The Ice Storm

  Williams tried to get out a sentence, an explanation for his family, but each time he was interrupted by the threat of his own speech, now weak, growing fainter. Then no words came forth. He simmered. Elena and Janey took hold of him, one on each arm, and in that way they shivered while the machinations of the state went on around them. Mike was being entered onto statistical rolls.

  The driver climbed out again—the driver’s-side door swung shut behind him.

  —Okay, we’re gonna have to take, uh, the deceased down to Norwalk. Would one of you like to go along? Don’t need all of you. In fact, it’ll be best if it’s … just one of you. Not going to be much to see now. Best if you just let the process take its course, if you want my advice.

  Ben was coming forward to volunteer, but his part in this subplot was done. Jim Williams stepped up again, out of the arms of these two women, out of their generosity, because who else could go? His uncertain, wordless gesture of assent—he raised a single finger, as though he were inconspicuously bidding at an auction—emerged from him without thought. Janey and Sandy and Elena let him go. He climbed into the back of the ambulance, and the driver climbed back into the driver’s seat.

  And then the car wouldn’t start. They had run the radio too long. Maybe. Or it was just one of those days. The engine coughed roughly several times, but nothing. Elena heard them swearing inside the ambulance; they had just started it, it had no history of problems.

  They jumped the engine off the police car. The state employees stood around scratching their heads, looking for the cables. After a dull, impenetrable quarter hour—Jim getting in and out of the back—ignition was achieved. The police took everyone’s name and number.

  This quarter hour was the last time when the Hoods and the Williamses would be this close, when their stories would be so easily told together, when, if there was going to be conversation on the subject of those keys and that party, or about dry-humping and teenaged drinking, or about the misshapen affection that bound these people, such talk should have taken place. They would be neighbors for a while yet. Look, Elena knew that apology was the impossible paragraph, its words were like the secret names of God. Simple apology, simple acknowledgment. That stuff, all that stuff that happened, it’s all forgotten. It’s history. Simple, right? They were all forgiven and free, unshackled, liberated to go and unravel the narratives of their lives. They were free to take up their fates, to take up their nameless destinies. So why didn’t apology come to Elena’s lips? Or to Benjamin’s? Elena wanted to say all this, to say impossible, ancient words of confession and absolution. And she knew that if she didn’t, she was condemned to watch the blunders of the past come around again for a revival, an encore presentation. So she did her best. She reached out for Janey and whispered to her a few unsatisfactory words, pittances. Oh, Janey, oh, Janey, I’m so so so sorry. Oh, I am so sorry. Their embrace was brief. And then Benjamin caught them at this moment and he wanted to be part of it. He touched his wife’s shoulder and then Janey’s shoulder. Neither seemed to notice. He stood awkwardly there. And then he turned toward the kids. Wendy and Sandy were facing away, toward the woods, toward the security of fallen trees, plotting the next ten years.

  They were transfixed, the Hoods and Williamses, by the spectacle of a lost future. It brought them together and it drove them apart but maybe this parting was inevitable anyway. Soon the car was jumped, and the police were gone, and Jim Williams, in the ambulance, vanished into the underworld.

  Wendy Hood’s bedroom. (They had walked Sandy and Janey over to the Steeles’ house, to wait for Jim, and then they had walked home, in single file.) Worn, balding teddy bear tossed aside on the corduroy bedspread. On the walls: posters of David Cassidy, the Dark Side of the Moon record sleeve, a peace symbol. Bumper sticker—Impeach Nixon—on the back of the door. All-in-one Magnavox record player with a warped copy of Neil Diamond’s Hot August Night resting on it. Side four, including “Mother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show.”

  Wendy was sprawled diagonally across the bed with her face stuffed into the folds of a crumpled feather pillow. She was sad and frightened. There was a malevolence lurking in the postelectrical silence of her house. And Mike. She imagined death coming for him, death riding on her town’s rich, privileged winds, death as witches, single women with cats, coming for him and carrying him past the window where she, Wendy, dallied with his brother. No, she imagined Mike was alone somewhere, that the hereafter for him featured aloneness, just like he had been alone at the moment of his death. Power lines, they said.

