Page 43 of The Spirit of Love

Chapter Twenty-Five

On the top bunk of the kids’ cabin aboard The Midlife Crisis , I sit between Olivia’s sleeping dog, Gram Parsons, and my two new stolen Garibaldi stuffies.

I vow to go back later and pay for the souvenirs, but I couldn’t stand in that market with Tania and Jude another minute longer.

I was halfway to the yacht before I realized the fish were still clutched in my hands.

“We’re going to get to the bottom of this, fellas,” I say to the fish and the dog.

Before us is my laptop, my reclaimed camcorder, and my phone. The yacht is quiet. Captain Dan took my friends on a bike ride across Catalina’s western rim—everyone except Masha, who is taking a nap in the cabin next door to mine.

Someday I’ll have a life where I can join my friends on aerobic island larks, but not today. It’s time to do what I should have done weeks ago. It’s time to figure out what the fuck is going on.

Last night Sam said he tested out my camcorder, that he’d filmed some “dumb stuff” to see if it still worked. Maybe it will be just dumb enough to help me. I turn it on. When it powers up, I cry. It feels like a miracle. I scroll to find the most recent footage. And there he is.

Sitting on the couch he’d sat on the first night he brought me to the cabin. He placed the camera on the coffee table, probably propped on his copy of The Tempest .

Late-afternoon sun comes in through the window, gilding his skin. I can see him fully for what feels like the first time. Smiling into the camera, effortlessly at home in his skin. How at home, how uninhibited, how enviably free he is as he flicks his hair back from his beautiful eyes and smiles.

“Found your camera, Fenny. It washed up on the beach, looking for you. But all it found was me.” There’s a pause while Sam looks out the window, the one that faces the sea.

There’s longing in his expression, and when he speaks again, his voice is softer and there’s longing in it, too.

“Where do you go when you’re not with me?

What are you doing all the way over there right now? ”

I watch this clip a second time, trying to find the connection between this man on the couch and the man I just ran into at the market. They’re so different, and yet, there’s something between them. Something connects them, something more than me.

I didn’t ask for this mystery to fall into my lap; I was simply trying to live my life.

In the past month I have cared about them both.

I’ve been inspired by—changed by—them both.

I’ve been driven slightly bananas by them both.

And sure, if I could make the perfect-for-me man, I would take Sam’s honeyed drawl when he predicted I’d be a great kisser, and I’d meld it with Jude’s thoughtful contemplation of my Zombie Hospital motifs.

I’d take Sam’s zest for adventure, tearing through canyons on zip lines he built himself, and link it to Jude’s focused generosity when he’s guiding an actor through a demanding scene.

I’d take Sam’s brawn and Jude’s depth, Sam’s confident lips and Jude’s sure dance steps.

Sam’s heart, Jude’s mind, Sam’s warmth, Jude’s wit.

Their laugher and their eyes and their hands.

I’d make one man.

And he’d be perfect.

But he wouldn’t be real.

And even if I could, magically, make him real, he wouldn’t want me. Not after the way I’ve acted with both of them.

I wish so many things could be different. I plug in the cable between the camera and my laptop and begin the slow process of transferring the files. While the devices work, I open YouTube and search “JDS.”

There’s footage of him on several red carpets.

There’s an interview with Scorsese for Directors on Directors .

But every video I watch shows Jude being professional, polite, and more than a little bit guarded.

Like he was when I first met him. Before we became friends.

There’s no comparing this walled-off version of Jude to the smiling version of Sam I know or the longing version of Sam he’s showing in his video diary.

But then I remember a time when I saw Jude smile on camera. In the photograph Summer texted me from the Zombie Hospital dinner at Amy Reisenbach’s house.

I reach for my phone and scroll through my texts, stopping at Summer’s name.

I open our conversation, then the photo.

It’s one of those “live” iPhone shots, so when I tap and hold, I can see half a second of Jude and me in motion.

This is the angle, the tip of the head, the smile.

I AirDrop it to my laptop and, without thinking, overlay it so the clip of Sam telling me he found my camera dissolves into the live photo of Jude telling me about his troubles bonding with Walter Matthau.

And when I watch the two men become one, I scream and slam my laptop closed.

“Fenny?” A groggy Masha pokes her head inside my open cabin door a few moments later. “Are you okay?”

“I need you to look at something and tell me my eyes are malfunctioning.”

Masha looks at the ladder and then the tiny crevice of space between the top bunk and the ceiling. She looks down at her beautiful orb of a belly and rubs it.

