by Lydia Millet
“We had those.”
“Naming a candy after a nuclear mushroom cloud. Only in America, right?”
“Yeah. What I meant, though, was how did you choose this particular motel?”
“Liked Don from the beginning. And heck, the price was right,” said Main Linda. “I’m cheap as crap. Always have been, always will be.”
“Good to know,” I said, but I was disappointed in my weak powers of detection. People revealed little to me, and I couldn’t even tell whether they meant to be evasive or were just uninterested in detail.
Maybe Don opened up his motel to those in need. But why disguise it?
I was at a dead end, I realized, falling silent as I sat in Main Linda’s heated passenger seat, and how did you get out of a dead end? You had no choice. All you could do was give up, turn around and drive the other way, drive back where you’d come from.
I mean I don’t want to leave the motel or the town, I want to keep my date with the librarian, for instance, a prospect that pleases me out of keeping with its likely outcome. But the sense I have of failing to understand the motel’s gathering has started to disrupt my sleep: I lie awake nights distracted by my ongoing failure to grasp why these people are here. Maybe there’s nothing to fathom in the first place but maybe there is, and the uncertainty doesn’t sit well with me.
And I’m not so sure anymore I need to be hiding us. Increasingly my past interpretations strike me as arbitrary and I pick through them, second-guessing.
There’s a chance I could stand up to Ned, I thought, sitting in the car, a chance he couldn’t make Lena and me do anything we didn’t want to do. Maybe I’m just a coward, I thought, hunkering here, as I was a coward about divorcing him. The line between cowardice and caution was blurred to me.
For a moment, Ned started to look less like a threat than an inconvenience and the future seemed almost simple.
Sitting in Main Linda’s car I lapsed into a daydream of peaceful retreat—retreat to my parents’ house, their quiet street where snow fell in pristine layers over the lawns. Only the few residents of the block drove down that street in winter, only the neighbors’ footsteps marred the sidewalk; the snow lay pure and gently curved on the bushes and old trees of the neat gardens. There would be no cold cement catwalk stretching between the bedroom and dining room, as there was here—no questions to speak of, either, beyond the mundane questions of the design and order of days.
I didn’t relish the part where I, fully grown, would be choosing to live in my parents’ house again, but they would be good to me and I could help my mother with my father, when she needed me. In that way I could do my part. We would stay there and Lena would go to school; I could get a new job, though I’d long since fallen off the tenure track—a community college might have me, or maybe a private high school. I could almost believe in a return to routine, an end to stealth.
I felt the wings of the normal touch my shoulders, ready to settle on me with a bland, insulating protection. I felt hopeful.
“Here you go, dear,” said Main Linda, and I saw we were already at the auto shop. There weren’t many cars in the lot: Saturday. “You want me to wait here till you make sure your car’s ready?”
“No, that’s fine,” I said.
“You sure? It’s no problem.”
“That’s OK. I’ve wasted enough of your time already. He said it was all done. You go ahead, Linda, and thanks so much. I’ll see you back at the motel.”
I regret those words.
4
IF I SHOULD DIE BEFORE I WAKE
B.Q. WASN’T IN THE OFFICE; BEEFY JOHN WAS ALONE. HE HUNG UP the phone as I went in stamping slush off my boots, shuffling them back and forth on the black rubber mat and making the electronic doorbell chime.
“Enjoying your weekend?” he asked.
I leaned over and scanned the bill on the counter, trying to pay attention to the line items as he explained what had been wrong with my car’s workings.
As usual when a mechanic talks to me I put considerable effort into looking interested, even respectful. I was intent on that effort, though it warred against my instinctive dislike of John, when I detected someone behind me, felt or heard the brush of thick, expensive fabric against itself. I registered that the doorbell hadn’t chimed this time and there was a scent, subtle but clear, which I had to identify—much as I wished not to—as a familiar cologne.
Beefy John, still talking about the car, looked steadily over my shoulder; I turned.
“Hey there, honey,” said Ned.
THERE WERE THREE thinly padded, black folding chairs along the wall, beside a fake potted plant with dusty leaves. I sat down on one. The fake plant was two times a standin, I thought, as a fake plant it stood in for a real one, and then the dust on it, the full neglect, made it seem so purely symbolic that it became an imitation not only of a plant but of an imitation plant.
I wished I could stare at that homely fake plant forever, and never, ever look upon Ned’s face.
I was ignoring Beefy John too, or ignoring the blank space left by him, because he must have retreated into the private recesses of the establishment. I felt a vacancy in the space over the counter. Had he given me back my car keys? It was as though I’d lost time, I’d skipped some minutes and found things changed. Instead of looking up I was staring at the fake plant and at myself—but from a great lunar or stellar distance, across a reach of airless space. I might have been a pushpin on a map, a piece on a board game, any tiny, manufactured item on a wide background.
I couldn’t choose a direction for my attention. I failed to assimilate.
“Relax, sweetheart, it’s all good,” said Ned.
His presence and the vapid words were separate—the words, I thought as I gazed at a streak in the plastic leaves’ dust, an impressively hollow comfort. In the instant when I turned from the counter I’d caught a flash of his handsome face, enough to register his features; but now I was insanely reluctant to raise my gaze to him again.
It was insane, I realized that—some kind of rapid breakdown. But I couldn’t change the angle of my head. I sat heavy in the chair, sack-like. After a minute he lowered himself into a squat in front of me.
And even squatting he stayed graceful, not subordinate the way a squat can make you. I kept my head bowed as long as I could, avoiding the solid offense of his beauty. Before me rose an immaculate camelhair coat, unbuttoned; a well-cut dark-blue suit beneath it, complete with downy-white shirt and silver tie; crisp, businesslike wrinkles on each side of his knees where the cloth was stretched taut. Yes: even the wrinkles in his slacks possessed a symbolic efficiency. They bracketed his sculpted knees concisely, minutely telegraphing competence, even mastery.
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.
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.
It was laughable, I thought, to have a man like that working for you when all you were doing was running for a Podunk state senate.
Lena. I knew the Lindas would still be looking after her, as long as they could. For an hour or two they wouldn’t even wonder where I was.