The Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman

Nothing distracts me for long from sex. A friendly, intelligent man makes a funny remark, almost for his private benefit. He thinks nobody hears, but I laugh. For a moment shared understanding exhilarates us both; then I go further. I feel a yen to place my hand on his bare thigh, to see what he’s like with no clothes on. I was single for decades, after a brief early marriage, and there were many men like that.

What interests me about sex is nothing dangerous, nothing life-changing. It’s like the impulse that sends some women into stores that sell colored floss and kits for making stained-glass pendants—and of course I know that sometimes those women can’t refrain, even when pendants hang in every window, twisting together on their dirty strings, falling and breaking into the shards they once were, maybe killing the cat. Sex has mostly, for me, been less threatening than that, a reasonably healthy pastime, a form of arts and crafts that uses people instead of glass or thread.

At length, though, even so delightful a practice as sex begins to feel airlessly limited, a means of expression made clumsy by the need to include bodies as well as talk. At such times, I can be diverted by a different kind of activity: I like to put on conferences. Like patches of plain fabric in a quilt, unremarkable people look better in contact with others, and I look for chances to arrange them. In the seventies I ran something called Women’s Weekend. Later I persuaded the community college where I taught to host a colloquium, What Do We Really Think About Race? Most recently, along with my mother, Roz Garber, I ran a conference on mothers and adult daughters. Along comes an idea—ideas come while I’m driving—that requires multitudes (at least groups) arguing and laughing. I start making calls in the car, on my cell phone, then continue at home, buoyant over subject matter, forgetting that by the time my conference takes place, I’ll have to think of bodies after all, bodies with their stodgy requirements for food, bathrooms, directions, and unlocked, lighted rooms, bodies that may miss the afternoon session because they’re in bed with other bodies, even mine.

I am in my mid-fifties, and I have long, blond hair, possibly too long or too blond for my age. I bear the last name, Andalusia, of a man I no longer know and scarcely remember, with whom I moved to New Haven, Connecticut, thirty years ago so he could go to Yale Medical School while I supported him. When Dr. Andalusia left, I stayed. I’m not the only Yale divorcée who has liked New Haven, to the puzzlement of a departing ex. I liked East Rock and West Rock—red, striated traprock cliffs that bracket this city—and I liked the dirty harbor full of oyster boats and oil tankers, and the Quinnipiac River emptying rather grandly if messily under Interstate 95 and into Long Island Sound. I liked the decorous, well-proportioned New Haven green with its three old-fashioned churches—two brick, one reddish stone—its bag ladies and black teenagers; and I was amused by the way each man I slept with connected to someone else I knew: he’d gone to school with the last man I slept with, or his sister cleaned my teeth. The story I’m going to write down had to happen in a small city. Here, you’re never quite sure you’re done with a person; you never know how many ways the two of you will touch.

Someone I stopped knowing many times was the man I eventually married, Pekko Roberts. Pekko is a New Haven native, a noticeable man in his sixties: sturdy, white-haired, with a big, white beard he brushes daily and a tidy but prominent belly. More often than not, I broke up with him when we had dated for a few months and were talking about living together. I don’t know why I kept leaving him, since I claimed to be tired of being single, and pointed out to myself that a variety of partners isn’t inherent to the pleasures of sex. Pekko was in love with me, which made me a little restless, but he wasn’t so in love that he couldn’t see my faults, about which he was frank. “Daisy, you’re not making sense,” he’d say when I wasn’t; I’d get angry. He wasn’t imaginative in bed, but sex with Pekko made me happy; with him, I didn’t experience what often took place after sex with other men: a half hour of dismay, even loathing, about my middle-aged body, my habits, my friends, the way I lived my life. I could talk myself out of that unexplained despair, but with Pekko it didn’t come. He was moody and often silent, gruff but not unkind; he knew himself well enough not to blame others for his bad days. His caring—about me, about others—might be expressed in grunts, but I never doubted it. He was a lake I could swim in, in which the drop-offs and rocks were what they were, but the water was clean and not too cold, and there was intense pleasure to be found by swimming out to the center, turning on my back, and closing my eyes in the sun, whatever that means in terms of a guy.

Four years ago, in 1998, Pekko and I bought a house together in Goatville, a nineteenth-century New Haven neighborhood of small houses with steep roofs and long, skinny backyards, where dogs bark through chain-link fences. (We also bought a dog, a standard poodle called Arthur: a dog should be able to pronounce his own name.) The narrow two- and three-story houses on our block look like kindergarten drawings. It’s a cityscape best seen in winter twilight, when the peaked roofs of different heights are scribbled over by the bare branches of maples, oaks, and sycamores. Our house isn’t covered with ugly aluminum siding, like some, and after many discussions, we had it painted light gray with dark and light blue trim. Pekko said the color scheme was fussy.

So we lived together, and even held an offhand wedding. We tried to control our exuberant young dog, and we talked about our house, Arthur, our experiment in not breaking up, more than we talked about what we each did when we weren’t together. I didn’t mind Pekko’s moods as much as I’d expected to. Sometimes I’d suddenly feel alone again, but I’d never minded being alone; it was restful. I established moods of my own.

What I did when we were apart was teach, with decreasing interest. Then one day, I stopped my car at a traffic light next to a red Audi driven by a young woman. The entire backseat and front passenger seat were filled with paper—old newspapers and mail from the look of it—all the way to the bottoms of the windows. I couldn’t stop thinking about that car, and a week later, when I saw the Audi parked not far from where I live, I taped a note to the windshield. “I’m expensive,” I wrote, as if I’d done this before, “but I can help.” The clutter stopped at the windows: the owner liked light, not darkness, and was cautious and disciplined enough to observe some limits. She called me, I figured out what to do, and it worked.

This was work I couldn’t stop talking about at home. I was nonthreatening, I explained to Pekko. Neither the owner of the Audi nor I had a driveway, so we moved the car to a parking lot and surrounded it with cartons. Only one was labeled “Keep.” Then we undertook a long process of sorting and deciding. I was so conservative, so hesitant, that after a while she became impatient—and nervous because I charged by the hour—and she threw away armloads.

“You like this,” said Pekko. “Quit your job and start a business.”

“How will I live?” I said, but I had stopped what I was doing—glancing at the paper in our kitchen—to think how much I’d like to have such a business.

“I make enough for both of us,” he said.

I was incredulous. “If you support me, you’ll start ordering me around. You’ll expect me to cook.”

“It’s an investment,” he said. “I don’t care if you cook. When you get rich, I’ll do something new, and you’ll support me.” Pekko had enough money, I was pretty sure, that he could do whatever he liked, whether I was rich or not. He’s had many businesses over the years. Now he buys and manages real estate in New Haven’s inner city.

(“You’re a slumlord?” I had said, when we got together after one of our gaps, and he described his new work.

“Without me they’d be homeless.”)

I liked teaching, but I’d had that job for decades—I was tired of it. Still, I’d never considered letting a man support me. “I’d be like a whore,” I said.

“What?”

“You’re offering me money for sex. You pay, I go to bed with you.”

Pekko sighed. “It’s different when you’re married,” he said. Then he added, “I won’t make fun of you if you fail,” and I understood what I’d been afraid of.

To my mother’s consternation—“As a teacher, you had clean hands!”—I became someone who sorted and organized clutter. I want to manage not just people, it seems, but their belongings, and they seem to want me to do it. I’ve been doing it ever since—two or three years.

 

Pekko cooks well, several times a week. Single for a long time, he learned to fix a few good meals to impress women. “Chicken is the best,” he used to say. “Women claim to like fish, but they’re easier to seduce after chicken.” One day in February, about a year ago—2001—Pekko broiled chicken breasts (“You want to say ‘breasts’ early in the evening”) spread with Dijon and sour cream. He’d found thin asparagus and strawberries at an Italian market a few blocks away. So we ate a spring meal, but it had started to snow in the afternoon, and now it was snowing hard.

Snow made us want to stay in our warm house and take each other’s clothes off, and Pekko’s cooking works on me. The winter strawberries weren’t quite sweet, so we dipped them in sugar. After eating them, we might have licked the juice from our fingers and gone to bed, but the phone rang. My mother—who moved to New Haven from New York when she retired—was calling from a soup kitchen in a downtown parish house, where she helped serve supper on Thursday evenings. The volunteers had locked their coats and purses in a closet, she explained with some zest, but now the lock was broken and nobody could open the door. The only locksmith they could reach had had a minor car accident in the slippery snow and refused to come until morning. “Pekko could fix the lock,” she said. “Also, I could take a cab home, but my house keys are locked in the closet.” She no longer drives at night and had gone to the soup kitchen by taxi.

I love to drive in snow, and I had a key to my mother’s house. Pekko doesn’t mind driving in snow, he likes my mother, and the story of the lock interested him, but by the time he’d taken off his apron—Pekko cooks in an apron—I was leading the way to my car, with an extra coat for Roz over my arm. I hate being a passenger in any weather. Pekko stumped along behind me in the light, gritty snow.

So I drove, and it was a little slippery. At the soup kitchen, the eaters had departed and the trays had been washed and replaced in the church kitchen. The place smelled of tomato sauce. I’d picked up or delivered my mother there a few times, and once I had stayed to serve dessert, wearing plastic gloves to offer assorted day-old pastries to men and women who thoughtfully chose a cherry Danish, an apple turnover, or an iced cruller. It’s a surprisingly appealing place, whether because a significant number of the guests are experiencing chemically induced euphoria or because black, Hispanic, and white people order one another around with jocularity and no fuss.

Now, the director—a big, cheerful woman with a loud voice—was organizing attempts to open the closet. The key went in, but the cylinder flipped over and over without resistance, without catching. So many people were sure they’d know just how to turn the key that Pekko couldn’t get near the door. The soup kitchen is staffed partly by volunteers, partly by people doing community service who are sent by the courts, and partly by kids from some kind of reform school. One of those—nobody was asking how he’d acquired his experience—moved forward now, and we joined the group watching him.

“I never put my things in that closet!” said a woman in a coat, with self-satisfaction. She could have left but didn’t. The rest, a coatless group of four or five, stood around my mother, who looked out from under white curls like a wise woman, good-naturedly razzing the young man at the door. I joined the crowd. Pekko watched quietly while the young man worked a length of wire coat hanger into the disabled lock. He bent it so it surrounded the bolt inside and came out the bottom, but it didn’t dislodge the bolt. “This is a good lock,” he said respectfully. The sexton arrived. He explained loudly that the door was specially braced and wouldn’t come off even if the hinges were removed.

“Pekko!” said one of the coatless women—a thin white woman, maybe in her forties.

“Hey.” Pekko shook her hand solemnly. “How are you, Daphne?”

My mother got interested. “You two know each other?”

“Do you know Gabby?” said Daphne. For some reason they call my mother Gabby at the soup kitchen.

Pekko introduced me, and Daphne said to him, “I heard you got married.” Then to me, “I worked for Pekko when he had the restaurant.” That would have been twelve or fifteen years ago. When we met, he owned a frozen yogurt store.

Daphne said she was working at the soup kitchen because of a traffic violation, and I wondered if that was true. I didn’t think you had to do community service for a speeding ticket.

“What are you doing these days?” Pekko said. Daphne’s face was jumpy, lined by too much smoking. Light brown hair fell close to her eyes, and a skittish teenage face was visible beneath her present one.

“Waitressing, still. Whatever I can get my hands on, but that pays the best. I’m working lunches now, so I can come here in the evening.”

Finally the sexton shooed us all out. The director’s car keys were in her pants pocket. Coatless, she led two people with neither coats nor keys to her car. Pekko offered Daphne a ride, and she followed us, hugging herself in the cold, while my mother came along, diminutive in my extra coat. I’m tall. Pekko hadn’t had a turn at the lock.

Daphne lived in Hamden, so I took Roz home first. Pekko and I sat silently in the front seat while Roz and Daphne chattered in the back like our children. Daphne talked about her kids, and Roz volunteered facts about my two older brothers and me, as if we were Daphne’s kids’ counterparts, and as if I wasn’t there. “Oh, Daisy had excellent teeth.”

Roz lives in a small brick house on Prospect Street. “It’s too much work for me,” she told Daphne as we approached it. “It’s supposedly low maintenance, but it’s not low enough.” She had a contract for snow removal, but keeping up the yard was difficult. “No help from my daughter,” Roz said. “She’s no gardener.”

“I like to garden,” Daphne said, after a pause. We had reached Roz’s as yet unplowed driveway, and I drove up it. I didn’t get out to help her. My mother, firm on her legs, was wearing state-of-the-art boots. “I could do your yard work,” Daphne continued, as Roz opened her door.

“You could?” she said, climbing out. She took my key to her house, and said, “I’ll keep this coat for a while. I like it.” She made her way through the snow, and as she let herself in, I backed carefully down the driveway. Then I took Daphne, who became quiet, to Hamden.

On the drive home, I asked Pekko, “What’s Daphne’s trouble?”

“She’s had plenty of troubles,” he said. He reflected for a while. “No fractures that I know of.”

“Healthy.”

