Rick Moody - The Ice Storm

Stamford was a vast, flat expanse below 1-95, below the train station. The public-housing projects, a number of circular buildings over to the left there, languished disconsolately on the skyline. Beyond them rose Stamford’s lone office tower. It was a gleaming rocket, sort of like the Fantastic Four’s pogo plane in its sleek design. Or sort of like the Baxter Building. He could easily imagine them taking off from this impressive launchpad to battle Dr. Doom or Blaastar.

— Flame on, Paul said.

When the train arrived, he took up residence in one of the four-seaters, with his feet propped up across. There was the usual fracas when he realized again that he hadn’t availed himself of the ticket window in Stamford. The conductor invoked a surcharge.

— Begging your pardon, Charles, Paul said. The conductor stared blankly at him.

— The fault’s all mine, sir. May I please purchase my ticket to Grand Central at the higher price?

Then he was thinking about school again. The Kittredge Cult — that was the name they had been given at St. Pete’s.

He and his friends. They were Cultists. They had all opted to hide out in the dormitory of that name, one otherwise considered cheap, modern, and lifeless. For two years now, they had all lived there. What they had in common was that they were undistinguished. Paul could boast nonpar-ticipation in any varsity sport. And he wasn’t a rock-and-roll musician or yearbook photographer like some nonathletes. And he was unattractive. And he hadn’t- unlike many of his fellow students — attended Greenwich Country Day or New Canaan Country Day or any of the other Country Days. The Cult was populated with just this sort of lost soul. The rest of the student body knew one another from summers on Nantucket or in Camden, or from tennis camp, or else they were related, or they were children of trustees or legacies or other prominent alumni. The Kittredge Cult was the remainder.

To them, adolescence was nearly fatal. Surprise. To survive a sober afternoon was heroic. Only a state of witless inebriation was really sensible. The best of life was intoxication. The promise of liberated sexuality, dangled before others of their age group, completely eluded Paul and his friends. They whacked off and got caught. They got stoned, and drank, and whacked off. They tortured freshmen, re-inflicting their frustration on these new kids, javelining them with cross-country ski poles. Then they stole five minutes to jerk off a second time.

The Cult’s precise origin was unknown. It included women, too. Not only Caria the Bear, but Christina Whitman and her roommate, Debby Vartagnan. Debby had these episodes in which she would permit guys from Kittredge, whom she usually loved only in a platonic fashion, to lie with her on a Saturday night, in violation of major school rules, and to touch her unnaturally large breasts.

Each victim would then be marked with a number of unmistakable welts on his neck. Paul hadn’t yet had his turn, but he had seen Hal Frost, another Cultist, come back from one of these encounters at first elated — he was going to be the first one to stain her blankets! to shower with her! to meet her parents! — and then ashamed. In the days af-terward, Debby Vartagnan wouldn’t speak to Frost. Where was the free love in this? Where was the revolution?

The size of the Cult was shifting, as was its group identity. Francis Chamberlain Davenport IV, Paul’s closest friend, was a founding member, as was Hal Frost. And there were Christina and Debby and Penny Belvedere and Johnny Wilde and Mike Russell and a host of secondary characters. Sometimes they all got along. Sometimes they could rest assured that the difficult moments of the day — the moment, for example, when each of them entered the dining hall unaccompanied and was subjected to its system of gazes and ratings — they had company. This company was worth the anxious apartness it also fostered in them. The Cult comforted, Paul Hood thought, as the train passed through Greenwich. The Cult was a tonic and a comfort.

But one thing the Kittredge Cult could not do was instruct about love. They were all orphans this way, from broken homes. They knew shit about love. Paul had gone out, in St. Pete’s parlance, with Eileen Becker in fourth form, but late in the spring she began seeing, instead, his roommate, Stan Sinclair. A period followed in which Paul frequently disturbed them in his dorm room — the two of them pretending to be asleep, or Eileen clutching a rumpled frock around her. Hood struck back with a few crushes that didn’t last more than a week. He struck back by being alone.

Then one night he persuaded Eileen into an empty reading room. In the sciences building. He had preyed upon her confused notions of fidelity. I can’t eat since you started up with Sinclair, he said. I’m all cut up inside. Which was misleading, since basically he felt that way all the time. Paul knelt at her waist, her jeans and panties in a tangle around her sneakers — Tretorns with pink stripes — and held her vagina close to his face. She parted her legs, standing over him, lowered herself down until they touched this way. He got the tip of his tongue inside her. So briefly it was almost certainly a dream. And though this was as far as she would go, further than she wanted to, she had whispered one thing, shivered and whispered it, before going back to Stan Sinclair. Paul Hood, she had said, / know what you’re gonna be good at one day.

The train roared through Pelham. Alongside, on the highway, cars were backed up in either direction. The headlights, the streetlights, were a forlorn effort in the sleet and snow.

Paul Hood had more ideas about the Wankel rotary engine than he did about love. But he was not dumb. Though Testers model glue in the bottom of a paper bag was his preferred companion, though he had once soaked his penis in milk in an effort to get his housemaster’s cat to have congress with him-her tongue was like sandpaper — he knew the name of what he was missing. He had gotten his hand down the waist of Jeannie McFarlane’s pants to feel the tuft of what she concealed there, and he had kissed a variety of girls for durations short and long, and he had read about blow jobs and sixty-nine, orgies, bisexuality, mutual masturbation, transvestism, menage a trois, anal sex, fetishism, and even fist-fucking. He had perused Davenport’s dog-eared copy of the Kama Sutra; he knew what love was. He was going to pursue this education. He didn’t want to be as sad as his parents.

So he was on the train, on his way to meet Libbets Casey, a girl from school, who, unlike his friends from the Cult, unlike Caria Bear, say, was a fine conversationalist, who did charity work with the St. Pete’s Missionary Society, and whose parents left her entirely unsupervised. Paul was infatuated. It had come over him suddenly. The Bear was just someone he liked; Debby Vartagnan was just someone he liked. He wanted Libbets, a girl who wore a mink coat with blue jeans. He thought about her day and night; he wrote her name into the stories he composed for English class; he dedicated songs to her on his radio show. This had gone on for days.

For two years now, he had spent virtually every afternoon with Davenport and Frost and Brendan Gilford. Out in the woods getting high. He breathed the same room freshener they breathed (Ozium); he had borrowed their records and loaned them his own. They all knew how to play the same Emerson, Lake and Palmer song on guitar. They knew the same jokes and disliked the same masters. They all volunteered for dish duty at the same time.

But he knew it was coming to an end, that the loose association that other people called the Cult was just something you had at one time in your life. In September, when Davenport had declared himself King of the Cult at his birthday party — he was on bounds at the time, unable to receive visitors in his room, for breaking curfew — the whole thing began to sour. And it had just been a joke anyway. A joke to make feeling like a loser tolerable. Soon everybody was giving themselves titles. It was just like the Fantastic Four. It was all relationships and politics and power.