The Ice Storm (10 page)

Sure, Paul had tried D.C. Comics. He had read
Batman
and
Justice League of America
, and he had followed some of the other Marvel titles, too:
Spider-Man, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Avengers
, and
X-Men
, and especially those titles that were F.F. spin-offs,
The Silver Surfer
and
The Sub-Mariner
. He had tried them all. He had ranged far and wide. But he kept coming back to the F.F. Batman was cool: his skills were not supernatural. He was just smart and rich. Superman was a moral force. The Hulk had hubris. Silver Surfer was definitely created by a mind on psychedelics.
Thor
was the comic you read if you wanted to work for one of those touring Renaissance festivals, if you wanted to wear a shirt that was called a
blouse
.

So why the Fantastic Four? First of all, Paul couldn't shake the uncanny coincidence that his father had the same first name as Benjamin Grimm, the Thing. When he was younger, he actually thought of his father as the Thing: chunky, homely, self-pitying. When Paul was a kid, his dad raged around the house like a pachyderm taking down underbrush. His father would find a damp towel clumped on the bathroom floor and sprint to Paul's room to accuse him. His father would lay in wait for the tiniest noise, the scantest footfall, and then he would howl from the bottom of the stairs. But his dad was always coming around to apologize, too. He couldn't terrorize with real commitment. He was like the Thing. He hated the world, hated mankind, hated his family, but loved people, loved kids and dogs.

And his mother was the Invisible Girl. Although, on the other hand, sometimes she was like Crystal, the Elemental, a prophetess, a seer. And sometimes his dad was Reed Richards, the elastic scientist. And sometimes Paul himself was Ben Grimm, and sometimes he was Peter Parker, a.k.a. the Spider-Man. These models never worked exactly. Still, the F.F., with all their mistakes and allegiances, their infighting and dependability, told some true tale about family. When Paul started reading these books, the corny melodrama of New Canaan lost some of its sting.

By the way, corny melodrama: Tuesday night, only three nights ago, they were all watching television in the dorm. At St. Pete's, where Paul was incarcerated. It was the last night before Thanksgiving vacation, and he was in the common room.
Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer
on the box. Seemed like every year they started these Xmas specials earlier and earlier. Someone had turned off the lights. They all cozied together in the dim, flickering images of holiday myth. Didn't matter who was there. Paul had been lucky enough to score some Thai weed from some math club guys who doubled as drug dealers. He had just smoked it.

One problem he had was that drugs had sort of stopped working for him. When he had stuffed his head for the first time, he had felt his teen death sentence lift temporarily. He had felt the kindness of inanimate objects, the kindness of trees, the kindness of old dormitories. He had found brilliant comedy in the connections between things. He had talked to girls and told them that he didn't want to go home, he didn't want to go home, he couldn't talk to anybody, he couldn't talk, oh, he didn't want to graduate,
ever
, and these girls had cupped his forehead with their palms and held him tight.

But lately these drugs had not been working. Lately, nothing made it through his paraffin shell. His skin crawled. And that night, Tuesday, after smoking the Thai stick, no matter where he looked he saw red dots. The screen was all red dots, shifting patterns of red dots. Like a pestilence of ladybugs. Rudolph made no sense at all. The story of Rudolph was menacing. In Rudolph's ascendance to lead reindeer, Paul sensed the machinations of thought control and government intrusion. He kept coming out of his hallucination to find the abominable snowman threatening the town. He had tried to cheer himself up by singing along with “Silver and Gold,” but it didn't do the trick.

—Hood, someone said. Hood, something wrong?

—Don't interrupt. Concentrating.

Or maybe he was feigning romantic transportation. Suddenly. Because the Bear, Carla Bear, not only a fan of Rudolph and his cousin Frosty the Snowman, but the kind of girl who could quote from
Miracle on 34th Street
and dance along with the Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation of
The Nutcracker
, was sitting next to him. And yes, he realized that the Bear was trying to calm him down. Carla Bear, one of the intrepid first women of St. Pete's. She had enrolled as a third-former in 1971, the first year of coeducation. She was leaning against him on the gray synthetic banquette and comforting him. And during a sequence in which Rudolph was being ridiculed by the other reindeer, or was it later, he encircled her in his arms. It overcame him. He yielded.

