I mean
Something catches my attention, and I look up. There is someone at a second-floor window. A man, fuzzy at first and then coming into focus between the slats of rain—Henry. My twin. My heart quickens, my palms begin to sweat, to shake. I watch him, and from this distance it appears that he turns his head toward me. Looks right at me. Impossible. My car is parked too far away for him to see. And yet he appears to be looking in my direction, waiting for me to make up my mind, to explain why I’ve come to spy on him this morning.
Something moves at my lap, and I look down. I have written: What happened to her? What happened to Laura?
But when I look back up, search that window for some kind of an answer, Henry has vanished.
5
I loved her before he did.
Laura was the daughter of my father’s publisher. Eighteen years old, shy and quiet, she had come with him on an afternoon visit one spring day before the end of the semester. I was home from Yale, without Henry. I left due to a disciplinary action that never went away, a misunderstanding at an off-campus party, and even though I promised my parents it was just a short-term thing, I never went back.
Henry remained, eroded slowly out of my life, went on to grad school in New Haven and earned a full professorship at Oldham at twenty-six. I wanted to tell them what had really happened at Yale, but they would never believe me. And besides, I liked the absence of him, the way my father looked me in the eye when he spoke, Henry’s presence nothing but a muffled voice on the telephone. I slept in his bed, the bottom bunk, his heavy metal posters from high school still adorning the dusty walls. I read his philosophy books—Hume, Locke, and of course Descartes—and purged his closet. I never wanted it to end.
On the afternoon I met Laura, we ate dinner together on a picnic table overlooking the Hudson. It was my father and hers, a mutton-chopped man who smelled of cigar smoke and old paper, and Laura and I, stragglers brought along on a hesitant date. The talk was of books, specifically my father’s next project. Thomas Malcolm had already achieved tenure, had written a bestselling book on Derrida, was always gone off to this campus or that, demanding steep lecture fees that allowed the Malcolm family to travel the world. He was the William H. and Martha Barer Professor of Philosophy at Oldham College, a tiny insulated fortress of a school on the banks of the Hudson near Albany. It had always been our home, Henry and I playing hide-and-seek in the campus buildings, getting lost in the basement of the old administration wing one winter and found shivering, clutching one another beside the dead boiler. And later, as high schoolers, auditing classes in obscure topics at our father’s discretion—Literature of Modern Israel, Water and War, the Old Testament. I remember Henry in a class once raising his hand, scrawny Tom Malcolm’s son, standing up and challenging the adjunct professor. “And why is it that when LeClaire writes about solipsism in the twentieth century, he fails to mention anything after 1970? What about Stoddard? What about Ellis, for fuck’s sake?” And the young professor, mortified, staring at the kid and his black eyes, noticing the aggression that always—always—wafted off Henry, at the way his fists were clenched at his sides as if this academic conversation in the Gray Brick Building were some kind of pitched battle.
It was the only thing Henry and I shared: our love of that college.
At first I was annoyed by Laura, this teenager, this intruder. On the day we met she carried a dog-eared paperback copy of Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, a pretentious book, I thought, although it (of course) impressed the hell out of my father. But as the afternoon went on the more I found myself staring at her: at the feminine manner in which she sat, the way she read the book during every spare minute, the way she picked carefully at her food, and how she laughed, her head tossed back, a purple-nailed finger to her lips.
She was at Burnbridge Prep now, bound for Sarah Lawrence in the fall. My father told me this, probably as a way to entice me into going back to Yale; I only nodded and yawned. Her own father was oblivious; there was money in his eyes. When she excused herself after dessert, I followed.
We walked down the little footpath behind our house to the river, the one Henry and I had worn flat as boys. The river was quick, darting and restless. The wind roiled and buffeted us against one another as we walked. My stepmother had planted rhododendron and holly along the path, and the air was thick and full and sweet. For the longest time we stood together, the fading sun warming our necks, Laura saying nothing, me making frantic notes in the notebook I’d brought along.
