Ed King

  Ms. Burroughs, I must tell you that, though I am not entirely in accord with your version of what happened in the summer of 1962, I have no problem with your use of the term “rape victim.” It was rape because you were in Walter’s employ, and therefore placed in an unfair position when it came to his advances, just as a secretary is in an unfair position when propositioned by her boss, and just as a college girl is in an unfair position with regard to a professor she has a lust for. In all of these situations the term “rape” can be fairly applied because the participants in the sex act are not on equal ground and do not come to bed with the same power or leverage. One partner has it over the other, and this was the case with Walter and you. Shame on him for that. There is no excuse for it.

  That said, I feel certain that Walter didn’t physically overpower you. I feel certain that you played some part in it. What we both are calling rape might also have elements of a sordid affair between a married man and a willing and sophisticated girl. Maybe a young and very confused girl, maybe a girl who is a victim of circumstance and of her childhood and culture and so on and so forth, but still there remains this element of will. I have a feeling, Diane, if I remember you correctly, that this didn’t go all in one direction.

  With regard to the money, I do believe that, after sixteen and a half years, Walter has fully done his duty. I wish you the best in raising your child, and I do hope he flourishes in the world, but as for money from Walter, that’s over.

  In closing, I’m saddened by the news you’ve sent me, but I suppose, in keeping with grief as a catharsis, this sad revelation comes at the right moment.

  Sincerely yours,

  Lydia Cousins

  About the time she turned thirty-three, Diane began mulling a face-lift. Certain holiday photographs jump-started her in this direction, but it was the trip to Lake Placid for the 1980 Winter Olympics—where Long Alpine was spending considerable money—that confirmed in her the need for action. The dry air there wreaked havoc on her complexion, sucking so much moisture from her skin that no amount, or brand, of rehydrating cream helped. Diane found herself looking, for long spells, in her hotel-room mirror, and feeling depressed because her jawline was sagging and the cords in her neck were tightening. In a parka and hat she looked so middle-aged that she didn’t want to go out to watch ski events with the family. She had to, though, because the Longs were expecting her, there’d be irritating questions if she failed to show, and so, standing in the snow wearing huge Vuarnet sunglasses, she found herself feeling ugly and bereft while the Olympics took place at a weird distance.

  A face-lift was complicated. Dr. Berg was board-certified as a dermatologist, but not as a plastic surgeon. Dr. Green didn’t do faces. They both had recommendations for her, but not the same recommendations. Diane found herself running around a lot, even flying to Los Angeles to consult with a surgeon to the stars. Everyone she interviewed had sound credentials on paper, and in person seemed equally stellar, but in the end she chose a doctor named Jerry Kaplan because he was local, booked into June, and had Vanity Fair instead of Vogue in his waiting room. His nurse gave Diane testimonials, informational pamphlets, reassurance, and compliments. Diane read the literature as well as some horror stories—suddenly ubiquitous—about face-lifts gone bad, anesthesia disasters, and painful problems with healing. These didn’t dissuade her. Dr. Kaplan, with his passionate ideas about her face and the things that might be done with it, seemed equal to the task. They could start with a brow lift to smooth her forehead, he said, plus eye work to tighten her lower lids—“bang-for-your-buck work,” he called it. He predicted she’d be happy with that package, but couldn’t make promises because his line of work was more art than science.

  “Art?” Diane asked. “That makes me a bit nervous.”

  Dr. Kaplan tilted back in his desk chair and clasped his hands behind his head. “It’s aesthetic surgery,” he said. “Results are therefore always subjective. They get viewed through the lens of emotional issues.” The doctor rotated his neck as if to loosen it. “Let me be one-hundred-percent candid,” he said. “No one should opt for aesthetic surgery when in fact what they need is therapy. My work is external. I only change the surface.”

  “I don’t need therapy,” said Diane. “I need to look better.”

