Looking for Laura (20 page)

“Good boy.” Trying not to scowl, Todd swiveled back to his monitor, now filled with his favorite screen saver, which featured floating headlines. He'd programmed it to quote famous real headlines: Dewey Beats Truman. Japan Attacks Pearl Harbor. Ford to New York: Drop Dead.

He told himself he was better off reading the archaic headlines than doing an Internet search on thighs. He wasn't really interested in thighs, anyway. Just one woman's thighs—and he wasn't interested in them, either.

He needed a social life. He and Eddie both. Maybe he ought to climb out from behind his desk and do a little investigative work up the hill on the Winfield College campus. Why not? All those pretty undergraduate girls—

Who were more too young for him than the undergraduate boys were too young for Gloria.

Five or six years ago, the Winfield undergraduates wouldn't have been too young for him. Five or six years ago, Paul had married a Winfield undergrad—not by choice, but still. If he'd had his pick of the entire student body, he probably wouldn't have selected Sally, but at that age, Todd certainly couldn't have faulted his friend for checking out the campus action. A fresh, nubile young thing with a sparkle in her eyes and a touch of
naiveté, glossy hair and a twinkly voice and plump, firm breasts, and free thighs….

He wondered how many undergraduates named Laura were enrolled at Winfield College.

He sat up so suddenly, the casters on the legs of his chair skidded on the smooth plastic that covered the carpet behind his desk. If Paul's Laura hadn't been a client, maybe she'd been a student. He'd screwed around with a student once. Why not twice?

Todd glanced through the glass wall at the newsroom. Gloria was at her desk, perusing a scholarly journal. Her oversize feet, shod in high-top canvas sneakers, were propped up on her desk beside her computer, and a wad of gum was receiving a violent working-over between her molars. Todd lifted the phone and punched in her extension. He watched Gloria glare at her ringing phone as if it were something evil. With a combination of reluctance and disgust, she reached across her desk and picked up the receiver.

“Gloria? Todd,” he identified himself.

Her disgust ebbed slightly. Gloria was arrogant and prickly, but she was a damn good reporter, so he put up with her. And he paid her a substantial salary, so she put up with him. “Yeah?”

“Have you got a Winfield College directory from last year? Or maybe the year before.”

“I've got them going back seventeen years,” she told Todd. She hadn't been working for the
Valley News
for seventeen years—in fact, seventeen years ago the bulk of her writing would probably have been book reports for her eighth-grade English teacher—but her damn-good-reporter instincts made her hoard all sorts of useful references and resources.

“I don't need them from seventeen years ago,” he said. “Just from last year and the year before.”

“I got 'em.”

In other words, if he wanted them, he could haul his butt out to her desk and fetch them himself. She wasn't going to bring them to him. He couldn't ask her to. If he did, she'd probably slap a sexism charge on him.

He needed to get away from his desk, anyway. Soviet Union Sends Cosmonaut Into Orbit was beaming across his monitor, and that reminded him of the way Sally Driver's kiss had sent him into orbit last Saturday evening. He was back on earth now—a bumpy landing, but he was safely on terra firma—and he was going to find out who Laura was so he could put his two-faced best friend and that best friend's aggravating widow, and her thighs, and her hair, and her steamy kiss, out of his mind forever.

Emerging from his office, he was blindsided by Stuart, the city editor, who yammered at him about the irate phone call he'd gotten from the school superintendent, responding to Todd's editorial on tenuring inept teachers. Todd nodded, sighed sympathetically, told Stuart he was not going to devote more than a single page to Letters to the Editor on the subject of tenure and continued through the newsroom until he reached Gloria's desk. She had resumed reading the scholarly journal; without looking up, she lifted her left hand, which held two Winfield College directories. He took them, thanked her, didn't wait around for her to say he was welcome—it would be a long wait—and returned to his office.

Aaronson, Laura. Adams, Laura. Ahern, Laura. Aikman, Laura. Albano, Laura. Anderson, Laura. Asturvian, Laura. Babcock, Laura…

Jesus Christ. The school had three thousand students, and half of them were named Laura.

