Ed King Read online

  “Absolutely. Tip-top, Walter.”

  “You went on dates, went to parties, ran around.”

  “I partook, yes. Indulged, shall we say. I enjoyed my year as an exchange student.”

  Walter—feeling like a teen-age boy again, one with the utterly transparent intention of getting his cute date drunk—went in for what remained of the half-case he’d bought that afternoon in Friday Harbor. “Partook,” he thought. “Indulged. Enjoyed. This girl’s talking about sex.”

  When he came back, Diane said, “Stars like this remind me of home. I used to look up at the stars quite a lot, for lack of better things to do.”

  “You’re a romantic, Diane, so try this out: look at that moonlight, glinting on the sea.”

  She did that. Then she leaned on her turned-back palms with a tilted head so as to look at the sky more comfortably. Walter almost said, “Can I kiss you, Diane?” but opted instead for, “You’re clever for your age. Incredibly mature. For someone just done with high school.”

  “Here,” she said. “But at home I’m below average.”

  “I’m sure that’s not so.”

  “Flattery gets you nowhere.”

  Walter shrugged like somebody defeated. “Changing the subject, then,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to ask. Have you overwhelmed our State Department yet with your vast English charm? Because, if not, maybe I could help you with it.”

  She hadn’t overwhelmed the State Department yet. “Though I’m still working on it,” she assured him. “But, please, don’t let’s talk about it.”

  “You’re on a little vacation up here. You don’t want to think about the real world, do you. Well, then, long live the Queen, or whatever you people say. Drink up.”

  And she did drink up, with her fair throat bobbing. He offered her another right away.

  “Declined,” said Diane. “Not tonight—no.” She grinned, rose, crossed her legs, and pressed her thighs. “Walter,” she said. “Walt. Wally. I need to run a bit quickly to the toilet. Excuse me, then. I’m off.”

  Walter considered the meaning of “Wally” while listening to his au pair pee forcefully. Then she emerged, took their beer cans to the sink, and, under the kitchen lights, bent at the waist to pick up a dish towel that had gotten shoved under the toe kick. The thick, falling hair, the tanned legs, the nimble hands, the shadow of her junior bra beneath her plaid dress: a familiar panic from his pre-married years began churning in Walter’s brain and chest. “Maybe,” he thought, “the ball’s in my court and she’s waiting for me to take a shot at her—or maybe, if I do that, she’ll scream.” However he looked at it, one thing was plain—this little chick had him gripped by the balls. “Fun game,” said Diane. “Good night.”

  Later, irritated by flies trapped against the ceiling in the loft, he jerked off while generating a mental slide show of Diane, in her underwear, meeting his needs.

  The flirtation and seduction that played out in the coming days, both on San Juan Island and back home, in Greenwood, were built from the usual and inevitable ingredients: double entendres, verbal sparring, electrifying unease, fearful agitation, bated breath, and, finally, desperation before the inevitable plunge over the waterfall.

  The kind of trouble that there was no going back from started before midnight on the Fourth of July, when Walter awoke to find Diane on his bed in light cotton pajamas printed with fire engines. “What is it?” he said, sitting up on one elbow. “What’s the problem, Diane?”

  “Oh, Walter,” she answered, pleadingly.

  He hesitated. “Bad timing,” he thought, because he’d eaten two burgers and a lot of macaroni salad around eight, then worked his way through nearly a half-case of Pabst while Diane, in her scissored-off jeans, lit sparklers and Snakes for the kids in the back yard. In other words, he felt sluggish, not in optimal form, and too bloated for what might be about to happen. In the bed he shared with Lydia. Beneath portraits of Tina and Barry on the wall. Where either of them might come padding in, wakened by fireworks, scared, seeking solace. And, finally, with a girl who claimed to be eighteen but who might be, by the look of it, considerably younger. “What’s the deal?” he said.

  “Can I get in?” Diane asked.

  She lifted his sheet, rolled onto the mattress, and tucked herself, urgently, against his side, as though she were his daughter and he was about to read a story. Walter, who wore only his boxer shorts, said, “Whoa-ho-ho, wait a second.”

