Olivia and Owen

The next night, the couple repeated what they had done the night before - the same acts, though their mood now was somber and passionate instead of lighthearted. They were even more substantial now. I could hear their movements more clearly, their sighs and moans, their words of love. Again they stopped without having sex, and without the boy having an orgasm. Again they stood up, and the boy fastened his pants.

As they turned to go, I said, very softly, "Olivia? Owen?"

4. The twins' story

They turned to look at me. "Who're you?" said the boy.

"My name is Angie," I said, "and I've come a long way to talk to you. Can you spare me a few minutes?"

"Was you watching us?" said the girl.

"Yes," I said. "I'm sorry."

She hesitated a few seconds and then said, "It don't matter." I expected her to say something like that. Our notions of privacy are derived, ultimately, from concerns about status and reputation, and the dead are beyond caring what the living think of them.

The boy said, "Why d'you want to talk to us?"

I said, "I collect stories, and I'm betting yours is an interesting one."

"You write for Black Mask?" he asked. "Andy Shiflett loaned me a copy of that once, and it was nifty."

"Something maybe a little like that," I said. "Will you talk to me?"

They exchanged a look, and she said, "Okay."

"Why don't you sit?" I said, gesturing at the ground in front of me.

"We don't get tired," said the boy.

"I know," I said, "but it would be easier for me if you were sitting."

They exchanged a look again, and then sat so we formed an intimate little circle.

I said, "Did I get your names right? Olivia and Owen Cross?"

"Yes, ma'am," said Owen. "That's us. What do you want to know about us?"

"Well," I said, "I'd like to know how you became lovers, and pretty much anything else you'd like to tell me about your lives. And I'd like to know how you met your end."

As we'd been talking, they had been growing more distinct. Now they seemed as real and solid as any living person.

"We's twins," Olivia began.

"I know," I said. "I am too. I have a twin brother."

Olivia looked at me with a new interest. "So you know," she said. "When you're growing up with a twin, you spend about every minute of every day together. You don't know nobody in the world better than you know your twin. There ain't nothing in the world that feels more right than being together."

"That's right," I said. "That was my experience too."

"We done everything together," said Owen. "We played with the same toys when we was little, and we played ball together when we got older. We even played together with Via's dolls. Folks didn't think nothing of it. They just thought we was cute."

Olivia said, "They didn't think nothing of it that we liked to play together more than we liked to play with other boys and girls. They understood, twins are like that."

"We had friends and all," said Owen. "But we couldn't be friends with boys that couldn't stand girls or girls that thought boys was icky."

"Was Earl a childhood friend?" I asked, wanting to drive the story forward but nervous about upsetting them.

But they both brightened up at the mention of Earl. "Yes, ma'am," said Owen. "We was friends with Earl as far back as we can remember. Earl, and Dottie, and a few others. We was the boys and girls club. I guess they's all dead now."

"You died eighty-seven years ago," I said. "You'd be a hundred and six if you were alive now."

"It don't seem that long," said Owen.

I said to Olivia, "People in town say Earl was sweet on you. They still remember how he courted you."

Olivia hesitated, then said, "I liked Earl. He was our best friend. But I didn't like him that way."

"When did the two of you find yourself starting to like each other that way?"

"It's hard to say," said Owen. "When you're growing up a twin, it feels so natural to touch each other, like there ain't nothing secret about your bodies. There ain't nothing dirty about it: when you're little, you don't know nothing about that kind of thing. But then when you get older you start to feel like there's something wrong, and you ain't supposed to touch. But you still want to."

"I know," I said. I remembered that awkward age when I had to become, in a way, estranged from the person closest to me.

Olivia said, "We'd wait till Daddy was away, or asleep, and we'd just sit together and talk, you know? Touching? Starting when we was fourteen or so. We didn't do nothing wrong, we didn't kiss or nothing like that. We just wanted to be able to hold hands, like, or sit with our knees touching."

Owen continued, "It was when we was sixteen that we was sitting on the sofa talking and holding hands, when Daddy come into the room - we didn't know he was home, or we wouldn't have done it. We knowed he didn't like it. He took one look at us and turned and left the room."

"And before I knowed it," said Olivia, "I was living with Aunt Pauline up to Winchester and going to a secretarial academy."

