Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman (20 page)

The line speeded up, then slowed. I had time to look over the room, where a few dozen people, mostly men, ate their supper, some in conversation with those around them at the long tables, others looking down at their aluminum trays. As always, I noticed the incongruities—the people who didn't look to me like street people—and as always I sensed calm in that room, a shared noncommittal glance that did not make judgments, at least about feeling—that let me, for one, feel what I liked, though I always feel what I like. What I liked feeling that day was desire for Gordon.

At Daphne's left, a tall, gray-haired black man served bread and pastries. I'd seen him each time I was there, and once he told me he was a retired school custodian and now volunteered at the soup kitchen several times a week. “So how are you doing, Miss Daphne?” he asked, when the line subsided.

“Can't complain,” Daphne said, and then both said in chorus, “But I do!”

He laughed silently, and I wondered if the joke was his or hers or even my mother's. “You know my mom?” I asked him. “Her name is Roz.”

“Gabby,” said Daphne.

“Oh, sure, Gabby. We call her Gabby,” said the man. “She claims she's older than I am.”

There followed boring joviality about my mother's age, my age, and so on. Daphne said she was forty-four. Then she said, “Your mom isn't the easiest lady I ever worked for.”

“No?” I said.

“The easiest lady I ever worked for,” she said, “wasn't a lady at all. She was a transvestite. I was supposed to think she was a lady. That was the only hard part.”

“You mean a man?” said my neighbor on the other side.

“What did you do for her?” I said.

“I cleaned, but she didn't care, she just wanted to talk. Your mom likes to talk, too, but she's mad if I don't get anything done.”

“What do you talk about?”

“Regular girl stuff. Men.”

“I didn't think my mother had much to say about men.”

“You'd be surprised. We talk about Pekko a lot, of course. You can always talk about Pekko. She tries to figure him out. I gave up long ago.” She seemed to think I'd take it for granted that Pekko had been her lover.

I was furious. I was supposed to agree that figuring out Pekko is a challenging pastime, but I couldn't and wouldn't make friends with her, and certainly not over that. I had to say something, so I said, “He says you're a good carpenter.”

Daphne had repaired and refinished that staircase in Pekko's single-room-occupancy building, and had now moved on to other projects there. Pekko said she was doing a decent job, and cleaning up after herself, unlike her predecessors. My mother complained that Daphne was slow.

“I'm great,” she said. “I know how to make joints and everything. These jobs don't use half of what I know.”

“Why don't you work for a cabinetmaker?”

“Cabinetmakers are particular,” Daphne said. “I don't do well with particular people.”

Suppertime was almost over, and soon we carried the remaining food into the kitchen. I found myself standing near Daphne again as we scrubbed a tabletop. The room had emptied. “Pekko's hitting on me,” she said, squeezing out a rag in a bucket of hot water. “I thought you should know.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” I said.

“You know what I mean.”

“Well, you'll have to deal with it,” I said, moving toward the kitchen.

Daphne spoke a little louder. I moved closer to her again, so she'd quiet down. “He's trying to buy me off,” she said. “If I get good sex, I'm not going to mind having roaches in my kitchen and a leaky bathtub. Maybe that was me ten years ago, but now I've got kids. And I'm sorry to say this about your husband, but he's not as attractive as he once was.”

“And I suppose you're getting prettier every year,” I said. Yet she was ten years younger than I. I wasn't going to cry, and I wasn't so angry I'd scream, but I was hurt, hurt for my husband—and for myself. I glanced at my watch, said, “Have to leave,” before Daphne could answer me, waved a good-bye to the people who ran the place, and left the building. In the last weeks I'd sometimes imagined Gordon, Pekko, and me as a lighthearted movie trio, an unlikely but blessed grouping that would never saunter together down a street in Paris or New York but should. But in my mind now, interesting Gordon stepped confidently on along the sidewalk, while Pekko and I remained behind—old, clumsy, undignified.