  Dr. Kaplan dislodged something irritating from the corner of his eye. “The way you look, yes, I can do something about,” he assured her, “but inner stuff, that’s not my area. I can’t do away with your emotional problems—I mean, if you had emotional problems.” Dr. Kaplan ground what had come from his eyelid between his thumb and forefinger. “Inside, that’s not my area,” he repeated. “I’m going to do everything in my power to make your face look absolutely wonderful, but—”

  “It isn’t wonderful now?”

  Not missing a beat, the doctor assessed her face. “It is wonderful,” he said. “Should we cancel your surgery?”

  Two weeks later, she sat on the edge of his examination table while he rolled her skin around under his hands and looked at it closely through a lit magnifier. As he pressed, pulled, lifted, and prodded, he said, “Under the jawline you’ve lost minimal structural support we could probably address with a simple S-lift, or just leave it for later. With the peels you’ve had, your skin quality is still good, but here, below your eyes, as you know, we have a little tiredness showing, which I think we should go after, and … well … your upper eyelids are debatable. I could lift them, I guess, or I could do the whole forehead, I could pull up the forehead, which does have just a little sag to it—not bad, though—and bring the eyelids up with it; I actually think that’s probably preferable in your case.” Dr. Kaplan moved her temples about under practiced fingers. “All right,” he said, still probing and pressing, “S-lift, lower lids, brow lift as opposed to just eyelids, let’s do that while you’ve still got good elasticity. And you do have good elasticity for someone your age. Not that I don’t want to have your business, but all of this could wait a few years, I feel obligated to tell you. It really could.”

  “Let’s do it all,” said Diane. “That’s what I want.”

  “Tell me again what you want,” said Dr. Kaplan. “Let’s do that one more time.”

  “What I want,” said Diane. “I want to look younger. I don’t want to have jowls. I don’t like my eyes. I don’t like my forehead. I don’t want to look droopy and tired all the time. Also, I don’t want to look like I’ve had any surgery. My goal is to look ten years younger, but natural, not fake.”

  Knowing how she sounded, Diane added, “I wouldn’t say this sort of thing except to a plastic surgeon. But really there’s another side of me—another me—who’s much less vain.”

  On the appointed day, Diane did what Dr. Kaplan’s nurse told her to do—showed up on an empty stomach, with a sedative swallowed, no makeup or jewelry, and Jim in tow. After her face was marked as if by a tattoo artist and she was supine on a gurney in an unbecoming hospital gown, Jim planted a kiss on her forehead and said, “I love you, Diane. I’ll be here when you come out. God bless.”

  And Jim was there when she awoke in the recovery room, except that she couldn’t see him, blinded as she was by claustrophobic bandages. She only knew he was there because when she said his name—“Jim?”—he answered, “Let’s cut to the chase, Diane. I noticed something funny in your charts.”

  This didn’t sound normal. It wasn’t what Jim ought to be saying to her, first thing, when she came out of surgery. “Are my eyes all right?” she asked, and it hurt her throat to say it. “Did it go all right? Am I in good shape?”

  There came what had to be a nurse’s voice: “It went great. Are you thirsty, Mrs. Long? You’re thirsty. I’ll get ice chips. It went fantastic—everything’s good. Doctor will be in to tell you more, but he’s very, very happy about everything.”

  Then it was Jim’s voice again, still with that flat, troubling, all-business tone so lacking in post-op sympathy. “I don’t know if everything’s so good,” he
told her. “You’re bandaged, so I can’t put your chart in front of your face, but what it says is C-O-C-P, Diane. Which means the pill.”

  Despite deep anesthetic grogginess, Diane met this aspersion with a display of calm candor. “I’m not on the pill,” she said.

  “Then why is it on your chart?”

  “Mistake.”

  There was a long pause, during which Diane thought, “Horrid timing.” Blind and helpless, she heard Jim say, “I’m pissed off. I’m really, really pissed. I don’t think I’ve ever been this pissed. This is low. It’s just so down there. I can’t believe this—it’s from someone else’s life. This shouldn’t be happening to me.”

  “Jim.”

  “Don’t ‘Jim’ me. You know what, Diane? All this money on your looks, it’s superficial. And then to lie on top of it, about the pill, to say it’s a mistake—who the hell are you? Who are you?”

