The Ice Storm (14 page)

Hood remembered his own, from 1969, with both pride and embarrassment. “Benjamin Paul Hood, Dartmouth College, '57. First Boston, '58–'65. Shackley and Schwimmer, '65–. Specialty: Media and Entertainment Businesses. Outlook: Bullish.” And then the company's bold proclamation beneath.
Shackley and Schwimmer
—
The Conventional Wisdom Is Wrong
.

In the days following the advertisement, no one in the supermarket or at the country club mentioned it at all. It was as if the advertisement had fallen out of the paper altogether. As if its page had been excised or printed badly. No one mentioned it. Well, maybe the barber mentioned it, and the cleaning woman, but no one else. Hood wondered if it was the picture, of course. They had tried to whip his mottled, puffy features into an inoffensive and jolly paste. His beady eyes protruded from this pudding like some garnish, like unwanted raisins. They had clamped him into a tight shirt: he felt he would gag or asphyxiate during the photo session. And yet, his neck hung over that tightened collar, that tightened tie knot, like a precarious rock formation. Even Elena offered no encouragement about the advertisement.

With the picture began the problems at the office. George Clair arrived not long after, in 1969, at the age of twenty-four. Harvard B.A. and M.B.A. Though he arrived at the office unaware of the so-called Woodstock generation and the Summer of Love, Clair grew his hair when he arrived at Shackley and Schwimmer. He purchased a tweed jacket with patches already sewn on the elbows.

Clair gave new meaning to the idea of borrowed culture. He was full of clichés about Latin American debt and the ridiculousness of the Wage-Price Freeze, but he was more concerned with appropriating certain simplistic messages about film, music, and sports, and transporting them into the offices of his superiors.
Ya gotta believe!
Clair had remarked volubly throughout the autumn as the Mets scrambled for the pennant.
Ya gotta believe!
he would tell the secretary whose car had been towed.
Ya gotta believe!
he would say affably to Shackley about that weekend's yacht club race or to Schwimmer about Nixon's role in the conspiracy or the cover-up.

And there had been
Last Tango in Paris. Most erotic film ever made
, Clair had said to his secretary with that earnest and sheepish expression.
Most erotic film
, he said, while cleaning an ear with his pinkie. Then he would go down the hall to remind one of the institutional sales representatives.—Shachter, he would say, have you see
Last Tango?
What about that butter, huh? That crumbly butter? Most erotic film ever made! Shachter would look up from the phone, wave, and then shout it into the phone at the Fireman's Fund.—Clair says see
Last Tango
. Most erotic film ever.

Hood began to be isolated within Shackley and Schwimmer not long after Clair arrived. His assessments of things, of upcoming trends—suddenly they just didn't want to hear from him at sales meetings. The salesmen began to report late on his revisions of quarterly figures, or they would double-check behind his back. Or they would ask who his sources were. As if he had to be joking. This was a long, slow, incremental process of isolation. Soon Shackley himself took up the issue. Hood was called into his office to explain why he hadn't correctly identified the recent profit Gulf + Western was seeing, the profit as a result of
Billy Jack
.

—Isn't this a relevant earnings uptick? Shackley said. Isn't this altering their figures in a way we ought to be expecting?

Billy Jack? One tin soldier rides away?
No one could have predicted the eminence of this Tom Laughlin, this established antiestablishment, middle-aged hippie in the Indian hat, who eliminated his antagonists with warmed-over martial arts. No one could have anticipated it. Except, as it turned out, George Clair.

