The Ice Storm (19 page)

It was a conversation designed to forbid. Finding a break in Boland's filibuster, Maria's son, Neil Conrad, moved in on Elena. He placed himself between her and Boland. Neil wore a tie-dyed turtleneck, patched jeans, and hiking boots. His hair was long. Elena wondered if he was going to play the game, the key party game, and if not, why Maria, who was here without her husband, had brought him. Elena considered his ectomorphic skeleton: what self-respecting adult would perch and grind against this
boy
in the act of love? Would Neil, only a year or two older than her own son, with his acne and his wavy, feminine hair, be someone with whom she could go home?

Absolutely not.

Young Neil mumbled in his confused way—under his halitotic breath—about how boring the party was and how boring this guy with the New Canaan stuff was—and then he began to fire questions at her. Elena had found herself the object of admiration from teenagers before. It was, she guessed, her nonjudgmental silences. They took this for listening. Anyway, as it turned out, Neil had just been through
the training
. That's right. His mind was a carefully brainwashed version of Werner Erhard's. He had spent weekends in an auditorium in which he could not leave to urinate, and now he had
got It
. He got that there was
nothing to get
. The effect of this had changed his life. Of the assembled in the party, he had chosen her to hear his message.

Neil mumbled that he was now interested in the spiritual basis of what Vonnegut was doing with Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. Drawings of assholes and everything. Also there was a record called
Dark Side of the Moon
. Getting into some pretty far-out shit. “Breathe in the air,” Neil Conrad told Elena. “Don't be afraid to care.” Jonathan Livingston Seagull was pretty hip to it, too. Each of us had an idea of the Great Gull within us.

—The movie sucks the big one, though. Neil Diamond music, forget it. Cracklin' Rosie.

—Well, I—

—And if you are into the ways the training can be used, y'know, with what's going on in religion and like the.… Well, then there's this guy here you should talk to.

Suddenly, Neil was leading her into the next room—Boland and his mother waving at them—into the library, where the sound of Antonio Carlos Jobim, being played at 45 r.p.m., maybe by accident, was competing with the television set, which was rebroadcasting
Miracle on 34th Street
. Dentist-chair music, elevator music, and then that Macy's version of God, that Macy's version of miracles, that bearded fellow in the nuthouse. Or was it Gimbels. She was permitting herself to be led only because she knew that somewhere in the shifting associations of this party there was an individual who would transform this evening. And she suspected that she would be led to him by chance. A group was clustered around the hexagonal, glass coffee table (base of bronze and low-carbon steel, manufactured by Philip Daniel)—a couple of men and women shaking absently in time to the Bossa Nova—so Elena didn't see him at first. Outside, in the light of a patio lamp, the snow seemed to be falling up. It was almost eleven.

Then Neil introduced her to the man she had met in the coffee shop before, Wesley. Wesley Myers. She wasn't surprised to find him on the premises. Or her surprise quickly dissipated. She had recognized in that moment in the coffee shop with him a whole different narrative of her marriage, a whole sequence of intimacies and distances and textures and motels and wines and partings, and she had balked at it. It was hard to see that narrative here again, in front of her, but it was good, too. She liked the sense of possibility in sad things. Wesley was here because he was single, she guessed, but also because this kind of basic Ten Commandments violation, the kind of violation at the party, must have drawn out the undesirable element of New Canaan in just the way a pie left out overnight draws out the ants. And Myers was an undesirable. This she knew from their two or three mild encounters. He was a restless thinker, an irritable, curmudgeonly guy. On the other hand, maybe he didn't know anything about the key party. Maybe he had just appeared. Maybe he responded to pheromones in the air, to animal endocrinology.

Myers did look like one of those mugging characters, like Buddy Hackett or Don Knotts. He was squat, short, dissipated, like a de Sade version of Santa Claus. He gave off the aura of having masturbated too frequently and too far into middle age.

He smiled warmly.

—How nice to see you, how really nice.

The gin blossoms that traversed his nose wrinkled in his smile.

