I wonder how many people have ever met their double. This came up because I saw a woman here at the conference I'm attending who looked so much like my friend and former colleague Ivette Callendar that I had to text Ivette, who assured me that she staying warm in her apartment in New York, nowhere near South Carolina. Then, this morning, when I saw the woman again, I introduced myself and told her she had a double and showed her Ivette's Facebook profile picture. "Oh, yeah, yeah. I can see it," she said politely. And that was it. She didn't want to have anything more to do with the crazy man handing her a Blackberry first thing in the morning.
Before it happened to me, it happened to a friend of mine. We were hanging out with a group at a bar in Madrid, and suddenly this weird kind of rolling commotion made its way across the room to us. It was odd, because even though Spaniards are generally quite open and friendly, madrilenos have that sort of cosmopolitan cool that tends to keep little groups of friends from mixing in bars like the one we were in, an old-fashioned neighborhood tapas place. But this murmur rolled its way over to us, and the people had all parted, so that my friend Jose could see this other guy who looked just like Jose across the bar. Both men laughed and shook hands, and exchanged a few words, and that was the end of it.
Up until the summer of 1988, I'd never had a double before. When Valley Girl came out, a lot of my high school friends made a big deal about Nicholas Cage and I having a resemblance to each other, which I guess I could see. The lidded eyes, dark brows, spiky (at the time) hair. I could see it. And there was a guy I waited tables with up in Syracuse who answered to the same general description, I'd say. (Enough so that our tables were always getting us confused, and we finally gave up correcting them and ended up sharing a bunch of tables and their tips.)
I did finally meet my double during that summer of 1988, while traveling in Greece. I was on a small power boat, an island hopper, with Susan and her dad, along with nine or ten other passengers. Suddenly, reminiscent of what had happened in the tapas bar with Jose, a murmur began building. This one was odder, though, since I don't speak any Greek. People shifted their places, leaning back, carefully, so as not to capsize, until another young man of about my age and I were looking at each other from either end of the boat, he at the stern, me at the bow. The people were laughing and patting both of us on the back, and I think Ken may have said something like, "Hey, would you look at that guy? He kinda looks like you."
I think my double and I were more embarrassed than anything else, now that all eyes were on us. I didn't quite know what I was expected to do. Was I supposed to wobble my way to the other end of the boat and shake his hand? Hug him? Instead, we just waved at each other weakly, until the people settled back down for the rest of the trip.
Of course, I no longer look anything like the slender, feather-haired young man that we both were that day on the Aegean Sea twenty-three years ago. I'm a heavier, balder, grayer version of that guy. I wonder if my double is still my double, or if he's still slender, with a full head of hair. And I wonder if he's sitting somewhere in Greece, wondering the same thing about me....
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