“So he deliberately made it seem as if New Haven poor people had done it.”
“That’s right.”
“And you forgave that.”
“I wouldn’t say I forgave it. I didn’t forgive it.”
We sat in silence for a while, and I said, “Was she in your class, too?”
“No,” Pekko said. “I only knew her a little. I’d see her in the halls. I knew her name. She had a lot of dark, curly hair.”
“But if he killed a woman just because she wouldn’t be his girlfriend—”
“I know. He might do anything.”
“You took that chance?”
“He was beside himself over her. I didn’t think it would happen again. Remember, he told me three years later. He talked more like the boy’s psychiatrist than the boy. I thought he was less likely to murder than I was.”
“He stabbed her?”
“He talked about the feel of the knife going in, how he did it again and again.”
I thought about it. “Do you think maybe it wasn’t true?”
“I think it was true,” he said. Then he got out and opened the back door for Arthur, who preceded us up our front steps and wagged when we produced a key, congratulating us for remembering where we lived.
The other night I was writing this thing I write, this account of a piece of my life, more than a year later (it’s the oddest thing, proceeding in time as time proceeds, but not at the same rate; I began in February, writing about the previous February, and now it’s June and I’m only in April), when the doorbell rang, and in, unannounced, came my brother Stephen. Maybe Roz knew he was coming to New Haven and forgot to tell me. He’d had supper with her. Or he’d shown up there unannounced, too. He likes to do that, to prove he’s still a boy. He’d taken the train from New York. I hardly ever take the train, I’m too impatient, but Stephen likes it, though he lives an hour from Grand Central, in Queens, and would get home in the middle of the night. He’s married, as I’ve said, and has a daughter, and yet he seems alone all the time, and seems most at ease when he’s put himself into a place where there’s a slice of emptiness around him, like someone who lived in Montana or Alaska, someone who didn’t want his neighbors near enough that he could hear their dog bark. I was alone. He came into the kitchen and sat in a corner of the old green sofa while I opened a bottle of Sam Adams for him.
“Did I interrupt something?” he said.
“I’m writing.” I gestured upstairs, where my computer is.
“Writing what?”
“I’m writing about half a year in my life.”
“Just any half year?”
“No, February to October of 2001.”
“Any special reason?”
“None of your business.”
“When can I read it?”
“Maybe never.”
“Then what’s the point?” said Stephen. I wonder if he dyes his hair. He still seems young, and his hair is dark brown. He carries an expensive ballpoint pen in his pocket, as if he were the writer, and he takes it out and removes the cover, as if he couldn’t wait to write, then puts it back on, as if he can’t think what to say after all. “Let me see it now,” he said. “Is it about that guy?”
“What guy?” I asked, though I knew. I knew he meant Dennis Ring, my young ex-con dead lover, about whom I’d told him one teary night a couple of years ago.
“You said he drank herbal tea with you. He had complicated opinions about herbal tea, which kinds were good.”
“He had opinions like that about everything, but that was ten years ago.” Denny the occasional thief, drug dealer, drug user, and maker of mischief had opinions about shapes of pasta, opinions about cookies. He knew where to find European cookies made with dark chocolate in the days before you could pick them up at any convenience store. I stopped and calculated. Denny would still be under forty if he were alive. He’d been on and off drugs, and he died—in Pekko’s frozen yogurt store—of an overdose. He’d broken into the store. He wasn’t my lover then. I hadn’t seen him in months. Sometimes he bored me. That was my big secret about Denny, sometimes he bored me. And sometimes he charmed me. He was my lover before he was my student. He signed up for my course as a tease, I think. We weren’t planning to sleep together anymore, until he got into the cleaning business. Again I talked to Stephen about Denny. I told him Denny had nothing to do with what I was writing.
“Then do I?”
