Gerald's Party

by Robert Coover

  ‘Oh no—!’

  ‘Stop him!’ somebody shouted.

  The two policemen managed to cut him off from the body, but they were unable to lay hold of him. He lurched violently about the room in a wild whinnying flight, blind to all obstacles, slapping up against walls and furniture, tangling himself in curtains, leaving not mere fingerprints behind but whole body blotches, and howling insanely as he went. People tried to duck out of his way, but he slammed into them just the same, knocking them off their feet, sloshing them with Ros’s blood, making them yell and shriek and lash out in terror. I saw Mavis tip backward on her round bottom, her thick white legs looping gracefully over her head like surfacing porpoises. Some guy behind her crashed into the fireplace in a cloud of dust and ashes, still holding his drink aloft, big Louise slipped on Ros’s blood, Howard hit the wall like a beanbag, spectacles flying. Roger was a man possessed. The police chased him, stumbling through the wreckage, knocking down what Roger missed, but there was no catching him. Glasses were spilling and smashing, tables tipping, potted plants splattering like little bombs, lamps whirling, camera gear flying like shrapnel; someone screamed: ‘Get down! Get down!’ I was glad my wife was well out of it, but I was afraid for Alison. She was standing in the middle of the uproar as though chained there, her eyes locked on mine, the tears drying on her cheeks, her smile fading. And then I couldn’t see her anymore as Roger pitched suddenly toward Ros again, tripped over Tania ducking the wrong way, and fell upon Naomi, who was trying desperately in the confusion to get everything back in her bag again. Naomi squealed as she sprawled under his weight and all her stuff went flying again. Before the police could reach him, Roger was back on his feet, half-galloping, half-flying through a flurry of paper and toilet gear, plowing into Patrick, caroming off big Chooch Trainer, whose eyes popped and crossed at the force of the blow, and sending Woody and Yvonne, who’d just come in with fresh drinks in their hands, scrambling back through the door again on their hands and knees.

  ‘Hey, listen, Ger, do me a favor,’ whispered Dickie in my ear as we watched all this (Anatole and Janice were just being knocked over like toy soldiers, Anatole’s black jacket and Janny’s pink skirt billowing behind their fall like lowering flags), ‘tell that silly slit to get off my case, will you?’

  I looked up at him (the short officer was clomping about furiously, his foot caught in the toolbox), standing tall and trim in his white vest and trousers, dark plaid sports jacket, blue tie, his blond hair swept back with care, a cool half-smile on his lips, yet a kind of loose panic in his eyes. ‘Who, you mean—?’ And just then Roger hit me. I felt the blood spray up my nose like wet rust and I crumpled to the floor under a creature moist and cold as a slug, but with roaring breath and flailing crablike limbs, and massive with its own furious but mindless energy. It was some kind of monster I was grappling with, not Roger, and the sheer bloody reality of it terrified me. Maybe I was even screaming. I saw the police grab at him, but he leaped away, kneeing me in the stomach, and they fell on me instead. The short cop’s hat had slipped down over his eyes, and in his blindness he seized my wrist, threw me over onto my face, and twisted my arm up to my neck, nearly breaking it. ‘Hey!’ I cried, and something cold and hard knocked up behind my ear.

  ‘Hold it, Fred!’ gasped the other one. ‘It’s the host!’

  ‘Wha—?’ The officer on top of me, snorting and blowing, leaned toward my face, pushing his hat up with the barrel of his pistol. ‘Whoof – sorry, fe – fah! – fellah!’ he wheezed, letting go my arm. His face was smeared with blood and sweat like warpaint and his shirtfront had popped its buttons, his blood-red belly pushing out in front of him like a grisly shield. He holstered the gun he had pressed to my head. ‘I thought it was the—poo!—bereaved!’

  Roger had got as far as Inspector Pardew, who was holding him calmly away from Ros’s body with one hand, while brushing irritably at the specks of blood on his white scarf and three-piece suit with the other, muttering something about ‘a stupid waste of energy.’ He frowned impatiently at the two policemen and, abashed, they got off me and (the short cop kicked the toolkit off his foot, there was a clatter of wrenches, glass cutters, and hammers, Kitty exclaiming: ‘Knud will never believe this!’) took hold of Roger, dragging him away, still screaming, into the next room. I sat up, massaged my twisted arm. My head was ringing, and there was a sullen pain deep in my stomach where Roger had kneed me. The others were picking themselves up, mumbling, coughing (Janny, snuffling, said: ‘Where’s my shoe?’), surveying the damage.

