“Come closer,” said Ed. “I can’t hear you.”
“Next,” said the reader, “we find the Strength card reversed, as the hallmark of your distant past, which speaks of discord, illicit behavior, abuse of power, those kinds of things—all markers for you, all embodied in who you are, and therefore all remaining dangerous.”
“Closer,” said Ed. “Please.”
“On to the Ace of Pentacles,” said the reader. “This is a card we can consider as auspicious, insofar as it indicates the direction of past trends. It suggests that well-being and pleasure have been yours, that you’ve begun along a path of material gain and have enjoyed, and might continue to enjoy, in the near term, the pleasures of the flesh.”
“Kiss me,” said Ed. “Fulfill our destiny.”
But she ignored this. “The Ace of Pentacles,” she said, “finds strong support in your next card, the Nine of Cups, hinting at a great bounty lying in your future. That brings us next to the Hanged Man reversed, which tells us what would be obvious to anybody—that in your present condition you suffer from a terrible inflation, a terrible narcissism, and an overwhelming and dangerous hubris.”
“Come on, kiss me,” repeated Ed.
“I mentioned earlier that your next card, the Knight of Swords”—the reader nearly touched it with her smallest finger’s fake nail—“can be read with diametrically opposed connotations. On the one hand, it might bode well going forward, but, on the other hand, this card can indicate misfortune. I think that in your case we—”
Ed leaned in and kissed her with the confidence that a kiss was all it would take. She tasted like myrrh. When he was done she said simply, “We haven’t finished your reading.”
“Forget it,” said Ed. “Let’s go somewhere. Anywhere.”
“You don’t want me to tell you about your last two cards?”
“Why would I care about the last two cards?”
“That’s a mistake,” the reader said. “Now get out of here, you arrogant bastard. You’re dangerous to the world and to yourself.”
“Don’t make me laugh,” Ed answered.
7
The Con
Diane decided that a fresh start meant distance, and relocated from Portland to Seattle. She also stopped calling herself Diane Long and became Diane Burroughs again. Returning to her old name was bureaucratically entangling, but every time she had to visit an office, fill out a form, mail something, or have a document notarized, she felt spurred by catharsis. The niggling paperwork—writing out her personal details ad nauseam—contributed to her purge. So did the other details of returning to her life as an unattached person. Diane bought a two-door car and, after a bit of investigation, chose a Seattle suburb called Kirkland—boutique shops and handsome lake vistas—where she signed a lease at The Palms. Favoring the view from Apartment 226 of the terrace full of chaises longues and of the pool and “cabaña”—a covered area for outdoor entertaining featuring a refrigerator and sink—she ordered furniture, shopped for kitchenware, and bought a stereo and a high-end television. Becoming single again swallowed a good part of June, but by July, Diane could do what she wanted, which was to sit by the pool, read, and drink Evian water. It was while she was in this bank-account-depleting mode that she heard from her half-brother the constable, who said he’d tracked her down via her car registration. “That’s lovely,” she said, “and good of you, John.” But it turned out his call was not just social. He’d called to say that Mum was in hospital. Besides her shot liver, a lot of things were ominous; the worst of it was that she no longer took food. She was incoherent, yet one thing was clear: Mum wanted to see Diane before she died. Diane said she’d look at the price of a plane ticket, but before she could, John called again, in the middle of the night, to report via a crackling, distant connection that Mum had “passed on at about ten a.m., without much trouble.”
Diane bought the ticket in the morning. John met her in the arrivals hall at Heathrow and, after offering a stiff embrace, hoisted her “trunk” onto his shoulder and carried it to his Lada like a sack of flour. He was a giant with awful walrus mustaches, ungainly and deferential. Whereas once he’d been an agile rugby prop, now he was flabby, short of breath, and slow. He used hair cream. His face was red, his lips cracked, his eyes beady. He had the broken blood vessels in his nose and cheeks often telling among alcoholics. In his car, where he loomed against the roof and overfilled his seat with girth, he told Diane that she looked “quite fit for her age.” It was a wonder he didn’t break the stick shift off, so puny did it look beneath his hand.
