The Ice Storm (11 page)

Then one night he persuaded Eileen into an empty reading room. In the sciences building. He had preyed upon her confused notions of fidelity.
I can't eat since you started up with Sinclair
, he said.
I'm all cut up inside
. Which was misleading, since basically he felt that way all the time. Paul knelt at her waist, her jeans and panties in a tangle around her sneakers—Tretorns with pink stripes—and held her vagina close to his face. She parted her legs, standing over him, lowered herself down until they touched this way. He got the tip of his tongue inside her. So briefly it was almost certainly a dream. And though this was as far as she would go, further than she wanted to, she had whispered one thing, shivered and whispered it, before going back to Stan Sinclair.
Paul Hood
, she had said,
I know what you're gonna be good at one day
.

The train roared through Pelham. Alongside, on the highway, cars were backed up in either direction. The headlights, the streetlights, were a forlorn effort in the sleet and snow.

Paul Hood had more ideas about the Wankel rotary engine than he did about love. But he was not dumb. Though Testors model glue in the bottom of a paper bag was his preferred companion, though he had once soaked his penis in milk in an effort to get his housemaster's cat to have congress with him—her tongue was like sandpaper—he knew the name of what he was missing. He had gotten his hand down the waist of Jeannie McFarlane's pants to feel the tuft of what she concealed there, and he had kissed a variety of girls for durations short and long, and he had read about blow jobs and sixty-nine, orgies, bisexuality, mutual masturbation, transvestism, ménage à trois, anal sex, fetishism, and even fist-fucking. He had perused Davenport's dog-eared copy of the
Kama Sutra
; he knew what love was. He was going to pursue this education. He didn't want to be as sad as his parents.

So he was on the train, on his way to meet Libbets Casey, a girl from school, who, unlike his friends from the Cult, unlike Carla Bear, say, was a fine conversationalist, who did charity work with the St. Pete's Missionary Society, and whose parents left her entirely unsupervised. Paul was infatuated. It had come over him suddenly. The Bear was just someone he liked; Debby Vartagnan was just someone he liked. He wanted Libbets, a girl who wore a mink coat with blue jeans. He thought about her day and night; he wrote her name into the stories he composed for English class; he dedicated songs to her on his radio show. This had gone on for days.

For two years now, he had spent virtually every afternoon with Davenport and Frost and Brendan Gilford. Out in the woods getting high. He breathed the same room freshener they breathed (Ozium); he had borrowed their records and loaned them his own. They all knew how to play the same Emerson, Lake and Palmer song on guitar. They knew the same jokes and disliked the same masters. They all volunteered for dish duty at the same time.

But he knew it was coming to an end, that the loose association that other people called the Cult was just something you had at one time in your life. In September, when Davenport had declared himself
King of the Cult
at his birthday party—he was on bounds at the time, unable to receive visitors in his room, for breaking curfew—the whole thing began to sour. And it had just been a joke anyway. A joke to make feeling like a loser tolerable. Soon everybody was giving themselves titles. It was just like the Fantastic Four. It was all relationships and politics and power.

The Conrail riders observed an unnatural calm. They were stretched out across the three-seaters with their luggage strewn carelessly around them. Paul always left things behind: watches, magazines, umbrellas. He borrowed articles and lost them. So he clutched
F.F
. #141, like it was a religious scroll or high-court decision, along with the November issue of
Creem
. And when the train rumbled down into the tunnel at 97th Street, and into the terminal, and when it disgorged its passengers with a sigh of hydraulic brakes, he was grateful to be a lone traveler, unencumbered with possessions or obligations.

Grand Central Terminal was deserted. The Kodak sign featured a happy, white family celebrating around a Christmas tree. As Paul had been instructed to do since he was a little boy, he found a spot against the wall and looked up at the stars on the ceiling. Sunk in dust and grime, the hulking simplicity of the constellations moved him. They were the imaginative work of another time. They were the superheroes of the past.

On the floor of the terminal, in the vast open spaces—bereft of the usual commuters—a platoon of men with blank faces and the cheapest spectacles sold books and records about meditation to the unsuspecting. Paul moved through them like a warrior.

