Rick Moody - The Ice Storm

— Janey…? Janey…?

To the right lay Sandy’s room. Jim and Janey’s prized, brainy, creepy son. The jigsaw-puzzling son. The son who did puzzles of popcorn — just popcorn, or just M&M’s.

The brainy son who memorized Nolan Ryan’s E.R.A. going back into the late sixties, who explained the physics of curveballs and kept track of the dead in Vietnam. He wouldn’t permit his photograph to be taken. He was afraid of water.

Sandy’s room was tentatively decorated, as if he suspected he would be moving soon. A lone Yale pennant was tacked up over his bed. It served only to confirm the emptiness of the space. There was a bookshelf full of strange-but-true baseball stories, strange-but-true ghost stories — The Thing at the Foot of the Bed — and the 1972 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records. (Heaviest man, Robert Earl Hughes of Monticello, Ill., who achieved a peak heft of 1,069 pounds. Buried in a piano case.) On top of the bookshelf, several small fish tanks full of Magic Rocks.

— Janey! Hood whispered, in the center of this unnaturally clean space.

He slid back the door to Sandy’s closet. A mound of dirty laundry piled there. No Janey, though, crouching, in lingerie, waiting.

Back in the hall. Hood headed for Mike Williams’s room. He was sure the doorknob would be rigged with home electronic alarms. The apparatus for this alarm would be arranged on the floor just inside the room, rigged with pipe cleaners and roach clips and a nine-volt battery he had lifted from somebody’s automatic garage opener. Mike liked whoopee cushions and rubber dog excrement. He often wore a Nixon mask.

And he also had a fondness for the crank telephone call.

— Hello, is your refrigerator running?

— Why, yes.

— Well, I guess it must be, because I just saw it run by my house. HA! HA! HA! HA! HA!

— Hello, is this 655-FUCK?

— Hello, is this 655-SHIT?

Paul had told him all this one night. One of those frail dusks when father and teenaged son share a good laugh over something. Few and far between were these days. Hood found these calls hysterically funny. Perhaps this was the day that Paul told him about his own crank phone calls, and about the bizarre miracle of their own number, 655-4663. The last four digits actually rendered their name. 655-HOOD.

Mike’s doorknob released no shock, however. It sent up no electronic squeak. (Alarms were never activated for the real intruders.) The room belonged to Hood, the interloper. Black-light posters and tapestries covered the walls, tapestries that, in light of the dim table lamp Hood switched on, were full of burn holes and unidentifiable stains. A water pipe the size of a barber pole stood in one corner. Janey permitted this behavior? With more time he might have extended the search. No doubt the traditional pornographic magazines were concealed between his mattresses, along with socks crusty with his dried seed. The shame and resourcefulness of the masturbator coming into his craft! No fabric or substance or receptacle was beyond being tested. Mike’s laundry was probably welded together with his semen.

Imagine the sheer volume of it at single-sex schools and in penitentiaries. Consider how often the average American male masturbated in 1973. That year there were, say, 100 million American men, two thirds of whom were capable of achieving orgasm. At once a week, that meant approximately 3,432,000,000 ejaculations in the calendar year. At V2 ounce per ejaculation, that’s 1,716,000,000 ounces or 13,406,250 gallons. Larger than a very large oil spill. Where to put all that waste sperm? All across the vast land, in the suburbs, in the rural and forested regions, in inner cities, guys were coming into rags, into sinks, onto their own bodies, outdoors in the alley or upon the earth. How many thought about disposal?

He had tried to explain self-abuse to his son once, and this was one of the conversations that did not go well. He sat the boy down in the bedroom one day and asked him not to do it in the shower, because it wasted water and electricity and because everyone would expect it of him there anyway, and not to do it onto the linen, and not to do it with his sister’s undergarments or any clothes belonging to his mother, and not to do it with the dog. The best time was when he was certain no one else was in the house. The best place was into the John, where it would cause no trouble and mix with the other sad waste products of America. If he became concerned about any sign of perversion in his habits, he should feel free to come forward and discuss it. Together they could consult a medical text.

At the close of this monologue, Paul looked as though he had just learned of his family’s financial ruin.

Every man lusted to renounce masturbation once and for all, to cease from those tepid orgasms whose only novelty lay in the freedom to invent that they encouraged (Janey in crotchless hot pants presenting her ass to him while sucking on her third finger). Inventions that were otherwise shameful to harbor. Yet Hood himself had not found occasion to give it up. Sometimes he even had to masturbate while lying next to Elena. He imagined, he hoped, he relied on the fact that she slept through these nocturnal abasements.

Hood left Mike’s room. He stood at the top of the banister and looked down. He leaned over it and felt the cool of the polished wood on his abdomen. Why dwell in the illusion that Janey was waiting for him here? She had left, of course. The conclusion was unavoidable. She had released him to the inevitability of his marriage, to confession and inadequate apologies. He could hear the rain and sleet pelting urgently against the windows of the second floor. It was only a half mile or so to his house, along Valley Road. In minutes, he might be settled in front of a fire in the library, contemplating the oblivion of fires.

He headed for the Williamses’ bathroom. One last look. A survey of the medicine cabinet. He wanted to see if there was a diaphragm in there at all, to see how deep the slight ran. He wanted evidence.

Where would Janey have gone? To the A & P to find something to go with turkey leftovers? To purchase beauty aids in pieparation for the Halfords’ party that evening? Maybe she had gone to his house, to rifle his own medicine cabinet?

Hood set the bottle of vodka on the speckled, beige, faux-marbleized countertop and poured some more ambrosia. Then he began to peruse the remedies on the other side of that mirror: Cover Girl Thick Lash mascara, Rev-Ion Ultima pancake, Max Factor lipstick (chocolate), Helena Rubinstein Brush-on Peel-off Mask, Kotex tampons, Bonne Bell Ten-0-Six lotion, Clairol Balsam Color (blond, although she frosted her hair). Summer’s Eve disposable douche, Spring Breeze. Valium, Seconal, tetracycline, the first of these in a renewable prescription.

No diaphragm case.

In a tiny space at one end of the top shelf, Jim Williams apparently kept a few things. The Dry Look, Old Spice deodorant, Noxzema Shave Cream, Water Pik teeth-cleaning system. Vicks VapoRub.

It was an L-shaped bathing suite. Hood drained his glass and ducked into the alcove where the toilet and shower were shrouded in darkness. On top of the toilet, Janey had piled Clairol Herbal Essence shampoo, Clairol conditioner, and Tegrin medicated shampoo.

She had taken leave of him at this spot. This was where she left behind her evidence. A black lace garter belt and stockings had been draped across these hair-care products. Like some waterfall of loss and eroticism, the stockings swept down over the closed lid of the toilet.

Meant for him. Hood marveled at her boldness. And having completely surrendered to an appreciation of her tactics, he decided he still couldn’t forgive her. Her flaws sprang to mind: her stretch marks, the port wine blemish on her left thigh, her lipsticked teeth and inexpertly manicured nails. She had left him in the guest room with his trousers around his ankles. She had sealed him down like a bank vault. He was an empty parade ground, a shuttered theater, an abandoned roadside attraction. Janey had information on him.