  “Please,” Diane answered. “I’m lonely.”

  She snuggled in farther. There was a big portable fan on in the room, and the window was open, but it was still hot. Already, between them, a film of sweat was forming. But that wasn’t the main thing. The main thing was that Diane was making a strange noise now, a cross between a whimper and a shriek. Was that crying? Yes, it was crying. Not knowing what to do or say, Walter said, “Hey, come on, now, Diane,” and patted her shoulder.

  Diane blubbered, sniffled, and honked while twisting a lock of hair around her index finger and giving him—maybe not unwittingly—a boner. Yet, despite his dick’s insistence on a selfish response, there was no way for Walter not to feel sorry for Diane, even tender, like a father. Until now she’d seemed so resilient and unsinkable. What was she crying about? He wasn’t ready for crying. “Diane,” he said, and stroked her hair once. “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not,” she answered.

  Then she let forth with personal information she seemed desperate to divulge. She was fifteen, she was “the daughter of the town whore,” she was “never, ever going back to England,” she’d lied to the State Department, her school year had been a social disaster, and nothing had gone right with her Seward Park host family, particularly with her host father, who’d ignored her. “How could that be?” asked Walter.

  “He didn’t like me, I know he didn’t.”

  “That’s impossible. He must be nuts.”

  Then she said that her own father was French or an American sailor—she didn’t know which. She had a half-brother, Caleb, older by sixteen months (“So I was right,” thought Walter, “about the letter on her desk—her half-brother Caleb is this ‘Club’ she writes home to”), who’d run off when he was fourteen to London, and another half-brother, John, older still, who was a constable. She had a grandmother in the countryside who, Diane said, was “a terrible witch,” and a grandfather who’d called her “a bastard miscreant from a litter of bastard miscreants.”

  She described for Walter a scene from her childhood. She was twelve, it was summer, she was in the countryside, slopping pigs, and her grandmother said, when Diane asked who her father was, “Only the Lord and your mum know.” Her grandfather added, “Before you was hatched she was consorting with a sailor.” Vivid recall made Diane sob all the harder. She even remembered that, later, in the house, her tormentors had gone on pitching it about: “Dallying with a Frenchman at the time, wasn’t she?” and “That sailor was a merchant-marine man and a sot.” “That sort of talk,” Diane told Walter, to which he replied, “That wasn’t nice. That was just plain inconsiderate.”

  Next complaints about her “mum” tumbled out—her mum who’d once made a shameful few quid servicing the needs of any and all comers, and a few more dusting and scrubbing genteel homes. But her mum couldn’t keep clients in either category, and went on the dole, and shut herself in, the better to monitor the phone and the neighbors. Thereafter, when forced to go out, she painted herself with a horrifying rough, and though she limped from sciatica, straightened up in the presence of men as though they still represented opportunity. They didn’t any longer, and it was Diane’s job to listen to her mum rant about it, and to agree with her about everything but especially about her remaining attractions, and to clean out her ashtrays and kitchen pots and toilet, and sleep on the sofa when the rooms were let to boarders, until, feeling taken for granted, she left.

  “Diane, you’re not taken for granted here,” said Walter. “I would never take you for granted.”
br />   With this, she kissed his cheek, he thought in gratitude. Walter felt that the next move was his, but he was worried about his breath because of the macaroni salad. For this reason he hesitated, wondering how bad it was, and in that moment, with force and suddenness, Diane climbed on top of him. “Jesus,” he said.

  “Oh, Walter.”

  It was a little bit hard to get past the fire engines on her PJs—past the idea that he was in bed with a fifteen-year-old—but Walter got past them soon enough. The PJs came off—he made sure of that—the top first, and then the bottoms. His au pair, naked, was so sleek and untarnished, so gleamingly pubescent, and so unlike Lydia after two babies, that even as he flipped her onto her back, even while he asked her, twice, if she was sure, he knew, glumly, that he was doing the wrong thing. There was a name for this, statutory rape, which, he had to admit, excited him. He had moral qualms, but he ignored them.

