Twin

encounter at court street...

Two years before she had seen him off in handcuffs. Apollo/Andrew had cursed her and swore revenge.

Some seven hundred days after the fact, after she cleaned herself up, she saw him standing at the end of Court Street. He was in the sunlight that poured off an unassuming building, cast one half of his body in shadow. Behind him, the traffic was black ghosts of a late autumn afternoon.

She thought of how they had had sex, quiet and with much vulnerability on the part of them both, when each screamed inwardly for the other. Kay thought about turning around, but she knew he'd seen her. He stared with the old intensity she could never avoid.

They met in a club, one of those many places that are all alike. All crazy light and alcohol. This one was an abandoned warehouse, detached from the normal community of industrial storage spaces on the side of town where the sky was choked with black soot. It had two levels. The first, the ground floor. And then an upstairs that was built around the open air like those suburban shopping malls buried deep inside of New Jersey- it was littered with mice and rat feces, with cartons of ribbon covered in dated shipping stickers and frozen cigarette ash. Girls danced up there on Saturday nights. Competition, and the best received a hundred bucks plus free beer all night long. The sound system was also up there, suspended in the air above everybody's heads, black and powerful. A solemn guy named Eddie pushed c.d's through his player in a back room somewhere. People said he was connected to the owner of the place. When he felt depressed, he only played Barry Manilow. It didn't matter, no one cared about the tempo.

A Friday, late in June, she first saw him. He stood in a corner, under a shock of white light that reminded Kay, at two a.m., of the sun. Blinking, she tried to be sure he was not her imagination. He looked out of place with the teenagers and twenty-year olds dressed in plastic colors wearing anxious eyes. His hair was the color of straw, like the hay that she used to feed her grandfather's horses on the farm. Had a round face, like a child's. She wanted to protect him. Whether it was the time or the amount of tequila in her blood, she didn't care. He was an angel crouching down.

"You were staring my way, girl with the gold brown skin." He touched the tender skin of her throat. When she didn't flinch, he put his whole hand there, caressed the smooth curve of her neck.

Around them, there was thrashing and kicking. The world got into a hammering dance song with some computer edge to it. Stoners were towards the rear of the warehouse. They screamed and twitched every so often. Drinkers could be found, for the most part, picking fights by the bar. In between were the kids who hadn't made it yet to either group.

"You look fifteen. " He studied her, she was in the average club attire- little clothing and lots of make up. "I mean that in a good, call me Humbert Humbert way."

"What?"

"Nothing. Lissen', you came to me for a reason, what is it? Did Renzo tell you to find me?"

"Who?"

He squinted and smiled. "No one. Business associate."

Every ten seconds someone passed by and greeted him "Apollo!" The interruptions unnerved her, he could tell. He told her to call him Andrew. She nodded numbly.

The noise in the club was defeaning. Already, you had the curse of a rhyming rainstorm that pounded on the windows, and the doors, and the eighty foot roof. The music, chanting and nonsensical drumbeats, every spare second of consciousness was stolen away. No time when they weren't hitting you, beating you down- she squeezed her eyes shut. Stoners yelled. The drinkers, they smashed bottles. Nearby, she could see a man forcing his hand up the skirt of an uncooperative girl. Couples argued, others just lazily tossed themselves across tables and went to sleep. No matter what, their faces pulsed like little, immediate, throbbing veins. Capillaries, you call them, those purple clusters. Everything was a hundred times. She took a deep breath. Focusing on him, on Apollo/Andrew, she was able to concentrate on what he was saying.

"Girl with the gold brown skin, will you hate me if I call you 'honey'?"

She blushed. "Must be ten years, Momma told me straight every day, 'Please and thank you. Please and thank you, Little Kay.' They said I had no social graces, I had no skills, they said I had no nothing. Sorry for not introducing myself. My name is Kay. Katie, Katherine, Kate, it doesn't matter which."

"I can't call you honey?" He smiled, his teeth were like seagulls, waiting. "Little Kay, please tell me you're not fifteen. You're sweet. I like sweet things."

Not sure of how to respond, she quickened the tapping of her feet. "I used to think I'd be a dancer by this time, by now. To answer you, I turn twenty in July. I weigh a hundred seventeen pounds. By Arthur Murray's standards, that'd be too old and too fat."

"You aren't."

"Okay, maybe not by his, but how about the New York Ballet?"

His front lip jutted forward, he raised his eyebrows. "That's the classiest thing I heard in awhile. How come it didn't-" he paused, glanced over his shoulder as if he had suddenly decided to expect someone who was hopelessly important. Then he returned his attentions to her. "Let's talk about where we should go." Apollo/Andrew brushed a loose piece of hair off her forehead. "Your apartment? Mine?"

And he never stopped asking her questions like that.

