3 is not a Crowd

PETER: I see. I thought you meant you couldn’t come, and I found that hard to believe.

WANDA: You know me better than that. I can come looking at a candle if I put my mind to it.

PETER: How about a picture of a candle?

WANDA: Probably.

WANDA: Here’s a funny thing. After they were both dead, after we were old enough to do what we wanted to do without anyone interfering in our lives, for the first time we voluntarily separated from one another. First Peter spent some time in Sweden and then Denmark studying furniture design. By the time he came back to the States I had left New York and was living in Chicago, working for a faggot decorator during the day and taking courses at U of C nights. You might think we would have finally taken advantage of the chance we had to be together, but it took us a long time to get back together again.

PETER: I think you used the word “brainwashing” earlier. This was part of it.

WANDA: Just part of it.

PETER: The other part was that we were going through a lot of changes. On the one hand we had some personal growth and development to undergo. Career-wise, for example. I really did want to get over to Scandinavia and learn why they could make chairs there that looked so damned much better than the chairs we make over here. Wanda also wanted to get into decorating in a meaningful way.

Beyond that, we were in a stock-taking period. We needed time to figure out how we really felt about each other. Correction — we knew how we felt about each other, knew we loved each other. What we didn’t know was what we intended to do about it.

There were a lot of big questions involved. Were we going to avoid each other for the rest of our lives? Were we going to live together and make love? Were we going to try to sublimate the whole thing, remain close but cut out the sex? The answers seem easy now, but the whole point is that they were not easy then, as screwed up as we were. We’d been through a very bad time, and it took a lot of settling before we were completely over it, if indeed we ever did get completely over it.

WANDA: Right before you went to Scandinavia, right before Peter went, we came very close to getting married.

PETER: That’s right, we did.

WANDA: We talked about it, and realized that a brother and sister can’t get married, but we also realized that we didn’t have to wear signs saying that we’re brother and sister. It would have been easy enough to take out a license and find some justice of the peace nearsighted enough to miss the family resemblance. I could have worn a dark wig or something.

PETER: You wouldn’t have had to. The average minister would hardly suspect a potential bride and groom of being brother and sister. It would never occur to him.

WANDA: I wonder how often it happens. Does it ever happen? Actual marriages?

JWW: As a matter of fact, I know of a case.

PETER: It’s not surprising. It must happen rather often. Do the people you know have children?

JWW: No.

PETER: It would be interesting to know of some who do. We’re past that now, the whole question of children, but at the time it was on our minds quite a bit. Not only as a practical consideration but because we had both heard at great length how the mating of siblings inevitably produced inferior children. I understand that this doesn’t have to happen, only if both carry an unfortunate recessive gene, but it seems as though it’s likely to happen.

The effect of this was that it did lend support to the arguments that our sort of thing is unnatural, contrary to nature. Now I could never accept this intellectually — I don’t think Nature gives a damn about what people do, certainly not what they do in bed. But I suspect it was one of the things that weighed rather heavily on our minds when we talked about getting married, and when we decided instead to let ourselves drift apart, at least for the time being.

JWW: Both Peter and Wanda mentioned several times that they were no longer interested in having children, problems of inbreeding notwithstanding. They went to great lengths to insist, to themselves more than to me, that children were the last thing they wanted for any number of reasons.

The frequent intrusion of this topic in our conversations led me to suspect that the issue of issue was by no means as settled as they prefer to think. I would be not at all surprised should they someday have children, either naturally or through adoption.