All right. He could eliminate the freshmen. They would have arrived in Winfield last September, and Paul had died in January, so he wouldn't have had a chance to screw anyone in the freshman class long enough to present her with his wife's hula-girl pocketknife. Even sophomores might be a bit too young. He'd focus on juniors and seniors—

And faculty. Of course. Paul had been a sucker for a pair of plump, firm undergraduate breasts once, but surely he'd learned his lesson after a few years of marriage to Sally. If he were going to have an affair, it would be with someone wiser, someone more mature, more dignified. Someone, judging from the tone of the letters, who was a bit too well read. A Lord Byron scholar, maybe. A Byron scholar with a Sartre sideline.

Todd flipped to the front of the directory, which contained a list of all the professors and their campus offices and extensions, as well as the school's support staff. Laura Benson was on the physical education faculty…. No, Todd couldn't see Paul lusting after a sweaty, muscular jock. Laurie Cantaggio of the theater department, seemed like a possibility—but she was clearly a Laurie, not a Laura. Laura Ellroy was the assistant dean in the financial-aid office. Maybe. Laura Hahn held the Strumbacher Chair in Molecular Biology. Nope.

Laura Lovelace—security department. Maybe she had a sexy gun. Maybe she looked hot in a uniform. Maybe Paul liked to play with handcuffs. Would someone from the security department be so well versed in existentialism?

Laura O'Connor—botany assistant. If Paul had wanted to hang around with someone into gardening,
he'd have hung around with his own wife. Sally was one of those earthy, organic types.

Laura Ruzeka—classics. Maybe. Laura Stratton—mathematics. Maybe. Laura Titwell—chemistry department lab manager. On the strength of her last name alone, she belonged on the maybe list.

Laura Walden—French. Promising. She could have read Sartre in the original. She could have lived for a few years in Paris, smoked too many strong black cigarettes, drunk too much overpriced wine in second-rate bistros and learned to take herself far too seriously. Laura Walden looked like a strong possibility.

In fact, she looked like the best possibility, given that the English and philosophy departments seemed to have a bias against hiring anyone with the name Laura.

Todd jotted down Laura Walden's name and office number on a memo pad. He added Laura Ellroy, Laura Lovelace, Laura Ruzeka and Laura Stratton—although he honestly couldn't see Paul getting it on with a math teacher—and Laura Titwell. He tore the sheet of paper off the pad, folded it and stuffed it into the breast pocket of his shirt.

Nearly noon, and his mother hadn't returned yet. Had she decided not to return because she'd discovered that life outside the
Valley News
was much more fun than life in her glass cage across the newsroom from him? Or had she and Sally sent each other into such extreme madness that they'd both wound up being strapped into straitjackets and trucked off to the nearest state hospital?

Either way, they weren't bothering him at the moment. He had a lunch meeting at noon with the deputy mayor, who was going to feed Todd and ply him with stories favorable to the current administration, and after that he had a meeting scheduled with his business vice
president and his circulation and advertising managers to review preliminary data on whether to launch a Sunday edition of the
Valley News
. After that, he, Stuart and Gail—who was his wire services manager—would be getting together to do a front-page mock-up for tomorrow's paper.

But after all that, by around four o'clock, he could spare some time for a visit to the campus, where he could pay a friendly call on a couple of Lauras.

Maybe one of them would have an incriminating pocketknife lying on her desk. Maybe one of them would say,
Oh, you were Paul Driver's friend. You were the anchor in his storm-tossed life. You gave him a sense of family he never experienced growing up, a brotherly bond, the security of knowing who one is and where one belongs. Oh, yes, he talked about you all the time. He wanted to tell you about our relationship, and he was going to, if only he hadn't skidded his car into a tree
.

Maybe one of them would say,
If you were Paul's best friend, then you must know Paul's wife, Sally. And if you know Sally, I'm sure you understand why Paul turned to me for sex and affection
.

And Todd would nod and say, Of course I understand.

Even though he was no longer sure he did.

