Demonology (23 page)

—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
having
fun,
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,
I
always 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?

—Gerry.

—Oh, yeah. Are you going to help me carry all this bedding?

—Must be a lot of beds.

—Have any gum?

He did have gum, of course. Sugarless, according to recommendations of four out of five doctors. She handed him the stack
of flat sheets as she worked to finish up the fitted counterparts. And it was true, she had a perfect intention, a complete
knowledge of tactics, if not the total command of muscular adjustments required for fitted sheets. Later in life she would
be as good at folding sheets as the German army was at lockstep, but she would pay someone else to do it. The transfer of
sheets into his arms, an important symbolic exchange, and the exchange of gum, these required the abandonment of his beer,
unfinished, on a rattling Maytag dryer. Polly demurely snapped the gum as she led him down the corridor at the rear of the
house. Through the pantry. There was an empty gallon crate of ice cream sweating off its remains that he hadn’t noticed earlier.
And in a door jamb, at the rear of the pantry, was the Fosters’
genealogical measuring station.
Nick Foster had once been
little Nicky,
who smiled recklessly and admired the action of waves on lifeless Long Island Sound. A wobbly line, made with Old Man Foster’s
golf pencil, indicated
Nicky, Age 6yrs, 6mos,
another,
Nicky, 8th birthday,
and so on, likewise for his little sisters, whom Nicky had terrorized into submission, and who were nowhere to be seen this
night, Annabelle and Grace. With his mother, they had relocated, probably to the Fosters’
pied à terre
in the East Fifties. Next right was the servants’ staircase to the second floor, half in shadow. He
bolted up these back stairs, and Polly, who waited behind, likely understood the implications of these researches. Every kid
who came to the Fosters’ house had to know its complete architectural layout, as if this were to understand all American power,
its implied antagonism of classes, its scant beachhead against wilderness, its scantly concealed totalitarianism. Polly was
impatient, though. She sighed. Nevertheless, he embarked on his frolic, without leaving aside the fitted sheets, no, carrying
them upon his person. There weren’t enough lights at the top of the servants’ staircase. There were low doorways, irregular
construction, pneumatic tubes, messages from below. Spiders everywhere, their astounding constructions brushing against his
brow,
spiders of finality, existing beyond the great net of causality.
The servants’ rooms were closed, storage vaults, now, in which boxes of neglected dolls’ dresses and cadets’ uniforms moldered.
An aunt had climbed these stairs in search of Christmas ornaments, several years past, never to return. But Gerry survived
these adventures. But soon he passed into the larger corridor of bedchambers on the second floor. These were constructed on
a plan of increasing size and ornament. The bed in each was more floral than the last. Simple double beds gave way to fabulous
poster beds with too many pillows. (A subject on which subject his father had recently expatiated,
Interior designers make their margin on the pillows. It’s a percentage of whatever fabric you use, so they buy these pillows,
different kinds of fabric, put the pillows all over the goddamned place. Any time you want to sit down, you dislodge pillows.
) There were sheer window dressings, draperies as convoluted as the waterfall outdoors, there was wallpaper with velvet upon
it. And a television in every room, a stunning
luxury from Gerry’s point of view, since his mother’s regulations allowed him to watch two hours of television per week. No
more. He was permitted to bank time from one week and use it toward the following week, but more frequently he squandered
it spinning the dial.

All the screens in the various rooms of the second floor of the Fosters’ house were tuned to horror films. From the sacred
to the profane:
Bride of Frankenstein
juxtaposed with
The Fly, Plan Nine from Outer Space
with
Night of the Living Dead.
In every room, a huddle of teens, as if born there, each in his or her Platonic cave, taking in the broadcast fuzz of UHF
stations. Gerry and his sheets swept past one of the guest rooms, where the mirror over the vanity captured in reverse the
image on the screen, Raymond Burr, from the original
Godzilla,
rumbling in monotone about destruction and waste,
This is Tokyo. Once a city of six million people. What has happened here was caused by a force which, up until a few days
ago, was entirely beyond the scope of mans imagination. Tokyo, a smoldering memorial to the unknown, an unknown which at this
moment still prevails.
In the deep space of the mirror image, featureless backs of teenaged heads. For a second it seemed that these were the
faces
of his acquaintances, each a blank mask. In each of the six bedrooms, this stultified tableau. In each, Gerry stopped and
inquired after the story: