Gerry found himself against the east wall of the dining room, against the throne that Lamb and Rich had helpfully built for Nicky Foster’s great-grandfather when he sat at table, and Gerry actually climbed up onto this high seat, as described in the plans for the house. He repeated words he had used before, Sure, yeah, great, I’ll definitely read it, while plotting to flank Dinah, the clamorous science fiction commentator, and make for the door, but then a really awful thought hit him. Since Dinah was the first girl he had spoken to here at the party, and since he had already agreed to a competition with Peltz having to do with conquest of as many girls as possible, did this not imply that he needed to attempt some kind of seduction of Dinah Polanski?
An enumeration of the girlfriends of Gerald Callahan Abramowitz up to this moment is now essential. Happily, this history is brief, because in spite of Gerry’s reputation for amiability, he had little experience with the fairer sex. Ginny Williams, for example, who lived up the block, was really good at weaving. This is what his mother said, Ginny Williams, she’s a sweet kid. Her mom says she’s crazy about weaving. Ginny also drew pictures of insects. The two of them had nothing to talk about, though they had often shared rides to school. She had never watched a baseball game even once. She had a permanent excuse from physical education because of scoliosis. She had a pet rabbit. Gerry had never seen Ginny’s neck. It had never been displayed. Perhaps she was a lupus sufferer. Her wrists were lovely, though. Like carvings of ivory. Anyway, he had asked her to go out with him, when he was thirteen, because he had heard from older adolescent males that this was what you were supposed to do. You were supposed to ask this particular question of girls, though he had no idea where he would go with Ginny if she said yes. He was very nervous when he posed the question. She was too. They were in front of her mailbox. Ginny Williams, with her beautiful coppery hair, yanked the mouth of the mailbox open and looked in. Closed it. Yanked it open. She would have to take time to think about his question, she told him. He was surprised at the warmth this exchange heated up in him. Then she started to cry. Why are you crying? He said. Inever expected anybody to ask, she said. She retreated into her house. And never did reply.
Later, there was Lisa Talmadge. He had liked watching Lisa Talmadge play soccer, but he never really got to know her. Lynn Skeele rebuffed him, as described above. Susie Harris was sweet on him in band. She offered him cigarettes during breaks. He played the acoustic bass, quite badly. She played trombone. In spring, band adjourned. She had urged that they swap instruments. But he had no embouchure. Later, on a trip to Jamaica with his family, Gerry had met a girl at the pool. When you’re an only child, you meet kids at the pool. Every day, at the pool, she was there, in a green French bikini. Anne, surname unknown. She was incredibly smart in addition to being beautiful. She lived in Scarsdale, which, by ten-speed bicycle, was far away. There was a common theme to his encounters with these girl schoolmates. He suspected it had to do with his Ashkenazi gene pool. Late at night, he suspected this, though his father lectured him contrarily, My kid is not going to let this stuff get him down, correct? My kid is going to persevere.
— The Fremen were supreme in a quality the ancients called “spannungsbogen,” that’s what Muad’Dib says. He’s this guy… His name is Paul. He’s just a boy at the start of the story, but then he gets chosen, you know. First he’s the duke of the house of Atreides, after his dad dies, and then, well, he sort of goes after the post of emperor of, you know, the universe.
— Did you memorize the whole book?
— I’ve read it a bunch of times.
Upstairs, Linda Ronstadt came to an end and was replaced by the Eagles. Desperado, when will you come to your senses? An appallingly blond girl whom Gerry had never seen before peeked into the dining room so fleetingly that in recollection, it was more like a head floating into the space than anything else. Was she wearing a tutu? Or was it a lie of remembering?
— Dinah, can you just step back like one foot?
Dinah Polanski blushed horribly, as though he had stumbled upon a core failure in her short life and probed it callously, without respect. Yet at last she stepped back into the North American conversational range. What a relief.
— Frank Herbert was living up in the Oregon area, she said, — working as a newspaper reporter, and he had this vision of what humans would be like when Old Earth, that’s us here, you know, with our energy crisis, took off into, you know, into space. Must have been really something. One night he was writing advertising copy for ladies’ hats, and the next night he knew about Arrakis, the wasteland. It’s kind of romantic, I think. You have your home on this planet Earth, this little polluted dump, and you imagine your future home, a desert planet, out in space. It’s romantic.
Gerry was uncertain whether this observation of Dinah’s, in the backwater of the dining room, was coincidence — two teenagers in a room will inevitably begin talking about love and its idioms, no matter the manifest content of theirconversation. Was she secretly trying to tell him something, at last, trying to incite to the surface any recumbent possibilities? Maybe that spot under the table where she’d been hiding led somewhere, to a mattress. Since Julian Peltz never showed up after going off to drain the snake, Gerry had no choice but to presume that the romantic was the goal of the Halloween party. After all, love was the scariest thing. Love was the uncanny force that people recoiled from on Halloween. They made these costumes to stave off things and people who proposed the responsibilities of love. So Gerry seized the initiative. Who cared if Dinah had really thick glasses, because when she smiled she actually conveyed, you know, enthusiasm, which was pretty rare, and in contact lenses she might look kind of good, actually, like when she talked about things that actually interested her
— Dinah, want to kiss me?
An eternal and unbearable instant lingered between them.
— Are you trying to fool with me, Gerry Abramowitz? Because I’m not like all those kids at your keg parties and at your football games.
— I wasn’t —
— Because even if I followed you around when we were in grade school doesn’t mean anything now, because we’re older, and maybe we have other things to think about, like getting into good colleges. I’m not going to squander valuable time having meaningless encounters with boys. I’m going to think about early applications to the Big Three.
Gerry began to apologize, but in the midst of this apology the sliding doors to the library, on the north face of the dining room, swung back, as if according to plan, and with this coincidental opening, feelings of relief pulsed vitally in him. And Dinah said, Iwant to show you what the book looks like, and Gerry understood now that the book was in this instance an ideal category. Not the particular novel by Frank Herbert, but the book itself, the notion of the preservation of impressions of the past, the book as Ark of the Covenant. He couldn’t return in the direction he had come. That was timid. He had to continue pursuing the essence of the party through the house, and it was okay to take his imported German beer with him. Therefore, it was the library to which he came next, and the amazing thing, considering that Fosters’ old man edited some magazine featuring think pieces about the corrupt labor movement and the moral bankruptcy of the Left, was that the entire library was composed of rack-sized spy novels. Mysteries. Maybe an odd title on the theory of backgammon. Must have been hundreds of these paperbacks. Thousands, maybe. Dinah was his companion as he strode across this threshold, and immediately he could hear Fosters dad discoursing on subjects relating to Our disgraceful abandonment of the Shah in his hour of need, and likewise the inability of the American people to understand the aims of our involvement in Asia, the urgent need to oppose the dark purpose of the Eastern bloc wherever it arises. He was holding a drink, Foster’s old man, and wearing a tweed jacket, khaki trousers, white dress shirt, paisley bow tie. He was gesticulating with one of those extra-long cigarettes that was about to deposit its payload of ash on the floor. Gerry expected that Old Man Foster, in laying out his Cold War policy doctrine, would have adults as his audience, but there were no adults in the room. Instead, Nick Foster’s dad was talking to two guys playing Pong, that Pleistocene video game. There was an enormous television set in one corner of the den and these two teens were so deep into the couch there that they seemed to have been upholstered into it. The only free movement left to them was in their arms, by which they might control remotes.