Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman (12 page)

“You didn't turn him in?”

“He wasn't going to hurt anyone else,” Pekko said, “so there was no reason for me to ruin his life. Turning him in wouldn't bring her back.”

“What happened to him?”

“He went to UConn. He lives out of state.”

“But if you'd been wrong—”

“I know, if he'd killed again. But I knew him. I was one of those teachers who have a little group of kids who stay after school and wash the blackboards. I had a long-term appointment that year. I was teaching eighth-grade English, figuring it out as I went along. I had kids keeping diaries. I never told you?”

“You told me about the diaries,” I said. “You made them read
The Great Gatsby.
”

“Right,
The Great Gatsby.
”

By now I had reached our street and parked in front of our house, but we sat, not moving, though Arthur began to whine.

“That boy had a cute diary. Always figuring out how to please his dad. An old-fashioned Irish family. Never imagined not going to church. But passion in that kid. Anger. I once saw it come out, when another kid got nasty with him. He was little and skinny, then. Later he got bigger. He still talked about pleasing his dad, pleasing his grandfather. His grandfather was a contractor. I knew him a little.”

“But if his temper made him kill once . . . Pekko, it's illegal not to turn in a criminal.”

“Not if you're a priest.”

“You're not a priest.”

“The night he told me, I was a priest. That's how it was. He came to me late at night and talked for six hours. Then I took him out to breakfast, to the diner on Whalley. He said, ‘Are you going to call the cops?' and I said I wouldn't. I told him if he wanted to turn himself in, he was free to do that. By then he was almost done with college.”

“Why did he kill her?”

“She wouldn't take him back. He'd been her boyfriend for a few weeks. Then he moved away. Family moved to Hartford.”

“Wasn't he a suspect?”

“Oh, I guess. They looked at a lot of kids. But the assumption was strangers, because she was robbed.”

“So he deliberately made it seem as if New Haven poor people had done it.”

“That's right.”

“And you forgave that.”

“I wouldn't say I forgave it. I didn't forgive it.”

We sat in silence for a while, and I said, “Was she in your class, too?”

“No,” Pekko said. “I only knew her a little. I'd see her in the halls. I knew her name. She had a lot of dark, curly hair.”

“But if he killed a woman just because she wouldn't be his girlfriend—”

“I know. He might do anything.”

“You took that chance?”

“He was beside himself over her. I didn't think it would happen again. Remember, he told me three years later. He talked more like the boy's psychiatrist than the boy. I thought he was less likely to murder than I was.”

“He stabbed her?”

“He talked about the feel of the knife going in, how he did it again and again.”

I thought about it. “Do you think maybe it wasn't true?”

“I think it was true,” he said. Then he got out and opened the back door for Arthur, who preceded us up our front steps and wagged when we produced a key, congratulating us for remembering where we lived.

 

T
he other night I was writing this thing I write, this account of a piece of my life, more than a year later (it's the oddest thing, proceeding in time as time proceeds, but not at the same rate; I began in February, writing about the previous February, and now it's June and I'm only in April), when the doorbell rang, and in, unannounced, came my brother Stephen. Maybe Roz knew he was coming to New Haven and forgot to tell me. He'd had supper with her. Or he'd shown up there unannounced, too. He likes to do that, to prove he's still a boy. He'd taken the train from New York. I hardly ever take the train, I'm too impatient, but Stephen likes it, though he lives an hour from Grand Central, in Queens, and would get home in the middle of the night. He's married, as I've said, and has a daughter, and yet he seems alone all the time, and seems most at ease when he's put himself into a place where there's a slice of emptiness around him, like someone who lived in Montana or Alaska, someone who didn't want his neighbors near enough that he could hear their dog bark. I was alone. He came into the kitchen and sat in a corner of the old green sofa while I opened a bottle of Sam Adams for him.

“Did I interrupt something?” he said.

“I'm writing.” I gestured upstairs, where my computer is.

“Writing what?”

“I'm writing about half a year in my life.”

“Just any half year?”

“No, February to October of 2001.”

“Any special reason?”

“None of your business.”

“When can I read it?”

“Maybe never.”

“Then what's the point?” said Stephen. I wonder if he dyes his hair. He still seems young, and his hair is dark brown. He carries an expensive ballpoint pen in his pocket, as if he were the writer, and he takes it out and removes the cover, as if he couldn't wait to write, then puts it back on, as if he can't think what to say after all. “Let me see it now,” he said. “Is it about that guy?”

“What guy?” I asked, though I knew. I knew he meant Dennis Ring, my young ex-con dead lover, about whom I'd told him one teary night a couple of years ago.

“You said he drank herbal tea with you. He had complicated opinions about herbal tea, which kinds were good.”

“He had opinions like that about everything, but that was ten years ago.” Denny the occasional thief, drug dealer, drug user, and maker of mischief had opinions about shapes of pasta, opinions about cookies. He knew where to find European cookies made with dark chocolate in the days before you could pick them up at any convenience store. I stopped and calculated. Denny would still be under forty if he were alive. He'd been on and off drugs, and he died—in Pekko's frozen yogurt store—of an overdose. He'd broken into the store. He wasn't my lover then. I hadn't seen him in months. Sometimes he bored me. That was my big secret about Denny, sometimes he bored me. And sometimes he charmed me. He was my lover before he was my student. He signed up for my course as a tease, I think. We weren't planning to sleep together anymore, until he got into the cleaning business. Again I talked to Stephen about Denny. I told him Denny had nothing to do with what I was writing.