Even before leaving the airport’s ring road, Diane was reminded that everything in England was smaller, closer, denser, more compact, and darkened by time. It was raining in August, at three in the afternoon. The rush of traffic, though pell-mell, felt cooperative. Diane recognized the blight between Epping and Stansted, and, beyond Great Dunmow, the unruly hedgerows. The countryside here looked like a rubbish heap, and was too close to London for its own good. There was the ancient pall of successive devastations, applied by nature and man both, that she recognized from girlhood but, in that era of her life, had had no name for. Nevertheless, Diane found herself feeling fond of England. She preferred it, with its dowdy pubs, chimney pots, and mansard roofs, to America’s shoddy newness. England’s industrial trim and tackle, even its wreckage, was properly bleak, whereas like clutter in the American Northwest corner struck Diane as the fresh detritus of a colonial outpost. But less than half her attention was available to these observations, because the constable, en route, was a fraternal chatterbox, full of information about Mum’s demise, and thorough in his rundown of his three grown children’s exploits. Coming into Great Hockwold he warned, “You won’t recognize it now,” which turned out to be true. The Tesco she’d frequently shoplifted from was brighter, much refurbished. There were plenty of new roundabouts, and pedestrians-only in the town center. A bulging mosque astride the bypass was visible from High Street, and—the constable’s tone bespoke a point of view on this—there were three Indian takeaways in walking distance of each other. At a traffic light Diane saw, next to her, a cluttered taxi dashboard starring what the constable said was Ganesha, the Lord of Success, and Rekha, a Bollywood star. The old mine works had been turned into a tourist attraction. So had Tate’s, now called the Pasty Shoppe. They lurched along the lanes past sodden house fronts before pulling up at what the constable, in a stab at wit, called his “domicile.” To offset its impoverishment, he’d planted decorative fuchsias, and these, obviously, had been assiduously watered. Still, they had a beleaguered look. By the front door sat a pair of rusting chairs.
Diane was installed in a damp, cheerless bedroom on the ground floor. The house smelled like cooking oil and laundry-soap flakes. The constable, it emerged, was a diabetic whose wife, Jenny, kept a pan of fudge for low moments. Diane, before skulking off to sleep away her jet lag, decided that Jenny’s doting was cruel. She carved her fudge with a furrowed intensity and stood over the constable to watch him eat it with one hand turned against her hip, as if administering cod-liver oil.
Club showed the next day, looking pop-eyed and goitery. As a kid he’d been brawny, jaundiced, and tough, but now, at thirty-seven, he looked beat up and unkempt. He was snaggle-toothed, and chain-smoked nervously, and spoke around his hand-rolled cigarettes. He wore a peacoat and a beret. Like his older brother, Club had a mustache, although his was closely trimmed to parallel his upper lip, and an alcoholic’s spidery network of blood vessels in his cheeks. There the resemblance ended. Club was compact, with a wrestler’s build, a low center of gravity, and a chimpanzee’s gait. He was overgrateful for the constable’s offer of a military-surplus cot set up in a storage pantry, and, having claimed it with his duffel, sat in the front room in his stocking feet with a cup of heavily sugared tea on his lap and the telly on in front of him. Soon he was asking John and Diane to remember Mum pegging a port bottle at Tom Clark, and—demonstrating—how she’d blown smoke rings at th
e telly. Later, at the table, over bread and soup, he remarked that Diane had a classy wardrobe. As for his own clothes, they smelled like the Fens.
At Mum’s funeral, a friend named Harriett Rivers gave a synopsis of Mum’s life and hailed her strong points—cheeky, quick with a joke, knew her mind and spoke it, friend to stray cats. Diane, at the open casket, thought it appropriate that the undertaker had presented Mum as a wizened tart, or a Gilbert and Sullivan old-lady-of-the-night. She looked as if she ought to be wearing ruffled bloomers and sitting in the lap of a sot with meager cash. Sure, it was darkly funny, but it was also sad, if not quite as sad as the rotund constable sniffling, red-faced, into his cravat when Mum’s remains were interred in the fourth vertical row of a mausoleum. Afterward, Jenny, to honor Mum, served pie, and the constable laid out photos on a sideboard, where he also displayed a half-dozen pieces of Mum’s crochet work and some letters from when Mum had been a land girl during the war. Before supper he gave a gin toast, teary-eyed. “So many pissed on Mum,” he said, “but, give her credit, she pissed right back. Gave ’em what for. Put ’em in their place. That was her speciality. From the school of hard knocks. Came up in a sheep barn but always stood tall. Say what you want, all the rows she caused, and the talk in town, Mum was a fighter. Harriett knows what I’m meaning to say, because Harriett saw it, and thank you, Harriett, for being here with us so late and for giving us your eulogy at the funeral. I thought it was spot-on. You had her in your sights. And here’s to Sweetie for your whortleberry pie, and to you, Club, and to Diane, you both come all this way. Blessings all around, then, and bottoms up! To Mum!”