“Well, I think she once had cancer.”

“That’s why you shook her hand that way?”

“No, no. It was a long time ago.”

“What else?”

“Nothing else.”

“Is it all right if she does yard work for my mother?”

“I suppose. She’s a nice woman.”

At home, there was a message for me on the answering machine. The last time I’d had the urge to put together a talking event, I’d gone on the radio instead of assembling a group. I’d become interested in a small, homey radio station not far from New Haven, run mostly by volunteers. I worked in their office for a while, then persuaded someone to let me substitute on her low-key, casual show when she went on vacation. So I’d done a few shows, playing music and reading poems aloud, and apparently people liked them. The message, that February evening, asked if I’d be interested in doing five programs on “a topic of public interest.”

“I could talk about hunger and homelessness,” I said to Pekko. “Or prostitution. Do they let you talk about whores on the radio?”

“Like daytime television?” He was stamping snow off his shoes. “What makes you think of that?”

“More like oral history. Sociology. Are some of your tenants prostitutes?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. I wrote down the name and phone number of the woman who’d called. Then I started washing the dishes. As I stood at the sink, still cold from being outdoors, Pekko came and stood behind me, putting his hands on my waist, then drawing them down the sides of my hips. Then he pressed his body into my back and moved his hands to my chest. I left the broiler pan to soak and turned toward him, my breasts throbbing. I didn’t reach under his clothes with my wet hands. Arthur squeezed his head between us, so Pekko put him in the yard. We went to bed at last, hurrying under the comforter once we were undressed. Pekko’s solid body was confident and warm as it moved above me. We came at the same time, and lay quietly afterward. I reached to stroke the side of his body, and he took my hand, held it, then let it go.

It was early for bedtime, and I’d left the dishes in the sink, but I thought I’d get up only to brush my teeth, then read in bed before sleep. Pekko now snored lightly beside me, but when I sat up, he roused himself, slapped his bare thighs as he swung out of bed, and said, “I’ll take Arthur for a walk.”

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 was 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.”

“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.

“At first, she’s a baby,” Muriel said. “I can make a two-headed doll.”

“That sounds horrible, a two-headed baby,” said the man.

“You want a two-headed woman,” Muriel said slowly from her lone folding chair, turning her big head in his direction, “you got a former two-headed baby.”

 

When my friends the LoPrestis take a trip, Philip keeps a journal that he later copies and gives to people he knows, recording not private insecurities or arguments with Charlotte but discoveries of painters and architects, praiseworthy restaurants, hotels worth the money. He must like to imagine being asked for advice; so do I. I’m no journal keeper, and I began writing this narrative without knowing why, but as I proceed, the reader I think of wants a guidebook. A voice—maybe Philip’s, maybe my brother Stephen’s—asks, “What’s it like to live the way you do?”

“The way I do?”

“Heedlessly. Is it a choice, or is this the best you can do? Is it worth it?”

“Heedlessly? Is that how I live?”

 

The client I described to myself as Irritating Ellen, who couldn’t reject what nobody wanted, was in her late forties, with too many light brown curls on her shoulders and fluttery arms, accustomed to shrugs and hugs. Though she’d given me a key, trusting me instantly, she seemed able to leave her job at any hour to meet me. Ellen had grown up in a big house, all cupolas and porches, on East Rock Road. When her husband left her, she and her two children returned there to live with her parents. Now one parent had died and the other was in Florida, while Ellen and her kids lived on with their own possessions, her parents’, and everybody else’s. We had an appointment on a sunny morning in March—around the time of the first meeting about the play—but when I rang the doorbell, I heard no footsteps. It was the first day warm enough that waiting wasn’t uncomfortable, and Ellen’s old-fashioned street was pretty even in the dull season between snow and buds. Each ample, intricately trimmed house had its own variation: carved balusters, curved front steps, a widow’s walk. As I stood there, my mind went not to Ellen’s mess but to Gordon Skeetling’s, and I tried to think where I’d sit in that side room so he couldn’t see me through the wide glass doors. When Ellen still didn’t come, I let myself into her crowded foyer and big, crowded, dusty living room, planning what I might do in her absence, noting that in Ellen’s house windows were obscured with junk. I was about to find the kitchen and fix myself a cup of coffee when Ellen came toward me. Not every window in this house was blocked, and sun lit her solicitous face. She held something in her arms.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m here.”

I thought she carried a pile of old clothes, but it was a baby.

“You didn’t let somebody give you that!” I said. Her children were school age.

“Just for a few hours.” The baby, a tense creature with hard fists and a swirl of light hair, was soon screaming.

“Why didn’t you say no?” I said, as if my work with Ellen entitled me to candor. I don’t have children, and other people’s instigate too many feelings in me: a wish both to protect them and to shake off encroaching protection, and helplessness, and also a frightening wish to hurt. Apparently I am both the one who might be harmed, rescued, or stymied by good intentions and the one who’d do the hurting, the saving, the encroaching. Soon I was carrying this girl around, my arms itchy with conflict while her fingers clutched my hair. Later, I couldn’t remember why Ellen suddenly wanted to show me something she had to retrieve, kneeling, from a basket on the floor—or exactly when she handed me the child. “At least she doesn’t have two heads,” I said nervously, so then I had to explain.

“I did theater in college,” Ellen said.

“This may not qualify as theater.”

“Mostly I was a director,” she said. “Sometimes I acted. I wish I had time for it now.”

I might have said she’d have time if she didn’t let other people rule her life, but the one-headed baby was making too much noise. I didn’t want to prolong the conversation anyway, lest Ellen try to join our cast. If she did, I’d drop out, I thought. If Ellen was even slightly interested in our play, it must be too obliging. The baby’s sobs quieted as I held her.

“We can make lists,” I said. “Get paper.” I demonstrated surprising patience with other clients, watching myself in disbelief as their tedium just made me smile like a cartoon Buddha, or a stereotype of a cloistered nun. With Ellen, I was my cranky self.

She went for paper. As I waited, I noted that she or someone else had once woven baskets, or people had taken to giving her baskets. Tall hampers and wicker urns held dusty dried flowers or fabric scraps that would never make a quilt. She might have carried baskets of goodies to her grandmother through the wood: she had that look. When she returned, she stood in the dust motes under her high ceiling, holding paper and pen ready. Even scrap paper in this house had been donated: this was the stationery of an oil company.

I didn’t know what to say while holding a baby. When I pretended to sympathize with other clients’ acquisitiveness I was not pretending—though I wasn’t a gatherer myself—but I couldn’t seem to join Ellen in her acquiescence, even temporarily. The baby wouldn’t settle into my arms but stiffened and arched. She and Ellen were in cahoots, preferring discomfort. Ellen had reasons I was too bored to refute for refusing to take any single load to Goodwill. “I thought we’d just arrange it more efficiently,” she always said.

“Could I have a cup of coffee?” I asked now.

“Of course!” I followed her into the kitchen, a big room with old-fashioned appliances. I stood where the baby could see over my shoulder, out the window, and she calmed enough that I gingerly sat down. Ellen measured coffee into a coffeemaker that stood on a tiny open space at the corner of a cabinet whose surface was filled with stacks of bowls, vases, and carafes. Glass doors in cupboards revealed shelves crowded with china and glasses.

Ellen served me coffee in a mug in which magenta and blue glaze splashed over speckled gray horizontal ridges, and my mood shifting, I curved my fingers around it to feel the warmth. “Hold the baby well away from the mug,” Ellen said, and I looked at her, startled by authority in her voice. I never yearn for the objects I see when I work. I alternate between wanting my clients to keep their elaborate constructions of junk and wanting to destroy and banish their possessions any way at all, ignoring civic-minded strictures about recycling, toxic waste disposal, and charity, scoffing at the supposed obligation to avoid waste by providing simple good people in simple good places used tires to make sandals of, used paper to turn into new paper. At home, after a day of work, I consider throwing out everything I touch, and Pekko and I don’t have a lot of objects. But in Ellen’s kitchen, I liked the mug I drank from, and then I desired something else: a fat white pitcher, possibly Italian pottery. It was about the size of the baby, with painted yellow flowers. Next to the sink, it took up counter space. “Let’s start by getting rid of that pitcher,” I said.

“My cousin . . . ,” she began. “And I think it’s nice.”

“Everything’s nice, but let’s decimate this collection, for a start. Let’s put every tenth object in the garbage can.”

“You said you had ideas,” Ellen said.

“Oh, you hate everything here.”

Ellen stood and stepped backwards, leaning against her sink as if to insert herself between me and everything in the room. She stretched her arms out and put a protective hand on the yellow-and-white pitcher. Then the baby wriggled, and for a second it seemed she’d fall. I started, and she did slip through my grasp, but I caught her with my other hand. In the meantime, Ellen’s arms swept toward us, and the pitcher crashed to the floor as my client cried out in grief and anger. Its interior was red clay, with the potter’s coils still visible. Ellen took the baby and carried her upstairs, shaking her head when I offered to clean up the shards. “Next week,” she said as she left the room, her coffee untouched. Not “Never.”

 

The play began with the pregnancy of the two-headed baby’s mother, who didn’t yet know about the two heads. The first time we tried making up a scene, I played the father. Feeling helpless, I stood in the middle of an open floor next to the young black woman, Chantal, who stared at me through rimless glasses. She had rolled up a sweater and stuffed it under her shirt. “Are you worried about your wife?” Katya prompted. She kept a tape recorder running.

So the father of the two-headed baby would be a worrier. “Did you sign up for childbirth preparation classes?” I asked my wife, remembering a friend’s account of this phenomenon.

“Shut up, I’m cooking!” she said. “Shut up! I’m dancing!” Chantal mimed cooking and dancing. She’d once been in an improvisation troupe. She had a quick way of moving, turning her head swiftly in response to what others said, so her glasses flashed.

“Did you ask the doctor if it’s all right to dance around like that?” I said, again after silence.

“Doctor, may I dance? May I eat? May I fool around with men?”

“Men?” I said. It was embarrassing. Why was I doing this?

The doctor sat on the floor, cross-legged, giggling. She was Denise, a Hispanic woman of about forty. Now she seemed to realize she had to talk. “None of that stuff. Certainly no sex,” she said as the doctor. “And don’t eat.”

“But I’m hungry,” said my wife. “I’m horny.”

The childbirth preparation teacher, who was Muriel Peck, organized two pregnant women and their husbands (everybody including Katya), and made the women lie on the floor and breathe deeply. After a while she stopped and said, “This isn’t a play.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Katya from the floor. “We’ll settle on a script later.”

I tried to be the husband. “My wife can’t lie on her back,” I said. “Her belly is too big.”

“I’m fine,” my wife contradicted me. “Leave me alone. I want to suffer.”

The other father—the Korean American kid, David—turned to me. “Are you glad your wife is pregnant? I’m scared.”

“I’m scared, too,” I said. “I’m scared the baby will die. I’m scared I’ll kill the baby.”

“How would you do that?”

“Oh, there are plenty of ways to kill a baby.”

In labor, Chantal kicked rapidly, then got up and ran around in circles. “In the improv troupe,” she said, “we looked for the large, surprising gesture.” Then she sat down on the floor and said, “I don’t want to be a mother! I can’t get this baby out because I don’t love it!”

“Oh, you’ll love it,” said the doctor. “But this is a difficult birth. I’d better do a cesarean.”

Chantal said, as herself, “Doctors call it a C-section.”

“A C-section.”

Katya stepped in as a nurse. “Here’s a knife!”

“Did you wash it?” said the doctor. I was surprised, and I laughed. I hadn’t expected Denise to surprise me.

With a swoop of the imaginary knife, the doctor slashed Chantal’s belly. She reached forward. “I know how they pull it out, because I had one,” she said. She grunted and held up an imaginary baby.

“Oh, my God,” the doctor shouted. “The baby has two heads!”

All of us except Chantal rushed around, clutching our heads. I was astonished to be doing this.

Chantal shouted, “It’s my fault!” and we stopped. “I slept with another man when I was pregnant. Each head looks like one of them.”

“Unfaithful?” I said. “How could you do that to me?”

“Well, I’m the one who slept with your wife,” David said. “But I didn’t make her pregnant. I’m Asian, and neither of these heads looks Asian.”

“It’s too soon to tell,” Denise the doctor said firmly. “Stop yelling, all of you. Nobody can live with two heads. Don’t look at the baby. She’s going to die. She has too much brain.”

Chantal had been lying on the floor, but now she sat up and said firmly, “Let me see my baby!” After the boisterousness, this was somewhat impressive. Obediently, as her husband I took an imaginary child from Denise and carried it toward my wife. “I love the baby,” she said, taking the child in her arms.

“Better not love the baby,” said the doctor.

“But I want to love the baby!”

“Give it a name,” said the doctor. “Name the baby before she dies.”

“I’ll name her TheaDora,” said Chantal. “That way, we don’t have to decide if she’s one person or two people. She’s Thea and Dora, or she’s TheaDora.”

Katya stopped being the nurse and withdrew to her place beside the tape recorder. “I’m the baby,” she said, and wailed. David joined in as the rest of the baby. This play was full of shouting.

