Vanishing Twins

by Leah Dieterich

  “How come you never listened to me when I told you your chest hair was sexy?” I asked Eric as we lay in bed.

  “Did you ever?”

  “I always said it looked fine.”

  Maybe fine wasn’t enough. Maybe I didn’t have the chance to love his chest hair until he showed it. And maybe I couldn’t have loved it until I loved my own hair.

  “Well, anyway, I always told you to get V-neck undershirts, so I’m happy someone talked you into it. Even if it wasn’t me.”

  I slipped my hand under the neckline of the undershirt and felt the warmth of his body. It was no longer my body. I wanted it.

  “I’m a bit worried we’re trying to make our relationship more sexy at other people’s expense,” he said.

  I’d been so focused on what I could learn and become around Elena, I hadn’t thought about it this way.

  I was discouraged by my callousness, but I was also encouraged by the fact that we wanted our relationship to be sexy. That we weren’t content with its filial charms alone. His fling had reinvigorated my passion for him, but I worried that if it stopped, so too would this heat.

  Ethan was coming apart. He bit his fingernails down further. He got into arguments with people at work. One night he left in a huff and called minutes later. “Come with me,” he said. “We’ll start our own agency, be our own bosses.” He had a potential client he couldn’t tell me about yet. I called Eric and talked to him in a low voice from behind the glass door of my office.

  “But I thought you wanted to be less involved in advertising, not more,” he said.

  He was right. I fantasized about a day where I wouldn’t have to write commercials and could instead write books. Why was I even considering leaving the agency to join Ethan? I looked down at my arms and hands, and imagined all the tattoos I hadn’t gotten because Eric didn’t want them. Just as I had mistaken Eric’s body for mine, for a moment I had confused Ethan’s dreams for my own.

  Weeks passed and Eric still hadn’t mentioned anything about the performance artist, so I cautiously asked whether they had been emailing. He said she hadn’t contacted him since she got back to London.

  I was envious of her restraint, her lack of neediness. I would have emailed immediately. This was what I’d done with Eric, with Elena. I always dove in headfirst without checking the depth, the safety of the situation.

  There was an edge to his voice, an anger that told me he was hurt by her silence, so I suggested he reach out to her, to gain closure, if nothing else. He did, and she responded, saying that this kind of relationship wouldn’t work for her. She needed to cut it off, to cauterize the passion between them, before it became a gaping wound. These are my words, not hers.

  A mixture of relief and sadness coursed through me. We had dodged this bullet as we’d dodged Elena’s.

  But what if they weren’t bullets? What if they were tiny invisible arrows lodged somewhere in our bodies?

  We floated through the house of us, shutting doors but not locking them. For the moment things were quiet—there were no other lovers in the picture—and I wondered if this was an opportunity, or even a sign, that we should close the open relationship for now.

  I’d always assumed that if I suggested it, Eric would immediately oblige. He didn’t. Instead he seemed to want to prove to me that the open relationship didn’t work in an absolute way, so I wouldn’t try to reopen it when my fear subsided or I met someone else.

  Openness is not self-regulating, Eric wrote in an email. Adam Smith was dead wrong to think the invisible hand of the market would save us. A great deal of work must be put into keeping it on track, continually adjusting the terms of the openness. Maybe the Whitney has distorted my mind, but this makes sense to me.

  I was tired of these Marx references. They felt cold and impersonal, but I appreciated the elaborate lengths he was going to. We had iChat summits, three- and four-hour-long conversations about possible controls we could put on future secondary relationships, but we could not agree on what those might be, and negotiations broke down.

  Eric invoked another discipline: architecture. The world just isn’t built for this kind of relationship, he said. It’s not set up for it on any level. Even down to architecture.

  I was frustrated by this argument too. I imagined the suburban tract homes of postwar America—houses built for a mother, a father, and two point five children. We never wanted to live in one of those houses, I said. We had always wanted an Eames, a Corbusier, a Mies van der Rohe. We scoffed at people who said, “Those are beautiful, but how can you live in them?” I know, he said. But do you see what I’m saying?

  I couldn’t fight anymore. I felt exhausted. I give up, I said. Let’s give this monogamy thing a try. It sounded like a relief. But I didn’t want to be naive to think it would solve all our problems.

  Friends in monogamous relationships are always complaining to me too, you know, I wrote. Their relationships aren’t necessarily easier than ours. But I guess as long as we’re happy most of the time,“working it out” is the best we can ever do.

  That’s very Chantal Mouffe of you ;) Eric wrote. She has a theory called Agonism that says there’s no such thing as true consensus, but that the struggle for it should be seen as positive.

  These were the magic words, the theory that worked for me. I’d always seen struggle as negative, something to be hurried through on the way to agreement, a state I associated with a deep and pleasing harmony. I had forgotten that harmony requires at least two different voices singing two different notes.

  Agonism made me think of Agon, a ballet by George Balanchine. It is the second entry in 101 Stories of the Great Ballets. Agon was a collaboration with Stravinsky, written during the time when he was shifting his musical compositions away from the diatonic scale he’d used previously, and toward a more complex, atonal twelve-tone one.

