Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman (32 page)

“I don't think that way.” I stepped away from him, from his gray, floppy hair and his pointed, black eyebrows.

“I have to leave,” I said.

“We're putting on an event here,” said Gordon.

“I changed the catering order yesterday, so you'll need a new invoice from her.” I touched Gordon's sleeve and pulled my hand away. I gathered myself, my error-prone self. It was over. It was over. How could it be over? It was over. I couldn't. I didn't have to.

“What? What?” Gordon shouted. “Where do you think you're going? Daisy!”

“I'm leaving,” I said. I did have to. I could turn around. I could walk.

“And I suppose what we've had is meaningless to you?” he said.

“No, it's not,” I said. I turned around and touched the tiled wall, to push myself off, the way a swimmer pushes herself off from the side of the pool. I walked through the door to the lobby, and through the lobby, pretending not to hear a question someone called to me. I watched myself to see if I'd turn again, but I didn't.

Walking to my car, I was thinking of Daphne. I'd have to find Daphne and persuade her to keep her mouth shut. But Daphne was not going to be persuaded, and by talking to her I might let her know there was something to think about. I got into my car and drove through the downtown traffic, up Orange Street on that quiet morning, when nobody was out except women with strollers, old people going to the markets, and kids from Cross High School, with backpacks and baggy pants. I didn't make the turn to my own street. I kept driving. Orange Street passes the high school and goes straight into East Rock Park, straight to the base of the hill—the hill of stones—and if you cross the river and turn left, which I did, passing the trail where I walked with Arthur, you can drive a loopy road under trees—lots of color just then—through woods and around the mountain, up to the top of East Rock, where there's a parking lot, a Civil War monument, a place to look at New Haven and Long Island Sound, and meadows where families picnic on hot days. On a weekday morning in October, nobody was present. I did not jump off the cliff. I parked and sat on a bench and looked at the city below me, the lines of houses and trees, the bigger buildings downtown, the green, the water.

I thought about what I'd learned at the conference. I'd learned that murder is dreadful, disgusting, and real. And appealing. I'd never murder anybody, but I did like to get rid of things, and maybe that was what had given me the nerve to get rid of my affair, which might as well have been stuffed into garbage bags and dropped off at the Salvation Army. My body seemed to have nothing inside it. I drove down the hill and stopped for coffee at Lulu's. It was warm enough to sit outside in the sun, but the morning rush was over, and nobody I knew was there.

 

A
s I write on my laptop at our kitchen table in the evening, in the hot, dry summer of 2002, Pekko walks in, coming from a meeting of a neighborhood group he belongs to. “Last month, in this area, no crime of any type was reported,” he says, leaning over to stroke Arthur, who has learned not to jump but is frantic with self-discipline and joy, seeing Pekko for the first time in two hours. “This month there were three break-ins. But the murder rate is the lowest in decades.”

 

I
drove to Ellen's house. I knew she'd be at work, but I still had a key. I wanted to be in her house, with its intricate arrangement of uselessness. I wanted to walk from room to room and touch things, look at things. Instead of a dreary, cluttered house, it was now a zany, cluttered house. I saw she'd been busy yet again. The shrines to New York were giving way to other shrines, maybe shrines to complexity. A battered end table I hadn't seen before held a collection of old kitchen utensils—ladles, tongs, tea strainers, wooden spoons. A shelf in the hall held more odd pieces of china than I remembered seeing there before. The floors were still mostly impassable. Soon dust would take over. Nobody could keep things clean here.

I heard a key in the lock, and Ellen came in. I stepped forward and said her name, so she wouldn't think I was a prowler. She started anyway. “I thought you were busy all week.”

“I walked out of the conference.”

“You left the play
and
the conference? What's wrong with you?”

“Different reasons.”

“Did you come here today to meet Gordon Skeetling?”

“No. That's over,” I said.

