Sourland

clothing. Here is the Atlantic Ocean — moving walls of jagged slate-colored waves — exactly the waves painted by Winslow Homer so precisely & obsessively, farther north along the Maine shore — in these waves a ferocious wish to sweep over us, to devour us.

Tyrell sees that I am shivering. Tyrell leans close to me, his arm around my shoulders. How clumsy we are, walking together! A man, a girl, a pair of crutches.

I ask him why he’d dropped out of the seminary & he says he was in despair, badly he’d wanted to be a “man of God” — to help others — while believing neither in God nor in others — & at last he realized that his desperation was to help himself — & so he quit. Living alone then in a single room on 113th Street, New York City — he’d broken off with his family in Barnegat Sound — went for days sometimes without speaking to anyone — took night courses at Columbia — found solace in his secular courses, psychology & linguistics — did research into the “secret language of twins” — the “social construction of twinness” & the “psychic ontology of twins” — its reception in the world.

“In some primitive cultures, twins are sacred. In others, twins are demonic and must be destroyed.”

“Why is that?”

“Why? No one knows why.”

From the subject of twins Tyrell shifts to the subject of the Hebrew Bible he’d studied — “deconstructed” — in the seminary; the compendium of writings — crude, inspired, primitive, surpassingly beautiful & terrifying — of an ancient people possessed by the idea that they are the chosen of God & hence their fate is God’s fate for them & never mere accident lacking in meaning.

“Essentially there are two ontologies: the accidental & the necessary. In the one, we are free. In the other, we are fated.”

“Are we! You sound very sure of yourself.”

“Don’t laugh at me, Jane! Please.”

“But why are you telling me these things? I don’t even know you.”

“Of course you know me, Jane.”

“No!”

“And you know why I’m telling you these things, Jane.”

“Why?”

“Because we are twins, Jane.”

“Twins! Don’t be ridiculous.”

The man’s calmness frightens me. His matter-of-fact speech. Though the wind is whipping at our faces, making our eyes tear. I want to think He’s mad. This is madness.

“Twins: in our souls. You know that.”

“I don’t know any such thing.”

“Yes. You know that, Jane. It’s clearer to me than any mystic identity of oneness in the universe. Just — us. We are oneness.”

“Oneness! That’s so — ”

I want to say ridiculous, mad. Instead, my voice trails off. I’m overcome by a fit of shivering & Tyrell grips my arm at the elbow, his fingers strong through the fabric of my coat.

Oblivious of our surroundings we’ve been hiking on the winter beach — a mile? Two miles? We turn back & retrace our steps in the hard-crusted sand.

The man’s heavy footprints, my smaller footprints & the slash-like prints made by my crutches.

No one could identify us, studying these prints. No one could guess at us.

The winter beach is littered with storm debris. Python-sized strips of brine, swaths of frozen & crusted ocean froth resembling spittle, or semen. Through a tear in the cloud-mass is a pale glaring moon like a mad eye winking.

The next time he asks, I will say Yes. You may carry me.

No one can understand how we are perfect together.

My stumps, fitted into the shallows at the base of his thighs.

My pale-pink skin, the most secret skin of my stumps, so soft, a man touching this skin exclaims as if he has been scalded. Oh! My God.

How do such things happen you ask & the answer is Quickly!

Those weeks of late-winter, early spring at the Jersey shore at Barnegat. Those weeks when Tyrell Beckmann entered my life. For there was no way to prevent him.

Saying Jane you are perfect. I adore you.

Saying I was born imperfect — “damaged.” There is something wrong with my body, no one can see except me.

It was so: Tyrell inhabited his body as if at an awkward distance from it. As if he had difficulty coordinating the motions of his legs as he walked & his arms that hung stiffly at his sides. Almost you might think Here is a man in the wrong body.

Confiding in me as I lay in his arms fitted into his body like a key in a lock.

So often in those weeks Tyrell came to me at the library, once I asked him where was his wife? & he said his wife was at home & in the mildest way of taunting I asked didn’t she wonder where he was on those evenings he was with me & he said she would suppose he was at the community college & I said oh but not every night! — & not so late on those nights — & it was then he said in a voice of male smugness: “She doesn’t want to know.”

Hearing this I felt a small stab of pleasure. Resenting as always the very syllable wife & certainly any thought of Tyrell’s wife until seeing now that this man was the prince of his household, very likely — the marriage, the family life, was centered upon him.

In any love-relationship there is the stronger person, & there is the weaker. There is the one who loves, & the one who is loved.

Loved, & therefore feared.

As often as he could come to me, he came. Arriving a half hour before the library closed. Or breathless & flush-faced arriving a scant five minutes before closing time. Sometimes Tyrell came directly from work — as he called it, without wishing to elaborate — as if the subject of his work in a family-owned local business was painful to him — & wore a sport coat or a suit, white shirt & necktie & black dress shoes like any professional man; at other times he wore corduroy trousers, the herringbone-tweed coat with leather elbow-patches, salt-stained running shoes.

Never did I look for the man. Never did I betray surprise or even (evident) pleasure glancing up & seeing the man looming over me with his tense tight smile, at the circulation desk.

There is the hunter, and there is the hunted.

Power resides not in the hunter — as you might think — but in the hunted.

In his hand a book as a prop. A book as a pretext. A book to be checked out of the Barnegat Public Library by the librarian at the circulation desk.

“Jane! Hello.”

It was not forbidden that Tyrell call me Jane. Many of the library patrons knew me & called me Jane.

It was not forbidden that Tyrell smile at me. Every patron known to me at the library was likely to smile at me.

It was forbidden that Tyrell touch me in public. Not even a handshake. Not even a brushing of his fingers against mine when I handed him back his plastic library card. Nor did I allow Tyrell to stare at me, in that way of his that was raw, ravenous. I had a horror of others knowing of us, or guessing. I had a horror of being talked-of, whispered-about.