—It's okay, kiddo, she said. It's okay.

She had a big maternal heart.

—I hate Thanksgiving, too, kiddo, she said. Who wouldn't? Why would you want to go home? On the other hand, staying here isn't so great either, y'know?

And Paul was sure she was telling the truth. St. Pete's was where the affluent families of the East unloaded their heirs, where they penned them until college. The Bear knew, because, he had heard, her own mother, her single mother, was ill. Dying. Tumors. Cancer of some kind. There were kids at St. Pete's whose parents would be removed from this very Thanksgiving table to have their stomachs pumped of sleeping pills. Whose siblings had hanged themselves or gassed themselves or who had driven expensive cars into the ocean. There were kids here whose only relative was a trust-fund officer. These were kids from devastated families. Devastated and wealthy.

—Shut up, someone said.

Paul couldn't hear the program. He had his arms around Carla. A little elf cheerfully rode a Norelco cordless razor across a snow-covered landscape. Over a mogul, into the air. Paul wanted this embrace to work magic. He was dimly aware that the common room was full of writhing embraces. He was seized with laughter. Something wasn't working.

So Paul put his hand inside the Bear's pink button-down shirt and felt the lace margins of her brassiere. There was an overpowering gentleness in the space close to a woman's heart. He was drawn to it, but at that moment he couldn't possibly say why. Carla the Bear neither encouraged nor denied. In the next stillness, during the next commercial break, he let his hand stray even further, to her breast—small, serene, and comforting. Not sexy so much as reassuring. She clamped her hand around his wrist. She restored it to his lap. All around the room—the room swimming in red dots—girls were clamping their hands on the wrists of boys. The whole thing messed with his high. His eyes were occluded by irritations.

—I know, kiddo, the Bear was saying, shoving his hand back down into his lap. I know, I know.

So he did the only sensible thing. He fled the common room. He waited for the drug, and for his shame, to pass. He fled.

That story was connected to this one just as events were linked in the world of Marvel Comics—where
The Sub-Mariner
#67 was folded between two panels in
F.F
. #140, which itself contained information primarily available in
F.F.
annual #6. This imaginary world and its inhabitants coexisted with the so-called real inhabitants of the so-called real world in just the way the dead saints of antiquity were supposed to be frolicking around him—right on this platform at the Stamford Conrail station. In the world of Marvel, his parents were off exposing the malfeasance of a local political figure whose daughter was the girl Paul would one day marry, while his sister, meanwhile, was seducing an art collector and amateur nuclear physicist who would one day be Paul's employer. This physicist just happened to be a part-time Balkan spy raised from the dead who was working on the
Apollo-Soyez
mission and carrying out, on the side, a high-level conspiracy to destroy Benjamin Hood's business. All these things were happening at once, simultaneously. In the world of Marvel, Carla Bear might show up on the train, in the seat next to him, to say that she had always loved him. The train would then be attacked by hordes of spear-bearing Connecticut Indians. Or this train would lead into the main action of
Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer
. Where Paul would engage in hand-to-hand combat with the abominable snowman, until Richard Nixon appeared, in person, to plead for peace, as he had done in
F.F
. #106.

Paul's dad hated comic books, of course. The idea that hard-earned Schackley and Schwimmer dollars might trickle down into the hands of the Marvel Comics Group needled him. Maybe it was because he and Ben Grimm were too much alike. Neither of them wanted to be reminded of it. But it wasn't only the comics that his father disliked. He disliked Paul's helmet of long, wavy hair, and his loneliness, and his lack of athletic prowess. Radio club and chorus and recreational tennis failed to impress Paul's dad.

So Paul had given up trying. He hung out with the stoners. Paul was a garbage head! A loser, as they were called among stoners. Paul bought oregano and thought it was good shit. He borrowed nutmeg from a master at school, hoping to catch its buzz. He had smoked a Quaalude; he had overdosed on cold pills. Paul Hood, eater of morning glory seeds. Decipherer of obscure lyrics. He and his roommate had parakeets named Aragorn and Galadriel. He had pored over
The Chronicles of Narnia
and the pronouncements of Michael Valentine Smith. He had black-light posters and tapestries and he burned incense and wore wire-frame glasses and played military strategy games. He managed to keep one shirttail untucked at all times. His tweed jackets and khakis looked as though he had slept in them. He wore them again today. Top-Siders without socks. His shirttail stirred in the breeze, like a flag from the nation of the feckless and affluent.
There was a rush along the Fulham Road!