  ‘Jesus! Remind me not to ask you any more favors!’ groaned Dickie in my ear. ‘That one fucking near killed me!’

  He sat beside me, wiping his face with his shirttail, his bright white vest and trousers peppered with blood as though riddled with punctures. His redheaded girlfriend Ginger, who had somehow kept her feet through it all, now fell down. I saw Alison in a corner, straightening her tights under the softly drawn folds of her skirt. Her husband seemed not to be around, had apparently missed it all. Had I seen him stroll disdainfully out when Roger launched forth? Or perhaps he’d gone before. Alison looked so vulnerable. I wanted to touch her, be touched, and just thinking about that eased the pain some. ‘She sure has a sweet ass on her,’ acknowledged Dickie, following my gaze. ‘Tight and soft at the same time, like bandaged fists.’ As though to model it for us, Alison turned her back and smoothed her silk skirt down. I sighed. Between us, in debris and rubble, Ros lay like a somber interdict. ‘Reminds me of a dancer I used to know who could pull corks with hers. Who is she anyhow, Ger?’

  ‘People we met,’ I said noncommittally. Dickie had energy, but no subtlety. He was like an artisan who had the craft, but no serious ideas, and what he didn’t finish, he often spoiled. ‘What do you think’s the matter with Naomi?’ I asked.

  We watched her, looking utterly stricken, go hobbling out of the room taking little baby steps, clutching her skirts tight around her knees, her shoulderbag spilled out behind her. ‘Christ,’ Dickie muttered, struggling to his feet, ‘she must’ve shit her pants!’ And he followed her out.

  Across the room, near the fireplace, Tania’s husband, Howard, held his spectacles up for me to see: both lenses cracked. Like everyone else, he was splattered all over with blood, making him look like his red tie had sprung a leak. The indignant expression on his flushed face seemed to suggest that he blamed me for the broken lenses.

  ‘Now then, one thing I don’t understand,’ insisted Inspector Pardew calmly, one hand at the knot of his tie as though to draw himself erect: ‘Why did you speak of an ice pick?’

  ‘Not an ice pick,’ I replied wearily, looking up at him from the floor. ‘Ice.’ Even as I spoke, my words seemed, like the punchline to one of Charley Trainer’s shaggy dog stories, stupid, yet compulsory. Something Tania had once said about art as the concretizing of memory lurked like a kind of nuisance (we’d been talking about her ‘Ice Maiden’ and the paradoxes of the ‘real’) at the back of my mind, back where it was still throbbing from the revolver’s knock on the skull. I hoped both would go away at the same time. The knife was nowhere to be seen, though it could have been anywhere amid all that wreckage. ‘I was trying to get at the time, working backward …’

  ‘Gerald was serving drinks,’ Alison said, coming over through the clutter to stand above me. Her voice was clear and musical, and it mellowed somewhat the Inspector’s expression. She let her hand fall softly into my hair, her silk dress caressing my ear like a blown kiss. Legs passed my head, moving toward the dining room. ‘Did you ever notice how blood smells?’ someone whispered. ‘It was about an hour ago.’

  ‘Ah, that’s better!’ The Inspector reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a fob watch. Beyond him, Mavis lay on her belly still, staring vacantly, Tania kneeling beside her, speaking softly into her ear. Smashed film gear lay scattered around them, the tripod’s legs bent double at the joints like broken ski poles. I rose achingly to my feet, helped by Alison. The touch of her
hands on me was wonderfully comforting. My wife’s fat friend Louise passed us on her way toward the back of the house, disapproval darkening her face like a bruise. The Inspector, his chin doubling, stared down at the body (I was thinking about Ros again, those gentle body massages she loved to give and receive between orgasms, the way she held your face in both her hands when she kissed you, even in greeting, and the soft silky almost phantasmal touch of her finger as she slipped it dreamily up your anus), idly winding his fob watch; then, pocketing it, he looked up and said: ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask everyone to turn their watches in to me, if you don’t mind.’ I sighed when Alison took her hands away, and in response she smiled. Her nose and cheeks were freckled with blood, and there were larger spots between her breasts, but she wore them gracefully, like beauty marks. ‘Come along, hurry it up, please!’

