Gerald's Party

by Robert Coover

She nodded, businesslike. ‘I loaned him my calculator, which should help, but he still has a long way to go.’ She handed Woody a gold watch which he pulled on, then she took his arm, looked up at me. ‘I’m sorry if we caused you any embarrassment in there—?’

  ‘No, it was my—’

  ‘How’s Patrick?’ Woody interrupted, placing a hand over hers, a hand stubbier than her own.

  ‘You’d be surprised. He has a split lip, some bruises, he’s going to be pretty sore – but I think he’s fallen in love.’

  ‘Patrick—?’ I couldn’t help smiling, and she returned it: I thought of teachers I’d had, bank managers, a doctor who treated me once for trenchmouth in Rouen. A man in lilac and gray passed us, muttering something about ‘a good run’ or ‘cut one.’ ‘I mean, is anyone noticing?’ he asked.

  ‘They discovered a set of photos of the girl – the victim – being raped by some man in disguise. It’s true, I’ve seen a couple of them – they’re pretty offensive, and there’s even a dagger or something in one of them. The only clue to the rapist’s identity, it seems, is his exposed genitalia, so they’re taking measurements, checking for peculiar marks, scars, circumcision, and so on, as you might expect.’ My smile was gone. She watched me serenely. ‘Anyway, when they took hold of your friend’s member, it erected on them. This enraged one of the officers for some reason and he struck it with his nightstick. Quite firmly, I must say – you may have heard the scream.’

  ‘Aha,’ smiled Woody. The photos: had someone just been telling me …

  ‘The Inspector reprimanded the officer and apologized to your friend, even patting him on the shoulder as he put his bruised organ away – then he returned the tweezers to him and with that the little fellow simply melted, started telling them everything he knows. When I left, it was something about a fabulously wealthy old woman who presumably came to Roger with what was a kind of parable about love and jealousy, if I understood it correctly.’

  ‘Close enough. I remember the day Roger came into the office with that stupid story,’ Woody said, shaking his head. ‘He was very talented, Roger. Sometimes, in a courtroom, he could be downright brilliant, an artist in his way. But he was too ego-centered ever to make a really good lawyer.’

  ‘I always had the feeling it was his loss of ego that got him into trouble,’ I said, recalling Tania’s account of Roger concussed by love.

  ‘Maybe.’ Woody pursed his lips like a skeptical prosecuting attorney confronting a dubious plea. It was almost as though he were preparing a case against his ex-partner. ‘But maybe ego is absence, that bottomless hole in the center that egomaniacs like Roger keep throwing themselves into.’

  Cynthia, on his arm, her gaze steady, seemed neutral, but there was something disquieting about her, too. Something odd. Now, fingering her medallion, she turned to Woody and said: ‘If we’re going up to see the body, we should do it soon, before Yvonne starts missing us.’

  ‘I know – but first, damn it, there’s something I have to …’ He glanced toward the study, his face clouded, just as Fats and Brenda, in tears, holding each other up, came staggering out. ‘God, it’s awful, Bren!’ ‘I can’t believe it! Did you see his eyes – ?’ ‘Gerry, listen, could you do me a small favor?’

  ‘Sure, Woody, only first I—’

  He laid a hand on my shoulder, leaned close. Through the doorway into the dining room, I caught a glimpse of Alison with Dickie, his arm around her, both of them laughing – she didn’t seem to see me. ‘Would you go in there with me? I’d really appreciate it …’

  ‘Well …’ I looked around. What was it my wife had wanted? Something from the freezer, a stepladder, fruit knife? I couldn’t remember. There was a lot of activity on the stairs and I could feel it inside myself like a kind of abdominal turmoil. Alison, I saw, had both hands at her ear, her head tipped toward them – what? My hand was empty: I must have dropped it! Dickie smiled and she gave him a little kiss on his cheek. ‘I’ve got a lot to do, Woody – my wife …’ Woody was gazing at me intently, as though through me, more than just an appeal somehow. ‘But, I suppose, if you really—’

  ‘Thanks, Gerry. I knew I could count on you. We’ll be right back, Cyn.’

  ‘That’s right, it nearly slipped my mind,’ Cynthia said, as Woody pulled me away. ‘The police were talking about your wife. I’m not sure – I think they found something in the laundry.’

  ‘The laundry—! But I just left her!’

