Elena and Jim Williams, therefore, like the rest of the carnal refugees from the Halfords’ house, were traveling out into a storm that was no longer safe. Three or four inches of snow had accumulated now, around Jim’s tires. The freezing rain was still pelting the Cadillac, and a thick glaze shellacked his windshield.
—We’re going to have to defrost this thing for a while, Williams said.
Elena wondered if the car would even start. It started on the first try. This was a Cadillac, after all. She wondered if the other revelers had found, as she had, that their resolve failed them outside, in the elements. If you weren’t into adultery for the erotic dementia, she thought, the amnesia it brought with it, why bother? But in the midst of the storm, infidelity felt almost ridiculous. She was about to tell Jim this when he leaned over to kiss her. The heating vents blew cool air on them; the exhaust bellowed clouds of obfuscation.—Do these seats go back? she said.
And that, suddenly, was the beginning of it. Elena had never made love in a car before. It was one of those rites of passage that she had read about in books. She hadn’t known about rock and roll, she hadn’t known about racial strife, and she hadn’t known about heavy petting in cars. The logistics of it were demanding, she was finding out. Jim was unfastening her pants and getting right to business. She had trouble getting any purchase on him. She was pulling down her panties with one hand and settling herself across his lap. She whispered reassuringly about birth control pills. Then he was inside.
It was urgent and painless and soon it was over. Jim moaned plaintively. In less time than it takes to defrost a windshield.
Kinsey: “The quick performance of the typical male may be most unsatisfactory to a wife who is inhibited or natively low in response, as many wives are; and such disparities in the speed of male and female response are frequent sources of marital conflict, especially among uppersocial levels where the female is most restrained in her behavior.”
Jim Williams was rubbing his neck.
—That was really awful, Jim Williams said, that was really awful. I’m so sorry, Elena.
They had trouble untangling themselves. Elena worried that she might have to open the door and slide out headfirst to regather herself. Eventually she slid down into the cavity by the glove compartment, and there she worked her trampled flannel pants around the right way.
—Things are rotten at home, Jim said. You wouldn’t believe how rotten. Janey’s sick. She’s unstable. I guess.… It’s not the right time to tell you … but that’s it, Elena. That’s it. She can’t be happy. I don’t know why. I can’t make her happy, the boys can’t make her happy. She just can’t do it. It’s like she thinks I lied to her or something. She treats me like I promised her something I have welched on.… She just doesn’t want the life she used to think she wanted. It’s not going to turn out well, I can tell you that much.
—Let’s go, she said. I have to look in on the kids. Paul is supposed to be coming back from the city.
—Jesus, Jim said, refixing his belt. I want to make it up to you, Elena. I can do better than that, honestly. I mean it.
She sighed.
—Well, we can talk about it.
—That’s fine. I wouldn’t expect you to see it any other way.
—Maybe you just need.… We can talk any time, you know—
—I need that, too. I really do, Williams said.
He pointed at the seat belts.
He threw the car in drive, and that was when they noticed the skid marks on the driveway. Beneath the crust of snow was a much harder, more implacable layer of ice. An equalizing layer. It was like trying to drive a bumper car. The Cadillac had a mind of its own. As they circled around the gravel circle, Jim Williams turned wildly in either direction. Trying to catch the wheel.
They each fell into their own remorse. They were just neighbors again, if they had ever been anything else. Elena felt cheap and isolated. It had been as romantic as a pap smear or a home breast exam. She would rather wait in a gas-rationing line; she would rather watch war footage; she would rather—she was shocked to learn—clean up after the drunken Benjamin Hood. She let herself do certain things because of fashion, though she didn’t think of herself as fashionable in any way, and fashion brought the unexpected along with it. So here she was driving home with the fraud next door, a man she had little respect for, after having fucked him in his car.
