Ed King (17 page)

Mrs. Long’s life was a veritable vacation punctuated by actual vacations. Her in-laws liked holidays at upscale destinations, and also liked to argue about upscale destinations, so usually airline tickets couldn’t be reserved until a spate of factional politicking had subsided. One brother would argue for Lake Tahoe, another would speak for Jackson Hole, a third would stump for Vail. Diane pretended to have opinions about the resorts, hotels, ski slopes, beaches, and golf courses in play, but really it was all the same to her as long as no roughing it was involved. While her in-laws skied, golfed, or snorkeled, Diane idled in shops or read in a chaise longue. Eventually, they’d limp in from their exertions, and then it would be time for cocktails with pupus, chips and dip, or fondue. Listening to the Longs relive their day—the transparent boasts, the fraternal animation—left Diane more antagonized than the day had.

The Longs were energetic social drinkers, and when they got on a roll, they loosened up. The vacationing clan would gather at poolside, and the brothers would compete as cannonball artists or shove their wives into the water. The characteristic family laugh was a cackle that, at these times, moved up the registers of frequency and decibel and spread like a
contagion. It ricocheted from one side of the pool to the other when the Long wives perched on their husbands’ shoulders, grappling, grunting, giggling, and cursing while their lesser halves made uproarious comments. The commentary became more subdued and solemn when the men engaged in underwater contests of aerobic capacity, only to devolve again toward the bawdy and inane when the women tried synchronized swimming. Finally, the Longs would haul out at poolside to chat, snack, and bask in the late sun. After showering, they’d eat on a terrace. Then they’d descend on a bar or a club, where one or more of Jim’s brothers might parody disco and, as the night deepened, strip-tease. The day after raucous benders like these, the Longs emerged from their rooms around noon, drank plain coffee, and described their hangovers. Soon, though, they were arranging to make their headaches go away via tennis, golf, or a run.

At home base—Portland’s Riverside Club—Impeccably Arranged kept most men at bay, but it didn’t slow down the “alpha males,” a term Jim used to describe the more aggressive players on the club’s tennis ladder. They flirted with Diane at dinner dances and cocktail parties, on the golf-course veranda, and on the terrace by the pool. Unimpressed by well-to-do pretty boys who, in the end, could do her no good, Diane focused on her complicated cosmetics, artificial nails, elaborate salon work, and faultless, stiff wardrobe. At least once a week, she made an appointment—for electrolysis, say, or to see a dermatologist, or for a pedicure or exfoliation. She knew that all of this was extravagantly bankrupt, because eventually you had to get old and maybe hideous. And how could you face being old and hideous if you didn’t practice for it when you had the chance? Mostly, though, Diane dismissed this line of thought, and told herself such questions didn’t need to be answered, that they mercifully came later and could stay in the background, that they could be met head-on when old age arrived. For the moment, though, the battle should be waged, because the battle—if not the war—could be won, hands down. In the name of this sort of limited victory, Diane had a lit mirror installed in her bathroom on an accordion-style hinge, the better for self-scrutiny. She tortured herself with tweezers to prevent pubic hair from showing near her bathing suit. She plucked down from her chin. She was meticulous with mascara. At the end of a long session of intensive primping, Diane looked so good, in her own eyes, it was
thrilling. “Yes,” she sometimes said to herself, “all is vanity, it’s true, but I’m the May Queen.”

Jim was openly glad that she looked spectacular. She also knew he had no idea how much effort was involved, and how much anguish and ambivalence. One day, as soon as he left the house, she stripped and stood before a full-length mirror without holding back her shoulders, sucking in her gut, or adjusting the lights beneficially. What she saw was shocking. Her side view in particular was horrifying, because it showed how clearly everything was sagging, how her body was getting wrinkled and dimpled. Face-to-face with herself in the mirror, Diane hated herself for hating herself, because it was one thing to be ugly, another to be fixated on it. Who was it who said that, whatever the inroads and humiliations of age, the inwardly graceful remained beautiful by definition? Mahatma Gandhi? Mother Teresa? Whoever it was, Diane didn’t believe it, because the evidence for error in this theory of beauty was everywhere to behold. What made more sense was whoever had said that there’s melancholy in seeing yourself rot.

