The Ice Storm (22 page)

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.

—Sorry about your sneakers, Libbets said.

He didn't know what to say. He kissed her once on the lips, tasted the rank contents of her stomach. Kissed her just because he wanted to be unafraid of this simple biological event now and because he wanted to prove he could kiss her gently, like a decent guy.

He bore her up, out of the cab, held her up past the doormen, caressed her in the elevator, caressed the small of her back, and led her into her room. She went into the bathroom and vomited again, almost daintily this time. Paul gagged, too, as though he were going to spill his own guts in sympathy. He heard her shit after that, too, a torrent of insubstantial, watery stuff. He realized he couldn't remember ever having heard a woman shit before. Libbets was still crying. These were the sounds in the Casey household, Libbets's diarrhea, her choking sobs, and, in the next room, Davenport snoring in Libbets's sister's room. Davenport had moved. Sleepwalked, maybe. The sound of the snoring carried through the apartment like the country sound of a chain saw.

She was in her nightgown now, when she came out of the bathroom, and his eyes lit on her little woven anklet. And when she was backlit by the bedside lamp, her curvy shape shimmered in her transparent nightgown. She got under the covers.

—Are you feeling okay? he said.

—Much better, she mumbled. Gotta quit mixing things, I guess.

—Thanks for the night, Paul said. It was really a wonderful night.

—Mmm.

He went on:

—I never get to see much of New York City. I don't come in much. We used to come in with my dad at Christmastime. Once we came to see the circus. Three rings, couldn't tell where to look. Totally fried. But now I don't get into the city too much and you know, well, I don't have that many friends either so it's not too often—

It was like throwing a switch, the way she free-fell into unconsciousness. One moment she was there and the next, gone. She was a ghostly and beautiful sleeper, almost invisible, curled in the delicate question-mark shape Paul would have imagined for her.

He asked if he could just rest with her in the bed for a minute. Just for a minute, really, then he had to catch the train. Just to help her off to sleep and everything. When he got no reply, he removed his wet Top-Siders—speckled with puke and slush—and then his khakis. In his checkered boxer shorts—no self-respecting man of St. Pete's wore briefs—he climbed into bed with Libbets Casey.

He meant only to curl his arm around her and to feel for her the sentiment that parents feel for helpless little kids. He meant only to help, to feel that he could help. And when she rose and fell in the little drama of respiration, her breasts brushing up against his arm, when he brushed back her dirty-blond hair and touched his palm to her forehead, he knew that his life wasn't here to be squandered. This was the thing that anybody could do. He knew the comedy of the human body. He could share it. And it didn't matter for a moment that Libbets was unlikely to do the same for him. It didn't matter. This was where the storm worked its change on him. He was ready to do a little service.

But instead, his erection began to rub against Libbets's voluptuous ass. He knew what he was doing, but he wasn't admitting it. He was feeling virtuous. His dick was making its own decisions, ones that involved chiefly sorrow and shame. His dick didn't give a shit about the community of lost teenagers. It only took a minute or so—he had hiked up her nightgown and was rubbing against her very flesh—before he was teetering on the brink of that fantastic and sorrowful ecstasy. What really gave masturbation its thrill was the possibility of getting caught at it at the moment of orgasm, when you knew that Jimmy Rodale, for example, was going to tell everyone in Manville that you used a nylon soccer jersey to accomplish the deed. Or getting caught by your mother. That cry of release was like no other—I wish I were in love! I'm never gonna be!

But Paul was gifted with a sudden moment of insight. He could see that the lovely cheeks of her ass, her coccyx, her knobby lower vertebrae, the breasts he held in his hand, would not bring him the good feeling he wanted. He could see what kind of creep he was. He would be no more
there
afterward than he was before. He was no sensuous man. And there was no colony on this planet where this kind of activity was rewarded. This insight was nothing more than a jab in the midst of the precipitous movement toward ejaculation.

He managed to roll over onto his side, though. To save himself a little heartbreak.

—Oh, Libbets, he groaned.

And he came. By himself. On himself. On his hand, and on Libbets's sheets.

Instantly, he was out of bed, checking the clock, his heart racing, looking for his clothes. Was he high? Was he a fool? Was he a deviant? He sprinted to the bathroom, where he gave his hands a good washing. He grabbed a flowered towel and rushed with it back to the bed. Libbets slept. He scrubbed at the puddle not a foot from her back. She rolled backward, from the commotion maybe, so that she was only inches away. He whispered apologies. He scorched the fitted sheet with scrubbing friction. It wasn't going to come out so easily. There were little clots of the stuff. It would just have to dry. He prayed that his semen would not make that journey of eight inches across the sheet and into Libbets's vagina. He prayed it would fade by morning. He prayed it would be transformed into the flaky and inoffensive crust he knew so well.

It was almost eleven. Had Davenport heard? The snoring had stopped. Paul's life was cheap. He dressed. He looked for his magazines. He was as alone in that apartment as he could be. A world of sleepers kept his secret. How could he sit across from Libbets in M. LeJeune's french class? How could he herald the birth of baby Jesus in a month's time? How could he ring in the fabulous year of 1974?

