The Ice Storm (15 page)

—You what?

He began slowly, but then, as Hood re-created the details, he became a sort of erotic revenant. He gulped the last of his drink—his equilibrium was really beginning to fall away, like the first stage of an
Apollo
rocket. He reveled in the hot flashes, in the indignity of his predicament.

—I searched the house. I figured you were hiding, in a merry widow or something, in the closets, or else behind some piece of furniture. I figured you were there. I thought there was more to it than there was. So then I got to the bathroom and I saw the lingerie. I thought that it was part of a trail, a romantic trail or something, or it was a reminder of you. Something to be contemplated, you know, drunk in or something, you know? I was looking around, that's all.

—You need help, Benjamin. That was just out to dry. I was leaving things out to dry.
Delicates
. What did you
do
with my clothes?

He was flattered by the degradation of his adultery, and as he told the story he felt its shame and joy. He knew he wished to be caught, that it was always the cuckold or the betrayed who was honored by the adulterer. And he was a liar, too, an exaggerator. Hood's past lies swirled in this next moment of fiction, these past lies fluttered and squirmed in this liar's chrysalis. He was thinking about padded expense accounts and cheating on exams as he spoke:

—I took it, the garter belt, to your dresser and buried it with its compatriots, with the lacy underthings, with the slips and panties and bras and stockings.

—Jesus, you are a mess, Benjamin. You're a case history of hung-up behavior. Where's your wife?

—I don't know. She was a little upset about the, uh, bowl out front. She ran in ahead of me. Probably in the kitchen. Planning something, some covert activity in the kitchen.

He snickered desperately.

They moved over to the couch, a Stendig, designed by Ennio Chiggio and arranged in a semicircle with a big apostrophe at the end, where Hood now rested his weary feet. An earnest bunch of locals, dressed in plaid shirts and skirts and jackets, in double-knit trousers, in gray flannel, in velour and polyester, was conglomerated at the end of the couch, the system of islands. Dave Gorman, a fixture at the promiscuous events of New Canaan, was plundering the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.—the Dresden fire-bombing and Ice Nine—in an effort to impress a young and attractive woman beside him.
Welcome to the Monkey House
, he said, had been a seminal influence for him. No one on the end of the couch seemed to know what he was talking about. Gorman was in some kind of import/export business, which Hood figured meant drugs. And sure enough, as Gorman spoke he was lighting a flaccid little marijuana cigarette.

Hood had never tried the stuff though it turned up at the margins of New Canaan parties—to the consternation of the older generation, those who had been established in town for some time. But soon the joint came his way. Gorman leaned into Janey and Hood's sullen truce:

—Benjamin, give it a try, why don't you? This stuff will make some sense out of those larger questions. Promise you. Do yourself a favor.

Gorman grinned.

—Thanks for the advice, Dave, Hood said, waving the joint away affably. But then some carelessness overcame him, and he took up that tiny, aromatic cigarette and clamped it between his lips. He tugged on it, holding the smoke in his lungs, as he had seen it done on film and television.

—Good shit, he cackled, hacking and erupting with smoke as he passed it to Janey.

—Sure is good shit, Gorman said. It's opiated. I had it in my chamber for a while. I was smoking this other—

—It's what? Hood said.

—Don't fret, Benj, it's—

—Darn it, Dave.

Hood rose unsteadily, clapped his hand on the top of the modular sofa to steady himself, and stumbled, because it was nothing more than a piece of polyurethane mush, that sofa, steadied himself by grabbing hold of Janey, and then hastened to the bar, to preempt his new intoxication.

In the white noise of American conversation he picked up voices the way one discerns a particular orchestral instrument—the triangle, the viola d'amore—in the grand narrative sweep of a concerto or symphony. As he filled his drink, one name kept reappearing, like a leitmotiv. Milton Friedman. Across the room there was this extravagant praise for this economist who was violently opposed to the wage-and-price freezes of Nixon, who advocated such locally popular measures as the abolition of Social Security, the elimination of governmental aid to education, and the end of the minimum wage.

