Ed King

  “No prob, Di. My stock’s like half a mil. Isn’t that unbelievable?”

  It was unbelievable. But, as usual, the world made no sense. Either you were in the right place at the right time or you weren’t. It had nothing to do with what you deserved or didn’t deserve. Here Emily had half a million dollars while Diane had—what? A half-bottle of Gilbey’s and some tinned smoked clams frigging Club had left behind? That night, at 2 a.m., with her TV set in the back seat of her car and a check for $750 Emily had written her, Diane fled. She went to a twenty-four-hour Denny’s, and when it got light, looked for an apartment. What she found was a two-hundred-dollar-a-month furnished studio in Bellevue where she signed a lease as Diane Long, the better to thwart Ron Dominick’s searches. From her new hovel’s cramped, narrow “balcony” she looked down on garbage bins in a locked corral, and on foraging crows. Then she went inside and wallowed. In fact, for the next ten days she mostly wallowed. She spent her time under a blanket watching television. Her efforts to sleep evolved into a fetish demanding carefully placed pillows, thin cotton socks, cheap gin, and Nightwatch. Seventy thousand dollars! … If she ever caught up with that son of a bitch Club … Mornings, she wearily made instant coffee that tasted like the ersatz her mum used to make. The smell of it confirmed her sense that, in the end, despite every effort to the contrary, she’d become her mum. Right down to the telly, bad coffee, and cheap gin.

  These facts were motivating. She would not be her mum! So Diane devised a notice: available for dog walking. She didn’t want to be available for dog walking, not in the least, but it was a way, she knew, into loaded people’s lives. So she made fliers and stapled them to telephone poles. She tacked them up at grocery stores and at veterinary offices that allowed her to. Eventually, she was walking someone’s dog. From the Occidental Grand Cozumel to walking a dog for peanuts! Here she was, leashed to a coddled canine, slogging through a neighborhood she couldn’t afford to live in. As new customers came her way, dogs put her in contact with birds, squirrels, furtiveness, and irritation. Some dogs refused to listen to her commands and provoked her to violence with their incessant pulling. Others galled her with their sniffing and pissing. She wanted to get on with it, walk and get paid, not stand guard over serial urinators. But her real point, of course, was to rub shoulders with money. Returning a nominally exercised charge, she’d offer, “He’s a delight,” “She’s lovely,” or “We enjoyed our time together,” with a little more Brit than usual, in the name of a gratuity. Where did it get her? Now that she wasn’t young? It got her paid work washing a greyhound once a week. She had a code she punched in to prompt an automated gate, and another for a side door, and then she went up back stairs behind a slavering, ribby hound, past modern art hung in a landing, and past a boudoir, more art, and a side table for fresh flowers, to where the greyhound awaited her attentions in a bathroom featuring a bidet. Diane liked the peek at luxe, but she didn’t really want to touch the dog, who was a ferocious drooler and, she thought, distraught about his circumstances. To get him in the tub, she flipped in a dry biscuit. While he gobbled it and slobbered, she turned on the water. The open tap would mesmerize the beast. He stood facing it, huffing, while she squirted him with an expensive shampoo. Afterward, she threw a giant beach towel over his back, necessary because otherwise he would fling water out of his coat that, Diane had learned, would leave her smelling the way he did. The whole thing was disgusting. The bottom of the bottom. The dregs. A servant. A serf.

  Soon she was engaged with an arthritic Boston terrier who needed physical therapy. Jon-Jon was owned by a retired couple, the Jamisons, who didn’t mind doing this but wanted breaks now and then. The Jamisons were kindly Democrats, each with a home office from which they battled for the Sierra Club. Diane’s job was to sit in the living room watching television and, with the pensive Jon-Jon in her lap, pry, pull, and massage his dry legs for forty-five minutes. After two visits of this sort, she was asked to stay for tea, and over tea with grapes, biscuits, and cheese listened to the Jamisons extol guesthouses in the Cotswolds. Mr. Jamison said that he and Mrs. Jamison thought highly of Wales. Mrs. Jamison said they’d made a trek, twelve years before, in the Scottish Highlands. Within two weeks, Diane was picking up their dry cleaning; and within four, their pharmaceuticals. They sent her to a wine shop, a cheese monger, a bakery, a fish market, and a chandlery. She also took the terrier to the vet, transporting it in a plastic carrier padded with a checked blanket. Yet, though all of this was good, it also went nowhere. The Jamisons gave to causes, but Diane wasn’t one of them. She could fawn and ingratiate all she wanted, but it wouldn’t change the tenor of her world.