Libbets Casey. Paul's destination. Deep in that stronghold of the silent majority, the Upper East Side. Her dad didn't have a job. He didn't need one. At an office in midtown, which he paid for himself, he occasionally wielded a gold letter opener and moved around lunch appointments and tennis dates with other professional board members and consultants. Libbets wouldn't have to work either. True idleness—ski-instructing, for example—was frowned upon in her family, but there was no need to hazard an office job. Generations of Caseys had pursued art collecting. They had donated a great number of cubist works, selected by Libbets's savvy grandmother, to the Museum of Modern Art. The Caseys had also established the reputations of some nineteenth-century American painters—Eakins, Childe Hassam. Collecting was a more than adequate vocation. As were any of the arts-related pastimes. Her mother was a docent at the Metropolitan Museum, and her various older sisters and brothers, all of them out in the world now, were art historians and gallery owners. As long as Libbets kept painting, she was in good shape.

The doormen at 930 Park let Paul up without buzzing. He suspected that they, too, had enjoyed her company for a joint or a beer. Libbets was everybody's friend. Her comportment was flawless. She knew the kids who hung out in the Central Park band shell; she knew Adam Purple, the guy who shoveled horse shit in the park for his garden downtown; she knew David Cassidy, whose father lived in the building. The doormen at 930 had long hair and shifty smiles, the smiles of men uncomfortable with the way their fetching-and-carrying jobs stretched out in front of them. These countercultural doormen knew the difference between their station and Libbets's, and they were ready for the first sign of condescension, just as they cherished the notion, like Libbets did, that the rich were just people, too. They could all share some dope. It was cool.

So one of the doormen asked Paul if there was a party.

Paul shook his head, mumbled.

He skidded out of that scrape and into the next one. The elevator opened right into the Caseys' foyer. They had the entire fourth floor of 930 Park. Paul set his blazer on a chair in the front hall. His heart raced with the recollection of Libbets's peasant dresses, with the smell of the skin lotion she used, with the lopsided way she smiled. Except for the dim stutter of the television down the hall, there was an austere stillness to the premises. The foyer was carpeted with antique Orientals and decorated with pre-Columbian urns and with small American impressionist paintings by artists recognizable from any day-camp art-appreciation course. The elevator slid shut behind him. Libbets called out cheerfully.

She came running out of the den. She slid, in stocking feet, across a bare strip of parquet.

—Excellent, she said. We were waiting!

We? We
were waiting? The revelation of that horrible plural struck Paul like a blow in the solar plexus.
We?
And yet he followed his hostess. Sure enough, in the den, he found Francis Chamberlain Davenport IV, cleaning an ounce of dope on an open copy of
Six Crises
by Richard M. Nixon.

All hope drained from Paul.

—You oughta read this, Hood, Davenport said distractedly. All you need to know about the travails of life. Myself, I was just checking out about Alger Hiss and Checkers.

—You're gonna leave the seeds in there? Paul said. In the binding like that?

—All will be revealed, baby. When the student is ready, the master will appear.

Libbets circulated nervously around the living room. Paul wondered if the two of them, Libbets and Davenport, had already collaborated in some afternoon sexual experiment. Even Libbets, in her secure and privately educated skull must have known how Davenport fucked him up.

—Flame on, he said.

—Huh? Libbets said.

—Awesome sleet and rain, Paul said. Far out. Let's do some reef. Neither sleet nor rain will stay this courier. What's on the idiot box?

—
Lost in Space
, Libbets said.
Star Trek
at seven.

—Moisture, moisture, Davenport said from his station. Moooiiiistuuuuure.

It was from this episode, this
Lost in Space
episode.

—Yeah, yeah, Paul said. Or remember that one where there were the guys with glittering, plastic bowlers. Zachary Smith was …

Davenport rolled a joint as carefully as if it were bomb disposal.

—Howdy, there, he said. You, young knight. Can you check on the mead? Can you sally forth and secure us some more mead?

—In the pantry, Libbets said. She pointed.

Paul trudged disconsolately out into the foyer, past the living room where a portrait of the Caseys—Libbets was the youngest of the six, seated in her father's lap—occupied most of a wall. He stood in the dark.

—No, that way, Libbets said, leaning out into the hall, slumped against the doorjamb. Take a right, through there.

—Just looking, Paul said. Got my “just looking” button on.

