Rick Moody - The Ice Storm

And they drank again.

Outside, the weather trashed the landscaping.

When she wrapped her arms around him, she knew she could break him in half. She kissed Sandy; he consented to be kissed. Sandy had no taste. He was tasteless like tap water. She could feel his ideas all confused, his uncertainty. She opened the chest of his pajamas. This was how they wore them now on Noxzema commercials and in the movies, a couple buttons opened up at the neck, chest hair overgrowing. But Sandy was a downy little babe, not encumbered with a single dark hair. He leaned back so she could open the pajama top. Herself, she was doffing layer after layer, trying to keep the pace up-hard to do in winter — her sweater, her turtleneck, her T-shirt. And they rubbed their chests together, the tips of her breasts, just beginning to be breasts, and then they worked on the rest of their clothes. Wendy carefully pulled off ski pants and panties all at once — so that she could conceal the soiled garter belt, the one she had taken from Mike’s room. Sandy was too preoccupied with his own nakedness to notice.

— Get ’em off, she said to him, laughing at the sound of haste. Laughing at her own forthrightness.

And pretty soon they were naked. His little soldier was at sharpest attention, like G. I. Joe with Lifelike Hair back when he was among the living.

— Under covers, Wendy said.

Sandy threw back the comforter and they slid under it. Sandy laughed again, and Wendy laughed, and the laughter was good. She took his hairless penis in her hand, and she cupped his hairless testicles, and she kissed his nipples, and they rolled around like that for a while.

— Have you had a nocturnal emission? she asked.

— Huh?

— That’s the name for when you wake up and find this little pool of sticky stuff. Supposedly like after a sexy dream.

He shook his head.

— They didn’t tell you this stuff yet? What planet do you live on?

Sandy didn’t want to answer questions, though; he wanted to continue. When his knee pushed up between her legs, when his hip mashed against her, she shivered, but it didn’t seem to be leading anywhere particularly. He didn’t know what he was doing. She could kiss his little pig-in-a-blanket. But she realized pretty soon the futility of the whole thing. There weren’t going to be any orgasms, simultaneous or even regular, old orgasms, in this guest room.

But maybe that was okay. She didn’t know much about them anyway. Orgasm was a word she had looked up a dozen times, and still she didn’t exactly know what it meant. Masturbation — excitation of the genitals, usually to orgasm, from the Latin manus stuprare, to defile by the hand. How many episodes, in the months before her first period, without anything but a nifty tingling. It was like the shock you got off a metal door handle after padding around in socks. Sodomy — any intercourse held to be abnormal, especially anal intercourse. Bestiality-sexual relations between a person and an animal. Huh? These things were impossible to imagine.

Orgasm was even harder to understand. Its only close relative in the word kingdom seemed to be something like grace. You could have grace explained to you a hundred times, but unless you got some, it was just air. One afternoon when Mikey had been busy humping away at her, suddenly part of his T-shirt right above his waist was soaked through, and then something overtook her, and she felt herself rushing up to a plateau. She pushed and shoved against Mikey, and then she just lost herself for a minute. She just slipped away entirely on some air mattress of breezes. It was like being spooked. It was an out-of-body experience, like grace.

She wasn’t sure if that was one or not. But this was how she thought she understood that strange word, that word that seemed to come from some distant language-family, Tibeto-Burman or something very alien to the language of her own family. She didn’t know if it had been an orgasm exactly, but she was chasing it anyway.

— I love you, Wendy, Sandy said.

— That’s nice, Sandy, she said. I love Chiller Theater and Nanny and the Professor.

They lay there in just the light from the hall. This stillness seemed pretty close to contentment. Wendy knew she had done a powerful job of initiation.

— Another drink? she said.

— I guess so.

And she sat up and surveyed the carnage, the covers half-kicked off, the clothes scattered around the floor. Wendy liked the look of disorder. She filled the glass, spilling a little — on herself, on the sheets, down the sides of the glass — filled it all the way up.

— Are you drunk? she asked.

— I don’t know, Sandy said. How do I know?

— I don’t know either. You spin around. That’s one way you know. You spin around when you try to lie down.

They enjoyed each other’s warmth like refugees. Glad for the warmth, for the company. And then, because they weren’t thinking very carefully about the night and its whirling array of parents and siblings, they fell tumultuously into sleep.

THE PARTY PEAKED around ten-thirty like a cheap acid trip. This party was going through some changes. Describing them, describing these changes — the personal growth, the group dynamics taking place at the Hal-fords’ — would have taxed the keenest reader of Psychology Today. Thomas Harris, M.D., author of I’m Okay — You’re Okay, put it this way: “Early in his work in the development of Transactional Analysis, Eric Berne observed that as you watch and listen to people you can see them change before your eyes. It is a total kind of change. There are simultaneous changes in facial expression, vocabulary, gestures, posture and body functions, which may cause the face to flush, the heart to pound, or the breathing to become rapid. We can observe these changes in everyone.”

Elena didn’t see how this transactional model was going to work for her. Though she was a reader of personal-growth books. She had read Jonathan Livingston Seagull and The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge and The Primal Scream by Arthur Janov and I’m Okay-You’re Okay and Games People Play by Eric Berne and Notes to Myself by Hugh Prather and The Gestalt Approach and Eyewitness Therapy by Fritz Peris and Be Here Now by Ram Dass and 5o/ on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver and / Never Promised You a Rose Garden and The Divided Self and Human Sexual Response and Island by Aldous Huxley and The Tibetan Book of the Dead and The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. She read this stuff, but it didn’t help her at parties.

And the party itself was of two minds, one mind in which the selection of house keys was a worthy and modern preoccupation, and one mind in which the whole game was a shame. Some people felt both ways, and some shifted back and forth between these two belief systems.

Uncomfortable as she was, how was Elena to account for the change that had overcome her? How was Elena to account for the joy that seized her not long after her arrival at the party? New Canaan society crept around trying to make decisions about the keys, about the repercussions of its participation. The conversations became vague, Elena noticed, as husbands and wives tried to avoid one another. They slunk from the bar to their conversations with eyes downcast, as Elena herself was avoiding Benjamin. Still, she found herself suddenly elated at the party; there was no other way to put it. She felt the loosening of the constraints that had bound her since she had come of age, and she realized she would play. She would select a key. She would clutch it to her, permit it to dangle around her neck, between her small, subdued breasts. She would play.