They went into the tailspin coming off Ferris Hill Road. Just as they saw the other cars abandoned at the bottom of the hill, Jim lost control of the Cadillac. It was more than one spin. They went all the way around twice, two three-sixties, and Elena could hear the scream coming from her, but it didn’t seem like part of her. It was as alien, as elsewhere, as a radio signal during one of those emergency tests. Her frequency was pure and open. She was uninterrupted by decisions or responsibilities: there was time to think. She didn’t notice or care that her screams originated in her own throat. In the second before she imagined death, she recalled many things to be done. The dog was pacing back and forth in front of his bowl. Paul needed a haircut. She wanted to see Wendy wear those lovely new shoes. They, she and Benjamin, were going to replace the curtains in the drafty living room. They were going to find out about energy alternatives for their drafty house. They were going to buy a smaller car.
The Cadillac landed nose down in a shallow ditch. The last revolution had been painfully slow, like a merry-go-round on the lowest kiddie speed. The front end of the car accordioned as though it were engineered to do so. The frame moaned slightly as the engine folded up within it.
Jim Williams cradled his head on the steering wheel. He asked if she was all right.
Elena nodded.
—Happy holidays, Jim said.
He untangled his legs from the engine parts that protruded up through the dash—he was miraculously uninjured—and helped her out. There were cars abandoned all around them. A Who’s Who of Halford party attendees.
—Look, let’s just put up at my place till morning, sweetie, Jim said. It’s closer. It doesn’t make any sense to be out walking. You can sleep in the guest room or something. If that’s what you want. But this isn’t a night to be going any further than you have to.
Elena thought it over.
—And your son. He isn’t on that train, I’ll bet you. He knows better than that. That is, if the trains are even running. And Wendy’s in bed and will be until morning. So it just makes sense. Besides, I owe you one. I want to pay up. Let me do just that.
She thought about it.
And the next thing that happened, at exactly midnight, was that the streetlamp at the corner of Ferris Hill and Valley Road, the only one for miles, abruptly went out.
Libbets Casey told Paul Hood that she loved him as a friend. Her reasoning was labored, her tongue was thick. The world outside vanished during this discussion. That class Paul hated, Origins of the West; Spiro Agnew’s resignation; Gerald Ford’s confirmation. All this stuff vanished. Paul told her she was his best friend in the world, the only person he felt comfortable with, some kinda exact opposite he had been circling around, but the way he said it, it felt desperate and exaggerated, even to him. He was trying to cudgel her with good vibes. And she knew it.
They sat on the edge of Libbets’s bed. She said:
—But you don’t even know me really.
—Sure I do, Paul Hood said. I know the aura you give off, Libbets. Sure. I know how you are in the cafeteria, where you sit, in the chapel, all over the place. It just seems right to me, you know? It just seems right.
—Well, I like you, too, Paul, but—
And she said it again: She loved him as a friend. Whatever that meant. They doodled in her blank book with colored pencils. Paul felt like some woeful responsibility of his was being held at bay, just while he was on that bed with her. As long as she let him sit there, whatever she said was just syllables flung at problems. She could still change her mind. These minutes were worth the hyperbole and the train ride a
nd the Seconals. Paul penciled an approximation of the Human Torch on the page, and then filled him in with the yellow and orange. It was that sweeping-fireball Human Torch, from upper right to lower left. Laying waste at jet speed. That smoldering, adolescent Human Torch, who dropped out of college—as Paul expected he would, too—and who couldn’t keep a girlfriend. In the balloon Paul scrawled a little dedication:
For Libbets, whichever way I fly.
She told him he was good at it, that he was as good as any comic-book penciller, but he just brushed it off.
Paul couldn’t be certain he wasn’t part of a dream, as he sat on the bed, watching her do a little cubist scribble across from the Torch. He couldn’t be sure he wasn’t the protagonist of a dream belonging, for example, to Francis Chamberlain Davenport IV, who slumbered peacefully on the couch in the library. A real wish-fulfillment dream, maybe, a mandala dream, or else an unpleasant dream that just happened to have a couple of nice moments. Moments that just set him up for the next long torture passage. One of those long, complicated narratives of missed planes or failed examinations or public nudity. As in a dream, the room was so still when Libbets told him haltingly that she loved him as a friend that he could marvel at the sheer beautiful predictability of it, the predictability of his loneliness. His whole life was someone else’s dream and sometime soon that sleeper would wake. Or maybe his life was a weekly comedy series, and he would soon be canceled or replaced by a summer variety show starring Mac Davis.
