Rick Moody - The Ice Storm

So: Paul and Wendy and Benjamin. And Daisy Chain, the dog, presently sprawled- licking himself- on the library carpet. This little family had tightened around Elena. She put aside Masters and Johnson, marked with a New Canaan Bookshop bookmark — at the page concerning the onset of menopause, just by chance — and repaired to the kitchen. She threw light switches up and down the hall. Because of the oil embargo the British were working a three-day work week, but Elena was uncomfortable in darkness. Duraflame logs. She needed more. The President was pondering special powers to ration electrical resources. Sunday leisure driving was officially discouraged. The market had plunged fifty points this week. Three percent, Benjamin had said, only three percent.

She thought of Janey Williams’s breasts, the perfect way she presented them, in a brassiere that probably carved tracks in her shoulders. Her breasts were large and rounded. This you couldn’t miss, through her lacy, flimsy chemises. Ripe and properly displayed, the way the men of Elena’,s acquaintance liked them. Janey was not afraid of presentation, while Elena was, on the other hand, small and compact and reserved. But she was sexual and capable of abandon. The mistake Benjamin made — in assuming she was only one kind of person, a virgin bride of the Eisenhower years, a daughter of gentility — brought her as close to outrage as she came. She had read widely on the subject of personal growth. She wasn’t impervious to change. There was growth left in her. To pin her down, wriggling like a butterfly specimen, was a kind of violence.

Still, when she had to be, she was a chef. She filled a saucepan from the tap, set it on the range, and immersed in it the brick of frozen peas. They were frozen into a small rectangular pool of yellow simulated butter. Then she exhumed the turkey carcass from its tomb in the fridge and set it on a cutting board. As dispassionately as any butcher, Elena aligned the hewn strips of turkey on each of three plates. Turkey the day after was the most heartbreaking protein she could imagine.

In the den, the screen door opened. The announcement of bad conversation. The gales had begun to whistle around the side of the house and over the creek. As her husband slid the door closed, this howling hushed briefly. Shuffling into the kitchen, Benjamin and Wendy muttered hello like late arrivals at church.

— Ten minutes, Elena said.

These estimates were almost always folly.

— Go dry off, Benjamin said to his daughter. The two of them, Ben and Wendy, were peeling off their footwear. The puddles extended around them in rivers across the kitchen floor, back toward the hall carpeting. They carried their drenched garments around the sink to the laundry room. Wendy stripped off her poncho and her pants and shook out her hair. In her panties, she stood dripping. It was one good thing Elena had done, she remembered; she had given birth to a great beauty.

Ben followed Wendy back toward the stairs, and Elena followed Ben. They climbed the stairs in this order. Wendy commandeered the bathroom right away. There was the firm ping of the push-button lock.

The hall was blue-gray and the master bedroom was blue-gray and the rug was a deeper shade of blue-gray and the curtains were a sort of blue-gray. The bedspread on the master bed was blue and red, checked. The light outside was blue-gray, and when Elena switched on a light by the bed it hardly did the trick. Benjamin had the last of his clothes off quickly. He piled them on the chair where he hung his suit pants overnight.

Elena watched him from the edge of the bed.

— Never guess where I found her, he said. He disappeared into the walk-in closet. The sound of his voice was husky among suits and gowns.

— In the basement over at Janey and Jim’s. With that creep. Not even a television on. And they’re on the floor. Kid’s got his trousers down — I can see his little white cheeks pumping away. Got his pecker out there and everything.

The Benjamin’s voice was muffled. The smell of naphtha and dry-cleaning chemicals. She could tell he was nervous.

— He’s only partly on top of her, though. He’s partly on top of her and partly off. She’s still dressed. He’s flopping around like a fish on the deck and she’s just lying there.

Benjamin poked his head out of the closet now and looked at his wife. She admired what was left of him, couldn’t help it, what was not consumed by uncertainty and heavy drinking and the ravages of adulthood with little exercise. In many ways, he was ugly, scaly, even repulsive. When he smiled, the effect was almost always lewd. It was getting hard to locate her affection in the midst of all this noise and dissolution and thoughtlessness, but she liked him sometimes anyway. It was hard to live next to someone and not come up with a little respect.

— Should I dress for the party now, or should I dress after? Give me your—

— Up to you, she said. I’d like to go early, though, and leave pretty soon after that.

— I get you loud and clear. Your signal is coming in. Anyway, I don’t know what was in it for her, because she wasn’t giving him… she wasn’t giving him a hand job or anything.

— Do you have to be so graphic?

— I’m just telling the story, baby doll. She’s not giving him a hand job and she’s not, you know, grappling with the situation herself either. Probably too shy to do it to herself in front of the creep. I guess we should be glad about shyness. And I come down the stairs and I pause dramatically, like I’m the prosecutor or something, and then I really let him have it. You’ve never seen anyone rearrange their clothing so fast in all your life. Kid’s got the pants hiked up around himself, shoes and socks on, shirt carefully tucked in before I can say a word. Shirt sticking out of the fly and everything. He’s pretending to be absorbed in the TV Guide.

Benjamin laughed. He was searching far and wide for a laugh.

— Hey, you look nice, he said to her now, fixing a paisley ascot around his neck, zippering the blue-and-gold-checkered pants. She knew she looked anything but nice. Familiar, maybe, kindly.

— And?

— And Wendy’s out of the way. She squirms away on the floor, puts some distance between her and the creep. So I started to yell and I called the kid I-don’t-know-what, told him I’d personally separate him from his manhood if I ever caught him with her again and that sort of thing. Wendy came home peacefully.

Another laugh. A party laugh, trailing off precipitously. Elena watched him in the bathroom now, straightening the ascot. She waited a while before asking. She let it hang in the air with the menace of a grave diagnosis.

— So what were you doing in the basement anyway? Only a slight hesitation:

— Just dropping off a coffee cup. Jim left it, last time he was over. It was on the dash of the car. You were, you know, reading. I was just dropping off the cup.

Benjamin emerged from the bathroom. Smiled. Spread wide his arms to announce his arrival.

— Let’s eat, babe. I am cool. I am ready. She lifted herself, as though it were the greatest chore, from within the fold of the comforter at the end of the bed. It diapered her. And this was a great chore, too. Being lied to required such work.

— Oh, right, she said. The mustache coffee cup. The one that was sitting on the dash.

— Yeah, sure, he said. That’s the one.

— That one.

Benjamin nodded vigorously.

— That one.

Her husband simply laughed. As if the flimsiness of his deceits wouldn’t adhere to him.

So they were back in the kitchen. Disappointment in the room like a sullen dinner guest. The peas bobbed in their sulfurous oil slick. All was ready. Wendy appeared behind Elena, wearing another pink turtleneck and corduroys. Without prompting, Wendy searched the long, narrow drawer by the range for a wooden spoon with which to disembowel the turkey of its stuffing. She set the spoon at the edge of the serving platter. Then, in the cupboard by the refrigerator, Wendy found three glasses, the ones with the decorative blueberries painted on them. The really good holiday finery would wait.