Near the end of his sophomore year, Ed met a girl named Tracy Stolnitz who’d just graduated from Nathan Hale and bussed tables in a Mexican restaurant. They did it in the back seat of Ed’s GTO, and then, for the rest of the summer, they did it as often as they could. Tracy not only was on the pill, she delivered in ways Ed hadn’t thought of. There were finer girls around, Ed knew, but Tracy was mouthy and droll as she talked around her cigarette. Her comportment was sallow, but her style in the sack was wild. She wore studded black leather and kept an elbow in a car window frame so that it was easy to flick ashes; either that or she dropped them in a beer bottle. She and Ed saw bands that summer in Vancouver, Portland, and Spokane.
They planned an end-of-summer road trip. There was a Battle of the Bands to hit in The Dalles, and this Stonehenge replica thing somewhere near The Dalles a guy had told Ed about, and there were some friends of Tracy’s with a house in Pullman, so they could stay there for a couple of days and go to this other Battle of the Bands, and then, on the way back to Seattle, Tracy knew some guys who had three-wheelers, and they could ride them or whatever. Ed told Dan and Alice he was going camping in the Blue Mountains, which wasn’t far from the truth.
With Tracy managing the 8-track, Ed drove east on the interstate at eighty-five, sometimes at over a hundred. That afternoon, he replaced his fuel filter on a butte while Tracy, with a beer bottle in her hand, hugged him from behind. The Battle of the Bands in The Dalles was a dud. For the Stonehenge thing, they split a tab of acid. Later, they slept near cottonwoods, under stars, Tracy wearing only her black leather jacket and a mastodon-tooth necklace that hung in Ed’s face when she climbed on top of him. Ed felt that he was living in a dream and that this was the high point of his life.
In Pullman, they went with Tracy’s friends to the second Battle of the Bands in their plan, taking along some piquant Thai stick and a bottle of mescal with a worm at the bottom. The next day, at about eleven, after a last session in the sack that was dulled by a hangover, they started westward, with Ed speeding—of course—and with his 8-track blaring, through the low, rolling hills of the Palouse. The roads were lonely and ran between wheat fields. There were farmhouses, barns, stables, railroad tracks, and rows of implements, but despite all these signs, they saw few people. Sometimes they saw a huge farm machine at work, usually so far away it looked no bigger than a toy; once they passed a truck parked beside a grain elevator; once they had to slow behind a farmer on a tractor, but otherwise, there was no one. With opportunity knocking this way, Ed went joyriding on dirt tracks with no names or signage, leaving behind him a rooster tail like a tornado. These were roads with persistent washboards, good for forty tops, but Ed was taking them at ninety with his rear end drifting, scouting ahead for potholes that might demand maneuvering and for intersections where he could show off his sudden turns. “Watch this!” he’d say, Tracy would brace, and Ed would send his GTO perpendicular to the road in a geyser of dust and a spray of flying gravel, his inside tires nearly airborne. Yelling and hooting, he’d regain control during a series of decreasing fishtails, after which he’d be driving east or west instead of north or south, or vice versa, all the while working his Hurst shifter.
They came to a two-lane meander, with wires overhead, eroding between wheat fields. Ed drove it like it was the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, timing himself on a zero-to-sixty twice but dissatisfied with the results. Pigeons flared at their approach, doves hopped off power lines, the chaff at the roadside swirled, but still there were no other drivers in this region, so Ed took it up, in a straightaway, to a personal best of 135. Satisfied, he stopped to piss by an abandoned barn, leaving his car, with Tracy in it and the 8-track blaring, idling in the middle of the road.
He was pondering what might have been the remains of a grain mill and peeing on a pile of sun-dried beams when a BMW approached, its tinny little engine whining. The driver careened around Ed’s car and, laying on his horn, gave Ed the finger. “What’s up with that?” Ed asked himself, returning the gesture with both hands. Then he zipped up, climbed in, and said to Tracy, “You know what? This guy’s toast.”
