The Double Bind by Chris Bohjalian Read Free Book Online Page A

wandered into her diner and paid for a cup of coffee and a couple of eggs with money he boasted proudly he’d raised Dumpster-diving for recyclable bottles and cans. He told her that once, a long time ago, he had been from a wealthy family on Long Island and that he had seen more of the world than she’d believe: He had met, he said, people she’d read about in books and magazines and encyclopedias.
    Serena presumed that most of his babble had only the most tenuous connection to reality. But she remembered her week and a half at BEDS, and how the people there had been very nice to her. She didn’t know whether Laurel might still be there, but she figured that even if that other woman wasn’t it would be a reasonable place for her new friend to get help. And so Serena brought him to the shelter, where Sam Russo got him a bed in the men’s section. In conjunction with a doctor at the state hospital, a chemical cocktail was found that stabilized his behavior and again synchronized his personal reality with the rest of the world. Bobbie didn’t see the planet precisely the way most people did, but he was no longer a danger to himself. Then, once the shelter had established that he was capable of living independently—he was even using a food stamp debit card to buy groceries—BEDS found him a room at the Hotel New England. Two-hundred and forty-five square feet, a single bed, a closet. A hot plate and a dorm-room-size refrigerator. He would share a bathroom with the other tenants on the floor and a kitchen with the other residents of the building. It wasn’t glamorous. But it was a room with a roof and plenty of heat in the winter and excellent ventilation in the summer. It beat the street, and with federal subsidies it cost him almost nothing.

    L AUREL’S BOYFRIEND that autumn was nearing forty-four. This meant that although he was eighteen years older than she was, he was considerably closer to her age than her previous boyfriend, a fellow who had insisted he was a mere fifty-one but Laurel was quite sure was lying. He used a face cream for wrinkles (though he called it a hydrating lotion), and he seemed to be popping Viagra—and then Levitra and Cialis—like M&M’s. This made the bedroom a frequent location for petty squabbles, because while he was on Viagra (needlessly, in her opinion, given that his unenhanced libido would have been impressive on a nineteen-year-old fraternity letch) she was still taking an antidepressant. It was a small dose and she had been tapering off it as she gained both distance and perspective on the attack. But while she was chemically slowing her sex drive, her boyfriend was souping up his with every drug he saw advertised on
Monday Night Football.
    Still, that isn’t why they broke up. They broke up because he wanted Laurel to move into the meadow mansion he had built on a parcel of what had once been a dairy farm ten miles south of Burlington—he was a senior executive with a group that had pioneered some kind of hospital software—and she didn’t want to live in the suburbs. She didn’t want to live with him. And so they parted.
    Her current boyfriend, David Fuller, was an executive as well, but he was profoundly commitment-phobic—which she considered at the time an endearing and helpful part of his nature, and thus far it had actually given their relationship considerably more longevity than most of her romantic liaisons. Laurel still had moments when she needed to be around people, especially nights, hence the importance of her friendship with Talia. But as her therapist had observed, she was still, apparently, unprepared for an adult commitment herself.
    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