Duplicity

Chapter 6

2. TWIN HOUSES (THE PAINTER OF GROUNDS)

I once tried to write a story about twins — not this story, the one you’re reading, but with much in common with it: its twin, you might say. The plot was based on a game Greg and I used to play. In the game one of us would pretend to be a millionaire, and the other a peasant. The game figured into the plot as one that the twins played when they were kids. In my story, the Millionaire (Twin A) is an enormously successful motivational speaker and bestselling author. Twin B, the Peasant, is a failed novelist.

I’d divide the book into two sections or parts, each self-contained — Book A and Book B— and have them printed dos-à-dos or tête-bêche like the old Ace Doubles science fiction paperbacks, the kind with titles like The Sword of Rhiannon and Stepsons of Terra. You would read Book A, then turn the thing over and upside-down, and read Book B — or vice-versa, since it wouldn’t matter which of the two books you read first. Each of the books would end where the other began and begin where the other ended, so in theory anyway one would never have to stop reading. The book — or books — would go on and on forever, sustaining and prolonging itself. A literary perpetual motion machine.

The novel’s two books would also contradict each other so thoroughly that as a whole it would self-destruct interminably, a chain reaction of equally opposite forces bound together in a ceaseless cycle of mutual obliteration, with everything becoming nothing and nothing becoming everything, on and on forever ad infinitum (as happens, or supposedly happens, when matter and anti-matter collide).

In the aggregate, my twin novel would constitute the single most unreliable narrative ever composed. For this and other reasons I would call it “Duplicity.”

To break all the rules of novel writing — that was my intention. And not just to break them, but to break them hard. That’s what you have to do. First learn the rules, then break them with conviction and without mercy so they stay broken.

So I taught my students at the Metropolitan Writing Institute.

• •

I digress, something else I’d take my Metropolitan students to task for. I should be writing about the rainy foggy March morning I arrived here at what had been my father’s lakeside cottage, and where, our mother believed, my twin brother was hiding out.

There I am — there we are — freshly arrived in my beleaguered Mazda. According to the dashboard clock it’s just past six-thirty in the morning. Dawn is just breaking. A dense fog has rolled in from the lake that I can’t see because it’s behind the house — or in front of it, since the house was built facing the water. I haven’t been here in thirty-five years. Except for one or two weekend visits by my brother and his wife, no one has been here, as far as I know.

The house looks smaller than in memory. A “modified” A-frame. Even through the fog I can see the yard is overgrown, the garden turned into a jungle, with weeds rising almost as high as the gutter. Where not overgrown the lawn is covered with dead leaves. To the far left of the house: a pile of rotted firewood. To the right a sagging carport with a tarpaulin-covered vehicle hunkered under it. Next to it, an overturned plastic trash container with a fallen sweetgum tree lying nearby. No lights burn inside the house. The place looks dead, haunted, the lake just visible behind it now through the already dissipating fog.

All I’ve just described is as seen through the Mazda’s cracked windshield. The engine still rumbles, the impotent defroster still blows, the wipers still wipe. Except where I’ve rubbed it with the wad of paper towel, the windshield is as opaque as the fog outdoors. The radio exudes a blend of static and bad news. I’m biding my time, not wanting to leave the car that suddenly feels like a warm, comfortable womb, afraid of what awaits me inside that house — despite that, apart from my mother’s dream-born hysteria, there’s no reason behind my fear. Why should anything bad have happened to my brother? He’s lying low, doing his Thomas Pynchon / J. D. Salinger recluse act, playing hard-to-get with the media and his fans. His last book didn’t sell that well. The ratings on his latest PBS fundraiser special disappointed. Or maybe he just needed a break from it all.

So I tell myself as I sit with the staticky radio telling me more about Russia and Crimea (“Dispensing with legal deliberations, despite U.S. and European pressure, a defiant Vladimir Putin announced a swift annexation of the Ukranian peninsula”) and daylight seeping into the surroundings. Why should I give a damn, anyway? Since when has my brother given a damn about me? Not since his f*****g epiphany, his metamorphosis. Since he reinvented himself, becoming rich and famous beyond anyone’s dreams. Meanwhile I, his twin, fell to pieces and went to seed. Like this house I’m looking at.

• •

As for the house, like the man who once occupied it, it was once proud and happy. I recall the first summer I spent here with him, with my father. I’d just turned seven. Greg and I used to take turns, alternating summers. Dad would drive all the way up to Connecticut, then drive us all the way back down, the same journey I just took, more or less. It was cheaper than him flying, renting a car, and so on. Or maybe he felt it would be more fun. Apart from stopping at a few roadside attractions (one of which featured a scaled-down Eiffel Tower), all I remember about that first trip here with him is me saying, “Are we almost there yet, Daddy?” pestering my poor father the way kids do. “Not yet, Stewie.” I kept having to pee. You peed ten miles ago! / I need to again. / Can’t you hold it, Stewie? / No! Instead of pulling into a gas station, my father quoted philosophers on the subject of patience. (“He who seeks the truth must have infinite patience.” — Socrates; Nietzsche: “Patience is so very hard that the greatest poets did not disdain to make its antithesis the theme of their poetry.”) I peed in my pants. By the time we got here, my father’s car reeked and we were both miserable.

