Gerald's Party

by Robert Coover

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  Gerald’s Party

  Robert Coover is the author of some twenty books of fiction and plays, his most recent being Noir and A Child Again. He has been nominated for the National Book Award and awarded numerous prizes and fellowships, including the William Faulkner Award, the Rea Lifetime Achievement Award for the Short Story, and a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship. His plays have been produced in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, and elsewhere. At Brown University, he teaches ‘Cave Writing’ (a writing workshop in immersive virtual reality), and other experimental electronic writing and mixed-media workshops, and directs the International Writers Project, a freedom-to-write programme. Coover currently splits his time between the United States of America and London. Pricksongs & Descants, Gerald’s Party and Briar Rose and Spanking the Maid are all published in Penguin Modern Classics.

  ROBERT COOVER

  Gerald’s Party

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann Ltd 1986

  Published in Penguin Classics 2011

  Copyright © Robert Coover, 1986

  A portion of this novel appeared previously in Anteus under the title The Interrogation

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-119301-4

  For John Hawkes, who, standing beside me in a dream one night long ago, long before we’d become friends, and remarking upon another author’s romanticization of autumn (there seemed to be hundreds of them actually, stooped over, on the endless tree-lined streets before us), observed wistfully: ‘It’s so true, people still do that, you know, count the dead leaves. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, three, four …’

  Contents

  Gerald’s Party

  None of us noticed the body at first. Not until Roger came through asking if we’d seen Ros. Most of us were still on our feet – except for Knud who’d gone in to catch the late sports results on the TV and had passed out on the sofa – but we were no longer that attentive. I was in the living room refilling drinks, a bottle of dry white vermouth for Alison in one hand (Vic had relieved me of the bourbon), a pitcher of old-fashioneds in the other, recalling for some reason a girl I’d known long ago in some seaside town in Italy. The vermouth maybe, or the soft radiance of the light in here, my own mellowness. The babble. Or just the freshening of possibility. My wife was circulating in the next room with a tray of canapés, getting people together, introducing newcomers, snatching up used napkins and toothpicks, occasionally signaling to me across the distance when she spotted an empty glass in someone’s hand. Strange, I thought. The only thing on my mind that night in Italy had been how to maneuver that girl into bed, my entire attention devoted to the eventual achievement of a perfectly shared climax (I was still deep into my experimental how-to-do-it phase then), and yet, though no doubt I had succeeded, bed and unforgettable climax had been utterly forgotten – I couldn’t even remember her face! – and all I’d retained from that night was a vision of the dense glow of candlelight through a yellow tulip on our restaurant table (a tulip? was it possible?), the high pitch of a complicated family squabble in some alleyway billowing with laundry hung out like bunting, the girl’s taste for anchovies and ouzo, and my own exhilarating sense of the world’s infinite novelty. Not much perhaps, yet had it not been for love, I knew, even that would have been lost. I passed among my guests now with the bottle and pitcher, sharing in the familiar revelations, appraisals, pressing searches, colliding passions, letting my mind float back to those younger lighter times when a technically well-executed orgasm seemed more than enough, feeling pleasurably possessed – not by memory so much as by the harmonics of memory – and working my way through the congestion meanwhile (‘She was great in The House of the Last Hymen,’ someone remarked, and another, laughing, said: ‘Oh yeah! Is that the one about the widow and the pick?’ No, I thought, that was Vanished Days …) toward a young woman named Alison: not only, uniquely, a vermouth drinker – thus the bottle in my hand – but virtually the sole cause and inspiration for the party itself. Alison. Her name, still fresh to me, played teasingly at the tip of my tongue as I poured old-fashioneds for the others (and not a pick but—): ‘A little more?’

  ‘Thanks, Gerry! You know, you’re the only man I know who still remembers how to make these things!’

  ‘Ah well, the ancient arts are the true arts, my love.’

  ‘Like poison, he means. Take my advice and stick with the beer.’

