CHAPTER 2

Julie

Before the sisters-in-law came the cousins, and it may be best to start with them.

Identical twins are supposed to feel so close to their former womb-mate that they sometimes can’t tell where their personality ends and their sibling’s begins. Young lovers staring into each other’s eyes also sometimes feel the boundaries dissolving between them.

That’s the way it was with Julie and me. Even before we became lovers.

Julie Weiss was the younger daughter of my mother’s unhappy little sister Jean. She was a year older than me, but we were the same size. Julie was skinny and fragile-looking, with curly black hair and tragic sea-green eyes. Her skin was eerily pale, and the veins under her arms looked like glaucous ridges. A forked vein on her temple throbbed when she was upset. Unlike her bubbly sister Cheryl, Julie was quiet and serious. Cheryl, I knew intuitively, was the cute sister, Julie thejeune fille fatale.

Jean and her husband Al, a cabinet-maker and carpenter, lived in a small house in Van Nuys, across the Hollywood Hills from my parents’ home in LA’s Beverly-Fairfax district. A stock video of Julie, aet seven: She’s standing beside me in the bright sunlight in the Weisses’s back yard, next to a wading pool. “Stick out your arms, Jonathan,” she tells me. “Now look up. Now we have to say the magic words. Double, double, toilet trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble. Twirl, twirl, twirl!” Around and around we both spin. The clouds and little sycamores blur. We fall to the ground on top of each other, giggling.

Before we’d get up, one of us would sometimes say, “One eye.” We’d slowly move our foreheads together until the eyes of the other merged into one. Sometimes we’d pause, a couple of inches apart, each looking at our reflection in the other’s eyes.

One thing Freud may have gotten right was infantile sexuality, and there were other games where we touched each other.

When the girls were a little older, Al and Jean bought a larger, above-ground pool, and Julie and I would