Jim Long was disciplined and didn’t drink insensibly, especially compared with his brothers. He’d come home in the evening from Long Alpine headquarters, ask Diane about her day, listen to her answer, ask follow-up questions, make her a cocktail if she wanted one, and, if she was at the sink in the kitchen or bathroom, pin her from behind and plant a kiss beside her ear. She liked Jim, at first, despite his conventionality, because he treated her like a princess. Jim was her hero, defending her against the pettiness and testiness in his clan of snobbish ski barons, and enjoying, literally, kissing her feet, due to what emerged as a foot fetish. He squired her to concerts and plays, and took her out for prime rib, king crab, or oysters on the halfshell. When they dined at the Benson, Heathman, or Seward, Diane felt self-conscious and feared she’d be revealed as the onetime consort of well-to-do hotel patrons. On the other hand, she’d left behind Blonde Ponytail Barbie and, on her way toward thirty, embraced Impeccably Arranged. Impeccably Arranged meant that, with enough money on hand and time to spend preening, no one would notice that she wasn’t perfect anymore. Why this was so important to her at such an early age was a question Diane pondered in a self-punishing way; she wondered if she was neurotic or normal, an obsessive narcissist or an average woman with an average concern about the degradations of time. Sometimes she felt like the victim of chauvinism, someone who had thoroughly objectified herself because of forces beyond her control. Other times she felt that she was pulsing with power—that, because she still looked relatively spectacular, men were putty in her hands. Looking spectacular was a fascinating game—without it, Diane felt, life might be boring. The only problem was that looking spectacular got harder as she got older. Gradually, adjustments to makeup, hairstyle, and wardrobe became less like fun and more like work, demanded rigor as the window for good results began to close, and took not only too much time but too much emotion. On any given day, Diane could be made to feel good or bad by the results of her labors at her mirror. That made her feel like a shallow twit, someone who spent time wondering if her current bad-hair day was a harbinger of unending bad-hair days to come instead of spending it wondering what she was going to do with her life. Diane thought about her looks with a terrible constancy. It was the monologue in her head for lonely hours at a time, the one that animated her current persona as the Impeccably Arranged Mrs. Long.
Mrs. Long’s life was a veritable vacation punctuated by actual vacations. Her in-laws liked holidays at upscale destinations, and also liked to argue about upscale destinations, so usually airline tickets couldn’t be reserved until a spate of factional politicking had subsided. One brother would argue for Lake Tahoe, another would speak for Jackson Hole, a third would stump for Vail. Diane pretended to have opinions about the resorts, hotels, ski slopes, beaches, and golf courses in play, but really it was all the same to her as long as no roughing it was involved. While her in-laws skied, golfed, or snorkeled, Diane idled in shops or read in a chaise longue. Eventually, they’d limp in from their exertions, and then it would be time for cocktails with pupus, chips and dip, or fondue. Listening to the Longs relive their day—the transparent boasts, the fraternal animation—left Diane more antagonized than the day had.
The Longs were energetic social drinkers, and when they got on a roll, they loosened up. The vacationing clan would gather at poolside, and the brothers would compete as cannonball artists or shove their wives into the water. The characteristic family laugh was a cackle that, at these times, moved up the registers of frequency and decibel and spread like a contagion. It ricocheted from one side of the pool to the other when the Long wives perched on their husbands’ shoulders, grappling, grunting, giggling, and cursing while their lesser halves made uproarious comments. The commentary became more subdued and solemn when the men engaged in underwater contests of aerobic capacity, only to devolve again toward the bawdy and inane when the women tried synchronized swimming. Finally, the Longs would haul out at poolside to chat, snack, and bask in the late sun. After showering, they’d eat on a terrace. Then they’d descend on a bar or a club, where one or more of Jim’s brothers might parody disco and, as the night deepened, strip-tease. The day after raucous benders like these, the Longs emerged from their rooms around noon, drank plain coffee, and described their hangovers. Soon, though, they were arranging to make their headaches go away via tennis, golf, or a run.
