by Rick Moody
In the library, the television grew louder.
—Oh, lord, Elena said. You think I’m so dense. And now you want to be seen with your dense wife at the cocktail party. You want to wear your ridiculous ascot out to a cocktail party. That ridiculous ascot that doesn’t go with those pants at all. You want to wear that out, and you want me to shake hands with your friends and make conversation. And you want me to dress up in some outfit that shows off a lot of cleavage. And you’re not even going to accord me the respect of talking honestly about this.
—At least we can get out of the house, he said. At least we can get some air. Let’s just go and try to be part of the neighborhood. Let’s just throw in with the rest of the people for the evening, honey. I don’t want to spend the night reading in separate rooms, you know? Let’s have a good time, run with the pack.
He threw the Almond Joy wrapper on the counter and stole into his daughter’s plunder again. Charleston Chew.
—You don’t really know what this feels like, Elena said. You haven’t considered that. You never do. And when you finally do—
—Sure I do, Benjamin whispered. Do I know what loneliness feels like? I sure do. I know a lot about it, if that’s what you’re saying.
—Benjamin, she said. That’s supposed to explain it?
—All I’m saying is that loneliness is the music of the spheres around here. That’s all I’m saying. And as a result I have fallen into some things I regret, baby doll. I have regrets, I will tell you that.
He seemed to grow tired suddenly. He walked into range, into her reach. She certainly was not going to embrace him. She certainly was not going to assume the posture of the vulnerable. They were apart, attracted and repelled. The moment passed. Elena thought practically about turning up the thermostat, and of reminding Wendy about the Duraflame logs. Her mind was deflected from her own predicament. She was sad, but she refused any responsibility for sadness. Was there enough newspaper by the fireplace?
They parted, to regroup. Hood closed himself into the hall bathroom.
Elena wiped her face with the dish towel. The dog stood expectantly in front of her, its windshield-wiper tail going back and forth.
In the library she found Wendy engrossed in her ninth or tenth encounter with Charlie Brown’s morose little Christmas tree. Elena leaned over the back of the Naugahyde recliner and buried her hands in her daughter’s hair.
—We’re going to the Halfords’. The number is on the calendar in the kitchen. We should be home around eleven.
—Is it a big party? A big neighborhood party?
Wendy’s eyes never strayed from the screen.
—I suppose, Elena said. Why?
—Just curious, Wendy said earnestly. If there’s a problem, I guess I’ll just call you there to interrupt.
—What sort of problems are you planning exactly?
Elena kissed the top of her daughter’s head, right at the part. Wendy’s concentration didn’t ebb.
—Thought I’d steal the station wagon, go joyriding, and then drive up to a commune. Or enlist. Or set the house on fire. You know.
—Just bundle up, Elena said. Extra blankets in the linen closet. We’ll see you in the morning.
The hall bathroom door was open. The toilet tank was filling. Elena would not change her Hush Puppies or paint her face. She searched the front hall closet for the right kind of rain gear. The journey was about a mile, door to door, and they would travel by car. Still, Elena took the light-blue raincoat she had purchased on sale at Lord & Taylor in Stamford.
Through the narrow windows by the front door, she peered out at the sleet. It had begun to collect on the lawn—what there was of a lawn there—and in the brush and fallen leaves around their house. The roads would be full of treachery. They would be slick and undependable. The maintenance crews would be laboring, again, up to the top of the hill, spilling rock salt and sand, casting floodlights to and fro.
Outside, Benjamin was going around and around in the circle at the end of the driveway. She called good night to Wendy and got no response.
Peanuts music again. Then she closed the door behind her and skipped through the first inches of slush on the flagstone. In the car, she and her husband were silent.
In college, she had often announced her love for Benjamin to the back of his head, to the back of his tweed suit, to his retreating figure. Only to find that it was not him after all, that it was simply some look-alike. Sometimes it was even a redhead or a black man or a woman. She had so much affection for him that it spilled over everywhere.