*****

Kay gazed at him, some sixty feet in front of her, there, on the street. He hadn't changed much- hair was still too long, skin was still too white. Tilting his head, he returned her curious glances. Both of his arms hung at his sides, much like they always had, suggesting an openess or candor that was almost scary. When he crossed his right hand over to grasp the fabric on the left side of his shirt, she realised he'd gotten thinner. Then he let the shirt go, wrinkled, and she saw his fingers close just below the joint of his other arm. She waited.

*****

"Choice. Just lookit how we're supposed to be descendents of angels an' the ancestors of monkeys. Columbus could've gone to Asia an' come back with silk, spices, fine women- be to that world what Mr. Bill Gates is to this one. Instead, he's all time. But in fifty years, the man behind Microsoft becomes just another one of those machines. An' what about abortion? Isn't life birth and death? how can the unborn be human? But thinking of a fetus as not human might be the same as saying a kid isn't yet because he doesn't pay taxes. Choice.

"Karl Marx had some good ideas, Karl Marx was an idiot. See war as a nightmare, see it as a chance to look for Oskar Schindlers, Anne Franks, General MacArthurs. Democrats have too much compassion, Republicans have too much reason. Choice.

"People done worse than me. I don't steal, I never hit a man who didn't deserve it, I don't even lie very much. There are pushers, I'm not one. I don't get anyone hooked, I supply whoever comes to me. Why not? They'll get it someplace else if I don't, so I figure I'm doing them a favor- I never added sugar or salt to the list of ingredients.

"I could go to jail, but liquor stores are legal. Sex isn't considered a drug, but it never touched a person who it hasn't hurt. Not giving to charity is a choice. What about the bookstore owner who lives on the corner? How different is he from me?"

Few had reasoning like his, like Apollo/Andrew's, even less could awaken each day and still look themselves in the mirror. Doing what he did. Explaining it away, detaching himself for love of money and not a single greater thing than that.

Little Kay spent many afternoons talking to him. She wouldn't say she learned a lot, but she picked up on the patterns and subtleties of manipulation. And how to break past defenses to needle the part of a person that always buckled when it got down to the wire on questions of desire and need. When talk became boring, she realised she had grown accustomed to him enough, by now, to take the next step. Child-like demons, the demons that prolong a holding pattern, flitted off into the night with her dreams. Little Kay found herself inside his arms. And then his bed. And, later, where she yearned to be. At the other end of his dinnertable conversations about music, about politics, and about television.

She had seen that there was more to him than a first, drunken glance. All Little Kay wanted was that reciprocation. Few friends. No one with whom to talk about what ballet school might've been. Although he cringed when she broached the subject of dance, he encouraged her in other ways. She had had a fascination with paints and canvases since she was young. Apollo/Andrew agreed to sit for her. For a portrait, one weary, bright afternoon.

His legs were in the right place. She had him seated in an old and rather ornate chair, given him by his grandmother, the only one in his family who he truly liked. Little Kay posed him with both arms resting atop the high-backed chair, so he was leaning into it, and his legs crossed in a collegiate way. He kept shaking free of her insistence. "That isn't me. That is not me. Shouldn't it be this guy?" He held a hand over his heart and she giggled. "No joke, kid, this isn't funny. I won't have a painting of me hanging in some rich guy's house, them gawking an' asking what prep schools did I go to? wouldn't it be nice, if just once, their daughter brought home a guy like me?"

All she heard was the first part. "You think somebody will buy this? A rich somebody, with a lot of cash to throw around?"

Apollo/Andrew, who took great care in maintaining things, seemed unable to get comfortable. He smiled at her. "Yeah. I guess I may not win on this one, huh?"

She puffed out her upper lip by blowing air into her cheeks. When she shook her head, laughing, her curls tossed and turned and twirled. It was something to see a sight like that. No one ever looked happy. "You tellin' me to say Andrew because you get so tired of all of them. 'Pollo this, 'Pollo that. Who do I paint? the face I kiss? the one I hate when he has no dust for me? Who should I put up on here?" Flicked the clean white canvas with her brush, it was covered in luscious red. Dots appeared everywhere. Little Kay giggled again, she loved the effect. Dipped the brush in water, and then blue, repeated herself. Her thoughts in the morning were of what to do with him. She was between abstract and surreal, certain that no matter what he said, he would not sit still for her for very long. "Who's the guy who put his canvas on the ground?"

"Jackson Pollak, yeah, he's dead. He's the one who you mean." Apollo/Andrew sat back and started on another cigarette. He had been smoking a lot lately.

She lit the canvas with more blues and greens, thinking that because of her excursion the painting had been ruined. He was manipulative. He cared, but he would not show it. He wore jeans all the time, but there was a distinct tuxedo air about all his movements. He dreamed good dreams. She knew because she heard him whisper in his sleep sometimes. He sold drugs. He worried for homeless people, and felt more pride than he should have for his own circumstance. It was in no way earned. Frowning, she drew a precise line down the center of her raindrop canvas. The easel wobbled. Her colors looked too thick, so she watered them down.

