Confident in the future—and leaning on Alice, who had the benefit of Dan’s belief in life insurance—Ed bought a house on Lake Sammamish with a boat launch, a hot tub, a heat pump, energy-efficient windows, high ceilings, and mahogany flooring from Brazil. His home office featured an expanse of curved glass wall overlooking the boat-churned lake—a backdrop for his monitors and hard drives. Rolling across the floor in a high-backed chair, tapping on keyboards and manipulating mice, he felt like a ship’s captain on duty in a wheelhouse. On a whim, he bought a runabout with an open cockpit and a foredeck made out of Alaska yellow cedar that made him feel, self-consciously, like James Bond. Diane moved in with him in ’91. They put up pickles, learned the secrets of a waffle iron, and hung curtains in the bathroom. At that point, Alice stopped telling herself that Diane was just a fling. She didn’t embrace Ed’s older woman, but she didn’t turn away from her, either. She accepted the cohabitation arrangement because, number one, what could she do about it, and, number two, because she didn’t really believe that her son would marry a woman too far along to have kids. Didn’t Ed want kids? She brought this up with him when Diane wasn’t around, and was surprised at how nonchalant he seemed about it. “Kids would just be in the way,” he told her. “I have big plans.”
The battle began for Alice’s approval. At Thanksgiving, Ed and Diane invited Simon and his “friend” Andrea, and Alice and her sister, Bernice, who, like Alice, was widowed and making the best of it, which meant, right now, visiting from Philadelphia and staying with Alice for six weeks. Simon came looking like Elvis Costello, down to the tight pants and high-water socks. Andrea, a pillowy yin to his knock-kneed yang, was edgy and plump. At first, she and Simon sat on a couch whispering into each other’s hair, but at dinner they let up a little under the influence of Diane’s comfort food. Andrea, her face flushed by red wine, became daughterly toward Alice and Bernice, ignored Diane, and got combative with Ed. “Simon’s brother,” she said, “I’m not as trim as you, but it’s Thanksgiving, okay? So pass the mashed potatoes.” “Did Ed ever help with the dishes growing up, Alice? He looks like he’s settled in over there. Have more pie, Ed. Relax.”
By mid-December, Si and Andrea weren’t together anymore, “not even as friends,” Si emphasized, “because she makes demands, and I’m way too busy.” Diane and Ed put on Christmas for Jews—the same crowd, minus Andrea—and that night Ed overheard Alice and Bernice talking quietly in the guest bedroom. “The plastic surgery’s so obvious,” said Alice. “I mean, her values, I don’t understand. Why spend a fortune on something like that? Caring so much about your appearance you’re willing to go under the knife?”
“What about your nose-job period?” Bernice said.
“I considered it, but my better self won.”
“Well, where do you draw the line?” asked Bernice. “How far do you want to take this discussion? Can I get my hair done without you … I don’t know, forget it. How old do you think she is?”
“If you adjust for the surgery? The completely vain surgery? But that’s not the real point. The real point is, she never went to college! Who knows if she even made it through high school? I don’t see that she’s done anything meaningful with her life. And when she got married, she married into money—her marriage was to money. That’s the most revealing thing about this … what does he see in her?”
“It sounded so WASP,” Bernice replied. “All that skiing and the trips to the Olympics. To me, the whole thing sounds … yuck.”
