Ed King (8 page)

“British,” said the concierge. “Am I right?”

Diane snapped open her bag and produced her business card, which he studied suspiciously, with pursed lips. It read:

“We run a very professional and aboveboard operation,” said Diane. “On top of that, we offer a ten-percent commission for client referrals.”

The concierge licked his lips as if consternated. “How old are you?” he asked.

“The escorts we employ are all between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five,” Diane answered. “No minors, we don’t employ minors, that goes without saying.”

“I’m guessing you’re sixteen, tops.”

“Please do give my proposal some thought, sir. Our ten-percent commission is competitive in the industry. Our agents have been known to make as much as twenty dollars per referral, even more. I’m sure you must have guests who inquire regarding escort services, and when they do, why, perhaps you’ll think of me.” She smiled, and once again curtsied.

The concierge’s eyes made a sweep of the lobby before he said, “We’ll see what happens,” and put her card in his jacket pocket.

It was the same at the Benson, with its marble floors and fireplaces, and at the Imperial on Broadway, and at the Heathman. At all of these fine hotels, a concierge took Diane’s card, each with his own we-both-know-what-this-is-about-but-we’re-not-going-to-acknowledge-it mien. It was fine with her for them to handle it that way. She concurred, silently, with their need for discretion, and let them know, without saying it directly, that she intended to be so impeccably discreet, at every turn, that nothing about her would ever threaten their good reputation, advantageous position, or employment.

She was in business after that, with some success. It was what she’d seen her mum do, after all, on a different scale, at home. Instead of entertaining
men in a parlor, Diane went with them to dinner, the theater, the symphony, and piano bars where richly colored drinks were served. Never did she announce herself as a purveyor of sexual services. The safer thing to do was to accept the offer of a hotel-bar nightcap, and then the invitation to the room. Then, behind the locked door with the security chain latched, and with no mention of money changing hands, to take control of the transaction. Diane did this by giving her client what he needed, even if he was blind, beforehand, about what he needed, and was only seeing it right now through the ministrations of “Candy Dark.” Sometimes, as soon as a client was sufficiently serviced, he’d ask her to leave with a gift for her trouble—the late-night cab, the prearranged “escort fee,” and “a gratuity,” as Diane taught them to call it—and sometimes she had to stay on until morning before, needing to get on with whatever it was that had brought him to Portland, her client, maybe half dressed, or in his underwear, or shoeless, or with a loose tie, would pull out his wallet. If he was cheap, she would prod him. Usually it was productive to prod a man who came up short in the cash department—to make him feel bad about that, but good in bed, was the right combination. There were skinflints, to be sure, and the expense of commissions—Diane paid her concierges with a punctilious discretion, if not always with a completely honest 10 percent—but in the end, she was rewarded handsomely for what she did. Before long, she was able to get a nice apartment and—with the help of a client who sold upscale trade-ins—a more respectable car.

One night, she escorted an attorney who specialized in immigration law, and made sure it came to pass that he requested her services for the following evening. This man, whom she found attractive, which was rare, insisted that it was important to him, erotically speaking, to know who he was sleeping with, it couldn’t really be “Candy Dark.” She told him her name, because she liked him and wanted to, but more because she thought he might take on her visa problems free of charge. He did take them on, this well-toned repeat client with broad shoulders and a slim waist, who was given to gasping, “Diane … Fucking … Priceless … Burroughs!” when his big moment arrived. Soon, with the right papers in hand, Diane got a driver’s license and a long-term visa.

There were problems, of course, with this manner of living, like worrying about arrest for solicitation, and concern about getting pregnant
again. Then there were the clients who seemed like potential murderers or, less frightening but more common, clients with sexual difficulties. There were men with ghastly halitosis, men whose proclivities were pathetic or onerous, and, worst of all, men who went too far despite her firmly articulated prohibitions, inflicting pains that weren’t artfully constrained or merely of the moment—injuries, sometimes, of the kind you limped home with and then recovered from with bed rest and ointment. Which wasn’t so bad, the days off and the unanswered telephone, the books, naps, TV shows, and American-cheddar tuna melts, the luxurious baths, the towel wrapped around the head, the robe and slippers, the indulgent home manicures—in sum, the life of a B-movie starlet. During these interludes, though, Diane felt lonely. Wallowing in the wounds of high-end prostitution, she remembered her son, wondered about his welfare, and regretted her decision to abandon him.

