Free The Ice Storm by Rick Moody Page A

It was getting hard to locate her affection in the midst of all this noise and dissolution and thoughtlessness, but she liked him sometimes anyway. It was hard to live next to someone and not come up with a little respect.
    â€”Should I dress for the party now, or should I dress after? Give me your—
    â€”Up to you, she said. I’d like to go early, though, and leave pretty soon after that.
    â€”I get you loud and clear. Your signal is coming in. Anyway, I don’t know what was in it for her, because she wasn’t giving him … she wasn’t giving him a hand job or anything.
    â€”Do you have to be so graphic?
    â€”I’m just telling the story, baby doll. She’s not giving him a hand job and she’s not, you know, grappling with the situation herself either. Probably too shy to do it to herself in front of the creep. I guess we should be glad about shyness. And I come down the stairs and I pause dramatically, like I’m the prosecutor or something, and then I really let him have it. You’ve never seen anyone rearrange their clothing so fast in all your life. Kid’s got the pants hiked up around himself, shoes and socks on, shirt carefully tucked in before I can say a word. Shirt sticking out of the fly and everything. He’s pretending to be absorbed in the TV Guide .
    Benjamin laughed. He was searching far and wide for a laugh.
    â€”Hey, you look nice, he said to her now, fixing a paisley ascot around his neck, zippering the blue-and-gold—checkered pants. She knew she looked anything but nice. Familiar, maybe, kindly.
    â€”And?
    â€”And Wendy’s out of the way. She squirms away on the floor, puts some distance between her and the creep. So I started to yell and I called the kid I-don’t-know-what, told him I’d personally separate him from his manhood if I ever caught him with her again and that sort of thing. Wendy came home peacefully.
    Another laugh. A party laugh, trailing off precipitously. Elena watched him in the bathroom now, straightening the ascot. She waited a while before asking. She let it hang in the air with the menace of a grave diagnosis.
    â€”So what were you doing in the basement anyway?
    Only a slight hesitation:
    â€”Just dropping off a coffee cup. Jim left it, last time he was over. It was on the dash of the car. You were, you know, reading. I was just dropping off the cup.
    Benjamin emerged from the bathroom. Smiled. Spread wide his arms to announce his arrival.
    â€”Let’s eat, babe. I am cool. I am ready.
    She lifted herself, as though it were the greatest chore, from within the fold of the comforter at the end of the bed. It diapered her. And this was a great chore, too. Being lied to required such work.
    â€”Oh, right, she said. The mustache coffee cup. The one that was sitting on the dash.
    â€”Yeah, sure, he said. That’s the one.
    â€”That one.
    Benjamin nodded vigorously.
    â€”That one.
    Her husband simply laughed. As if the flimsiness of his deceits wouldn’t adhere to him.
    So they were back in the kitchen. Disappointment in the room like a sullen dinner guest. The peas bobbed in their sulfurous oil slick. All was ready. Wendy appeared behind Elena, wearing another pink turtleneck and corduroys. Without prompting, Wendy searched the long, narrow drawer by the range for a wooden spoon with which to disembowel the turkey of its stuffing. She set the spoon at the edge of the serving platter. Then, in the cupboard by the refrigerator, Wendy found three glasses, the ones with the decorative blueberries painted on them. The really good holiday finery would wait.
    In the den, Ben had vanished to fix himself another drink. Absences of this sort Elena knew intimately. Soon, according to habit, there would be the sound of ice hitting the bottom of a tumbler and the sudden swelling of show tunes from their new high-fidelity stereo system.
    Richard Kiley was going to dream that impossible dream