W
infield College sat on a hill above downtown Winfield. A small hill, to be sure, and Sally ordinarily would have enjoyed a leisurely stroll up Main Street's gentle incline, observing how the shops lining the sidewalk evolved from practical to whimsical. The boutique specializing in candles and incense would have gone bust in a week if it had been located down near the railroad tracks. It was half a block from campus, though, and it was flourishing. The hardware store, on the other hand, was thriving where it was, a full block downhill from the New Day Café, which was located in the no-man's-land between town and gown.

She didn't have time to browse in the college-oriented boutiques today, however. She'd picked Rosie up at her school an hour ago, brought her home, and then Tina had phoned.

Fortunately, Trevor's mother, Marcia, had said Rosie could come to their house and play while Sally raced off to see Tina. Leaving Rosie and Trevor armed with make-believe bazookas and engaged in guerrilla warfare with a couple of imaginary giant squids in Trevor's backyard, Sally had driven as far as the café, where she'd abandoned her car in the employee lot behind the building. The college was only a short hike up the hill, and finding a parking place close to the campus was as difficult as
getting e-mail from Mars, so it was easier to leave her car at the café and walk.

She couldn't help but think Tina was overreacting. Just because Howard had made up his mind to transfer to Dartmouth didn't mean Tina's life was at an end. She had lots of options. She could visit him at Dartmouth on weekends. Or she herself could arrange to transfer to Dartmouth. Or she could see a plastic surgeon about getting her tattoo removed. Or, if she broke up with Howard and didn't want to go the plastic surgery route, she could find another boyfriend named Howard. She could advertise in some singles chat room on the Web: “Attractive eugenics scholar, self-supporting, five-four, brown-brown, looking for brilliant, sexy, independently wealthy and kindhearted dude. Must be named Howard.”

Sally wasn't sure why Tina had called on her. She had friends at the school, dorm mates, classmates she could turn to for comfort. It was probably the mommy–surrogate thing again, Sally brimming with wisdom, competent to guide her through this dreadful romantic crisis. Or perhaps she wanted to talk to someone whose romantic crisis half a dozen years ago had wrecked her own college career.

As Sally neared the baroque wrought-iron gates that marked the main entry to the campus, she thought about that wrecked college career. Coming to Winfield had been for her as transporting an experience as arriving over the rainbow had been for Dorothy Gale. She'd gone from being a smart-mouthed, earthy, ambitious straight-A student in her mediocre regional high school to a freshman at a genuine private college. She had figured she would attend a community college or a state university, but her English teacher had been a Winfield alumnus, and he'd known more about colleges than Sally
or her mother. So when he'd urged Sally to apply to Winfield, Sally had applied. She'd been accepted and offered a scholarship, and that had seemed reason enough for her to go.

She'd liked Winfield, even though she'd felt out of place there. So many of the students had come from comfortable suburbs near cultural hubs—the bedroom communities of Boston, the ritzy villages along the commuter rail line in southern Connecticut, the pampered punks of northern New Jersey, a hefty handful of students from the towns surrounding Washington, D.C., a few exotic imports from Ohio and the Chicago area, even some long-distance immigrants from Texas and California. Sally hadn't been intimidated by her fellow students, but she hadn't exactly fit in with them, either. They'd all seemed savvier than her, cooler…richer.

Unlike her, most of them hadn't had to hold down real jobs. The scholarship students generally filled campus jobs—shelving books in the library, scraping and rinsing dishes in the dining-hall kitchen—but those were minimum-wage jobs, and the students who took them did so mostly because if they didn't, the college might reduce their financial-aid packages.

Sally had truly needed the money, not just to pay for the occasional pizza or movie but to cover the cost of her textbooks, bus trips home for the holidays, crew socks for gym class and towels for showering. “What do you mean, they don't have towels?” her mother had raged over the phone. “What kind of place is that? They always have towels hanging in the bathroom and spare towels piled up on a shelf somewhere.”

“You're thinking of hotels, Mom. This is a dormitory. We're supposed to bring our own towels. Can you mail me some?”

