The Ice Storm (13 page)

Dorothy Halford overtook them in the foyer. With a free hand, she waved a little celery canoe at them. It was loaded down with an aqua-colored dip. Dot wore a blue-and-gray crocheted sweater over a thin crepe de chine blouse, pants of gray flannel, black velvet beret. No makeup. She was petite; there was something Katharine Ross–cherubic, unthreatening, wholesome about her. She appeared both willing and unsullied in the brute arena of erotic love. She seemed to take no notice of how her guests, the Hoods, were turned out, and she couldn't have seen the traces of a recent disagreement in their eager hellos.

—Ben, Elena! Wonderful! wonderful. So wonderful to see you.

She swallowed the last of the celery canoe. With an adolescent sexual pout, Dot kissed the air near Ben's ear and crushed Elena in a manic hug. Then she seized the simple, white salad bowl that had been sitting on the table in the front hall. It was sinister in its simplicity. She thrust it at them.

—Would you care to play?

The enormity of the bowl took a moment to dawn on Ben. At first, he thought it was a joke, a joke with a visual gag—Did you hear the one about Spiro Agnew's accountant? HA! HA! HA! HA! What did Mary Jo Kopechne's mom say to Jack Ruby? HA! HA! HA! HA!—at which he might laugh agreeably without any comprehension of the punch line. But when he examined the contents of the bowl, he understood. Swimming there like uncataloged water bugs were a dozen or more sets of house keys. They chimed agreeably as Dorothy shifted herself from one pump to the other, and their sundry key rings—a yellow slab of plastic with the word
MOM
embossed on it in red, a Caucasian troll doll with magenta hair, a miniature can of Löwenbraü beer—caught the light like flea-market prizes. Dorothy examined Ben and Elena—Ben could feel this. She watched their faces set the way a dentist searches for the repressed shudder of discomfort.

—Strictly volunteer, of course. You can put your coats right in the library if you like.

—Oh, damn, Elena said, smiling herself. Oh, I've left the—

—You've—

—In the car, Elena said.

—Oh, yeah, Ben said. Yeah, we'll be right back. Dot.

Just as soon as the Hoods had arrived, they were gone. Cramped in the front seat of the Firebird, windshield fogged, defroster on high, in silence. Parked in the driveway. Surrounded by the wheels of the neighborhood—Cadillac Eldorados, BMW 2002s, and then an AMC Matador, a Plymouth Duster. Beetles, Beetles, and more Beetles, that design created with slave labor. Cars creeping into the Halfords' turnaround and then thinking better of it, thinking better of getting stuck in the bad weather to come, creeping out through the slush and onto Valley Road to park up on the embankment. The low chortle of expensive engines idling lazily.

A little history. The key party came into existence several years before, in a more freewheeling environment. This is one hypothesis. It came of age with hippie erotica and bohemian orgies in cramped apartments owned by poorly groomed professors. Or among the dangerously promiscuous, those who didn't distinguish between the sexes or who slipped into the tepid waters of dimly lit love grottoes and swamps. But like so many reasonable ideas that seem less bright in the harsh illumination of general distribution, it was soon exported to this land of tidy shrubs and the Junior League.

Maybe the key party first touched suburban ground on Long Island, on the bay side; it might have landed in New Jersey, in Bernardsville or Princeton; or it might have emerged in Westchester, or even as far north as the Boston suburbs. Or maybe even California, where lax-moraled filmmakers and artists lived contiguously with taxpayers and families. Whatever its true origin, or its distribution (its Poisson Distribution), west to east, south to north, it undeniably appeared in Fairfield County in the early seventies.

The rules were appallingly simple. The men tossed their house keys into a convenient container—or hung them on pegs or spread them like a buffet on the front table or on the master bed—and the women, at evening's end, selected a set at random. And then the party retired to taste novelty. Sometimes the men looked on as the women selected—leering, suggestive, hopeful, disappointed, or despairing; sometimes the women wore blindfolds fashioned from metaphorically rich garments, black silk stockings, for example; sometimes, the proceedings took place with a joyless resolve, as if the participants were merely plugged into a circuitry of compulsion.