Stamford was a vast, flat expanse below I-95, below the train station. The public-housing projects, a number of circular buildings over to the left there, languished disconsolately on the skyline. Beyond them rose Stamford's lone office tower. It was a gleaming rocket, sort of like the Fantastic Four's pogo plane in its sleek design. Or sort of like the Baxter Building. He could easily imagine them taking off from this impressive launchpad to battle Dr. Doom or Blaastar.

—Flame on, Paul said.

When the train arrived, he took up residence in one of the four-seaters, with his feet propped up across. There was the usual fracas when he realized again that he hadn't availed himself of the ticket window in Stamford. The conductor invoked a surcharge.

—Begging your pardon, Charles, Paul said.

The conductor stared blankly at him.

—The fault's all mine, sir. May I please purchase my ticket to Grand Central at the higher price?

Then he was thinking about school again. The Kittredge Cult—that was the name they had been given at St. Pete's. He and his friends. They were Cultists. They had all opted to hide out in the dormitory of that name, one otherwise considered cheap, modern, and lifeless. For two years now, they had all lived there. What they had in common was that they were undistinguished. Paul could boast nonparticipation in any varsity sport. And he wasn't a rock-and-roll musician or yearbook photographer like some nonathletes. And he was unattractive. And he hadn't—unlike many of his fellow students—attended Greenwich Country Day or New Canaan Country Day or any of the other Country Days. The Cult was populated with just this sort of lost soul. The rest of the student body knew one another from summers on Nantucket or in Camden, or from tennis camp, or else they were related, or they were children of trustees or legacies or other prominent alumni. The Kittredge Cult was the remainder.

To them, adolescence was nearly fatal. Surprise. To survive a sober afternoon was heroic. Only a state of witless inebriation was really sensible. The best of life was intoxication. The promise of liberated sexuality, dangled before others of their age group, completely eluded Paul and his friends. They whacked off and got caught. They got stoned, and drank, and whacked off. They tortured freshmen, re-inflicting their frustration on these new kids, javelining them with cross-country ski poles. Then they stole five minutes to jerk off a second time.

The Cult's precise origin was unknown. It included women, too. Not only Carla the Bear, but Christina Whitman and her roommate, Debby Vartagnan. Debby had these episodes in which she would permit guys from Kittredge, whom she usually loved only in a platonic fashion, to lie with her on a Saturday night, in violation of major school rules, and to touch her unnaturally large breasts. Each victim would then be marked with a number of unmistakable welts on his neck. Paul hadn't yet had his turn, but he had seen Hal Frost, another Cultist, come back from one of these encounters at first elated—he was going to be the first one to stain her blankets! to shower with her! to meet her parents!—and then ashamed. In the days afterward, Debby Vartagnan wouldn't speak to Frost. Where was the free love in this? Where was the revolution?

The size of the Cult was shifting, as was its group identity. Francis Chamberlain Davenport IV, Paul's closest friend, was a founding member, as was Hal Frost. And there were Christina and Debby and Penny Belvedere and Johnny Wilde and Mike Russell and a host of secondary characters. Sometimes they all got along. Sometimes they could rest assured that the difficult moments of the day—the moment, for example, when each of them entered the dining hall unaccompanied and was subjected to its system of gazes and ratings—they had company. This company was worth the anxious apartness it also fostered in them. The Cult comforted, Paul Hood thought, as the train passed through Greenwich. The Cult was a tonic and a comfort.

But one thing the Kittredge Cult could not do was instruct about love. They were all orphans this way, from broken homes. They knew shit about love. Paul had
gone out
, in St. Pete's parlance, with Eileen Becker in fourth form, but late in the spring she began seeing, instead, his roommate, Stan Sinclair. A period followed in which Paul frequently disturbed them in his dorm room—the two of them pretending to be asleep, or Eileen clutching a rumpled frock around her. Hood struck back with a few crushes that didn't last more than a week. He struck back by being alone.