DURING LENA’S BOUT with the flu I was more solitary with my thoughts than I am usually, and I don’t think it was healthy. I started to wonder if Ned did know where we were, if he’d known for ages, if I’d been wrong to think we were on our own the whole time. I felt more and more paranoid and I made up theories—he was watching us using satellites and GPS, he’d turned my laptop camera into a spy device.
In the movies it was easy.
The paranoia’s still with me, exaggerated and ridiculous as paranoia has to be. I live alongside it the way I would an unpredictable roommate. A suspicion rises that we’re not as far away from him as I assumed we were, that Ned hovers unseen. Then I reassure myself, which works mildly: the nervousness subsides, until it rises again.
He’s always known my parents’ telephone number—it’s the same number they’ve had since I was a child, I say to myself. So what if he called while Lena and I were there? It was Thanksgiving and I knew he might call, or worse. Our material circumstances haven’t changed, I tell myself, I have no real evidence of his proximity here at the motel.
It’s only that his voice—a warm South Carolina drawl that’s alluring until you detect the insincere overtone—and his manipulative conversation with my mother have infected me, exactly as he intended. It’s me realizing, hearing that voice for the first time in two years, that I’ve gone from what I thought was love to neutrality to dislike to open hostility. I’m contaminated by the discord between loathing Ned now and once having adored him: I remember my adoration acutely and wince. I don’t know how much is shame and how much is confusion. My former, deluded self was a loose construction of poorly angled mirrors and blind spots, I can see that now.
But Lena’s better. She woke up smiling and full of energy yesterday morning with no fever, and we’ve started lessons again. I’m relieved but out of sorts anyway, because besides my paranoia about Ned I’m also grappling to understand the staying of the guests.
In Lena’s and my case I know why we’re lying low. We have two scarce commodities: disposable income and my willingness to spend it on a dingy motel in Maine in December. I hold my willingness to pay for this cold privilege to be an idiosyncratic feature. But here are the other guests, also apparently willing and able to pay and stay.
They can’t all be in hiding from estranged husbands; they can’t all be, say, drug dealers on the lam. And even if they are all friends or relations of Don’s, that fails to fully explain their presence, short of a simultaneous eviction from their homes. It’s disorienting and is preoccupying me. Technically it’s none of my business, though, and I’m reluctant to broach the subject with Don.
And the college drug dealer with the five o’clock shadow has been making overtures to Kay. He approached her in the café this morning and offered small talk about genres of orange juice.
“Who likes the kind with orange pulp?” he asked. “Where are these orange pulp drinkers? I don’t want to drink the pulp. Do you want to drink the pulp?”
There was a certain expectant force to his approach that I recognized with curiosity. Pick-up lines have changed since the advent of Seinfeld; now they often take the form of one person asking another about a mundane detail, a baffling social or consumer habit. Maybe the idea is to forge an alliance in the face of seemingly senseless choices made by others. Anyway Kay shrugged at the orange-juice pulp opener, but she smiled at him.
Later she told me he isn’t a college drug dealer but a guy who makes and spends fortunes selling Hollywood movies to foreign markets. His youth combined with his skill in this realm makes him a prodigy at profit, a producer or studio executive or other dealmaker, I can’t recall the title she gave me. So he is rich, but not aimless or deranged, and his wealth, combined with the youth and good looks, makes it even more unlikely that The Wind and Pines would find itself by chance at the top of his list of winter vacation spots.
“What’s he doing here?” I asked her. “I mean, why here?”
I wanted to ask, Why are any of us here? Why here? But it was too pointed.
“Not sure,” she said, as though it was all the same where he was.
“Well, how about you?” I asked. “I don’t mean why aren’t you in Boston, I understand that. I mean how did you end up at this motel?”
Again she looked indifferent to the question but passingly curious about why it had been asked, the way a person might look if you asked them, with intense and focused interest, where they bought their toothpaste.