The Double Bind

by Chris Bohjalian

  Sometimes when they were together at a restaurant, a young waiter would say something that would suggest he presumed that David was Laurel’s father, but this happened less often with the two of them than it had with her other boyfriends in the years since the attack. After all, he wasn’t quite two decades her senior; most of the others had been at least that. Moreover, she was getting older, too.

  She had a date with David the night Katherine shared Bobbie Crocker’s photographs with her, and it was the first time they had seen each other in four days. They went to a Mexican restaurant not far from the newspaper’s offices. Whenever they tried to talk seriously about what they had done in the days they had been apart, however, Laurel found herself steering the conversation back to the once-homeless man and his pictures. She grew a little light-headed and excited whenever she contemplated the images that existed in the box. Over coffee, she brought up Crocker again, and David said—his tone characteristically dry, every syllable distinct—“I think it’s fine that you’re interested in this fellow’s work as an artist. As a photographer. I applaud that. But I hope you see that Katherine is foisting on you a serious time sucker. From what you tell me, this project has the potential to eat every spare moment you have—and then some.”

  “She’s not foisting it on me.”

  He smiled and sat back in his chair, folding his arms across his chest. “I have known Katherine a long, long time. Years longer than you. I have watched her in board meetings, at fund-raisers, at phonathons. I’ve stood beside her and read the names of the homeless at the annual BEDS service at the Unitarian church. I’ve probably interviewed her a dozen times for stories. Foist may not be the right word for her methods. She’s far too seductive to be a…foister. But she’s a seducer, and she’s very good at getting what she wants. What her people need. And right now her people need a lot. Hell, you know that better than I do. You see the effects of the federal budget cuts daily.”

  She had actually met David the previous December, when the two of them had wound up walking beside each other in the candlelight parade that followed the BEDS vigil down Church Street. It had been one of those nights when it’s so cold the air stings, but the flickering line of candles stretched nearly two blocks, and when they reached City Hall the two of them had melted into a dark little restaurant for hot chocolate. “Well, if she doesn’t mind my focusing on Bobbie’s work, why should I?” Laurel asked. “Why should you?”

  “I don’t mind. That would suggest I have more antipathy to the notion than I do. But I don’t believe for one moment that Katherine expects you to curate this show—research the pictures, restore the pictures, annotate the pictures—on BEDS time. You’ll be spending your nights and weekends in the darkroom, and when you’re not in the darkroom you’ll be at your computer trying to figure out who these people are.”

  Laurel didn’t honestly believe this was a sudden burst of midlife male selfishness on David’s part. She understood that he wasn’t concerned the endeavor would take her away from him on those evenings when he wasn’t with his children. Nevertheless, there was a hint of condescension in his remarks, and it made her defensive. This wasn’t the first time he had tried to lord over her the wisdom that he thought came with age. And so she responded by telling him, “If you’re worried about me not being available when you want to play, don’t. It’s not like there’s some kind of deadline. I’d work on the photos when I felt like it, and only when I felt like it. It would give me something more to do when you’re with your girls.”

  “Honest, Laurel, this isn’t about me. It’s about you. Once your initial enthusiasm for this elephant of a project wears off, I think you’ll find it profoundly frustrating to be printing and processing someone else’s work.”

  “Then I’ll stop.”

  He toyed deliberatively with the stem of his coffee cup, and she thought for a moment he was going to say something more about the subject. But David was a man who took great pride in the sheer equanimity of his personality with his family, with his friends, and with his young girlfriend. He saved his volatility and his righteous wrath for the politicians and the policymakers who offended him, and he unleashed it only in print—never in person. In the nine months Laurel had known him and the seven in which they had been lovers, she had never once heard him raise his voice; nor had they ever endured a serious fight. It could be—he could be—maddening.

  Finally, he reached across the table and gently massaged her fingers. “All right, then,” he said. “I don’t mean to pressure you one way or the other. I have some incredibly decadent hot fudge sauce left over from my dinner the other night with the girls, and some vanilla ice cream in the freezer. Let’s go have dessert in bed. If we leave now, we can be naked in time for the last of the sunset over the lake.”

