Rick Moody - The Ice Storm

— Hell on the fillings, Charles. He opened the other two, passed them around, and then lit a joint.

— Everything’s gonna freeze over, Davenport said. Big freeze.

— Yeah, Paulie, Libbets said, are you going to get home okay?

They explained about the predicted sudden drop in temperature, the predicted freezing of road surfaces, the devastation — you wouldn’t be able to get a cab, the airports would close down, everything would have to be delivered. All the food. All the health and beauty aids. Then Libbets put on an Allman Brothers tape — 8-track, television on with the sound down — and they talked about Duane and the crash.

They drank. They smoked pot. Quickly. As though it were an obligation somehow.

No matter how many times the weather repeated its four symphonic movements, the specifics of rainfall and wind direction and velocity and barometric pressure seemed new to Paul. The false logic of marijuana was dawning in him. Six Crises, for example, absorbed his complete attention. He gulped for air: the enormity of this Nixonian schema! Urgently, Paul tried to make the various reversals of his life — his grandparents’ deaths, his stolen bicycles, his father’s drinking, his failure to make junior varsity soccer at St. Pete’s, the time in first grade that his mother made him wear tights in the East School Xmas pageant — add up to six crises. In a flash of specious enlightenment, he saw that every life could fit into this ingenious brilliant systematization. Libbets’s life. Davenport’s life. Daisy Chain’s life, even. Then Paul started thinking about Watergate, a seventh crisis.

— Holy shit, he said.

— How long have we been sitting here? Libbets said. I’m so stoned.

— Seven minutes, Davenport said. Who knows?

— How much beer is left? Paul said. Davenport reached over to where Paul was sitting. He poked him in the chest.

— How the hell do we know? You’re in charge of the kitchen, cowboy.

They all laughed. HA! HA! HA! HA! Paul went to fetch still more beers, and while he was there he tried to decide whether or not Davenport and Libbets were really trying to get rid of him. The evidence mounted. It was in their facial expressions. They were using some kind of facial code. Paul remembered that he’d had the same thought last time he was in the kitchen. His mind couldn’t light on anything long enough to reason it out. His mind was a slippery, reptilian thing. How much time had passed?

The next beers went more quickly than the first. Paul was careful to permit Davenport to have more than his share. Libbets wasn’t counting. She was just happy to be there.

Then Paul excused himself.

The plan was happening at some lower level of cognition. It was like collective unconscious or something. Next thing he knew: Mr. and Mrs. Casey had decorated their master bath in a style according to their age and means. Lavender shell soaps-they were everywhere, no home without them — occupied a china soap dish. Floral wallpaper, also flecked with lavender, adorned the walls. The soap and the wallpaper and the tissue paper and the hand towels matched. The medicine cabinet yielded precisely the kind of paydirt he had been hoping for. Besides some Preparation H and some perfumed douches, there were several prescriptions: phenobarbital, Valium, Seconal, and an old one, paregoric.

The Seconals interested him particularly.

Before he could effect the next stage of his plan, however, he unzippered his khakis and took himself in hand. An inevitable part of marijuana intoxication. When Paul felt irritable and forlorn, he noticed he was also especially prone to jerk that thing. He had elaborated a number of complicated masturbation scenarios. He always liked to begin, for example, when the second hand of his watch was precisely at twelve. (There was a small wind-up clock on the sink.) He liked to finish before the second hand made it around twice. He also like to whack off to pictures of girls he found by randomly flipping through his St. Pete’s yearbook.

Once he had arrived at Libbets’s picture through this procedure, and though these yearbook episodes were usually memorable, he found on this occasion that he wilted in his hand. He just couldn’t bring himself to do it with a woman so adorable. He just couldn’t bring himself to that point. He had tried a variety of lubricants. Skin lotions, lip balms, even Stan Sinclair’s jar of QT tanning lotion. This failure turned out to be good luck. It proved that Libbets was appropriate for his worship. So appropriate that he got hard, this time, this day.

Shafts of light coursed through his penis. He could feel light in his scrotum, in every millimeter of that downy chicken skin. His ecstasy was religious. This orgasm would be compensation for Paul Hood’s troubles here on earth. Yes, the best orgasms were characterized not by joy — he couldn’t remember a joyful one anyway — but by earthly loss and the desire to fortify himself against it. With this in mind, he was about to tearfully leak a couple of teaspoons of disaffection in the sink. But a knock at the door interrupted him.

— Champ, Davenport called from the other side of the door. What the hell is going on in there? We are bored and desire your company. Come on out. Desist from choking that toad, champ. Desist.

Paul froze. Did Davenport really—

— Just gotta spill in the sink here first, Francis. He giggled wretchedly at his floppy divining rod. — Then I’ll bring out the heavy chemistry.

— Okay, but don’t be long about it. If you’re gonna take your pleasures in there we want to know about it. We’ want to participate.

Paul caught his breath. Ran water through his hair. Took a deep breath. Back in the library. Star Trek with American Beauty soundtrack.

— What took so long? Libbets asked.

— Checking out the medicine cabinet, Paul said. your parents have some excellent shit in there.

— What didst thou find? Davenport said.

— Wait a sec, guys, Libbets said anxiously. You aren’t going to take prescription drugs from my parents’ bathroom without permission?

— Never a thought in our minds, babe, Davenport said, holding in his lungs the last of another joint, so that his voice was husky and forced. But do you mean to suggest that you have never taken advantage of that most convenient supply? What are you, un-American?

— Lots of stuff, Paul said. Diverse items. Tranquilizers and sleeping pills.

He fell lengthways upon the couch.

— Elixirs, Davenport said, that have a promising effect, very promising, when combined in small dosage levels with alcoholic beverages.

— Let me go look, Libbets said. I’ll go look. Once she had gone, Davenport’s demeanor changed. It was the strangest thing. Suddenly, he was friendly again. Suddenly. They were old friends after all. Davenport knew how Paul got encased in himself. They were old friends and they had been through a few things, but they could still have a good laugh about masturbation or at somebody else’s expense. That Davenport’s headband was stupid, that his beard was a little on the simian side — Paul could overlook this stuff. He could still like him.

So they talked about Thanksgiving. And since Davenport was adopted, as were his brothers and sisters, the notion of a collegia! family get-together had its dark, obverse side. Davenport’s younger sister actually aspired, he claimed, to a life of prostitution. She liked to hang around the bars in Times Square. And his younger brother was racked by psychosomatic illnesses. Lately, he had been hospitalized with phantom kidney pain. Which of these children could one day run the Davenport venture-capital organization? Which would entertain at their Sea Island summer home? Francis Chamberlain Davenport IV, the likely choice, wanted to be a Jungian psychoanalyst.