Jude bumped into him between the two doors of the men's room — Jude going out, Simons going in.
"So," said Simons with a smirk, which looked slightly grotesque at such close quarters, "now we know why you got that twins assignment."
"What? What are you talking about?"
But Simons had already disappeared inside, so that Jude had to wait for him outside in a busy aisle of the newsroom. He waited a long time — so long that he actually began pacing, which was usually all it took to set off rumors that a reporter was having trouble with a story.
Finally, Simons emerged, a flicker of satisfaction on his face that Jude was still there. Jude could care less — he needed to find out what Simons knew.
"So what do you mean?"
Simons feigned incomprehension. "Mean?"
"The twins thing. What in hell are you talking about?"
"Simply that it's obvious why you got it. Because you have a twin yourself."
Jude was too stunned to speak. He felt light-headed.
"If you don't have a twin, then I guess it must have been you in Central Park yesterday, rummaging through garbage cans. At least, that's what Helen said — Helen, in real estate news. She said he looked a lot like you. Except of course the way he was dressed — not up to your standard, apparently. She also said that he… I think I'm right in saying he instead of you… I mean, giving you the benefit of the doubt and all that—"
"Simons, so help me, I'm going to wipe that smile off—"
"All right, all right. Calm down. What she said was that he looked pathetic. Like a whipped dog was the expression she used."
Jude looked as if he was about to belt him.
"Look, take it easy. So it's not a twin. But you ought to know there's somebody going around who looks a lot like you."
Jude turned and walked away, but Simons made him look back with one last jibe.
"There, now, wasn't that worth waiting for?"
At noon, Jude ran into Betsy in the cafeteria. He had just finished consuming a mound of spaghetti, when he saw her pay the cashier and venture into what was euphemistically called the dining area, carrying her tray high before her as if it were an offering. He looked deeply into his peaches, but she spotted him and sat down directly across from him. He smiled, but not for long: what he read in her face was disconcerting — solicitous concern.
"Jude, tell me, are you all right? I mean, you would tell me if you weren't — true?"
She was thrilled. Only his total self-immolation could make her shine more brightly.
"Yes. I mean, I'm fine."
He did not ask why she was concerned — in fact, he had conspicuously not asked why — but he had a feeling that she was going to tell him.
"I've heard these strange things about you — Simons said you were roaming the streets like a bum. Foraging for food in garbage cans. If it wasn't you, it was somebody who looks like you. What's going on?"
It struck him that she fancied that she might be the cause of his misery — that he was a casualty of love. That would account for the sprightly tilt of her head.
"Helen," he said.
"I beg your pardon."
"Helen in real estate news. Apparently, she saw someone who looks like me, and she's been spreading these stories. I'm sorry to disappoint you, Betsy, but I really don't know anything about it."
"I see," she said, looking down her nose at him, almost as if he were rifling through a garbage bin right now.
In ordinary times Jude could have sloughed these encounters off. But they were getting to him. He was feeling a vague floating anxiety. It had started with that unsettling exchange with Bashir. Too bizarre. A man with a streak of white in his hair. The little Afghan had seemed so damn sure. And now all this talk of a doppelganger. What the hell was that about?
Jude did not use paranoid loosely. Being a purist when it came to language, he believed the word was bandied about too often in these conspiracy-minded days. But right now if someone had asked him how he felt — assuming, of course, that he would answer truthfully — he would have replied: "Paranoid."
Over the weekend — on Sunday — Tizzie and he had their first fight.
Saturday night, she had seemed distant and distracted while they were dining at a restaurant on Third Avenue. At one point, he saw her peer over his shoulder, her eyes widening before she glanced away. Jude turned and, looking through the window, he thought he saw someone, a man perhaps, or a shadow, sliding off into the darkness. Tizzie made light of it and said it had been nothing, really, just a horrible-looking man leering inside. She had not finished the main course, and they left soon after.
The next day, he was feeling ill and decided to stay in bed. Tizzie came over, letting herself in with the brand-new key that he had given her — to him a symbol of a turning point in their relationship, but to her little more than a convenience. She had not, he noticed without remarking on it, given him a duplicate of her key.
He was running a fever. She busied herself in the kitchen, making him soup and tea. When she brought it to him, he didn't want any. She tried to take his temperature; he resisted. She added an extra blanket, and he took it off. All her fussing bothered him — this female need to nurture — it seemed almost as if she were nagging. He snapped at her.
"What I really need is to be left alone."
She flinched. He saw a hurt pass across her face that quickly turned to anger.
With that, she spun on her heel and walked out, slamming the door.
He kicked himself: why the hell had he acted like that?
He called her later and apologized and she seemed to accept it, but her voice had taken on a cold tone, which was disturbing. He was bothered by how much it bothered him. They had known each other for scarcely two weeks and he felt — for the first time with a woman — that he cared for her more than she did for him. He wasn't accustomed to the seesaw turning that way up. Maybe he liked her too much, he thought — maybe that was why he couldn't accept her ministrations.
From the first, he had felt comfortable in her presence, able to speak his mind honestly and drop the poses that he had adopted with others. He discovered, with a bit of surprise at first, that she seemed to actually like him, and not some image of him, and he relished the candor this brought out in him. Maybe she could finally open him up, the way other women had said they wanted to.
But did she want to? That was the question. He had thought they were going great guns. If it was up to him, they would move in together, but he was loath to bring the idea up — new honesty be damned — because he sensed that she would not go for it. Something about her remained out of reach, inscrutable, and it fed a fear in him that her interest in him might soon flag.
Face it, he told himself, you are more involved with her than she is with you. He wanted to know everything about her — what she'd been like as a child, where she spent her vacations, how her day had been, what she was thinking. She was reticent to fill in the blanks. Some role reversal—he had always been the one accused of being unreachable.
And now it was the beginning of a new week and Tizzie was away on a trip — she had not even told him where she was going. He kicked himself again for acting like a jerk. When she came back, he'd have to do something especially nice for her.