Ed King Read online

  That afternoon, in Portland, Oregon—in the wrong part of town—Diane paid cash for a motel room rife with spiders and saturated with tobacco. She got herself installed in this squalid fleabag, removed both hospital ID bands—her own and the baby’s—changed another nappy, worked the bottle, watched television, took a shower, and then, for the umpteenth time already, burped her son—who spat up on her, wailing—and slept when he did. In the morning, bleary, she bought a twin packet of cupcakes and ate them with chocolate milk in the car. Well into afternoon, she drove broad circuits, surveying Portland, while the baby, swaddled in his suitcase-nest, rode shotgun with, unfortunately, distress, odors, and complaints. Portland seemed smaller than Seattle, but leafier and just as prosperous. There were plenty of grand Victorian homes in neighborhoods where the streets were shaded by large trees, but also plenty of dutifully kept ranch houses like the Cousins home in Seattle. Diane cruised neighborhoods with an eye toward their amenities before renting a post-office box in Sullivan’s Gulch, not far from Lloyd Center, a new shopping center. She wanted to go inside Lloyd Center and have a look around, but instead, with her baby on her arm, she went into a battered-looking secondhand store and bought him a wicker basket, a blue baby blanket, a grow suit, and corduroy booties. Lloyd Center would have to wait.

  That night, Diane parked her beater beneath a streetside elm in the Eastmoreland neighborhood, where she could see downhill a long way. For an hour and a half she watched the scene in front of her and in her rearview mirror. People came and went, cars pulled in and out, lights went on, lights went off, people walked with dogs on leashes, a cat prowled cryptically. Around nine-thirty, Diane selected the third house from the end on the east side of the block, a large, red-bricked Tudor with tall hedges. Now came the hard part—the disturbing crux of the deed. She got out, looked around, collected herself with one deep breath, then opened the passenger door and gathered up the wicker basket containing her sleeping son, who was tucked into his blue blanket and warmly dressed in his baby grow and booties. As calmly as she could, but steadily, she walked down the sidewalk through intervals of yard lamplight that illuminated her son’s perfect face. And it was perfect. Why was her son so perfect? She looked, alternately, at him and at the Tudor. From its front window, a purple light emanated; the people inside, she understood, were watching TV. TV watchers in a red brick Tudor were going to have to do the right thing. “Okay,” Diane thought, “this is it,” and then, suddenly welling up, she climbed the stairs and left her son on the stoop.

  It was bitter-hard. But, driving off, she bucked up within minutes. The TV watchers, upstanding people who lived in a good home in a good neighborhood, would squire Baby Doe to the next step along his way. All he had to do was cry how he did and they would give him what he needed and take him where he needed to go. And that left her free now—free, foremost, to call that toff Walter on Monday morning and bleed him for everything he was bloody worth. For now though, she returned to her dingy quarters, where she passed a night equal in sleeplessness to the one before it, if for different reasons. Her baby kept her awake not with intermittent squalls but with his absence.

  The following afternoon, with Walter on the hook, a bag of chocolates beside her, the television for company, and a pillow behind her head, Diane sat on her motel bed circling rooms for rent in the Journal. She looked at the comics, did the crossword puzzle, and read “Hints from Heloise” and “Dear Abby.” Below the fold in the local section she came across the headline police seek parents of abandoned baby. No witnesses or clues were mentioned in the story. The infant was in the care of the Boys and Girls Aid Society of Oregon. Diane felt relieved to know that Baby Doe was settled. Her plan was a success.