  She couldn’t follow a single thought to its conclusion. She couldn’t distinguish between Mike and Sandy, as she lay there on the bed. She saw Sandy in the basement with her, instead of Mike, or she suddenly believed that she had spent the night with Mike and that now Sandy was dead. Sex and death were all confused in her. Everything was all confused. She didn’t know what to do to console herself, if she even deserved consolation. She wanted to sleep in the bosom of the good people of New Canaan. She wanted to forget, to ride the pendulum away from this weekend and its bad luck.

  But she had other impulses, too. She pulled the soiled garter belt out of the front of the jeans she had changed into and it emerged like the handkerchief of cheap legerdemain, that endless handkerchief of changing colors and styles—which reveals, in its ultimate fold, a gray and diseased pigeon. She had begun to mythologize this garter belt in the last hour or so. Its rank sea smell—tuna salad with mustard-honey dressing—mingling with the intoxicating smell of her own unwashed body. Its black, sultry shape, alluring and violent.

  Wendy had to try it on. She didn’t make this decision, really, she just yielded to it. The river flowed in one direction and she paddled along with it. Flow. First she inhaled the human fumes of that garment. She cradled it. She had read in one of Paul’s cheap pornographic magazines—Oui—that semen was both a good conditioner and a fine skin lotion. The smell of Mike’s lost progeny—the hint of the family he might have had—was thick upon her. This was what memory was like—it was all fingerprinted with desire. So, reveling in the good ideas falling away from her, Wendy began to unzip her jeans. Had the electricity been on, she would have played weepers on her Magnavox. She would have played death ballads on old, scratchy forty-fives.

  With the hooks available, she locked the garment around the spot where her hips were beginning to blossom. She looked with horror at the precise fit of the thing. She stumbled, jeans and panties around her ankles, back onto her bed; she could see where her downy, blond pubic hair would vanish soon and give way to the thick, coarse tangle of womanhood. It sickened her. What had happened to Mike? What had she done to him? A few more years and she wouldn’t even be a kid anymore. She would bind her breasts tautly against her. She would preserve her chastity, starve her menses; she would keep herself free from wants. But even as she vowed these vows, she felt in herself the oblique stain of arousal. Wendy wiggled her hips on the bed, in Mike’s mother’s garter belt—as she was now sure it must be—feeling grief and need mixed up together.

  In the thrall of the moment, her jeans knotting her ankles together, shivering, her ass—tickled by the straps of the garter belt—exposed to the chill air, she reached into the drawer of her unsturdy bedside table and found the Wilkinson double-bonded razor she had liberated from her parents’ bathroom.

  She pulled up the sleeves of her turtleneck sweater. A tear appeared at the edge of her eye—from the pain—as she tested the blade on her wrist, delicately. A small test cut. It was just a scratch really, nothing like the fountain she deserved, the fountaining of blood you might get from a hair shirt, say, or from an undergarment fashioned with nails and tacks, each tipped with special preparations to attract insects and vermin. Wendy clenched her jaw. She raised a cold sweat on her brow. She pulled at clumps of her blond locks. And then she panicked. She could imagine cutting down to the bone, parting sinew and nerve and what fatty tissue was lodged there. She could imagine grappling with her own shiny
bones, wresting them apart and scattering them on the carpet, but then she was begging Mike to pardon her, telling Mike that she couldn’t do it, that she was gonna have to stick around, Charles. She just couldn’t. Poor Mike, solitary ghost. Solitary ghost of New Canaan.

  With jeans still twisted around her ankles, with a wrist presented as if in some kind of religious rite, Wendy waddled out into the hall and then into the bathroom.

  There was no running water, because of the flood, but a bucket of cold water sat on the floor of the bathroom—for flushing the commode. Wendy plunged her wrist into this bucket. The cold water stung. The scratch on her forearm turned the water the color of a cranberry spritzer, the color of those transfusions of cranberry and ginger ale her mom used to give her when she was out sick from school. She hobbled toward the door, the blade still in her left hand. She squirmed to the edge of the staircase.