—Washington's solution to a problem is a problem, too, said a voice as Hood loaded his glass using the impressively ample ice tongs. Take the control of airfares. Friedman said this in an interview. This is how the whole thing works. If you didn't have this price fixing, airfares would be probably half of what they are now. Look at California. California has got its own airline within the state, and that's an airline that's not subject to the fare guidelines. None at all. Compare Sacramento to L.A. on Pacific Northwest with the price-fixed fares from L.A. to Reno—same distance more or less. Just look at the difference! The market prices are about
60 percent of the government's prices
—

Poor Madeline Gadd was stuck listening to this shit, and Hood was not surprised she was reapplying caramel-colored lipstick in a small compact mirror as she listened absently. Jack Moellering, the Friedman apologist, was, as he spoke, fixed raptly on the slit up the side of Madeline's harem pants.

—Supply and demand … less restriction, Moellering was saying. Less restriction.

The laissez-faire stuff was really traveling around the room. Several feet away, by the mantel, Bobby Haskell, normally a guy who concentrated on paddle tennis to the exclusion of all other forms of conversation, was proposing that unions were a kind of labor monopoly, just an antitrust problem in the arena of labor.

These Friedman arias swooped around one another like the diverging themes of a duet, until Hood began to experience the opera of economics as just that, an opera, an opera full of good stories: the chance of great or mean birth, the influx and egress of fortunes honest and swindled, the plunging and soaring of government statistics along the g- and f-clefs of official statistical graphs and indexes. Friedman's beloved money supply, new housing starts, durable goods, factory inventories, auto sales, and, of course,
Variety
's top-grossing films of the week—each had its thrill of victory, its agony of defeat. Hood heard the long, bickering synopsis of lives in recitative, the surge of fine melody in an investment success, and the elaboration of a reversal in the sudden downturn in the market. The paisley and earth colors in the room swam before his intoxicated eyes, but the music of his business, the investment business, was music to his ears. America rose and fell on the melody of New Canaan's songs of the economy. Songs sung by a Jewish economist and mimicked by WASPs who would have thought twice before playing golf with the guy.

Hood was capable of formulating one last coherent thought: they were all scattered like seeds, flying outward from the primal fist of Europe long ago. Hood circled the room alone, and no companion—not Elena, not Janey Williams, not George Clair or Dave Gorman (now slumped by himself on the modular sofa)—would salve his isolation. He was as alone as Elena, who couldn't break a silence with a stranger, as alone as some fur trapper in the first light, in the wilderness of the new continent.

Janey was gone anyway, vanished. And so was George Clair. He didn't recognize any of these people. Outside, in the dim light of outdoor lamps, snow accumulated. In the corner of the room, for a split second, Hood thought he saw Buddy Hackett.

More about television. From
Sunrise Semester
to
Love, American Style
, from
Banacek
to
The New Price Is Right
, television served as the structured time, the safe harbor for Wendy Hood. She gave the dial a spin, she let it land wherever it would, afternoons when she avoided extracurriculars—field hockey or Bible study or Super-8 Cinematography or the Quilting Club—mornings when her parents weren't up or had left early for church, evenings when, again, she was by herself.

She loved
Electric Company
and
Sesame Street
though she was too old for them, loved the hyperbole of puppets and the restless, kinetic pacing of these programs. The shape of advertisements ruled the world. Advertisements and comic books and teen fanzines. As she watched television, she gave herself back to her childhood, to some part of herself that had never passed beyond that demographic category. But she also loved reruns:
The Flying Nun, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres
, and
Family Affair
. She loved Gene Rayburn and Monty Hall. She respected enforcers of justice, such as Cannon, Kojak, and Toma—Tony Musante, so cute—and elegies to place, like
Streets of San Francisco
and
Hawaii Five-O;
she loved variety programs,
Sonny and Cher
and
Flip Wilson
and
Andy Williams
and
Ray Stevens
, who had parlayed his hit “Everything Is Beautiful” into a summer replacement program that year; but she lived for the Saturday night horror films—
Chiller Theater
and
Creature Features
.

