Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman (30 page)

“I don't care if they feel guilty. Eventually they'll pay. People do. Or they don't. If I can't pay the mortgage, I lose the building. But I won't starve.”

“We won't starve.”

“We won't starve.” He dropped the towel and kissed me. His body was warm and steamy as he drew me closer, and I put my hands on his backside and felt aroused. We walked to the bedroom and lay down. Being with him temporarily soothed the pain in my mind over Gordon, who hadn't touched me all week.

 

M
y mother dropped in on a Saturday, and I gave her coffee. “The rent strike might have been my fault,” she said, leaning forward in the empty house with conspiratorial enthusiasm. Pekko was out, finishing repairs Daphne had never completed. “But it might have been worth it,” she went on.

“All right, what?” I said.

“I said to Daphne, ‘You may not wreck my daughter's mar-riage.' ”

“Daphne wasn't wrecking my marriage,” I said.

“So you tell me, but I saw how you were all summer.”

“Mom, it was something else. I told you it was something else.”

“Maybe it was something else, but it was also this. That girl wanted Pekko. She was going to lure him away. I talked her out of it, but of course that made her mad. She had to find a way to get back at him.”

“Do you want a cookie?”

“Sure.”

“It was a guy bothering me.” I put the package of cookies on the table and sat down opposite her. “I told you.”

“But you're married. That comes first, even if you don't want
it to.”

“It was a guy.” My mother looked up at me, cookie in hand, one bite missing. I saw her consider understanding me. Then she chose against it. “Maybe you
thought
it was a guy,” she said.

“Did you talk to the paper about the play?” I said.

“I'm working on it. I forgot all about it, that week.”

“Of course. Nobody did anything, that week.” But then I continued. “Listen, do me a favor and don't talk to the paper.”

“Why not?”

“The play's not very good,” I said. “If there's no audience, that might be better.”

“If the rehearsals aren't good, the play will be great. That's a famous thing about the theater. Don't you know that?”

 

I
n the past, when a man was upsetting me I'd tell Charlotte or my mother, and we'd have one of the two traditional talks women have: Relax, he's crazy about you, or Forget him, you're worth a dozen of him. This time I didn't tell anyone the whole story. Though every morning I read biographies in the
Times
of people who'd died on September 11, my selfishness thrived and I felt terrible about my own small trouble. I smoked for the first time in years, only in my car—not in the clean, pleasant house I shared with Pekko and Arthur. I didn't want Arthur breathing secondhand smoke. Toward Pekko I felt a brutal recklessness, mixed with tenderness. I cherished Pekko with a new fondness, unrelated to sex. But at the same time I felt dangerous and bad, an outlaw who cared scrupulously for her buddy or her horse but put them at risk by holding up the stagecoach at gunpoint. Gordon proposed sex once or twice during those weeks, and I agreed, and it was good, but I never stopped scrutinizing him—looking for evidence of another woman, other women—and that hint of
a dismissive laugh was never completely absent when he spoke
to me.

With the crash of the towers, New Haven murders had become quaint, the mischief of kindergartners, and at times, those weeks, the mail didn't work. I claimed nobody would come to the conference, but Gordon was confident. “E-mail's working,” he said.

“I might drop out,” I said to Muriel, again, at the next rehearsal. That night I couldn't endure being enclosed in that dress with her. I wanted to burst its seams and escape. I am half good, I reminded myself. I pictured myself throwing the play—a little package containing Katya, Jonah, David, Chantal, Denise, and Muriel, clutching one another in a bunch—over my shoulder. Then throwing the dress. I said, “I just don't have time.” The clutter business had picked up again; I really didn't have time. Ellen and I had decided to draw up a written plan to deal with what she'd created, her household of frequently vacuumed artifacts, now arranged in categories her kids took pleasure in modifying and modifying again. Ellen's house was a weird but colorful museum, and mostly she and I toured it at our weekly appointments. After September 11 she created shrines all over the place—drawings by the children, postcards and souvenirs from New York. We'd look and talk and write things down. Working with her wasn't time-consuming, but my jobs added up. I was loyal to the conference, and loyal to my clutter business. I wouldn't throw paid work over my shoulder because I was unhappy about a man, but I might throw the play. “I might drop out.”

“Daisy, this isn't you,” said Muriel. “Why are you telling me this?”

“It might be what I want.”

 

G
ordon had no complaints as I worked on the conference, but I thought he forgot about me when I wasn't there. He was right that registrations happened. We'd had a good response to the brochure. People who had always been interested in crime in small cities were still thinking about the subject, or were thinking again after a few days' break, and every day more of them e-mailed, faxed, or mailed in their forms. We had room for eighty. I'd planned to feel successful when we reached sixty-five, but one day we went from sixty-three to seventy all at once.

When we weren't making love, Gordon and I spoke as if we never did. We were generally alone but talked as if a stranger were present. Once I heard him on the phone, making a date with a woman. Maybe it was business. I blamed him for talking in my presence as if we weren't lovers, but I did it too. Within that context, he was friendly and full of warnings, advice, jokes, and the usual assurances that I needn't pay attention to his opinions.

“Six was too many for a panel discussion anyway,” he said one morning, when I told him a speaker had canceled. “Five is fine. Make the fifth guy the moderator, and use the moderator someplace else. Who's the moderator for that one? Oh—me. Okay, put me on that afternoon session that nobody's signing up for, with the lady from Baltimore. Then you'll get her following plus my following.”

“What will you do together?” I said, already jealous of the lady from Baltimore.

“You'll figure something out.”