 

Pekko’s back reveals more than his face. A thick man, he experiences feeling with his shoulders. He thinks his face conceals him, and maybe it does, but his back is less circumspect. Walking into the kitchen one evening, I saw his back first as he sat at the kitchen table, talking on the phone, and I guessed we wouldn’t be making love for a while. He was elsewhere and needed to be retrieved, but I don’t know how to do that. I’d come home tired and was in the bathtub when I heard him come in, greet Arthur, and then answer the phone. From the rise and fall of his voice, the pauses, I knew he was talking to my mother.

Pekko was the landlord of several apartment houses and one of the last SROs in New Haven—that’s a single-room-occupancy building, in which people with meager resources have a room with a hot plate and use a bathroom in the hall. At the time I’m recalling, he was having the hallway fixed up and painted, and uncharacteristically, he’d hired a contractor who was a former drug addict and who’d put together a company of ex-users. They were competent, but they wanted to be watched and praised as they worked. “I’m not a kindergarten teacher,” Pekko had been saying. He hates standing around. He’s incapable even of waiting while I finish playing solitaire on the computer (and he thinks playing solitaire is addictive behavior). Pekko looks like the king of spades, by the way.

Walking into the kitchen behind him, I sat down, half listening and looking over the mail, assuming Pekko would soon hand me the phone, but he didn’t. It had grown dark, and he hadn’t bothered to stand up and turn on the light.

“You buy these things ready-made,” Pekko was saying. “She doesn’t have to be an old world cabinetmaker.” At last he hung up.

I was too tired to talk to Roz, but I said, “She didn’t want to talk to me?”

“She called to ask my advice.”

“I gather, but usually that’s just an excuse.”

“Not this time.”

“What did she want?”

“She wants to hire Daphne to install kitchen cabinets.”

“But she already has kitchen cabinets,” I said. “Not that she cooks.”

“She doesn’t like them. Daphne claims what she’s really good at is carpentry. She says she took a job training course in carpentry for women.”

“Is that true?”

“I don’t know. Your mother seems to think I’m an expert on carpentry and an expert on Daphne.”

“She thinks you’re an expert in everything, but you like that. How did they get from raking leaves to carpentry this fast?”

“How should I know?”

“She had her in for coffee,” I said, picturing the two of them in the kitchen. “She was so happy with Daphne’s raking that she offered her a cup of coffee.” This image annoyed me, as if my mother was allowed to have coffee only with me, although I didn’t visit her often. “There were the old cabinets,” I continued. Then I said, “I wish she wouldn’t make friends with people like that.”

“Like what? There’s nothing wrong with Daphne.”

“Pekko, you’re obviously wary of Daphne. And she’s doing community service. Doesn’t that mean she committed a crime?” I stood up and turned on the light.

“I don’t know anything about it. We’re old friends,” said Pekko. “I ought to fire those druggies and hire her to paint that staircase.”

“Did you sleep with her when she worked for you?” I said.

“I didn’t even know you then.”

“I don’t care.” But now he picked up the newspaper. So I went back to reading the catalog I’d glanced at before, and time passed, and the mood changed. I for one was too hungry to think about what my mother and Daphne did, or even what Daphne and Pekko did.

I was too hungry to think and too hungry to cook, too tired even to take on the minor responsibility of suggesting dinner out. I knew Pekko wanted me to take charge, and I thought he might know I wanted him to. So we continued to sit. This sort of impasse led to bad times in our dating days. We’d finally eat at ten o’clock and be so hungry we’d quarrel. Now, Arthur pressed his head onto my lap and under my hands, making me stroke his hard, narrow skull. Then he thrust his nose into the crotch of my pants. I rose to feed him and broke the tension in the room. Pekko stood too, slapped his thighs, and watched me feed the dog. “Basement Thai,” he said. The Thai restaurant we like best, where there’s usually room for us, is in a basement on Chapel Street.

“It’s Tuesday, so I have time,” I said.

“No radio.”

“Radio’s finished. No play.” Both were on Wednesdays.

But that made me think about the radio series, and I wanted to ask, “Was Daphne ever a prostitute?” Of course I wouldn’t get an actual answer.

“So what you’re saying,” said Pekko, “is that if you had something to do, you’d skip dinner with me and do it.”

“I’m hungry,” I said.

 

Why the fascination with prostitutes?” Gordon Skeetling asked a few days later, as we walked down Temple Street, where the sycamores weren’t green yet. He’d proposed lunch so he could explain what he wanted of me. “Not that you can’t develop your own ideas.” He had a way of whooshing aside objections that hadn’t yet been made, by claiming not to disagree with them. The objections were bold, so within a sentence or two he might make fair conversational progress on my behalf. Now he added, after “fascination with prostitutes,” “Not that there’s anything illegitimate about the subject of prostitution.”

“That’s right, there isn’t!” I said, instead of claiming I wasn’t fascinated.

We crossed a parking lot and entered Clark’s Pizza—which is Greek despite its name—through the back door. It’s an old-fashioned lunch place with red upholstered booths and a menu including gyros and moussaka. Gordon had a light, tenor voice—the voice of a younger man—and as we sat down in a booth near the windows, I looked around to see if anyone was listening.

“Prostitutes are just one sort of needy person,” I continued. “They’re usually poor. They may be homeless. They may have AIDS.”

I ordered a Greek salad, and he asked for spanakopita. I didn’t feel rushed with Gordon Skeetling, so after my outburst I tried to answer his question truthfully. Of course I didn’t know why I’d wanted to do a series about prostitution, only that I did. “I’m not a prostitute,” I began again, in a different tone.

“Were you ever offered money for sex?” he said. “It never happened to me. I guess I’m not attractive enough.”

“Twice,” I said and told him the stories I couldn’t get Pekko to listen to—the man outside the bakery, the man outside the dress shop. I remembered another occasion I didn’t mention.

“Were you tempted?” he said quickly, sounding not as if he was trying to get personal but as if he was such a curious person he couldn’t keep from asking. Then he answered his own question. “Well, you were tempted as I would be—by the chance to learn something. Not by the money or the sex itself.”

Then he added, “What did you do, when the first man asked you?”

“I think I pretended I hadn’t heard. I hurried away. I was afraid he might follow me.”

He nodded, and shrugged off his raincoat, and he was wearing a tan sweater, the way I’d first imagined him. He was narrower than I thought when I saw him in a jacket. He took up room when he spread his arms, and now he stretched one arm along the back of the booth. Behind us, a small child stood up and patted Gordon’s arm vigorously. He ignored her.

“Yes,” I said slowly. “It’s the idea of doing something with a stranger that you’d ordinarily do only with someone you cared about. Or at least knew.”

“Something about eliminating distance?”

“No. I think prostitutes and their clients must be lonely. They don’t make a connection.”

“With me they do,” he said.

“You patronize whores?”

“No, but I buy them drinks, or cups of coffee. I don’t want to sleep with them, but I like to talk to them. Like you, but I’ve never gone on the radio.”

The child in the next booth had been coaxed to sit down, but now she turned and patted Gordon’s arm once more. He glanced at her as if at a woman who tapped his arm in the street. “What you do for a living is perfectly respectable, of course,” he said then. “This poking in attics and cellars. But I wonder— Don’t be insulted.”

“I’m never insulted.”

“You go to people’s houses, and they take you to a private room and show you something they don’t show anybody else.”

“Yes,” I said. “The locked door. It’s true.”

Our lunches were brought. “Maybe trash is the new genitalia,” said Gordon.

There was one more interruption by the child, and I asked him if he had kids. “Nieces, nephews,” he said.

“Me too. You’re married?”

“Twice,” he said. “Not now. You?” So I told him about marrying Pekko after years of being single.

“I know Pekko Roberts,” he said. “We were on a board together.”

He ate spanakopita in silence, concentrating on cutting layers of phyllo dough and spinach and feta cheese, and then told me more about the Small Cities Project. He was a paid researcher; small cities paid him for studies, and in the course of his research, he often found a magazine piece he wanted to write. “The archive is leftovers,” he said. “My thought is, if you show up, read, throw away the trash—well, what’s left will have an emphasis, just because I do, because the people who’ve worked with me do, maybe because you do. Maybe everything you look at will have to do with prostitution. The process could lead to something—another radio series, a paper, a book. I can pay you for a while, but if you hit on something big, you’ll have to find somebody to fund it.”

I considered mentioning what I’d already come up with, after my single look at his archive—the play about the two-headed woman—but I didn’t.

 

On April 1, Muriel brought the two-headed doll to rehearsal. She was bigger than a baby, a tan rag doll with something inside to stiffen her a bit. Her arms were slightly bent, and her legs were straight and fat. She wore a yellow nightgown with broad shoulders and two neck openings, and out of each opening rose a head. One had a dark brown face, short, black yarn hair, and black button eyes, while the other’s face was peach-colored. It had short, yellow hair and blue eyes. The doll was startling, and it silenced me; I stopped feeling, at least for now, as if I’d wandered into something beneath me. I was the first to take it from Muriel, and I held it gingerly. Both faces had appliquéd circles of red felt for mouths. They silently screamed. “You sewed each strand of hair, one at a time,” I said.

“You make loops, then you cut them. It makes that cute baby fuzz.” Muriel’s placid pride did not quite acknowledge the doll’s strangeness. It was numinous, and nobody ever picked it up casually.

When we began rehearsing, David and Muriel played the baby’s parents, because Katya said it was too soon to decide on roles. As the mother, Muriel stroked the baby and walked with it. Muriel’s body was muscular and efficient, and she walked fast. She always wore jeans. She made dolls, but she looked as if she’d wear a hard hat and drive a bulldozer.

“There’s something I have to tell you, dear,” said her husband. “I want a divorce.”

Muriel turned her still, intent face in his direction. “You’re going to leave me alone with TheaDora?”

“April fool!” said David. “I don’t want a divorce. April fool!”

“Lover boy,” Muriel said slowly, “I have to tell you something.”

“What’s that?”

“Our baby has two heads. Not April fool. Not April fool.” Muriel was bigger than David, and when she stared at him, he seemed to grow smaller. He’d gone to Yale and was barely out of college. He had told us he worked with computers.

When David and I left together after the rehearsal, I asked, “What made you say that?”

“The April fool joke? I felt mean. That doll is so weird.”

 

The next time I saw Ellen she had no spare children in her arms, and we tried to make a plan for her kitchen. She still wanted to keep everything, just rearrange it, and I forced myself to agree. She didn’t mention the broken pitcher. Sitting on the floor, we gathered pots and pans and crockery from her many pantries and cabinets and shelves, and then we grouped everything in categories: baking pans in a pile, sugar bowls in one corner, stacks of plates in another. Ellen’s children came home from school, and each watched us briefly before turning away. One was a rather mature-looking girl with long hair, who looked around critically but didn’t speak. The other I took to be a boy—stubby, plump, with a practical look—but she later turned out to be another girl. For the rest of the afternoon I heard footsteps or music, occasionally, from upstairs. The children played sad folk music, not what I’d have expected. Ellen and I had made matters worse, but as we worked she said, “This was a good idea.”

“What about supper?”

“We’ll order in.”

“What about breakfast?”

“Breakfast is easy.”

At least she didn’t have a dog running around. “Why don’t you have animals?” I said, surprised by that thought. “Where are everybody’s unwanted cats and dogs?”

“I got rid of them. Three cats and a dog. Justine’s allergic.”

“What did you do, kill them?”

“No, I didn’t kill them!” She sat up. She’d been lying on her stomach, pulling dusty bowls out from a deep shelf, getting dust on her skirt. Ellen wore wide cotton skirts in pale, swirling prints. “I bought cute things for them—leashes, little beds. Then I lined them up outside a supermarket and looked pathetic until people took them.” We stopped working and began discussing animals. Ellen had missed those pets. We had a conversation new friends have, beginning with childhood dogs, but I grew bored with her undifferentiated grief for the pets of her life. I didn’t want to be her friend, but I kept listening, and narrowly missed eating Chinese takeout with her and the children. I promised to come the next day. When she was out of the room for a moment, I dealt with my feelings by pocketing a sugar bowl—a rather nice one, blue ceramic—and later I threw it in the garbage.

 

As my mother told Daphne, I am no gardener, but on a windy but sunny Saturday I raked the mucky dead leaves of the previous autumn—leaves we hadn’t bothered with when they fell—into piles. Arthur sniffed the fecund stuff my rake was exposing and sometimes rolled in it. I was cold, but activity warmed me. Inside, the phone rang. Pekko wasn’t home, but the machine would pick up the call. When Arthur barked, I followed him down the alley between houses and found my mother ringing our doorbell. She came into the yard.

“Daphne did that for me,” she said, after watching me for a while. “She took a long time, and she charged me by the hour.”

“It’s a big job,” I said. I leaned the rake on a tree.

“I’m not complaining,” my mother said. “It’s important to know how to charge. I hope you charge your customers enough.”

