He paused, then said, “Nobody ever has an easy time,” in a slightly admonitory tone, as if I was a shy child in his office, too shy to be bad but in need nonetheless. I was not too shy to be bad but I was in need. “Children’s anxieties are as bad as those of adults,” Edmund continued, “but it’s worse, because when it’s the first time, they don’t know it’s ever happened before. No boy has ever disappointed a father before. No girl has ever lost her boyfriend.”
“Does anybody learn that it’s not the first time?” I said, quieted. I minded Gordon’s departure from New York as much as if nothing had ever happened to me.
“Maybe not,” Edmund said, and I found myself taking unforeseen comfort from a counter of paper clips. The waitress brought our check. “Maybe nobody ever does.”
Curled sycamore leaves—faded green with brown edges—lay at the curb on Temple Street on the Thursday after the weekend in New York. It had been hot and humid all week. Would we still be lovers in the fall? I hadn’t seen Gordon since he walked out of the hotel room. I’d done little, making appointments and breaking them. I considered phoning Charlotte and didn’t; I wanted to go to Gordon’s office and didn’t, though there was work to be done. By Thursday I’d stopped hoping he’d phone. I figured out when to arrive at his office, leaving time for work plus swimming and sex. I spotted his Saab as I hurried along the street, but when I went inside he was standing, gathering papers hastily.
“How are you?” I said, standing in his doorway, my arms around a big, stuffed loose-leaf binder in which I carried everything
I needed for work on the conference. The office wasn’t air-conditioned—Yale took Gordon seriously, but only up to a point.
“Hi, Daisy. Awful weather. I’d have called you, but I have a feeling it isn’t a good idea to call you. Tell me if I’m wrong. How was the drawing show?”
“I went to the movies. I visited my brother.”
“Stephen.”
“You could have called me,” I said. I’d waited at home all day. Pekko wasn’t home during the day. “Are you leaving?”
“I’m meeting with that guy in city planning about the project in Schenectady.” I couldn’t remember what Gordon was doing for Schenectady. “I said to him—your place. He has air-conditioning.”
I should have continued through his office and begun work. I’d been making calls from home about printing the brochure for the conference, but now I had to call the speakers to confirm their time slots. It was almost time to mail the brochures. I’d been compiling a mailing list and making labels. The printer would do the mailing, which would arrive just after Labor Day, when with any luck the weather would be cool and people would be energetic, looking for something to do, a reason to leave home. I’d lure them to New Haven. By the end of the conference, in October, everybody else would have learned what they learned. As for me, I’d know something more about killing, how it can become the next event in a series, how an action that wasn’t going to happen becomes an action that has happened.
But I stood in Gordon’s office, twisting my hair like Cindy. If he didn’t say something now to renew the affair, it was not quite—surely not quite—the same as if he’d ended it, but almost as bad, as though we were lovers day by day, like travelers in a hotel who must inform the proprietor if they wish to extend their stay. I wanted a lease. It crossed my mind that Gordon—like me at the start—might have decided we’d go to bed a fixed number of times. “Thirty-two,” I imagined him thinking, climbing out of bed at the SoHo Grand. “That’s it.”
“Did you choose the design?” he said. I’d had a couple of mock-ups of the brochure.
“I don’t have to let them know until I give them the copy, and I can’t do that until I talk to a few more people.”
“People are away. They’re hard to reach.”
“Don’t worry.” I’d had long conversations and lively e-mail exchanges with my proposed speakers. Everyone who’d promised to speak would come to my conference.
“Gordon, let’s pick a time to go to your place, okay?” I said then. I couldn’t help it. “If not now, whenever.”
“I’d rather keep it spontaneous,” he said.
I forced myself to pass through his office into the archive and get on the phone. Before leaving he interrupted me, coming to my doorway. “Have you talked to the man who’s going to speak about Marie Valenti?” he said. “When is that scheduled for?”
“The last morning.” I hadn’t been able to think of a good enough reason to cancel that discussion. Gordon was right—it was a little bit of reality inserted in a theoretical few days: Who killed Marie Valenti? I’d pretend Pekko had never spoken.
