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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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œBank is predictable,” said Katya. “I never loved you, not even the night we robbed the natural foods store!”
    â€œYour ugliness is beautiful,” Muriel said now.
    â€œHis ugliness, her ugliness . . . ,” Katya mumbled.
    â€œBuy me a snake, honey,” one of the other two women said. One was black and one was Hispanic.
    â€œBuy 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.
    â€œAt first, she’s a baby,” Muriel said. “I can make a two-headed doll.”
    â€œThat sounds horrible, a two-headed baby,” said the man.
    â€œYou 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.”
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    W hen 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?”
    â€œThe way I do?”
    â€œHeedlessly. Is it a choice, or is this the best you can do? Is it worth it?”
    â€œHeedlessly? Is that how I live?”
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    T he 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