At home base—Portland’s Riverside Club—Impeccably Arranged kept most men at bay, but it didn’t slow down the “alpha males,” a term Jim used to describe the more aggressive players on the club’s tennis ladder. They flirted with Diane at dinner dances and cocktail parties, on the golf-course veranda, and on the terrace by the pool. Unimpressed by well-to-do pretty boys who, in the end, could do her no good, Diane focused on her complicated cosmetics, artificial nails, elaborate salon work, and faultless, stiff wardrobe. At least once a week, she made an appointment—for electrolysis, say, or to see a dermatologist, or for a pedicure or exfoliation. She knew that all of this was extravagantly bankrupt, because eventually you had to get old and maybe hideous. And how could you face being old and hideous if you didn’t practice for it when you had the chance? Mostly, though, Diane dismissed this line of thought, and told herself such questions didn’t need to be answered, that they mercifully came later and could stay in the background, that they could be met head-on when old age arrived. For the moment, though, the battle should be waged, because the battle—if not the war—could be won, hands down. In the name of this sort of limited victory, Diane had a lit mirror installed in her bathroom on an accordion-style hinge, the better for self-scrutiny. She tortured herself with tweezers to prevent pubic hair from showing near her bathing suit. She plucked down from her chin. She was meticulous with mascara. At the end of a long session of intensive primping, Diane looked so good, in her own eyes, it was thrilling. “Yes,” she sometimes said to herself, “all is vanity, it’s true, but I’m the May Queen.”
Jim was openly glad that she looked spectacular. She also knew he had no idea how much effort was involved, and how much anguish and ambivalence. One day, as soon as he left the house, she stripped and stood before a full-length mirror without holding back her shoulders, sucking in her gut, or adjusting the lights beneficially. What she saw was shocking. Her side view in particular was horrifying, because it showed how clearly everything was sagging, how her body was getting wrinkled and dimpled. Face-to-face with herself in the mirror, Diane hated herself for hating herself, because it was one thing to be ugly, another to be fixated on it. Who was it who said that, whatever the inroads and humiliations of age, the inwardly graceful remained beautiful by definition? Mahatma Gandhi? Mother Teresa? Whoever it was, Diane didn’t believe it, because the evidence for error in this theory of beauty was everywhere to behold. What made more sense was whoever had said that there’s melancholy in seeing yourself rot.
Jim, on the other hand, by the time he was thirty-four, seemed perfectly able to go about in a bathing suit looking like a five on a scale of ten, as if flab, sag, back hair, narrow shoulders, spindly legs, and a droopy chest were not embarrassing. Diane could see that Jim wouldn’t avoid the destiny of the Long males, which was to be thin at the lip, high at the forehead, and swollen in a way that looked painful at the belly; these signature flaws would pronounce themselves as Jim aged, in fact already pronounced themselves. No matter what he did at the health club or on his fields of play, Jim had the depleted look of his Anglo-Saxon forebearers. Before long, like his father, he’d lack a posterior presence—it would look as though, inside his pants, his rump had dehydrated and shriveled. The older brothers were increasingly like this, junior versions of their faltering dad, whose knees were obviously killing him as he battled down slopes and returned tennis balls. Yet Jim grew older the way Diane knew you were supposed to grow older—he let go, somehow, of the need to be perfect, and he didn’t let it bother him, on the beach or by the swimming pool, when other men, younger and older both, looked better than he did. “I can either let it bother me or accept it,” he told Diane. “I golf, try to eat well, go to the weight room, and play tennis,” he droned on. “I work at keeping my perspective on life humble, and if I’m lucky enough to one day have children, I’ll feel completely at peace and really blessed.”
Diane was on the pill but didn’t tell her husband. It seemed to her the least damaging way, for both of them, to deal with something she didn’t want him to know about: that she didn’t want to have kids. The pill, thought Diane, meant at least five extra pounds. She was past thirty and her thighs were getting bigger. Also, her butt was expanding. It was time to put up a more serious fight, so Diane began to use Jim’s Ab Blaster and to walk on the treadmill in the basement. It cut against her grain to do these things, but the facts were plain now in the mirror.
Exercise, besides hurting, had another downside—after ten minutes of ab work and twenty minutes of treadmilling, Diane wanted to go out and order nachos. She began shopping at a health-food store, so that when the fatal urge hit her, there was something around that didn’t go immediately to her backside. For about six months, she held the line—sort of—but not without having to increase her efforts and face up to her propensity to avoid exercise. Then it became necessary to join Jim’s health club and to suffer on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays through an hourlong, deafening aerobics class.
