Demonology

by Rick Moody

  It wasn’t a story he told. In fact, the accident enraged him, especially the retelling of it. The necessity of medication enraged him. The lackluster sympathies of acquaintances enraged him, their troubling cases of tennis elbow, their arthriscopic interludes.

  On the other hand, there were tales of the past worth remembering. There were consolations in memory. There were narratives of things lost. That party at the Fosters’ house, for example. In Darien. The Fosters’ house? It wasn’t a house. It was a mansion, and the Fosters —though you wouldn’t know it from Nick Foster, whose only distinguishing characteristic was an inclination to set things on fire —went as far back in American history as America went back; there was a Foster who was the law partner of Button Gwinnett or Roger Williams; there was a Foster on the bridge in the battle for Concord and Lexington. And Nick Foster’s grandfather had made a lot of money in millinery, hydro-electrics, espionage, some grand American business. He’d made a lot of money, and they had this mansion, and outbuildings next to it, for the butler, the cook, the maids, the groundskeeper. They had a river that meandered through their yard. Stream was the more appropriate term, maybe even creek. The creek had a waterfall on it. He couldn’t believe it, back when he was a teenager, that anyone had so much money that they were allowed to own a waterfall, and horses, too, and miles of trails. So many miles of trails that there were always kids wandering around there. He had taken Lynn Skeele to the Fosters’ property to woo her, though no wooing was done; instead they exchanged stories of the past, that raw material of all present association, lies about the past, false memories, hyperboles, concentrations of remorse. He miserably frequented trails with Lynn Skeele, boasting that he had shot things with a twenty-two-caliber rile. As if a twenty-two could impress Lynn. On the contrary, Lynn knew what all residents of Gerry’s neighborhood knew: his surname was Abramowitz. In a town full of Burnses, Sutherlands, Talmadges, Griswolds. He was Abramowitz. He was Jewish on his dads side and he didn’t wear a yarmulke, but he sure didn’t wear Lacoste shirts or L. L. Bean either. Lynn Skeele didn’t want to hear about it, the kind of stuff that won you friends in Young Adult novels. He grew up skeptical. His skepticism was a seedling in the old forest behind the Fosters’ mansion, and Lynn Skeele and the others might have wiped out this seedling of skepticism with a little kindness, but instead they fed and watered it. He was Abramowitz.

  It was no particular honor that he’d gotten invited to Foster’s Halloween party. It was not evidence of diversity in the matter of invitations. Foster invited every student in their class. All the sophomores and juniors at the day school. And he invited the kids on his street, Brookside. Most of the kids from the school didn’t want to come to Darien to go to a Halloween party. A lot of them were from the next town over. They had mischief in their own neighborhoods. They soaped windows on the hospital in their own town.

  Gerry Abramowitz’s mother had theories about Halloween. Her maiden name was Callahan. She was a psychologist. She argued that, according to recent monographs on the subject, Halloween was a counterproductive American holiday tradition, inherited from Druids and other pre-civilized groups, one which encouraged liberty hysteria among children of the upper-middle class (the term, of course, derived from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, third edition), itself a dangerous condition of lawlessness upsetting to children even as they coveted it. Liberty and security are at opposing ends of an essential continuum, and security is important enough in the ego formation of children that liberty should be tightly controlled in order to create and nourish feelings of safety. The real ghouls depicted in Halloween outfits, in masks, his mother argued, were the ghouls of lawlessness residing in young people. When faced with drugs, explosives, incendiary devices, pint flasks, premarital sex, well, children of the suburbs began to panic, to beg for regulations, for maximum-time allotments for television-watching, for curfews, and so forth. His mother went further. The most popular costume of the Connecticut region was the vagrant. The bum, as the young called this sinister figure. And who was this archetype? He was the children despairing of themselves, of course, of their place in affluent civilization. He was their feelings of homelessness and dispossession writ large. The windows that got soaped, the shaving cream in the mailboxes, toilet paper in all the trees, liberty hysteria, an upsurge of the stratum of destructive fantasy that must be suppressed in a democratic society if it wished to function securely, equitably, peaceably. Gerry’s mother therefore concluded that the Fosters’ party was an affront to commu nity standards. Gerry had no business being there at all, but his father had the final say.

  Party, blessed word, blessed state, thank God for parties, for ounces of dope, harder drugs. That hippie shit, that vestigial tune in, turn on, drop out business that mainly expressed itself in sleeping overnight in front of record stores until concert tickets went on sale —this was horse shit. And yet partying was a holiness. It survived even a squabbling over music. A little squabbling at a party was a good thing. A fistfight over a billiards table, drinks flung at a girl, someone’s car stolen, beds of parents befouled with teenage bodily fluids. Get the intoxicants together! Night had descended! So his parents loaned Gerry their Jeep, because other parents were doing it too, and he was driving it over to Foster’s place, though he could have walked; this was his mothers negotiated compromise: Idon’t want you walking miles in the dark and the cold on a night like this. His father intervened, at last, Let the kid do what he wants. I could swear you were a kid once, too. Looking up from the day’s most active trading. Gerry exploited this gap in consensus, procured the car keys, drove.

