The Double Bind

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

DAVID FULLER was sitting in the pediatrician’s waiting room with his older daughter on Friday morning, painfully aware that every plush animal, plastic toy, and glossy magazine was a veritable petri dish of infectious agents. Worse, the small children in the room with them were coughing and wheezing and sneezing. He wanted them quarantined somewhere far, far away from Marissa-who, at the moment, felt just fine. In fact, she was practically the only kid in her class who did not have strep throat. The only reason they were here was because a cut on the pinkie toe on her right foot wasn’t healing: too much time, he guessed, with sneakers, tap shoes, and ballet slippers rubbing against it.

Marissa, of course, was absolutely thrilled that the only moment their HMO-sanctioned pediatrician could see her was on a Friday morning-when she was supposed to be in math class. She sat beside him now on the orange Naugahyde couch, her uninjured foot curled up on the cushions beneath her thigh and her head buried in a Cosmo Girl! magazine that her father thought was completely inappropriate for this waiting room. (Just where, he wondered, was Highlights when you needed it?) He feared her silence had to do with the usually forbidden things she was getting to read about in the magazine. Consequently, to break the periodical’s spell, he asked (ponderously, he feared), “Other than your pinkie toe, how are you doing?”

“Okay.”

“Is the magazine really that enticing? I certainly hope you’re not taking too much pleasure in whatever decadence you’ve found-if only so your mother doesn’t kill me.”

“She won’t.”

“Anything on your mind?”

She looked up from her magazine. “You mean, like, right now?”

“Sure. What are you thinking about…like, right now?”

“Well, since you ask, Mom thinks Laurel is way too young for you.” His ex-wife, an attorney, was in court that morning.

“Why is your mother even worrying about the age of the women I’m seeing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Wrong question. Forgive me. Does it bother you that your mother is, suddenly, unnecessarily interested in Laurel ’s age?”

“Oh, it’s not sudden.” She dropped the magazine back into the rack beside the couch and yawned, then stretched. She leaned her head against the side of his arm.

“Thank you for letting me know,” he said simply.

“No problem.”

“So…does it bother you?”

“ Laurel ’s age? Nope.”

“Does it bother Cindy?”

“She is, like, totally unaware of age. For all she knows, Laurel is Mom’s age.”

“I think you can give your sister more credit than that.”

“Not much.”

“For a kid with a sore toe, you are impressively sassy this morning,” he said.

“Hey, it was pretty gross last night.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So?”

He pulled his arm free and wrapped it around her in a hug. “So, nothing. I’m glad we’re taking care of this.”

After a long moment in which neither of them said anything, she asked, “You seeing Laurel this weekend?”

“I am.”

“Tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Saturday, too? Or Sunday?”

He thought carefully about her inquiry. Was she asking because she wanted to see Laurel, or because she was worried that his girlfriend was going to impinge upon their time as a family? She and her sister had both been more clingy ever since their mother had announced she was going to marry Eric Tourneau, another lawyer in her firm, in November. Marissa probably didn’t view Laurel as an impediment to her parents ever reconciling-a reconciliation that was wholly inconceivable even before his ex-wife and Eric had fallen in love, but an idea that he understood a child might cling to tenaciously nevertheless-but perhaps she felt Laurel was stealing away her father’s attention.

“I’m going to be with you and your sister this weekend,” he said, hoping he sounded casual. He had the girls, as usual, from the moment he picked them up on Saturday until they left for school on Tuesday morning. He hadn’t planned on Laurel and his daughters spending any time together in the next couple of days: He was having dinner with Laurel that evening precisely because he wanted to be able to focus entirely on his girls over the weekend. He had carefully compartmentalized his life, and an advantage, he had discovered, to dating a woman as young as Laurel was that she made no demands that he contemplate marriage. She felt no pressure yet to have children because she still had lots of time. Whenever he dated women even close to his age, he felt on the first date that he was being scrutinized as a marriage prospect; if he passed-which invariably he would because he was breathing and employed-by the second or the third the subject of children would arise. And the reality was that he had no intention of becoming a father again. It was not that he didn’t love children; rather, it was that he was devoted to his two girls and would never do anything to make them feel replaced or replaceable. His own father had a daughter and a son from his second marriage when David was still shuttling between his parents’ homes as a child, and he always felt like a second-class citizen after they arrived.

