One and the Same (25 page)

Hayton can see that I register a familiarity with the personality she's describing. “Bless his little heart,” she says sympathetically, which I half appreciate and half resent, because I don't like the presumption that Ben fits some prototype or thesis, especially one so
unproven. “Do you know,” she goes on above the cocktail hour din, “that Benjamin is the name I gave my
own
womb twin? I called him ‘Ben' because if he had lived, he would have been the second son in the family, and Benjamin means ‘the second son.'” She's referring to the fact that Benjamin in the Bible is the second son of Rachel and Jacob, but the name actually means “son of my right hand.” “Maybe you unconsciously named him for his missing twin,” Hayton ventures.

I can imagine readers rolling their eyes, so I challenge her.

“How do you handle people saying there's no science to support this? No data?”

“Well, there's data,” Hayton counters. “There's plenty of data.” She means the stories she's gathered. “All I can say is that this is the sixth version of the questionnaire I've done, and I'm getting the same top twenty results that I've had from the beginning. Some of the questions are new questions. Like the loneliness one—it goes straight to the top ten in one leap—and then the ‘feeling different,' the searching, the feeling something's missing. I didn't invent that. People have been talking about that for years.”

I push Hayton a little further: “When people tell you this is hog-wash—that it's just convenient for people to say, ‘So
this
is why I'm depressed!' or
‘This
is why I feel lonely!'—how do you answer them?”

“I would say that there are so many different reasons that psychiatrists and psychologists throw at you to explain why you're lonely or depressed. They say you were abused as a child; they'll say you didn't bond with your parents; they'll say it's because you were adopted or went to boarding school; they'll say you were beaten by your father; they'll say you were transcultural and you don't know who you are. They'll throw thousands of different reasons at you about why you have a very poor sense of self, and then you don't believe any of them. You go from one therapist to the next and they tell you all this crap. Hallo! I said ‘crap,' didn't I? I call it ‘crap' because it's a completely reversed alternative perception.”

Reversed alternative perception?

“Everyone's got it all upside down! It's got nothing to do with what happens after birth. It's what happened
before
birth that mattered! These people were
born
like this. Nothing has
made
them that way. They were born with a predisposition because they'd lost a twin. And then, if nasty things
also
happen later, like adoption or whatever, then they
really
suffer, in ways that other adopted children won't. So it's not the actual
events
of childhood that are distressing; it's your
response
to those events because of an earlier loss that shaped you. It's like your boy, Ben; should
you
, for example, lose your husband tomorrow, he'd be wrecked. Because he won't be able to handle death at all. Another kid would just be okay and say, ‘So we'll get on with it, then.' But if you have a very sensitive, empathetic, intuitive kid who's picking up on pain everywhere, whenever a really bad event happens, he's completely squashed. Totally lost. So they come across as very vulnerable.”

Does Hayton believe these twins
remember
their vanished twins in some way?

“Well, it's not in their memory,” she replies. “It's a kind of imprinting. I call it ‘the Dream of the Womb.' Because it's like a dream. It's in the deepest, darkest place in your mind, right at the very back. But it's also right at the very front. So you see the world through it. Everything is seen as the loss of your twin.”

It's interesting to see that two of the OB-GYNs who specialize in twins and who clearly respect each other—obstetricians Louis Keith and Birgit Arabin—disagree on the legitimacy of “vanished twin syndrome.” Whereas Keith heartily recommends Hayton's book (and wrote the introduction), Arabin is skeptical. “I don't think that any fetus will remember what has happened between weeks four and eight,” she tells me. “Though there are paramedical psychoanalysts who think that you already felt pain at the conception. I heard a lecture once and I was really laughing—about ‘conceptional pain.' So there are deep psychological experts who discuss it, but scientifically I doubt.”

When I send Arabin an e-mail a year later to confirm her comments, she's quick to modify them. “I become older and more cautious,” she writes. “Scientifically there is not (yet?) an explanation but God knows what might happen. … There is more than pure science between heaven and earth. Maybe the reasons that I myself chose to work with twins is because I was a member of an early twin—you never know.”

Twins researcher Nancy Segal, however, is unequivocally dismissive: “There's no such thing as intrauterine knowledge of being a twin,” she tells me. “I think that's just a misguided, romantic notion.”

Hillel Schwartz refers in his book to Plato's Symposium on love, the philosophical dialogue that asserts that all human beings start as two: In it, Aristophanes gives a speech about how a double human was split by Zeus and doomed to seek his other half forever. “If it was true that initially all human beings were
conceived
as twins,” says Schwartz, “but only some were
born
as twins, then all these people that are called ‘singletons' must go through life aching for that complete companionship of a twin. But at the same time, they go through life with a terrible guilt. Because one way or another they were responsible for devouring the other twin in the womb.”

If this premise were true—that we all start as twins but that most end up being born alone—I'm curious if Schwartz believes that the average person functions in the world as if he or she is missing a partner. “I don't think that the average person would explain it to you that way,” he replies, “but if you would ask him what his ideals are for a partner, it always has to do with another half. Not someone diametrically different from you, but another half. This is probably not something people would have said in the sixteenth century; I think it's a relatively new romantic notion that there is another half that will perfectly match you.”

Maybe that “romantic notion” of a perfect match is why I relate somewhat to the concept of a vanished twin. Robin is obviously (thank God) still around, but there's a sense in which her uncoupling has felt like a kind of disappearance, leaving me with some of the
same feelings that Hayton describes: longing, incompletion. Robin told me in our interview, “You feel a hole sometimes.” Maybe that gap is her: my “vanished” half.

