“Help me pick out new glasses?” he said as we got dressed.
“But you don’t wear glasses.”
“I wear contacts. Sometimes my eyes get tired, and then I wear glasses.”
It felt disconcerting not to have known I’d been kissing eyes with little disks in them. I didn’t want to do anything more with him, just get back to the office, have a cup of coffee from his pot, and resume work. I’d started planning the conference, and sex stimulated my brain, too. But I thought tenderly of Gordon with tired eyes, long, knobby, gray-haired Gordon wanting me to look at him in glasses, some of which wouldn’t look good. It was a nice lovers’ errand: nobody would suspect, if we met anybody at the optician’s, a block from Gordon’s office. We’d be a man taking advice from a woman he knew and worked with. So I accompanied him. In the car, I asked him, “Do you imagine going to bed with me before we do it?” For me, the imagining was particularly delectable.
“I don’t imagine,” Gordon said.
Coming from bed, it was hard not to walk too close, rubbing limbs. I loved helping pick out glasses, teaming up with a stylish saleswoman whose good ideas resembled mine. Together we talked Gordon into the best frames, though they cost more, and he said he hardly ever wore them except alone at home in the evening. I was pleased to hear that he spent his evenings at home, alone.
What were you doing buying eyeglasses?” my mother asked me on the phone. “Do you need glasses all of a sudden?”
I’ve used reading glasses for a while—not as long as most people my age—but a pair from the drugstore seems to work. Sex with many partners kept my eyes young, I used to tell my friends. Sex lubricates the entire body.
“I saw you in Kennedy and Perkins,” Roz continued. “I was on my way to the ATM machine. You were with someone, or I’d have stopped to say hello.”
I told her who Gordon was, how I had met him, and how I’d helped him pick out frames. My mother, who also wears glasses only for reading, turned out to be an expert. She said, “You have to try on glasses different ways— wearing a hat, or pretending you’re angry. You have to frown at the mirror.”
“He mostly wears contact lenses.”
“Oh, Daphne has contact lenses,” my mother said. “You don’t know somebody is wearing them.”
“That’s right.”
“She took them out when she clipped the hedges. Something got in her eye. How’s her daughter doing?”
“Fine.”
“She has those kids trained. The minute they get home from school, the phone rings. She doesn’t let them play outside until she gets there.”
“Did she move?” I asked, remembering that Pekko had offered her an apartment.
“Oh, sure. She says she’s glad to have it, even if it’s not perfect.”
“What does that mean?” I said.
“Pekko has so many places, he can’t keep them all just so,” said Roz. “When she has more money, she’ll move again. She’s installing those kitchen cabinets for me.”
“Mm.” I was in my kitchen, watching Arthur in the backyard as he sniffed and paced, stopped to pee, trotted to a corner of the yard, then trotted back.
“She’s good at things. I don’t know why you’re suspicious of her,” my mother said.
“I’m not,” I said.
“Maybe you’re jealous because I have a friend younger than you.”
“I’m not,” I said again. Then something made me remember and speak. “Mom, was your cousin a call girl?”
“Actually, she did it only once,” said Roz, after a long pause. “As far as I know.”
“You weren’t shocked,” I said. “You liked it, didn’t you?”
“I used to imagine it,” she said. “Stupid of me. As if it carried no risks.”
The next time I saw Justine—on her way into the building where we held rehearsals, while Ellen’s car paused at the curb and took off—I remembered that I’d agreed to ask if she’d mind having her mother participate. She’d missed one rehearsal because of a school project, and in the intervening time warm weather had come, or children thought it had: she was in shorts. I envied Justine’s perfect skin, and said so.
She shrugged.
We were the first ones there. I had no idea what to say next, then began with “Are you at all worried about your mother?” As if we were both older than Ellen, or as if Ellen might be senile.
“A little. But I think she’s all right. She’s got a boyfriend.”
“I think she might like to be in the play—maybe to help direct,” I said. “But I thought I should check with you first.”