Difficulty in conceiving began to needle Jim, who said he’d always thought that by the time he was his age he would have had at least two or three kids. When his patience with God and destiny wore out, he broached the idea of a fertility specialist. Diane treated this as a rhetorical suggestion for as long as she could, then told him she would “do a bit of research,” while hoping—in private—that time would do the trick. But Jim’s campaign was just beginning. There began to be enthusiasm for the prospect of his progeny in other quarters of the family, most assertively from Jim’s sister Sue, the one who’d married into long-haul trucks and, for reasons Diane never understood, was deemed a wise voice by her clan. Sue was the Long who spearheaded vacations, spoke to travel agents, and reserved blocks of rooms. She was also the one who arranged loge seats for The Nutcracker every year. Whenever a Long daughter reached thirteen, Sue made sure that the females in the family were invited to an elaborate afternoon tea in a reserved room at the Heathman. Sue had two daughters of her own, and three sons, and her husband was such a talented golfer that he gave eight strokes to Jim when they played. Sue golfed, too.
Sue called Diane to suggest they go to lunch. Over bay-shrimp-and-avocado salads, she beat around the bush before coming forth with sympathy, encouragement, and the names and phone numbers of fertility specialists. Sue passed this information to Diane on a memo sheet with “From the desk of … Sue Strom” printed on top. She’d written the names and numbers in her large, looping, unslanted hand. Below she’d added the words “God Bless!” next to a smiley face.
Still Diane didn’t act. Jim, now desperately on the offensive, went to a specialist of his own, and “checked out,” as he put it, “all systems go.” Diane had the feeling he read his test results as a kind of report card on his value as a man—semen volume, sperm count, motility—and also that, by extension, he saw her as a failure. In response, she claimed to have seen a specialist, too, and to have heard that, for reasons unknown, she was “subfertile.” This, she added, meant that they should try harder, which, for the moment, was good enough for Jim. On Super Bowl Sunday, at his brother Will’s suburban castle, he jocularly described, to his smirking clan, his assignment “to work overtime with Diane.”
Extra exertions of course got Jim nowhere. Fecund as he was, and willing, and hard-charging, he couldn’t get the better of Diane’s “subfertility.” She kept hope alive, though, by pretending to be taking a hormone stimulator. She bought The Joy of Sex, which at first embarrassed Jim. Undaunted, she picked up a pornographic manual on positions that might improve their odds, and encouraged Jim to try them all. This he did with no lack of enthusiasm. He bought in wholeheartedly. He aimed for deep penetration. One night, he brought home a Xeroxed research paper establishing the relationship between the quality of a woman’s orgasm and her odds of pregnancy, built around the theory that—he read this to her—“strong female contractions are like powerful waves on which sperm ride toward the cervix.” Intrigued by the idea of focusing on his partner’s pleasure, Jim next brought home a vibrator and a dildo. Diane, who’d borne up under plenty of partners interested in accosting her with these and other tools, not only let him go at her with them but dutifully pretended to contract in more powerful waves.
Jim, ever clueless despite his wealth and privilege, had no idea what he was up against, and, despite his unplanted seed, enjoyed his expanded sex life. At the height of his powers, he was on a roll, and so was Long Alpine, which had become so successful that it was written up not only in the fawning The Oregonian but in Fortune and The Wall Street Journal. Soon, the Long plant was enlarged and streamlined, and the marketing department got imaginative and savvy under Jim’s energetic management. Long hosted contests at major ski resorts, gave away skis, vacations, and season lift tickets, bought out a rival, expanded research and development, and, at Jim’s insistence, started a line of “cutting-edge” winter wear. Soon a new company catalogue had been developed featuring bold and athletic models, expensive photographs, and clever product descriptions. Long sold not only clothes, skis, and poles, but goggles, helmets, travel bags, boots, sunglasses, and other top-of-the-line fashionable accessories. All of it carried Long’s updated logo, featuring the word long as if engraved inside an oval belt buckle. Jim closely monitored Long Alpine’s ad development and spent a lot of time thinking about storyboards. He told Diane that his interests had turned creative and that he felt himself expanding as a human being.
