Prologue
I thought, Just turn the TV off already.
The scene on-screen was taking place just outside the room I was in, had been for several days. I could just as easily have peered out a window, but I didn't. This kind of thing belonged on the news. I did not belong at the epicenter of the story.
Fans of Flora and Fauna's had started turning up at the gates to the drive not twenty minutes after the news had hit the wires two days before. The camera crews had followed swiftly, as had fans who'd taken a bit more time to prepare -- long enough to blow their babysitting money on yellow roses, long enough
to pull colored markers out of desk drawers and commit declarations of adoration for the Sparks sisters to oaktag in curly script. Some had pasted pictures of the twins to their placards; culled from the likes of People and Rolling Stone, they were glossy and bright and entirely inappropriate given the circumstances, like Hawaiian shirts at a ball.
I turned from the TV to look around the room I'd called home for the past several months. All the furniture would stay; it wasn't mine. But I had packed up all of my personal effects immediately following the press conference. The two identical suitcases set side-by-side at the door held everything I was taking with me and almost nothing I'd brought from New York. Literally and metaphorically, my baggage had been irrevocably altered during my time in L.A.
A knock on the door startled me -- That would be Ed -- and I rose to switch off the TV. He'd told me I could stay as long as I needed; as long as it'd take me to kick Jessie out of my apartment or make other provisions back in New York. It didn't seem right, though, sticking around.
I opened the door to find Ed, whom I'd seen wearing a suit only once before, at the Grammys. That night's getup had seemed less droopy, better cut. "Are you sure you won't come back here later?" he asked.
"I'm sure." I wondered whether I looked as bad as he did, like he'd dehydrated his thin body through crying.
He glanced down at his feet, brushed the toe of a dress shoe over the forest green shag of the room. I imagined he was thinking of the last time he'd visited me in this room and -- instinctively, dumbly -- I looked at the bed.
"I guess we should go," he declared when he looked up, and I couldn't resist. I hugged him. But only for a second before his soft frame stiffened into a stick figure; in a matter of seconds, reed to oak.
"Sloan," he croaked. "Please."
I pulled away as tears gained volume inside me. I willed my body to pull the plug. "Sorry," I said.
"Come on." He stepped back into the hall. "We have to go."
Driver aside, we were the only two in the limo. The crowds at the gates at the end of the drive parted reluctantly to let us pass. Through the tinted windows they all took on a sepia tone: preteen girls with puffy eyes shadowed by bewildered mothers who couldn't quite see what the big deal was but who knew enough to bring their daughters here lest those daughters never speak to them again. Above the whirr of the air-conditioning I heard a mournful chorus of the twins' most popular ballad, "I'm Beside Myself"; it sounded like a 45 being played at 33 speed, so worn I half-expected it to skip. Then it did. Sort of.
I heard a shriek. The pounding on his window jerked Ed back. A palm print stuck to the glass.
She was glaring into the limo in the wrong direction, toward a bar that I knew had never managed to remain stocked for very long, not if Flora or her father had had anything to do with it.
"Are you in there?" she screamed, pounding with fists now as the car slowly inched forward.
I'd never seen her in person before, but I knew who she was as surely as I knew the lyrics the crowd would sing next: Now that you're by my side, I'm beside myself just being alive.
Her gaze still searching for purchase, she screamed, "You nosey bitch! This is all your fault!"
Copyright © 2005 by Tara McCarthy
Chapter One
It was the assignment of a lifetime and I was sure I was going to blow it. I was being sent to Los Angeles to interview pop princesses Flora and Fauna Sparks about their most recent slew of Grammy nominations, and I was the exact wrong person for the job.
Yes, I knew a lot about the twins -- for starters, that only three living people on the planet had ever seen them naked and that Playboy had made an open-ended offer of twenty-five million for the privilege. I knew that they were virgins (shocker); that they'd accepted the Lord Jesus as their savior; that their father-slash-manager -- a former Atlantic City blackjack dealer who was now People magazine's reigning Eligible Bachelor -- had raised them after their mother abandoned them not forty-eight hours after their birth because she never really wanted to have kids anyway. I knew they were born and raised in a part of New Jersey that has more in common with rural Pennsylvania than with, say, Hoboken. I'd eaten in the New York restaurant they owned; I knew their dog, Deuce, had recently gone to doggie heaven; I even knew the lyrics to most of their hits. By that time, everyone in the free world did. Their songs were ubiquitous, still are.