  When Diane didn’t answer, the nurse intervened with, “Maybe you should talk about this later, Mr. Long. Our patient is just out of surgery.”

  But the talk that came later was in the same losing vein. Jim brooked nothing and wrathfully put his foot down. The righteous assurance that made the Longs so rich? Jim displayed it in spades now, the full version. In other words, there was nothing to talk about, or nothing Jim would talk about. Before Diane could grasp where things were going, her furiously wronged husband had hired an investigator. Within a week of her face-lift, the pill was a fact, and then lying became Jim’s theme—how many lies, of what sort, when. The investigator found plenty that was fodder for Jim, including the post-office box in Sullivan’s Gulch she’d recently closed. Things hit bottom when he tied Diane’s old phone number to the Candace Dark Escort Service. This investigator was good, but—the saving grace—he didn’t find out about Baby Doe.

  The Longs were aghast to find that Jim had married a former “escort.” They closed ranks, as they had against Sue’s wayward trucking magnate, and handed Diane her head on a plate. The deceit about fertility, the strangeness of the post-office box, the lies about her past, the invented life, the phony persona: all of this added up to more than enough grist for the top-notch divorce lawyer Jim retained—the one who’d helped Sue take her cheating magnate to the cleaners—to make sure that Diane was banished from the family with as little diminution of its ski fortune as Oregon law would allow. When all was said and done, she was back on the street after eleven years as Mrs. Long with twenty-five thousand dollars Jim gave her to go away, thirty thousand dollars of Walter Cousins’s hush money, some pretty decent clothes, a slim butt and waist, a worked-on face that looked permanently astonished, and—as always—regrets about her son. Not bad, all things considered. Regrets, clothes, beauty, relative youth, and fifty-five thousand for a fresh start.

  6

  Ed and Older Women

  Following his victory in the region of wheat, Ed drove scrupulously under the speed limit, with frequent reference to his rearview mirror. “You think he’s dead?” he asked Tracy Stolnitz at intervals. “You think that guy is really dead?”

  “Yeah,” answered Tracy, or something like it, each time. “I think we’re in some pretty deep shit.”

  Ed worried that a farmer had seen what he’d done and had called the State Patrol already. Near Washtucna, he worried about a roadblock, like in the movies, but, grimly rolling the dice, passed through at the posted speed limit. After that it was an hour to Othello—an hour with persistent rearview-mirror checking, more worry about a farmer making a phone call, worry that the BMW driver might have miraculously survived, worry about everything. But there was still no roadblock when he got to Othello, or at Royal City, Vantage, or Ellensburg. Although that didn’t mean much. Because, if the guy had survived, trouble could come later. Maybe he’d convalesce with steely vengeance before tracking Ed down and killing him. Or he’d roll out of surgery, gasp, groan, and tell an investigator about the black ’66 Pontiac GTO, with Washington plates and racing stripes, that had forced him off the road. The very GTO Ed was driving, with its thick film of farm dirt. The one for which there might be, by now, a “be on the lookout” for everyone in law enforcement from Idaho to the coast and from Oregon to the Canadian border. There was much to worry about, but Ed and Tracy made it back to Seattle without any trouble except, in Ed’s case, inner trouble—remorse, self-examination, and, most of all, fear of being caught.

  “Cool,” Tracy said, when he dropped her off at her mother’s house. “I think we’re cool.”

  “I can’t believe it,” answered Ed. “I killed a guy.”

  The next morning, after a bout with sleeplessness, he washed the dust from his car. He told Alice he couldn’t drive it because it needed work, and asked her if he could move her Peugeot outside so that he could use the garage for repairs. “I also wonder if I could borrow the Peugeot,” he said, “to go get some parts.” “Yours until noon,” she replied, and planted a kiss on his cheek. Ed, with his car hidden, drove straight to the downtown library, where he read, in the Moscow-Pullman Review, an article called SEATTLE MAN KILLED IN SINGLE CAR ACCIDENT.

