Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman (22 page)

I finished my story and leaned back in my chair, reaching for my wineglass, examining Gordon's face for signs of admiration, looking into his eyes through the glasses. Just then the waiter asked if everything was all right. Was I still working on that? I was.

“Not as good as you expected?” said Gordon.

“The play?”

“No, the shrimp.”

“The shrimp are all right.”

“Oh, you want me to say something about the play. Well, better you than me.” He smiled. Gordon had a jaunty smile, and when he'd smile at me, I'd calm down.

“You don't mind that I appropriated your headline?” I said.

“Of course not. I don't own it. I didn't write it. Of course, there never was a two-headed woman.”

“Did you ever read the article? Was it just a hoax?”

“What else could it be?” He shrugged. “Are you done now?” He signaled the waiter for the check.

I felt buoyant from wine, but I knew we'd need to return to this conversation. Not now. Then I didn't wait. “What's wrong with my play?”

“Well . . . it's not really a play, is it? I mean, you're not playwrights. You don't have a dramaturge, a director . . .”

“We have a director.” We had two.

“Putting on a play that an audience will sit through isn't easy, even for professionals,” said Gordon. He replaced his credit card in his wallet. “Tell me if I'm wrong.”

“You don't have to pay for me,” I said belatedly. “I know it's not
good,
exactly,” I then added quickly. “It has its own validity.”

“I like paying for you.” And we stepped onto the crowded Greenwich Village street on a warm but pleasant Friday evening. Gordon steered me straight back to the hotel, so I thought he was too lustful to wait, and I liked that, but once in our room, he turned on the television.

People in the hotel and in the restaurant had assumed we were married—you can tell when people don't find you worth puzzling over—and like a married couple we fell asleep at different times, though we were spending the night together for the first time. I lay down on the bed in my clothes while he watched an old movie. I fell asleep, not wanting to stay up and pay attention to this weekend, this evening in a luxurious hotel room with the lights of the city outside. I awoke when I felt Gordon get into bed next to me. I rose, showered, and returned to bed, naked. Gordon was naked, too, I found, reaching for him across the unfamiliarly wide bed. He was awake—or he woke up—and he stroked my shoulder with his fingertips and then, shifting closer, my back. He took my face in his hands.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “It's been a difficult week. I should have told you.”

“What?”

“A woman I'd been seeing ended things.”

I drew in breath. We were naked, our knees drawn up, touching, our hands on each other's faces as we lay, our mouths inches apart.

“What was she like?”

“Young.” I watched his mouth shape the words, his teeth.

“Were you in love?”

“This isn't fair to you, Daisy. You don't want to know.”

“How long have you known her?”

“Oh, a year or so. At first, we were just friends.”

“Do you want to get up and talk about it?” I said. “Do you want me to put on the light?”

“No. I want to make love to you.”

I drew him to me, feeling old—not just older than a woman for whom there was only one adjective,
young,
but older than Gordon. I
was
older than Gordon, but only two and a half years. Now I felt decades older, my body supple with experience of man after man: supple but leathery, without sensation, like the skin of someone who's been out in so much wind and rain that now no weather stimulates the nerve endings. I thought of getting up and phoning Charlotte on my cell phone, in the bathroom (“I'm going to tell you the whole story”), but I stayed and let him suck my breasts, and then I was aroused, and came before he did.

Saturday was better, at first. From the windows of our room we could see much of downtown, including the World Trade Center. Quick sex, breakfast, tenderness in the still-quiet downtown streets.
Tenderness
. Gordon put his arm around me as we walked and mumbled teasing compliments. “Why, it's Daisy of New Haven, mysterious, sexy Daisy in her tight black pants with her nice little ass . . .” He seemed glad to be where he was. We looked into store windows, walked, returned to the hotel for “more and better sex,” he said. We'd been hurried first thing in the morning.

But after sex that never quite concluded, he opened his laptop, still in bed with the covers over his knees. The hotel had an Internet hookup, and he checked his e-mail. Then he dressed hurriedly and left while I was in the shower. And didn't come back. When I stared out the window, the air looked hot, glittery, though the weather had been pleasant earlier. Maybe Gordon was sitting in the lobby, talking on his cell phone. I didn't want to see that, didn't want to see his intent face in those glasses. I dressed, left the hotel without looking left or right, and began walking north. I was hungry. I walked as far as Washington Square Park and sat on a bench, observing a young man managing a small crowd of retarded kids, who'd been walked here and then were walked away. Dogs made me miss Arthur. Old people on the benches talked to me. An old man claimed to remember me from years ago, and I eventually agreed that I'd been in that park before, though not often. “You were a girl. A beautiful girl. You're still a beautiful girl.”

Finally I was too hungry to wait any longer but too upset to go someplace and buy food, no matter how many times I ordered myself to do so. I walked back to the hotel, I who rarely walk except with my dog, because walking feels less powerful than driving, and I like to think I am a powerful person. My feet hurt in sandals. My feet felt dirty. I was hot in my tight black pants.

Gordon was in the hotel room. “Where were you?”

“You left, so I left.”

“I came back,” he said.

“I waited a long time.”

“I was back in twenty minutes.”

I'd been gone for an hour and a half or longer. “I'm sorry,” I said.

“Listen, I have to leave,” Gordon said. “It's not what you think. It's not the woman. Or, it is that woman, but it's something else. She and I have broken up—that's clear—but she needs me today, as a friend.”

“You don't have to lie,” I said.

“Look, I'll tell you. She had an abortion. She's at her parents' place in Westport, and she's bleeding. She doesn't want them to know, and she's scared. I'm going to drive to Westport and take her home, maybe to the hospital. She doesn't have a car—she got there by train.”