  A moment after he released her hands, the young waiter arrived at their table. “So,” he said abstractedly, hoping to make a little small talk as he reached into the pocket of his apron to find the folder that contained their bill, “are you two in town looking at colleges?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE APARTMENT THAT Laurel and Talia shared was the same one they had begun renting together as students at the start of their senior year of college. It was two-thirds of the second floor of a beautiful Victorian in the hill section of Burlington, a mannered neighborhood of elegant Georgians and Victorians and even a few arts-and-crafts homes from the 1920s, only a few blocks from the university’s row of fraternity houses in one direction and the city of Burlington in the other. The vast majority of the homes were lived in by single families—the town’s lawyers and doctors and college professors—but a few, such as the one in which Laurel and Talia resided, had been carved up into apartments. It was a fifteen-minute walk to the BEDS shelter in the city’s Old North End, or twelve to the Baptist church where Talia worked as the youth pastor. It was also close to the campus darkroom in which, once a week, Laurel was still printing her own photographs. When the two women first moved there, they were the youngest of the house’s tenants. No more. Now it was inhabited mostly by students in their very early twenties, and Laurel and Talia were the only two people who actually had full-time jobs.

  Across the hall from them in the smaller apartment that comprised the final third of their floor lived a first-year student at the medical school, a slim young man from Amherst who seemed to have puppylike energy. He had delicate, almost girlish features, thin bay-colored hair that was already receding, and a glib sense of humor. He was an avid bicyclist—and his friends who came by all seemed to be enthusiastic bicyclists—and since he had moved into the house in July he had twice asked Laurel if she wanted to go for a ride. He actually owned two bicycles: a hybrid and a road bike. His name was Whitaker Nelson, but he said that everyone called him Whit. Clearly, he wanted to get to know Laurel better, but he had sensed instinctively that it would be difficult to simply (and obviously) suggest they go out.

  The other tenants included three women and one man scattered above and below them in four single apartments. The most interesting among them, at least in Talia’s opinion, was actually the dog owned by an aspiring veterinarian named Gwen. The animal, Merlin, was a sweet-tempered mutt from the Humane Society that was part springer spaniel and part—based on its size—draft horse. It was gigantic and looked a bit like a Shetland pony. Sometimes when Gwen was away for the weekend, Talia would have the pleasure of trying to walk the beast. Usually, it simply walked her.

  Faith in Talia’s family seemed to skip generations. Her grandfather—her father’s father—was an Episcopalian minister in Manhattan, and he actually officiated at her parents’ wedding. Talia’s father, however, always called the sanctuary the First Church of the Holy Brunch, and it angered him the way attendance dropped off in the summer as the congregation migrated east each weekend to the Hamptons. He had drifted away from the church by the time Talia was in kindergarten, and so she only set foot in the place when she was staying with her grandparents. And her mother? She had a
lways been allergic to anything that resembled religion. Talia feared that when her mother died the woman was going to want show tunes sung at her service instead of hymns.

  Talia had started to return to the church after Laurel had gone home to recover from the attack early into their sophomore year of college. Suddenly, she was living alone in their small suite at the school, and she was scared. That one small voice? She heard it. This was not a Pentecost talking-in-tongues sort of voice. It was instead a gentle and reassuring little murmur, and before Talia knew it, she was—much to the astonishment of both herself and her parents—taking comfort from the fellowship of a congregation on Sunday mornings. She shopped around and wound up at the Baptist church, because they seemed to be doing so much with the fringe people—the poor and the homeless and the drug-addicted—who populated the downtown. And there she started to pray for Laurel. And for the men who attacked her. It seemed to her that it was easier to pray for the change of heart of two evil people than it was to pray for the thousands who were their possible victims. It was, in her mind, all about statistics and probability and her sense that God had to be pretty damn busy.