Despite the rising fortunes of her marital community, Diane remained privately averse to the Longs and to their upbeat mercenary endeavors. She sat in judgment of them with growing severity. When she wrote to her half-brother Club to complain about her in-laws, she made what she knew were unfair exaggerations, subsuming them under the heading “Rich Americans” to make things clear. He wrote back to say that he’d never been to the States but that these monied in-laws sounded familiar from television. He wrote that he was “hod-carrying for shit money” and that this line of work was doing his back in. He had “a mate who does up gypsy caravans” and was thinking of making his way down to Dorset to help him with the painting. Maybe he was going to travel, he claimed; maybe he would visit her one day. All of that was refreshing to Diane, who otherwise had to put up with the band of philistines she’d married into. Her critique of her in-laws eventually extended to the way Isobel’s breath smelled (“tonsillar concretions” was the name of her malady) and to the make and model of Nelson’s tennis racket. The phrase “ruthless buggers” sat high in her head when the arrogant Longs complained about American proles on the dole, or the supposed laxity of the American justice system, which they felt favored criminals. Their ignorance repulsed her. Their politics were galling. They were not very happy with Jimmy Carter and on the Fourth of July, by the pool at Will’s house, bitched drunkenly and loudly about the peanut farmer from Georgia who’d so far done diddly-squat about inflation but had sure been busy on amnesty for draft evaders. Jim joined his brothers in this line of attack with what Diane thought was a surprising vehemence. He may have protested to her his midlife turn toward liberal sentiments and creative concerns, but by the pool he sounded just like his brothers—like a plutocrat with a crabbed pecuniary complaint. Bottom line, though: Jim still had a lot of money. And with time he seemed to accept the fact that Diane would never give him heirs. He told her that he’d decided to be thankful for his eleven nieces and fourteen nephews, most of whom lived in driving distance. He said he saw nothing wrong with being a good uncle. If indeed it was his fate not to have his own kids, he could—and did—accept that and see the bright side. Jim took pains to let Diane know that he didn’t blame her, which made her feel guilty. He wasn’t a bad person, after all, just well-heeled and dumb. Maybe, she told herself, she should have chosen a wanker, because then her exploitation could proceed guilt-free. But, anyway, there was no going back now. Guilt or no guilt, she still didn’t want children. After all, if Jim was finally getting used to her “sterility,” what would be the point in getting pregnant? “Nada” was the answer from her hairdresser, Steve, a diminutive and leathery Louisianan who looked like a cross between Mick Jagger and a rodeo rider—especially when he wore a torso-grabbing T-shirt—and who knew not only about her ruse of subfertility, but also, hilariously, about the vibrator and dildo. Good old Steve was wonderful as a confidant but nasty as a hair critic. At times he would hold Diane’s hair in his hands and say, “I can’t work with ignored raw material, you know,” or, “If you’re not going to use a good conditioner daily, there’s no point in coming in to see to me.” She put up with his barbs because her appointments with Steve always ended in triumph. When he finally swiveled her chair toward the mirror, Diane looked better, and because she looked better, she felt better, too.
The day came, though, when they were jointly disappointed. Steve refused to take money for his “disaster,” and tried, fruitlessly, to correct it with his shears. This way, things went from bad to worse until Steve, with tears in his eyes, asked Diane to join him outside for the cigarette he needed “to just come down from this … this … I don’t even want to say.” On the sidewalk, pacing in front of the salon and smoking furiously, he was silent for a long time. Then, with one of his zippered black boots on the salon’s windowsill, and with his anguished scrutiny of her bad hairdo distorting his face, he urged Diane to see “a specialist friend of mine about a light facial peel, just to touch up and rejuvenate a little, and I’m paying for it, because I feel so devastated.” Diane felt immediately drawn to the idea, and wondered why she she’d never thought of it.
Steve’s friend was a dermatologist named David Berg, whose results were so overwhelmingly good, and whose manner was so encouraging and soothing, that Diane became a fan of light facial peels. Always explaining everything as he went—“This is just a very gentle cleanser; now I’m applying our magic solution; now we’ll carefully and thoroughly rinse; I’m just finishing up with a little soothing lotion”—and doing it in a silky voice, Dr. Berg made a facial peel seem like a spa treatment. Each time, Diane was amazed and impressed by his ability to coax new vibrancy from her skin with a minimum of pain. Her peels were a private matter between her and Dr. Berg that Diane paid for with Walter Cousins’s money, taken from her secret safety-deposit box in Sullivan’s Gulch. When the time came for more elaborate work, though—targeting the fine wrinkles in her brow, around her mouth, and next to her eyes—Diane was forced to discuss it with Jim, because there wouldn’t be a way, said Dr. Berg, to pretend it hadn’t happened. A crust would form on the treated areas, and for a couple of weeks they would appear bright pink, before she could expect the end result of a smoother, tighter, more youthful appearance. “But you don’t need to do that,” Jim countered when she explained, “because I’m Billy Joel—I love you just the way you are.”
