“Do you have more than one lover?” I said.
“Naturally,” he said. “I’m not going to remain faithful to my married lover, am I?”
“Naturally not,” I said. “I was thinking about something that happened yesterday, at the soup kitchen.”
“The soup kitchen? What were you doing there?”
I explained.
“Soup kitchens exist for the benefit of the beneficent,” said Gordon, from his elbow. I reached my hand up to trace the line of his black, pointed eyebrows. Daphne would think I was powerful if she knew I was in the bed of a man with eyebrows like that, agreeing with him that he needn’t be faithful.
“Hungry people do eat there,” I said.
“People who like spooning out porridge serve it to people who like lining up for their porridge. ‘Come and be humiliated!’ ‘Oh, thanks, I love being humiliated.’ ”
“Not true.”
“I used to date a woman who ate in a soup kitchen off and on for a year, though she had plenty of resources. She was in medical school.”
“A doctor?”
“Now she’s a gynecologist.”
I was silent. I wondered how old she was. “Look, that was years ago,” he said. “I’m dating someone else now, but I’m not thinking of her when I’m with you.”
“Well, I’m not thinking of my husband when I’m with you,” I said. “I’m not quarreling with you about women. I don’t understand fidelity. I never have.”
A gynecologist, I told myself, wouldn’t give him AIDS. At least he was a snob. But a gynecologist who ate in soup kitchens might have been a complicated gynecologist. Dismissing the question of whether I was risking my life with Gordon, I tried to decide whether I had to defend the soup kitchen. He began kissing my neck, hard, and for a moment I was happy, because the intensity felt needy. “Did you think I’d break up with you if you mentioned another woman?” I said.
“No. You’re not stupid—and I don’t think.”
But he said it fast. Maybe we were equally needy. I took his bony head in my hands and kissed him girlishly, the way a woman in a blue print dress with long sleeves, a flounce, and white buttons down the front might kiss. Gordon pushed me aside so as to kiss my neck some more, aiming for the indentation in the front, thrusting his rough head at my throat, kissing. His hair was prickly against my skin. He kissed his way down until he was driving his head at my crotch, kissing and licking till he was breathless and I’d come recklessly, hither and thither on the bed. “Right this second, you’re the only woman in the world,” he said, but a second doesn’t last long.
For years, while Charlotte stayed faithfully married, I kept starting over with a new man. She’d had lovers before she met Philip, and hadn’t forgotten the patterns of love affairs. With brief, sardonic laughter, we’d note “the day he talks about his childhood,” “the day you go to the grocery store,” or “the day he criticizes your clothes.” Then there was “the day he tells you he’s seeing someone else.” I’d lived through that day several times in the long years when I had boyfriends who overlapped with others, who had girlfriends who overlapped with me. Charlotte and I distinguished between the early announcement—“Before we start this, you should know there’s someone else”—and the late one, when he was seeing someone else because he’d decided you wouldn’t do. “Don’t go hiking,” Charlotte would say, when I’d begin to be tense about a man, because twice I’d heard about another woman on a hike in the woods.
But the process was surely different if you were married and he knew. I had no intention of telling Charlotte anything about sex with Gordon, but it was she I phoned—when I couldn’t stop thinking about Gordon’s other women or woman, whether that made sense or not—a few days later, in the middle of July. We met for lunch on a working day, although I’d rather see Charlotte at some other time. On weekdays she can’t dismiss the inward, professional woman, and is perhaps too conscientious about looking steadily and speaking plainly. For most of the morning I’d been sorting books and papers—speaking toughly, to little avail—in Ellen’s dining room, and I was so glad to be in the instant comfort of an air-conditioned restaurant that I almost said, “Charlotte, I’m having an affair.” I heard myself think it. I’d told no one about Gordon, and there was no danger. Yet Charlotte heard me, or heard something. “Did you just sneeze?” she said, as a waitress handed us menus. We were at Atticus, a big, brightly lit bookstore with a café. I’m fond of their gazpacho in summer. “I have the feeling I was thinking so hard just now I missed something.”