I was ill suited to produce a piece of fluff about the Sparks sisters for that most basic of reasons: I was scared shitless. Not because I was a cynical, single 35-year-old being sent into the foreign world of puppy love pop; my undistinguished career as a celebrity journalist straddling the worlds of music and film had previously sent me deep into more unfamiliar terrain, like hip-hop and, deeper still, new age. But I'd long ago buried an unhealthy fascination with Siamese twins, and it began to scratch at the coffin lid the second I got the call from my editor.
I blame the small, framed replica of an old vaudeville poster that hung in the basement of my childhood home. It was my father's (he can proffer no explanation for owning it), and it depicted Daisy and Violet Hilton -- pygopagus twins joined at the base of the spine just like Flora and Fauna. Dressed in silky green dresses, they wielded their trademark saxophones flirtatiously. With every first star or fountain coin-toss or airborne seed of my youth, I'd wished I could be them. I'd been so mesmerized with the idea of actually being joined to another person for life -- for life -- that I'd once convinced my sister, Tracey, to let me tie us together to see what it'd feel like. We'd lasted all of ten minutes with a hand-knit wool scarf stretched around our hips before realizing the bondage made it impossible to play Spit; our favorite card game required that we face each other sitting cross-legged on the floor.
Tracey's participation had ended there (she refused to reprise her role come Halloween; my mother could barely hide her relief), but my own obsession gained force. I wrote papers about conjoined twins for science class; sculpted Siamese snowmen; even glued two Ken dolls together with a sticky band made of dried Elmer's for my own makeshift Chang and Eng action dolls. When my parents had just about had enough (a feeling they would eventually develop for each other), my fascination merely turned inward. I'd stand with one hip against the full-length mirror in my room, holding my own sax (but of course!) and straining to get a glimpse of Siamese me. I'd wondered, What would she be like? That other me? Would I like her?
As interview day approached, I fretted that when I met the Sparks twins my face would say deliver us Lord from every evil even as my mouth said "Nice to meet you." Though I was no longer a child, and though the science of conjoined twins had been cleared up by any number of Dateline specials and Learning Channel documentaries over the years, the psychological and emotional ramifications of being literally joined at the hip to another person all but stilled the blood of the single, fiercely independent woman I had become. For the ten years since I'd been, in effect, left at the altar by the so-called love of my life, it had been all I could do to get past date number three. A couple of years before I got the Sparks assignment, having learned that life and chick lit bore no resemblance, I'd given up trying.
So I scrutinized every picture of Flora and Fauna I could find in an attempt to strip the live image of shock value. I read every interview once, then twice. I was determined to appear calm and collected in their presence, convinced they wouldn't catch me staring at that part where their two bodies fused into one. I would neither gawk as they approached, in their slightly awkward equine trot, nor would I look away in disgust. I would refrain from the tired questions. (Do you sleep at the same time? Do you like the same boys?) In fact, I'd act like there was nothing unusual about them at all. Never mind that they were as close as I'd ever get to the women who had most captured my childhood imagination. They were pop stars -- that's all. I'd met a bunch of those before.
The plan was to meet poolside at the Standard Hotel, one of the girls' favorite haunts. On the afternoon of the interview, fresh off the plane, I strode through the lobby with an air of supreme confidence -- a feeling Ian Schrager's hip hotels always seem to inspire in me, if fleetingly -- and stepped back out into the sun on the other side of the building. With my black hair, pasty East Coast legs, black skirt, and maroon sleeveless collar shirt, I felt I might have had New York tattooed on my forehead. I thought, The sun shines there sometimes. Really. I wear bright colors sometimes. Really. Hand to brow, I scanned the pool area and spotted the twins. That quickly, I had the overwhelming need to throw up. Welcome to the hotel California. I hadn't been expecting bikinis.
A stiff drink awaited me when I came to and I recognized the man holding it as Ed Sparks. "Take a swig of this," he said, as he helped me over to a lounge...
