Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman Read online

  Arthur likes an evening walk, but he’d been outside for forty minutes, barking now and then at the other Goatville dogs. “It’s snowing,” I said.

  “I think it stopped.”

  I wanted to stay near him. “Shall I come?”

  “No.” He got dressed, and after a while I heard the jingle of the choke collar, and then Pekko let himself out, locking the door behind him. In the old days, a man I’d brought home would sometimes leave after sex when I expected him to spend the night. I’d be disappointed, then relieved. Now Pekko and Arthur took a long walk. I brushed my teeth and was asleep before they returned.

  I like serious clutter. I’m not stimulated by messy closets but by rooms piled to the ceiling. And I do like it, though it makes me slightly ill with anxiety. I like dismantling it, but I am sad, which might be why hoarders trust me. I can find what’s worth keeping: love letters from the First World War, usable furniture for the homeless shelter. I don’t like garbage—smelly clutter—and sometimes the distinction is subtle. If everything is wet or otherwise disgusting, I call in a firm that empties and fumigates, but if possible I work myself, salvaging what I can—most often ceramics and glassware, which doesn’t crumble, rust, or become permanently stained or greasy. Of course the usual problem is dust. A mask offends some gatherers. I carry a small battery-powered vacuum cleaner. I don’t mind bugs, but I’m afraid of snakes.

  The recalcitrant hoarders I like best are the divided souls, like me, not the single-minded accumulators who’ve been prodded to call me by a horrified acquaintance. My favorite clients have had a partial conversion: a vision of a bare room, a vision they’re resisting. One man hired me when the immense accumulation of trash in his apartment was what he called “complete.”

  “Now,” he said, “it’s time to go the other way.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s what I imagine.” I join a client’s inner life. I view and handle its embodiment. What could be better? Secrets please me—learning them, telling them—especially when revelation confirms separation. When I’m alone with my oldest friend, a social worker named Charlotte LoPresti, I don’t tell secrets easily. “What are you afraid of?” Charlotte would say, if she read what I just wrote. I don’t know what I’m afraid of, but I know I like the edge of secrecy, the nearly public edge.

  When I began volunteering at that local station, radio wasn’t entirely new to me. Years ago, at the time of the conference on women, I was interviewed at a small radio station full of unwieldy equipment with the mechanical look of the thirties or forties: metal poles swung in our faces; nothing flickered electronically or kept discreetly to itself. As far as I remember, nobody was present except the interviewer and me, and between the contraptions holding microphones aloft, I could hardly see her. I thought nobody was listening. First we talked about standard women’s issues. Soon we began telling personal stories, and I forgot the possible radio audience. It was a call-in show, but the phone didn’t ring. When it did, and a listener asked me to repeat the conference schedule, I looked at the interviewer, startled. She laughed lightly, and I complied. Then we returned to our conversation. See, she seemed to say, listeners make it more private.

  Those more recent evenings—playing Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith, reading poems—felt similar. It was late at night, and I seemed to be alone. The last time I did a show, I read parts of Wallace Stevens’s long, difficult poem “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”—because I always thought it should be heard on some ordinary New Haven evening. Like others in this town, I imagine, I’d come upon it first in a table of contents, and read a little because it seemed to promise to describe my life. It didn’t. I had no idea what it was describing. It has thirty-one sections, each almost a page long. Somebody’s in a hotel room, and then he’s walking around among the Yale colleges and New Haven’s churches. He imagines New Haven, and he tries to work out the relation between the city he sees—“the eye’s plain version” and the city he imagines, “an impalpable town, full of impalpable bells.” Out loud, I read,

  The point of vision and desire are the same.

  It is to the hero of midnight that we pray

  On a hill of stones to make beau mont thereof.

  If it is misery that infuriates our love,

  If the black of night stands glistening on beau mont,

  Then, ancientest saint ablaze with ancientest truth,

  Say next to holiness is the will thereto,

  And next to love is the desire for love,

  The desire for its celestial ease in the heart.