“Fine with me,” Justine said. I was sure it wasn’t true, but I didn’t know how to encourage her to say something different, and to my surprise, I didn’t want to. I’d been pretending to myself that I liked Justine better than her mother, but Justine was a child, and though I wished Ellen had her daughter’s restraint, I would always be more comfortable with an adult.
At that rehearsal, Jonah said, “I don’t think we should make up one more scene without deciding what the two-headed woman means. What’s the point of her?”
Nobody answered. Then I said, “We won’t know until she’s grown up, Jonah. She’ll tell us, when she’s grown.”
“But she’s a made-up person.”
“Jonah, you’re playing characters too much like yourself,” Muriel said. “Tonight you have to be the two-headed little girl. You and Cindy. You won’t know what it’s like until you try it.”
“I still don’t want to be part of somebody,” Cindy said. “And I certainly don’t want to be part of somebody with him.”
Jonah was four times Cindy’s size. Finally we did a scene in which she stood on a chair and Jonah sat beside her, with the dress draped like a barber’s bib over their chests and shoulders.
“I hate you,” said Cindy, as soon as they were joined.
“I hate me too,” said Jonah. “I hate having two heads. I don’t want to be the same person as this little white girl! Nobody understands what it’s like to have two heads! All of you talking about tolerance. I do not tolerate it! I will not tolerate it!”
Then he started to laugh. We all laughed. He rolled up the dress and tossed it to Katya. Then he picked up Cindy and gave her a kiss. “Nothing personal,” he said.
Calling through the open French doors of Gordon’s office one afternoon, I said, “Did you know that the first act of the New Haven government, in 1638, was trying an Indian for murder?”
“Who did he murder?”
“Another Indian.”
“White men trying nonwhites for murder. Started early.”
“Wanna fuck?” I called now.
“Not today, monkey face,” he said. “I’ve got my period.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Monkey face?”
“Period,” I said.
“I don’t know. I love going to bed with you. But today I have to get some work done.”
“Well, so do I,” I said, wishing I hadn’t spoken. Events at the conference might be: Prosecutor speaking about murder trials in New Haven. Historian talking about history of crime in New Haven. Panel discussion: cop, social worker, head of organization of former prisoners, talking about murder and race: Are murders of white people paid more attention (surely)? Are murders by white people prosecuted as vigorously as murders by black people? Or Hispanic or other? Indian? City planner or urban anthropologist or whatever, comparing New Haven with other cities. Who will come to this conference? Academics. Public defenders? A public defender should speak. Can a poor person get a fair trial for murder in New Haven? Causes of murder, psychological and sociological. Could a psychiatrist talk about death wishes and destructive impulses?
I’d been writing rapidly, getting over my chagrin at Gordon’s rejection. I wanted substance, not just the mouthing of clichés about a violent society.
“Changed my mind,” he said.
“Work,” I said.
“An hour?
” he said.
I had an appointment in an hour and a half. I’d cancel it. “Too late in the day for Ellen’s house.”
“Let’s go to my place,” said Gordon.
“How far is it?”
“Not too far, and we’ll have a new activity. Riding in my car. Since you don’t know the way, and I won’t tell you.” I’d never been in his car.
Gordon was curious and clever, but he didn’t imagine. He seemed to feel close to dogs, and dogs wonder, but like Gordon they perhaps don’t picture scenes at which they are not present. Gordon often watched me lie to a client when I canceled an appointment, but if someone canceled an appointment with him, he didn’t wonder what the real reason might be. I suppose his lack of a fantasy life made it possible to go to bed with a married woman. He neither imagined me in bed with my husband, making himself jealous, nor imagined my husband finding out, making himself nervous. Each event was what it was until it was over, and trying to put myself in his mental position, I felt as if the world had been freshly washed.