  Did she have moral qualms? She cried a lot while he went at her, but didn’t resist or make him stop. Walter pressed on, determined to incite participation, to goad from Diane some clenching and clutching, some shortness of breath, any signal of his prowess or good technique, but somehow, at the end, she still seemed miserable, and the worst of it was her almost imperceptible orgasm, during which she squeezed her eyes shut. She fluttered under him, with effort, like a wounded bird, and immediately afterward, or before she was done, sobbed again in childlike catches, smelling of her tears and his spunk. “Diane,” he said, “are you okay?”

  “Oh, Walter.”

  To his surprise, she didn’t say another word, and before long began to snore intermittently in an ascending nasal hum. He listened to that for fifteen minutes, running a hand along her back and flanks and admiring their youthful smoothness. Then, fearing that one of his kids might stumble in, he woke Diane and asked her to go back across the hall to her bedroom.

  “Ask nicely, Walter.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I don’t want you to go, Diane. But for the sake of the kids, please, I think it’s time.”

  She got on her PJs and exited. A bit later, he heard the morning paper land on his porch, and got up to read it. The French were tossing in the towel in Algeria, JFK was pussyfooting with the Russians. He found he couldn’t concentrate on any of this, because he kept wondering if what had happened was a train wreck. “Of course,” he thought, “it’s a major train wreck. I better nip this in the bud and get a hold of myself.”

  But he didn’t get a hold of himself, for a whole thrilling month, until the day his wife was discharged from the hospital.

  Walter collected Lydia on the first Saturday in August. She kissed him in the doorway of her room on the ward—with a guilt-expanding, marital ardor—and he took in the view of the fine down on her forearms. Her hair was done up loftily—stacked high by an in-hospital dresser—and she’d put on, for her return home, a newly ironed floral shift and scarlet pumps. Lydia paused at the threshold of the hospital to say, “I never want to come back to this hellhole,” took Walter’s hand, and again kissed him. She kissed him a third time beside the Lincoln, and told him how wonderful it felt to be rested and to have lost ten long-resistant pounds. She wanted her life back, she said. She sounded hopeful. Walter said he wanted that for her, too, then asked her to explain what her illness had been about. What did the shrinks say? What was behind it? Lydia told him that it was very complex and without an easy, all-purpose explanation. It went back to her childhood, he gathered she was saying. Her mother had been beautiful and slim. Her father, a small-town accountant, had been distant. The main thing was, she felt better now.

  Walter brought Lydia’s suitcase into the house, while Lydia brought a regal calm. The kids greeted her with no less affection than if there’d never been a Diane Burroughs. Lydia got down on the floor with them right away, the better to deploy her newfound serenity, and so did Walter, miserably. Diane turned out to be a consummate actress, and introduced herself to Lydia wearing culottes, an apron, and pigtails she flipped to entertain the kids while extolling the “tasteful, modern decorating scheme” in the Cousins home and the “marvelously quiet” electric dishwasher. That was the full extent of her welcome. She kept aloof from the rest of the family reunion, as if to exercise English serving-class discretion. Then it was time to eat what she’d prepared—a summertime salad of cold poached chicken breasts laid on spinach leaves, with mandarin oranges and almond slivers. The kids had mostly Tater Tots, and, for dessert, a Duncan Hines chocolate cake that Lydia declined, claiming fresh resolve. Diane told Lydia she looked beautiful.

  After dinner, Walter and Lydia sat in the back yard while Diane did the dishes and watched the kids. There was some talk about flowerbeds, about changing things, about a birdbath and pavers and less weeding. Walter felt half present for this dialogue, preoccupied, as he was, with marital angst. What to do? What came next? What was his future with Diane? He tried focusing on Lydia, who looked good on the patio—in fact, with her post-institutionalized, preternatural calm, and minus ten pounds, she looked better, in his eyes, than she had for a long time, and not at all furrowed, desultory, or anxious. Walter knew she hadn’t “done it” for a month, which meant doing it with her tonight should be better than it normally was. Unfortunately, he was beset by morose feelings that he knew would detract.

  When he thought he could do so without giving Lydia the impression that he was abandoning her on the night of her return to the family circle, he said, “I’ll go check on the kids.”

  “Good,” answered Lydia. “I’ll take a shower.”

