I was at the Morgan Library—a wonderful small New York City Museum centered around J.P. Morgan’s library, personal study and art collection, plus marvelous rooms for the display of Art. It was my second visit to the current exhibition of works on paper. Great art can be inspiring and engrossing, so when another museum visitor kept calling out “Susan!” I was perturbed and then annoyed. I thought, “Susan, go find your friend.” A while later, the woman searching for Susan approached me, “Are you Susan?”
“No.”
“You look so much like her and…”
“It’s the hair.”
Now that we’re all masked up in public, my hair—which has always been the first thing anyone notices about me—has become THE thing they notice.
We laughed. My friend laughed. Her friend laughed. And we all went on looking at art.
A couple of weeks later, another friend told me that she was walking near her home in StuyTown (Stuyvesant Town, a short walk from where I live near Union Square) and she saw a woman she was almost certain was me.
“She looked taller than you and she was wearing a purple, sparkly face mask, but I thought she really was you.”
When she approached the person who was not me, my doppelganger replied.
“Someone else has my hair?”
I’m not “Desperately Seeking Susan” (the 1985 film with Rosanna Arquette and Madonna), but I’m sort of hoping to run into her. What is she like? Do we go to the same salon specializing in curly hair? Do we have anything else in common?
I’ve been intrigued with the idea of doppelgangers for a long, long time having read Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Despair’ at an impressionable age. In the novel, the protagonist believes he’s met his double and decides he can run away from his depressing life by murdering the other man, as everyone will believe he’s the one who is dead. It’s a terrible plan. But the concept of two unrelated twins is ripe for mystery fiction.
Now that I know that—at least while we’re all wearing masks—I have a double walking around in New York City, I must get a story out of this!
Wow! I’m sure it’s just the masks, and the hair, but wouldn’t it be incredible if it turned out that the face beneath the mask was like yours as well?
I hope you meet Her one day. 🙂
Yes… that would be the start of the science fiction story. Clones?
There could also be the long lost branch of the family for a historical novel, perhaps a historical romance about a “wayward” girl with curly hair who … (you get the picture)
Or a completely horrible suspense thriller, drawing from Nabokov where one of us kills the other hoping to be declared dead. Kind of hard in the days of DNA, but if it were set back in time… Then it would be the Nabokov, so cancel that…
Yes, a funny strange Covid related turn of events.
I used to have a double. Random people in my life would tell me so. Never met that double. Maybe one day. . . !
I picturing a “reunion” of doppelgangers. What a party that would be! Massive, crazy confusion…
I think the woman I greeted was a hologram. Saddened that it wasn’t you, I waved her away, but my hand went right through her. It was kind of a chilly experience. Clammy, even.
I LIKE that… Susan is the hologram doppelganger. The start of a science fiction tale…