One and the Same (30 page)

Charlie recognizes this scenario. “There will be people in my parents' life,” Charlie says, “who remember us vaguely by—'There's the twin who's an actor [Tim] and then there's the one who does … Something else.'” (They both run nonprofits at the time we talk.)

Charlie recounts how painful it was years ago when Tim seemed to be on top of the world, studying acting at San Francisco's prestigious American Conservatory Theater, while Charlie was floundering in law school, unsure whether he wanted to be a lawyer.

“That was the hardest time,” Charlie tells him. “The one time that we were each at very different places.”

Did they talk about it?

“We didn't really.” Charlie seems surprised to say it.

“In some ways, that was probably the least communicative we've ever been.” Tim nods. “It was too weird to have a moment where I was worried about you, where I couldn't help you.”

They do this a lot during their interview: address each other instead of me, really look at each other, without self-consciousness. It's noticeable because it's so relaxed, and even tender.

“That Christmas I was in this really dark time of not knowing what I wanted to do. And here's the funny part: To exacerbate the whole thing, I evaluated every Christmas present—probably, I think, rightly—through this lens of ‘Tim is the California Cool Actor Guy and my parents don't really know what to do with me. And then of course Tim got cool luggage and I got a matching set of Samsonite.” They both laugh.

“It's a family story we tell to this day, about the time Charlie kicked over the Samsonite, yelling, ‘What do they think I am? Some little uptight fucking guy?'”

Alison Lord (née Smith) remembers meeting Charlie back at Yale in 1986. “He seemed cute, smart and ‘cool,'” she says, but she wasn't interested in him. Her roommate, Blyth, was.

Blyth and Charlie started dating, which meant the girls soon met Tim, who visited from Brown. Charlie says the “Tim Introduction”
was always significant for any of his relationships. “Most of my girlfriends who didn't know Tim well,” Charlie says, “were always nervous to meet him. They knew it was a momentous occasion.”

“The approval of Tim still really matters to me,” Blyth acknowledges.

Alison says she didn't consider Tim romantically because he was Blyth's boyfriend's brother. Not to mention the fact that she wasn't Charlie's biggest fan. “I don't know that Charlie knows that I think this, but Charlie and I actually don't get along that well.”

Charlie says the same thing in his own interview with me: “The funny thing is that Alison and I never really got along.”

Tim agrees: “They are like oil and water.”

“We're better now,” Charlie says. “But at the time, it was always very complicated.”

“We rub each other the wrong way,” Alison says. “Which is so bizarre, when you think about it, but we do. My general inclination in the world is to be extremely organized, helpful to everyone, and I am a control freak by nature. I think Charlie views me as a meddler in other people's business.”

Alison's efficient personality is glimpsed even in our short meeting. She speaks very quickly, in articulate, economical sentences—no word wasted—and betrays no self-doubt.

Blyth Lord, on the other hand, has a laid-back demeanor, and seems more ruminative. I interview her at her office at WGBH, the Boston public television station, where she's a producer. She's wearing a black V-neck T-shirt and green corduroys with a soft fabric belt. “I posed this to Charlie, actually,” she says, “when he was telling me about his interview with you. I said, ‘Perhaps all the ways that Alison works for Tim are where you and Tim differ.' And he thought that was very interesting, and then we got distracted and never analyzed what those things were.”

Would Blyth say that one twin is closer to the parents?

“I think Charlie was always the more intense child and he had
more of a temper and engaged with his parents more than Tim did. Charlie felt that was almost his role—to be more of the challenger, and Tim was more of an appeaser.”

Charlie, in his interview, agrees: “I think I got more of my mother's volatility. So two volatile people will inevitably collide. … I was pegged as the wild man, which I never liked. I really hated it. I got pigeonholed as the temper guy, with Tim as the gentle one.”

Blyth goes on: “I think because of that history, Charlie's parents have a more easygoing relationship with Tim. Charlie believes that his father is more comfortable with Tim.”

Interestingly, when I ask Charlie and Tim who is closer to their mother, they each point at the other twin. They have the same response when I ask who is closer to their father.