Diane wanted to say, “It isn’t about you, Jim,” but by now she knew better. “I just feel fortunate to live in modern times,” she told him, “and to have the wherewithal for an intensive peel, and while it might be better, morally speaking, to give our money to charities, we can do that, too, can’t we?”
“We can,” answered Jim, “but that’s not the issue. I don’t know how else to say this, but the issue is vanity.”
He was sitting with his Docksiders crossed on the coffee table—not, Diane thought, the best posture for an attack on vanity. “What about your weight-lifting supplements?” she asked, even though he hadn’t used them for years. “What is it you take? For more defined muscles? Or that thing you ordered—what’s it called?—the Ab Blaster? Come on—don’t be self-righteous.”
Jim flexed his right biceps facetiously. “And now my abs are perfect,” he said.
So she went for the more intensive peel, which hurt a little, and ended with a coating of petroleum jelly, substantial adhesive tape, and pain meds. At home that night her eyes swelled shut, and in the morning she woke up sick to her stomach and suffering from a second-degree facial burn. She couldn’t say much, because talking hurt her face. Half blind, mute, and in considerable pain, she had to wait patiently for her appearance to improve. After two weeks, some stay-at-home weight gain, and a thousand-plus pages of Sidney Sheldon and Harold Robbins, her face, indeed, looked great.
At Mazatlán, the next month, she was scrupulous about staying out of the sun, for which Jim rebuked her, but this was an argument he couldn’t win, because the American Cancer Society was on Diane’s side, and because Nelson had recently had basal-cell carcinomas removed from his left cheek and temple. Diane passed hours in a breezy cabaña, playing games of Scrabble with Nelson and Isobel, drinking Evian water and piña coladas, and earning points for being charitable to the geriatrics. It was easy, mindless duty, and in every regard it would have been all right were she not made to feel so insecure by the many younger women passing by. They looked so good that Diane felt terrible and vowed to lose five pounds straightaway.
On Thanksgiving, she resisted the stuffing and potatoes and, avoiding the kitchen, focused on her nieces. Diane was popular with the teen-age Long girls, not only because of her vestigial English accent but because, out of earshot of other adults, she joined their adolescent criticism of the world. Before dinner, she’d leaned in the doorway of a bedroom where a density of Long darlings had congregated, and laughed when one of them pointed out that Uncle Trip had gross chest hair. Diane told her nieces that chest hair could be sexy, which they would understand when they were more experienced. This numbed all talk while they deciphered Aunt Diane and—she knew—grappled with discomfort. No matter. She let a beat pass before revealing to her confused audience that men who were feminine in gesture and aspect could be attractive as well. Diane looked theatrically up and down the hall to make certain no adults were in hearing distance, then urged her nieces not to count on condoms. They should take the pill, or get an IUD or a diaphragm—the pill, of course, was best. Again there was discomfited teen-age silence, which she ended by saying, “I suppose I should join the oldies for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres in front of the television, and for chitchat about—whatever.”
Through the December holidays, Diane ate with greater-than-normal abandon, and the inevitable weight gain—some in her butt, some in her midriff—left her in need of a mood pick-me-up in the form of yet another facial peel. Jim, who was at this point well practiced as a husband, asked, “What weight gain are you talking about?” Nevertheless, when she weighed herself, four new pounds corroborated her position that a visit to David Berg was necessary.
Dr. Berg listened to Diane’s concerns, then referred her to a friend in body reshaping, a Dr. Green in Lake Oswego, who, Berg said, was “absolutely magnificent.” At her first appointment with Dr. Green, he wanted to know what she didn’t like about her body, and asked about her psychological, marital, health, and eating problems. At a second appointment, Diane had to take off her clothes and submit to being photographed by a nurse with a Polaroid instant camera, and to a tape measure and calipers. She and Dr. Green discussed her butt and midriff, and then he insisted that she take a week to think about the risks—including the risk, however slight, of death—and about the scars he would do his best to conceal, the possibility of less-than-perfect results, and the certainty that time would undo all his efforts. A month later, Diane had a combination tummy tuck and butt lift, supplemented by liposuction contouring. Other than some irritating itching around her stitches, and a little redness at the site of a surgical drain—remedied with an antibiotic—her recovery period, though boring, wasn’t painful. And the results, after three months, were good.
In fact, that spring she looked “incredible”—Jim’s word—in a French-cut bikini on the beach at Puerto Vallarta, where Jim’s clan was a bit desultory, because, just two days before their departure, in a surprise to all, Sue had reported that her trucking-magnate husband had been philandering with a much younger woman. The Longs were livid and ready for a war. Jim told Diane that he hoped his sister would “take that jerk for all he’s worth and drive him into the ground.” Before the summer was over, she had.
