said, gesturing to me.

  “She’s in the program,” he told me a few blocks later, as we stopped to look in the window of a Victorian-style ice cream parlor.

  “I noticed you called me your partner,” I said.

  “Yeah, I’m trying it out.”

  Partner was the accepted term at the Whitney for the many participants who were queer and even for some of the straight ones who were married. I think Eric was embarrassed to call me his wife around his new peers.

  I liked that he was trying out partner. For one thing, partner felt more gay, and also, the terms husband and wife had felt too old for me when I’d married him at twenty-three. I’d liked girlfriend and boyfriend better.

  People use the word fiancé to describe the person they are going to marry, but I’d rejected the term. I’d felt that women used fiancé as a way to brag about having found a mate. These were the same women who ran around thrusting their engagement rings out at people. Begging to be seen. Begging to be recognized as having won a prize or passed a test. Now I realize they were just happy.

  I’d paused my communication with Elena while I was in New York in an effort to direct all my attention toward Eric. I’d told her in advance I’d be doing this, and she said it made sense. But even when I wasn’t talking to her, she was there in song lyrics at coffee shops, in lesbian haircuts on sidewalks.

  At the end of my trip, at the gate at JFK, I got a long email from her with the subject line Strict Diet.

  She had written to me all five days I’d been gone but had disciplined herself not to send the messages. Instead, she saved them into one long email and sent it fifteen minutes before I took off. Her timing and control amazed and frightened me.

  I miss you badly. Need to find a way of not thinking of you every minute. You are having your time with your husband and there is no space for me, which is totally understandable . . . but that thought is poisoning my head. Knowing I’ll never be your priority kills me today.

  I didn’t have to smoke these words. They found their way inside immediately and burned in my chest, drew heat to my face, echoed in my ears. There is no space for me. There is no space for me.

  She was right, but I couldn’t admit it to her yet. I thought confirmation would only hurt her more. I couldn’t quite admit it to myself, either, because I wished it could be otherwise. That there could be infinite space. That no one would be edged out. Before the flight attendant made me turn off my phone, I typed her a message.

  There is space for you. In the gaps of my broken Spanish. In the back pockets of your jeans I’m wearing. There is space in the empty seat across the aisle on this flight; the middle one, between the man in A and the woman in C, who can’t seem to open her tiny bottle of wine. If I were filling that space, I’d use my strong hands to help her on her way to getting drunk.

  I’m good at opening things.

  Zeus said that if the humans didn’t behave after he divided them, he’d have to divide them again, leaving them each with only one leg to hop around on. This division wouldn’t have fazed me back in my ballerina days. I was pretty good on one leg. When I did pirouettes in class, sometimes I could complete seven rotations atop my tiny satin pointe shoe tip.

  I didn’t need Zeus to cut me in half, though; I was doing his job for him. I had one foot in Eric and the other in Elena, doing the splits.

  In ballet, the more flexible you are, the better, but sometimes being too flexible signals a connective-tissue condition that makes you more prone to injury.

  That wasn’t me, people say. That must have been my evil twin. I want to believe it was my evil twin who brought Elena to our house while Eric was away. The evil twin who told her she would never come before him.

  I did those things. Does that make me the evil twin?

  I want to believe in evil twins because that means there are good twins too. I might glimpse mine in a crowd and chase after her, or I might literally run into her on a city street, our identical exteriors colliding and cracking open, the badness and goodness inside each of us mixing.

  At the office, Ethan was frazzled after my weeklong absence. Normally I did most of the interfacing with my boss. Contrary to what I’d heard about women in business, my boss was more willing to hear my opinions than those of men. I think he saw other men as competition, even if they were his underlings. His inability to see me as a threat made him more open to my opinions. Or maybe he just respected me more than he respected Ethan. Whatever the case, when I wasn’t there, things were more difficult.

  Ethan had a lot to juggle. He was an adult with a job, a marriage, a mortgage, children. David’s lack of respect was getting to him. He was outgrowing the supportive but infantilizing nature of this full-time employment but he wasn’t ready to give up the job.

  He thought a Volkswagen camper van might be the solution. We were in advertising, after all. Even though we were the architects of these empty promises, we weren’t above them. Our vocation had soaked into our subconscious, leading us to believe that something we purchased could cure us.