As I sat there, not turning to look at him while he stood in my doorway and asked two more quick, impersonal questions, I remembered Pekko’s friend Edmund, his kind eyes ready to hear something funny. His eyes had met mine as we both reached for the same slice of pizza at the same moment. We laughed, and he pulled his hand back. I pictured that hand—a little pudgy, quite pale. Now the thought of it, the hand of a man I wasn’t attracted to sexually and had never touched, comforted me as Gordon also left without touching me.
I worked for a while, not well, then found myself thinking of a reason to go to Ellen’s house despite the heat. She’d probably be home, and wouldn’t mind my coming without an appointment. She didn’t want to be away from New Haven while her lover was here, and he wouldn’t be here much longer. I drove to her house and rang the bell. I was businesslike, and within a few minutes, though she’d proposed drinking iced tea instead of working, we were going through a closet together. I heard the children’s voices from the backyard. A heavy coat in her arms, Ellen suddenly turned and let it fall to the floor. She held out her practiced hands. “What?” she said. “What?” I pictured myself falling into her arms, but I said, “Some of this could join the pile upstairs.” That’s how we’d taken to working at her house—I colluded with her. We didn’t throw anything away, but we organized everything into ever more precisely defined piles. Her children both now hopped from room to room, which wasn’t strictly necessary but made the point. She and I walked demurely in narrow paths like ladies with parasols.
She shook her head and smiled. As we worked it started to thunder, and I left, so as to drive in the rain. I took a long drive, just to be driving, before I went home. My hands, aching for Gordon’s body, squeezed the hard steering wheel. When I came home at last, Pekko was sitting in the living room, patting the dog and watching the storm. He seemed larger than usual. His knees were spread, and he leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, listening as if to distinguish mood and tone in the thunder. He opened his left arm, and I nodded, then busied myself for a few minutes, too restless to settle. I went to the bathroom and washed my face. I drank a glass of water and stroked the dog, who had come forward, quieter than usual, when I entered, and now followed me expectantly. I looked at the mail. Then I returned to the living room and sat down, leaning back against Pekko’s arm. He put his hand on my shoulder. It was five days and some hours since Gordon had touched me. I began to cry, though I never cry. I cried with the sheer exhaustion of wanting. Pekko didn’t ask questions but rocked me forward and back and pulled me closer.
The storm lasted a long time. When I thought of wine and went for a glass, the air had cooled so quickly that opening the cupboard door released distinctly hot air. I brought Pekko a glass of ginger ale, and I drank some Chardonnay. Then he put his arm around me, and we walked upstairs to the bedroom, where he undressed me and we lay until we were chilly before turning to each other, thrusting our tongues into each other’s mouths. I didn’t care that he was he and not Gordon—I’d always liked both.
As we lay naked, satisfied, in the new, cool air, I thought again of Edmund reaching for the pizza and pulling his hand back. “Did Edmund kill Marie Valenti?” I said. “Is he the one?”
“Let’s not talk about that.” Pekko climbed out of bed, and I heard him pad to the bathroom, piss, flush the toile
t, and return. I wanted Pekko to get back into bed with me, and he did. We lay in silence. So Edmund, who could pull his hand back from a slice of pizza, had stabbed a woman he loved to death. Was it true? What did I learn, knowing Edmund, knowing that about him?
At length Pekko said, “I might have been wrong about Daphne, all those years ago. I thought it didn’t matter much to her.” All right, we would change the subject.
“It mattered,” I said.
“I’m not Cindy’s father.”
“I know that,” I said. “But what does she want now?”
He sat up, turned away from me, and put his feet on the floor, so his wide hips and big thighs were what I saw, not his face. “Just to make trouble.”
“She says you hit on her.”
“She can’t imagine decency,” Pekko said. “She thought I gave her a break with the rent so she’d go to bed with me.”
“Is that what it was like before?”
“Oh, no,” Pekko said. “Nothing like that. No, it was good before. It was good but she was married. And screwed up.”
I touched the side of his hip.
“She wants different paint,” he said, “I buy her different paint. I don’t know what I’ll do with the paint I already bought. If she scraped properly, she wouldn’t need different paint.”