I offered her coffee, and as she explained that she’d come with another question for Pekko, I heard him thumping around inside. Roz isn’t shy about visiting, but she doesn’t want me to think she moved to New Haven to bother me, so she always gives a reason. When we came into the kitchen, he’d discovered the blinking light on the answering machine and was listening to a rapid, friendly message from Gordon Skeetling. “Hi, Daisy, it’s Gordon,” and his 432 number—which always means Yale—spoken in the hasty manner of someone who knows you already have it.

“Who’s that?” he said. “Hi, Roz.”

“A client.”

“Gordon who?”

“Skeetling. The Small Cities Project. He says he knows you.”

“You’re working for him? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Who is he?” said Roz. “A big shot?”

“He says Yale barely tolerates him,” I said to Pekko. “He sounds like your sort—inner city and all that.”

“I don’t like him,” Pekko said.

“What’s wrong with him?” I put my jacket on a chair and took three mugs from the cupboard.

“I don’t want coffee. He was on the board of the shelter with me.”

“He said so. He seems nice. He has a room full of papers he wants me to sort out.”

Pekko walked out of the room, but a minute later, as I was measuring coffee, he returned. “A little too clearheaded,” he said. “Sees things just as they are.”

“What’s wrong with that?” I said. “You’re the one who’s always claiming to be a realist.”

“If I were a realist,” said Pekko, “I wouldn’t rent an apartment to the man I just rented an apartment to.”

He was standing in the doorway, filling it, but now he turned away again. Roz called after him, “Speaking of apartments, Pekko, I need a good deed.”

“Yes?” he said, sounding friendlier. “How are you anyway, Roz? What are you up to now?” My mother’s conscientious vigor amuses Pekko, and he also admires it. “We’re friends,” he says, which is also what my mother says, though she’s more detailed about it: she claims they made friends because they went through the war together, meaning Vietnam. They didn’t meet until years later, but she says they thought the same way about it. She marched, wrote letters to editors, and affixed bumper stickers to her car reading SUPPORT OUR BOYS: BRING THEM HOME. Pekko was drafted and spent a year in Vietnam. “Not as bad as some people’s year,” he says, “but bad enough.” Discharged, he returned to New Haven and, while taking courses at Southern Connecticut, began organizing against the war.

They’re a little superior about it. During the war I was busy marrying Bruce Andalusia, who had a good lottery number and wasn’t drafted. I tried not to think about Vietnam. Now and then, all my life, I’ve imagined myself tossing something over my left shoulder with my right hand, walking on and not seeing where it falls. I tossed the war like a button I pulled off my coat and didn’t keep to sew on again.

Now my mother said to Pekko, “I promised Daphne I’d ask if you have room for her anywhere.”

“She getting evicted?”

“Oh, no,” said Roz, “but her place is expensive.”

“How old are her kids?” Pekko said.

“I think nine and seven.”

“I suppose she’ll pay the rent if it’s me.”

“Of course,” Roz said. “Thank you.”

“I haven’t done anything yet,” Pekko said. He climbed the stairs at his steady pace.

I’d offered my mother a cup of coffee not to be hospitable but because I wanted one myself. She was too pleased to have had her leaves raked by the remarkable Daphne, and I wanted her to leave so I could call Gordon back. That impulse made me angry with myself, so I drank the coffee too fast and burned my mouth. As I drank, I formed a policy about not making client calls over the weekend.

My mother drank only a few sips of coffee but lingered, talking about my brothers. The oldest of us, Carl, is gay and lives with a man and two adopted children. Stephen is still married to his first wife, and they have a daughter. Sometimes I am sure Roz is about to blame me for being childless, but the truth is that Roz doesn’t want me to be more conventional than I am. She wants to prove that she’s as unconventional as I, and she wants me to delight her with stories. That day she probably hoped for confidences and intimate talk. When I was single, I often told her about my men. She didn’t disapprove, nor did she grow wistful as I aged out of my fertile years, but prided herself on her appreciation of another way.

Married, though, I’d gone into our bedroom, so to speak, and closed the door. I thought my mother disapproved not of any way of life but of people who don’t know how to get what they want. Possibly, these days, my silence made her think I was unhappy, but I didn’t want to talk about Pekko. Now she said, “After she finished raking, she came inside and I gave her a glass of water. Then we talked for an hour. I couldn’t believe it when I saw the clock. I never do that with anybody but you. She’s a lonely person. She hasn’t time for boyfriends, just taking care of those kids. All of a sudden she looked at her watch and skedaddled—time for school to let out. She’s so skinny she looks twenty, but she’s past forty. Would you have guessed that?”

“Yes,” I said.

“How well does she know Pekko?” she asked.

“How should I know?” Finally my mother left, and I called Gordon right away. He needed to change our next appointment. And he wanted to know if I minded that he wouldn’t be in the office while I worked. He’d just let me in and leave. I said I’d be fine.

 

Katya was tall and wide, given to exaggerated gestures and mild bullying (“Use your body, Daisy! This isn’t radio!”) but maddeningly wary of deciding anything definitely. While the rest of us—except for Muriel—sat on the floor, Katya would pace, looming hugely when she came near. She’d expostulate—and then say, “But what do you guys think?”

I found I looked forward to rehearsals, though after each one I promised myself I’d quit. Then I’d decide to stay in but keep silent as much as possible. Yet I always went, and talked a lot, both in character and out of it. As I’d begin to move around the area we called the stage—with exaggerated gestures and speed—I’d feel a familiar, anxious pleasure in my throat and at last I identified it as the sensation I’d get, in my single years, when I was about to sleep with a man I scarcely knew.

Denise always had an opinion about what we were doing, and she was always wrong. She wanted the play to be innocuous, so it wouldn’t upset anybody. Invariably I disagreed, and then everyone would offer a view, and we’d be back where we started. We were now a group of six actors, not counting Katya. She’d found another man, a rotund black storefront preacher with a glorious, deep voice. His name was Jonah. “I was swallowed . . . by a whale!” he said the first night. He had been a drug addict many years ago, he told us, so he was not shocked by swearing. We mustn’t become shy, just because there was a reverend in the room.

We were not shy, and we weren’t a coherent group of rational adults. David, the computer kid, had a habit of scooting his mat around the floor while people talked, like an eight-year-old. Chantal was tall and sharp-looking, with her quick glances and glittery glasses. She was bright but illogical. At least she no longer rushed around as much. Denise, the little Puerto Rican lady, used to hug her knees as we sat there, as if she was so anxious not to be in the way that she’d decided not to let herself stand up. When she talked about the play, she urged blandness, but her acting wasn’t bland. Something was freed in her, and she often startled me. Muriel retained her dignity and always seemed grown-up, but even Muriel had a fault: she could be boring. Sometimes I had to remind myself that she’d been a prostitute, to make her seem slightly exotic. She looked exotic, and I couldn’t keep up with her long stride as we walked to our cars after the rehearsals, but she was as likely to talk about her special red-and-green Christmas plates as anything else.

That night we decided, after some debate, that we needed a couple of kids to play the two-headed little girl if we were indeed presenting a sort of biography. I was opposed, but when I lost the argument I didn’t lose my usual desire for control. Somebody said she knew a cute ten-year-old, and I thought of Ellen’s not-cute Justine, with her cool, intelligent look. I didn’t want Ellen involved in the play, but I often can’t help trying to seem more competent than anybody else, so while the others shrugged, I scribbled her phone number on a bit of paper and handed it to Katya.

Then we acted out a scene in which the mother of the two-headed baby tries nursing both heads simultaneously, one on each breast. Denise was the mother this time, and she arranged the doll on her chest. “My kids had only one head, and still I could nurse and keep private,” she said serenely. As friends and family members, we circled her, offering imaginary cushions and other props, as well as advice.

“Just nurse one head! Maybe the other will drop off!” I said. Nobody noticed what I considered my funniest lines, but I hoped that Katya’s tape recorder was picking them up. We had played back some of what we’d done. Parts sounded more like scuffles and panting than speech, but Katya insisted she had plenty to transcribe. She also took notes. When she wasn’t pacing, she sprawled with her back against a wall, a big drawing pad in her lap, a felt-tipped marker in her hand. She said she wrote faster if the writing was big.

“May I ask a question?” Jonah said in measured tones. The current parents had flopped onto their mats after trying a scene we all hated, in which the father (Chantal, that night) tried to persuade the mother (me) to go to bed with him, and she said, “Yeah, and get a three-headed baby?” while as a baby-sitter, Denise tried walking with the two-headed doll. Wiping sweat and patting our hair, we nodded and looked at Jonah, who had not participated so far. “What is the meaning?” he said.

Somebody explained the headline. We were working up to a wedding, we said. “We’re searching for the story,” Katya offered, easing herself to the floor. “There will be a process of decision making later.”

“Is it about prejudice?” Jonah persisted. “I think it’s about prejudice.”

“You mean race?” said Muriel. “I’m tired of talking about race.”

“Her race, or maybe her handicap?” Jonah said. “I’m just asking.”

Chantal said, “No, no, nothing like that. I think it’s about not being able to make up your mind. Some days I feel like I have two heads.”

To my astonishment, I was suddenly angry; I felt the kind of anger that burns the veins in your arms. I almost said, “But I brought the headline!” as if that made me the boss. I knew the two-headed woman had nothing to do with indecision, and I thought she had nothing to do with prejudice either. I was surprised to be angry, because I didn’t know I cared about the play at all. All I could say was “That’s too simple, don’t you see?” They looked at me. They did not see. “We’re talking about having two heads. Don’t you see how interesting that is? Having two heads is—having two heads. It’s not like anything.” To myself, I sounded childish and obvious, and everyone looked at me with careful politeness.

“Then why do it?” Jonah said. “Nobody really has two heads. It’s about being anyone who’s looked down on. We need reminders about that.”

“I guess I think it’s something like that, too,” Katya said.

“No,” I said from my mat, pressing my hands into my thighs. “I have no interest in that.”

“You don’t think it’s important that people are prejudiced?” Denise said.

“Of course it’s important.” I couldn’t explain further because I didn’t know what I meant. All I could think of was Pekko saying that Gordon saw things as they were. I wanted to look at that two-headed person, at the two-headedness of her. “Comparing her to anything,” I said, struggling to control my voice, “is disrespectful. She’s not like anything.”

 

Gordon had changed our appointment so he wouldn’t be late, but he was late. I thought of Ellen as I again stood waiting on steps, but this time I had no key, and the day was colder, though it was later in the spring. At last I saw him coming quickly toward me down the other side of Temple Street, past the gray stones of the back of St. Mary’s Church. He was not just hurrying but running, the bottom of his jacket flapping. He crossed with a glance at the traffic and stopped, puffing, at the foot of the stairs I stood on. “It’s worth it, because I have more time than I thought. I can stay a little.”

I didn’t need him to stay. I had learned enough to get started, which probably meant sitting and reading at random. But once we were inside I began to talk about how I usually worked. I was unsure of myself, uncomfortable because I’d expected him to leave, and so I found myself talking about Ellen, the client who made me feel unsure and uncomfortable. “I’ve got a client now who doesn’t want to keep anything she has,” I said. “She just thinks she ought to. I can’t deal with conscience.”

“Conscience isn’t the usual reason for clutter?” His pointed eyebrows moved up and down, and he stroked the doorjamb.

“No, avarice,” I said. I was trying to sound provocative; I had no idea what the usual reason for clutter is, but I wished I hadn’t mentioned Ellen.

He said, “You’re thinking I’m the greedy kind, or you wouldn’t talk about her.”

“No, no.”

“So what’s she like?” Gordon Skeetling said, resting against his raised arm. He was wearing not the tan sweater today but a similar blue one. He smiled and encouraged me to make a funny story out of Ellen, but New Haven is too small. He’d recognize her—he’d turn out to be her next-door neighbor. “Why does she do this?”

“I have no idea,” I said. Then, “I took something from her.”

“You stole it?”

“It was worthless.”

“To you. What did you do with it?”

“I threw it away.”

“Hmm.”

I could tell he was more curious than troubled, that he didn’t care whether Ellen was deprived of her possession or I turned out to be a thief. Have I described his face? Bony planes, lots of forehead. The expressive black eyebrows moved one at a time, and the gray, straight hair flopped when he gestured. A face ready to listen attentively, and then laugh. Now he was getting ready to laugh not at Ellen but at me. At least I’d deflected his attention from her. Usually someone who looks about to laugh doesn’t bestow permission here and there, as Gordon Skeetling did, but his wasn’t mocking or condescending laughter. What amused him was apparently the oddness of human behavior. He seemed to exist, just then, in order to hear me, and so he satisfied a longing I’ve always had: to explain, as if something would be accomplished forever if someone would only listen until I was done. . . .

“What did you take?” His voice rose zestfully with the question.

“A sugar bowl.”

“Sugar bowl? Hmm, a sugar bowl!” Was a sugar bowl a symbol of something? The womb?

But he didn’t keep on listening. He looked at his watch and gathered some papers, telling me to leave the key in the mailbox. “Take your time and don’t steal anything. No, if you want to, take whatever you like.”

“I usually steal cars.”