“No,” I said, understanding that Denny and Stephen were linked in my mind, somehow—because Stephen had been the kid with trouble in our household. But that’s not true anymore, is it—that neither Denny nor Stephen is in this book? I didn’t show it to Stephen. He left late at night. I drove him to the train. Driving home, I thought it had been the first time since September 11—nine months ago—that Stephen and I didn’t talk about it, then remembered we had. I’d rinsed his beer bottle and put it into the recycling bin, and Stephen had said, “We don’t recycle plastic anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Because terrorists knocked down the World Trade Center, and now we can’t afford it.” I’d thought he meant his family by we, but he meant New York. Stephen was wearing a jacket too warm for the weather, though this is a cool June. My brother’s lifelong gesture was fixed one summer afternoon when we were teenagers, when he stood up, not quite surprised, and took a step backwards but grasped a chair as if to keep himself from stepping too far back. He is always receding but never goes far.
Gordon called me to change some of the appointments we’d laboriously set up. “Sometimes I want to avoid you, and sometimes I want to be there with you,” he said in his frank way.
At least he didn’t always want to avoid me. “How do you know now that you’ll feel like avoiding me two weeks from Wednesday?” I said.
“I have a schedule. I write on Wednesdays and Fridays in alternate weeks and on Tuesdays and Thursdays during the other weeks, so sooner or later I can make appointments with people who are never free on a particular day.” He added, “But sometimes I have to change my schedule.” He was odd, but I liked his willingness to answer me, to answer more fully than I expected. The trait compared well with Pekko’s silences. “If I’m not writing,” he said, “I like it when you’re here.”
I’d shown him stacks of articles about urban renewal, community gardens, community policing. Sometimes he said he’d already worked on a topic, and I filed what I’d found, but sometimes he said he’d like to think about the subject matter, and I should find a way to keep it from disappearing. I imagined my stacks going slowly by on a circular moving sidewalk, so he could glance at them now and then.
Before we hung up he said, “Let’s schedule a lunch, too. I need to fight you some more about foster care. It clarifies my thoughts to argue.”
“Did you tuck your shirt in?” I said.
He didn’t know what I meant. “There wasn’t any hanky-panky, was there?”
“You mean you don’t recall whether there was or not?”
“I recall there wasn’t.”
“So do I. You waved your arms around so much, arguing with me, that your shirt came out.”
“Oh, it’s always out. Doesn’t that happen to everybody?”
Was I flirting? Yes, but I always flirt. In my single days, I didn’t bother to flirt, I’d just proposition a guy. I might say, “If you’re interested, by the way, so am I,” and often he became interested whether he had been or not. I think my flirting with Gordon was a sign, given my nature, that we were going to keep the relationship businesslike, with an admixture of casual comradeship. Flirting can be a substitute for sex. I have flirted with Philip LoPresti for years but never considered sleeping with him.
And the next two times Gordon Skeetling and I were together, nothing much happened personally. We had lunch without arguing, talking about dogs. Nobody flirted. I interrupted him a few times to show him material I’d gathered. I continued to amass a pile about murder in New Haven, though I told mysel
f I was simply doing it out of curiosity and, in deference to Pekko, would not use it for any public purpose. I worked at Gordon’s office alone a few times, too, when he was away. By now he’d given me a key. Then I saw him again on a cold day, a return to March-like weather after the warmth earlier in April. It was chilly in his office. I was sorting dusty papers from the bottom of an old pile in a corner of the floor, and I frequently went to the bathroom to wash my hands.
Gordon was restless, leaving his desk every few minutes to pace, look out the window, or take his own trip to the bathroom. He seemed to forget I was there. I had given up trying to stay out of his line of sight and mostly didn’t close the French doors, since I could hear him on the phone whether they were closed or not. I’d look up and see him ambling back, automatically checking his fly, his eyes unfocused. I looked as I always did at his clothes. By now I associated him with tan and brown, colors I hadn’t much liked before. They looked woodsy and comfortable on him.
“Did I tell you about the conference?” he asked, on one of these walks, and I’d been so sure he’d forgotten me that I glanced to see if he was speaking on the telephone.