The best thing to do was to attempt to adhere to his normal daily schedule in all other areas of his life. To come and go according to his habits; the best thing to do was to catch the train as planned; to return to New Canaan as planned; to have breakfast with his parents as planned; to try to bask in the company of his parents, to try to learn the lessons of family; to catch the train back to Boston on Sunday, as planned, and from there catch the bus to Concord; to go to chapel on Monday morning as required; to attend Origins of the West, Geometry One, Chemistry One, English Five, and French Four as though nothing concerned him more than the usual battery of exams and the stress of selecting the correct St. Pete's bumper sticker for his parents' station wagon for Xmas. The slim rewards of habit would be his.

His clothes were straightened out (though he was dripping slightly into his pants), his tweed jacket was buttoned. His penis hurt. He leaned over Libbets's shoulder to grace the clean, broad plane of her cheekbone. She slipped halfway out of delirium.

—Mmmnn, Libbets said.

And then she sank again. He muttered another apology, as if words were going to do the trick.

Paul Hood begged his cab driver to make it to Grand Central Terminal by 11:00. This required haste. The grand avenue they hurtled down couldn't impress him now. Nor could the snow and sleet drifting in the streetlamps like ash from an incinerator. He was unaware. He had plunged himself into the netherworld of troubled adolescents. He wasn't a man at all. He was a boy. A privileged kid. His parents could get him out of what he had done. He would go to Silver Meadow. His dad had money. His dad could pay for psychiatric treatment. His dad would turn up during visiting hours with fresh socks. His dad would ferry him home to Silver Meadow after he got thrown out of St. Pete's. His dad would ferry him into that subspace of forgotten perverts.

He was at the ticket window by ten minutes past, and he slipped between the doors on the train just before they closed. A dozen other burnouts, including some older guys he thought he remembered from public school—bar drinkers and lonely souls—were strewn around the empty car. When the train began to roll, Paul Hood laid himself out lengthways on the three-seater like a corpse on the marble mortuary slab.

And in that first moment of repose, he remembered issue #141 of
The Fantastic Four
. Like a desert oasis to him. Deviants and losers and mutants and the loveless, these, Paul Hood's people, were the proper readers of Marvel comics.

To recap: In issue #140, Annihilus was busy trying to take control of the world. Natch. This was all happening in the Negative Zone, that universe beside our own, where the laws of nature were subtly altered. Annihilus was a sort of insect—a late-model Gregor Samsa—who had been transformed through the agency of some extinct Negative Zone creatures, called Hereroes, into a winged, metallic fighting machine in pursuit of immortality. The control of the universe was his goal. The means to this end, in Annihilus's view, was none other than the F.F. In particular, he intended to sap the powers of young Franklin Richards, who was being held in the country by his mother, Sue—away from Reed, her husband, who never gave enough time to his child, who was no kind of father or husband.

Agnes Harkness, Sue's former governess, had been hypnotized by Annihilus into leading Sue and Franklin to the Negative Zone. Reed, Johnny, Ben, and Medusa—who had assumed Sue's spot on the team way back in issue #112—and Johnny's old college roommate, Wyatt Wingfoot, followed.

Most of the issue, though, was just a setup. Annihilus narrated at length his origins to Wyatt Wingfoot. This was the kind of issue that had no purpose but to insure that Paul Hood would purchase the next. Which brought Paul to #141.

Reed was set to rescue his estranged wife and son. He was half-crazy with paternal and marital loyalty. Paul had never seen him so frenzied, so … irrational. Yet as the issue opened, Annihilus had immobilized Reed and the rest of the team in some kind of antigravity paralysis. “You brought us here for a reason, Annihilus,” Reed cried out to the insect. “Revenge was part of it—but so is my son. What is it you
want
with him?”

Meanwhile, Alicia Masters, the blind girl who loved Benjamin Grimm was traveling to Latveria, to try to find a cure for her blindness.

The F.F. escaped from their suspended animation—they
just did
—and were soon walking the surface of Annihilus's desolate planet. They fought off and befriended the telepathic aliens who lived there. And they tunneled through the rock under their foe's fortress. Soon they had managed to penetrate the laboratory chamber where Sue, Agnes Harkness, and Franklin Reed were being held in an enormous test tube.

These last eight pages were enough to lift Paul Hood from the murky bog of self-recrimination. As the cover promised, little Franklin was indeed glowing like an ATOMIC BOMB! It began with this light in his eyes, this internal and eternal cosmic power raging in him. Galaxies, endless expanses of primordial creation,
were spread before him like mere toys
. Medusa, Johnny, and Ben launched Annihilus into a tomb of corroded machinery. It was that simple. The stage was set for the final act of this grave domestic tragedy.

Reed wanted to get them all back to N.Y.C., where he could use his untested antimatter device to try to stabilize Franklin. Using a bogus spell in bogus dimeter, Agnes Harkness transported them back to the city. Reed rushed off to find his invention. “Wait, Medusa,” Sue suddenly cried, “what is he doing? That looks like some sort of
gun!
No—Reed, no!”