“Then you’re stuck, because I’m taking mine with me. But speaking of conscience, remind me to tell you about my dream. Oh, I’ll tell you now and be late. I had a German shepherd—a lovely dog—and she grew old and died. This was a dog with a conscience. If she did something she thought she shouldn’t have, she’d incarcerate herself in the bathtub, because she hated baths. So one day, after she died, I dreamed about a minister—a pastor, he was called in the dream—in Germany who was so conscientious, he threw himself out of his own church. Excommunicated himself. When I woke up, I remembered that pastor means “shepherd.” He was a German shepherd. Isn’t that good? Don’t I have great dreams?”

Now he hurried away, and I missed this friendly man, who I thought probably resembled his dog. He’d have a functioning conscience, not one that operated like Ellen’s, without meaning, or that failed to operate, like mine. His would keep him from doing harm, and I wanted to stop stealing sugar bowls if only to please him.

In the archive I began by dusting, and then I read. I read or skimmed a stack of articles copied from magazines or torn out: an old account of an election in Albany, a recent story about the New Haven homeless shelter. I could see no unifying principle or subject. It made no sense to group them by city, except that New Haven came up often. I was interested, because around here it’s a little hard not to focus on big, bold New York, which is only seventy-five miles away.

I could already see that some stories could easily be discarded. I grouped the rest by subject: poverty, public transportation, crime. At the corner of the table I gathered those that piqued my interest the most. They were invariably about New Haven, I noticed. Then I noticed that they were almost all about a death, not the predictable death of an old person with a cluttered house but the shocking death of a young man or woman who hadn’t had time to accumulate much—the violent death of some young person, a violent death in New Haven.

 

When I notice a selfish or unselfish act I’ve committed, I can’t seem to help balancing it. Half the time, that is, I fail morally. After being friendly to Ellen about dead pets, I took a sugar bowl. I took a sugar bowl, so I told Gordon. I told Gordon, so I complained about Ellen on the phone to my friend Charlotte. “I guess in your field there’s no such thing as confidentiality,” Charlotte said. As I add to this narrative, I’m sometimes ashamed of one detail or another, but more often I’m pleased to describe what I did, how I am, as if being an identifiable sort of person matters more than being one sort or another. Accounts like this are supposed to record a change: this is how I became different. But I didn’t change. What could I be except myself?

What I don’t like is rest. Only when I have a cold do I understand the wish to snuggle and stop striving. “I like to think of finding a place to rest here,” Ellen said, fluttering her hand at the confusion in her living room, where extra dining room chairs in many styles were lined up along one wall, one behind another as in a train. On them, as it happened, her children were playing train, but they stopped to listen, tilting their heads: wary Justine, who gave me the same shrewd look that had caught my attention before, and the younger one, with short, blond hair, the one I kept forgetting wasn’t a boy, who’d pull his or her shirt up when thinking, baring the belly.

“A nest,” said Ellen. I dislike the word nest unless a bird is involved, and I loathe nestle. Ellen said, “I keep imagining that if I moved things just a little, I could hide properly. Wouldn’t you love a curtained bed with red velvet hangings?”

“Dust,” I said. “You’d get entangled with the curtains and wouldn’t be able to escape if there was a fire.”

“Or if your lover refused to perform,” said Ellen, now laughing at herself. Justine looked alert. She’d been asked to join our cast. I’d given Ellen’s phone number to Katya without permission. Ellen was grateful. She approved of me too heartily. She wanted some connection with the play, because I was in it.

The kitchen, a week after the day we’d emptied the cabinets, was subtly altered. Ellen and the children had not cleaned up but had transformed the mess into an intricate domestic installation, half nostalgic, half critical of the trammels of household, something you might almost see in the Whitney Biennial. They’d washed everything, then arranged the objects in neater groups: platters, teapots (red, blue, patterned), bowls (handmade pottery, old china with pink flowers, Danish stoneware). Silverware, separated by function and pattern, was spread on a blanket under the table. The children fussed importantly, lending Ellen more direction as they explained that after meals they replaced the dishes on the floor. They tried to use different plates and bowls at each meal now. Walking from doorway to sink was tricky, and the smaller child—Celeste, she was a girl called Celeste—hopped, as if to suggest that the aisle wasn’t wide enough for two feet, though it was.

Ellen didn’t want help putting the kitchen back to rights. “The girls and I will do it,” she said. I knew they couldn’t. They couldn’t keep everything, yet everything seemed to be cherished. Ellen was transforming herself into my other sort of client, making her own the objects that had been thrust upon her. I said, “You’re appalling,” which Ellen took with one of her accepting shrugs. The children disappeared, and Ellen led me to a spare bedroom. The closet was crammed with clothing.

“I suppose you want to do the same thing here?” I said.

“Let’s just see,” said Ellen.

She wasn’t a real gatherer, not one of my glinty-eyed, irrational but avid accumulators. Her stories were always of imposition, even about her own clothes. “My wedding gown. I never liked it. My mother chose it.”

“And now you’re planning to force it on your daughters?”

“Celeste might like it. Justine will marry in a black leotard.”

We piled clothes halfheartedly on the bed and in a heap on the rug. She’d brought a garbage bag, but it remained empty. Ellen had the profound stubbornness of passivity. As before, when she was out of the room I took something, at greater risk this time. I rolled a green print cotton shirt tightly, then stuffed it into my jacket pocket. And as before, shortly after I left her house, I passed a trash basket on a corner, stopped the car, got out, and threw the shirt away.

I am good half the time. From Ellen’s house I went to my mother’s, thinking she’d be alone and maybe lonely. Roz and I visited each other uninvited, but while she justified or explained her visits, I acted as if mine were treats. It was a hot spring day, one of those early summer days before the leaves have come out, which make me dread sweating for the next half year but please some people. Instead of moping at home, my mother might be striding briskly through the park, swinging her arms and smiling under her white curls, being the sort of older woman who heartens younger ones. Roz, however, was neither out walking nor home alone but drinking iced tea with Daphne in her little kitchen. Both were in shorts—a picture of midsummer, though clouds were gathering, and we’d be back to April the next day. Daphne said, “Hi, Daisy,” her mouth barely opening.

The iced tea was from a mix, so with the disapproval daughters feel they may express toward their mothers’ choices, I filled a glass with tap water and stood leaning on the sink—the interloper—while the two women sat at the table. I could hear a wind starting outside, but in the kitchen it was close.

“Daphne has a nine-year-old daughter,” my mother said significantly, after they’d talked for a few minutes about people from the soup kitchen. I’d described the rehearsals to Roz and mentioned the quest for little girls to play the two-headed kid. “I’ve been telling her about your play. Maybe Daphne’s daughter could be in it.”

“Katya is pretty much set,” I said. “I gave her the name of a child.”

“But you need two children,” my mother persisted. To Daphne she added, “She’d play a girl with two heads.”

“Like, two of them inside a big dress?”

“Something like that,” I said reluctantly.

“Oh, Cindy would love that. Does the girl die? She’d love playing a corpse.”

“No, she doesn’t die,” I said. “Most of the play is about when she grows up.”

“So it’s a small part? That’s okay, I’ll explain it to her.”

I pointed out that by now Katya had probably found many little girls. Nonetheless, I was talked into giving her number to Daphne, and before I left I also promised to remind Pekko that Daphne needed an apartment.

And I heard the details of the plan to install kitchen cabinets. Daphne described the carpentry for women course she’d taken. “It was supposed to be job training, but guess what.” She had a two-dimensional look—a flat face with a small nose, small breasts, no belly, no backside. Her face, with thin, shoulder-length brown hair around it, was expressionless at rest, then quickly cheerful or combative, then expressionless again. She was well-defended. I doubted that she could laugh easily, and to test her I told a joke Charlotte had told me the night before, about a cocker spaniel who rides a motorcycle and won’t wear a helmet—or condoms either, it develops. I like dog jokes, and my mother stared, then laughed. Daphne glanced at her, as if for permission. Then she banged her empty glass on the table, laughing and laughing. She was somebody else, as if she’d stepped through a transforming curtain, and I knew why I had a suspicion about her and Pekko in the past.

“Tell Pekko I still like roller coasters,” she called as I left. She and my mother remained at the table, sucking half-melted ice cubes, while I let myself out. As far as I know, Pekko dislikes roller coasters. I didn’t reply.

 

One afternoon I had an unexpected cancellation, so I went to Gordon Skeetling’s office without an appointment. He let me in, surprised but apparently pleased. He led me inside, then crossed to the coffeepot and gestured, one eyebrow raised. He stepped into sunlight near the window, and his thick, gray hair seemed to lift slightly from his head, as individual strands became visible in the spring light. I wanted coffee and nodded. He paused, slightly puzzled, as if he hadn’t expected me to understand, then smiled in appreciation of his own peculiarities.

“Last time I was here,” I said, “I kept noticing clippings about violent death.”

“I don’t remember collecting stories of violent death,” he said.

“I’ll show you.”

He followed me into the side room, and I handed him the pile I’d made. He sat down on a tall stool, leaning forward to establish his feet far apart on the floor. I was facing his crotch, and as sometimes happens, I imagined him undressed, how his penis and balls might rest on the edge of the stool, how a hand might hold them. I sat down with my back toward him and reached for a folder, so as to fill my hand with something else.

“This is terrible,” he said at last. “This murder on Hillhouse Avenue. I remember it.” His voice sounded tense with grief.

“It happened a while ago,” I said. A Yale student had been killed in the middle of the night by New Haven kids. The case had made national headlines. According to rumor, Yale’s enrollment had suffered afterward. “Do you know why Hillhouse Avenue intersects with Sachem Street?” I said, again changing the subject, this time because Gordon’s burst of feeling made me uncomfortable. “It’s named for James Hillhouse, a nineteenth-century treasurer at Yale. He was called Chief, and that’s what Sachem means.”

“An Indian word.”

“I think so. I can’t remember who told me that,” I said.

“I remember when that kid died,” he said. “Christian Prince. What a name. I read everything about it. I cried. My wife thought I had some kind of weird Freudian identity thing.”

“You mean you thought you killed him?”

“What a funny mind you have,” said Gordon. “She thought he represented the child I never had.”

“Oh,” I said, “you’re the victim. When I read about a crime, I’m the perpetrator.”

“It was terrible,” he said again and put down the stack of clippings. Then he returned to his desk in the other room. When I heard him on the phone, I closed the door between us; reading and sorting, I quickly forgot about him. I was interested and curious as I looked through these stacks of paper—not needing to pretend to be interested and curious, as I often did, while concealing mild frustration or amusement toward a client. My pile of clippings about death—local death—grew. I made a few more piles. This archive also had an urban renewal motif. The unknown scissoring hands had often saved pieces about the unexpected effects, good and bad, of change. There were stories of neighborhoods fragmented by a superhighway, sustained by repair of a bridge, or changed by the placement of a bus route. I had a public transportation stack and an arts stack, but that one rapidly began to seem condescending; everything was about the making of art by people who might have been expected not to be capable of it. I remembered our play with a rush of confusion: I’d stolen the headline, in a way; Gordon Skeetling would surely scorn this unsophisticated venture; I would surely scorn it; I ought to be scorning it, and withdrawing from it. I had no business participating in art by the barely capable.

The door opened. “More coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

“Then I won’t make another pot.”

“Not for me.”

“Did I show you the headline about the woman with two heads?”

“Don’t you remember?”

“You didn’t throw it away?” he said.

“You said I could throw away whatever I wanted to.”

“But I said I’d yell if you did.”

“Well, I didn’t.”

He seemed to want something, and I wondered if he hoped I’d tell him more about Ellen and my theft of her possessions. I made up my mind not to take anything else. He stood in the doorway, so I edged past him and asked the way to the bathroom. When I returned, he’d gone back to his desk, but when I sat down, he again came and stood in the doorway. “Call me before coming in next time, all right?” he said.

“Oh, sure,” I said. “Sorry.”

“I like to know whether I’ll be alone,” he said apologetically. “I do different work.”

Gordon Skeetling seemed to bestow permission with every gesture, but now he was refusing it. “What kind of work?” I said.

“I’m writing.”

“A paper for a journal?”

“An op-ed piece. The Times has run a few I’ve done, over the years.”

“What about?”

“If I wanted company to hear about it, maybe I could write it with company around,” he said.

“Okay,” I said, but then he told me.

“I’m arguing in favor of decreased funding for foster care.”

“But that’s a terrible idea!” I said.

“The state is a bad parent,” he said. “Do you know how many foster kids end up in the prison system?”

We argued for an hour. Neither of us got anything done. By the end his hair was in his eyes and his shirt was hanging out because he waved his arms so much. I didn’t convince him. “You look as if I’ve been beating you up,” I said at last, gathering my things. When I left, the afternoon was yellow. I drove home and took Arthur on a walk to the river, along a trail through woods near the base of East Rock. The trees hadn’t leafed out yet, so I could see a distance in all directions. The forest had a roominess I’d miss when the leaves came. The air was light green and anticipatory. I began the walk angry with Gordon, but as I walked my anger was replaced by that awareness, again, of permission. He could cry over a murder by poor children and then argue for decreased help to their younger brothers, and his very refusal to see a connection—though I’d pointed it out—exhilarated me, it was so unapologetically outrageous. I also liked the willingness to take me on in combat, to take me seriously enough to fight, to tell me what I wasn’t allowed to do. “Arthur,” I said, as if I had something to tell him. “Arthur, Arthur.”

