Demonology (19 page)

The front door of the Mad Son Electric Gallery swung back almost exactly on time, seven
P.M.,
that evening in October, for its opening gala, and the guests outside, who numbered exactly seven, were unaware that anything
much in the way of a delay had taken place. M. J. Powell, temporarily sobbing hostess, could hear, on the other side of the
door, Gideon Katz, the boyfriend of Lori Fine, her dancer friend from NYU; Gideon was a mathematician, extremely talkative,
and his specialty was
knots,
and Gerry Abram-owitz loved him, loved everything about him and his knots, how beautiful they could be in the telling, no
symbolism to them at all, just knots with numbers describing them,
An invariant, you know, that’s any number you can assign to a knot which doesn’t change if you twist the knot or pull on it,
like if you wrap a piece of rope around a banister and don’t tie it and just pull on one end, it comes off the banister, well
except that they’re not knotted around anything. They just are. So that example doesn’t count. On the other hand, if you have
two ends in front of you, you cross one over the other, one way would be the positive way and you can assign a number of one
to that, the right strand going over the left, a positive crossing, see, and the other way would be negative. So any kind
of knot has an algebraic length, get it? The minimum is if you pull on it to get rid of the loops, and so forth.
Had to be Gerry that Gideon was talking to. Who else could it be? Who else would tolerate a disquisition on knots?
No knotted knot has a crossing number less than three, see, but, unfortunately, its also true that there’s knots that have
the same invariant but aren’t the same knot, so it gets complicated.
Maybe Gerry had lost his key too. He had left his key in the library up at Columbia, the library for Asian languages, where
they had once gone together to kiss, because he liked it so well, its dim, neglected stacks. Books and kissing were related
somehow. When she appeared in the threshold of the doorway, to the seven excited guests here for the
opening gala,
she could see that Gerry was not among them. What a disappointment. And she was a complicated figure to the assembled, too,
and instead of attending to them immediately, she watched as, going up the block in the distance, a shade, carrying some bulky
object, hastened off.
If you have a loop with two crossings in it, then you can pull it and flip it and twist it with just an unknotted loop.

—Are you okay? Lori said. M. J. saw herself as she must have appeared, torn skirt and stockings, face wet, hair matted, an
open gash on her thigh.

—A long story, she said. —Come on in.

Here was the part that Gerry would have loved, because it was the part he designed himself. He often made sketches
of things, on scrap paper, not terribly adept sketches, but sketches anyhow. One day she’d found the plans for the gallery,
scribbled in this style, on the coffee table. Just sitting there. For her. Then she began the job of realizing this interior
for the Mad Son Electric Gallery, according to his vision; no whitewash since Tom Sawyer’s was applied with such method. They
had taken the whole of the weekend, and while they were laboring, they were laboring
together.
It involved putting the old sofa, with the stuffing unstuffing, out onto the street, where it disappeared at once. Other
furnishings, such as they had, were hidden under white sheets, so that the effect,
in toto,
was of perfect eggshell, a blank slate, incomplete potential, like in the great galleries. All these years later, fifteen
years later, she remembered the sad parts of the story, but the good parts too, as one thinks of youth after it is gone, a
laugh, a goof, a riot, made some bad decisions, made some worse decisions, made awful decisions,
smoked a Quaalude,
slept with a boy on antipsychotic medication, wrecked a car, watched thirteen dawns in thirteen towns, loved people otherwise
spoken for, wrote a life story, threw it out, spent recklessly, gave a dog to the ASPCA because it barked, quit speaking to
a guy and his friends,
gave up dancing,
above all,
gave up dancing.
Tried out for Arnie Zane and Bill T. Jones, stayed up nights, didn’t get the job, and then the knee problems, and then social
work school, after which she got married to somebody, some other guy. Oh, it wasn’t worth going into. What was attractive
became repulsive, this particular habit, this particular inhibition in the beloved, you were married and your heart was
in the freezer in the basement.
But all that weekend they
painted the interior of the gallery, she and Gerry, that was a good weekend. The disappointments from later on never interfered
with the memory of washing paintbrushes and rollers with Gerry, holding his hands under the faucet. His hands: long and narrow,
fingernails incredibly short, the hair on his hands strawberry blond. All this, his hands under the faucets, the big soft
part at the base of his thumb. If she had these hands, fifteen years later, in her own hands, if she had back her youth, she
knew she would prize these things in a way she hadn’t then.

The exhibition? The opening?

