One and the Same (22 page)

“I wouldn't say that surgery fixed everything or solved all my problems,” says Clair, “but definitely I feel like I was reborn in many ways and can start fresh. That's the most powerful part of it: I've been given the opportunity to start over in a new body.”

They spent their childhood as inseparable playmates in Missoula, Montana. The film includes home movies of the boys dancing merrily together. At one point, Mark says on-camera, “We were just in love with each other from the day we were born,” and their mother adds, “They know each other in ways you and I will never know.”

In seventh grade, Alex came out as a homosexual. Mark was still in the closet, but their classmates assumed he was gay, as did their mother. The twins were going through an angry phase, fighting with each other constantly; Clair admits she was physically abusive to Mark. In the film, Mark says their sameness magnified their adolescent awkwardness: “We were definitely really self-conscious at that point in our life, and having each other as a mirror of what we didn't like about ourselves.”

At fifteen, they decided to commit double suicide. It was Mark's idea. “I asked Alex to make a promise,” he recounts on film. “I told him he had to say yes before I told him what it was. I started telling him that I didn't feel anyone really loved us and that we had a place in this life. Things had to be better somewhere else.”

Alex agreed to Mark's plan. “We both had been depressed and suicidal,” Clair recalls. “Why wouldn't you end your life with the person you began it with? Why would you want to live on without him?”

They drove to a bluff overlooking Missoula. Both did a large amount of cocaine; then they directed the exhaust pipe into their car and turned on the ignition. “We closed all the windows and started breathing in the fumes. He kept kind of shaking me and we were both in the backseat. He wanted me to get up—‘Get up, get up.' You know, ‘You can't die yet. No, we have to die together; wake up, wake up, wake up.'”

“We stayed in there for hours,” Mark recalls, “and I remember at
one point saying, ‘This isn't working; we're not dying.' And so we talked about driving the car off the cliff.”

“‘I don't want to drive off the side of the cliff,'” Clair recalls saying. “‘Please let's not do this. I just want to go home.'”

“So I got out of the car,” Mark continues, “and took the hose out of the exhaust and drove us home.”

When they got home, drugged and sickened, they confessed everything to their dad, who rushed to the hospital; they were sent from there to a mental facility, then for four years to separate drug rehabilitation centers, Alex in Oregon, Mark in Idaho. They saw each other twice during that entire time.

“This came after a fifteen-year relationship of spending every single day together,” Clair says now over her salad. “Suddenly we had to survive without each other. For the first time, we created an identity that was separate.”

Though their phone conversations were monitored, Alex did tell Mark at one point that he had decided to become a woman. Alex also told his mother, who, in the film, offers her own take on Alex's choice to change genders. “[It was] his attempt to not be a twin. To be totally isolated from us. And it worked. Do I think it's real? Yeah. For the time being.”

I ask Mark if there was a point where he asked his twin not to go through with it.

“Never,” he replies firmly.

Today, Mark minimizes the question of whether Clair's decision was a reaction to their twinship, but in the documentary, he tells Clair he was somewhat offended at the time. “It's still hard for me sometimes,” he tells her on-camera, “because we were born as twins; we were born as boys. That's part of our identity; it's part of my identity. You said you don't like what you're like—your physical body—and you don't like me because we look so much alike. I explained to him that I don't look at you [now that you're a woman] and see myself. Part of who we were was lost in that transformation.”

Their relationship, which had been so intertwined as children, suddenly felt annulled.

Mark: “It was almost like you were cutting this cord that we had: this twinship. This identical identity. I just couldn't imagine you desiring to be someone else because it was who I was and who you are. You didn't want to be like me and that's why you hated yourself and hated me at times.”

Clair: “But I'm still the same person.”

Mark: “You're the same person, but it's not Mark and Alex anymore.”

I tell Clair it's difficult not to see her sex change as a repudiation of Mark—at least to some degree. “I would say that growing up, I did have some resentments about him because I saw those qualities in him that I didn't like in myself,” she explains. “But to say that it was because of him is not the case. It was more a rejection of the person I had been.”

“I do remember feeling just a kind of abandonment in a sense,” Mark tells me, barely touching his entrée, “because Clair had told me that she didn't want to be my brother any longer and she wanted to transform her body into something else. And to me, not understanding what that process is all about, it felt like a rejection and it felt hurtful.”

Clair concedes: “I think there was probably some unconscious desire to have individuality or space. When I was separate in boarding school, I was able to explore these things for the first time and say, ‘I have to have a personality that's not connected as a twin.' I think that's when I started to realize that I really did want to transition.”

I ask Clair if today she feels like a woman.

“For me, gender is not as simple as ‘I'm a woman.' Yes, biologically now my genitals are female, but I wouldn't necessarily say that my expression and behavior and spirituality are female. I feel like it's evolved past those qualifications or those labels. My spirituality is nongender. … We're all much more than a woman or a man. None
of us is based on these inherent stereotypes; we're all much more than that.”

Does Mark consider Clair his sister or his brother?