And then Neil got right into it. Because there was no delaying where spiritual issues were concerned. Because this was a time of great spiritual questing. The center of the conversation was again
est
, on which Myers had an inside track, as he seemed to have on a variety of nontraditional avenues of worship, including the Church of Scientology, Parhamansa Yogananda, the Peoples' Temple, Gestalt therapy, and transcendental meditation.

The main issue, the way Myers put it, was the
Fleece
. You had a right, as a struggling human machine, to the fleece, to get all the fleece in your daily life.

—But having a right, well, and I'm paraphrasing here, paraphasing Werner and one of his students, having a right is different from
being
right. Being right and being happy are on opposite ends of this dance that is the life of human machines. That's all that's going on here. Being right is the last refuge of scoundrels. Abdicate totally and completely. Right? Instead, as
est
accounts for it, you're going to have to search for your
flow
and negotiate … its currents and its white water. That's right. Once you have found the center-that-is-not-a-true-center, as a human machine you can partake of it at any time. Werner says pretty clearly that when you begin to communicate about your flow, it will take the shape of this globe, this world. That's the big secret that isn't really a secret. Once you've constructed this raft for this voyage along your flow, once you have copped to the twists and bends of this journey, you can think about becoming a spiritual adept yourself. That's the secret. That's about all there is to it.

—Now, good relationships in the dance, well, the problem there is simply adjustment to the other person's flow, Myers went on. You have to work toward an avenue of play and love that feeds on the dance. Your avenue of play and love becomes shelter for the object, the other human machine. These are your options. Your flow has tributaries, see, and these are called options, the way Werner talks about it. The field of tributaries just goes on and on. And the end point here is that everything in heaven … everything in heaven is fashioned from the mutability of these options constructed in your flow, whether with consciousness or unconsciousness. And that means that your feet rest in heaven. As Werner says,
you are
the higher power, the supreme being. You are.

Myers broke into an unashamed grin.

—Well, honestly, I'm glad somebody is, Elena said.

—I'll bet you are, Myers said, as cheerful as Buddy Hackett. Because that's getting it. That's getting It.

—Well, tell me, Elena said. How did you two meet?

—Well, he's my minister, Neil said.

And then it struck Elena. In fact, she was pretty stupid for having failed to put it together before. Myers was, of course, the new rector of the Episcopalian church, at St. Mark's. The church nobody liked. And though Myers was distasteful, though he looked like the sort of minister who might fondle a choirboy or -girl, or both, and though he had agreed to meet her on a couple of occasions for these furtive luncheons that were certainly testing-the-water types of things, and though he had never even—on these occasions—admitted that he was a minister, she felt bad for him. After each pronouncement of his search for grace in this community, she imagined, after each interpretation of the readings, after each admonition, the people of New Canaan rewarded him with silence, with that gloomy barometer of Episcopal failure: the empty coffee hour. In the weeks following he would reach further into his bag of incantations and prayers and critical exegeses to placate them, only to hear the same silence again.

—
Breakfast of Champions
is a failure. A flawed, questing work, not at all the work of the man who produced
Slaughterhouse-Five
, Myers was saying to Neil. Read those earlier books. The sustained period of creativity from
Mother Night
to
Slaughterhouse-Five
is.… Well, it's sustained.

Neil was smiling broadly at this display of hipness from Myers. There weren't too many New Canaanites who could talk to him in his own brutish tongue.

When Dot Halford came into the room a few minutes later—at twenty past eleven—the three of them, Elena, Neil Conrad, and Wesley Myers, had lapsed into an awkward party silence. The Wesley Myers Elena had met in the diner downtown, several months ago, was gone now. Myers seemed weary and preoccupied. Self-pitying, even. When Dot turned off the television set, it became clear, in fact, that no one in the room was talking, that silence had settled on the room as a whole, one of those statistical silences. The key party was going into its next phase.

Elena noticed the modern art on the wall—a couple squiggles of red and yellow on a white canvas. And the rug pattern—reptiles on pebbles. Pebbles under water.

—Well, Dot said, slurring faintly, teetering on her pumps. Well, we have a little business to attend to now. So if you're going to stay, let's please gather in the living room now.

And she led the way.