  “Next to love is the desire for love,” I repeated firmly—talking, perhaps, to nobody. I think Pekko and I had just gotten married then, or maybe we were planning our casual little wedding. I wasn’t certain I loved Pekko, but I knew I desired to love him, and I was glad when this poem I didn’t understand—but liked—seemed to tell me that was almost as good.

  Then someone called the station, as someone had called that first station, all those years ago—breaking into solitude, proving I wasn’t alone. A man who identified himself as Isaac said, “The poem was written in 1949, so the hotel at the beginning is the Taft. The hill of stones could be East Rock. East Rock is certainly visible from the high windows of the Taft.”

  Maybe I finally married Pekko because he’d become a slumlord—because in his screwy way he was demonstrating his love for the city of his birth, which is a city I’ve become quite fond of myself. New Haven is turbulent, multiethnic, industrial—formerly specializing in the manufacture of guns—and somewhat but not quite dominated by Yale. If you lingered in some literate nook here—say the Foundry Bookstore—and talked to the people you saw, many would report that they, or their parents or grandparents, moved here to study or teach at Yale. Not Pekko; he’s a townie. His sexy name comes from an immigrant great-grandfather, but most of his people have lived in New England for generations. His grandparents moved to New Haven from Rutland, Vermont, so his grandfather could work as a police officer.

  “Yale!” Pekko says impatiently. In New Haven, Yale employs, Yale owns, Yale operates, Yale pronounces—and because of Yale, crimes here are national news, so we who live here find ourselves defending the place, even defending homelessness, poverty, and criminals. Pekko says, “Those professors think New Haven is Yale plus blight. They’ve never looked around.” My mother would tell me to point out that New Haven has many thriving neighborhoods with well-kept old houses, including some big, fancy ones still inhabited by single families. Our mansions are not funeral homes.

  “I’m a realist,” Pekko says. He’d acknowledge that New Haven has plenty of blight, though much of it, these days, is being replaced with public housing developments so pretty they look like sets for Our Town. Drug dealers live in Pekko’s properties. If they pay the rent, he doesn’t bother them. If they don’t, he says something to somebody—he knows everybody—and the police hold a raid. “It’s faster than eviction,” he says.

  From the time I began talking about my radio series on prostitution, which was arranged within a few days, Pekko seemed uncomfortable. It was one thing to be a realist; another, apparently, to be a realist on the radio. I’d agreed to put together five one-hour programs, once a week, starting in a month. I was somewhat alarmed that the people in charge believed I was a radio interviewer who could lure former prostitutes and knowledgeable professionals to the station, but I seem to run my life by pretending I already am what I want to be.

  “You must know prostitutes,” I said, the day after I’d made the agreement. “Or former prostitutes. Poor women have no choice.” I told him about a discussion of homelessness I’d attended once at which a powerful, attractive woman looked steadily at the audience and said, “Well, a woman can always find a place to stay.”

  He shrugged and looked at me as if to say, Of course. As if I’d said, “You must eat fruit,” which comes to mind because he was eating an orange. Every year he orders a box from Florida.

  Pekko didn’t
want to talk about whores, but I did, and I described a fellow teacher who made extra money modeling bathing suits whenever a local manufacturer entertained out-of-town buyers—and even more money going to their hotel rooms. I recounted two occasions in my twenties when I myself was approached by potential johns, both as I looked into a shop window at the wares displayed, which for all I know is a signal. I was frightened when a man outside a bakery said quietly, “If you come home with me, I’ll give you twenty dollars,” but a few years later, when a similar man—in a well-pressed, conservative raincoat—lingered beside me before a display of Marimekko dresses, then said, “Would you like one of those?” I was not scared or angry but fascinated.

  I said, “I’m waiting for my husband,” who was Bruce Andalusia, and I was even more fascinated when the man apologized and thanked me—as if I was warning him that Bruce might beat him up, though I was merely refusing his offer politely. I couldn’t help imagining what might have happened, titillating or terrifying, if Bruce hadn’t been on his way, and if I had said I would like one of those richly dyed dresses.

