Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman (26 page)

“Who's going to talk about Malik Jones?” he said.

“A retired New Haven cop and a black sociologist.”

“Do they claim it was murder?”

“There's some notion of wrongful death. His mother's suing for wrongful death.”

“I still think it blurs your argument to include it. And it takes away from other topics.”

“Like Marie Valenti.”

“Oh, Marie Valenti. That might have been a mistake. The guy from the state bores me on the phone. These unsolved cases—when you first come across them they seem exciting, but there are an awful lot of them. I think it's the exception when they do get solved, and maybe after a certain time it never happens.”

I grunted. Wanting him while talking of other things made me tired, but I was stunned with tenderness, despite myself, for the unimpeded space in Gordon's mind, the roominess of a head—and he did have a large, roomy head—so uncluttered with memory, association, and the workings of the imagination that thoughts could pass through it with the freedom of a hang glider leaping from a mountainside into the empty air above a treeless valley. That's how I wanted my clients to be, once I was finished with them: thinking without impediment in unblocked air, after they wrote me a check and ushered me out the door. But nobody except Gordon could think that freely. He didn't even know that he'd changed his mind. He didn't imagine my memory of the old idea.

“Let's get iced coffee,” he said.

“Why not?” I said, though I didn't have time.

We walked up Temple and through an alleyway, past the Bryn Mawr bookshop and onto Whitney Avenue, where we were stopped by someone I'd often seen, a woman who offered to recite Shakespeare for money. She was thin, imperious, a graduate of the Yale School of Drama who had found a way to act despite illness and trouble. Gordon looked impatient—mystified—but I nodded, and this time she spoke not Shakespeare but a speech from Euripides'
Medea.
Her voice was rich, and her black eyes moved with authority and sanity in a dark-skinned face with strong cheekbones. I teared up as I took in her pain, Medea's pain, my own. I thought Gordon would hurry away and say something disparaging, but to my surprise he handed her a dollar. Then he took my elbow and steered me down Audubon Street to Koffee? which is usually full of students staring at nothing, then typing on laptops, then staring again. Now it was almost empty, with summer school over and the fall term just beginning. We bought iced coffee and sat at a table in the back, looking at a small, grassy park, a self-conscious urban amenity but a good one. Across from us, in the back window of the Foundry Bookstore, a hand-lettered sign, which has been there for years and years, read, you could be drinking koffee? and reading now if you had bought a book here first.

“Iced coffee season's almost over,” I said.

“I drink it year-round,” said Gordon. In the long years of my single life, I'd sometimes seduced a man with a touch, perhaps to his hair or his wrist. Once I did it by unbuttoning a man's cuff as he sat next to me. But most often I simply asked, and either he'd been wondering or the question itself was enough to evoke desire and will. This time it was no game, and I didn't know how to make Gordon go to bed with me again, now that he seemed to have let the habit lapse: it was almost two weeks since New York. I could all but hear a woman breathing behind him, a woman with long, dark hair, for whom I couldn't design a face. As I looked past him into the Park of the Arts, filled with frisky teenagers, I thought that if he didn't invite me to his house, his white bed, that afternoon, I'd be helpless to continue moving through the complicated life I'd succeeded in arranging for myself, which I had thought was mine.

I'd just given the final schedule to the printer. Gordon talked about the layout skills of the woman who'd designed the brochure, about one thing we might have done differently. “It's fine,” I said. “It's clear, and it states the days of the week as well as the dates. That's all that matters.”

He still thought he'd have done one thing differently.

Gordon didn't imagine, so I couldn't try to make him imagine taking me to bed. Lately, asking seemed to arouse resistance. Syllogistic reasoning did not come naturally to me. If I could stop thinking it was over, I'd be fine, but I couldn't stop thinking he wanted it to be over.

“Do you want to stop being my lover?” I finally said, playing with my straw, regretting my words.

“No. Why, have you had enough?”

“No.”

“It's a busy time,” he said.

“How's your friend? The woman who had the abortion.”

“Fine. We're not in close touch.”

“That must have been hard,” I said.

“For her?”

“And for you.”

“Well!” He shrugged. Then he said, “What's excellent about you, Daisy-love, is directness,” and I was fine for three seconds. “You must be a nuisance in the cast of that play, though.”

“Oh, everyone in that group is outspoken.”

“But from the way you described the group, you're the only one who might, well, bring to it a more ambitious awareness.”

“I'm not ambitious.”

“Of course you are.”

“Not about the play,” I said.

“Ambition doesn't make distinctions. People like us—we need everything we do to achieve a certain level.”

“I suppose that's so,” I said.

“If I did want to stop,” he said then, “stop our—afternoons—or stop for a while, would you mind?”

“Of course I'd mind!”

“You're not in love, surely?” he said. “Because I love you, but I'm not in love with you.”

“I'm not in love,” I lied. “But I want to give you a present.”

“What sort of present?”

I'd had an idea, and then I'd had a different idea. The first idea was that Gordon would think better of me if I could surprise him with some fact he'd like to know, and the fact was that I knew who murdered Marie Valenti. I could tell him what I knew, making him promise not to tell—or even not making him promise. I didn't even know Edmund's last name. Nothing could come of my knowledge. I had no idea why Edmund was living in an apartment Pekko had rented him, or sometimes living there. I was powerless. Maybe that was the lesson I'd needed to learn about myself. I had thought of myself as a woman who could make events happen, but maybe I was a woman who gazed at events as they took shape before me. It would be unfair to Pekko to tell, but since it would do no harm, it would be no more wrong than the wrongs I committed against him whenever Gordon did invite me into the bed with the fluffy white comforter.

