Coincidence (9 page)

Eventually Larry was sent away to school, paid for out of a trust left by grandparents. Holidays were a nightmare, shuttling
between two desperately unhappy and now self-destructive parents. Perhaps out of a lack of imagination, at least that was
how he felt about it, he became an actor and got a little work for a few years, mainly in fringe theater. Then, as he heard
the junior partner solemnly announcing, young Larry Hart had dropped out of sight. That was almost twenty years ago. The firm’s
associates in London had called Equity as well as his former agents, but nobody had any clue as to his whereabouts, or even
whether he was alive or dead.

The junior partner closed the file he had been reading from and pushed it across his desk to the man he took to be his client.
Did Mr. Daly wish, he asked, to pursue further the search for Laurence Jeffrey Hart?

Larry took a deep breath. How tempting it was to tell them that the man they were discussing was sitting with them at that
moment, but he had gone too far by now to be honest. There would be accusations of deception, all kinds of complications.
Besides, his main concern was to find out why this man they took him for, George Daly, was so interested in him and his parents.

“I’d like to think about it,” he said. “Over the weekend. I’ll get back to you on Monday.”

With that they had shaken hands and he had stood up to leave. There was nothing to pay, Nadia Shelley informed him. Everything
so far was covered by the retainer he’d paid on hiring them; he would find an itemized accounting in the folder.

He would also find, he knew because he had glimpsed it, the address and phone number of the client, George Daly. That was
his prize.

And that was what had brought us, Larry Hart and myself, to our Saturday morning encounter in the park.

I
have to say that if Larry’s story did nothing else, it took my mind off the painful subject of my ailing marriage. Now and
again, when my concentration faltered briefly, the memory of that softly spoken “Yes” with which Sara had answered my question
“It’s Steve, isn’t it?” plunged again like a knife into my heart, and would have twisted there until I screamed for mercy
had I not forced my attention back to Larry and the extraordinary coincidence of his meeting Nadia Shelley. It was tailor-made
for the book I was planning to write. Work, I have always believed, is the best antidote to depression and despair, and here
fate was handing me a more extraordinary story than I could ever have invented from my own imagination. I knew I must cling
to it, stay focused, because in time this would be my way through and (I could only hope) eventually out the other side of
the agony I now faced.

At my suggestion we walked back to the apartment together. Although Larry’s “disguise” would probably have got him through
the lobby without so much as a suspicious glance from the doorman, I preferred not to take the risk. Instead we went around
the side of the building where I used my key to enter the garage, then we took the elevator directly to my floor. Only when
we had closed the front door firmly behind us did he remove his hat and sunglasses.

“Great view,” he said, looking around approvingly.

“Would you like some coffee? I can fix it in a minute.”

“Sure.”

He followed me into the kitchen, and while I made the coffee filled me in on the “missing” details of his life. When he had
realized that acting wasn’t for him, he had gotten into the music business more or less by accident: first of all as a “roadie”
on various U.K. tours by visiting American groups, eventually returning to Los Angeles with one of them, where he had lived
for most of the last fifteen years—which explained why no obvious trace of a British accent remained. He had become a manager
and record producer, obviously with some success, because he had second homes in Switzerland and Hawaii.

“Okay,” I said as I handed him a mug of freshly brewed coffee, “I’m now going to tell you the whole story from my side, and
you will see why the key word in all of this is the one you used in connection with your meeting Nadia Shelley two days ago.
That word is ‘coincidence.’ As a matter of fact, I’m writing a book—I’m a writer, by the way—about that very subject right
now.”

“Hey, no kidding!”

I brought out the envelope filled with the things I had found in my father’s chest—the photographs, the old copy of
Variety
—and gradually, throughout the afternoon, pausing only to make a quick sandwich around two o’clock, we put together a theory
about what must have happened, what accidents of fate (for want of a better word) had brought us to this point.

What seemed inescapable was that we were twins. Of course we couldn’t be absolutely sure without DNA tests, and we agreed
we would both give blood samples on Monday. But the photographs and everything I knew about my parents pointed to one relatively
simple though remarkable scenario. My mother, having become pregnant, was told that she was carrying twins. Bearing in mind
my father’s ambitions as an artist at that time and my mother’s slavish devotion to his career, they had decided that the
financial burden of two children at once was too great. By some accident they had met and gotten to know two English actors
touring a play around America in the late fifties. Jeffrey and “Larry” Hart had been childless, perhaps unable for some medical
reason to have children of their own, though they had wanted one. Perhaps they had been thinking about adopting already. Perhaps,
for all I knew, “theatricals” were not considered desirable parents by official adoption agencies. At any rate, it had suited
both couples to make this private arrangement between themselves. My mother would have her twins and give up one of them at
birth to the Harts. They then, by whatever means (the details were unimportant, perhaps we would uncover them later), had
somehow gotten their adopted baby into Britain and registered him—Larry—as their own by birth.

Larry leaned back in the armchair he’d settled into and looked at the ceiling before letting the air out of his lungs with
a whooshing sound. Then he looked at me and shook his head in wonderment.

“Who in the hell would believe this if we told them?” he asked.

“Pretty much everybody when I get this book written,” I said. “We’ll go on talk shows and do press interviews together—if
you’re agreeable, that is.”

“No problem.”

“There’s a certain amount that’s been written about synchronicity already, and some amazing coincidences recorded, but I’ve
never come across anything as extraordinary as this.”

His face cracked into a grin. “Tell you what,” he said, “why don’t we have a little fun with this while we can—you know, before
everybody knows about it. It could make a whole extra chapter for the book.”

“Like what?” I asked him. “What d’you have in mind?”

He shrugged. “I dunno. That stuff that twins do when they’re kids, I suppose. You know, swap roles, fool people into thinking
that I’m you and you’re me. The kind of stuff we’d have been doing if we
had
been kids together.”