David Teplica, a plastic surgeon in Chicago, is convinced that he lost his twin in utero. This became the genesis for an entire second career: He has spent twenty years photographing naked identical twins.

Teplica's black-and-white pictures, some of which are in collections such as that of the Chicago Art Institute, and one of which is the cover image for Wally Lamb's best-seller
I Know This Much Is True
, are unflinchingly close-up and intimate. The portraits feel more private than the typical side-by-side, ‘Gee, can you believe how much they look alike!' twins photos.

One image shows two nude twin brothers, coiled around each other like they're still in utero. Another shows two eleven-year-old girls' faces—nose-to-nose, freckle-to-freckle; the sameness of their features is startling. Another is of two male twins biting parts of each other's faces.

Teplica is an elegant, slim man—a towering six three and a half, with slicked-back silver hair and sizable sideburns. He lives with his partner, Kalev Peekna, in a fifteen-thousand-square-foot mansion with stained-glass windows, a castle incongruously situated among modest row houses in downtown Chicago. “I had been doing twin research as part of my plastic-surgery world for about four years,” Teplica explains as we settle ourselves into his attic studio. “And I was gravitating toward photographing twins pretty wildly. One day, the president of the foundation that was supporting my work”—the Center for the Study of Multiple Birth, run by Louis Keith—”came up to me and said, ‘So why are you so interested in this stuff?' And I said, ‘I don't know.' And he said, ‘Why don't you ask your mother why you're so interested in twins?' And I said, ‘I'm not going to ask my mother; that's ridiculous.' And he repeated,
‘Why don't you go ask your mother?'

“So the next time Mom was in town, I asked her. And she turned
white
and said, ‘I never thought you'd hear this, but when I was pregnant with you, I was told that I was carrying twins. But then, in the fourth month, I started passing some clots and tissue, and in the end, only
you
were born.' This was before ultrasound, so there was no way of confirming that I was part of a miscarried twin pair at that point, but she probably miscarried my other half.”

Teplica says this revelation filled in the blanks for him. “For a while I'd felt I was a freak, just obsessively diving into the twin issue. This validated things.”

Teplica says his twin identification has played out mostly in his photography. He says he asks himself, “Am I yearning for a relationship I had for the first four months of my gestation? I don't know; I think that's a little bit of a stretch. But maybe. In fact, we do know—Louis and his brother, Donald Keith, published a study about the vanished twin syndrome: Eighty-five percent of single-birth people like me, who align themselves with twins, are from pregnancies where there was heavy bleeding in the fourth month. That's statistically significant. So it's likely that there is some brain chemical or anatomy thing sensing a need for a relationship like that.” No such need has been scientifically established, but Teplica believes people who have lost a twin in utero feel incomplete in their adult life.

“I live it,” he replies.

A photo titled
Ovum
captures nude twin sisters who happen to be waitresses at Hooters. “They were nervous as hell at first.” Teplica smiles. “I said, ‘Ladies, I'm gay.' They said, ‘We're not worried about
you
. We don't want to be naked in front of each other.'”

I don't blame them. The thought of Robin and me naked and entwined together makes me flinch and blush. I can't fathom a situation in which I would feel comfortable doing that. Of course, on occasion we still see each other's bodies—in a clothing shop, for instance, if we're sharing a dressing room. But I wouldn't say our closeness translates to much physical interaction. It's odd to think I'd be so shy in front of Robin.

I ask Teplica why he insists that his twin subjects be naked. “Oh my God!” Teplica exclaims, as if to say, How could it be more obvious? “All the barriers are gone. It's like returning to the uterus. And the twins just relax. It might be awkward at first, but suddenly they cuddle, and do things they haven't done in thirty years. Then I get very
rich
stuff. Giggling and biting and punching and hair pulling—I've seen it all. For instance, two straight guys, twenty-one years old, training as actors in London, ask me if they can please just suck each other's thumbs because that's what they did for the first five years of life. Society would think that they're freaks, except that the photographs are lovely.”

Teplica says the twins who pose for him have a comfort level together that goes back to the womb. “You're smashed against another living beast for nine months!” he exclaims. “It's not like they're floating around separately.
There's no extra space!
They're two tiny objects smashed against each other in one closed uterus. And the reason the uterus grows is because the smash becomes too tight, and it pushes the uterus out and stretches it over time. So for the entire pregnancy, these two little fetuses are cuddling. They're kissing and stroking and touching and urinating and playing with each other's faces and limbs and toes and holding hands. It all happens in there.”

The final photo we discuss,
Reunion
, is the one most viscerally moving to me: Two newborns are suckling each other's noses. Teplica took the shot just minutes after the twins emerged from their mother; they'd been separated briefly for their newborn tests, then reunited in a bassinet. “I kind of postulated that they would recognize each other and instantly start clinging and coiling around each other,” Teplica says. “So I was hovering over the bassinet as they placed the two twins into it, and the very first thing that happened was that one twin stuck its fist down the mouth of the other twin. As a physician, I was so shocked and worried that he would be suffocated or something that I did not push the camera shutter, and instead lurched toward them to try to see if I could get the fist out. But instantly the twin pulled its fist
out, and they recognized each other—by this act, apparently—and started suckling each other's noses. So it's clear there was this thing that used to happen in the uterus, where they would stick their fists into each other's mouths and suckle each other's noses. And they realized they were back, reconnected with each other after having that very painful and traumatic time during delivery where they were separated, and then they were very peaceful after they were rejoined.”

I ask how he felt personally—watching that. “It was pretty earth-shattering,” he admits. “It also helped me validate my own obsession with twins, right? If there is this bond that happens in the uterus, and I can
prove
it, then I'm not crazy for having these feelings. So on a personal level, it meant everything to me.”