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.
two
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.
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.