by Rick Moody
So Paul put his hand inside the Bear’s pink button-down shirt and felt the lace margins of her brassiere. There was an overpowering gentleness in the space close to a woman’s heart. He was drawn to it, but at that moment he couldn’t possibly say why. Carla the Bear neither encouraged nor denied. In the next stillness, during the next commercial break, he let his hand stray even further, to her breast—small, serene, and comforting. Not sexy so much as reassuring. She clamped her hand around his wrist. She restored it to his lap. All around the room—the room swimming in red dots—girls were clamping their hands on the wrists of boys. The whole thing messed with his high. His eyes were occluded by irritations.
—I know, kiddo, the Bear was saying, shoving his hand back down into his lap. I know, I know.
So he did the only sensible thing. He fled the common room. He waited for the drug, and for his shame, to pass. He fled.
That story was connected to this one just as events were linked in the world of Marvel Comics—where The Sub-Mariner #67 was folded between two panels in F.F. #140, which itself contained information primarily available in F.F. annual #6. This imaginary world and its inhabitants coexisted with the so-called real inhabitants of the so-called real world in just the way the dead saints of antiquity were supposed to be frolicking around him—right on this platform at the Stamford Conrail station. In the world of Marvel, his parents were off exposing the malfeasance of a local political figure whose daughter was the girl Paul would one day marry, while his sister, meanwhile, was seducing an art collector and amateur nuclear physicist who would one day be Paul’s employer. This physicist just happened to be a part-time Balkan spy raised from the dead who was working on the Apollo-Soyez mission and carrying out, on the side, a high-level conspiracy to destroy Benjamin Hood’s business. All these things were happening at once, simultaneously. In the world of Marvel, Carla Bear might show up on the train, in the seat next to him, to say that she had always loved him. The train would then be attacked by hordes of spear-bearing Connecticut Indians. Or this train would lead into the main action of Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Where Paul would engage in hand-to-hand combat with the abominable snowman, until Richard Nixon appeared, in person, to plead for peace, as he had done in F.F. #106.
Paul’s dad hated comic books, of course. The idea that hard-earned Schackley and Schwimmer dollars might trickle down into the hands of the Marvel Comics Group needled him. Maybe it was because he and Ben Grimm were too much alike. Neither of them wanted to be reminded of it. But it wasn’t only the comics that his father disliked. He disliked Paul’s helmet of long, wavy hair, and his loneliness, and his lack of athletic prowess. Radio club and chorus and recreational tennis failed to impress Paul’s dad.
So Paul had given up trying. He hung out with the stoners. Paul was a garbage head! A loser, as they were called among stoners. Paul bought oregano and thought it was good shit. He borrowed nutmeg from a master at school, hoping to catch its buzz. He had smoked a Quaalude; he had overdosed on cold pills. Paul Hood, eater of morning glory seeds. Decipherer of obscure lyrics. He and his roommate had parakeets named Aragorn and Galadriel. He had pored over The Chronicles of Narnia and the pronouncements of Michael Valentine Smith. He had black-light posters and tapestries and he burned incense and wore wire-frame glasses and played military strategy games. He managed to keep one shirttail untucked at all times. His tweed jackets and khakis looked as though he had slept in them. He wore them again today. Top-Siders without socks. His shirttail stirred in the breeze, like a flag from the nation of the feckless and affluent. There was a rush along the Fulham Road!
Stamford was a vast, flat expanse below I-95, below the train station. The public-housing projects, a number of circular buildings over to the left there, languished disconsolately on the skyline. Beyond them rose Stamford’s lone office tower. It was a gleaming rocket, sort of like the Fantastic Four’s pogo plane in its sleek design. Or sort of like the Baxter Building. He could easily imagine them taking off from this impressive launchpad to battle Dr. Doom or Blaastar.
—Flame on, Paul said.
When the train arrived, he took up residence in one of the four-seaters, with his feet propped up across. There was the usual fracas when he realized again that he hadn’t availed himself of the ticket window in Stamford. The conductor invoked a surcharge.
—Begging your pardon, Charles, Paul said.
The conductor stared blankly at him.
—The fault’s all mine, sir. May I please purchase my ticket to Grand Central at the higher price?
