Demonology

  —Definitely talking about sex. He’s claiming that he really loves her deeply and that it will be really meaningful for him to express the depth of his profound love for her in this special way. And she’s stuck. If anything, she’s more into it. Abramowitz, let’s be clear. Guy and a girl, getting wild, it’s the girls that are driven to a frenzy. That’s why all those other girls, like Nancy Van Ingen and Polly Firestone, they need men like us, who can offer them the real experiences of love.

  —So we head off in different directions, each with our really bad social skills and we try to get these girls interested in us, and then later we compare notes?

  —Brilliant.

  —If you say so.

  Foster’s greyhounds came bounding out of the orchard on the west side of the main house. Freed from lethal injection, they had reservoirs of energy, in accordance with which they were cantering from the gazebo where Nick Foster had once pretended to hang himself. One of them paused, by the parked cars, to lift a leg on a Mercedes. Then off toward the house again. Gerry and Julian didn’t have time to reflect on the immediate need for shelter from these marauders, because the dogs were immediately surrounding them, snouts low to the ground as if bent upon retrieval of their primeval mechanical rabbit. In lead position, a whippet, ribs multiply protruding, kicked up divots on the magnificent lawn, moist from the rain that month; in second position, but gaining, since the whippet seemed to be tiring, was an Irish wolfhound, a tall example of the species, too, close to four feet, a mighty hound with a blood-curdling grin, which just then veered around Peltz, before vanishing into darkness at a full gallop; in show position, the Fosters’ exotic pharaoh hound, a breed brought to Spain during the Saracen invasions and later exported abroad, thus a dog as old as civilization, in third place, yes, but exerting enormous pressure on the leaders! Look at him nosing on the wolfhound! He could almost sniff the underside of the larger dog’s tail! Restof the pack several lengths back, an afghan, a borzoi, three of your traditional Anglo-Saxon greyhounds. Banking around the house, they poured it on, heading for the home stretch, frolicking in draperies of mist!

  They were heading for the next property over, probably which was not a private residence, but, rather, the grounds belonging to the Cherry Lawn School. An alternative school, noteworthy for its accumulation of boys with long unwashed hair and acne who dotted the front steps of the administrative building smoking cigarettes. Gerry’s mother thought the school was fabulous, because it was so much like a minimum-security penitentiary, but apparently it didn’t make any money, and was therefore doomed. Moreover, the Cherry Lawn School was a zoning nightmare, and it provided known drug addicts with an address at which to receive shipments of controlled substances which they then passed on to impressionable young persons of Darien. There was a tennis court in front of the Cherry Lawn School upon which no one had ever, to Gerry’s knowledge, played a single set of tennis. There was a tetherball court with grass growing through its tarmac. The young men of Cherry Lawn, meanwhile, were like the greyhound starvelings of the Foster Mansion and Plantation, and they fed these animals with whatever institutional food was offered at the Cherry Lawn School, Swedish meatballs, Salisbury steak, chicken teriyaki, pizza squares, tuna casserole, minute rice. One of the greyhounds was called Warren G. Harding; one was called Zachary Taylor, one was called Franklin Pierce. Gerry was pretty sure there was also a William Henry Harrison and a Millard Filmore. In this way, the young men of Cherry Lawn learned about the less-well-known presidents, as it was these presidents who most interested the Fosters, a family bent on assembling a complete set of presidential dogs. What breed would you choose for James Earl Carter? Miniature schnauzer?

