Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman (29 page)

“What's wrong?”

For a moment I thought that I could end the affair or not, that I was in charge. But I wanted his hands on my breasts, I just wanted the necessary ceremonies first. With everyone else, there had been the necessary ceremonies. Living close to New York, I kept hearing stories of people who barely escaped death. “Did anybody you know die?” I said.

“Yes,” Gordon said.

“Oh, my God. Who?”

“A college classmate.”

“How do you know he's dead?”

“A dozen e-mails. Now may I touch your breasts?”

“Okay.” I felt happy and free for a few seconds, happy and free and guilty, enjoying the sensation of hands on my breasts—soon, under my shirt and bra—despite the death of Gordon's classmate. Then we agreed to drive in separate cars, as usual, to Gordon's house near the water, and as I drove, I began to feel bad again: incomplete, unfinished. I found myself in an imaginary conversation with Gordon, in which he made fun of Pekko the slumlord.

Bed was fine, but then we talked again about September 11. “Do you constantly imagine your friend jumping from the tower?” I said. “I wonder if he jumped.”

“He wasn't a friend, and you know I don't imagine.”

“Is that actually true, Gordon, or do you just say it?”

“It's true. My inner life is not pictorial.”

“No wonder you don't like theater,” I said.

“I do like theater, I just don't like bad theater, and good theater is rare. I don't have to imagine the play, however. I can see it.”

“But you have to imagine that the stage is a living room.”

“Oh, I can do that. I can pretend.” He turned playful. “I shall pretend that Lazy Daisy is my lover, and I want to kiss her in as many locations as possible.”

“Lazy Daisy?”

“Just a good rhyme. Although if you don't get that conference pulled together . . .”

“I'm doing it,” I said.

“Interrupted by theater. Sort of theater.” It was true that we were now holding three rehearsals a week, and once I'd rushed out of Gordon's office so as not to be late. The conference would take place two weeks before the play; by the time of the performance, this job would be done.

“Moments in the play are quite interesting,” I said, wondering if Gordon and I would still be lovers after the conference.

“No good play was ever written by committee. Tell me if I'm wrong.” He got out of bed, and in a moment I heard him in the shower, washing me off. I was still lying under the comforter in his chilly bedroom when he returned. “Hurry up, Lazy Daisy, I need to leave,” he said.

 

C
harlotte and I had the requisite twenty-minute conversation about September 11. Then I said, “One of these days, I want to tell you the whole story.”

“I might not like the whole story.”

“There's that risk.”

“Are you going to tell me now?”

“No.”

 

I
wanted a wedding dress for Thea and Dora, though I had not wanted one for myself. (That's what my two weddings had in common: I wore what I had around.) I met Muriel at the fabric store and put more than a hundred dollars on my credit card for satin and netting, figuring in a discount from the store because we were a theater group and planned to donate ticket proceeds to the soup kitchen. (One of Roz's ideas. It gave us publicity. I said there would be no ticket proceeds, but she said of course there would.) It was pleasant to think about the likes of cloth and thread; had I believed that September 11 somehow destroyed everything minor? I wanted to see Muriel cut cloth recklessly again, this time with expensive satin between the blades of her shears. She hesitated when I proposed going home with her but then agreed. Again, we drank glasses of water in her kitchen with its silly appliqués, again I later went for Chinese takeout. The waiters wore T-shirts with American flags. At Muriel's house, we planned and cut and I followed instructions. The dress was just like the blue one, with a few improvements she'd thought up. It was easier this time, because we had the other dress to measure against. But as we worked, I was uneasy. Muriel looked angry when I happened to glance at her face in repose. I thought her talk was excessively patriotic. “So you think the United States should just destroy something quickly, and you don't care what?” I said.

“That's not what I think,” said Muriel. She was in a chair at the desk, her back to me as I sat on the bed and hemmed with white thread. Muriel didn't approve of machine hemming. Now she turned her big head to look at me. “You're pretty quick to jump to conclusions, Miss Daisy.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “Tell me again.”

“Oh, I think what everybody thinks. I think what if it was my son, sitting at his computer, and that plane coming closer and closer.”

“I don't think that, because I don't have kids,” I said. “I think, What if it was me?”

“How come you never had kids?” Muriel said after a pause.

“It never happened.”

“But you could have made it happen.”

“I wanted kids,” I said. “But always in the future. Like wanting to live in Paris someday.”

“Fantasy kids.”

“How many kids do you have, Muriel?”

“Just the two. LaShonda was almost like mine, for a while. My niece.”

“How's that going?”

“Nice of you to ask,” she said, but I thought she meant I should have asked before this. “I want my brother to bring her to the play, but he says that's just more of my craziness. He says the play will teach wildness. Even the play.”

“The play doesn't teach wildness,” I said.

“Of course not! We're doing it in a bunch of schools. Those schools wouldn't let us in if it taught kids bad stuff.”

“What schools?” I said, putting down my needle. “I thought we were doing just the one performance.”

“I don't know what schools. Some schools. Didn't Katya tell you?” She'd gone back to a complicated pinning and clipping operation at the desk.

“No.”

“She's going to announce it at the rehearsal. I talked to her this morning. She's getting all kinds of calls. Schools. Public access TV.”

“But I don't want to be on TV!” I said. I pictured Gordon flipping channels, suddenly hearing my voice shouting nonsense about two heads. “It's not that kind of play,” I said. “It's fun, but we're amateurs. We don't know how to make up a play, and we don't know how to act.”

