One and the Same (21 page)

Gretchen is a Columbia-trained psychotherapist; Belinda has a degree in fine arts from the School of Visual Arts and currently makes handbags. Close as the Langners are—they freely call each other “honey,” something I can't imagine Robin and I doing—Belinda has recently felt burdened by Gretchen's incessant discussions of her turbulent love affair. “I think I'm trying to make it clear to Gretch we need to be our separate selves,” she says in front of her twin. “Sometimes I set limits now—on the time that she wants to talk about it and have me try to help her figure out what to do about him.”

When we all sit down to talk, Belinda is buoyant about her own current romance with an old friend (“He's very respectful and sweet with our twinship,” Belinda says), while Gretchen has recently reunited with the on-again, off-again boyfriend Belinda dislikes.

“It's been a struggle to say to myself, I can be happy even if Gretch is unhappy right now,” Belinda admits. “If I'm around her a lot and she's really unhappy, I have to leave to be around other people, who are happy.” She and Gretchen have had couples therapy together. “Because we had begun to feel like a cranky married couple rather than a happily married couple.”

Gretchen similarly describes their twinship as a lifelong marriage: “A therapist once told us, ‘This is a relationship you can't get divorced from.'”

“There has always been this unwritten law that we have to be there for each other,” Belinda continues. “But now what I'm seeing is that we need to be there for each other and also be independent. That is probably our life's work.”

Gretchen's training in social work has given her the vocabulary, if not always the capacity, to address their hurdles. “When you have such a close relationship—and I don't think there's a relationship closer than ours—if you read the top couples therapies books, this is exactly what couples are dealing with: separation, individuation, boundaries.”

Gretchen says their recent prickliness is in large part because they're unused to bunking together; up until recently, they lived two hours apart. “This has been really challenging,” she admits.

“I think it's been a strain on our relationship,” Belinda says bluntly. “I'm walking this tightrope between being the one whom she turns to, the one she really wants unconditional love and understanding from, but also feeling the need to tell her the truth. … I'm finally in a good relationship now, and I'm about to be engaged.”

“She's my role model.” Gretchen smiles.

“Even with my white hair,” Belinda says, touching her locks, which she won't dye because of her illness. “I'm going to be a bride finally. So now I just want to shake her. I want us both to be happy now.”

Belinda called me four months later to tell me her engagement was off. She didn't want to reveal the cause publicly, but she did talk about the difficulty of once again having to move back in with her twin. “Neither one of us wants to be still living together in our forties, not married and not mothers,” she says quietly. “We've always encouraged each other to find someone, and wanted so desperately to be married.”

In the same Langner spirit that I remember from childhood—always finding the deeper meaning of things—Belinda said she and Gretchen have chosen to see mystical signs of optimism around them. “One of the roads that intersects ours is called ‘Twin Ridges,'” Belinda tells me when we speak again, months after our first interview. “There's a beautiful pond there where Gretchen and I go to sit. And on the same sign that intersects Twin Ridges is a road called
‘Crossways.'” The symbolism of those street names obviously resonates with her. “We almost have this spiritual idea that we're meant to be here in this house together,” Belinda says. “To have each of our lives begin again.”

Psychotherapist Dale Ortmeyer believes twins have distinct but harmonizing traits that combine to create one shared self, so it follows that twins would need to be physically together in order to feel complete. As Ortmeyer puts it, “The need to be with each other is heightened.” He elucidates further by citing a myth in which one twin is absent. Though Narcissus is generally believed to have fallen in love with his own reflection, second-century Greek geographer, Pausanias, hypothesized a different explanation: that, in fact, Narcissus had a twin sister, whom he loved totally and who died, which is why Narcissus gazed endlessly at his own reflection—to remind himself of her.

“What was Narcissus mourning?” Ortmeyer asks in his 1970 paper. “Could it be that the youth was not searching for his own reflection, but for the complementary attributes of his twin?… His loss, then, would not be the loss of an identical person, but of a different person, his twin, the two of them making a unity.”

One result of a “unity” identity—or a unified one—is that it makes each twin lazy about developing the attributes they're missing. This may be because twins aren't aware of their “identity fusion,” as Ortmeyer calls it. I can't say I was, but now that I've been forced to think about the idea, it's intriguing. Maybe it's too pat, but it's possible that Robin brought to the twinship self-possession, while I brought mirth; that she made me more intrepid, while I made her more buoyant. Robin told me in our interview that when we're in social situations, she'll defer to my talkativeness. (No wonder I lost my voice.) “You say what you think a little more,” she said; “you're more comfortable jumping in with your thoughts about what's going on and can hold the table in a dinner situation. I have felt that in family gatherings especially, I end up receding a little bit.”

Similarly, when I'm with Robin, I find myself becoming more inept, absentminded, dependent. I'm the one who loses an earring, forgets the lunch date, leaves my purse unzipped in the subway. I let her be the grown-up.

Ortmeyer suggests that only later in life do twins even realize they have a deficit; it usually happens when the twin isn't by their side anymore. “In adolescence, when twins can no longer have the same degree of intimate contact,” Ortmeyer tells me, “the we-self becomes a handicap. Twins unconsciously may mourn the absence of the personality traits of the other, yet not see the need to develop those traits.” Diane Setterfield, in her novel
The Thirteenth Tale
, captures this perfectly: “You could view the twins as having divided a set of characteristics between them. Where an ordinary, healthy person will feel a whole range of different emotions, display a great variety of behaviors, the twins, you might say, have divided the range of emotions and behaviors into two and taken one set each.”

Joe, who prefers a pseudonym, says he misses his twin brother, Peter, but their separation has calcified to the point of estrangement. “What does one do?” Joe asks over coffee at a tiny bakery in lower Manhattan. “I guess one starts picking up the phone or writing. Stuff like that. But the habit of avoiding has been a lot easier than breaking it.”

