Sweet Lamb of Heaven (48)

“Lymphoma on top of the ol’ dementia,” Ned said.

I hope my mother or Solly don’t see any of the coverage of Ned’s campaign, that none of it makes its way onto YouTube. I imagine how their faces would crumple, seeing my father used that way.

At dinner I had to talk directly to him at close quarters. I had to look closely at his smooth features, his deep-blue eyes that glance off me now, never resting for long, straying around whatever space we’re in as though even a table leg is more compelling than my face. I welcome it in practice, but it hits me how he used to work those eyes so hard to make me believe he was earnest.

The Moose’s Tooth was crowded as usual—there are always lines there—and our booth was sandwiched close between two others. Ned’s fake-Secret Service bodyguards took the nearest two-top, but still we were back to back with other diners and I could tell Ned felt everyone must be watching him, so the fake cheer of our conversation had to pass muster. It was surprisingly difficult to smile and nod and be a wifely mainstay.

I found I couldn’t eat. The restaurant’s pizza, which I used to love, reminded me of egg salad. So I drank my one glass of white wine, picked at a salad and listened to Ned rattle off his campaign reports. My single glass of white wine was mandated by his staff, as it didn’t look feminine to drink beer, it didn’t look Christian to have a second glass, and red might stain my teeth. I drank my quota slowly, savoring it as I watched Lena doodle on a child’s menu and Ned reeled off a list of coming events, repeated sound bites about his exchanges with campaign donors, why they believed in him and his values “in their own words.” There were the usual anecdotes about small-town Americans, a farmer named Milt, a grandma named Pearl. He seemed to be running lines, rehearsing his material with a very small focus group.

After a while I looked up from Lena’s artwork and found myself staring at elements of his face and carefully detesting each. You’d think a facial feature in itself would tend to be inoffensive, particularly a well-formed one, but I discovered that if I concentrated even an earlobe could be invested with spite.

Lena spoke quietly, softly about the plot of a Disney movie while I stared at the earlobe and savored my distaste. There were a couple of moments when I felt deranged looking at him, considering my loathing, but mostly I relished it.

I couldn’t believe we’d make it out of the restaurant without running into someone I knew. Ned had instructed me to prepare my Anchorage friends on the specifics of the narrative even if I didn’t plan to see them; he’d sent me a list of talking points as an attachment to one of his blank emails, including a timeline: when my father became terminally ill, when we were notified of the diagnosis, when we left Anchorage to help my mother take care of him.

The timeline projected forward, even stipulating when my father would enter hospice. These would all occur, of course, in the months before the election, explaining our absences from Alaska.

So I’d emailed my friends and bcc’d Ned as he instructed, putting the talking points into a “personalized letter.” Partly because of this, the prospect of actual in-person encounters dismayed me. As we were rising to go—Ned had, to my relief, spent half the meal talking into his phone’s headset—we were intercepted by a group of people from city government, civil servant types who were mainly Ned’s contacts but whom I’d spoken to a few times at parties. Their faces betrayed a certain hesitation at my presence, which made me wonder who Ned was sleeping with these days, whether these people knew the marriage was a sham. I wondered how it was possible that everyone didn’t know, since Lena and I had been away two full years. Yet they acted as though nothing was out of the ordinary and I reminded myself that Ned took care of business, Ned kept his ducks in a row. For the past few months we’d been staying with my terminally ill father . . . the narrative, unbeknownst to me, has been in place for some time.

I made my excuses and led Lena away, Ned grabbing his jacket and glad-handing behind us.



WHILE LENA AND I sleep in the house that used to be ours, Ned’s supposedly staying at a B&B tucked away in the foothills of east Anchorage. He thought we’d be noticed coming and going from a hotel, whereas he can move around discreetly. I’m not sure why, since he’s the public figure with the striking face and still lives full-time in the city. On the other hand, so far no one has found out that we’re sleeping separately, so maybe he’s correct in his calculations.

He has a “house,” these days, not a house, much as he has a “family.” His car, driven by the chauffeur, had dropped us off and pulled away quietly in the dark: entering the building I felt stealthy, though it’s hard to feel stealthy in puffer coats and mukluks.

Lena and I have been sharing the master bedroom, which feels like a hotel room—as though no one familiar has slept there before, certainly not me. Along with the rest of the place, its redecoration was drastic. There’s the skin of a polar bear on the wall—Ned must have bought it from a native, I thought, or possibly on the black market—a bold choice, given the politics. Maybe it signals his radicalism; in the bedroom, maybe he reveals his radical anti-government core. But it doesn’t quite ring true, since the king bed’s piled high with satiny showroom cushions that only his interior decorator could have chosen. They do feature masculine colors.

Lena fell right to sleep despite the bearskin, curled up with Lucky Duck, and I went back to the living room, where I flicked on the gas fire in the fireplace. I took a bottle of wine out of Ned’s new wine refrigerator, poured myself a glass, and sat on the sofa with a blanket, feet tucked under me, to call Main Linda.