So I felt free, with Gordon, as if I stood on a windy dock, looking over water, letting my hair blow. I knew he didn’t have a notion of me that I would have to work to fulfill or contradict. He wanted to know about me—he asked a million questions—but he hadn’t speculated in advance. I wonder as I write this whether that’s so unusual, and how I knew right away that Gordon looked at “the plain sense of things,” though I didn’t understand my knowledge until he said, “I don’t imagine.” I recall that Pekko said something about it when I first mentioned Gordon Skeetling. He’d noticed it too—noticed it and disliked it. To me—as we drove east on I-95, for Gordon lived on the shoreline, in Madison—to me, Gordon’s refusal to imagine felt roomy, like the place he took me to on that splendid May day, a middle-sized house not far from the water, with a wide screened porch. I looked in all directions, then turned and looked at Gordon watching me—waiting—one hand on his screen door, waiting without impatience until I followed him inside.
The porch was deep, made of new-smelling pine planks, profoundly shadowed. “Did you build this house? Are you the first person to live here?”
“My wife had it built, before I knew her—my second wife,” he said. “She’s an architect, and she did some of the work herself. I moved in with her, and when we divorced, she moved to Arizona and I bought the house from her.”
“Thank you for telling me more than I asked.”
“I have no secrets,” Gordon said. “That’s how I got my car, too. It was hers.” I liked his black Saab. He unlocked the front door as he spoke and turned again to watch me admire his porch. As he so often did in the office, he raised his arm and leaned against the doorjamb, his palm braced, and as in the office, he took up all the room. I stepped forward and placed my hands on the sides of his hips, below his belt on his trousers. Then I moved my right hand until it covered his fly. I felt him stir beneath my hand, but instead of unzipping him where we stood, which would have required undoing his belt buckle, I put my arms around him. I felt luckier than ever in my life, having found a man who had no secrets. But we were about to go to bed for the fourth of five occasions. We went into the house, while I marveled at myself. I thought I liked secrets.
The house was light despite the deep porch because the first floor was one big room, with windows all around. It was floored with polyurethaned wooden planks, and furnished with not much. It was cooler indoors than out, the way houses are in May in Connecticut. We moved quickly upstairs to the bedroom, where without hurry, and without having to be neat, we took off each other’s clothes. Some men find this funny—bra hooks and so forth—and some do it sentimentally, as if undressing a bride. Others are matter-of-fact, completing a task. But the best men are aroused by it, and do it aggressively, and that’s what I like, and that’s what Gordon did.
“Come,” he said and pulled me by the hand toward the bed, while with his other hand he shoved the comforter, which was white, onto the floor. I was cold and warmed myself with his body on the bare bed. He seemed like a young man—like Denny—as he seized me, his hands everywhere: someone who didn’t plan his every move, didn’t remember what he’d done last time. For the first time, I felt an exuberance in the man that had to do, it seemed, not with the fun of taking a business connection to bed but with me. And as always I felt his clarity. Making love to me, he was doing nothing but making love to me. I tried to keep myself from coming, because when I did, we’d have only one more time together. As Gordon thrust and thrust again, I thought that if I didn’t come, it wouldn’t count. There would still be two times to go. But he’d raised me to such a pitch that I had to let the release happen, and then we lay silently, getting colder until I snagged the comforter on my foot and sat up to pull it over the two of us. I lay down luxuriously in its warmth and Gordon’s, pressing myself into his body. He put his arms around me. “We’re getting to be friends,” he said.
There were no rugs in this house. After a while I got up to pee, finding the bathroom without directions because Gordon had fallen asleep. I tiptoed on the cold floor. Alone, I had a sudden sense of completeness, something exquisite. I’d found a man who could finish me, put his semen into me in a way that made me feel I needed nobody’s semen for the rest of my life, not even his. From now on I’d make friends with women. I’d call Charlotte, whom I hadn’t talked to in weeks. Maybe I wouldn’t go to bed with Gordon again. Maybe I’d keep that fifth time unused, like a framed dollar bill on the wall of a restaurant. I flushed the toilet and walked out of that bathroom as if into the rest of my life, almost expecting Gordon to have vanished, his role completed, like an insect who achieves his destiny by copulating, then flies off in an iridescent flicker.
