Later, there was Lisa Talmadge. He had liked watching Lisa Talmadge play soccer, but he never really got to know her. Lynn Skeele rebuffed him, as described above. Susie Harris was sweet on him in band. She offered him cigarettes during breaks. He played the acoustic bass, quite badly. She played trombone. In spring, band adjourned. She had urged that they swap instruments. But he had no embouchure. Later, on a trip to Jamaica with his family, Gerry had met a girl at the pool. When you’re an only child, you meet kids at the pool. Every day, at the pool, she was there, in a green French bikini. Anne, surname unknown. She was incredibly smart in addition to being beautiful. She lived in Scarsdale, which, by ten-speed bicycle, was far away. There was a common theme to his encounters with these girl schoolmates. He suspected it had to do with his Ashkenazi gene pool. Late at night, he suspected this, though his father lectured him contrarily, My kid is not going to let this stuff get him down, correct? My kid is going to persevere.
—The Fremen were supreme in a quality the ancients called “spannungsbogen,” that’s what Muad’Dib says. He’s this guy… His name is Paul. He’s just a boy at the start of the story, but then he gets chosen, you know. First he’s the duke of the house of Atreides, after his dad dies, and then, well, he sort of goes after the post of emperor of, you know, the universe.
—Did you memorize the whole book?
—I’ve read it a bunch of times.
Upstairs, Linda Ronstadt came to an end and was replaced by the Eagles. Desperado, when will you come to your senses? An appallingly blond girl whom Gerry had never seen before peeked into the dining room so fleetingly that in recollection, it was more like a head floating into the space than anything else. Was she wearing a tutu? Or was it a lie of remembering?
—Dinah, can you just step back like one foot?
Dinah Polanski blushed horribly, as though he had stumbled upon a core failure in her short life and probed it callously, without respect. Yet at last she stepped back into the North American conversational range. What a relief.
—Frank Herbert was living up in the Oregon area, she said, —working as a newspaper reporter, and he had this vision of what humans would be like when Old Earth, that’s us here, you know, with our energy crisis, took off into, you know, into space. Must have been really something. One night he was writing advertising copy for ladies’ hats, and the next night he knew about Arrakis, the wasteland. It’s kind of romantic, I think. You have your home on this planet Earth, this little polluted dump, and you imagine your future home, a desert planet, out in space. It’s romantic.
Gerry was uncertain whether this observation of Dinah’s, in the backwater of the dining room, was coincidence —two teenagers in a room will inevitably begin talking about love and its idioms, no matter the manifest content of theirconversation. Was she secretly trying to tell him something, at last, trying to incite to the surface any recumbent possibilities? Maybe that spot under the table where she’d been hiding led somewhere, to a mattress. Since Julian Peltz never showed up after going off to drain the snake, Gerry had no choice but to presume that the romantic was the goal of the Halloween party. After all, love was the scariest thing. Love was the uncanny force that people recoiled from on Halloween. They made these costumes to stave off things and people who proposed the responsibilities of love. So Gerry seized the initiative. Who cared if Dinah had really thick glasses, because when she smiled she actually conveyed, you know, enthusiasm, which was pretty rare, and in contact lenses she might look kind of good, actually, like when she talked about things that actually interested her
—Dinah, want to kiss me?
An eternal and unbearable instant lingered between them.
—Are you trying to fool with me, Gerry Abramowitz? Because I’m not like all those kids at your keg parties and at your football games.
—I wasn’t —
—Because even if I followed you around when we were in grade school doesn’t mean anything now, because we’re older, and maybe we have other things to think about, like getting into good colleges. I’m not going to squander valuable time having meaningless encounters with boys. I’m going to think about early applications to the Big Three.
Gerry began to apologize, but in the midst of this apology the sliding doors to the library, on the north face of the dining room, swung back, as if according to plan, and with this coincidental opening, feelings of relief pulsed vitally in him. And Dinah said, Iwant to show you what the book looks like, and Gerry understood now that the book was in this instance an ideal category. Not the particular novel by Frank Herbert, but the book itself, the notion of the preservation of impressions of the past, the book as Ark of the Covenant. He couldn’t return in the direction he had come. That was timid. He had to continue pursuing the essence of the party through the house, and it was okay to take his imported German beer with him. Therefore, it was the library to which he came next, and the amazing thing, considering that Fosters’ old man edited some magazine featuring think pieces about the corrupt labor movement and the moral bankruptcy of the Left, was that the entire library was composed of rack-sized spy novels. Mysteries. Maybe an odd title on the theory of backgammon. Must have been hundreds of these paperbacks. Thousands, maybe. Dinah was his companion as he strode across this threshold, and immediately he could hear Fosters dad discoursing on subjects relating to Our disgraceful abandonment of the Shah in his hour of need, and likewise the inability of the American people to understand the aims of our involvement in Asia, the urgent need to oppose the dark purpose of the Eastern bloc wherever it arises. He was holding a drink, Foster’s old man, and wearing a tweed jacket, khaki trousers, white dress shirt, paisley bow tie. He was gesticulating with one of those extra-long cigarettes that was about to deposit its payload of ash on the floor. Gerry expected that Old Man Foster, in laying out his Cold War policy doctrine, would have adults as his audience, but there were no adults in the room. Instead, Nick Foster’s dad was talking to two guys playing Pong, that Pleistocene video game. There was an enormous television set in one corner of the den and these two teens were so deep into the couch there that they seemed to have been upholstered into it. The only free movement left to them was in their arms, by which they might control remotes.