“Then do I?”

“No,” I said, understanding that Denny and Stephen were linked in my mind, somehow—because Stephen had been the kid with trouble in our household. But that's not true anymore, is it—that neither Denny nor Stephen is in this book? I didn't show it to Stephen. He left late at night. I drove him to the train. Driving home, I thought it had been the first time since September 11—nine months ago—that Stephen and I didn't talk about it, then remembered we had. I'd rinsed his beer bottle and put it into the recycling bin, and Stephen had said, “We don't recycle plastic anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Because terrorists knocked down the World Trade Center, and now we can't afford it.” I'd thought he meant his family by
we,
but he meant New York. Stephen was wearing a jacket too warm for the weather, though this is a cool June. My brother's lifelong gesture was fixed one summer afternoon when we were teenagers, when he stood up, not quite surprised, and took a step backwards but grasped a chair as if to keep himself from stepping too far back. He is always receding but never goes far.

 

G
ordon called me to change some of the appointments we'd laboriously set up. “Sometimes I want to avoid you, and sometimes I want to be there with you,” he said in his frank way.

At least he didn't always want to avoid me. “How do you know now that you'll feel like avoiding me two weeks from Wednesday?” I said.

“I have a schedule. I write on Wednesdays and Fridays in alternate weeks and on Tuesdays and Thursdays during the other weeks, so sooner or later I can make appointments with people who are never free on a particular day.” He added, “But sometimes I have to change my schedule.” He was odd, but I liked his willingness to answer me, to answer more fully than I expected. The trait compared well with Pekko's silences. “If I'm not writing,” he said, “I like it when you're here.”

I'd shown him stacks of articles about urban renewal, community gardens, community policing. Sometimes he said he'd already worked on a topic, and I filed what I'd found, but sometimes he said he'd like to think about the subject matter, and I should find a way to keep it from disappearing. I imagined my stacks going slowly by on a circular moving sidewalk, so he could glance at them now and then.

Before we hung up he said, “Let's schedule a lunch, too. I need to fight you some more about foster care. It clarifies my thoughts to argue.”

“Did you tuck your shirt in?” I said.

He didn't know what I meant. “There wasn't any hanky-panky, was there?”

“You mean you don't recall whether there was or not?”

“I recall there wasn't.”

“So do I. You waved your arms around so much, arguing with me, that your shirt came out.”

“Oh, it's always out. Doesn't that happen to everybody?”

Was I flirting? Yes, but I always flirt. In my single days, I didn't bother to flirt, I'd just proposition a guy. I might say, “If you're interested, by the way, so am I,” and often he became interested whether he had been or not. I think my flirting with Gordon was a sign, given my nature, that we were going to keep the relationship businesslike, with an admixture of casual comradeship. Flirting can be a substitute for sex. I have flirted with Philip LoPresti for years but never considered sleeping with him.

And the next two times Gordon Skeetling and I were together, nothing much happened personally. We had lunch without arguing, talking about dogs. Nobody flirted. I interrupted him a few times to show him material I'd gathered. I continued to amass a pile about murder in New Haven, though I told myself I was simply doing it out of curiosity and, in deference to Pekko, would not use it for any public purpose. I worked at Gordon's office alone a few times, too, when he was away. By now he'd given me a key. Then I saw him again on a cold day, a return to March-like weather after the warmth earlier in April. It was chilly in his office. I was sorting dusty papers from the bottom of an old pile in a corner of the floor, and I frequently went to the bathroom to wash my hands.

Gordon was restless, leaving his desk every few minutes to pace, look out the window, or take his own trip to the bathroom. He seemed to forget I was there. I had given up trying to stay out of his line of sight and mostly didn't close the French doors, since I could hear him on the phone whether they were closed or not. I'd look up and see him ambling back, automatically checking his fly, his eyes unfocused. I looked as I always did at his clothes. By now I associated him with tan and brown, colors I hadn't much liked before. They looked woodsy and comfortable on him.

“Did I tell you about the conference?” he asked, on one of these walks, and I'd been so sure he'd forgotten me that I glanced to see if he was speaking on the telephone.

“Me?”

“Who else? I didn't, did I? The project hosts a conference in October every two years. This arises out of a byzantine arrangement with two other Yale projects, but lately they've essentially dropped out. Do you want to do it? Obviously I'd pay you.”

“Do you have a topic?” I said.

“No, that's the carrot. You can host a conference on anything you like that's remotely connected to urban life in small cities.”

“How about murder in New Haven?” I said immediately.

“Whoa. I guess so. It's not our usual pedantic crap, but I suppose you could turn it into something academic enough.”

“Sure,” I said. As I talked with Gordon about it, I scurried around in my mind to discover why I was completely willing to oppose my husband. I decided, with the kitchen of my mind—while its parlor and dining room decorously considered what Gordon was saying—that I was angry with Pekko after all, because I'd felt morally bullied on the walk, shamed out of thinking about what I wanted to think about. Moral bullying seemed like a crime bad enough that I could now do whatever I liked.

“I mean,” Gordon said now, “could you plan this conference in additional time? I don't want you to stop the sorting-out project.”

“I guess I'll be spending most of my life here,” I said.

“Fine with me,” said Gordon, “except for those afternoons I write. Well, maybe we'll have to rethink that, if you're going to have time for this.” Then he said, in the tone in which he might have proposed still another schedule change, “You could also become my mistress, if you choose to.”