Rick Moody - The Ice Storm

— Oh, I don’t think so, Jim said. It’s been a discouraging evening.

— You couldn’t have hoped for much better when you came up the walk, Elena said. And that’s the truth.

— Somehow it was different in my imagination when I thought about it. Actually, I didn’t think about it at all, really.

Williams was wearing plaid pants — kelly green field with red and yellow lines crisscrossing — and a striped shirt. Maroon stripes on white. A big collar wide open at the neck, spread out upon the wide lapels of his tweed jacket. Tan patent-leather loafers with heels. He had facial hair. Sideburns, and a large mustache that he stroked contemplatively as they spoke.

They sat. On the modular-seating unit.

— Do you want coffee or something? Williams said.

— If we can do it quick, she said. Maybe they have one of those filter jobs…. Did you come down from the city? Was the weather—

The weather was awful, and Jim Williams had heard gloomy forecasts about the effects of the sudden twenty-degree drop in the temperature that was expected. His conductor, on the train out, had grim prophecies.

— Well, if it’s going to be so cold, Elena said, as they combed the kitchen looking for the coffee, the half-and-half, and the drip apparatus, you might as well—

— Look, Elena, he said, the fact that we’re… neighbors, you know, close friends, well, it sort of makes this a little strange, don’t you think?

Well, they didn’t have to share their feelings on the subject of infidelity. They both had experience. A complex of feelings had passed through Elena since early evening. The tough job of naming feelings seemed overwhelming. It was a job for social workers, for the professionals at Silver Meadow. Her feelings, they would say, had a Reichian name. She could locate them in an orgone accumulator.

— My husband is passed out in the bathroom. I’ve been married to him for seventeen years and I don’t have any intention of going in there to pick him up. This is one night I’m just not doing it. Come what may…. He’s not my profession…. Do you know what I mean? Jim Williams didn’t say anything.

— So what I’m proposing is that since your wife has gone off with a boy, and since you are standing here alone, I’m proposing that you and I just do what makes sense. Stay warm. Pass some time. That’s all. It’s not elegant—

They were looking at their hands, looking at their coffee cups, looking at the lacerations in the very wood grain of the chopping board — celery ends stacked upon it; they were looking at the bowl of dip and the cellophane wrap crumpled next to it. They were looking around the room at refrigerator magnets and salt cellars and church keys and the stems of freshly cut flowers in the sink and bottle caps and a lone spice jar marked marjoram.

— I’m already married, you know, Elena said. I don’t have any use for you in the long run. If that’s what you’re worried about. If you don’t want to talk about it ever again, you don’t have to. Now don’t make me feel as though I’m being too forward, okay? Don’t make me feel that trying to persuade is unbecoming. Because I can tell it’s not the furthest thing from your mind.

A long, silent communion between the two of them.

— What the hey, Jim said. Let’s go for a drive. And then she hesitated.

— Okay. Okay. Should we clean up around here first? Elena said. Do you think it’s all right—

— Nah, he said, that wasn’t in the contract.

But they walked around the first floor turning off lights. Elena didn’t pay any attention to the sound of running water in the bathroom there — where not so long ago Mark Boland had stared at the panties knotted around her bony legs — or to the light that still shone beneath the door there. They turned off the appliances in the kitchen, the lamps in the dining room, in the den, and back in the living room. They pushed the sculpture in the foyer back into the open space by the guest room, where Dot usually kept it. They helped each other into their coats.

Outside, everything had changed. Meteorologically, the phenomenon, which occurred rarely in that part of the Northeast, went like this: rain, sleet, and snow, propelled by subfreezing winds — warmer temperatures aloft and freezing temperatures at ground level — began to harden instantly on trees, rooftops, power lines, and other surfaces. The ice built up on every surface. (The worse such storm in thirty years, according to Mike Powers, spokesman for Connecticut Light and Power. Stamford Advocate, November 23, 1973, p. Al ff .) Moving up the East Coast, the low-pressure system spread from Virginia to Maine and from four hundred miles out on the Atlantic Ocean to Pennsylvania.

Elena and Jim Williams, therefore, like the rest of the carnal refugees from the Halfords’ house, were traveling out into a storm that was no longer safe. Three or four inches of snow had accumulated now, around Jim’s tires. The freezing rain was still pelting the Cadillac, and a thick glaze shellacked his windshield.

— We’re going to have to defrost this thing for a while, Williams said.

Elena wondered if the car would even start. It started on the first try. This was a Cadillac, after all. She wondered if the other revelers had found, as she had, that their resolve failed them outside, in the elements. If you weren’t into adultery for the erotic dementia, she thought, the amnesia it brought with it, why bother? But in the midst of the storm, infidelity felt almost ridiculous. She was about to tell Jim this when he leaned over to kiss her. The heating vents blew cool air on them; the exhaust bellowed clouds of obfuscation. — Do these seats go back? she said.

And that, suddenly, was the beginning of it. Elena had never made love in a car before. It was one of those rites of passage that she had read about in books. She hadn’t known about rock and roll, she hadn’t known about racial strife, and she hadn’t known about heavy petting in cars. The logistics of it were demanding, she was finding out. Jim was unfastening her pants and getting right to business. She had trouble getting any purchase on him. She was pulling down her panties with one hand and settling herself across his lap. She whispered reassuringly about birth control pills. Then he was inside.

It was urgent and painless and soon it was over. Jim moaned plaintively. In less time than it takes to defrost a windshield.

Kinsey: “The quick performance of the typical male may be most unsatisfactory to a wife who is inhibited or natively low in response, as many wives are; and such disparities in the speed of male and female response are frequent sources of marital conflict, especially among uppersocial levels where the female is most restrained in her behavior.”

Jim Williams was rubbing his neck.

— That was really awful, Jim Williams said, that was really awful. I’m so sorry, Elena.

They had trouble untangling themselves. Elena worried that she might have to open the door and slide out headfirst to regather herself. Eventually she slid down into the cavity by the glove compartment, and there she worked her trampled flannel pants around the right way.

— Things are rotten at home, Jim said. You wouldn’t believe how rotten. Janey’s sick. She’s unstable. I guess…. It’s not the right time to tell you .. . but that’s it, Elena. That’s it. She can’t be happy. I don’t know why. I can’t make her happy, the boys can’t make her happy. She just can’t do it. It’s like she thinks I lied to her or something. She treats me like I promised her something I have welched on…. She just doesn’t want the life she used to think she wanted. It’s not going to turn out well, I can tell you that much.