Ed King (23 page)

December in Seattle is a dark proposition—by four, the light has disagreeably failed, and from there the descent into night is so rapid that by five one feels a sense of lockdown. The freeways, especially on a Friday after dark, are zones of blurred vision and unsociable fear, and of rainy pavements as translucent as oil slicks in the massed glow of headlights. It was into such a baleful atmosphere that Ms. Klein plunged the van one Friday, heading for a weekend tournament across the state, in Spokane. As always, Ed was ensconced in the rear seat, with the tight-lipped, reserved Linda Dorman on his left and Yael—all honey and gall—on his right. From shoulder to knee, he was pressed against them both, and this made his groin feel pleasantly electrified, as if he were a glowing light-bulb filament completing a circuit of charge.

In the driver’s seat, Ms. Klein was pulled close with her hands at ten and two o’clock as she battled to keep the van from being battered from the side, struck from behind, flipped, dinged, or otherwise assaulted. Ed could see, dimly, the myopic strain of her neck and the gravity with which she peered through exhalations and vigorously whapping wipers. Emily, riding shotgun, was half turned toward the throne seats, so she could carry on a conversation with Vanessa about physics homework, sleeping late, and how retro Olivia Hussey looked in Zeffirelli’s
Romeo
and Juliet
. Overhearing their movie review, the dour Linda leaned forward to insert, “Hey, you guys, wait a sec—what about Romeo’s butt?”

Simon swiveled toward her like an adolescent Dr. Strangelove. On these trips, Ed appreciated his presence, partly because Si was an indomitable math contestant and partly because of the light he shone on Ed. “Now we’re talking about
butts
,” said Si. “What’s next? Penis size?”

Ed, from the rear seat, heard Ms. Klein snort in what was clearly amusement and possibly approval. “Simon,” she sang. “Ouch.”

Everyone laughed, and for a moment the mood in the van felt light, despite the morass of aggressive, wet traffic just beyond the smeared windowpanes. Emily, ever gleeful, laughed longer than the others, with a sharp edge of sarcastic hilarity, prompting Linda to say, “You freak.” At this Ms. Klein, shifting in her seat, glanced in her mirror to assess her charges. “High-school kids,” she observed.

Ed wondered if Ms. Klein included him in her blanket disparagement of teen-agers. He wondered if he should have spoken up, in a frank way, about Romeo in the buff, so as to indicate for her his adult take on sexuality. It was too late now, because the subject had faded, and so he returned to the deliciousness of his warm, feminine surround, and to the perplexity he inferred from Linda Dorman’s arm as she acknowledged to herself—he was pretty sure of this—that contact with Ed felt good.

A half-hour later, the traffic had thinned out, but the rain had turned, with elevation, to snow, and the tractor-trailers hauling past were shooting grimy slush at the math van’s windows. When snow began to make a film on the road, Ms. Klein pulled over between monstrously large trucks, put the van in “Park,” and, adjusting the rearview mirror, looked at Ed. “Can anyone here put on chains?” she wondered.

Ed, Simon, Linda, and Ms. Klein all piled out onto the freeway shoulder. At first they just stood there getting wet and cold. Simon said, “Brrrrr.” Flakes flecked their heads. The traffic skidding past seemed unhinged and precarious. Advancing headlights showed the slant of the blizzard, which fell into view out of cloud-suffused darkness. Linda pulled her knit scarf across her mouth, and Ms. Klein, shoulders high, hugged herself.

Shortly there was a shuffling of luggage between the opened twin rear doors of the van, which eventually produced a set of tire chains in their box, never used. As Ed unpacked them, he felt Ms. Klein touch him. Her cold hand pressed into the ridge of his shoulder muscle as if she were a
masseuse who’d located a pressure point. “Do they go front or rear?” she asked.

“Rear,” said Ed. “Always rear. Unless you have front-wheel drive.”

“Do we?”

“Let’s go for rear,” Ed said.

Fifteen minutes later, when they were back on the road, with the chains now making their characteristic rumble—as if something were broken—Ms. Klein asked Ed if his hands were warming up. “They’re always warm,” he told her.