Or she called his fraternity—Darling, I’m looking forward to seeing you tonight!—and found herself connected with a brother posing as Benjamin. Oh, Elena, sweetiekins, my little lemon tart! HA! HA! HA! HA!
This period of farce, culminating in the day on which Benjamin proposed—out of lack of imagination, it seemed now—was also characterized by calls she meant to place elsewhere—to Diana Olson or to Billy O’Malley, for example—but that ended up ringing at Benjamin’s fraternity house. She would get him on the phone and believe him, at first, to be someone else. It was as if she couldn’t have any other relationship, as if there were no other calls left for her to make. Back then, she had loved all of them, all those who resembled Benjamin Hood and even those who did not.
So love was mistaken identity. Erich Fromm and C. S. Lewis and Paul Tillich all agreed. Love was scattered on the winds. It exceeded its targets. So maybe Benjamin was right and the adults of the seventies had good cause to misplace their affections among phantoms and strangers and memories of desire. This man driving the car picked his nose in the same way as the man she’d married, scratched his ass in the same way, and took incredibly long showers, but he was not the same man. She remembered things about him he would never know again. The way he started to cry over a run-down petting zoo they had visited with the kids in Bridgeport; the way he had loved reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s; his bewilderment at his mother’s stroke. His smile was full of cheap sunsets and lonely Christmases. His rage had sharp angles. She’d remember all this stuff. She cheated on Benjamin with his own lost youth.
And Benjamin had his perceptions of her as well. Chief among his criticisms of his wife, she knew, was her failure to make small talk at parties. In the car there was a moment to bone up. Since the market had fallen off, since the government had recently revealed that it had both lost and erased important sections of its own secretly recorded tapes, since the Arab nations had effected an oil embargo against Western nations that supported Israel, and since the U.S., therefore, would likely be rationing petroleum in the near future, current events were not an appropriate topic of conversation at the party. They were all trying to forget current events.
It was late autumn, and the country club had been closed for three months, so no one had much played tennis lately. Or golf. A few, maybe, had played paddle tennis. But there was touch football and high school football and college football—which would be televised all weekend—and these were effective subjects, as were the professional sports. The Giants were again failing to live up to their promise. The Mets had been good until the series, and the Rangers were said to be excellent this year. See what you can learn from a quick glance at the second section of the Stamford Advocate?
Theology was out, of course, except for the practical issues at any given parish. Was anyone doing anything about the winter clothing drive? Who was supposed to make coffee this Sunday? Complaining about sermons was also a fine thing to do. Or about the rector at a church. And then there was popular religion: Godspell was a hit. Jesus Christ Superstar was a hit. Jonathan Livingston Seagull was a hit. (And the film version had just opened, featuring the songs of Neil Diamond.)
Likewise, there were the P.T.A. and local property taxes and the selectmen and the cessation of town meetings. But these were topics that would go only so far. What were you to do during the long, sprawling, drunken turns, when you were pinned to the wall by a bearded man with pinkeye wh
o wanted to discuss two-headed dildos in African art or the bisexuality of higher mammals. What were you to say to him?
There was one man who had cornered her at parties in the past, who had gone through a sort of Gestalt-therapy cult where they made you sit still for three days in a windowless conference room and listen to convolutions about the universe, which would, it was said, improve your productivity at work. But this man was rarely invited to New Canaan parties anymore, and the fact that she had met him at the post office and later arranged to see him at a diner in Norwalk, well, it was probably just as well. Wesley. They’d had a vague, abstract sort of conversation and nothing had come of it anyway. Maybe that was how these things were supposed to turn out.
The only right and true subject for party conversation was gossip. The more tawdry the better. Elena had gossiped like anyone else, about friends checking themselves into Silver Meadow, about breakdowns and cheap affairs and white-collar crime. And Elena realized, of course, as Benjamin eased the Firebird up the hill toward the Halfords’ house, that she was now the subject of this gossip. She was appearing in public with a man who was no longer faithful to his wife. And the question in some circles would be whether or not she, Elena Hood, knew herself to be betrayed. She was like a lonely spinster now, a lonely spinster in a riverfront town, who wore, as perfume, her own urine.
