Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman Read online

  “What’s the Soul Patrol?”

  “Back in the seventies. Probably you’d rather keep your show current. Black women mysteriously murdered—quite a number of them, mostly prostitutes. In those days hookers walked on Chapel Street near Howe. You could see them there any evening.”

  “I remember.”

  “You go back, like me.” He was older than I’d thought. “So the brothers from Dwight decided they’d just keep the hookers company, a brother walking behind each woman. Of course business went way down. Those white guys from the suburbs figured they’d look somewhere else.”

  “Were the murders ever solved?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe we could find some guy who was in the patrol, for the show.”

  We? I thought. I said, “Are you black?”

  “White.”

  I’d never asked such a question. He seemed to offer permission of one sort or another. I got off the phone and hurried to my appointment.

  When I saw Gordon Skeetling a few days later, he did not wear the sweater I’d pictured. His hair was gray, thick, and straight—floppy—but his face was young, with inquiring, surprised blue eyes under black eyebrows that came to points. He was fifty, I guessed, a thin, rangy guy in a striped shirt and no tie, with long arms that often stretched sideways—toward a light switch, a coat hanger, a chair. He wore no wedding ring. Two desks stood in his big office—the main room of an old brownstone—but he was alone.

  “I’m one of those Yale people who doesn’t get tenure and doesn’t get fired,” he said, showing me around. “I got a grant and talked myself into an office, more than twenty years ago, and I’m good at finding money, so I’ve been here ever since. They’re a little ashamed of me because cities mean grubby, but they keep me because I locate my own funding. Mostly, I work on small cities, humdrum problems. I’m a researcher. I find things out for people who want to know them.”

  “New Haven?”

  “Sometimes New Haven. When Yale is accused of ignoring the inner city, they trot me out and I talk about research I did on public schools, or a study of prenatal care in low-income areas. That one, I worked with the medical school.”

  I felt the sense of permission I’d had on the phone—Gordon Skeetling gave it and had it—which surely is the opposite of arrogance, though he’d called himself a snob. I liked the thought of this man with long arms, unintimidated by Yale, who casually grabbed money and used it for some slightly confusing purpose. Gordon Skeetling found himself funny but wasn’t bitter, though he’d kept a job into middle age that probably wasn’t the one he’d imagined. Enjoying the permission, I said, “Did you think you’d do something else, twenty years ago?”

  “I don’t remember!” he said, waving his right arm, with apparent pleasure in his capacity to forget. “I have a law degree,” he said, “but I never practiced.”

  He led me to his archive—the mess that had brought us together—which was behind French doors, in a side room that had windows, because this row house was at the end of the row. The archive had once been a dining room or library. When I saw it, I sighed happily and stretched out my own arms as if to claim it, exaggerating the gesture to show that I too could make fun of my enthusiasms, that I had enthusiasms as remarkable as his.

  It was a colorful mess. Color matters. It was orderly but not too orderly. Extremely straight piles of accumulated artifacts make me uneasy, but these were rough piles in red, blue, green, yellow, and purple folders. There were heaps of folded maps, and the walls were covered with maps pasted to poster board in a nice, amateurish way: maps of Waterbury, Connecticut; Waterville, Maine; Worcester, Massachusetts; New Brunswick, New Jersey. New Haven. I said, “I’m glad New Haven counts.”

  “New Haven counts. You like New Haven?”

  “I do.”

  “So do I,” he said.

  Some maps were framed and properly hung. Others were propped against the wall, with still others behind them.

  “What’s in the folders?” I said.

  He shrugged. “Clippings, pamphlets, studies, offprints. Rules and regulations. Statutes and ordinances. No person shall keep a goat in the city of . . .”

  One wall held books and shelves of black boxes. On a table I saw posters and placards that Gordon Skeetling probably stole, warnings not to park because of construction, parades, street sweeping, leaf sweeping, snow plowing. A long table was covered with stacks of newspapers. Although he now worked alone, he said, over the years he’d sometimes had interns or assistants. He’d kept anything that excited somebody, and maybe that was why the room had tautness despite the conglomeration. It didn’t smell of exhaustion, like heaps and piles that have become routine.

