Ed King Read online

  ALSO BY DAVID GUTERSON

  The Other

  Our Lady of the Forest

  East of the Mountains

  Snow Falling on Cedars

  Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense

  The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2011 by David Guterson

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random

  House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Alfred Music Publishing Co. Inc.: Excerpt from “Do You Remember Walter?” words and music by Raymond Douglas Davies, copyright © 1969, copyright renewed by Davray Music Ltd. and ABKCO Music Inc., 85 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003.

  All rights on behalf of Davray Music Ltd. administered by Unichappell Music Inc.

  All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Alfred Music Publishing Co. Inc.

  Hal Leonard Corporation: Excerpt from “Killer Queen,” words and music by Freddie Mercury, copyright © 1974, copyright renewed 2002 by Queen Music Ltd. All rights for the United States and Canada controlled and administered by Glenwood Music Corp. All rights for the world excluding the United States and Canada controlled and administered by EMI Music Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Guterson, David.

  Ed King: a novel / David Guterson.

  p. cm.

  “This is a Borzoi book.”

  eISBN: 978-0-307-70042-1

  1. Orphans—Fiction. 2. Free will and determination—Fiction. 3. Fate and fatalism—Fiction. 4. Millionaires—Fiction. 5. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3557.U846E33 2011

  813′.54—dc22 2011010255

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is

  entirely coincidental.

  The math problems referred to in Chapter 6 have been culled from

  Gordon Raisbeck’s Information Theory and from David Harel’s

  Algorithmics: The Spirit of Computing.

  Jacket photograph by Tim Ridley/Getty Images

  Jacket design by Chip Kidd

  v3.1

  With gratitude to Fikso

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 - The Affair with the Au Pair

  Chapter 2 - Candy Dark

  Chapter 3 - The Adventures of Baby Doe

  Chapter 4 - Poor Walter

  Chapter 5 - Mrs. Long

  Chapter 6 - Ed and Older Women

  Chapter 7 - The Con

  Chapter 8 - The King of Search

  Chapter 9 - Incest

  Chapter 10 - Ed King

  Epilogue

  Reading Group Guide

  A Note About the Author

  Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

  And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

  Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

  Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

  The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.

  —from Shelley’s “Ozymandias”

  Far off, far down, some fisherman is watching

  As the rod dips and trembles over the water,

  Some shepherd rests his weight upon his crook,

  Some ploughman on the handles of the ploughshare,

  And all look up, in absolute amazement,

  At those air-borne above. They must be gods!

  —from Ovid’s Metamorphoses,

  Book 8, “Daedalus and Icarus”

  Prologue

  From KingWatch, twelve days post-crash:

  7:47 A.M. EST BREAKING NEWS:

  Ed King’s flight data recorder recovered.

  No evidence of mechanical failure.

  Aircraft altitude at apex of flight: 54,500 feet.

  Aircraft flight ceiling (manufacturer’s recommended maximum elevation): 51,000 feet.

  Comments? (20 words or less)

  KingCrank: Might have guessed it: King flew too high. Rule out mechanical failure. This was pilot error.

  grizpilot: I’m a pilot and can tell you—there’s no defeating physics. Must have believed he was God.

  pythiamist: What a coincidence. King goes down, queen disappears. Where do you get pilot error?

  rudewakeup: Of course the conspiracy theorists tab queen as culprit. Oldest story in the world.

  techtrappist: She’s dead, too. They’ve both been offed. By us or the Chinese. Take your pick.

  candydark: Queen survives. Even thrives. I say so in no uncertain terms. techtrappist—you’re wrong. She goes on.

  pythiamist: I agree w/ candydark. Queen told her pilot to cruise to Carlisle without her. Then disappeared. She had a plan.

  techtrappist: And what was that? Walk away from billions? Give me a break, pythiamist. She’s dead.

  candydark: You must be a male, techtrappist. I smell dead-wrong male certainty every time you hit your Send key.

  FiNancy: Speaking of walking away from billions, wish I’d run, not walked, from their stock 12 days back!!!

  KingCrank: Pythia’s toast.

  FiNancy: I agree: history.

  shanghairoller: Deal with it, folks. Just deal with the facts. Pythia’s not coming back.

  1

  The Affair with the Au Pair

  In 1962, Walter Cousins made the biggest mistake of his life: he slept with the au pair for a month. She was an English exchange student named Diane Burroughs, and he was an actuary at Piersall-Crane, Inc., whose wife had suffered a nervous breakdown that summer. Diane had been in his house for less than a week—mothering his kids, cleaning, making meals—when he noticed a new word intruding on his assessment of her. “Here I am,” thought Walter, “an actuary, a guy who weighs risk for a living, and now, because I’m infatuated with the wrong person—because I’m smitten by an eighteen-year-old—I’m using the word ‘fate.’ ”

  Diane had been peddled to Walter, by an office temp familiar with her current host family, as “a nice girl from the U.K. who needs work to extend her visa.” Walter, who at thirty-four had never left North America, thought “au pair” sounded pretentious—“You mean babysitter,” he told the temp. Immediately regretting his provincialism, he added, “I could also go with ‘nanny.’ ” The temp’s comeback was sharp. She was younger than he was, wore formidable boots, and had an air of immunity to an office flirt like Walter. “No, definitely, it’s ‘au pair,’ ” she said. “She’s here on a visa. She’s from out of the country. If you take her on, you become her host father, and you give her an allowance for whatever she does for you—child care or housework or whatever.”

