The Ice Storm Page 3

  He headed for the Williamses’ bathroom. One last look. A survey of the medicine cabinet. He wanted to see if there was a diaphragm in there at all, to see how deep the slight ran. He wanted evidence.

  Where would Janey have gone? To the A & P to find something to go with turkey leftovers? To purchase beauty aids in preparation for the Halfords’ party that evening? Maybe she had gone to his house, to rifle his own medicine cabinet?

  Hood set the bottle of vodka on the speckled, beige, faux-marbleized countertop and poured some more ambrosia. Then he began to peruse the remedies on the other side of that mirror: Cover Girl Thick Lash mascara, Revlon Ultima pancake, Max Factor lipstick (chocolate), Helena Rubinstein Brush-on Peel-off Mask, Kotex tampons, Bonne Bell Ten-O-Six lotion, Clairol Balsam Color (blond, although she frosted her hair), Summer’s Eve disposable douche, Spring Breeze. Valium, Seconal, tetracycline, the first of these in a renewable prescription.

  No diaphragm case.

  In a tiny space at one end of the top shelf, Jim Williams apparently kept a few things. The Dry Look, Old Spice deodorant, Noxzema Shave Cream, Water Pik teeth-cleaning system. Vicks VapoRub.

  It was an L-shaped bathing suite. Hood drained his glass and ducked into the alcove where the toilet and shower were shrouded in darkness. On top of the toilet, Janey had piled Clairol Herbal Essence shampoo, Clairol conditioner, and Tegrin medicated shampoo.

  She had taken leave of him at this spot. This was where she left behind her evidence. A black lace garter belt and stockings had been draped across these hair-care products. Like some waterfall of loss and eroticism, the stockings swept down over the closed lid of the toilet.

  Meant for him. Hood marveled at her boldness. And having completely surrendered to an appreciation of her tactics, he decided he still couldn’t forgive her. Her flaws sprang to mind: her stretch marks, the port wine blemish on her left thigh, her lipsticked teeth and inexpertly manicured nails. She had left him in the guest room with his trousers around his ankles. She had sealed him down like a bank vault. He was an empty parade ground, a shuttered theater, an abandoned roadside attraction. Janey had information on him.

  He liberated the garter belt from where it was anchored by the dark green shampoo bottle, and the stockings from the garter. And then he flung back the shower curtain, hoping one last time to see her there, grinning, shivering, perhaps stretching out one hand to him, the other on the hot water spigot.

  Realizing, of course, that abandonment titillated him, that he was mildly aroused, that his beleaguered member thrived under bad circumstances, he unzippered anew his flannel slacks and, using the garter belt as a spur to his isolation and arousal—as a dressing gown for his hard-on—in flagrant violation of the precepts of autoerotics as he had explained them to his son, he began to stroke himself. Always practical, Hood secured the door as he worked.

  Must we always imagine a woman to accomplish the deed? It was less hurtful to women and their history to imagine them this way than to violate and oppress them. Hood recognized and was proud of his own technique—above all he wished to hurt as few people as possible. Yes, he himself had eliminated the problem of representation entirely.

  In the fifties, back in Hartford, Conn., where his father’s insurance business had temporarily been located, and where Hood’s testes had first erupted, he had been able to ejaculate simply over the word bosom. He had also managed to fashion an orifice for himself out of a pliable old feather pillow. The pillow took him all the way to college, where the abundance of breasts lingered in his imagination like some divinely inspired thought, like the perfection of harmony and meter. But then he had fallen on hard times. In the company of the marriage neither breast nor ass nor the vesuvian moisture of down below on its own moved him. The contemplation of body parts was no more fascinating than a grocery list.

  At last, in his early thirties, only true pornography would do it. Solitary orgasms were like sneezes or yawns. He imagined women in hot pants and leather goods. He kept Playboy around. (In this month’s issue there was a first-rate short story by Tennessee Williams.) He imagined devices. His cheeks flushed.

