One and the Same (9 page)

Dr. Michael Rothman, supervising psychologist at New York's Beth Israel Medical Center, has studied the psychological snags of having a double. “I think your social development probably is delayed,” he tells me in his downtown office. “You're slower in some ways. You're probably better at the intimate stuff than you are at the ‘Let me get to know you' phase, which isn't something you've had to do that often; you've always had your twin, who knows you. And you know how to connect to and relate to another human being in a very powerful, old, long-term relationship, but not necessarily in a new one.”

Psychotherapist and fraternal twin Dr. Dale Ortmeyer, eighty-five, who wrote about twin psychology in the 1970s, said that twins are good at intimacy because they've had a lot of practice with each other. But Rothman says twins can be bad at intimacy because they haven't needed to find it elsewhere. In his paper on twins, Rothman says forging romantic relationships can be an extra challenge—not just because twins haven't sought outside intimacy before but also because they don't feel that anything's missing. “While twins can engage in their own ‘chumship' much earlier than pre-adolescence,” writes Rothman, “learning to seek objects outside of the twinship is, for obvious reasons, a crucial skill that should be developed but may not seem needed to the twin.”

“If Fern and I were young today and I was our mother,” Sharon says, “I would have been a little concerned that we were not social at all.”

She tells me they fell in the awkward category in grade school, which was compounded by them having two of everything—skinniness, acne, and thick glasses.

“Had there been just one of us,” Sharon offers, “there wouldn't be fuel or fodder.”

“We were at the bus stop with this girl, Valerie,” Fern recalls. “There we were, the Nerdy Twins, and she had this curly thick hair; she wasn't cute. We weren't cute. They'd call us ‘Boobsy, Bobsy, and Brillo.' They were just mean.”

Fern says it wasn't until she was twenty-five that she really gained confidence apart from Sharon. “It wasn't till I moved to New Jersey that I realized I can be social on my own,” she says. Sharon, meanwhile, was much more proactive about finding a mate. “Sharon wanted to be married,” Fern says. “More important, she believed it was going to happen.”

As with the Perskys, there was some melancholy when Sharon actually did get engaged. “I felt for Fern,” Sharon says; “I worried she might feel bad.”

“I
did
feel bad,” Fern confirms—partly because she sensed her family pitied her. “I didn't want people to feel sad for me,” she said. “But there was also a part of me that thought, What's wrong with me that I can't find someone I feel comfortable with and fall in love with?”

And the twinship got in the way?

“Yes. That may be an excuse. But once you know Sharon, how do you find someone to match …?” She doesn't finish the question. “There's a closeness that we have—even if it isn't spoken—that was hard to duplicate.”

Sharon nods and smiles. “She completes me.”

• •

Paul and George Kogan, Russian-Jewish identical twins who were orphaned at the age of fifteen and adopted by Orthodox Jewish parents in Manhattan, are archetypes of twins who felt married and then went through a tense divorce. When I meet the brothers—forty-two, five eleven, spirited, rosy-cheeked—at a noisy café in Manhattan, the
fault line in their love affair emerges as our dinner progresses. But it all starts out cheerfully with descriptions of how their twinship used to be a powerful wooing tool. “It was a mark of distinction and it got me laid in college,” George boasts.

“When we would go out together during college,” Paul recalls (he went to Princeton, George to Penn, and they visited each other often), “typically we would be in some booth at a bar with some girls, and the banter and flirtation was very much driven by the twin thing.”

George continues. “We'd be sitting there, and girls would say, ‘Hey, are you two twins?' And we would literally have, I think, three or four witty repartee scenarios worked out.”

They admit their interaction was alluring—or reassuring—to women. “George and I were very close,” Paul says. “We would rub the backs of each other's heads; we were very affectionate with each other.”

“It was exactly what the girls wanted to see,” George marvels. “It's terrifying how much we played on that.”

“We were shameless.” Paul smiles.

Why do they think women were attracted to Twin PDA (public display of affection)
?

“It was warm to watch,” George ventures.

“I think they wanted to see men showing physical closeness,” Paul adds.

I ask if they continue to act that way with each other. Paul answers yes immediately, but George is more equivocal.

“I think there's a recognition that at some point, there was a split in the road and we both went our own ways,” George says. “When my brother found someone he was very serious about, it changed our relationship a lot.”

He's referring to Paul's marriage to Deborah Copaken in 1992. (Deb, an author and photographer, is a close friend of mine, who happens to have identical twin sisters.) “Paul and I were not in the same
place,” George recalls. “There was some point, when I moved back to New York from working in Moscow, I realized we had very different social scenes and I had kind of
lost
my brother.”

Paul looks surprised.

I ask George if he mourned that loss a bit.

“I think I mourned that privately and very quickly, but I did mourn that.”

He didn't express it to his brother at the time. “I just sort of moved on.”

And, in fact, he says that their threesome—he, Paul, and Deb—was felicitous while it lasted. “This whole
Jules and Jim
trilogy stuff worked very well,” George admits. “I played the third wheel and it suited me perfectly.”

Paul: “He was always very entertaining.”

George: “Paul and Deb would just set me up with all of their friends.”

Paul: “You shagged a lot of our friends.”

George: “So everyone got their new roles: Paul was the Committed Guy and I was the Single Irresponsible Guy.”

After thirteen years (and Paul becoming a father three times over), George married Irina in 2006, which wasn't as smooth going.

“You know … I
like
her,” Paul says tentatively. “I certainly have my issues with George's choice.”

“You don't like my wife at all!” George protests. He turns to me. “He was counseling me to leave her at the beginning.”

“It's true,” Paul concedes.

“He doesn't think she's worthy of me,” George explains.