Their individuation can be traced to high school, when Joe got immersed in the math team and Peter fell in love during sophomore year. “This is not a great psychological insight,” Joe says, “but I feel like he replaced me with his girlfriend. … He spent all his time with her and they were weirdly bonded.”

Joe went to an Ivy League college and never returned home to California.

Peter attended a local university with his high school girlfriend, and they're together to this day—married, with one child.

“I remember making a point of going over to their house for dinner and telling my brother, ‘You're really important to me; I want you
in my life,'” Joe recalls. “Peter seemed really moved by that, but the evening ended with his girlfriend getting really upset. Maybe she felt defensive or threatened. … I know that she always looks irritated when people would remark upon our twinness at family parties. I don't think the fact of our being twins was a delight to her.”

When Peter and his wife had a child, Peter changed his last name to a new surname that his wife and baby would all share. Maybe it was another attempt at separation, but Joe took it personally. “I thought it was a strange, hostile gesture,” he says now. He never told Peter how he felt. “I should have. But part of me feels very guilty—like I abandoned him; I went off to college and didn't come back. It wasn't a priority for me to live near my twin.”

Ultimately, Joe married, too, then divorced after seven years. At thirty, he came out as a gay man. “My mother said she could see it in our baby pictures.” He smiles. “She was very into it—'Rah, rah!' She immediately started marching in PFLAG parades.” (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.) “My brother was intelligent about it, sensitive to me.”

I ask Joe what he makes of the fact that he and Peter have the same DNA but different sexual orientations. He tells me that losing his closeness with Peter made him seek closeness with other men. In other words, his twinship and homosexuality are linked not because of some genetic blueprint, but because of Peter's disaffection.

“I don't have the sense of my sexuality being this thing that I was born with,” Joe says. “It felt much more circumstantial. Because, who knows? If Peter and I had been really close friends and been twinlike, I just wonder—would that have somehow freed me to explore different kinds of relationships, to be in the world differently? There was always a profound sense of insecurity in my friendships in my teens and twenties, which was wrapped up with him. … When I would typically enter into relationships, they had the dynamic of my expecting too much and being disappointed; the person I loved, who wasn't a twin, would see me as obsessive or needy. So I'm wondering if having a twin who's actually
there
, who's always checking in with you,
that must be pretty nice. That must make you pretty secure and confident. Right?” He really seems to want an answer: “Don't
you
have that?”

The cashier in the three-table café is giving us dirty looks because we're nursing our coffees, which barely meet the minimum charge. Before we leave, I ask Joe if I can contact Peter. “I'll have to find his number,” he says, appearing surprised himself that he doesn't know it by heart or even where he keeps it. “I'll have to get back to you on that.”

I relate to Joe's story in this way: I think I, too, may have sought out—or gravitated toward—more intense female intimacy in my adult friendships because of what's absent from my twinship. I have longer, weightier discussions with Rachel, Marcia, and Dani than I do with Robin, partly because my friends probe deeper and draw out the minutiae of whatever I confide. Our exchanges are in many ways more tender, more comprehensive than mine with my sister.

My husband falls into a category of his own: He is the person who undoubtedly knows me best, whom I trust the most. But Dave is not a gooey girlfriend. He doesn't fill that place I may be wired to need filled. I have what feels like a congenital clarity of what it is to be wholly close to another human being—what poet Karl Jay Shapiro, in his 1942 poem “The Twins,” called “the instinctive partnership of birth.” Twin after twin described the same primal sureness. Once you've had it, it's hard to let it go, or to settle for anything less. Dave is unfailingly patient with this need, partly due to his equanimity, partly because he grew up with identical twin sisters himself.

Robin, on the other hand, hasn't so much collected new intimacies as found it tricky to tend them. She said in our interview that our closeness made her “sort of a lazy,” then added, “When you have a twin, you don't really need friends or a best friend. All through my youth, I wasn't that open to close friendships. You were enough. Now I feel like my eggs are in one basket a little bit and I resist that.”

Eggs in one basket—
that's just the phrase Joan Friedman used
when we spoke in Los Angeles: “Twins understandably, genetically, put all their love in one basket. For some reason, you were more capable of spreading it around. She's had to shut off the love that she has for you in order to feel as if she has enough love for others.”

Separating from one's twin can require more conscious effort than we expect, and multiple attempts before the individuation sticks. Some move to different cities, some go to couples therapy, and some extricate themselves gradually. Others mark a line in the sand by the striking clarity of their self-definition.

Perhaps the most extreme example of this is offered by Clair Farley, who, thanks to a sex-change operation, is no longer Alex Farley. Her identical brother, Mark, is still male, still Mark, and a homosexual. They both live in San Francisco because lately they want to be near to each other. Clair is, when we meet, the transgender economic development coordinator for the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Community Center; Mark is still mulling career paths after coproducing a highly praised documentary,
Red Without Blue
, about his and Clair's story. (The title refers to the colors their mother dressed them in as babies—Mark in red, Alex/Clair in blue.)

When I meet them for dinner at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Mark is somewhat underdressed for the stuffy restaurant, wearing a white long-sleeved T-shirt under a short-sleeved one; Clair, on the other hand, is turned out in a black-and-white herringbone jacket, black top, skirt, and heels. She's pretty—softer-looking now than when I watched her on film a year earlier. Their voices are the only feature that is still identical about them, which, Clair admits, sometimes gives her away as a former man.

Both twins answer my questions in measured tones; neither reveals any feeling, despite the intensity of their story. Clair is more overtly at ease than Mark, more talkative. Mark seems chary, despite the fact that their story has already played nationally on the Sundance Channel—or perhaps because of it.