On Monday morning, in Bellevue again—the weather clammy, her back a little tense—Diane met with a new Fresh Start client as whiny, self-absorbed, and neurotic as the rest, and this shoved her back into her hole. By ten, she knew that her lakeside idyll was not going to have any useful staying power and, panicking about her durable paralysis, opened her English novel in an effort at self-improvement. By noon, defeated, Diane was downtown, wandering in high-end and middlebrow shops—for a long time, dreamily, amid the women’s apparel at The Bon—since this was a time-tested and reliable salve, as was the spinach salad with avocado and grapefruit at the Sheraton at Sixth and Union. Same old, though. Now what, dessert? More browsing, shopping, coasting—more aging? More nothing except this bland playing-out? It was raining again—time to head home to an evening of solo television. But then she remembered that Emily had raved, while rolling out pasta at Lake Wenatchee, about the wonders of the IMAX movie Blue Planet. As part of her new general earthiness campaign. Part of her compensatory environmental correctness. What time was it? It was three, a quarter past. Why not ride the monorail to the Seattle Center and snooze a little through Emily’s Blue Planet? She could talk about it with Emily later. Keep their relationship going strong. A theater interlude on a rainy afternoon, darkly hunkered down with no obligations—that didn’t sound too bad to Diane. So, overcoming inertia, she dealt with the details. She stood in line at the IMAX Theater with April tourists who’d been brought to this pass by “spring” weather they’d been warned about, handed her ticket to a twenty-year-old who looked as if he was dressed for a role on Star Trek, and settled in beneath the looming swath of screen. Thereafter, she was awake off and on. The picture was so big you couldn’t even see it. If you looked, you risked getting sick to your stomach. Worse, she felt admonished by the narrator of Blue Planet for being alive. “This is our earth … a planet in space,” followed by blame, then more blame, then more. Whoever had cobbled up this film wanted you to gaze unrelentingly on the earth from a window on the Space Shuttle, the better to suffer the sheer breadth of your mistakes. Diane sat through this punishment, thinking, “What do you want from me? What am I supposed to do? I take in oxygen and give back carbon—kill me already, I’m a blight on my own planet.” Finally, her forty-two minutes of eco-lashing over, she emerged with her fellow castigated consumers into an unmitigated spring rain, thunderous.
Precipitation-bound, hoping for a lull, Diane squandered time in the Pacific Science Center, which on this late afternoon was inhabited predominantly by mothers pushing strollers or chasing toddlers. The place was crammed with what were advertised as marvels—stationary bicycles with calorie read-outs, a so-called Shadow Wall, a gyroscope, an echo tube, a Tesla coil, a model dinosaur-dig pit. Lo and behold, in a corner of Building Three, Diane found an antiquated, lonely contraption she remembered from the Seattle World’s Fair in ’62: the gimmicky, glasswalled Probability Exhibit, with its thousand pennies falling regularly past pegs, which had so enthralled the hapless Walter Cousins as it steadily, inevitably, built a hill of mounded coins, and illustrated a truth no one cared about. From a distance it looked like an ant colony on display, but up close, behind a pane of foggy glass, there was Walter’s must-see math marvel. “Brilliant,” thought Diane. “Coins in a box. Walter was such an overgrown child.”
Another Science Center patron sidled up to the Probability Exhibit. He was young, handsome, and upper-class enough to wear corduroys, good shoes, and a fitted wool sweater with a rib-knit collar and cable stitching. He had the sort of face, so pregnant with youth, that made Diane not just conscious of her age but conscious that its owner would age sooner than he thought—if he thought of age at all, in any realistic way, busy as he must be being young. It was a young face but not an innocent one; in fact, at the moment, it looked troubled behind a fragile stoic mask of male confidence. Nevertheless, a shiny head of hair, an untarnished complexion, a strong brow, a well-shaped chin—in short, all the markers of male pulchritude. A guy so iconically young and pulchritudinous he made Diane wonder if she had any charm left, or any winning female magic to assert. Was it over already—were all the good ones behind her? Taking a flier, she straightened her skirt—the knee-length navy-blue flight-attendant skirt she wore on weekdays, along with a white blouse, her crisp, sprightly Fresh Start costume—and said, “I don’t get this.”