—It’s not that I don’t care about you, Libbets was trying to say, because I do, or maybe I do, but I just don’t think this is right. I feel more like you’re a brother. I feel this love for you like a brother. You know what I mean? Because—
The pencils were spread out around the drawing book like a fan. What reply was there for a line like this? You’re wrong? You’re going to regret it? He didn’t know what he wanted anyway, or how to persuade her. He only knew that he didn’t want to move from this bed or from her side to return to the cage of his education. He thought maybe he wanted some sort of contact, some shocking and permanent contact. He wanted to be surgically attached to Libbets, stitched, cat-gutted to her, or he wanted one of those Looney Tunes kisses that were like electrocution. He wanted this moment on the bed to be in the absolute zero time of Marvel. She overlooked the magic in their predicament, the ramifications for the other characters in the strip. She didn’t see how Paul single-handedly beat back the threat of growing up.
—Well, let’s go to that bar, he said.
—I don’t know. I’m so wasted …
—Don’t you just want to.… Don’t you want to get out of your head one time before going back to school? Don’t you want to celebrate one night? Just one time? You’ll be okay, right? I’ll make sure you get home.
—Maybe, Libbets said. Maybe, if we take a cab.
This was about ten o’clock.
He called home first. He was supposed to keep his mom up on his movements, but the main thing was that he wanted to talk to his sister. He wanted to tell her how this wasn’t going to work, how no girlfriend was ever going to work, and how he was always going to live in this windowless vault where no one ever touched his skin. His body, he wanted to tell her, was like the sweating wall of a wine cellar. He breathed the musty air of crypts. He couldn’t sit still. But he didn’t tell Wendy any of this. Whenever he told someone in his family this kind of thing, they always asked him if he could pass the dill spears or the apricot chutney. Would he mind taking out the trash? So he never did tell. He just got off the phone.
Libbets had an inexhaustible roll of bills her parents had given her. She handed the roll to Paul. She couldn’t concentrate on the denominations. The snickering doormen had the cab waiting for them. Seventeenth Street and Park Avenue South. Paul tipped big.
The sign at Max’s said Big Star. Two shows. From the street, he could hear their sweet harmonies. He held Libbets close, and they listened to the band for a while. From the street. Right out on the sidewalk in front of Max’s. Because this was the closest they were going to get to that bar. All the way down there, and they couldn’t get in. The bouncer frowned and pointed. Out. Paul Hood was sixteen years old and Libbets Casey was seventeen and they both looked like it. They weren’t dressed in black jeans and black turtlenecks and they didn’t dye their hair. They were a couple of preppies with fake identification cards—Citizen of the State of New York cards—who thought they could buy their way into any bar. They stood out in the cold, and taxicabs drove the slush and water out of the drainage depressions and up onto the curb. Pedestrians scattered.
They watched the parade into Max’s Kansas City.
The rock and roll that was king in November of 1973 was Glitter. The New York band that was king was the New York Dolls, a collection of guys from the boroughs who wore makeup and fake furs. They had played recently at the Waldorf-Astoria, and at the State Theatre in New Brunswick. Their big hit was “Personality Crisis.” Mott the Hoople was also playing in New York that month. They had started out playing the usual Stones-imitation stuff, but by 1972, when All the Young Dudes was released, their costumes had become more creative. Lou Reed was playing at the Academy of Music, just down the street, in a couple of weeks. This was Glitter. These men all wore platform shoes and boas and blouses and leather jumpsuits. They were writing songs about transvestites—Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling, Sugar Plum Fairy, Jackie Curtis.