  “Is prostitution always appalling?” I asked Pekko, who had listened to what I’d said without comment. “Is fantasizing about it inherently disrespectful—like glamorizing rape?”

  He shrugged and shook his head, gathering his orange peel and emptying his hand into the garbage pail on his way out of the room.

  I did put on five radio programs about prostitution: they happened, people heard them—or didn’t—they were over. They weren’t important, but in one way or another, they determined the next half year. They are the beginning of the story I seem to be telling. The first show, in March, was on another night when wet snow made driving difficult. I was afraid my guest, a social worker who counseled drug-addicted women, wouldn’t show up, but she did. “Do prostitutes want our pity or our respect?” I asked her; in a raspy voice with a Brooklyn accent she said, “Nobody ever wants anybody’s pity.” She talked matter-of-factly about her clients’ lives, how they might turn to prostitution now and then, yet insist they weren’t pros, how some of them were pros. Yet again, I’d agreed to a call-in show, but this time I knew people were listening. A producer sat behind a glass partition screening calls. I was nervous that callers would condemn prostitutes, but the first person I talked to was a man who’d patronized prostitutes and had discovered how decent they were; the second was a woman whose sister, a prostitute, had been killed by a man she’d picked up. “If prostitution is a victimless crime, I don’t know what a victim is,” she said.

  The last person we had time for was Mary, who sounded just like my mother until the strange moment, thirty seconds into her contribution, when I realized Mary was my mother. “Wait a second,” I said, then quieted myself. Roz or Mary was saying, “My cousin turned tricks during the Depression. She was a classy whore—an escort for businessmen. A call girl. She looked as if she didn’t have a brain in her head, but she was a college graduate. She’d gone to Hunter, like me, and we couldn’t get jobs. Even to be a salesgirl at Macy’s, you had to be Vassar or Smith. And I have to say, she was a nice person, but not that nice. Let’s not start thinking these women are saints.”

  I thanked my mother for her contribution—wondering which of my relatives she meant—and soon the show was over. As I drove home, alert for slippery spots, my hands trembled on the steering wheel. I was tired, and giddy with relief from a tension I hadn’t known I felt. And happy. I parked just down the block from our house, fitted my key into the lock, and crouched to forestall Arthur’s joyful leap at my chest with his front paws. He led me to Pekko, who was stretched out on our bed with The New York Times (he takes the New Haven Register at his office) and still another orange. By March he has used up the oranges from Florida and is buying them from Stop & Shop. Pekko said my mother had called to say she’d forgotten to listen until it was too late. “Oh, sure,” I said. “Did you hear Mary?”

  “I forgot to listen, too,” Pekko said.

  “You did?” It had not occurred to me that Pekko might not be listening. I wasn’t sure if I minded or not.

  Arthur sprang onto the bed and stood over Pekko, licking his lips and cheeks above the beard, celebrating my arrival with Pekko, then returning to celebrate their celebration with me. I sat down on the floor so as not to be jumped on and pinched Arthur’s bony neck through his black curls. The dog settled beside me while Pekko peeled the orange with his thumb, making a yellow pile of peel on our puffy green comforter. Then he ate it, section after section. When Arthur vaulted onto the bed again, he received an orange section.

  “You forgot?” I said. I reached over and took a piece of the orange so as not to have to wonder whether I’d get any.

  The penetrating smell of the orange peel narrowed my scope from the southern Connecticut listening public to the bedroom I sat in, while juice stung a paper cut on my finger. I should wear gloves to clean up trash, but I never bother. Leaning on the wall, still stroking the dog—who had returned to me—and looking up at Pekko, I said, “You really don’t think it’s a good idea to go on the radio talking about whores.”

  “I forgot. Oh, I suppose I was afraid you’d get calls from my friends, confessing to being pimps.”

  “I used to think you might be a pimp.”

  “I’ve done everything,” he said. “But not that.”

