Sweet Lamb of Heaven (26)
Could Don help me?
I got into my car and of course couldn’t stop Ned from following in his own—a rented SUV driven by someone else, some kind of bodyguard or other employee—in a dutiful procession to the diner a block down, a procession that made me feel like a condemned person. The diner served beer and wine, at least . . . and what could Ned do to me there, in broad daylight? I didn’t care how early it seemed to be; it was a zero hour for me, the time of reckoning. I had to stay clearheaded for Lena, but also I desperately needed to calm down.
I ordered a beer.
STRANGE THINGS EXIST, astonishing oddities—transparent butterflies, three-foot-wide parasites that look like orange flowers, babies born pregnant with their own twins. There are fish like sea serpents, fifty-five feet long, lizards whose species are all female; there’s the mysterious roar from outer space, the contagiousness of yawns, the origin of continental drift.
What I want to know is whether the unknowns in nature are only unexplained phenomena or whether there are genuine anomalies—whether a true anomaly exists. I doubt that it’s possible for an event to occur only once, to one person, and as I look and look for an answer the more it seems to me that what are called anomalies aren’t unique but only symptoms of gaps in understanding. Some of them are just exceptions to the systems people have invented, showing the limits and biases of those invented systems. Or, in physics or astronomy, anomalies are names for states or forces that haven’t been figured out.
It was always improbable that whatever happened, way back then, happened only to Lena and me.
a·nom·a·ly [uh-nom-uh-lee] noun, plural a·nom·a·lies.
1. deviation from the common rule, type, arrangement, or form.
Synonyms: abnormality, exception, peculiarity.
I CAN’T RECALL the pattern of our conversation at the diner. Ned, when he wants to, can have a way of saying nothing specific, conveying only a broad intent. And that intent was exactly what I’d been afraid of: he wanted Lena and me back with him, he wanted us to be his TV family.
His position, as far as I could tell—or his pollster’s—was that he was much too good-looking to run as a bachelor or divorced man. And the fact that he was married was already public, so now he had to produce the wife.
No emotions were summoned to build a case for this, no passionate declarations or rhetorical flourishes; Ned simply projected his plan. He has the knack of power, I thought as I drank my beer and picked at the corner of a limp grilled-cheese sandwich, intermittently wiping my fingertips on a napkin. It was undeniable. No wonder he’s running for state senate. This first race may be small-time but at some point it’ll be a governorship or a senate seat, he’s in that forum now, and then probably Congress, just as he’d said.
I wondered how I’d ever become connected with such a man, much less married to him—a person who’s mechanistic in his view of others, an individual streamlined to exploit them.
We’d met through a woman I’d only half-liked who had a history at prep schools like Choate and a new, expensive silver-blue car, a brand of car I felt should never be owned by an undergraduate. She’d been a student of mine while I was working toward my PhD, a student in a class I taught as part of my grant package.
This woman had thrown a dinner party the summer I finished grad school, while I was still living in Providence and working as a cashier in a gourmet food store, after the assistant teaching gig had ended. (My family money wasn’t given to Solly or me to spend as we saw fit; our parents expected us to work like everyone else. Much of the money Ned took came to us at our wedding, by which time my parents were apparently convinced I wouldn’t become a wastrel. Now, of course, I wish they’d never handed it over.) I’d gone to the party because I was lonely and needed to feel like a guest for once instead of a cashier, needed to say something to someone else other than Did you find everything you were looking for today?
Ned was at the party too, Ned the frat-boy Boy Scout, and somehow not a year later I married him. It must have been partly the setting that carried the evening: a rambling green garden with flowers on trellises and weeping willows and ponds arranged around a house with a colonial aspect, columns, wraparound porches, shining wood floors and chandeliers. I’d had no one to talk to there while my hostess was busy; I hovered awkwardly on the porch, looking out at the garden with my wine in hand, till Ned approached.
He’d been washed in those August colors, a borrowed glow that took a long time to fade since, unlike him, I harbored romantic delusions—that pre-nostalgic filmmaking of the self that separates events into vignettes and montages, curates time into a gallery of sepia-toned images. What were the chances of meeting someone like Ned, a man with movie-star charisma at large among the civilians?
Even as inexperienced as I was then, I was foolish to overlook the indicators of his mercenary bent, blind not to notice his edge of narcissism—an edge that was leading. I must have been quite stupid, I reflected, sitting across from him over grilled cheese. The selfish stupidity of youth had been upon me.
For a minute I sat listless, not even attempting to remove myself from his slick enchantment. In one corner of the diner was the man who had to be his driver or bodyguard, with nothing in front of him on his own table but a cell phone and a glass of what looked like iced tea. He wore a wire in one ear like a Secret Service officer.