Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman (13 page)

“Your
what
?”

“Obviously we'll continue with both projects whether you say yes or no.”

“I didn't think you were asking for sexual favors,” I said, “in exchange for the right to organize your trash.”

“Or even put on my grubby little conference, eh? Oh, I know. The word
mistress.
”

“It's a rather startling term. But I suppose you required a word that could have the possessive adjective
my
in front of it.” What I primarily felt, that is, in response to his suggestion, was even greater permission—the right, now, to say anything whatsoever.

“Oh, I'm a possessive bastard, indeed I am. Will you go to bed with me, Daisy?”

“Where?” I said.

“Good question. Not here. Not in my house in Madison, which is too far.”

“Not in my house.”

“You don't seem like a motel girl.”

“I know where to go,” I said. We seemed to have skipped over the question of whether. Ellen's children were on vacation, and she'd taken them to Florida to see her mother. Or her father, whichever it was. I had a key. It was a nice house. I was going to accept
mistress,
apparently, and even
girl.
My body had just turned into an object that required touching by Gordon Skeetling. My arms and legs seemed to be located where they were only to serve as lines pointing directly or indirectly to my crotch.

I'd never touched him. I wasn't in love with him. I believe in work relationships. That is, I believe passionately that people can express what is inside them by working together as authentically as by sleeping together. I don't imagine that work is a substitute for love or sex in any way. I wanted to work with Gordon Skeetling, and the fact that I'd considered him attractive from the beginning, with his dangly, mobile, bony arms and his up-and-down eyebrows, just made the work pleasanter, maybe more likely to be good work. What I'd just agreed to do—though I was eager—seemed as unlikely as if I'd moved comfortably through his rooms and he'd offered to lead me to the bank on the corner and arrange a mortgage so I could buy them. (Not that I was buying Gordon Skeetling. I knew from the first he was a rental.) We didn't leave immediately for Ellen's house, once I told him where I thought we could go and he'd nodded quickly.

“An hour?” he said and went back to work. I had another appointment. I phoned and canceled. Then I went back to work, too. Sorting through piles of documents that seemed to be connected with the building of the New Haven Coliseum, throwing most of them out, was more fun with a tingling crotch. I'd made several decisions in a row, and as I write this I remember writing not many pages ago that my habit is to be good half the time. Deciding to do the conference over Pekko's objections felt good, as I made the decision, not bad. Deciding to be Gordon's lover felt good, not bad, although I was surprised to notice that. Deciding to use Ellen's house was decidedly bad and felt that way, and I also felt guilty about canceling that appointment. You could say my conscience works well about the minor issues and less well about the major ones. Or you could say I have an original notion of right and wrong. Writing this now, I am not sure I disagree with the assessment my overburdened conscience, working in a hurry, made then. During that hour I did not think for long about the right and wrong of it, although I believe I did total the thing up in a rough way, something like the way I've just described. Mostly I spent the hour doing good work, and waiting.

 

 

 

 

 

I
'm writing because I want to, but when I sit down to it, I don't always want to tell the story of Pekko, Gordon, and the play about the two-headed woman. Sometimes I feel like writing about the moment that changed my brother Stephen, more than thirty years ago. Stephen called me, a few nights ago. (Now it's July 2002.) “When are you going to show me what you're writing?”

I liked his curiosity. I said, “You didn't tell anyone, did you?”

“No. But I want to see it.”

“Why?”

“Because you're my sister. Because you didn't tell me what was going on, and now I'll find out.”

“What was going on when?”

“Last summer. I knew something was going on last summer. I wondered if that guy was really dead. The guy from ten years ago.”

“How did you know something was going on?”

“It was clear, the time you were in New York.”

That's still to come, the time in New York. Talking to Stephen the other night, I changed the subject.

I didn't invent Denny's death. He died ten years ago, two years after I met him. I met him at his grandmother's house. That wraith had a grandmother—a canny woman who loved him, a schoolteacher who'd taken her small grandson for pancakes each year on the morning of his birthday, and when he was grown (and not in prison) bought him Thai dinners whenever she could invent an excuse. The grandmother had a Fourth of July party, at which I was somebody's date. Denny and I met over salad: he was tossing his grandmother's salad.

“Did you ever go to bed for money?” he asked me, when I hardly knew him. Not that first night, and not after we slept together—yet I think I remember that we slept together the second time we met. I suppose there was a time in between. When he asked the question, we were in my car. I was driving.

“Did
you
?” I said.

“Sure. It's not so bad. I've done everything.”

“Was it a woman?” I asked.

“I wouldn't go to bed with a man for money. With a woman, I figured I was cheating her.” Of course this was before I gave him money when we went to bed. Which I did because he needed money. I think. He persisted. “Did you? Did you ever?”

“Not exactly.” I told him a story nobody else has ever heard. I was in my thirties. A blond, pudgy man in a bar took me to his sister's apartment, to which he had a key. I suppose he was married. When I walked in, I noticed the smell of gas, and I checked the stove. One of the burners was slightly on. I turned it off on my way to his sister's couch, taking my clothes off. After we were done, he handed me two fifty-dollar bills.

“What's that for?”

“You saved my life. My sister deliberately left the stove on. She did this to asphyxiate me.”

“That's ridiculous,” I said. “I'm not taking your money.”

“You said you like to read. Buy books.”

I shrugged and took the bills. In New Haven, there are people you know whom you never run into, and others with whom you have a high coincidence rate. For years I kept noticing that man. Sometimes he smiled. After a while I knew I'd been a whore—he'd wanted me to be a whore and I'd complied—but when I talked to Pekko and Gordon about my interest in prostitution, I left that incident out.

