David Guterson's new novel, Ed
King (Knopf), tells the story of a man who sleeps with the sexy,
not-quite-legal British au pair who’s taking care of his children for the
summer. The affair leads to a child, named Edward Aaron King, who grows up to
become a billionaire internet tycoon and an international celebrity.
The following is an excerpt
from Ed King, which will be released on October 18th.
Did he read her correctly? Was
he getting her signals? Because it seemed to Walter she was skirting the
obvious–the nudity two feet in front of their faces—so as to give them both a
chance to linger. She seemed, at the moment—if he wasn’t mistaken—a prick tease
of the precocious teen brand. He was confident that the point she meant for him
to take was, as long as neither of us mention nudity, we can go on standing
here, looking at pornography together.
“Personally, for me, it’s the
blue sky,” he said. “That amazing blue sky in the background.”
Again her convulsive laugh, as
at an inside joke, which he was now laboring to solicit at every turn.
They went to examine The World
of Tomorrow. The line for this exhibit was long and hot, but eventually they
found themselves inside the Bubbleator with 150 other agitated fair-goers,
ascending, as if inside a soap bubble, toward “The Threshold and the Threat.”
“The Threshold and the Threat” had been highlighted in press reports as a
thought-provoking and instructional tour-de-force—Walter thought that sounded
good for the kids—and was billed in the fair’s extensive guide as, “a 21-minute
tour of the future.” Yet after a half minute of ominously slow rising to a
soundtrack called–Walter knew this from the guide–“Man in Space With Sounds,”
the Bubbleator arrived not in the future but underneath a strangely lit
semblance of the night sky. Stars and planets were projected onto distorted
cubes, or on something like magnified cells in a beehive. What was this anyway?
Why had they been lifted to this surreal destination? Tina clung anxiously to
his pant leg, and Barry looked frightened and aghast. In contrast, the new au
pair only stretched her back, pointing her girlish breasts at the faux heavens.
Then she dropped them, and they huddled together like an abducted family in the
bowels of a B movie spaceship. Everyone had to endure more “Man in Space With
Sounds”–alarms, theramin wails, inharmonious strings and brass, much of it
familiar to Walter as the sort of thing that backed Vincent Price–until, cast
in celluloid on the weirdly curving cubes, a frightened family crouched in a
fallout shelter. This was too much for Tina, who covered her eyes. Walter
wondered who at the World’s Fair had given the green light to “The Threshold and
the Threat,” because whatever else it was–beside some pointyheaded goofball’s
dark view of the future—it was also, in his view, wrong. Subliminal, demonic,
scarring, you name it, but best summed up as wrong. ‘We should have been told
before we got in line,’ he thought angrily. ‘Somebody should have warned us.’
And now, on the cubes, came
one image atop another, kaleidoscopic, fleeting, discombobulating,
disassociative–jetports, monorails, the Acropolis, a mushroom cloud—before,
again, that pathetic, cellared family, this time with JFK exhorting them, and
all other Americans, in his Bostonian brahmin brogue, to build a brighter world
through technology.
The hallucinatory journey
through apocalypse ended, and Diane said only, “That was fab.”
“That was a nightmare,”
countered Walter. “Let’s get out of here.”
Outside he felt reassured by
the real world, and so, clearly, did his kids. They all breathed happily the
June carnival air, pregnant as it was with cooking grease and promise. In the
Food Pavilion it was Orange Juliuses all around—the kids and Diane sucking away
at jointed, double straws, while he, having bolted his Extra Large, ate a corn
dog. Just let it happen, he told himself, when Tina implored him for a Belgian
waffle–be carefree and magnanimous, stay with the pointed humor (“How about the
Girls of the Galaxy Exhibit?”), and tease them all often, with easy tenderness.
There were solid points to be earned, he felt sure, by riding the fine line
between paternalism and friendship, between daddy and a nice guy with cash.
“Girls of the Galaxy?” Diane
asked.
“According to the fair guide
they pose naked for Polaroids.”
“Including Earth girls?”
“Especially Earth girls.”
“That wouldn’t do in England.
Not at all.”
Walter shrugged as if Girls of
the Galaxy was just old hat in his world. “My, what do you call it, bonny
lass,” he said, “you’re not in England anymore.” Diane separated her lips from
her straws. “‘Bonny’s’ Scottish,” she said, looking into her drink. “In
England, you might try ‘stunning’.”
“Stunning, then.”
“Or ‘comely’ would do–I would
accept that.”
They moved along until the
kids got tired and the lines for the bathrooms too frustrating. It was time to
go home but, because he wanted to–it was the only thing he was really
interested in at the fair–they visited The World of Science building and its
Probability Exhibit. Here, in a glass box, thousands of pennies dropped
mechanically down a chute and were shunted thereafter past equidistant dividers
so as to demonstrate the inexorability of a bell curve. As the pennies fell in
essential randomness, they inevitably built up a standard normal distribution
(“A Gaussian distribution,” he told the kids and Diane), which never varied and
was a fixed law of nature; the pennies made a perfectly symmetrical hill, the
formation of which could be relied on. He admired this so much he got effusive
about it and explained, to Diane, what a bell-curve was, and in language he
hoped didn’t sound too actuarial delineated the “central limit theorem”
associated with what they were witnessing. “Put it this way,” he said, moving
closer to her. “The sum of variables at work among those pennies follows a
unique attractor distribution.”
“How interesting,” she shot
back, mirthful at his expense, and mimicking his enthusiasm while flipping her
ponytail absentmindedly. “An attractor distribution.” They were now 6 hours
into their relationship, and already, it was more than he could take.
They were now six hours into
their relationship, and already it was more than he could take.
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