  Gerry and Julian arrived at the house itself. As you know, George Sheldon, historian and popularizer, described the house in his Artistic Country Seats, dwelling at some length on its effect of length and lowness; the finishing of the great hall in immemorial pine. Next to Dutch doors of the south side are transomed English basement windows. Above the mantel in the parlor sits a large hood supported by four brackets whose intervening spaces each show a lion triumphant in relief and so forth. Designed in the Shingle Style by Lamb and Rich in 1885, not long after their completion of the Hinckley commission on Long Island. The Foster home betrayed its influence. The main entrance at the end of the walkway required passage onto a luxurious porch that sleeved the residence on three sides: the den, the dining room, the hall, the parlor, and the pantry, where the most magnificent face of the porch, fitted out in unavoidable rattan porch furniture, overlooked the Fosters’ Illyrian waterfall. But here, where Gerry stood, in the front, was the intended entrance. However, no one answered when the two of them called at the front door. There was the warbling of a convex piece of vinyl, Linda Ronstadt, distantly. They pushed their way inside. The screen door swung shut behind them as if controlled from the spirit world. The hall was lit only in candles, but not the sort that you got in a dozen box at your department store. These were altar candles from northeastern Protestant churches, where Gerry had occasionally been as a young boy, during the interval in which his mother attempted to give him a range of denominational experiences, so that he would better understand the social ideology of his peers, so that he could better make up his mind later in life about the contested space of American spiritual experience. What he figured out during this period was that the dispossession of American Judaism was native to his spirits. He was a Jewish boy. He ascribed to the religion of a people who didn’t belong anywhere, unless you counted the promises on some mystic scroll. Gerry’s United States of America was a Jewish country, because it was a nation of people cast wide, like seed cases, in some awesome planting, broadcast upon gales.

  He grew accustomed to the trembling candlelight, to the stillness of the main hall, to the conflagration likewise dancing in a walk-in fireplace there, and then he noticed that there was a headless man in the foyer. A man holding his own head. A man wearing clerical garb of Puritan faith, holding a bloody head with stump under one arm. A specter who now broke the silence in an eerie and familiar voice to speak to the two of them.

  —You aren’t wearing costumes either? How come nobody’s wearing any costumes? Its Halloween. Don’t you kids have any fun? The whole point of Halloween is to wear a costume.

  The groundskeeper. Gerry knew his son. The kid was an athlete, the Platonic ideal thereof, a halfback with a strong need to assault others. This kid only had one eye. Nate, that was this kid’s name, would show you his eye socket, too, pin you down in some corridor, if he really wanted to intimidate you. He’d wanted to intimidate Gerry a number of times, so now Gerry knew exactly what an eye socket looked like: the surface of Mars, pinky-yellow with red irrigations, much adorned with encrustments and green slime. The same information was confirmed by a friend of a friend of a friend who had also seen it. Everybody talked about Nate’s eye socket. And maybe the dismembered head that his dad carried under his arm, tonight, with the fake blood all over it, was an evocation of the part of Nate’s dad of the day when he had to come back home one afternoon to find that the boy had lanced a baby blue, playing with a plastic sword ordered from a cereal manufacturer. Or maybe it was just that Old Man Foster preferred his groundskeeper to wear a ridiculous costume on Halloween, indicating class difference, even though Nick Foster had no interest in costumes at all and didn’t want any kind of costume party. Mr. McGloon, the groundskeeper, had the cassock up over his actual head and was therefore peeking through the space between buttonholes:

  —Your friends are already leaving, I think.

  —We didn’t see anyone leaving. We saw some girls coming in, Peltz said. Julian often contradicted persons of authority, even when it was inadvisable to do so. It made Gerry want to get the hell away from him sometimes.

  The headless clergyman, weary from labors, sank onto the divan beside the fireplace. He pointed, wordlessly, to the three porcelain bowls that were laid out, with cheesecloth draped across their mouths, on a Shaker sideboa
rd. Though the main hall was noteworthy for its absence of activity, Gerry nonetheless glimpsed the retreat of a pair of toe shoes near the top of the great staircase. Candles trembled anew. A pedal steel guitar shivered in the backdrop of the distant Linda Ronstadt album.

  —This is the part where we touch the cold pasta and it’s supposed to feel like brains, Julian said. —Or is it pasta that’s supposed to feel like intestines? Or Jell-O that’s supposed to feel like a liver, right? I can’t remember. Anyway, it’s foods you’d find anywhere. You’re meant to believe they’re guts.

  —Just go on in, McGloon said wearily to Peltz. The groundskeeper’s flushed visage now protruded from the neck-hole of his vestment. He gazed away from the boys, through the window by the divan. Across a colonnaded porch.

  Peltz nodded dismissively. And then he uttered the words that would become pivotal in any midlife recollection of the Fosters’ Halloween party. —I’ll be right back. Nature calls.