Simon, on New Year’s Eve, had yet another new look—lean the way a vulture can be lean, but outdoorsish with a hi-tech flourish. He was now enamored of lightweight clothing that offered maximal warmth-value per ounce while wicking away moisture and perspiration. His glasses were sturdier than they’d been before, and his skin looked wind- and sun-cured. Simon had done a December stint of “competitive orienteering,” which meant unearthing snowbound clues, discovered via careful map and compass work, with a partner name Logan Ames. He, Logan, and Logan’s girlfriend were going to Argentina in February for a guided climb of Aconcagua. Simon had taken up cooking, too. There was an hors d’oeuvre he was bent on serving that night involving Brie and chanterelles, and a date-and-walnut tapenade he’d brought in a fanciful crock. He’d also brought videocassettes of King family movies, which made Alice ecstatic, and so all of them—Diane, Bernice, Alice, Ed, and Simon—watched an hour of grainy footage while eating Simon’s noshes with gusto. They laughed at Dan, in mirrored glasses, reading Sports Illustrated on a Mexican beach while looking scalded and droopy, and heard Alice whisper, from behind her movie camera, “Say something, Daniel, talk about our trip.” There was a blip, some white space, and then on the screen Ed appeared as a four-year-old, hobbling around on his curved feet in the back yard and throwing a Wiffle Ball wildly. Next, Ed, age eight, with his baseball cards, celebrating them like a salesman while sitting at the kitchen table with a three-ring binder; Ed in a skimpy nylon swim suit, shaking his hands out before a race, then diving powerfully at the firing of a pistol and immediately taking a big lead. Restless footage, marked by background din and a lot of shaky camera work, of Bar Mitzvah boy Simon at the height of his geek period, giggling with his friends and gobbling cake, followed by Ed at sixteen, changing the oil in his GTO while Alice, behind the camera, said, “Eddie, pull your hair out of your eyes and smile for once, please.” “Looking pretty retro,” Simon now sniggered, while spreading his homemade tapenade on crostini. “I’d sort of forgotten your muscle car, Eddie, not to mention your bad-ass era. You were one evil dude. You were classic.”
Diane had dressed conservatively for New Year’s, but still showed ample, handsome leg, which had the effect, Ed thought, of making Bernice and Alice antagonistic. Bernice explained, for Diane’s benefit, the distinction between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews, between Hasidism and more conventional Orthodoxy, and between rugelach and a cinnamon twist. She also said that, looking in the mirror, she saw Bette Midler, whereas Alice insisted that Bernice looked more like Glenn Close (“Your chin is definitely Glenn’s, not Bette’s”). They tried Simon’s tapenade, pronounced it wonderful, and extolled Simon’s culinary skills and “expansion of interests.” Too much wine was going down now, and the overrouged Levine sisters were out of control. Bernice insisted that an English breakfast was inexplicable to Americans (“We would never eat a tomato that way”). Diane replied that it wasn’t an English breakfast without baked beans and black pudding, and then she had to explain black pudding, which Bernice said sounded “oy, but to each his own.” “Isn’t this nice?” said Alice. “Some girl talk of the Martha Stewart variety.” Bernice added, “I read recently that her maiden name was Kostyra and that she grew up in Polish Jersey.”
“Okay,” said Ed. “You’re harassing Diane. Diane—harassment can happen here, definitely.”
“We love her,” Bernice answered. “She’s beautiful.”
“How old would Petula Clark be these days?” asked Alice.
“Or Lulu,” said Bernice. “The To Sir, with Love singer.”
“Harassment,” said Ed. “Come on, it’s New Year’s.”
“No,” said Diane, “I’m having a great time.” And, raising her glass of Asti Spumante, she merrily added, “L’chaim!”
When the night was over and they were jointly cleaning up, Bernice said, “I’ve always admired the British. If it wasn’t for Churchill being such a pit bull, Hitler might have annihilated the Jews, and I probably wouldn’t be standing here with my dish towel. Which maybe wouldn’t be such a bad thing, because, really, I’m about to fall over.”
“Ditto,” said Alice. “What a night!”
Diane looked animated, wide awake, and bright. “Why don’t the two of you sit?” she said. “Put your feet up and don’t worry about a thing. I’ll clean this up. You sit.”
Ed and Diane got married at the Chapel of the Flowers in Las Vegas. First they bought a license at the Clark County Courthouse, and then, at the chapel, they picke
d out a bouquet and a boutonniere, stepped up to the altar for the minister’s shtick, laughed a little with the campy, droll organist, and handsomely tipped their smiling witness, a nursing student at UNLV. Since the weather that day was not unbearably hot, they walked the two and a half miles from the chapel to the Mirage, where they consummated their contract on a heart-shaped bed before appropriating a poolside cabaña. That night, Ed and Diane ate five courses of French food, then watched a magician, as his culminating act, produce a Corvette out of nowhere and drive offstage in it.
At home again on Lake Sammamish, Ed got out his calculator. Though he was newly married, it was now nearly four years since he’d met Diane, and (six times a week on average, multiplied by 190 weeks) they’d copulated more than a thousand times. When he mentioned this figure to her, she smiled and said she hoped a marriage license would not be deleterious to either quality or quantity. As things unfolded, a thousand was just a start; five years later—at about the time when people were beginning to worry about Y2K—they surpassed two thousand. By then, Ed was past thirty-five, so thereafter frequency declined more steeply—still, their total rose steadily as the new millennium gained steam. On his fortieth birthday, in 2003, Ed concluded that he’d come three thousand times in, on, or with the assistance of Diane. Calculating further, he estimated that they’d engaged in sex for somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred hours. He and Diane had done everything, and plenty of it. He’d explored, thousands of times, every nook of her body, and she’d explored his with equal, unflagging interest. Their juices and smells had mingled and mixed. It had been, and still was, electrifying.
