Demonology (15 page)

The block was empty, the block on Madison between Fifth and Sixth, a block of mostly industrial buildings, loading docks that
no longer loaded. The box of sodas she carried, in a variety of types and brands, was overwhelming, and she could see, though
her sunglasses were sliding down her nose and neither elbow nor finger was available to restore them to the perfect bridge
of her nose, that, up ahead, one of the
dogs
was indeed on the step, as there was always one. But which? And why couldn’t security be routine in the matter of where you
had your stereo and your jewelry and your paperbacks and your inherited lamps? Closer now, she could almost make out, it was
either the lab-and-shepherd mix or it was the shepherd-and-lab mix and was it the one that was going to take a hunk out of
her unprotected calf, so that she would never dance again and would have a hideous and disfiguring scar. Like that night when
she was a little drunk and was first bringing home her boyfriend, okay more than a little drunk, absolutely dyslexic with
surfeit of drinks, and they were coming up the step and she had said to him,
Nevermind about the dogs,
and then the dog had begun to growl, on the crumbling step of the landing, and then when she tried gamely to overleap the
dog, as though stepping over the dog were to step across the nuptial threshold, the dog had nipped at her. She’d felt a dis
turbance of air. She’d jumped. She was known for her ability to jump, to perform the entrechat and the grand jet, and this
was therefore a professional jump. The dog didn’t make contact, understand, but nipped at her, and then her boyfriend-to-be
yelled at the dog and waved his arms until it skulked down the steps and waited, for a time, in the empty expanse of Madison
Street. Growling. Yes, she was certain of it, it was that dog with the
shepherd
in it, as opposed to the dog with
lab
in it, an unbalanced dog, a dog from some deep troubled realm of doghood that didn’t recognize that it was a companion species
or had a history of protecting and admiring humans; it was part timber wolf, and it intended to bite clean through her Achilles’
tendon and to disable her; it had unlearned its domestication. There was a desperation to its movements, when it moved, a
desperation of the sort that animal psychologists refer to as
liberty hysteria.
It would run up and down the street, this way and that, unknowing, anxious, deprived of the strategic constraint of home.

Naturally,
as she began to mount the three steps that ascended to the entrance of her building,
carrying a cardboard box full of twelve bottles of soft drinks in a variety of brands, the dog began to growl again. And
the street was empty, and she was alone, and she had this party to prepare for tonight. That was it, see, there was a party,
in less than an hour and a half, she was a busy woman, and didn’t have time for this dog on the step, and she was a little
panicked, if also resolute, and somehow the dog sensed this (they can smell the fear), and began to become agitated, at first
growling quietly, but then barking continuously, and the two of them, she and the dog, fell into a mutual refusal to yield,
a
refusal to go forward, she wouldn’t go forward up the step, she was afraid, the dog wouldn’t budge either, wouldn’t attempt
its violence, but wouldn’t move. They stared at one another in this way, the dog bared its rotting smile; she attempted to
refix her grip on the cheap, corrugated cardboard box that housed the sodas (an ineffectual box that the discount-beer-and-soda
place had given her). Then after one of those prolonged cinematic intervals that had much to do with the flood of relevant
chemicals into the viaducts of the circulatory system, a prolonged cinematic instant that involved recollections of the German
shepherd that lived up the street in Wilton, the stray
lunged
and the cardboard box
gave out,
as she instantly recognized it was designed to do, and there were bottles rolling, into the street; this way a pair of Diet
Cokes; in another direction, some tonic water; there a lone bottle of orange soda that she shouldn’t have bothered to purchase.
Who drank orange soda? She tumbled, fell backward, down the two steps,
onto her butt,
gouged a big hole in her black nylons, smudged her miniskirt with soot, and the dog lingered on the edge of the top step,
fierce, insistent, in full possession.