  He could use the van to escape, to get back to nature, to take his kids camping at a moment’s notice, the way his parents h
ad done when he was growing up. He was looking for a 1996 model, the last year VW made them.

  When he found the one he wanted on Craigslist, we snuck out of the office together to see it, on the pretext of “concepting off-site.”

  The van was gray, and German in its boxiness and ingenious use of space. There was a foldout table and a hot plate hidden under the seat that plugged into the cigarette lighter. The camper top popped up to create a sleeping loft. My childhood camping dream: a whimsical tent inside a vehicle, safe from bugs and snakes.

  The man selling it thought we were a couple, because what else are a man and a woman, roughly thirty years old, looking to buy a van and talking about how the kids will like it? It felt strange to have someone assume this about us, oddly like a betrayal to Eric. But it felt innocent at the same time, to let the unspoken assumption go unresolved.

  The van drove well. Ethan liked it, and I did too. He told the man he’d be back with a cashier’s check to buy it, and I felt sad that it wouldn’t be mine too.

  “We can concept in it!” he said. “We can start a mobile ad agency and travel around the country in the van, working jobs here and there.”

  “Let’s do it,” I said.

  In the space between his suggestion and my reply hung the sorrow of knowing that the reality was so much more complicated than the fantasy. We laughed. What else could we do?

  I’ve thought several times since you left that you have a kind of sadness about Elena, Eric wrote. I told him he was right, that it upset me to know I was responsible for other people’s suffering, or their happiness, for that matter. I was talking about both of them.

  That’s what it is to connect with someone, he said. At least that’s part of it. If I gave you no happiness, what would be the point of our relationship? It was obvious but true. And despite some difficult moments during our visit, I got a lot of happiness from him. In our silly talk, our sex. The art he exposed me to. The way I could completely relax while he led me around New York, a city he now knew better than I did.

  I was tired of depending solely on you for my happiness, I said. It felt too dangerous. I thought if I spread myself around I could be more independent. But that has its inherent problems too. More people to disappoint.

  At the Whitney they’d been reading Marx, and Eric talked about how the capitalist drive for individuality and self-improvement are meant to make people feel alienated and unhappy so they’ll consume more.

  What’s the answer, then? I said, slightly annoyed that he was filtering our experience through this lens and intimidated because I knew nothing about Marx.

  I don’t know, he said, but I do know that withdrawing from your feelings and trying not to be affected by others won’t make you . . .

  Me: Self-sustaining?

  Eric: Whole.

  Well, if that’s the case, we should all be fine with the open relationship, I wrote, knowing it was a ridiculous thing to say. We both laughed our textual hahas. If only it were that easy, I said.

  I know, he said. It confuses me to no end. But I like puzzles.

  He hadn’t lost his sense of humor even through all of this. It made me miss him.

  We were shooting a commercial at a beach in Malibu, just a few miles up the road from our office. This was the beach where they shot Planet of the Apes, we were told, and it was often used as a stand-in for the French Riviera. We sat in the new van, our water bottles making long black shadows on the foldout table. The sun was setting over the ocean, the offshore winds grooming the gentle waves into curling-iron barrels. Out the back window of the van there was a different scene—a host of production vehicles, tall and white, carrying metal C-Stands, costumes, lights, and miles of heavy electrical cables, coiled like snakes, or covered by portable speed bumps so no one would trip while walking through the set.

  The fantasy of concepting in the van had become a reality, if only occasionally, when we were on location and needed a quiet place to work. On normal days we still went to Swingers, and over plates of scrambled eggs or tofu chilaquiles wrote commercials for hamburgers and cars. Violent video games and flat-pack furniture. It was both easier and harder to concept in the van. It was quieter than the diner, but the beauty of the beach was distracting.

  The perpetual motion of work was like being in the ocean. There were waves of TV briefs and radio assignments and billboards and endless social media updates that needed to be written, presentations that needed to be made to bosses and clients, revisions, sometimes complete do-overs, and, finally, approvals. Then there were commercial shoots that needed to be prepped, shot, edited, color-corrected, mixed, and shipped to TV stations. You’d paddle toward these waves, knowing if you didn’t come at them with all your speed and strength, you’d inevitably run into the wave head-on, just as it was breaking, and be pushed down to the bottom of the seabed. And then you’d swim to the surface, grateful for that trusty, buoyant surfboard: your partner, leashed to your ankle. But as soon as you pushed the wet, matted hair out of your eyes, you’d see another wave coming toward you. And you’d be tired and you wouldn’t want to keep going, but you’d have to, because you didn’t want this to be the end. You didn’t want this to be it. You had loved ones at home who needed you, who depended on you. And you weren’t ready to die anyway, not like this, in the ocean, at work.

