Ed King (36 page)

Now Club’s betrayal began to have a bright side. That fleecer had shown Diane things she could apply. Not that his lessons were worth seventy thousand dollars. She wasn’t going to take it that far. But here she was, conning people, without even getting out of her chair. Without lifting a finger. She was paying her bills this way, without walking dogs—just sitting there putting on a cheery and together show. A neat little scam, life coaching, but the problem was, it didn’t have a future. Yes, she could buy a better television and make some satisfying additions to her wardrobe, but there had to be more to life than that. Because, as things stood, she was eternally asking, “Is this my life as I will live it to the end?” And, according to circumstance, adding, “Living in a studio by a shopping center in Bellevue?” “Pumping up disorganized nerds?” “Watching
Dallas
and
Saturday Night Live
?” “Saving up to see Fleetwood Mac, with Emily, at the Kingdome?” Diane was forty-two and had a bunion on her left foot that probably needed to be operated on. The only gold star she could give herself was that recently her reading had moved up and forward. Sidney Sheldon no longer made the grade. Now she was reading serious books, the ones shelved under “Literature,” mostly by writers who were dead.

She frequently went to movies by herself. Used-book stores. Coffee shops. She would sit in a coffee shop drinking a latte and reading a novel by a dead person in the hope of attracting attention. At Bellevue Square there was an atrium-style food court full of ladies like herself—no longer young but not grandmothers yet—well dressed for shopping and for a
midday smoothie spiked with healthy ingredients. Diane drank these, too. She got her hair done at a 20-percent discount by clipping a coupon. She sat in the massage chair at the Sharper Image. She went to cosmetics counters and goaded cosmeticians into guessing her age. Her one splurge was anti-wrinkle cream that advertised itself as taking off ten years. At forty-two, she looked thirty-two, but that wasn’t good enough.

She met Emily at Bellevue Square for a smoothie. Emily frequented REI now and, because of her height, wore the rec look well. She had a sleek, small rucksack and lightweight boots. She wore a fleece jacket with a hood and two-way zipper. “I think I know what you need,” she told Diane. “You need a date.”

“Here we go,” said Diane.

Emily touched her arm. “No one wants to be dependent,” she said. “You don’t need a guy to make you happy. But if you can take some of the focus off yourself, the irony is, it’s good for you, too. You just need someone else to think about.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You could use a dating service.”

“Emily,” said Diane.

“I know people who’ve done it successfully.”

“Good for them.”

“I know guys at work who’d love to date you. You’re like super good-looking, Diane.”

But Diane didn’t date. She felt spinsterish and wilted. Fresh Start, she knew, was theater, performance. She herself could use a life coach—someone who would tell her how to get on track again—so she became her own. Full of desperate resolutions, she bought a VCR and a Jane Fonda exercise video. Determined, she lost weight and bought new clothes. A Fresh Start client owned a timeshare on Lake Wenatchee he wasn’t able to use that year; he gave her a free week there, and she took it in April, when the roads were mostly clear of snow, and with the intention of eating little, exercising daily, reading by a fire, and going to bed early. She did this for two days, but then Emily came over and they drove down to Leavenworth for a dinner at Cafe Mozart that included a fifty-dollar bottle of Kerner Spätlese and tall mugs of Bavarian Coffee—whipped cream, sugar, peppermint schnapps—served next to warm apple strudel. Things felt fat and cozy after that. They rented a video and
picked up a newspaper. The Germanys were getting back together.
The Fabulous Baker Boys
was better than expected. In the morning, the lake looked pleasantly still; in the afternoon, it rippled, and that was pleasant, too. The apple and pear trees were leafing out with vernal charm. Deer foraged outside their picture window. Feeling domestic and even sisterly, Diane helped Emily make fresh pasta with a device Emily had brought—as a gift for Diane—on the back seat of her Jetta. They ate it
con aglio e olio
, with red wine. The next morning, after Emily said goodbye with a meaningful hug, Diane felt motivated to make progress in the English novel she’d brought, and to take a considerable late-afternoon oxygenating walk. In dusk’s chill air, her skin felt firm. She was impressed by the new Gore-Tex walking boots she’d bought. They were dry, stylish, felt already broken in, and did nothing to irritate her bunion.

