Rick Moody - The Ice Storm

Benjamin Hood reflected on fashion only briefly upon taking his wife’s hand — noticing in passing her ring and the raw, red crevices that surrounded it. She needed lotion. Passing across the Halfords’ threshold, into the foyer with its large standing sculpture — a melted I-beam twisted into a sort of anguished helix — catching a glimpse of the clustering and valent neighbors arranged in the corridor, Hood realized the truth of the matter: his ascot was no longer in fashion.

In fact, sweaters, furry and dense and of Netherlandish origin, were numerous in the front hall at Dorothy and Robert Halford’s. There were a few old tweed jackets, but no ascots. Had Hood been in a mind to comfort himself, he might have approved of his ample shirt collar, spread wide on the wings of his lapels. But how had he managed to get out the door wearing the ascot? How had he let himself? Hood didn’t wear three-inch cork heels or white loafers. And he didn’t wear his hair long or wear double-breasted suits or pleated pants. His gesture toward what he saw as a more flamboyant presentation had been these ascots, fashioned of a silk he liked to feel against his neck, against spots irritated by his Wilkinson double-bonded razor. But these ascots were no longer appropriate. Only months before, Benjamin Hood had lived in the certainty that his dress was in accord with the prevailing climatic conditions. But now, just as quickly, he was solitary in his garb. He dressed poorly. He disgraced himself. His wife looked fine, in her slacks and Hush Puppies, but he disgraced her company.

Of women’s fashion at the Halfords’, Hood might have noticed ankle-length skirts, dignified and elegant, though there were also skirts at the knee and the midcalf. Here, too, sweaters were the accessory of choice, reflecting a polyphony of styles-sweaters of cashmere, mohair, and Shetland. Sweaters, sweaters, sweaters. Sweaters, and pearls.

Dorothy Halford overtook them in the foyer. With a free hand, she waved a little celery canoe at them. It was loaded down with an aqua-colored dip. Dot wore a blue-and-gray crocheted sweater over a thin crepe de chine blouse, pants of gray flannel, black velvet beret. No makeup. She was petite; there was something Katharine Ross-cherubic, unthreatening, wholesome about her. She appeared both willing and unsullied in the brute arena of erotic love. She seemed to take no notice of how her guests, the Hoods, were turned out, and she couldn’t have seen the traces of a recent disagreement in their eager hellos.

— Ben, Elena! Wonderful! wonderful. So wonderful to see you.

She swallowed the last of the celery canoe. With an adolescent sexual pout, Dot kissed the air near Ben’s ear and crushed Elena in a manic hug. Then she seized the simple, white salad bowl that had been sitting on the table in the front hall. It was sinister in its simplicity. She thrust it at them.

— Would you care to play?

The enormity of the bowl took a moment to dawn on Ben. At first, he thought it was a joke, a joke with a visual gag — Did you hear the one about Spiro Agnew’s accountant? HA! HA! HA! HA! What did Mary Jo Kopechne’s mom say to Jack Ruby? HA! HA! HA! HA! — at which he might laugh agreeably without any comprehension of the punch line. But when he examined the contents of the bowl, he understood. Swimming there like uncataloged water bugs were a dozen or more sets of house keys. They chimed agreeably as Dorothy shifted herself from one pump to the other, and their sundry key rings — a yellow slab of plastic with the word mom embossed on it in red, a Caucasian troll doll with magenta hair, a miniature can of Lowenbrau beer-caught the light like flea-market prizes. Dorothy examined Ben and Elena — Ben could feel this. She watched their faces set the way a dentist searches for the repressed shudder of discomfort.

— Strictly volunteer, of course. You can put your coats right in the library if you like.

— Oh, damn, Elena said, smiling herself. Oh, I’ve left the—

— You’ve—

— In the car, Elena said.

— Oh, yeah, Ben said. Yeah, we’ll be right back. Dot.

Just as soon as the Hoods had arrived, they were gone. Cramped in the front seat of the Firebird, windshield fogged, defroster on high, in silence. Parked in the driveway. Surrounded by the wheels of the neighborhood- Cadillac Eldorados, BMW 2002s, and then an AMC Matador, a Plymouth Duster. Beetles, Beetles, and more Beetles, that design created with slave labor. Cars creeping into the Halfords’ turnaround and then thinking better of it, thinking better of getting stuck in the bad weather to come, creeping out through the slush and onto Valley Road to park up on the embankment. The low chortle of expensive engines idling lazily.

A little history. The key party came into existence several years before, in a more freewheeling environment. This is one hypothesis. It came of age with hippie erotica and bohemian orgies in cramped apartments owned by poorly groomed professors. Or among the dangerously promiscuous, those who didn’t distinguish between the sexes or who slipped into the tepid waters of dimly lit love grottoes and swamps. But like so many reasonable ideas that seem less bright in the harsh illumination of general distribution, it was soon exported to this land of tidy shrubs and the Junior League.

Maybe the key party first touched suburban ground on Long Island, on the bay side; it might have landed in New Jersey, in Bernards ville or Princeton; or it might have emerged in Westchester, or even as far north as the Boston suburbs. Or maybe even California, where lax-moraled filmmakers and artists lived contiguously with taxpayers and families. Whatever its true origin, or its distribution (its Poisson Distribution), west to east, south to north, it undeniably appeared in Fairfield County in the early seventies.

The rules were appallingly simple. The men tossed their house keys into a convenient container — or hung them on pegs or spread them like a buffet on the front table or on the master bed — and the women, at evening’s end, selected a set at random. And then the party retired to taste novelty. Sometimes the men looked on as the women selected — leering, suggestive, hopeful, disappointed, or despairing; sometimes the women wore blindfolds fashioned from metaphorically rich garments, black silk stockings, for example; sometimes, the proceedings took place with a joyless resolve, as if the participants were merely plugged into a circuitry of compulsion.

In New Canaan, word had come of the key parties long before the first had been thrown. Local marriages awaited key parties the way a smart boy, already having pored over the dictionary definition of masturbation, awaits the day when he will understand it. The first one, thrown by some younger, unhappier residents over in the West School district, on Ponus Ridge, was viewed publicly with contempt but privately with much interest. And this contradictory posturing became the rule. At the Armitage party, held in the summer of 1972, partners at competing law firms bedded one another’s wives, and women who were best of friends compared notes on the prowess and endowment of local men.

The ramifications of these first parties took some time to emerge. Love had woven its tapestry, and the Armitages, the Sawyers, the Steeles, the Boyles, the Germans, the Ja-cobsens, the Hamiltons, the Gadds, the Earles, the Fullers, the Buckleys, the Regans, not to mention the Bolands, the Conrads, the Millers, and others, had followed its complex thread. But the revelations of this inquiry weren’t so surprising. No one returned with tales of dark new terrains — anal sex or urolagnia or masochism or coprophagy; in fact, the Armitage’s couples coupled in the way they always had. But they walked with a new jauntiness. For a day or two. Their hearts twittered with novelty.