Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman (24 page)

 

M
y house looked pretty in the summer dusk. I hoped Pekko wasn't home. I was sure he'd read the whole bad story from my face: how I'd lied to him, hurrying to New York in a naïve, stupid fantasy of love, how I had not been pretty and interesting enough to keep Gordon Skeetling to myself for two days in the city, and even how I had not been able to help or comfort my friend in her trouble—the size of which reminded me of the pettiness of mine, without making me feel any better. I was ashamed of my stupid grief, but no less grief-stricken. I kept reminding myself that Gordon had not broken up with me. Probably he would, any day, and I'd blame myself then for this hysteria. After all, nothing was wrong yet.

I fitted my key in the lock and heard voices in the kitchen as I opened the door. Arthur came skidding and cavorting toward me, so I had to put my two bags on the floor and sink down to have my face licked, to grasp his muscular body.

“Daisy?” came Pekko's voice. He sounded surprised. He must have assumed I'd have dinner in the city.

“I'm here,” I said.

“Should I go?” I heard a man say.

“Of course not.”

I picked up my possessions and walked into the kitchen, where Pekko and a man I didn't know were drinking O'Doul's from bottles. Pekko thinks nonalcoholic beer is pointless, so he must have thought well of this plump, middle-aged man if he'd picked up a six-pack. Or the man had brought it. He stood, a man in his forties, black hair slicked back, in a white shirt, open at the neck, and dark pants you'd wear to work. He had an eager look, a readiness to smile, as if he loved jokes but couldn't remember any, and depended on others to tell them. “This is Edmund,” said Pekko. “My wife, Daisy.”

We shook hands. “I'm sorry,” I said. “I'm just back from New York.” I felt unpresentable, my makeup old and my clothes wrinkled.

“How was your weekend?” said Pekko.

“It was good,” I said. “I went to see Stephen. He gave me lunch.”

“How's Stephen?”

“He's fine. Thinking deep thoughts,” I said.

“He does that,” Pekko said.

Edmund offered me an O'Doul's. I wanted a glass of wine. I hesitated, not sure if bringing out the bottle would be rude. Then I was too tired to look after this person of whom I knew nothing. If he was a recovering alcoholic who suffered when he saw others drink, he'd just have to suffer. I did everything wrong anyway. I might as well do that wrong too. “What I need is Chardonnay,” I said, “and I think we've got some.” I opened the refrigerator, found the bottle and a glass.

Then I took my wine and said, “I need to change my shoes.” I thought I'd go to bed with my Chardonnay and stay until this man left, though I hated being in one more situation in which I couldn't or didn't take charge. I went upstairs, unpacked my bag, washed my face and repaired my makeup, changed my clothes. I felt unreasoning rage at Pekko for bringing home a stranger, unreasoning rage at the stranger. He looked nice, foolish and nice—just the sort of boring person Gordon might expect me to hang out with.

I didn't want to go to bed after all. I wanted to do something to somebody, and if nobody else was available, I could demoralize this innocent former drinker by drinking. So I went back to the kitchen. As I came down, Pekko was telling Edmund about his troubles with the former contractors.

“Edmund was my assistant, when I had the bike store,” he said to me. That went back a long time. Edmund must have been a young assistant.

I poured another glass, then sat on the faded green sofa. “Do you still bike?” I said. “Pekko doesn't.”

“Now and then,” he said. He didn't look like an active man.

“We were thinking of going out for a pizza,” Pekko said. “Did you eat?”

I had had nothing since Stephen's bagel. I went along with them and drank more wine at Modern Apizza. Edmund seemed unperturbed. He discovered I had a mother who lived near me and expressed envy. His parents were in New Haven, he said, and that was why he came back here from where he lived—somewhere a couple of hours away, apparently—but he didn't see them often enough, and they weren't doing well.

“Did you grow up here?” I said.

“We moved away when I was in high school, but my parents came back when they retired.”

I told him my mother had moved to be near me when she retired.

“That's great. But she must be a worry, too.”

“My mother's just fine,” I said truculently. “She has more energy than I do.”

