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 ofPeopleandRolling 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. Literallyandmetaphorically, 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 thatPlayboyhad 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 nowPeoplemagazine'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 --pygopagustwins 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 -- forlife-- 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 hadjust 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 chair with a strong hand under my armpit. My stomach did a little flip as I studied the superfine brown hair on his lean arms, noticed the elaborate Celtic tattoo peeking out from under his shirtsleeve. I was grateful I hadn't known that Ed was going to be there, though, really, I should have expected as much. He was known worldwide for his ferocious protection of the twins -- he was their constant companion -- and maybe it was that very quality that made him so attractive to me. My own father had walked so far out of my life that he'd risk trespassing if he tried to return.

Seeing Ed in the flesh --feelinghim in the flesh -- I suddenly wanted to know everything about the man who had raised two seemingly perfectly well-adjusted Siamese twins, the man whose jeans seemed magnetically attached to his Axl Rose hips in fierce defiance of gravity. Would he have developed those dashing character lines and those sophisticated premature grays had the egg fully separated? Would he be as supportive of his girls if they hadn't made him a millionaire ten times over? Would he let their mother back into his bed if she resurfaced after all these years? Would he ever invitemeinto it, to pry open his thin mouth and move against his lanky body? As my head spun with the thought of it and calculated that he was dateable -- probably only 45 or so -- I thought,Freud would be bored to tears with me.

I focused my attention on the shot glass, on the golden-brown liquid contained therein. I lay back in the chair, took a sip, and closed my eyes as heat spread down my chest. I was relieved that my body had opted for fainting over puking. Then I heard the giggling gaining force: an avalanche of glee.

"Is she okay?"

"Did she hit her head?"

I opened my eyes just as the twins sat sidesaddle on the lounge chair beside me.

"I'm Fauna," the one on the right said, twirling the string of the sarong that tied on her left hip, the hip that was exclusively hers.

But how could they each have their own skirt and how do they...

"I'm Flora," the other one said, adjusting her heart-shaped sunglasses on her nose and chewing what smelled like grape gum. My nausea started to swell again and I sipped my drink to keep the contents of my stomach where I wanted them. It occurred to me that I'd been a fool to think that studying pictures of the twins could have prevented this visceral reaction. I know now that a subscription toNational Geographiccan't possibly prepare you for encountering a jaguar in the wild.

"I'm sorry," I said, after introducing myself. "I just flew in from New York. I must be dehydrated."

"Liar, liar." Flora playfully poked my bare leg with a sparkly, painted nail. "Skirt on fire." She snapped her gum. "Don't sweat it. It's cool."

"Yeah," said Fauna, taking the shot glass from my hand and sniffing its contents before handing it back. "If I met us for the first time I'd probably pass out, too."

We sat there in silence; them watching me, me staring at my drink. I don't know how much time passed, but as the sun dipped behind the hotel, leaving us in the shade, I realized I was not going to be able to control the urge to touch them. Through my research I'd learned that in parts of Africa it was good luck to touch a twin, like knocking on wood, and maybe I thought it would help me get on with the business of interviewing. I'd been my editor's fourth choice for the job -- the other writers had been otherwise engaged -- and I needed to prove I was worthy of this caliber assignment.

I swung my legs to the ground. The twins jolted back, then seemed to relax again when it was clear all I was doing was situating myself to face them. I took a deep breath as I began studying them, comparing knobby knees and meticulously pedicured feet and silky hands. Except for the fact that Flora was tanner than Fauna, it was like an optical illusion; one blonde girl turned into two by some invisible cosmic mirror. I compared their bony shoulders, their meaty breasts, their muscular stomachs, my head moving back and forth almost imperceptibly as though following a peewee soccer game. Then, having found myself with nowhere else to look but the place where their two perfect bodies met, I reached out and pulled on the strap Fauna had been twirling. When she didn't move an inch, I grew even more brazen. I reached around to undo Flora's and pulled their tiny sarongs away. I leaned forward and they each seemed to lean forward, too, parting like a river. And there it was.

Their sweet spot.

I touched it -- only for a second, as if dipping a finger in holy water -- then touched it again, this time to assess it properly. It was a hard lump that melded into both of their hips, buttocks, and lower backs. Nothing more spectacular than a thigh, really,except that it wasn't supposed to be there.

I exhaled deeply, feeling calmer than I had since accepting the assignment, and met Flora's stare. Was it amusement or disgust in her eyes, I wasn't sure.

"What do you think, Faun?" she said, not breaking the visual bond between us.

"I think yes, definitely."

Flora smiled at me as Fauna took her turn poking my leg. She said, "You want to write a book about us?"

Two warring instincts rose up inside me after I parted company with the twins that day: prayer and sex. After muttering, "Please, God, let me not be getting in over my head" a few times, I called Brian Understahl, a very longtime but very occasional lover of mine, and asked him to meet me for a drink. I did this maybe every third time I was on the West Coast, so Brian would undoubtedly know that I was looking for more than a martini with a twist. We'd met in our midtwenties when both working as editorial assistants at a now defunct entertainment magazine, and it had been Brian -- after a booze-soaked office Christmas party -- who'd introduced me to the idea of sex with someone other than my ex-fiance. Whether because I'd still been bruised from my wedding-that-wasn't or because Brian wasn't the monogamous type, it had never been more than sex and professional camaraderie that we'd shared. And then he'd moved to L.A.

