Ed King (2 page)

“You truly have great names,” he tossed out.

“Tip-top, the best, brilliant.”

“Barry and Tina: it’s genius, it’s beautiful.”

Diane, and then Walter, laughed.

And she laughed an hour later—the same truncated notes, issued through her nose and throat—when, on the mammothly rising Space Wheel, they all rocked precariously in the apex tub, ninety feet above the mania of the fairgrounds. She laughed because, taking hold of the lap bar, he’d muscled them into rocking harder while Tina put up conflicted resistance (“Daddy!”) and Barry applied a grit-filled assist. “Beastly!” hissed Diane, pulling Tina toward her. “Never mind such recklessness, love—he’s only toying with your dear, precious life.”

“But Tina absolutely adores danger. Don’t you, ‘luv’?”

To this his daughter had a one-word reply, delivered while clutching the au pair’s stellar thighs: “Diane.”

On the fairgrounds, Walter followed Diane like a dog, so he could admire how she wore those dungarees. There were a lot of bare-armed dresses on the midway, and peppermint tops, and circus stripes, but nothing that could beat Diane in dungarees. Nothing could beat Diane’s
tilting ponytail when she lifted her chin to pack in wads of cotton candy; nothing could beat her in the Fine Arts Pavilion with her lovely little hands at the small of her back, leaning toward a painting called
Oedipus and the Sphinx
. Barry stood beside her with his head on her hip, and Walter stood alongside with Tina in his arms. The odd and slightly uncomfortable thing was that Oedipus had been painted monumentally naked—two spears, points down, beside one foot—while the Sphinx, half in darkness, winged and severe, pointed her bare breasts, from startling close range, at his face. “Ace,” said Diane, examining it. “I must say I like that running fellow in the corner. He’s quite active—he fixes Oedipus to the canvas. It’s arresting, so to speak, wouldn’t you say?”

Walter nodded as if he knew what she was talking about, then set Tina down and crossed his arms, the better to brood on art.

“Look how he’s brushed in the shadows of the cave,” Diane said. “Look how the sun plays in those rocks, lower left.”

Did he read her correctly? Was he getting her signals? Because it seemed to Walter she was skirting the obvious—the nudity two feet in front of their faces—so as to give them both a chance to linger. She seemed, at the moment—if he wasn’t mistaken—a prick tease of the precocious-teen brand. He was confident that the point she meant for him to take was, As long as neither of us mentions nudity, we can go on standing here, looking at pornography together.

“Personally, for me, it’s the blue sky,” he said. “That amazing blue sky in the background.”

Again her truncated laugh, as at an inside joke, which he was now laboring to solicit at every turn.

They went to examine the World of Tomorrow. The line for this exhibit was long and hot, but eventually they found themselves inside the Bubbleator with 150 other agitated fairgoers, ascending, as if inside a soap bubble, toward “The Threshold and the Threat.” “The Threshold and the Threat” had been highlighted in press reports as a thought-provoking and instructional tour-de-force—Walter thought that sounded good for the kids—and was billed in the fair’s extensive guide as “a 21-minute tour of the future.” Yet, after a half-minute of ominously slow rising to a soundtrack called—Walter knew this from the guide—“Man in Space with Sounds,” the Bubbleator arrived not in the future but underneath a strangely lit semblance of the night sky. Stars and planets were projected
onto distorted cubes, or onto something like magnified cells in a beehive. What was this, anyway? Why had they been lifted to this surreal destination? Tina clung anxiously to his pant leg, and Barry looked frightened and aghast. In contrast, the new au pair only stretched her back, pointing her girlish breasts at the faux heavens. Then she dropped them, and joined him and the kids as they huddled together like an abducted family in the bowels of a B-movie spaceship. Everyone had to endure more “Man in Space with Sounds”—alarms, theremin wails, inharmonious strings and brass, much of it familiar to Walter as the sort of thing that backed Vincent Price—until, cast in celluloid on the weirdly curving cubes, a frightened family crouched in a fallout shelter. This was too much for Tina, who covered her eyes. Walter wondered who at the World’s Fair had given the green light to “The Threshold and the Threat,” because, whatever else it was—besides some pointy-headed goofball’s dark view of the future—it was also, in his view, wrong. Subliminal, demonic, scarring, you name it, but best summed up as
wrong
. “We should have been told before we got in line,” he thought angrily. “Somebody should have warned us.”

