Ed King

  “Thanks,” said Dan. “Thanks a lot.”

  “Come on,” said Alice, stroking the dog’s head. “I didn’t name him—I thought you could name him. You have to admit, you like him, right?”

  “He’s so ugly,” said Dan. “If you have to buy a dog, at least buy one with some dignity or something. That thing looks like a frankfurter on legs. Besides, dachshunds are deutsch, didn’t you know that? I hope you did a little homework.”

  “Let’s name him Adolf,” suggested Simon.

  The dachshund circumambulated, sniffing crotches. With regard to his slobbering, heavy breathing, and whining, Alice pointed out that his circumstances were unfamiliar and that such signs of distress should be expected. Dan held the leash while Alice lit the candles. In makeup mode, he reported, after one bite of cake, “I’m going to get porky with this in the house,” to which Alice replied, “High cholesterol.”

  “Actually, only my bad cholesterol is high. My good cholesterol is low.”

  “Your father’s going to start walking more.”

  “Alice!” said Dan. “They don’t want to hear this.”

  “They love you,” said Alice. “They’re darling, loving boys. They want to listen to whatever you have to say. They’ll even make the sacrifice of eating my carrot cake so you don’t have to get … corpulent, Daniel. Look at them, just look how they’re helping. Does anyone want more ice cream at the moment, or should I put the carton away?”

  Adolf stayed. Alice walked him, at first every day, then every other day, then once in a while. Adolf scratched the front door, even the doorknob, trying to get out of the house. They had to put him in the bathroom when guests came, because of his tendency to growl. In short, Adolf was an opportunity for Dan to chastise Alice. He wanted to take Adolf back to the pound, but Alice wouldn’t let him. Adolf, eventually, had to live in the garage with a bark-stopping apparatus strapped around his muzzle. Three times a day, Alice opened the garage door with the remote-control device on the visor in her Peugeot so Adolf could relieve himself. Each time, she tricked him into returning to his cave by tossing beef jerky in and shutting the door behind him as he tried to eat despite the barkstopper. Taking pity on Adolf, she’d remove it for ten minutes, during which he ate the beef jerky and lapped water while she read a magazine in the car.

  In the realm of math, Ed played catch-up. He bought himself a good graphing calculator and, after rolling through Algebra III, joined Simon in Advanced Calculus and Statistics. They competed for high scores on standardized tests. They noted, and remembered, each other’s missed problems. One would go to the blackboard, when called, to race through a difficult equation or proof; the other would sit on the edge of his seat, waiting, and hoping, for a hesitation or an error, so he could chime in forcefully with a corrective. The King brothers battled over differential calculus and went head to head on information theory. How many times do you have to cut and interleave a deck of cards in order to arrive at a perfect shuffle? What are the relative probabilities of spaces and letters in an English text? You have a balance and nine coins; eight of the coins are equal in weight, but the ninth is defective and weighs less or more than the others; find a way to determine, using the balance three times, which is the defective coin, and whether it’s heavier or lighter than the others. Ed and Simon treated these problems the way athletes treat sporting events. There were plenty of ties—and 4.0’s and A-pluses—but trends emerged, and strengths and weaknesses. Ed could never convincingly defeat Simon in the spatial world of advanced geometry and felt lost in the vortex of the non-Euclidean; Simon was markedly dominant, too, when it came to complex data analysis, and more supple in his work on number theory. Where Ed excelled was in information theory and in the creative realm of the algorithm. Ed had an affinity for algorithms the way the double-jointed have an affinity for contortions, or in the manner of an autistic savant who memorizes phone books at a glance. Supposing you needed to distribute 20,000 newspapers to 1,000 locations in 100 towns using 50 trucks—Ed could give you the algorithm in two minutes. Assume you’re confronted with N sleeping tigers and that to avoid being eaten when one or more wake up you are going to construct a fence around them—what’s the smallest polygon that will surround them? Again, Ed could give you the algorithm in the time it took others to understand the problem. Simon had no chance to beat him at algorithms. There, Ed was ascendant.

