Sweet Lamb of Heaven (53)
OUR LAST COMMITMENT was today, a dinner with some of the donors and staff. We leave tomorrow and don’t have to come back till spring.
I’ve been torn since the call with Will and Don. Their theory of Ned as a murderer has set me half-against them. It’s irrational but I can’t help it—I’m set off at a new distance. Their conviction seems to skew them to outlier status. On one hand there’s Ned, for whom I feel fear and loathing, and on the other there are these men who’ve been kind enough to help me, given me time and care. But their murder thesis is an awkward weight on my shoulders I have to shrug off.
I float in isolation between Ned and them, not touching either of the shores.
In the morning I pulled my old belongings from storage, lugged them to the post office and sent them to my parents’ house, Lena tagging along with her face in a picture book. In the afternoon I visited my closest friend here, the only one who didn’t seem to think the reported kidnapping, or its poor resolution, was the result of my own weakness. Charley, who taught with me at the university and is soon to retire, has disliked Ned from the start, much as Solly did, and it relaxed me to be with someone I didn’t have to convince of anything—Charley has a serene bearing and little surprises her. From the trees in her garden hang bamboo wind chimes and homemade birdfeeders.
We sat in her sprawling house full of natural light and drank tea, watching out the big bay window as Lena made snow angels in the backyard.
It was during the snow angels that Ned showed up: his driver had dropped us at Charley’s, our whereabouts weren’t secret, but I hadn’t expected him to take an interest. He’d always dismissed Charley with her hand-knit sweaters, her chunky necklaces made of shell and rock; yet now he rang the doorbell and when she let him in he was with a beautiful girl, doe-eyed and long-limbed, draped in furs and wearing giant, shaggy boots that gave an impression of an adorable yeti.
She might have been twenty-two, she might have been nineteen. She would have been more usual in SoHo or Milan.
Trying to be polite, I think, she pointed at a sculpture on Charley’s mantel and asked if it was “done by an Eskimo.” When Charley said no, it was a Chinese Buddha, she went on to say Oh with a round, pretty mouth, frozen in wonder. The words were blank as paper: that lovely child was so slow to make connections that it almost hurt to listen to her talk. Maybe she was sixteen, not nineteen or twenty-two, I thought, and it was simple childishness.
Ned bringing her was of course, given his PR focus, his obsessive commitment to the slick campaign, startling. It seemed needlessly risky and certainly meant to be needling. He may have thought I was still capable of jealousy. But I felt only pity for her as she sat, nestled into his side on Charley’s deep sofa, long legs drawn up.
Charley, who cared as little for what Ned thought as he cared for her, asked her outright how old the girl was at one point, but Ned intercepted the question and asked Charley how old she thought the girl was.
When Charley said “Too young for you,” he smiled and trailed his fingers along the gazelle’s spaghetti-thin upper arm. With her furs off she wore only a tight dress sparkling with gold flecks, and the arms were full of holes made to look like knife slashes.
They didn’t stay long, only long enough to accept Charley’s offer of coffee with disinterested shrugs and then leave before it was finished brewing. The two of them stood briefly at the big bay window, from which Ned—one arm strung over the young gazelle’s shoulders—watched Lena run across the snow for a few seconds while his girlfriend looked down at her phone, texting with lightning speed. When it came to texting she wasn’t slow at all.
“Place hasn’t changed one little bit,” he said to Charley as they were leaving, in a clearly insulting tone. He turned, smirked and pointed at me. “We’ll pick you up at six. Cocktail dress in the master bed.”
Charley looked at me for a long time after the door closed, shaking her head. Meanwhile Lena was still playing in the back by herself; she’d never noticed they were there.
8
BONES THAT FED OUT THEIR COLD
MY BROTHER’S APARTMENT IS SMALL. HE MAKES DECENT MONEY for a young guy working at a start-up, but this is Manhattan—where he was lucky to get five hundred square feet in a building with roof access.
So he sleeps on the couch and Lena and I take the bedroom. He wakes us up by coming in to open his closet; Solly’s a sluggish awakener and every morning he stands there tousled and half-asleep, swaying faintly and staring at his row of shirts on their hangers. The shirt indecision paralyzes him.
I promised we wouldn’t stay for long, this is a quick visit, but he waved away that promise when we arrived and said we could stay forever, if we wanted to. Lena nodded solemnly.
“Forever, Uncle Solly,” she agreed.
Forever means two weeks. I feel safe in this prewar ziggurat with its thick walls and overheated air. I don’t love the city at this time of year—the way white snow turns to gray slush, how the freeze of the sidewalk reaches right through your boot soles. But it’s good to see Solly, and I need a break before we go back to Maine.
Whenever I call Will he brings up his worry about Ned, his fear that Ned’s going to have me hurt or killed. It makes the conversations strained. I was so pleased by his quiet bearing when I first met him, his calmness that had an almost mystical quality. But now that quality is gone, its glassy surface has been broken and doesn’t seem to be smoothing out again. He’s still soft-spoken and kind, but there’s wariness when he talks to me. I know he feels he should be here—whether he wants to or not, he believes he should be near enough to guard me, that it’s somehow his responsibility, which is preposterous.