In 2003, Alice died of breast cancer, in disbelief until the end. Ed grieved, of course, but went on with life the way people said you were supposed to—by keeping busy. Keeping busy was easy, because Pythia, by then, had become a mega-company. Besides growing with a decided roar into global prominence, it was, by 2003, relocating to a four-thousand-acre complex ten miles east of Seattle. The mooring of major tech companies to geography had, by this time, yielded “the Googleplex” and “the Microsoft campus,” but Pythia headquarters, in the Cascade foothills, soon became known to the world, simply, as Pythia. Ed and Diane lived famously there. Pythia was vast, with lakes, woods, hills, valleys, ravines, and bogs surrounding its buildings and parking lots, and this allowed the Kings to dwell securely on three hundred acres walled off as private grounds. Their much-talked-about estate was ringed by speculation. The house wasn’t visible except from overhead. Servants and assistants lived on-site. Deliveries were met and off-loaded at the main gate, then transferred to the couple’s inner sanctum, or to the Japanese teahouse where the Kings met dignitaries. Or, rather, it was said they met dignitaries there. Little was known definitively, though two sets of facts were a matter of record—the estate’s assessed value as it changed from year to year, and what the Kings paid annually in property taxes. (These numbers appeared on dedicated Web sites, foremost among them KingWatch and Python, as did descriptions of Ed’s haircuts, the names of Diane’s dress designers, sightings of Ed and Diane in foreign locales, blurry photos of them on vacation, and the price, configuration, and security features of their super-yacht.) A widely accepted truth held that their complex at Pythia had copious and cutting-edge green-design features (these had been tipped to the press before construction). Beyond that, nearly everything was rumor. Reportedly, a herd of Roosevelt elk had been transferred to the grounds so that the Kings could observe them from various balconies. And there was speculation that the aboveground house, as seen on P-Planet, was the mere tip of the iceberg—that beneath it lay an unknown world.
“The Castle,” as it was ubiquitously known, walled Ed and Diane off from the voyeurs, celebrity addicts, and paparazzi, who, by 2005, were relentlessly not leaving them alone. But what walled people out also walled them in, so Ed and Diane bought an island in the San Juans and conjured a second kingdom there. After that they bought a twelfth-century castle in Cumbria—twenty-seven minutes from the airport in Carlisle—with walled gardens, a Norman keep, and seventy-four buffering acres of rolling lea and wood. This was where Diane liked to spend her days, living like a baroness behind ashlar walls, taking her meals by a window with a fine prospect, and reading in a solarium that looked out on roses. In Cumbria, she developed an interest in Jane Austen’s novels. In interviews, she said that she liked Austen’s smart women and loathed her cads and lords. Soon it occurred to her to give a million pounds to the Jane Austen Trust. Lo and behold, the response to her largesse was so overwhelmingly positive that Diane started looking for other places to put money. Pythia made her the head of its foundation, and she passed long hours examining pleas for funding. Diane loved this work: here, the nays; there, the ayes; over there, the pile of maybes. Requests were endless. With no shortage of need, Diane kept busy, often at a writing table in her library at Cumbria, which looked out on vast greenswards and scrupulously shorn topiary.
Despite multiple homes, walls, and acreage, Ed and Diane remained exposed to clever litigants—a constant stream—and to tangible threats necessitating an ever-expanding security apparatus. In Diane’s case that meant deflecting old johns who thought they could come out of the woodwork without consequence. Ron Dominick, too, tried stepping up to the plate but, unwilling to reveal his identity as a former coke dealer, never gave heft to unsubstantiated claims. A number of journalists assailed Jim Long in the hope of digging up divorce dirt from the ski baron, but Jim refused all media requests, preferring, as he wrote in a press release on the subject, “to respect Diane King’s right to privacy regarding personal matters.” What stuck? Hearsay? Titillating innuendo? That Diane had had a sex life before marrying into Pythia? That Diane had been young in the era of Big Blow? There were presidents and prime ministers who’d been coke users, too. Everything else was tabloid grist. Diane didn’t exactly resemble Teflon, but nothing bouncing around out there about her did material damage to Pythia’s image or bottom line.
