Vanishing Twins

by Leah Dieterich

  The character of Llorarita had come to me while Elena was visiting. We had gone to see friends of hers from film school who’d just had a baby and were living in a trailer on their family’s ranch in Ventura County. We cooked outdoors and listened to coyotes, and the mother told me the story of the baby’s birth. I cried silent tears and hoped they might go unnoticed in the dark. I didn’t think I was the kind of person moved by these sorts of things. The mother saw them first. Llorarita, she said, warm and soft, caressing me with this moniker. Elena smiled and nodded and stroked one of my cheeks with the back of her hand.

  In the novella, I imagined that Llorarita could quench the thirst of an entire city during a drought with only her tears, but she was tired of how much people needed her to cry. She couldn’t cry at the usual things, either—only at books and movies, at architecture. She’d fallen in love with a woman who didn’t try to catch the droplets that fell from her lashes even though she was parched. But in the end it became clear that this new lover needed her tears too.

  Elena sent me another cryptic message, this time via email. She said she wished that she, Eric, and I could each be like a single die, rolling a one. Each of us having equal status in our relationship. Despite Eric’s warning about individuality being a capitalist trap, I liked the thought. I wanted to be a single die.

  I went to a hobby store and purchased three loose dice in primary colors. Dice is a conjugation of the verb decir, which means to say in Spanish, and although I had known that before I met Elena, I’d used it more with her than I had anywhere else. Como se dice? How do you say? I was hoping the dice would tell me something.

  That night, I set up a video camera and filmed the table as I threw them all at once to see if I could roll three ones. I shook the dice in my hand and tossed them out.

  1, 3, 5

  2, 5, 6

  3, 1, 1

  6, 3, 4

  2, 2, 2

  4, 6, 1

  I rattled them in my loose fist, and threw them again and again and again. My body cramped, but I kept going until it happened. After fourteen minutes, I rolled three ones.

  I sent the entire excruciating video to both Elena and Eric, even though I wasn’t sure what it meant. It was the first time I’d emailed them both at the same time.

  How could she have you equally without you leaving me? Eric asked. I had already tried to figure out this math, but could not.

  In addition to the dice analogy, Elena had mentioned wanting to come to LA for a longer period of time; she’d rent her own apartment instead of staying with me. How do you feel about that? he asked. My first impulse was to think about how he’d feel, because the answer was more obvious. Instead, I pushed past my telepathy with him and thought about what I really felt.

  I’m realizing it’s more than I want, I said, and was surprised by the relief of admitting this. I had assumed that giving up on my radical, sci-fi ideas about relationships would make me feel like a failure. Instead, I felt like a human rather than an automaton.

  Good, he said, because it makes my stomach flip.

  I didn’t want less of a relationship with Eric than I already had. I didn’t want to risk throwing away the ten years of work we’d done together—work I felt most people wouldn’t have bothered to do with me. A relationship of three equals was out of the question for him, and despite the theatrical satisfaction of my dice throwing, I didn’t know how to make it work either. Still, I hoped there was some other arrangement, some other way, because I didn’t want to let Elena go. I felt twinned with her and wasn’t ready to divide, to separate, but the most I could offer her were quick trips, glimpses of each other, and if that wasn’t enough, I didn’t know what else I could do. Sorry, I said to Eric, I’m talking this out like I’m saying it to her. I knew he was annoyed that I wouldn’t swear her off completely, but he didn’t say so.

  It’s good to rehearse, he wrote.

  In ballet I had always liked the performance, but never the class. The show, but not the work. But here I was, going over it again and again, sweating it out, trying to get better. Maybe I was evolving.

  That evening, Elena’s image materialized on my screen. I didn’t recognize the wall behind her. It was bare, and the round table where she sat was also foreign. “Where are you?” I said.

  “Madrid,” she said, swallowing the final d completely. Her tone was that of a cop or detective on a television show. He’s dead, the actor says. Casual, but hoping to shock at the same time.

  “¿Por qué?”

  “Working on my film en casa de mi hermano. Needed to get out of London.”

  It was the film she’d started working on when she stayed with me. It was about immigration, but also about another of her impossible loves, the one before me, who’d been sent back to South America after her student visa had expired. It would be animated, like her first.

  She lit a cigarette, squinting as she took a drag on it, and exhaled smoke, glaring at me. This gaze made me fidgety. I was conscious of my own image on the screen, the small picture-in-picture in the larger video chat window. I put my eyes back on hers, but trying to meet her gaze with the webcam was always difficult.

  “What?” I said to her stare.

  She shook her head slowly. Then she stopped. Kept smoking, kept staring.

  I squinted back, mocking her serious face. I thought it would lighten the mood, but it did not. She took another drag of her cigarette.

  “Come to Spain,” she said. “I’ll work, and you can write. I’ll take care of you.”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t leave my job.”

  “You wouldn’t be leaving forever. You’d just be coming here for a little while. You’re too good to waste your time forever in advertising.”

  These were compliments, but they didn’t feel particularly kind.