  “You just like cities?” I said.

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  The man was respectable. People in expensive offices with central air-conditioning took him seriously. But he was quirky, like me and my friends. I thought people like him had to run antiques shops or used bookstores in Vermont, but he’d found a way to impress people in charge. I wanted him to be impressed with me.

  He perched on the edge of a table, and I did the same. “So,” I said, drawing out my notebook, “you want me to work along with you, and make decisions about what to keep?”

  “I’m too busy. Work by yourself. That’s why you had to be smart.”

  “I do this with my clients,” I said. “Unless they’re dead. Then they can’t complain about what I throw away.”

  Gordon Skeetling shrugged. “Pretend it’s yours. Figure out what you want. If I yell, yell back.”

  “Then why?” I said, interested but wary.

  “I would like the archive to be smaller,” he said, reaching his arms in both directions, as if to measure the room. “But primarily I want it used. Make something.”

  “What sort of something?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll talk.”

  I looked to see what I was sitting near. Stacks of tabloid newspapers, big old stacks of The National Enquirer, the Star. “You like these papers?” I said.

  “Not as much as I used to, before they were all about celebrities,” he said. “I used to buy them for the headlines. ‘Fisherman Kisses Loch Ness Monster. His Wife Divorces Him.’ Wonderful headlines and then wonderful subheads.”

  “They don’t particularly have to do with cities.”

  “I guess not,” he said, unperturbed. “Let me show you a good one.”

  He knew where it was. Others had taken this tour. The headline was maybe twenty years old. It read, TWO-HEADED WOMAN WEDS TWO MEN, and the subhead was doc says she’s twins.

  “I love that,” said Gordon Skeetling, stretching his arms wide, and I loved hearing him sing the word love. “Twins!” This man wasn’t afraid of himself.

  Of course I wanted a rich, glamorous call girl for my show. In my imagination, she’d come to the station in a fur coat, murmuring, “I hated them all, but they didn’t guess.” One morning at Lulu’s—my neighborhood coffee shop—a journalist I knew handed me a scrap of paper with a phone number on it. “She’s a psychologist in Boston,” she said. “She used to be a call girl. She’s willing to be interviewed by phone.”

  “I liked it,” the former call girl said, in an educated voice, on my third show. She’d been a graduate student in psychology, and she claimed that she’d practiced on the men she visited in their hotel rooms. “I learned more than I did in the placements they made me do for school. I felt sorry for them, and I helped them—for plenty of money. I lied to my friends about where I got my good clothes.”

  “You’re still talking about it,” I said. “People might recognize your voice.”

  “Maybe I want to be found out,” she said amiably. “I don’t think much of psychologists who don’t have a little pathology of their own. How do they sympathize with the lure of the irrational?”

  I too, in my youth, was bold, smart, sexy, and in need of money. “But wasn’t it humiliating?” I said.

  “Assuming it’
s humiliating,” she said, “depends on giving sex a certain weighty symbolism. You could feel that way about sharing food with someone, or shaking hands . . .”

  “Yes!” I said.

  She went on, “It’s not sex for money that makes prostitution disgusting. It’s the opportunity for blackmail, for disease, for cruelty. It’s dangerous because it’s a secret.”

  “I guess the secrecy is inherent,” I said. But I was mistaken. Our city held one former prostitute who cared nothing for secrecy, but I hadn’t found her. She called the station. “I have something to say about whores,” said her message. “My name is Muriel Peck.”

  Muriel Peck worked in a health program for poor people and in her spare time was an activist for prostitutes. She was willing to come to the station and discuss her history and views, so I canceled the criminologist I’d scheduled for the last session. A dark-skinned black woman wearing blue jeans, a purple corduroy jacket with a hood, and hiking boots, Muriel Peck arrived carrying a large blue-and-green bag, which turned out to contain rag dolls about two feet tall: one pink, one brown, and one green. She propped them on chairs. They were whore dolls, she explained. She’d made them. One doll was dressed in a short, sequined skirt and a bra top, another wore overalls, and the third—the green one—a long, old-fashioned skirt with a bustle. There was no way to know they were prostitutes, except that they wore cardboard labels: “Lady of the Night,” “Woman of Ill Repute.” The point was that women of all sorts have become prostitutes.

