“I don’t have a sense of humor,” said Denny, “I have a sense of sadness.”
“You make me laugh, though.”
“That’s what I said to my brother. I make people laugh, not cry. But he said, ‘No, no, you make Mom cry.’ See, maybe I won’t do that forever, but then I wouldn’t be around anymore.”
“You mean you’d go away?”
“Go away, die. Same difference, from your point of view.”
“You don’t seem like a potential suicide, Denny. Is that a signal for me to worry?”
“I don’t mean suicide. I’d never commit suicide. It’s not my style.”
It was winter, and I got cold, or impatient, or came back to my senses and remembered I had to work in the morning, so the evening ended. Something like that. But I did not think about this meeting with Denny on the day of the white comforter, and I don’t know why I wanted to write it down now, except for the obvious connection anybody could make, when I say what I told Gordon next, which is “When my brother was seventeen, he was questioned by the police after his girlfriend died.”
“Did they think he killed her?”
“In fact, apparently not,” I said, surprised that I was about to tell Gordon a story I hardly ever told anyone, and hadn’t told Denny, who found out most of what he wanted to know. I was fourteen and Stephen was seventeen. Carl wasn’t home, but Stephen and I were being shown off to some cousins from the Netherlands, people my parents scarcely knew, who’d settled there after the war and had come to America on a visit. I was lusting after the son of this family—a boy with a bright, friendly laugh, a look unlike the guarded looks of boys I knew—when the police arrived. We three had gradually moved away from the adults, who were lingering over coffee, and we were listening to records in Stephen’s room. The boy didn’t have enough English to follow Tom Lehrer’s satirical songs, but he liked Judy Collins. We heard the doorbell, and when the record ended, we listened—some romantic, violent ballad still in our heads—as my father talked with the policeman, then led him past the visitors to the room where we were.
Stephen’s girlfriend had died a month earlier. It was a shock, but not as shocking as it might have been, because she’d been a troubled girl. My parents had been terrified of her, and that Sunday I was still angry because they refused to regard her death as a full-scale tragedy: according to them her life was doomed, one way or another. I screamed at them about that. She wasn’t doomed, I insisted, though her death seemed to contradict that notion. She’d slit her wrists, yes, but that didn’t have to be—if she’d had a good psychiatrist she might have led a long, reasonably happy life. Now I know I was right, but at the time, as children do, I secretly thought my parents probably knew better. I thought I was making these arguments, night after night (while Stephen stayed quietly in his room) out of stubbornness. I felt guilty for shouting at my parents.
That afternoon, as a policeman entered Stephen’s bedroom, my brother stood up. The visiting boy was sitting on the bed, and I was on the floor, working up my courage to rise casually and sit next to the boy. Now I went through a swift progression of thought: My brother had killed his girlfriend! I was angry at my brother for killing his girlfriend and therefore impeding my lust toward the Dutch cousin. Then I was afraid.
Stephen was questioned in the policeman’s car and returned to the house. “It was nothing,” he said. The next day the policeman returned, questioned Stephen some more, and left again. My fear didn’t dissipate for weeks. Months later, Stephen told me he’d been asked if he knew in advance what the girl planned to do. He’d said no. The policeman had been gentle but persistent. By then it seemed absurd to have thought my brother was a murderer.
For years, I blamed myself for my disloyalty and suspicion. The long piece I wrote was originally about Stephen and also about me: about my slow discovery that it’s possible to think mixed-up thoughts and go on, essentially—and therefore about how I finally came to feel that my lusting after the cousin was not proof that my brother was a murderer, that I hadn’t retroactively turned Stephen into a murderer by lusting after the cousin. The early drafts contained much information about my youthful sexual life that I gradually omitted. Eventually the article, or a fragment of it, was published. It concentrated on the ordeal that began for Stephen when he made friends with this troubled girl, and went on to make an argument I’d come to understand in the course of revising it. I argued for the importance of wrong guesses. I argued that my mistake was permissible, even though it was to think my brother was a terrible criminal: I argued, that is, for the innocence of imagination. When the piece was published, Stephen told me it was good, told me he was glad I’d written it—he’d read twenty drafts along the way—and quietly said he hoped I never wrote about him again. I said of course I wouldn’t.
