Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman (6 page)

I tried to be the husband. “My wife can't lie on her back,” I said. “Her belly is too big.”

“I'm fine,” my wife contradicted me. “Leave me alone. I want to suffer.”

The other father—the Korean American kid, David—turned to me. “Are you glad your wife is pregnant? I'm scared.”

“I'm scared, too,” I said. “I'm scared the baby will die. I'm scared I'll kill the baby.”

“How would you do that?”

“Oh, there are plenty of ways to kill a baby.”

In labor, Chantal kicked rapidly, then got up and ran around in circles. “In the improv troupe,” she said, “we looked for the large, surprising gesture.” Then she sat down on the floor and said, “I don't want to be a mother! I can't get this baby out because I don't love it!”

“Oh, you'll love it,” said the doctor. “But this is a difficult birth. I'd better do a cesarean.”

Chantal said, as herself, “Doctors call it a C-section.”

“A C-section.”

Katya stepped in as a nurse. “Here's a knife!”

“Did you wash it?” said the doctor. I was surprised, and I laughed. I hadn't expected Denise to surprise me.

With a swoop of the imaginary knife, the doctor slashed Chantal's belly. She reached forward. “I know how they pull it out, because I had one,” she said. She grunted and held up an imaginary baby.

“Oh, my God,” the doctor shouted. “The baby has two heads!”

All of us except Chantal rushed around, clutching our heads. I was astonished to be doing this.

Chantal shouted, “It's my fault!” and we stopped. “I slept with another man when I was pregnant. Each head looks like one of them.”

“Unfaithful?” I said. “How could you do that to me?”

“Well, I'm the one who slept with your wife,” David said. “But I didn't make her pregnant. I'm Asian, and neither of these heads looks Asian.”

“It's too soon to tell,” Denise the doctor said firmly. “Stop yelling, all of you. Nobody can live with two heads. Don't look at the baby. She's going to die. She has too much brain.”

Chantal had been lying on the floor, but now she sat up and said firmly, “Let me see my baby!” After the boisterousness, this was somewhat impressive. Obediently, as her husband I took an imaginary child from Denise and carried it toward my wife. “I love the baby,” she said, taking the child in her arms.

“Better not love the baby,” said the doctor.

“But I want to love the baby!”

“Give it a name,” said the doctor. “Name the baby before she dies.”

“I'll name her TheaDora,” said Chantal. “That way, we don't have to decide if she's one person or two people. She's Thea and Dora, or she's TheaDora.”

Katya stopped being the nurse and withdrew to her place beside the tape recorder. “I'm the baby,” she said, and wailed. David joined in as the rest of the baby. This play was full of shouting.

 

P
ekko's back reveals more than his face. A thick man, he experiences feeling with his shoulders. He thinks his face conceals him, and maybe it does, but his back is less circumspect. Walking into the kitchen one evening, I saw his back first as he sat at the kitchen table, talking on the phone, and I guessed we wouldn't be making love for a while. He was elsewhere and needed to be retrieved, but I don't know how to do that. I'd come home tired and was in the bathtub when I heard him come in, greet Arthur, and then answer the phone. From the rise and fall of his voice, the pauses, I knew he was talking to my mother.

Pekko was the landlord of several apartment houses and one of the last SROs in New Haven—that's a single-room-occupancy building, in which people with meager resources have a room with a hot plate and use a bathroom in the hall. At the time I'm recalling, he was having the hallway fixed up and painted, and uncharacteristically, he'd hired a contractor who was a former drug addict and who'd put together a company of ex-users. They were competent, but they wanted to be watched and praised as they worked. “I'm not a kindergarten teacher,” Pekko had been saying. He hates standing around. He's incapable even of waiting while I finish playing solitaire on the computer (and he thinks playing solitaire is addictive behavior). Pekko looks like the king of spades, by the way.

Walking into the kitchen behind him, I sat down, half listening and looking over the mail, assuming Pekko would soon hand me the phone, but he didn't. It had grown dark, and he hadn't bothered to stand up and turn on the light.

“You buy these things ready-made,” Pekko was saying. “She doesn't have to be an old world cabinetmaker.” At last he hung up.

I was too tired to talk to Roz, but I said, “She didn't want to talk to me?”

“She called to ask my advice.”

“I gather, but usually that's just an excuse.”

“Not this time.”

“What did she want?”

“She wants to hire Daphne to install kitchen cabinets.”

“But she already has kitchen cabinets,” I said. “Not that she cooks.”

“She doesn't like them. Daphne claims what she's really good at is carpentry. She says she took a job training course in carpentry for women.”

“Is that true?”

“I don't know. Your mother seems to think I'm an expert on carpentry and an expert on Daphne.”

“She thinks you're an expert in everything, but you like that. How did they get from raking leaves to carpentry this fast?”

“How should I know?”

“She had her in for coffee,” I said, picturing the two of them in the kitchen. “She was so happy with Daphne's raking that she offered her a cup of coffee.” This image annoyed me, as if my mother was allowed to have coffee only with me, although I didn't visit her often. “There were the old cabinets,” I continued. Then I said, “I wish she wouldn't make friends with people like that.”

“Like what? There's nothing wrong with Daphne.”

“Pekko,
you're
obviously wary of Daphne. And she's doing community service. Doesn't that mean she committed a crime?” I stood up and turned on the light.

“I don't know anything about it. We're old friends,” said Pekko. “I ought to fire those druggies and hire her to paint that staircase.”

“Did you sleep with her when she worked for you?” I said.

“I didn't even know you then.”