The pantry was long, empty, spotless. The banality of this kind of housekeeping made Paul uncomfortable. The place begged for the release of cockroaches or lab rats. It begged for finger-painted floors, tie-dyed curtains, for graffiti and noise pollution.

Paul was a third term, an unwelcome geometrical element. Davenport hadn't even greeted him. And supernumerary was a feeling he knew as well as he knew that parched baby blue of Connecticut summer skies. Blundering in the kitchen, he felt sure that it would always be this way, this blunt little diorama of a life with its cessation of miracles would never change—except that it would get worse. Davenport wasn't satisfied with his own charm. He wanted to inhabit his friends, to neutralize them. He wanted Paul's socks and Paul's records and Paul's homework assignments and even Paul's nuclear family with its 2.2 children and its five basic food groups and its pristine genetics. They were the best of friends, Davenport and Paul. This was what friendship was like.

Paul formulated his plan. He removed the cold six-pack of Heinekens from the refrigerator. He trudged out of the kitchen.

—Frankie opens them with his teeth, Libbets giggled, back in the library. This wasn't news. It was part of Davenport's arsenal of entertainments. Paul had tried the same trick on a couple of occasions, with painful results. He had settled for opening beers with house keys, which involved no bodily harm. Davenport, after licking the second joint and setting it aside, used his rear molars on a Heineken.

—Hell on the fillings, Charles.

He opened the other two, passed them around, and then lit a joint.

—Everything's gonna freeze over, Davenport said. Big freeze.

—Yeah, Paulie, Libbets said, are you going to get home okay?

They explained about the predicted sudden drop in temperature, the predicted freezing of road surfaces, the devastation—you wouldn't be able to get a cab, the airports would close down, everything would have to be delivered. All the food. All the health and beauty aids. Then Libbets put on an Allman Brothers tape—8-track, television on with the sound down—and they talked about Duane and the crash.

They drank. They smoked pot. Quickly. As though it were an obligation somehow.

No matter how many times the weather repeated its four symphonic movements, the specifics of rainfall and wind direction and velocity and barometric pressure seemed new to Paul. The false logic of marijuana was dawning in him.
Six Crises
, for example, absorbed his complete attention. He gulped for air: the enormity of this Nixonian schema! Urgently, Paul tried to make the various reversals of his life—his grandparents' deaths, his stolen bicycles, his father's drinking, his failure to make junior varsity soccer at St. Pete's, the time in first grade that his mother made him wear tights in the East School Xmas pageant—add up to six crises. In a flash of specious enlightenment, he saw that every life could fit into this ingenious brilliant systematization. Libbets's life. Davenport's life. Daisy Chain's life, even. Then Paul started thinking about Watergate, a
seventh crisis
.

—Holy shit, he said.

—How long have we been sitting here? Libbets said. I'm so stoned.

—Seven minutes, Davenport said. Who knows?

—How much beer is left? Paul said.

Davenport reached over to where Paul was sitting. He poked him in the chest.

—How the hell do we know? You're in charge of the kitchen, cowboy.

They all laughed. HA! HA! HA! HA! Paul went to fetch still more beers, and while he was there he tried to decide whether or not Davenport and Libbets were really trying to get rid of him. The evidence mounted. It was in their facial expressions. They were using some kind of facial code. Paul remembered that he'd had the same thought last time he was in the kitchen. His mind couldn't light on anything long enough to reason it out. His mind was a slippery, reptilian thing. How much time had passed?

The next beers went more quickly than the first. Paul was careful to permit Davenport to have more than his share. Libbets wasn't counting. She was just happy to be there.

Then Paul excused himself.

The plan was happening at some lower level of cognition. It was like collective unconscious or something. Next thing he knew: Mr. and Mrs. Casey had decorated their master bath in a style according to their age and means. Lavender shell soaps—they were everywhere, no home without them—occupied a china soap dish. Floral wallpaper, also flecked with lavender, adorned the walls. The soap and the wallpaper and the tissue paper and the hand towels matched. The medicine cabinet yielded precisely the kind of paydirt he had been hoping for. Besides some Preparation H and some perfumed douches, there were several prescriptions: phenobarbital, Valium, Seconal, and an old one, paregoric.