Then he was thinking about school again. The Kittredge Cult—that was the name they had been given at St. Pete’s. He and his friends. They were Cultists. They had all opted to hide out in the dormitory of that name, one otherwise considered cheap, modern, and lifeless. For two years now, they had all lived there. What they had in common was that they were undistinguished. Paul could boast nonparticipation in any varsity sport. And he wasn’t a rock-and-roll musician or yearbook photographer like some nonathletes. And he was unattractive. And he hadn’t—unlike many of his fellow students—attended Greenwich Country Day or New Canaan Country Day or any of the other Country Days. The Cult was populated with just this sort of lost soul. The rest of the student body knew one another from summers on Nantucket or in Camden, or from tennis camp, or else they were related, or they were children of trustees or legacies or other prominent alumni. The Kittredge Cult was the remainder.
To them, adolescence was nearly fatal. Surprise. To survive a sober afternoon was heroic. Only a state of witless inebriation was really sensible. The best of life was intoxication. The promise of liberated sexuality, dangled before others of their age group, completely eluded Paul and his friends. They whacked off and got caught. They got stoned, and drank, and whacked off. They tortured freshmen, re-inflicting their frustration on these new kids, javelining them with cross-country ski poles. Then they stole five minutes to jerk off a second time.
The Cult’s precise origin was unknown. It included women, too. Not only Carla the Bear, but Christina Whitman and her roommate, Debby Vartagnan. Debby had these episodes in which she would permit guys from Kittredge, whom she usually loved only in a platonic fashion, to lie with her on a Saturday night, in violation of major school rules, and to touch her unnaturally large breasts. Each victim would then be marked with a number of unmistakable welts on his neck. Paul hadn’t yet had his turn, but he had seen Hal Frost, another Cultist, come back from one of these encounters at first elated—he was going to be the first one to stain her blankets! to shower with her! to meet her parents!—and then ashamed. In the days afterward, Debby Vartagnan wouldn’t speak to Frost. Where was the free love in this? Where was the revolution?
The size of the Cult was shifting, as was its group identity. Francis Chamberlain Davenport IV, Paul’s closest friend, was a founding member, as was Hal Frost. And there were Christina and Debby and Penny Belvedere and Johnny Wilde and Mike Russell and a host of secondary characters. Sometimes they all got along. Sometimes they could rest assured that the difficult moments of the day—the moment, for example, when each of them entered the dining hall unaccompanied and was subjected to its system of gazes and ratings—they had company. This company was worth the anxious apartness it also fostered in them. The Cult comforted, Paul Hood thought, as the train passed through Greenwich. The Cult was a tonic and a comfort.
But one thing the Kittredge Cult could not do was instruct about love. They were all orphans this way, from broken homes. They knew shit about love. Paul had gone out, in St. Pete’s parlance, with Eileen Becker in fourth form, but late in the spring she began seeing, instead, his roommate, Stan Sinclair. A period followed in which Paul frequently disturbed them in his dorm room—the two of them pretending to be asleep, or Eileen clutching a rumpled frock around her. Hood struck back with a few crushes that didn’t last more than a week. He struck back by being alone.
Then one night he persuaded Eileen into an empty reading room. I
n the sciences building. He had preyed upon her confused notions of fidelity. I can’t eat since you started up with Sinclair, he said. I’m all cut up inside. Which was misleading, since basically he felt that way all the time. Paul knelt at her waist, her jeans and panties in a tangle around her sneakers—Tretorns with pink stripes—and held her vagina close to his face. She parted her legs, standing over him, lowered herself down until they touched this way. He got the tip of his tongue inside her. So briefly it was almost certainly a dream. And though this was as far as she would go, further than she wanted to, she had whispered one thing, shivered and whispered it, before going back to Stan Sinclair. Paul Hood, she had said, I know what you’re gonna be good at one day.
The train roared through Pelham. Alongside, on the highway, cars were backed up in either direction. The headlights, the streetlights, were a forlorn effort in the sleet and snow.
