Ed King (37 page)

“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 responsive 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.

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.

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
.”