  They rarely used the living room, except for company. But Elena and Benjamin were camped there now, guests in their own home. Each nursed a lukewarm cup of Sanka. And they had changed their clothes—they were clothed in many layers. They were prepared. Their voices were soft and low, like lover’s voices. The leak in the wall, while it hadn’t subsided entirely, had slowed, and since Benjamin had shut off the water at the valve down in the basement, there would be less trouble when the pipes refroze that evening. The fire in the fireplace sputtered: it was on its way out.

  —Well, someone’s going to have to go into town for the plumber, Benjamin said quietly. And to get some supplies, some food. I’ll be happy to go. You could come along if you like. Maybe we all need to get out and have a little activity. Maybe that would be just the ticket. If we can get the Firebird started. The station wagon wouldn’t.… I can understand that you’re upset, honey. I’m upset too. But it would be better if we could just get this all out in the open. That’s all I’m asking. I’m sincere about this, about my part.

  Elena whispered, as though whispering to herself. Some inaudible murmur of equivocation.

  —No one can know when he died, Hood said. He might have died instantly, or he might have just fallen unconscious and frozen to death. That’s not for anybody to know really. They’ll make up some scientific horseshit. You never know. So you were just doing whatever you were doing. Everyone’s going to feel bad. That’s just what something like this is like. But this sort of second guessing.… Well, that’s just baloney.

  They sipped.

  And Elena said, suddenly:

  —Oh, and your conscience is clear.

  Then:

  —Well, where were you anyway? Were you up to anything better? Where did you spend the night if your conscience is so clear?

  —I didn’t say anything, Ben said. I made no judgment—

  —So high and mighty—

  —I was on the bathroom floor. Rob and Dot’s bathroom. If it makes you happy … to know that. I was goddam passed out on the floor of a goddam bathroom. And I’m not saying, if that’s what you think I’m saying, that spending some time on their water bed—your spending some time there—is the worst thing, even if it makes me feel—

  Elena grew quieter still:

  —It doesn’t make me happy. It’s predictable is what it is. It’s just predictable, and that doesn’t make me happy. I’ve seen more drunkenness in this marriage. I’ve seen a lot of awful stuff. There are more vomit stains around this house—

  —I know, I know, I know, Ben said. I’ve said I’m sorry. I know. I’ve apologized until I’m blue.… I’m going to—

  —Sorry is a nothing word, Ben. It just takes up air. You’re going to have to—

  —Well, what can I offer you then? We took these vows, remember? I want to talk about that now. We said these words, you said them, too, and I’m trying to stick by them—

  —In somebody else’s arms. That’s how you—

  —Trying to restore them is what I mean. You haven’t improved the situation either by.… Listen, I’m upset about poor Mike. I don’t want to … I’m not going to … even if Jim’s kids are out all hours of the night, I can see that he’s doing the best he can with them. I know it’s hard to raise kids—

  —Like ours are not? Elena said. Look at our own children—

  —Just let me speak for a moment, honey. Just let me finish what I’m trying to say. A terrible thing like this … and let’s remember that I was the one who found Mike’s body. I found it—

  Benjamin’s face twisted into grimace.

  —I was giving him … what do you call it? Mouth-to-mouth. Blowing air into his lungs. And it didn’t matter that I always thought he was a little shit. It didn’t matter. And what I mean is that this ought to make it plain, you know, how a family ought to be. That’s what I want to tell you: we have trouble with the house, we have trouble with the kids, I have trouble at work, but we can still work it out.

  —What? What trouble at work?

  —Well, it’s.… You know. It’s just not going all that well. You know that.

  —No, I didn’t know that. Because you don’t tell me these things.

  —I just … I just haven’t felt good about myself at work. I need—

  Elena didn’t say anything.