Daphne was working in a second building now, stripping and refinishing a different staircase and stairwell. “You think it’s easy, an apartment house, somebody constantly working on the staircase?” Daphne resisted what Pekko told her to do, claiming her instructor had taught her something else. Meanwhile she and her neighbors complained about their house. There were bugs despite fumigation. The plumbing needed work. “Well, of course,” Pekko said. “You can’t replace plumbing just like that.” A tenant with small children claimed there was lead paint in her apartment. Daphne had called a newspaper reporter about that, and then called in the fire marshal, who gave Pekko a summons for a blocked hallway, just because he’d allowed tenants to leave things.
“Why didn’t you tell me all this?” I said.
“It’s boring.”
“What does she want?” I said again.
“Oh, she’s sincere. She’s bringing about justice.”
“She’s not doing this because she’s mad at you?”
“I guess she was mad at me to start with. She acted friendly, but I guess she never got over all that, way back. But right now she’s on a crusade. She’s saving the poor by living among them.” He had stood up, somewhere along here, and slowly begun to put on his clothes. We went to Basement Thai. I was glad Gordon lived in Madison, but people in Madison may spend an evening in New Haven. As we left the restaurant, I thought I saw his Saab pass, with two people inside. A woman in the passenger seat with long, dark hair had turned sideways. I could not see her face, which looked toward the driver.
My mother kept calling, and at last I suggested we meet for lunch downtown.
“Clark’s Pizza?” she said.
“All right.” Gordon might come in. But surely not with a woman, unless it was a business lunch, and maybe I could stand that. I agreed because I hoped he’d come in, but he didn’t.
“I know what the trouble is,” Roz said, peering out from under her white curls as soon as we’d put down our menus. This was a Thursday, one week after the day I’d seen him. I’d been in the office several times, alone.
“What trouble?”
“Daphne’s been hinting at this all summer. I have to tell you. She’s in love with Pekko.”
“No, she’s not, she’s trying to ruin him.”
“People are complicated, Daisy. But I am sure you’re not going to lose him.”
“To Daphne? Of course not.”
She glanced in both directions, but the booths near us were empty. “But it’s been worrying you,” she said. “I know it’s been worrying you.”
“No, Mom, it hasn’t.”
“Then what?” I could have insisted I was fine—but I couldn’t insist I was fine, so I told a truth that was less humiliating than the exact truth. “Oh, you know me. There’s someone I like. That didn’t stop just because I got married.”
“With you, I assume there’s always somebody. I hope you can keep it within reasonable limits.”
“You mean, stay out of bed?”
“Or at least be careful.”
“That’s my mom. To tell you the truth, it happened, a little, it’s over, and I’m fine.”
“You got it out of your system.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Did Daphne finish your kitchen cabinets?”
“She never gets around to the last coat of varnish. She’s one of those people who doesn’t do the last thing, so you can’t pay them and end things. But I don’t want her to stop coming to see me.”
“She’s interesting,” I said.
“To be fair, with the humid weather, it didn’t make sense to put that coat of varnish on. But now she should do it. It’s almost fall. Schools are open. It’s cool today—I wish I had a sweater.” It was cool, though it was still August.
I asked my mother if she’d like to help with publicity for the play, and she had a couple of ideas immediately. We had a small budget, and I gave her Katya’s number. I’d eaten as much lettuce from my Greek salad as I wanted—as had happened once, I thought I remembered, with Gordon—and I was finishing olives and feta cheese as she enumerated all she might do, sounding like me. Cool weather had brought on list making in her, and as I listened, I began to make my own inward lists, of all I had to do for the conference. List making was a comfort. Enough lists, perhaps, and I could manage this affair.
“She’s more sensible than she seems, that Daphne,” my mother said, after a silence. “At first I thought she had to be exaggerating, because I know Pekko is a good landlord. But now I’m not so sure. Reporters are interested—newspaper and radio.”
“She’s crazy,” I said.
“Have you ever seen the building?”
“I don’t even know the address,” I said.