  He gestured in the direction of a theoretical half-bath under the staircase, as if he already knew the layout. In the sinister light of candelabras, space and design were in the eye of the beholder. Sure there was a bathroom, next to that secret passageway there. And maybe this door, to the right, led to the dining room, maybe not. He would wait for Peltz there. Was this the true location of the party then? Was this to be its epicenter? It was a question asked across the recent decades of polite society with increasing vehemence. Parties, according to most celebrants, had to have a centermost emanation, a spot of perfect celebration, over and through and above the hang-ups and put-downs that always threatened a party. A popular theory indicated that the center of the party was always identical with a particular person —Danny Henderson, for example, the guy from up the street who never took anything seriously. Not even one thing. Henderson had never been known to make any utterance but that it was at the expense of some poor classmate. When you were with him, you had best not take anything seriously either. By this hour, Henderson would have cast off his regulation outfit; he would be wearing only the bearskin rug from the parlor next door, like Marianne Faithful during the Stones bust. He would be mooning kids from the debating team. Therefore, according to this first theory, the center of the party was a particular person, and all good times were his or hers to execute, as puppeteer works the strings of marionette. Yet a competing theory held that the center of the party was always a room. The room, for example, where two guys were reciting entire recordings by a certain British improvisational comedy troupe. Passing a joint between them. Everyone was laughing. This isn’t Argument! This is Abuse! Or maybe the room where a snaking line of white girls attempted to do a version of a dance entitled the Bus Stop to the Linda Ronstadt recording or to its successors. Any of the rooms in Grasslands, which was the name of the Foster residence (there were some good jokes about that!), was liable to be the center of the party, because they were all impressive spaces. However, according to yet another theory (this elaborated by a minor writer of the Prague School), the center of the party was neither inherent in person, nor in place; it was located, rather, in mood. As it happened, the mood was frequently intoxication, the obliteration of day’s cares in the here and now of drink. Genuine Miller Drafts were stashed in an additional refrigerator, in the basement, by the billiards table. Children loitered there. Think of the feeling of a thirteen-year-old, forbidden by his uptight folks to consume any such fermented beverage as he reached into the refrigerator for the first can. His algebra homework far from his mind. The difference between compliment and complement far from his mind. The Emancipation Proclamation far from his mind. He was at the center of the party, because he was intoxicated. And it was good.

  Meanwhile, the fourth and final theory of party topographics held that the center of the event was unstable, was always elsewhere from where you found yourself no matter the room, the mood, the company. A seeker of the center of the party was according to this theory never at the center of the party himself or herself, by definition, and all party-goers, by definition, were seekers of the party. The essence of the party was migratory, impermanent, provisional. You felt you were there, at the party, your glass was newly filled, and right across the undulating sea of witnesses you saw a teenager with whom you knew you were destined to have exquisite romance —her eyeliner like the lines in Picasso drawings, just as certain, just as enduring —but as you began to cross the room, knowing that this was the place and this was the time, you began to feel the center of the party spiraling away. The party tacked upwind, came about. Suddenly, you were lost. Suddenly, you were having a conversation with Glen Dunbar about standardized tests. What’s the best model for taking standardized tests? Do you think it’s best to rule out one of the questions definitively, and at what point? Or should you really try to work out each answer before you give up on a particular question?

  But Gerry was alone and therefore certain that he was missing whatever it was he was supposed to be experiencing. He was in the Fosters’ dining room. The table, draped in a white silk tablecloth, was laden with confections. Not with the individually wrapped Tootsie Rolls or two-packs of Devil Dogs or Twinkies, boxes of Dots, holiday servings of Jujyfruits, M&M’s, Mars bars, Snickers, Three Musketeers, Charleston Chews, Bazooka Joe gum. No, the table was piled high with baked goods, with eclairs and cupcakes and Tollhouse cookies. Repulsive. Who wanted to eat homemade crap? Nick Foster had probably hacked up rhinoviral gobs into the batter, laughing, before stirring vigorously. On a silver serving tray however, Gerry found a single bottle of German imported beer. How had it come to be here, this German beer, illegally proffered to minors, and why did it seem to be the solution to the difficulties inherent in the Fosters’ party? The chairs had been removed from the table, to permit party-goers to circulate, but there were no party-goers. At least until Dinah Polanski crawled from under the table, drunk.

