The Double Bind

  Oh, but her mother simply had to tease her father over the way he had insisted on rearranging the boat so this image of family harmony would not have behind it the shadow cast by a house that looked like a French estate with a tower that once had belonged to a bootlegger.

  “Really, Tom,” she’d said, motioning behind her with her thumb and one finger, her hand limp at the wrist, “you act like there are ghosts over there. If you don’t want to see that old hulk of a house, we should move. We probably should have moved years ago.”

  Instantly, the mood was curdled.

  “I want you to see that house,” he told her. “I don’t care.”

  “I don’t see why,” she answered. “You ought—”

  “No, we shouldn’t have moved,” he snapped decisively. “I won’t be bullied, and I won’t have you bullied.”

  “I have never been bullied by anyone. Present company, excepted.”

  Her mother was sitting and her father was standing, and their eyes met and neither would look away for a long, horrid moment. It was her father who blinked first, but as he turned away, he told her, “It wasn’t that house that I didn’t want in the picture. It was any house. I didn’t want any house in the picture.”

  “Oh, Tom, please. Now you’re a photographer? You actually think about things like composition?”

  “You need to see it,” he said again.

  “I just told you, I don’t need—”

  “Consider it penance.”

  “Penance? Do you even know the meaning of that word?” Then she rolled her eyes, craned her neck like a swan, and slowly shook her head. She allowed herself a small chuckle at his expense. This was too much for him.

  “Fine, you want that house in the picture? We can do that!” he snarled. Abruptly he grabbed both her wrists, the biceps in his arms tensing against the short sleeves of his shirt, and he dragged her first to her feet and then down the beach a dozen steps so that her ankles were in the water. There he pushed her hard into the small breakers, where she landed with a splash on her bottom. Before she could rise to her feet, he squatted, brought the camera up to his eye, and snapped a picture. Then another. She squinted back at him defiantly but didn’t say a word or make a move to stop him.

  “You will always see that house,” he told her. “Always!”

  Both Pamela and Robert had seen their father manhandle their mother before. But never outside. Never when the two of them hadn’t been drinking or weren’t enduring the pain of a serious, lights-out hangover headache. And so before either Pamela or their mother could stop him, Robert ran at Tom and pummeled him so hard in the stomach and with such unexpected ferocity that he knocked the wind out of him. Had the large camera not had a strap that Tom had looped around his neck, it probably would have splashed into the water when he doubled over and the film inside it ruined.

  “Stop it!” Robert screamed at him. “Don’t hit her! Stop it!”

  Sometimes Pamela had tried to de-escalate her parents’ fights before they grew this violent by changing the subject. By bringing up a boy in whom she had some interest—a surefire way to get both of her parents’ attention. Some evenings she even had the foresight to water down the gin. On this occasion, however, she simply stood by as a few churlish comments had mushroomed into this public, midsummer explosion, and now—for the first time, but not, alas, the last—her brother had involved himself by attacking the proud and arrogant and physically intimidating Tom Buchanan.

  Their mother quickly climbed to her feet, rising so fast that the water poured off her bathing suit in streams and her emergence made a great sucking sound in the small spot in the cove where she had fallen, and she managed to get between her husband and her son just as Tom wheeled on the boy with the back of his hand. Instead, he hit Daisy, and he hit her so hard in the cheek that her head whirled around as if it were on a spindle and Pamela screamed because she thought he had broken her neck. He hadn’t, but Daisy corkscrewed into the sand and would have a bruise on her face that would last into the autumn. Both of her children fell upon her and hugged her. They were desperate to know how badly she was hurt.

  Still winded, Tom watched them for the briefest of moments, then stomped from the shallow water with his camera bouncing heavily against his chest and started back up the manicured lawn to the house. Pamela remained with her mother and her brother on the beach for at least twenty minutes, until they all heard first the creak of the broad doors on the carriage barn opening and then the roar of the man’s new black and red Pierce-Arrow. Only when the sound of the engine had completely receded in the distance did they shuffle like wounded soldiers up to the house and start to ice down Daisy’s face. The woman didn’t even try to lighten the mood with a remark at her husband’s expense.

  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.

  CHAPTER TEN

  TALIA 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 s
at 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.

  “Well, I know I am totally psyched!” This was Matthew. Predictably, the boys in the youth group were considerably more enthusiastic about the paintball outing than the girls. Lightly, but certainly not gently, he thumped Schuyler, the other boy on the committee, on the shoulder and added, “Wear a ton of sweatshirts, bro. Those paintballs hurt!”

  Schuyler took a massive slurp of his hot chocolate and nodded, expelling an immense sigh that suggested orgasmic satisfaction. He had already finished a chocolate chip muffin the size of a grapefruit.