 

I
t wasn't Daphne's opinion of Pekko that hurt, I understood the next afternoon. It was that she considered me so weak that she could wound me with a sentence or two. Lying in Gordon's bed, I had a sudden nostalgia for the day, not long ago, when I'd planned to sleep with him only once more, and had even thought I might stop where I was and just save that last time. If I still had that choice, I thought illogically, Daphne couldn't hurt me.

“What are you thinking, lover?” said Gordon from his postcoital position next to me, under the thick, ivory-colored sheet. Now he propped himself up on his elbow as if to see which lover I might be, his straight, gray hair flopping down on his forehead, his blue eyes studying me.

“Do you have more than one lover?” I said.

“Naturally,” he said. “I'm not going to remain faithful to my married lover, am I?”

“Naturally not,” I said. “I was thinking about something that happened yesterday, at the soup kitchen.”

“The soup kitchen? What were you doing there?”

I explained.

“Soup kitchens exist for the benefit of the beneficent,” said Gordon, from his elbow. I reached my hand up to trace the line of his black, pointed eyebrows. Daphne would think I was powerful if she knew I was in the bed of a man with eyebrows like that, agreeing with him that he needn't be faithful.

“Hungry people do eat there,” I said.

“People who like spooning out porridge serve it to people who like lining up for their porridge. ‘Come and be humiliated!' ‘Oh, thanks, I love being humiliated.' ”

“Not true.”

“I used to date a woman who ate in a soup kitchen off and on for a year, though she had plenty of resources. She was in medical school.”

“A doctor?”

“Now she's a gynecologist.”

I was silent. I wondered how old she was. “Look, that was years ago,” he said. “I'm dating someone else now, but I'm not thinking of her when I'm with you.”

“Well, I'm not thinking of my husband when I'm with you,” I said. “I'm not quarreling with you about women. I don't understand fidelity. I never have.”

A gynecologist, I told myself, wouldn't give him AIDS. At least he was a snob. But a gynecologist who ate in soup kitchens might have been a complicated gynecologist. Dismissing the question of whether I was risking my life with Gordon, I tried to decide whether I had to defend the soup kitchen. He began kissing my neck, hard, and for a moment I was happy, because the intensity felt needy. “Did you think I'd break up with you if you mentioned another woman?” I said.

“No. You're not stupid—and I don't think.”

But he said it fast. Maybe we were equally needy. I took his bony head in my hands and kissed him girlishly, the way a woman in a blue print dress with long sleeves, a flounce, and white buttons down the front might kiss. Gordon pushed me aside so as to kiss my neck some more, aiming for the indentation in the front, thrusting his rough head at my throat, kissing. His hair was prickly against my skin. He kissed his way down until he was driving his head at my crotch, kissing and licking till he was breathless and I'd come recklessly, hither and thither on the bed. “Right this second, you're the only woman in the world,” he said, but a second doesn't last long.

 

F
or years, while Charlotte stayed faithfully married, I kept starting over with a new man. She'd had lovers before she met Philip, and hadn't forgotten the patterns of love affairs. With brief, sardonic laughter, we'd note “the day he talks about his childhood,” “the day you go to the grocery store,” or “the day he criticizes your clothes.” Then there was “the day he tells you he's seeing someone else.” I'd lived through that day several times in the long years when I had boyfriends who overlapped with others, who had girlfriends who overlapped with me. Charlotte and I distinguished between the early announcement—“Before we start this, you should know there's someone else”—and the late one, when he was seeing someone else because he'd decided you wouldn't do. “Don't go hiking,” Charlotte would say, when I'd begin to be tense about a man, because twice I'd heard about another woman on a hike in the woods.

