Demonology Read Online Free PDF Page A

—check it out. There’s
     a couple falling in love once and for all. You can see it in their eyes.
    I was sipping a Canadian spring water in a piece of company stemware. I reacted to Linda’s news nonchalantly. I didn’t think
     much of it. Yet I happened to notice that Linda’s expression was conspiratorial, impish, as well as a little beatific. Linda
     often covered her mouth with her hand when she’d said something riotous, as if to conceal unsightly dental work (on the contrary,
     her teeth were perfect), as if she’d been treated badly one too many times, as if the immensity of joy were embarrassing to
     her somehow. As she spoke of the couple in question her hand fluttered up to her mouth. Her slender fingertips probed delicately
     at her upper lip. My thoughts came in torrents:
Where are Stig and Cheese and Blair? Why am I suddenly alone with this fellow employee? Is the couple Linda is speaking about
     part of the wedding party today? How many points will she get for the first sighting of their extramarital grappling?
    Since it was my policy to investigate any and all such phenomena, I glanced desultorily around the screen and, seeing nothing
     out of the ordinary, slipped further into the shadows where the margins of Ticonderoga led toward the central catering staging
     area. There was, of course, no such couple behind the screen, or rather Linda (who was soon beside me) and myself
were the couple
and we were mottled by insufficient light, dappled by it, by lavender-tinted spotshung that morning by the lighting designers, and by reflections of a mirrored
disco ball
that speckled the dance floor.
    —I don’t see anything, I said.
    —Kiss me, Linda Pietrzsyk said. Her fingers closed lightly around the bulky part of my arm. There was an unfamiliar warmth
     in me. The band struck up some fast number. I think it was “It’s Raining Men”or maybe it was that song entitled “We Are Family,”which
     played so often at the Mansion on the Hill in the course of a weekend. Whichever, it was really loud. The horn players were
     getting into it. A trombonist yanked his slide back and forth.
    —Excuse me? I said.
    —Kiss me, Andrew, she said. —I want to kiss you.
    Locating in myself a long-dormant impulsiveness, I reached down for Linda’s bangs, and with my clumsy hands I tried to push
     back her blond and strawberry-blond curlicues, and then, with a hitch in my motion, in a stop-time sequence of jerks, I embraced
     her. Her eyes, like neon, were illumined.
    —Why don’t you tell me how you feel about me? Linda Pietrzsyk said. I was speechless, Sis. I didn’t know what to say. And
     she went on. There was something about me, something warm and friendly about me, I wasn’t fortified, she said; I wasn’t cold,
     I was just a good guy who actually cared about other people
and you know how few of those there are.
(I think these were her words.) She wanted to spend more time with me, she wanted to get to know me better, she wanted to
     give the roulette wheel a decisive spin: she repeated all this twice in slightly different ways with different modifiers.
     It made me sweat. The only way I couldthink to get her to quit talking was to kiss her in earnest, my lips brushing by hers the way the sun passes around and through
     the interstices of falling leaves on an October afternoon. I hadn’t kissed anyone in a long time. Her mouth tasted like cherry
     soda, like barbeque, like fresh hay and because of these startling tastes, I retreated. To arm’s length. Sis, I was scared.
     What was this rank taste of wet camp-fire and bone fragments that I’d had in my mouth since we scattered you over the Hudson?
     Did I come through this set of coincidences, these quotidian interventions by God, to work in a place where everything seemed
     to be about
love,
only to find that I couldn’t ever be a part of that grand word? How could I kiss anyone when I felt so awkward? What happened
     to me, what happened to all of us, to