Rick Moody - The Ice Storm

So Mark Boland wanted a little of this key business. And that was why Elena was talking to him. She wanted to see it up close.

— Goodness, Elena, I’m sorry, he said.

— Not at all, she said. These things happen. Just have to get back on the horse, I guess. That’s why you show up chez Halford. You never know how it’s going to turn out.

Boland smiled. A little too long.

— Yes, that’s right.

— Mark and I were just talking about the weather, Maria interrupted.

— The weather, Elena said.

— Yes, well, it’s supposed to freeze up tonight. Quite dangerous by morning time, Maria said.

— Most dangerous storm in some time, Boland said. Have you and Benjamin made arrangements?

— Arrangements?

— Well, yes.

And when this aside had been exhausted, Boland launched back into his historical ramblings. Canaan Parish, separated by the Perambulation Line, he was saying, had at one time been composed of a Stamford section and a Norwalk section. Probably they had storms then, too, storms of this very type. The wall that marked the Per-amublation Line had probably been rebuilt many times because of these storms. Did you know a small piece of it still stood behind the new high school? A tiny bit of spittle collected at the corners of Boland’s mouth as he spoke, as though he were parched. It was an erotic froth, the milk of erotic starvation. On he went, about the differences between the New Haven Colony, which founded Norwalk in 1651, and the Connecticut Colony, which founded Stamford (or Stanford, because that’s what it was called then) in 1650. In 1686, when the Perambulation Line was first erected, New Canaan was still entirely part of both Norwalk and Stamford. The first private purchase on the Norwalk side of the line was in 1699, for land at Silvermine Hill.

— Back then it was always two words, Boland said. Silver Mine Hill. Then…. Well, of course, the town was established as a church parish — I’m sure you know all this — Canaan Parish, so that the locals, the Stanford and Norwalk citizens, wouldn’t have to travel so far to go to church…

It was a conversation designed to forbid. Finding a break in Boland’s filibuster, Maria’s son, Neil Conrad, moved in on Elena. He placed himself between her and Boland. Neil wore a tie-dyed turtleneck, patched jeans, and hiking boots. His hair was long. Elena wondered if he was going to play the game, the key party game, and if not, why Maria, who was here without her husband, had brought him. Elena considered his ectomorphic skeleton: what self-respecting adult would perch and grind against this boy in the act of love? Would Neil, only a year or two older than her own son, with his acne and his wavy, feminine hair, be someone with whom she could go home?

Absolutely not.

Young Neil mumbled in his confused way — under his halitotic breath — about how boring the party was and how boring this guy with the New Canaan stuff was — and then he began to fire questions at her. Elena had found herself the object of admiration from teenagers before. It was, she guessed, her nonjudgmental silences. They took this for listening. Anyway, as it turned out, Neil had just been through the training. That’s right. His mind was a carefully brainwashed version of Werner Erhard’s. He had spent weekends in an auditorium in which he could not leave to urinate, and now he had got It. He got that there was nothing to get. The effect of this had changed his life. Of the assembled in the party, he had chosen her to hear his message.

Neil mumbled that he was now interested in the spiritual basis of what Vonnegut was doing with Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. Drawings of assholes and everything. Also there was a record called Dark Side of the Moon. Getting into some pretty far-out shit. “Breathe in the air,” Neil Conrad told Elena. “Don’t be afraid to care.” Jonathan Livingston Seagull was pretty hip to it, too. Each of us had an idea of the Great Gull within us.

— The movie sucks the big one, though. Neil Diamond music, forget it. Cracklin’ Rosie.

— Well, I—

— And if you are into the ways the training can be used, y’know, with what’s going on in religion and like the…. Well, then there’s this guy here you should talk to.

Suddenly, Neil was leading her into the next room — Boland and his mother waving at them — into the library, where the sound of Antonio Carlos Jobim, being played at 45 r.p.m., maybe by accident, was competing with the television set, which was rebroadcasting Miracle on 34th Street. Dentist-chair music, elevator music, and then that Macy’s version of God, that Macy’s version of miracles, that bearded fellow in the nuthouse. Or was it Gimbels. She was permitting herself to be led only because she knew that somewhere in the shifting associations of this party there was an individual who would transform this evening. And she suspected that she would be led to him by chance. A group was clustered around the hexagonal, glass coffee table (base of bronze and low-carbon steel, manufactured by Philip Daniel) — a couple of men and women shaking absently in time to the Bossa Nova — so Elena didn’t see him at first. Outside, in the light of a patio lamp, the snow seemed to be falling up. It was almost eleven.

Then Neil introduced her to the man she had met in the coffee shop before, Wesley. Wesley Myers. She wasn’t surprised to find him on the premises. Or her surprise quickly dissipated. She had recognized in that moment in the coffee shop with him a whole different narrative of her marriage, a whole sequence of intimacies and distances and textures and motels and wines and partings, and she had balked at it. It was hard to see that narrative here again, in front of her, but it was good, too. She liked the sense of possibility in sad things. Wesley was here because he was single, she guessed, but also because this kind of basic Ten Commandments violation, the kind of violation at the party, must have drawn out the undesirable element of New Canaan in just the way a pie left out overnight draws out the ants. And Myers was an undesirable. This she knew from their two or three mild encounters. He was a restless thinker, an irritable, curmudgeonly guy. On the other hand, maybe he didn’t know anything about the key party. Maybe he had just appeared. Maybe he responded to pher-omones in the air, to animal endocrinology.

Myers did look like one of those mugging characters, like Buddy Hackett or Don Knotts. He was squat, short, dissipated, like a de Sade version of Santa Claus. He gave off the aura of having masturbated too frequently and too far into middle age.

He smiled warmly.

— How nice to see you, how really nice.

The gin blossoms that traversed his nose wrinkled in his smile.

And then Neil got right into it. Because there was no delaying where spiritual issues were concerned. Because this was a time of great spiritual questing. The center of the conversation was again est, on which Myers had an inside track, as he seemed to have on a variety of nontraditional avenues of worship, including the Church of Scientology, Parhamansa Yogananda, the Peoples’ Temple, Gestalt therapy, and transcendental meditation.

The main issue, the way Myers put it, was the Fleece. You had a right, as a struggling human machine, to the fleece, to get all the fleece in your daily life.

— But having a right, well, and I’m paraphrasing here, paraphasing Werner and one of his students, having a right is different from being right. Being right and being happy are on opposite ends of this dance that is the life of human machines. That’s all that’s going on here. Being right is the last refuge of scoundrels. Abdicate totally and completely. Right? Instead, as est accounts for it, you’re going to have to search for your flow and negotiate… its currents and its white water. That’s right. Once you have found the center-that-is-not-a-true-center, as a human machine you can partake of it at any time. Werner says pretty clearly that when you begin to communicate about your flow, it will take the shape of this globe, this world. That’s the big secret that isn’t really a secret. Once you’ve constructed this raft for this voyage along your flow, once you have copped to the twists and bends of this journey, you can think about becoming a spiritual adept yourself. That’s the secret. That’s about all there is to it.