That was the first idea, and it made the second one possible. I didn't need to tell Gordon about Edmund. Knowing I could made it unnecessary. He was attracted to me. He loved being my lover. We didn't need to have this competitive conversation, hurting each other with nonsense about being in love or loving, whatever that meant. It meant nothing. Anything I did that shifted his attention even a trifle would work, I now knew. So I'd buy a book, as the sign I faced suggested. I told Gordon that I'd seen birds I couldn't identify at the shore near his house, and that I knew there was a new bird guide. “Maybe the Foundry has it,” I said. “I'll buy it for you.”

“I'd like that,” Gordon said, and for some reason I thought of my young self turning down a Marimekko dress—which I'd have loved to own and wouldn't have bought for myself.

We bused our table, as instructed by a sign on the wall, then walked around the corner and down a short flight of stairs into the bookstore, which is below ground, as if to suggest that reading is private, that reading's a secret vice. Henry, the proprietor, who's known for plaid shirts and suspenders, was in long sleeves for fall. “Hi, Daisy,” he said. “Hi, Gordon. Didn't know you two knew each other.”

Henry had the book, and Gordon watched quietly while I paid for it. Outside on the sidewalk again, holding the book between us, we turned the pages, looking for shorebirds. Our hands pushed against each other as we each tried to control the book and our investigation of it. I made a joke, just because I felt so much better—for no reason. Then I said I ought to get back to work. I knew he'd invite me home, and he did. We took two cars. I kept seeing his on the highway, changing lanes just ahead of me.

It was too cool to swim, and too late in the day. We hustled into the house and into bed, as we had the first time, ignoring birds. His hands were all over me. I said, “Shall I get on top of you?” and he murmured no and pushed my shoulders down, vaulting on top of me. Then he thrust himself into me from above. I couldn't remember why I had thought he wanted to end it, but I also imagined it might be the last time, as if affairs never persisted from summer to fall.

After he'd withdrawn from me, Gordon put his hand on my belly, and we lay silently for a long time. His hand was warm and heavy. I wanted to get up and pee, but I had to stay and keep his hand there. “I know who killed Marie Valenti,” I said.

“What do you mean?” I didn't have his full attention yet.

“A high school friend who'd moved away. He came back that night. They'd dated, but so briefly nobody thought of him. Pekko's known all along. A school administrator in Massachusetts. His name is Edmund. I've met him.”

Gordon's hand stayed on my belly for a few moments longer. Then he took it away and sat up. “No shit,” he said.

When I left, alone in my car, I didn't dare imagine being in bed with Gordon again. I imagined the conference, the discussion of Marie Valenti's murder—boring for others, interesting for Gordon and me, who I pictured on opposite sides of the room, taking it in and saying nothing, each knowing exactly what the other was thinking.

 

E
arly in September, Katya said we'd begin rehearsing twice a week, and after discussing everyone's elaborate schedules, we held an extra rehearsal on the evening of Sunday, September 9. Ellen asked me to drive her and Justine because her car had been unreliable, but I thought she wanted the time with me, and I was glad. I had no intention of telling her about Gordon, but in my mind I told her the whole story many times: receptive Ellen, Ellen the receptacle. When I picked her up it was almost dark. Justine was waiting on their deeply shadowed porch as I drove up, and she called into the house, then climbed into the backseat of the Jetta. “Mom's talking to the sitter.”

Ellen got into the car next to me, fluttering and hesitating. “I wanted to say,” she said, “the dalliance ended.”

“I know what you mean, in case you're talking that way for my benefit” came Justine's voice from behind us.

“If you know what I mean I don't want to know it,” said Ellen.

“You don't seem too upset,” I said.

“I ended it.”

“Why?”

“Scruples.”

But when we reached the theater—we were now rehearsing where we'd perform—she sent Justine in, then turned and burst into tears. “Of course I'm upset. It was the best thing in my life, other than the kids.”

“What kind of scruples?”

“Not scruples,” she said. “Fear.”

“I know about that,” I said.

“I figured you did.”

 

T
heaDora went hiking in the forest in her big blue dress, accompanied by her younger sister, Hydrangea. Some discussion about the proper route. Katya offered a piece of paper they could hold and look at, and Daphne promised to provide a map. TheaDora's hands snatched the paper, one hand trying to position it so Thea could take a good look, one hand favoring Dora. They could go nowhere until both heads agreed, so it made sense to follow Hydrangea, who scampered back and forth across the stage. “I'll make trees,” Daphne called. “Plywood trees.”

“We take the left fork,” called Thea.

“We already
took
the left fork,” said Dora.

“That wasn't a fork.”

“Of course it was.”

At that moment a scream was heard, and Denise ran across the stage in front of us, followed by Chantal. Thea studied the map and looked to the left, ignoring Denise, but Dora looked directly at her, and Chantal raised her arm, imaginary knife in hand, and stabbed Denise, who fell dead. Dora began to scream, “Police! Police!”

“What happened?” cried Hydrangea, who had run ahead and seen nothing.

“Murder! Murder!”

“What?” said Thea. “What happened?”

Chantal had fled through the woods. Now, after weeping over the body of this stranger, TheaDora and Hydrangea began hiking back for help—crossing and recrossing the stage.

Chantal returned. Alone on the stage, she said, “Killing her was easy. I brought the knife just to scare her. Then she said something bitchy. I knew it was sharp. I moved it toward a place on her arm between two freckles. They showed me a place to go. I thrust the knife between those freckles, and then she was bleeding and screaming, running away from me. She ran, I followed, and when I reached her, I pushed it as hard as I could into her body.”