“It's not true to say that I don't like her at all,” Paul insists.

“I thought we were going to be honest,” George says.

“We're being very honest!” Paul objects.

“I think you're being a little defensive,” George says. “You don't like my choice. You're willing to accept it, but you're not thrilled about it.”

The fissure in their twin romance is exposed at the dinner table.

“I think, in the end, I found the woman who was right for me,” George says somewhat defensively. “But when I met Irina, Paul was already married for ten years. We had grown apart; there's no question. We weren't nearly as close as we were at eighteen or twenty-two years old. … When he started having children, our lives and values became completely different.”

“The thing that was upsetting to me was ultimately the lack of communication,” Paul explains. “Certainly, after I was in the trenches of marriage and children, there was a real disconnect.”

They now rarely see each other alone. To me, it appears that George misses Paul more than he admits—and, frankly, more than Paul misses him. “I understand that my brother's life structure is very heavy,” George allows. “There are his kids' schools and other friends. He has a very extroverted, socially focused wife. So that world is very pulling for him.”

I ask George if he sees Paul as much as he wants to.

“No. Of course not.”

Same question to Paul.

“The simple answer is yes, I see him as much as I want to, in terms of what I can do right now.”

I see myself in George: the jilted lover. I've had that dispiriting realization that my twin is satisfied with the amount of time we spend together. I am aware of wanting her to want more dates with me.

Paul thinks that Irina is primarily what's keeping them from spending more time together as couples. “Before George was married,” Paul says, “I had a vision of the four of us sitting around having brunch, drinking coffee, and reading the
New York Times.”

“But I needed to marry a different person for us to do that,” George interjects. “I needed to marry an East Coast, Ivy League–educated chick, who spoke the same language. Irina is a Russian émigré. She's been here for twelve years; she has completely different concerns. Her priorities are much more earthy: yoga, holistic medicine.
She's as far from the Upper West Side as you can get. So that was the big division. … I think my brother's house, or his family, generally makes Irina feel very intimidated, so she tries to drag me away from them.”

“I think there are two divides,” Paul interjects. “One is the divide of the woman who George married, and the other is the divide of my brother not having kids. So I hold out great hope that at the very least, when they have kids, we will enter a common—”

“I don't see it.” George skewers the daydream. “I think our social circles are too different.”

“But we'll speak the same language,” Paul insists. “We'll speak the language of naps and diapers, at least for a few years.”

“But I don't think we're going to socialize more because of it,” George counters.

“I think that's up to Irina,” Paul persists. “For instance, Deb helps run this music group that meets every Friday morning. … Irina and your future baby could join. I'd love to see a return to some sort of a more common conversation we might have.”

“I think that could happen,” George allows.

“It would be nice,” Paul says. “It would make our lives easier.”

I see that George doesn't buy the happy ending. “I think it's part of our character—this resignation,” he says. “My brother and I never made the effort to get back closer. We look at time as sort of an inevitable process. We say, ‘Well, if anyone's going to make the effort, it's going to be the other guy.'”

I relate to that—waiting for my twin to make the first move.

“If my brother made more of an effort, I would respond,” George confesses. “But I don't see him making an effort, so I'm not going to do it.”

I find myself wanting to nudge them to a more acute awareness of the preciousness of each other. Maybe because I wish someone would nudge Robin and me, or maybe because I've recently met Gregory Hoffman, who lost his twin on 9/11 and thus dramatized most painfully how twins can't be too casual about time together.

“I do think that my brother and I take each other for granted in a way that we expect the other one always to be there,” George says in response. “If we were ever to admit the idea that he may not be there, you'd be touching on the idea that we're not permanent. The easier option is to take each other for granted.”

Paul shakes his head. “Taking each other for granted is only part of it. The other part of it is the time pressure and how crazy our lives get. Part of it is the gap between us, from my perspective. Very honestly, to some degree, I see George falling behind me on certain levels. And my wish is that he would catch up.”

What does he mean by “falling behind”?

“I think there is a movement forward in a life cycle,” Paul says, clarifying. “So I feel like, in terms of maturity and getting to a certain place, even though we're twins, he's my younger brother. That he's about seven years behind me.”

“Because I don't have kids,” George says.

“Primarily because he doesn't have kids,” Paul affirms. “In addition to my dream of sitting there together reading the
New York Times
, there is the other dream of us sitting and having our babies play together during a backyard barbecue as we talk about auto insurance. I consciously and actively miss that.”

I ask Paul what would happen if he reached out to George more to ask to spend time together.

“No.” Paul cuts me off. “No.”

“See, it's a central and immovable denial on his part,” George declares. “He never changes.” He looks at his brother with a fearlessness I can't imagine showing Robin. “The truth is that it's really your insecurity, in the most fundamental sense, that is preventing you from, first, reaching out to me, and, second, from admitting the fact that it's not a passive thought like, Oh, I wish my brother had kids. Then it would all get fixed.”

Paul is insecure
?

“It's hard to define,” says George. “If Paul was more at ease with himself, maybe he would appreciate what he had and he would be
charitable enough to share it. But I think that he's not quite comfortable in it, so I think there's a sense of hoarding what he has for himself.”

“I'm very at ease with myself,” says Paul, disagreeing. “I'm surprised you say that.”

“Part of it is, yes, him wishing I'd get to the same point,” George continues. “But my guess is that when I have kids, there will be other reasons why we don't get closer.”

“I agree with you,” Paul agrees, sharing his pessimism. “Even when you have kids, I don't see much of a scenario where we get much closer.”

Somehow the Kogans' sparring actually makes them appear
more
intimate, not less. Their exchange bespeaks an entrenched familiarity with each other, and safety in candor. They can say the toughest thing and survive it.