Rick Moody - The Ice Storm

He liberated the garter belt from where it was anchored by the dark green shampoo bottle, and the stockings from the garter. And then he flung back the shower curtain, hoping one last time to see her there, grinning, shivering, perhaps stretching out one hand to him, the other on the hot water spigot.

Realizing, of course, that abandonment titillated him, that he was mildly aroused, that his beleaguered member thrived under bad circumstances, he unzippered anew his flannel slacks and, using the garter belt as a spur to his isolation and arousal — as a dressing gown for his hard-on — in flagrant violation of the precepts of autoerotics as he had explained them to his son, he began to stroke himself. Always practical, Hood secured the door as he worked.

Must we always imagine a woman to accomplish the deed? It was less hurtful to women and their history to imagine them this way than to violate and oppress them. Hood recognized and was proud of his own technique — above all he wished to hurt as few people as possible. Yes, he himself had eliminated the problem of representation entirely.

In the fifties, back in Hartford, Conn., where his father’s insurance business had temporarily been located, and where Hood’s testes had first erupted, he had been able to ejaculate simply over the word bosom. He had also managed to fashion an orifice for himself out of a pliable old feather pillow. The pillow took him all the way to college, where the abundance of breasts lingered in his imagination like some divinely inspired thought, like the perfection of harmony and meter. But then he had fallen on hard times. In the company of the marriage neither breast nor ass nor the vesuvian moisture of down below on its own moved him. The contemplation of body parts was no more fascinating than a grocery list.

At last, in his early thirties, only true pornography would do it. Solitary orgasms were like sneezes or yawns. He imagined women in hot pants and leather goods. He kept Playboy around. (In this month’s issue there was a first-rate short story by Tennessee Williams.) He imagined devices. His cheeks flushed.

What a blessing when oblivion descended on these exercises. Masturbation was a falling sickness, with the emphasis, these days, on the sickness part. But at least he didn’t have to think. At least he was granted a moment without Benjamin Paul Hood and his fiscal responsibilities, without the lawn, the boat, the dog, the medical bills, credit card and utility bills, without the situation in the Mideast and in Indochina, without Kissinger and Ehrlichman or Jaworski or that Harvard asshole, Archibald Cox. Just a little peace.

He groaned dully as he issued forth, firing with unusual range and payload onto the shag throw rug, as well as onto the garter belt itself. With the soiled garment, he swabbed and dabbed at the spot on the rug where he had splattered. Sighing, he refixed his trousers. Sighing, he unlocked the door.

Where to stow the evidence?

The garter belt was an empty snakeskin, a stately and somber artifact of his failure, a sort of Shroud of Turin. In the hall, with it balled in his fist, he turned first left and then right. Like a ghost, he ventured into Janey and Jim’s bedroom and gazed sadly upon the pacific waters of their waterbed.

He thought to set it right upon their pillow, but he couldn’t do it. Scruples.

In the hall, though, he found himself again at Mike’s door. Impulsively, he entered with his death shroud, with Mike’s mother’s soiled garter belt, and stuffed it in the back of Mike’s closet. The kid would never even know he had been framed.

Then with a lightness of heart, a relief at folly alleviated, Hood started down the stairs. He thought about riding the banister, but the newel post had a sort of asparagus bulb at the top of it, one that must have neutered generations of banister-riders. Unable to leave the premises, he toured the first floor. Possession was the larger part of ownership. Fluted crystal, lace napkins, the finest eight-track stereo components, all the Williamses’ personal property belonged that afternoon to him.

At the front door, however, the last of Hood’s resolve failed. He was a spook, a fool, a voice from the beyond, a housebreaker, and it was time he faced up to these things. Hiswife took no notice of his comings and goings, his mistress abandoned him in her own house, his children wouldn’t speak to him. Only the back exit was fit for Benjamin Paul Hood. He would leave by the servant’s entrance, with imperceptible footfalls. On tippy-toes. Like a Plumber, an official burglar.

Then, at the top of the basement stairs, having opened the door already, having opened the door absently, he heard laughter. The laughter of teenagers. That hard, bitter, revenging laughter of distrust and disillusionment. One way out! One way only!

NEW CANAAN was tiny already, but as Wendy got older it seemed to be shrinking, too. It was vanishing, maybe. Its avenues were like the crosshatching on a legal tender dollar bill. You could read Wendy’s town with one of those beginner microscopes that Paul had gotten for his birthdays from three or four relatives. Next to New Canaan, a black ant was like a Cadillac or like an armored personnel carrier; a housefly, the Huey helicopter. Shag carpet was like an Asian rain forest. One time she had cut her wrist lightly — just a scratch:

long sleeves to school for a while and no one knew any better; later you couldn’t even tell — so that she could look at her own blood under the microscope. Just the usual traffic and hustle, though, these globs of color overtaking these other globs.

In New Canaan, there was one high school, one junior high, four elementaries. No school bus more than fifteen minutes from its destination. This meant that you could know everyone in your demographic category by the time you started high school. So Wendy Hood knew everyone. One movie theater. One grocery store. Churches were Protestant. Neither snow, nor rain, nor gloom of night stayed New Canaan’s relentless progress toward neighborliness.

The girls took home economics and the boys took shop or else risked civic humiliation for the rest of their lives. Wendy took home economics but she hated it. Best thing about it was its resemblance to sorcery. Between cooking and science, she had learned all the fundamentals of poisoning. Eagerly she imagined dispatching a loved one, or altering her own future, or turning her father’s SX-70 camera into a twisted sculpture of metal and plastic.

To class she wore ponchos and handmade sweaters, and her blond hair tickled the top of her butt. She had toe socks and clogs and painter’s pants. Wendy’s Tretorn tennis sneakers were filched from Mike’s Sports not two days ago (the day before Thanksgiving) and now the patent leather gear she was supposed to wear for the holidays was safely enclosed in a Tretorn box on the 5Vi shelf in the back of the very same store. Wendy wore the uniforms other kids wore, but she thought a lot about black gowns and putting spiders in the pockets of her girlfriend’s hip-huggers. She wanted to smoke pot and take sleeping pills (she had located some prescriptions in her parents’ bathroom) and fondle the one sad-looking boy in the special-education class. Fondling she had learned precociously like everything else, in conversation with her brother, from her mother’s copy of The Sensuous Woman, and partly from her own imagination. Sometimes it was hard to understand the descriptions of this stuff in books. You had to use the wilder senses.

Only one place in this desolate village interested her really. She was lucky enough to live beside it. Silver Meadow! A private residential psychiatric facility. A drying-out joint, her father called it. Funny farm. It was marked off as precisely as a crossword puzzle on the hillside beside their house — neat little footpaths, neat architecture, neat bowling alleys and auditoriums, pools, saunas, paddle-tennis courts. Precisely landscaped shrubs and evergreens. Benevolent security personnel roamed Silver Meadow and they recognized in Wendy Hood a local sylph whose comings and goings were not averse to the therapeutic process.