  Out of nowhere, she caught a break of sorts. Somehow she was able to lie her way into meal prep for a basketball player on the Seattle Supersonics, who not only paid well but doled out tickets. Since she didn’t cook, she contracted the meal prep to a caterer she found in the Yellow Pages, and since she needed the money, she sold the seats. It was a pretty good hook-up, but, still scrambling, she asked her Supersonic, through his assistant, to recommend her to the rest of the team. He did—or his assistant said he did. “Sure,” she thought. “He recommended me—right.” The basketball star was so full of himself, with his career-extending yoga, high-fiber diet, inane rap music, and muscular young sluts, that in the end, she knew, she wasn’t on his radar. She should have known this right away, because at their first meeting he’d told Diane that she’d be working with his assistant. After that, he only spoke to her the way you’d speak to hired help. For example, running into her in his kitchen one morning, he said, “Hey—could you do the poached chicken breasts for lunch today?” Diane looked him up at the library. He was thirty-one and had played in Italy for two years, which might explain his propensity for women who looked like Roman whores. She told the caterer: chicken breasts for lunch. It was degrading, really. The whole thing was beneath her. The assistant she had to talk to was a twenty-something dunderhead. He teased Diane about Prince Charles after hearing that Prince Charles had broken his arm in a polo match. “Say what?” he said. “Are you people serious? Come again? Prince Charles?” This was prefatory to the making of a list—grits, fresh salmon, brown rice, etc. “My man wants lean bacon for breakfast,” he would say, or “You better be looking for some different bread, because my man’s burning out on whole wheat.”

  Just jolly great. From frigging terrible to worse. She had to spend money to visit an optometrist, because she couldn’t read the nutritional information anymore on the Supersonic’s preferred food items. “The time has come,” she was told in a darkened room. “The eye gradually loses elasticity, and then it’s time for reading glasses.” For fun, she lingered with a fitting specialist who had much to say on the geometries of eyewear and on how frames might complement, or pick up, skin tones. But of course this was neither here nor there, because Diane couldn’t afford to buy fashionable glasses. The exercise with the fitting specialist was just entertainment—although, in the end, it was also depressing to sit close to a mirror that way. It was better not to look too critically at this point. In clear light, after a shower, she now had to acknowledge lumps along her flanks. Cellulite, generic reading glasses, ordering chicken breasts for an idiot—every day, a fresh bottom.

  Diane went to a health-food store because her Supersonic needed multivitamins, glutamine, and ginkgo biloba. There was a public-service community bulletin board out front, and, stopping briefly to check, she noticed that nobody had removed even one of the phone-number tabs she’d made with toenail scissors at the bottom of a handwritten dogwalking solicitation. This had to be at least partly because someone had used one of her pins to tack up a business card, in the process partially concealing Diane’s appeal. “Sorry,” Diane muttered. “That’s unacceptable,” before lifting the pin and removing the offender. “It’s every man for himself,” she thought. “I’ve no room for sympathy.”

  She took the card with her. Her bulletin-board usurper was in business as a “life
coach.” Underneath a heading—chrysalis—was “Budgeting? Parenting? Career? Spirituality? Let me help you pull it all together.” This was followed by a name, a phone number, and the words “Certified Life Coach.”

  Diane went around dumping supplements in her basket and shaking her head in disbelief at the idea of a life coach. How did that work? Was that real? “Life coach”? It turned out, at the library, that Life Coaching was in the Yellow Pages, between Clutches and Coal. “Helping clients make positive changes in their lives since 1981,” one life coach pointed out in a Yellow Pages ad. Diane called but got a message machine. She called another number and pretended that she might need a life coach but wanted to know first what life coaching cost. Way less than a psychiatrist, but way more than a plumber. Less than a call girl, but more than a dog walker. Gambling, Diane spent money on a business card:

  FRESH START LIFE COACHING SERVICES

  Work? Relationships? Conflict? Transformation?