  What a blessing when oblivion descended on these exercises. Masturbation was a falling sickness, with the emphasis, these days, on the sickness part. But at least he didn’t have to think. At least he was granted a moment without Benjamin Paul Hood and his fiscal responsibilities, without the lawn, the boat, the dog, the medical bills, credit card and utility bills, without the situation in the Mideast and in Indochina, without Kissinger and Ehrlichman or Jaworski or that Harvard asshole, Archibald Cox. Just a little peace.

  He groaned dully as he issued forth, firing with unusual range and payload onto the shag throw rug, as well as onto the garter belt itself. With the soiled garment, he swabbed and dabbed at the spot on the rug where he had splattered. Sighing, he refixed his trousers. Sighing, he unlocked the door.

  Where to stow the evidence?

  The garter belt was an empty snakeskin, a stately and somber artifact of his failure, a sort of Shroud of Turin. In the hall, with it balled in his fist, he turned first left and then right. Like a ghost, he ventured into Janey and Jim’s bedroom and gazed sadly upon the pacific waters of their waterbed.

  He thought to set it right upon their pillow, but he couldn’t do it. Scruples.

  In the hall, though, he found himself again at Mike’s door. Impulsively, he entered with his death shroud, with Mike’s mother’s soiled garter belt, and stuffed it in the back of Mike’s closet. The kid would never even know he had been framed.

  Then with a lightness of heart, a relief at folly alleviated, Hood started down the stairs. He thought about riding the banister, but the newel post had a sort of asparagus bulb at the top of it, one that must have neutered generations of banister-riders. Unable to leave the premises, he toured the first floor. Possession was the larger part of ownership. Fluted crystal, lace napkins, the finest eight-track stereo components, all the Williamses’ personal property belonged that afternoon to him.

  At the front door, however, the last of Hood’s resolve failed. He was a spook, a fool, a voice from the beyond, a housebreaker, and it was time he faced up to these things. His wife took no notice of his comings and goings, his mistress abandoned him in her own house, his children wouldn’t speak to him. Only the back exit was fit for Benjamin Paul Hood. He would leave by the servant’s entrance, with imperceptible footfalls. On tippy-toes. Like a Plumber, an official burglar.

  Then, at the top of the basement stairs, having opened the door already, having opened the door absently, he heard laughter. The laughter of teenagers. That hard, bitter, revenging laughter of distrust and disillusionment. One way out! One way only!

  New Canaan was tiny already, but as Wendy got older it seemed to be shrinking, too. It was vanishing, maybe. Its avenues were like the crosshatching on a legal tender dollar bill. You could read Wendy’s town with one of those beginner microscopes that Paul had gotten for his birthdays from three or four relatives. Next to New Canaan, a black ant was like a Cadillac or like an armored personnel carrier; a housefly, the Huey helicopter. Shag carpet was like an Asian rain forest.

  One time she had cut her wrist lightly—just a scratch: long sleeves to school for a while and no one knew any better; later you couldn’t even tell—so that she could look at her own blood under the microscope. Just the usual traffic and hustle, though, these globs of color overtaking these other globs.

  In New Canaan, there was one high school, one junior high, four elementaries. No school bus more than fifteen minutes from its destination. This meant that you could know everyone in your demographic category by the time you started high school. So Wendy Hood knew everyone. One movie theater. One grocery store. Churches were Protestant. Neither snow, nor rain, nor gloom of night stayed New Canaan’s relentless progress toward neighborliness.

  The girls took home economics and the boys took shop or else risked civic humiliation for the rest of their lives. Wendy took home economic
s but she hated it. Best thing about it was its resemblance to sorcery. Between cooking and science, she had learned all the fundamentals of poisoning. Eagerly she imagined dispatching a loved one, or altering her own future, or turning her father’s SX-70 camera into a twisted sculpture of metal and plastic.

