The Ice Storm (18 page)

—I love you, Wendy, Sandy said.

—That's nice, Sandy, she said. I love
Chiller Theater
and
Nanny and the Professor
.

They lay there in just the light from the hall. This stillness seemed pretty close to contentment. Wendy knew she had done a powerful job of initiation.

—Another drink? she said.

—I guess so.

And she sat up and surveyed the carnage, the covers half-kicked off, the clothes scattered around the floor. Wendy liked the look of disorder. She filled the glass, spilling a little—on herself, on the sheets, down the sides of the glass—filled it all the way up.

—Are you drunk? she asked.

—I don't know, Sandy said. How do I know?

—I don't know either. You spin around. That's one way you know. You spin around when you try to lie down.

They enjoyed each other's warmth like refugees. Glad for the warmth, for the company. And then, because they weren't thinking very carefully about the night and its whirling array of parents and siblings, they fell tumultuously into sleep.

The party peaked around ten-thirty like a cheap acid trip. This party was going
through some changes
. Describing them, describing these changes—the personal growth, the group dynamics taking place at the Halfords'—would have taxed the keenest reader of
Psychology Today
. Thomas Harris, M.D., author of
I'm Okay
—
You're Okay
, put it this way: “Early in his work in the development of Transactional Analysis, Eric Berne observed that as you watch and listen to people you can see them change before your eyes. It is a total kind of change. There are simultaneous changes in facial expression, vocabulary, gestures, posture and body functions, which may cause the face to flush, the heart to pound, or the breathing to become rapid. We can observe these changes in everyone.”

Elena didn't see how this transactional model was going to work for her. Though she was a reader of personal-growth books. She had read
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
and
The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge
and
The Primal Scream
by Arthur Janov and
I'm Okay
—
You're Okay
and
Games People Play
by Eric Berne and
Notes to Myself
by Hugh Prather and
The Gestalt Approach and Eyewitness Therapy
by Fritz Perls and
Be Here Now
by Ram Dass and
Soul on Ice
by Eldridge Cleaver and
I
Never Promised You a Rose Garden
and
The Divided Self
and
Human Sexual Response
and
Island
by Aldous Huxley and
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
and
The Hobbit
and
The Lord of the Rings
. She read this stuff, but it didn't help her at parties.

And the party itself was of two minds, one mind in which the selection of house keys was a worthy and modern preoccupation, and one mind in which the whole game was a shame. Some people felt both ways, and some shifted back and forth between these two
belief systems
.

Uncomfortable as she was, how was Elena to account for the change that had overcome her? How was Elena to account for the joy that seized her not long after her arrival at the party? New Canaan society crept around trying to make decisions about the keys, about the repercussions of its participation. The conversations became vague, Elena noticed, as husbands and wives tried to avoid one another. They slunk from the bar to their conversations with eyes downcast, as Elena herself was avoiding Benjamin. Still, she found herself suddenly elated at the party; there was no other way to put it. She felt the loosening of the constraints that had bound her since she had come of age, and she realized she would play. She would select a key. She would clutch it to her, permit it to dangle around her neck, between her small, subdued breasts. She would play.

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 …