Ed King Read Online Free PDF Page A

of macaroni salad around eight, then worked his way through nearly a half-case of Pabst while Diane, in her scissored-off jeans, lit sparklers and Snakes for the kids in the back yard. In other words, he felt sluggish, not in optimal form, and too bloated for what might be about to happen. In the bed he shared with Lydia. Beneath portraits of Tina and Barry on the wall. Where either of them might come padding in, wakened by fireworks, scared, seeking solace. And, finally, with a girl who claimed to be eighteen but who might be, by the look of it, considerably younger. “What’s the deal?” he said.
    “Can I get in?” Diane asked.
    She lifted his sheet, rolled onto the mattress, and tucked herself, urgently, against his side, as though she were his daughter and he was about to read a story. Walter, who wore only his boxer shorts, said, “Whoa-ho-ho, wait a second.”
    “Please,” Diane answered. “I’m lonely.”
    She snuggled in farther. There was a big portable fan on in the room, and the window was open, but it was still hot. Already, between them, a film of sweat was forming. But that wasn’t the main thing. The main thing was that Diane was making a strange noise now, a cross between a whimper and a shriek. Was that crying? Yes, it was crying. Not knowing what to do or say, Walter said, “Hey, come on, now, Diane,” and patted her shoulder.
    Diane blubbered, sniffled, and honked while twisting a lock of hair around her index finger and giving him—maybe not unwittingly—a boner. Yet, despite his dick’s insistence on a selfish response, there was no way for Walter not to feel sorry for Diane, even tender, like a father. Until now she’d seemed so resilient and unsinkable. What was she crying about? He wasn’t ready for crying. “Diane,” he said, and stroked her hair once. “It’s okay.”
    “No, it’s not,” she answered.
    Then she let forth with personal information she seemed desperate to divulge. She was fifteen, she was “the daughter of the town whore,” she was “never, ever going back to England,” she’d lied to the State Department, her school year had been a social disaster, and nothing had gone right with her Seward Park host family, particularly with her host father, who’d ignored her. “How could that be?” asked Walter.
    “He didn’t like me, I know he didn’t.”
    “That’s impossible. He must be nuts.”
    Then she said that her own father was French or an American sailor—she didn’t know which. She had a half-brother, Caleb, older by sixteen months (“So I was right,” thought Walter, “about the letter on her desk—her half-brother Caleb is this ‘Club’ she writes home to”), who’d run off when he was fourteen to London, and another half-brother, John, older still, who was a constable. She had a grandmother in the countryside who, Diane said, was “a terrible witch,” and a grandfather who’d called her “a bastard miscreant from a litter of bastard miscreants.”
    She described for Walter a scene from her childhood. She was twelve, it was summer, she was in the countryside, slopping pigs, and her grandmother said, when Diane asked who her father was, “Only the Lord and your mum know.” Her grandfather added, “Before you was hatched she was consorting with a sailor.” Vivid recall made Diane sob all the harder. She even remembered that, later, in the house, her tormentors had gone on pitching it about: “Dallying with a Frenchman at the time, wasn’t she?” and “That sailor was a merchant-marine man and a sot.” “That sort of talk,” Diane told Walter, to which he replied, “That wasn’t nice. That was just plain inconsiderate.”
    Next complaints about her “mum” tumbled out—her mum who’d once made a shameful few quid servicing the needs of any and all comers, and a few more dusting and scrubbing genteel homes. But her mum couldn’t keep clients in either category, and went on the dole, and shut herself in, the better to