The Ice Storm

  The office problems became worse during Clair’s romance with Last Tango. Of course, Hood didn’t go around talking about Bank of America or First National—Clair’s specialties. Out of the blue, though, Clair loved movies. Clair was first to discuss home videotaping and Super-8 as consumer electronics items that would soon transform the entertainment business. He was first to understand the importance of tabloid point-of-purchase magazines. At the weekly research meetings, Clair was constantly leaping in to help out with the media and entertainment securities. And it wasn’t that he wanted to cover entertainment stocks: he just wanted the space Benjamin Hood took up, Hood’s air and water and space and pension and office. Clair’s photograph was a gleaming pinup. He was a Best and Brightest male model. A Harvard M.B.A. who could play touch football and get misty-eyed over a Saturday Evening Post cover. By the time of Clair’s ad in the Journal, in 1971, Hood was beginning to see implications wherever he turned. Overlooked for an important lunch, not copied on an important memo, not tipped off on a hot stock. The hypocrisy and surveillance of office politics were closing in on him. There was a positive side to all this: Hood could read annual reports in peace; he could borrow them from the firm library for weeks. He could do the crossword puzzle and correspond with his accountant. The phone never stirred in his office. He knew the trouble that lay ahead. But he hadn’t told his wife, hadn’t sought the counsel of his friends, hadn’t considered the future. He couldn’t say it out loud. He knew what was coming.

  While crosshatching his face each morning with the Wilkinson double-bonded, Hood swore that he would never live life like George Clair, at the expense of others, if he ever worked again—after that pink slip turned up in his In box. He would be a benevolent supervisor, a friend and confidante to working men and women, no matter how insignificant their positions. Then he would arrive late at the office and shout down his secretary, Madeleine, for failing to make his coffee light enough. Get your ass down there and get another cup! He was digging his own grave and holding it like a pearl inside of him.

  —Clair, George Clair, he said, overfilling his glass, plucking a single ice cube from the silver ice bucket. What a surprise.

  —Benjie!

  Firmly they clasped one another’s hands. Clair’s expression was inoffensive and slyly confused. Smile lines skirted the planes of his face.

  —What the hell has you here in New Canaan?

  —Well, it’s the funniest thing, Benjamin. I’ve been talking with some investors—a little outside venture, you understand, between you and me—about a scheme to manufacture a new Styrofoam packaging. It’s little S-shaped Styrofoam pieces that can help keep an item free from trauma during shipping. Really miraculous. Really remarkable. Delicate stuff, stuff that can get tossed around by the shippers, still arrives intact. It’s just going nationwide, the way I see it, nationwide. Anyway, it turns out one of the principal thinkers behind the whole project is your neighbor Jim Williams. How about that!

  Clair hoisted his glass a couple of inches. Benjamin was almost certain: Clair drank club soda and pretended it was gin and tonic. The blood rose in Hood’s face. That Clair and Jim Williams were bedfellows now augured some consolidation of bad energy in the universe. It was evidence of an order that chilled his bones. Either a paranoid assumption about the world was correct and it was filled with plots by human souls, occasionally selfish, occasionally generous human souls—plots that they pursued compulsively, recklessly, without regard for those they might harm—or else there was a force that ordered human society, ordered even the coexistence of plots and meaninglessness, that located oil under Arab countries and dust under Israel, that parched Bangladesh and froze the Baffin Bay, that raised up Richard Nixon from Checkers to dash him at the Watergate Hotel—while he realized the largest margin of victory in a presidential election in decades.

  Either way, Hood detested George Clair. Detested him. He was the truest suburban phony: without culture, without native character, who was compelled here and there only by expedience. Hood would have liked to yank tight Clair’s squeaky-clean bow tie and to watch him, in the process, swell and burst.

  —Well, hey, Benjamin said, isn’t that a one-in-a-million coincidence? A real dreamer, Jim Williams. And the sort of guy to turn those dreams into, well, bottom-line realities.

  —Darned right about that. Look here, Benj, whaddya make of this film of The Exorcist, you know, William Peter Blatty’s novel? You think it’s gonna work?

  —Don’t see how, Hood said. The star’s a little girl. Just devil-worship stuff. I mean, maybe if the little girl was possessed by an Indian spirit, angered by the white man’s occupation of his native … ancestral lands or something. No, that’s not it, George. Tell you what I like right now: disaster films. And air hockey.