For those not lucky enough to have experienced this old world home entertainment concept, it amounted to a reductio ad absurdum of all that is suggested by today’s video age. Each of two players controlled a small white oblong parallelogram on a vertical axis of the black television screen. Each attempted to hit a small white square with his vertically scrolling parallelogram so that it would carom back at the other guy. If one player missed and the square traveled to the edge of the screen, he lost. Very simple. This particular match, taking place between the two silent guys on the couch, had been going on at great length, perhaps since puberty. The square, the metaphoric tennis ball, went back and forth between the guys on the couch, neither of them acknowledging one another, neither of them acknowledging Foster’s old man, as he hypothesized: The decision to pardon the former president was a dramatic misstep, because the former president needed to stay and fight the charges against him, in order to vanquish the resistance of our American youth: the circular imperatives of Mr. Fosters soliloquy were ordered and ratified by the movement of the square back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.
—Mister Foster, did you happen to see Julian Peltz come through here?
Gerry had seen cars out front. He knew there were people in here somewhere. He knew there were young people havingfun, and he knew there was a lightness of conversation, the riposte, the rejoinder, the one-liner, the shaggy dog story, the tangle of flirtation that came with talk. Happening all around him, happening wherever he, the Jewish kid, was not.
—The young women are upstairs. And the young men are not far away. Please don’t interrupt me now.
—Sorry, Mr. Foster.
He stepped around Foster’s dad, as
though the old man were decorative. A number of paperbacks were stacked there, and these toppled. Early le Carré novels fanned out around the older mans feet. Mr. Foster picked up one of them, and with expert aim flung it into the fireplace, which even now, as Gerry watched, seemed to be robustly fueled with Trevanian and Robert Ludlum. At the far end of the den was another recessed divan, carved out of pink marble, and while the present action took place, a pair of girls from school motionlessly slept. It was essential for Gerry to investigate this phenomenon. Who were those girls exactly, and would it count, in the enumeration of conquests, if he kissed one of them on the lips?
—Gerry. Wait. Don’t you want to see it?
Dinah Polanski. The book. He’d almost forgotten. How quickly attachments came and went. Dinah had been scouring the east wall of the den, a small section of hardcovers, looking for her title. Now she had it. She was waving it like it was an illuminated spiritual text. She would bring the message to the people, though the people had shown that they were much more interested in yeast, fermentation, hunks of mutton, swords.
—Just a second, Dinah!
He leaned over the sleeping form of Sally Burns, for her identity was now apparent, Sally, who wore nondescript corduroys and a pink turtleneck sweater.She was blond. Didn’t the Anglo-Saxons turn out any girl children who were not blond? A tiny strand of drool, like a synthetic fiber, fresh from its vat of plastics, stretched from her lips. With an index finger, Gerry interrupted this circuit of drool connecting lip and chintz throw pillow so that the moisture instead coiled around his index finger. He put this finger to his own lips, and the liqueur of Sally Burns’s mouth was now upon his own. Her drool tasted like bubblegum. And celery. He composed the following love lyric, Ialways thought you were really good in that mock debate that we had in history on the subject of abortion and I was proud that you supported a woman’s right to whatever it was you were supporting, but I didn’t say anything to you about it, because I’m just some guy. It’s not my right to choose. I support a guy’s right to get the hell out of the way when a girl has a decision she’s going to make. It was kind of you to let me do the cross-questioning of that one ninth grade kid and it was great when he was so frustrated that he turned red. If you ever wake up, be sure to remember that I had all these compassionate thoughts about you. Sally Burns’s friend, Dee Maguire, was laid out parallel, in the opposite direction, head to Sally’s feet, one hand draped over Sallys hips. Gerry had never seen anything so beautiful in his life, and yet gazing upon it he suddenly felt like a shoplifter, and so he made his way around the end of the divan, and from there toward the door to the pantry.
—Gerry!
—All this nonsense about our having come to the end of a consumer society! Mr. Foster thundered. —It’s industry that has made this great nation what it is. Take the Panama Canal, a good example, and why we should have to —
Meanwhile, on the television screen in the den, the white square went back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.