“My mother's not too bad,” he said, “but my father's losing ground pretty quickly. Forgetful. I've just come from arguing with them about giving up the house.” As we waited for our pizza, I felt sorrier and sorrier for myself, listening to this man, who had come from an intergenerational fight about whether the old people were too feeble to continue their lives and couldn't make them interesting. Charlotte would have made the story exciting. She often talked about the peculiarities and obstinacies of the old people she worked with, scrupulously omitting identifying details. But I didn't like thinking about Charlotte. When I thought of her disapproval, I imagined her laughing at me, though Charlotte isn't like that. I excused myself and left, looking for a phone. I found one, phoned Gordon, and got his machine. I didn't leave a message but returned to Pekko and Edmund, and slid into the booth next to Pekko. He patted my thigh.

“Now, how could he say he's a perfectly safe driver, after something like that?” Edmund was asking Pekko, who shook his head solemnly. Pekko is never bored.

“What do you do for a living?” I asked Edmund.

“I'm assistant principal of a middle school in Worcester, Massachusetts,” Edmund said, and I almost laughed, he seemed so like the assistant principals of my youth.

“He counts paper clips,” said Pekko.

“I once told your husband that one of my responsibilities is supplies,” Edmund said, “but I assure you, I spend plenty of time counting children, too. I was telling my mother,” he continued, “I don't have trouble with the mischief makers, but sometimes good kids need attention, too, and I'm less sure of myself with them.”

“What do you do?” I said. We had meatball pizza, and I'd eaten two or three slices. I wondered if I wanted another.

“I ask them to help me count paper clips!” he said triumphantly, and as I laughed, I began to see why Pekko liked this man. “That is, I find something useful for them to do, and I hang around and start talking about some problem of my own. That gets them started. I'm not too bright, and the smart ones see I'm not too bright, but sometimes they trust me anyway, because they need someone to trust so badly.”

He paused, then said, “Nobody
ever
has an easy time,” in a slightly admonitory tone, as if I was a shy child in his office, too shy to be bad but in need nonetheless. I was not too shy to be bad but I was in need. “Children's anxieties are as bad as those of adults,” Edmund continued, “but it's worse, because when it's the first time, they don't know it's ever happened before. No boy has ever disappointed a father before. No girl has ever lost her boyfriend.”

“Does
anybody
learn that it's not the first time?” I said, quieted. I minded Gordon's departure from New York as much as if nothing had ever happened to me.

“Maybe not,” Edmund said, and I found myself taking unforeseen comfort from a counter of paper clips. The waitress brought our check. “Maybe nobody ever does.”

 

 

 

 

 

C
urled sycamore leaves—faded green with brown edges—lay at the curb on Temple Street on the Thursday after the weekend in New York. It had been hot and humid all week. Would we still be lovers in the fall? I hadn't seen Gordon since he walked out of the hotel room. I'd done little, making appointments and breaking them. I considered phoning Charlotte and didn't; I wanted to go to Gordon's office and didn't, though there was work to be done. By Thursday I'd stopped hoping he'd phone. I figured out when to arrive at his office, leaving time for work plus swimming and sex. I spotted his Saab as I hurried along the street, but when I went inside he was standing, gathering papers hastily.

“How are you?” I said, standing in his doorway, my arms around a big, stuffed loose-leaf binder in which I carried everything
I needed for work on the conference. The office wasn't air-conditioned—Yale took Gordon seriously, but only up to a point.

“Hi, Daisy. Awful weather. I'd have called you, but I have a feeling it isn't a good idea to call you. Tell me if I'm wrong. How was the drawing show?”

“I went to the movies. I visited my brother.”

“Stephen.”

“You could have called me,” I said. I'd waited at home all day. Pekko wasn't home during the day. “Are you leaving?”

“I'm meeting with that guy in city planning about the project in Schenectady.” I couldn't remember what Gordon was doing for Schenectady. “I said to him—your place. He has air-conditioning.”