  ‘More in the fridge, Dolph, help yourself. Naomi—?’

  ‘What? Oh yes, thank you – what is it?’

  I poured, glancing across the busy room at Alison, now profiled in a wash of light cast by the hanging globes behind her – like a halo, an aura – and I knew that, crafted by love, that glow of light would be with me always, even if I should lose all the rest, this party, these friends, even Alison herself, her delicate profile, soft auburn hair (‘Ouch, Dolph! Stop that!’), the fine gold loops in her small ears –

  ‘Hey, golly! That’s enough!’

  ‘Oops, sorry, Naomi … !’

  ‘Steady!’ shouted Charley Trainer, charging up to lick at her dripping hand. ‘Yum!’

  ‘What is this, some new party game?’

  ‘Ha ha! Me next, Ger!’

  I heard the doorbell ring, my wife’s greeting in the hall. Sounded like Fats and Brenda, but my view was blocked by the people pushing in and out of the doorway: Knud’s wife Kitty gave Dickie a hug and he ran his hands between her legs playfully, Yvonne looking wistful, her husband Woody shaking the hand of an old man who said: ‘In Babylonia, y’know, they used to drown folks for sellin’ beer too cheap – we visited the holes they dipped ’em in!’

  ‘Love the ascot, Gerry! Très chic! Cyril and Peg here yet?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. In the dining room maybe. Old-fashioned?’

  ‘Mine’s a stinger.’

  ‘Ha ha! don’t kid me!’ someone butted in, crowding up behind me.

  ‘I can show you pictures.’

  ‘Try it and see!’

  Laughter rose lightly above the drone of music and chatter, then ebbed again, throbbing steadily as a heartbeat, as people pressed close, parted, came together again, their movements fluid, almost hypnotic, as though (I thought in my own inebriate and spellbound state) under some dreamy
atavistic compulsion. I squeezed, myself compelled, past a group of serious whiskey drinkers hustling a painted-up redhead with pickaninny pigtails (Ginger: one of Dickie’s girls), ignoring their disappointed glances at the vermouth bottle in my hand, and made my way toward Alison (Kitty, flushed and happy, crossed left of me, just as Patrick in immaculate green passed right, someone singing ‘It’s No Wonder’ on the hi-fi), feeling the excitement of her as I drew near.

  The glow, profile, it was different now, yet overlaid as though stereoscopically by the way I’d seen her just before. And by that earlier time across the dimming auditorium. We’d met a few weeks earlier in a theater lobby during intermission. Friends of friends. We’d exchanged passing reflections on the play, and Alison and I had found ourselves so intimately attuned to each other that we’d stopped short, blinked, then quickly, as though embarrassed, changed the subject. Her husband had given me his card, my wife had said something about getting up a party, I’d said I’d call. On the way back to our seats, passing down parallel aisles, Alison and I had exchanged furtive glances, and I’d been so disturbed by them that the play was over before I’d realized that I’d not seen or heard any of the rest of it: only by asking my wife her opinion of the last act did I learn how it came out. Now Alison’s glance, as I pressed up beside her at last and refilled her glass with vermouth, was not furtive at all, even though there were several other people standing around, watching us, waiting for refills of their own: she was smiling steadily up at me, her eyes (so they seemed to me just then) deep brown puddles of pure desire …

  ‘Somehow,’ I said pensively, holding her gaze, seeking the thought that might connect us to that heightened moment at the theater, ‘I feel as though all this has happened before …’

