Ed King by David Guterson

Author:David Guterson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307700421
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-10-18T10:00:00+00:00

Ed wasn’t surprised, in the fall, to hear that Elarth had been relieved of his teaching duties. His lectures had become antagonistic to colleagues and fanciful beyond any value to students. There was a rumor that, in defending himself to a committee, Elarth had mentioned hearing voices in his head. Stanford got a think tank to take him on and, Elarth having disappeared from campus, Ed got transferred to a new adviser, who urged him toward an advanced class on information theory. We have a table around which are seated N philosophers. In the center there is a large plate containing an unlimited amount of spaghetti. Halfway between each pair of adjacent philosophers there is a single fork.… How should the philosophers go about their rituals without starving? Or: Imagine you’ve trained your St. Bernard, Bernie, to carry a box of three floppy disks, etc. For what range of distances does Bernie have a higher data rate than a 300 bps telephone line? Ed killed these kinds of problems. His abilities were celebrated. And not just by faculty but by females generally. At Stanford, he was surrounded by hundreds of girls who were patently obvious as fantasy fodder, good-looking young women in all colors and stripes who were brimming with intelligence, purpose, and style as they leaned toward equations on overhead projectors and thrilled to the voices of genius professors waxing eloquent on everything. Of course, he undressed these attractive peers in his head, but, having gotten started with Darlene Klein down the path of older women, ended up in bed not with peers but with—for example—a computer-security consultant who cruised Stanford for associates. After a month of complicated liaisons with this married, driven tennis ace, Ed, against his better judgment, joined her for a Napa weekend. They laughed at their mutual lack of wine knowledge. They played tennis, with Ed in the role of student. She sprang for a couples aromatherapy steam bath. During sex, she made a lot of primal noises. Ed stopped programming for her and took up with a woman in Stanford Admissions who, during a first, long, casual chat, wondered if he wanted to get acquainted with an art museum in Belmont. They went immediately. After forty-five minutes of combing galleries, she told Ed she needed a glass of wine, so they went somewhere for wine, which she fidgeted over before asking how old he was. Ed said, “Twenty-nine,” adding extra years because he thought she could use them, and she replied that she had a nineteen-year-old daughter volunteering at an orphanage in Senegal. “Is that not interesting?” she added, laughing. “Am I not a scintillating, fascinating person?” Then they went to her house in Redwood City, which was available because her husband, an anthropologist, was on sabbatical in Papua New Guinea.

None of this felt dark enough for his post–Darlene Klein erotic interests, so he took up with a Palo Alto patent attorney he met by responding to an “Adults Only” personal stating, “Tumultuous and

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