Jim, on the other hand, by the time he was thirty-four, seemed perfectly able to go about in a bathing suit looking like a five on a scale of ten, as if flab, sag, back hair, narrow shoulders, spindly legs, and a droopy chest were not embarrassing. Diane could see that Jim wouldn’t avoid the destiny of the Long males, which was to be thin at the lip, high at the forehead, and swollen in a way that looked painful at the belly; these signature flaws would pronounce themselves as Jim aged, in fact already pronounced themselves. No matter what he did at the health club or on his fields of play, Jim had the depleted look of his Anglo-Saxon forebearers. Before long, like his father, he’d lack a posterior presence—it would look as though, inside his pants, his rump had dehydrated and shriveled. The older brothers were increasingly like this, junior versions of their faltering dad, whose knees were obviously killing him as he battled down slopes and returned tennis balls. Yet Jim grew older the way Diane knew you were supposed to grow older—he let go, somehow, of the need to be perfect, and he didn’t let it bother him, on the beach or by the swimming pool, when other men, younger and older both, looked better than he did. “I can either let it bother me or accept it,” he told Diane. “I golf, try to eat well, go to the weight room, and play tennis,” he droned on. “I work at keeping my perspective on life humble,
and if I’m lucky enough to one day have children, I’ll feel completely at peace and really blessed.”

Diane was on the pill but didn’t tell her husband. It seemed to her the least damaging way, for both of them, to deal with something she didn’t want him to know about: that she didn’t want to have kids. The pill, thought Diane, meant at least five extra pounds. She was past thirty and her thighs were getting bigger. Also, her butt was expanding. It was time to put up a more serious fight, so Diane began to use Jim’s Ab Blaster and to walk on the treadmill in the basement. It cut against her grain to do these things, but the facts were plain now in the mirror.

Exercise, besides hurting, had another downside—after ten minutes of ab work and twenty minutes of treadmilling, Diane wanted to go out and order nachos. She began shopping at a health-food store, so that when the fatal urge hit her, there was something around that didn’t go immediately to her backside. For about six months, she held the line—sort of—but not without having to increase her efforts and face up to her propensity to avoid exercise. Then it became necessary to join Jim’s health club and to suffer on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays through an hourlong, deafening aerobics class.

Difficulty in conceiving began to needle Jim, who said he’d always thought that by the time he was his age he would have had at least two or three kids. When his patience with God and destiny wore out, he broached the idea of a fertility specialist. Diane treated this as a rhetorical suggestion for as long as she could, then told him she would “do a bit of research,” while hoping—in private—that time would do the trick. But Jim’s campaign was just beginning. There began to be enthusiasm for the prospect of his progeny in other quarters of the family, most assertively from Jim’s sister Sue, the one who’d married into long-haul trucks and, for reasons Diane never understood, was deemed a wise voice by her clan. Sue was the Long who spearheaded vacations, spoke to travel agents, and reserved blocks of rooms. She was also the one who arranged loge seats for
The Nutcracker
every year. Whenever a Long daughter reached thirteen, Sue made sure that the females in the family were invited to an elaborate afternoon tea in a reserved room at the Heathman. Sue had two daughters of her own, and three sons, and her husband was such a talented golfer that he gave eight strokes to Jim when they played. Sue golfed, too.

Sue called Diane to suggest they go to lunch. Over bay-shrimp-and-avocado salads, she beat around the bush before coming forth with sympathy, encouragement, and the names and phone numbers of fertility specialists. Sue passed this information to Diane on a memo sheet with “From the desk of … Sue Strom” printed on top. She’d written the names and numbers in her large, looping, unslanted hand. Below she’d added the words “God Bless!” next to a smiley face.

Still Diane didn’t act. Jim, now desperately on the offensive, went to a specialist of his own, and “checked out,” as he put it, “all systems go.” Diane had the feeling he read his test results as a kind of report card on his value as a man—semen volume, sperm count, motility—and also that, by extension, he saw her as a failure. In response, she claimed to have seen a specialist, too, and to have heard that, for reasons unknown, she was “subfertile.” This, she added, meant that they should try harder, which, for the moment, was good enough for Jim. On Super Bowl Sunday, at his brother Will’s suburban castle, he jocularly described, to his smirking clan, his assignment “to work overtime with Diane.”

Extra exertions of course got Jim nowhere. Fecund as he was, and willing, and hard-charging, he couldn’t get the better of Diane’s “subfertility.” She kept hope alive, though, by pretending to be taking a hormone stimulator. She bought
The Joy of Sex
, which at first embarrassed Jim. Undaunted, she picked up a pornographic manual on positions that might improve their odds, and encouraged Jim to try them all. This he did with no lack of enthusiasm. He bought in wholeheartedly. He aimed for deep penetration. One night, he brought home a Xeroxed research paper establishing the relationship between the quality of a woman’s orgasm and her odds of pregnancy, built around the theory that—he read this to her—“strong female contractions are like powerful waves on which sperm ride toward the cervix.” Intrigued by the idea of focusing on his partner’s pleasure, Jim next brought home a vibrator and a dildo. Diane, who’d borne up under plenty of partners interested in accosting her with these and other tools, not only let him go at her with them but dutifully pretended to contract in more powerful waves.

Jim, ever clueless despite his wealth and privilege, had no idea what he was up against, and, despite his unplanted seed, enjoyed his expanded sex life. At the height of his powers, he was on a roll, and so was Long Alpine, which had become so successful that it was written up not only in the
fawning
The Oregonian
but in
Fortune
and
The Wall Street Journal
. Soon, the Long plant was enlarged and streamlined, and the marketing department got imaginative and savvy under Jim’s energetic management. Long hosted contests at major ski resorts, gave away skis, vacations, and season lift tickets, bought out a rival, expanded research and development, and, at Jim’s insistence, started a line of “cutting-edge” winter wear. Soon a new company catalogue had been developed featuring bold and athletic models, expensive photographs, and clever product descriptions. Long sold not only clothes, skis, and poles, but goggles, helmets, travel bags, boots, sunglasses, and other top-of-the-line fashionable accessories. All of it carried Long’s updated logo, featuring the word long as if engraved inside an oval belt buckle. Jim closely monitored Long Alpine’s ad development and spent a lot of time thinking about storyboards. He told Diane that his interests had turned creative and that he felt himself expanding as a human being.

Despite the rising fortunes of her marital community, Diane remained privately averse to the Longs and to their upbeat mercenary endeavors. She sat in judgment of them with growing severity. When she wrote to her half-brother Club to complain about her in-laws, she made what she knew were unfair exaggerations, subsuming them under the heading “Rich Americans” to make things clear. He wrote back to say that he’d never been to the States but that these monied in-laws sounded familiar from television. He wrote that he was “hod-carrying for shit money” and that this line of work was doing his back in. He had “a mate who does up gypsy caravans” and was thinking of making his way down to Dorset to help him with the painting. Maybe he was going to travel, he claimed; maybe he would visit her one day. All of that was refreshing to Diane, who otherwise had to put up with the band of philistines she’d married into. Her critique of her in-laws eventually extended to the way Isobel’s breath smelled (“tonsillar concretions” was the name of her malady) and to the make and model of Nelson’s tennis racket. The phrase “ruthless buggers” sat high in her head when the arrogant Longs complained about American proles on the dole, or the supposed laxity of the American justice system, which they felt favored criminals. Their ignorance repulsed her. Their politics were galling. They were not very happy with Jimmy Carter and on the Fourth of July, by the pool at Will’s house, bitched drunkenly and loudly about the peanut farmer from Georgia who’d so far done diddly-squat about inflation but had sure been busy
on amnesty for draft evaders. Jim joined his brothers in this line of attack with what Diane thought was a surprising vehemence. He may have protested to her his midlife turn toward liberal sentiments and creative concerns, but by the pool he sounded just like his brothers—like a plutocrat with a crabbed pecuniary complaint. Bottom line, though: Jim still had a lot of money. And with time he seemed to accept the fact that Diane would never give him heirs. He told her that he’d decided to be thankful for his eleven nieces and fourteen nephews, most of whom lived in driving distance. He said he saw nothing wrong with being a good uncle. If indeed it was his fate not to have his own kids, he could—and did—accept that and see the bright side. Jim took pains to let Diane know that he didn’t blame her, which made her feel guilty. He wasn’t a bad person, after all, just well-heeled and dumb. Maybe, she told herself, she should have chosen a wanker, because then her exploitation could proceed guilt-free. But, anyway, there was no going back now. Guilt or no guilt, she still didn’t want children. After all, if Jim was finally getting used to her “sterility,” what would be the point in getting pregnant?
“Nada”
was the answer from her hairdresser, Steve, a diminutive and leathery Louisianan who looked like a cross between Mick Jagger and a rodeo rider—especially when he wore a torso-grabbing T-shirt—and who knew not only about her ruse of subfertility, but also, hilariously, about the vibrator and dildo. Good old Steve was wonderful as a confidant but nasty as a hair critic. At times he would hold Diane’s hair in his hands and say, “I can’t work with ignored raw material, you know,” or, “If you’re not going to use a good conditioner daily, there’s no point in coming in to see to me.” She put up with his barbs because her appointments with Steve always ended in triumph. When he finally swiveled her chair toward the mirror, Diane looked better, and because she looked better, she felt better, too.