Apollo/Andrew asked what time it was, when did she think that she would be done? She mumbled something.

Her hands shook after a half an hour, she was breathing deeper to concentrate. The line separating the two sides had grown bigger and thicker since the time when she began, when she didn't know what to do with him. Her dots became an ideal backdrop, some sort of frantic cascade from a cloud that didn't know whether it was cumulous or nimbus, from a day that didn't know whether it should love the light or the dark. She sighed, perspiration ran down her forhead.

"You know what I been thinkin' just the other day, just the other day, Little Kay? Little Kay, my girl with the honeysuckle skin, I been thinkin' maybe we should get married."

She bumped the easel, knocking it over with a suddeness that shook her from her trance. It lay there, cracked, on the floor. "What?"

"Maybe we should get married. Hog tied. Swing the old ball and chain back an' forth. Then again," he paused, "there is that marriage tax to think about."

"You love me?" She tried to make it nonchalant, a search for reassurance made in passing, but it came out sounding like a question and the shock of saying those words made her voice trail off into nervous nothing.

"I like you best. We have fun, you an' I."

"'Like you best', what does that mean? Better than who?"

He grinned. "Everyone. Anyone."

"I'm a good girl." She stared at the paintbrush she loved. "No matter what my momma thinks of me, no matter what the rest of them say. I'm a good girl. I want the house, and the fence, and the little boy who pretends to be Superman. And the husband who worships ground I walk on. You understand? I want that for myself."

Apollo/Andrew studied her lovely dancer's body, it was full of pleasure for him. He sighed, and puffed another time on his cigarette.

*****

He stood in front of her on Court Street, one hudred feet from the door of her new apartment building, the place she had moved to after the trial. They had sentenced him to twenty-five years, but she heard later that he made some kind of a deal with the prosecution. That was when Kay left Seattle and moved to Richland, in Pennsylvania.

She made mistakes. She helped him sell. She saw kids die slow, horrible deaths, with vaccuums where their mouths should've been-- they weren't allowed last words, just an oxygen bubble born of their crushed insides. When he pursed his lips and gazed down at the sidewalk, she said, "Look me in the eyes, baby. Who's scared of who?"

He turned his face toward the street, toward the silken sunlight, and the late afternoon traffic. "'Member how I used to read your palm? Aunt Gwen, she thought she was a gypsy in another life. Yours said eighty-five or ninety years, kids, grandkids, picket fences, lots of love. Handsome prince. A duel. You were goin' out in a blaze of glory, I knew that. Little Kay would make a lot of noise. Who wins? Maybe she never dies, I don't know. Maybe the bad guy kills the princess. Maybe it ends in a tie." His hands were in his pockets.

*****

The kleig lights lined the roof of the warehouse, forming neat t's and h's. Someone whispered that Eddie, the depressed D.J., had signed divorce papers with his wife that morning. The sound system was hooked into raw jazz.

Little Kay was covered in paint, regretful of her spots like a baby leopard in a pack of lion cubs. She couldn't get it off of her.

*****

On Court Street:
"I wish I never met you. What? No rhyme for me, 'Pollo, no present, no nothing?"

He remained silent. He thought if he could look at her everything would be okay. Now his stomach lurched. The line that had been dividing him was gone. It left off somewhere between Apollo and Andrew, between his own attempts at combining the two, and his girlfriend. The little girl who had put him together soon enough to break him apart. He thought that if he could just touch her one more time, then everything would be okay. He reached out for the smooth and tender skin of Kay's neck...

*****

As she sat in the lieutenant's office, she contemplated a future of certainty, in jail, and the other, if she were to turn state's evidence against Andrew David Lees. Used to be, 'uncertainty' expected everything to go wrong. After all, wasn't that her life? As she smiled now, looking at the fading glow of the lieutenant's desk lamp, Little Kay wondered if what it really meant was that anything was possible. There was no one in the room with her. She signed the dotted line of a page she had been doodling in the margins of for fifteen minutes. There was quiet all around.

*****

On Court Street again, the tension is palpable.

She pulls him to her. Their mouths meet in an old embrace. Neither is hungry, they realise, after a number of seconds; it is a handshake, perhaps a "congratulations on your sobriety," yet they hold each other for a long time, both crying, both whispering apologies, promises, and fantasies about what their life together might've been. A nonsense dream. They were each other's creation. She, the painter; he, the acceptor of her vision.

After awhile he lets go. He turns and walks past her, down the street, into the dying afternoon. The last thing she hears him say is, "I'll never forget you. I will never regret you."