 

Pekko and I had dinner one night in April at Basement Thai with Charlotte and Philip LoPresti. I arrived alone in my Jetta, straight from a client, and parked a block away. Approaching the restaurant in the cool twilight, I glanced through a window and saw Pekko and my friends already seated together. Pekko leaned forward over the table with his hands extended—as for clapping—but held steady, as if he was saying, “This big.” When I sat down, Charlotte was talking earnestly about a misunderstanding with her younger daughter, Olivia, her pale blue eyes holding Pekko hard, then refocusing on me, as they all smiled to be caught talking so intently so soon.

“We’re discussing clarity,” said Philip, a man who looks ascetic, like a graying priest. He did spend a couple of years in a Catholic seminary in his youth, before he changed his mind, became a teacher, and married Charlotte. “We’ve ordered appetizers.”

Charlotte is a social worker, as I’ve said somewhere, and Philip was my colleague when I taught at the community college. I knew Philip first, then met Charlotte, years before I knew Pekko. They liked Pekko and became increasingly impatient with me when I kept breaking up with him. Once Charlotte accused me of being a less serious person than she had imagined. “I always knew your style was not serious,” she said, her eyes filled with tears, “and I love that. But lately I think it’s more than style.”

I cried too, though I never cry, and we were shocked into new closeness by her honesty. When I married Pekko, she and Philip were happy and went out of their way to spend time with us.

“I rented an apartment to Daphne Jenkins,” Pekko said. Clarity, apparently, had something to do with Olivia, the daughter, and something to do with Daphne. I hadn’t known Daphne’s last name, but of course Pekko did. I felt at a disadvantage, as if knowing her last name was equivalent to knowing an intimate fact about her, and he probably knew some of those as well. I was also bothered because he’d made up his mind without discussing it with me, though he never talked about professional decisions. I’d promised my mother to ask him again about Daphne, but I never had. Eating a Thai dumpling, I said, “I don’t trust Daphne.”

“She’s reliable,” he said, “if you let her know the rules.” Again he made the gesture I’d seen through the window—hands held stiffly, facing each other—and I recognized it this time as the way people signal that they will keep a difficult person within limits. Of course he’d meant Daphne that time, too, but I couldn’t keep from wondering whether he had said earlier that he’d have to set limits for me.

Charlotte drank some wine and said, “I was just saying that I hadn’t been clear enough with Olivia.” Olivia has always been complicated, and I’ve always liked her. She went to medical school and had recently begun a residency in surgery, in which, Charlotte said, “The final exam is cutting off your mother’s head.” Olivia claimed not to mind being insulted by her professors but was quick to leave sharply worded, offended messages on her parents’ answering machine.

“What rules did you tell Daphne?” I asked Pekko, interrupting Charlotte.

“Mostly no extensions on the rent—that’s the problem with friends. I’m not worried she’ll trash the apartment.”

If Daphne did fail to pay the rent, I thought, Pekko might let her get away with it. I sensed an unusual distraction in him. The very fact that he’d told Charlotte and Philip what he’d done: he was less protected than usual. I didn’t trust Daphne because she penetrated barriers, and that thought reminded me of Gordon Skeetling.

“I’m working on a rubbish heap at the Yale Small Cities Project,” I said now to Charlotte. “I had a fight with the director.”

“I never heard of that project.”

“One guy in a row house on Temple Street.”

“Yale has hundreds of tiny kingdoms,” Charlotte said. “Some do evil, some good.”

“What did you fight about?” said Philip. By now we were eating our main course. I probably had seafood curry.

“He’s in favor of reducing funding for foster care.”

“A reactionary?” Charlotte said, the lines around her blue eyes deepening.

“He says he’s a sensible lefty.”

“He’s a pile of shit,” Pekko said. “I was on a board with him. He’s one of those people who’s too damned clearheaded. No feelings.”

“Oh, he definitely has feelings!” I said, remembering Gordon’s reaction to the clipping about the murder. I wanted to see if by chance Charlotte agreed with him about foster care—I wanted to see if I’d been arguing on the wrong side—and she agreed heartily that, as Gordon had said, the state is a bad parent.

“Maybe it would be better after all . . . ,” I said.

“If kids were left with abusive parents?”

“Or their relatives had to take them in, instead of having foster care as an option.” I was arguing Gordon’s position, I saw to my dismay. “Terrible things do happen.”

“But mostly not,” Charlotte said with authority. She works with the elderly, but she knows about all parts of the system. She wanted to talk about Olivia, though. Her older daughter, Amy, is easygoing, but cranky Olivia has always been the one who can get her mother’s full attention. That week she’d called late at night, exhausted from long hours at the hospital. At first Charlotte was delighted to hear from her, but she was sleepy, and Olivia got angry when Charlotte insisted on hanging up.

“I recognize her,” I said ruefully. “That’s what I do to my mother. I need her too much, so I’m mean to her.”

“I think Roz doesn’t mind, in the last analysis,” Charlotte said. “I don’t.”

“She moved here, near me, not near my brothers.” The oldest of us has lived in Chicago for a long time, but the brother I think about—my younger older brother, I call him, Stephen—is still in New York, where we all grew up.

“Correct,” said Charlotte.

Philip sat back, looking at me. I’ve known him now for twenty-five years, and he looks his age. “You’re still a handful, Daisy,” he said. Maybe he aged worrying about me.

I’ve probably made mischief all my life so as to hear that loving remonstrance in people’s voices. When Philip’s or Charlotte’s disapproval became real, I was wretched. Now I looked at Philip and felt gratitude—I love his attention—and a resolve not to make further mischief. And then I found myself wanting to check my date book, to see when I’d work at Gordon Skeetling’s office again. We had set up a series of appointments, so I wouldn’t be tempted to come at other times. Maybe I could have another fight with him, a fight that would make his shirt come partway out of his pants once more.

“He doesn’t want me to come when he doesn’t expect me,” I said to my friends. “Does that make sense?” I told them what he’d said. I liked watching them listen.

 

I was just wondering,” Ellen said on the phone. “Did you notice an ugly green print shirt? I can’t find it.”

“What do you need it for if it’s ugly?”

“I like thinking about the woman who left it here. She forgot it after she stayed overnight, and when I offered to send it, she said, ‘Keep it.’ It wouldn’t fit me—and it’s ugly—but I thought of her when I saw it, and I want that to happen again.”

“I’ll help you look,” I said.

“Oh, never mind, the kids will help,” she said. “I just thought you might have noticed it.”

 

So how much truth am I going to tell, and how far back need that truth go? And, maybe more important, to whom am I telling this truth? When I began writing this story, if it’s a story, I had a half-formed idea that I would write it all down, put it away, and someday read it. I was writing for my future self, assuming I’d forget, or forget how it felt if I remembered the events. I wanted to preserve the good parts of what happened and also preserve the bad parts, and I’m still hoping to demonstrate to that future Daisy, Old Daisy, that what I felt was as good as I will claim it was, and as bad.

So will nobody but me ever read this document? Someone could break in and steal my computer. A floppy disk could fall out of my bag onto the street. Or I could change my mind. I could show what I’ve written to a friend, or even to a stranger.

More likely, I’m doing something I did before. I wrote and published a magazine article. It began as a hundred-page essay about something that happened to my brother Stephen, but in the telling, because I was telling it, my reactions and feelings were central. I wrote it over and over, for years, and each time it became shorter, and contained less detail about me. There’s no need to say here what it was about. The point is that maybe I’m doing that again, maybe I’m writing another publishable five-page article or, more likely, a couple of thirty-page pieces about New Haven, and maybe this is how I do it. In that case I can be as revealing as I like, risk-free. The final version won’t have the word I in it, or it will, but I will just gracefully personalize a serious subject. “When I myself had the opportunity to participate in community theater . . .”

Well, if there’s going to be a scrubbing of secrets before anyone reads this, I can write down something I suddenly understood some pages back. I know why I wanted to learn about prostitution. It’s because there was a time that I paid for sex, or almost did. I’d begun an affair with a student twenty years younger than I was—I was in my forties. He cleaned houses for a living. He’d been to prison. He was slight and dark, and he resembled Peter Pan—about to slide into the air on an invisible wire. He would come to my house—talking fast and cleverly and oddly—we’d go to bed, I’d pay him for not cleaning. I went on the radio, talking about prostitutes, to find out if the customers are ever not pathetic. The young man, Dennis Ring, has been dead for years. He was crazy and difficult, and I still miss him.

 

Three girls came to the next rehearsal: Justine; Daphne’s daughter, Cindy; and a bustling, bossy kid named Morgana and called Mo, a black girl with a head full of barrettes. Of course Katya hadn’t been able to say no to anyone who called. She thought they should watch for a week before two of them began playing the two-headed girl. “The third one can be her friend,” she said. Ellen also watched, sitting in a corner on a folding chair. I was constantly aware of her. I was angry with her because I’d thrown away her shirt, as if her mildness had forced me into wrongdoing.

But I liked Justine, who laughed quietly, with an adult laugh, at moments I wouldn’t have thought were funny, so we became funnier. We were a series of baby-sitters and day-care workers trying to look after the two-headed baby. Then Jonah was a minister who baptized her TheaDora. He did a parody of a preacher, which seemed strange for a real preacher, but maybe he wasn’t trying to be funny. When Justine laughed, I noticed, Mo kicked her, and she pushed Mo’s shoulder. Then Jonah delivered a sermon. “We must examine our thoughts about this child,” he said. “We must destroy any prejudice in our hearts.”

Playing the baby’s mother, I said, “Reverend, I am not prejudiced against the baby.”

“The one who’s prejudiced,” said Chantal, who was playing the father, “is Uncle Fractious.”

Muriel volunteered to be Uncle Fractious, who said, “The baby is an abomination in the sight of God. She is too much trouble. Let’s sacrifice the whole child or cut off one of her heads!” Muriel stepped forward briskly as she finished, then resumed her vigorous striding, being both Muriel herself in her men’s blue jeans, with her hair sticking out in all directions, and the equally energetic Uncle Fractious.

There followed a debate by the parents, the doctor, and the director of the managed-care plan—David, nodding rapidly, as was his habit in any role though not when he wasn’t acting. “The parents’ insurance does not cover cutting off extra heads,” he said.

“I love both heads!” Chantal screamed.

“How can you leave these parents with this monster?” said Denise, who always seemed to play the doctor, no matter how much we meant to trade roles around.

“No child is a monster,” said Jonah, who was not in the scene and was seated cross-legged on his mat at the edge of the open area where we worked, his big knees sticking up. It didn’t matter; the managed-care company was adamant.

Later, Jonah played the minister again, and as the mother I found myself giving him a species of confession, explaining how hard it was to love my husband and our peculiar baby, how my husband was afraid of me now, as if I was a witch. Jonah encouraged me to pray.

“He’s ashamed to be seen pushing the carriage,” I said.

“Because of her deformity?”

“People will think it’s his fault.”

“TheaDora may be a punishment for all our sins,” the minister said.

“She’s a sweet baby, Reverend. Both heads laugh. Thea is starting to talk. Dora has three teeth.” Getting into the car after the rehearsal that night, I had a momentary feeling of panic: I’d left my baby behind.

The following week, when we moved ten years forward in the life of this family, different combinations of the three girls tried playing TheaDora. Muriel had made a red calico dress with two necklines, and we had two girls at a time try it on, quickly discovering that it hung correctly only when the girls were more or less the same height. Justine and Mo, then, became TheaDora, while Cindy, who was smaller, was their friend. We all laughed the first time our wide little girl, with Mo’s confident black face and Justine’s sly fair one sticking out of the great big dress, moved toward us, a dark brown left arm and a light-skinned right arm slapping the air as they tried to balance, while four sneakers stepped on one another. The girls stumbled and fell in a tangle but soon were rehearsing out in the corridor, coached by Ellen, while the rest of us reworked baby scenes. Intertwining their hidden arms and counting softly, they were able to walk. By the following week, Muriel had added a flounce to the dress. Their feet concealed, Mo and Justine became a two-headed girl. I watched Muriel watch them, first critically, then with a look of astonishment and pride. Cindy, who commented on everything while twisting or sucking on strands of thin, brown hair, played with TheaDora, teased her, argued with her. “You’re not my friend. I don’t want a friend with two heads.”

 

Pekko thought he might buy a pickup truck from a dealer in Watertown, and on a Saturday late that month I drove him there. Beside me on the front seat of my car, he talked in a slow, steady voice about what he could do with a pickup. At such times we might talk on and on, back and forth, making obvious remarks like a real married couple. Arthur barked too often in the backseat, and Pekko told him to be quiet. The stretch of Route 63 that was our destination was ugly, nothing but car dealerships. While Pekko examined the truck he’d seen advertised, I walked Arthur along the edge of the road. The day was sunny and warm, and we’d seen tulips in every yard. Arthur yanked on the leash, and I yanked back.

