The Double Bind (8 page)

She stared for a moment at the little boy, trying to find a resemblance to Bobbie Crocker. A glimmer in the eyes, maybe. The shape of his face. But she couldn’t. It wasn’t that there might not have been a resemblance. But it was hard to discern one because so much of Bobbie’s face was obscured by that impenetrable beaver beard.

“And, of course, this all presupposes that the little boy in the photo is Pamela’s brother and the little girl is Pamela,” her aunt continued. “Why would you make such a leap? Why couldn’t they be two other children visiting the house? Guests, maybe?”

“I guess they could be.”

“Yes! Maybe they were friends of the family. Or cousins,” the older woman added, her voice regaining its typically agreeable lilt. In the background, Laurel could hear that Martin had skipped ahead on the CD all the way to the king’s first big number, and was belting out “A Puzzlement” with his usual flair. What Martin lacked in pronunciation, he more than made up for in enthusiasm.

“But I really have a hunch I might be on to something here,” she said.

“Then maybe you should talk to Pamela Marshfield. Why not? Show her the pictures. See what she says.”

Laurel reached for the photo with her phone on her shoulder and gazed at the little girl. The child looked entitled and intense; when she envisioned her as an elderly woman, she saw someone who was more than a trifle intimidating.

“Do you know where she lives now?”

“Haven’t a clue. But the Daytons might. Or the Winstons.”

“The Daytons are the family that bought her house?”

“That’s right. And the Winstons built that elegant Tudor on some of the land she’d once owned. Mrs. Winston is very old now, too. I believe her husband has passed away. I think she lives there alone.”

Laurel’s office door was wide open, and she saw a slightly walleyed young man with spaniel ears and a scrawny turkey neck hovering in the hallway outside it. His hair was dyed the color of orange Kool-Aid, and he had long cuts on both emaciated arms, one stitched till it disappeared beneath the sleeve of his sweat-stained gray T-shirt. He was a mess, and Laurel could tell by his deer-in-the-headlights stare that he couldn’t believe he was here at the city’s shelter for the homeless.

“I have a client,” she told her aunt. “I think I need to go now.”

“All right. You let me know if you find out anything interesting about your mystery man,” Aunt Joyce said, and they exchanged their good-byes and hung up. Then Laurel rose to greet her new client. She had the sense that he had been hungry for a very long time, and so she suggested that they stroll to the kitchen for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The intake forms could wait until after he’d eaten.

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

H
IS MOTHER NAMED HIM
W
HITAKER,
which was also her father’s name. His older brother recast him as Witless when they were arguing siblings in Des Moines. His resident adviser his first year at college christened him Witty, because he tended to hide his nervousness and insecurity behind a thick veil of irony. The RA thought this was clever, and for a while the young man had feared the name was going to stick. It didn’t. Thank God. That would have been too much pressure. And so most people simply viewed him as Whit. At least that was how he introduced himself, and that’s what the other tenants in the apartment house, including Talia and Laurel, called him that summer and autumn.

He had two buddies helping him move his stuff in, including a bruiser with whom he’d once played rugby, but Talia and Laurel were around that Saturday morning and offered to help, too. He was instantly smitten by both. Talia had exquisite, almond-shaded skin and a raven’s black mane that she wore in a single long braid that fell almost to her waist. She managed to make gray sweatpants and a yellow UVM T-shirt look like loungewear from a lingerie catalog. She was disarmingly tall and moved with the grace and poise of a dancer. He assumed that every one of the teenage boys at her church had a crush on her—that is, if she didn’t leave them intimidated and mute—and every one of the girls wanted to emulate her. She was, clearly, a rock-and-roll pastor.

Laurel was wearing a ball cap with her homeless shelter’s slogan on the front, “Homeland Security Begins with a Home,” and her blond ponytail rose over the plastic fit strap in the back like a fountain. It actually bounced against her neck as she raced up and down the stairs with boxes of his CDs and plastic garbage bags full of his clean shirts and socks. She was wearing a pair of pink Keds and denim capris, and he was mightily impressed by those calves. Gastrocnemius. Soleus. Peroneus longus. The muscles that were extending her feet as she moved. The girl had calves that were glorious. A biker’s calves. A swimmer’s calves. A—okay, he admitted to himself, it wasn’t merely a professional’s appreciation—lover’s calves.

He might have become infatuated with either woman. They were both four years older than he was, and that alone was a powerful aphrodisiac. Why? It meant, pure and simple, that they were no longer in school. Any woman who actually had a job seemed indescribably exotic to him at the time.

But it was Laurel who inadvertently cast the first spell. Perhaps because it was so unintended. So accidental. Early that afternoon, when they were just about done moving him into the house, they were standing together on his little—and
little
was indeed the apt word; it was more like a ledge with a railing—terrace. They’d wandered out there to catch their breath and drink their water. They were hot and sweaty and breathing heavily from their exertions, and Laurel asked him about Iowa and his family and the house in which he had grown up. She asked him why he wanted to be a doctor. She seemed so honestly—and intensely—interested in his responses that briefly he worried that she viewed him as one of the lost causes who appeared at the shelter. But then he let that fear go, because he realized this was just how this new housemate of his was hardwired. She asked about others because she cared about others—and, perhaps, because it meant that she was less likely to have to talk about herself. Regardless of the reason, she made his heart pound as he babbled on about who he was, until she did something so extravagantly intimate and unexpected that his breath caught in his throat: While he was describing for her his grandfather’s farm, she took her water bottle and sprinkled a few drops on a delicate handkerchief she had in her pants pocket, and then leaned in close to him and pressed it against his jaw. Apparently, he had cut himself at some point and the small wound had once more started to bleed, and he hadn’t noticed it yet. They stood that way, close enough to kiss, for easily half a minute.

