The Invitation (Montgomery/Taggert 19)

I was highly flattered by this because, to me, “real writer” means Pulitzer Prize. Not sales, but the prize. As I was flushing with pleasure at this accolade, Richard said, “Real writers are incurably nosy and cannot keep their mouths shut.”

I laughed so hard that the man who was trying to teach us called me down, and after that, Richard and I were great friends.

Well, I am, in every

sense of the word, a real writer. I’m nosy and I don’t keep my mouth shut. If someone tells me she’s just gotten a divorce, I’ll say, “So why’d you divorce him?”

Kane and I had been introduced, and we’d shared enough that I guess we were at least on a first-name basis, so I said, “How come you’ve been p.o.’d since your wife died? Did you hate her or what?” Subtlety is not part of my personality, and besides, I’ve found that the direct approach earns me either silence or a story.

I could feel Kane hesitate, and a part of me sensed that he’d never told anyone, not anyone on the face of the earth, the truth about his wife. While he was making up his mind whether or not to tell me, I held my breath because I suddenly knew that I wanted to know whatever was inside him. It was at that moment that he became a person to me. Maybe it was the sex, maybe it was his looks, maybe it was the sweetness of his breath, and maybe it was my love of a story from any source, but I don’t think so. I think it was a feeling that there was more to him than muscle and sex appeal. I think I knew that a man who could make me feel as he’d just done was not an insensitive clod, that there was a real person inside.

“I have an identical twin brother,” he said.

I didn’t expel my breath. Several times I had wondered why Mike had asked me not to let Kane know that I knew about him.

He went on. “There’s an asinine saying in my family: You marry the one who can tell the twins apart.”

Oh, Lord, I thought. No wonder Mike asked me to, for once, keep my mouth shut. Marry? Me? Marry some great big, sexy cowpoke whom, until a few hours ago, I disliked rather heartily?

“Could your wife tell the twins apart?” I asked, and my voice was a small thing.

Kane didn’t seem to notice my voice as he started telling me how he’d met her in Paris.

Paris? I thought. What was a cowboy doing in Paris? Having the hair done on his best bull?

Anyway, he was in Paris, met her, fell madly in love, and married her six days later. Sometime during this six days he called his mother, and she sent his brother Mike over to check out the bride. Here Kane’s body began to tense up as he told how his family had sent Mike to see if she could tell the twins apart.

“And when she couldn’t, that was it,” Kane said. “No one else in the family besides Mike attended my wedding. It was as though they’d dismissed her because of some stupid legend.”

He didn’t say anything after that, so I said, “You liked her, though?” I was praying he wasn’t going to tell me that the legend had been right, that he’d fallen out of love with her two weeks after the wedding.

“Yeah, I loved her. I loved her madly. We were perfectly suited. It was as though we were two halves of a whole. If she had a thought, I had it at the same time. We liked the same food, the same people, wanted to do the same things at the same time.”

If I lived with somebody like that, I’d be crazy in a week. In fact, once I had a boyfriend like that. The girls in the dorm all said I was so lucky, but I thought I’d go out of my mind. One night I said I wanted Italian for dinner, and when he said he did too, I attacked. “What if I wanted Chinese? What if I wanted Peking cat?” I yelled at the poor guy. “Don’t you have any thoughts of your own? Don’t you ever want a good ol’-fashioned argument about where we’ll eat tonight?” Need I say that that particular young man never called me again?

I’d learned long ago that most people aren’t like me, so maybe most people would enjoy living in complete peace and harmony. Personally, I’ve never experienced tranquillity, but my intuition tells me that it’s not something for which I have any natural talent.

One minute Kane was telling me about his dead wife and the next, he was telling me about his brother’s wife, and for a while, from the tone of his voice, I thought he was in love with her. But he was explaining how his family had accepted Mike’s wife, Samantha, into the family but not his wife. There was anger in his voice, but I’m glad to say there was no jealousy.

So now what do I do? I thought. Say, Hey, I can tell the twins apart? I’m not much of a believer in magic—magician shows put me to sleep—so I’m sure there are hundreds of women in America who can tell Kane from his very different brother. Next time Kane got married, he should pick one of them and make his family happy.

He went on talking to me, telling me in detail about his paragon of a wife. I refrained from making snide remarks about how “perfect” the two of them sounded—how perfectly boring, that is. Perfect conversations, perfect sex, perfect children. If she’d lived, would they have had a perfect divorce? Maybe they wouldn’t have divorced and maybe I’m just being cynical, but every marriage where I’ve heard the wife say, “My husband is a darling. We never fight,” ends in divorce. The marriages that last have a wife who says, “My husband is a pain in the neck,” then elaborates on the subject. Maybe it has to do with telling yourself what you hope is the truth and facing what actually is.

Kane went on to tell of his loneliness after her death and how he had not been allowed to grieve for her. Everyone in his family seemed to have the same attitude: Buck up and think of your sons. He’d wanted to sit in a dark room and cry for days, but his wife’s mother had been the one to cry while Kane had to be the strong one and listen to everyone else’s grief. How could they mourn her death, he wondered, when they’d never celebrated her life?

In the end he didn’t get to cry. Everyone seemed to think that it was the boys who were important, who were going to need their mother. Kane wasn’t the type to shout that he needed her too, so he’d kept his tears inside and carried on as before, except that there was no longer anyone waiting for him at the end of the day. No one to laugh at his jokes and rub his tired shoulders, no one to bounce ideas off—no one to make love to.

I don’t know why people tend to tell me their most intimate secrets. Maybe it’s because I’m interested, but then, maybe it’s because I’m an empath.

I saw a “Star Trek” episode where a woman was an empath; she felt other people’s joys and miseries. That’s what I do. I think it has to do with my being a fixer and listening so hard that I try to solve people’s problems for them. If I want something, I go after it. I have tunnel vision. Nothing distracts me; nothing discourages me.

It took a really rotten secretary to teach me that everyone isn’t like me. Hildy told me that what she wanted most in the world was to write children’s books. In fact, she had written one and now all she needed was a publisher.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me: I believe what people tell me. Hildy said she wanted a publisher, so I called in some favors and arranged for her story to be read by one of the top children’s book editors in New York. I then spent three days on the phone trying to reach Hildy. When I finally got her, late on a Sunday night, she told me angrily that since I hadn’t called her as I said I would, she’d mailed her manuscript in to the slush pile at another house. Of course she received a rejection, and she felt that it was my fault.

It took me a long time to figure out that what Hildy really wanted was to tell people that someday she wanted to write children’s books.

Since I listen to people so intently, following their angst-ridden sighs with offers of help—all of which I carry out—I figure that’s why people talk to me about their problems.