Rick Moody - The Ice Storm

Then Maundy moved into the academic arena with Paul. Coming down the long hallway that ran along the gym, he would break free from his platoon of handlers and harass Hood over by the water fountain. Pass your test over to me during math. Just do it. Maundy always smiled during these demands, as though he were engaged in an act of philanthropy.

Paul wished, as in after-school specials, that he had lived to see Maundy brought low, or that he would learn of some terrible tragedy in the Maundy family — his father’s cancer, his mother’s alcoholism — that would explain their son, the thug. But Paul never told anyone about the situation. He never turned Maundy in. He just took it.

Wendy also lived with the responsibility of isolation in public school. He had seen public school kids turn away rather than talk to her; he had heard her called whore and freak by the children of judges and social workers. In the dark, under his tweed jacket, Paul got stuck, all over again, on his parents and their chemistry. What kinds of genes gave him a life like this?

And the truth was that the story of Skip Maundy did have a conclusion. Later on, at New Canaan High, Maundy apparently dallied with a retarded girl in one of the lavatories. It was that girl Sarah Joe Holmes. Here’s what they said: that Maundy had pissed on her, held her down and pissed on her. That was the alleged crime. Held her down, exposed himself, pissed on her, and then smoked a cigarette. Maybe it was just a story someone concocted to explain a horrible situation. But maybe, on the other hand, the miracle of inheritance had produced a guy who felt comfortable in this crime. Paul went over the story again and again.

How did Sarah Joe account for that moment, that moment when the urine splashed across her face and smock, puddling around her? Was Skip sad about it, afterward, the way Paul was sad about Libbets? Paul didn’t know.

It was a story that didn’t lead anywhere. Just something that happened. Just something to think about in the locked vault of familial regrets.

OKAY, the time has come in this account for a characterization of the mind of God. Just briefly, for thematic reasons. Happily there’s no need to concern ourselves with this mind as it has expressed itself directly — because it hasn’t, really. Therefore this story can be content with indirect examples, with metaphor and with evidence from nature. For example: Benjamin Hood, who was on Saturday morning asleep on the floor of the Halfords’ bathroom, had a dream — an uncomfortable dream in the midst of a grueling hangover. Dreams retold are a burden, so this will be brief. In Hood’s dream, a special tax had been levied against him because of fruit-bearing trees growing in his yard on Valley Road. He learned of this tax while taking a drive with Jim Williams (in a station wagon with simulated wood paneling, though Williams actually drove a Cadillac). Hood was trying to explain the presence of government inspectors in his yard, those inspectors in white, lead-lined suits, measuring the size and yield of his plum trees and then blowtorching them.

— The thing I can’t figure out, he told Jim Williams, is whether this is happening in 1973 or in 1991.

— Well, pal, Williams said, the past and the future happen in the present moment. That’s just how it is.

That’s it. That’s the dream. And the amazing thing about this dream is that Benjamin’s son would dream it, too. Years later. Really. In Hoboken, New Jersey. Paul Hood. With his father as the main character and everything. Benjamin, however, as he lay on the floor of the bathroom dreaming uncomfortably, couldn’t know — would never know — that his son would dream this very dream, that his son would wake and retell it and in the retelling become his father’s imaginer as well as his father’s son. His father’s narrator.

This congruency — between Paul and his dad — is sort of like the congruency between me, the narrator of this story, the imaginer of all these consciousnesses of the past, and God. All these coincidences and lapses of coincidence were set in motion long before Benjamin or Paul was conceived, the way the topography and history of New Canaan — the shifting course of its rivers, the rise and fall of its tax revenues, its past, its future — preceded Benjamin and Paul, preceded all of us.

That’s metaphor. I mentioned an example from nature, too. It follows. Though metaphors of the mind of God are characterized by coincidence and repetition, examples from nature aren’t as tidy. Nature is senseless and violent. So this part of the story is violent, and because it’s senseless, too, it’s not from the point of view of any of the protagonists. It features a minor character. Mike Williams. The ice had built up on every surface, on roofs and shrubs and avenues and cars and waterways. It formed a glittering and immense cocoon on tree limbs and power lines, a cocoon of impossible mass. The sound of tree limbs giving out under this weight was like the crackling of gunfire. Mike Williams, who was wandering around in the earliest part of dawn, heard these explosions in the stillness and laughed giddily at them. He was up really late. The threat of heavy weather impelled him out into the elements. To watch.

Danny Spofford’s had been his first destination, up on Mill Road; Mike walked up Silvermine. When the occasional vehicle skidded past, he hid. The Conrads’ AMC Gremlin went by. Somebody in a Corvette. It took a while to get to the Spoffords’ on foot. When he got there, though, he and Danny stayed up watching television — Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert — until the electricity went off. Then they became inventive, resourceful and inventive, as though the storm could in some way end all conversation, all teenaged fraternity. As though they only had a little time left. They began to counsel one another on what sexual intercourse would really be like. Fucking. At one point, Danny went into the kitchen and fetched a jar of strawberry jam out of the dormant refrigerator, Shopwell brand jam, into which he slid his middle finger. In an effort to simulate the velvet interior of a woman’s reproductive apparatus. Standing in the middle of the kitchen, licking the jam from his fuck finger, Danny Spofford said that if it was going to be like that he wanted to do it right away.

— Pop the cherry, Charles.

Mike, of course, had experienced more of this than he was letting on. He was a Casanova. But since Danny Spofford was homely, since he was a kid with a big beak and a sloping forehead, ears that stuck out too far, Mike didn’t want to insult him with too much experience. Not right away. But then as the night got deeper and colder and they wrapped themselves tighter in the blankets and quilts that Danny’s dad had piled up on the old couch in the basement, Mike started to tell Danny about Wendy Hood.

— That slut? Danny Spofford said.

— Hey, you don’t know her. Don’t say that.

— A harlot, Charles. She’s a lesbee. You’re not gonna tell me—

— You don’t get it, Spud. Let me finish.

But Mike was powerless to render the intricacies of unconsummated teen lust, the way it flattened out differences and made everyone compatible and everything tolerable. He couldn’t explain how Wendy’s dad had caught them with their pants down, because it was too embarrassing, and how this entrapment (kind of like that other arrest, in which Frank Wills stumbled upon Egil Krogh’s men: James McCord, Bernard L. Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, and Frank Sturgis) had only deepened his feelings for her. In the flickering candlelight, in the riot of competing flashlight beams, he couldn’t say why he was always thinking about her, how he doodled her name and her initials in his ring binder, how he concealed it in english assignments, how he searched out songs in which her name appeared in the title or lyrics, how even words like wind and when had become pleasant because they were phonetically near to her name. Mike couldn’t think of a way to tell Danny about any of this without sounding like a sap, a moe, a fag, a homo, a feeb. And anyway, he wasn’t too good with words. What he liked to do was wander around.