Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman Read Online Free PDF

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.
    â€œYou just like cities?” I said.
    â€œThat’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?”
    â€œI’m too busy. Work by yourself. That’s why you had to be smart.”
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œThen why?” I said, interested but wary.
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œWhat sort of something?”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œNot 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.”
    â€œThey don’t particularly have to do with cities.”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œI 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.
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    O f 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.”
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œYou’re still talking about it,” I said. “People might recognize your voice.”
    â€œMaybe 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.
    â€œAssuming 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 . . .”
    â€œYes!” I