For some reason I felt oddly dubious about this. Not just that I felt it was treating too frivolously something of potential
importance: more a feeling that with all the other problems on my plate at that moment I wasn’t really up to goofing around
like some teenager. He must have read the reaction in my face, because he immediately tried to reassure me.

“Nothing serious. Just, you know, when your wife gets home, for example, you could be sitting right where you are now, and
after a couple of minutes I could walk out of the bathroom. I don’t know her, but I bet she’s got a sense of humor. Can you
imagine her reaction?”

He laughed at the thought of it, as though seeing the scene clearly in his head.

“I don’t want to involve my wife in this,” I said quickly, and in a tone that wiped the smile from his face and left him once
again anxiously reassuring me.

“You’re right. That’s kind of a dirty trick. Lousy idea. But there must be something we can do just to prove that we really
are as identical as we think we are. I mean, if you called up a friend of yours to come over for a drink, then I opened the
door pretending to be you, wouldn’t that be great to see how long it took him to figure out something was wrong?”

I remained noncommittal, though I could see his point. The idea had some appeal. He was right; it would make an amusing little
episode for the book. Suddenly I thought of the perfect candidate to play the trick on: my agent, Lou Bennett. Lou hadn’t
been sure that he could sell my publishers on the idea of a book about synchronicity, but with this whole story attached,
the discovery of my long-lost twin, I wouldn’t have been surprised if we found ourselves in a bidding war.

Larry loved the idea of Lou. “It’s perfect,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

I called Lou at home. He had a house on the East Side in the seventies. It was already after four in the afternoon, and he
said he had a couple of things to do and didn’t have time to come over. However, he was dining at Smith & Wollensky’s down
on Third at eight o’clock and would be happy to meet somewhere for a drink around six-thirty or seven. We settled on a bar
we both knew.

“It’s about the book,” I said, while Larry made signs at me not to say too much. “Kind of a discovery I’ve made that I think
you’re going to really like. I’ll tell you about it when we meet.”

I hung up and looked at Larry. We both began laughing. In a few moments we were cackling like idiots. I don’t know about him,
but I’m sure that my own hilarity came from a release of the pent-up tensions that I felt and still couldn’t bring myself
to talk about. It was a kind of hysteria, but I was grateful for it, and for the chain of events that had led up to it. I
was grateful that I had something to distract me from the painful events and the unbearable truth that I was not yet ready
to face up to.

“You’d better come and check out my wardrobe,” I said, wiping my eyes and getting my breath back. “Pick out what you’re going
to wear. I get the impression looking at you that you’re a snappier dresser than me, so think of this as a character role.”

He laughed and followed me through the bedroom and into my walk-in closet. Half an hour later he was dressed in one of my
casual tweed jackets, cords, and a roll-neck sweater. I wore the jacket, designer jeans, and handmade boots that he’d been
wearing—everything a perfect fit. The boots were the most comfortable I’d ever worn, and I made up my mind to get some made
for myself. I even tried on his hat and sunglasses. When we looked at each other, the transformation was complete.

“Okay,” he said, “here’s the plan. Why don’t I take a cab to meet your agent, then you follow on in about half an hour. When
you walk in wearing my clothes, he’s
really
not going to know which of us is which.”

“Wait a minute,” I said as an obstacle occurred to me, “how will you recognize Lou? You’ve never seen him.”

Larry looked blank. “Shit, I hadn’t thought of that. Don’t you have a photograph or something?”

Luckily I did have one, taken at some writers’ dinner where Lou had been my guest. It was a good enough likeness for Larry
to find him in a bar.

We took the elevator down to the garage again and exited the side of the building. After a couple of blocks Larry waved down
a cab.

“This,” he said, getting in, “is going to be fun.”

He pulled the cab door shut, and I watched it drive off into the gathering Manhattan dusk. He twisted around to look back
at me through the rear window and made an “O” with his thumb and forefinger, grinning broadly with boyish pleasure.

I began walking in the same direction. After a couple of blocks—inevitably, I suppose—a certain melancholy descended on me
again, but not with quite such a crippling heaviness as it had earlier. I still had the distraction of this strange new adventure.
Something else to think about. Something that was by any standards remarkable. It had been both the saddest and the most astonishing
day of my life. Such a coming together, a coincidence of opposites, must mean something in itself, I thought. A book, certainly.
I had a book to write, of that there was no question. I would throw myself into it with all the energy I had.

Yet I sensed there was still something more to it all. The day was far from over, but by the time it was, I felt that I would
know something more about the direction my life was going to take, was perhaps destined to take, from that point on.

It was a disturbing and at the same time an oddly liberating feeling.

“L
ARRY
“

I
t has always been a rule of thumb with me never to lie unless I have to, and even then to keep it to a minimum. I would never,
for example, resort to an outright untruth where a simple exaggeration would suffice. Sometimes it is enough simply to leave
some small detail out of the larger picture.

My encounter with Nadia Shelley happened exactly as I described it to George, though I confess to omitting any mention of
the circumstances that led me to that point. When he did ask, later, I made up something bland about being in town on business
and taking a walk.

The truth was that I had been attempting to enter a branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank at which I had set up an account under
one of the various aliases I find it convenient to use from time to time, and into which I was expecting some urgently needed
funds to be transferred. I had decided to approach the bank with caution. The possibility of a trap could not be ruled out.
Therefore I drove past in three different cabs before deciding whether to risk an approach on foot. And sure enough, I saw
them waiting. There were two of them. One of them was black, wore sunglasses and a long tan leather coat. The other was less
tall but slightly broader, with chiseled Slavic features and small, deep-set eyes. Each time I passed they were somewhere
different, but they were always there.