  Not that Ed spent all of his time grappling with Simon. He spent a lot of it grappling with U Prep’s females. One, like him, was a page for a state senator over spring break in 1980; another was a member of a student group Ed joined for a summer tour of European capitals. Then there was the Math Club team, where Ed and Simon both excelled, and where Ed met Yael Anon, an Israeli transplant who, even in winter, looked so fresh from the beach at Haifa that she might still have sand in her hair. The math team traveled by van across the state for competitions with other clubs, and on these excursions Ed and Yael disported themselves in Holiday Inns and Best Westerns.

  Ed looked forward to these Math Club weekends. The club’s young adviser, Darlene Klein, was popular with students because of her beauty, and widely referred to as “Decline,” since on her syllabi she gave her name as “D. Klein.” Privately, though, a lot of boys called her Recline, because they wanted to tilt her to that position and—their going term was—plank her. Ed was among these adolescent salivators. Like many boys at U Prep, he ogled Ms. Klein with an ever-humming erotic interest. He liked her style. He liked the way she made the Math Club van feel like a rolling excuse for levity and indulgence. Usually, the team lit out on Fridays after school, Ms. Klein at the van’s helm with a student riding shotgun, two more in rotating middle thrones, and three on the cramped rear bench. Ms. Klein was still hip enough to be part of things. She ate convenience-store candy like the rest of them, swigged pop from a large plastic bottle, fussed with the radio, gossiped about teachers and student romances, and commented on movies and music. Reaction to her in the van was mixed: Emily Sussman engaged Ms. Klein as if she was part of her inner circle; Vanessa Tate adored her, too, but more obsequiously and slavishly; Simon seemed nerdishly and frequently dubious, as if Ms. Klein was unethical and unbecoming; Linda Dorman, as always, held her cards close; and Yael Anon, with her blue eyes, Persian skin, and wild mass of tangled red hair, made sure Ms. Klein caught the gist of her commentary, which was acerbic and judgmental. That left Ed to moderate and nudge, delicately keeping Yael satisfied with affirmations, elbows, and pinches, while still reserving access to Recline and staying on her good side.

  December in Seattle is a dark proposition—by four, the light has disagreeably failed, and from there the descent into night is so rapid that by five one feels a sense of lockdown. The freeways, especially on a Friday after dark, are zones of blurred vision and unsociable fear, and of rainy pavements as translucent as oil slicks in the massed glow of headlights. It was into such a baleful atmosphere that Ms. Klein plunged the van one Friday, heading for a weekend tournament across the state, in Spokane. As always, Ed was ensconced in the rear seat, with the tight-lipped, reserved Linda Dorman on his left and Yael—all honey and gall—on his right. From shoulder to knee, he was pressed against them both, and this made his groin feel pleasantly electrified, as if he were a glowing light-bulb filament completing a circuit of charge.

  In the driver’s seat, Ms. Klein was pulled close with her hands at ten and two o’clock as she battled to keep the van from being battered from the side, struck from behind, flipped, dinged, or otherwise assaulted. Ed could see, dimly, the myopic strain of her neck and the gravity with which she peered through exhalations and vigorously whapping wipers. Emily, riding shotgun, was half turned toward the throne seats, so she could carry on a conversation with Vanessa about physics homework, sleeping late, and how retro Olivia Hussey looked in Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet. Overhearing their movie review, the dour Linda leaned forward to insert, “Hey, you guys, wait a sec—what about Romeo’s butt?”

  Simon
swiveled toward her like an adolescent Dr. Strangelove. On these trips, Ed appreciated his presence, partly because Si was an indomitable math contestant and partly because of the light he shone on Ed. “Now we’re talking about butts,” said Si. “What’s next? Penis size?”

  Ed, from the rear seat, heard Ms. Klein snort in what was clearly amusement and possibly approval. “Simon,” she sang. “Ouch.”

  Everyone laughed, and for a moment the mood in the van felt light, despite the morass of aggressive, wet traffic just beyond the smeared windowpanes. Emily, ever gleeful, laughed longer than the others, with a sharp edge of sarcastic hilarity, prompting Linda to say, “You freak.” At this Ms. Klein, shifting in her seat, glanced in her mirror to assess her charges. “High-school kids,” she observed.

  Ed wondered if Ms. Klein included him in her blanket disparagement of teen-agers. He wondered if he should have spoken up, in a frank way, about Romeo in the buff, so as to indicate for her his adult take on sexuality. It was too late now, because the subject had faded, and so he returned to the deliciousness of his warm, feminine surround, and to the perplexity he inferred from Linda Dorman’s arm as she acknowledged to herself—he was pretty sure of this—that contact with Ed felt good.