  Two days later, on a sunny morning, standing in the post-office foyer, she tore open Walter’s first installment with giddy pleasure, counted and then folded his fresh bills into a fat wad, noted with interest but not disappointment the absence of a note or letter, then walked down the street and leased a safety-deposit box at a branch of Portland Trust and Savings. The next day, she took a furnished room in Sullivan’s Gulch, dank and dreadful but dirt-cheap, and certainly no worse than what she’d known growing up. Determined to save what she could on rent, she shared a bathroom with other tenants and cooked soup and oatmeal on a hotplate. The landlord didn’t ask for references or a damage deposit, and the building was in walking distance of her post-office box. Lloyd Center was a bit of a trek, but the weather was fair, the days were long, and she had time, suddenly, to do as she pleased, which meant reading in bed all morning if she felt like it, sitting in a cinema in the middle of the afternoon, eating in restaurants, and shopping. Diane, settled in, sent Club her mailing address, saying, “Write to me here—I’ve gone a bit south.” A month later, he replied with a postcard from Liverpool depicting, in sepia, its long-ago canning dock. “Scraggy-neck,” it read. “Right enough for the moment. Studying electrical from mail order manuals. Wouldn’t mind putting to sea as a joiner, something in an engine room, thank you please, what I would like is electrical greaser, out of the wind, where it’s snug.” In a second paragraph he asked, “What’s all this with them thrashing up their Negroes? Cattle prods and hoses? God save the Queen, Luv!—Club.”

  Lloyd Center was American and fantastic. At a kiosk, she counted one hundred shops and read a sign claiming that no shopping center in America was larger. There was an ice rink with a viewing balcony. Lipman’s sold fine apparel for women, as did Meier & Frank. Diane spent a lot of time combing the racks, contemplating the displays of fashionable clothing, and trying things on in tiny dressing rooms. Everything was a no-go—even though she was snapping back from pregnancy—but she still liked rhythmically sliding the dresses, skirts, and blouses on their hangers, pulling out a possibility, eyeing it critically, checking the price tag, assessing the fabric, reading the label, and slipping it back in place before rifling, once more, through the rack. If she lingered long enough, a floor clerk might come round to suggest the girls’ department for a proper fit. There were a lot of tucked bodices, and gloves for evening wear, and seersucker suits, and dozens of variations on Jacqueline Kennedy’s pillbox hat, but none of that seemed right to Diane. What seemed right was a look she came across while passing the toy department at J. C. Penney: Blonde Ponytail Barbie, in a maroon velvet sleeveless top and a white satin skirt, complete with glossy lips, painted fingernails, and maroon wedges.

  Three weeks later, costumed as Blonde Ponytail Barbie, Diane sat in the tea shop on the tenth floor of the downtown Lipman’s, eating tuna casserole and, with a pencil, designing a business card on a napkin. A week later, after picking up a hundred freshly printed cards at a stationer’s, she bought a handbag, earrings, necklace, bracelet, and watch. These were of good quality, as was her hairdo—glossy, with bangs—which she’d paid an expensive dresser to put together. On a side street, in her mildewed beater, Diane adorned herself with the jewelry, tucked a dozen of the fresh cards into her handbag, and made a last assessment in her rearview mirror. Then, wearing a straight face, she got out on the passenger side, looking, she hoped, supremely confident.

  Diane walked down Eleventh drawing glances. At the Seward Hotel, with no hesitation, she glided through the door held open for her and sat in the lobby with her legs crossed, as if she belonged there, under the rustic chandeliers, the gilded archways, and the murals depicting the Lewis and Clark Expedition. For a half-hour, she monitored the front desk and the concierge stand, the comings and goings of the bellboys with their carts of luggage, and the Seward’s guests, with their gaiety, fine clothes, and need for taxis. The concierge, in a tight serge suit, with a scarlet face and a walrus mustache, stood at a kind of podium. Diane, after smoothing down her velvet top and brushing at her satin skirt, approached him, half curtsied as part of her act, and said, “Pardon me. I wonder if I might inquire.”

  “British,” said the concierge. “Am I right?”

  Diane snapped open her bag and produced her business card,
which he studied suspiciously, with pursed lips. It read:

  First Class Service

  CANDACE DARK ESCORT SERVICE

  Portland’s #1 rated agency

  Sophisticated, refined, and high-class escorts,

  strictly for gentlemen

  We Are Happy to Serve You

  Call CA7-4223

  “We run a very professional and aboveboard operation,” said Diane. “On top of that, we offer a ten-percent commission for client referrals.”