  My own watch was on an expansion band and simply slipped off, but Alison’s band was a complicated green leather affair with three different buckles. ‘Here, let me help,’ I said, taking her hand in mine. A warm flush of nostalgia swept over me as, like a boy again with bra hooks, I fumbled with the buckles, her fingers teasing my wrists, her free hand falling between our thighs.

  I wanted to hold on to this moment, but Pardew interrupted it. ‘I’ll need someone to collect them,’ he said. I knew he was looking at me, and I smiled apologetically at Alison. Her eyes seemed to be penetrating mine, reading feverishly behind them, while her free hand stroked the inside of my thigh as though scribbling an oath there. Or an invocation. ‘And I’ll want those of all the people outside this room as well.’

  ‘Allow me,’ offered Mr Draper, stepping in behind us from the dining room with a roast-beef sandwich in his bony fist, and Alison took her hand away. ‘I may not be good for much, old as I am, heh heh, but takin’ up collections is one thing I can still execute, as you might say.’ To my embarrassment, he turned to Alison and presented her with his sandwich, softly mangled at one end. ‘Here, hold this for me, will you, dear?’ he said. ‘Can’t seem to get these new choppers through the durned thing.’ He saw me staring and clacked his teeth once for me as a demonstration. ‘Store teeth, y’know,’ he explained wistfully, removing his suit jacket and rolling up his sleeves. ‘Perils of a long life, son, nothin’ works like it used to.’ And he winked meaninglessly, snapping his braces.

  ‘Thanks, Mr Draper,’ I said, handing him our watches.

  ‘My pleasure, sir!’ He strapped mine on his arm, dropped Alison’s into a pocket of his baggy trousers, then went off on his rounds, gathering watches onto his arms and into his pockets, greeting everyone boisterously: ‘I’ll take your watches, please! At my age, I need all the time I can get!’ Followed by a mechanical chuckle like some kind of solemn ratification. Ame-heh-heh-heh-hen.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said to Alison, trying to disassociate myself from him, ‘I’ve never seen him before tonight.’ Certainly he was out of place here, he and his wife both. I supposed my wife had invited them. ‘The old fellow’s been badgering me all night to look at some snapshots from his tourist travels. I think he’s a bit—’

  ‘I know, I’ve seen them all.’ She smiled, but when I reached for her hand, she pulled it away. Absently, she began eating the old man’s sandwich. Dolph came by with a can of beer in one hand, gazing at something across the room, and Alison winced, bumping me with her hip. She reached into her teeth and pulled out a little piece of string. ‘Tell me about her, Gerald. The girl …’

  ‘Ros?’ I looked down at the body. Inspector Pardew was chalking out an outline of her. It occurred to me that she’d been jostled somewhat during Roger’s recent rampage. One arm and leg had shifted and her head was tilted a different way. Did that matter? Exposed film plates lay beside her like last words and the apparatus had fallen out of her gaping mouth. ‘She was an actress. Not a very good one. Her problem was, she could never be anyone on stage but herself. Mostly she was in chorus lines or shows where they needed naked girls with good bodies.’ Roger seemed to have quieted down. ‘Did you see Lot’s Wife, by any chance?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’ She chewed, watching me closely, eager, it seemed, merely to hear me speak, no matter what about. The Inspector, having completed his chalk outline of the corpse and some of the stuff around it – including, I noticed, some of the junk that had fallen out of Naomi’s bag and out of the toolbox – was now moving Ros’s limbs about as though looking for something under them. Mr Draper’s croaky old voice could be heard out in the hallway, saying: ‘Watches, please! Take time off! Thank you, thank you! Your time is my time! Yeh heh heh …’

  ‘She had the title role, probably her best part, one of them anyway. She’d been getting little but walk-ons before then, back row of the chorus, even nonparts like one of Bluebeard’s dead wives or the messenger at the door who never enters, and mainly because Roger blew up such a storm whenever something a little more adventurous came along. So when the chance came to do Lot’s Wife, she could hardly turn it down.’ I felt as though I were shaping the words for her, rounding them, smoothing them, curling them in over the little gold loops: and that she felt them there, sliding in, caressing her inner ear, and that it made her breathe more deeply. ‘The play was a kind of dionysian version of the Bible story in which, after being turned to salt and abandoned by Lot, she was supposed to get set upon by ecstatic Sodomites, stripped, stroked, licked from top to bottom, and quite literally reimpregnated with life. At the end, Lot returns, sees his mistake, repents, and joins the Sodomites, now no longer as her husband of course, but just one of her many worshipers, which is supposedly an improvement for him.’