“Me?”
“Who else? I didn’t, did I? The project hosts a conference in October every two years. This arises out of a byzantine arrangement with two other Yale projects, but lately they’ve essentially dropped out. Do you want to do it? Obviously I’d pay you.”
“Do you have a topic?” I said.
“No, that’s the carrot. You can host a conference on anything you like that’s remotely connected to urban life in small cities.”
“How about murder in New Haven?” I said immediately.
“Whoa. I guess so. It’s not our usual pedantic crap, but I suppose you could turn it into something academic enough.”
“Sure,” I said. As I talked with Gordon about it, I scurried around in my mind to discover why I was completely willing to oppose my husband. I decided, with the kitchen of my mind—while its parlor and dining room decorously considered what Gordon was saying—that I was angry with Pekko after all, because I’d felt morally bullied on the walk, shamed out of thinking about what I wanted to think about. Moral bullying seemed like a crime bad enough that I could now do whatever I liked.
“I mean,” Gordon said now, “could you plan this conference in additional time? I don’t want you to stop the sorting-out project.”
“I guess I’ll be spending most of my life here,” I said.
“Fine with me,” said Gordon, “except for those afternoons I write. Well, maybe we’ll have to rethink that, if you’re going to have time for this.” Then he said, in the tone in which he might have proposed still another schedule change, “You could also become my mistress, if you choose to.”
“Your what?”
“Obviously we’ll continue with both projects whether you say yes or no.”
“I didn’t think you were asking for sexual favors,” I said, “in exchange for the right to organize your trash.”
“Or even put on my grubby little conference, eh? Oh, I know. The word mistress.”
“It’s a rather startling term. But I suppose you required a word that could have the possessive adjective my in front of it.” What I primarily felt, that is, in response to his suggestion, was even greater permission—the right, now, to say anything whatsoever.
“Oh, I’m a possessive bastard, indeed I am. Will you go to bed with me, Daisy?”
“Where?” I said.
“Good question. Not here. Not in my house in Madison, which is too far.”
“Not in my house.”
“You don’t seem like a motel girl.”
“I know where to go,” I said. We seemed to have skipped over the question of whether. Ellen’s children were on vacation, and she’d taken them to Florida to see her mother. Or her father, whichever it was. I had a key. It was a nice house. I was going to accept mistress, apparently, and even girl. My body had just turned into an object that required touching by Gordon Skeetling. My arms and legs seemed to be located where they were only to serve as lines pointing directly or indirectly to my crotch.
I’d never touched him. I wasn’t in love with him. I believe in work relationships. That is, I believe passionately that people can express what is inside them by working together as authentically as by sleeping together. I don’t imagine that work is a substitute for love or sex in any way. I wanted to work with Gordon Skeetling, and the fact that I’d considered him attractive from the beginning, with his dangly, mobile, bony arms and his up-and-down eyebrows, just made the work pleasanter, maybe more likely to be good work. What I’d just agreed to do—though I was eager—seemed as unlikely as if I’d moved comfortably through his rooms and he’d offered to lead me to the bank on the corner and arrange a mortgage so I could buy them. (Not that I was buying Gordon Skeetling. I knew from the first he was a rental.) We didn’t leave immediately for Ellen’s house, once I told him where I thought we could go and he’d nodded quickly.
“An hour?” he said and went back to work. I had another appointment. I phoned and canceled. Then I went back to work, too. Sorting through piles of documents that seemed to be connected with the building of the New Haven Coliseum, throwing most of them out, was more fun with a tingling crotch. I’d made several decisions in a row, and as I write this I remember writing not many pages ago that my habit is to be good half the time. Deciding to do the conference over Pekko’s objections felt good, as I made the decision, not bad. Deciding to be Gordon’s lover felt good, not bad, although I was surprised to notice that. Deciding to use Ellen’s house was decidedly bad and felt that way, and I also felt guilty about canceling that appointment. You could say my conscience works well about the minor issues and less well about the major ones. Or you could say I have an original notion of right and wrong. Writing this now, I am not sure I disagree with the assessment my overburdened conscience, working in a hurry, made then. During that hour I did not think for long about the right and wrong of it, although I believe I did total the thing up in a rough way, something like the way I’ve just described. Mostly I spent the hour doing good work, and waiting.