“This is friendship, baby,” she says to her bump and begins to climb. She sinks down next to me with a groan. “So what are we looking at? Scoot over, Gram Parsons.”

“Remember when I told you and Olivia about the first time I met Jude? How I mistook him for Sam?” I take Masha’s hand and press Play.

We watch it eighteen times. The whole time Masha is shaking her head.

“Holy doppelg?nger,” she finally whispers. “Did you read that article in The New York Times ?”

“Yeah, but—”

“I know,” she says. “You’re right. This is more than that.

Unless my eyes are malfunctioning, too. Which would make sight the final of my senses to fall prey to baby side effects.

” She rubs her eyes. “We need Olivia. She believes in crazy shit like this.” Masha sighs and watches the footage one more time.

“Okay, it’s Occam’s razor: The simplest solution is the best one. Jude and Sam are the same person.”

“How is that simple?! What do I do with it?!”

“So at the Getty,” Masha says, “when we’re looking for counterfeits, we need multiple originals. Do you have any other footage we could look at for a side-by-side comparison?”

“There’s plenty of Sam on this camcorder, but finding footage of Jude we can use is trickier. All the clips I’ve found of him online show him looking so stiff that there’s no comparison to Sam.”

“I’ve got it,” Masha says, reaching for her own phone. “I have a shared photo stream with Eli. That picture of you two dancing at Liv and Jake’s wedding.”

She AirDrops it before I can respond. The Live Photo opens before I’m ready to see it, especially now that Jude’s probably sitting fireside at the Banning House, licking honey off some body part of Tania’s.

But I can’t look away from the looped image of the two of us, all dressed up, dancing in each other’s arms, looking like we belong together.

From Eli’s angle, you can’t see my expression, but I remember how it felt.

The camera does pick up Jude’s expression, and that look in his eyes…

It’s longing.

I overlay it with the moment Sam started talking to the camera with the same expression, when he wondered what I was doing away from him.

Masha gasps as she watches me merge the two together, manipulating each one only slightly so they sync right up.

“It’s like ten years passed”—she snaps her fingers—“like that.”

“That’s it,” I breathe. I hadn’t known how to put it into words, but Masha’s right. Sam seems like Jude if I had met him ten years ago. Jude seems like Sam all grown up.

“What do I do about it?” I ask Masha.

“What I do when I don’t know what to do,” Masha says with her phone in her hand. She puts it on speaker. I hear it ringing. A moment later, someone picks up.

“You’ve got Lorena, but Lorena doesn’t have you.”

“Lorena,” Masha says. “I’ve got Fenny here. We need your help.”

“I’m listening.”

I take the phone from Masha. “Remember when we spoke at Liv’s dress fitting about erotic confluence?”

“You’re ready for me to tell you it’s a bunch of bologna?”

“Lorena,” Masha says, “we’re looking at some very unsettling footage Fenny put together, and we’re pretty sure—even though this is impossible—that the two men are actually one man, spanning some sort of ten-year time warp.”

Lorena is quiet, then lets out a low whistle.

“Okay, girls,” she finally says. “This is beyond my level of expertise. I’m more Brené Brown than Marianne Williamson. But recently I met someone who might be able to help. I’m sending you her contact info now. Maybe you know her? She’s a friend of a friend of Jake’s.”

Masha looks at me and shrugs.

“She works as a soul integration midwife, very highly reviewed,” Lorena says. “Her name is Tania.”

“Tania from the wedding?” I groan and palm my face. “She’s on the island right now. With Jude. They’re together .”

“Are you sure?” Masha asks.

“We just had the most awkward run-in at the market. They’re definitely here. Definitely together.”

“It sounds to me, honey,” Lorena says, “as if a bigger storm is brewing. My two cents: Find him.”

“Which him?”

“The one you want. The one you were dancing with at the wedding.”

“Jude.”

“Find Jude. Tell him the truth—”

“That I think he’s two men, caught in a ten-year loop?” I say.

“No, honey,” Lorena says, straight up laughing at me. “Tell him how you feel. That’s the only truth there is.”

“Ew,” I say to Masha, tossing aside the phone after we’ve hung up with Lorena.

Masha gives me a look. “The thought of telling Jude how you feel is ew?”

“It’s very uncomfortable. Telling Jude how I feel requires me knowing how I feel.”

“That seems like a great place to start,” Masha leads.

I shake my head. “I know things by reading books, studying films, spending years apprenticing, or”—I point to my laptop—“having physical evidence.”