  “I can’t do that,” I said, glancing at my own face in the bottom right corner. Watching myself say these things made them seem more definitive. “That would be the end of me and Eric.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “It would. I can’t do it.”

  “It’s not that you can’t do it. It’s that you won’t do it.”

  “Okay, fine,” I said. “I won’t do it.”

  We hung up shortly after that. There was nothing left to say, really. I closed my laptop, wandered around the living room, gazed out the windows. They were dirty and rain-stained even though it hadn’t rained in months, not since Elena had been in LA the first time, almost a year before, when there had been many days of thick, desperate rain. I wandered over to the front door, checking to make sure it was locked, as I often did when I was feeling anxious. It was, both the knob and the deadbolt. I leaned my upper back against the cool sturdiness of it. I slid down and got to my knees, slowly lowering my entire body to the floor. I turned my head so that one side of my face pressed into the carpet. If someone had seen me lying there, they might have thought I’d come home from a long day at work, put down my imaginary briefcase like a proper 1950s man, and said, “Honey, I’m home!” Then fallen, face-first, onto the floor, dead.

  I was not dead. But I did stay there a long time, breathing in the dirt and dust I’d tracked in on my shoes.

  Sometimes I did wonder: If suddenly I couldn’t support Eric, would I lose him altogether? Would he put up with my bullshit if I was also a struggling writer or artist, with no emotional or financial security to offer?

  Occasionally, it did feel difficult to support him—when I felt hobbled by work, when it ate up all my time and energy. I felt like I was taking care of everything. Who was taking care of me?

  I didn’t want to be taken care of by Elena. What I wanted was to be her. To be self-sufficient. She worked freelance jobs, and in between took long periods of time off to work on her films. It didn’t seem like tearing herself in two, the way I envisioned it would for me, to work in advertising and write books or
make movies on the side.

  The idea of allowing myself to be taken care of was beyond me. Cuídate. Take care of yourself. That was what Elena had said to me at the end of our last call.

  I tried to contact Eric the next morning but he wasn’t online until much later than usual. When he appeared, I was at work, so I instant-messaged to ask how he was doing. He said he was hungover.

  Me: What’d you get into last night?

  Eric: Oh brother . . . I took someone home.

  He only told me her first name. I didn’t ask for her last. I didn’t want to be able to look her up, worried about what I’d find. Instead I relied on what he would tell me about her.

  He said she was petite and that she lived in London. He said she had an accent and pale skin with freckles, dark brown hair, and breasts larger than mine.

  Much later when I mentioned these features to him, he seemed confused. He claimed her breasts weren’t particularly large, nor was her hair particularly dark.

  Did I make this up? Was I thinking of Elena’s breasts? Of their weight and softness? Confusing her translucent skin for the skin of this other woman?

  There are three things I know for sure: (1) She was a performance artist visiting New York for a weeklong festival. (2) The night they met, they got kicked out of a gay bar for making out. (3) They had sex.

  I hope that’s okay, he iChatted.

  It’s fine, I typed back. As I’ve always said, it’s up to you. I asked if he felt okay about it and he said that he did, especially now that he knew I wasn’t upset.

  I’m really grateful for your understanding, he said. You are too amazing.

  His compliments helped temper the feelings that were simmering deep inside. Something geologic was happening, but for now I could still put a stopper on it.

  Two strange coincidences. First: Like me, the performance artist had been a ballet dancer in her youth. Were we interchangeable? Different versions of the same person? Second: She currently lived in the same neighborhood as Elena. Maybe they were interchangeable, playing the same role in our relationship. I wondered how Eric and my trip to London might have been different for him, had he already known her. How it would have been different for me.

  We could start a commune there, he joked. Or at least take a visit together.

  I wasn’t interested in returning to London now that my relationship with Elena was over. I wanted to go to a country where they spoke Spanish, to continue to improve my skills. Elena and I had talked of visiting her friends in Buenos Aires, but I knew now that would never happen.

  She wants me to come to Istanbul with her, Eric said. She’s going to move there in a few months. It’s the new Berlin or something.

  I punctuated my responses with exclamations. Whoa! Oh wow! Haha! I wanted to be supportive in the way he had been with me. I wanted to look excited. And I was, at an atomic level. It felt like everything inside me was dividing and dividing. Like it was all going to come apart.

  The following evening, he told me they’d spent the day together, shopping for books and going to a lecture. A small part of me is worried about getting too attached to her, he wrote. We fit each other so well, and that’s rare, as you know.

  I did know. I tried to stay calm, acting like a coach or a big sister instead of a jealous lover, a role he’d never played with me. I tried to give him the tools I’d used with Elena. I told him how I frequently reminded myself that what I was feeling was new relationship energy, and that I was conscious of the need to balance it with the old relationship energy I had with him. The ORE, like the raw material you pull out of the ground. Sometimes you have to dig deep for the things you depend on: comfort and security.

  I don’t want to give that up for NRE alone, I said. Me neither, he echoed.

  As long as you still love me, I’m happy, I said. At this point.