The
Chiller
theme's graphic was especially satisfying, a six-fingered hand emerging from some rank Paleolithic ooze. This was a gigantic hand—it dwarfed, just behind it, a tree plucked clean as a piece of driftwood, so that you could get a sense of the scale—a hand the size of a Mack truck. The fingers waved around a little bit, as though signaling to you not to abandon the show during the commercial. Meanwhile, a deep and ominous voice, a voice kind of like the one that announced the radio spots for local drag- and stock-car racing, intoned the word
chiller
. Long, low, and slow, this guy declaimed it, like it was a wind-borne message of evil sweeping across a steppe.

Mostly she watched television alone, since the days were gone when Paul snuggled with her through the horror flicks. She was alone that Friday night in the drafty library along the Silvermine River. She had a Duraflame log in the fireplace and a blanket wrapped around her, but the cold was relentless anyway. Snow fell, cascading, out in the driveway. Gales circled the house like the sound effects of low-budget movies. On the box, during the breaks, WPIX heralded tomorrow evening's dramatic television presentation—first ever—of the Shroud of Turin. Through these announcements Wendy had grown accustomed to this textile, to the faint traces of a likeness there, and in the midst of this dreamy evening of martyrdom and B-films, the scary weather outside seemed to be appropriate, like Old Testament vengeance.

She had played hooky during Sunday School and confirmation classes. Unitarian services: her mother had left the church of her birth and was on this Unitarian kick, though she still tried to keep Wendy interested in Episcopalianism. All the neighbors went. Wendy hated the discipline of waking early on Sunday—though she was up by then anyway—the donning of starchy and uncomfortable clothes, the confusing silence whenever she prayed, the confusing banter of church doctrine. Wendy felt the American Indians had the most reliable religion—with their peyote buttons and tricksters. When her mother scrunched up her face and dispensed morality, Wendy's ambition was to be as unlike her mother as possible in every way. In fact, this was almost always her ambition. Her mother's judgmental rap was her only real conversation. Sometimes Wendy felt her mom had turned deaf-mute or slipped into a coma; other times, the significance of Elena Hood's unhappiness, in the midst of plenty, in the midst of a town with forests, streams, and shopkeepers who remembered your name, a town of school crossing-guards who told you to dress warmly and policemen whose kids were the stars of the football team—the significance of her mother's unhappiness settled over the house and gathered all of the Hoods around it.

To avoid this trouble, Wendy got herself into trouble elsewhere. At a slumber party after her birthday, earlier in this very month, she had put her tongue in Debby Armitage's vagina. It happened suddenly, as if she hadn't been responsible for it somehow. She could recall the moment she yanked down her own pajamas and hiked up Debby's nightgown. In the corner, Sally Miller watched with an expression of excitement and horror both. Debby stood on the bed, her long, pubescent lower half uncovered except for heavy socks. Wendy parted Debby's legs gently, and in a posture that could only be described as religious, importunate, she craned upward to fit the tip of her tongue under the bed of Debby's soft, new, blond pubic hair. With one hand she cradled the perfect, divine curve of her friend's ass.

The taste was no taste at all. There was none of the rich marine life that she had read about in Paul's stash of sexually explicit materials. Debby Armitage was as clean as church clothes. No arousal disturbed the folds and recesses of Debby's vagina; no moisture, besides what moisture Wendy's tongue brought there. Still, the two of them went on with it. Sally Miller watched as Debby and Wendy positioned one another for mutual oral gratification—it was a position that dawned on them the way a small child stumbles upon the revelation of placing round pegs in round holes; Sally was watching in a state of frightened excitement, it seemed, and later in a state of arousal, though Debby and Wendy were no nearer a climax of any kind than if they had been outside raking leaves.

Sally, however, was able to take the story public at Saxe Junior High. She was still in the eighth grade. Because of her nonparticipation, she could go public. She could offer her opinions as observer and critic. She could stonewall on the subject of her own motives. Wendy had never wished, even in her idle algebra class fantasies, that she was a hummingbird darting between the legs of Debby Armitage. Not really. Though she hankered after some association with the people of her town, some sense of community that stuck deeper than the country club stuff. On the other hand, there was something compulsive about the way she got entangled, as though Wendy herself had picked the posture and activity that would most make her feel ashamed.