  A half-hour later, the traffic had thinned out, but the rain had turned, with elevation, to snow, and the tractor-trailers hauling past were shooting grimy slush at the math van’s windows. When snow began to make a film on the road, Ms. Klein pulled over between monstrously large trucks, put the van in “Park,” and, adjusting the rearview mirror, looked at Ed. “Can anyone here put on chains?” she wondered.

  Ed, Simon, Linda, and Ms. Klein all piled out onto the freeway shoulder. At first they just stood there getting wet and cold. Simon said, “Brrrrr.” Flakes flecked their heads. The traffic skidding past seemed unhinged and precarious. Advancing headlights showed the slant of the blizzard, which fell into view out of cloud-suffused darkness. Linda pulled her knit scarf across her mouth, and Ms. Klein, shoulders high, hugged herself.

  Shortly there was a shuffling of luggage between the opened twin rear doors of the van, which eventually produced a set of tire chains in their box, never used. As Ed unpacked them, he felt Ms. Klein touch him. Her cold hand pressed into the ridge of his shoulder muscle as if she were a masseuse who’d located a pressure point. “Do they go front or rear?” she asked.

  “Rear,” said Ed. “Always rear. Unless you have front-wheel drive.”

  “Do we?”

  “Let’s go for rear,” Ed said.

  Fifteen minutes later, when they were back on the road, with the chains now making their characteristic rumble—as if something were broken—Ms. Klein asked Ed if his hands were warming up. “They’re always warm,” he told her.

  After an hour of dark and snowy tension, it was time to strip off the chains again, on a moonlit exit ramp, beneath frigid stars, with Yael, Ms. Klein, Vanessa, and Emily all blowing prolific vapors from their mouths while Ed, on his knees, did the manly work, and Simon fumbled with an icy lever and intermittently blew on his fingers. Only Linda stayed in the van, reading beneath a dome light. Vanessa made the comments, “King, you’re my hero,” and, “King, you’re such a man.” Ms. Klein had dug her coat out of her bag—a hooded wool mackintosh that seemed to Ed Irish—and in the dry, clear air looked pleased with herself and merrily agitated by adventure. Her wet hair had increased in ringlets and curls, and on the rounded prominences of her wide, Baltic cheekbones stood slashes of cold-weather scarlet.

  Over the mountains, across the snowy pass, they were soon so far outside of their lives that their school personas worked loose. Simon receded into meditative sulking, Linda fell asleep, Emily and Vanessa lived increasingly in tandem, and Ms. Klein, driving, withdrew into a silence that seemed to Ed like reverie. Her silence intimated, for him, a private life beyond the scope of U Prep. Ed put a hand on Yael’s thigh, and she, in answer, put one hand on his and ran the other through her hair.

  At the Moses Lake interchange, they hit a McDonald’s, piling out to deliver their orders, visit the cans, and rain sarcasm on things hayseed. Ms. Klein was adept at driving with a hamburger but had to ask Emily to open her ketchup packets and between bites gave a lecture on judging people because they lived in the sticks. She herself had been brought up in Westchester and educated at Wellesley, Brown, and Johns Hopkins, and because of all this—or despite it, she said—she tried not to judge “the bulbous, unenlightened interior,” though it was, at the same time, completely unbelievable that the heartland states, not to mention the majority of the country, had voted so thoroughly for “the vapid Ronald Reagan.” How was it possible that “the total doofus from Bedtime for Bonzo” was president of the United States?