  “Being a whore did not make me somebody who was only fit to die,” Muriel said confidently on the air. Her graying hair stuck out from her head a few inches in all directions, which made her head look big and led the eye to rest on her face, which was still but intense, with prominent nose and cheekbones, and hooded eyes; you looked to make sure she wasn’t angry. “That’s how people thought for centuries, you know—not just about whores but about any poor girl who went to bed when she wasn’t married. Italian girls, Jewish girls. I am part Italian and part Jewish. Black skin is like chocolate ice cream. Any flavor the factory messes up, they add chocolate and everybody says it’s chocolate. That’s why you sometimes find a strawberry in chocolate ice cream.”

  “Oh, that can’t be right,” I said.

  “Oh, yes. One fourth Jew and one eighth Italian. I can show you the family tree.”

  “That’s not what I was doubting!” I said. “I’m one fourth Italian, too.”

  “There you go.”

  “Three quarters Jewish.” We seemed to have changed the subject. Listeners probably thought they’d somehow tuned in to two ladies in a living room.

  “Why did I start?” Muriel said, though I hadn’t asked. “I was poor. Times were bad. The factories seemed worse.”

  “But wasn’t it dreary, being a whore?”

  “Yes.”

  She now worked in organizations that fought to decriminalize prostitution. “Some of us want to make it legal,” she said. “Some just want to take away the criminal penalties, so a girl can go to the doctor without thinking next stop is the jail.”

  She’d quit being a prostitute after two years. “I was lucky. My pimp died.” Eventually she’d gone to a community college, and later she’d studied nursing. She wanted to talk about the dolls, and I tried to describe them. “All sorts of women,” she said again. “Shakes up your preconceptions.”

  “Even green women,” I said.

  “Even green. I make baby dolls too, for kids. Some kids love the green dolls, the lavender dolls. Some scream if you show them a green doll.”

  “The babies are not whore dolls,” I said.

  “No indeed. No baby whores. Child prostitution is one hundred percent evil. Because no child chooses that. Even if they think they choose, they don’t choose.”

  “So adult prostitutes choose?” I said.

  “Some choose,” Muriel said sadly. “And those are the ones you’re talking about on this show, am I right? The dead ones, the ones in jail, the ones somebody won’t allow to talk. You don’t have them on your radio show.”

  “No,” I admitted.

  I liked Muriel Peck. After the show she stuffed her dolls into the blue-and-green bag, and reached to shake hands. I was sorry I wouldn’t see her again. The radio series had just ended, and I drove home, pleased with myself but sad. I didn’t know who’d heard me. I didn’t know if Pekko had; he’d listened to one or two of the earlier shows. My mother admitted to hearing all but the first, and my friend Charlotte and her husband, Philip, had been carefully faithful, leaving enthusiastic phone or e-mail messages, but Pekko had said little, though I thought he’d heard at least one show. I wished I could gather my listeners into a room and look at them.

  At home I was greeted by Arthur and poured myself a glass of wine while Pekko, who had been reading the Times, watched me from the kitchen table. “Tired, sweetie?” he said, and I nodded. Our kitchen is big, and at one end there’s an old sofa, a faded greenish, comfortable thing, from the beach house where Pekko used to live. I sat down on it. “I caught part of that,” he said.

  “Was it all right?”

  “I know Muriel Peck.”

  “She lives in New Haven.”

  “The crafts are a sideline,” he said. “She works at Hill Health. That’s her real name.”

  “I know.”

  “For years and years,” Pekko said, “New Haven had visible hookers on Chapel and Howe. I guess they all died of AIDS.”

  “I remember them.”