Diane, who was drinking gin, said, “To Mum, then,” and after Club’s toast—“To Mum, the old fighter!”—she offered: “Rest in peace, Mum, and no more misdeeds.” Harriett Rivers, whose gravelly voice betrayed her many years of Golden Virginia roll-ups, said, “No more misdeeds? Your old mum?” And once more, they all went bottoms up.
Diane and Club pursued a post-funeral mission to finish off a fifth of Gilbey’s while sitting in the constable’s rusty chairs a few feet from night traffic. Memories, memories. The shifty dealer they’d bought puff from with the lame, chained dog just past Park Crescent, and playing football with those slobbery and foul-mouthed Carricks on the supposedly offlimits cricket pitch in winter, and the blind boy on Trelawney Road whose eyes scared the shite out of you because they rolled back so far in his head, and baked potatoes on Bonfire Night. The more they talked like this, the more treacly they got. Still, Club held his drink well—as juiced as she was, she could see that about him. Reeling in bed afterward, she regretted bashing Jim Long in front of Club, and rued her version of her current circumstances—well-heeled divorcee, living large and on a spree, was how she’d besottedly painted things for him.
Diane flew back to Kirkland feeling cash-depleted and chastised. The constable, at least half a dozen times, had dropped his jowly head in her presence and opined, “Oh, if she could have seen you at the end, it would have brought a ray of happiness in,” and “She asked after you any number of times. She had her regrets, you know, and wanted to make things right with you, in my opinion, but it’s a fair trip from America, she knew that. Too bad when someone’s on their last legs, eh?” Diane smoldered in her coach seat now. She chewed her fingernails. The important thing was to put it all behind her. Her mother was dead, and the constable, for all intents and purposes, was noise wafting away in the Gulf Stream. Who was he to insinuate or accuse? A constable on foot patrol, portly and huffing. A dunderhead with an awful mustache too often dipped in ale froth.
Redelivered to The Palms, Diane took to the pool deck in the French-cut bikini Jim had bought her in Puerto Vallarta. It was a Saturday, and The Palms’ tenants were out in numbers. Some brought radios, so there was music, not played too loudly, and some discreetly broke the rule about glassware and, while Diane kept track, got tipsy. The whole scene was sexy in an American way—the chicks, mostly, glistened with health, and the dudes, mostly, had weight-room muscles. Diane could see that many of them were restless, as if they believed there was something better to do elsewhere. They were like nice state-university kids on spring break, but a little older, and they left Diane feeling so self-conscious that on Saturday evening she went shopping for less European-looking swim apparel that would let her sit around the pool without disturbing people. She found a red two-piece that Lynn Long—Jim’s sister, who’d married a PGA golfer—might have worn in her era as a hot chick attending U of O, kind of a Miss Teen USA look. Then she went into a club called the Pelican because she felt like it, and, besides, there was nothing to stop her, including the bouncer, who nodded not at her but at her boobs.
The singer onstage was called Sir Charles, and with his long fingers and huge Afro, his over-the-top bellbottoms and half-opened shirt, he called to mind Sly Stone. Diane took a seat at the end of a long bar where the servers, costumed in black tank-tops, black flares, black aprons, and sensible shoes, came to yell at the bartenders, pick up orders, and keep track of tabs. Underneath, these girls looked a lot like the bimbos at The Palms, with their careful hairdos and sunny complexions. The bartenders, all three, looked like soap-opera bachelors, two with the air of marriage material, the third with a slightly more sensual demeanor, as if he moonlighted as a gigolo. From him, she ordered a mai tai.