“No.”
“God bless you, anyway,” said Charlotte.
“Same to you,” I said. “What were you thinking about?”
I’ve always considered Charlotte beautiful. Now she’s a grandmother, but I still love to look at her pale blue eyes. For a moment she stared, as if she was surprised that I’d want to hear what she was thinking, then took me at my word. She’d been thinking about scheduling a long weekend away with Philip, a topic slightly more interesting than it might have been because it concerned Olivia, who might or might not have a day off, and might or might not visit her parents if they were home. “Boring,” she said, stopping herself from a full analysis of this subject. “Are you still working with the man who doesn’t believe in foster care?”
“I’m putting on a conference with him.” That interested Charlotte, and I told her more about it.
“Is he still obnoxious?” she said.
“He’s never exactly been obnoxious. He’s opinionated, certainly.”
I knew what I wanted to eat, but Charlotte had to read the menu and consider, so I had time to observe myself and know that something sad was occurring. The reasons not to tell her Gordon was my lover were clear to me, perhaps not reasonable reasons but my reasons. I said nothing more about him as we ordered and ate our lunch. But we talked about uninteresting subjects, then looked at our watches, signaled the busy waitress, and waited with too much attention, glancing over our shoulders, for the check. I took our money to the register and gave Charlotte her change, which she stuck into her skirt pocket instead of taking out her wallet. It’s a habit; sometimes we’ve bought treats with money she finds in her pockets, as if she thinks fairies left it there. Remembering one of those times—ice cream cones after Charlotte reached for a tissue and came up with a five-dollar bill—I wished I had treated her to lunch. Maybe a gift would have kept her quiet. As we left the store, she turned the way I did, though her office was in a different direction, and said, scurrying slightly as if she thought I’d bolt, “When I don’t have a good time with you, I know you’ve got a secret. I’m tired of your secrets, Daisy.”
I stared without answering, and after a while she turned and walked the other way. At first I shrugged and walked on toward my car, parked a block farther down Chapel Street. I like what’s unresolved. Trouble to be sorted out captures my attention, and in the past I’ve taken new interest in a diminishing friendship or love affair when I’ve sensed resistance. So I walked away, promising myself that Charlotte’s censure would be worth it, because we’d have such a good time, not quite yet, arguing and fixing our friendship again.
Waiting in the heat for a traffic light to change, eyeing the Yale summer school students in shorts; the street people, always dressed for cooler weather than we had (some were in coats and watch caps); the office workers looking uncomfortable in jackets—I admitted to myself that irresolution with Charlotte was not fun. A sense of desolation claimed me, and when I got into my car, instead of driving the few blocks to Gordon’s office, I drove onto the highway and all the way to Hammonasset Beach State Park on Long Island Sound, not far from where he lived in Madison. My red bathing suit was in my bag in case Gordon had wanted an afternoon together. Now, driving, I worsened my mood on purpose, imagining him on the phone—since I wasn’t there—with a woman in another Yale office, jauntily proposing an afternoon swimming near his house, and some time in his bed. I was angry with Charlotte. What sort of f
riendship could exist without secrets? Had she no secrets from me? I’d be boring without secrets.
That evening I told Pekko about my afternoon at Hammonasset. “I should do it more often,” I said. “It was too hot to work.” It’s a long, wild stretch of beach, with skinny, rocky peninsulas, and I told Pekko that going there had been a terrific idea. It’s crowded on weekends, but on that weekday afternoon I saw mostly suburban women with kids. Pekko nodded noncommittally; he doesn’t like to swim. But I was no more persuaded than he was. I had thought my afternoon at the beach would soothe and comfort me, but it didn’t, and I began to feel a sense of irresolution that made it impossible
to sit still, or do anything useful. All I wanted to do was phone Gordon. And then I did, while Pekko walked Arthur. Gordon wasn’t home, and I left a message: “Don’t call me, I just wanted to say hello.” I regretted leaving any message as soon as I’d done it, as if I’d left something of value he might alter to his own purposes. What would prove Charlotte wrong would be a happy affair, the one I’d described to Arthur in that walk at the river. I’d stayed away from Gordon that afternoon so as to prove to myself I was free, to prove the affair was fun.