  There was one kid he would know well at the party, Julian Peltz. Peltz was of the persecuted faith, too, Gerry was sure. He was of the wanderers on the globe. But Peltz would never answer any questions about it. A cloud passed over Peltz’s face when Gerry asked, Is your family German or Polish, or what? Peltz was not noteworthy in any way. He wasn’t good in school, wasn’t good at sports, wasn’t extracurricular, didn’t play chess, had only one record: a scratchy copy of Classical Music for Young People, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. He was a guy in school whom people liked all right but with whom they would stop to talk only if unobserved. However, a subject on which Peltz was really well informed was human sexuality, and that was why Gerry liked him. Since his own mother was a mental health professional and every discussion on any subject was laden with doctoral revelation, Gerry couldn’t stand talking to her about sex, Honey, I know that you’re expressing your need to individuate, but it’s important that you understand my authority and allow me access to your bed and your underthings when I am in the process of cleaning your room. And furthermore, Gerry, I need to know about how much information you’ve gathered in your social network on the issues of the erotic drives. Can we have an honest dialogue about this?

  His social network consisted mainly of Julian Peltz. At lunch, at school, Peltz constructed quizzes. You know what frottage is, right? It’s really cool Like you’re on a bus, okay. You’re on a bus and it’s really crowded, crowded with girls, let’s say. And there’s no room left to sit. You’re going to the big game and you’re on this bus, with all these girls, and you know you could just sort of brush up against one of those girls, while she’s standing there, you brush up against her using the lower part of your torso as the targeting mechanism, right? And then everybody clears out of that end of the bus and bingo, you get a seat. It’s really easy! Gerry antiphonally replied: You are totally fucked up. Nevertheless, he had an alibi when his mother entrapped him and demanded if he knew what protection was, or how a girls menstrual cycle fluctuated, or the precise location of the clitoris. Peltz had explained all this to him, over the years, had given him a package of rubbers. There’d also been the instruction of Mr. Smith, school psychologist, of whom everyone said he touched students inappropriately.(Peltz: I’d just about pay someone to touch me inappropriately. How come I always get overlooked when the inappropriate touching is going around?) Mr. Smith recently sl
ipped a rubber on a banana for the tenth grade kids. Gerry knew about protection. Gerry had ideas about love. Gerry was therefore able to rebuff his mother’s theoretical overtures. Meanwhile, Peltz: Today I’m going to tell you about a particular taste of some guys, which is how they like to go down between their wives’ legs during the time of the month, when… Or one day it was necrophilia, and how Peltz said that necrophilia was a perfectly reasonable lifestyle choice, especially since it only required the consensual input of one adult, so what difference did it make? Victimless crime!

  Often Gerry would show up at school, late, and kids would be loitering out front, getting ready to go to their first classes, and he’d see Peltz a hundred yards off, talking to a tree or to a dog or to a chipmunk, probably on subjects such as double-digit inflation or Jimmy Carter’s adultery of the mind. No one noticed Peltz’s loneliness. If Peltz neglected to show up for school, it would have been weeks before anyone would have inquired. He was a library assistant, it was true, and probably, eventually, people would have had trouble checking out their library books, but, at the same time, he was of such diminutive stature that he was almost invisible behind the counter in the library, and Gerry wasn’t sure anyone really knew Peltz was there. They probably believed the checking-out procedure was automated. The line would back up, if he vanished, and people would demand copies of INever Promised You a Rose Garden and A Separate Peace, and there would be library complaints, because Peltz was dead.

  Loud popular music emanated from the Foster house. The Californian idiom, soft rock, like a perfumed glob of used toilet tissue or a sample of imitation American cheese food product or meatless chili. He liked the crass stuff coming out of England and New York City, where people couldn’t play their instruments very well. But soft rock was no surprise here. Peltz was standing at the edge of the driveway poking dead leaves with a stick. His absurd ringlets, about which he constantly complained, could not be combed down. He was dressed the same way he always dressed, in the regulation nondescript corduroy trousers and blue pullover sweater So much for the costumes of a Halloween party. Gerry was careful to lock the doors of the Jeep. Somebody’s car would get rolled before night was over. Its canopy would be crushed. And allowing his own parents’ car to be crushed would be a sign of adolescent pathology, and he would be grounded until receipt of his first social security check.