Paul Hood had more ideas about the Wankel rotary engine than he did about love. But he was not dumb. Though Testors model glue in the bottom of a paper bag was his preferred companion, though he had once soaked his penis in milk in an effort to get his housemaster’s cat to have congress with him—her tongue was like sandpaper—he knew the name of what he was missing. He had gotten his hand down the waist of Jeannie McFarlane’s pants to feel the tuft of what she concealed there, and he had kissed a variety of girls for durations short and long, and he had read about blow jobs and sixty-nine, orgies, bisexuality, mutual masturbation, transvestism, ménage à trois, anal sex, fetishism, and even fist-fucking. He had perused Davenport’s dog-eared copy of the Kama Sutra; he knew what love was. He was going to pursue this education. He didn’t want to be as sad as his parents.
So he was on the train, on his way to meet Libbets Casey, a girl from school, who, unlike his friends from the Cult, unlike Carla Bear, say, was a fine conversationalist, who did charity work with the St. Pete’s Missionary Society, and whose parents left her entirely unsupervised. Paul was infatuated. It had come over him suddenly. The Bear was just someone he liked; Debby Vartagnan was just someone he liked. He wanted Libbets, a girl who wore a mink coat with blue jeans. He thought about her day and night; he wrote her name into the stories he composed for English class; he dedicated songs to her on his radio show. This had gone on for days.
For two years now, he had spent virtually every afternoon with Davenport and Frost and Brendan Gilford. Out in the woods getting high. He breathed the same room freshener they breathed (Ozium); he had borrowed their records and loaned them his own. They all knew how to play the same Emerson, Lake and Palmer song on guitar. They knew the same jokes and disliked the same masters. They all volunteered for dish duty at the same time.
But he knew it was coming to an end, that the loose association that other people called the Cult was just something you had at one time in your life. In September, when Davenport had declared himself King of the Cult at his birthday party—he was on bounds at the time, unable to receive visitors in his room, for breaking curfew—the whole thing began to sour. And it had just been a joke anyway. A joke to make feeling like a loser tolerable. Soon everybody was giving themselves titles. It was just like the Fantastic Four. It was all relationships and politics and power.
The Conrail riders observed an unnatural calm. They were stretched out across the three-seaters with their luggage strewn carelessly around them. Paul always left things behind: watches, magazines, umbrellas. He borrowed articles and lost them. So he clutched F.F. #141, like it was a religious scroll or high-court decision, along with the November issue of Creem. And when the train rumbled down into the tunnel at 97th Street, and into the terminal, and when it disgorged its passengers with a sigh of hydraulic brakes, he was grateful to be a lone traveler, unencumbered with possessions or obligations.
Grand Central Terminal was deserted. The Kodak sign featured a happy, white family celebrating around a Christmas tree. As Paul had been instructed to do since he was a little boy, he found a spot against the wall and looked up at the stars on the ceiling. Sunk in dust and grime, the hulking simplicity of the constellations moved him. They were the imaginative work of another time. They were the superheroes of the past.
On the floor of the terminal, in the vast open spaces—bereft of the usual commuters—a platoon of men with blank faces and the cheapest spectacles sold books and records about meditation to the unsuspecting. Paul moved through them like a warrior.
Libbets Casey. Paul’s destination. Deep in that stronghold of the silent majority, the Upper East Side. Her dad didn’t have a job. He didn’t need one. At an office in midtown, which he paid for himself, he occasionally wielded a gold letter opener and moved around lunch appointments and tennis dates with other professional board members and consultants. Libbets wouldn’t have to work either. True idleness—ski-instructing, for example—was frowned upon in her family, but there was no need to hazard an office job. Generations of Caseys had pursued art collecting. They had donated a great number of cubist works, selected by Libbets’s savvy grandmother, to the Museum of Modern Art. The Caseys had also established the reputations of some nineteenth-century American painters—Eakins, Childe Hassam. Collecting was a more than adequate vocation. As were any of the arts-related pastimes. Her mother was a docent at the Metropolitan Museum, and her various older sisters and brothers, all of them out in the world now, were art historians and gallery owners. As long as Libbets kept painting, she was in good shape.