  ‘It’s an illusion, Gerald,’ she replied, her voice smooth, round, almost an embrace, my name in her mouth like a cherry. She reached into the old-fashioneds pitcher for an ice cube without taking her brown eyes off me. There was a peculiar studied balance in her stance that made me think of those girls in advertisements out on the decks of rushing yachts, topless, their bronzed breasts sparkling with sea spray, hair unfurling, legs spread wide and rigid in their tight white denims like cocked springs – though tonight in fact she was wearing a green-and-gold silk charmeuse dress of almost unbelievable softness. The peculiar thing about love, I thought, gazing deeply into those beckoning pools of hers which yet reflected my own gaze, the reflected gaze itself a reflection of that first numbingly beautiful exchange (that night at the theater she’d been wearing a Renaissance-styled suit of cinnamon panne velvet with a white ruffled blouse, the ruffles at the cuffs like foliage for the expressive flowering of her hands, her auburn hair, now loose, drawn then to her nape by an amber clasp), is that one is overwhelmed by a general sense of wanting before he knows what it is he wants – that’s why the act, though like all others, seems always strange and new, a discovery, an exploration, why one must move toward it silently, without reason, without words, feeling one’s way … ‘You know, I’ll bet you’re the sort of man,’ she said, as though having come to some sort of decision, her voice gloved in intimacy and, yes, a kind of awe (I felt this and drew closer), ‘who used to believe, once upon a time, that every cunt in the world was somehow miraculously different.’

  ‘Yes – ah, yes, I did!’ I glanced up from her gaze: we were alone. Our thighs were touching. ‘Hot what—?’ someone hooted behind me, and I thought, this may not turn out quite as I’d imagined after all. My wife, in the next room, pointed, her hands high above her head, at Tania’s empty glass. Tania, smiling broadly over the faces between us, held it up like a signpost. ‘Each one a … a unique adventure.’ Alison was licking the ice cube before dropping it into her glass of vermouth, and, watching her, I seemed to remember the ice wagons that used to call at my grandmother’s house, the heavy crystallized blocks that had to be chopped up (this memory was soothing), the ice chips in the truck beds, the little girl next door … ‘But I was young then …’

  ‘Ah, but it’s true, Gerald!’ She smiled, sucking coyly on the cube. It sparkled like a fat gem between her lips. She let it ooze out like a slow birth and drop – plunk! – into her vermouth. ‘Each one is …’

  And just then Roger came through, interrupting everybody, asking if we’d seen Ros.

  I understood Roger’s anxiety, I’d witnessed it many times before. Roger loved Ros hopelessly – loved her more no doubt than the rest of us loved anything in the world, if love was the word – and he was, to his despair, insanely jealous of her. He’d found her, as though in a fairy tale, in a chorus line, a pretty blonde with nice legs and breasts, a carefree artless manner, and an easy smile (yet more than that, we’d all been drawn to her, her almost succulent innocence probably, and a kind of unassuming majesty that kept you in crazy awe of her, even in intimacy – during my own moments with her, I’d found myself calling her Princess), and he’d been overwhelmed at his good fortune when she took him to bed with her the same night he met her. That there might be others who shared in his fortune, he could hardly believe; in fact, to the best of his ability, he chose not to believe it, which was the beginning of his grief. Instead, he pursued her with the relentless passion of a man with a mission, striving to fill up her nights so there’d be no room for others, begging her to marry him, and because in the end you could persuade her to do just about anything, she did. And went right on living as she always had, barely noticing she’d even changed her address. Poor Roger. She loved him of course: she loved all men. He was still in law school at the time and had difficulty finding the money for them to live on. Eager to help, she took a job as a nude model for a life-drawing class in a men’s prison, and nearly drove him mad. She’d plan a big surprise for him, take him out to dinner, joined by another man who’d pick up the bill and offer to drive Roger back to the library after. She returned to the theater, to acting, unable to stay away, and so then neither could he, doing his studying in the back rows during rehearsals, almost unable to see the texts through his tears. Backstage, of course, her thighs were pillowing cast, crew, and passing friends alike, but Roger wasn’t even aware of that – just the scripted on-stage intimacies were enough to plunge him into all the desolation he could bear.