  The concierge licked his lips as if consternated. “How old are you?” he asked.

  “The escorts we employ are all between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five,” Diane answered. “No minors, we don’t employ minors, that goes without saying.”

  “I’m guessing you’re sixteen, tops.”

  “Please do give my proposal some thought, sir. Our ten-percent commission is competitive in the industry. Our agents have been known to make as much as twenty dollars per referral, even more. I’m sure you must have guests who inquire regarding escort services, and when they do, why, perhaps you’ll think of me.” She smiled, and once again curtsied.

  The concierge’s eyes made a sweep of the lobby before he said, “We’ll see what happens,” and put her card in his jacket pocket.

  It was the same at the Benson, with its marble floors and fireplaces, and at the Imperial on Broadway, and at the Heathman. At all of these fine hotels, a concierge took Diane’s card, each with his own we-both-know-what-this-is-about-but-we’re-not-going-to-acknowledge-it mien. It was fine with her for them to handle it that way. She concurred, silently, with their need for discretion, and let them know, without saying it directly, that she intended to be so impeccably discreet, at every turn, that nothing about her would ever threaten their good reputation, advantageous position, or employment.

  She was in business after that, with some success. It was what she’d seen her mum do, after all, on a different scale, at home. Instead of entertaining men in a parlor, Diane went with them to dinner, the theater, the symphony, and piano bars where richly colored drinks were served. Never did she announce herself as a purveyor of sexual services. The safer thing to do was to accept the offer of a hotel-bar nightcap, and then the invitation to the room. Then, behind the locked door with the security chain latched, and with no mention of money changing hands, to take control of the transaction. Diane did this by giving her client what he needed, even if he was blind, beforehand, about what he needed, and was only seeing it right now through the ministrations of “Candy Dark.” Sometimes, as soon as a client was sufficiently serviced, he’d ask her to leave with a gift for her trouble—the late-night cab, the prearranged “escort fee,” and “a gratuity,” as Diane taught them to call it—and sometimes she had to stay on until morning before, needing to get on with whatever it was that had brought him to Portland, her client, maybe half dressed, or in his underwear, or shoeless, or with a loose tie, would pull out his wallet. If he was cheap, she would prod him. Usually it was productive to prod a man who came up short in the cash department—to make him feel bad about that, but good in bed, was the right combination. There were skinflints, to be sure, and the expense of commissions—Diane paid her concierges with a punctilious discretion, if not always with a completely honest 10 percent—but in the end, she was rewarded handsomely for what she did. Before long, she was able to get a nice apartment and—with the help of a client who sold upscale trade-ins—a more respectable car.

  One night, she escorted an attorney who specialized in immigration law, and made sure it came to pass that he requested her services for the following evening. This man, whom she found attractive, which was rare, insisted that it was important to him, erotically speaking, to know who he was sleeping with, it couldn’t really be “Candy Dark.” She told him her name, because she liked him and wanted to, but more because she thought he might take on her visa problems free of charge. He did take them on, this well-toned repeat client with broad shoulders and a slim waist, who was given to gasping, “Diane … Fucking … Priceless … Burroughs!” when his big moment arrived. Soon, with the right papers in hand, Diane got a driver’s license and a long-term visa.

  There were problems, of course, with this manner of living, like worrying about arrest for solicitation, and concern about getting pregnant again. Then there were the clients who seemed like potential murderers or, less frightening but more common, clients with sexual difficulties. There were men with ghastly halitosis, men whose proclivities were pathetic or onerous, and, worst of all, men who went too far despite her firmly articulated prohibitions, inflicting pains that weren’t artfully constrained or merely of the moment—injuries, sometimes, of the kind you limped home with and then recovered from with bed rest and ointment. Which wasn’t so bad, the days off and the unanswered telephone, the books, naps, TV shows, and American-cheddar tuna melts, the luxurious baths, the towel wrapped around the head, the robe and slippers, the indulgent home manicures—in sum, the life of a B-movie starlet. During these interludes, though, Diane felt lonely. Wallowing in the wounds of high-end prostitution, she remembered her son, wondered about his welfare, and regretted her decision to abandon him.

