Rick Moody: The Ice Storm

— Ben, Ben, she whispered, let’s move. This isn’t the right place. You know that.

He pretended she meant to the back seat. Hood banged the back of her head on the rearview mirror as he was swinging her around and trying to carry her to that tiny storage area behind the front seats. He was close to tears now, though he was determined to go through with it.

— Take them down, she said, take down your trousers. I want to see you in full. If it’s going to be like this.

She worked the zipper herself. She didn’t require his help.

He remembered her kneeling across him. His suit pants coiled around his ankles like shackles, around his cordovans. His tie was loosened, his shirt unbuttoned, the tails of his shirt flapping around in the midst of their efforts. It was cold in the car, he could see his breath.

— Get on board, he said. C’mon.

He had never spoken during the act before. The words sounded to him like an impropriety. They were like an ethnic slur. They were like talking about money in public.

She sat on his impoverished penis.

Hood thought of Elena, of course. How could he not? And of Paul and Wendy and how they would feel when they found out. The look of inconsolable shame and remorse with which they would greet him. Something led Hood these days into degradation. There was some tug, some mournful and beckoning melody he followed.

In fact. Melody turned out to be the girl’s name, and she was better at it than his wife. She was fortissimo- ff, when scored. What was upsetting about Melody was what was good. He thought about prostitutes and group sex and transvestites and sadomasochism and he could see the lure of the alien, the lure of the barbarous sexual act. As she rocked, she banged her head again. On the ceiling. He came. All the life went out of him. And then the moment turned. Really. For a second everything smelled sad and good. Like after a heavy rain. He held her in his arms. Melody from the office, whom he would have to see again right after the family ski trip to the Berkshires, right after he saw his dad, his lonely dad, right after he relaxed for a week. He would have to see her and he wouldn’t know what to say. He would forget he had been happy right then, for a moment.

— Should we get a drink?

He hoped she would decline. He was a little scared.

— You have to go back to your wife, fool, she said quietly. You’ll be folded up on some lane divider if you have another drink.

— I can make my own decisions—

— Well, I don’t want another drink with you. Even if I do appreciate the company.

They didn’t talk anymore after that. He dropped her off at her apartment.

The trip home was an adventure into the northern wastes. He drove erratically, despondently, dangerously. He sped, tailgated. Back at his house, in the master bedroom, he splashed water on his penis. He bathed the site of his transgression with a violet shell soap.

— What are you doing? Elena called sleepily as he dried himself off in the bathroom. Never coming enough out of her unconsciousness to see it.

— Oh, just brushing my teeth. Hood mumbled. Didn’t want to wake you. Just brushing.

Nine months later. A full gestation period after Melody, he began to execute his affair with Janey Williams.

Their kids and his kids got along famously. This provided the opportunity. The kids were like some suburban gang of Sharks or Jets. Slovenly, affluent kids from the suburbs, staying out late to shoot pellet guns at the Van Dorens’ rottweiler, to smoke marijuana, or to get into one another’s pants. Mikey Williams and his friends had begun to call each other Charles all the time — this was part of how Janey and Hood had grown close, one night, talking it over. Hood had asked Mikey, taking him aside brusquely one night at a dinner party at the Williamses, what the hell Charles was all about. Short for the opposition in the Vietnam conflict? Nickname of Manson? Name of a perfume? Nah, Mike told him sullenly, Charles, like Charles Nelson Reilly. From Match Game. The one. Hood surmised, with the incredibly long microphone.

Wendy was the only sensible kid on the block.

The wind gusted fiercely, wailing its dissonances, turning the corner around Janey’s house, around the guest room, passing into the valley below, over the Silvermine River — a creek, really — and into the forest. The weather report was bad. Rain, rain, and then turning sharply colder. It was coming down in sheets now and mixed with harder stuff.

Kids, that was how it happened. They had a laugh over Charles. It was Halloween night and their kids, his daughter and the Williams kids and Danny Spofford from up the street, were dressed up, along with every other kid in the neighborhood, as vagrants. Decked out in rags with mud and tar and eyeliner speckling them, with penciled-on boils and gin blossoms and dead teeth. Dressed like urban flotsam. Benjamin Hood had driven the half mile to fetch some forgotten culinary item, a cup of milk or some Tang or something. .He sat for a moment on the couch next to Janey. They rated the costumes of their beloved vagrants. The further the distance from their cushy lives, the higher the rating.

It had to do with kids and Halloween. With this mythology of the holiday. The carnival of sleep and death. The ghosts of the past, the ghosts of all his mistakes, crowded the earth, reminded him of the folly of his best efforts. Regrets. Hood turned the other cheek: he permitted the kids to carry shaving cream and soap and raw eggs out into the street. Go ahead, he laughed. Go fuck each other up. Doesn’t matter in the long run. Doesn’t matter what the hell you do. The kids froze, stunned by the oath. Then they piled out the door, to menace the neighbors. Janey Williams’s lipstick was a chocolate color, a real earth tone.

The long flat stretches of matrimony were over. He was thirty-nine and balding and unattractive and his children wanted to be nothing so much as vagrants.

— Let’s fuck, he desperately proposed to his neighbor. He drained a highball.

— So romantic, she said. But I think you might have another engagement.

— Oh, Janey, he said. You know what I mean.

— Boy, do I, she said.

— Tell me I’m totally wide of the mark, he said. Tell me it’s all in my head.

Janey smiled sadly. She had her own problems.

He made it back in time for dinner.

The erotics of adultery are well documented. In the guest room, thinking back, Hood drank again. Maybe he honored his wife in this way; maybe it was for her. Maybe he fucked against the notion of family, to escape its constraints. Maybe he adultered because of his keen appreciation of beauty. Maybe he celebrated the freedom of the new sexuality. Maybe he did it to abase himself. Maybe he did it to hurt Janey Williams, or to injure her husband — they were more attractive than he was, they were more at ease. Maybe it was her husband he wanted to fuck, and it was such a terrible, dark secret that it was secret even from Benjamin. Maybe he wanted to get caught. Maybe he did it to escape, from his job, his anxieties, his psychosomatic complaints. Maybe he did it because his parents, too, had done it (or so he supposed) and the desire to cheat boiled in his genes. Maybe, at last, he did it simply because he wanted what he couldn’t have.

Touching briefly — in the guest room — on this shortage theory of adultery, Hood arrived at a brilliantly incorrect understanding of Janey’s absence. He believed suddenly that he understood the afternoon. Of course! He was supposed to look for her! In the overdecorated chambers of her house, he was to embark on a quest, a Buzz Aldrin or Neil Armstrong sort of a quest. He would have to work for this oblivion he wanted. He was dressed but ready to disrobe. He poured a fresh tumbler of vodka and set off on the tour.