She looked doubtful, standing in the archway between the living and dining rooms, her pocketbook over her shoulder, confronting me as if she in her jacket were the visitor and I in my shirtsleeves dwelt there. She took off the jacket and put away the purse. “I came home for lunch, and to do a little crying,” she said.

“Over the man?”

“I don't know. I'm still crying about the World Trade Center. Come in the kitchen and I'll make lunch.”

Ellen's complicated house now constantly shifted meanings, as she did. As she walked through the rooms, the objects complemented and enlivened her indefiniteness, so I had the sense of someone whose surroundings matched her, but in a somewhat scary way. “Are you tired of living like this?” I said.

“I'm tired of living,” said Ellen.

“What should I do?”

“Distract me with your story.”

“Is that a suicide threat?”

“No, I'm a mother.”

“Some mothers do it.”

“Not this one.”

“Getting help?”

“Getting help. Not to worry. Distract me, distract me,” she said.

She'd distracted me, but now the heft of the morning's events stopped my mouth. She seemed to know my story already, so I told it to her, told her the story I've been telling here, leaving out what she already knew—herself, the play—but including, without details, Pekko's connection to Edmund and what had happened. This time, though I was sure that now I had before me someone I could trust, I swore her to secrecy before saying that Pekko had known all along who killed Marie Valenti. “It's funny,” I said. “From the time I first met him, I knew there was a secret. Maybe that's why I married him. I knew he knew something that everyone wanted to know.”

“I won't tell,” she said, and as far as I know she hasn't, though if Pekko knew I'd told her, I can't imagine what he'd think. Of course, that's not all he doesn't know. Or so I believe.

As I spoke, Ellen took a container of eggs and a bunch of spinach from the refrigerator and made us an omelet, beating the eggs in a bowl she placed on the only bare spot on her counter. “Is Gordon why you gave up the play?” she said. “Because he might phone when you were at a rehearsal? I used to stay home, hoping Lou would call. It's shameful.”

“That's an old-fashioned reason. I have a cell phone.” But Gordon never used it. He said he hated the sound of cell phones. He said there were gaps in my sentences.

“Or because he thinks the play is stupid?”

“It
is
stupid.”

“In fact, it's not,” said Ellen. “I wouldn't be in it if it were.”

“You let everything happen to you,” I said.

I don't remember everything Ellen said about the play, my inextricable connection to the play. She didn't say that I'd be sorry because I'd hate my disloyalty, or that I'd be sorry because I'd miss my friends and their fun. She may have said the connection existed whether I wanted it or not. “Thea can't leave Dora,” she may have said. “Dora can't leave Thea.” After a while she became tedious. I waved her quiet, and left quickly.

 

A
s I entered my house—after driving many miles up I-91, fast, into Massachusetts, then back, fretting against the traffic—I didn't hear anything. I was glad Pekko wasn't there. Arthur came to greet me as usual. I scratched behind his ears and grasped his big, black feet to lower him when he placed his paws on my chest. The mail was on the table. Pekko was home, or had been home. I heard a sound and climbed the stairs. A light was on in the bathroom, but the door was ajar. “Pekko?” I called.

“I'm in the tub. Come in.”

The bathtub is against the wall at a right angle to the door, so when I paused in the doorway he was looking straight at me. Uncomfortable—still in a jacket in the warm bathroom—I had to stop myself from reaching to outline the doorjamb with my fingers. Gordon's gesture.

“Did you turn him in, Daisy?” Pekko said. He had filled the tub as full as possible, and his thick limbs and stubby penis shifted and wavered under the water. His beard rested on its surface.

For many miles I'd been planning this conversation. I don't remember what I'd decided, but I told the truth. “No. Gordon Skeetling turned him in. But it was my fault. I told Gordon.”

“I thought it was Daphne.”

“Daphne knows?” I said.

“I told her ten years ago. I never should have told anybody. I was sure it was Daphne when I saw the paper, but she came to the office to tell me she didn't. She knew he stayed in the house sometimes. She said, ‘I know right from wrong.' ”

I stood silent for a long time. “So you figured I didn't know right from wrong.”