  “I thought that after one of our breakups,” I said. Our many separations were abrupt and surprising, each precipitated by a trivial disagreement. I’d drive away from the argument, stunned. Now my date book would be wrong and my days lopsided, skewed by absence. A few days later, I’d convince myself that the disagreement had indeed been significant; something was truly amiss. Once, I believed he despised me because he was incorruptible while I was amoral and irresponsible. Another time, I was afraid he was a crook. Sometimes a year or two passed before he called me again, or I called him, or we met by chance, falling into each other’s arms as if the other had been lost all that time, beyond the reach of e-mail, regular mail, phone.

  The orange was gone. I said I needed a glass of wine, because I did need it, or because I was mildly taunting Pekko, who hasn’t drunk alcohol for decades, after heaven knows what before that. He doesn’t do drugs, either, possibly so as to look down on people who do. I started refusing joints (I’d never had my own supply) when I decided to marry him, so I wouldn’t be one of those people.

  “Who’s Mary?” he said eventually.

  “Am I supposed to call my mother?”

  “She said, ‘Tell her don’t bother.’ Who’s Mary?”

  I fetched a glass of Merlot and sat on the edge of the bed while I told him about the show.

  “I should have listened,” he said. “Are you sure it was Roz?”

  “She did go to Hunter. I’ve never heard the story of the cousin who was a call girl. Maybe she didn’t want me to know.”

  “Maybe it’s not true,” said Pekko. He and Roz and I, I thought. There’s not one of us you can trust. “Maybe she was the call girl,” Pekko said.

  Next day the snow was less of a presence than it might have been, but the weather was damp and cloudy, and I slipped when I ventured down the steps, in my bathrobe, for the Times. I spent the morning at home, working on my coming radio shows and printing out clients’ bills. The phone rang as I left, at last, to keep an appointment with someone who didn’t interest me, Ellen Arlington. Ellen’s immense quantities of junk consisted not of objects she’d chosen to keep but of what had been imposed upon her: given, forcibly lent, or abandoned. Her accumulation concealed rather than revealed her, and working with her taught me nothing. I turned back to the ringing phone, hoping she was calling to cancel, but the voice was a man’s.

  “Daisy Andalusia,” he said quickly. “I’m a listener. Love that station.” He talked fast but didn’t sound peremptory or bureaucratically self-important. This speed seemed to claim, with a childlike guilelessness, that the speaker talked fast to have enough time for extra remarks, since he wa
s unendingly fascinating. So I pictured a man in a house, a man in a tan sweater with his back to a kitchen window.

  He sounded friendly, but it occurred to me for the first time that a listener could call to be rude, or to hurt. “You didn’t say your name,” I said.

  “Gordon Skeetling, the Yale Small Cities Project.” Office after all—Yale office: a large, glossy brown desk. “You work on messes,” he continued. “I’ve meant to call you for weeks, but I didn’t know if you’d do. Then, there you were on the radio. I assume you’re the same Daisy Andalusia. I’ve got a mess.”

  A client of mine had recommended me. “I was afraid you might not be intellectually up to the job,” he said, “but you’re smart, which is what I need: someone with brains, not just someone with a feather duster.”

  “I know people who clean to earn their living but are smart,”

  I said.

  “Of course. I apologize. I’m a snob. Come see my mess.” I pictured him walking back and forth, stretching the phone cord—a man in his late thirties, not quite as good-looking as he wanted to be. I made an appointment to visit his office in a row house on Temple Street, a downtown street at the edge of the Yale campus.

  As soon as we’d settled on a day and time, Gordon Skeetling said, “That social worker didn’t know what she was talking about,” changing subjects so fast I had to think what social worker he could mean.

  “On my program?”

  “She was advertising despair as tolerance. You don’t know how to keep a girl from turning tricks, so you decide it’s her right to do it. Tell me if I’m wrong.”

  “Isn’t it her right?”

  “It’s her right to step in front of a speeding truck, but if I see her, I’m going to grab her and pull her back,” he said. “Do you know about the Soul Patrol? A possibly simplistic solution to the moral problem, but intriguing, especially if you want to focus on local stuff. Which is the advantage of regional radio—you can do that.”