“I don't
care.
” But now he picked up the newspaper. So I went back to reading the catalog I'd glanced at before, and time passed, and the mood changed. I for one was too hungry to think about what my mother and Daphne did, or even what Daphne and Pekko did.

I was too hungry to think and too hungry to cook, too tired even to take on the minor responsibility of suggesting dinner out. I knew Pekko wanted me to take charge, and I thought he might know I wanted him to. So we continued to sit. This sort of impasse led to bad times in our dating days. We'd finally eat at ten o'clock and be so hungry we'd quarrel. Now, Arthur pressed his head onto my lap and under my hands, making me stroke his hard, narrow skull. Then he thrust his nose into the crotch of my pants. I rose to feed him and broke the tension in the room. Pekko stood too, slapped his thighs, and watched me feed the dog. “Basement Thai,” he said. The Thai restaurant we like best, where there's usually room for us, is in a basement on Chapel Street.

“It's Tuesday, so I have time,” I said.

“No radio.”

“Radio's finished. No play.” Both were on Wednesdays.

But that made me think about the radio series, and I wanted to ask, “Was Daphne ever a prostitute?” Of course I wouldn't get an actual answer.

“So what you're saying,” said Pekko, “is that if you had something to do, you'd skip dinner with me and do it.”

“I'm hungry,” I said.

 

W
hy the fascination with prostitutes?” Gordon Skeetling asked a few days later, as we walked down Temple Street, where the sycamores weren't green yet. He'd proposed lunch so he could explain what he wanted of me. “Not that you can't develop your own ideas.” He had a way of whooshing aside objections that hadn't yet been made, by claiming not to disagree with them. The objections were bold, so within a sentence or two he might make fair conversational progress on my behalf. Now he added, after “fascination with prostitutes,” “Not that there's anything illegitimate about the subject of prostitution.”

“That's right, there isn't!” I said, instead of claiming I wasn't fascinated.

We crossed a parking lot and entered Clark's Pizza—which is Greek despite its name—through the back door. It's an old-fashioned lunch place with red upholstered booths and a menu including gyros and moussaka. Gordon had a light, tenor voice—the voice of a younger man—and as we sat down in a booth near the windows, I looked around to see if anyone was listening.

“Prostitutes are just one sort of needy person,” I continued. “They're usually poor. They may be homeless. They may have AIDS.”

I ordered a Greek salad, and he asked for spanakopita. I didn't feel rushed with Gordon Skeetling, so after my outburst I tried to answer his question truthfully. Of course I didn't know
why
I'd wanted to do a series about prostitution, only that I did. “I'm not a prostitute,” I began again, in a different tone.

“Were you ever offered money for sex?” he said. “It never happened to me. I guess I'm not attractive enough.”

“Twice,” I said and told him the stories I couldn't get Pekko to listen to—the man outside the bakery, the man outside the dress shop. I remembered another occasion I didn't mention.

“Were you tempted?” he said quickly, sounding not as if he was trying to get personal but as if he was such a curious person he couldn't keep from asking. Then he answered his own question. “Well, you were tempted as I would be—by the chance to learn something. Not by the money or the sex itself.”

Then he added, “What did you do, when the first man asked you?”

“I think I pretended I hadn't heard. I hurried away. I was afraid he might follow me.”

He nodded, and shrugged off his raincoat, and he was wearing a tan sweater, the way I'd first imagined him. He was narrower than I thought when I saw him in a jacket. He took up room when he spread his arms, and now he stretched one arm along the back of the booth. Behind us, a small child stood up and patted Gordon's arm vigorously. He ignored her.

“Yes,” I said slowly. “It's the idea of doing something with a stranger that you'd ordinarily do only with someone you cared about. Or at least knew.”

“Something about eliminating distance?”

“No. I think prostitutes and their clients must be lonely. They don't make a connection.”

“With me they do,” he said.

“You patronize whores?”

“No, but I buy them drinks, or cups of coffee. I don't want to sleep with them, but I like to talk to them. Like you, but I've never gone on the radio.”

The child in the next booth had been coaxed to sit down, but now she turned and patted Gordon's arm once more. He glanced at her as if at a woman who tapped his arm in the street. “What you do for a living is perfectly respectable, of course,” he said then. “This poking in attics and cellars. But I wonder— Don't be insulted.”

“I'm never insulted.”

“You go to people's houses, and they take you to a private room and show you something they don't show anybody else.”

“Yes,” I said. “The locked door. It's true.”

Our lunches were brought. “Maybe trash is the new genitalia,” said Gordon.

There was one more interruption by the child, and I asked him if he had kids. “Nieces, nephews,” he said.

“Me too. You're married?”

“Twice,” he said. “Not now. You?” So I told him about marrying Pekko after years of being single.

“I know Pekko Roberts,” he said. “We were on a board together.”

He ate spanakopita in silence, concentrating on cutting layers of phyllo dough and spinach and feta cheese, and then told me more about the Small Cities Project. He was a paid researcher; small cities paid him for studies, and in the course of his research, he often found a magazine piece he wanted to write. “The archive is leftovers,” he said. “My thought is, if you show up, read, throw away the trash—well, what's left will have an emphasis, just because I do, because the people who've worked with me do, maybe because you do. Maybe everything you look at will have to do with prostitution. The process could lead to something—another radio series, a paper, a book. I can pay you for a while, but if you hit on something big, you'll have to find somebody to fund it.”

I considered mentioning what I'd already come up with, after my single look at his archive—the play about the two-headed woman—but I didn't.