On the other hand, maybe Benjamin Hood was right and everyone was a cuckold. Maybe the nature of marriage was to be both cuckolded and cuckolding, adulterer and adulteress. Yes, the thing to do was to relax into this deterioration, to recognize that we could still live in these calm and lovely homes and still make ourselves beautiful on occasion and still love our children and lavish them with the opportunity and affection that we never received. We could spill the wine and dig that girl.
Hard times at the Baxter Building. Bleak House. Heartbreak Hotel. Is life not ironic? If nothing else? As Annihilus remarked back in issue #140. Love and work had come between the Fantastic Four, America’s greatest superheroes. For almost a year—a year in real time, a year in Paul Hood’s whirlpool teens, but a few days, no more, in the motionless, imperceptible time of Marvel comics—Sue Richards, née Storm, the Invisible Girl, had been estranged from her husband, Reed Richards. With Franklin, their mysteriously equipped son, she was in seclusion in the country. She would return only when Reed learned to understand the obligations of family, those paramount bonds that lay beneath the surface of his work. In her stead, the Medusa had joined the Fantastic Four. Medusa: Tibetan-born Inhuman and cousin of Johnny Storm’s paramour, Crystal, the Elemental. Medusa: her tresses had a life of their own. Once a sworn enemy of the Fantastic Four, a member of the anti-F.F., the Frightful Four.
The mood in the Baxter Building was grim. Besides the Richards’s marital problems, Crystal had recently chosen to marry Quicksilver instead of Johnny Storm. Sue was worried about Franklin’s trances; Reed was worried about Sue; Johnny was worried about Crystal; Ben Grimm was worried about himself.
It was a good period for readers of the F.F. And Paul Hood was a compulsive reader of comics. Still, the magazine would never equal its first eighty issues, when its creators, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, were at the helm. But it was pretty cool. Twelve years ago, exactly, in 1961, the first issue, with its chronicle of the battle with Mole Man, had appeared. Paul’s sister, Wendy, was almost the same age as the book. Fourteen years ago his family had arrived at its tetragonal shape. In fact, if you thought about it, it was possible that his sister, Wendy, was born during the creative gestation that led to the Fantastic Four. Where had Stan Lee been in those two years? The Hoods trailed after the implications of these characters as if Stan himself pulled their strings.
At a newsstand in Stamford, at the train station, Paul was perusing the squeaky spin rack in the rear, near the pornography, where the comics were nestled. Number 141 beckoned to him. It boasted, unsurprisingly, the end of the Fantastic Four. On the cover, a deeply perturbed Sue held in her arms her irradiated son: “Little Franklin is glowing like an ATOMIC BOMB!”
Sure, Paul had tried D.C. Comics. He had read Batman and Justice League of America, and he had followed some of the other Marvel titles, too: Spider-Man, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Avengers, and X-Men, and especially those titles that were F.F. spin-offs, The Silver Surfer and The Sub-Mariner. He had tried them all. He had ranged far and wide. But he kept coming back to the F.F. Batman was cool: his skills were not supernatural. He was just smart and rich. Superman was a moral force. The Hulk had hubris. Silver Surfer was definitely created by a mind on psychedelics. Thor was the comic you read if you wanted to work for one of those touring Renaissance festivals, if you wanted to wear a shirt that was called a blouse.
So why the Fantastic Four? First of all, Paul couldn’t shake the uncanny coincidence that his father had the same first name as Benjamin Grimm, the Thing. When he was younger, he actually thought of his father as the Thing: chunky, homely, self-pitying. When Paul was a kid, his dad raged around the house like a pachyderm taking down underbrush. His father would find a damp towel clumped on the bathroom floor and sprint to Paul’s room to accuse him. His father would lay in wait for the tiniest noise, the scantest footfall, and then he would howl from the bottom of the stairs. But his dad was always coming around to apologize, too. He couldn’t terrorize with real commitment. He was like the Thing. He hated the world, hated mankind, hated his family, but loved people, loved kids and dogs.
