The Ice Storm by Rick Moody Page B

The rest of the time she squinted. She wore amber wool slacks and a wool sweater she had knitted for herself and Hush Puppies. Elena was always cold. Her college textbooks were relegated to a low, dusty corner of the shelves, below the Book-of-the-Month Club selections—glossy, hardcover editions of current fiction that she ordered for her husband, who neglected them.
    She was reading about impotence in older men. She had opened Masters and Johnson, Human Sexual Response , to the very page. According to the experts, the chief cause for the diminishment of intercourse in middle-aged couples was a single incident of impotence. This initial crisis, whether caused by the traditional drinking— provokes desire but affects performance —or by anxiety or other mental factors, so frightened men that thereafter they frequently inclined toward celibacy. In their indignity and remorse, they claimed to be uninterested.
    The very page she turned to. She enjoyed Masters and Johnson. Much better than Havelock Ellis, the grandfather of sexual studies, who was big on examples from country life—hairpins removed from teenaged girls’ vaginas, accounts of couples unable to uncouple afterward—but short on the pathos of unhappy marriages. Much better than Kinsey, that precursor, with his quaint, polite view of sexuality—mouth-genital contact may not be, after all, a strictly homosexual practice—or Krafft-Ebing’s monumental Psychopathia Sexualis: the hallucinatory and dangerous cousin to Reich’s Function of the Orgasm .
    There were some sensational pictures in here. Like the diagram of the penis, scrotum, anus, and prostate. All neatly inked in. The prostate intrigued her—that little walnut the urologist was always wringing out. Men sheltered it away. So much, in the end, was done in deference to the prostate. When it strangled off the urethra in older men, it struck the famous and unknown with the equanimity of a plague. They all stood shaking out meager drops at the urinal.
    And there were graphs, too, graphs that rendered, in seconds, the likelihood of nipple-stiffening and muscle-shuddering and labia-moistening. This was up-to-the-minute stuff. For example: in New Canaan, suddenly, women were familiar with the term labia . They had strong opinions on the vaginal orgasm. She could recall any number of recent afternoons when she had overheard Dot Halford and Denise Blackmun—or somebody—trading theories over a glass of carrot juice: Dot, I’m aware of how the clitoris functions when I climax, but I’m just not sure, when he’s wombing me, that my vagina has a role in it. I’m just not sure . Anxiety etched in their faces.
    Elena and her husband were not truly middle-aged. They hadn’t sagged that far yet, but they had experienced the initial trauma of impotence . They had felt its clean incision. Both of them. Yes, she had felt it, too: “The inhibitions of the upper-level female,” as the experts had it, “are more extreme than those of the average male.” It was something like eighteen months. Eighteen months since then.
    Whether Ben’s drinking had brought on his impotence, which had in turn brought on the drought in their connubial relations, she couldn’t say. But when she saw his penis now, as he showered or dressed for work, she felt no more for it than she felt for any plucked and headless game bird. It was a quaint reminder of another time, an antique, a curio. A reminder of Ike’s stroke or the Berlin crisis. And the worst thing about it was she felt the same way about herself. The fertile spot in her, the mandala in her belly was shut down, stored away.
    The way she saw it, the drought led straight to Benjamin’s unfaithfulness. Masters and Johnson had no good advice here. The plain facts hadn’t dawned on Elena suddenly. There had been no painful encounter with evidence—stained shorts or lipsticked collars or