For a few miles he drove up the Beemer’s license plate, castigating its driver continuously and in concert with his nervously laughing girlfriend, but the guy refused to do more than sixty unless he came to a passing situation, in which case he sped up so that Ed couldn’t get around him, afterward slowing back to sixty and giving Ed, again and again, the finger. “What’s up with this asshole?” asked Tracy.
“He’s toast,” answered Ed. “I’m gonna toast him.”
At last they came to a straightaway between wheat fields. “Okay,” thought Ed. “This is it. No one gets away with giving me the finger.” Then he punched his pedal to the floor and veered, with a roar, into the oncoming lane. Quickly he was hood to hood and face to face with his adversary, where he took a penetrating look: an old fucker of the type who was arrogant and overconfident. A bastard completely full of himself. God, what a loser! Like he owned the road! Like Ed was nobody! Fuck that!
“Goddamn it,” said Ed. “I’ll kill this bastard. This goddamn bastard deserves to die!” And twenty seconds later, at a crossroads, he did kill him, by running him off the road into a wheat field, where the Beemer, after rolling four times—the first three sideways and the last end to end—came to rest on its flattened roof.
4
Poor Walter
Having gotten started with Diane as an adulterer, Walter Cousins found cleaning up his act harder than he’d imagined. The discipline to resist a new liaison faltered in proportion to passing time, and the further he got from his affair with the au pair, the harder it was to feel admonished by it. After a while, he forgot how he’d felt on the Monday morning when he was blackmailed by a teen-ager for $250 a month in perpetuity, and shortly after that he broke down altogether and began a dalliance with a married woman. This new fling proceeded amiably. When it dwindled, there followed three more like it, all casual, experimental, and pragmatic. Finally, though, in his sixteenth year of marriage, Walter was caught in an indiscretion with one of his wife’s friends. Lydia and the other woman had been close for a decade, and Walter had been jocular and easy with her husband, so it took eleven months of pretty good acting before the affair was undone by carelessness. Of course, that was the end of the couple-to-couple friendship, and of Lydia’s trust. He and Lydia went to couples counseling, but quit when it became apparent that the money they were spending on it would be needed to put the kids through college. Besides, after all those expensive fifty-minute sessions, they’d at best reached a stalemate. Or maybe the better word, thought Walter, was “détente,” as in Nixon with the Russians. At any rate, détente was what was on Walter’s mind lately, when he lay with Lydia in their connubial bower feeling anguished about their very meager sex life. Once a week, or maybe every ten days, he tried to get something going with Lydia, but three out of four times he was explicitly spurned, and the fourth time there was rarely much to it. Lydia, like him, was in sexual decline, but, though back to obsessive and anxious dieting, seemed clear of the more severe mental-health problems that had besieged her in 1962. These days, she Jazzercised and, after seeing Nathan Pritikin on 60 Minutes, subscribed to his diet plan. As a result of proximity, Walter ate better, too, lifted dumbbells a little, and logged minutes on a treadmill in the bedroom. He also now found gardening relaxing, and sometimes dug weeds beside Lydia. Together, they went for fast walks on weekends, both dressed in sweats and swinging two-and-a-half-pound weights, cotton towels around their necks. On San Juan Island, they walked in the morning, worked on the cottage in the afternoon, and did very little in the evening. Walter had stopped caring that the place wasn’t perfect. He and Lydia milled there, feeling lonely. The kids, grown, rarely joined them on the island, leaving Walter with time to stare at the water, usually with a beer in his fist. There was always something to irk or perturb him during these ocean-view meditative sessions. The bottom line was that he didn’t w
ant to die. As far as he was concerned, death was the problem. The basic human problem. Everyone’s problem. He wasn’t any different from anyone else, but there was no consolation in that.