On Monday morning, in Bellevue again—the weather clammy, her back a little tense—Diane met with a new Fresh Start client as whiny, self-absorbed, and neurotic as the rest, and this shoved her back into her hole. By ten, she knew that her lakeside idyll was not going to have any useful staying power and, panicking about her durable paralysis, opened her English novel in an effort at self-improvement. By noon, defeated, Diane was downtown, wandering in high-end and middlebrow shops—for a long time, dreamily, amid the women’s apparel at The Bon—since this was a time-tested and reliable salve, as was the spinach salad with avocado and grapefruit at the Sheraton at Sixth and Union. Same old, though. Now what, dessert? More browsing, shopping, coasting—more aging? More nothing except this bland playing-out? It was raining again—time to head home to an evening of solo television. But then she remembered that Emily had raved, while rolling out pasta at Lake Wenatchee, about the wonders of the IMAX movie
Blue Planet
. As part of her new general earthiness campaign. Part of her compensatory environmental correctness. What time was it? It was three, a quarter past. Why not ride the monorail to the Seattle Center and snooze a little through Emily’s
Blue Planet
? She could talk about it with Emily later. Keep their relationship going strong. A theater interlude on a rainy afternoon, darkly hunkered down with no obligations—that didn’t sound too bad to Diane. So, overcoming inertia, she dealt with the details. She stood in line at the IMAX Theater with April tourists who’d been brought to this pass by “spring” weather they’d been warned about, handed her
ticket to a twenty-year-old who looked as if he was dressed for a role on
Star Trek
, and settled in beneath the looming swath of screen. Thereafter, she was awake off and on. The picture was so big you couldn’t even see it. If you looked, you risked getting sick to your stomach. Worse, she felt admonished by the narrator of
Blue Planet
for being alive. “This is our earth … a planet in space,” followed by blame, then more blame, then more. Whoever had cobbled up this film wanted you to gaze unrelentingly on the earth from a window on the Space Shuttle, the better to suffer the sheer breadth of your mistakes. Diane sat through this punishment, thinking, “What do you want from me? What am I supposed to do? I take in oxygen and give back carbon—kill me already, I’m a blight on my own planet.” Finally, her forty-two minutes of eco-lashing over, she emerged with her fellow castigated consumers into an unmitigated spring rain, thunderous.

Precipitation-bound, hoping for a lull, Diane squandered time in the Pacific Science Center, which on this late afternoon was inhabited predominantly by mothers pushing strollers or chasing toddlers. The place was crammed with what were advertised as marvels—stationary bicycles with calorie read-outs, a so-called Shadow Wall, a gyroscope, an echo tube, a Tesla coil, a model dinosaur-dig pit. Lo and behold, in a corner of Building Three, Diane found an antiquated, lonely contraption she remembered from the Seattle World’s Fair in ’62: the gimmicky, glasswalled Probability Exhibit, with its thousand pennies falling regularly past pegs, which had so enthralled the hapless Walter Cousins as it steadily, inevitably, built a hill of mounded coins, and illustrated a truth no one cared about. From a distance it looked like an ant colony on display, but up close, behind a pane of foggy glass, there was Walter’s must-see math marvel. “Brilliant,” thought Diane. “Coins in a box. Walter was such an overgrown child.”

Another Science Center patron sidled up to the Probability Exhibit. He was young, handsome, and upper-class enough to wear corduroys, good shoes, and a fitted wool sweater with a rib-knit collar and cable stitching. He had the sort of face, so pregnant with youth, that made Diane not just conscious of her age but conscious that its owner would age sooner than he thought—if he thought of age at all, in any realistic way, busy as he must be being young. It was a young face but not an innocent one; in fact, at the moment, it looked troubled behind a fragile stoic
mask of male confidence. Nevertheless, a shiny head of hair, an untarnished complexion, a strong brow, a well-shaped chin—in short, all the markers of male pulchritude. A guy so iconically young and pulchritudinous he made Diane wonder if she had any charm left, or any winning female magic to assert. Was it over already—were all the good ones behind her? Taking a flier, she straightened her skirt—the knee-length navy-blue flight-attendant skirt she wore on weekdays, along with a white blouse, her crisp, sprightly Fresh Start costume—and said, “I don’t get this.”

He was tall and strapping—Superboy, American. Clean, well groomed, trim-waisted, trimmed nails. He put his hands at the small of his back, tapped a big shoe, and said, “What?”