  Initially, friends gave her grief and said she was going Baptist because the church was near the very best shopping in Burlington. That was an inducement, she would admit. But she enjoyed her Sunday mornings in the sanctuary. And the minister was a vegetarian, and she liked the way animals figured often in his sermons.

  Nevertheless, when she graduated she was as unsure of what to do with her life as Laurel: She was considering divinity school, but she thought it was equally as likely she might wind up at Wharton. She did, however, know that she loved Burlington, and so when the minister asked if she would be interested in remaining in town and starting a program for teenagers in the congregation, she jumped at the chance. Fifteen months later, she was enrolled in the graduate program in theology and pastoral ministry at nearby Saint Michael’s College, driving to and from her classes each day while continuing to work with the teens at the church. Other than Laurel, her friends were incredulous. But they were also in attendance—as were most of the teens and even some of their parents from her church youth group—when she was awarded her master’s.

  She had been at the church over four years now, the program was thriving, and most of the time she was having more fun than she’d ever had in her life—and Talia was a woman who’d had a great deal of fun in her two and a half decades on the planet. She had always been drawn to men with eyes that could scorch off a skirt; in truth, she had eyes a bit like that herself.

  She had grown up in Manhattan and her decision to attend the University of Vermont had been a rebellion: It had meant that she was no longer going to be wearing stilettos with three- and four-inch heels that cost as much as a mountain bike, or retain any friends with the audacity (or lack of self-awareness) to actually call themselves Muffy. Consequently, she and her parents continued to have what she still considered an uncomfortable relationship at best. They viewed Vermont as an outback-like mountain range peopled largely by sanctimonious liberals in rusted-out Subarus who dressed exclusively in flannel and fleece. This was a misperception that Talia tried to correct: She reminded them that a lot of her neighbors actually drove Volvos. Still, her parents never came north, and she only returned south on the major holidays: Easter, Christmas, and the Neiman Marcus personal shopper sale (some habits died harder than others).

  She and Laurel would often have breakfast together when Laurel returned from the pool at the university, and they did the morning of Bobbie Crocker’s funeral. She was reading the newspaper on the floor when Laurel arrived, her roommate’s hair still damp from her swim. She had already set out a small feast on the mirror-topped coffee table that Laurel had discovered years earlier at a yard sale. There were sliced apples and pears, bagels beside a tub of blueberry cream cheese, orange juice, and hot steeping tea.

  “I think you should stay out of the water for a while,” Talia remarked, barely glancing up from the paper.

  “Why, do I look pruney?” Laurel asked from the bathroom, as she hung her wet suit in the shower.

  “Not at all. But water is getting awfully dangerous,” she answered. “Have you seen today’s newspaper? Just when you thought it was safe to go trudging through the swamps of Alabama, they tell us there’s a twelve-foot, thousand-pound gator prowling around. Apparently, he escaped from the zoo during the hurricane last week. Answers to the name Chucky. Meanwhile, a seventeen-foot great white shark has made the Woods Hole area of Cape Cod its new home—in water as shallow as three and four feet.”

  “I don’t think there are carnivorous predators in the school pool. I don’t think I have to worry about getting eaten.”

  “Maybe not by gators and sharks. But watch out for those snarky undergrad frat boys in Speedos.”

  “I wear a Speedo!”

  Talia folded the paper and stretched. “Speedos on women are suitably modest. Speedos on men are unsuitably…instructive. Too much information. And, somehow, the package always looks a little off. Know what I mean? It all looks so lumpy. What kind of turnout do you expect at the funeral today?”

  Laurel had told her about Bobbie Crocker and the photographs he had left behind, and they were both worried about the attendance at the cemetery because the man hadn’t any family that they were aware of.

  “I think it will be okay. Small but respectable. If nothing else, there will be a group from BEDS big enough to pack the van.”

  “Good. Intimate, but not lonely.”

  “No, not lonely,” Laurel said, sitting across from her. Talia started to hand her a bagel, but Laurel was too fast and grabbed one herself. Sometimes, Talia knew, she treated her roommate like an invalid. She tried to do too much for her. “Still, I’ll be very interested to see who else will be there,” Laurel went on. “I might learn something. Maybe there will be someone who can help me make some sense of the photos we found.”