Owen said, "She was there for two years. She only come home twice, for Christmas, and Daddy watched us like a hawk then. We wrote to each other, but we had to be careful what we said, because they was reading our letters. Still, I could tell how Via missed me, and I missed her too."

"I got back home in spring of twenty-seven," Olivia continued, "and went to work for Alberene, in the office. Taking dictation. Typing. I liked the work, and the pay was good. Earl was there, too. They had him doing different jobs, learning how the company worked. He was going to be a manager. Owen was working in the quarry."

"That was hard, hot work," said Owen, "but I liked it."

"We tried not to touch each other," said Olivia, "because we knowed Daddy didn't like it. He didn't want to leave us alone: he'd kind of hang around when we was together, or we'd see him looking at us through doors and windows."

Owen said, "Sometimes we'd hear him sort of muttering to himself. I worried he was going round the bend."

"Everything picked up where it left off with Earl," said Olivia. "He'd come calling in the afternoon, asking to go for walks. He was the same nice guy, and I liked him the same way as before. Finally he up and told me he was sweet on me, and asked would I marry him. He was kind of hopeless like when he said it, like he knowed what the answer was, and why, but he had to ask anyways."

"She told him she'd always be his friend," said Owen, "but she couldn't be his wife. She just didn't love him that way. He said he'd always be her friend, too, and if she ever wanted him to be more, he'd be ready."

"So he took it well?"

"Yeah," said Olivia. "He took it real well. Earl was so sweet."

"What changed him?" I asked.

"What do you mean?" she said, looking puzzled.

"Why did he shoot you?"

"Earl didn't never shoot us," she said.

My heart skipped a beat. "I guess I got the story wrong," I said. "So tell me what happened."

"It was the day after Earl asked me to marry him," said Olivia, "and we was just turned nineteen. We was sitting on the back stoop talking about Earl. We was holding hands."

Owen said, "I asked why she wouldn't marry Earl, because he was a good fellow and a good match, and he was real stuck on her."

Olivia said, "I said I wouldn't never marry, because I couldn't love nobody, and when he asked why, I said I knowed I couldn't never be as close to nobody as I was to him."

"I realized right there that I felt the same way," said Owen, "and that was why I hadn't gone courting - not Dottie, not Alice. They was all pretty, and good catches, and they'd started to smile at me that way, you know, but I didn't want none of them."

"He told me that," said Olivia, "sitting there on the back stoop, holding hands, and it come to me that maybe Owen was the one I loved. His hand felt so good in mine, I asked him if he'd kiss me."

"She was cute about it," said Owen with a smile. "She said, you know, like an experiment, to see if kissing feels good. Maybe we just wasn't cut out for loving. So I kissed her."

"Nothing ever felt so good before," said Olivia. "It was like suddenly I was ten times as alive as I'd ever been in my life. The moon was almost full, like tonight, and it seemed ten times as bright as it ever was."

Owen said, "I felt like my body was full to bursting with something sweet like honey, or bright like sunshine."

"We kissed and kissed," said Olivia, "till I got up and pulled him out into the backyard. I pushed him down on the ground and got on top of him to kiss him some more, just like what you seen us do tonight."

"We rolled on the ground, kissing and kissing, till she sat up on me, and undid my pants, and . . ."

"I put his willy in my mouth," Olivia giggled.

"How did you get the idea to do that?" I asked. "Lots of girls do it now, but I hear they didn't do it so much back then."

She said, "Some of the girls at the secretarial academy talked about doing it, and it sounded like fun. I thought I'd never felt nothing so wonderful. I held him in my mouth, and sucked him, and ran my tongue up and down him."

"It was amazing how good it felt," said Owen, "and I knew there wasn't nobody else that could ever make me feel that way. I just propped myself up on my elbows and watched her - I'd never seen such a beautiful sight, like it was meant to be."

"And that's when I heard the click of somebody racking a shotgun behind me," said Olivia. "I looked around - it was Daddy. He said just one word, 'abomination,' and then he shot me. It hurt bad, and it made a huge hole in my side."

"He shot me in the chest," said Owen. "Then he turned around and went inside without saying another word."

"We was there a little while," said Olivia. "We stood together, holding hands and looking at our bodies. They was a big mess. I'd fell with my head in Owen's lap, and Owen had fell backwards so he was laying on his back. There was blood all over us and all around us."

