94
Kim walks into the shop and asks to try on the Charles Jourdans.
The clerk looks at her in her pink waitress uniform with that “You’re wasting my time” look, but something in Kim’s eyes makes her go find a pair of 5 ^1 / 2 s and bring them out.
Kim makes her bring out 5s and 6s, too, just to be sure, but the 5 ^1 / 2 s fit perfectly and Kim says she’ll take them.
The clerk takes the shoes to the counter and asks for a credit card.
Kim pays cash.
God as my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.
95
Tia Ana dresses her.
For she knows not what
But the girl is beautiful.
No, not beautiful Exquisite.
96
For a week, Stan says nothing about Diane’s announcement.
He’s sly enough to know that this seeming indifference is the best revenge, the harshest way to punish her, to inflict retaliatory pain, to pretend that her infidelity isn’t important enough to merit discussion, and besides, he doesn’t know what to say, having already confessed that her kissing John turned him on, and also, the truth of it is he’s afraid to talk about it
Afraid of the confrontation igniting a conflagration that might end in his having to demand a divorce
(What if she doesn’t apologize? What if she says she’s going to do it again? With John? With other men? What if she demands an “open marriage”?) which he doesn’t want.
So Stan pretends that his silence is a punishment and Diane pretends to believe the same, although she’s pretty sure that He’s actually afraid, and it deepens her
Contempt, which tempers her shame
Not so much that she cheated on her husband, but the fact that she bestowed herself on John, who didn’t seem to think it was such a
Big deal.
They did it, and it was nice, it was good, but it was nothing special, and afterward he got up and got a beer and offered her one (she declined) and he didn’t ask “What now” or “What next” and she just went home and washed him out of herself and couldn’t avoid the truth that she betrayed Stan for nothing and then Stan decided to punish her with silence, which was so stupid because couldn’t he see that she’d done it largely to give them something to talk about?
But they settled into silence an unspoken agreement to pretend and
Diane begins to think that maybe it’s the necessity of marriage to let scar tissue form over the wounds so that you both become, literally, callous.
They settled into silence until tonight
Stan sets his Updike down, gets up, and says that he’s going to the store to take inventory.
97
Kim pauses in the lobby outside the fund-raiser cocktail party and experiences
A moment of self-doubt.
The women are so elegant, so beautifully turned out, so confident in their wealth and elegance. The men are so casual and handsome, so well dressed. Their laughter comes out of the room like a challenge to her, saying You don’t belong here
Trailer-park trash
Waitress
Your mother cleans our houses and
You lived in a cave.
She stops and stands there.
Thinks, as she did at the border check, of simply turning around and going home to the trailer, where she belongs.
It’s her eighteenth birthday.
Stan gets a gun.
Freudian, sure, but there it is.
Finding a gun in Dodge City is like finding sand on the beach. All he does is walk over to John’s house and let himself in.
The pistol is under John’s bed.
Don Winslow
The Kings Of Cool
99
She turns heads.
She’s that beautiful.
Exquisite, Kim walks into the cocktail party uninvited with her head high you might call her bearing regal and no one stops her at the door, no one has the nerve to tell this lovely creature that she can’t come in.
Even the women, although jealous, are intrigued. They want to see what’s going to happen, they want to test their husbands and boyfriends and their own attractiveness against this newcomer.
Kim walks through the crowd, seemingly unconscious of their stares-certainly not self-conscious-walks to the bar, asks for a glass of Chablis, and gets it
She looks twenty-three, at least
No one asks for an ID or an invitation And then, glass at her lips, she coolly turns to survey the crowd as if to determine whether they’re worthy of her interest.
It’s a stunning debut.
Kim is certainly not a debutante, there was no money for even a Sweet Sixteen, but this is her
Coming-Out Party.