She knew, from this, that he was not going down the path with her toward common ground where math was boring. So she shifted her coat from one arm to the other, moved closer as if to reassess the falling coins, and said—a tad British—“I don’t grasp”—
grawsp
—“how it works.”

“Simple,” said Boy Wonder, showing off his white teeth. “Every time a coin starts to fall, there’s a fifty-fifty chance it will go left or right. It falls left or right, comes up against another peg, goes left or right again at fifty-fifty odds, and so on,
ad infinitum
, until it stops at the bottom. That’s what gets you the bell-shaped curve. The fifty-fifty chance. Each time.”

How very male of this guy to have an answer. The one and only absolute answer, presented with certainty but poorly explained. “Fifty-fifty,” Diane countered. “As in a coin toss? So this is just a series of coin tosses? That’s where I struggle. I see that if I toss a coin the chances of it landing on heads are the same as the chances of it landing on tails. But what about the
next
time? Let’s say I toss a coin right now, today, right here in front of you, and up it comes, heads. I let twenty-four hours pass, and again, tomorrow, I toss the same coin right here in front of you. Are the odds once again fifty-fifty for heads? I should think not. I should think they’re one in four at that point. But what if I waited a hundred years? Say I forget about the toss I made today and just happen to next toss a coin a hundred years from now. Fifty-fifty, or one in four for heads? What would the odds be? Can you answer?”

Boy Wonder looked amused. He crossed his arms and took in Diane as if she was a novelty. He scratched his head, tapped his shoe again, pondered
the ground, and finally said, “Hmmm. My advice to you is, never go to Vegas. Unless you want to lose your shirt there. Fifty-fifty or four to one? Each toss is independent, so the odds of heads are always fifty-fifty. Because the coin doesn’t know it was tossed before. A minute ago or a hundred years. Each time it’s tossed, it’s fifty-fifty, as if the coin was being tossed for the first time.”

Diane shifted her coat again. Was her sorcery working? Or was he merely being polite to her, a fellow muller of a science exhibit? “I still don’t get it,” she insisted. Coyly.

“Try this,” the guy advised. He shoved his hands in his front pants pockets and rocked on his heels, which, she had to notice, set his pelvis in motion. “You’re on
Let’s Make a Deal
. You’re on
Let’s Make a Deal
, and Monty Hall is telling you there’s three doors. Behind one’s a car. Behind each of the other two is, let’s say, a goat. What do you do? Which door do you pick? Let’s say you pick Door Number One. So now Monty Hall opens Door Number Three. Out steps a goat. And you’re glad you didn’t pick Door Number Three. But then Monty Hall says, ‘Here we go. I’m going to open another door now, but before I do, let me ask you something. Would you like to switch your pick to Door Number Two?’ ”

“No.”

Boy Wonder stopped rocking. “This is what I meant about Vegas,” he said. “Don’t go there. I beg you. Please.”

Diane laughed, two truncated notes, issued through her nose and throat. “You’re
mean
,” she told him. “Stop it.”

“I’m not,” he answered. “Door One or Door Two? Odds were one out of three at the beginning. At the total-guess stage. The clueless stage. Then Monty opens a door and shows a goat. Now you’re choosing between two doors, right? It’s like I said about the coin flip—heads or tails. You’re starting over, Door One or Door Two, fifty-fifty, so what difference does it make? According to you, it makes no difference, you might as well stay with Door Number One. Okay, fine. But what if Monty knows that the goat’s behind Number One? So when you say, ‘One,’ he knows you’re wrong. Then he can
only
open Door Three, because behind Door Two is the car, and he knows that, too. He’s forced to open Door Number Three because he doesn’t want to show you the car’s behind Two. Three is the only choice you’ve left for him by choosing Door Number One, a goat door.”

Diane threw her coat over her shoulders like a cape. “Hmmm,” she said. Boy Wonder smiled. “Win the car,” he said. “When Monty opened Door Number Three and a goat walked out? Remember that? Before that, the odds were two out of three that the car was behind either Door Number Two or Door Number Three. Also, before that the odds were one out of three that the car was behind Door Number One. But now Monty opens Door Three and shows you the goat. And now Door Three is out of the running, and with Door Three out of the running, you can take it as a fact that the odds for Door Two are two out of three, not one out of three. So it’s the better choice.”