In September, Walter Cousins stopped sending money. At this stage his faltering was financially meaningless, but, still, Diane wasn’t going to let him get away with it. If Walter thought time had let him off the hook, he definitely had another thing coming. Feeling vindictive, victorious, and gleeful, Diane wrote a letter to Walter’s wife. “Dear Mrs. Cousins,” she began. “This is rather hard. This is far from pretty.” She paused for a moment at this early stage of composition, imagining Mrs. Cousins at the reading end of this, then added:
I have to tell you that, in the summer of 1962, when I was employed as an au pair in your home, your husband repeatedly took advantage of me. He took advantage of my youth and insecurity. He took advantage of a young woman who was a visitor to America. For years I’ve lived with the disturbing memory of the summer of 1962. I’ve also lived with a considerable burden, because I’m the mother of your husband’s child. I have a boy, age sixteen and a half, who until this month your husband supported with monthly payments of $250. Unfortunately, those payments stopped coming recently. This is most regrettable, because I’m dependent on those payments to meet my son’s needs. Perhaps you could remind Mr. Cousins of his obligations to his son born out of wedlock.
I write to you about this only with the greatest pain. That you now know of your husband’s past behavior gives me no pleasure. Forgive me. I have no wish to add to whatever sadness permeates your life. I remember that in the summer of 1962 you were receiving treatment for mental illness and hope and pray that since then you have been free from more of same. I also remember your children, Tina and Barry, and hope that their lives are happy and in order. They were a pleasure to spend time with, and I enjoyed their company. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for your husband. He has brought much pain into my life and, as a traumatized rape victim, I have experienced considerable hardship and misery.
Please consider my request. I hope you can impress on Mr. Cousins the moral imperative he is under to continue to provide support for his son.
With prayers and best wishes,
Diane Burroughs
Lydia Cousins’s response arrived four days later, in a white business envelope, typed, with no letterhead. “Ms. Burroughs,” it began. “Walter is dead.”
He died in an automobile accident five and a half weeks ago. I’ve been assured that no alcohol was involved. It was a single-car accident on a road in eastern Washington. Walter was returning from a visit with our son, Barry, who is now a student at Washington State University. Since Walter’s death Barry has had difficulty with his studies and I am worried that this will be for him a lost semester.
Tina, my daughter, is closer to home, studying at the University of Washington. She, too, is devastated by Walter’s passing. They did not always get along too well and poor Tina is now suffering, naturally, from guilt. I worry about her mental health, frankly. You may remember how she was as a child, so emotionally delicate and sensitive. These things remain big challenges for Tina, and have all been intensified by her father’s sudden death. All of that said, I think she’ll pull through. She is very dedicated to her studies.
But I don’t write merely to update you on the children. My true purpose is to respond to your revelation regarding the summer of 1962. Let me preface my response to that by pointing out that Walter went outside our marriage in 1973. He was discovered and we confronted it via marriage counseling. With the years we came to grips with what had happened, and we went on together, not without some happiness. That said, it’s disheartening to now know that Walter lied when he insisted to me that the philandering he was discovered at was the only philandering he’d engaged in throughout our marriage. It hurts to know that our subsequent life together had as its foundation this deceitfulness on his part. I have to wonder now what else he never told me about, and this is compounding my grief at the moment and making it even more difficult for me to get on with life. But get on I must. And I will tell you that despite my sadness I am in many ways looking forward. What’s done is done.
Ms. Burroughs, I must tell you that, though I am not entirely in accord with your version of what happened in the summer of 1962, I have no problem with your use of the term “rape victim.” It was rape because you were in Walter’s employ, and therefore placed in an unfair position when it came to his advances, just as a secretary is in an unfair position when propositioned by her boss, and just as a college girl is in an unfair position with regard to a professor she has a lust for. In all of these situations the term “rape” can be fairly applied because the participants in the sex act are not on equal ground and do not come to bed with the same power or leverage. One partner has it over the other, and this was the case with Walter and you. Shame on him for that. There is no excuse for it.
That said, I feel certain that Walter didn’t physically overpower you. I feel certain that you played some part in it. What we both are calling rape might also have elements of a sordid affair between a married man and a willing and sophisticated girl. Maybe a young and very confused girl, maybe a girl who is a victim of circumstance and of her childhood and culture and so on and so forth, but still there remains this element of will. I have a feeling, Diane, if I remember you correctly, that this didn’t go all in one direction.