He was tall and strapping—Superboy, American. Clean, well groomed, trim-waisted, trimmed nails. He put his hands at the small of his back, tapped a big shoe, and said, “What?”
She knew, from this, that he was not going down the path with her toward common ground where math was boring. So she shifted her coat from one arm to the other, moved closer as if to reassess the falling coins, and said—a tad British—“I don’t grasp”—grawsp—“how it works.”
“Simple,” said Boy Wonder, showing off his white teeth. “Every time a coin starts to fall, there’s a fifty-fifty chance it will go left or right. It falls left or right, comes up against another peg, goes left or right again at fifty-fifty odds, and so on, ad infinitum, until it stops at the bottom. That’s what gets you the bell-shaped curve. The fifty-fifty chance. Each time.”
How very male of this guy to have an answer. The one and only absolute answer, presented with certainty but poorly explained. “Fifty-fifty,” Diane countered. “As in a coin toss? So this is just a series of coin tosses? That’s where I struggle. I see that if I toss a coin the chances of it landing on heads are the same as the chances of it landing on tails. But what about the next time? Let’s say I toss a coin right now, today, right here in front of you, and up it comes, heads. I let twenty-four hours pass, and again, tomorrow, I toss the same coin right here in front of you. Are the odds once again fifty-fifty for heads? I should think not. I should think they’re one in four at that point. But what if I waited a hundred years? Say I forget about the toss I made today and just happen to next toss a coin a hundred years from now. Fifty-fifty, or one in four for heads? What would the odds be? Can you answer?”
Boy Wonder looked amused. He crossed his arms and took in Diane as if she was a novelty. He scratched his head, tapped his shoe again, pondered the ground, and finally said, “Hmmm. My advice to you is, never go to Vegas. Unless you want to lose your shirt there. Fifty-fifty or four to one? Each toss is independent, so the odds of heads are always fifty-fifty. Because the coin doesn’t know it was tossed before. A minute ago or a hundred years. Each time it’s tossed, it’s fifty-fifty, as if the coin was being tossed for the first time.”
Diane shifted her coat again. Was her sorcery working? Or was he merely being polite to her, a fellow muller of a science exhibit? “I still don’t get it,” she insisted. Coyly.
“Try this,” the guy advised. He shoved his hands in his front pants pockets and rocked on his heels, which, she had to notice, set his pelvis in motion. “You’re on Let’s Make a Deal. You’re on Let’s Make a Deal, and Monty Hall is telling you there’s three doors. Behind one’s a car. Behind each of the other two is, let’s say, a goat. What do you do? Which door do you pick? Let’s say you pick Door Number One. So now Monty Hall opens Door Number Three. Out steps a goat. And you’re glad you didn’t pick Door Number Three. But then Monty Hall says, ‘Here we go. I’m going to open another door now, but before I do, let me ask you something. Would you like to switch your pick to Door Number Two?’ ”
“No.”
Boy Wonder stopped rocking. “This is what I meant about Vegas,” he said. “Don’t go there. I beg you. Please.”
Diane laughed, two truncated notes, issued through her nose and throat. “You’re mean,” she told him. “Stop it.”
“I’m not,” he answered. “Door One or Door Two? Odds were one out of three at the beginning. At the total-guess stage. The clueless stage. Then Monty opens a door and shows a goat. Now you’re choosing between two doors, right? It’s like I said about the coin flip—heads or tails. You’re starting over, Door One or Door Two, fifty-fifty, so what differenc
e does it make? According to you, it makes no difference, you might as well stay with Door Number One. Okay, fine. But what if Monty knows that the goat’s behind Number One? So when you say, ‘One,’ he knows you’re wrong. Then he can only open Door Three, because behind Door Two is the car, and he knows that, too. He’s forced to open Door Number Three because he doesn’t want to show you the car’s behind Two. Three is the only choice you’ve left for him by choosing Door Number One, a goat door.”
Diane threw her coat over her shoulders like a cape. “Hmmm,” she said. Boy Wonder smiled. “Win the car,” he said. “When Monty opened Door Number Three and a goat walked out? Remember that? Before that, the odds were two out of three that the car was behind either Door Number Two or Door Number Three. Also, before that the odds were one out of three that the car was behind Door Number One. But now Monty opens Door Three and shows you the goat. And now Door Three is out of the running, and with Door Three out of the running, you can take it as a fact that the odds for Door Two are two out of three, not one out of three. So it’s the better choice.”
“Bravo,” said Diane. “I guess I don’t have to get it. If I go to Vegas, I’ll just take you along.”
They had coffee. Followed by dinner. His name was Ed—Ed King. His father, a doctor, had died that day, and he was, she could see, in need of comfort. “Well,” she thought, “he’s come to the right place. I’m all over that. I can do comfort.” So, when the bill came, but before he’d paid, she told him, bluntly, “All right, Ed. Let’s cut to the chase.” And they did. At his house. Where things got strange.
Okay. Now we approach the part of the story a reader can’t be blamed for having skipped forward to—“flipped forward to” if he or she has a hard copy, but otherwise “scrolled to” or “used the ‘Find’ feature to locate”—the part where a mother has sex with her son. Who could blame you for being interested in this potential hot part, and, at the same time, for shuddering at the prospect of it? Such mixed feelings are to be expected. Most people, bound by taboo, shy away from this arena even while propelled toward it. Most people, on hearing about the Oedipal complex, feel both resistant and drawn. The common solution is to take Freud figuratively, as pointing to psychological and emotional tendencies, but here, right now, with Ed and Diane, what we’re moving toward is sex.
Males: if you didn’t know that the woman you were about to have sex with was your mom, would leeriness stop you? What if, from your point of view, she was just a lot older than you, someone who, because of her age, might make you think of your mom but who definitely—you’re sure of it—is not your mom? And females—here you are about to have sex with your son, but since you don’t know it’s your son, what difference could it make? None. You might think, “This guy is young enough to be my son,” just as he might think, “This woman is old enough to be my mother,” but in neither case would such thoughts necessarily put a stop to things. (In fact—and to the contrary—in many cases they would spur things on.) True, one or both partners might be distracted by the awareness that sex with someone so many years their junior or senior—as the case might be—was psychologically telling and a clue to something deep, but even that would rarely be a hindrance to their going ahead. And as for the sex itself, people think all sorts of things while in its throes, but when things are going right for them—when the sex is what is sometimes called “transporting”—their thoughts leave out everything else. Once they’re transported, the Oedipal consideration, like a lot of other things, gets thrown out the window. And it got thrown out Ed and Diane’s window at Ed’s house that night. Diane knew perfectly well what she was doing—she didn’t have to be a psychiatrist to understand the connection. At a point in life when some women looked up old boyfriends or paddled a kayak around Patagonia, Diane had sex with a twenty-seven-year-old. How wonderful it was—wonderful and surprising—to be attracted to a guy, to want sex. Diane found, once she was naked with him, that there were things she really liked in his performance, including, foremost, that he was relentlessly, acutely, even obsessively servile. It was fine with Ed to spend a half-hour massaging her feet and squeezing her ankles, followed by nearly equal devoted caressing of her shins and calves; next, moving up, he gave substantial attention to her knees and thighs, and when, in her massage trance, she hoped and believed that his hands would surely next go where they would do the most good, Ed didn’t go there, he flipped her over instead and massaged, kneaded, stretched, rubbed, pinched, flicked, feathered, licked, kissed, and gently bit her shoulders, neck, back, and butt. Again she believed that he was on the verge of getting a hand between her legs, especially when, while massaging the small of her back, he found the tip of her tailbone. How long was he going to go on with the erotic massage and general body worship without getting to her quim? Would he please just go ahead and do something not frustrating? But she knew, before long, what he had to be waiting for. He was waiting for a display of need. So she took him by the wrist and moved the base of his hand into her pubic hair until his middle fingertip settled in the no-man’s-land between her “front parlor” and “back door” (those were the quaint, prudish terms of her girlhood), she got him on the node between neighboring needs (both of which had been explored by johns who almost never tarried). She gave him this particular sign, this clear permission, and he began a careful prodding of her perineum, which was as good a starting place as any for Diane, because it instigated those processes of memory her sexuality required. It triggered memories with the uncanny force of déjà vu, and what she thought of, as Ed slaved away, was a boy from her village who had fingered her adroitly in a greenhouse thick with green tomatoes. She’d just turned