  A 51-year-old Seattle man was killed in a single-car accident in Whitman County on Sunday morning.

  The accident occurred between 11 a.m. and 12 p.m. about 4 miles west of Dusty on Zaring Cut-Off Road.

  The driver, who was at the wheel of a BMW when he apparently lost control and left the road, died at the scene.

  There were no passengers, and the name of the driver was not immediately released.

  Ed copied this article and took it to Tracy’s. They went into her room and shut the door. She read it, shrugged, and handed it back to him. “Deal with it,” she said.

  Ed didn’t answer, because he felt chilled by this response, and because he didn’t want to have an argument with a girl who so willingly did everything for him. Their habit that summer had been daytime sex, because her mother wasn’t back from her shift until six, her chip-toothed brother couldn’t have cared less, and her father lived somewhere else. Nothing had mattered at Tracy’s house except for what went on in Tracy’s bedroom. There, Ed had enjoyed himself to the hilt while feeling on top of the world.

  On this day, though, he lay clothed on Tracy’s bed, talking about what had happened in eastern Washington. “I killed that guy,” he kept repeating.

  “And now you’re freaking out about it,” Tracy kept answering.

  That afternoon, doing it with her, Ed couldn’t get in the right mood. How was he supposed to enjoy someone who turned out to be so callous about murder? Who could clutch, moan, grunt, and suck as if nothing had happened? Ed pressed on anyway, but the more avid he became about Tracy’s pallid body and the rhythmic jabbing of her narrow rib cage, the worse he felt.

  The next day, it was in the Spokane Spokesman-Review under SPEED CONTRIBUTED TO SINGLE-CAR ACCIDENT:

  A Seattle man died Sunday morning in Whitman County following a single-car, single-occupant, high-speed accident.

  Walter M. Cousins, 51, died at the scene after the vehicle he was driving left the road at high speed. Cousins was traveling westbound on Zaring Cut-Off Road outside of Pullman.

  Neither the Whitman County Sheriff’s Office nor the Washington State Patrol was able to say how fast Cousins was driving at the time of the accident, or if there were other contributing factors.

  A Washington State Patrol Accident Reconstruction Unit is conducting an investigation.

  He took this to Tracy, too. Again they lay on her bed, talking about what had happened near Pullman—or Ed talked about what had happened near Pullman—while, across the hall, Tracy’s brother punished a drum set. “Why did I do it?” Ed asked.

  “Come on.”

  “What got into me?”

  “Come on, Ed.”

  But he didn’t want to have sex. He kept rereading the article. Tracy, exasperated, picked up a paperback with a picture on its cover of a ghoul in a graveyard. “How can you read that?” he asked.

  “This?”


  “Why would you want that stuff in your head?”

  “It’s just a story,” said Tracy.

  On Wednesday, Ed didn’t have to go to the library, because Dan and Alice subscribed to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which ran Walter Cousins’s obituary. Ed quickly took in the headline—HO CHI MINH DIES—then flipped to the B section and read:

  Walter Monty Cousins of Seattle, age 51, passed away in Whitman County on August 28 following an automobile accident. Born in Ames, Iowa, in 1928, Walter was the youngest child of Wesley and Barbara Cousins. A proud alumnus of North Ames High School, he played on 2 league champion football teams, in 1945 and 1946. He attended Iowa State University, marrying Lydia Wallach in 1957 and beginning a 22-year career at Piersall-Crane, Inc., an actuarial firm, shortly afterward. In 1958, Walter and Lydia moved to Seattle, where their first child, Barry, was born that year, and their second, Tina, the next year. Walter took great joy in the family’s summer cabin on San Juan Island, where he pursued gardening and “puttering.” He was an excellent golfer, and enjoyed reading in his spare time. Walter is survived by his wife of 22 years, Lydia; son Barry; daughter Tina; brothers Jack, Joe, and Bill; and sister Caroline. A memorial service will be held on Saturday, September 6, at 1 p.m., at the Bleitz Funeral Home, 316 Florentia Street, followed by burial at Evergreen Washelli Cemetery.