  Hood knew what came next—the competition to excuse yourself first. Clair didn’t want to talk to him any more than he wanted to talk to Clair. What they would do now, in unison—Hey, well, great to talk, see you Monday—was make a run at the hors d’oeuvres. Or suddenly recognize a face across the room. Whoever got out first won. So Hood was already searching the room as he spoke, distractedly. And as he came to the end of the sentence, as he spoke the words air hockey, he saw his mistress, Janey Williams, wife of the S-shaped Styrofoam-packaging king, across a crowded room.

  —Whoa, big fella, Hood mumbled, you gotta—

  Only to find that Clair had already turned away. Clair was engaged with Maura O’Brien. Probably getting some inexpensive advice about a urological condition.

  Janey was in black, silk pajamas, the top opened to just below her breasts. No bra. At her cleavage, turquoise beads swayed. As she leaned down to take up her drink, she stilled the shimmering pajama top with one hand. Her earth-colored lipstick and eye shadow matched her brown stiletto heels. Her frosted-blond hair was flawlessly arranged, like a fiberglass waterfall. Hood’s first sensation was of reunion, of wholeness and conjunction, like he had the rollerskate and she had the key. But the feeling soured almost immediately, because he remembered the afternoon.

  Janey pretended to be occupied with a vase of flowers beside the trapeze chair—chrome and steel with a pure rubber sling—in which the Halfords’ cat was curled.

  He made for her like any spurned lover.

  —Oh, Jeez, Benjie, she said, fingering her beads. Well, here you are.

  —Damn right, but where the hell were you?

  —What are you talking about?

  —Don’t bullshit me around, Janey. Hood was whispering, but he was caught in some tidal or astrological imperative, some mood that would not be stopped, and the words poured from him as though their syntax was using him to express some mood. He felt, suddenly, that he might even cry.

  —Jesus Christ, I waited around for more than a half hour, in the dark, in nothing but my boxer shorts, no wait, with the light on, so anybody could have come by and seen me in the window. What’s that all about? What the hell happened?

  Janey sipped. She set the drink down on the table, beside the vase.

  —A prior engagement overcame me.

  —What do you mean? What kind of stuff is this? I mean—

  —Listen, Benjamin Hood, I have obligations that precede your … from before you showed up in my life. One or two, you know, good-natured encounters, that doesn’t mean I’m … I’m not just some toy for you. When I remembered some chores I wanted to get done before the party, I just did them, that’s all, because I wanted to do them before I saw Jimmy. I just did them. And that’s how it’s going to be.

  The cat lolled on the chair in front of them. Hood’s face was inches from Janey’s. He mumbled.

  —I don’t know how to take this. And what do you mean, Jimmy? I thought you said—

  —How you take it isn’t all that interesting to me, Benjamin. I’m sorry—

  —I just can’t believe you would be so …

  The talk stalled. The two of them fell to watching other molecules of conversation cleave and sunder. They
circulated. Fragments of sense came and went in the room, evanescent fragments. Sobriety was dwindling. All over the room. The New York Mets and the oil crisis, Watergate and Rod Laver and Billie Jean King, and the unacceptable new rector at the Episcopalian church—all mixed up. No calamity would organize these fragments, no moment of high gossip. Ford had ended the production of the beloved convertible in July of this year. Modular furniture, flared trousers, plaids on plaids. Noise.

  Janey lit a Virginia Slims and French-inhaled it.

  —Things aren’t going well for me, Hood said. You know, Elena is very unhappy and the office has become a really desperate situation. Really desperate. I wish you didn’t have to make things hard, Janey. I don’t understand why you have to. I guess I was dumb, but I was sort of counting on you.

  —I’m not making it anything, she said. The situation just is difficult. And I’ll tell you this, Benjamin, your domestic … your home life is no worse or better than anyone else’s. In my house, we’re living separate lives. Separate floors, separate lives, separate everything. And I don’t go expecting a little afternoon something-or-other to alter that. A couple of hours with you isn’t going to change that. I’m not going to threaten my family, my security, just so that I can listen to your problems at the office, you know?

  —But why didn’t you just say so? Why couldn’t we talk—

  —I—

  —And why did you leave the lingerie out for me?