  ‘Well, I don’t know when,’ she called back over her shoulder. ‘I really don’t have much time, Woody,’ I insisted, though by now it was too late, we were already at my study door.

  I blinked, drew back, bumping into Woody in the doorway. I was almost unable to believe what I saw in there. Everything had been turned inside out. The desk drawers and filing cabinets had been broken open and emptied out on the floor, books dumped from the shelves. The walls, seen only insubstantially through the haze of pipesmoke and shadows (the lamps had been moved about, it was hard even to get my bearings), were smeared now with what was no doubt blood, most of the pictures torn away so violently there were holes in the plaster. There were sketches of the crime pinned up in their stead, procedural charts and instructions, a diagram of what looked like an amusement-park maze. They’d set up a lot of strange equipment, turning the place into a kind of crime lab with test tubes and burners, sieves, calipers, inkpads and rollers, odd measuring gadgets – even now the tall cop, Bob, sat at a microscope holding up between his fingers what looked like a piece of bloody flesh – ah no, the swatch he’d cut out of our white easy chair … Fred, wearing translucent rubber gloves, worked at a hot plate. He seemed to be boiling up some kind of soup. Photographs hung from strung-up lines like dance decorations, and brightly tagged objects – I saw knives, drinking glasses, an ax, swimming trunks, Mark’s paintbox, knotted-up pantyhose, a tin of anchovies, pillboxes and specimen bottles, a blackstriped croquet ball, a pink shoe – lined the swept-out bookshelves like museum exhibits. I had the feeling my whole house was reinventing itself. ‘What have you done—?!’ I gasped, and Woody said: ‘Here he is.’

  Inspector Pardew looked up from his paperwork. He sat at my desk behind a heap of watches, calculator in hand and dead pipe in mouth, Patrick hunched nearby, hands between his legs, muttering something about ‘the woman in red.’ The Inspector looked me over carefully, passed a folded bill to Woody. ‘Very well.’

  ‘Let me know if you need any help, Gerry,’ Woody whispered in my ear. ‘We’ll be upstairs.’

  ‘Hey, wait a minute, I thought you—!’

  ‘Here! Just look at this!’ Inspector Pardew commanded, holding up a little heart-shaped watch on a gold chain. In his other hand, I saw, he now held Alison’s watch with its three opened buckles, the straps dangling from either side of its digital face like green plaited locks, the numbers blinking between them like a part. ‘I tell you, time is not a toy!’

  ‘Actually, I was only, uh, passing by, I have to get back to—’

  ‘It is not a mere decoration!’

  ‘It certainly is not!’ echoed Patrick, scowling at me like a judge. His mouth where Fred had hit him was puffed up and purple, and there was a big bloody gap just under his nose that made him look like he was metamorphosing into a frog or something. Woody was gone, vanished in that moment that Alison’s watch had distracted me, and the short cop, tracking through the correspondence and check stubs, travel brochures, books, photos, and old newspaper clippings that littered the floor, had moved over between me and the door. He wore his rubber gloves still, white powder down his front. I seemed to have trouble thinking clearly, my mind confused by all this … this confusion.

  ‘It is the very content and shape of the world,’ Pardew was saying. ‘Look! This one doesn’t even have a face! It doesn’t have hands! It’s like a theater marquee, reflecting nothing but our pathetic vanity!’

  Turning back to him, I now saw, past Fred’s abandoned hot plate, what I hadn’t seen before: Roger, sprawled
upside down in the far corner like a broken doll, limbs akimbo, legs listing against the walls as though he’d slid down from the ceiling, his right leg bent sideways at the knee, forming a kind of aleph of the whole. His face was smeared with blood, his hair matted with it, his eyes below the gaping mouth starting minstrel-like from their sockets. I gaped my own mouth (I was thinking suddenly about Tania, what she’d said: ‘Like a newborn child … !’) to suck in air. ‘Are you just – just leaving him there—?!’

  ‘Time,’ Pardew was insisting, wagging the heart-shaped watch at me (I’d turned just in time to see him hurl Alison’s watch behind him as though it were contaminating him: ‘It’s a mockery! A corruption!’), ‘we’re talking about time!’ With a sweep of his other hand, his white silk scarf fluttering about his neck as though in awe and wonder, he indicated the glittering mound of watches on the desk, and it was then, noticing a heavy ring he wore with a large red stone in it, that I realized what it was that had seemed odd about Cynthia just now: her rings. She had been wearing four of them, all uncharacteristically ostentatious, on one hand, none on the other. ‘It’s the key to it all, it always is, the key to everything!’

