“The strangest trip of all was to Miami. John knew a businessman there he thought was a real original. He wanted him to move to New Bentwick, yes here, it would be right for him and he for it. He said to me, ‘You keep saying you owe me so much. You say you want to pay me back. So here’s your chance.’ ‘Huh?’ I said. ‘I’ll introduce you. You get into his life any way you want. You overwhelm him — yes, you can. You can take him over. Then you can bring him to New Bentwick to your Uncle John.’ ‘You’re asking me to fuck somebody I haven’t even seen?’ ‘Absolutely not. He’ll be eighty years old next year. Good Lord, I thought you’d never get around to using that word in front of me.’ ‘So what else can I do?’ ‘Dazzle him out of his wits! You’re asking me? You talk shop with astrophysicists, maybe you can teach him gin rummy.’ ‘You know that for you — ’ ‘Yes. And I’m asking you. His name is Schlemkes.’”
“Wait,” Andreas interrupted. “Can you spell that?” Wicheria obliged. Andreas counted the letters. “Seven consonants, two vowels. Like the name Geoffrey couldn’t remember. Is his first name Malachi?” Wicheria: “Don’t tell me you know him?” “No. But our friend Geoffrey Hyde does. You mean to say you’re the beautiful shiksa that moved in with him?” “Moved in, no. But I hung out at his place all the time.” “I thought he’d fallen for —” “He did, in a way. We really clicked. You know he’s been hung up on this Jewish revenge shtik. I started getting him to see he was looking the wrong way, timewise. He’s still got great ideas in him.” “You should inform him that the man who sat next to him on a Pan Am flight from Sydney to Zurich in 1980 (I think), the one he wanted to hire to write his book, is living in New Bentwick and is starting up an innovation —”
The conversation could go no further. The four-piece band that had drawn out a few hesitant dancers with “La Vie en rose” now broke into the snappier “Winchester Cathedral,” at whose first chords Wicheria grabbed a startled Andreas by the hand and pulled him toward the dance floor.
The vocalist was getting the song right — sad words juggled by happy music:
Winchester Cathedral
You’re bringing me down
You stood and you watched as
My baby left town.
Andreas was protesting, “But I can’t dance to this stuff!” Wicheria: “You will.” She certainly could (but she kept her first turns small to let her partner get started). He was timidly shifting from foot to foot. She was moving a shoulder or a foot or her head or hips in no recognizable order. He tried repeating one of her movements — “You’re doing steps, Andreas baby, never do steps. Just listen to the music.” (Andreas reported all this to Berenice later.) “OK. Imagine your left hip is a fixed point in space and around it the rest of you can do anything, anything.” She demonstrated.
“Fine, you can do what I do but just once! Then you make up your own moves.” Not knowing what to do, Andreas started loosening bits of his frame, wiggling for instance. Meanwhile, to calls from the sidelines of “Go for it, Witchy!” the lady put on a show — graceful slides, spins, and leaps that set her loose bright clothes and her long hair swirling about her in savvy escalation to an apex at the end of the song — “My baby left town” repeated over the electronic din of two guitars, a double bass, an agitation of drums — an apex with Wicheria’s right leg raised high behind her in a classical arabesque. Berenice watching prayed her Andreas remembered enough from his ballet evenings to do what he should; and he did, dropping to his right knee and taking her waist in his two hands to support her arabesque now penché, her raised leg perfectly vertical, sheathed to the slight parenthesis of her underbutt in glittering-green, irregularly see-through pantyhose, held straight and pointed for five full seconds until the two dancers broke into giggles, stood up and kissed each other on the cheek, the onlookers cheered away, and Wicheria led Andreas back to our table — a happy, slightly reconditioned Andreas, and still all mine!
8
Mine?”
After our lunch with John, when it became certain that neither of the twins would ever publicly tell their story, I decided to preserve these pages that I began writing months ago, the day after I met Andreas. They are not meant to replace what Andreas hoped to publish. They are no more than a chronology of our life here, a kind of journal that has now unexpectedly changed into a memoir. Now Berenice can say “me,” “we,” and “mine.” And Berenice’s new name is “I.”
We finally met John at the same spruce and pleasant bar where he’d long ago happily accosted me. Its name is the Bentwick Arms; it serves light lunches as well as drinks, including the Sardinian vermentino that Andreas had been longing to taste ever since I’d mentioned it to him.
John was visibly pleased to