Blyth is certain the twins' differences explain why the four spouses are not interchangeable. “Charlie could never be married to Alison,” she says. “I have no idea if Tim and I could be married. I have not truthfully ever thought about that one.”

Never thought about it? I certainly have at least thought in passing about whether I could be married to Robin's husband, Edward, but, yes, it feels too taboo to even contemplate.

Blyth continues: “Since I know that Charlie is really annoyed by parts of Alison, I have asked myself what parts of me must annoy Tim. And I don't know the answer to that. I will say that I have moments of insecurity around Tim; I get uncomfortable because I do feel the need for him to think I'm bright. I know he likes me, but I do have these moments of thinking, Does he think I'm interesting? Does he think I'm smart? Could he sit on a desert island with me for two days? And then I'll also say, Does he think I'm attractive? You think these things, inevitably.”

Has she asked herself whether
she's
attracted to
him?

“Well, yeah. I play that one out fairly often. I'll say, What parts of Tim are more attractive to me than Charlie? Like Tim's a better dresser now, probably because he lets Ali dress him. Charlie doesn't let me dress
him. Tim's hair is looking better than Charlie's hair these days, and maybe that's because he wears hair product, but my husband won't.”

“I am
not
attracted to Charlie,” Alison tells me in our interview at Lowe Advertising, where she's head of human resources at the time we talk. “To me, the brothers look and sound different, and just are totally different. I think Tim is much cuter than Charlie.” She has only mixed them up once—when Tim changed his T-shirt without her knowing and she mumbled hello when he walked by her, without realizing it was her husband. “I was completely freaked out,” she said. “But that's the only time.”

Tim and Alison finally started dating a full five years after graduation, when Tim was living in Manhattan and Alison was living with Blyth in a rental house in D.C. (To complete the incestuousness, the girls' roommates included the Lords' sister, Deirdre, and, at one point, Tim's then girlfriend, Delia.) It was only after Tim and Alison had each broken up with their mates that they started noticing each other—strangely enough, just two weeks before Charlie and Blyth's wedding day, June 27, 1992. “I saw Alison completely fresh, almost instantly,” Tim says now.

“We ended up making out all night in Washington Square Park.” Alison smiles. “But we basically agreed that we were not going to say or do anything about it because Blyth and Charlie were getting married in two weeks and we didn't want to make us a
thing
to distract from their wedding.”

The secret didn't last long. At the wedding, Alison told Blyth the news, and Tim told Charlie. “They were delighted,” Alison recalls. “But we didn't tell anyone else.”

“I was incredibly excited,” Blyth says now, “because I just thought that the four of us married would be really fun—assuming it worked. I did get very anxious that it might not work and that then it would be incredibly awkward if they had a terrible falling-out and all of a sudden one of my best friends and my brother-in-law weren't friends anymore. Obviously nothing like that happened.”

“Alison and I were in love very quickly,” Tim recounts. “But Charlie's wedding was a really emotional day for me. I remember when Charlie and Blyth left at the end of their reception, I went out into this field that was behind the tent, and my mom and dad really sweetly came out and found me. They were really conscious of things like that. They knew, I think before I did, that it was going to be an intense day. And I really couldn't even articulate it, but it was really hard. I'm sure a psychotherapist could tell you the obvious thing: Your twin has just ridden off with his wife for his honeymoon and you guys are entering a new phase in your life. But I hadn't been able to articulate that.”

Tim and Alison were engaged sixteen months later, and married in September 1994.

Charlie and Blyth had a daughter, Taylor, in 1997 and another daughter, Cameron, in 1999. Tim and Alison had a son, Hayden, in 1998.

The nightmare began when Tim's son, Hayden, a towheaded, cheerful infant, started to show signs of failure. He was diagnosed first with cerebral palsy; then at eighteen months, the diagnosis was changed to Tay-Sachs disease. Tay-Sachs is a fatal breakdown of the central nervous system. The gene mutation occurs in 1 out of 250 babies around the world, predominantly in descendents of Ashkenazi Jews. Children with Tay-Sachs have, by all appearances, completely healthy infancies, but gradually they start to lose their ability to smile, grasp, or eat with their hands. Eventually they become blind and paralyzed. Few children live past the age of five. For a baby to have the disease, both parents have to be carriers, so most Jewish parents get genetic testing early to rule it out. Tim and Alison, despite having no known Jewish blood, were that rare exception: Both were carriers.