  ‘Yes, pay attention, Gerald.’

  The Inspector sighed, sat back, nodded at Fred. ‘If you don’t mind, please,’ he said to Patrick.

  ‘But I haven’t finished telling you about—!’

  ‘I know, we’ll discuss it later. Now I have to speak with this gentleman.’

  ‘But I’ll be quiet! I won’t be in the way! I promise!’

  ‘Sergeant … ?’

  ‘Please! Wait! My tweezers!’ Patrick cried, fumbling in his pocket as Fred took his arm.

  ‘I gave them back to you.’

  ‘Yes, but –’ He fished them forth, thrust them at Pardew. There were tears welling up in his eyes. ‘There was a little silver chain – it’s not there anymore!’

  ‘Oh, I see. Well, you’ll have to fill out a claim form,’ the Inspector said, his moustaches lifting and falling with a dismissive smile as he handed the tweezers back. Bob was stapling a tag to the patch from our easy chair. ‘We’ll leave one with you before we go.’

  Patrick hesitated, tugged at by Fred in his dusty rubber gloves, then plunged recklessly forward and planted a wet crimson kiss on Pardew’s cheek. ‘Thank you!’ he burbled, his split lip bleeding afresh, as Fred collared him. ‘You’re so … so kind!’

  The Inspector winced faintly, narrowing his eyes at Fred, and the policeman led Patrick away, still twittering and squeaking, holding himself as he hobbled along. ‘In the old days,’ Pardew muttered icily, ‘we used to strip perverts like that in the middle of winter and scourge them in the marketplace.’ He caught my frown and added: ‘Well, a long time ago, of course. That old gent was telling me …’ He touched his cheek, glanced at his fingertips. ‘Do you perhaps have a handkerchief I could borrow?’

  ‘Sure, here, I won’t—’

  ‘Thank you.’ He folded it into a little pad, dabbed at his cheek with it as though at a wound. ‘Your wife took mine. Said she’d wash it for me.’ Bob looked up at us from his microscope, lip between his teeth like a thought he might be chewing on, then (the alarm went off on one of the wristwatches in Pardew’s heap: he located it, depressed the button that turned it off) bowed his head again. ‘Does your wife usually do the laundry during a party?’

  ‘Sometimes. It depends. Why do you ask?’

  He shrugged, staring at the stained handkerchief, then refolded it and applied it to his cheek again. ‘I’m interested in patterns. And the disruption of patterns. That’s my job. I solve crimes. Do you understand?’

  I nodded. I was trying to be civil, but his bluntness and cold piercing gaze made civility seem like evasion. I felt unfairly singled out, he at my desk, I before it as though at a dressing down, but when I turned away from him, there was only poor battered Roger staring back, the preoccupied cop at his microscope (he was working now with a piece of material from the heap of rumpled clothing at his feet, and as I watched him bend to his lens, I thought of my wife at the kitchen stove, lifting the pan lid to peer in at the boiling water – I realized I should have gone over right then and taken her in my arms, but the moment was gone, what had been done could not be undone – or rather, undone done – and I felt a flush of sorrow penetrate my chest, spread, pulsing, through my body, and leak away like time itself, like hope, like Being, that great necromantic illusion …), close-ups of Ros’s corpse hanging from the line, the room upended and strewn with the debris of my dislodged past. What they’d done here reminded me of a line Ros once had to deliver in a film called The Invasion of the Panty Snarfers: ‘When they stuck their noses in, it felt like everything just changed its shape!’ Pardew waited still. Watching. ‘I mean, patterns, and, uh, crime – murder – as … you know …’ I was struggling. The Inspector narrowed his eyes: I supposed I was an open book. ‘A … disturbance of things, and so—’

  ‘Not necessarily. On another scale, this party of yours is the true disturbance. Maybe all conventions are, all efforts at social intercourse.’ He sighed, and sighing, seemed more human. There was still a trace of blood on his cheek where Patrick had kissed him, but he’d ceased rubbing at it. ‘Since I was a child, I have been troubled by, let’s call it the irrational, and have been trying to find an order, a logic, behind what is given to us as madness and disorder. That hidden commonality, you see. Well, I have been in homicide a very long time now, and I can tell you, the more I run into all the surface codes and structures – as we say in the business – that people invent for themselves, the more it seems to me that the one common invariant behind them all is, quite frankly, murder itself!’