But the process was surely different if you were married and he knew. I had no intention of telling Charlotte anything about sex with Gordon, but it was she I phoned—when I couldn't stop thinking about Gordon's other women or woman, whether that made sense or not—a few days later, in the middle of July. We met for lunch on a working day, although I'd rather see Charlotte at some other time. On weekdays she can't dismiss the inward, professional woman, and is perhaps too conscientious about looking steadily and speaking plainly. For most of the morning I'd been sorting books and papers—speaking toughly, to little avail—in Ellen's dining room, and I was so glad to be in the instant comfort of an air-conditioned restaurant that I almost said, “Charlotte, I'm having an affair.” I heard myself think it. I'd told no one about Gordon, and there was no danger. Yet Charlotte heard me, or heard something. “Did you just sneeze?” she said, as a waitress handed us menus. We were at Atticus, a big, brightly lit bookstore with a café. I'm fond of their gazpacho in summer. “I have the feeling I was thinking so hard just now I missed something.”

“No.”

“God bless you, anyway,” said Charlotte.

“Same to you,” I said. “What were you thinking about?”

I've always considered Charlotte beautiful. Now she's a grandmother, but I still love to look at her pale blue eyes. For a moment she stared, as if she was surprised that I'd want to hear what she was thinking, then took me at my word. She'd been thinking about scheduling a long weekend away with Philip, a topic slightly more interesting than it might have been because it concerned Olivia, who might or might not have a day off, and might or might not visit her parents if they were home. “Boring,” she said, stopping herself from a full analysis of this subject. “Are you still working with the man who doesn't believe in foster care?”

“I'm putting on a conference with him.” That interested Charlotte, and I told her more about it.

“Is he still obnoxious?” she said.

“He's never exactly been obnoxious. He's opinionated, certainly.”

I knew what I wanted to eat, but Charlotte had to read the menu and consider, so I had time to observe myself and know that something sad was occurring. The reasons not to tell her Gordon was my lover were clear to me, perhaps not reasonable reasons but my reasons. I said nothing more about him as we ordered and ate our lunch. But we talked about uninteresting subjects, then looked at our watches, signaled the busy waitress, and waited with too much attention, glancing over our shoulders, for the check. I took our money to the register and gave Charlotte her change, which she stuck into her skirt pocket instead of taking out her wallet. It's a habit; sometimes we've bought treats with money she finds in her pockets, as if she thinks fairies left it there. Remembering one of those times—ice cream cones after Charlotte reached for a tissue and came up with a five-dollar bill—I wished I had treated her to lunch. Maybe a gift would have kept her quiet. As we left the store, she turned the way I did, though her office was in a different direction, and said, scurrying slightly as if she thought I'd bolt, “When I don't have a good time with you, I know you've got a secret. I'm tired of your secrets, Daisy.”

I stared without answering, and after a while she turned and walked the other way. At first I shrugged and walked on toward my car, parked a block farther down Chapel Street. I like what's unresolved. Trouble to be sorted out captures my attention, and in the past I've taken new interest in a diminishing friendship or love affair when I've sensed resistance. So I walked away, promising myself that Charlotte's censure would be worth it, because we'd have such a good time, not quite yet, arguing and fixing our friendship again.

Waiting in the heat for a traffic light to change, eyeing the Yale summer school students in shorts; the street people, always dressed for cooler weather than we had (some were in coats and watch caps); the office workers looking uncomfortable in jackets—I admitted to myself that irresolution with Charlotte was not fun. A sense of desolation claimed me, and when I got into my car, instead of driving the few blocks to Gordon's office, I drove onto the highway and all the way to Hammonasset Beach State Park on Long Island Sound, not far from where he lived in Madison. My red bathing suit was in my bag in case Gordon had wanted an afternoon together. Now, driving, I worsened my mood on purpose, imagining him on the phone—since I wasn't there—with a woman in another Yale office, jauntily proposing an afternoon swimming near his house, and some time in his bed. I was angry with Charlotte. What sort of friendship could exist without secrets? Had she no secrets from me? I'd be boring without secrets.