Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman (17 page)

“So did you tell Daphne she can do the carpentry?” I said.

“I did. Against my better judgment. Before I called your mother. I called her to reassure myself, but of course I didn't learn anything.” Daphne had appeared in his office to negotiate, taking notes so as to write up a contract. Her main concern was apparently that Pekko would exploit her, and she had negotiated an hourly rate, insisting on weekly paychecks once she'd earned the rent.

“She's not donating one flick of a paintbrush,” Pekko said as we ate.

“No nostalgia for lost love?” I said lightly.

“I'm not sure it was ever lost love.” It was all right, I explained to myself. My afternoon was less bad if Pekko had leftover feelings for Daphne, and the feelings made him more interesting to me. We were almost done eating before I heard all of what he was thinking—or another part of what he was thinking. “If I asked you to cut her daughter out of the play, would that be possible?”

“Of course not. Is that what you want me to do?”

“Not so far.”

“But ever? Pekko, you're not like that. Even if you did feel terrible when you saw Cindy's knee move before she was born.”

“It might have been her butt. Maybe she had her back to Daphne's front, and when she flexed her legs, her butt moved.”

“Or her butt.” He got up and gave Arthur, who'd been attentive, his plate to lick.

“Even if her mother cheats you,” I persisted. “What difference does it make if Cindy's in the play?”

“I might need a threat.”

“If Daphne doesn't work hard enough?”

“No. If she doesn't work hard enough, I'll be out the rent. That's happened before. But she's complaining about the building. I don't need stuff in the paper.”

“Throw her out.”

“Civil liberties. That's the one thing you can't do.”

“You can blackmail her by breaking her kid's heart but you can't refuse to renew her lease?” I said, wondering if Cindy cared about the play.

“Violates her civil liberties.”

But now Pekko had done talking, and as I gathered the plates to wash them—the cook shouldn't have to clean up—he wandered out of the room. When I was done, I took Arthur for a late walk so as to think about my lover—the light on the planks, which were the color of corn oil, the off-white walls and white comforter and nothing much in the room to distract me from the sensation of my vagina pulsing and rippling around him.

 

I
planted my garden toward the end of May, feeling a sudden wish for flashy annuals and something I could eat. I don't like impatiens or pansies, but I put in a lot of zinnias and tomatoes, and then watered only now and then and weeded hardly at all. June was warm but not too hot, cooler than those hot days in April, and when I was home I was often in the backyard, in sandals, throwing Arthur's ball. Sometimes I tried teaching him something, but I soon gave up and spent time reading and thinking about Gordon. Charlotte came over late one afternoon, and being together in the sunshine felt so good, for me at least, that we didn't talk for long minutes, leaning back on canvas chairs in my backyard, looking up at layered maple leaves, and drinking white wine. Then we began, sleepily, listing the epochs of our long friendship, just referring to times we were at ease and times we were not, mentioning them and not needing detail. “The time I didn't tell you about—” she said.

“Yes. And the time you told Philip—”

“About your mother?”

“Oh, that too. I was thinking about something else,” I said.

“Oh. Yes. The time at the beach.”

“Yes, the time at the beach.” Which was the time I found out that Denny was dead. I was staying at the old beach house where Pekko was living, and Charlotte and Philip and maybe her girls—yes, her girls—had come over for supper, but Pekko was late, and it got later and later: a summer evening that began hot and became cool. Olivia ran around in her wet bathing suit to keep warm while we waited for Pekko before eating, then ate without him. When he arrived, it was with the news that Denny was dead. He'd broken into Pekko's frozen yogurt store and died of an overdose. Now Charlotte and I stopped hinting and told each other that story, over and over, it seemed: how I'd slept with Denny, though I was in my forties and supposedly sane, while he was twenty-three and apparently crazy, how I'd stopped, how he'd died.

“You know, he had been
living
in Pekko's store,” she then said, after a long pause. “He didn't break in just that one time.”

“He was living there?”

“He was homeless. He broke in every night. Lots of street people do that someplace.”

“How do you know?”

“Somebody reliable told me the story, not long after.”

“Another street person?”

“A case manager.”

“Did Pekko know?”

“How could he not? Daisy, how could he not?”

“You've been quiet about this for ten years?” I said.

“Eight, nine maybe. I didn't hear it right away.”

“Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you get angry with Pekko for keeping quiet?”

“Oh, Daisy, Pekko's just like that. He does what he does.”

That's why I keep thinking about Denny, as well as about the events of last spring and summer. He was part of them, too. He gets younger in my mind, a sort of imp, laughing at us all. He did laugh at us all. He was thin, with a tough look about him that didn't seem real to me, as if he was playing bad guy, and nothing really bad could happen.

That afternoon in the backyard, I didn't tell Charlotte about Gordon, but I told her all about the play. She was enthralled. It was just her sort of thing—talky, good-natured, naïve.

 

R
ehearsals, speaking of the play, had become three quarters discussion. Katya said that didn't matter, it was our process at that time. She was a great one for following us as we sniffed each bush, and sometimes I tried to follow Arthur on a walk the way Katya followed us. I always lost patience, but Katya, like a big, soft shadow, never did. She'd signed us up for a performance: we were to perform our play in October as part of a community arts festival at the Little Theater, a small theater that used to be an art-movie house and got rescued, renovated, and set up for plays when the movies stopped. In the old days, before the renovation, I remember watching bats flying in the light from the screen. I remember Denny and me together there, but that might be wrong.

