Rick Moody - The Ice Storm

— Sorry about your sneakers, Libbets said.

He didn’t know what to say. He kissed her once on the lips, tasted the rank contents of her stomach. Kissed her just because he wanted to be unafraid of this simple biological event now and because he wanted to prove he could kiss her gently, like a decent guy.

He bore her up, out of the cab, held her up past the doormen, caressed her in the elevator, caressed the small of her back, and led her into her room. She went into the bathroom and vomited again, almost daintily this time. Paul gagged, too, as though he were going to spill his own guts in sympathy. He heard her shit after that, too, a torrent of insubstantial, watery stuff. He realized he couldn’t remember ever having heard a woman shit before. Libbets was still crying. These were the sounds in the Casey household, Libbets’s diarrhea, her choking sobs, and, in the next room, Davenport snoring in Libbets’s sister’s room. Davenport had moved. Sleepwalked, maybe. The sound of the snoring carried through the apartment like the country sound of a chain saw.

She was in her nightgown now, when she came out of the bathroom, and his eyes lit on her little woven anklet. And when she was backlit by the bedside lamp, her curvy shape shimmered in her transparent nightgown. She got under the covers.

— Are you feeling okay? he said.

— Much better, she mumbled. Gotta quit mixing things, I guess.

— Thanks for the night, Paul said. It was really a wonderful night.

— Mmm. He went on:

— I never get to see much of New York City. I don’t come in much. We used to come in with my dad at Christmastime. Once we came to see the circus. Three rings, couldn’t tell where to look. Totally fried. But now I don’t get into the city too much and you know, well, I don’t have that many friends either so it’s not too often—

It was like throwing a switch, the way she free-fell into unconsciousness. One moment she was there and the next, gone. She was a ghostly and beautiful sleeper, almost invisible, curled in the delicate question-mark shape Paul would have imagined for her.

He asked if he could just rest with her in the bed for a minute. Just for a minute, really, then he had to catch the train. Just to help her off to sleep and everything. When he got no reply, he removed his wet Top-Siders — speckled with puke and slush — and then his khakis. In his checkered boxer shorts — no self-respecting man of St. Pete’s wore briefs — he climbed into bed with Libbets Casey.

He meant only to curl his arm around her and to feel for her the sentiment that parents feel for helpless little kids. He meant only to help, to feel that he could help. And when she rose and fell in the little drama of respiration, her breasts brushing up against his arm, when he brushed back her dirty-blond hair and touched his palm to her forehead, he knew that his life wasn’t here to be squandered. This was the thing that anybody could do. He knew the comedy of the human body. He could share it. And it didn’t matter for a moment that Libbets was unlikely to do the same for him. It didn’t matter. This was where the storm worked its change on him. He was ready to do a little service.

But instead, his erection began to rub against Libbets’s voluptuous ass. He knew what he was doing, but he wasn’t admitting it. He was feeling virtuous. His dick was making its own decisions, ones that involved chiefly sorrow and shame. His dick didn’t give a shit about the community of lost teenagers. It only took a minute or so — he had hiked up her nightgown and was rubbing against her very flesh — before he was teetering on the brink of that fantastic and sorrowful ecstasy. What really gave masturbation its thrill was the possibility of getting caught at it at the moment of orgasm, when you knew that Jimmy Rodale, for example, was going to tell everyone in Manville that you used a nylon soccer jersey to accomplish the deed. Or getting caught by your mother. That cry of release was like no other — I wish I were in love! I’m never gonna be!

But Paul was gifted with a sudden moment of insight. He could see that the lovely cheeks of her ass, her coccyx, her knobby lower vertebrae, the breasts he held in his hand, would not bring him the good feeling he wanted. He could see what kind of creep he was. He would be no more there afterward than he was before. He was no sensuous man. And there was no colony on this planet where this kind of activity was rewarded. This insight was nothing more than a jab in the midst of the precipitous movement toward ejaculation.

He managed to roll over onto his side, though. To save himself a little heartbreak.

— Oh, Libbets, he groaned.

And he came. By himself. On himself. On his hand, and on Libbets’s sheets.

Instantly, he was out of bed, checking the clock, his heart racing, looking for his clothes. Was he high? Was he a fool? Was he a deviant? He sprinted to the bathroom, where he gave his hands a good washing. He grabbed a flowered towel and rushed with it back to the bed. Libbets slept. He scrubbed at the puddle not a foot from her back. She rolled backward, from the commotion maybe, so that she was only inches away. He whispered apologies. He scorched the fitted sheet with scrubbing friction. It wasn’t going to come out so easily. There were little clots of the stuff. It would just have to dry. He prayed that his semen would not make that journey of eight inches across the sheet and into Libbets’s vagina. He prayed it would fade by morning. He prayed it would be transformed into the flaky and inoffensive crust he knew so well.

It was almost eleven. Had Davenport heard? The snoring had stopped. Paul’s life was cheap. He dressed. He looked for his magazines. He was as alone in that apartment as he could be. A world of sleepers kept his secret. How could he sit across from Libbets in M. LeJeune’s french class? How could he herald the birth of baby Jesus in a month’s time? How could he ring in the fabulous year of 1974?

The best thing to do was to attempt to adhere to his normal daily schedule in all other areas of his life. To come and go according to his habits; the best thing to do was to catch the train as planned; to return to New Canaan as planned; to have breakfast with his parents as planned; to try to bask in the company of his parents, to try to learn the lessons of family; to catch the train back to Boston on Sunday, as planned, and from there catch the bus to Concord; to go to chapel on Monday morning as required; to attend Origins of the West, Geometry One, Chemistry One, English Five, and French Four as though nothing concerned him more than the usual battery of exams and the stress of selecting the correct St. Pete’s bumper sticker for his parents’ station wagon for Xmas. The slim rewards of habit would be his.

His clothes were straightened out (though he was dripping slightly into his pants), his tweed jacket was buttoned. His penis hurt. He leaned over Libbets’s shoulder to grace the clean, broad plane of her cheekbone. She slipped halfway out of delirium.

— Mmmnn, Libbets said.

And then she sank again. He muttered another apology, as if words were going to do the trick.

Paul Hood begged his cab driver to make it to Grand Central Terminal by 11:00. This required haste. The grand avenue they hurtled down couldn’t impress him now. Nor could the snow and sleet drifting in the streetlamps like ash from an incinerator. He was unaware. He had plunged himself into the netherworld of troubled adolescents. He wasn’t a man at all. He was a boy. A privileged kid. His parents could get him out of what he had done. He would go to Silver Meadow. His dad had money. His dad could pay for psychiatric treatment. His dad would turn up during visiting hours with fresh socks. His dad would ferry him home to Silver Meadow after he got thrown out of St. Pete’s. His dad would ferry him into that subspace of forgotten perverts.