Still, as soon as I saw the place, I fell in love with my father’s house, and by extension with my father. We hardly knew each other. Greg and I were only four when he and our mother split up. I knew he was a professor and that he lived on a lake. That’s all I knew. I’d seen him two or three times, at one or another holiday gathering. He’d arrive smelling of books and pipe tobacco, bearing gifts. Then he’d be gone again until next year. He existed in our lives like a tweedy, pipe-smoking Santa Claus (minus the white beard). It was only after I’d seen his house for the very first time that my father became real to me.

The house was magical. So it seemed to me. Though no larger than the one before me now, it seemed bigger. I remember, entering it for the first time, how the cathedral ceiling lived up to its grandiose name, with its wooden beams and ceiling fans, and the huge triangular windows through which thick rays of sunlight speared the cavernous space at 45-degree angles. Below the windows were two sets of French doors, their venetian blinds raised, letting in more sunlight. Through them I had my first glimpse of the lake, glittering through the slats of the deck railing beyond a phalanx of potted geraniums: this vast, wide, glimmering lake, with a dock jutting into it, and two wooden chairs on the dock, and the lawn sloping down. My Daddy’s house! Over each set of French doors he had mounted a wooden oar. At one end of the cathedral ceiling, suspended by a pulley system, hung what I soon learned was my father’s pride and joy, his Adirondack guide boat, complete with folding caned seats. Between the sets of French doors was a fireplace, its mantle formed of rugged fieldstones. But I couldn’t stop looking at that boat. I was entranced by it. I’d never seen anything more beautiful, its smooth hull a deep ultramarine, its varnished gunwales gleaming gold.

“Daddy, Daddy, can we take the boat out? Please, Daddy?”

“Tell you what,” my father said. “We’re both sweaty and stinky from all that driving. What do you say we go jump right in the lake?”

To which I responded: “Yipppeeeee!” (If that “Yipppeeeee!” didn’t represent the happiest moment my father and I ever shared together, it came close.)

We had a good time on that first visit. We did indeed take out his boat, which I kept calling a “canoe” (“It’s not a canoe, Stewie; it’s an Adirondack guide boat”). Almost every day we took it out, in the mornings before breakfast and evenings at twilight. We swam, fished off of the end of the dock, did jigsaw puzzles, cooked pancakes and French toast, went for walks, barbecued on the deck, watched TV. All very father-son, straight out of the Andy Griffith show. He introduced me to his colleagues at the university, those who hadn’t left for the summer. My father seemed happy, fulfilled. I had no idea how depressed he was. I didn’t know that word, let alone what it meant. My father didn’t strike me as sad, let alone as someone who, thirty-one years later, a few weeks shy of his twin sons’ 36th birthdays — six months after his 67th — would, as they say, “take his own life.”

How? you ask.

He hanged himself. From the oak beam of his modified A-frame. As my brother would. As I myself will soon do. While I still have the chance.

Before they come for me.

• •

That can wait. Right now I’m still remembering — we’re still remembering — that happy moment with Dad the first time we visited him here. He was a kind man, an intelligent man, a gentle man. A philosopher, a scholar, a professor. We recall our last summer here with him. We were sixteen. Impatient, impetuous, rebellious, obsessed with girls and s*x. The novelty of our father’s house, the lake, the rowboat, the hammock, barbecues and puzzles and card games, had long since worn off. We would have rather been back in Connecticut with our friends. We grew increasingly surly, petulant, unpleasant. For the rest of the summer we wore a perpetual scowl. We treated our father like s**t. (Was it really that bad? Maybe not, but guilt makes us remember it that way.)

Something peculiar happened during that last visit with my father here, an episode eerily relevant to this confession’s overarching theme.

My father and I had had a quarrel. I’m calling it a quarrel, though what really happened was that I abused him and he stood there taking it. It happened during the third week of my five-week visit. I’d been complaining about everything. The lack of young people for me to interact with, my father’s cooking (good at barbecues and breakfast, hopeless otherwise; we ate pancakes, bacon and eggs, or hot dogs for every meal), and mainly the fact that, despite the learner’s permit in my pocket, my father refused to let me borrow his vermilion 1963 Alfa Romeo Giulietta Spider convertible roadster, the one he used only in perfect weather and otherwise kept tarped under the now tottering carport (his regular car was a 1974 Ford Pinto).

“What for?” he asked me.

“So I can drive into town,” I answered.

“Drive into town for what?”

I shrugged. “To see what’s there,” I said.

“I’ll tell you what’s there, Stewie. Nothing. That’s what’s there.”

You can imagine how pleased I was with this response. Of course, he was right; there was nothing to the town, a sprinkling of seedy antique shops and tattoo parlors, a few hamburger and pizza joints, the usual soporific student dives and strip malls. Apart from the college, the town’s only points of interest were the coal-fired power plant at the other end of the lake, with its three-hundred foot tall smokestack, and the grounds of the formerly bustling state mental asylum, now deserted, its brick buildings spangled with kudzu and NO TRESPASSING signs, and which my father and I had already explored several times.