It took a few moments to sink in. They were huddled in the doorway, in the glare of interior light, her guests. Two or three
of them squeezed into the doorway, like Keystone Kops hastening into a comic interior. The paint job was semigloss. The bright
illumination of track lighting and the spots that Gerry had erected around the ducts on the ceiling ricocheted from these
blank walls. Across the space, into corners, back into the space, the glare of it. Blank walls. Exactly blank. Completely
blank. Blank without interruption. As the first two guests lurched into the space, more were just behind, crowding behind
them. It wasn’t like every corner had been swept clean. M. J. could see that colony of dust bunnies, making its way, as always,
from the heating register under the bay window into the center of the floor. But it was the walls that arrested everyone.
Whiteness of the white walls, absolute blankness of the display, absolute poverty of ideas contained in it, M. J. could feel
it even where she stood, the moment where each of the guests tried to evaluate whether or not they should consider themselves
suckered
by the gallery interior. By the implicit privation of the space. There was no exhibition. Or, at least:
no art.
The art at the Mad Son Electric Gallery
was the gallery,
was the fact of its presentation, was its concept, was its appearance, was its history, was its ambition. There was a discouraging
silence, while each of them made his or her way past each of the dividers that separated the exhibition space, looking, making
sure there wasn’t some tiny, postage-stamp-sized
statement
somewhere that might account for what they were
not
seeing.

Gideon was the first to get the drift. By exercising the powers vested in him as a doctor of philosophy in mathematics, he
found that the piece of art that most fascinated him was the table on which the case of wine sat, still in its box. A pair
of sawhorses with a door across the top of them, a sheet thrown over the whole thing, bottled wine on top.
Meaning is usage, after all. Right? An interpretation of a gallery, not a gallery itself. You rope it off, but the ropes themselves
are the artwork. Something like that. I can get behind it. Let’s drink.
A good preliminary theory, anyway, unless it was the people contained in the gallery who were the show, a bunch of youngsters
from the Mile Square City of Hoboken, NJ, who had come through intersecting routes, to be here, at this moment of disappointment.
M. J. stood at the mirror by the front door, attempted to fix her makeup. There was Gideon and Lori, and the three locals
—musicians, one of whom had once played bass for Yo La Tengo. There was her cousin Nicky Jarrett, who never said
boo,
his girlfriend of the week, called Annabelle. They all made themselves comfortable.
The ancient crushed grape
flowed from a decanter.
Gideon acted as steward for the event, carrying the first and second and third bottles around, pouring out their contents,
mopping up the overturned glasses.

Later, with the sprawl of them sitting on the floor laughing, drinking out of plastic cups, she roamed out onto the step.
There were two strays now. One of them was Gerry.

Late in every possible way. Late to engagements major and minor; late when it was crucial to be on time; late when it made
no difference; late when lateness was clearly his fault; late when he was at the mercy of others; late in the mornings (for
having slept late); late in the evenings (for having stayed up late); late to the birth of his godchildren; late to the World
Series game,
that October classic;
late to movies, notwithstanding trailers; late to plays; late to job interviews; late to the doctor and dentist; late to
dates and romantic escapades; late when remorseful about lateness; late when careless; late when happy, late when sad or impervious
to feelings, increasingly late, and it had always been that way. He was always leaving someone, arms folded, irate, in a lobby
or on a street corner. He’d even been late to his
accident,
that frivolity of kids in their twenties. He’d waited until later, a decade later, after giving up on New Jersey, before
finding himself on a stretch of interstate between Brattleboro and Northampton, on a rainy autumn afternoon, at dusk.
Red been drinking sure.
His was a flying car. He swerved onto the shoulder, gravel percussive in his treads, and then the car lifted off, and there
was a blissful
moment of flight, too brief. The front tires struck earth and his car began to negotiate the fields of New England, rolling
lengthways, like a steed getting friendly with the mud, three or four of these gymnastic tumbles. Inside, alone, upside-down,
right way around,
a game.
It didn’t leave him time to think of his death, although death was a possibility. How were the cars behind him accounting
for this sequence, in which a rental car plunged off the road into a meadow? What did they think as this rental car rapidly
approached a majestic American linden over near some cows; wasn’t it clear that he would frontally strike the American linden,
now, scattering the cows, and what did those cars back on the interstate think. There was nothing to do but strike the tree.
His aloneness was poignant to him later: if none of the cars on the interstate skidded onto the shoulder, to offer help, well,
there would be no one to acknowledge his
last end;
there was barely time for conjecture as the car was telescoped by the tree, and his arm, his left arm, the arm with which
he wrote diary entries and scribbled doodles that a quack therapist had once called
evidence of a fine, questing mind,
his left arm was pinioned by the engine when the engine came up into the front seat of the rental car, pinioned between steering
wheel and engine, when the air bag failed to inflate. He fractured his arm so multiply that even a half-dozen invasions by
eager surgeons couldn’t alleviate his suffering.
We can give you ninety percent movement, definitely.
He had fifty percent movement. And there were pieces of aeronautically perfected metal in there now. He had an elbow made
of plastics, a titanium humerus, bone grafts in the radius and the ulna, and
pain all day.
Pain in the morning, pain in the evening, pain when he slept. He
hadn’t known anything about pain until a state policeman with an infernal apparatus pulled him from the wreckage. The arm
hung from him sideways as if it were the
right
arm and he had wrongly assembled himself with right attached to left side. Pain commenced. Medication commenced (Percocet,
Percodan, Dilaudid). Now there were two things that were chronic in his life, namely lateness and pain.

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.