Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman (16 page)

“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 stopped 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.”

“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.

 

C
all 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.”