The Nest(54)

“Oh, I know exactly why you were confused,” Simone had said.

“Hello?” Simone tapped the top of Nora’s shoe with hers, reclaiming her attention. “Do you understand what I’m saying? Being somebody’s looking glass is not your job.”

“I understand. I get it. But it’s not just everyone else; it’s me, too. I like definitions. I like to be sure of what’s happening.”

Simone put a consoling arm around Nora. “You can be sure about me.”

Nora wished they were alone. She wished they could go somewhere and just be alone. If she told Louisa what was going on, maybe they could. Maybe they could stop these stupid afternoons at the museum, stop sneaking around.

“If somebody insists on a definition,” Simone said, “tell them you’re bicurious. That will shut them up, trust me.”

Nora was imagining telling her parents that she was bicurious. God. She knew exactly what Melody would say and she said it to Simone: “That doesn’t even sound like a real word.”

“Maybe. But how does it feel?” Simone asked, pressing Nora against the darkened back wall in a remote corner of the Hall of Biodiversity. “How does it feel?”

NORA AND LOUISA TALKED ABOUT BOYS all the time and it had never occurred to Louisa that Nora might actually want to be talking about girls. There were plenty of lesbians at their school, but they all seemed so dramatically lesbian with their short haircuts and black boots and tattoos and multiple piercings; they were so in-your-face lesbian, holding hands and making out in cars in the parking lot. Or there were the girls who play-acted at being lesbian, usually to flirt with boys, touching each other’s hair and tentatively kissing on the lips, sometimes with tongues and then laughing and pulling away, wiping their mouths with the back of their hands. But Louisa knew that what she’d seen between Nora and Simone wasn’t either of those things; it wasn’t statement and it wasn’t fashion. What she saw in the darkness of the museum was something else. It was lust.

If Nora was gay and they were twins, was she gay, too? She liked boys, but she had to admit that when she’d seen Simone kiss Nora, watched the rise and fall of Nora’s chest and Simone’s hand move over Nora, her entire consciousness had reduced to one lasting image: Simone’s thumb stroking Nora’s nipple. But what did she want? To be touched by another person? A boy? A girl? Either? Both? She’d always imagined herself with a boy, but seeing Nora with a girl had upended something, introduced a new possibility that was rooted in their twinness. This was the thing about having a twin, the enveloping, comforting, disconcerting thing: They were equal parts and seeing the other doing something was almost like doing it yourself.

You are each other’s pulse, Melody would tell them all the time, and Louisa believed it; she didn’t always like it, but she believed it. When their father had taught them how to ride a two-wheeler, Louisa was terrified. Every time he let go of her bike, she felt the loosening at the back wheel and stopped pedaling in sheer terror and her bike would slow and wobble and tip and she’d have to jump off and free herself from the spinning spokes and whirring pedals.

“Let’s let Nora have a go,” Walt finally said.

Then it was Nora’s turn, Nora who was always more fearless, more agile, and when Louisa watched her father run with Nora’s bike and then release the back tire and saw Nora lean into the pedals, pump her legs faster, give the bike the speed and ballast it needed to stay upright, it was almost as if she’d done it herself. She could feel it exactly. Watching Nora’s body do something gave her the concurrent muscle memory.

The next time Louisa tried the bike and her father let go, she flew.





CHAPTER TWENTY–ONE


Woman. Runner. Literary agent. Single. Stephanie looked over her list, the four words she’d hastily written to describe herself to a room mostly full of strangers.

“Don’t think too hard,” Cheryl, the cheerful woman running the team-building session, had said. “Jot down the first four words that pop into your head. No editing your first impulse and no job titles.”

Stephanie crossed out literary agent and in its place wrote reader, which was more accurate anyway, describing what she was supposed to be doing all day but never actually had time to do until the evenings or weekends. She was a little stung that she’d written single, was surprised to see it emerge from the spongy ooze of her uncaffeinated subconscious. It had been four days since she surreptitiously switched the coffee beans to decaf (Leo hadn’t even noticed), and she still felt groggy, as if her brain stayed at half-mast for most of the morning. But single was not how she ever thought of herself. She considered her list again, thought about erasing single and replacing it with something else (New Yorker? Foodie? Gardener?), but that would be cheating and everyone else at the table seemed to be finished.

Stephanie very much wanted this day to end, the first of three infuriating, obligatory days of employee orientation. The corporation she’d sold her agency to, a behemoth of entertainment representation—film, television, music—headquartered in Los Angeles and wanting a literary presence for their New York office, insisted on the training. She knew this was just the first of many irritations she would have to endure after running her own office with the beloved, if quirky, group of employees she’d worked with for so long. She was trying to be patient, but this was bullshit—days of icebreakers, group dynamics, and sexual harassment seminars. What did any of this have to do with her or her employees? They already knew how to work together, and they worked together well because each and every one had been handpicked by Stephanie for their specific intellectual gifts, for their discerning taste and, most important, for their ability to work with her.