  “Where have you heard that?” Talia asked Matthew. No one had told her that paintballs might hurt. She thought they were little marbles about the consistency of a gelatinous bath bead—the sort of thing that would more or less melt in your fingers if you held it too long.

  “Heard that? I’ve felt ’em!” said Matthew. “I played once, last year, and I was, like, completely humbled. I walked like an old dude for days.”

  This was news to Talia—and, clearly, to the two girls at the table. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see they both looked a little sheepish.

  “Oh, come on, how painful could it really be?” she said. “Middle-aged executives play it all the time as a team-building exercise. They get a dozen employees—all white-collar geeks, most of whom are in serious need of defibrillation when they’re done—”

  “Defibri-what?” asked Randy.

  “Electric shock. It gets the heart beating…after it stops.”

  “Is it that hard?”

  “Paintball? No! All I meant is that it can’t be all that difficult or all that painful if a lot of out-of-shape, middle-aged—”

  She stopped when she felt a hand on her shoulder and turned around instantly. It was David. Laurel’s boyfriend. Laurel’s middle-aged boyfriend. The latest in her roommate’s string of middle-aged boyfriends. The three of them had had dinner together a couple of times, but he had never spent the night at Laurel’s and her apartment. Why would he when he had a place of his own that looked out on the lake, and he and Laurel could make all the noise they wanted when they were there? Consequently, she didn’t know him especially well. She certainly didn’t know him well enough that she thought he might see the humor in her dissing out-of-shape, hypochondriac, middle-aged, white-collar…geeks.

  And, she realized with embarrassment, she had used that very word.

  “Do I really seem that old and infirm, Talia?” he asked, his voice playful and bemused. He had at least a decade on everyone else in the café. He was wearing a gray tweed blazer and his eyeglasses had retro tortoiseshell frames. At least Talia hoped they were meant to be retro. It was possible he really had owned them for decades. Middle-aged people weren’t nearly as bad as senior citizens when it came to wearing dowdy old frames, but they sure as hell didn’t update them often enough.

  “I was generalizing,” she said and started to rise, but with a gentle downward pressure of his fingers he suggested she needn’t stand on his account. Then he pulled back his hand and waved—more of a salute, really—at the students crowded around the table beside her.

  “How are you?” Talia asked him, surprised at how small her voice sounded. Was she really that mortified by what she had said?

  “Still a few years shy of a respirator, I hope.”

  “I was just kidding. I—”

  “And I’m just kidding, too. I wasn’t offended, honest.”

  “So, what are you doing here?”

  He rolled his eyes from side to side conspiratorially, as if he wanted to make sure no one was listening. Then in a stage whisper he said, “They sell coffee here. You can buy it and”—again the eyes darting from one wall to the other—“bring it back to your office.”
r />   She nodded. The newspaper building was right around the corner.

  “Yo, you ever play paintball—like as a team-building exercise or something?” asked Matthew. Everyone at the table, even the girls, started to laugh.

  “Can’t say that I have. Are you all about to?”

  “Saturday, man!” the burly teen announced. “And I am pumped!”

  “Well, then, I am pumped for you,” he said patiently to the boy before turning back to Talia. “Have you heard from Laurel since she went to Long Island?”

  “An e-mail or two. Nothing major.”

  “She back yet? I know she was planning to drive home today.”

  “She might be. I haven’t been home since breakfast.”

  “Well, I’m seeing her tomorrow night. Say hi to her for me,” he said, and then he retreated to the rear of the café where three young adults with significant parts of their faces pierced danced like dervishes behind a counter to grind and brew and steam a lengthy menu of coffee and espresso drinks.

  “That dude”—the word stretched out into two lengthy syllables—“is dating Laurel?” Vanessa asked, unable to hide the incredulity in her voice. Vanessa was Talia’s young biblical scholar, and she looked up at the youth pastor now with wise eyes and straight hennaed hair—hair so straight that it fell like curtains down the sides of her face.

  “Indeed he is.”

  “Isn’t he, like, old enough to be her dad?”

  “It’s close. But I think he may only be old enough to be her uncle.”

  She made a mental note that when she saw Laurel next she should tell her that she might get some grief from the youth group about the age of her boyfriend. And, she realized, she had better warn her that paintball might be more painful than she had let on—than, in all fairness, she had known. Well, maybe not warn her—at least not use that particular word. She knew that occasionally she treated Laurel with more delicacy than was really necessary, but something about the violence of the game had her questioning now whether it might have been her very best idea to insist that Laurel join them in the woods that coming Saturday: Yes, it had been years since her roommate had been attacked, and they hardly ever discussed it. But her friend was far more damaged than she ever let on. The girl still made a point of being out of state on the mere anniversary of the attack.