“It would cost me more to mail you towels than it would cost you to buy them. Just get cheap ones, honey. Don't get bath sheets. When they call them bath sheets, they charge you twice as much.”

Sally had needed towels, soap, a fluorescent lamp for her desk, highlighter pens and Post-its, a bulletin board and a radio. Once she'd landed the job at the New Day Café, earning a real wage supplemented by the loose change people tossed into the tip jar, she'd been able to buy all the gear she needed. She'd read the newspaper in the library's periodicals room so she wouldn't have to pay for it, and she'd hoarded single-portion boxes of cereal and extra fruit when she'd run her tray along the cafeteria counter, so she wouldn't have to buy late-night snacks. Monica Penn down the hall had given haircuts that weren't half bad for five dollars a pop, and the used clothes Sally had purchased at the Salvation Army store on the corner of East Street and Clancy had carried a kind of retro cachet, so she'd looked almost stylish in her recycled ensembles.

And in truth, she'd loved working at the New Day. She'd liked it more than she'd liked most of her classes. Greta was shy and terse, but Sally could relate to her more easily than she could relate to all those affluent, mollycoddled girls in her dorm, graduates of Miss Prissy's Prep, with adenoidal voices and perfectly streaked blond hair and an understanding of the nuances of field hockey. Sally had liked waking up before dawn and watching the sun rise as she ground and brewed coffee and bantered with the early-shift cops who started their day with a cuppa-joe and one of Greta's oversize muffins. She'd liked chatting with the laborers who stopped in, the shopkeepers who ran neighboring estab
lishments, the city hall hacks and the UPS delivery guy and the handsome young lawyer who flirted with her.

She'd flirted back. Why not? Flirting with Paul Driver had come more naturally to her than writing a term paper on Sarah Orne Jewett's use of pine trees as a symbol of her characters' austere and leafless lives, or unlocking the secrets of ribonucleic acid, or explaining whatever the hell Sartre was talking about in
Being and Nothingness
.

Still, standing before the ivy-twined Winfield gates now, six years after she'd dropped out of school, Sally felt a twinge of regret. She'd completed two years. Only two more, and she would have become a college graduate.

When Rosie had been about three years old, Sally had mentioned to Paul that she'd like to go back to college part-time and finish her degree. He'd pointed out, with infuriating logic, that she had a job she enjoyed, a daughter she adored, and a house and a husband, both desiring a modicum of attention. “When are you going to find time to go to school?” he'd asked.

“I was thinking, maybe one class a semester. I can take classes that meet in the evenings—”

“So you wouldn't be eating dinner with us those evenings? You wouldn't be eating with Rosie?”

“Well, I just thought…”

“And when would you get your homework done? Weekends? Weekends are when you take Rosie out into the backyard and play with her, and work on your garden, or you bake, or you read. Do you really want to sacrifice that time to schoolwork?”

She really didn't.

But it would still be nice to get that degree. Maybe
now that Paul wasn't around to talk her out of it, she would investigate the possibility.

She passed through the gates and felt, once more, as if she'd landed over the rainbow. The air smelled greener and fresher on this side of the ornate wrought-iron portal—probably because the campus had expanses of lawn and lush plantings and no through streets clogged with cars spewing exhaust fumes into the atmosphere. Quaint paths cut across the lawns, weaving around mature maples and oaks, past budding rhododendrons and azaleas stirring awake in the new spring warmth. Majestic buildings of brick and brownstone rose up alongside the paths, gothic and imposing, their heavy glass windows whispering, “We are seats of knowledge. We are launch pads of privilege. Professors bore sophomores to tears in our rooms.”

She strolled past the academic buildings, the administration buildings and the sprawling monstrosity of a library, its pillared Greco-Roman core annexed and expanded with wings dating from at least three different decades, designed by at least three different architects. She hiked past the language building, where she'd met her doom in a first-year Russian class with Gozbodin Markoff. All she remembered from that class was
Nye horosho
, which meant, “Not good.”

