On the ninety-seventh night of his search, Andre was moving along the Quai Voltaire when he was suddenly seized by a storm of emotion so powerful it shook his bones and knocked his heart. Voices that he heard but did not hear made him stagger toward an intersection, where he froze.
Across the narrow street under a bower of trembling leaves, there was a small audience staring at a brass-framed menu, and the window beyond. Andre stepped, as in a trance, to stand behind the people.
“Impossible,” whispered Andre.
For in the candlelit window sat the most beautiful woman, the most beautiful love of his life. And across from her sat an amazingly handsome man. They were lifting glasses and drinking champagne.
Am I outside or in? Andre wondered. Is that me in there, as before, and in love? What?
He could only swallow his heart as, for an instant, the gaze of the beautiful young woman passed over him like a shadow and did not return. Instead she smiled at her friend across the candlelit table. Stunned, Andre found the entryway and stepped in to move and stand close by the couple who whispered and laughed quietly.
She was more beautiful than in all the nights he had imagined her multitudinous names. Her travels across Paris had colored her cheeks and brightened her incredible eyes. Even her laughter was made rich by a passage of time.
Outside the restaurant window, a new audience watched as Andre said:
“Excuse.”
The beautiful young woman and the handsome man looked up. There was no remembrance in her eyes, nor did her lips smile.
“Madame et Monsieur Shill?” Andre asked, numbly.
They held hands and nodded.
“Yes?” they said.
And finished the wine.
The Mirror
Good Lord, there must be a thousand ways to tell of these two ladies. When they were girls, in yellow dresses, they could stand and comb their hair looking at each other. If life was a great Swiss clock, then these were the sprightliest cuckoos that ever jumped out of two doors at once, announcing the exact same time, each of them, not a second lost between. They blinked as if one cord was pulled by a great magician hidden behind the scenes. They wore the same shoes, tilted their heads in the same direction, and trailed their hands like white ribbons on the air as they floated by. Two bottles of cool milk, two new Lincoln pennies were never more the same. Whenever they entered the school proms the dancers halted as if someone had suddenly removed all of the air from the ballroom; everyone gasped.
“The twins,” everyone said. Not a name was mentioned. What matter if their name was Wycherly; the parts were interchangeable, you didn’t love one, you loved a corporative enterprise. The twins, the twins, how they floated down the great river of years, like two daisies tossed upon the waters.
/> “They’ll marry the kings of the world,” people said.
But they sat upon their porch for twenty years, they were as much a part of the park as the swans, you saw their faces uplifted and thrust forward like winter ghosts in the dark night of the film theater.
Oh, once there’d been men, or a man in their life. The word “life” is suggested because a plural noun would not do justice to their oneness. A man had tipped his hat to them here or there, only to have the hat returned to him as he was floated to the door. “Twins is what we’re looking for!” you could hear the older sister saying across the twilight lawns. “We’ve two of everything in the house, beds, shoes, sun-chairs, dark glasses; and now how wonderful if we could find twins like ourselves, for only twins would understand what it is to be an individual and a mirror reflection—”
The older sister. Born nine minutes before the younger, and the divine right of elegant queens in her veins. “Sister do this, sister do that, sister do the other thing!”
“I’m the mirror,” said Julia, the youngest, at the age of twenty-nine. “Oh, I’ve always known. Coral, everything went to her, the sense, the tongue, the mind, the coloring …”
“Alike as two vanilla cones, both of you.”
“No, you don’t see what I see. My pores are larger and my skin redder and my elbows are rough. Coral says sandpaper is talcum by comparison. No, she’s the person, and I only stand here and act out what she is and what she does, like a mirror, but always knowing I’m not real, I’m only so many waves of light, an optical illusion. Anyone who hit me with a rock would have seven years bad luck.”
“Both of you will be married come spring, no doubt, no doubt of it!”
“Coral maybe, not me. I’ll just go along to talk evenings when Coral has a headache and make the tea, that’s a natural-born gift I have, making tea.”
In 1934 there was a man, the town remembers, and not with Coral at all, but with the younger Julia.
“It was like a siren, the night Julia brought her young man home. I thought the tannery had gone down in flames. Came out on my front porch half-dressed with shock. And there was Coral on the front porch making a spell on the young man across half the lawn, and asking the earth to swallow her, and Julia hidden inside the screen door, and the young man just standing there with his hat on the wet grass. The next morning I saw Julia sneak out and grab it and run in. After that, didn’t see the twins for, well, a week, and after that, there they were, sailing like boats again, down the sidewalk, the two of them, but after that I always knew which was Julia—yes, you could tell every year after that which was Julia by looking in her face.”
Only last week they turned forty, the old and the young Wycherly. There must have been something about that day which broke a harp-thread so quick and so loud you could hear the clear sound of it across town.
On that morning, Julia Wycherly awoke and did not comb her hair. At breakfast the oldest one looked in her faithful mirror and said, “What’s the matter with your comb?”