I should have continued through his office and begun work. I'd been making calls from home about printing the brochure for the conference, but now I had to call the speakers to confirm their time slots. It was almost time to mail the brochures. I'd been compiling a mailing list and making labels. The printer would do the mailing, which would arrive just after Labor Day, when with any luck the weather would be cool and people would be energetic, looking for something to do, a reason to leave home. I'd lure them to New Haven. By the end of the conference, in October, everybody else would have learned what they learned. As for me, I'd know something more about killing, how it can become the next event in a series, how an action that wasn't going to happen becomes an action that has happened.

But I stood in Gordon's office, twisting my hair like Cindy. If he didn't say something now to renew the affair, it was not quite—surely not quite—the same as if he'd ended it, but almost as bad, as though we were lovers day by day, like travelers in a hotel who must inform the proprietor if they wish to extend their stay. I wanted a lease. It crossed my mind that Gordon—like me at the start—might have decided we'd go to bed a fixed number of times. “Thirty-two,” I imagined him thinking, climbing out of bed at the SoHo Grand. “That's it.”

“Did you choose the design?” he said. I'd had a couple of mock-ups of the brochure.

“I don't have to let them know until I give them the copy, and I can't do that until I talk to a few more people.”

“People are away. They're hard to reach.”

“Don't worry.” I'd had long conversations and lively e-mail exchanges with my proposed speakers. Everyone who'd promised to speak would come to my conference.

“Gordon, let's pick a time to go to your place, okay?” I said then. I couldn't help it. “If not now, whenever.”

“I'd rather keep it spontaneous,” he said.

I forced myself to pass through his office into the archive and get on the phone. Before leaving he interrupted me, coming to my doorway. “Have you talked to the man who's going to speak about Marie Valenti?” he said. “When is that scheduled for?”

“The last morning.” I hadn't been able to think of a good enough reason to cancel that discussion. Gordon was right—it was a little bit of reality inserted in a theoretical few days: Who killed Marie Valenti? I'd pretend Pekko had never spoken.

As I sat there, not turning to look at him while he stood in my doorway and asked two more quick, impersonal questions, I remembered Pekko's friend Edmund, his kind eyes ready to hear something funny. His eyes had met mine as we both reached for the same slice of pizza at the same moment. We laughed, and he pulled his hand back. I pictured that hand—a little pudgy, quite pale. Now the thought of it, the hand of a man I wasn't attracted to sexually and had never touched, comforted me as Gordon also left without touching me.

I worked for a while, not well, then found myself thinking of a reason to go to Ellen's house despite the heat. She'd probably be home, and wouldn't mind my coming without an appointment. She didn't want to be away from New Haven while her lover was here, and he wouldn't be here much longer. I drove to her house and rang the bell. I was businesslike, and within a few minutes, though she'd proposed drinking iced tea instead of working, we were going through a closet together. I heard the children's voices from the backyard. A heavy coat in her arms, Ellen suddenly turned and let it fall to the floor. She held out her practiced hands. “What?” she said. “What?” I pictured myself falling into her arms, but I said, “Some of this could join the pile upstairs.” That's how we'd taken to working at her house—I colluded with her. We didn't throw anything away, but we organized everything into ever more precisely defined piles. Her children both now hopped from room to room, which wasn't strictly necessary but made the point. She and I walked demurely in narrow paths like ladies with parasols.

She shook her head and smiled. As we worked it started to thunder, and I left, so as to drive in the rain. I took a long drive, just to be driving, before I went home. My hands, aching for Gordon's body, squeezed the hard steering wheel. When I came home at last, Pekko was sitting in the living room, patting the dog and watching the storm. He seemed larger than usual. His knees were spread, and he leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, listening as if to distinguish mood and tone in the thunder. He opened his left arm, and I nodded, then busied myself for a few minutes, too restless to settle. I went to the bathroom and washed my face. I drank a glass of water and stroked the dog, who had come forward, quieter than usual, when I entered, and now followed me expectantly. I looked at the mail. Then I returned to the living room and sat down, leaning back against Pekko's arm. He put his hand on my shoulder. It was five days and some hours since Gordon had touched me. I began to cry, though I never cry. I cried with the sheer exhaustion of wanting. Pekko didn't ask questions but rocked me forward and back and pulled me closer.