Cindy had a sharp directness that made everyone wish she had a bigger part, and someone suggested that, once the two-headed girl grew up, she could have a little sister. That idea led us into a somewhat idiotic discussion about whether these parents would take a chance on another baby. I was against it and found myself ridiculously involved, arguing against Jonah, who thought they should accept the will of the Lord. Maybe I wanted Cindy's part to stay small.

“You're not thinking about whether these
particular people
would accept the will of the Lord,” I said.

Ellen had come into the room and was watching at one side, and then Daphne came in as well, to pick up Cindy. Daphne emitted an atmosphere of disdain. Of course she wanted there to be another child, so her daughter could have a bigger part. Finally she called, “Oh, give them a break. Give that couple something good.”

We agreed that the play had enough sorrow in it, and Cindy was confirmed as the future sister of the two-headed girl.

 

R
eading about murder, I was more interested in the killer than in the killed. When I wasn't thinking about bedding with Gordon, I'd think about the sensation of killing, the sensation of getting away with it. Many murders I read about were unsolved, or solved only provisionally. It felt strange to begin my research about murder in New Haven—or small cities, we'd broadened the topic that much—already knowing that Pekko had told me about the murder of Marie Valenti, knowing that, if Pekko had told the truth, someone was living his life as if it hadn't happened.

Not all the murders I read about were unsolved. Sometimes crowds saw a killing. I found an amateur book in the local history room of the Main Library about the killing of cops—a typed tribute, all in capital letters, to policemen who died on duty between 1855 and 1970. When cop is killed, another cop is usually around to tell about it, and sometimes there's a crowd of bystanders interested in whatever the cop was investigating. Sometimes it seemed that everybody had lied.

New Haven is composed of Yale and Not Yale, and Not Yale is composed of African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Italians, Jews, WASPs, Poles, Irish, and so on. (I suppose Yale is too, these days.) Reading about dead policemen was like watching outsiders arrive, one group followed by the next. The first cop murdered on duty, in 1855, had been born in England. Before a raffle intended to raise money for a poor widower, neighbors held an impromptu dance. According to the
New Haven Register,
a young girl who went to the dance was tracked down by her mother, who began beating her with a stick. The neighbors grew agitated, and when an officer tried to arrest a drunken man, they beat the policeman to death. The paper reported that everyone in the crowd was Irish.

The next police officer to be murdered, some years later, was Irish. Again the book quoted the
Register
: “In consequence of the inequities practiced in the Fair Street, Italian quarter of the city, Policeman Hugh McKeon, a stalwart member of the New Haven Police . . . [was] the victim of the bullets of a dwarfed specimen of the Italian race.” Andrea Laudano, who'd been running “a house of ill repute,” shot the policeman three times when the cop broke the door down to stage a raid.

By 1915 the witnesses to the murder of another police officer had Jewish names, and an officer was killed in 1935 by a burglar with a Polish name. Poles seemed to figure in the next murder as well; one of them, known as the Eel, escaped from prison. Near the end of the book, though it doesn't say so, the perpetrators are probably black—to judge from the names and addresses—while the police officers are Italian. And the last murder described, of an undercover agent who posed as a bookmaker, seemed pretty clearly to be the killing of a black police officer.

I was asking around for the names of urban sociologists, looking for someone who'd talk about New Haven's ethnic history and how it connected to murder. I was also looking for a psychiatrist. I wanted to know about New Haven's murders, but I also wanted to know about murder: how it feels to do it, why people do it, and how they sometimes get away with it. I didn't like thinking about Marie Valenti because I didn't know what to do with my knowledge, and couldn't talk to Gordon about it, and I didn't like thinking about Pekko's disapproval. I hadn't told him about the conference. I wasn't afraid to have an argument with him, but I was afraid to think he might be right, that if anybody ever heard of my conference, it would be one more reason people I met outside New Haven might ask why on earth I lived there.

Uncomfortable learning about Marie Valenti, I went searching for information about the murder of Penney Serra, another young woman killed in the seventies. One day I went to the public library to read about the murder itself. I thought the newspaper article at the time of her death would have huge headlines, but sitting in the library basement, trying to work a balky microfilm viewer, I took a while to find the story. I struggled with flapping plastic tape and reels that spun too slowly or too fast, then first came upon not the news story but the death notice. “Suddenly in this city July 16, 1973 . . .” Shaken, I continued looking. Another rattle of the machinery and I found the story, not a big headline—all the big headlines that month were about Nixon—but a story in the lower left-hand corner of the first page, police seek motive in garage slaying. Penney Serra, age twenty-one, had gone downtown looking for a job. She was found dead in a stairwell on the top level of the garage, which was fairly new then—one of those gray concrete, cavernous things; I remember wondering, when I first drove into it, if it could hold up so many cars. She had no reason to be at the top level. Her shoes were in the front seat of her car, and her purse was in the backseat. She'd been stabbed once in the chest, and also in the right hand: that brave child had been fighting back, and reading about that wound, I saw the girl—her useless, reflexive grab at the hand with the knife.

 

E
llen, in a white T-shirt with a low neckline, walked with her usual hesitation into the bedroom, where I was sitting on the floor amid piles of clothing. She'd left me to talk on the phone; lately, that happened. For the first time, as she paused, watching me, her tentativeness pleased me. Ellen and I now worked together more easily. She still believed that objects own their present locations, or that people who had long forgotten them have a claim that they be well-treated. She argued, but now she was occasionally willing to lose. I guess she'd decided that I too had some respect for the ancient leaseholds of things. We stacked stuff in piles, room after room. Her house was turning into the worst sort of clutter museum, the organized sort.