Deeper into the campus stood the dorms, several quadrangles of bland brick buildings with smaller stand-alone residences surrounding them. Tina lived in Cabot House, one of the quad dorms. Entering the first quad under a brick archway that connected two of the dormitories, Sally had to veer around a game of Frisbee in which the three male participants were clearly showing off for a small gaggle of female onlookers. They jumped, they caught and tossed the disk in a single motion; they
reached between their legs to snag it and flipped it behind their backs to launch it. The girls seemed impressed, but they were probably more impressed by the boys' dramatic hair and healthy young physiques than by their prowess with the plastic toy.

Rosie would have sniffed and turned away. Once you'd seen a clown juggling while perched atop a towering unicycle, a few boys playing Frisbee would seem pretty mundane.

Sally found the main entrance of Cabot Hall and pushed the door open. A student posted at the entry desk stopped and asked her to identify herself. “I'm here to see Tina Frye. I'm Sally Driver.”

The boy ran his gaze from her hair to her sandaled feet and back up again. Although he had to be at least eighteen years old, he seemed much younger, his skin bearing lingering traces of acne, his hair shorn to the length of peach fuzz, his body swimming in an oversize T-shirt even though he was not a small person. If he looked that young to her, she probably looked that old to him. She was tempted to say,
Excuse me—I'm twenty-six. I am
not
old enough to be your mother
.

But she'd been summoned because Tina saw her as a mother figure of sorts. And she sure couldn't pass for a student, not in her corduroy jumper, dark tights and plaid shirt, not with her unfashionably long, wavy hair. Not with the tiny lines that edged her eyes, the little crease that folded the skin at one corner of her mouth. She didn't mind these souvenirs of her advancing age. She was actually kind of proud of them. But she knew they separated her from the students, whose greatest worries usually revolved around tomorrow's test or where to score an evening's worth of weed or whether some guy was going to ask them to the campus flick that Saturday,
and if he did, whether that meant they were obligated to sleep with him afterward.

After assessing her, the boy lifted a desk phone, punched in three numbers and said, “There's some lady here to see Tina Frye. What's your name again?” he asked Sally.

Not the sharpest knife in the drawer. “Sally Driver,” she said.

“Sally Driver,” the boy repeated into the phone.

She turned to study the notices pinned to a bulletin board on the wall to her right. A pro-choice rally in front of the library Friday afternoon. A Celtic-music festival in the Higgins Auditorium on Sunday. A reading in the Boylston Reading Room by the poet-in-residence. Several pleas for rides to Boston, Long Island and Providence. Someone with a car offering regular rides to Hanover, New Hampshire.

Hanover, New Hampshire, was where Dartmouth was located. If Howard transferred to Dartmouth, Tina could catch a ride with whoever had posted that notice when she wanted to visit him.

The boy hung up the phone and cleared his throat, discreetly demanding her attention. “She's on the third floor,” he said. “Room 314.”

As it turned out, Sally didn't need to be told the room number. When she pushed open the third-floor fire door and emerged from the stairwell, she heard a stream of voices flowing out of one of the rooms. She followed the stream to its source: a closed door marked 314. The voices all sounded female, and they all seemed to be talking at once.

Sally knocked.

The door swung open to reveal a tear-stained, blotchy-faced Tina, her hair standing in odd tufts as if she'd been
tugging at it. Her oversize Winfield College T-shirt drooped toward one shoulder, and her pants, as usual, were too baggy. “Oh, Sally, thanks for coming,” she managed to mumble before collapsing in Sally's arms and sobbing inconsolably.

Sally half carried, half dragged her back into the room, a narrow rectangle not much larger than a walk-in closet, although six girls had somehow crammed themselves into it. Three sat on the unmade cot-size bed, one on the windowsill and one on the desk. The last one paced—two steps in one direction, two steps in the other. They all seemed deeply concerned with Tina's trauma. Indeed, they all seemed to share equally in it. Their facial expressions ran the gamut from distressed to distraught. They had shiny tear tracks striping their cheeks.