Demonology (22 page)

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.
I
never expected anybody to ask,
she said. She retreated into her house. And never did reply.

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 their
conversation.
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,
I
want 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.