fourteen. They’d both been stung by trapped bees that afternoon while grappling in the swelter and brilliant light and knocking over pots and tools. The sweat, swelling, and loam had staying power for her, as did the tang of chlorophyll and pungent tomatoes. So many of her johns had been musty, or sweet and sour, and then there was Jim with his Dial and Arid, and Walter Cousins with his cheap-cigar stink. Diane’s imagery, as provoked by Ed, intensified and mingled with long-latent memories. On a bus to Bath there’d been favorable bouncing; then a lean-muscled tour guide asking, in a rhetorical and educational vein, why Apollo was in Roman bathhouses. The boy in the greenhouse was flawlessly adolescent and shockingly beautiful, and in his innocent way, he’d made her come resoundingly—Apollo with his modest marble membrum virile, otherwise known, in her village, as a skin flute. This memory sparkled as Ed intently suckled. They were both on their left sides now, Ed behind, where he’d pried her right shoulder back while deeply inserted and twisted his head so he could suckle away madly. He freed himself from her nipple after a long attachment so as to kiss her on the mouth at length—as if seeking to set the world record for kiss duration—and she smelled her breast on his breath, which was otherwise piquant with saliva, a little tart, a little bitter, and humid with the churning underworld—the raw metabolism and generative heat—beneath the flawless exterior. Jim Long’s odor had been a little like Naugahyde, and his mouth, lips, and tongue had often tasted metallic (or, just as often, steeped in vermouth), whereas Ed smelled vulnerably digestive, warm-blooded, moist, and, just now, breast-fed. He smelled great, and she began to think, the way he was going at it now, that this was how he wanted to come—in her from behind, on one hip and elbow, contorted to kiss and with a hand between her legs. She was fine with that, would have welcomed it and joined him with a considerable bang, but what happened instead was that he pulled out at the last moment and, after turning her on her back, began yet another eternity of regional body worship, this one built around working his lips, tongue, and teeth down her rib cage and belly with that servility of his that was the flip side of masochism. To get Ed to burrow headfirst into her quim, Diane had to put her hands in his hair and, acknowledging her pressing need, press.
And here was another thing she really liked. The will to power that made him slavish in his attentions, dedicated to exploration, and responsiv
e to response, also made him so lingual and labial that it spilled over to his nose, chin, and jaws; half of his face, nearly, was activated for her pleasure, and got slicked to a rough shine by his efforts. But—enough already. How much do we need? Or almost enough. Because it ought to be said that, at the moment of their mutual climax, Ed made sure Diane was on top, deliriously doing all the work.
These sorts of gyrations and five-sense choreographies, with variations on Ed’s main themes, played out episodically between 10 p.m. and 10 a.m., when Diane said, “Let’s shower.”
In the shower, Ed stood with his hands at the back of his head, like someone just arrested, while she abused him with a bar of soap. After a while he shut his eyes, and Diane, wielding her fingernails now and staring at his face, helped him out with two practiced hands, one squeezing the family jewels, the other vigorous with the soap-and-warm-water treatment. It didn’t take long for the beautiful and perfect Ed King to ejaculate for the fifth time in twelve hours, while looking like Roman public-bath statuary. Then they rinsed, dried, dressed, and went to an expensive restaurant for lunch.
10
Ed King
Ed and Diane did a lot together in the second half of Bush Senior’s administration. They saw Green Day and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. They got scared during The Silence of the Lambs, then took the Argosy Cruise to Tillicum Village for clams and salmon in a longhouse. They went to the Goodwill Games to watch fantastic swimmers, to the Bolshoi, and to War and Peace, the opera. They saw “modern tap” at the Egyptian, Cirque du Soleil at Marymoor Park, Tom Jones at the Paramount, Herbie Hancock at Jazz Alley, and Penn & Teller at the 5th Avenue. They ate regularly at Il Terrazzo Carmine. They visited the Burke Museum, did the Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding dinner show, and sunbathed at Alki. They rented a canoe and toodled around Lake Washington, took the train to Glacier Park—white tablecloth, private berth—stayed for three nights at Paradise on Mount Rainier, then three at Mount Hood, then three at Crater Lake. They went to San Francisco to roam and eat well. They read the same books and discussed them on trips. More than once the subject came up: how did Ed really feel about an older woman? Always wonderful. Great.