Half a lifetime later, I think I’m doing something similar. Maybe eventually I will omit, again, the secrets I’d rather keep from this record—and omit Stephen—and publish what is left as an essay in which, once more, my life is merely illustrative. The point might be how, in a city these days, what we consider outside the line we draw around ourselves—the boundary beyond which we do not go—may turn out to be inside, how the boundary may need to be redrawn, and again redrawn.
We got dressed and drove back to town. Even telling Gordon about Stephen, the Dutch cousin, the dead girl, and the resulting piece of writing did not take all afternoon, yet I worked late that evening, completing what I’d hoped to complete, and didn’t cook the meal I’d promised Pekko when I left that morning. I hadn’t cooked for a while. It occurred to me, as I finally drove home, that if he were a roommate instead of a husband, my account of my afternoon could be my apology. Don’t scold, I’ll tell you a story.
Call your mother,” Pekko said when I arrived. He was cutting up onions, celery, and mushrooms for spaghetti sauce.
“Oh, did she call?”
“I called her.”
“Did you think I might be there?”
“It had nothing to do with you,” Pekko said. “I wanted to find out if Daphne actually knows anything about carpentry.”
“Roz claims she’s installing those kitchen cabinets,” I said. I began setting the table.
“Daphne said so. Roz says they’ve looked at everything in Home Depot and now Daphne is emptying the old cabinets and carrying the canned goods to the basement. I can’t tell from that if she knows what’s she’s doing.”
“Why did you call?”
“She wants to work off the rent, and I need someone. The guys I used in the other building are impossible.”
“Daphne hasn’t got the rent money?”
“Or she wants it for something else.”
“For what?”
“Not my business,” said Pekko. He opened a can of tomatoes. Pekko chops vegetables well, with a cleaver, cooking deliberately, as if listening to instructions in his mind, choosing the correct tool. His back was to me as he stood at the counter, and I appreciated his vulnerable firmness even while I was still appreciating another, different man. No matter; it felt tiresome to limit myself to one man, an odd requirement, no more sensible than a rule that would have me manage with a single woman friend. With his face hidden and mine not visible to him, I asked experimentally, with a mischief maker’s need to shift a pile of objects, just to see which one broke, “When was Daphne your lover?”
Pekko hardly ever answers questions directly, but this time he said, “When she was pregnant.”
“With Cindy?”
“Is that the ten-year-old?”
“Nine, I think.”
“Nine.”
Somebody had to be careful, so I asked nothing more, but he continued to talk, without turning. “The last time I saw her she was too pregnant for sex. She pulled up her shirt, and from across the room, I could see bulges move up and down her belly.”
I’d known Pekko for ten years—with gaps. I didn’t know exactly how old Cindy was. It didn’t matter, yet I wondered where I was
while Pekko looked at Daphne’s belly, whether we were dating then.
“The baby was kicking,” I said.
“No, I think it was a knee moving. The baby pulled her knees to her chest and then straightened them.”
“The fetal position.”
“I suppose. I remember the bulges moving. I never felt so sad.”
“Was she your baby?” I thought of putting my arm around him as he stirred the sauce, but it seemed like a sentimental idea.
“No. Daphne was married, and we started when she was pregnant. I was glad it wasn’t my baby. I didn’t want to marry her. I didn’t want to know her after she had the baby, because I knew she’d leave her husband sooner or later, and I didn’t want all that. I’d probably fall in love with the kid.”
“She’s a cute kid.”
“I guess she’s all right, even without a father.” He swept mushroom slices off the cutting board into the pot. “Set the table,” he said.
“I already did.”
He glanced over his shoulder. “Right. Sorry.”
