Tizzie was wearing a dark blue, double-breasted pinstripe suit. She did not have on a blouse as far as Jude could tell, which afforded him a perfect view of her collarbones and the pearl necklace. He had to admit, she looked good.
But he was here for work, he reminded himself.
"How do you explain the findings when it comes to personality?" he asked. "The fact that twins who are reared apart can turn out to be so similar."
"It's complicated. The literature's confusing. There was a seminal article by Bouchard in 1988, which set the groundwork. Basically, it compared identical twins raised separately and identical twins raised together, and concluded there were no substantial differences — they share more or less the same cluster of personality traits."
"There you go again — defying common sense."
"It gets worse. There are some studies that suggest that twins raised apart are actually more alike than twins raised together."
"More? How's that possible?"
She chuckled, took a deep sip and put her glass down.
"The best guess is that twins raised together sometimes go to great lengths to be distinctive, to appear more different than they are. They want to carve out their own identities, which is only natural. The emotional dynamic between twins growing up together is more complicated than we can ever imagine."
"But it's paradoxical. How can twins who haven't even laid eyes on each other until middle age be more alike than ones growing up in the same household? That contradicts what common sense tells us — that character is forged by experience, by family and upbringing."
"I admit it's a lot to swallow. Can it be that all that stuff — families, home life, schooling — doesn't really carry much weight in the final analysis? Doesn't it matter whether we have parents who love us uncritically or freeze us out, siblings who support us or undermine us, grandparents who pass on traditions and values or who are in the grave? Doesn't any of that shape us irrevocably?"
"It has to. I have to think two people in the same environment have a better chance of turning out similar. Think of all the influences — going to the same kindergarten, hearing the same Sunday sermons, being subjected to the same mother hugs and the same whacks of the belt from dad. Doesn't all that count?"
"So you'd think," she said. "The alternative is that all that is minimal in terms of forming our character. In a determinative sense, who we are depends upon other variables."
"Such as?"
She sipped her wine. "There are two possibilities. One is that personality is much more genetically determined than we give it credit for, that it unfolds more or less on its own, like film pouring off a spool. That's a kind of frightening hypothesis, because it doesn't allow much room for change or variation — what we like to think of as free will."
"And the other?"
"Simply that we haven't identified the formative variables. Maybe they are experiences so profound and basic to early childhood that they supersede the influences we usually point to. Maybe different ways of delineating the self. Or coping with loss or coming to terms with death. Or maybe something in the mind and the way it interacts with the outside world, something in how we process experience. Outwardly, things could appear very much the same for any two people. But inwardly, internally, the two might be living in two completely separate and disengaged universes. For them, life could never be remotely comparable."
Tizzie raised a finger and poked an ice cube.
"I don't know if you've known identical twins. Most people have. And the remarkable thing is that, though they do look the same, once you know them you can always tell them apart. They are truly very different as people. And of course there's one bit of good evidence to back that up."
"Which is…?"
"Which is that while it's clearly possible to fall in love with one twin, I don't know of anyone who's fallen in love with both. Spouses of identical twins make for a good talk show — how do you fight down your attraction to the other one, that sort of thing. But it doesn't happen much in real life. The more interesting question — from the point of view of what we can learn from research — is to look at it from the twins' point of view. Are identical twins, those raised apart, attracted to the same type of person?
"When it comes to their love lives, there are a lot of coincidences. They'll start dating about the same time, have the same sexual hang-ups and dysfunctions, get divorced a comparable number of times, even — if they're women — start their periods at the same time. But the choice of a mate is still elusive. The jury's out on that one. One study done at Minnesota seems to suggest that the spouses end up being wildly different. On the other hand, you hear some interesting stories of mental swapping — maybe it just means that love is still a mystery after all."
Jude looked at her glass, which was empty. She followed his gaze, gave him a quizzical nod, then caught the eye of the waiter and ordered another wine and another scotch.
"There's so much that's unexplained in this field," she continued. "I suppose that's why I like it. We're still at the stage of asking basic questions. Fraternal twins, for example — we all know that they happen when two separate eggs get fertilized at the same time. But did you know that even they share a number of physical traits, more than ordinary siblings — that their teeth are more symmetrical, for one thing. Why in God's name should that be true?
"In some cases, maybe they come from a single egg that splits before fertilization. We don't know. We don't even really know why twins occur to begin with — what is it that causes two eggs to drop or one egg to break apart. But we do know — now, at least — that it occurs much more often than anyone suspects."
"What do you mean?"
"Now that we have ultrasound to record early pregnancies, we've learned that double pregnancies happen many, many more times than the results suggest. About one in ninety live births produces twins. But, believe it or not, about one in eight of all pregnancies start out with twins."
"That's amazing."
"It is. You talk to gynecologists these days, and you hear some interesting tales. One day a woman comes in, he examines her with ultrasound, and she's bearing two tiny embryos. A month later, she's back and there's only one."
"The other one died."
"Right."
"So a few of us had brothers or sisters in the womb we never even knew about."
"More than just a few. Estimates are that between ten to fifteen percent of us so-called singletons began life in utero with a sibling snuggling up to us or fighting with us or kissing us — all of which goes on there, by the way."
"We're just the ones who won out."
"Yes. The great Darwinian struggle. It begins with the sperm swimming up to the ovum, but it doesn't end there. It goes on during pregnancy."
"Incredible."
"But true. It's been happening since time in memoriam, but of course no one ever realized. One week the mother-to-be has a little extra blood, doesn't think much of it, and that's it — it's over before it's even had a chance to start, so to speak. There's a word for the phenomenon."
"What?"
"Vanishing twins."
Jude wrote it down.
"Vanishing twins. I like that. Talk about drama."
She looked at him intently and continued. "An awful lot of people have a vague notion that they might have had a twin somewhere along the line. Nothing they can pin down — just this sense that somewhere out there is — or was — someone they were incredibly close to. In a few cases, they turn out to be right — unbeknownst to them, a twin was separated out and reared somewhere else. In the other cases… who knows? Maybe a prenatal memory. There's no reason your brain can't register something inside the womb as well as outside.