  Dinah Polanski. She already wore bifocals. Behind her spectacles, the lenses of which resembled bulletproof Plexi-glas, her eyes wandered in contrary directions. And yet even wall-eyed Dinah was wearing the obligatory nondescript corduroy trousers, along with a gray cardigan sweater from the Lands End catalogue. In her case, the look was fashion abomination. Dinah had apparently donned it in imitation of Nancy Van Ingen and her crowd. She had not arrived at her outfit through the adventure of personal expression. Maybe it was the fact that Dinah was hefting an extra eight or ten pounds and had dun brown locks that ruined the effect of her reliable and understated garb. And beyond the fashion problem there was the further deep historical indignity that Dinah had been following Gerry around Fairfield County, turning up as regularly as a Connecticut raccoon, since they were six years old. She’d been trying to get his attention for some reason, even when, because of his unremitting neglect, it was self-destructive to do so. Her motives were unclear. In the last year, however, these efforts had been focused almost exclusively on recounting for Gerry the intricacies of a certain science-fiction novel entitled Dune. In the present instance, Dinah launched in immediately with only the briefest introduction —

  —I was over next door, and I noticed that they had all the books of H. P. Lovecraft. And Edgar Allan Poe. Stories of Poe, and also the works of H. G. Wells. I like all of those books. Just really wonderful, you know? Then I noticed that they had a copy of Dune.

  Dinahs face was aglow, and close to his now, as he attempted to work a church key on his imported German beer. Gerry backpedaled to achieve a requisite conversational twenty-four inches of distance from Dinahs rheumy face, and so that he might prevent salivary driblets from showering upon him, but as he retreated she followed, always closing in to a range of twelve to fourteen inches, a distance more frequently associated with conversational styles of the Mediterranean nations. He could see a patch of dermatitis on her brow. She was in need of a cream of some kind.

  —Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. That’s Pardot Kynes, first planetologist of the planet called Arrakis…
. He dies in a landslide. Well, the House of Atreides, you know, comes to this desert planet, and there’s only these worms, gigantic worms, miles long, and these smugglers and their spice. The spice is called melange. And there’s this tyrant. Baron Harkonnen.

  Gerry found himself against the east wall of the dining room, against the throne that Lamb and Rich had helpfully built for Nicky Foster’s great-grandfather when he sat at table, and Gerry actually climbed up onto this high seat, as described in the plans for the house. He repeated words he had used before, Sure, yeah, great, I’ll definitely read it, while plotting to flank Dinah, the clamorous science fiction commentator, and make for the door, but then a really awful thought hit him. Since Dinah was the first girl he had spoken to here at the party, and since he had already agreed to a competition with Peltz having to do with conquest of as many girls as possible, did this not imply that he needed to attempt some kind of seduction of Dinah Polanski?

  An enumeration of the girlfriends of Gerald Callahan Abramowitz up to this moment is now essential. Happily, this history is brief, because in spite of Gerry’s reputation for amiability, he had little experience with the fairer sex. Ginny Williams, for example, who lived up the block, was really good at weaving. This is what his mother said, Ginny Williams, she’s a sweet kid. Her mom says she’s crazy about weaving. Ginny also drew pictures of insects. The two of them had nothing to talk about, though they had often shared rides to school. She had never watched a baseball game even once. She had a permanent excuse from physical education because of scoliosis. She had a pet rabbit. Gerry had never seen Ginny’s neck. It had never been displayed. Perhaps she was a lupus sufferer. Her wrists were lovely, though. Like carvings of ivory. Anyway, he had asked her to go out with him, when he was thirteen, because he had heard from older adolescent males that this was what you were supposed to do. You were supposed to ask this particular question of girls, though he had no idea where he would go with Ginny if she said yes. He was very nervous when he posed the question. She was too. They were in front of her mailbox. Ginny Williams, with her beautiful coppery hair, yanked the mouth of the mailbox open and looked in. Closed it. Yanked it open. She would have to take time to think about his question, she told him. He was surprised at the warmth this exchange heated up in him. Then she started to cry. Why are you crying? He said. Inever expected anybody to ask, she said. She retreated into her house. And never did reply.