A good corner, because she blended into the commerce there, and could watch without self-consciousness the loud behavior apparently natural to the Pelican, and also watch the dancers, most of whom were terrible, so that Diane thought of opening a dance studio, Diane’s, where couples would learn to salsa and tango and where singles could pursue each other. Maybe during the day her space could be sublet to Al-Anon and Weight Watchers for meetings; at other times it could accommodate a support group she’d run, fee-based, for divorced women seeking to get back on their feet but having a time of it. Maybe Sir Charles needed an agent, or the bartender needed a pimp, or she could set herself up as a quasi-legitimate masseuse, or get good at investing. Diane, sipping from her mai tai, tried to think of ways not to work and still cash in, like people at the top who, instead of working, intercepted funds.
In the midst of such thoughts, she was assailed by a guy, tall, neat, but not good-looking, whose come-on was to yell, over Sir Charles’s “Let’s Stay Together,” “I know you probably think I’m hitting on you.” Diane answered, “Mind reader.”
“I’m actually just checking,” the guy said, without smiling, “to see if you want to score some blow.”
“I don’t do blow.”
“Want to get started?”
“I want you to get out of here.”
“What if I give it to you?”
“You’re giving away blow.”
“Yep,” said the guy. “Like free-sample sausage in the grocery aisle. Same strategy. Customer grooming.”
Diane put her elbow on the bar and her chin in her hand. The coke dealer did, too. He had closely cropped gelled hair and a broad, Gallic nose; he wore his polo shirt buttoned to the throat, tight chinos, and a wedding band. He looked law-abiding, if a little greasy—like many of Candy Dark’s clients. “Free blow,” said Diane.
“Yep.”
“I never turn down samples.”
“Now you’re talking.”
“What’s your name?”
“My name is … Bill. I mean Mike. Why did I say Bill? My name is Michael Bill, I mean Bill Michaels. But just call me Bill. Or Mike. What’s your name?”
“Funny,” said Diane. “My name’s Bill, too.”
“Great,” said the coke dealer. “What are you drinking?”
“I’m drinking a Mike,” said Diane.
The coke dealer’s wedding band was alongside one nostril, and the green face of his sizable watch, with its articulating silver band, now glowed in the relative darkness of the Pelican. He looked hangdog, impatient, big-elbowed, and uncoordinated, and hulked like a basketball player. “Great,” he said. “Mike. Whatever. Bill. But
maybe, since you’re nursing that mai tai, I ought to come back later.”
“Why?”
“Take your time. Nurse away. I’ll come back. We’ll do the blow.”
Diane, from behind, was crowded by one of the all-American servers, who put a hand on her shoulder and yelled, over Sir Charles, “Hey, Mike!” Mike returned a peace sign, and Diane said, “I thought this was like free-sample sausage, Bill. So why would you and me be doing blow?”
“Fine,” he said, checking his watch. “You do the blow, I’ll watch.”
Diane unzipped her handbag for a matchbox. “Take that,” she said. “Put in your blow. I’ll be here for a while.”
“You never did blow before?”
“I’ll figure it out.”
“Good play,” said Mike. “Be seeing ya.” But ten minutes later, he brought the coke.
On Sunday, Diane wore the less noticeable bathing suit and made an effort to talk to people. There were two girls in chaises ten yards away with whom she chatted about Mexico, tanning salons, England, and carbs. One, Kelly, pointed out a guy who had good pecs. The other, Teddie, assured her that guys loved British accents. They compared suntan lotions. Diane said she was in 226 and that the girls should come around when they wanted, for margaritas. Kelly responded to this with a too-many-margaritas anecdote. Teddie, who had a Cosmo in her lap, said people called her Ted. Next they talked about the Princess of Wales, who, said Kelly, wasn’t good-looking. She couldn’t understand the big deal, the hype, which maybe Diane, being English, could explain. Surprisingly, Ted was well versed in the nuances of royal intrigue, and spoke authoritatively, at some length, on the Duchess of York, who, she said, was weird-looking. Diane agreed. There ensued a dialogue on standards of beauty. Ted was not an admirer of teased hair and provided the example of Olivia Newton-John, “after she went spandex, in Grease.” That was a weird look. Another was leg warmers. They checked out a guy with great shoulders who, said Ted, was a jerk, not that she meant to be judgmental. Diane made sure to mention 226 again, where the door was open a lot.