"Then Earl come along," said Owen. "His house wasn't far away, and I guess he heard the shotgun blast. He stood there a long time, looking at us. Then he rolled Olivia off me and fastened my pants. He drug us out to the road and laid us there, me on my back and Olivia face down, sort of like the way we was in the backyard, but side by side. I guess he didn't want folks to find us the way we was. Then he left us, and nothing else happened till the sheriff got there. We didn't pay much attention after that. We was already starting to lose interest in the world of the living."

"Still, we stayed near our bodies. The Coroner had us for a while, and then they brung us here," said Olivia. "And we been here ever since."

"It's a nice place," said Owen. "It was all logged out when they put us here - bare land. But the trees has all grown up now - it's real pretty."

"Quiet, too," said Olivia. "And the other folks here is nice."

I had a hundred questions to ask them, but I was agitated, emotions boiling inside me.

"May I come and visit you again tomorrow night?" I asked.

They exchanged a look again; then Olivia shrugged and said, "Sure."

5. The trouble with sex

"You have to see them to understand how completely not disgusting they are," I said. "They're just kids - they were nineteen when they died, and they're still nineteen now. And they're pretty and sweet. Sure, what they did was wrong, when they were alive, sort of - they didn't go all the way. But how bad is it now? They love each other, they're happy together, and what they do seems beautiful and innocent."

We were working in Frank's garden, weeding on either side of a row of tomatoes. The July sun was hot, and we were both wearing big floppy hats and sweating in baggy khakis.

"Okay," said Frank. He was working with great concentration, face set.

"What they were saying resonated with me, in a funny way," I said. "About the time when it started to be not okay to, you know, share a bed, bathe together, or just touch, hold hands, wrestle in the grass - things we did when we were small, before touching started to seem personal in a different way. Do you remember that awkwardness?"

"Yeah." Frank's face softened a little. "You matured faster than I did and started to seem stand-offish. I didn't quite understand it, even though Mom and Dad tried to explain it to me. Adolescence was hard."

I said, "At least until you figured out how much all the girls liked you."

Frank laughed. "Did you ever notice how all my girlfriends looked a bit like you?"

"I used to wonder if it was my imagination - and after all, Italian-American girls were what you had available there in our neighborhood. But yeah - Gina used to joke that you'd married your twin."

We worked quietly for a while. I was sorry I'd told him what Gina had said. The air between us was dense with unsaid things.

Finally Frank said, "Tomorrow's Sunday. Why don't we drive up to Charlottesville and go to church? Get a nice lunch afterwards?"

"Why, Frank?" I said. "We're both lapsed Catholics. We haven't been to church in ages."

"I want to remember what it was like being a kid. I think maybe going to church would help."

That night I was in the graveyard again. I expected it to be my last visit: only two more days in Virginia, and then I'd go home to New York.

Olivia and Owen again performed their strange not-quite sex act, apparently undisturbed by my presence. Then they came to sit with me.

"What you do," I said, "your lovemaking. You can feel the physical pleasure, right?"

"Oh, yeah!" said Owen enthusiastically, and Olivia nodded vigorously.

"But you don't ever do more than that? Go all the way?"

"We don't know how," said Olivia. "We was virgins when we died."

"If you could learn, though - then you could do it?"

"Sure they could," said a man who'd come up to our group - the suddenness of his appearance startled me. He would have been about fifty when he died - maybe younger, because work in the quarries aged you fast. He was lean, almost emaciated, and dark-haired. "Me and the missus do it all the time."

"Angie," said Olivia, "this is Mr. Harrington. He was buried here just a year after us, and his wife a couple years later."

"I'm glad to meet you, Mr. Harrington," I said.

"Call me George," he said. "Me and Beth tried to learn these young 'uns how to do it, but they couldn't catch on."

"It's hard to learn new things when you're dead," said Owen ruefully.

George said, "You living folk are always in a hurry, changing and going places. We done all our changing, and we got where we're going."

"Do you never change or learn?"

"We used to learn the names of newcomers, before they stopped burying here. We learned your name, Angie," said Olivia proudly.

"It's the how-to things that's hard," said George. "These kids like to hear me sing 'Big Rock Candy Mountain,' but they can't learn it."

