Demonology (21 page)

—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!
Rest
of 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 sideboard. 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?