Lee was standing in the crowd of fifty or so eighteen-year-olds when a girl approached him. She was pretty, well dressed in the mode of those days, and should have been happy for all she had won in the genetic raffle. She was not happy. Her first angry words to Lee were, “You said you weren’t coming.”
After all these years, Lee did not recall much of what he had said during their brief encounter. He recalled his embarrassment, his face reddening, his palms suddenly moist, as the girl came closer until her face was inches from his and he could feel her sweet breath on his lips. He’d probably managed only fragments of sentences that, had he finished them, would have meant, I have no idea what is happening right now. I have no idea who you are. I am beginning to think I have no idea who I am.
Her fists clenching and unclenching at her sides, the girl kept saying to him, “You promised me you wouldn’t come! You promised!”
The girl’s anger and the volume of her voice had cleared a space around them so that, like two dancers of exceptional skill, they stood at the center of a circle, their faces close together while the girl repeated her strange accusation, and Lee backed away sputtering his confused innocence. He remembered searching faces in the crowd for the sly smile or laughing eyes of an accomplice. Some gesture that would tell him that others were in on this, that it was some kind of prank. Maybe this was some sorority or fraternity foolery. But even as Lee considered this, his young mind objected that it was too early in the semester for the traditional rush. If this was a prank, it was the invention of freelance deviants.
The girl repeated her complaint — that Lee should not be here, that he had broken a promise — for what seemed a long time but really could not have been more than a few minutes. Then she stopped as abruptly as she had started and, face bright red, eyes streaming tears, turned and shoved her way through the crowd.
Lee never saw her again. Not in the chemistry class or anywhere else.
Later, back in his dorm room reflecting on the incident, he had rung through the possibilities.
There was the prank option.
Or the girl was just, well, nuts.
Or he was nuts. His fevered mind had sent him on a trip to a mad fantasyland.
Or this was some sort of acting exercise designed by the theater department.
If it was theater, the girl was the best teenage actress in America. Lee had heard that actors lived their roles, but he couldn’t convince himself that the girl was acting. Her anger and her fear were real, and someone had caused them, someone she had cared about a great deal. Lee’s reflections always led him to the same conclusion. There really was a boy out there somewhere who had promised this girl he would not be here, and she had believed Lee Taylor was that boy. The most extraordinary and the most frightening explanation was that Lee Taylor had a double.
Years later, when late one night he had told this extraordinary story to a stranger in a bar, the man, a scholarly type with the weary manner of those who had looked unabashed into the mysteries of the universe, had pulled off his glasses and rubbed his tired eyes with a thumb and forefinger. “My friend,” the scholar said, “you ought to look into the myth of the doppelgänger.”
“Oh yeah,” Lee had said, baffled, “I should do that.” He borrowed a pen from the bartender and asked the scholar to spell the word. Lee wrote it, doppelgänger, on a cocktail napkin and tucked it into his pocket. Then the scholar said, “In the myth, it’s sometimes true that the doppelgänger is a menacing figure.”
The woman beside him at the Hurricane bar sipped her wine and turned to face him. “It’s been a long time, but I thought you’d recognize me. I was pretty sure you would.”
Lee looked at the glittering bottles across the bar. For a couple of months now, maybe three evenings a week, he’d found himself sitting at this polished zinc bar drinking something with a paper umbrella in it and watching the sun set memorably. Happy to think of himself as dormant. Waiting to see what the next phase would be. Maybe this woman, Helen Trenam, was that phase.
He had picked the Hurricane for this meeting because it was too loud and too young for anything too serious. It was unlikely that here a meeting with a stranger could get out of hand. He membered Helen Trenam saying she owed him a full and complete explanation. “That day in chemistry,” he said, “you were just messing with me, right?”
“Oh, no,” she said, “far from it. I was as real that day as anything that’s ever happened to you.”
A lot of what had happened to Lee Taylor had been of questionable provenance, but now was not the time to go into that. Now was the time to fall into this woman’s unfathomable brown eyes and drown.
She stared into Lee’s eyes for a while, not blinking, certainly not afraid of anything she saw in them. She set her glass on the bar with a delicate finality. “You’ll see when we talk some more, but not here. Let’s go for a walk on the beach. It’s been awhile since I’ve had sand between my toes.”
Lee found that the prospect of seeing her bare toes, and maybe even more of her, was more than enough to get him up off the barstool, and headed for the elevator.
They walked across Gulf Way and through a gap in the low retaining wall that the city fathers believed would stop a mild tidal surge. Then on down a sand pathway through clumps of sea oats to the beach. It was fully dark now and Venus was rising out of the gulf, her brilliance shaming the pale stars of the early dark. A warm land breeze had begun to blow, and Lee knew it would grow stronger as night deepened. He followed Helen Trenam to the waterline where she leaned down and removed her sandals. Her knee-length turquoise silk skirt ruffled in the wind, and her feet, small and shapely, were the treat Lee had promised himself. She pulled her white cotton blouse from the waistband of her skirt, unbuttoned the bottom of it, and tied the shirttails in a knot, exposing a band of tanned flesh to the night wind. She waved her hand vaguely toward the south, the jetty at the end of the beach, and said, “Let’s walk that way. It’s nice out here tonight, don’t you think?” Her voice was low and calm, strange for a woman who had called a man she had seen only once for a few minutes years ago and asked for a rendezvous.
“Sure, it’s nice, very nice, but, uh, shouldn’t you tell me what this is all about?” Give me that full and complete explanation?
She stopped walking, turned to him, moved close, their bodies almost touching, and gripped his upper arms with her strong little hands. “You’re right. This has been a mystery for too long. That day in chemistry... was a cry for help. Didn’t you know that?”
“No, I...”
“I was in trouble. I went to you for help, and you didn’t... you didn’t do anything.”
Reason failed Lee. What could he say to this? “Why didn’t you say you needed help? What was happening to you?”
“I couldn’t. He was watching. He was there.”
“You said I promised I wouldn’t be there. What did that mean?”
She let go of Lee’s arms and started walking again along the surf line. Lee glanced behind them at her small footprints in the sand.
“I know it’s strange. You must have thought I was crazy.”
“Yeah, I considered that, and that I was too. But I finally decided the best explanation was that you really believed I was some guy you knew. Some guy who had promised not to come. Believe me, I had to work through a lot of possibilities to get to some certainty — I mean, you know, provisional certainty — about that.”