And now, on the cubes, came one image atop another, kaleidoscopic, fleeting, discombobulating, dissociative—jetports, monorails, the Acropolis, a mushroom cloud—before, again, that pathetic cellared family, this time with JFK exhorting them, and all other Americans, in his Boston-brahmin brogue, to build a brighter world through technology.

The hallucinatory journey through apocalypse ended, and Diane said only, “That was fab.”

“That was a nightmare,” countered Walter. “Let’s get out of here.”

Outside, he felt reassured by the real world, and so, clearly, did his kids. They all breathed happily the June carnival air, pregnant as it was with cooking grease and promise. In the Food Pavilion, it was Orange Juliuses all around—the kids and Diane sucking away at jointed double straws while he, having bolted his Extra Large, ate a corn dog. Just let it happen, he told himself when Tina implored him for a Belgian waffle—be carefree and magnanimous, stay with the pointed humor (“How about the Girls of the Galaxy exhibit?”), and tease them all often, with easy tenderness. There were solid points to be earned, he felt sure, by riding the fine line between paternalism and friendship, between daddy and a nice guy with cash.

“Girls of the Galaxy?” Diane asked.

“According to the fair guide, they pose naked for Polaroids.”

“Including Earth girls?”

“Especially Earth girls.”

“That wouldn’t do in England. Not at all.”

Walter shrugged as if Girls of the Galaxy was just old hat in his world. “My, what do you call it, bonny lass,” he said, “you’re not in England anymore.”

Diane separated her lips from her straws. “
Bonny
’s Scottish,” she said, looking into her drink. “In England, you might try
stunning
.”

“Stunning, then.”

“Or
comely
would do—I would accept that.”

They moved along until the kids got tired. It was time to go home, but, because he wanted to—it was the only thing he was really interested in at the fair—they visited the World of Science building and its Probability Exhibit. Here, in a glass box, thousands of pennies dropped mechanically down a chute and were shunted thereafter past equidistant dividers so as to demonstrate the inexorability of a bell curve. As the coins fell in essential randomness, they inevitably built up a standard normal distribution (“A Gaussian distribution,” he told the kids and Diane), which never varied and was a fixed law of nature; the pennies made a perfectly symmetrical hill, the formation of which could be relied on. He admired this so much he got effusive about it and explained, to Diane, what a bell curve was, and in language he hoped didn’t sound too actuarial delineated the “central limit theorem” associated with what they were witnessing. “Put it this way,” he said, moving closer to her. “The sum of variables at work among those pennies follows a unique attractor distribution.”

“How interesting,” she shot back, mirthful at his expense, and mimicking his enthusiasm while flipping her ponytail absentmindedly. “An attractor distribution.”

They were now six hours into their relationship, and already it was more than he could take.

Walter had needed no more than a year of marriage to get to where he’d felt the odds were decent that he could predict what his wife, Lydia, would say. When the McGuire Sisters were on
Ed Sullivan:
“Phyllis has
gained weight”; when he asked what she needed from the A&P: “Nothing”; when he kissed her in the bathroom: “I have to get dressed now”; when he said “Good night”: “I hope so.” Walter was pretty certain he could see inside her brain, so he was caught off guard one Monday morning when he was unable to rouse Lydia. It unfolded that she needed hospitalization following an overdose of prescription sleeping pills he hadn’t even known she’d been taking. A psychiatrist said she must now have complete rest from household responsibilities and duties.

It shocked Walter to see Lydia in a hospital gown, haggard, without makeup, without stockings, bereft of dignity, but there was nothing to be done about it, or at least nothing
he
could do. She was in the hands of head doctors at this stage, who put her, he thought, through strange paces. She scribbled pictures, modeled with clay, attended daily “group sessions,” and played shuffleboard. On his visits to the ward, Walter felt out of her loop, estranged not just by virtue of her mental illness but by virtue of her therapy. He went daily, and always found her the same—drugged and incapable of speaking intimately or of explaining her problems to him. She wasn’t a zombie, but she wasn’t
there
, either, and he couldn’t figure out how to act around her or what her illness portended. Nor could he trace her demise backward in time to how, and why, it had happened. Out of nowhere she’d simply gone off the deep end—Lydia, who’d long been steady and forthright; Lydia, who’d taken him into her arms in the middle of the three and a half Chicago years he’d enjoyed after Iowa State. He’d thought of her, in that era, as a poor man’s Sabrina—Sabrina if half Norwegian, Midwestern, and plain-speaking—because she looked so much like the sensationally built British pinup who’d consorted with Fidel Castro. He’d married her eagerly. Then she got pregnant, and her cheesecake magnetism evaporated, never to return. Since Barry’s birth, she’d struggled with weight gain in a way that drove both of them to the brink. Lydia was always riding the diet roller-coaster, up and down, up and down, which would have been all right with Walter if she didn’t have to talk about it so much. He felt bad about his irritation when she brought up calories, but she’d become obsessed to the point of having no subject other than food. So what if she was too broad in the beam to make it as a calendar girl—was that any reason to starve yourself? After all, he’d gained weight, too, but was
he
going crazy about it? Didn’t she know that he loved her despite her weight problem?
On she went, looking sadly in the mirror, counting calories, and buying new clothes. Lydia was so concerned about the heft of her behind, its geometry and sag, its silhouette in skirts and pants, that sometimes, in the wee hours, she jarred him from dreams because she was performing “clenches” in bed and the box spring was quaking under him from the stress of her exertions. The first time this happened he’d teased her about it, but before too long, it was troubling.