Occasionally, Walter and Lydia were able to coax Tina to the island, mainly because she had a friend in Friday Harbor who had summer work waiting tables. Barry, though, for three years in a row, came up only for the Fourth of July weekend, when the taverns in town went crazy. In other words, even when the kids were there, they weren’t there. Lydia said that having them around was like running a bed-and-breakfast—which, she added, she was happy to do because she loved them so much. Mostly, though, it was just Walter and Lydia, reading, eating, walking, arguing, and doing their onerous second-home chores before settling into long, fruitless evenings. During all of it, Lydia talked about the kids so much—strengths, weaknesses, challenges, temperaments, marriage prospects, jobs, careers, schools, and the odds of producing grandchildren while continuing to live within driving distance—that they might as well have been there in the flesh. Walter, tiring of the subject, did zero to egg her on, but still he found himself thinking about his kids whenever he stared at the water. It seemed to him that, in the early years, things had been okay with them, the problems he’d had with the kids had been normal—the occasional tantrum, some spoiled behavior, some crying, yelling, lying, and disrespect, but nothing serious or out of the ordinary, nothing demanding special attention. But then, when Barry was fourteen and Tina thirteen, Walter was exposed as a breaker of vows, and after that, things changed.
Was there a connection? Lydia was certain of it. Walter, professionally accustomed to manipulating factors, pronounced himself ambivalent on the question of his culpability, but at the same time, privately, agreed with Lydia. After all, could it be a mere coincidence that, on the heels of the father’s fall from grace, the son had changed so dramatically? After a boyhood of excelling as a Little League pitcher and getting pretty good grades at school, Barry had suddenly withdrawn into his bedroom. He became a Dungeons and Dragons devotee, a collector of pewter fantasy figurines, and a dope smoker. In fact, it soon emerged that he was not just a dope smoker but a daily dope smoker, and, more distressing, the kind of kid who needed counseling for depression. All of that would have been okay if he had just shown a sign of bucking up after “graduating” (Barry’s diploma was from a pass/fail alternative program). Instead, he became a repeat watcher of Star Wars on a Betamax, a committed fan of punk and New Wave, and a regular at a midnight Rocky Horror Picture Show fest at the Neptune Theatre on Saturdays. On the wall above Barry’s desk was a poster of Devo—four guys in belted yellow radiation suits with “energy domes” on their heads and black whips—and another of the Sex Pistols. Even all of that could have passed for sort of normal, as far as Walter was concerned, if Barry hadn’t gotten as skinny as his hero Sid Vicious, and if he hadn’t started dressing in what Walter thought of as his Night of the Living Dead attire, which meant he looked like he’d just popped out of a grave.
Then there was Tina. Blonde, chubby, cherubic, and serious, she began keeping a journal after intimations of Walter’s debacle filtered down to her. Gradually, she went from selling Girl Scout cookies to editing her high school’s “literary arts” publication. This meant that a gaggle of arty kids showed up at the Cousinses’ house once a week and, behind Tina’s bedroom door, murmured about poems. Sometimes Walter overheard them in the kitchen, tearing into the Oreos and drinking all the 7 Up while—for example—making fun of Lydia’s milk glasses because cows were etched into them. Tina’s own poems were well received by the teacher in charge of Student Achievement/Art Night Open House, who displayed them in the library alongside student photographs and paintings. Her subjects were mass suicide, the Khmer Rouge, corrupt military contractors, and love, the latter, Walter knew, due to her experience as a girl with a new soulmate every month. In many of her verses she was ecstatic about a new soulmate, in mourning about the last one, or both. Yet, whether rapturously mournful or mournfully rapturous, Tina always seemed to listen to the same albums, including The Concert for Bangladesh, over and over again, and to music that sounded to Walter like monks humming in a cistern. This last was because she dabbled in spirituality. Whereas before Walter’s infidelity cataclysm she would innocently assert that “science explains everything,” afterward she was more inclined to say that “science is just another religion.”
In 1975, on his forty-seventh birthday, Tina gave Walter a used album called The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. With a felt pen she drew an arrow, on the jacket, to a track called “Do You Remember Walter?” and beside it she wrote, “YOU!” Walter took a sip from his birthday martini, scratched his head, and said, “Oookay, me.” Then Tina put “Do You Remember Walter?” on the stereo and made Walter sit there while she smiled at him. They listened—at her urging—to the song’s lyrics, which began:
Walter, remember when the world was young
And all the girls knew Walter’s name?
Walter, isn’t it a shame the way our little world has changed?