With regard to the money, I do believe that, after sixteen and a half years, Walter has fully done his duty. I wish you the best in raising your child, and I do hope he flourishes in the world, but as for money from Walter, that’s over.
In closing, I’m saddened by the news you’ve sent me, but I suppose, in keeping with grief as a catharsis, this sad revelation comes at the right moment.
Sincerely yours,
Lydia Cousins
About the time she turned thirty-three, Diane began mulling a face-lift. Certain holiday photographs jump-started her in this direction, but it was the trip to Lake Placid for the 1980 Winter Olympics—where Long Alpine was spending considerable money—that confirmed in her the need for action. The dry air there wreaked havoc on her complexion, sucking so much moisture from her skin that no amount, or brand, of rehydrating cream helped. Diane found herself looking, for long spells, in her hotel-room mirror, and feeling depressed because her jawline was sagging and the cords in her neck were tightening. In a parka and hat she looked so middle-aged that she didn’t want to go out to watch ski events with the family. She had to, though, because the Longs were expecting her, there’d be irritating questions if she failed to show, and so, standing in the snow wearing huge Vuarnet sunglasses, she found herself feeling ugly and bereft while the Olympics took place at a weird distance.
A face-lift was complicated. Dr. Berg was board-certified as a dermatologist, but not as a plastic surgeon. Dr. Green didn’t do faces. They both had recommendations for her, but not the same recommendations. Diane found herself running around a lot, even flying to Los Angeles to consult with a surgeon to the stars. Everyone she interviewed had sound credentials on paper, and in person seemed equally stellar, but in the end she chose a doctor named Jerry Kaplan because he was local, booked into June, and had Vanity Fair instead of Vogue in his waiting room. His nurse gave Diane testimonials, informational pamphlets, reassurance, and compliments. Diane read the literature as well as some horror stories—suddenly ubiquitous—about face-lifts gone bad, anesthesia disasters, and painful problems with healing. These didn’t dissuade her. Dr. Kaplan, with his passionate ideas about her face and the things that might be done with it, seemed equal to the task. They could start with a brow lift to smooth her forehead, he said, plus eye work to tighten her lower lids—“bang-for-your-buck work,” he called it. He predicted she’d be happy with that package, but couldn’t make promises because his line of work was more art than science.
“Art?” Diane asked. “That makes me a bit nervous.”
Dr. Kaplan tilted back in his desk chair and clasped his hands behind his head. “It’s aesthetic surgery,” he said. “Results are therefore always subjective. They get viewed through the lens of emotional issues.” The doctor rotated his neck as if to loosen it. “Let me be one-hundred-percent candid,” he said. “No one should opt for aesthetic surgery when in fact what they need is therapy. My work is external. I only change the surface.”
“I don’t need therapy,” said Diane. “I need to look better.”
Dr. Kaplan dislodged something irritating from the corner of his eye. “The way you look, yes, I can do something about,” he assured her, “but inner stuff, that’s not my area. I can’t do away with your emotional problems—I mean, if you had emotional problems.” Dr. Kaplan ground what had come from his eyelid between his thumb and forefinger. “Inside, that’s not my area,” he repeated. “I’m going to do everything in my power to make your face look absolutely wonderful, but—”
“It isn’t wonderful now?”
Not missing a beat, the doctor assessed her face. “It is wonderful,” he said. “Should we cancel your surgery?”
Two weeks later, she sat on the edge of his examination table while he rolled her skin around under his hands and looked at it closely through a lit magnifier. As he pressed, pulled, lifted, and prodded, he said, “Under the jawline you’ve lost minimal structural support we could probably address with a simple S-lift, or just leave it for later. With the peels you’ve had, your skin quality is still good, but here, below your eyes, as you know, we have a little tiredness showing, which I think we should go after, and … well … your upper eyelids are debatable. I could lift them, I guess, or I could do the whole forehead, I could pull up the forehead, which does have just a little sag to it—not bad, though—and bring the eyelids up with it; I actually think that’s probably preferable in your case.” Dr. Kaplan moved her temples about under practiced fingers. “All right,” he said, still probing and pressing, “S-lift, lower lids, brow lift as opposed to just eyelids, let’s do that while you’ve still got good elasticity. And you do have good elasticity for someone your age. Not that I don’t want to have your business, but all of this could wait a few years, I feel obligated to tell you. It really could.”
“Let’s do it all,” said Diane. “That’s what I want.”
“Tell me again what you want,” said Dr. Kaplan. “Let’s do that one more time.”
“What I want,” said Diane. “I want to look younger. I don’t want to have jowls. I don’t like my eyes. I don’t like my forehead. I don’t want to look droopy and tired all the time. Also, I don’t want to look like I’ve had any surgery. My goal is to look ten years younger, but natural, not fake.”
Knowing how she sounded, Diane added, “I wouldn’t say this sort of thing except to a plastic surgeon. But really there’s another side of me—another me—who’s much less vain.”
On the appointed day, Diane did what Dr. Kaplan’s nurse told her to do—showed up on an empty stomach, with a sedative swallowed, no makeup or jewelry, and Jim in tow. After her face was marked as if by a tattoo artist and she was supine on a gurney in an unbecoming hospital gown, Jim planted a kiss on her forehead and said, “I love you, Diane. I’ll be here when you come out. God bless.”
And Jim was there when she awoke in the recovery room, except that she couldn’t see him, blinded as she was by claustrophobic bandages. She only knew he was there because when she said his name—“Jim?”—he answered, “Let’s cut to the chase, Diane. I noticed something funny in your charts.”
This didn’t sound normal. It wasn’t what Jim ought to be saying to her, first thing, when she came out of surgery. “Are my eyes all right?” she asked, and it hurt her throat to say it. “Did it go all right? Am I in good shape?”
There came what had to be a nurse’s voice: “It went great. Are you thirsty, Mrs. Long? You’re thirsty. I’ll get ice chips. It went fantastic—everything’s good. Doctor will be in to tell you more, but he’s very, very happy about everything.”
Then it was Jim’s voice again, still with that flat, troubling, all-business tone so lacking in post-op sympathy. “I don’t know if everything’s so good,” he told her. “You’re bandaged, so I can’t put your chart in front of your face, but what it says is C-O-C-P, Diane. Which means the pill.”
Despite deep anesthetic grogginess, Diane met this aspersion with a display of calm candor. “I’m not on the pill,” she said.
“Then why is it on your chart?”
“Mistake.”
There was a long pause, during which Diane thought, “Horrid timing.” Blind and helpless, she heard Jim say, “I’m pissed off. I’m really, really pissed. I don’t think I’ve ever been this pissed. This is low. It’s just so down there. I can’t believe this—it’s from someone else’s life. This shouldn’t be happening to me.”
“Jim.”
“Don’t ‘Jim’ me. You know what, Diane? All this money on your looks, it’s superficial. And then to lie on top of it, about the pill, to say it’s a mistake—who the hell are you? Who are you?”
When Diane didn’t answer, the nurse intervened with, “Maybe you should talk about this later, Mr. Long. Our patient is just out of surgery.”
But the talk that came later was in the same losing vein. Jim brooked nothing and wrathfully put his foot down. The righteous assurance that made the Longs so rich? Jim displayed it in spades now, the full version. In other words, there was nothing to talk about, or nothing Jim would talk about. Before Diane could grasp where things were going, her furiously wronged husband had hired an investigator. Within a week of her face-lift, the pill was a fact, and then lying became Jim’s theme—how many lies, of what sort, when. The investigator found plenty that was fodder for Jim, including the post-office box in Sullivan’s Gulch she’d recently closed. Things hit bottom when he tied Diane’s old phone number to the Candace Dark Escort Service. This investigator was good, but—the saving grace—he didn’t find out about Baby Doe.
The Longs were aghast to find that Jim had married a former “escort.” They closed ranks, as they had against Sue’s wayward trucking magnate, and handed Diane her head on a plate. The deceit about fertility, the strangeness of the post-office box, the lies about her past, the invented life, the phony persona: all of this added up to more than enough grist for the top-notch divorce lawyer Jim retained—the one who’d helped Sue take her cheating magnate to the cleaners—to make sure that Diane was banished from the family with as little diminution of its ski fortune as Oregon law would allow. When all was said and done, she was back on the street after eleven years as Mrs. Long with twenty-five thousand dollars Jim gave her to go away, thirty thousand dollars of Walter Cousins’s hush money, some pretty decent clothes, a slim butt and waist, a worked-on face that looked permanently astonished, and—as always—regrets about her son. Not bad, all things considered. Regrets, clothes, beauty, relative youth, and fifty-five thousand for a fresh start.