Diane moved into a new apartment, significantly more posh and with a view of the Willamette, and traded in her car for one more daring. She also made some updates to her wardrobe, not because she needed to, but because shopping was fun—shopping, crossword puzzles, dime-store novels, television, and desserts filled her days, just as needy men filled her nights. She bought Junior Miss light pajama sets in both black and pink, carried them in her bag, and sometimes emerged from a hotel bathroom with one or the other on, and, with her ponytail tightly banded and her face freshly scrubbed, purred, “I was naughty and got my other PJs dirty.” It was fair to say that playing Candy Dark was satisfying, since it included turning men around and exploiting them whenever possible.

Diane took a vindictive delight, too, in Walter Cousins’s payoff packets, which now always arrived with an accompanying note wishing her and “the baby” well, or with an inquiry about visiting her when next he was in Portland. She never answered these. She tossed them in the trash. Sometimes, in the grip of melancholy, she drove past the Tudor in Eastmoreland where she’d left her son, slowing so as to hurt herself, once again, by drumming up the disconsolate feeling of leaving him on the stoop. Sometimes she parked outside the Boys and Girls Aid Society of Oregon Home—actually three cottages, quite charming, on Southeast Powell Boulevard—for no reason other than to share her baby’s world: the grounds he knew, just visible through a gate, the trees, gardens, squirrels, and calling birds he was becoming aware of as he grew. Or maybe
not, since by now he could have been adopted. She hoped that, if so, he was somewhere wonderful. She hoped he’d landed in the proper sort of family, with a mother who served good suppers every night and a father who tucked him in and read him stories. These homey images comforted Diane. She was entirely for them, for every middle-class convention, for all the stock concepts of sound child-rearing. It pleased her to think that at least one Burroughs might escape the impoverished fate of her clan. Hurrah for Baby Doe, slung from that impossible English mess as if from a catapult. He would soar, she constantly hoped and prayed, while following an American arc.

In the summer of 1970, a client took Candy Dark to a soirée at the Riverside Golf and Country Club. Along the way, in a hired car, he explained who would be there—rich people, in a nutshell. He said he needed her “to hold up her end.” He added that introducing her as Candy Dark was “not going to wash,” and that he wanted her to choose a different phony name that was “a lot more plain.” “What about ‘Diane’?” Diane suggested. “Would ‘Diane’ be acceptably unremarkable?” And so, at this soirée, she was introduced as “Diane Davis” to men in cummerbunds and women in summer gala dresses. Her client, it emerged, was loud and overbearing, and went about asking people, regarding Diane, “Ain’t she cute?” The more he drank, the more unacceptable he became, and the more uninhibited. He put his arm around her waist and his lips around her earlobe. His ranging mitt stopped, now and then, to squeeze her neck below her ponytail. Eventually, and drunkenly, he lost track of her whereabouts, and this left Diane free to sit with a decorated drink, waiting for the night’s dénouement.

She was people-watching at the verge of a great pulse of revelers when a tall, not bad-looking young nob approached, introduced himself as Jim Long, and asked if he could sit with her “while these people make fools of themselves.” Diane pointed out a nearby chair.

Jim Long had dark, curly hair, aquiline features, and a prominent Adam’s apple. He was twenty-seven. He was the fourth of five brothers and had two sisters—one older, one younger. The month before, he had been appointed vice-president of marketing at Long Alpine Industries, Inc., the company his father had started after World War II, which specialized
in alpine skis, though they also made Nordic, touring, and tele-marking skis. They had a factory in the area, and were just beginning production of a new line of fiberglass skis after having used laminated wood for twenty-two years. Long was in a period of change, risk, and new investment that made the future feel, Jim told Diane, “like a game we’re in without a playbook.”