The news was devastating. Charlie's first impulse was to go be with his brother in New York.

“You were there that same night we found out,” Tim recalls.

“I was,” Charlie confirms.

“That was probably the most important thing—outside of Alison,” Tim tells me. “That Charlie was there. And through that whole thing, I think we were more open about how we felt about each other and how much we needed each other.”

“I made a decision,” Charlie says, “as soon as I knew what was happening, that I was going to come down to see Tim and Hayden every three or four weeks. That I was going to come to New York. It was just unspoken that I had to be there.” He looks at Tim with a kind of fierce focus. “That I had to get to know Hayden.”

“The first thing that happened when he got there the Friday that Hayden was diagnosed,” Tim recalls, “Hayden was upstairs in our apartment, and Charlie and I just went out in the park and threw a ball together and just talked and tried to reorder where we were. And I just knew that you and I were going to do it together. You said, ‘I'm going to be down here every couple of weeks.'”

Charlie continues the story: “When I got to the apartment where I was staying in New York that night, I called Blyth to check in and to try to describe what it had been like to be with you.” He's looking at Tim. “And Blyth said, ‘Did you ever notice that Cameron startles easily?' And I said, ‘What are you talking about?' She said to me, ‘Charlie, you're obviously a carrier because you're twins. I went on the Web site and it says the first sign of Tay-Sachs is an exaggerated startle reflex. Cameron has an exaggerated startle reflex.' I went cold. When she said it, I went cold. I thought, ‘Fuck, I'm a carrier.' It hadn't even occurred to me. I said, ‘I think we should get her tested and get you tested, so you feel better.'”

Tim looks startled. “Oh my God,” he says. He's never heard Charlie's side of those first horrible hours.

“What's interesting,” Charlie goes on, “is that I didn't call Tim about my fear for my daughter until Blyth was tested. So I went through the first ten days of waiting for Blyth's results—”

“By yourself,” Tim interjects, sounding sorry.

“—not talking to anybody because I had decided, Everyone is
struggling with Hayden. I'm not going to add to their worries. I thought, This will be a drama-queen move if I mention it. It will suddenly be about me and Blyth, and it shouldn't be about me and Blyth. It's about Hayden and Tim and Ali.”

The waiting period for Blyth's test results were rough. “That was a really bad ten days,” Charlie says. “But it wasn't ridiculously bad, because the genetics counselor we saw had said to Blyth, ‘Statistically it is so improbable that all four of you would be carriers. There's just no way Cameron has Tay-Sachs, but I'll just indulge you anyway and get you tested.'”

But the unimaginable scenario unfolded before their eyes. Blyth was a carrier, too.

“When Charlie called and said, ‘Blyth is a carrier and they're testing Cameron,' I almost went crazy,” Tim recalls. “I remember my partner at work, Jason, was trying literally to make sure I didn't lose it. I was
that
emotional. All of a sudden it was almost as if I was getting a sense of what this looked like from the outside—what people were seeing in terms of what we were going through. It seemed
much
more terrible, more horrible. I think I almost went crazy when I got that phone call. All of a sudden I was running around One Hundredth Street and the East River Drive, screaming. I could not believe that this was going to happen. I literally could not believe it.”

Charlie looks stunned. “I never heard that story.”

Cameron's test came back positive. She had Tay-Sachs, too; double death sentences for two cousins whose fathers couldn't be closer.

Blyth said her first reaction was,
Of course
. “It made total sense to me,” she says. “Ever since Cameron was diagnosed, I've always said that the coincidence was connected to their ‘twin thing.' Because it's so inexplicable otherwise. I mean, it makes sense that they're both carriers: They're identical twins; they have the same genetic makeup. It is
possible
that their wives are both carriers—that is
possible
. But statistically, it's like one in—I don't even know the math on it. And therefore the ‘why' of it to me is fatelike, mystical;
this was always going to be their thing. They needed to be there for each other.”