The doormen at 930 Park let Paul up without buzzing. He suspected that they, too, had enjoyed her company for a joint or a beer. Libbets was everybody’s friend. Her comportment was flawless. She knew the kids who hung out in the Central Park band shell; she knew Adam Purple, the guy who shoveled horse shit in the park for his garden downtown; she knew David Cassidy, whose father lived in the building. The doormen at 930 had long hair and shifty smiles, the smiles of men uncomfortable with the way their fetching-and-carrying jobs stretched out in front of them. These countercultural doormen knew the difference between their station and Libbets’s, and they were ready for the first sign of condescension, just as they cherished the notion, like Libbets did, that the rich were just people, too. They could all share some dope. It was cool.
So one of the doormen asked Paul if there was a party.
Paul shook his head, mumbled.
He skidded out of that scrape and into the next one. The elevator opened right into the Caseys’ foyer. They had the entire fourth floor of 930 Park. Paul set his blazer on a chair in the front hall. His heart raced with the recollection of Libbets’s peasant dresses, with the smell of the skin lotion she used, with the lopsided way she smiled. Except for the dim stutter of the television down the hall, there was an austere stillness to the premises. The foyer was carpeted with antique Orientals and decorated with pre-Columbian urns and with small American impressionist paintings by artists recognizable from any day-camp art-appreciation course. The elevator slid shut behind him. Libbets called out cheerfully.
She came running out of the den. She slid, in stocking feet, across a bare strip of parquet.
—Excellent, she said. We were waiting!
We? We were waiting? The revelation of that horrible plural struck Paul like a blow in the solar plexus. We? And yet he followed his hostess. Sure enough, in the den, he found Francis Chamberlain Davenport IV, cleaning an ounce of dope on an open copy of Six Crises by Richard M. Nixon.
All hope drained from Paul.
—You oughta read this, Hood, Davenport said distractedly. All you need to know about the travails of life. Myself, I was just checking out about Alger Hiss and Checkers.
—You’re gonna leave the seeds in there? Paul said. In the binding like that?
—All will be revealed, baby. When the student is ready, the master will appear.
Libbets circulated nervously around the living room. Paul wondered if the two of them, Libbets and Davenport, had already collaborated in some afternoon sexual experiment. Even Libbets, in her secure and privately e
ducated skull must have known how Davenport fucked him up.
—Flame on, he said.
—Huh? Libbets said.
—Awesome sleet and rain, Paul said. Far out. Let’s do some reef. Neither sleet nor rain will stay this courier. What’s on the idiot box?
—Lost in Space, Libbets said. Star Trek at seven.
—Moisture, moisture, Davenport said from his station. Moooiiiistuuuuure.
It was from this episode, this Lost in Space episode.
—Yeah, yeah, Paul said. Or remember that one where there were the guys with glittering, plastic bowlers. Zachary Smith was …
Davenport rolled a joint as carefully as if it were bomb disposal.
—Howdy, there, he said. You, young knight. Can you check on the mead? Can you sally forth and secure us some more mead?
—In the pantry, Libbets said. She pointed.
Paul trudged disconsolately out into the foyer, past the living room where a portrait of the Caseys—Libbets was the youngest of the six, seated in her father’s lap—occupied most of a wall. He stood in the dark.
—No, that way, Libbets said, leaning out into the hall, slumped against the doorjamb. Take a right, through there.
—Just looking, Paul said. Got my “just looking” button on.
The pantry was long, empty, spotless. The banality of this kind of housekeeping made Paul uncomfortable. The place begged for the release of cockroaches or lab rats. It begged for finger-painted floors, tie-dyed curtains, for graffiti and noise pollution.
Paul was a third term, an unwelcome geometrical element. Davenport hadn’t even greeted him. And supernumerary was a feeling he knew as well as he knew that parched baby blue of Connecticut summer skies. Blundering in the kitchen, he felt sure that it would always be this way, this blunt little diorama of a life with its cessation of miracles would never change—except that it would get worse. Davenport wasn’t satisfied with his own charm. He wanted to inhabit his friends, to neutralize them. He wanted Paul’s socks and Paul’s records and Paul’s homework assignments and even Paul’s nuclear family with its 2.2 children and its five basic food groups and its pristine genetics. They were the best of friends, Davenport and Paul. This was what friendship was like.