In New Canaan, word had come of the key parties long before the first had been thrown. Local marriages awaited key parties the way a smart boy, already having pored over the dictionary definition of masturbation, awaits the day when he will understand it. The first one, thrown by some younger, unhappier residents over in the West School district, on Ponus Ridge, was viewed publicly with contempt but privately with much interest. And this contradictory posturing became the rule. At the Armitage party, held in the summer of 1972, partners at competing law firms bedded one another's wives, and women who were best of friends compared notes on the prowess and endowment of local men.

The ramifications of these first parties took some time to emerge. Love had woven its tapestry, and the Armitages, the Sawyers, the Steeles, the Boyles, the Gormans, the Jacobsens, the Hamiltons, the Gadds, the Earles, the Fullers, the Buckleys, the Regans, not to mention the Bolands, the Conrads, the Millers, and others, had followed its complex thread. But the revelations of this inquiry weren't so surprising. No one returned with tales of dark new terrains—anal sex or urolagnia or masochism or coprophagy; in fact, the Armitage's couples coupled in the way they always had. But they walked with a new jauntiness. For a day or two. Their hearts twittered with novelty.

Then silence took hold of the participants. Whispers, that fall, at cocktail parties or on the paddle-tennis courts, spoke of unsubstantiated liaisons between those whose night of passion was intended to be singular, unique, unrepeatable. Annie Buckley told Maria Smith who told Maura O'Brien who told her husband, Phil O'Brien, the urologist, who told Steve Buckley in the very midst of percussing Buckley's enlarged prostate, who told his wife, Annie, who knew already. And as this information circulated—according to statistical order and disorder, according to summation, transition, and reciprocal induction—it became painful, injurious. It became compulsive. You couldn't avoid talking about it and yet you did nonetheless. Just as the key parties themselves persisted.

How could Benjamin and Elena have been so stupid? They ought to have known. Invitations usually didn't advertise a key party, but somehow the word usually got out. You had to be in the food chain to know, but then that was the premise of an invitation, right? The Hoods hadn't attended any of the key parties, but not because they had discussed it. No, they hadn't been to a key party because they hadn't been invited.

Anyway, Benjamin thought, Elena was no swinger.

Hood worried again about his ascot. In the half-defogged rearview mirror he unknotted the thing from his neck and breathed a sigh of relief.

—This just isn't the best moment for this, Elena said.

He did his best to avoid her distress. Trying to repair the situation would only be selfish. With his handkerchief he began to clean the window on the driver's side.

—It'll just streak, she said.

—I know. I know that, Hood said. Well, if we'd understood we could have fabricated an excuse. Plenty of movies to see. There's a little thing of tissues in there.

She opened the glove compartment.

—Well? she said.

He took in the cool glow of her pale, pale eyes. She had left her glasses at home. Sometime in the midst of that uncomfortable discussion back at the house she had left off her glasses. (For a time she had worn contact lenses, which clogged with pollution whenever she wore them, or which would pop out, pop like a fierce tear from her eye and drift to the floor, so that the two of them would fall into a prayerful attitude and comb the rugs and floors at parties.)

—I think we're here and we don't have to stay—we ought to simply put in an appearance and then we can head home.

He knew this wasn't her feeling.

—Darn it, Ben—

—I'm not staying at this party so that I can go home with someone else's wife, darling. Let's just talk about it. That's not why we're here. Right? We're simply being neighbors here, and I think we should do just that, and then we can go.

—You're going to—

—I'm
not
.

—You have some
marker
, that's what I think, if you want to know the truth. You have some marker and you're going to put it on the house keys so that Janey can find them and then when I get back to the house I'll find the two of you in there and Wendy'll be able to hear you and Paul will be back and he'll hear you and I'll catch you, that's what I think. She'll be moaning and swearing, banging against the wall and I'll catch you—

Elena smiled faintly when she was distressed—he attributed this to the way things went during her childhood—and she was smiling now. In a way, it was a diabolical smile, the smile of a conspirator or politician, just as she was rubbing her eyes. Her nose was red.

—Elena, he said.

And he offered to take her hands.

—It's not like you think, he said. It's not a big plot, honey. Honestly. Honestly. I don't know if you want to go over this now, but it's just something that comes over me. I don't feel good about myself. I don't feel good about it at all. I know that I've done what I didn't want to do, and I don't know why. So I'm not going to do it tonight, Elena. That's my solemn … that's my promise.

—Well, I'm really pleased to hear a confession, she said. I'm happy about that.

He said nothing. Switched the heat from defrost to ordinary heat. It roared from the vents in the dashboard.