  —What lingerie? I went to the store for God’s sake, to Shopwell. I had to get some things before Jimmy came back. I just remembered. Okay? Are my answers good enough? What are you, a special prosecutor or something? And what do you mean about the lingerie?

  —Never mind, Hood said.

  —Hey, wait just a second—

  —I thought when you didn’t turn up that you were hiding somewhere. I thought maybe you—

  —You what?

  He began slowly, but then, as Hood re-created the details, he became a sort of erotic revenant. He gulped the last of his drink—his equilibrium was really beginning to fall away, like the first stage of an Apollo rocket. He reveled in the hot flashes, in the indignity of his predicament.

  —I searched the house. I figured you were hiding, in a merry widow or something, in the closets, or else behind some piece of furniture. I figured you were there. I thought there was more to it than there was. So then I got to the bathroom and I saw the lingerie. I thought that it was part of a trail, a romantic trail or something, or it was a reminder of you. Something to be contemplated, you know, drunk in or something, you know? I was looking around, that’s all.

  —You need help, Benjamin. That was just out to dry. I was leaving things out to dry. Delicates. What did you do with my clothes?

  He was flattered by the degradation of his adultery, and as he told the story he felt its shame and joy. He knew he wished to be caught, that it was always the cuckold or the betrayed who was honored by the adulterer. And he was a liar, too, an exaggerator. Hood’s past lies swirled in this next moment of fiction, these past lies fluttered and squirmed in this liar’s chrysalis. He was thinking about padded expense accounts and cheating on exams as he spoke:

  —I took it, the garter belt, to your dresser and buried it with its compatriots, with the lacy underthings, with the slips and panties and bras and stockings.

  —Jesus, you are a mess, Benjamin. You’re a case history of hung-up behavior. Where’s your wife?

  —I don’t know. She was a little upset about the, uh, bowl out front. She ran in ahead of me. Probably in the kitchen. Planning something, some covert activity in the kitchen.

  He snickered desperately.

  They moved over to the couch, a Stendig, designed by Ennio Chiggio and arranged in a semicircle with a big apostrophe at the end, where Hood now rested his weary feet. An earnest bunch of locals, dressed in plaid shirts and skirts and jackets, in double-knit trousers, in gray flannel, in velour and polyester, was conglomerated at the end of the couch, the system of islands. Dave Gorman, a fixture at the promiscuous events of New Canaan, was plundering the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.—the Dresden fire-bombing and Ice Nine—in an effort to impress a young and attractive woman beside him. Welcome to the Monkey House, he said, had been a seminal influence for him. No one on the end of the couch seemed to know what he was talking about. Gorman was in some kind of import/export business, which Hood figured meant drugs. And sure enough, as Gorman spoke he was lighting a flaccid little marijuana cigarette.

  Hood had never tried the stuff though it turned up at the margins of New Canaan parties—to the consternation of the older generation, those who had been established in town for some time. But soon the joint came his way. Gorman leaned into Janey and Hood’s sullen truce:

  —Benjamin, give it a try, why don’t you? This stuff will make some sense out of those larger questions. Promise you. Do yourself a favor.

  Gorman grinned.

  —Thanks for the advice, Dave, Hood said, waving the joint away affably. But then some carelessness overcame him, and he took up that tiny, aromatic cigarette and clamped it between his lips. He tugged on it, holding the smoke in his lungs, as he had seen it done on film and television.

  —Good shit, he cackled, hacking and erupting with smoke as he passed it to Janey.

  —Sure is good shit, Gorman said. It’s opiated. I had it in my chamber for a while. I was smoking this other—

  —It’s what? Hood said.

  —Don’t fret, Benj, it’s—

  —Darn it, Dave.

  Hood rose unsteadily, clapped his hand on the top of the modular sofa to steady himself, and stumbled, because it was nothing more than a piece of polyurethane mush, that sofa, steadied himself by grabbing hold of Janey, and then hastened to the bar, to preempt his new intoxication.

  In the white noise of American conversation he picked up voices the way one discerns a particular orchestral instrument—the triangle, the viola d’amore—in the grand narrative sweep of a concerto or symphony. As he filled his drink, one name kept reappearing, like a leitmotiv. Milton Friedman. Across the room there was this extravagant praise for this economist who was violently opposed to the wage-and-price freezes of Nixon, who advocated such locally popular measures as the abolition of Social Security, the elimination of governmental aid to education, and the end of the minimum wage.

  —Washington’s solution to a problem is a problem, too, said a voice as Hood loaded his glass using the impressively ample ice tongs. Take the control of airfares. Friedman said this in an interview. This is how the whole thing works. If you didn’t have this price fixing, airfares would be probably half of what they are now. Look at California. California has got its own airline within the state, and that’s an airline that’s not subject to the fare guidelines. None at all. Compare Sacramento to L.A. on Pacific Northwest with the price-fixed fares from L.A. to Reno—same distance more or less. Just look at the difference! The market prices are about 60 percent of the government’s prices—

  Poor Madeline Gadd was stuck listening to this shit, and Hood was not surprised she was reapplying caramel-colored lipstick in a small compact mirror as she listened absently. Jack Moellering, the Friedman apologist, was, as he spoke, fixed raptly on the slit up the side of Madeline’s harem pants.

  —Supply and demand … less restriction, Moellering was saying. Less restriction.

  The laissez-faire stuff was really traveling around the room. Several feet away, by the mantel, Bobby Haskell, normally a guy who concentrated on paddle tennis to the exclusion of all other forms of conversation, was proposing that unions were a kind of labor monopoly, just an antitrust problem in the arena of labor.

  These Friedman arias swooped around one another like the diverging themes of a duet, until Hood began to experience the opera of economics as just that, an opera, an opera full of good stories: the chance of great or mean birth, the influx and egress of fortunes honest and swindled, the plunging and soaring of government statistics along the
g- and f-clefs of official statistical graphs and indexes. Friedman’s beloved money supply, new housing starts, durable goods, factory inventories, auto sales, and, of course, Variety’s top-grossing films of the week—each had its thrill of victory, its agony of defeat. Hood heard the long, bickering synopsis of lives in recitative, the surge of fine melody in an investment success, and the elaboration of a reversal in the sudden downturn in the market. The paisley and earth colors in the room swam before his intoxicated eyes, but the music of his business, the investment business, was music to his ears. America rose and fell on the melody of New Canaan’s songs of the economy. Songs sung by a Jewish economist and mimicked by WASPs who would have thought twice before playing golf with the guy.

  Hood was capable of formulating one last coherent thought: they were all scattered like seeds, flying outward from the primal fist of Europe long ago. Hood circled the room alone, and no companion—not Elena, not Janey Williams, not George Clair or Dave Gorman (now slumped by himself on the modular sofa)—would salve his isolation. He was as alone as Elena, who couldn’t break a silence with a stranger, as alone as some fur trapper in the first light, in the wilderness of the new continent.

  Janey was gone anyway, vanished. And so was George Clair. He didn’t recognize any of these people. Outside, in the dim light of outdoor lamps, snow accumulated. In the corner of the room, for a split second, Hood thought he saw Buddy Hackett.

  More about television. From Sunrise Semester to Love, American Style, from Banacek to The New Price Is Right, television served as the structured time, the safe harbor for Wendy Hood. She gave the dial a spin, she let it land wherever it would, afternoons when she avoided extracurriculars—field hockey or Bible study or Super-8 Cinematography or the Quilting Club—mornings when her parents weren’t up or had left early for church, evenings when, again, she was by herself.

  She loved Electric Company and Sesame Street though she was too old for them, loved the hyperbole of puppets and the restless, kinetic pacing of these programs. The shape of advertisements ruled the world. Advertisements and comic books and teen fanzines. As she watched television, she gave herself back to her childhood, to some part of herself that had never passed beyond that demographic category. But she also loved reruns: The Flying Nun, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, and Family Affair. She loved Gene Rayburn and Monty Hall. She respected enforcers of justice, such as Cannon, Kojak, and Toma—Tony Musante, so cute—and elegies to place, like Streets of San Francisco and Hawaii Five-O; she loved variety programs, Sonny and Cher and Flip Wilson and Andy Williams and Ray Stevens, who had parlayed his hit “Everything Is Beautiful” into a summer replacement program that year; but she lived for the Saturday night horror films—Chiller Theater and Creature Features.