  I can help you make positive changes.

  Followed by her name, her telephone number, and the line Providing life coaching services since 1981.

  Fresh Start brought some meager funds in. Bellevue was full of college grads who’d once thought highly of working eighty-hour weeks but had since changed their minds. It was full of techies with relationship challenges. It was full of people young enough to believe that they should have a life coach on their side. Diane netted three in the course of a month. Since her apartment didn’t cut it, she rented a studio near a shopping center and put it to double use. It was a matter of sleeping on a couch instead of a bed, and of stuffing things into a closet every morning. The conversion from lodgings to office took twenty minutes. After that, she showered and put on the sort of white blouse and navy skirt a flight attendant might wear. Her English accent helped, as did her pixie. She looked and sounded upbeat and organized. The terminology sounded right coming out of her mouth. For confidence-building props she had a pen and a planner. “Have the courage to reinvent yourself,” she told clients. “The world is full of wonderful possibilities.” Two of her three clients needed that sort of shoring up; the third had no clue how to organize or schedule, and couldn’t say what his goals were in life. Diane didn’t really believe in goals, but goals were a big part of being a life coach, so she trafficked in them. She signed up a fourth client, who was trying to decide whether he should leave his current company to strike out on his own as a software developer. She took on a fifth, who couldn’t figure out how to work less and felt stuck in a boring but lucrative job. Diane made charts and lists for her clients—on yellow legal paper, but neat—usually in the fifteen minutes before they showed up. She referenced bulleted items with a pen as she talked, and as she listened she gave perpetual indication that she was listening more closely than anyone had ever listened to another person before. She made a siege out of eye contact. She calibrated her expressions, moment to moment, to correspond to what was being said. If things flagged, she said “Aha!” and took a note. By pushing objects around her desktop, she gave the impression that she was expending energy over clients and deserved to be paid ridiculous sums. That was the advantage of settling where there were discretionary funds. You could siphon some off.

  Telling other people how to live their lives was—to use a professional term—empowering. Here these young Americans were making fortunes, and Diane, the daughter of a British whore, was in charge of which affirmations they would say each morning. It often occurred to her that, given the advantages they’d had in life, they ought to know better. Instead, they fell for everything. When they came in, Diane would have classical music of the cheerful variety playing—Prokofiev, for example. A good Allegro con brio, or a galloping Gavotte. She would offer Pellegrino from a pitcher dense with lemon rounds. Since her window opened onto traffic, she’d covered it with a poster of redwood behemoths. Between clients, she sprayed the room with a tea-tree-oil-scented deodorizer and made sure the candle in her bathroom remained lit. When someone knocked, she opened her door briskly, stepped aside, and gestured the way a child’s piano teacher gestured at the beginning of a lesson: Let’s get started, ready position. “Have a seat and we’ll begin,” Diane would say, followed by “So tell me about your week,” as, with a flourish, she pushed the cassette player’s stop button. Now it was up to the client to pick up where Prokofiev had left off, while Diane gave her active-listening performance, took notes, interjected queries, and provided positive reinforcement. She always found a way to employ the term “progress,” but it was just as important to insinuate doubt, because she didn’t want her clients to exit with the idea that they shouldn’t return for another round. Always, in the name of continuity, she ended sessions with the reminder “I’m on call from nine until five every weekday, so ring me if there’s a crisis.” Crises occurred more often than she’d anticipated. A client would be in the middle of something tenuous and, not knowing where to turn, dial Diane. “Begin at the beginning,” Diane would tell them, or something like that, with her TV muted. “What are your goals? Start with your goals. I’ve got your file open in front of me, and I’m looking at the goals we prioritized together. Any changes there? Should we walk through your goals?”