The sun declined under the ridge adjacent, upon which sat Union City, abruptly rendering the facades of Madison Street in
umbral gloom. Bottles of soda continued to hasten away. A gray Honda Civic ran over one of the Diet Cokes with the pop of
a cheap firearm. She began in the most forceful language to admonish the hound,
You stupid dog, I have things to do, okay? Beat it!,
which antagonist continued to bark anyhow. Remember the dog that your neighbor had that one summer when you rented a house
on the Jersey Shore or on the Cape or in Southampton, the neighbor
who rarely went outside except to remonstrate with his kids and to turn the sprinkler on his desertified lawn? Remember his
rottweiler, that miserable rottweiler, in the spattered cage out by the garbage cans, who, when his owner went to the local
watering holes, would bark, at painfully unpredictable intervals, four or five hours at a clip, a mournful, desperate barking?
If you tried to rectify the barking, with a couple of dog biscuits or a bowl of Kal-Kan, you would find his lonesomeness was
nothing compared to his desire to devour all intruders or passersby and therefore yourself? This scene was like that.

She blushed. She summoned her bravest and most firm voice, low in the register,
Get out of here, come on, really, go to the meats department at C-town, or something, I don’t have time.
Some resolve of her youth had given out and she felt suddenly helpless. The dog refused to yield. She was getting ready to
hit him with her handbag, which had not a single blunt object in it
(Anna Karenina,
a plastic twelve-ounce bottle of water, three lipsticks, a wallet, a holder for tampons, a hairbrush, several varieties of
breath mints, two ballpoint pens, an address book, a spiral-bound notebook), but which nonetheless would be useful as a device
for a throttling, though maybe she could also use several bottles of soda as missiles, which, under compression of carbonation,
would scare the hell out of the dog. But before she could effect the plan, the two additional dogs swung wide around the corner
of Madison and Sixth, sprinting according to their
liberty hysteria,
following a navigational sense invisible to
homo sapiens sapiens;
they soon fell into position at her crumbling step. Maybe they had been intent upon another destination. Not now. It was
a territorial
thing. The three were assembled, the stray dogs of her neighborhood, all in disputation, each wanting ascendance of her step,
its view, its majesty. One of the two at the bottom of the step leaped at the shepherd-and-lab mix,
it was the mutt,
and they fell into a real commotion. Somebody’s neck was going to be perforated. So aggravated was the altercation that a
neighbor was moved to lean out a window across the street, to complain,

—What’s the idea? We got a business here. We can’t work with that racket going on. Give it a rest.

—Then give me a hand, she called in reply. —Or they’ll be at it all day and all night and they’ll drive us all crazy.

The window slid shut.

—At least call the police, she said. —Or the fire department. Or whoever it is you call when you’re trapped in a stray-dog
dispute. I mean,
come on.

She added dulcetly:

—You asshole.

The window, designed and constructed in an era when manufacturing industries still had windows, when offices had windows,
when
window
meant
access to fresh, unrecirculated air,
as opposed to double-thick water-retardant panes that insurance corporations will not allow open lest some employee should
have the good sense to plunge to his or her final end, landing on the roof of an El Dorado, bouncing to the left, crushing
a gifted young Slovakian flutist making her first visit to the United States,
the window slid up,
and the aforementioned small business owner, of Hobo-ken Tool and Die Corporation, again leaned out.

—You’re on
this
block, honey. This is my block. I been working on this block since before you were a glint in your
parents’ eyes. Get my drift? I grew up here. I didn’t move here because it’s cheaper than Greenwich Village but with good
access to the city. Understand?

The window slid shut, the dogs continued to tangle. Moments later, though, the large gray steel door with multiple locks at
the loading entrance of Hoboken Tool and Die swung ominously open, and out came the C.E.O. and major shareholder of the corporation,
Anthony Somebody, slack in the middle section, okay he was
fat,
wearing a knock-off of a Van Heusen shirt purchased at the outlets in Secaucus, short-sleeved, blue flannel slacks that he
was having trouble positioning at the waist (either up or down). Arms folded. Similarly, coming upon the scene, a crosstown
bus screeched to a halt, between Fifth and Sixth, while Anthony labored toward the curb on his bad knees. These two events
at once. Anthony offered no rationale for coming to her aid. Schoolchildren, in the windows on the lee side of the bus, pointed
at the dogs, one of which had now drawn blood from another.
Five bucks on the shepherd!
The bus meanwhile, at its designated stop, attempted to disgorge an older woman with a walker who was wearing a plastic Ziploc
bag on her grayish hair to protect her coiffure from moisture. A hush on Madison Street. The senior unable to disembark. The
bus idling. Voices of children on the bus.