Now she was in a mental hospital, which he should have seen on the horizon. She’d been worn down by domesticity, by multiple sinks, kids, shopping lists, and dirty underwear in the hamper. That was Walter’s theory, anyway. He thought that Lydia was resisting domesticity after four years of French with a minor in history, and two more as a good-looking single woman in Chicago with friends, dates, a downtown job, and a series—probably—of boyfriends. That made sense. After all, there were girls he missed and longed for. There were days when he didn’t want to be who he was or do what he was doing, at home or at the office. So who could blame Lydia for going off the deep end? He himself could go off the deep end. For now, though, the main thing was, Lydia’s illness was an all-out crisis. Lydia had left him juggling all the pins. It wasn’t her fault, but the pins were in the air, and Walter only had two hands.

And that made the au pair, Diane Burroughs, a godsend. At just the right moment this dazzling girl, brimming with pluck and perpetual good humor, domestically energetic, chipper, and playful, had landed on Walter’s doorstep. What a miracle! Here was this pretty young Brit in an apron, fixing wholesome meals, making up beds, and ironing, with charm, while listening to banal pop music. Walter didn’t really know anything about her, but he wanted to know everything, right away. It was like his crushes in junior high—he felt a stomach-churning need to make on-the-prowl headway despite overwhelming trepidation. And so, when it seemed safe, he snooped among her things, starting in the bathroom she shared with the kids, where he pondered, alongside Lustre-Creme Shampoo and Junior Pursette tampons, a jar of coconut oil. He wondered about this oil, and how and why she used it. He wondered if Diane liked to—how did the English put it?—diddle. Was that their term?

One thing he did know was that Diane liked television. Nightly, when the kids were under their laundered sheets, tucked in with teddy bears, read to, and asleep, Diane made her way to the living room to watch, for
example,
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
. When he called home at four-thirty, she would cheerfully tell him that she and the kids were watching
American Bandstand
. On Saturday mornings, wearing cotton PJs, she cuddled with Barry and Tina in front of
The Alvin Show
and
Top Cat
. Could you blame her for any of this? Did it make her less attractive? No, you couldn’t blame Diane—she didn’t lend herself to blame. Blame wouldn’t attach to her peerless young body. Walter tried to roll his eyes at her and feel superior, but that was no use, because he didn’t feel superior—he felt older, yes, but not superior. At the end of week one, after giving it careful thought, he paid Diane her right and proper tribute: a sizable cash bonus with a note confessing, “I feel lucky, Diane. You’re worth it.”

Sometimes, in the late evening, he listened hopefully—and pathetically—for the pad of her slim, slippered feet in the hallway, louder as she emerged from the children’s bathroom and headed in his direction. Always, at the last, she turned left instead of right, shut the door behind her with a thoughtfully quiet click, and made the muffled, unextraordinary noises that went with arranging herself for sleep. At that point he liked both to listen and to imagine, conjuring scenarios involving coconut oil and Diane Burroughs in … a pink chiffon baby-doll with spaghetti straps? No. Her innocent white cotton underwear? Yes. If her box spring made the slightest noise, he ran with that and felt his heart jump a little—maybe she’d finally surrendered to desire … maybe, in a moment … But he knew this was ridiculous. Besides, he couldn’t sleep with all this yearning, with the guilt and fantasizing and the laughing at himself. “I’m a fool,” he thought, “thirty-four and a fool. The truth is, I’m lying here in a T-shirt and boxers, pining for a girl who watches cartoons and sings along to the Billboard Top 40.”