The key party lacked a comprehensive system of manners. There were things still to be negotiated. No one knew quite what to do, how to follow. Most of those who had no intention of playing had already left. George Clair and his wife had left, most of the old families of New Canaan—the Benedicts, the Bootons, the Carters, et al.—had left. Yet from the rigid uncertainty that swept the room, Elena could tell that Dot's anxiety and her drunkenness extended to her remaining guests. Of the group gathered around the glass coffee table in the library, six or seven headed for the front hall immediately. For their coats. Those who remained also seemed to be getting ready to leave. They stretched and headed for the bathroom or finished off conversations, though all the while they were intent on that salad bowl in the front hall, that simple, white salad bowl with the keys nestling in it.

The range of uncertainties fascinated Elena. They were gathered there, just after eleven, like some convention of toastmasters. All putting a good face on it. Mark Boland, Maria Conrad, Neil Conrad, Sally and Steve Armitage, Alice and Pierce Sawyer, Ernest and Sari Steele, the Boyles, the Gormans, Janey and Jim Williams, the Gadds, Stephan Earle and his wife, Marie, the Fullers, the Buckleys, Chuck Spofford, June Devereaux, Tommy Finletter, Alicia Monroe. Dot and Rob Halford.

And the Hoods.

Because Elena was a forecaster of difficulties, a seer, she realized the crucial problem of the key party right away. The numbers were uneven. There was an extra guy.

And the pickings were pretty slim. Wesley Myers had slipped out suddenly, out some back door. Why had he been there in the first place? Elena couldn't imagine whom, of the assembled, she could stand.

Her husband was still there, though, and statistically she might well choose him. He was close by her now, holding her lightly by the shoulders, swaying from side to side.

—Ready to go? Benjamin whispered. I was.… You know, I was thinking I was.… Well, let's just go, honey. Let's get out of here. I want to go. I've had … enough. Enough of this shit.

A defeated look marred his features. In the lines and around the pouches of his face perspiration collected. He grimaced. He wanted help. But Elena didn't feel up to it. On other occasions, she had put him to bed. She had changed the sheets when, once or twice, he had actually, in the midst of some drunken episode, pissed in them. She had driven him to the station when he was too hung-over to drive. She had called his secretary at Shackley and Schwimmer to explain away his absences.

—We're not going anywhere, she said.

Benjamin groaned sullenly. It was an interrogative and preverbal drunken noise.

—That's right, Elena whispered.

She waved affably at Janey Williams, who was standing across the living room.

—Hi there, Janey.

Janey waved back. Without expression.

Dot had turned on some racy music to go with the event—theme music from the Tribal Love Rock Musical,
Hair
. Now she dimmed the living room lights. Those thirty-one betrayers gathered round, as though to stay warm. Elena and Benjamin were crowded in by the Armitages on one side and by Maria and her son, Neil, on the other. Certainly the kid would be the one leftover, right? The remainder? Would anyone in this town really spend the night with Maria Conrad's teenaged son, initiating him into the joy of sex?

—Well, what shall the order be? Dot Halford said with exaggerated calm. Alphabetical? In order of appearance?

—Golf handicap! bellowed Pierce Sawyer. Lowest handicap does the honors.

HA! HA! HA! HA! Nervous laughter.

—Golf handicap? Dot said. Ladies? Isn't it up to you?

—Oh, I'll go first, dammit, Maria Conrad said. Let's just line up and get it over with.

The bowl went around like the wine at Eucharist. The men stood behind hovering behind Dot's circle of women. A solemn pall overtook the room as Maria reached for that first set of keys. A dark, leather key chain dangled at the end of the prize she selected—an Alfa Romeo key chain. Stephan Earle. Elena realized how weak Stephan Earle must have felt as he came forward, how womanly and weak. He had had someone else in mind. On the other hand, who knew really? Maybe he felt real affection. Everyone applauded as Maria smilingly returned the keys to him and then, taking his arm, proceeded to the guest room, where the coats were piled. Just like that. Even Stephan's wife, Marie, wished them
good luck
. She watched her husband leave the way in the Middle Ages wives must have watched ships leave for the spice trade.