—Got a problem, little lady? called Anthony, from his side of the thoroughfare.

As though it were not plainly obvious. There was this party, for example, and the party was to publicize this
gallery
that she was starting, with her boyfriend, except that she was not certain if her boyfriend was still her boyfriend or not,
because there were semantic difficulties, for example,
how did you
define
boyfriend, because the only time he seemed as though he were her boyfriend was at parties; it was an association that only
made sense in the ignoble atmosphere of parties; when not at parties, there was silence, estrangement, distance; when she
tried to rectify silence, as by attempting to figure out what her boyfriend might want from her, certain outfits, certain
attitudes (condemnation of popular culture), she found that he didn’t want her to make attempts to please, but he didn’t want
her
not
to want these things either —when she called him a
dick
for flirting with Maria at a dinner party, for example, he didn’t like it and wouldn’t speak to her for three days, but would
have liked her less if she had ignored the whole thing, the flirting, which she was inclined to do; one week he loved her,
the next she could tell that her body disgusted him, even though her body was perfect, at least according to standards of
a Lincoln Kirstein or a George Balanchine; and she had put her head over the toilet that very morning and felt the compressed-firehose
surge of Raisin Bran and fresh peach slices, after which she toweled off, applied lotion to her hand, gargled, all this while
waiting for him to go to work,
God, when you were feeling the superabundance of rich creative license, you imagined a dancers body;
her body would be used up and injured in five years’ time, cartilage harvested from both knees, maybe sooner, and anyway
this kind of abstract posturing and psychologizing about relationships was really boring, made her weary; when women imagined
they were supposed to talk about
relationships,
she could tell that they were uncomfortable, outmaneuvered, they were looking to protect themselves against male
liberty hysteria;
it was another way of being
terrified,
really; but, as long as she was
enumerating problems, there were cocaine problems, for example; there was this guy who would deliver to their address, a reasonable
Middle Eastern guy, who once even offered to put her in touch with a client of his who worked as a psychotherapist; this dealer
would come by to Madison Street and buzz the capricious buzzer, there was a period wherein they had to see this guy every
night, and it was uncomfortable, him telling them that their records were shit and their sofa was shit, and it wasn’t the
expense of the cocaine, since her parents had some money that they were giving her, it was that
her boyfriend never bought any of it;
in fact, he didn’t seem very effective at earning his own cash, and so there was the problem of him owing her money for the
cocaine and owing her money generally, so that she would occasionally brood over exact figures of indebtedness. Even sweet
moments, like when they rented a car and drove up the Hudson and went to a farm stand and bought pumpkins, stood in a pick-your-own
orchard, ill-reciting fragments of poems,
That time of year thou may’st in me behold,
even in sweet moments, she was calculating debt,
I don’t honestly believe that you have given back a proportionate amount and even if money is irrelevant and I have enough
money to a pay a larger portion of the rent it doesn’t mean that I can forgive in perpetuity the fact that I have spent more
than you even if I say I love you,
or she was thinking of a moment when she had gotten up in the middle of the night to guzzle orange juice and had seen him
in the kitchen, at the far end of the odd commercial space that was their apartment, with a rolled-up bill and a mirror and
lines and she pretended she saw nothing.

Her boyfriend had scraped the “I”off of the sign in the storefront window where they now lived together and it no
longer said
Madison Electric,
as it had once, but now said
Mad Son Electric,
and that was the name of their gallery, and they had written a press release replete with art-critical language that her
boyfriend had somehow acquired during his all-but-dissertation career as an analytic philosopher; the press release used
liminality
and
numinosity
and
dialectic,
and it referred to
tactical strategies of subjectivity in postmodernism,
and the
Hoboken Reporter
had picked the whole thing up, on the page opposite the police blotter, where the paper recorded with gusto a recent surge
in arrests for public urination attributable to all the new restaurants downtown, and then on the facing page,
New Gallery Brings a Touch of the Village to Midtown,
featuring a photo,
M. J
.
Powell and Gerry Abramowitz in front of the former Madison St. Electrical Corp.
(He clutched a thrift-store overcoat around himself; his black self-inflicted haircut stood on end.) There would be guests,
there would be drinks, there would be the wildness. No time to waste.