“She's my sister,” Mark replies. “There's no hesitation at all. … I could say I've stopped using ‘Alex,' but at the same time I don't feel bad about using ‘Alex' when I'm speaking about Alex and a memory of my brother. Because that's still real and it existed. But I never make the mistake of calling Clair ‘Alex' today.”

Does he feel like he lost his brother?

Mark shakes his head. “I feel there are things about Clair that are gone. Some things I'm glad are gone: some of the anger and the tendencies to be aggressive—those qualities that I saw in Alex that I feared a little bit or didn't like. I see those are gone and I don't miss them at all. And the qualities that I always enjoyed about Alex, I still see in Clair today. … It's amazing just to see how far she has come.”

And he'd still say she's his identical twin, though they're not a match anymore?

“Of course,” Mark replies.

I wonder, chiefly because they share the same DNA blueprint, whether Mark has had similar urges to have a different body.

“I'm happy with my penis,” he replies. “But I wouldn't say the whole of me is male. I agree with Clair that there are aspects of me that are female.”

“You have worried about people wondering if you're trans,” Clair reminds him, meaning transsexual.

“Now people think Clair's voice is too low”—Mark smiles—”but for years, my voice has been too high. People have inbred in them that ‘this is what a man sounds like; this is what a woman sounds like.'”

Though Clair made perhaps the most dramatic symbolic separation of any twin I've met or known, I find it remarkable the extent to which her breaking away has brought them closer than ever. “If a week goes by, I totally need to see him,” Clair says. “I think I'll always
have that feeling of wanting to connect with someone I've loved for my entire life.” Though they spent years apart during and after boarding school, they now choose to live in the same city, talk daily, and honor a weekly date every Friday. Mark's longtime boyfriend, David, is understanding that Mark's twin takes precedence.

“There's just a huge responsibility I feel to be there for her,” Mark admits. “It can take me away from my own life.”

Clair's decision to “transition” from male to female has been the dominant event of their lives for a while now—because it was such a radical, public metamorphosis; because their mother was embarrassed and vehemently resistant for so long; because it required drastic, expensive medical procedures; and because they chose to put their story on film.

“There will be times Mark feels more caught up in my own experience,” Clair says almost apologetically. “The worst part of being a twin is feeling responsible for the other person's situation, and feeling like you have some control over it. When you don't have control, it can feel like heartache. I really don't want to see him in pain or for him to see me in pain.”

Mark seems to want to make clear that he doesn't resent for a moment being his twin's chief supporter, and, in some sense, her supporting player. “She's still the wisest, strongest person I've ever met,” he tells me. “I feel honored to be part of her life.”

• •

“A twin doesn't know what alone means until you lose your twin.”

Gregory Hoffman is a broad-shouldered, ruddy-faced Long Island native, dressed in a U.S. Open windbreaker when we meet over a burger, medium rare, in a pub-like restaurant called Churchill's in Rockville Centre. He lost his identical twin, Stephen, in the Twin Towers on 9/11, when they were both thirty-six years old.

There is no way to overstate the emotional wreckage; Gregory was undone by it. “Those times I've thought about killing myself, I'd say, What would Stephen want me to do now? When I asked myself that question, the right answer was always, Stay alive. Sometimes I have to divorce myself from the pain I'm in, and put myself in a position of being able to ask that question. That's been helpful through this.”

He still hasn't gotten “through” it, and he seems to bristle at the idea that he's supposed to. “I hate the words
move on,”
Hoffman says briskly. “You move forward. There's no moving on.”

Stephen Hoffman, three minutes Gregory's junior and a bond broker at Cantor Fitzgerald, was—even according to his twin—the more gregarious of the two, which is hard to imagine, because Gregory's personality is outsized: energetic, high-volume, and bursting with twinship. More than any one thing he says about it, what comes through is rapture at their alliance—an unbreachable, almost hallowed union.

“One day you talk to somebody,” Gregory says, “and the next day, they're just
gone
. I remember the first night I went home by myself and I was hyperventilating. I was looking at pictures; they weren't enough. I
had
to watch Stephen talk; I had to see him
move
. I started watching football tapes from when we were coaching together. I needed to see him alive. I had never had such a strong urge, like I couldn't breathe. I was going through major twin withdrawal.”

Gregory remembers the sickening escalation of that awful Tuesday morning. “I'm looking at the North Tower on television and I'm counting down from the top of the building, trying to see his floor. And I say to myself, If that plane flew into their floor, they're all dead. People were calling in: ‘Have you heard from Stephen?' I was initially calm. I said, ‘Stephen was in the Towers in ‘93 and he got out; he's going to get out again.' But I remember looking at the screen and saying, ‘How the hell are they going to put out that damn fire?' So I'm calling him on the phone, and suddenly he picks up. And I say, ‘Steve! It's Greg!' To hear his voice …”

Greg looks so relieved for a split second that I actually have the fleeting hope maybe the story can turn out differently. “I'm sure it was so reassuring to hear my voice, too,” he continues. “He says, ‘Greg, I'm okay,' and the next thing you know it's 9:02, and the second plane smashes in. I'm watching CNBC on my computer screen at work, and it was just disbelief. I hear Stephen say, ‘Oh my God. Look at that.' He was talking to somebody, and then the cell phones went dead.”