Nick Foster probably had imagined a party in which lots of mischief was accomplished to the detriment of neighbors near and far, such that adult males of Darien would, in a collective rage, climb stepladders fetching down the toilet tissue from the willows and forsythia and dogwoods, all the next day, while their wives worked over the outsides of the french windows with a bucket of water and a scrub brush. Yet this vision would never come to pass. The materiel for Halloween’s fiendish assault on norms and standards was still stacked on top of the countertops in the pantry. There were three or four cartons of toilet paper on the floor, two dozen cans of Noxema mentholated shaving cream, a box of Ivory soap bars. Gerry also noted that the Fosters possessed a number of sets of china, not just one set, but two or three, including stuff that looked old and hand-painted, perhaps in an Asian country where the folk arts flourished until recently.
He then stuck his head inside the kitchen, which was porcelain, magnificent, and spotless. A young black woman sat, reading a hardcover at a breakfast table. She paid no attention to Gerry, as if it were rude to pay attention to him, as if any interaction would be rude, and he knew, from experience, that he likewise was intended to be neglectful of this black woman, this staff person. This was just the kind of thing that they did here. This was the way the system worked. Its what she expected, it’s what her employers demanded.
—What’s it like working for the Fosters?
—Beg pardon?
—Working here. For the Fosters.
—What are you talking about?
—Just asking.
—You should mind your own business. Her voice diminished to a whisper. —Don’t you worry about what goes on in somebody’s house. You wouldn’t understand anyhow.
—No, I would understand.
The black woman waved him off.
—I don’t have time for nonsense.
He would have pursued his convictions, but beyond Gina the cook’s fiefdom of particulars, he could see someone in the laundry room. A girl. A beguiling and comely someone. Girls, from a distance, and the heartbreaking recognition of their superiority to boys, their fleeting perfection, the curve of them in jeans, the strap of a bra peeking out of a V-neck sweater, smudged eyeliner; there was nothing more perfect than that smudge of eyeliner; a sobbing girl (perhaps disconsolate over some brutality of the world, the starvation of distant children, the local athlete with his neck broken); weeping girls; disheveled girls; girls at dusk; girls in autumn; girls running; girls laughing; girls growing up. Here was a girl, mostly concealed in a luffing of white sheets, bleached and dried, sheets in the process of being folded. What a relief from the tense atmosphere of the kitchen, from the Victorian stiffness of the parlor. This girl was trying to fold king-sized sheets, twice again as wide as she was, longer than she was. She was dressed in white corduroys, and a white velour turtleneck sweater, and so she was a vision of simulated virginity and piety. Polly Firestone. The mere syllables of her name summoned nobility. She could purchase multiple sets of new sheets if she wanted. And yet where on another day he might have resented it, the way in which the name Firestone summoned nobility, the way in which the name Abramowitz sounded like a name for a manufacturer of carpets. Nevertheless, there was a pathos to Polly’s travails in the laundry room. Despite her inability to manage the king-sized sheets, she didn’t seem at all resentful. In fact, she was radiant, and lit in profile, across planes of cheekbones, by candlelight, by a pair of hatless jack-o’-lanterns on a shelf with the powdered detergents. Polly Firestone, in a flattery of candlelight, resembled the heavenly servant girls of Flemish painting, and her every movement summoned the music of zithers from a heavenly bank of cumulonimbus clouds. There was a stack of a dozen sheets already piled on the dryer, folded in a number of oblong and imperfect ways. Now, as Gerry watched, Polly turned her attention to that most vexatious of folding responsibilities, the fitted sheet. Would the young heiress, of the Philadelphia Firestones, know the proper way to fold a fitted sheet? Would she at least be able to argue for the proper strategy in folding this sheet, having been informed through some matri-lineal ritual that Gerry’s mother would eventually write about for the Cultural Anthropology Quarterly, in a monograph that would include a note saying, Jane is not the subject’s real name. It has been changed at the insistence of her family. Would Polly jam the fitted sheet up into a ball, as the vast majority of Americans had been doing for almost fifty years now, proving that class difference was not as rigid as it had once been? No, Gerry Abramowitz divined: Polly had known the theory of folding since birth.
—Hi there. Polly Firestone said, without looking up. —Aren’t you a little late?
He manufactured the appropriate ennui. Boys of Darien avoided caring perceptibly about anything, the trajectory of that revolving plastic disk that was about to float into their hands, chased by a golden retriever. It was routine. Everything was routine. Boys could walk across a festooned gymnasium into the arms of a girl at a dance as though it were
like getting the mail. Without evident feeling. He would attempt these skills, though they were foreign to him.
—Everyone keeps saying that.
He felt a powerful urge to reach for a laundry marker on the shelf above her, so that he might connect her freckles.
—Where is everyone?
—If you got here earlier, you wouldn’t be asking.
The exchange might have been considered flirtatious, at least according to his mother’s theory, Disregard as Complex Coital Strategy, but he decided that the tone was actually intended to be callous. No festivity without cruelty. Gatherings of kids always had their body counts. He thought of Peltz, and of the dwindling of his own opportunities at the party. Time was passing. He didn’t even have any candy to show for himself.
—Will you kiss me? he asked.
—No. Why would I want to kiss you? What’s your name, anyway?