  “Au pair” it was, then. Walter took down the phone number, called Diane’s host mother, then spoke to the girl herself. In no position to be picky—he needed help yesterday—he hired Diane on the telephone. “This is hard to explain,” he explained, “but my wife’s … hospitalized.”

  Back came the sort of English inflections he couldn’t help but be charmed by. “In hospital,” she said.
“I do hope it isn’t serious.”

  “No,” he said, “but meanwhile there’s the kids. Four and three. Barry and Tina. Out of diapers, but still, they’re tricky to corral.”

  “Then allow me just a smidgen of shameful self-promotion. What you need is an English au pair, sir, adept with a rodeo rope.”

  “I think you mean lasso.”

  “A lass with a lasso, then, for when they’re mucking about starkers.”

  “That’s what I need. Something like that.”

  “Well,” said Diane, “I’m your girl.”

  This flagrantly forward use of language—neat, cunning phrases and breezy repartee—from the mouth of a high-school girl jockeying for work was new in his American ear. Diane sounded quick-witted and cheerfully combative—qualities he’d always found winning and attractive—as in her screed on the U.S. State Department and its byzantine visa requirements. “I’m still keen to go to college in America,” she told him, “but at the moment I’m furious with your Seattle passport office. They’re trying, actually, to throw me out.”

  The next Sunday, with his kids complaining in the back seat of his Lincoln Premiere, Walter went to escort this girl from her host family’s large Victorian near Seward Park to his brick-veneered ranch house in Greenwood. He hoped Diane wouldn’t be too disappointed to discover she was moving down in the world, and as he parked on the cobbles fronting the Victorian, he imagined himself apologizing for having nothing to offer in the way of gilding or ambience. Seward Park, after all, dripped old money and featured lake views; Greenwood, by contrast, was dowdy and decrepit, with summer-arid grass patches and sagging gutters. Walter, of course, would have liked a better neighborhood, but his was a notoriously mid-wage profession, a fact he hadn’t reckoned with at Iowa State but was reckoning with now, too late. Not that it was bad at Piersall-Crane, where he held down a cubicle by a window. Walter took certain consolations there—in collegial hobnobbing, in crisply dressed women, and, not least, in the higher realms of actuarial science. That the predictive power of numbers on a large scale could be brought to bear on future events—for Walter, that was like an esoteric secret and, as he put it to himself, sort of mystical. Okay, it wasn’t art or philosophy, but it was still deep, which almost no one understood.

  When he first saw her, the au pair struck him as nowhere close to legal. She looked like a child, unfinished, a sprout—no hairdo or makeup, no jewelry, unadorned—she looked like the younger sister of a girl he’d dated long ago, in high school. Her abraded leather suitcases, strapped and buckled, and riddled with tarnished rivets that looked shot from a machine gun—a matched set, though one was a junior version of the other—waited for Walter on the porch. Propped on the clasp of the larger one was a transistor radio with an ivory plastic strap and ivory knobs. Feeling like a porter—but also like a honeymooner—he hauled her overstuffed luggage to the Lincoln’s trunk while Diane, in dungarees, doled out last-minute hugs and delivered farewells in her disarming accent. “Lovely,” he heard her say. “Perfect.” Then he held the car door wide for her, and when she turned, brightly, to greet his kids in the back seat, he looked, surreptitiously, down the gap that opened between the rear waist of her dungarees and the nether regions of her back, at the shadow there, the practical white undies, and the reddish down along her tailbone.

  It was so—you never knew; you couldn’t predict. Not even an actuary knew what would happen—there were broad trends, of course, which he could express in tables, but individual destinies were always nebulous. In Walter’s case, this meant his wife was out of the house while he, against the odds, on a fair summer morning, was collecting up this enticing piece of luck to install in the bedroom across the hall from his. How had this dangerous but fortuitous thing happened? What had he done to deserve this risk? With these questions and her underwear in mind, he chose, as his route, Lake Washington Boulevard; there might be an intangible benefit in such a sinuous and scenic drive. He also decided to take all three kids to the booming, newly opened Seattle World’s Fair, because there he could function like a grandee, bestowing cotton candy and other largesse, before introducing Diane to Greenwood. With this plan in mind, he motored past pleasure craft and horse chestnut trees while, on the passenger side, hands twined in her lap, Diane answered questions, ingratiated herself skillfully and easily with his offspring, and brought to his mind the pert and perfect Hayley Mills, that upbeat, full-lipped, earnest starlet who, on the cover of Life in a sailor outfit, had puckered, naughtily, for a kiss. In fact, as Diane chatted up his children in lilting tones but with a teasing irony that, over their heads, might be aimed at him, she was a drop-dead ringer for the sixteen-year-old Disney darling who’d been in newspapers and magazines lately for turning down the lead role in Lolita. A morsel, a nymphet, in frilly socks and Keds, a junior-high date—the beach walk, for sodas—and at the kind of youthful sexual crest that even a four-year-old could sense. Sure enough, Barry, with a four-year-old’s primal yearning, leaned over the front seat and settled his head on his hands, like a cherub posed for a Christmas portrait, the better to bask in Diane’s nubile aura. Flicking two fingers against his bony shoulder, the object of his son’s newly stirred affections chirped, as if on cue, “I love your name, Barry, really I do. And ‘Tina,’ ” she added, “is so lovely.” After that, she shot Walter a look, and winked as though he, her new employer, were instead her intimate chauffeur.