There was something about her that was at once nurturing and deeply vulnerable. He could see it in what she had chosen to do with her life and in her relationship with Talia: Talia was like a big sister who watched over her.

Whit was not awkward around girls, but he had always been a little shy. He once had a girlfriend who said he was attractive in an unthreatening sort of way. He presumed she had meant this as a compliment, but then she broke up with him a week after making the observation. In college he had been considered discreet. He sometimes wondered if he’d been born a generation earlier whether he would have been every girl’s best male friend: the one who is there after they’ve been hurt by some jerk on the football team or college radio station and helps to pick up the pieces. But, of course, always goes home alone. Consequently, he was grateful he was born when he was.

Whit didn’t pretend to understand women, and he found Laurel particularly enigmatic throughout August and those first weeks of September. They went to a couple of movies together and dancing once—as friends, nothing more, always in a group—and a few times they walked together into the downtown for ice cream. All very wholesome. He knew his Iowa grandparents would have been proud. He found her to be an enthusiastic conversationalist when they spoke about her work with the homeless, about medical school, about the films they had seen. They could talk about politics and religion, and they did—sometimes briefly in the apartment house’s hallway and sometimes for longer periods on the house’s front stoop. But other subjects seemed to transform Laurel in seconds from pleasant to distant, and he began to grow increasingly careful about what subjects he brought up. One time he offered to take Laurel biking on the spectacularly beautiful roads west of Middlebury, and it was as if he had suggested that they take in a funeral. She grew remote and then excused herself and returned from the stoop to her apartment. Another time he had been prattling on—charmingly, he supposed, in a Comedy Central sort of way—about slasher movies and the idiocy of the women and men who always get themselves killed in the woods, and she withdrew completely. Laurel didn’t ever demean or dismiss him; it was clear to Whit that she didn’t demean or dismiss anyone. But she would break off their discussions abruptly, and continue on her way to BEDS or the university darkroom or the grocery store. Other than Talia, she didn’t seem to have any friends.

Of course, he understood that if she were to examine his world she wouldn’t have seen an especially frenetic social life, either. But he had an excuse: He was just starting medical school. For biochemistry alone he could have spent his life memorizing names and structures and pathways. And, yes, he could be blushingly self-conscious around pretty women.

Still, he had a sense there was going to come a time when he was going to regret a sizable number of the things he had said, no matter how innocuous the remarks had seemed at the moment. One conversation in mid-September was indicative in his mind. It was a weekday morning, and he was standing in his bike shorts and a black T-shirt on the terrace off his apartment that looked out over the street just as Laurel raced through the front door below him and started down the sidewalk toward the city. He was probably staring (though, he would hope later, not too feverishly). Suddenly, she turned back toward the house, swiveling almost balletically on the toe of her sneaker. She looked up, saw him watching, and smiled.

He waved back with a pair of fingers, a small salute, and hoped the intense way he had been scrutinizing her hadn’t been obvious. Maybe that two-finger wave would look casual. It hadn’t: He could tell by the way she had glanced up at him and then quickly away that his colossal interest was evident.

“Forget something?” he called down.

“I did,” she said, and she raced back inside. A moment later, she reemerged. He had barely moved.

For a second, he was unsure whether it would be more polite to show his interest by inquiring what she’d returned for, or whether he might risk embarrassing her if he did. For all he knew, she’d forgotten her diaphragm. After all, she had a boyfriend, an older man who worked at the newspaper. But after a brief pause, as she jiggled the keys on her ring after locking the front door, he went ahead and asked, “So, what was so important?”

“A book on rock and roll. The roots of rock and roll. There’s a chapter in it about Muddy Waters.”

“I didn’t know you were so into music history.”

She rolled her eyes and smiled. “Trust me, I’m not. But we had a client who might have had a connection to some early rock musicians.” She had a red backpack draped casually over one shoulder, and she slung it in front of her now so she could unzip it and drop the book inside.

“Someone homeless?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Was he a musician?”

“Nope.”

“A songwriter?”

“No. A photographer.”

“Where’s he living now?”

“He died.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s a little sad. But he did live a long time. He was an old man.”

“And so you’re researching rock music now because…because why?”

“It’s complicated. I’m actually interested in the photo credits. I could tell you more, but it would take up most of the morning. And I have to be at work. I’ll fill you in later. Okay?”

“And, yes, I have to go for a ride,” he said, hoping he sounded suitably slackeresque, but was afraid after he’d spoken that he’d sounded only cavalier and irresponsible. “I don’t have class today until ten-thirty.”

“We do keep different hours.”

“You know, it wasn’t all that long ago that you were a student, too.”

“Sometimes it feels like it was.”

He leaned over the balustrade. He wasn’t precisely sure how, but he had the disturbing sense that he was about to say exactly the wrong thing. Again. He just knew it. But he felt he had to say something, and so he forged ahead. “This is going to be a pretty short ride. I thought I might go for a much longer one this weekend. Maybe up in Underhill. There are some wonderful logging trails up there, you know. I guess I bike the way you swim. Tell me again: Why did you swap your bike for a swimsuit?”

“I don’t think I told you once,” she answered, not looking at him at all, but focusing intently on the process of zipping up her knapsack. It was the kind of remark that coming from anyone other than Laurel would have sounded curt and left him feeling profoundly diminished. But from her it seemed merely wistful. As if, suddenly, the topic had made her tired.

“Any interest in coming with me? I have two bikes, you know. I could lower the seat on one and you’d be incredibly comfortable. I was up there a month ago—up in Underhill—and there is one stretch where the woods just open up completely, and the view—”

“Whit, I have to run. Forgive me,” she said, not even looking up at him as she cut him off.

“Oh, I understand,” he said.

Though, of course, he didn’t really. Not yet. And not at all.