After an hour of dark and snowy tension, it was time to strip off the chains again, on a moonlit exit ramp, beneath frigid stars, with Yael, Ms. Klein, Vanessa, and Emily all blowing prolific vapors from their mouths while Ed, on his knees, did the manly work, and Simon fumbled with an icy lever and intermittently blew on his fingers. Only Linda stayed in the van, reading beneath a dome light. Vanessa made the comments, “King, you’re my hero,” and, “King, you’re such a
man
.” Ms. Klein had dug her coat out of her bag—a hooded wool mackintosh that seemed to Ed Irish—and in the dry, clear air looked pleased with herself and merrily agitated by adventure. Her wet hair had increased in ringlets and curls, and on the rounded prominences of her wide, Baltic cheekbones stood slashes of cold-weather scarlet.

Over the mountains, across the snowy pass, they were soon so far outside of their lives that their school personas worked loose. Simon receded into meditative sulking, Linda fell asleep, Emily and Vanessa lived increasingly in tandem, and Ms. Klein, driving, withdrew into a silence that seemed to Ed like reverie. Her silence intimated, for him, a private life beyond the scope of U Prep. Ed put a hand on Yael’s thigh, and she, in answer, put one hand on his and ran the other through her hair.

At the Moses Lake interchange, they hit a McDonald’s, piling out to deliver their orders, visit the cans, and rain sarcasm on things hayseed. Ms. Klein was adept at driving with a hamburger but had to ask Emily to open her ketchup packets and between bites gave a lecture on judging people because they lived in the sticks. She herself had been brought up in Westchester and educated at Wellesley, Brown, and Johns Hopkins, and because of all this—or despite it, she said—she tried not to judge “the bulbous, unenlightened interior,” though it was, at the same time, completely unbelievable that the heartland states, not to mention the majority of the country, had voted so thoroughly for “the vapid Ronald
Reagan.” How was it possible that “the total doofus from
Bedtime for Bonzo
” was president of the United States?

No one in the van had heard of
Bedtime for Bonzo
, which left Ms. Klein explaining the president’s shoddy acting, his divorce from Jane Wyman, his marriage to “Mommy,” his son the probably bisexual Joffrey dancer, and his daughter the pot-smoking nuclear activist who hung out with Bernie Leadon from the Eagles. Ed was able to add, with calm seriousness, that Reagan was an advocate of capital punishment and had nefariously made use of the California Highway Patrol to tear-gas protestors in Berkeley. Ms. Klein, adjusting her mirror while he spoke, nodded with vigor, smiled archly, and praised Ed for having his “ducks lined up exactly right on a total reactionary who thinks trees cause pollution.” When they stopped at the rest area near Sprague, she sought his company in the parking lot, where the two of them milled aloofly in the frigid night air to denigrate the president with the benefit of no obstructions. Ms. Klein said Reagan had been a stooge for Hoover and had seen to it that gay actors were hounded and blacklisted; in her currently unzipped hooded mackintosh, tight blue jeans, wool socks, and mary janes—not to mention the surplice top that, with its band beneath the bust, called Ed’s eye to her ample chest—she incited, for him, a cold-weather erection. Under the icy stars of the steppe, with the acrid sting of frosted sage in his nostrils, he savored his teacher in her present context, lit as she was by sodium-vapor lights, doing toe-raises to thwart the cold. She was at least fifteen years older than he was, but it occurred to him, for the first time since he’d known her, that this shouldn’t bar him from testing her waters. It was the age gap itself, he understood with delight, that goaded him to break new ground with the aggressively opinionated Ms. Klein.

In Spokane, the team touched down at a Holiday Inn fully rampant, at 10 p.m., with math contestants. They traversed wetly between a small indoor pool and a console TV in the lobby, bounced through the halls from room to room, congregated loudly at vending machines, trotted up and down the stairs, and stifled giggles in elevators. Yael’s roommate, Linda Dorman, went for a swim, so Ed latched her door and produced a rubber. When Linda came back, the door was unlatched and he and Yael were innocently watching TV together. Ed said good night and left.