“I didn't know what else to think. Nobody else knew.”

“I'm sorry I told Gordon.”

I waited for Pekko to ask why I did it—and I don't know what I'd have said—but he didn't. He sat silent in the tub, his arms under the water. He had no washcloth or soap. His face looked sweaty. The water must have been quite hot.

In the car, I'd imagined putting my arms around him and saying “I'm sorry” into his neck, but hugging him when he was in the tub would have been ludicrous. Another woman might have knelt and put out her arms and gotten wet, but I didn't.

“Sending Edmund Doyle to prison accomplishes nothing,” he said at last. “It does only harm, no good.”

“You could argue that upholding the law accomplishes something,” I said, even though it was what Gordon would have said. “You could argue that he did commit murder.”

“I don't see things that way,” Pekko said.

I left Pekko in the tub and walked downstairs to feed Arthur and start supper. I wondered momentarily if Pekko would leave me. I'd done two wrongs, I thought, as I peeled an onion. I had told Gordon about Edmund, and I'd quit the play for fear of embarrassment. But I'm the woman who's good half the time. I couldn't turn into someone three quarters good. Still, I didn't want to reduce my average. That night I called Katya to ask for my part back. She was glad. Angry but glad. “Ellen and Muriel wasn't a combination that worked,” she said, after sounding angry for a while.

 

W
e rehearsed almost every night for the final two weeks, and at last we had a play, which most of us memorized. Denise spoke in a singsong when given a script, but Katya was able to get her to improvise over again, so what she said came out slightly different each time but sounded natural. The play was to be performed with no backdrop but with several large, colorful props made by Daphne and friends of hers—cheerfully gnarled trees—and objects borrowed by Ellen, who knew how to get objects. Katya recorded some songs, and the play began with music. There was music as well in between scenes, and of course at the wedding, about which we had some disagreement. Tradition won out: we had Wagner for the processional and Mendelssohn for the recessional. “Definitely traditional,” I had said, my first day back. I was instantly full of opinions about the play, once again. I suppose I should have been humble, but I wasn't. When I first walked in, Muriel took my head in her hands and held it so tightly it hurt, for a long time, staring at me. Then she ducked my head roughly into her chest and kissed my hair.

“It's funnier if it's traditional,” I persisted, later that same evening.

“Is the wedding supposed to be funny?” said Jonah.

He was upset when he realized that Thea and Dora were having secular weddings. “It needn't be Christian, if that's a problem,” he said to me, and I realized that he'd figured out I'm Jewish, the only Jewish cast member. “We could have a rabbi perform the ceremony if you'd rather,” he continued. “But I think a religious wedding would be more seemly, don't you?”

“In real life, I've been married twice, both by judges,” I said, and Jonah looked disappointed, but the list of characters already included a judge (who was formerly a doctor), and we thought it would be confusing to have Denise play a minister, priest, or rabbi at that point. The cast also included a minister, Jonah, in the baptism scene, but by the time we reached the wedding, Jonah was one of the grooms—mine. We did add a nondenominational prayer, to be spoken by the only adult actor who was not in the wedding, Chantal. Chantal could sing gospel, it turned out, so we added a gospel song at the end of the wedding, just before Mendelssohn. It made me choke up every time, but I didn't have to speak at that point.

Katya had come up with a donation from a printer, and a friend willing to design a poster, and my mother did a good job with publicity. A week before the play, stories ran in the
Register
and the
Advocate,
and posters appeared in store windows all over town. We had eight performances altogether. I knew I wouldn't feel bad about Gordon—not truly bad—until they were all over. It was good to postpone that pain (which, in its time, was considerable). Now I cared only about the play. I had vowed to behave myself, returning, but from the first I was arguing my complicated positions as forcefully as ever and taking people aside to give them hints. Chantal habitually said “flustrated” for “frustrated.” She looked hurt when I mentioned it, and at the next rehearsal she still said “flustrated.”