Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman by Alice Mattison Page A

shop. I remembered another occasion I didn’t mention.
    â€œWere 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?”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œYes,” 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.”
    â€œSomething about eliminating distance?”
    â€œNo. I think prostitutes and their clients must be lonely. They don’t make a connection.”
    â€œWith me they do,” he said.
    â€œYou patronize whores?”
    â€œNo, 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.”
    â€œI’m never insulted.”
    â€œYou go to people’s houses, and they take you to a private room and show you something they don’t show anybody else.”
    â€œYes,” 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.
    â€œMe too. You’re married?”
    â€œTwice,” he said. “Not now. You?” So I told him about marrying Pekko after years of being single.
    â€œI 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.
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    O n 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