  To class she wore ponchos and handmade sweaters, and her blond hair tickled the top of her butt. She had toe socks and clogs and painter’s pants. Wendy’s Tretorn tennis sneakers were filched from Mike’s Sports not two days ago (the day before Thanksgiving) and now the patent leather gear she was supposed to wear for the holidays was safely enclosed in a Tretorn box on the 5½ shelf in the back of the very same store. Wendy wore the uniforms other kids wore, but she thought a lot about black gowns and putting spiders in the pockets of her girlfriend’s hip-huggers. She wanted to smoke pot and take sleeping pills (she had located some prescriptions in her parents’ bathroom) and fondle the one sad-looking boy in the special-education class. Fondling she had learned precociously like everything else, in conversation with her brother, from her mother’s copy of The Sensuous Woman, and partly from her own imagination. Sometimes it was hard to understand the descriptions of this stuff in books. You had to use the wilder senses.

  Only one place in this desolate village interested her really. She was lucky enough to live beside it. Silver Meadow! A private residential psychiatric facility. A drying-out joint, her father called it. Funny farm. It was marked off as precisely as a crossword puzzle on the hillside beside their house—neat little footpaths, neat architecture, neat bowling alleys and auditoriums, pools, saunas, paddle-tennis courts. Precisely landscaped shrubs and evergreens. Benevolent security personnel roamed Silver Meadow and they recognized in Wendy Hood a local sylph whose comings and goings were not averse to the therapeutic process.

  What did it mean to dry out? She had seen the lonely and decrepit emerging from the Mercedes and BMWs. They wore suede and fur and bangles or matching denim suits; they checked to be sure the car door was locked because issues of security were important to them. They tried to memorize their spot in the parking lot and failed. She saw them walking aimlessly around the parking lot, forgetting. What they had in common besides their wealth were their anguished faces. They had rings and minks but they were worn out and desperate. You could tip them over just by blowing hard. And they weren’t violent or criminal. They were just people. As far as Wendy could tell. No hardened serial killers sodomizing young girls and leaving their bodies in rural creeks. Wendy was among her people here on the premises of Silver Meadow. From all around the country, from New York and Cleveland and Athens and Dallas and Las Vegas, they came to Silver Meadow for the cure of folly. She didn’t want to overstay her welcome here—she didn’t want to exhaust its riches—but she liked the place better than her hometown. And that was why, on Friday afternoon, she was here waiting for Mikey Williams.

  Rain. Some fat, smiling weatherman would say it was raw. New Canaan was maybe a single degree about freezing. Surfaces contracted. There had been hail, too. Her poncho didn’t keep out the cold, but she withstood it, shivering, because she was precociously brilliant—everyone said so—and impractical. Anything was better than the homely, pink ski jacket her mom had bought her.

  Originally, it wasn’t Mike Williams but his brother, Sandy, with whom these trysts had taken place. He was a jumpy, quiet boy and Wendy liked how he was shocked by her, how he was always a little bit uncomfortable when she was around, how he didn’t want to kiss with his mouth open; she liked how he was always skulking off to work on a model airplane, one of those monuments to futility and boredom. He was a challenge.

  One afternoon she successfully persuaded him to let her enter the bathroom with him. It was just the sort of pastime they got into over the years. Wendy had wrestled with him at touch football; she had eaten the sandwich ends he left behind—cream cheese and jelly, Fluffernutter, deviled ham; she had shared her Mountain Dew with him and tortured insects with him. Though Sandy didn’t talk much, Wendy thought what he thought and knew what he knew. Until that time in the bathroom.

  The Williamses’ downstairs bathroom was wallpapered in a velvet floral print. As Sandy unzipped his tiny shorts (this was the summer just past), and squatted down over the toilet, the absolute nakedness of his skeletal body struck her. There wasn’t a fold or pouch on him. He was like a little National Geographic photograph—the wise villager struggling against famine.

  And then there was his dick. It was no more than a little outcropping. It looked like the end of a number-two pencil, the part you throw out because it would be too short to extract from the sharpener. Not a hair surrounded this appendage. Sandy was as blank as a newborn, as simple as one of those modern pictures—all black or all white or all red—that any kid could do. He reposed on the toilet like a little girl, and began to empty himself. But then the enormity of being observed in this private ritual, this ritual of cleanliness messed him up. It was like she had stumbled into his sleep and learned all about his nightmares. Immobilized on the commode, he started to shout:

  —What do you want? What do you want? Get out! Get out of here!