“So did you tell Daphne she can do the carpentry?” I said.
“I did. Against my better judgment. Before I called your mother. I called her to reassure myself, but of course I didn’t learn anything.” Daphne had appeared in his office to negotiate, taking notes so as to write up a contract. Her main concern was apparently that Pekko would exploit her, and she had negotiated an hourly rate, insisting on weekly paychecks once she’d earned the rent.
“She’s not donating one flick of a paintbrush,” Pekko said as we ate.
“No nostalgia for lost love?” I said lightly.
“I’m not sure it was ever lost love.” It was all right, I explained to myself. My afternoon was less bad if Pekko had leftover feelings for Daphne, and the feelings made him more interesting to me. We were almost done eating before I heard all of what he was thinking—or another part of what he was thinking. “If I asked you to cut her daughter out of the play, would that be possible?”
“Of course not. Is that what you want me to do?”
“Not so far.”
“But ever? Pekko, you’re not like that. Even if you did feel terrible when you saw Cindy’s knee move before she was born.”
“It might have been her butt. Maybe she had her back to Daphne’s front, and when she flexed her legs, her butt moved.”
“Or her butt.” He got up and gave Arthur, who’d been attentive, his plate to lick.
“Even if her mother cheats you,” I persisted. “What difference does it make if Cindy’s in the play?”
“I might need a threat.”
“If Daphne doesn’t work hard enough?”
“No. If she doesn’t work hard enough, I’ll be out the rent. That’s happened before. But she’s complaining about the building. I don’t need stuff in the paper.”
“Throw her out.”
“Civil liberties. That’s the one thing you can’t do.”
“You can blackmail her by breaking her kid’s heart but you can’t refuse to renew her lease?” I said, wondering if Cindy cared about the play.
“Violates her civil liberties.”
But now Pekko had done talking, and as I gathered the plates to wash them—the cook shouldn’t have to clean up—he wandered out of the room. When I was done, I took Arthur for a late walk so as to think about my lover—the light on the planks, which were the color of corn oil, the off-white walls and white comforter and nothing much in the room to distract me from the sensation of my vagina pulsing and rippling around him.
I planted my garden toward the end of May, feeling a sudden wish for flashy annuals and something I could eat. I don’t like impatiens or pansies, but I put in a lot of zinnias and tomatoes, and then watered only now and then and weeded hardly at all. June was warm but not too hot, cooler than those hot days in April, and when I was home I was often in the backyard, in sandals, throwing Arthur’s ball. Sometimes I tried teaching him something, but I soon gave up and spent time reading and thinking about Gordon. Charlotte came over late one afternoon, and being together in the sunshine felt so good, for me at least, that we didn’t talk for long minutes, leaning back on canvas chairs in my backyard, looking up at layered maple leaves, and drinking white wine. Then we began, sleepily, listing the epochs of our long friendship, just referring to times we were at ease and times we were not, mentioning them and not needing detail. “The time I didn’t tell you about—” she said.
“Yes. And the time you told Philip—”
“About your mother?”
“Oh, that too. I was thinking about something else,” I said.
“Oh. Yes. The time at the beach.”
“Yes, the time at the beach.” Which was the time I found out that Denny was dead. I was staying at the old beach house where Pekko was living, and Charlotte and Philip and maybe her girls—yes, her girls—had come over for supper, but Pekko was late, and it got later and later: a summer evening that began hot and became cool. Olivia ran around in her wet bathing suit to keep warm while we waited for Pekko before eating, then ate without him. When he arrived, it was with the news that Denny was dead. He’d broken into Pekko’s frozen yogurt store and died of an overdose. Now Charlotte and I stopped hinting and told each other that story, over and over, it seemed: how I’d slept with Denny, though I was in my forties and supposedly sane, while he was twenty-three and apparently crazy, how I’d stopped, how he’d died.
“You know, he had been living in Pekko’s store,” she then said, after a long pause. “He didn’t break in just that one time.”