And ended with:
Yes people often change, but memories of people can remain.
After they listened, Tina said, “It’s not exactly you, but it’s got your name and it’s about a guy who’s out of it, like you, so I thought you’d like it.”
“Um, what?”
“So that’s my birthday present.”
Walter wouldn’t have minded that his daughter had turned out this way—a poetess in an alpaca shawl scrounged from a thrift shop, drinking kefir with pale bards at the Sunlight Cafe—if a few of her poems didn’t so flagrantly indicate that she despised him. Tina wrote a series of verses about a guy in Bermuda shorts barbecuing human limbs while smoking a cigar. Her coup de grâce, though, was a long, even epic, narrative denunciation, called “Walter,” with references to Richard Cory, Walter Mitty, Willy Loman, Casanova, and Nixon. After that, Tina dropped him as subject matter.
Too bad for her, he told himself. Because, actually, at the moment, he was ripe for poetic skewering. On the approach to the terrifying Big 5-0, he had significant regrets. He didn’t want to be an actuary anymore, and didn’t know why he was an actuary. What was the point of all those statistics? Nothing important, that was for sure. Charts, graphs, tables, analyses—what a colossal, and egregious, waste of time, this math with which he’d elided his own life. Poetry writing, by comparison, sounded sort of fun. If it gave you a way to let your emotions out, poetry might be really worth doing. But where did you start? Poems didn’t just come. And meanwhile, while he hadn’t been looking—not in the way he saw now he should have looked—he’d risen to senior vice-president of research at Piersall-Crane. “Senior vice-president of research,” he said to Tina. “You ought to write a poem about that.” In jest, of course, though he wouldn’t have minded. Better than nothing, a poem about him. So he was glad when Tina answered, “All right, a poem about it. What exactly is it you do for a living?”
“I’m in the numbers game. You know that.”
“I’ve never really understood the term ‘numbers game.’ Why don’t you be more specific?”
Walter decided to explain loss reserves and Financial Analysis of Insurance Companies by walking her through all the high points methodically, but hardly was a sentence out of his mouth when she demanded a definition of “liability.” “Put it this way,” he said, cutting to the chase. “People in business want hard information about the past and present so they can make predictions about the future.”
“Why?” asked Tina. “Why don’t they just live?”
Walter resigned himself to the removal of this conversation from the intricacies of his daily labors to … what would he call it? Soft teen-age thinking? Sophomoric value judgments? “What,” he said, “business people are dead? Business people don’t have lives?”
Tina, he could see, was holding back a smile—that scoffing know-it-all vegetarian poet smile with which she beleaguered him somet
imes. She looked, he thought, something like Lydia, but this was beyond what Lydia ever did, this insulting, condescending, internal laughing, this snide, superior, and silent ridiculing, this wholesale dismissal, this contempt. “You’re pissed off at me,” Tina said.
“Maybe you should write a poem about it.”
She did write a poem, called “Lost Reserving”—the intellectual poetess thought “loss” was “lost”—which began by saying, “He does Lost Reserving / for the undeserving, / this drone who has made his Faustian bargain / with the Capital for Captains Company of Amerika,” and ended with “There will be nemesis.”
Walter told Lydia that Tina despised him, and Lydia replied, in her long-suffering tone, “What do you expect, Walter? Another chicken’s coming home to roost.”
When Barry turned nineteen, Walter and Lydia bought him a used car with under fifty thousand miles on it. Barry, after two years of food prep in restaurant kitchens, was thinking of trying a community college. He now wore exclusively black, including, for a while, black fingerless gloves and a bowler. He also liked wrist bands, safety pins, studded belts, spiked bracelets, dog tags, and combat boots. His pants were festooned with chains, rings, buckles, a small skull on a strap, and a pair of handcuffs. In the rear of his pants was a large button-up flap. Barry had gone through a number of hairstyles before settling on Statue of Liberty spikes—black—held in place with Aqua Net hairspray. He wanted to try North Seattle Community College, since it wasn’t too far from some friends he could live with, but the only thing was, he didn’t have the money.