And his mother was the Invisible Girl. Although, on the other hand, sometimes she was like Crystal, the Elemental, a prophetess, a seer. And sometimes his dad was Reed Richards, the elastic scientist. And sometimes Paul himself was Ben Grimm, and sometimes he was Peter Parker, a.k.a. the Spider-Man. These models never worked exactly. Still, the F.F., with all their mistakes and allegiances, their infighting and dependability, told some true tale about family. When Paul started reading these books, the corny melodrama of New Canaan lost some of its sting.
By the way, corny melodrama: Tuesday night, only three nights ago, they were all watching television in the dorm. At St. Pete’s, where Paul was incarcerated. It was the last night before Thanksgiving vacation, and he was in the common room. Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer on the box. Seemed like every year they started these Xmas specials earlier and earlier. Someone had turned off the lights. They all cozied together in the dim, flickering images of holiday myth. Didn’t matter who was there. Paul had been lucky enough to score some Thai weed from some math club guys who doubled as drug dealers. He had just smoked it.
One problem he had was that drugs had sort of stopped working for him. When he had stuffed his head for the first time, he had felt his teen death sentence lift temporarily. He had felt the kindness of inanimate objects, the kindness of trees, the kindness of old dormitories. He had found brilliant comedy in the connections between things. He had talked to girls and told them that he didn’t want to go home, he didn’t want to go home, he couldn’t talk to anybody, he couldn’t talk, oh, he didn’t want to graduate, ever, and these girls had cupped his forehead with their palms and held him tight.
But lately these drugs had not been working. Lately, nothing made it through his paraffin shell. His skin crawled. And that night, Tuesday, after smoking the Thai stick, no matter where he looked he saw red dots. The screen was all red dots, shifting patterns of red dots. Like a pestilence of ladybugs. Rudolph made no sense at all. The story of Rudolph was menacing. In Rudolph’s ascendance to lead reindeer, Paul sensed the machinations of thought control and government intrusion. He kept coming out of his hallucination to find the abominable snowman threatening the town. He had tried to cheer himself up by singing along with “Silver and Gold,” but it didn’t do the trick.
—Hood, someone said. Hood, something wrong?
—Don’t interrupt. Concentrating.
Or maybe he was feigning romantic transportation. Suddenly. Because the Bear, Carla Bear, not only a fan of Rudolph and his cousin Frosty the Snowman, but the kind of
girl who could quote from Miracle on 34th Street and dance along with the Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation of The Nutcracker, was sitting next to him. And yes, he realized that the Bear was trying to calm him down. Carla Bear, one of the intrepid first women of St. Pete’s. She had enrolled as a third-former in 1971, the first year of coeducation. She was leaning against him on the gray synthetic banquette and comforting him. And during a sequence in which Rudolph was being ridiculed by the other reindeer, or was it later, he encircled her in his arms. It overcame him. He yielded.
—It’s okay, kiddo, she said. It’s okay.
She had a big maternal heart.
—I hate Thanksgiving, too, kiddo, she said. Who wouldn’t? Why would you want to go home? On the other hand, staying here isn’t so great either, y’know?
And Paul was sure she was telling the truth. St. Pete’s was where the affluent families of the East unloaded their heirs, where they penned them until college. The Bear knew, because, he had heard, her own mother, her single mother, was ill. Dying. Tumors. Cancer of some kind. There were kids at St. Pete’s whose parents would be removed from this very Thanksgiving table to have their stomachs pumped of sleeping pills. Whose siblings had hanged themselves or gassed themselves or who had driven expensive cars into the ocean. There were kids here whose only relative was a trust-fund officer. These were kids from devastated families. Devastated and wealthy.
—Shut up, someone said.
Paul couldn’t hear the program. He had his arms around Carla. A little elf cheerfully rode a Norelco cordless razor across a snow-covered landscape. Over a mogul, into the air. Paul wanted this embrace to work magic. He was dimly aware that the common room was full of writhing embraces. He was seized with laughter. Something wasn’t working.