  So when he came through now with that look of rage and terror and imminent collapse on his face, breaking up conversations, shouting over the music, demanding to know if we’d seen Ros, I smiled patiently and – though in fact I couldn’t remember having seen her since the moment they’d arrived – said, ‘I think she’s in the kitchen with my wife, Roger.’

  ‘No, she’s not!’ he cried, turning on me. The light gleamed on his damp face almost as if he were drawing it to him. ‘I’ve just come from there!’

  Some people were still dancing out in the sunroom, or conversing in remote corners, slipping off to the toilet or wherever, but most of us in here were by now watching Roger. Our relative silence made the music – oddly romantic, nostalgic (a woman was singing about mirrors and memory) – seem to grow louder. I remember Roger’s law partner Woody stepping forward as though to offer consultation, then shrugging, turning away, as a woman sighed. Parties are clocked by such moments: we all knew where we were in the night’s passing when Roger’s anguish was announced. He glanced fearfully from face to face (Dickie, leaning against a doorframe near Vic’s daughter Sally Ann, winked and cast an appraising eye on Alison beside me), then down at the floor. Roger turned pale, his eyes widening. We all looked down: there she was, sprawled face-down in the middle of the room. She must have been there all the time. ‘Ros – !!’ he gasped and fell to his knees.

  Alison touched my arm, pressed closer. I could almost feel the warmth of her breath through my shirt. ‘Is she all right?’ she whispered.

  I opened my mouth to speak, perhaps (as though obliged) to reassure her, but just then Roger turned Ros over. Ros’s front was bathed with blood – indeed it was still fountaining from a hole between her breasts, soaking her silvery frock,
puddling the carpet. I could hardly believe my eyes. I had forgotten that blood was that red, a primary red like the red in children’s paintboxes, brilliant and alive, yet stagy, cosmetic. Her eyes were open, staring vacantly, and blood was trickling from the corners of her mouth. Roger screeched horribly, making us all jump (some cried out, perhaps I did), and threw himself down upon her, covering her bubbling wound with his own heaving breast.

  Alison’s hip had slid into the hollow above my thigh, as though, having pushed past me for a moment to see, she was trying now to pull back and hide inside me. It felt good there, her hip, but I was wondering: How has it got so hot in here? Who turned up the lights? Is this one of Ros’s theatrical performances? I glanced inquiringly up at Jim.

  Jim was staring down in surprise at Ros like everyone else, his thick square hand on the back of his head, his professional instincts momentarily enthralled. Roger screamed again—‘Ros! Ros, what have you done?!’ – releasing Jim from his stupor: he knelt, felt her wrists, her throat, peered under Roger at the wound, closed the girl’s eyes, concern clouding his face, actually darkening it as though (I thought) in closing Ros’s eyes, some light in the room had been put out. Alison trembled slightly and reached behind her to touch my hand: the thought had not been wholly mine (a responsive tremor made my head twitch), but hers as well. Jim looked up at me, his coarse gray hair falling down over one eyebrow. ‘She’s dead, Gerry,’ he said. ‘She seems to have been stabbed to death.’

  I looked around at the shocked faces pressing in, but I couldn’t see her: she must have gone to the kitchen. Even in this crowd of friends, squeezed up against Alison, I felt alone. The house was silent except for the upbeat wail, oddly funereal, of the show tune playing on the hi-fi. Roger shrieked – ‘No! No! No!’ – and someone turned the music down. ‘What’s happening?’ Tania cried, and pushed through the jam-up in the doorway. Jim, standing now, was wiping his bloody hands with a white handkerchief. I saw that his sleeves were rolled up, yet seemed to remember him kneeling beside Ros in his suit jacket still. Memories, I realized (recalling now the sudden gasps, the muttered expletives of disbelief, the cries rushing outward from the body through the door like a wind: ‘It’s Ros! She’s been killed!’), always come before the experiences we attach them to. Comforted somehow by this insight, I brushed past Alison’s hips, bumped gently by each firm buttock, and went to the kitchen, looking for my wife.