  Diane moved into a new apartment, significantly more posh and with a view of the Willamette, and traded in her car for one more daring. She also made some updates to her wardrobe, not because she needed to, but because shopping was fun—shopping, crossword puzzles, dime-store novels, television, and desserts filled her days, just as needy men filled her nights. She bought Junior Miss light pajama sets in both black and pink, carried them in her bag, and sometimes emerged from a hotel bathroom with one or the other on, and, with her ponytail tightly banded and her face freshly scrubbed, purred, “I was naughty and got my other PJs dirty.” It was fair to say that playing Candy Dark was satisfying, since it included turning men around and exploiting them whenever possible.

  Diane took a vindictive delight, too, in Walter Cousins’s payoff packets, which now always arrived with an accompanying note wishing her and “the baby” well, or with an inquiry about visiting her when next he was in Portland. She never answered these. She tossed them in the trash. Sometimes, in the grip of melancholy, she drove past the Tudor in Eastmoreland where she’d left her son, slowing so as to hurt herself, once again, by drumming up the disconsolate feeling of leaving him on the stoop. Sometimes she parked outside the Boys and Girls Aid Society of Oregon Home—actually three cottages, quite charming, on Southeast Powell Boulevard—for no reason other than to share her baby’s world: the grounds he knew, just visible through a gate, the trees, gardens, squirrels, and calling birds he was becoming aware of as he grew. Or maybe not, since by now he could have been adopted. She hoped that, if so, he was somewhere wonderful. She hoped he’d landed in the proper sort of family, with a mother who served good suppers every night and a father who tucked him in and read him stories. These homey images comforted Diane. She was entirely for them, for every middle-class convention, for all the stock concepts of sound child-rearing. It pleased her to think that at least one Burroughs might escape the impoverished fate of her clan. Hurrah for Baby Doe, slung from that impossible English mess as if from a catapult. He would soar, she constantly hoped and prayed, while following an American arc.

  In the summer of 1970, a client took Candy Dark to a soirée at the Riverside Golf and Country Club. Along the way, in a hired car, he explained who would be there—rich people, in a nutshell. He said he needed her “to hold up her end.” He added that introducing her as Candy Dark was “not going to wash,” and that he wanted her to choose a different phony name that was “a lot more plain.” “What about ‘Diane’?” Diane suggested. “Would ‘Diane’ be acceptably unremarkable?” And so, at this soirée, she was introduced as “Diane Davis” to men in cummerbunds and women in summer gala dresses. Her client, it emerged, was loud and overbearing, and went about asking people, regarding Diane, “Ain’t she cute?” The more he drank, the more unacceptable he became, and the
more uninhibited. He put his arm around her waist and his lips around her earlobe. His ranging mitt stopped, now and then, to squeeze her neck below her ponytail. Eventually, and drunkenly, he lost track of her whereabouts, and this left Diane free to sit with a decorated drink, waiting for the night’s dénouement.

  She was people-watching at the verge of a great pulse of revelers when a tall, not bad-looking young nob approached, introduced himself as Jim Long, and asked if he could sit with her “while these people make fools of themselves.” Diane pointed out a nearby chair.

  Jim Long had dark, curly hair, aquiline features, and a prominent Adam’s apple. He was twenty-seven. He was the fourth of five brothers and had two sisters—one older, one younger. The month before, he had been appointed vice-president of marketing at Long Alpine Industries, Inc., the company his father had started after World War II, which specialized in alpine skis, though they also made Nordic, touring, and tele-marking skis. They had a factory in the area, and were just beginning production of a new line of fiberglass skis after having used laminated wood for twenty-two years. Long was in a period of change, risk, and new investment that made the future feel, Jim told Diane, “like a game we’re in without a playbook.”