Diane acknowledged that skiing was not particularly popular among the English but claimed that it had always excited
her
, especially after seeing what the Goitschel sisters had accomplished at the Innsbruck Olympics. She mentioned the handsome Frenchman Jean-Claude Killy—whom she’d read about in magazines—but pronounced his name without refinement, not wanting Jim to think she was a snob. Jim replied that he’d met Kill-
ee
at the ’67 World Cup race in Berchtesgaden, and that there’d been a follow-up discussion with “that self-infatuated playboy” about endorsing Long’s new fiberglass product. Which went nowhere, because a rival nabbed “the Frog” by agreeing to name a ski for him—in fact, a whole line of skis. What were Diane’s special interests?

European travel. American baseball. Outdoor recreation. Water skiing. As a girl, she’d roamed often in the Lake District.

Jim drank Miller High Life from a bottle. His fingers ended in broad nails, his expression suggested an amused judgment of the world, and he wore a checked shirt and blue blazer. He reiterated his distaste—demonstrated by this casual attire—for country-club parties of the sort now unfolding. He said that he liked to ski, play golf, and fish for salmon, that he liked to do all of these things with friends but that large gatherings didn’t appeal to him because at large gatherings the conversation was superficial. Diane had heard this come-on before, but she agreed anyway, pretending it was novel.

What did she do? She’d done many things, mostly for firms in London, New York, and now in Portland, where she’d relocated because of an attractive offer at a pharmaceutical firm and for its proximity to the out-of-doors. Jim would chalk up this circumspect story, she knew, to feminine evasiveness, but a woman, after all, had a right to mystery. Later, she could admit to exaggerations, if she had to—it would be easy to do and he would love it.

They repaired to a veranda with a view of the golf course, where night bugs agitated the lamplight near the top of a pole, and where a fairway
appeared endless and moonlit. Jim put one hand on the railing and made a comment about Canada geese fouling a green that was too close to a water hazard. Then he confided that, for the past few months, he’d been struggling against fogies both at the club and at the company. He was on the Greens Committee, and there was considerable expense involved in addressing the Canada-goose issue permanently. The problem was that most of the executive positions were held by old duffers who opposed improvements that might increase dues. Now Jim slid one hand into the pocket of his slacks and, with the other, aimed his beer bottle at the golf course. “These guys are old-school,” he said. “I’m not old-school. It’s a little bit never-the-twain-shall-meet. A little bit rock-and-a-hard-place.”

Jim talked next about Autzen Stadium, where the University of Oregon Ducks football team played; the Long family had been a major contributor to its construction. And about Timberline Lodge at Mount Hood, where the rooms were Spartan but the setting spectacular. It had sunk, years before, into disrepair, and closed, but the Longs had put money there as secondary investors, and for ten years now, Timberline had turned advancing profits. At the moment, the ski industry—the entire recreation industry, in fact—was “booming along nicely,” even as Nixon led the country into recession and inflation, and deeper into a war that was “going south.” Americans, Jim argued, felt a need for escape.

Broaching Vietnam made him grave. A friend had died there; two more had been wounded. This left him “pissed off enough to want to do something about it,” he didn’t know exactly what, but he was thinking of voting for Bob Straub for governor, and he was lobbying his family to increase its support for Mark Hatfield now that Hatfield had teamed with George McGovern on troop-withdrawal legislation. “Enough,” he said. “Should we walk on the golf course?”

Diane said she would like that enormously, but she was here with someone else, and even though this someone else was absolutely paralytic, she—

“Absolutely paralytic,” Jim said. “I like that. In fact, I love it. Who are you here with?”

“Nobody who matters.”

He smiled and ran a hand through his curly hair. “I hate these parties,” he said as though he wasn’t repeating himself. “Duffers and drunks. They ought to be moving on improving this place and doing something about the damn war.”

Diane looked at her watch. “Midnight,” she said. “As in ‘Cinderella,’ Prince James. I’d better make an appearance inside; His Lordship might fret—assuming he’s still conscious.”