I was halfway through my second drink in the garden at Bar Marmont (I guess drinking was the third instinct) when Brian arrived and smacked a pack of Lucky Strikes on the table. "You look fabulous," he said, kissing me on the cheek.

"Yeah, you don't look so bad yourself."

Talk about understatement. He looked like Adonis to me just then. Here was this lean, six-foot-two man standing before me, his freshly cut chestnut brown hair exposing the beams of his neck as they melted into his sturdy back, spread into his wide shoulders. He seemed the perfect antidote to my afternoon, proof of the levels of perfection available in the human form. When he disappeared inside to get a drink, I thought,Please, God-- apparently still clinging to that prayer thing --let him not be seeing anyone.

My own pack empty, I pulled a cigarette from Brian's when he returned, and he swiftly produced a lighter. I held his hand steady with my own for the sole purpose of touching him.

"You're lucky I could make it, babe." He slapped the lighter down and stroked his goatee. The moustache didn't connect to the beardy part, and the whole configuration seemed designed solely to call attention to his lips. "I had a big meeting scheduled for tonight, but it got postponed." He slipped his jacket off and I wanted him to just keep on going, to take it all off. "I think this could be the one, though. Seriously. The big break."

"Let me guess." I was hot from drink and the irrational need for skin on skin brought on by my encounter with the twins. "Steven Spielberg."

Brian shook his head and smiled. "No, that was last week!" His knee careered into mine. "Anyway, what brings you here? Did Debra Messing redo her kitchen?"

Since moving west Brian had established a fairly standard screenwriting career -- one that had yet to result in a script of his actually getting optioned, bought, or made into a film. Since I'd never pushed beyond the world of celebrity fluff pieces that went out with the recycling every week, I wasn't really one to criticize his apparently limitless determination -- not in any real way, anyway. I'd paid my rent for ten years writing sophisticated Mad Libs. (When I arrive atrestaurant name, starisadverbsippingbeverageand wearing the most spectacularitem of clothingI've ever seen. It's stolen, I'll later learn, from the set ofmovie name,for which star has earnednumbermillion.Ad nauseum.)Brian, at least, spent his days creating something. I respected that -- the from scratch of it all. It was all the on-the-verge posturing I couldn't handle, the way he always claimed to have some kind of deal in the works, always introduced himself with both his names.

Happily, our conversations about our careers had long before settled into a wry, comfortable groove; he had learned how to utter phrases like "Hey, your Salma Hayek piece was great." I, in turn, let him use lingo like "ro-co" and "back-end points" without reproach. If sex was in the cards -- and it usually was if neither of us was seeing someone, which in my case was all of the time -- the gentle mocking usually started up immediately. I don't know if Brian ever consciously noted that our more serious, supportive, writerly chats led to polite cheek-kisses while more antagonistic can-you-top-this interactions resulted in kisses of an entirely different kind, but I recognized the pattern and was happy to manipulate it to my advantage. That night, I was counting on the fact that Brian would come back to my room at the Standard, do my bidding, then offer a perfectly valid reason for not staying the night, as per usual. The Debra Messing dig was a good sign.

"So really," Brian said. "What brings you to town?"

I exhaled and watched swirls of smoke get sucked up over the tall patio fence. "Flora and Fauna Sparks."

"Holy fuck." Brian smashed his cigarette out in an ashtray. "When do you meet them?"

"Already did. And I'm having breakfast with them tomorrow."

"Holy fuck," he said, with more emphasis this time. "Was it freaky?"

"I guess so." I made a split-second decision to come clean: "I passed out."

"No!" His eyes widened.

"Yes."

"Ohmigod. That's hilarious." His hands looked hard and tan and vein-y, and I longed to see them against my own pale skin.

"Yeah, well, I think it worked to my advantage," I said. "They asked me to write a book about them." I still couldn't believe it was true.

Brian's head jolted forward. He had a look in his eyes that several of my writer friends had no doubt seen in mine on different occasions over the years: crystal blue excitement coated in murky white jealousy. Close proximity to some variation on the American dream provides a certain rush, but it's followed by envy whiplash. At least it was for me whenever I got wind of college acquaintances with six-figure book deals and the like. Why I'd chosen to build a career around the lives of the rich and famous was one of the great mysteries of my life.

"Are you serious?" Brian finally said.

I nodded.

"You're going to get rich before I do, you little bitch." He pinched my leg under the table. "I should've married you when I had the chance."

I looked at my left hand and said, "I don't see a ring on my finger."

He sat back in his chair, shoulders dropped forward, head bobbing ticcishly, like a fuzzy dashboard dog. The moment had turned serious somehow and I could tell he was weighing the seven deadly sins, deciding whether envy would counter lust. Then he smiled and, through the small gap between his front teeth, I could see his tongue darting around. I hoped it was warming up. I looked at him hard, drained my drink, and said, "Well?"

He smiled. "And there I was thinking you'd have a hard time topping your piece on Gary Coleman."

Copyright © 2005 by Tara McCarthy

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Excerpted from Love Will Tear Us Apart by Tara McCarthy
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.