Ed King Read Online Free PDF

monitor the phone and the neighbors. Thereafter, when forced to go out, she painted herself with a horrifying rough, and though she limped from sciatica, straightened up in the presence of men as though they still represented opportunity. They didn’t any longer, and it was Diane’s job to listen to her mum rant about it, and to agree with her about everything but especially about her remaining attractions, and to clean out her ashtrays and kitchen pots and toilet, and sleep on the sofa when the rooms were let to boarders, until, feeling taken for granted, she left.
    “Diane, you’re not taken for granted
here
,” said Walter. “I would
never
take you for granted.”
    With this, she kissed his cheek, he thought in gratitude. Walter felt that the next move was his, but he was worried about his breath because of the macaroni salad. For this reason he hesitated, wondering how bad it was, and in that moment, with force and suddenness, Diane climbed on top of him. “Jesus,” he said.
    “Oh, Walter.”
    It was a little bit hard to get past the fire engines on her PJs—past the idea that he was in bed with a fifteen-year-old—but Walter got past them soon enough. The PJs came off—he made sure of that—the top first, and then the bottoms. His au pair, naked, was so sleek and untarnished, so gleamingly pubescent, and so unlike Lydia after two babies, that even as he flipped her onto her back, even while he asked her, twice, if she wassure, he knew, glumly, that he was doing the wrong thing. There was a name for this, statutory rape, which, he had to admit, excited him. He had moral qualms, but he ignored them.
    Did she have moral qualms? She cried a lot while he went at her, but didn’t resist or make him stop. Walter pressed on, determined to incite participation, to goad from Diane some clenching and clutching, some shortness of breath, any signal of his prowess or good technique, but somehow, at the end, she still seemed miserable, and the worst of it was her almost imperceptible orgasm, during which she squeezed her eyes shut. She fluttered under him, with effort, like a wounded bird, and immediately afterward, or before she was done, sobbed again in childlike catches, smelling of her tears and his spunk. “Diane,” he said, “are you okay?”
    “Oh, Walter.”
    To his surprise, she didn’t say another word, and before long began to snore intermittently in an ascending nasal hum. He listened to that for fifteen minutes, running a hand along her back and flanks and admiring their youthful smoothness. Then, fearing that one of his kids might stumble in, he woke Diane and asked her to go back across the hall to her bedroom.
    “Ask nicely, Walter.”
    “Okay,” he said. “I don’t want you to go, Diane. But for the sake of the kids, please, I think it’s time.”
    She got on her PJs and exited. A bit later, he heard the morning paper land on his porch, and got up to read it. The French were tossing in the towel in Algeria, JFK was pussyfooting with the Russians. He found he couldn’t concentrate on any of this, because he kept wondering if what had happened was a train wreck. “Of course,” he thought, “it’s a major train wreck. I better nip this in the bud and get a hold of myself.”
    But he didn’t get a hold of himself, for a whole thrilling month, until the day his wife was discharged from the hospital.
    Walter collected Lydia on the first Saturday in August. She kissed him in the doorway of her room on the ward—with a guilt-expanding, marital ardor—and he took in the view of the fine down on her forearms. Her hair was done up loftily—stacked high by an in-hospital dresser—andshe’d put on, for her return home, a newly ironed floral shift and scarlet pumps. Lydia paused at the threshold of the hospital to say, “I never want to come back to this hellhole,” took Walter’s hand, and again kissed him. She kissed him a third time beside the Lincoln, and told him how wonderful it felt to