  —Stop looking at me that way, Ben said. I don’t want to raise my voice. I don’t want to have to put Wendy through all this again. This conversation should take place in private, that’s what I’m asking. I’d like to suggest, Elena, that the trouble at work—which is more difficult than I’ve wanted to admit even to myself—well, I’m in a situation where I can try to make a new start here.

  —Come on, Ben. What makes you think that’s the way I’m thinking about it?

  —Goddammit, that’s it, Benjamin said. You think you’re not part of the problem here, but you are. Let’s face up to that for a second. Let’s talk about the sorts of problems you bring to this room. That you are a remote person. You’re a remote, difficult person, and for someone who’s always made a lot of noise about community, about the community of the Unitarian goddam faith and all that balderdash, about psychiatrists and psychologists and all that, all that community of overpriced mental-health quackery, you don’t seem to have a lot of concern for this community right here, in this house, and the decision you made seventeen years ago and the people who are part of that decision with you.

  Elena said, almost whispering, not looking him in the eyes at all, looking instead at the fire:

  —It wasn’t just this free and easy choice, you know. You don’t know how it works. Later, I don’t know how I make these decisions, how I made them. I don’t have any skills, and I never did. I’m no worker. I woke up breast-feeding one morning. And I don’t feel like there’s much dignity in it, that’s what I mean. So what am I supposed to do?

  Hood got up to poke at the fire.

  —So what are you saying? You’re saying this was just some arrangement?

  —I’m not saying that … I’m saying you’re not looking at the other angles.… There are points of view here.

  —You were just coerced into this marriage by the social climate and all that: Carl Rogers or Carl Jung or somebody says women of the fifties were coerced into marriage. And they need Virginia Slims or something. And meanwhile I’ve neglected the family. I’m the neglecter. The villain.

  He crouched down low and inserted a balled-up piece of newspaper under the last unconsumed transverse of Duraflame log.

  —So you think it’s best if you leave, he said.

  —That’s right, Elena said.

  Then:

  —Well, this is the era for it, Benjamin said.

  Elena said nothing.

  Benjamin watched the fire.

  Their remorse was peaceful.

  —Should we tell the kids now? Is that what you want to do?

  He set down the bellows.

  —And that reminds me, he said. Where the hell is Paul, anyway?

  —What?

  —Paul, our son, Paul. Did you call the city to see if he stayed over with
his friends?

  —I thought you did.

  —You mean you.… Oh, great, this is great. This is great.

  —Is it my sole responsibility to look after the children? Elena said. It’s a holiday weekend—you’re here.

  —Well, I’m glad I won’t have to listen to this shit for the rest of my life, because I couldn’t take it. Did you happen to talk with Wendy about Paul’s plans, whether she knew anything about it?

  The answer arrived right then. The drawing room doors—a pair of antique sliding doors whose period feel had once made Benjamin Hood feel good—parted. Wendy entered, like the buried woman breaking the surface of the earth, coming up for air. She looked nothing like the Wendy that Elena remembered, the exasperating and charming little girl who had to be the center of attention. The little girl whom everybody loved, waiters, doormen, conductors, passersby, all of whom had to talk to her. That girl had vanished entirely, and though Elena recognized this apparition, she recognized it from some more distant register of memory. The generations seemed to have collapsed into Wendy, because Wendy looked exactly like Elena’s own mother, coming downstairs, her mother frightened by the implications of another long afternoon. Wendy, with her arm stretched out in front of her. Her jeans partly hiked up, partly unzipped, over a black lace garter belt, straps clearly visible, zipped into the zipper. The huffing sobs coming from her daughter like a backward language. Elena heard her mother’s cries, heard the ghost of her own mother, and she saw her own place in the ladder of madness and desolation. She felt that she, too, would be locked away, locked into Silver Meadow and visited only on weekends. The two of them encircled their daughter.

  —Oh, baby doll, Benjamin said. What the hell. Oh, lord.

  Hood saw, with horror, the familiar garter belt.

  —It’s okay, darling, Elena said to Wendy. And then to her husband:—It’s okay, it’s just a scratch. This isn’t too bad. It’ll close up fine. It’s not a …