  “You truly have great names,” he tossed out.

  “Tip-top, the best, brilliant.”

  “Barry and Tina: it’s genius, it’s beautiful.”

  Diane, and then Walter, laughed.

  And she laughed an hour later—the same truncated notes, issued through her nose and throat—when, on the mammothly rising Space Wheel, they all rocked precariously in the apex tub, ninety feet above the mania of the fairgrounds. She laughed because, taking hold of the lap bar, he’d muscled them into rocking harder while Tina put up conflicted resistance (“Daddy!”) and Barry applied a grit-filled assist. “Beastly!” hissed Diane, pulling Tina toward her. “Never mind such recklessness, love—he’s only toying with your dear, precious life.”

  “But Tina absolutely adores danger. Don’t you, ‘luv’?”

  To this his daughter had a one-word reply, delivered while clutching the au pair’s stellar thighs: “Diane.”

  On the fairgrounds, Walter followed Diane like a dog, so he could admire how she wore those dungarees. There were a lot of bare-armed dresses on the midway, and peppermint tops, and circus stripes, but nothing that could beat Diane in dungarees. Nothing could beat Diane’s tilting ponytail when she lifted her chin to pack in wads of cotton candy; nothing could beat her in the Fine Arts Pavilion with her lovely little hands at the small of her back, leaning toward a painting called Oedipus and the Sphinx. Barry stood beside her with his head on her hip, and Walter stood alongside with Tina in his arms. The odd and slightly uncomfortable thing was that Oedipus had been painted monumentally naked—two spears, points down, beside one foot—while the Sphinx, half in darkness, winged and severe, pointed her bare breasts, from startling close range, at his face. “Ace,” said Diane, examining it. “I must say I like that running fellow in the corner. He’s quite active—he fixes Oedipus to the canvas. It’s arresting, so to speak, wouldn’t you say?”

  Walter nodded as if he knew what she was talking about, then set Tina down and crossed his arms, the better to brood on art.

  “Look how he’s brushed in the shadows of the cave,” Diane said. “Look how the sun plays in those rocks, lower left.”

  Did he read her correctly? Was he getting her signals? Because it seemed to Walter she was skirting the obvious—the nudity two feet in front of their faces—so as to give them both a chance to linger. She seemed, at the moment—if he wasn’t mistaken—a prick tease of the precocious-teen brand. He was confident that the point she meant for him to take was, As long as neither of us mentions nudity, we can go on standing here, looking at pornography together.


  “Personally, for me, it’s the blue sky,” he said. “That amazing blue sky in the background.”

  Again her truncated laugh, as at an inside joke, which he was now laboring to solicit at every turn.

  They went to examine the World of Tomorrow. The line for this exhibit was long and hot, but eventually they found themselves inside the Bubbleator with 150 other agitated fairgoers, ascending, as if inside a soap bubble, toward “The Threshold and the Threat.” “The Threshold and the Threat” had been highlighted in press reports as a thought-provoking and instructional tour-de-force—Walter thought that sounded good for the kids—and was billed in the fair’s extensive guide as “a 21-minute tour of the future.” Yet, after a half-minute of ominously slow rising to a soundtrack called—Walter knew this from the guide—“Man in Space with Sounds,” the Bubbleator arrived not in the future but underneath a strangely lit semblance of the night sky. Stars and planets were projected onto distorted cubes, or onto something like magnified cells in a beehive. What was this, anyway? Why had they been lifted to this surreal destination? Tina clung anxiously to his pant leg, and Barry looked frightened and aghast. In contrast, the new au pair only stretched her back, pointing her girlish breasts at the faux heavens. Then she dropped them, and joined him and the kids as they huddled together like an abducted family in the bowels of a B-movie spaceship. Everyone had to endure more “Man in Space with Sounds”—alarms, theremin wails, inharmonious strings and brass, much of it familiar to Walter as the sort of thing that backed Vincent Price—until, cast in celluloid on the weirdly curving cubes, a frightened family crouched in a fallout shelter. This was too much for Tina, who covered her eyes. Walter wondered who at the World’s Fair had given the green light to “The Threshold and the Threat,” because, whatever else it was—besides some pointy-headed goofball’s dark view of the future—it was also, in his view, wrong. Subliminal, demonic, scarring, you name it, but best summed up as wrong. “We should have been told before we got in line,” he thought angrily. “Somebody should have warned us.”