A LITERARY DINNER FOR A FEW EXTREMELY CLOSE COUPLES

Author: By Edith Pearlman

Date: SUNDAY, August 2, 1998

Page: F4

Section: Books

That's life. Literature gives us liberty to peer and wonder. And literature has always been interested in perfect pairs. This year, for instance, there appeared a story about an exotic city enduring a ruinous battle; in the heat of the flames, two siblings fall in love. ``The Burning of Smyrna'' by Jeffrey Eugenides (in The New Yorker of Jan. 5) is about a young Greek brother and sister orphaned by the 1922 war with Turkey. At the story's end -- about a week has elapsed -- they marry.

Eleutherios Tatakis and Desdemona Tatakis Tatakis are not the only pair of sibling lovers I've encountered in literature, just the most recent. I'd like to give a small dinner party for some of the couples. I won't invite gods of myth, to whom incest was an afternoon's dalliance; I prefer long-term commitments. I'd certainly invite the Tatakises; and Justin and Celia Tizard from ``A Love Match'' by Sylvia Townsend Warner; and Eugenia and Edgar Alabaster from ``Morpho Eugenia'' by A. S. Byatt; and Van and Ada Veen from ``Ada'' by Vladimir Nabokov. And -- if they promised not to insult the other guests -- I'd add Siegmund and Sieglinde Aarenhold from ``The Blood of the Walsungs'' by Thomas Mann. The last story is laced with aphrodisiac food: aromatic broths, Rhine wine prickling the tongue, caviar, brandied chocolates. I'd borrow the Aarenholds' cook. And I'd ask my brother to co-host -- if only I had a brother.

Celia Tizard's brother, Justin, shell-shocked in World War I, has come home to London in ``A Love Match'' (in ``Selected Stories of Sylvia Townsend Warner''). Celia's fiance has just been killed. In sympathy Justin and Celia reach for each other, first figuratively, then literally.

Truth is their disguise. They move to a village and pass as bachelor brother and maiden sister. They surprise their neighbors by refusing to employ live-in servants, but their other habits are unexceptionable. What goes on behind the brick walls of their house is nobody's business. ``Puss,'' he calls her -- what a wealth of conjugal fondness lies in that word. One woman in the village does suspect them. ``How did she guess?'' Celia cries. ``No fire without smoke'' is Justin's reply; their passion has sent heated wisps into the cool English air.

The Tizards deliberately make themselves dowdy. The Aarenhold twins adorn themselves like potentates. ``A large pearl -- his gift -- hung down upon her brow. Round one of his boyish wrists was a heavy gold chain -- a gift from her.'' These self-centered 19-year-olds of ``The Blood of the Walsungs'' (in ``Stories of Three Decades'') have been inseparable since birth. Their love for each other is love of self, a narcissistic mirroring. ``You are just like me,'' he says. ``Your little arm feels like satin.'' We wait for their union to happen by accident. But it happens through art -- the twins watch their namesakes in ``Die Walkuere'' and the blond Teuton pair on stage inspire and license the dark Jewish pair in the audience. They are last seen on a rug, fragrant, abandoned. This first coupling will not be the last. Ahead lies a lifetime of illicit excess.

As for Van Veen and his sister in Nabokov's ``Ada,'' their excursions into the forbidden take place several times a day during childhood and then at various heady moments until their 90s. What energy! They romp joyously through their big book -- part epic, part science fiction. They are clever in several languages. I'd seat them on either side of me at that imagined dinner party. My phantom brother will have to manage the Aarenholds. Mr. and Miss Tizard, surreptitiously holding hands, can face Mr. and Mrs. Tatakis, openly embracing.

Eugenia Alabaster flutters into the room. Her brother Edgar enters sulkily behind her. (``Morpho Eugenia'' is one of the two short novels in Byatt's ``Angels and Insects.'') Eugenia, as pale as her surname, has ``large eyelids, blue-veined, almost translucent,'' with ``thick fringes of white-gold hair on their rims.'' If this description reminds you of the wings of an insect, it is meant to. The story is allegorical: Men are idle impregnators; each generation supports a languid queen annually bearing children; a battalion of females runs the household and rears the young and feeds sweets to the queen.

``Only the exhaustive is truly interesting,'' wrote Mann, and Byatt has taken this statement to heart. Her stories and novels are compendia of knowledge -- ``Morpho Eugenia,'' with its insect lore, is no exception. But she is too good a writer to produce a merely a didactic allegory; Eugenia the moth is also Eugenia the human. Remorse tugs her. ``I know it was bad,'' she stammers when her wrongdoing is discovered. ``But you must understand, it didn't feel bad.''

It doesn't feel bad to the reader, either. Entering these works -- three stories, a novella, and a novel, each a stunning example of both its genre and its creator's talent -- I forget my customary approval of self-restraint, my prim worry about recessive genes. I value instead whatever the protagonists hold dear: passion, in the Veens' case; generativity, in the Alabasters'; consolation, in the Aarenholds'; emotional partnership, in the Tizards'; destiny, in the Takakises'.

Smyrna is on fire. ``Figs heaped along the quay . . . began to bake, bubbling and oozing juice. . . .

`` `We are going to die, Eleutherios.'

`` `No, we're not. You're going to marry me.' ''

They escape the flames and board a ship where no one knows them. Brother and sister are united by the captain.

``I think love breaks all taboos,'' says Eleutherios to Desdemona. ``Don't you?''

Yes, she does. Yes, I do. I wish I'd had a brother. I do have a husband, and as time goes on our behavior and foibles and vocabularies grow more similar. Couples eventually feel they have known each other all their lives, and even begin to look like siblings. These stories of siblings who become couples turn that curious truth on its head; giddily we recognize ourselves, upside down.