Christopher Bohjalian: The Double Bind

And while David was content to allow their relationship to idle in neutral, he wasn’t cold. Part of the reason why he was uncomfortable with their relationship maturing into something more serious was that he was a divorced father of two girls, the older of whom was an eleven-year-old aspiring drama diva who Laurel thought was adorable. She wished she got to see more of the girl. His children were his priority, especially since his ex-wife was getting remarried in November, and Laurel respected that.

David was the editorial page editor for the city newspaper. He had a glisteningly modern, beautiful co-op apartment overlooking Lake Champlain, but because of the time he wanted to devote to his girls and because his first marriage had wound up a train wreck there was no chance he was going to pressure Laurel into moving in with him anytime soon. Consequently, she spent no more than two or three nights a week at his place. The other evenings he either had custody of his daughters, a sixth-grader named Marissa and a first-grader named Cindy, or he was working late so that on those days when he did have them he could lavish his full attention upon them. Thus she only saw the girls a couple of times each month, usually for picnics or movies or (one time) to go skiing. Twice she had convinced David to let her have Marissa alone for a Saturday, and both times they’d had a spectacular day shopping at the vintage clothing stores Laurel frequented and experimenting at the endless cosmetics counters at the one elegant department store in the city’s downtown.

He was always careful to drop Laurel off at her apartment first when his children were with them. She never left any sign of her occasional presence-a toothbrush, a robe, a couple of tampons-at his co-op.

David was known professionally for tough, sardonic editorials when he felt there was either a colossal injustice or a monumental stupidity that needed to be addressed. He was firm-jawed and tall, easily six feet and change, and despite his age he still had thick, straw-colored hair: He kept it cut short now, but when he had been younger-before he became the editorial page editor and had a persona to project-he had actually looked a bit like a surfer. Laurel had seen the photographs. He didn’t swim, but he ran, and so, like his girlfriend, he was in excellent shape.

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?”

T HE 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.