“Inspiration hit you or something?” she asked, still not looking at me. Looking down at the river, where a tug slipped lazily out of view.
“No,” I said. “I do this. Take notes. On everything. The river. The trees. You.”
Finally she glanced up. “Like graphomania?”
“It’s called different things. Scribomania, graphorrhea. It all refers to the same disease—the obsession to write, to just put words on the page. Always.”
“Disease,” she said. “So you’re sick? Is that why you dropped out of Yale?”
I stopped in the middle of a twisted, snaking sentence. “Sort of.”
There were a few seconds of silence. I took my pen to the end of the line, wrote her name in the margin, then started back again. Calm calm calm calm be calm Laura—
She said, “Daddy says you have a twin.”
“Identical.”
“What’s it like? I imagine it would be . . . exciting.”
Again I stopped writing, looked at her. “How do you mean?”
“To always know that someone who’s just like you is out there somewhere. To have somebody who’s so close, a copy, living a different life. What’s he like?”
“Different,” I said. “Moody.”
“I sense a sibling rivalry.”
“You don’t know Henry.”
“Henry Malcolm.” She said the name as if it had a taste, a texture. “Are you a philosopher too, Jonathan?” she asked, her eyes flicking toward my notebook, and at the sound of my own name something happened inside me, an electric tingle. I glanced back down at the ink-slick page, at the quickening water.
“A writer.”
“You’ve published?”
I shrugged. “I will. Soon.”
She smiled, freckles stretching tight. “Maybe I’ll read your books one day. Maybe my father will publish them.”
But as she said this she was walking away, and for the longest time I stood, my heart pounding, the river loud and fast below me, until I realized I was standing in the rain.
* * *
It stormed that night, and Laura and her father stayed with us. My stepmother fixed up the guest bedroom, flurried around the house clutching towels and sheets. As much as I would like to speak of a romance, it didn’t come. Not then. We were too young, too wrapped up in ourselves. Our time would come five years later.
I was doing a signing in a bookstore in Manhattan. My first book had just been published by Ashbrook, her father’s imprint, and there were a few people milling about. They were more curious than anything—Leibniz and Kant: A Philosophy of Rivalry would, alas, not change the world.
Signing books, speaking with my eyes down (“Who should I make it out to? Sarabeth? Ah, that’s a beautiful name—is she your daughter?”), I heard a familiar voice and looked up. She stood at my table, smiling. She had changed ever so slightly, like a vase turned so that it strikes a different light. There was a hardness in her blue eyes, a weariness.
“Laura,” I said, looking up, pen poised above paper, fingers tensing gray-knuckled against one of Henry’s fountain pens.
“Daddy says the book is selling well,” she said, a lie that I appreciated nonetheless. “He says you’re a natural, like your father.”
I waved a hand. “And what about your own father? He’s a great editor, Laura. Tell him I said so.”
“I will.”
A comfortable few seconds passed. There was no one behind her.
“So what bri
ngs you here?” I asked. “A run on Umberto Eco?”
The smile touched her eyes. “You remembered.”
“I wrote it down.”
I went back to the page, scratched To Laura, I will always remember our storm, staved off the urge to go on, to tell her everything I was thinking, and slid the book toward her across the table.
“Sarah Lawrence,” I said. “You must have graduated by now.”
“Life’s weird” was all she said, tucking my book beneath her arm and glancing beyond me, at the wide front window, the people streaming up Eighth Avenue.
I said, “Would you like to get some coffee?”
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Will Lavender
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First Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition September 2012
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Lavender, Will, date.
Dominance / Will Lavender.—1st Simon & Schuster hardcover ed.
p. cm.
1. College teachers—Fiction. 2. Murderers—Fiction. 3. College
students—Fiction. 4. Serial murder investigation—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3612.A94424D65 2011
813’.6—dc22
2010046118
ISBN 978-1-4516-1729-0
ISBN 978-1-4516-1730-6 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-4516-1731-3 (eBook)
Dominance Page 28