Right now I'm recounting, however, not Stephen's early life or what I told Denny, but the day I agreed to go to bed with Gordon Skeetling for the first time. I enjoyed the postponement and the anticipation. I felt clever, having acquired something I wanted that wouldn't become a nuisance, like a travel bag of just the right size, one that would fold up later, using little space in the corner of the closet.

We worked for an hour, then Gordon walked in and put his hand on my shoulder. I murmured, “One second,” and made a brief note on my pad. The room was becoming more orderly, something like Ellen's kitchen, an artistic arrangement of chaos reduced to categories, and Ellen's kitchen was where I led him first—so he could see it—after we'd clumsily walked out of his office (suddenly I was nervous), bumping into each other and apologizing, and had gotten into my car, almost without discussion. I drove to Ellen's house, parked boldly in front, unlocked the door, and led Gordon in.

It was several weeks since we'd dismantled the kitchen. Ellen and her daughters still ate meals in that complicated array, that statement of the value of detail for its own sake. Everything she owned could be connected to someone in her life, some painful or joyful event. When Ellen was home, memory ruled that room, but now she was not home, and the objects themselves sat there like “the plain sense of things” as Wallace Stevens put it. “Look at that!” Gordon said, bracing his long arm in the kitchen doorway and taking in the view with some amusement. “What a conglomeration!”

He was delighted, which delighted me. He blocked the doorway, but moving up behind him, under his arm, putting my hand on his waist as if I'd done that before, and looking into the room as if he was showing it to me instead of the other way around, I saw it his way. When Ellen was home, everything was fogged with meaning—often with loss, disappointment, or betrayal. “This was the teapot my college roommate left behind when she moved out. She liked the man I was dating, and she moved out when she couldn't bear it any longer. I hadn't even guessed.” Ellen's memory dulled the blue glaze even for me, but when Gordon stared at the teapot, and everything else, that glaze shone bright. Each object was simply itself, and even I could see the difference, with my partial view under his elbow. “It is as if we had come to an end of the imagination,” Stevens wrote.

I led Gordon to the spare bedroom in which Ellen and I had piled clothes. Heaps of coats, men's suits (her father's?), dresses, and blouses were still on the bed. I removed the piles carefully, lining them up on the floor so I could replace them. I felt a pang about the lost green print shirt, and even looked around for it, as if I might have incorrectly remembered my theft and disposal of it. Then, in that roomful of piled clothing—which Ellen was reducing to cleaner, neater, but never smaller piles—I began unbuttoning my shirt, and Gordon stepped forward and put his hands over mine. I didn't become completely passive, though I let him do it. I knew we had to keep track of our own clothes in this array of clothes, not mislaying Gordon's tan sweater or the silk scarf I wore. We made two neat piles, both moving unself-consciously, usefully, though we were becoming naked. I liked Gordon's substantial but bony torso, his rounded, surprisingly fleshy ass. Standing next to our folded clothing, Gordon put his hands on my breasts. He laughed, then kissed me, a long, good kiss that made me forget everything but the tongue in my mouth.

When I drew back the old pink chenille bedspread, I found that the bed was made. We'd have to do something about the clean but slightly musty sheet we were about to muss and stain. I left the room, found Ellen's linen closet in the hall, and returned—while Gordon looked at me with open curiosity—with a towel, which I spread between the sheets, postponing the question of what I'd do with it later. If the plan I'd made was awkward, that made the enterprise better—touchingly amateurish, like a homemade greeting card. We were laughing when we lay down, and I drew this new, differently shaped man to my body with nothing but pleasure in chance, pleasure in possibility, and my old, too-long-forgotten delight in the variety of captivating male bodies available to someone who kept
an eye open.

“I didn't know we'd do this,” I said, marveling, after he'd entered me and we'd both come quickly, too excited to take it slow. What if we'd missed it, as people do?

“You're married.”

“You're not, or so you said.”

“I'm not.”

“Well, that's good.” He had multitudes of girlfriends, of course. All right. We hadn't used a condom. All right.

We lay companionably on the scratchy towel, and he began to talk about work, telling me with some excitement about the next article he intended to write. He was now thinking about a new way of organizing the categories in municipal budgets, and he talked fast, rising on an elbow to explain better. Like a cup of coffee, sex had awakened him.

When I laughed, he said, “Work is sex.” He kissed me again, longer this time.

“I know,” I said when we stopped. “That's what people don't understand. Work is sex.
Good
work. Putting on a conference.”

“Can you do that? Can you put on a conference?” Another kiss.

“Oh, sure, I'm terrific,” I said.

I did not steal the towel but put it in the clothes hamper, assuming Ellen wouldn't notice an extra dirty towel. That morning, I had told Pekko I wouldn't be home for supper, because of an appointment so late it left little time before a rehearsal. I dropped Gordon off near his car, an old black Saab (he got out without kissing me, but that was only sensible) and arrived late for that last appointment. It was disconcerting to be with a different man, someone who didn't count, a man who chose not to clean up his clutter when he heard what I charge. Then I ate Chinese takeout in the car, irrationally elated by good food, and elated that my old capacity for mischief wasn't gone. I walked into the rehearsal room feeling at peace in my body, as if I'd swum a long, slow distance.

 

W
ith Justine away, Cindy could have joined with Mo to play the two-headed girl, but she didn't want to. “I don't like being squashed together with somebody,” she said.

“You think I like it?” Mo said.

“Could we record that?” said Katya. “Could you kids say that again?”