"There was a record of it made after we died," said Owen.

"Fella come through here a few years ago and learned me a song," said George. "A hiker. Nice fella, not afraid of ghosts at all. Want to hear it?"

"Sure," I said.

He started to sing off-key, "Hey, Jude, don't make it bad . . ."

I laughed. "Okay, so you can learn."

"We can learn from living folks," said George, "and even so it ain't easy. I had to sing along with that fella a couple a times. I wasn't gonna learn it by hearing it only the once."

"Let me ask you," I said to Olivia and Owen. "If you could learn to make love, would you want to do it? Or are you happy the way you are?"

Owen took Olivia's hand and said, "It's the onliest thing we do want to learn."

Olivia said, "We would've done it that night, if Daddy hadn't a killt us first."

I said, "Did you ever hear what happened to Earl and your father?"

"We ain't seen Daddy since he come here and put some little soapstone markers on our graves," said Olivia. "He stayed here, and cried a while, and then went away. We didn't let him see us."

"Earl took the blame for your killings," I said. "The state executed him later that year. And your father committed suicide." I told them the few details I knew.

They were quiet for a while. Then Owen said, "Well, if that don't beat all."

"Do you have any idea why Earl would have taken the blame?" I asked.

Olivia said, "I think maybe he didn't want to live no more, after me and Owen was gone."

"It's a hard way to commit suicide, though," I said. "It's the way you might do it if you really hated yourself."

"Maybe he did," said Owen.

After the twins had left, George lingered, blocking the path that led back to Frank's friends' house.

Grinning, he said, "That hiker told me about you modern dolls, how you's all trollops. You could learn 'em, sure enough. You could show that boy how to put his dick in a nice warm fur pie and come there and make a girl come. Then he could fuck that sweet sister of his for the rest of eternity, just like me and the missus."

"In theory," I snapped, and brushed past him, switching on my flashlight.

"In theory," he mocked, and a few seconds later, as I was retreating around a bend, he shouted, "Be a thousand year before anybody else come along as could do it!"

He was right - the ghosts and I were real enough to each other that physical relations were possible. But of course the idea was absurd.

The next day Frank took me to a pretty old Catholic church in downtown Charlottesville. He was right that it would make us feel like children again. The stained glass, the ritual, and the Eucharist all put me in mind of Sundays when Mom and Dad would shepherd us down the aisle and into a pew, and we'd feel small and cared for and, somehow, strangely, free.

After church we had an outdoor lunch on a street that had been closed off to make a tree-shaded pedestrian mall. We talked about our gentle, indulgent parents and the childhood we'd shared in our leafy, prosperous Connecticut suburb - worlds and eternities away from the poor, hard world of the stoneworkers. But we had this in common with Olivia and Owen: we'd known the intimacy they'd spoken of, the sense, as children, that it was perfectly natural for us to do everything together, to touch and be easy with each other's bodies.

The loss of that paradise is inevitable - for identical twins as well as fraternal ones like Frank and me. We have to make our separate ways in the world and pursue our separate careers and loves. And for boy-girl twins, the beginning of that process of separation can be cruel, as the familiarity of childhood becomes, all too suddenly, taboo.

We bought a week's worth of groceries and took the slow back way down to Schuyler, along the Old Lynchburg Road, through lush woodlands and tiny crossroad villages, past three-century-old farms. Back at Frank's house, we did our separate things for what was left of the afternoon, made and ate dinner, and afterwards sat together on his big screened porch, on a swinging seat under a lazily turning fan.

I said, "I hope I didn't upset you, mentioning what Gina said about your marriage. She was just joking, you know."

"It's okay," he said. "But you can pack a lot of truth into a joke. She never said it to me, but I knew it anyway. She understood better than I did that our marriage was as much about you as her, and she made herself live with that understanding because she loved me. I loved her, too. She was fun, and beautiful, and we had shared interests. But I've regretted, every day since she died, that I never managed to love her quite as much as she loved me."

His left arm lay on the arm of the porch swing, his right hand on his thigh. I put my hand on his, squeezed his fingers, and let it rest there, enjoying the warmth and moisture of his skin, pleased that he was willing to be comforted this way, with my touch. Cooled by the overhead fan, we watched the shadows lengthen over his garden.