  His usually peaceful face became twisted and raw as he rose up toward her. Brass-colored urine trickled lazily down his thigh—under his bunched, unfastened safari shorts—onto the throw rug. No girlish smile was going to get her out of this.

  Mrs. Williams must have heard the commotion. She pulled Wendy out by the ear. But because Mrs. Williams was cool and because she approved of the basic changes brought about by young people in the last five or six years, she let Wendy off with just a few cautionary words. A person’s body was his temple, Mrs. Williams had said, and it was his decision when to worship there and when to fast or rest. Did she understand? A person’s body was his first and last possession. We come into this world alone, Mrs. Williams said, and we permit this aloneness to be understood by another maybe once or twice in a whole life. And in adolescence, which Wendy probably knew about from her own parents, our bodies betray us. They grow strange. That was why, Mrs. Williams said, in Samoa, and in other developing nations, adolescents went out into the woods on foot, unarmed, and didn’t come back until they had learned a thing or two.

  Sandy hated her after that, as Mike and Sandy hated each other. Wendy knew already how boys fought when they were close. They fought the way families fought. The explosions and the affections came out of the same place. She had seen Mike chase Sandy with a fire iron one day, fully intending to put out his brother’s charcoal eyes, the next day volunteering to write Sandy’s poem for English class. They were more alike than not, those two boys. She watched Sandy and she learned how silence could conceal all kinds of high jinks. Still waters ran organized criminal networks and spearheaded new pornographic markets. Mike and Sandy were the same way except Mike was loud about it. They called each other Charles (and it was a term of respect) and they never went in the other’s bedroom, but the loved each other and would die inside when they parted for good.

  An example of their unsavory entrepreneurial activities: Mr. Williams had negotiated a deal with the folks at Topps Chewing Gum. What the deal was, nobody could ever explain to Wendy. She wasn’t sure Sandy or Mike understood it either. Bazooka gum, among the principal product lines of Topps, was a factor in the deal. As a result, the Williamses ended up with several large crates of Bazooka. These crates were warehoused in their basement. Bazooka, which was like a gold standard at Saxe Junior High and at New Canaan High School, was thus available to Mike and Sandy in gross quantities for use at school. With it, Mike was able to produce an impeccable collection of the 1973 New York Mets baseball cards (which didn’t help them win the World Series). With Bazooka Joe he had also procured fake vomit, a T-shirt that said Enjoy Cocaine in the same letters as the Enjoy Coca-Cola commercial, many types and varieties of firecrackers, such as M-80s and lady-fingers and bottle rockets, and a red Flexible Flyer sled. Sandy had turned his gum into currency, for a price slightly above retail, and filled
a gigantic change bank with the money. He just liked to count the stuff.

  How Mike bested Sandy in the battle for Wendy’s body, a prize she was pretty willing to give up anyway, isn’t much of a story. Sandy wouldn’t look at her after the bathroom incident, and there was no one else suitable within a mile or so with whom to lock arms and make flimsy vows. She missed Sandy, but she was always missing something, and that little naked spot wasn’t going to be filled by him or by anyone else on Valley Road. It was through the chewing gum, ultimately, that Mike had lured her, alone, into the basement with him. She had walked among those boxes as carefully as if this were some vast arms shipment. The sheer amount of gum dumbfounded her! What kid in their age and class would not kill for a twenty-four-count box of Bazooka rolls? Who cared about the endless fillings, about the horror of dentistry? Today a kid is here, tomorrow she is grown! Gum! Give us gum! We are hungry for gum!

  And Mike was prepared to honor her wishes. He popped a piece in his mouth right then. She could smell it. She could taste the taste—amusement park and industrial cleaning agent. Together—shoulders brushed up against one another like they were already pledged to troth—they read the comic, laughing at how Sandy was like the guy, Mort, who always wore a turtleneck up over his mouth.

  —Seriously, Mike said. Do you want gum?

  —Of course, you jerk, she said. Why else would I be here?

  —Nasty mouth, he said. Well, there’s gonna be a little, you know, opportunity cost here. It’s a cost-of-doing-business-type thing.