  Walter retreated. Being out of Lydia’s presence was a reprieve—he didn’t have to hold his face to a false expression, and he could anguish without worrying how it looked. At Diane’s bedroom door, he gave a warning knock, then opened it and said, “Kids! It’s time to calm down now and brush your teeth.”

  It took a while, but Barry and Tina finally went—right after he’d told them to, with severity at last, for the fourth time. Walter shut Diane’s bedroom door behind them, stood against it, and said—to a teen-ager in culottes—“What now?”

  “We’ll find out, won’t we.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Plenty of things.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Walter.

  He pinched her chin between his fingers, the better to admire her face before moving in to kiss her, but Diane pushed his hand off and stepped back. “Don’t do that,” she said. “Not now.”

  “Okay,” said Walter. “I understand.”

  It didn’t at all surprise him, forty minutes later, to find that he had trouble in the sexual department with the freshly washed, scented, and slightly damp Lydia. Under him she felt urgent for renewed affections of a sort that at the moment he was incapable of providing. After much effort, he softly snaked into her, where he found himself wallowing not in pleasure but in guilt. Lydia’s familiarity and recent mental illness guided him into a sea of self-loathing, where he shrank to almost nothing, apologized profusely, felt grateful for his wife’s reassurances, and finally did what he always did when, failing to get started or show self-control, he still felt a need to be a source of satisfaction. Walter became earnest with his hands.

  The question developed, by Lydia’s third day back, as to the future status of the au pair. Did they need her anymore? What was her role? Was Lydia now ready to resume her tasks as housekeeper, laundress, cook, mom? Was it prudent for her to plunge in right away—into everything that had driven her, recently, to exhaustion? Was it fair to the au pair to dismiss her without warning, or was it better to make a gradual transition, in which case Diane should stay on in the guest room as an ancillary figure, a mother’s helper? Could they justify the continued expense?

  About Diane’s status—should she stay or go?—Walter thought it best to defer. “Don’t argue it either way,” he decided. “Leave it to Lydia.” But Lydia insisted on his active participation, and coaxed him to express himself, until he felt forced to say what he knew he had to sa
y, but didn’t want to say, since there was no right answer—that it was time for Diane Burroughs to exit.

  Together, they broke the news to Diane, explaining the simple, unsurprising truth that, with Lydia’s return, they didn’t need an au pair. Diane took this in stride, which hurt Walter’s feelings, assuring the Cousinses cheerfully that of course it made sense—“Mum’s home, so absolutely. My job’s done.” Lydia hugged Diane, told her how grateful she was for her “extraordinary and wonderful way with the children,” praised her for everything she’d done for her family, and assured Diane that Diane needn’t leave until she’d made arrangements for, as Lydia put it, “the next exciting phase of your young life.” Through all of this, they were in each other’s arms, patting, rubbing, and massaging each other’s backs, with Diane grinning at Walter over Lydia’s shoulder in a way surely meant to mock his wife, then forming her lips into the shape of a kiss before showing Walter the slick tip of her tongue, all of which childish display he endured with a bitter censure and regret. Then Diane said to Lydia, embracing her harder and staring Walter down, “For me, being the au pair in your home has been deliriously exciting. But you’re right, Mrs. Cousins. I’m looking forward to whatever happens next.”

  What happened next came later that summer, after Walter had consigned Diane to the consolatory vault of sexual imagery he employed while doing it with Lydia. She called one morning at his office to say, “Are you ready for this? I’m pregnant.”

  Walter sat up straight in his cubicle. He was in the throes of a loss-cost calculation for a savings-and-loan under time-sensitive duress, and felt driven to get numbers out the door, but forget that now: Diane was pregnant. Pregnant and, he had to assume, fingering him as the father—but was he? Couldn’t it be some other fool? Walter looked over his dividing walls to see who might be in hearing distance. Next door, to his left, was Duane Keene, chewing on a stem of his glasses; to his right was Rick Lubovich, with his hangdog shoulders, as usual doing little more than rubbing his head while pondering his IBM Selectric. Since they could both overhear him, Walter said, in a normal voice, “Okay, I’m listening to you.”