In Paul Hood’s November issue of Creem, one rock critic called 1973 “the year of the transsexual tramp. All of a sudden almost everyone in rock n’ roll wanted to be—or at least suggest the possibility of being—a raging queen.” Even Dick Clark had an opinion on the subject, in the same issue: “Bisexual … what’s the other word, AC/DC? I think it’s partially fad and partially goldfish swallowing, as protest was. A lot of kids got into protest because it was ‘the thing.’ That may be what’s happening with the fag-drag crazy transsexual rock scene. I think that’s a quickie. I think more importantly that’s an indication of the desire to have show business return to music. That’s why you have an Elton John, a Liberace, an Alice Cooper. That’s show biz. We all know Alice is a put-on, a shuck. But what’s funny is when you read the sociological commentators and how torn up the whole straight world is over this craziness. I can’t attach any significance to that.”
The Factory, on Union Square, wasn’t far from Max’s Kansas City. If Paul Hood had known, he might have been able to identify Andy Warhol. He might have seen that platinum blond eminence sweep by into the club. Warhol had been in Rome filming Frankenstein and Dracula in the summer of 1973, but by now he was back and hard at work revamping his magazine, Interview, which included the following item in the November 9 issue, concerning a dinner at Pearl’s, a Chinese restaurant: “Bob Colacello in his emerald green corduroy suit by Polidori of Rome, Yves Saint Laurent silk shirt, Givenchy cologne; Vincent Fremont in his dark brown custom-tailored gabardine jacket, tan pants, white Brooks Brothers shirt; Jed Johnson in blue Yves Saint Laurent blazer, light blue Brooks Brothers shirt, striped tie from Tripler’s, New Man pants; Andy Warhol in his chestnut DeNoyer velveteen jacket, Levi’s, boots by Berlutti di Priigi, Brooks Brothers shirt, red and gray Brooks Brothers tie, brown wool V-neck Yves Saint Laurent pullover.”
But because of the Valerie Solanas shooting, because he had scaled back his public appearances, Warhol didn’t go to Max’s on Friday night. Meanwhile, Glitter hadn’t made it to the Stamford Local. Edie was a real tragedy—many in New Canaan and Greenwich and Darien knew her family personally, and they held Warhol responsible. There was no Glitter in New Canaan, and none in New Hampshire, where Libbets and Paul went to boarding school.
They were cold, standing there, trying to figure out what to do. And Libbets was feeling sick. This was what nightlife was like when you were sixteen or seventeen and you had enough money to go anywhere in New York City. Paul thought about going into Union Square Park, with its dense shrubbery and rich vein of drugs and crime
. But he knew he would only end up with his usual fare—totally awesome oregano. They could go to another bar. One of those holes-in-the-wall on the Upper East Side where few questions were asked. But the fact that he was going to have to part from Libbets’s side eventually was dawning on Paul. The necessitites of travel lurked in him. He needed his last ten dollars. To get home.
—Let’s go back, he said. We shouldn’t have come down here. It’s my fault. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I’ll take you back up to your place and then I’ll go.
—I’ll just … drop you, Libbets said.
—No, no, he said. I’ll take you back. You’re not feeling well.
Purest helplessness passed across Libbets’s face. She shivered and frowned and bowed her head in a strange, almost grief-stricken way. And then she vomited on the street in front of Max’s Kansas City. It was a thick, white soup and Libbets spewed it with the compressed fury of a fire hose. She doubled over. When it reached the slush and mud and water, those gloomy little ponds of Manhattan treachery that had overflowed corners and collected in gutters and potholes, it steamed like some radioactive substance. Some of the vomit splashed on Paul’s Top-Siders, which were wet through and through now, and he jumped up, as though there were a way to escape it. As though it would be possible somehow to ditch her there. But he couldn’t even wipe the stuff off. He couldn’t do it until she was safe at home.
He was out with a woman who vomited in public.
—Sorry, Libbets moaned, oh, God, sorry—
He was propelled by this horror out onto Park Avenue South to hail a cab. He waved desperately at the traffic.
Libbets was crying as he helped her in. It was the day after Thanksgiving and her family had gone away and hadn’t invited her. They had gone away on a ski trip. Paul saw her predicament, and his own. He wished he could have spirited her to safety like a Human Torch, like a roadrunner. Abandonment was in the parlors of America, in the clubs, in the weather. He wanted to abandon her, too, this vomiting girl. He loved her and he wanted to abandon her. It was 10:28.