But Gordon was present, and now awake. “I thought you had a dog,” I said. Suddenly I remembered the way I’d imagined his house: old, old-fashioned, crammed with books, cracked leather furniture, and dusty end tables, and festooned with dog hair; I’d pictured a big, shaggy dog greeting me solemnly, swinging his tail. This place was clean.
“She died. I told you.”
“You didn’t want another dog?”
“I wanted that dog.”
I reached for my underwear; then, chilled again from getting up, I relaxed into the empty space next to Gordon and pulled the comforter, once more, around my shoulders. “That’s how my brother lives,” I said.
“Carl or Stephen?”
The man’s memory was uncanny. “Stephen. He lives with empty spaces that stand for what used to be.”
“I don’t. I simply had a dog who died. When my mother died, I didn’t replace her either.”
“All right,” I said, wondering if what I’d said was untrue of Stephen as well. He lives in a small brick house in Queens, with the usual quantity of furniture. Only one child, away at SUNY New Paltz now, but he didn’t, as far as I knew, leave her place at the dinner table sentimentally clear in her absence. He and his wife had taken to letting their mail accumulate there, Stephen had said, and had to sort it when my niece came home on vacation. But what I’d said about Stephen was true, I continued to feel. I pulled the comforter more closely around me, and then Gordon stood and began to dress, and I felt a twinge of desolation, though I knew he wouldn’t depart, leaving me alone in his house. “Get up,” he said. “Let’s go back to the office.”
I sat up, still swathed in the big, puffy comforter. “Well, in Stephen’s case, it’s not a dog or a person who’s gone, it’s a way of thinking about himself. His life is like an exhibit in a museum—it preserves an idea about himself he doesn’t have any longer.”
“When did he lose it? You said he works in a museum.”
“Yes. He lost it at seventeen.”
And now I come to a difficult point, because I said early on there was no need to describe Stephen’s trouble—or talk about Denny—in this narrative. I don’t want to write about Stephen, and I don’t want to write any more about Denny, and I’ve been avoiding this manuscript for days—I stopp
ed at “seventeen,” doing anything else I could think of, because I didn’t want to write about either of them. I didn’t talk to Gordon about Denny then, but I did later. Now, it’s either write about Denny and Stephen or play computer solitaire, and I’m exhausted with playing solitaire.
For some reason, I seem to need to begin—now that I’m doing it—with a time Denny and I threw sticks in the river. Denny would get excited about something he did as a child. He was a juvenile delinquent and a druggie, but he’d had a normal, middle-class childhood, his respectable mother (or, more likely, that grandmother I mentioned) had read him Winnie-the-Pooh, and he liked to go to one of the bridges in East Rock Park, even when I knew him, and play pooh sticks, which if you recall is the game in which you throw sticks from a bridge into the river, upstream, rush to the downstream side, and see which stick emerges first from under the bridge. We’d do this late at night: I’d say, “I’m starving, let’s get something to eat,” and he’d say, “No, let’s go to the river.” You couldn’t always see the sticks at all, but the river—the Mill River, the same one where I walk Arthur these days—was mysterious and enticing (and I’d have visions of my young lover found drowned at the edge of it). One night we’d thrown sticks, and gone and leaned over the parapet, but we began to talk and forgot to watch for the sticks. Denny told me how his younger brother had come to him recently, crying, saying, “Man, you have to stop making Mom cry.”
“What did you say?” I said.
“What does anybody say to a younger brother? Or a younger sister? What did your brother say to you when you asked that?”
“How do you know I asked that? I don’t think I did,” I said.
“Sure you did. Your brother got in trouble, didn’t he?”
“Well, yes, but I don’t recall telling you about that.”
“You once said I reminded you of him. That’s the only reason I remind people of anybody.”
“It wasn’t that, it was your sense of humor.”
Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman Page 11