  Now Club’s betrayal began to have a bright side. That fleecer had shown Diane things she could apply. Not that his lessons were worth seventy thousand dollars. She wasn’t going to take it that far. But here she was, conning people, without even getting out of her chair. Without lifting a finger. She was paying her bills this way, without walking dogs—just sitting there putting on a cheery and together show. A neat little scam, life coaching, but the problem was, it didn’t have a future. Yes, she could buy a better television and make some satisfying additions to her wardrobe, but there had to be more to life than that. Because, as things stood, she was eternally asking, “Is this my life as I will live it to the end?” And, according to circumstance, adding, “Living in a studio by a shopping center in Bellevue?” “Pumping up disorganized nerds?” “Watching Dallas and Saturday Night Live?” “Saving up to see Fleetwood Mac, with Emily, at the Kingdome?” Diane was forty-two and had a bunion on her left foot that probably needed to be operated on. The only gold star she could give herself was that recently her reading had moved up and forward. Sidney Sheldon no longer made the grade. Now she was reading serious books, the ones shelved under “Literature,” mostly by writers who were dead.

  She frequently went to movies by herself. Used-book stores. Coffee shops. She would sit in a coffee shop drinking a latte and reading a novel by a dead person in the hope of attracting attention. At Bellevue Square there was an atrium-style food court full of ladies like herself—no longer young but not grandmothers yet—well dressed for shopping and for a midday smoothie spiked with healthy ingredients. Diane drank these, too. She got her hair done at a 20-percent discount by clipping a coupon. She sat in the massage chair at the Sharper Image. She went to cosmetics counters and goaded cosmeticians into guessing her age. Her one splurge was anti-wrinkle cream that advertised itself as taking off ten years. At forty-two, she looked thirty-two, but that wasn’t good enough.

  She met Emily at Bellevue Square for a smoothie. Emily frequented REI now and, because of her height, wore the rec look well. She had a sleek, small rucksack and lightweight boots. She wore a fleece jacket with a hood and two-way zipper. “I think I know what you need,” she told Diane. “You need a date.”

  “Here we go,” said Diane.

  Emily touched her arm. “No one wants to be dependent,” she said. “You don’t need a guy to make you happy. But if you can take some of the focus off yourself, the irony is, it’s good for you, too. You just need someone else to think about.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You could use a dating service.”

  “Emily,” said Diane.

  “I know people who’ve done it successfully.”

  “Good for them.”

  “I know guys at work who’d love to date you. You’re like supe
r good-looking, Diane.”

  But Diane didn’t date. She felt spinsterish and wilted. Fresh Start, she knew, was theater, performance. She herself could use a life coach—someone who would tell her how to get on track again—so she became her own. Full of desperate resolutions, she bought a VCR and a Jane Fonda exercise video. Determined, she lost weight and bought new clothes. A Fresh Start client owned a timeshare on Lake Wenatchee he wasn’t able to use that year; he gave her a free week there, and she took it in April, when the roads were mostly clear of snow, and with the intention of eating little, exercising daily, reading by a fire, and going to bed early. She did this for two days, but then Emily came over and they drove down to Leavenworth for a dinner at Cafe Mozart that included a fifty-dollar bottle of Kerner Spätlese and tall mugs of Bavarian Coffee—whipped cream, sugar, peppermint schnapps—served next to warm apple strudel. Things felt fat and cozy after that. They rented a video and picked up a newspaper. The Germanys were getting back together. The Fabulous Baker Boys was better than expected. In the morning, the lake looked pleasantly still; in the afternoon, it rippled, and that was pleasant, too. The apple and pear trees were leafing out with vernal charm. Deer foraged outside their picture window. Feeling domestic and even sisterly, Diane helped Emily make fresh pasta with a device Emily had brought—as a gift for Diane—on the back seat of her Jetta. They ate it con aglio e olio, with red wine. The next morning, after Emily said goodbye with a meaningful hug, Diane felt motivated to make progress in the English novel she’d brought, and to take a considerable late-afternoon oxygenating walk. In dusk’s chill air, her skin felt firm. She was impressed by the new Gore-Tex walking boots she’d bought. They were dry, stylish, felt already broken in, and did nothing to irritate her bunion.