  Of course, he said. I feel guilty having so much pleasure, though. How can one person be so fortunate?

  I too had felt this way, in disbelief about the abundance of love; guilty that I didn’t deserve it. But I got over it, I told him. Good to hear, he said, and laughed.

  Looking back, I might have described the feeling differently, less positively. Rather than abundance, I had felt surrounded by love.

  The more worried Eric seemed, the more worried I became. It manifested as a pain in my ribs, on the lower right side, the same little knives stabbing from within I’d felt when I had shingles. But no lesions came. I thought about the man who’d had a pain in the same place. The one who had his twin removed. My worry grew teeth and hair. It bit and tangled me.

  I needed reassurance that loving this woman didn’t make him love me less, just as loving Elena hadn’t diminished my love for him.

  I have an incredible time with her, he wrote, but it does change how I feel about you.

  Whoa! Wow! Ah! Ha!

  I mean, it doesn’t. Sorry, massive typo.

  I couldn’t believe he’d left off the n’t by accident. But I know fingers can move quickly, quicker than mouths can form words. I imagined her mouth on him. His hands on her. And of course, I wanted to know if it had been good. It was, he said. And I didn’t just want to know if it was good. I wanted details, I wanted moments, I wanted snapshots and sound bites that I could scroll through in my head, alone in my apartment. They helped soothe the pain in my ribs, which only went away when I lay on my stomach and masturbated myself to sleep.

  I always thought of her. An individual o to his individual e. Not fused like we had been for so long. Our ligature was fracturing.

  I cursed myself for being a hypocrite. I cursed myself for being weak and afraid. At the same time, I was grateful for the opportunity to learn my limits, because it was there in the outer reaches that I finally encountered my feelings. I wasn’t just afraid of being alone. I was afraid of losing Eric, and I told him so.

  But I wouldn’t tell him to stop seeing the performance artist. I felt I owed it to him to have this experience with her, even if, or perhaps because I found it so difficult. She was going back to London soon, so I resigned myself to struggling through her last few days in New York.

  I was also struggling with my desire to contact Elena. I wanted to tell her that I finally understood how she and Eric had felt, but I didn’t know what good it would do either of us. I don’t need to bring her into this crisis, I told Eric.

  Eric: Is it a crisis?

  Me: I knew you were going to ask that. My body is telling me it is.

  Eric: Then it is.

  I asked what his body was telling him about the performance artist. I think I need to be more honest with her. More open. He had told her he was married and that our relationship was open, but I sensed that he hadn’t talked much about it, or me. I reminded him that I’d never hidden my commitment to him from Elena.

  I know, he said. None of this is easy. Well, some of it is. My love for you.

  Those words gave me some relief. We decided we would regroup after she went home. By another strange coincidence, I was due to arrive in New York the day after she left. I’d had the ticket for ages. There would be no way for us to cross paths, which was fine with me. I wanted her to remain a ghost. She was more manageable that way.

  During the final days of her visit, Eric didn’t answer his phone very often. I lived those days in a kind of purgatory, hovering between fear and fantasy. Now that I’d severed my ties with Elena I had little to ground me, and I could only masturbate so much.

  Here is something that might have soothed me: Barthes says the lover’s anxiety is the “fear of a mourning which has already occurred, at the very origin of love . . .”

  He borrows this idea from Winnicott, who says fear of a breakdown is fear of a breakdown that has already occurred. This breakdown is always some kind of rupture with the mother, a primitive agony, and because it happens at such an early age, it is impossible for the baby to process. Losing a twin must produce the same cycle of agony.

 
Or perhaps it’s relief. “Don’t be anxious anymore,” Barthes counsels; “you’ve already lost him/her.”

  The night of my arrival, Eric and I had sex in his tiny Brooklyn bedroom, and I asked him to tell me everything he’d done with the performance artist. “Are you sure you want to know?” he said. I was sure. “Well, for one, she asked me to fuck her against a hard surface.”

  His bedroom door was open a crack, and I could see a table in the living room with a bright yellow Formica top. I held it in my gaze and imagined her/me being flattened against the cold, hard plastic. Asking for it.

  Eric had new undershirts. He’d always worn a crew neck, which showed under his buttoned shirts, and now he had three or four V-necks, which I noticed each time he got undressed.

  “When did you get those?” I asked.

  They’d bought them together while she was visiting. She said his chest hair was sexy.

  After being with Elena, I’d stopped shaving my pubic hair into the landing strip I’d started in college. That awful little Hitler mustache surrounded by sandpapery stubble. Elena’s was natural, so I let mine grow. There was comfort in matching, and I realized the pleasure that could be had from hair matted down by wetness touching other hair matted down by wetness.

  She also made me less ashamed of my mustache by showing me hers. She sent me photos of herself between waxings or bleachings, looking as sexy as ever. Con bigote, the subject line read. Her mother didn’t like it when she let her mustache go, she said. Their relationship seemed so easy to me, and I was reassured by the fact there were things her mother didn’t like. I still wanted to camouflage my mustache, but finding it sexy on other women was a step toward finding myself sexy.