“Did you know that the first act of the first New Haven government was a trial for murder?” I said when we drove off again together, since Pekko hadn’t bought the pickup. I suppose I wanted to give him details about my work, too: an even exchange. I’d read this fact in Gordon’s office. Then I interrupted myself. “Let’s take Arthur to a park.” I remembered a nature preserve in Litchfield I’d visited with a former boyfriend, and without waiting for an answer, I made a U-turn and drove north.

“It wasn’t well-maintained,” Pekko said. “I want a truck that belonged to someone who appreciates trucks.”

“Right,” I said. “Did you know that the first act of the New Haven government, when they set it up in the sixteen hundreds, was a murder trial?”

“And what does that mean?” said Pekko, suddenly paying attention.

“What does it mean?”

“What are you implying?”

“I’m not implying anything,” I said. Gordon had been away at a conference that week, and I’d read for hours without a plan, obeying impulse. The archive included pages photocopied from a history of New Haven. Its government, I explained to Pekko, had been modeled not on the English common law system but on one derived, somehow, from the Bible. It was based on a system that had been established for Massachusetts but never used. New Haven—briefly called Quinnipiack—was established while an Indian named Ne-paumuck awaited trial for murder. Once the state was set up, he was tried and decapitated.

“Why are you so interested?” he said.

“It’s a good subject,” I said. “I’ve been making a pile of material having to do with murder in New Haven. Obviously somebody who worked in that office was thinking about it, because there’s a lot of stuff, and I know I could find more—I mean, when you think about some of the murders that have taken place here, just in the years I’ve lived here. And their importance. What happened on account of them. Alex Rackley. Penney Serra. Christian Prince. Malik Jones.”

“Malik Jones wasn’t murdered.”

“Technically, no.”

“He wasn’t murdered.”

“I read the police report on Malik Jones the other day,” I said.

“What are you up to?” Pekko said tensely, turning in his seat, angrier than I’d seen him in a long time.

I was interested in his anger, not afraid of it, almost amused. I don’t know what I should have done, but I pretended I was alone, monologuing in the shower. “Marie Valenti,” I said. “Marie Valenti. The one nobody can forget. Oh, God, and Suzanne Jovin.”

The truth is that except for Nepaumuck’s victim, nobody can forget any of the abovementioned people (and quite a few others), all murdered or at least killed in New Haven. Alex Rackley, a Black Panther, was executed by the Black Panthers in 1969. Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins were accused of conspiracy leading to the murder, and the trial, in 1970, was the occasion of rallies and riots. Penney Serra, a young New Haven woman, was murdered in a big downtown garage in the summer of 1973. Marie Valenti was eigh-teen years old, an honor student, when she was found dead on the New Haven Green in 1976. Christian Prince was the Yale student whose death Gordon remembered, killed by New Haven kids who robbed him. Malik Jones was a black New Haven boy who was shot by an East Haven cop after a car chase. Suzanne Jovin was a Yalie killed on a December evening on a residential street—the street where Ellen lived—in 1998. A professor was suspected of the crime, but he’s never been charged.

Penney Serra’s death, in the garage, increased the public’s loss of faith in the safety and bustle of downtown, which grew less bustly and less safe after she was killed. The murder was unsolved for decades. A Waterbury man, identified by DNA, has just been convicted of her murder—in the spring of 2002, as I write this. But the murder of Marie Valenti—unsolved after almost as many years—might make people feel even worse. She was the granddaughter of a New Haven grocer, and hundreds of people had watched her playing with her little brother in the aisles of the Italian market. People who hadn’t seen her decided after she died that maybe they had. Marie Valenti had been a student at Wilbur Cross, a reporter on the school paper—and she’d just been accepted at Yale. Her body was found on the green at nine on a Tuesday evening, a couple of weeks before she’d have graduated from high school. I’d lived in town just a few years then. I hadn’t seen Marie Valenti playing on the floor of the grocery store—which had closed when the highway cut through its neighborhood—but I remember the headlines.

I said much of the above as I drove, talking more to myself than to Pekko. In my peripheral vision I saw Pekko holding himself tightly next to me, as if gathering his strength to strike—or keep what he gathered. He became more solid, more compact. He didn’t speak.

I knew it made no sense to find him funny, yet I coaxed, as if he were four, “What?”

He shook his head. When I slowed, driving into the park I remembered—a wooded nature preserve—Arthur whined. In the parking lot, I opened the back door for Arthur, reaching past him to take hold of his leash. But Pekko had detached it when we left Watertown, so now the dog bounded out of the car and took off across a meadow.

Young and disobedient, Arthur ignored my shouts, cantering toward the nearby woods. I couldn’t help delighting in his poodle, squared-off directness, his pleasure in motion. I hurried after him, and Pekko followed me at a steady pace, snapping the folded leash against his leg. Pekko is the sort of powerful man who looks more natural on a ladder than walking in a forest.

A family with children and a small white dog came out of the woods, and Arthur and the dog ran off together. I called Arthur once more, but on his way to me, he veered off and put a paw on the shoulder of a little child, who fell down and began to wail. Pekko came puffing up behind me, shouting, “You damned dog, get your ass over here!”

The father of the child had picked him or her up—it was one of those indefinite stubby children, recently a baby—but didn’t look concerned. I rushed to apologize, but the people were untroubled. Now Arthur let himself be put on the leash, and we walked into the woods, where the trees were evergreens but the undergrowth on either side was all but ready to leaf out. In the oxygenated quiet, I began to calm down. I’d been afraid the family would be angry, and I might have become angry myself in response, though the mishap was my fault. As I grew calmer, I remembered that Pekko had been angry with me, and I’d laughed at him. I didn’t know why he was angry.

It was new for us to walk like this. Ordinarily one of us walked Arthur alone. “So why don’t you want me to be curious about murder?” I said. “Are you afraid I’ll become a murderer?” I felt tender toward him, ready to get along with him, to compromise, as if that relaxed family had argued his case.

“You don’t know why?” he said.

“I don’t know why.”

“New Haven,” he said, gesturing at the woods that were not New Haven, apparently imagining New Haven superimposed on them. “I’ve been there longer than you have. I was born there.”

“That’s why I married you,” I said. “I was bored with people who complain about New Haven.”

“Then why spread bad news? Penney Serra. Christian Prince. Haven’t we been criticized enough?”

“By we you mean the citizens of New Haven?”

“What else would I mean?”

“Why would my curiosity make people criticize us?”

“Next thing you’ll be on the radio again, talking about New Haven murders.”

I hadn’t had such a specific idea yet. “It’s a thought,” I said, “but wouldn’t it be possible to present it in a such a way that—”

“No, it wouldn’t. You presented prostitution with all sorts of do-gooder, scholarly fuss, and the message was, New Haven is a city of whores.”

“No.”

“That’s how it sounded to me.” His stubborn bulk moved beside me.

“You barely heard any of it,” I said.

“I heard enough.”

Now I was angry. “You’re acting as if I arrived three days ago, determined to destroy the place.”

“You and your Yale friends.”

“Oh, come on! Yale barely tolerates Gordon, because he cares about the stuff you care about!”

To my surprise, Pekko bent and released the snap on Arthur’s leash. We hadn’t seen any people or dogs for a long time. Arthur had been sniffing and peeing, behaving as politely as he ever did on a walk. Of course he bounded away again. Pekko watched with satisfaction, standing still and nodding, so his beard rose and fell. “It’s time to turn back,” he said.

As we turned, he brushed my shoulder with his arm, a rough, apologetic gesture of amity. I turned toward him and took his white-bearded face in my hands. “Let’s not fight,” I said. “I won’t do anything without telling you all about it.”

“Well, there have been murders,” he said gruffly. Then he took my shoulders in his hands and almost harshly thrust his tongue into my mouth. When he pulled away, he said, “I can’t bear it.”

“I know,” I said, and we set off, while Arthur followed us, running ahead, then turning to look for us, staying away from other people, behaving—after all—like a dog who didn’t need to be restrained. The air was cooler, and the light jacket I wore was no longer enough. I zipped it and wound my arm around Pekko’s, drawing warmth from his body.

We were silent a long time. Then Pekko said quietly, “Look. I know something about Marie Valenti.”

“About her?”

“About how she was killed.”

I said, “You mean New Haven killed her. Unidentified poor black kids with unstable home environments killed her. You mean that if I start talking about murder, some of the time I’m inevitably talking about poor blacks killing middle-class whites. You mean I ought to publicize something else about New Haven. Successful black middle class. Integrated neighborhoods. Falling crime rate.”

I stopped and sighed and tried to gather my thoughts. New Haven does have a successful black middle class, some integrated neighborhoods, and a falling crime rate. I had no impulse to study those subjects. Death had seized my imagination, which has always gone where it wants to go. Surely there was a way to make a public presentation on murder in New Haven—whether I was talking about radio or something else—that would not just encourage the city’s critics. I suddenly remembered a short, obnoxious woman who thrust herself in front of me at a gathering I once attended in Philadelphia. “How can you live in New Haven?” she said.

Pekko didn’t reply to my account of the causes of Marie Valenti’s death, so I kept talking, trying to explain that something about murder intrigued me, and it wasn’t the sensationalism. “I wanted to think about prostitution for the same reason,” I said. “Honestly, it isn’t just sex and violence.” We approached the parking lot again, and I crouched to call Arthur, who thrust his hard head into my breasts as he did at home, letting me snap the leash on once more. “I want to know,” I said, rising and understanding myself a little better than I had—entranced with what I now understood—“I want to know what it’s like to be someone else. And it seems easier to find out if I can think about someone going to bed with a stranger than if I think about someone cooking a chicken.” I asked myself what about murder interested me. Not the moment of being murdered but the moment of murdering. I thought if I could fasten on that second—the second of pulling the trigger, pushing in the knife—then I’d know someone. I’d know someone just when everything came apart for him, when he did something terrible, secret, and amazing.

I didn’t want it to sound as if murder was good. “I’m not saying,” I said, as I put Arthur into the car, then got into the driver’s seat and waited for Pekko—who hadn’t spoken for a while—to walk around to his side. “I’m not saying prostitution and murder are good. I’m not saying it’s fine to have them in New Haven because they’re great!” I drove out of the parking lot. Wasn’t that what I was saying? Wasn’t my defense that prostitution and murder were so inherently interesting that a city was all but enhanced by their existence within its borders? Well, if that was the case, I’d better deny it, I thought, turning the car toward home. Eventually I’d figure out something more plausible and less shocking. “I’m definitely not saying that,” I finished and was finally silenced by my inability to make sense of my feelings.

We drove without speaking for most of the hour it took us to get home. Without consulting Pekko, I stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts and brought containers of coffee to the car. He took his and drank it.

As we crossed the New Haven line, making our way through the trafficky western edge of the city, with its shopping centers and strip development, Pekko seemed to come to himself again, studying his fellow New Haveners on Whalley Avenue. He no longer seemed angry or impassive. The people on the street were indeed different from anybody we might have noticed up north in Litchfield County. It was late Saturday afternoon by now, and Orthodox Jews in black hats, leading big families, were walking near a synagogue. Two black teenage girls in shorts, intent on their conversation, waited to cross Whalley, not seeming to mind the evening chill. A small child lingered behind them, one finger in mouth, eyes on the passing cars, looking just about to figure everything out. I stopped for a red light. Pekko said, “I know who killed Marie Valenti. I’ve been alone with this. I want to tell you. Can you listen? Can I trust you?”

“Trust me?”

“I know if I tell you something in confidence, you’ll keep it a secret. I want you also to forget this plan to find out about murder
in New Haven. It’s not a good plan. You have to trust me, and I’ll trust you.”

“Sweetie, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but you can trust me.”

“Marie Valenti was not killed by a black teenager or a group of black teenagers. She was killed by a white kid she’d known in middle school. Nobody knew he was here that night. He’d moved away.”

“How do you know?” For a moment I thought he was just pretending to know something, something he’d somehow deduced. “What paper do you read?”

“I don’t live like the rest of you, speculating from headlines. There are people in this town who know what’s going on, and I’m one of them.”

“But how?”

“I knew them both. I was a sub when they were at Fair Haven Middle School. I made friends with the boy. He’d come to see me now and then when he was in high school. Two, three years after she died, he came and told me. By then he came to New Haven occasionally, to see his grandparents. Nobody thought anything.”

“You didn’t turn him in?”

“He wasn’t going to hurt anyone else,” Pekko said, “so there was no reason for me to ruin his life. Turning him in wouldn’t bring her back.”

“What happened to him?”

“He went to UConn. He lives out of state.”

“But if you’d been wrong—”

“I know, if he’d killed again. But I knew him. I was one of those teachers who have a little group of kids who stay after school and wash the blackboards. I had a long-term appointment that year. I was teaching eighth-grade English, figuring it out as I went along. I had kids keeping diaries. I never told you?”

“You told me about the diaries,” I said. “You made them read The Great Gatsby.”