  He gathered the newspaper sections. “Oh, Daisy.”

  “What? You hated the program?” I drank all my wine in a rush and stood up to pour some more.

  “I didn’t hate it. It was good. You’re funny on the radio. Your voice goes up and down. It’s nice.”

  “But?”

  “If you were going to talk about New Haven, you couldn’t find any other topic?”

  “Pekko, there’s nothing wrong with talking about prostitution,” I said.

  He gestured with the newspaper sections, as if they contained relevant evidence. “Look,” he said. “I’m not going to tell you this is some picture-perfect New England village where the big event of the week is the minister’s wife baking cookies.”

  “Those places have prostitutes, too,” I said. The phone rang.

  “But don’t you see what you’re doing? So many people are already afraid of this city.”

  “It wasn’t just about New Haven. Wait a second.”

  “Well—”

  I picked up the phone, thinking I should tell him about the Soul Patrol and Gordon Skeetling. He hadn’t heard the show on which I mentioned it, and so far, I hadn’t told him about my newest client. “Hello?” I said, my mind on Pekko, who left the room.

  “I got the right number,” said a woman. “I recognize your voice. Muriel told me to listen, and I just heard the show. I called her and got your number.” I put my hand over the receiver and called to Pekko, but he’d turned on the TV. The call was the third one that mattered arising from the radio show. The first was Gordon Skeetling, the second Muriel Peck, and the third was the woman on the phone. I was too unsettled and tired to take in her name that night, but I listened when she said she wanted to put on a play.

  Her name turned out to be Katya, and she had some sort of theater-related degree and a grant to put together community theater. Ordinary people would make up a play and produce it. “I want you,” she said. “You say what you think, and you don’t mumble.” The cast was about to meet for the first time, and Muriel had already agreed to join. I wanted to see Muriel Peck again, and I was sad about an ending and looking for a beginning. So I found myself, a few days later, in a big, drafty room at a downtown parish house (not the one that housed the soup kitchen; much of New Haven’s communal life takes place in parish houses) with Muriel, two other women, a man, and Katya, thinking up a play. We sat on mats on the floor, though chairs were piled in a corner, and Muriel brought one for herself, saying, “The floor is
for dogs, cats, and babies.” Katya—a big, white woman with glasses and long, light brown hair over her shoulders like a cloak—began with mindless physical exercises. Then we talked briefly about who we were. After that Katya asked us to say the most outrageous, the most unspeakable things we could think of. I was unimpressed, but I joined in. Oddly enough, or maybe not so oddly, we began with obscenity and profanity, and worked our way backwards to phrases of some interest, remarks that we’d heard or that had been said to us, remarks we could imagine someone making at a tough moment. It was true that one of these statements might conceivably be the basis for a play, or a moment around which a play could be constructed.

  “I never loved you, not even the night we robbed the bank!” said the man, who was young and Asian—Korean American, I found out later. This project had self-conscious ethnic diversity, like a photograph in a college view book. Katya and I were the only white people, and I liked that.

  “Bank is predictable,” said Katya. “I never loved you, not even the night we robbed the natural foods store!”

  “Your ugliness is beautiful,” Muriel said now.

  “His ugliness, her ugliness . . . ,” Katya mumbled.

  “Buy me a snake, honey,” one of the other two women said. One was black and one was Hispanic.

  “Buy me a car, buy me a rake, buy me a gun, buy me a man, buy me a . . .”

  I said, “It’s a headline.” Everybody turned toward me as I sat cross-legged on my mat. They nodded, as if to say they knew what a headline was. “Two-Headed Woman Weds Two Men,” I said. “Subhead: Doc Says She’s Twins.”

  They laughed, beginning to be comfortable, this little group, mussed and sweaty from the exercises. I can work up a sense of competition in any situation, and my skepticism about this undertaking disappeared temporarily when they liked my suggestion. There were other ideas, but we came back to Gordon Skeetling’s favorite headline. We could imagine a play about the Two-Headed Woman. We could begin to imagine her life.