Ed roomed with Simon. Simon was in the habit of sleeping fully dressed to block germ transmission from motel sheets, and of staring at late-night television. Ed enjoyed provoking him with questions like, “So
who’d you like to bang at school?” He was ribbing Si when, at eleven, Ms. Klein knocked on their door to remind them to meet at eight in the lobby and to urge them toward a good night’s rest. She spoke in the late-night murmurs of a mother bent on setting a hushed tone for bedtime, and wore Zorris exposing painted toenails. Ed, thinking quickly, said he needed the van key because he’d left his graphing calculator on his seat; Ms. Klein replied that she couldn’t, by the book, give Ed the van key, because “U Prep has a stick up its you-fill-in-the-blank.” “We’ll go down together, then,” Ed said. “That way they can keep their stick in place.”

Ms. Klein looked at Si—Ed thought to take the measure of his cluelessness as she pondered the liaison he’d insinuated—then said, “Okay—I’ll get my coat.”

“Great,” said Ed. “I’ll go with you.”

She was a neatnik par excellence, he discovered in her room, with her bag zipped shut on the folding rack, her coat hung up, her traveling alarm clock unhinged and opened, and her toiletries kit set upright beside the sink. Only a packet of gum on the bed stand, with a crumpled foil wrapper beside it, marred the otherwise pristine scene, which smelled the way Ms. Klein smelled—perfumed and hormonal.

When Ms. Klein unzipped her bag to get a pair of socks, Ed caught a glimpse of pink underwear. She sat on her bed and slipped on a mary jane, and the choreography of this propelled him forward; on the other hand, maybe it was best not to risk permanent awkwardness with Ms. Klein in the wake of a failed seduction. But her suddenly studied exhibitionism—the way she arched her foot to catch her sock, pulled the sock tight, slipped on the second shoe, and shook the curling bangs off her forehead with her teeth dug into her lower lip—it all seemed to say, “go ahead.” What to do?

They went out. In the hall, the lobby, and the parking lot, Ed savored the way Ms. Klein’s great butt moved. He could make out the low band of her panties through her slacks. At the van, when Ms. Klein unlocked the door, he said, “Huh—where’s my calculator?” and even went so far as to look for it.

They went inside again—Ed protesting about his missing calculator—but in the elevator Ms. Klein changed the subject very suddenly. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about Yael,” she said. “Is there something going on with her? Is she unhappy with me or something?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Don’t you sleep with her, Ed?”

“I have to take the Fifth on that.”

“The Fifth,” said Ms. Klein. “I’ve used that before.”

“Oh, really,” Ed answered, as the doors slid open, “when have you taken the Fifth?”

Ms. Klein gave her squinty smile and stepped into the hall in front of him. Again he appreciated the way her butt moved and had to quell an urge to reach out and palm it. “I’ve had to take the Fifth with Reed,” she said. “Reed—the guy I live with. My boyfriend.”

They came to her door. She stopped and turned around. “Look,” she said, “we’ve been flirting with each other. Both of us know what’s going on, but I don’t think I should sleep with a student.”

She kissed him next. He could tell, from the way she kissed, that the kiss was a test, and he could also tell when he’d passed it. “This is too dangerous,” she said, coming up for breath. “I can’t afford to get caught. I’d lose my job.” Then she stepped in and shut the door on him.

On Saturday, U Prep’s team went to work on its first question:
P is a point inside a given triangle ABC; D, E, F are the feet of the perpendiculars.…
Simon led the way on this one, and they had a good solution in three hours. After lunch:
Three congruent circles have a common point O and lie inside a given triangle. Each circle touches a pair of sides of the …
Again Simon took the reins, quickly working up the necessary vertices and insisting that—when the team began to argue—“the center of homothety is the incenter of both triangles.” He was right, and once again they found a swift and winning solution. The third and last problem of the day was:
The function f(x, y) satisfies (1) f(0, y)
=
y + 1
, etc., and this time Ed beat Simon to the punch with: