The Ice Storm

  This decision was a function of her Parent, her Child, or her Adult. A function of one or more of the three. The Parent, of course, was a huge collection of recordings in the brain of “unquestioned or imposed external events perceived by a person in his or her early years,” and the Child was the recorded responses to this first collection of “tapes.” Adult data, in the meantime, accumulated “as a result of the child’s ability to find out for himself what is different about life from the ‘taught concept’ of life in his Parent and the ‘felt concept’ in his Child.”

  The results of the battles that took place in these three phenomenological realities were the Four Life Positions: I’m Not Okay—You’re Okay, I’m Not Okay—You’re Not Okay, I’m Okay—You’re Not Okay, and the paradisaical I’m Okay—You’re Okay. One of these four had its hooks in Elena.

  Any analysis of her mood would have to take into account the material that led up to this moment. She had spent the afternoon thinking about her family. She then confronted her husband about his infidelity and agreed to attend a party—as a good-faith promise—where her husband’s mistress was likely to be present. Somewhere in this decision to attend—this good-faith decision that had simply come to her—lurked the seeds of this present instance of serenity. She had admitted to herself for a moment that her husband’s infidelity was, in the end, his own business, however awful it made her feel. Or as they said in est: “You are at the cause of whatever ill you suffer, no matter what it is. It’s time now to accept responsibility for it. That willingness to be responsible is the key.” Elena created her world.

  Thomas Harris, M.D.: “Three things led people to change. One was that they hurt sufficiently. Another thing that made people change was a slow type of despair called ennui, or boredom. And, finally, people changed because of the sudden discovery that they could.” This was the Adventure in Contentment. To find in the circumstances around you the lemonade, the sustenance, the opportunity of the day. This is a gift indeed. As Hugh Prather said, Elena remembered: “open / and alert / empty / and available / human / and / alive waiting / (without purpose) / ready / (without wanting) / existing (without needing).”

  Nonetheless, when Elena learned about the key party, she was stuck in Benjamin’s own constrictive system of decision making. It was hard for her to open up, to be in her own needs, wants. She was stuck in the moment when Benjamin would somehow, through some prestidigitation, attach their house key, with its little equine key ring, to Janey Williams’s hand. She was attached to the look on her son’s face when Janey and Benjamin would slip out the front door, on some Saturday morning, to have breakfast in Darien or Norwalk, where no one would see them. No one but the other couples slipping out.

  In this blue mood, she snuck in the door, past Dot and Rob Halford, past the Armitages, the Sawyers, the Steeles, the Boyles, the Gormans, the Jacobsens, the Hamiltons, the Gadds, the Earles, the Fullers, the Buckleys, the Regans, the Bolands, the Conrads, the Millers. Past the old families of New Canaan, the Benedicts, the Bootons, the Carters, the Newports, the Eels, the Finches, the Hanforts, the Hoytts, the Kellers, the Lockwells, the Prindels, the Seelys, the Slausons, the Talmadges, the Tarkingtons, the Tuttles, the Wellses. And past the new elite crop of divorced New Canaanites—Chuck Spofford, June Devereaux, Tommy Finletter, Nina Kellogg. She avoided the living room, where Janey Williams was already situated, heading instead for the kitchen and the library. Here she darted around conversations for an hour or more, never staying long enough to complete a thought or register an intimacy. She helped Dot, who disdained caterers, load up the hors d’oeuvre trays. Then she had a conversation with George Clair, a man her husband couldn’t stand. Seemed nice enough. After this, her first stop was the bathroom, where she sat for a while crying and applying prudent amounts of the makeup before the medicine-cabinet mirror.

  Right then, it didn’t seem like much had changed or that much would change. But the fact is that most of us have mood changes as each part of our P-A-C (Parent-Adult-Child) makes its contribution to our behavior. “Sometimes the reasons for our mutability are elusive or do not seem to be related to any special signal in the present.” While Elena was crying, though, Mark Boland entered the bathroom without knocking—it had no satisfactory latch—and found her—legs uncrossed and panties stretched between her kneecaps like a fancy wrapping paper—applying tan lipstick. Combs surrounded her, stuck up on all four walls. Dot Halford collected combs.

  Boland blushed terribly, stammered an apology, and slammed the door. This was the real beginning of the evening’s comedy.

  When she emerged, she could sense the key party in the air like the grope games of elementary school. Spin the Bottle. Post Office. She was operating according to the promptings of chance now. She couldn’t go any lower anyway. She would talk to whomever she talked to; she would let the conversation rise and fall like the wind battering the house with its arctic freight; she would dance to records by Antonio Carlos Jobim, the master of Bossa Nova, or to Switched-On Bach by Walter Carlos, or to the Carole King LP everyone seemed to have; she would accept any hors d’oeuvre offered; she would accept token offerings of drug or drink; she would go with whoever was suggested by the serving bowl in the front hall.

  So when Elena emerged from the bathroom, it was as a butterfly sprung from the cocoon. Elena searched for the face of her seducer, wondering. Would he be hunched and remote? Would his posture be as perfect as freshly milled planking? And the first person this new Elena O’Malley Hood looked for was Mark Boland—the very man who had seen her in the bathroom. Mark, it turned out, was talking with Maria Conrad and her teenaged son, Neil. Both Boland and Maria were dressed in styles that had long since passed into attics and Goodwill bins. Mark’s rep tie could have come from any postwar fall sale. Maria was arrayed in a simple, dependable plaid skirt.

  Boland, who had lived for twenty years on Heather Drive, down near the Norwalk border, was an unofficial historian of the town in which he lived. As such, his dullness was legendary. He was a juggernaut of tedium. Even Elena, who on occasion sought out the bores of a party and built with them a fortress of social insignificance, had trouble with him. At the first sign of party discomfort, he sank into a long disquisition on the shoe factories that propped up the local economy in the nineteenth century—why, for two decades New Canaan was the second-largest shoe-manufacturing center in the country!—where the old factories had been situated (one on the site of the present firehouse) and how the industry weakened after 1850. Did you know they tried to build a railroad to attract business at that point, but no one was taking!

  Hard to imagine that Boland was a regular fixture on the party circuit until you realized that behind the white hair and thick glasses lurked the true cheater’s heart. He hated his wife. He had slapped a drink out of her hand in public once, when he was losing a game of backgammon at the country club; he had insulted her to her friends. It had gotten back to her. Still they were married. Still he talked. Sometimes you saw him trapping the same victim for forty-five minutes or more. The endless chatter about history or local elections or town meetings concealed some empty part of himself—the area where he buffered his own wounds, where he concealed the regret about his own miserable life. And since he no longer worked—Boland had invested in Xerox at the right moment—he had nowhere to take his misanthropy but to parties. But as the years went by, Elena noticed, his wife grew stronger. She grew more self-assured. She never appeared at parties with him. She seemed forever to be crossing Fairfield County on the Merritt Parkway in search of the arts, wherever they lurked. Betty Boland had become, in her dark green Mercedes-Benz, one of the informed of New Canaan. Elena imagined that the two of them slept in separate rooms now. Like so many of the older, Protestant couples, they were courteous, charming, and estranged.

  So Mark Boland wanted a little of this key business. And that was why Elena was talking to him. She wanted to see it up close.

  —Goodness, Elena, I’m sorry, he said.

 
—Not at all, she said. These things happen. Just have to get back on the horse, I guess. That’s why you show up chez Halford. You never know how it’s going to turn out.

  Boland smiled. A little too long.

  —Yes, that’s right.

  —Mark and I were just talking about the weather, Maria interrupted.

  —The weather, Elena said.

  —Yes, well, it’s supposed to freeze up tonight. Quite dangerous by morning time, Maria said.

  —Most dangerous storm in some time, Boland said. Have you and Benjamin made arrangements?

  —Arrangements?

  —Well, yes.

  And when this aside had been exhausted, Boland launched back into his historical ramblings. Canaan Parish, separated by the Perambulation Line, he was saying, had at one time been composed of a Stamford section and a Norwalk section. Probably they had storms then, too, storms of this very type. The wall that marked the Peramublation Line had probably been rebuilt many times because of these storms. Did you know a small piece of it still stood behind the new high school? A tiny bit of spittle collected at the corners of Boland’s mouth as he spoke, as though he were parched. It was an erotic froth, the milk of erotic starvation. On he went, about the differences between the New Haven Colony, which founded Norwalk in 1651, and the Connecticut Colony, which founded Stamford (or Stanford, because that’s what it was called then) in 1650. In 1686, when the Perambulation Line was first erected, New Canaan was still entirely part of both Norwalk and Stamford. The first private purchase on the Norwalk side of the line was in 1699, for land at Silvermine Hill.

  —Back then it was always two words, Boland said. Silver Mine Hill. Then.… Well, of course, the town was established as a church parish—I’m sure you know all this—Canaan Parish, so that the locals, the Stanford and Norwalk citizens, wouldn’t have to travel so far to go to church …

  It was a conversation designed to forbid. Finding a break in Boland’s filibuster, Maria’s son, Neil Conrad, moved in on Elena. He placed himself between her and Boland. Neil wore a tie-dyed turtleneck, patched jeans, and hiking boots. His hair was long. Elena wondered if he was going to play the game, the key party game, and if not, why Maria, who was here without her husband, had brought him. Elena considered his ectomorphic skeleton: what self-respecting adult would perch and grind against this boy in the act of love? Would Neil, only a year or two older than her own son, with his acne and his wavy, feminine hair, be someone with whom she could go home?

  Absolutely not.

  Young Neil mumbled in his confused way—under his halitotic breath—about how boring the party was and how boring this guy with the New Canaan stuff was—and then he began to fire questions at her. Elena had found herself the object of admiration from teenagers before. It was, she guessed, her nonjudgmental silences. They took this for listening. Anyway, as it turned out, Neil had just been through the training. That’s right. His mind was a carefully brainwashed version of Werner Erhard’s. He had spent weekends in an auditorium in which he could not leave to urinate, and now he had got It. He got that there was nothing to get. The effect of this had changed his life. Of the assembled in the party, he had chosen her to hear his message.

  Neil mumbled that he was now interested in the spiritual basis of what Vonnegut was doing with Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. Drawings of assholes and everything. Also there was a record called Dark Side of the Moon. Getting into some pretty far-out shit. “Breathe in the air,” Neil Conrad told Elena. “Don’t be afraid to care.” Jonathan Livingston Seagull was pretty hip to it, too. Each of us had an idea of the Great Gull within us.

  —The movie sucks the big one, though. Neil Diamond music, forget it. Cracklin’ Rosie.

  —Well, I—

  —And if you are into the ways the training can be used, y’know, with what’s going on in religion and like the.… Well, then there’s this guy here you should talk to.

  Suddenly, Neil was leading her into the next room—Boland and his mother waving at them—into the library, where the sound of Antonio Carlos Jobim, being played at 45 r.p.m., maybe by accident, was competing with the television set, which was rebroadcasting Miracle on 34th Street. Dentist-chair music, elevator music, and then that Macy’s version of God, that Macy’s version of miracles, that bearded fellow in the nuthouse. Or was it Gimbels. She was permitting herself to be led only because she knew that somewhere in the shifting associations of this party there was an individual who would transform this evening. And she suspected that she would be led to him by chance. A group was clustered around the hexagonal, glass coffee table (base of bronze and low-carbon steel, manufactured by Philip Daniel)—a couple of men and women shaking absently in time to the Bossa Nova—so Elena didn’t see him at first. Outside, in the light of a patio lamp, the snow seemed to be falling up. It was almost eleven.

  Then Neil introduced her to the man she had met in the coffee shop before, Wesley. Wesley Myers. She wasn’t surprised to find him on the premises. Or her surprise quickly dissipated. She had recognized in that moment in the coffee shop with him a whole different narrative of her marriage, a whole sequence of intimacies and distances and textures and motels and wines and partings, and she had balked at it. It was hard to see that narrative here again, in front of her, but it was good, too. She liked the sense of possibility in sad things. Wesley was here because he was single, she guessed, but also because this kind of basic Ten Commandments violation, the kind of violation at the party, must have drawn out the undesirable element of New Canaan in just the way a pie left out overnight draws out the ants. And Myers was an undesirable. This she knew from their two or three mild encounters. He was a restless thinker, an irritable, curmudgeonly guy. On the other hand, maybe he didn’t know anything about the key party. Maybe he had just appeared. Maybe he responded to pheromones in the air, to animal endocrinology.

  Myers did look like one of those mugging characters, like Buddy Hackett or Don Knotts. He was squat, short, dissipated, like a de Sade version of Santa Claus. He gave off the aura of having masturbated too frequently and too far into middle age.

  He smiled warmly.

  —How nice to see you, how really nice.

  The gin blossoms that traversed his nose wrinkled in his smile.

  And then Neil got right into it. Because there was no delaying where spiritual issues were concerned. Because this was a time of great spiritual questing. The center of the conversation was again est, on which Myers had an inside track, as he seemed to have on a variety of nontraditional avenues of worship, including the Church of Scientology, Parhamansa Yogananda, the Peoples’ Temple, Gestalt therapy, and transcendental meditation.

  The main issue, the way Myers put it, was the Fleece. You had a right, as a struggling human machine, to the fleece, to get all the fleece in your daily life.

  —But having a right, well, and I’m paraphrasing here, paraphasing Werner and one of his students, having a right is different from being right. Being right and being happy are on opposite ends of this dance that is the life of human machines. That’s all that’s going on here. Being right is the last refuge of scoundrels. Abdicate totally and completely. Right? Instead, as est accounts for it, you’re going to have to search for your flow and negotiate … its currents and its white water. That’s right. Once you have found the center-that-is-not-a-true-center, as a human machine you can partake of it at any time. Werner says pretty clearly that when you begin to communicate about your flow, it will take the shape of this globe, this world. That’s the big secret that isn’t really a secret. Once you’ve constructed this raft for this voyage along your flow, once you have copped to the twists and bends of this journey, you can think about becoming a spiritual adept yourself. That’s the secret. That’s about all there is to it.

  —Now, good relationships in the dance, well, the problem there is simply adjustment to the other person’s flow, Myers went on. You have to work toward an avenue of play and love that feeds on the dance. Your avenue of play and l
ove becomes shelter for the object, the other human machine. These are your options. Your flow has tributaries, see, and these are called options, the way Werner talks about it. The field of tributaries just goes on and on. And the end point here is that everything in heaven … everything in heaven is fashioned from the mutability of these options constructed in your flow, whether with consciousness or unconsciousness. And that means that your feet rest in heaven. As Werner says, you are the higher power, the supreme being. You are.

  Myers broke into an unashamed grin.

  —Well, honestly, I’m glad somebody is, Elena said.

  —I’ll bet you are, Myers said, as cheerful as Buddy Hackett. Because that’s getting it. That’s getting It.

  —Well, tell me, Elena said. How did you two meet?

  —Well, he’s my minister, Neil said.

  And then it struck Elena. In fact, she was pretty stupid for having failed to put it together before. Myers was, of course, the new rector of the Episcopalian church, at St. Mark’s. The church nobody liked. And though Myers was distasteful, though he looked like the sort of minister who might fondle a choirboy or -girl, or both, and though he had agreed to meet her on a couple of occasions for these furtive luncheons that were certainly testing-the-water types of things, and though he had never even—on these occasions—admitted that he was a minister, she felt bad for him. After each pronouncement of his search for grace in this community, she imagined, after each interpretation of the readings, after each admonition, the people of New Canaan rewarded him with silence, with that gloomy barometer of Episcopal failure: the empty coffee hour. In the weeks following he would reach further into his bag of incantations and prayers and critical exegeses to placate them, only to hear the same silence again.