  I felt he was confiding in me and I smiled politely, hoping only to get out of here. What I’d thought was a maze, I saw now, was only a diagram of the brain, showing the consequences of injury to the various parts. ‘That’s interesting, but I don’t believe anyone here could possibly—’

  ‘What? What—?! You think I can’t see what’s going on here?’ he roared, bolting up out of his chair in a sudden rage that sent me staggering back a step. ‘I live in the filth of the world! I live at the heart of absolute evil and degradation! It’s my profession, and certain things I am good at! I have an eye for them! Hatred, for example! No matter how deeply it is buried, I can see it! Lust, doubt, fear, greed: I can see these things like color painted on people’s faces, washed into their movements, their words, and believe me, this place is screaming with it!’

  ‘It – it’s only a party—!’ I protested.

  ‘Only! Do you think I’m blind? You’ve got drug addicts here! You’ve got perverts, anarchists, pimps, and peeping toms! Adulterers! You’ve got dipsomaniacs! You’ve got whores, thugs, thieves, atheists, sodomists, and out-and-out lunatics! There isn’t anything they wouldn’t do!’ He seemed almost to have grown. He was rigid, powerful – yet his hand was trembling as he picked up a piece of paper. ‘In this world, nothing – nothing, I tell you – is ever wholly concealed! I know what’s in their sick stinking hearts!’

  ‘But—!’

  ‘Look at this! It’s a drawing of the murder scene! Only it was drawn before the murder! We can prove this! Somebody was planning this homicide all along! You see? Somebody here, in this house! Down to the last vile detail – except that they apparently meant to strike her in the womb instead of the breast – at least that must be the true meaning of the crime – you can see here the blood, the hideous weapon between her legs. There’s the killer standing over her. Gloating! One interesting thing: he’s bearded. That might be a clue or it might not, of course. It might be a disguise, for example, or some fantasy image of the self, a displacement of some kind …’ He was calming some and, reluctant to stir him up again, I was tempted to let him have his ‘bearded murderer.’ But then he added: ‘And beside him, this horned figure, his diabolical accomplice, you might say, his own evil conscience!’ – and I felt obliged to interrupt.

  ‘I’m afraid that�
��s the, uh, Holy Family.’

  ‘The what?’ He looked pained, his eyes widening as he stared at me, as though I might have just grown horns myself and struck him.

  ‘It’s the Christmas scene. You know, the manger and all that. My son drew it for nursery school.’

  He slumped back into his chair, staring at the drawing in disbelief. ‘But – all this blood—!’

  ‘There was a childbirth documentary on television the week before that we all watched. Not surprisingly, my son put the two things together. The “weapon” is the baby and the “killer’s” the father, and that, eh, “diabolical accomplice” is a cow.’

  The Inspector seemed momentarily deflated, his moustaches drooping, and I was sorry I had had to be the one to tell him. ‘It’s terrible,’ he said. He turned the drawing over, applied a self-adhesive label to the back, and scribbled something on it. ‘It might be worse than I thought. Your son’s name?’

  ‘His—? Mark, of course, but—’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘He’s four, almost five now, but he—’

  ‘Did you or your wife ever have syphilis?’

  ‘No!’

  He handed the drawing to Bob, who asked: ‘Should we get stats?’

  ‘Probably a good idea.’

  ‘Wait a minute! What are you—?’

  ‘Now as regards the missus and her laundry,’ the Inspector continued icily, turning back to me. I watched Bob add a few notes of his own to the label on Mark’s drawing, then put it on the shelf beside a crushed beer can and what looked like part of a truss. ‘She’s been a busy little lady.’

  ‘Well …’ It was a mistake, I sensed, to be too frank with this man. Yet, it was difficult to conceal anything from him either. ‘She likes things clean, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s not as simple as that. Let me show you something.’ He nodded Bob over. The policeman picked up some jockey shorts lying near his feet, brought them to Pardew. ‘She was just stuffing these into the washing machine when we stopped her. She pretended surprise, of course. Or perhaps she was really surprised. You can see that there is blood on them. Very close to that of the victim, I might say.’