The next day I went to his office, and after I’d sat tensely for a while, trying to work as Gordon had incomprehensible phone conversations, I walked past him to the bathroom, and when I returned he followed me into the archive, talking in his light voice about the heat (“Can’t think, can’t think . . .”), then grabbing my arm, then becoming quieter and gentler, but no less insistent, as his gestures became caresses. But as I was chiding myself inwardly for my nerves—and wondering what I’d do for a bathing suit, since I’d forgotten to return the red one to my bag—he dropped his arms at his sides, shook his head, and said, “Not a good plan today. Another day.”
“Okay,” I said lightly, but I minded. As usual, his shirt—short-sleeved, striped blue and white—had worked its way free from his pants, and he stuffed it back where it belonged, and returned to his desk.
In some ways the weeks that followed, through July and into August, were better than the start of the affair—just because I do like irresolution. Gordon made me as uncertain as an adolescent, needy for the phone or the touch of a hand. The last person who could make me wait that way was Bruce Andalusia. Gordon didn’t ordinarily call me, because we couldn’t talk much—and anyway, he didn’t see any point in discussing sex—but now and then he’d have a professional question, and I anticipated those times too intently. I experienced anew the convalescent feeling (when he did want to leave the office with me, when he did phone) that makes minor illness such a pleasure for the young: pain succeeded by euphoria when pain goes. Identifying to myself what made me happy now, I recalled with pleasure even menstrual cramps, because of the moment when after hours of pain enough pills loosened the body into sleep, sleep and comfort. Postmenopausal, in July I became a connoisseur of pain that will dissipate, postponing even glasses of water in the heat, aspirin for headache, until I could no longer bear waiting for pleasure. I didn’t want Gordon to swivel his chair around and start up with me at work, because I wanted to prolong hoping he would.
I couldn’t stop suggesting afternoon encounters, but I was no longer natural about it. I’d lost my sense of rhythm. I always wanted to do it, and twice he said no and didn’t change his mind. Then one afternoon, his back to me, Gordon said from his desk, “Can you go away for a weekend?”
“Me?”
“Who else?”
“Sure,” I said, before trying to figure out how that might be possible. Eventually I decided to tell Pekko I wanted some time alone, away. Pekko likes cool-weather vacations in cities with lots of jazz. He wouldn’t want to come.
“New York?” said Gordon.
“Not the country?”
“I live in the country.”
New York in summer wouldn’t have been my first choice, but Gordon said, “Hotels are air-conditioned.” I told Pekko I wanted to sleep alone in an air-conditioned hotel for a couple of nights, visit my brother, and see a drawing show in SoHo I’d read about. My plans didn’t sound quite plausible to me, but he made no objection.
Our weekend took place a couple of weeks after we first discussed it. In the interval, one hot afternoon Ellen lured me into her backyard with iced tea. She talked about her married boyfriend. “It would be simpler to have this out of my life,” she said. “I picture having picnics in the park with the children. Of course I could do that whether I’m seeing Lou or not—I don’t see him every day—but I know I won’t.”
I didn’t say anything.
“If I go on a picnic, something terrible will happen to the children. A punishment for dating a married man. I’ll take them to the top of East Rock, and they’ll fall off the cliff and get killed.”
“The monument on top of East Rock,” I said, “looks like an erect, circumcised penis. With a woman on top of it.”
“That’s true, it does,” said Ellen. Then she continued, “Remember when I told you my neighbor saw you going into my house with Gordon Skeetling, and you explained how he loves houses and wanted to see the shape of my dining room?”
“Yes,” I said, startled that she’d remembered Gordon’s name. I swallowed some tea. Maybe now I could get her to come inside and work.
“I didn’t say so at the time,” Ellen said, “but she saw you go in with him twice.”