Ed was similarly resilient, but in ’05 his shield was penetrated by a phone message reading, “Tracy, no last name given,” followed by a return number and the insinuating message: “We need to talk about Walter.”
He called immediately. His goth ex-girlfriend was now Tracy Hoepfinger, forty-four, mother of two, living in Phoenix, and recently divorced from an HVAC technician. “And you’re rich and famous,” she said. “Your name’s in all the tabloids.”
“Good to reconnect, Tracy.”
“For me it is. Because my ship just came in.”
Before long, she’d forced him to orchestrate a summit worthy of a spy movie. Tracy insisted that it had to happen now, which was easy for a guy who owned a customized 747, a matched pair of fifty-million-dollar Gulfstream G-550s, and a Cessna Citation X that flew at nearly the speed of sound. For his trip to Phoenix, Ed chose a Gulfstream and an on-call pilot who went by a name—Guido Sternvad—that was hard to take seriously. “How does a person get a name like Guido Sternvad?” he’d asked, the first time he’d strapped in beside Guido in an airplane. Guido had replied, “I ask the same question. It’s that kind of name. Guido Sternvad. Calls attention to itself. People are always asking me about it. They think it’s a joke, it can’t be what I’m called. As soon as they hear it, they laugh, you know? They think I must be kidding. They want to know—is that really your name?”
“Doesn’t matter to me one way or the other,” replied Ed. “But as long as we’re just sort of fooling around talking about it, I mean, Guido, come on, if you read ‘Guido Sternvad’ in a book you’d think the author couldn’t think of a believable name. It’s not believable.”
“Hmmm,” said Guido. “I don’t think you’re right about that. Cuz I’m a big reader, a big reader there, boss, and, really, you see all kinds of names in books. You ever read Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov? Main character’s name is Humbert Humbert. You supposed to believe that? No, you’re not. And there’s another guy in Lolita, name of Vivian Darkbloom. ‘Vivian Dar
kbloom’ is ‘Vladimir Nabokov.’ Does the author have a reason for doing that, you think? Or is he just goofing around and playing games for the hell of it? Speaking of anagrams,” Guido pressed on, “I’m an anagram freak. I love ’em, anagrams. Especially when they bring a big shot to the ground. Take T. S. Eliot—anagrams to ‘toilets.’ Hey, try me. Try ‘Guido Sternvad.’ See what you get. You’ll be surprised.”
“I doubt it.”
“Worth your time,” said Guido. “Lot of fun. There’s great ones out there. I think of anagrams all the time. Deviant Rug Sod. That’s me—Guido Sternvad. Doug Invert Sad. Me again. Dan Soviet Drug. Me. Vern Studio Gad. Me. Nat Dodge Virus. Me. Sometimes I get obsessed with a first name, too. David Nuts Gore, David Ogre Stun, David Gut Noser, David—”
“Shut up, Guido.”
“There’s you, too, boss. Don’t forget you. Edward King? Kindred Wag? But I can see you’re not impressed. You want names? I can tell—you want names. Okay, tough guy: Dirk Gnawed? Drake W. Ding? Kidder Wang? Isn’t this great! I could—”
“Guido. Please.”
“One more,” said Guido. “One I really like. Nothing to do with your name, boss, just a good old-fashioned dark, foreboding one. It’s ‘our destiny,’ stick ‘our destiny’ in your anagram generator and guess what you get? You get ‘It’s your end.’ ‘Our destiny’ equals ‘It’s your end.’ Isn’t that something? Isn’t that great? How the hell did God come up with anagrams?”
Swarthy and porkchop-sideburned, moody and manipulative, Guido held sway over Ed this way. It was understood that copilots got paid to stay on the ground and watch movies in the hangar while Ed took informal but advanced flying lessons, checked out the novel vista of the earth’s curve, and got a bang out of Guido and the radio traffic: all those dueling military drawls, diligently projecting calm. Ed had a working knowledge of the Gulfstream’s Flight Management System and of its Engine Indicating and Crew Alerting System. He could fly by instruments, if not by stick and rudder, and since the plane was his, he did whenever possible—including on this trip to Phoenix—with Guido providing wicked commentary.