Audrey Niffenegger - Her Fearful Symmetry

“Um, hello,” said Martin. He extended his hand, and Julia grasped it and pulled. She noticed as she let go of his hand that it was bleeding; a thin glaze of blood covered her palm. Martin had expected her to shake his hand, so he was surprised to find himself standing. Julia, in turn, was surprised at how agile Martin was. She found herself staring up at a slender, middle-aged man whose horn-rimmed glasses were askew. He seemed rather knobbly to her; his knees and elbows and knuckles were prominent. He was not at all hairy. Julia noticed that his chest was a little concave. She blushed and looked up. He had short salt-and-pepper hair. He seemed kind.

“I’m Martin Wells,” he said.

“I’m Julia Poole,” Julia replied. “I live downstairs.”

“Oh, of course. And…you were lonely?”

“No, see, the water…Our bed’s right under here, and there was a lot of water coming through the ceiling, and it, like, woke us up.”

Martin blushed. “I’m terribly sorry. I’ll call someone to fix it. He’ll put it right for you.”

Julia looked away, at the pail and the scrubbing brush, at the wet floor. She looked back at Martin, puzzled. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Cleaning,” he replied. “I’m washing the floor.”

“Your hands are bleeding,” Julia told him.

Martin looked at his hands. The palms were crisscrossed with open cracks from long hours in water. His hands were shiny and bright red. He looked back at Julia. She was looking at the bedroom, at the stacks of boxes that lined the walls.

“What’s in the boxes?” she asked.

“Things,” he replied.

Julia abandoned tact. “You live like this?”

“Yes.”

“You’re one of those people who wash all the time. Like Howard Hughes.”

Martin didn’t know what to say, so he simply said, “Yes.”

“Cool.”

“Um, no, it isn’t, at all.” Martin went into the bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet and took out a tube of lotion, which he began to rub onto his hands. “It’s an illness.” He straightened his spectacles with a lotiony finger. Julia felt that she had made a faux pas.

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right.”

There was an awkward pause during which neither looked at the other.

Julia began to feel nervous. I was right before-he’s mentally ill. She said, “I should go back downstairs. Valentina is probably wondering.”

Martin nodded. “I’m sorry about your ceiling. I’ll ring up someone first thing tomorrow. I would come down myself-”

“Yes?”

“But I never leave my flat.”

Julia was disappointed, even though she had been intent on getting away from him just moments before. “Not at all?”

“It’s part of-my illness.” Martin smiled. “Don’t look like that. You are quite welcome to come and visit me .” He guided Julia through the maze of boxes. When they arrived at his front door he let her open it and step into the landing. “I hope you will come again. For tea? Tomorrow, perhaps?”

Julia stood on the well-lit landing and peered at Martin, who hung back from the door in his dark hall. “Okay,” she said. “Sure.”

“And your sister is welcome, as well.”

Julia felt a tiny pang of possessiveness. If he met Valentina he would probably like her better. Everyone did. “Um, I’ll see if she’s available.”

Martin smiled. “Until tomorrow, then. Four o’clock?”

“Okay. It was nice to meet you,” Julia said, and fled downstairs.

Valentina had just emptied the soup pot when Julia returned. The ceiling was still dripping and the bedding was a sodden mess. The twins stood together and surveyed the damage. “So what happened?” Valentina asked.

Julia told her, but she had trouble describing Martin. Valentina looked horrified when Julia said they’d been invited to tea. “But he sounds awful,” said Valentina. “He never leaves his apartment?”

“I dunno. He was super polite. I mean, yeah, he’s obviously crazy, but in a nice eccentric English way, you know?” The twins began to strip the quilts off the bed. They carried them into the bathroom and tried to wring the water out of them. “I think maybe these are ruined.”

“No, it’s only plaster. It should rinse out. Maybe we could soak them?” Valentina put the stopper in the plughole and began to run warm water into the tub.

“Anyway, I said I’d come and have tea and you can come if you want. I think you should at least meet him. He’s our neighbour.”

Valentina shrugged. They finished stripping the bed and left the soup pot sitting on the mattress to collect the drips. They put themselves to bed in the spare bedroom (which was rather clammy) and each went to sleep worrying about home repair and tea.

T HE TWINS found virginity burdensome, each in her own way.

Julia had experimented some. In high school she had let boys kiss and/or fondle her in cars, in the bedrooms of friends’ parents at parties when those parents were out of town, once in a ladies’ room at Navy Pier, and several times on the doorstep of Jack and Edie’s unimpressive ranch house, which she always wished was a gigantic Victorian with a porch so she could sit with the boy in a porch swing and eat ice cream and they could lick it off each other’s lips while Valentina spied on them from the darkened living room. But there was no porch, and the kisses were as lacklustre as the house.

Julia remembered fending off boys on the beach, behind the shelter in West Park after ice skating, in a music-practice room at the high school. She remembered each boy’s reaction, the various shadings of confusion and anger. “Well, why d’ya come in here, then?” the boy in the practice room had asked her, and she had no answer.

What did she want? What was it she imagined these boys could do to her? And why did she always stop them before they could do it?

Valentina was more sought after, and not as proficient at saying no. During the twins’ teen years it was Valentina who was singled out by the quiet boys, and by the boys who thought of themselves as nascent rock stars. While Julia chose boys who weren’t interested in her and then chased them, Valentina dreamily ignored them all and won hearts. She was always surprised when the boy who sat behind her in algebra declared his love as she unchained her bike; when the editor of the school paper asked her to the prom.

“You should let them come to you,” Valentina said, when Julia complained about the discrepancy. But Julia was impatient, and cared about being passed over. These things are fatal to romance, especially if a more indifferent version of yourself is nearby.

Sex was interesting to Valentina, but the individual boys she might have had sex with were not. When she focused her attention on a boy, that boy always seemed to her unfinished, dull, absurd. She was used to the profound intimacy of her life with Julia, and she did not know that a cloud of hope and wild illusion is required to begin a relationship. Valentina was like the veteran of a long marriage who has forgotten how to flirt. The boys who followed her through the hallways of Lake Forest High School at a safe distance lost their ardour when it was met with polite bewilderment.

And so the twins had remained virgins. Julia and Valentina watched all of their high school and college friends disappear one by one into the adult world of sex, until they were the only people they knew who lingered in the world of the uninitiated. “What was it like?” they asked each friend. The answers were vague. Sex was a private joke: you had to be there.

The twins worried about virginity individually, and they worried about it together. But the most basic problem was one they never talked about: sex was something they couldn’t do together. Someone would have to go first, and then the other would be left behind. And they would each have to pick different guys, and these guys, these potential boyfriends, would want to spend time alone with one or the other; they would want to be the important person in Julia or Valentina’s life. Each boyfriend would be a crowbar, and soon there would be a gap; there would be hours in the day when Julia wouldn’t even know where Valentina was, or what she was doing, and Valentina would turn to tell Julia something and instead there would be the boyfriend, waiting to hear what she was about to say although only Julia would have understood it.