  ‘And Roger, I take it, was not so wise.’

  ‘I’m afraid not – of course, Lot probably had some help from the director.’

  ‘Roger had not seen the script.’

  ‘Oh, he’d seen it all right.’ I smiled. ‘That was exactly the problem.’

  Pardew was down on his hands and knees now, fishing about under Ros’s skirt with the tweezers. He had filter papers in one hand, empty pillboxes, tape, and a pick glass on the floor beside him. Alison watched him a moment, distracted, the last bite of her sandwich held out absently like a coin about to be dropped in a meter. The two policemen had returned and the short one was holding Ros’s limbs in various positions at the Inspector’s instructions, while he nosed around. The other was making sketches of the scene. They seemed a bit subdued.

  Alison turned back to me, her face softened by a momentary sorrow. ‘The problem—?’

  ‘He turned up at the first rehearsal with a gun at his head, saying he’d pull the trigger if she didn’t leave the play and come home with him, and since Ros couldn’t say no, that’s what she did.’

  ‘Turned back. Like Lot’s wife, after all.’ She popped the last bite in. I saw a neat row of gleaming white teeth sunk into red flesh, crisp green lettuce, dark rye painted with yellow mustard. If even that arouses me, I thought, I’m pretty far gone … ‘Yet you said—?’

  ‘Well, the author refused to let the play go on without her. He insisted she’d inspired him to write it, a dream he’d had or something, and she had to play the lead. So they talked Ros into having Roger temporarily committed. Because of the suicide attempt. For his own good, they said, and it probably was.’

  ‘Until the show closed.’

  ‘That’s right. Ros visited him every day in the ward to cheer him up, never told him she was in the play, and he never asked.’

  ‘An old trouper, after all. And so,’ she added, not wryly, just sadly, staring down at her hands, ‘everybody lived happily ever after.’ She brushed the crumbs away, tongued a bit of sandwich from her teeth. For some reason I thought: Am I forgetting something? What I remembered was an old beggar in Cadiz who did tricks with coins. His last trick always was to stack as many coins on his tongue as people would put there, then swallow them. Or seem to. I made some remark at the time about ‘pure theater’ and the woman I was with said: ‘I know a better trick
but it is not so practical.’ The old fellow climaxed his act by belching loudly and producing a paper note in ‘change,’ and the truth about the woman was that she was mistaken. ‘And was the play a success?’

  ‘It had a good run.’

  In fact, she packed them in. But mainly because they invited the audience to join in, and the same crowd kept coming back night after night to lick the salt. True believers. Her breast, I saw, had fallen out of the dress again. It seemed less important now. The Inspector, peeling down one stocking, had found a run, which he peered at now through his pick glass. ‘There’s another one here at the back, Chief.’ Alison touched my hand. ‘You loved her very much.’

  ‘Yes. Along with a thousand other guys.’ I watched Pardew and his two assistants tugging her dead weight this way and that, watched her breast and head flop back and forth together as though in protest at the mockery of it, thinking: How quiet it has grown! I lowered my voice: ‘She had something … very special …’

  ‘I might have guessed,’ Alison said. She was grinning. ‘Unique, I think you said before…’

  I smiled, leaning toward her touch. ‘Mm, but hers really was, you see,’ I said, brushing at the specks of blood on Alison’s nose, letting the truth slip away now, or at least that kind of truth, letting myself be led, ‘and not just in the eye, so to speak, of the beholder …’

  ‘Ah, poor Gerald!’ she laughed. ‘When will you ever learn?’

  She stifled her laughter: people were staring at us. Even the police had glanced up from the body. She covered her mouth, forced a solemn expression onto her face, peeked up at me guiltily. She waited until the others had looked away again (‘Calipers, please,’ the Inspector muttered), then whispered: ‘But it was her breast that made you want to cry.’