“He was living there?”
“He was homeless. He broke in every night. Lots of street people do that someplace.”
“How do you know?”
“Somebody reliable told me the story, not long after.”
“Another street person?”
“A case manager.”
“Did Pekko know?”
“How could he not? Daisy, how could he not?”
“You’ve been quiet about this for ten years?” I said.
“Eight, nine maybe. I didn’t hear it right away.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you get angry with Pekko for keeping quiet?”
“Oh, Daisy, Pekko’s just like that. He does what he does.”
That’s why I keep thinking about Denny, as well as about the events of last spring and summer. He was part of them, too. He gets younger in my mind, a sort of imp, laughing at us all. He did laugh at us all. He was thin, with a tough look about him that didn’t seem real to me, as if he was playing bad guy, and nothing really bad could happen.
That afternoon in the backyard, I didn’t tell Charlotte about Gordon, but I told her all about the play. She was enthralled. It was just her sort of thing—talky, good-natured, naïve.
Rehearsals, speaking of the play, had become three quarters discussion. Katya said that didn’t matter, it was our process at that time. She was a great one for following us as we sniffed each bush, and sometimes I tried to follow Arthur on a walk the way Katya followed us. I always lost patience, but Katya, like a big, soft shadow, never did. She’d signed us up for a performance: we were to perform our play in October as part of a community arts festival at the Little Theater, a small theater that used to be an art-movie house and got rescued, renovated, and set up for plays when the movies stopped. In the old days, before the renovation, I remember watching bats flying in the light from the screen. I remember Denny and me together there, but that might be wrong.
Cindy had a sharp directness that made everyone wish she had a bigger part, and someone suggested that, once the two-headed girl grew up, she could have a little sister. That idea led us into a somewhat idiotic discussion about whether these parents would take a chance on another baby. I was against it and found myself ridiculously involved, arguing against Jonah, who thought they should accept the will of the Lord. Maybe I wanted Cindy’s part to stay small.
“You’re not thinking about
whether these particular people would accept the will of the Lord,” I said.
Ellen had come into the room and was watching at one side, and then Daphne came in as well, to pick up Cindy. Daphne emitted an atmosphere of disdain. Of course she wanted there to be another child, so her daughter could have a bigger part. Finally she called, “Oh, give them a break. Give that couple something good.”
We agreed that the play had enough sorrow in it, and Cindy was confirmed as the future sister of the two-headed girl.
Reading about murder, I was more interested in the killer than in the killed. When I wasn’t thinking about bedding with Gordon, I’d think about the sensation of killing, the sensation of getting away with it. Many murders I read about were unsolved, or solved only provisionally. It felt strange to begin my research about murder in New Haven—or small cities, we’d broadened the topic that much—already knowing that Pekko had told me about the murder of Marie Valenti, knowing that, if Pekko had told the truth, someone was living his life as if it hadn’t happened.
Not all the murders I read about were unsolved. Sometimes crowds saw a killing. I found an amateur book in the local history room of the Main Library about the killing of cops—a typed tribute, all in capital letters, to policemen who died on duty between 1855 and 1970. When cop is killed, another cop is usually around to tell about it, and sometimes there’s a crowd of bystanders interested in whatever the cop was investigating. Sometimes it seemed that everybody had lied.
New Haven is composed of Yale and Not Yale, and Not Yale is composed of African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Italians, Jews, WASPs, Poles, Irish, and so on. (I suppose Yale is too, these days.) Reading about dead policemen was like watching outsiders arrive, one group followed by the next. The first cop murdered on duty, in 1855, had been born in England. Before a raffle intended to raise money for a poor widower, neighbors held an impromptu dance. According to the New Haven Register, a young girl who went to the dance was tracked down by her mother, who began beating her with a stick. The neighbors grew agitated, and when an officer tried to arrest a drunken man, they beat the policeman to death. The paper reported that everyone in the crowd was Irish.
Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman Page 12