“Right, The Great Gatsby.”

By now I had reached our street and parked in front of our house, but we sat, not moving, though Arthur began to whine.

“That boy had a cute diary. Always figuring out how to please his dad. An old-fashioned Irish family. Never imagined not going to church. But passion in that kid. Anger. I once saw it come out, when another kid got nasty with him. He was little and skinny, then. Later he got bigger. He still talked about pleasing his dad, pleasing his grandfather. His grandfather was a contractor. I knew him a little.”

“But if his temper made him kill once . . . Pekko, it’s illegal not to turn in a criminal.”

“Not if you’re a priest.”

“You’re not a priest.”

“The night he told me, I was a priest. That’s how it was. He came to me late at night and talked for six hours. Then I took him out to breakfast, to the diner on Whalley. He said, ‘Are you going to call the cops?’ and I said I wouldn’t. I told him if he wanted to turn himself in, he was free to do that. By then he was almost done with college.”

“Why did he kill her?”

“She wouldn’t take him back. He’d been her boyfriend for a few weeks. Then he moved away. Family moved to Hartford.”

“Wasn’t he a suspect?”

“Oh, I guess. They looked at a lot of kids. But the assumption was strangers, because she was robbed.”

“So he deliberately made it seem as if New Haven poor people had done it.”

“That’s right.”

“And you forgave that.”

“I wouldn’t say I forgave it. I didn’t forgive it.”

We sat in silence for a while, and I said, “Was she in your class, too?”

“No,” Pekko said. “I only knew her a little. I’d see her in the halls. I knew her name. She had a lot of dark, curly hair.”

“But if he killed a woman just because she wouldn’t be his girlfriend—”

“I know. He might do anything.”

“You took that chance?”

“He was beside himself over her. I didn’t think it would happen again. Remember, he told me three years later. He talked more like the boy’s psychiatrist than the boy. I thought he was less likely to murder than I was.”

“He stabbed her?”

“He talked about the feel of the knife going in, how he did it again and again.”

I thought about it. “Do you think maybe it wasn’t true?”

“I think it was true,” he said. Then he got out and opened the back door for Arthur, who preceded us up our front steps and wagged when we produced a key, congratulating us for remembering where we lived.

 

The other night I was writing this thing I write, this account of a piece of my life, more than a year later (it’s the oddest thing, proceeding in time as time proceeds, but not at the same rate; I began in February, writing about the previous February, and now it’s June and I’m only in April), when the doorbell rang, and in, unannounced, came my brother Stephen. Maybe Roz knew he was coming to New Haven and forgot to tell me. He’d had supper with her. Or he’d shown up there unannounced, too. He likes to do that, to prove he’s still a boy. He’d taken the train from New York. I hardly ever take the train, I’m too impatient, but Stephen likes it, though he lives an hour from Grand Central, in Queens, and would get home in the middle of the night. He’s married, as I’ve said, and has a daughter, and yet he seems alone all the time, and seems most at ease when he’s put himself into a place where there’s a slice of emptiness around him, like someone who lived in Montana or Alaska, someone who didn’t want his neighbors near enough that he could hear their dog bark. I was alone. He came into the kitchen and sat in a corner of the old green sofa while I opened a bottle of Sam Adams for him.

“Did I interrupt something?” he said.

“I’m writing.” I gestured upstairs, where my computer is.

“Writing what?”

“I’m writing about half a year in my life.”

“Just any half year?”

“No, February to October of 2001.”

“Any special reason?”

“None of your business.”

“When can I read it?”

“Maybe never.”

“Then what’s the point?” said Stephen. I wonder if he dyes his hair. He still seems young, and his hair is dark brown. He carries an expensive ballpoint pen in his pocket, as if he were the writer, and he takes it out and removes the cover, as if he couldn’t wait to write, then puts it back on, as if he can’t think what to say after all. “Let me see it now,” he said. “Is it about that guy?”

“What guy?” I asked, though I knew. I knew he meant Dennis Ring, my young ex-con dead lover, about whom I’d told him one teary night a couple of years ago.

“You said he drank herbal tea with you. He had complicated opinions about herbal tea, which kinds were good.”

“He had opinions like that about everything, but that was ten years ago.” Denny the occasional thief, drug dealer, drug user, and maker of mischief had opinions about shapes of pasta, opinions about cookies. He knew where to find European cookies made with dark chocolate in the days before you could pick them up at any convenience store. I stopped and calculated. Denny would still be under forty if he were alive. He’d been on and off drugs, and he died—in Pekko’s frozen yogurt store—of an overdose. He’d broken into the store. He wasn’t my lover then. I hadn’t seen him in months. Sometimes he bored me. That was my big secret about Denny, sometimes he bored me. And sometimes he charmed me. He was my lover before he was my student. He signed up for my course as a tease, I think. We weren’t planning to sleep together anymore, until he got into the cleaning business. Again I talked to Stephen about Denny. I told him Denny had nothing to do with what I was writing.

“Then do I?”

“No,” I said, understanding that Denny and Stephen were linked in my mind, somehow—because Stephen had been the kid with trouble in our household. But that’s not true anymore, is it—that neither Denny nor Stephen is in this book? I didn’t show it to Stephen. He left late at night. I drove him to the train. Driving home, I thought it had been the first time since September 11—nine months ago—that Stephen and I didn’t talk about it, then remembered we had. I’d rinsed his beer bottle and put it into the recycling bin, and Stephen had said, “We don’t recycle plastic anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Because terrorists knocked down the World Trade Center, and now we can’t afford it.” I’d thought he meant his family by we, but he meant New York. Stephen was wearing a jacket too warm for the weather, though this is a cool June. My brother’s lifelong gesture was fixed one summer afternoon when we were teenagers, when he stood up, not quite surprised, and took a step backwards but grasped a chair as if to keep himself from stepping too far back. He is always receding but never goes far.

 

Gordon called me to change some of the appointments we’d laboriously set up. “Sometimes I want to avoid you, and sometimes I want to be there with you,” he said in his frank way.

At least he didn’t always want to avoid me. “How do you know now that you’ll feel like avoiding me two weeks from Wednesday?” I said.

“I have a schedule. I write on Wednesdays and Fridays in alternate weeks and on Tuesdays and Thursdays during the other weeks, so sooner or later I can make appointments with people who are never free on a particular day.” He added, “But sometimes I have to change my schedule.” He was odd, but I liked his willingness to answer me, to answer more fully than I expected. The trait compared well with Pekko’s silences. “If I’m not writing,” he said, “I like it when you’re here.”

I’d shown him stacks of articles about urban renewal, community gardens, community policing. Sometimes he said he’d already worked on a topic, and I filed what I’d found, but sometimes he said he’d like to think about the subject matter, and I should find a way to keep it from disappearing. I imagined my stacks going slowly by on a circular moving sidewalk, so he could glance at them now and then.

Before we hung up he said, “Let’s schedule a lunch, too. I need to fight you some more about foster care. It clarifies my thoughts to argue.”

“Did you tuck your shirt in?” I said.

He didn’t know what I meant. “There wasn’t any hanky-panky, was there?”

“You mean you don’t recall whether there was or not?”

“I recall there wasn’t.”

“So do I. You waved your arms around so much, arguing with me, that your shirt came out.”

“Oh, it’s always out. Doesn’t that happen to everybody?”

Was I flirting? Yes, but I always flirt. In my single days, I didn’t bother to flirt, I’d just proposition a guy. I might say, “If you’re interested, by the way, so am I,” and often he became interested whether he had been or not. I think my flirting with Gordon was a sign, given my nature, that we were going to keep the relationship businesslike, with an admixture of casual comradeship. Flirting can be a substitute for sex. I have flirted with Philip LoPresti for years but never considered sleeping with him.

And the next two times Gordon Skeetling and I were together, nothing much happened personally. We had lunch without arguing, talking about dogs. Nobody flirted. I interrupted him a few times to show him material I’d gathered. I continued to amass a pile about murder in New Haven, though I told myself I was simply doing it out of curiosity and, in deference to Pekko, would not use it for any public purpose. I worked at Gordon’s office alone a few times, too, when he was away. By now he’d given me a key. Then I saw him again on a cold day, a return to March-like weather after the warmth earlier in April. It was chilly in his office. I was sorting dusty papers from the bottom of an old pile in a corner of the floor, and I frequently went to the bathroom to wash my hands.

Gordon was restless, leaving his desk every few minutes to pace, look out the window, or take his own trip to the bathroom. He seemed to forget I was there. I had given up trying to stay out of his line of sight and mostly didn’t close the French doors, since I could hear him on the phone whether they were closed or not. I’d look up and see him ambling back, automatically checking his fly, his eyes unfocused. I looked as I always did at his clothes. By now I associated him with tan and brown, colors I hadn’t much liked before. They looked woodsy and comfortable on him.

“Did I tell you about the conference?” he asked, on one of these walks, and I’d been so sure he’d forgotten me that I glanced to see if he was speaking on the telephone.

“Me?”

“Who else? I didn’t, did I? The project hosts a conference in October every two years. This arises out of a byzantine arrangement with two other Yale projects, but lately they’ve essentially dropped out. Do you want to do it? Obviously I’d pay you.”

“Do you have a topic?” I said.

“No, that’s the carrot. You can host a conference on anything you like that’s remotely connected to urban life in small cities.”

“How about murder in New Haven?” I said immediately.

“Whoa. I guess so. It’s not our usual pedantic crap, but I suppose you could turn it into something academic enough.”

“Sure,” I said. As I talked with Gordon about it, I scurried around in my mind to discover why I was completely willing to oppose my husband. I decided, with the kitchen of my mind—while its parlor and dining room decorously considered what Gordon was saying—that I was angry with Pekko after all, because I’d felt morally bullied on the walk, shamed out of thinking about what I wanted to think about. Moral bullying seemed like a crime bad enough that I could now do whatever I liked.

“I mean,” Gordon said now, “could you plan this conference in additional time? I don’t want you to stop the sorting-out project.”

“I guess I’ll be spending most of my life here,” I said.

“Fine with me,” said Gordon, “except for those afternoons I write. Well, maybe we’ll have to rethink that, if you’re going to have time for this.” Then he said, in the tone in which he might have proposed still another schedule change, “You could also become my mistress, if you choose to.”

“Your what?”

“Obviously we’ll continue with both projects whether you say yes or no.”

“I didn’t think you were asking for sexual favors,” I said, “in exchange for the right to organize your trash.”

“Or even put on my grubby little conference, eh? Oh, I know. The word mistress.”

“It’s a rather startling term. But I suppose you required a word that could have the possessive adjective my in front of it.” What I primarily felt, that is, in response to his suggestion, was even greater permission—the right, now, to say anything whatsoever.

“Oh, I’m a possessive bastard, indeed I am. Will you go to bed with me, Daisy?”

“Where?” I said.

“Good question. Not here. Not in my house in Madison, which is too far.”

“Not in my house.”

“You don’t seem like a motel girl.”

“I know where to go,” I said. We seemed to have skipped over the question of whether. Ellen’s children were on vacation, and she’d taken them to Florida to see her mother. Or her father, whichever it was. I had a key. It was a nice house. I was going to accept mistress, apparently, and even girl. My body had just turned into an object that required touching by Gordon Skeetling. My arms and legs seemed to be located where they were only to serve as lines pointing directly or indirectly to my crotch.

I’d never touched him. I wasn’t in love with him. I believe in work relationships. That is, I believe passionately that people can express what is inside them by working together as authentically as by sleeping together. I don’t imagine that work is a substitute for love or sex in any way. I wanted to work with Gordon Skeetling, and the fact that I’d considered him attractive from the beginning, with his dangly, mobile, bony arms and his up-and-down eyebrows, just made the work pleasanter, maybe more likely to be good work. What I’d just agreed to do—though I was eager—seemed as unlikely as if I’d moved comfortably through his rooms and he’d offered to lead me to the bank on the corner and arrange a mortgage so I could buy them. (Not that I was buying Gordon Skeetling. I knew from the first he was a rental.) We didn’t leave immediately for Ellen’s house, once I told him where I thought we could go and he’d nodded quickly.

“An hour?” he said and went back to work. I had another appointment. I phoned and canceled. Then I went back to work, too. Sorting through piles of documents that seemed to be connected with the building of the New Haven Coliseum, throwing most of them out, was more fun with a tingling crotch. I’d made several decisions in a row, and as I write this I remember writing not many pages ago that my habit is to be good half the time. Deciding to do the conference over Pekko’s objections felt good, as I made the decision, not bad. Deciding to be Gordon’s lover felt good, not bad, although I was surprised to notice that. Deciding to use Ellen’s house was decidedly bad and felt that way, and I also felt guilty about canceling that appointment. You could say my conscience works well about the minor issues and less well about the major ones. Or you could say I have an original notion of right and wrong. Writing this now, I am not sure I disagree with the assessment my overburdened conscience, working in a hurry, made then. During that hour I did not think for long about the right and wrong of it, although I believe I did total the thing up in a rough way, something like the way I’ve just described. Mostly I spent the hour doing good work, and waiting.