Rick Moody - The Ice Storm

— Let’s go, she said. I have to look in on the kids. Paul is supposed to be coming back from the city.

— Jesus, Jim said, refixing his belt. I want to make it up to you, Elena. I can do better than that, honestly. I mean it. She sighed.

— Well, we can talk about it.

— That’s fine. I wouldn’t expect you to see it any other way.

— Maybe you just need…. We can talk any time, you know—

— I need that, too. I really do, Williams said.

He pointed at the seat belts.

He threw the car in drive, and that was when they noticed the skid marks on the driveway. Beneath the crust of snow was a much harder, more implacable layer of ice. An equalizing layer. It was like trying to drive a bumper car. The Cadillac had a mind of its own. As they circled around the gravel circle, Jim Williams turned wildly in either direction. Trying to catch the wheel.

They each fell into their own remorse. They were just neighbors again, if they had ever been anything else. Elena felt cheap and isolated. It had been as romantic as a pap smear or a home breast exam. She would rather wait in a gas-rationing line; she would rather watch war footage; she would rather — she was shocked to learn — clean up after the drunken Benjamin Hood. She let herself do certain things because of fashion, though she didn’t think of herself as fashionable in any way, and fashion brought the unexpected along with it. So here she was driving home with the fraud next door, a man she had little respect for, after having fucked him in his car.

They went into the tailspin coming off Ferris Hill Road. Just as they saw the other cars abandoned at the bottom of the hill, Jim lost control of the Cadillac. It was more than one spin. They went all the way around twice, two three-sixties, and Elena could hear the scream coming from her, but it didn’t seem like part of her. It was as alien, as elsewhere, as a radio signal during one of those emergency tests. Her frequency was pure and open. She was uninterrupted by decisions or responsibilities: there was time to think. She didn’t notice or care that her screams originated in her own throat. In the second before she imagined death, she recalled many things to be done. The dog was pacing back and forth in front of his bowl. Paul needed a haircut. She wanted to see Wendy wear those lovely new shoes. They, she and Benjamin, were going to replace the curtains in the drafty living room. They were going to find out about energy alternatives for their drafty house. They were going to buy a smaller car.

The Cadillac landed nose down in a shallow ditch. The last revolution had been painfully slow, like a merry-go-round on the lowest kiddie speed. The front end of the car accordioned as though it were engineered to do so. The frame moaned slightly as the engine folded up within it. Jim Williams cradled his head on the steering wheel. He asked if she was all right.

Elena nodded.

— Happy holidays, Jim said.

He untangled his legs from the engine parts that protruded up through the dash — he was miraculously uninjured — and helped her out. There were cars abandoned all around them. A Who’s Who of Halford party attendees.

— Look, let’s just put up at my place till morning, sweetie, Jim said. It’s closer. It doesn’t make any sense to be out walking. You can sleep in the guest room or something. If that’s what you want. But this isn’t a night to be going any further than you have to.

Elena thought it over.

— And your son. He isn’t on that train, I’ll bet you. He knows better than that. That is, if the trains are even running. And Wendy’s in bed and will be until morning. So it just makes sense. Besides, I owe you one. I want to pay up. Let me do just that.

She thought about it.

And the next thing that happened, at exactly midnight, was that the streetlamp at the corner of Ferris Hill and Valley Road, the only one for miles, abruptly went out.

LIBBETS CASEY told Paul Hood that she loved him as a friend. Her reasoning was labored, her tongue was thick. The world outside vanished during this discussion. That class Paul hated, Origins of the West; Spiro Agnew’s resignation; Gerald Ford’s confirmation. All this stuff vanished. Paul told her she was his best friend in the world, the only person he felt comfortable with, some kinda exact opposite he had been circling around, but the way he said it, it felt desperate and exaggerated, even to him. He was trying to cudgel her with good vibes. And she knew it. They sat on the edge of Libbets’s bed. She said:

— But you don’t even know me really.

— Sure I do, Paul Hood said. I know the aura you give off, Libbets. Sure. I know how you are in the cafeteria, where you sit, in the chapel, all over the place. It just seems right to me, you know? It just seems right.

— Well, I like you, too, Paul, but—

And she said it again: She loved him as a friend. Whatever that meant. They doodled in her blank book with colored pencils. Paul felt like some woeful responsibility of his was being held at bay, just while he was on that bed with her. As long as she let him sit there, whatever she said was just syllables flung at problems. She could still change her mind. These minutes were worth the hyperbole and the train ride and the Seconals. Paul penciled an approximation of the Human Torch on the page, and then filled him in with the yellow and orange. It was that sweeping-fireball Human Torch, from upper right to lower left. Laying waste at jet speed. That smoldering, adolescent Human Torch, who dropped out of college — as Paul expected he would, too — and who couldn’t keep a girlfriend. In the balloon Paul scrawled a little dedication: For Libbets, whichever way I fly. She told him he was good at it, that he was as good as any comic-book penciller, but he just brushed it off.

Paul couldn’t be certain he wasn’t part of a dream, as he sat on the bed, watching her do a little cubist scribble across from the Torch. He couldn’t be sure he wasn’t the protagonist of a dream belonging, for example, to Francis Chamberlain Davenport IV, who slumbered peacefully on the couch in the library. A real wish-fulfillment dream, maybe, a mandala dream, or else an unpleasant dream that just happened to have a couple of nice moments. Moments that just set him up for the next long torture passage. One of those long, complicated narratives of missed planes or failed examinations or public nudity. As in a dream, the room was so still when Libbets told him haltingly that she loved him as a friend that he could marvel at the sheer beautiful predictability of it, the predictability of his loneliness. His whole life was someone else’s dream and sometime soon that sleeper would wake. Or maybe his life was a weekly comedy series, and he would soon be canceled or replaced by a summer variety show starring Mac Davis. — It’s not that I don’t care about you, Libbets was trying to say, because I do, or maybe I do, but I just don’t think this is right. I feel more like you’re a brother. I feel this love for you like a brother. You know what I mean?

Because—

The pencils were spread out around the drawing book like a fan. What reply was there for a line like this? You’re wrong? You’re going to regret it? He didn’t know what he wanted anyway, or how to persuade her. He only knew that he didn’t want to move from this bed or from her side to return to the cage of his education. He thought maybe he wanted some sort of contact, some shocking and permanent contact. He wanted to be surgically attached to Libbets, stitched, cat-gutted to her, or he wanted one of those Looney Tunes kisses that were like electrocution. He wanted this moment on the bed to be in the absolute zero time of Marvel. She overlooked the magic in their predicament, the ramifications for the other characters in the strip. She didn’t see how Paul single-handedly beat back the threat of growing up.