  —You’re late, Peltz said.

  —Nice costume.

  —I’m a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, Peltz replied.

  —Lots of thinking went into that.

  —What are you?

  Gerry, too, wore nondescript corduroy trousers, matched with a navy blue turtleneck.

  —I’m a lupus sufferer. Peltz mulled it over.

  —They look just like everybody else, Gerry said.

  —What about the skin problems?

  —The turtleneck is covering my rash. I’m telling you, we have hopes and fears just like you do.

  Another car pulled up. Parked on the lawn. Out of it came a procession of attractive girls, more girls than should have been able to fit in a Honda Civic. Amazingly, these classmates were also wearing nondescript corduroy trousers. But with frilly blouses. They paid no attention to this pair of boys, these interlopers of Eastern European extraction secreted in the shady grove of the Fosters’ yard. The girls themselves disappeared in and out of shadows of oaks and maples on their way across the enormous lawn. As if these sylphs were the muses of his fantasies and daydreams, Peltz announced that he had a plan for the evening. In order to make the party more happening. Multiple conquests, he elaborated. Like see that carload of girls just got out here, well, there’s Nancy Van Ingen, heir to the Weyerhauser paper fortune, at least I think her dad is somehow involved with those paper products, paper towels, and next to her, that’s Bernie Cooper, a Rockefeller through an aunt, her family goes back to the dawn of time, which was when her family rented out the space on cave walls for the guys who did the cave paintings. They were already going to France for vacations, see, and they cornered the market in cave walls. Next to her is Annie Win-ningham. Annies great-great-grand aunt owned the boat where the Boston Tea Party took place, actually sold tea to protesters at a huge markup, and that’s not all. Lots of them are inside, heiresses, women who’ll rule the world, Gerry, they’ll rule the world. They’re related to the kings of all different countries, they’re related to the kings of Monaco and Estonia and Macedonia and Bhutan, and one of them is actually the God Queen of Krakatoa, no shit, these girls, they’re coming to this partyexpecting that something memorable is going to happen, that there’s going to be a surprise, because it’s Halloween, and even though these women will probably figure out later on that really they’d rather be with other heiresses, not with the guys they’re supposed to marry, well, eventually they’ll get married anyway so that their fortunes can be given away to kids instead of to charitable foundations. We still have to be ready to offer them the stuff that they need, Gerry, we have to be able to tell them, look, we have pot, we have booze, and we’re ready to teach you what premature ejaculators on the football team won’t be able to teach you how to, you know, experience it, feel the whole thing, feel the feeling called love. But that’s what we have to be able to do. We know all there is to know about love. We know everything. That’s what I’m saying, Gerry. Heiresses of Fairfield County, they’re here for us.

  Gerry didn’t believe a word of this speech, but it was made more impressive by the sight of the Fosters’ mansion, which loomed in the distance. Up over the rolling hill just ahead was the sand trap where the foster patriarch once practiced his chips and putts, back before liver disease. Gerry sprinted to the edge of it, out of the sheer enthusiasm for sprinting on a night in October, but at the lid of the trap he almost tripped over a body. Sand billowed. He tumbled to the side of the trap. It was Lyle Hubbell. Wearing the obligatory nondescript corduroys, of course, affixed with a few patches, a T-shirt, a denim jacket. Lyle Hubbard, completely unconscious. Expressions of shock issued from Gerry, instinctively, at the insult of this corpse. And yet it was consistent with Hubbell’s character that he was here. Hubbell failed all the tests of human company. And he was always sneaking beers. It was said that the diet sodas that Hubbell frequently carried around school were actually filled with intoxicants. He was even rumored to have his own distillery out in the woods, by the retirement facility next to the school. Since, in this tableau, there was a six-pack of pull-tab Millers in Hubbell’s left hand, and a couple of loose cans nearby, prejudice on the matter of his condition was justified.

  —Bodes well, Peltz remarked.

  —I almost kicked him in the head. You know, head injury leads to a lifetime of impulse-control problems.

  —We could put a sign up. Teenager trying to escape from feelings of isolation, use caution. People would steer clear.

  Next, on the landscaped walkway, the goldfish pond, brightly illumined with subaqueous lamps. The pond was in season, too, because the color of the fish, their unearthly orange, was a near match with the pumpkins, actual and plastic, that were strewn widely across the premises. The fish were demonic, possessed. Casting off their usual lethargic demeanor, they streaked from end to end in the little pond, as if unfed or disturbed by pressure from without. Perhaps it was the fact that two teens, Steven Dodge and Eloise Falk, were sitting in one end of the water, the pond rippling well above their waists, ruining their outfits. They talked calmly, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Julian Peltz wished them a good evening with exaggerated felicity. They looked up briefly.