Alice Mattison's last novel, New York Times Notable Book The Book Borrower, was called "extraordinary" (Washington Post Book World) and "ambitious and original" (Wall Street Journal), and was lauded for capturing in "deceptively quiet prose ... the fraught, complex relations of men and women" (New York Times Book Review). Now Mattison revisits Daisy Andalusia, a character from her critically acclaimed collection of stories, Men Giving Money, Women Yelling, in a simmering, intelligent novel of love, marriage, and friendship set in a New England city that's sometimes charming, sometimes dangerous.

Following an early first marriage, Daisy Andalusia remained single and enjoyed the company of men on her own terms, making the most of her independent life -- especially her sexual freedom. But now, in her fifties, she is no longer unattached; after a long on-again off-again love affair, she has married inner-city landlord Pekko Roberts. A resident of New Haven, Connecticut, Daisy earns her living organizing clutter, a calling that affords her an intimate peek at the disorder of the lives of others. Her business soon leads her to a Yale project studying small cities, where she partners with the ebullient director, Gordon Skeetling.

Over her husband's fierce objections -- and working with Gordon, with whom life becomes ever more complicated -- Daisy organizes a conference about murder in small cities, including New Haven. And for a community theater group seeking a subject for a play, Daisy appropriates a tabloid headline that Gordon has kept for years among the dusty piles in his office: two-headed woman weds two men: doc says she's twins. These words will take on increasing significance over eight transformative months, March through October, 2001, as Daisy questions whether she can truly be a part of anything -- a two-headed woman, a friendship, a marriage -- while discovering more about herself than she wants to know.

Profoundly moving and psychologically penetrating, The Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman is the intimate, endearing, and finally triumphant story of how Daisy at last learns to live the life she has so lovingly crafted for herself.

Alice Mattison is the award-winning author of four story collections and five novels, including Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn. She teaches fiction in the graduate writing program at Bennington College in Vermont and lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

The Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

Nothing distracts me for long from sex. A friendly, intelligentman 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 placemy 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 weremany men like that.

What interests me about sex is nothing dangerous, nothinglife-changing. It's like the impulse that sends some women intostores that sell colored floss and kits for making stained-glasspendants -- and of course I know that sometimes those womencan't refrain, even when pendants hang in every window, twistingtogether on their dirty strings, falling and breaking into theshards they once were, maybe killing the cat. Sex has mostly, forme, been less threatening than that, a reasonably healthy pastime, a form of arts and crafts that uses people instead of glass orthread.

At length, though, even so delightful a practice as sex begins tofeel airlessly limited, a means of expression made clumsy by theneed to include bodies as well as talk. At such times, I can bediverted by a different kind of activity: I like to put on conferences.Like patches of plain fabric in a quilt, unremarkable people lookbetter in contact with others, and I look for chances to arrangethem. In the seventies I ran something called Women's Weekend.Later I persuaded the community college where I taught to host acolloquium, What Do We Really Think About Race? Most recently,along with my mother, Roz Garber, I ran a conference on mothersand adult daughters. Along comes an idea -- ideas come while I'mdriving -- that requires multitudes (at least groups) arguing andlaughing. I start making calls in the car, on my cell phone, then continueat home, buoyant over subject matter, forgetting that by thetime 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 afternoonsession because they're in bed with other bodies, even mine.

I am in my mid-fifties, and I have long, blond hair, possibly toolong or too blond for my age. I bear the last name, Andalusia, of aman I no longer know and scarcely remember, with whom I movedto New Haven, Connecticut, thirty years ago so he could go to YaleMedical School while I supported him. When Dr. Andalusia left, Istayed. I'm not the only Yale divorcée who has liked New Haven, tothe puzzlement of a departing ex. I liked East Rock and WestRock -- red, striated traprock cliffs that bracket this city -- and Iliked the dirty harbor full of oyster boats and oil tankers, and the Quinnipiac River emptying rather grandly if messily under Interstate95 and into Long Island Sound. I liked the decorous, wellproportionedNew Haven green with its three old-fashionedchurches -- two brick, one reddish stone -- its bag ladies and blackteenagers; and I was amused by the way each man I slept with connectedto someone else I knew: he'd gone to school with the lastman I slept with, or his sister cleaned my teeth. The story I'm goingto write down had to happen in a small city. Here, you're never quitesure you're done with a person; you never know how many ways thetwo of you will touch.

Someone I stopped knowing many times was the man I eventuallymarried, Pekko Roberts. Pekko is a New Haven native, a noticeableman in his sixties: sturdy, white-haired, with a big, white beardhe brushes daily and a tidy but prominent belly. More often thannot, I broke up with him when we had dated for a few months andwere talking about living together. I don't know why I kept leavinghim, since I claimed to be tired of being single, and pointed out tomyself that a variety of partners isn't inherent to the pleasures ofsex. Pekko was in love with me, which made me a little restless, buthe wasn't so in love that he couldn't see my faults, about which hewas frank. "Daisy, you're not making sense," he'd say when Iwasn't; I'd get angry. He wasn't imaginative in bed, but sex withPekko made me happy; with him, I didn't experience what oftentook place after sex with other men: a half hour of dismay, evenloathing, about my middle-aged body, my habits, my friends, theway I lived my life. I could talk myself out of that unexplaineddespair, but with Pekko it didn't come. He was moody and oftensilent, gruff but not unkind; he knew himself well enough not toblame others for his bad days. His caring -- about me, about others -- might be expressed in grunts, but I never doubted it. He was a lakeI could swim in, in which the drop-offs and rocks were what theywere, but the water was clean and not too cold, and there wasintense pleasure to be found by swimming out to the center, turningon my back, and closing my eyes in the sun, whatever that means interms of a guy.

Four years ago, in 1998, Pekko and I bought a house together inGoatville, a nineteenth-century New Haven neighborhood of smallhouses with steep roofs and long, skinny backyards, where dogs barkthrough chain-link fences. (We also bought a dog, a standard poodlecalled Arthur: a dog should be able to pronounce his own name.)The narrow two- and three-story houses on our block look likekindergarten drawings. It's a cityscape best seen in winter twilight,when the peaked roofs of different heights are scribbled over by thebare branches of maples, oaks, and sycamores.