A few years ago, I was playing the messages back on my answering
machine justas my husband, Jeff, was coming into the apartment. He heard
a familiar voice and ran for the answering machine.
"It's Phil!" he yelled, shrugging out of his coat. "Pick up the
phone. Phil's calling."
Only it wasn't Phil. It was Phil's identical twin brother,
Jeff.
"Oh, it's me," my husband said sheepishly. Sheepish in the sense of
Dolly, the cloned sheep.
When I was first dating Jeff, the prospect of marrying an identical
twin seemed magical. Jeff spoke of his brother as if he were talking
about himself, almost as if he could bi-locate and live two contrasting
yet mutually enriching lives. Jeff worked at a literary agency in
Manhattan and loved boy fiction, thrillers, and horror novels, while Phil
was overtly spiritual, editing a journal dedicated to the study of myth
and tradition. When they were together they seemed to merge into one
complex yet cohesive personality. They talked like hyper-bright little
boys, each of them bringing equal heat and erudition to Stephen King and
esoteric teachings, baseball, and the possibility of spiritual
transformation. They argued--and still argue--like Trotsky and Lenin,
desperate to define themselves as individuals, yet they define themselves
against each other. Jeff and Phil love their wives and children, but they
obey the orders they get from the mothership of their identical
DNA.
My husband and his twin brother live by E.M. Forster's admonition,
"Only connect " The pair e-mail each other at their respective offices
two, four, even more times a day. A few weeks ago, Phil wrote Jeff that
he was trying to decide his favorite 10 films of all time. He listed
Journey to the Center of the Earth, Star Wars, seven other boy classics,
and asked for Jeff's help thinking up a 10th.
"Phil and i decided that Jurassic Park is our favorite movie of all
time," announced Jeff the other evening at dinner" In the course of
dozens of soothing little dispatches Phil's movie list and Jeff's movie
list had become one.
My marriage to Jeff has locked me into a triangle. The bond between
these twins amazes and amuses me, yet it fills me with an unappeasable
longing. After all, unlike Phil's wife, Carol, who is an only child, I
was conditioned even before I was born to be with a twin. I am a
fraternal twin, a girl born 10 minutes after a boy.
"What do you get out of being a twin?', I asked my husband the
first day we had lunch. "What insight does it give you that's harder for
single people to understand?"
"Trust," said my husband. "That pure physical trust that comes when
you know someone loves and accepts you completely because they are just
like you are."
I knew the primordial closeness he was talking about. As tiny
premature babies, my brother Steve and I used to cuddle in the same crib
holding hands. My earliest memory is of being lifted up high and feeling
incredible joy as I gazed into my mother's vast, radiant face. I was put
back down on a bIg bed. I remember sensing another baby lying next to me,
my twin. His presence felt deeply familiar, and I know I had sensed him
before we were born. For me, in the beginning there was the light but
there was also the son. In addition to the vertical relationship I had
with Mommy, I also had a lateral relationship, a constant pre-verbal
reassurance that I had a peer. I was in it with somebody else. This
feeling of extending in two directions, horizontal and vertical, made up
the cross of my emotional life.
At the age of 3, I remember standing in the grass on a hot, bright
day in El Paso, Texas, aware as never before that my brother was
different from me, not just because he was smaller then and a boy, but
because he was different inside. I loved him and felt protective towards
him, as I would throughout my childhood, lout I also felt the first
stirrings of rebellion, of wanting to go vertical in my identity, to make
it clear to my parents and everybody else that I was not the same as
Steve.
I began to relish the idea of not being completely knowable. I
developed a serious underground life. At 8, I twinned myself with an
invisible black panther I called Striker. At 10, I became a spy I made
cryptic notes in a notebook. I had sinister passport photos taken. I had
a plastic revolver I carried in a plastic attache case. You may call me
one of the twins, I thought to myself, but I come from a foreign country
that has malevolent designs on your own.
No one ever calls me and Steve "the twins" anymore, except as an
artifact of childhood. I tend to think of my birth twin, who is now a
Porsche mechanic and a big, outdoorsy guy who lives with his wife and two
kids in a small town outside of Boston, as the brother who was with me
when I was born, who shared space with me in the womb. I feel close to
him not because we are exactly the same, but because I still have bedrock
sensation and empathy for his life.
Tags:
admonition,
answering machine,
e mail,
identity,
jurassic park,
literary agency,
little boys,
marriage,
personality,
spiritual transformation,
twin,
twin brother