“Oh, I know the address,” said my mother and reached into her bag. “It’s in Fair Haven. I dropped Daphne off once. It looked all right, but she says that’s deceiving. Here it is.” She handed me a piece of paper. “What I wanted to say, honey—you’re going to keep him, but you’d better pay attention.”
When we separated, I couldn’t imagine why I wanted to drive straight to Daphne’s house and look it over, and then I did know why, and I did drive there. Of course, it was what Roz intended. She was saving my marriage, somehow, by making me find out about that house, what was or wasn’t wrong there. My father died many years ago, but the expression I imagined on my own face now was one I’d seen on my mother’s during his lifetime, a tolerant alertness for the peculiarities of men. You loved them, you trusted them, but you kept an eye on them.
But I wasn’t thinking about Pekko twenty-three hours a day, I was thinking about Gordon. I had to see if Pekko’s building was a wreck, because I had to know it wasn’t, so Gordon wouldn’t think even less of me if he ever found out—wouldn’t think I was married to a slumlord. I was fighting the image I’d had when Daphne was so difficult at the soup kitchen: Daisy and Pekko, a couple of old fools. I was discovering something marriage does: it defines you, in part, as the sort of person who’d marry whoever your spouse is.
The building was on a quiet street full of two- or three-family wooden houses, most covered with aluminum siding. Fair Haven is a neighborhood much like my own but older, with bigger trees, and poorer, with vacant lots and, lately, buildings here and there being briskly put to rights by some community-minded effort. Pekko’s building was a rickety, red three-story frame house with two doors: two attached three-family houses. It needed painting. I didn’t think all the apartments were floor-throughs, so quite a number of people lived there. I parked and went up on the porch. A wall of tidy steel mailboxes was inside a locked front door. I hurried back to my car, unsure what I’d learned, but before I cou
ld reach it, another car parked and Daphne got out, shaking her limp, tan hair from her eyes, looking like a teenager who’d borrowed her mother’s car. She’d obviously seen me, but before she spoke she locked the car deliberately and deposited her keys in a tiny black purse on a long cord, which she hung from her shoulder. Then she said, “What are you doing here?”
“My mother gave me the address. I wanted to see if it was
so bad.”
“I’ll show you.”
Her apartment was not attractive—a dark kitchen; ugly green appliances—but I didn’t see anything to interest a newspaper reporter. The bathroom was worse. Daphne invited me to press my hands on the broken tiles in the shower, and I could tell that the wall behind them was porous, crumbling. Tiles had fallen, more would fall. Some were stained from leaks. Most convincing was the smelly basement, full of junk, dangerous to children. Traps were set for rats and roaches.
We climbed the stairs. “You see?” she said. “I don’t know what he’s trying to do. Bribe me to keep silent by being nice to me? He gives me a break with the rent, he gives me fatherly pats on the shoulder . . .”
“You said he made a pass at you.”
“One day it seemed like that . . .”
“Well, which do you mean?” I said. “He’s giving you the apartment so you’ll go to bed with him, or he’s offering to take you to bed to shut you up? Is bed a treat or not?”
“How should I know?” Daphne said. Pekko was nice to her because he’s nice. He might have gone to bed if she wanted it, except that she was too unpredictable. He didn’t take that kind of risk. Or maybe he believed in fidelity. I found I didn’t know if he did. Maybe he did. Probably, come to think of it, he did. I thanked her for the tour and drove away, thinking of Pekko for once—Pekko who had acquired too many properties and bestowed too many favors, so he couldn’t care for his holdings as he should. With stubborn goodwill and stubborn cynicism, he thought it was better to house ten people under some kind of roof than five under a roof that didn’t leak. Pekko didn’t believe good could be done neatly. He had an instant suspicion of anything that wasn’t for profit—some profit to someone. I’d hoped to find out, in my tour, whose side I was on—Daphne’s or Pekko’s. I hadn’t been married to Pekko long enough to side with him without an investigation, or maybe I’m the kind who could never do that. Now I thought he was laying himself open to trouble, doing too many favors for mixed-up people who could turn on him. Certainly there was enough wrong with the place to satisfy someone who wanted trouble. What I saw made me angry with Pekko.
Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman Page 18