Christopher Bohjalian - The Double Bind

Pamela found it interesting now that her mother hadn’t bothered to save the other photos Tom had taken that day-the ones of Daisy staring back at him after he had thrown her into the shallow water. Most likely this was because they were so unflattering. Had they been at all becoming, her mother most certainly would have kept them. Years later, who would know what really had occurred that afternoon? At least that’s what her mother would have told herself. It could all have been innocent horseplay. Daisy probably went to her grave believing that she had redeemed the family image.

But, of course, she hadn’t. Not completely. Some people viewed their family merely as luckless and ill-fated-which, given her brother’s tragic life, might actually have been the case. Who could say? Maybe her own inability to have children was a sign, too. But Pamela knew that others saw her family as decadent, careless, unfeeling. Some considered them cruel.

Nevertheless, Pamela was confident that her mother had lived for her children in the years after her summer with Gatz. She didn’t remember what her mother had been like when she had been carrying Robert, but she had heard enough stories growing up to know that Daisy had loved every moment she’d had with that little baby inside her, and her relationship with Tom had never been better. Nor would it ever be that good again. The greatest tragedy in her mother’s life? Not the death of James Gatz, though Pamela knew how much her mother had loved him. Nor was it Daisy’s own culpability in the death of her husband’s lover, Myrtle Wilson. It was the way she would lose her son.

That was the great tragedy of Daisy Buchanan’s life.

And now, Pamela thought, once and for all I have lost him, too.

She contemplated for a moment the ad she had seen in the newspaper on Friday. She had phoned her attorney that afternoon. And then the next day, Saturday, this social worker from West Egg had called her. She wondered if the girl was aware of the ad-of what her shelter was doing. One would suppose that she was. Still…

She recalled Laurel ’s stricken face that morning after she had toppled the teacup. The child was peculiarly interested in the pictures. She wanted them. But Pamela knew that she wanted them, too-precisely because she didn’t know what images might exist in those negatives or what Robert might have photographed later in life. She had only a hunch.

And so she resolved that she would get the pictures back, every last one. It was the least she could do for her mother.

T ALIA RICE SAT in the dimly lit espresso bar Tuesday afternoon sipping a hot chocolate all but smothered by a giant puffball cloud of whipped cream, while chatting with four of her young charges from the church youth group. The café had once been a ritzy craft cooperative with shelves of hand-thrown pots, handblown martini glasses, and handmade silver jewelry. The shelves were gone now but the dark paneling remained, and the current owners had covered the walls and the ceiling with lush plants and meandering vines. Talia imagined it was a bit like sipping coffee in the Colombian jungle-except for the blue glow of the laptops on which the students tirelessly searched the Web from the small rustic tables and the varied rings and whirrs from their cell phones-and her high school kids liked coming here because it was usually filled largely with college kids. Talia had sat in this very spot often when she’d been in school.

Occasionally, she glanced down at her hot chocolate and her mind roamed to a question that she pondered more often than she figured was healthy: Exactly how much longer would she be able to eat like this? Her Botox-shooting, carrot-crunching, gym-junkie mother on Manhattan’s Upper East Side could no longer eat the way she once had-at least, that is, if she wanted to remain the anorexic size four that she claimed to be with her friends, (though Talia knew that more and more of her mother’s wardrobe was actually a size six). She guessed that she had at least another half a decade, but a lot would depend on when she had children. And she wanted children, she wanted them badly.

Of course, that meant having a husband. And Talia hadn’t even had a serious boyfriend since college. She’d had plenty of sex in that time: If you were young and female and breathing in this town, you couldn’t help but have a lot of sex. But it had largely been hookups with friends she had met at parties: nice boys. Fun evenings. No future.

And lately even the casual, hormone-satiating sex had dwindled. It was as if her time at the church-proximity alone to something that just might represent a moral compass-was proving sufficient to minimize the usual days of the week when she was quite sure she was in heat. Not that heat, in Talia’s opinion, was immoral. But the more time she spent with teens as young as twelve, the more she found herself slinking back to her apartment and wondering what the hell she’d been thinking when she’d been having sex with her friends in Manhattan when she was fifteen and sixteen years old.

“So, like, how many fund-raisers do we need?” Matthew was asking her. He was wearing a Boston Red Sox baseball cap backward, the bill so far back that it was flirting with the collar of his faux army jacket. The four high school students who she was treating to hot chocolate and snacks that afternoon were the youth group’s activities committee. Talia was a little disappointed that Matthew was bringing the subject back to fund-raising, but she wasn’t surprised: A few minutes earlier, at the instigation of her disarmingly scholarly high school sophomore, Vanessa, the conversation had turned briefly to free will and what the apostle Paul had meant when he wrote that the path to freedom was to be found in obedience. There was little that unnerved Matthew-that unnerved many of her teens-more than in-depth biblical deconstruction. Usually, Talia had to remind them that two and three thousand years ago people were even more primitive than their grandparents, and it wasn’t impossible to find a lesson in all that violence, disrespect, and abuse.

“I think we need one every other month,” she answered. “But it all depends on how successful the fund-raisers are and just how ambitious we want to be with our mission work.” Mission work was the term they used for the money they were planning to raise that year and turn over to BEDS in June-the end of the school year. Laurel had given a presentation to the teenagers about the homeless in Burlington, and the group had agreed instantly to make them their cause.

Of course, Talia knew that they also needed money for what they called their “activities” because trips to rock concerts-even Christian ones-and amusement parks and movies and (yes) paintball didn’t come free.

“How much is this paintball thing costing?” Randy, the other young woman on the activities committee, asked her, seeming to read her mind and not even trying to hide her disgust with the activity they had planned for that coming Saturday. Over the summer, Randy had cut most of her hair and dyed what remained a creosote black, moussing it up most days into a series of small, prickly daggers. This week she had added a strip of blue a bit like a Mohawk. The girl probably hoped that she looked a little scary, but her eyes were too wide-even with all that black mascara-and her face too cherubic. She actually had dimples. In the end, Randy looked like nothing more than a little girl playing dress-up.

“Not a whole lot,” Talia answered. “Laurel and I are paying for ourselves, and the folks at the paintball park are letting all of you on to the field at half-price because we’re a youth group. And a member of the congregation has agreed to pay for all of our ammunition.” The irony of this last sentence caused her a moment of introspection, but the moment was brief and-through force of will-shallow. She didn’t like the juxtaposition of the words congregation and ammunition.