  The diatonic scale has seven steps. Seven steps like our wedding vows. Five whole steps and two half steps for each octave. In a twelve-tone composition, all twelve notes of the chromatic scale are given more or less equal importance, which prevents the music from being in any particular key.

  The music in Agon is a struggle. The dancers don’t dance with it, per se, but around it, underneath it, through it. The music and the choreography also have equal importance and yet, somehow, they do not compete with each other for the audience’s attention. There is no backdrop, no sets, no props, just four men and eight women in practice clothes: black tights over white cap-sleeve leotards for the men, and black leotards over pink tights for the women.

  First, there is a dance for the four men, then for the eight women, then for all twelve dancers. Within the three main sections are smaller breakdowns, a pas de deux, a solo or two, but there is never a corps de ballet. No group of dancers who merge their bodies into one and become set dressing. The dancers own their bodies; even when they are together, they are individuals.

  The taboo of nonmonogamy had infused every sexual experience with a naughtiness that excited me, but I knew now that I couldn’t live with it in the uneven times. If Eric had someone else, I would always want someone else too. I’d constantly need to ground myself with the weight of others, unless I could find another way to increase gravity’s pull on me.

  And though the idea of monogamy was soothing, it wasn’t necessarily arousing. In my fantasies, I liked the idea of being tied down, but I couldn’t see this bondage as erotic.

  How would I hold on to my queerness, now that I’d let Elena go? I want to express that part of myself but don’t know how, in the context of our relationship, I wrote to Eric. I don’t even know what that means.

  I had no answers, and it nagged at me. I think we both worried it was impossible to do without dating a woman, which I didn’t even want to do at that particular moment. I just didn’t want that part of myself to be invisible, to disappear.

  I don’t know what it means either, he said. But it would be good for you to unravel tho
se desires, I think.

  I felt resistant to this unraveling. If I pulled the yarn at the hem of this desire, I feared it would reduce me to a messy tangle. I didn’t have faith that I could knit myself back together.

  “I’ve been seeing a psychoanalyst,” Eric told me. A man.

  “For how long?” I asked.

  “A couple of months.”

  I felt threatened the way I had when he’d told me about sleeping with the performance artist. I knew that he wouldn’t be having sex with his therapist, but I worried that the more he got to know himself, the less he would want to be with me. I tried to combat these fears by relying on an old technique. I copied him. But I didn’t buy myself more men’s clothes, or cut my hair shorter, or find a performance artist to fuck. I went online to search for my own therapist.

  In Intimacies, Adam Phillips says that “psychoanalysis is about what two people can say to each other if they agree not to have sex.”

  I sat in my new therapist’s office, noting the various volumes of Freud on the bookshelves and the fleece vest she was wearing. It reminded me of a vest my mother had.

  One of the first questions my therapist asked me was this: Can you picture you and Eric as close but separate? I could not. I told her I felt like I’d never even heard those two words in the same sentence. They echoed in my head all afternoon. They seemed important.

  I enrolled in a fiction class that took place at the teacher’s house in Hollywood. It was difficult to get there during rush hour, and to find the time to do the assignments and read my classmates’ work. I started staying up until one or two in the morning and getting up at seven, but it was worth it. I loved being around other writers. I loved having deadlines and an audience. And since Eric wasn’t living with me, I didn’t feel bad about being gone all day and then spending the rest of the night at my desk.

  For our homework one week, the teacher had us read a short story she’d pulled from The New Yorker. It was a series of statements written from different points of view. First person, second person, and first person plural. These shifts in perspective shaped the narrative arc of a relationship. She told us to mirror this structure and write a story of our own.

  Mine was about two characters based loosely on me and Ethan, and when I read it aloud in class, the teacher liked it, and said I should think about submitting it to some publications. I was skeptical. It wasn’t original. I couldn’t submit a rip-off.

  Instead, I showed it to Ethan. He’d put in notice at the agency, and we didn’t have much time left together. He’d refused to fantasize about running away in the van that day. He did want to hear what I’d written, though.

  We were closed up in our office late in the day, the skylights gone black. I reached for my backpack, glancing over at his sofa to make sure I saw his identical bag lying there, so I knew I was fishing around in my bag, and not his. There was frequent confusion about whose was whose. I’d unzip the small vertical pocket on the front of the bag, the one he called the vagina pocket, looking for my gum or earbuds, and find his wallet or the keys to his house.

  I pulled the papers out and made noise with them until he looked up from his screen.

  “Ready?” I said.

  “Yeah.” He faced me and crossed his legs.

  I put on my reading voice. Slightly more projection, a little slower than normal. Longer pauses between sentences.

  “I started getting avant-garde haircuts. I used the phrase ‘totally’ more than I was comfortable with. I relied too much on peanut butter for protein. I wasn’t concerned about how often I used porn to masturbate.”

  He laughed. I continued.

  “You hadn’t always not drank.”

  I stumbled a bit through that sentence. I couldn’t tell if using the double negative on purpose was interesting or just bad.

