For those not lucky enough to have experienced this old world home entertainment concept, it amounted to a reductio ad absurdum of all that is suggested by today’s video age. Each of two players controlled a small white oblong parallelogram on a vertical axis of the black television screen. Each attempted to hit a small white square with his vertically scrolling parallelogram so that it would carom back at the other guy. If one player missed and the square traveled to the edge of the screen, he lost. Very simple. This particular match, taking place between the two silent guys on the couch, had been going on at great length, perhaps since puberty. The square, the metaphoric tennis ball, went back and forth between the guys on the couch, neither of them acknowledging one another, neither of them acknowledging Foster’s old man, as he hypothesized: The decision to pardon the former president was a dramatic misstep, because the former president needed to stay and fight the charges against him, in order to vanquish the resistance of our American youth: the circular imperatives of Mr. Fosters soliloquy were ordered and ratified by the movement of the square back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.
— Mister Foster, did you happen to see Julian Peltz come through here?
Gerry had seen cars out front. He knew there were people in here somewhere. He knew there were young people havingfun, and he knew there was a lightness of conversation, the riposte, the rejoinder, the one-liner, the shaggy dog story, the tangle of flirtation that came with talk. Happening all around him, happening wherever he, the Jewish kid, was not.
— The young women are upstairs. And the young men are not far away. Please don’t interrupt me now.
— Sorry, Mr. Foster.
He stepped around Foster’s dad, as though the old man were decorative. A number of paperbacks were stacked there, and these toppled. Early le Carré novels fanned out around the older mans feet. Mr. Foster picked up one of them, and with expert aim flung it into the fireplace, which even now, as Gerry watched, seemed to be robustly fueled with Trevanian and Robert Ludlum. At the far end of the den was another recessed divan, carved out of pink marble, and while the present action took place, a pair of girls from school motionlessly slept. It was essential for Gerry to investigate this phenomenon. Who were those girls exactly, and would it count, in the enumeration of conquests, if he kissed one of them on the lips?
— Gerry. Wait. Don’t you want to see it?
Dinah Polanski. The book. He’d almost forgotten. How quickly attachments came and went. Dinah had been scouring the east wall of the den, a small section of hardcovers, looking for her title. Now she had it. She was waving it like it was an illuminated spiritual text. She would bring the message to the people, though the people had shown that they were much more interested in yeast, fermentation, hunks of mutton, swords.
— Just a second, Dinah!
He leaned over the sleeping form of Sally Burns, for her identity was now apparent, Sally, who wore nondescript corduroys and a pink turtleneck sweater.She was blond. Didn’t the Anglo-Saxons turn out any girl children who were not blond? A tiny strand of drool, like a synthetic fiber, fresh from its vat of plastics, stretched from her lips. With an index finger, Gerry interrupted this circuit of drool connecting lip and chintz throw pillow so that the moisture instead coiled around his index finger. He put this finger to his own lips, and the liqueur of Sally Burns’s mouth was now upon his own. Her drool tasted like bubblegum. And celery. He composed the following love lyric, Ialways thought you were really good in that mock debate that we had in history on the subject of abortion and I was proud that you supported a woman’s right to whatever it was you were supporting, but I didn’t say anything to you about it, because I’m just some guy. It’s not my right to choose. I support a guy’s right to get the hell out of the way when a girl has a decision she’s going to make. It was kind of you to let me do the cross-questioning of that one ninth grade kid and it was great when he was so frustrated that he turned red. If you ever wake up, be sure to remember that I had all these compassionate thoughts about you. Sally Burns’s friend, Dee Maguire, was laid out parallel, in the opposite direction, head to Sally’s feet, one hand draped over Sallys hips. Gerry had never seen anything so beautiful in his life, and yet gazing upon it he suddenly felt like a shoplifter, and so he made his way around the end of the divan, and from there toward the door to the pantry.
— Gerry!
— All this nonsense about our having come to the end of a consumer society! Mr. Foster thundered. — It’s industry that has made this great nation what it is. Take the Panama Canal, a good example, and why we should have to —
Meanwhile, on the television screen in the den, the white square went back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.
Nick Foster probably had imagined a party in which lots of mischief was accomplished to the detriment of neighbors near and far, such that adult males of Darien would, in a collective rage, climb stepladders fetching down the toilet tissue from the willows and forsythia and dogwoods, all the next day, while their wives worked over the outsides of the french windows with a bucket of water and a scrub brush. Yet this vision would never come to pass. The materiel for Halloween’s fiendish assault on norms and standards was still stacked on top of the countertops in the pantry. There were three or four cartons of toilet paper on the floor, two dozen cans of Noxema mentholated shaving cream, a box of Ivory soap bars. Gerry also noted that the Fosters possessed a number of sets of china, not just one set, but two or three, including stuff that looked old and hand-painted, perhaps in an Asian country where the folk arts flourished until recently.
He then stuck his head inside the kitchen, which was porcelain, magnificent, and spotless. A young black woman sat, reading a hardcover at a breakfast table. She paid no attention to Gerry, as if it were rude to pay attention to him, as if any interaction would be rude, and he knew, from experience, that he likewise was intended to be neglectful of this black woman, this staff person. This was just the kind of thing that they did here. This was the way the system worked. Its what she expected, it’s what her employers demanded.