I’m writing because I want to, but when I sit down to it, I don’t always want to tell the story of Pekko, Gordon, and the play about the two-headed woman. Sometimes I feel like writing about the moment that changed my brother Stephen, more than thirty years ago. Stephen called me, a few nights ago. (Now it’s July 2002.) “When are you going to show me what you’re writing?”
I liked his curiosity. I said, “You didn’t tell anyone, did you?”
“No. But I want to see it.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re my sister. Because you didn’t tell me what was going on, and now I’ll find out.”
“What was going on when?”
“Last summer. I knew something was going on last summer. I wondered if that guy was really dead. The guy from ten years ago.”
“How did you know something was going on?”
“It was clear, the time you were in New York.”
That’s still to come, the time in New York. Talking to Stephen the other night, I changed the subject.
I didn’t invent Denny’s death. He died ten years ago, two years after I met him. I met him at his grandmother’s house. That wraith had a grandmother—a canny woman who loved him, a schoolteacher who’d taken her small grandson for pancakes each year on the morning of his birthday, and when he was grown (and not in prison) bought him Thai dinners whenever she could invent an excuse. The grandmother had a Fourth of July party, at which I was somebody’s date. Denny and I met over salad: he was tossing his grandmother’s salad.
“Did you ever go to bed for money?” he asked me, when I hardly knew him. Not that first night, and not after we slept together—yet I think I remember that we slept together the second time we met. I suppose there was a time in between. When he asked the question, we were in my car. I was driving.
“Did you?” I sa
id.
“Sure. It’s not so bad. I’ve done everything.”
“Was it a woman?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t go to bed with a man for money. With a woman, I figured I was cheating her.” Of course this was before I gave him money when we went to bed. Which I did because he needed money. I think. He persisted. “Did you? Did you ever?”
“Not exactly.” I told him a story nobody else has ever heard. I was in my thirties. A blond, pudgy man in a bar took me to his sister’s apartment, to which he had a key. I suppose he was married. When I walked in, I noticed the smell of gas, and I checked the stove. One of the burners was slightly on. I turned it off on my way to his sister’s couch, taking my clothes off. After we were done, he handed me two fifty-dollar bills.
“What’s that for?”
“You saved my life. My sister deliberately left the stove on. She did this to asphyxiate me.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “I’m not taking your money.”
“You said you like to read. Buy books.”
I shrugged and took the bills. In New Haven, there are people you know whom you never run into, and others with whom you have a high coincidence rate. For years I kept noticing that man. Sometimes he smiled. After a while I knew I’d been a whore—he’d wanted me to be a whore and I’d complied—but when I talked to Pekko and Gordon about my interest in prostitution, I left that incident out.
Right now I’m recounting, however, not Stephen’s early life or what I told Denny, but the day I agreed to go to bed with Gordon Skeetling for the first time. I enjoyed the postponement and the anticipation. I felt clever, having acquired something I wanted that wouldn’t become a nuisance, like a travel bag of just the right size, one that would fold up later, using little space in the corner of the closet.
We worked for an hour, then Gordon walked in and put his hand on my shoulder. I murmured, “One second,” and made a brief note on my pad. The room was becoming more orderly, something like Ellen’s kitchen, an artistic arrangement of chaos reduced to categories, and Ellen’s kitchen was where I led him first—so he could see it—after we’d clumsily walked out of his office (suddenly I was nervous), bumping into each other and apologizing, and had gotten into my car, almost without discussion. I drove to Ellen’s house, parked boldly in front, unlocked the door, and led Gordon in.
Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman Page 9