The office problems became worse during Clair's romance with
Last Tango
. Of course, Hood didn't go around talking about Bank of America or First National—Clair's specialties. Out of the blue, though, Clair loved movies. Clair was first to discuss home videotaping and Super-8 as consumer electronics items that would soon transform the entertainment business. He was first to understand the importance of tabloid point-of-purchase magazines. At the weekly research meetings, Clair was constantly leaping in to help out with the media and entertainment securities. And it wasn't that he wanted to cover entertainment stocks: he just wanted the space Benjamin Hood took up, Hood's air and water and space and pension and office. Clair's photograph was a gleaming pinup. He was a Best and Brightest male model. A Harvard M.B.A. who could play touch football and get misty-eyed over a
Saturday Evening Post
cover. By the time of Clair's ad in the
Journal
, in 1971, Hood was beginning to see implications wherever he turned. Overlooked for an important lunch, not copied on an important memo, not tipped off on a hot stock. The hypocrisy and surveillance of office politics were closing in on him. There was a positive side to all this: Hood could read annual reports in peace; he could borrow them from the firm library for weeks. He could do the crossword puzzle and correspond with his accountant. The phone never stirred in his office. He knew the trouble that lay ahead. But he hadn't told his wife, hadn't sought the counsel of his friends, hadn't considered the future. He couldn't say it out loud. He knew what was coming.

While crosshatching his face each morning with the Wilkinson double-bonded, Hood swore that he would never live life like George Clair, at the expense of others, if he ever worked again—after that pink slip turned up in his In box. He would be a benevolent supervisor, a friend and confidante to working men and women, no matter how insignificant their positions. Then he would arrive late at the office and shout down his secretary, Madeleine, for failing to make his coffee light enough.
Get your ass down there and get another cup!
He was digging his own grave and holding it like a pearl inside of him.

—Clair, George Clair, he said, overfilling his glass, plucking a single ice cube from the silver ice bucket. What a surprise.

—Benjie!

Firmly they clasped one another's hands. Clair's expression was inoffensive and slyly confused. Smile lines skirted the planes of his face.

—What the hell has you here in New Canaan?

—Well, it's the funniest thing, Benjamin. I've been talking with some investors—a little outside venture, you understand, between you and me—about a scheme to manufacture a new Styrofoam packaging. It's little S-shaped Styrofoam pieces that can help keep an item free from trauma during shipping. Really miraculous. Really remarkable. Delicate stuff, stuff that can get tossed around by the shippers, still arrives intact. It's just going nationwide, the way I see it, nationwide. Anyway, it turns out one of the principal thinkers behind the whole project is your neighbor Jim Williams. How about that!

Clair hoisted his glass a couple of inches. Benjamin was almost certain: Clair drank club soda and pretended it was gin and tonic. The blood rose in Hood's face. That Clair and Jim Williams were bedfellows now augured some consolidation of bad energy in the universe. It was evidence of an order that chilled his bones. Either a paranoid assumption about the world was correct and it was filled with plots by human souls, occasionally selfish, occasionally generous human souls—plots that they pursued compulsively, recklessly, without regard for those they might harm—or else there was a force that ordered human society, ordered even the coexistence of plots and meaninglessness, that located oil under Arab countries and dust under Israel, that parched Bangladesh and froze the Baffin Bay, that raised up Richard Nixon from Checkers to dash him at the Watergate Hotel—while he realized the largest margin of victory in a presidential election in decades.

Either way, Hood detested George Clair. Detested him. He was the truest suburban phony: without culture, without native character, who was compelled here and there only by expedience. Hood would have liked to yank tight Clair's squeaky-clean bow tie and to watch him, in the process, swell and burst.

—Well, hey, Benjamin said, isn't that a one-in-a-million coincidence? A real dreamer, Jim Williams. And the sort of guy to turn those dreams into, well, bottom-line realities.

—Darned right about that. Look here, Benj, whaddya make of this film of
The Exorcist
, you know, William Peter Blatty's novel? You think it's gonna work?

—Don't see how, Hood said. The star's a little girl. Just devil-worship stuff. I mean, maybe if the little girl was possessed by an Indian spirit, angered by the white man's occupation of his native … ancestral lands or something. No, that's not it, George. Tell you what I like right now: disaster films. And air hockey.

Hood knew what came next—the competition to excuse yourself first. Clair didn't want to talk to him any more than he wanted to talk to Clair. What they would do now, in unison—Hey, well,
great to talk
, see you Monday—was make a run at the hors d'oeuvres. Or suddenly recognize a face across the room. Whoever got out first won. So Hood was already searching the room as he spoke, distractedly. And as he came to the end of the sentence, as he spoke the words
air hockey
, he saw his mistress, Janey Williams, wife of the S-shaped Styrofoam-packaging king, across a crowded room.

