Sweet Lamb of Heaven (25)
I remembered being in bed with him, in bed where he’d always been so perfect that it disguised his lack of emotion. It didn’t occur to me to wonder about what wasn’t given.
Ned was still exactly the man he intended to be.
Inevitably I found myself looking into his face. He had a light and pleasant tan that must have looked as out of place in the Alaskan winter as it did in Maine. I tried to calm myself by picturing him in a sunbed at Planet Beach, slathering lotion onto his body, arranging the little goggles onto his face. I remembered how the fatless musculature of his torso was maintained with daily bouts of grunting resistance training. But it was no use, no matter how hard I tried to belittle him I couldn’t reduce the feeling of beauty and threat he imparted.
Except for the anxiety of his nearness, though, I found I was less susceptible to his looks than I remembered being. I could see him impersonally by placing the barrier of my dislike between us. As I did this, his looks became less the features of a living person and more a formal structure—less animal than mineral, transmuted into a polymer that encased him in its petrochemical sheen.
Had he already sent his guys to the motel? Henchmen, I repeated silently, henchmen, a comical word I’d never thought I’d have a use for. Was Lena already with them? Had her babysitters been pushed aside or persuaded?
I felt a twinge of panic. What should I do? What was the right course of action? Call the Lindas? Don? 911? My cell phone was in my bag, on the counter; there were my car keys beside it. I could grab them and run.
I couldn’t decide. I was useless. I tried to stall.
“A suit and tie? On Saturday?”
He smiled at me indulgently, as though what was coming from my mouth was empty breath. There was no need for him to acknowledge my speech.
“Look, honey, you and me just need a little face time. We need to put our two heads together and be reasonable here, figure out what’s best for everyone.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
In fact I did not know what I meant: he was terrifying me. I shook my head. I wasn’t in charge of myself, just flustered and stuck. It was exactly what I’d been afraid of since the day he started pursuing us. He’d never laid a finger on me in anger, Ned had never been violent physically. He’d only been false and cold.
Despite this nonviolent history he chilled me to the bone.
“I know you want to come home,” he said.
The arrogance of it flummoxed me—as though he was speaking to a third party, a cameraman, maybe, who was watching and evaluating our performances and knew nothing whatsoever about us.
“I don’t want to at all,” I rushed. “I don’t have a home with you and I don’t want a home with you. You know what I want, don’t you, Ned? I just want a divorce.”
“Oh now. Listen. You’re getting yourself all in a bunch, aren’t you? Relax! We’ll go down the street and get a bite. John here tells me y’all have a diner in this town that serves Mexican Coke. All the way up here in the pine-tree state. Go figure. You like that Mexican Co-cola, don’t you? Cane sugar, not corn syrup? We need to bring that old-style Coke back to the U. S. of A. I’ll put a bill in Congress, on down the road when I get there.”
He’d ramped up his Southern accent several notches, the Southern manners of speech he’d partly suppressed in his first flush of adulthood. Maybe he’d raised the good ol’ boy quotient for electability—Alaska has a certain kinship with the South, a redneck commonality without the heat or black people. Southern accents may be a bankable asset, I thought. Ned had always considered Alaska a frontier, the main reason he’d asked me to move there in the first place—not that he cared about the wild and scenic aspects, not that he was attracted to the state’s unpopulated beauty. It was the mythology of fortune-seeking that he liked, the small but abundant niches in various markets in the state that called to him.
Because while it was true that Alaska had glaciers and polar bears, albeit melting and starving/drowning, it was a frontier in other ways too—a colony still in development, into which, therefore, generous moneys pour from oil companies and Washington. Ned had been right, I guessed, to see his future in a place where men loved both their guns and their government and corporate handouts. He liked the cojones of Alaskans, was what he always said, the way they swaggered like lone cowboys and professed to hate all vestiges of government but at the same time clung fiercely to the coattails of that government—both to their own small government and its big, rich uncle in D.C.
Anyway he’d rediscovered his Southernness. And he was on a first-name basis with Beefy John.
“How’d you know I was here?” I asked.
All of it hung at the margins, all was fuzzy irrelevance except for Lena—where was she, who had her right at this moment? I struggled to think of anything else, stalling until I saw clearly what I should do. I expected a decision to come: presently I would render a decision, a decision would descend and land on me.
I waited for it.
“I make friends easy, honey,” Ned said smoothly. “You know me.”
“ ’Fraid I got to close up, folks,” interrupted Beefy John, emerging from the back office, grinning broadly. The pink skin on his nose and cheeks shone under the fluorescents. “Don’t keep Saturday hours, normally.”
That was how I came to scrape my keys toward me on the counter and follow Ned out into the parking lot. Trudging through the slush I considered the fact that Beefy John had opened the shop on Saturday and then Ned had been there. Conspiracy, I thought, conspiracy, I’d been stalked, I’d been tracked, I hadn’t been paranoid at all.