  “Are you going to the desert soon?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but I wanna take the boys to Death Valley. I’m sick of Joshua Tree.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t leave with all this shit going on right now, but I’m dying to have a break.”

  It had only been a month since my trip to New York, but I needed one too.

  “What if we just left?” I said. “What if we just drove off together right now and went on an adventure and didn’t tell anyone where we were going?”

  Ethan didn’t reply. He was looking out the window at the place where the director and the camera were.

  “I mean, Eric wouldn’t know I was gone anyway, as long as I called him every now and then.”

  “Should we be paying attention?” he said.

  “We’re fine. They’re not gonna start shooting until the sun gets lower.”

  His phone rang and it was his wife. He slid open the side door of the van and jumped out. I watched him walk slowly around the parking lot while he talked, unreasonably irritated that he took her mundane calls more seriously than our fantasies.

  I imagined driving north on the Pacific Coast Highway toward Big Sur, or east toward Death Valley, but it was no fun imagining it alone. I wanted Ethan to build on the story with me, like an exquisite corpse. I wanted to pass it back and forth and see it get wilder with each iteration. I felt safe within the boundaries of this narrative, but maybe it didn’t feel that way for him.

  I had stopped wearing mascara when I met Elena. I was tired of the way it made me look like a sad clown when I washed my face, and I’d admired the way she didn’t try to make herself more beautiful with makeup.

  Still, I was obsessed with Ethan’s lashes. They were thick and dark—the kind of eyelashes women say are wasted on men. Sometimes I stood over his shoulder when he wanted my opinion on a design or layout, and looked down onto his lashes, fanned out at the edge of his lids like tiny black combs. I imagined kneeling down and turning his chair toward me, our faces close, so I could lay my lashes on top of his, moving ever so slightly to the right or left, until they clasped together like hands in prayer, the tiny hairs interlocking in a black-brown boy-girl eye zipper. We’d blink a kind of handshake, like the butterfly kisses children give, but deeper.

  Elena had stopped sending daily pictures of herself and chatting with me online. She had made herself invisible. I missed the days when I could access her just by clicking her name. Often I didn’t even get the chance to do so. I’d open my computer and she’d pop up in a window almost immediately. Hola profesora, I’d say. Hola linda, she’d reply.

  It
drove me mad, not knowing if she was there and hiding, or gone completely. I tried to follow her lead and respect her feelings, to give her space. I didn’t try to communicate; I waited. She only texted when the moon was full, and again when she was getting her period.

  La sangre viene, was all she wrote, and I responded in kind. At first our sangre came at the same time, as though we were injured, waves of blood cresting on our shores. It was comforting to think of her, across an entire continent and ocean, with the same bloated belly, the night sweats, the same red in the toilet. To feel that we were under the sway of the same celestial body. By the next month, the orbits of our menstrual cycles were no longer in sync.

  We stopped talking about our periods and talked only about the moon, predictable and distant.

  A book arrived in the mail. A hardbound copy of Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vila-Matas, with a note from Elena. Go to page 234, it said, and I did.

  [Pineda] produced cigarette-paper from his pocket and without pausing wrote a complete poem . . . which shortly afterwards he made into a cigarette and calmly smoked.

  When he had finished smoking it, he looked at me, smiled and said:

  “What matters is that you write it.”

  I hadn’t even started my rolling-papers novella. I’d never had idle hands. I’d been too busy juggling her and Eric. When she’d been staying with me, I’d wanted to film her smoking, so the day before she left, I had scribbled a possible first line on a single rolling paper and asked her to smoke it.

  They call me Llorarita—“the little crier” in Spanish.

  She’d been seated at the same table where I’d photographed her the summer before, looking out the window at magic hour. I waited all day for that particular light, warm and cool at the same time. The smoke exhaled from her mouth was white against the shadows on the wall behind her. In my haste I forgot to offer her the ashtray and her ashes fell directly on the table.