—Whoa, big fella, Hood mumbled, you gotta—

Only to find that Clair had already turned away. Clair was engaged with Maura O'Brien. Probably getting some inexpensive advice about a urological condition.

Janey was in black, silk pajamas, the top opened to just below her breasts. No bra. At her cleavage, turquoise beads swayed. As she leaned down to take up her drink, she stilled the shimmering pajama top with one hand. Her earth-colored lipstick and eye shadow matched her brown stiletto heels. Her frosted-blond hair was flawlessly arranged, like a fiberglass waterfall. Hood's first sensation was of reunion, of wholeness and conjunction, like he had the rollerskate and she had the key. But the feeling soured almost immediately, because he remembered the afternoon.

Janey pretended to be occupied with a vase of flowers beside the trapeze chair—chrome and steel with a pure rubber sling—in which the Halfords' cat was curled.

He made for her like any spurned lover.

—Oh, Jeez, Benjie, she said, fingering her beads. Well, here you are.

—Damn right, but where the hell were you?

—What are you talking about?

—Don't bullshit me around, Janey. Hood was whispering, but he was caught in some tidal or astrological imperative, some mood that would not be stopped, and the words poured from him as though their syntax was
using him
to express some mood. He felt, suddenly, that he might even cry.

—Jesus Christ, I waited around for more than a half hour, in the dark, in nothing but my boxer shorts, no wait, with the light on, so anybody could have come by and seen me in the window. What's that all about? What the hell happened?

Janey sipped. She set the drink down on the table, beside the vase.

—A prior engagement overcame me.

—What do you mean? What kind of stuff is this? I mean—

—Listen, Benjamin Hood, I have obligations that precede your … from before you showed up in my life. One or two, you know, good-natured encounters, that doesn't mean I'm … I'm not just some toy for you. When I remembered some chores I wanted to get done before the party, I just did them, that's all, because I wanted to do them before I saw Jimmy. I just did them. And that's how it's going to be.

The cat lolled on the chair in front of them. Hood's face was inches from Janey's. He mumbled.

—I don't know how to take this. And what do you mean,
Jimmy?
I thought you said—

—How you take it isn't all that interesting to me, Benjamin. I'm sorry—

—I just can't believe you would be so …

The talk stalled. The two of them fell to watching other molecules of conversation cleave and sunder. They circulated. Fragments of sense came and went in the room, evanescent fragments. Sobriety was dwindling. All over the room. The New York Mets and the oil crisis, Watergate and Rod Laver and Billie Jean King, and the unacceptable new rector at the Episcopalian church—all mixed up. No calamity would organize these fragments, no moment of high gossip. Ford had ended the production of the beloved convertible in July of this year. Modular furniture, flared trousers, plaids on plaids. Noise.

Janey lit a Virginia Slims and French-inhaled it.

—Things aren't going well for me, Hood said. You know, Elena is very unhappy and the office has become a really desperate situation. Really desperate. I wish you didn't have to make things hard, Janey. I don't understand why you have to. I guess I was dumb, but I was sort of counting on you.

—I'm not
making
it anything, she said. The situation just
is
difficult. And I'll tell you this, Benjamin, your domestic … your home life is no worse or better than anyone else's. In my house, we're living separate lives. Separate floors, separate lives, separate everything. And I don't go expecting a little afternoon something-or-other to alter that. A couple of hours with you isn't going to change that. I'm not going to threaten my family, my security, just so that I can listen to your problems at the office, you know?

—But why didn't you just say so? Why couldn't we talk—

—I—

—And why did you leave the lingerie out for me?

—What lingerie? I went to the store for God's sake, to Shopwell. I had to get some things before Jimmy came back. I just remembered. Okay? Are my answers good enough? What are you, a special prosecutor or something? And what do you mean about the lingerie?

—Never mind, Hood said.

—Hey, wait just a second—

—I thought when you didn't turn up that you were hiding somewhere. I thought maybe you—