“How old is she?”

“Oh, for heaven's sake, Daisy. I shouldn't have said she was ‘young.' She's not that young, and I didn't mean it the way it came out. She's emotionally young. Not like you and me. Not able to take care of herself.”

He had packed his things. He was checking the closet and the bathroom. Then he said, “I wish you hadn't gone wandering around Greenwich Village like a fifties beatnik. I didn't want to leave you a note, and I've just been getting tense, waiting. The room is paid for. You can find something to do in New York, I'm sure, and go home on Metro-North. I love you, I want to be with you—but I can't. It's our weekend. I know that. I should have canceled when I heard the abortion was this week, but that didn't seem right either. I'm sorry.”

“Gordon, don't go,” I said, though I don't say things like that.

“Please, Daisy.”

“Never mind. I'm sorry. Of course, go. I'll be fine.”

“You don't mind taking the train home, do you?” And he kissed me and was gone.

I lay on the bed with my eyes closed. Then I called room service. Then I called my brother and got his machine. I'd visit my brother. I'd go to the movies. I'd spend a night by myself in this fancy hotel. I happen to like going to the movies alone. I happen to like being alone. Gordon had said he loved me. I saw
Pollock
. I bought a book for the train. I ate ice cream in the New York streets. After many hours I came back to find a message from my brother, who invited me to lunch on Sunday. I called him back—awakening his wife—and accepted. Then I went to bed and couldn't sleep. Among other events, I remembered Gordon not believing in the play, Gordon persuasively dismissing the play from behind his glasses, as if nobody could take it seriously.

 

W
hen I called Stephen, he insisted that I take the subway to Queens but promised to meet me at the station. I felt elderly, unattractive, and not sufficiently in charge. Arriving at my brother's in a taxi might have helped, but he said, “A taxi will cost you a million dollars, and the subway is faster. I'm leaving now for the subway station. I'll wait there all day if you don't come.” My overnight bag bumped into me on the subway stairs. I inwardly blamed my brother but also felt obscurely and sentimentally grateful that someone else was making decisions. Gordon had said his girlfriend was emotionally young, unlike him and me, and I wanted to be emotionally young.

I even had to change trains, but Stephen was right; it wasn't a bad trip. Still, as I stood in the second quiet station, waiting for the oncoming roar, I felt desolate. Pekko didn't miss me or wonder what I was doing. Charlotte was angry. Gordon was with the woman who had aborted his child. It had to be his child. He would be thinking of me as someone who cavorted around making up nonsense, who didn't know the difference between nonsense and a play. I was too selfish and trivial to grieve for the loss of his only chance, ever, to father a child. I wanted to be a triumphant woman visiting her brother, not someone who'd been left alone in a hotel by a man with more urgent plans involving worthier people. I wanted to be the one with urgent business. My brother in Queens, with his hushed museum job, is just a little bit like a loser, and I prefer seeing him at good moments in my own life.

Stephen was waiting just where he said he'd be, outside the turnstile, looking thin and dark, ironic, as if standing in a subway station was an inherently foolish activity. He took my bag and kissed my cheek. “You look well, Daisy,” he said.

“So do you.” He looked slightly uncomfortable, but he always does.

We climbed the stairs, and he pointed to where he'd parked, at a not quite legal spot near a corner. We climbed into his Toyota. “Marlene's having lunch with some people.” His wife.

“What about Leah?” His daughter.

“Away for the summer. She's working at a hotel in the Adirondacks.”

“That sounds good.”

“Maybe.” There has long been something sad about Stephen. He made Leah's summer job sound as if it had just the remote possibility of tragedy, as if his only source of information about the Adirondacks was Theodore Dreiser. The terrorist attacks of September 11, a month later, didn't change Stephen, though he can't stop talking about them. For him, everything that happens successfully does so by an unlikely accident. I've fought and argued with him on that subject much of my life, but that day in August, settling into his car, for a moment I gave up trying to be the successful sister and wished I'd shared his almost Eastern European pessimism all along. I could say, “I'm having my heart broken, but hearts are often broken.” Instead I was Daisy Busy, with my calendar full of foolish plans and projects—connections that existed, apparently, to hurt me.

But being me, I soon began, a little defensively, to tell Stephen what I'd been up to. I described working for Gordon, and the conference—the aspect of Gordon that was going reasonably well. “Off and on all summer,” I said as we parked in his driveway and went into his little brick house with its patch of grass, “I've been quarreling with Skeetling about Malik Jones.” I explained who Jones was—the young black man killed by an East Haven cop in a car chase. “Skeetling says it isn't murder, but plenty of people think it's almost as bad.” I told Stephen about the police report I'd read. There had been a report of reckless driving, and the officer had pursued two boys (both high on drugs, one out on bail) into New Haven, where he cornered them in a vacant lot. Jones backed the car toward the cop when he approached on foot. So the cop fired. All the witnesses said he had to fire—once things had come to that point—but nobody thought the chase made sense.

“I know it's not murder, technically,” I said. “I don't know why I'm so interested.”

We went inside. I hadn't been there in years. Usually I saw Stephen in New Haven, and now and then we'd met in the city. As a clutter professional, I was struck by clutter's absence. Gray or brown chairs stood with space around them, as if they made do for larger pieces. Stephen had bought food for our lunch: Dr. Brown's black cherry soda, bagels, lox, and cream cheese. He set about feeding me.

“Usually, when there's a murder,” I said, returning to my subject, while Stephen unwrapped lox and forked it onto a plate, “it's all over and nobody can reconstruct it, not really, not even the killer. But Malik's death was witnessed. The death was not yet, and not yet, and not yet—and then it was. Everyone had time to become afraid, but it happened anyway.”