  “You used an X-Acto knife to pick at the eczema on your palm, and started shaving your head after realizing no pill was going to bring your hair back. No one had ever corrected you when you called barbed wire bob wire.”

  I didn’t look up, but I could feel he was smiling.

  “I was happy I could dress like myself on the first day of work, and that you were dressed like me too. We didn’t always agree on what was funny, but we made each other laugh by repeating the Swedish names of the chintzy furniture we were making ads for. We encouraged people to buy violent video games and eat fast food. I tried not to let it bother me. We came in early and stayed late, but we made an arrangement never to call each other on weekends unless it was an emergency. We decided it was probably better if we didn’t become friendly with each other’s spouses. You had been burned by this when you’d quit your last job.”

  New paragraph.

  “You probably wouldn’t have had a baby so early, but your wife had insisted she be a mom by age thirty. My husband and I didn’t have sex. You stopped calling stuff ‘gay’ after I said it bothered me. I always thought it was weird that you did that, especially since you seemed so gay yourself. Other people around the office thought so too, even though you were married. I could tell by the jokes they made, even if they took great pains not to make them in front of me. They knew I wasn’t one of them. I was one of us.

  “You tried to be a good sport. You participated in the running joke about the belt you once wore that was made out of a pink necktie. You were starting to win bike races then. I was obsessed with the idea of having a threesome. I accidentally replied all on an email. To nonadvertising people, I qualified what I did as ‘not real writing.’ You would suddenly ask me someone’s name whom we’d worked with for months.

  “You were totally exhausted. I was totally distracted. I could totally not stop saying totally. I began an open relationship, and you had another son. It’s so hard, but it’s so great, you know? That’s what we told people. We took my car everywhere because your wife always had yours. At work, people waited on us hand and foot. Can I get you a coffee? they’d say. What would you like for lunch? There were elaborate afternoon cheese plates. I felt guilty about it at first. You didn’t understand why. You’d never had a problem with entitlement.”

  He shrugged and smiled coyly.

  “I wanted to tell you I liked girls, so instead of telling you, I asked if you’d ever been with a man. I wanted us to be the same. You told me you had been with men, but you’d never really liked the sex, just the cuddling. I dated a few girls, with my husband’s permission, but I prided myself on not falling in love with anyone. I was so sure of myself. But then I met a girl who looked like a boy, and I wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

  “You had always helped your wife with her small-business ideas, even if you thought they had no potential. You designed pink-and-white business cards for the dog-walking service, a logo for the artisanal baby food delivery van. You liked this work. You were good at it. I told my husband if he wanted to go to art school, he shouldn’t compromise his dreams for me, so he moved to New York, and we said we’d stay together. I said I would keep working and support him.

  “When our boss tried to give us more money, you took it. I took some and asked for more time off. I wanted to travel. I wanted to write. We got our own office. We got a new title, Associate Creative Director, and were embarrassed when our boss told us to lord it over the others. You decorated your side of the office with furniture from the company we used to do ads for and charged it all to the agency. I still refused to buy a sofa for my apartment.

  “I developed a bad habit of buying shoes online and returning them immediately. I told my husband if he wanted to date someone else, he should. I don’t think he wanted to, but he did it anyway. He met a girl he really liked, and I was surprised at how much that excited me. But the excitement was not just sexual. There were stabbing pains too.”

  That was the end of a paragraph. I looked up to make sure Ethan was still with me. I didn’t know what he’d make of this next part.

  “At a certain point, we touched each other. It was whil
e we were shooting a documentary about the do-gooders who’d won the free-car contest. You stood behind me while we watched a woman talk about the dogs and cats she rescued, tears in all our eyes—the director, the cameraman, the sound guy. We were waiting for the moment when we’d surprise her with the SUV that had space for three large animal crates and a plastic interior that could be hosed down. I reached behind me and put my hand on the fly of your jeans, fingers pointing downward, lightly cupped. It was a joke, something silly, like from a movie, and I did it to make you laugh, but you couldn’t laugh because we were filming, and you didn’t move my hand. So I kept it there.”

  That was the end of a paragraph, but I kept my eyes on the paper and read on.

  “After the shoot, the crew piled into the van, and we took the way backseat. It was dark, and we each let one hand crawl over each other’s laps like spiders. The lighter we touched, the less it was really happening.

  “The next day at work, we started talking about it midconversation, as though we’d each already carried out the beginning in our heads.

  “ ‘As long as it’s only in public, but no one can see,’ you said, ‘I don’t think it’s so bad.’

  “ ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘As long as it never goes any further than that, it’s fine.’ ”

  I could feel Ethan’s eyes on me. “It’s funny,” he said. “I had a similar fantasy, but mine wasn’t that elaborate.”

  “Well, that’s why it’s my story,” I said. And read on.

  “You never wanted to sit at the communal lunch table at work, so I ate in our office with you. I stopped driving my car. We rode bikes together instead. We dressed alike more and more. I had cut my hair short by then. You said you liked it on me. You also liked it when I wore oxford shirts from the school-uniform section of the boys’ department. I liked that you liked these things, because my husband did not like them. It made it easier for me to like them when someone else did.