Was this fair to Laurel? Probably not. In this regard-and, yes, in other ways, too-he knew that he was not an especially suitable companion for her. For many women. What he viewed as a mere compartmentalization, other people had told him was coldness. He was emotionally indifferent, one girlfriend advised him when they were breaking up. Given Laurel ’s own wounds, this may have been a particularly damning flaw. But he was confident that she didn’t see it this way. He thought that precisely because of her own need to cocoon, she saw his distance as an indication that he was an apt partner. And, of course, his age helped. He knew she desired only older men, and he understood why.

Did he feel badly about the way he remained so detached? Yes, on occasion. But not badly enough that he had any intention of changing.

As early as that morning in the pediatrician’s office, however, he had begun to question Laurel ’s interest in Bobbie Crocker. And so when Marissa brought her up, it crossed his mind that it might actually be good for his girlfriend to be spending a little more time with his kids. Anything to focus her interest away from that old photographer who had died.

“Why are you wondering about Laurel?” he asked Marissa.

“I need a headshot.”

“Excuse me?” He honestly wasn’t sure he had heard her correctly.

“You know, a picture that makes me look really professional. I’m going to audition for The Miracle Worker, and I’m going to be up against like fifty other girls for Helen Keller. It will be a real cattle call, so I figure I need all the help I can get.”

“And you want Laurel to take your picture?”

“I could pay her my allowance for the next couple of months.”

“Oh, good Lord, I doubt she’d accept money.”

“Do you think she’d mind? I don’t. I know it’s a huge favor and all…”

He exhaled, relieved that the whole reason she was bringing up his girlfriend was because she wanted a headshot. “I wouldn’t call it a huge favor,” he said.

“Well. It would still be a favor. Especially if I didn’t pay her. And Laurel has already done tons for me.”

“Tons?”

“She knows every cool clothing store in town, and she must have taken me to them all. You saw the skirts and scarves she got me when we were together.”

“I remember.”

“I think that’s what got Mom really jazzed up. The idea that your college-aged girlfriend-”

“ Laurel finished college four years ago. Your mother knows that. She has a master’s in social work. Your mother knows that, too.”

Marissa thought about this briefly. Then: “I have a question.”

“Yes?”

“ Laurel sometimes seems a little, I don’t know, faraway.”

He knew his older child was perceptive and empathetic, and so he wasn’t surprised that she had sensed that something was slightly wrong with Laurel. A little off. In his opinion, Laurel was always going to be a beautiful but wounded little bird. Nevertheless, he wasn’t about to discuss what had happened in Underhill. Not that moment, anyway. Someday, maybe. Marissa needed to know that the world was a dangerous place. Even Vermont. But he wasn’t about to go into any details. “Oh, I guess like the rest of us she can be sad sometimes,” he answered simply, hoping he didn’t sound evasive.

“Not sad. It’s different than sad.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s that she’s…wispy.”

“Wispy?”

“Like the curtains in Mom’s dining room? The ones you can sort of see through?”

“I know the ones.”

“But I really do like her. You know that, right?”

“I do.”

A woman with a clipboard-a nurse Laurel’s age-gently called, “Marissa?” and scanned the small crowd for a reaction.

“That would be us,” he said, raising an arm, and then-because it struck him as funny-his daughter’s.

Marissa giggled at the idea she was a puppet, but turned to him as she rose to her feet. “So, Laurel can take my headshot?”

“We’ll ask her,” he said, but he guessed she would. And he was glad. Suddenly, he was intrigued by the idea of Marissa sharing her interest in drama with Laurel. And he liked the notion of Laurel doing something-anything-in her free time that did not involve the work of a schizophrenic photographer.

“Really?”

“Sure.”

She jumped up and down two or three times in quick succession and pantomimed a short staccato clap with her hands. Then, abruptly, she flinched and closed her eyes because, clearly, she had just landed exactly the wrong way on her toe.