He was standing and I was sitting, and he grinned down at me almost lewdly, as if what I'd figure out would be pornographic, and as if he was taking a liberty, acting lewd with me, someone with whom he'd never been lewd. It was almost noon. With some unexpected free time, I'd gone to his office. Gordon wasn't there when I arrived. He came in as I was reading my e-mail, and the sound of his quick feet elated and frightened me. Now he said, “I've been thinking about Marie Valenti. That panel will be fine.”

“I shouldn't have told you what Pekko told me.”

“Why not?”

“You don't see why not?” I said. “I had no right to tell you, even though I know I can trust you.”

“Trust me to do what?”

“To keep quiet, of course,” I said.

“Don't worry,” said Gordon. He walked to the window and adjusted the Venetian blind. The sun was strong. “I'd like to kiss you,” he said, “but not go further.”

“You mean ever?”

“No, just today.”

I stood and met him at the window. Maybe that was why he'd closed the blind, though I didn't know who could see us. We kissed, and his tongue explored my mouth for a long time. I put my hand on his pants.

“I have some good ideas about what we could do now, but there isn't time,” said Gordon. Then he said abruptly, “Shall I come to your play, Daisy?”

“No.”

“If you weren't ashamed of it, you'd want me to come.”

He seized me and kissed me even longer than before. “Could we maybe have a quick time somewhere, after all?” he said, looking around the office, which contained no soft furniture. “I have a meeting at one. We can't go to my house.”

So I took him to mine, for the first time, feeling as if I'd lost a contest. He didn't like Arthur, who barked at him. “You're jealous,” I said.

“Possibly.”

We lay in the bed I shared with Pekko. I felt bad, but it was quick. We dressed, then Gordon held me tightly and I pressed my face into his chest. Hugs are metaphors for attachment, but we stepped apart, and he left me standing in the bedroom while he let himself out of the house. I was alone, at an hour I'm rarely home. I didn't feel like lunch. I checked my e-mail. I played solitaire. I had nothing to do for an hour. I left a message on Katya's answering machine, withdrawing from the cast of the play.

 

W
hat were you doing when you paid for that fabric, buying your way out?” Muriel shouted on the phone. “You think all we want is your money? You pay for that cloth, you can just go?”

“No. It had nothing to do with that.”

“Are you one of those white people who think if they just hand over some money, that's all they have to do to fix the world?”

“That play isn't fixing the world, Muriel,” I said. “Did you see the schedule Katya sent? I don't have that kind of time, and I don't think the play is interesting enough to take up the time of all those audiences.”

“So you're going to leave the rest of us to do it without you—so it's even worse?”

“It'll be fine. Ellen will play Dora.”

“She is not you.”

“Of course she's not me, but she has more experience acting than I do. She'll be great.”

“She is not you. This is not right, Daisy.”

“The play is not right,” I said. “We should all drop out and forget about it. It was fun rehearsing, we learned a lot, and that's enough of an accomplishment.”

“You don't mean that, and I don't want to hear you say it,” Muriel said. “I'm not going to talk to you anymore. I got plenty of trouble today, and I don't need more. I called because I just didn't believe it when Katya called me.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“LaShonda was arrested. I got to go, Daisy.”

 

N
o, Daisy,” said Ellen. “I'm
not
glad. I'll make an adequate Dora, but I'd prefer not to do it.”

“Is Justine mad?” I said.

“Of course. She says I've been conspiring to crowd her out. She says between Cindy and me, nobody notices her. It's not true, because she looks so strange, but she can't know that.”

“I'm sorry to dump it on you, Ellen.” I wouldn't have said Justine looked
strange.
Well, maybe.

“That's what people do. They dump things on me.”

“I was supposed to help you with that problem,” I said.

“That's right.”

“You still want to know what's been going on with me, don't you?”

“I think you'd do better to tell me, Daisy.”

We were on the phone. It was late at night. She'd called me. I lay on the bed in the dark. Pekko wasn't home. I delayed and changed the subject three or four times, and then I said I was tired and hung up.

 

I
dropped out of the play,” I said to Gordon. We were in the office.“Then I can cross it off my calendar.”

“You were planning to go?”

“Only to see you.”

“I decided you were right. It's not very good. I wish they'd just give it up.”

“Are they angry with you for dropping out?”

“Very angry.”

He picked up a notebook as my phone rang. We were in the office. “Meeting,” he said, pointing to the door as I reached for the receiver. Hearing his quick footsteps on the stairs outside, I was angry with myself for expecting to be praised for dropping out. The person on the phone was the caterer, with a question about tables and another about muffins.

But even while being distracted by practical questions and by Gordon himself, I had not lost interest in the subject matter of the conference. I kept saying it was about small cities, but the city I cared about was New Haven, and I wanted something for me from our three days of talk. I wanted to learn that New Haven was, somehow, despite everything, all right. I wanted confirmation that I was correct when I sensed neighborliness and health, up to a point, whenever I arrived in New Haven from another place. I didn't want the conference to make fun of my faith in one small, grubby city; I didn't want it proved that I should adopt Gordon's unsurprised shrug, his cynical certainty that he wouldn't be impressed. Pekko was a complicated character, but in some ways his faith was entire and childlike. In the contest between naïveté and knowingness, Pekko was naïve, and I wanted him to win. I wanted the smart, pessimistic speakers we'd invited and the smart, pessimistic audience to conclude that we in New Haven were managing, that we weren't killing one another as often as we might have, or behaving with flagrant injustice on every occasion when a killing occurred. I wanted Pekko to hear about the conference, and to understand that I was not irresponsibly trying to bring trouble to the city in which he lived and did his work.