  No one in the van had heard of Bedtime for Bonzo, which left Ms. Klein explaining the president’s shoddy acting, his divorce from Jane Wyman, his marriage to “Mommy,” his son the probably bisexual Joffrey dancer, and his daughter the pot-smoking nuclear activist who hung out with Bernie Leadon from the Eagles. Ed was able to add, with calm seriousness, that Reagan was an advocate of capital punishment and had nefariously made use of the California Highway Patrol to tear-gas protestors in Berkeley. Ms. Klein, adjusting her mirror while he spoke, nodded with vigor, smiled archly, and praised Ed for having his “ducks lined up exactly right on a total reactionary who thinks trees cause pollution.” When they stopped at the rest area near Sprague, she sought his company in the parking lot, where the two of them milled aloofly in the frigid night air to denigrate the president with the benefit of no obstructions. Ms. Klein said Reagan had been a stooge for Hoover and had seen to it that gay actors were hounded and blacklisted; in her currently unzipped hooded mackintosh, tight blue jeans, wool socks, and mary janes—not to mention the surplice top that, with its band beneath the bust, called Ed’s eye to her ample chest—she incited, for him, a cold-weather erection. Under the icy stars of the steppe, with the acrid sting of frosted sage in his nostrils, he savored his teacher in her present context, lit as she was by sodium-vapor lights, doing toe-raises to thwart the cold. She was at least fifteen years older than he was, but it occurred to him, for the first time since he’d known her, that this shouldn’t bar him from testing her waters. It was the age gap itself, he understood with delight, that goaded him to break new ground with the aggressively opinionated Ms. Klein.

  In Spokane, the team touched down at a Holiday Inn fully rampant, at 10 p.m., with math contestants. They traversed wetly between a small indoor pool and a console TV in the lobby, bounced through the halls from room to room, congregated loudly at vending machines, trotted up and down the stairs, and stifled giggles in elevators. Yael’s roommate, Linda Dorman, went for a swim, so Ed latched her door and produced a rubber. When Linda came back, the door was unlatched and he and Yael were innocently watching TV together. Ed said good night and left.

  Ed roomed with Simon. Simon was in the habit of sleeping fully dressed to block germ transmission from motel sheets, and of staring at late-night television. Ed enjoyed provoking him with questions like, “So who’d you like to bang at school?” He was ribbing Si when, at eleven, Ms. Klein knocked on their door to remind them to meet at eight in the lobby and to urge them toward a good night’s rest. She spoke in the late-night murmurs of a mother bent on setting a hushed tone for bedtime, and wore Zorris exposing painted toenails. Ed, thinking quickly, said he needed the van key because he’d left his graphing calculator on his seat; Ms. Klein replied that she couldn’t, by the book, give Ed the van key, because “U Prep has a stick up its you-fill-in-the-blank.” “We’ll go down together, then,” Ed said. “That way they can keep their stick in place.”

  Ms. Klein looked at Si—Ed thought to take the measure of his cluelessness as she pondered the liaison he’d insinuated—then said, “Okay—I’ll get my coat.”

  “Great,” said Ed. “I’ll go with you.”

  She was a neatnik par excellence, he discovered in her room, with her bag zipped shut on the f
olding rack, her coat hung up, her traveling alarm clock unhinged and opened, and her toiletries kit set upright beside the sink. Only a packet of gum on the bed stand, with a crumpled foil wrapper beside it, marred the otherwise pristine scene, which smelled the way Ms. Klein smelled—perfumed and hormonal.

  When Ms. Klein unzipped her bag to get a pair of socks, Ed caught a glimpse of pink underwear. She sat on her bed and slipped on a mary jane, and the choreography of this propelled him forward; on the other hand, maybe it was best not to risk permanent awkwardness with Ms. Klein in the wake of a failed seduction. But her suddenly studied exhibitionism—the way she arched her foot to catch her sock, pulled the sock tight, slipped on the second shoe, and shook the curling bangs off her forehead with her teeth dug into her lower lip—it all seemed to say, “go ahead.” What to do?

  They went out. In the hall, the lobby, and the parking lot, Ed savored the way Ms. Klein’s great butt moved. He could make out the low band of her panties through her slacks. At the van, when Ms. Klein unlocked the door, he said, “Huh—where’s my calculator?” and even went so far as to look for it.

  They went inside again—Ed protesting about his missing calculator—but in the elevator Ms. Klein changed the subject very suddenly. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about Yael,” she said. “Is there something going on with her? Is she unhappy with me or something?”

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “Don’t you sleep with her, Ed?”

  “I have to take the Fifth on that.”

  “The Fifth,” said Ms. Klein. “I’ve used that before.”

  “Oh, really,” Ed answered, as the doors slid open, “when have you taken the Fifth?”

  Ms. Klein gave her squinty smile and stepped into the hall in front of him. Again he appreciated the way her butt moved and had to quell an urge to reach out and palm it. “I’ve had to take the Fifth with Reed,” she said. “Reed—the guy I live with. My boyfriend.”