  Her friend picked up the local section of the newspaper and glanced at the headlines. After a moment, Talia brought up the subject that was most on her mind that morning: “So, are you doing anything a week from Saturday?”

  “That’s pretty far away,” Laurel said. “Probably the usual, I guess. Take some pictures. Maybe swim. See David.”

  “Want to play paintball with me and the youth group?”

  “What?”

  “Paintball. You know, get in touch with your inner child?”

  “My inner child is not a Green Beret. Why in the name of God—”

  “Careful.”

  “Why in the world would you take your church youth group out to play paintball? What possible theological lessons are there to be learned from running around the woods shooting one another?”

  “Absolutely none. But it’s early in the school year and I want the group to start bonding and working like a team. I want them to get to know each other. And—and this is no small and—it’s always good to show the kids there are adults out there who care enough about them to give up a Saturday to play paintball with them.”

  “Couldn’t we just go for a hike? You know, woods. Squirrels. No guns.”

  “Oh, come on, they aren’t real guns. And this is something that will build a little camaraderie and juice up the boys. The truth is, I need an activity right now that will get the kids’ engines’ running.”

  “Can I think about it?”

  “Nope. I need another chaperone and I know the group adores you.”

  “Is this your way of trying to get me to go to church more often?”

  “If it gets you there the next morning, fabulous. But no, that’s not my agenda. I just don’t think you get out enough.”

  “I get out plenty. You’re the one who’s boyfriend-less at the moment.”

  Talia ignored this, but only because it was true. “You might get out,” she said simply, “but not with a Piranha-brand automatic paintball rifle and a couple hundred marble-sized pellets of paint. Now that’s getting out.” />
  Talia knew that Laurel found it hard to say no to her. The reality was that most people found it hard to say no to her. She took pride in her powers of persuasion. In the past, Laurel had joined her when the youth group had built giant slingshots to hurl water balloons at each other across the UVM rugby pitch, accompanied the group to an alarmingly creepy community theater production of Jesus Christ Superstar ( Judas was hanged from the ceiling over orchestra row M), and been among the chaperones when they built a raft for a regatta across Lake Champlain to raise money for the local food shelf. The catch was that all the boats had to be homemade and the materials weren’t allowed to cost more than $150. Their boat cost nowhere near that much. It was built largely of plywood and old oil drums (though they did paint them an attractive robin’s-egg blue), and it moved gracefully through the water for easily a minute and a half before starting to list, then sink. Still, the teens’ sponsors came through with their pledges.

  “I should warn you,” Talia continued, “there is a downside to paintball—and it’s a big one.”

  “The fact it’s a tad violent? A wee bit antisocial?”

  “Oh, don’t get all PC on me.”

  “Then what?”

  “We’ll have to wear these goggles that are big and gangly. I mean really big. And really gangly. They’re a very bad fashion statement.”

  “We will, huh?”

  She nodded. She noticed that Laurel had used the word we. Laurel hadn’t said yes yet, but it was clear to them both she was going.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ALTOGETHER, THERE WERE ten mourners at Bobbie’s funeral at the soldiers’ cemetery in Winooski, and that included a minister Laurel met for the first time; Serena Sargent, whom she had called with the news of Bobbie’s death; a woman who served lunch at the Salvation Army; and a representative from the VFW who wanted to present someone—anyone—with a beautifully folded American flag. But there were also three tenants from the Hotel New England who had known Bobbie the last year of his life, all of whom Laurel guessed were in their forties and fifties. And joining her from BEDS were Katherine Maguire and Sam Russo, the night manager who had been on duty when Serena had first brought Bobbie in. It was drizzling, but it was a warm autumn rain and they were not uncomfortable as they stood beneath the black umbrellas the funeral home had provided and listened to the minister read Psalms for this man he’d never met. Then Katherine shoveled some moist dirt onto the modest casket in the hole and they were done.