“Oh, you're a ham,” Muriel said, rising to find another task. “You have a fine time acting!” She worked faster than I did, and her hand didn't stop to gesture when she spoke. I was waving my needle in the air. “You do just fine,” she said.

I said, “Katya can't sign us up without consulting us.”

“She's consulting us,” said Muriel. “She didn't give them definite dates.”

“I don't want to do it.”

“If you're so sure it's no good, how come you're buying satin? How come you're always pushing me around?”

The play, I now understood, was stupid. Gordon was right. I'd liked the friendship that had formed among the cast, the recurring thought that we wouldn't have known one another except for this odd project, the tension and laughter at rehearsals, our arguments, our stubborn different notions about two-headedness. I liked being in a dress with Muriel, learning not to trip when we walked and learning how to gesture so we looked as if our two outer arms belonged to the same body. I was titillated by the claustrophobia I couldn't help feeling when we were in the dress, by the intimate smell of Muriel's sweat and breath, the touch of her solid body when we collided. It was like an affair in some ways, like my intimacy with Gordon, someone else whose body I knew better than his mind. As we sat there, I wanted to climb into the new dress with Muriel. But the play wasn't professional, and Daisy Andalusia did nothing in public that wasn't at a professional level. And the play had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks. It wasn't inappropriate in the way a sex farce might be, but it was beside the point. Who would care, now—if anyone ever could have—about the wedding of a two-headed woman?

“I don't have time for a lot of performances,” I said.

“You already put in the time. It would be a shame to do it only once.”

“I don't want to do it,” I said. “I don't want to do it.”

“You're just a worrier. You'll be fine. It'll be fine.”

“Muriel,” I said, “I might not do it at all. I just realized that.”

“Don't be silly,” she said. “You're tired. I'll finish the hem. Go home.”

And she hustled me out of there.

 

I
didn't think about the play much in the next few days. For a while, my default mental topic had been September 11, but now, when my mind was not specifically occupied, it returned, as it had all summer, to Gordon: sometimes I remembered, sometimes I imagined good times, most often I imagined rejection or disapproval—disappointment in what I'd turned out to be. In my mind, we talked back and forth. He seemed to supervise my life now, and I'd imagine him commenting as I fed Arthur or did my laundry.

I hated the next rehearsal. I'd been trying to ignore uneasiness since we'd moved to the Little Theater; now I let myself feel it. Being in a real hall revealed shortcomings I hadn't noticed in the room where we'd worked before. Some of us sounded stilted, some moved sloppily. Our method of working made me frantic. By now, we had scripts in our laps (and of course some of us couldn't memorize), but many speeches were not yet fixed. Katya had explained how she worked, and her method was reasonable. She listened to the tapes, transcribing what moved the story along or struck her as worth keeping, skipping chitchat and inconclusive arguing. Then she rearranged what she had. She wasn't confident enough, though, so at every rehearsal she handed us not just the play to date but a sheaf of alternate speeches, about which we argued for too long. Jonah wanted to add abstract, preachy language. Denise tried to tone down conflict. I complained about wasting time but took up time fixing subtle grammatical errors and logical lapses that bothered nobody but me.

Now we were trying to run through the whole play at each rehearsal. It was repetitious. There were too many scenes in which people chased each other around the stage, too many spats. “Stop putting your hands on your hips,” I said to Chantal, who played TheaDora's mother. At least we'd figured out who would play whom.

“Maybe you're not the director,” Chantal said.

“Sorry.” But I was angry.

“Well, Daisy's right,” said Katya. “But maybe everybody should leave the directing to me.”

“Direct, then!” I said, but so quietly that nobody heard me except Muriel. We were lying on the dirty floor, playing pregnant women at the childbirth preparation class, and she reached over and pinched my arm. I thought Katya should point out that Chantal gave all speeches the same rhythm, that Denise always looked to the right when she spoke, that David talked too fast. Sometimes Ellen might whisper to Katya, or pass her a note, and then Katya might say something.

“How do you keep from getting angry?” I asked Ellen on our way out of the building.

“Why would I be angry?”

“You think this is working out?” I said.

“You don't?”

“No, I don't.” Of course, her child was in it. She was applying the standards of a parent. We'd reached her car, and she put her hand on the door, turning back to note Justine and Cindy approaching. “I should get going,” she said.

I felt outnumbered as I walked alone to my car, which was parked two blocks away. It was dark and shadowy under the still, thick leaves, and Afghanistan—which our country would be bombing shortly; a horrifying thought—seemed extremely far away. It was raining lightly. I loved my quiet city in the rain, loved not being afraid, though some might consider it risky for a woman to walk alone in a city at night. A few months earlier, I'd have used the couple of blocks of solitude to think about Gordon as if he was a sour ball I'd unwrapped and popped into my mouth. Now I struggled not to hear him, in my mind, pointing out that Denise always looked to the right, that David talked too fast.

 

B
ut have they paid the rent?” I thought to ask Pekko. I was talking to him through the bathroom door. He'd just turned off the shower.

“Some have, some haven't.”

He'd left the door unlocked, so I went in. He was drying his thick, compact body, jerking a towel back and forth across his behind. “Are you going to start eviction proceedings?” I said, closing the door behind me to keep the cooler air out. It was fall now, and chilly.

“That's not my style.” Pekko rubbed his head and his beard.

“So your idea is that eventually they'll feel guilty and pay?”