I said, “What do you want, Ellen?”
“You’re going to tell me about it sooner or later, so why not now?”
“I don’t have time,” I said. “Sorry.” I put down my glass and left by the driveway, without returning to the house.
That night or maybe the next, Daphne called when Pekko was out. “I called to talk to him,” she said. “Some of the neighbors are pretty impatient. But there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you, too. Your mom feels bad about you. She keeps telling me she’s worried because you haven’t dropped in. She thinks there’s something wrong that you’re not telling her.”
I called my mother and yelled at her for talking to Daphne about me. “I don’t tell her any secrets,” my mother said. “I don’t know any secrets.”
I never told my mother secrets, because I told so many people the history of my progress in and out of men’s beds that secret wasn’t the word, but my mother was one of the people I told. I don’t think I talked about Denny to anyone but Charlotte, and I lied to her, minimizing the affair, but I talked about everyone else. As for Roz, she was never great at the comforting remark, but in my single days I did like dazzling her with a carefree tale of my recent exploits, reassuring myself as well that carefree was the right word. I’d point out to myself that if I were in love—meaning needy and at risk—I wouldn’t talk to Roz. Now I hung up without persuading her she shouldn’t have talked to Daphne. I might have been in her kitchen, bending my legs around her table leg, drinking iced tea or iced coffee (preferably iced coffee, but she didn’t make it on purpose; she had it only when there was leftover morning coffee), and talking, giving myself daughter points for being there. I missed that happy woman, that me.
Muriel and I got the part of TheaDora, though we were older than the other women, older than TheaDora. But we were the same height, and finally everybody thought that mattered most, as it did with the children. In the dress we looked most like one person. Cindy, now TheaDora’s little sister, Hydrangea, tormented her. Cindy chanted, “You have two he-ads, you have two he-ads.”
“So what?” I said. I was Dora.
“Now, Hydrangea, honey,” said Thea, “I want you to think about what you just said. How do you think I feel?”
“We’ll be late for work,” Dora snapped.
Thea kept talking, but in practice, if I hurried, she fell into step. Dora’s consciousness ruled. “We have to go to the bathroom,” I said once, just to see what would happen.
“You think I don’t know that?” said Thea.
TheaDora worked as a carpenter. Invited by Ellen, Daphne cam
e in from the corridor, where she lurked, to provide technical advice. Ellen was a brisk assistant director, quite different from the Ellen I knew at home. She wanted the play to be “right,” as she put it.
“I’m more interested in spontaneity,” Katya said.
“Up to a point,” said Ellen. As TheaDora staggered around the stage, enormous in her blue dress, the others tended to pair off and shout back and forth.
All but Hydrangea, a loner. “You’re always late to work. Why should today be any different?”
Daphne listed carpentry terms for us to use. “One-by-four. Mortise and tenon.”
TheaDora was hired by Jonah, a foreman on a construction project who advocated affirmative action and was delighted to see her. “You are not only a woman,” he said, “you are of mixed race!”
“We are two women,” I said as Dora.
“No, dear, we are a woman,” said Thea.
We took our place in a line of people hammering. Jonah hammered, David hammered, and I hammered with my right hand while Thea held the nail with Muriel’s left hand. As we hammered, Jonah said, “Well, you certainly are a pretty girl!” and Dora said, “It’s nice of you to notice, although we’re two girls,” but Thea didn’t answer.
“What do you think, Thea?” called Ellen.
“He’s fresh,” Thea said. Thea liked David, but Dora liked Jonah.
“We need a little more going on in this story, not just love and work,” said Ellen, as Muriel and I climbed out of the dress at the end of rehearsal.
“TheaDora could witness a murder,” I said, since murder was always on my mind these days. “One head sees it, the other doesn’t.”
Denise offered to murder Hydrangea.
“I don’t want to be murdered. Then I can’t say anything,” said Cindy.
“You’ll say plenty before you’re murdered,” Katya said.
“Can I die slowly?”
“We’ll think about it.”
Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman Page 15