—You imagine you're protecting me from some wicked ways of the world, but you're not protecting me, Elena said. I don't need your protection, you know. I don't.

—Oh, you're just getting wound up to get wound up.

—Thanks for the diagnosis, Ben. Living so close to the … to Silver Meadow, that's opened you up. You're very open tonight. You're at some magnanimous spot. I'm not an earnings model. And I'm not a subject for your casual sort of analysis. So let's go to this fiasco if that's what you want to do. Let's just go on in. I'd rather talk to anyone else but you.

And she threw open the door of the Firebird and gathered the Dubarry raincoat—$85 with liner, 65 percent dacron and 35 percent cotton—around her. She gave the door a good heave—with American cars it needed that—and left him there.

Hood reopened the glove compartment and fumbled around for the flask. With a brisk, purposeful negligence, he hoisted it in his wife's honor.

His capacity for drinking surprised even him, but it paled in the face of his capacity for self-deception. His denial was significant enough to suppress even any notion of denial. He concealed in himself all notions of motive. So as he lifted the pewter flask again—warm from its proximity to the heating vents on the dash—any questions about the key party or its farcical possibilities failed to occur to him. Where his motives were concerned Hood was like a blind man without a cane. He was night diving. He was flying without instruments. He was going to this party.

When he followed Elena in, minutes later, it was with the elation of stiff drink. Thus elated, he elbowed past the Sawyers—gabbing with Dot Halford in the doorway—and worked his way into the conversation. He wanted to get to the
bowl
.

—More than pleased to be part of the proceedings, he mumbled. And then he ceremoniously tossed his keys to Dot—a jaunty little toss—as though she were the parking flunky for the evening, and she, startled, angled under them with the bowl. For a moment she was frozen, with her carefully lipsticked mouth open wide, and then she made the catch. The keys were nestled among their brethren. The sound of keys seemed to follow. Dot frowned. The Sawyers said nothing.

This giddy feeling evaporated almost immediately. In the foyer, surrounded by couples he hadn't met, couples giggling nervously or ribaldly about the storm, the bowl, the party, their good luck, in the foyer, Hood ran into George Clair. From the office. Benjamin was on his way to the bar to get another drink, though he felt already that words were dissolving on his tongue, that the beginnings of WASP pronunciation were upon him—people always felt it was an ethnic thing. Then Clair appeared, in his bow tie and navy blue blazer. Elena was vanishing deep into the pantry of the Halfords' house and Benjamin could feel himself stretch out toward her, to apologize again, but Clair was in his way. A faint fecal odor perfumed George always.

The house of Shackley and Schwimmer had been at one time the most maverick and creative of the brokerage operations on the street. This was circa the Summer of Love. Though Hood hadn't sampled the psychedelic cafeteria of that time, he often felt that he had come close—as close as those subordinates who smoked joints and finger-painted at Trinity Church at lunchtimes, who knew the unemployed musicians who played there, who could read the hidden messages in rock-and-roll album sleeves. Even Shackley and Schwimmer themselves had been known to turn up at Trinity now and then. They also went to parties to benefit the Black Panther Defense Fund. They opposed the Vietnam conflict. They were fellow travelers.

Shackley and Schwimmer were Harvard-educated men who wore beards and studied like the Orthodox of their faith, though they were as secular as most of their Protestant counterparts. Sometimes they eschewed ties entirely or wore beat-up tweed jackets that must have been left over from their school days. Sometimes they ate at delicatessens and brought sandwiches back for the girls at the switchboard.

What did they have going for them? They were smarter then everyone else. Shackley and Schwimmer's reputation rested on this simple arrogance. Prior to S&S, the world of brokerage had been a world of congeniality and fraternity. Guys who had gone to the same boarding schools and who belonged to the same country clubs or squash clubs doing business with one another. This fraternity was no guarantee of business acumen. Shackley and Schwimmer confronted old-boy business with academic disdain and with statistics—debt, assets, amortization, dividends, quarterly earnings figures. A little analysis, a few hot tips. The old brokerage houses weren't prepared for it, and they didn't like it. About this time Shackley himself devised an advertising campaign, perfected by one of the expensive Madison Avenue advertising firms, in which individual members of the Shackley and Schwimmer team were introduced in full-page advertisements. A huge full-face photograph, retouched, with copy beneath.