“Liz had a conference with her lawyer.”
“Oh, dear,” she said, and sat on the other end of the sofa, half-turned toward me, her face and knees all giving me sympathetic study. “I know she’s my sister,” she said, “but I must admit she can be a trial sometimes.”
“And a judgment others.” On screen, Herbert Lom dispatched Cecil Parker on the cottage roof with Parker’s own cane. Trundle trundle trundle down the tile.
Betty continued to study my profile. “I’ve never seen you like this,” she said. “You know, quiet and serious.”
Quiet and serious. I frowned at the television screen, unable to think of an answer to that, and suddenly realized I was being quiet and serious.
“It’s strange about twins, isn’t it?” she said.
I turned away from Alex Guinness’s manic smile. “What’s strange?”
“They’re so alike, and yet they’re so different.”
Ah hah — profundity. It had been a while since I’d been Art in Betty’s presence, and with my other problems to think about it was hard to reach for the right responses. Bart, of course, would simply have agreed with her yin-yang statement by adding a platitude of his own, but what would Art say?
Wonderful. I’d forgotten how to make believe I was Art.
In the meantime, Betty had filled my silence with more words of her own. “Like Liz and me,” she said. “I know we look alike, but inside we’re so different it’s hard to believe sometimes that we’re even related.”
“I’ll go along with that,” I said. Discreet mayhem continued on the television screen.
“I bet it’s the same with you and Bart,” she said, and when I glanced at her again there was some sort of tiny glint in her eye. And was that the ghost of a playful smile manifesting itself around her lips?
And what have we here? My curiosity piqued and my interest aroused, I said, “You think we’re that different?”
“Well, I don’t really know, do I?” Now it was her turn to look at the television screen, and the expression of innocence glued to her face was about as realistic as a Dacron wig.
“You’ve seen us both,” I said.
A sidelong look. “Not the same way.”
I reached out my left hand and used my forefinger to tap a knee. “You interested in a scientific experiment?”
She faced me, the innocent look tilted askew by a crooked grin. “Whatever do you mean?”
“I’d like to know if you’re really different,” I said.
“I’m sure you’d just be disappointed,” she said, but the open smiling mouth and the sparkling eyes were saying, Come and get it, come and get it.
So I went and got it.
30
Suddenly, in the middle of the proceeding, the thought came to me, I am cuckolding myself! This was so startling that for a minute I wasn’t at all sure it would be physically possible to go on. However, I rallied, and I don’t think Betty noticed the slight sag in my narrative.
But the thought did not go away. God knows I’ve applied the horns to other men’s brows, and I’ve always suspected the existence of some antlers of my own from my marriage to Lydia, so I know the appropriate state of mind for each of the potential roles, but what was I to think when playing both roles at once? Has such a thing ever happened before? Maybe somewhere in the Decameron, but what about real life?
As to Betty, this little bitch was supposed to be the good sister. Married four days, and straight into bed with another man, by God. Well, maybe not exactly another man, but certainly not her husband. Or in any case she didn’t know it was her husband.
Just what sin was this, anyway? She was trying to commit adultery, God knows, but in truth she wasn’t succeeding. On the other hand, she didn’t know that. Was it a sin of intent? Can a sin that involves an action be a sin of intent?
And just who was I, in all this? For the first time, the twin brothers did both exist, simultaneously and in the same corpus, both thinking away at top speed. I was both sinned against and sinning, in identical proportions.
And as if that weren’t enough, not only was Betty wildly different from her sister, a fact I’d already known, she was also very different from the Betty who slept with Bart. This Betty was rather more demanding, more vocal, and more readily satisfied. What madness was I into here? Doesn’t anybody have a solid reliable personality you can count on?
Betty, who as Bart’s bride always followed sex with a relaxed and boneless dreaminess, turned out in this version to be a toucher and a commenter and a nibbler, darting this way and that on my chest like a kitten on a shag rug. She consoled me for my rib bruises — I did my usual muttering about an accident, when asked — and complimented me on my belly button, which she apparently found of abiding interest.
So did I. Some of her other activities were also interesting, and soon we were at it again.
After that one, Betty loomed over my supine body, resting her forearms on my chest and smiling down at my face as she said, “Isn’t it amazing?”
“Amazing,” I agreed, though I had no idea what she was talking about. Perhaps just twin-ness, the idea of distinction within identity.
“Sometimes I wonder about you two,” she said, grinning knowingly at me.
“You do?”
“Yes,” she said, and then she chilled my blood. “I’ve never seen you both at the same time,” she said, and laughed at her idea. “Wouldn’t that just be too awful? Then you’d be Bart, and you’d know everything.”
“I don’t think I’d like that,” I said. “I’d rather be me.”
“Mmm, you.” She kissed my chest, while I searched frantically for a change of subject. But she switched all by herself, lifting her head again to say, “Well? Is there any difference?”
“Vive la difference,” I told her, stroking her cheek. And then, since a certain curiosity on my part would surely be considered normal at this point, I said, “What about me? Am I different?”
She was smirking, grinning, giggling at me. “Close your eyes,” she said, “and I’ll tell you.”
So I closed my eyes. I felt her leaning down over me, I felt the warmth of her breath in the cavern of my left ear and the trembling of her lips around my earlobe. “YOU’RE BETTER,” she whispered.
31
Was that a thoughtful look in Betty’s eye when she saw me off at the ferry? Was she remembering last night’s joke, about never having seen the two of us together? Would that thought return to her? “See you soon,” I said, as the ferry started away from the dock.
Standing there in the sunlight in her white tennis shorts and yellow-and-white striped blouse, she smiled through her frown and called, “See you.” And was her frown caused only by the sunlight?
Too many problems. I went into the cabin to sit down and try to think, and they all kept crowding in on me.
Liz, for instance. She had not come back at all last night, and still hadn’t returned. I’d seen on the schedule that this ferry was leaving just after one o’clock, so at twelve-thirty I told Betty I was going back to the city, and I handed her a sealed envelope containing a note for Liz. “When you’re ready to get married,” the note said, “call me at the office.”
Betty had said, “Do you have to go?” We’d started the day with another sexual encounter, but since then by unspoken mutual consent we’d returned to our previous friendly distant relationship.
“I can’t stay here like a lapdog,” I’d told her, “waiting for Liz to come back whenever she feels like it.”