Gerald's Party

by Robert Coover

  ‘Hormone tablets,’ my mother-in-law replied icily, speaking up to be heard over Yvonne’s bawling as the ambulance men stretchered her away. ‘And before that it was some kind of foot ointment!’

  ‘No, hey, I like it, it’s got something!’

  ‘Ow, what happened?’ Talbot moaned, then coughed and gagged. Jim was holding something to his nose. ‘Who did I hit?’

  ‘All you hit was that young man’s fist with your silly face,’ sniffed Wilma. ‘And then the floor.’

  ‘Hard, though – right? Hard! Ooohh … !’

  ‘Take another whiff of this,’ Jim said, and Talbot snorted and gagged again.

  ‘Gerry – ? Do something! Help me!’ I caught just a glimpse of the terror on her stricken face (‘You know what I hate most, Gerald?’ my mother once exclaimed – maybe the expression on Yvonne’s face had made me think of it – ‘What I really hate is having a good time!’) as they squeezed her through the door into the hall, past the new arrivals pressing in. ‘Man, somebody really chewed up the scenery in here!’ one of them said: Scarborough, Quagg’s lugubrious baggy-eyed set designer. He looked around as though measuring the space.

  ‘If this is a party, Daddy, why aren’t there any balloons?’

  ‘Yeah, there was some guy went crazy, Scar …’

  ‘I’ll be good! I won’t complain!’

  ‘I didn’t realize it would hurt so much,’ Anatole whimpered, holding his mouth as though to keep his teeth from falling out.

  ‘Here, try this, Mark,’ Sally Ann suggested, picking up one of the condoms Naomi had dropped earlier in the evening. Alison had vanished, and in her place Ginger was just wobbling out of the room on her high red heels, her pigtails bent askew, the cheeks of her narrow behind peeping out through gaps in her costume, looking carpet-burned, others drifting away as well.

  ‘Whoo! After all that excitement, I think I’m gonna hafta go out back and – wurp! – table a motion!’

  Mark puffed futilely into the condom, then handed it back to Sally Ann. ‘The hole’s too big.’

  ‘What—?!’ Brenda cried.

  The tall cop was crawling around on his hands and knees. ‘I lost her goddamn teeth,’ he grumped.

  ‘It’s also fun to fill them up with water,’ Sally Ann whispered conspiratorially, ‘and drop them like bombs!’ Mark grinned, his eyes lighting up under the woolly fringes of the ski cap, and my mother-in-law said: ‘That’s not clean! It was on the floor!’ She looked up at me accusingly. ‘Daddy, who’s the lady in the bathtub?’

  ‘No one, pal – now you get to bed.’ I took his hand and led him toward the door, Brenda crying behind me: ‘Oh no! My god, where’s Fats? Fats?!’ just as Yvonne in the hallway in front of us (‘Last Year’s Valentine’ was playing on the hi-fi, a silly nostalgic song about time and loss, and it reminded me somehow of something Tania had once said to me about the way language distorts reality: ‘I know we can’t survive without it, Gerry, probably we even need all those fictions of tense embedded in the goddamn grammar – but art’s great task is to reconcile us to the true human time of the eternal present, which the child in us knows to be the real one!’ – which is why, paradoxically, she had always defended abstraction as the quintessence of realism) cried: ‘Woody—?!’

  ‘Fats said he was flyin’ light,’ someone said. ‘I think he went to put on the nosebag.’

  ‘Fats—?!’ Brenda cried, charging off toward the dining room. ‘You won’t believe it!’

  ‘Don’t let them take me away, Woody! Please!’

  Woody and Cynthia were standing on the stairs a step or two below the landing, holding hands in their underwear, Woody in stolid boxer shorts and ribbed undershirt, Cynthia in a heavily cross-strapped brassiere and old-fashioned umbrella-shaped lace drawers, seemingly stunned into a kind of grave compassionate silence. ‘Cyn—?! Christ all Jesus, don’t just stand there!’ There were tears in Cynthia’s eyes now as she took Woody’s stubby hand in both of hers (their heavy ornamentation made her hands now seem more overdressed than ever), sliding partway behind him and nuzzling her pale cheek against his bare dark-tufted shoulder. ‘Help me! WOODY—?!’

  ‘Daddy, why is the lady all tied up? Did she do something bad—?’

  ‘No, son, she—’

  ‘Gerry?!’ Yvonne wailed, spying me past the others, her eyes raw, her gray hair stringy and wild. She had grabbed onto the front doorjamb, and the ambulance men were now prying her hand loose. ‘Goddamn it, Gerry, you promised—!’

  ‘I – I’ll get Jim,’ I offered (and there was another thing about my mother: you could have anything she had, she was utterly unpossessive, thought of nothing in the world as exclusively her own – but she never, ever – this came to me now, and I felt, oddly as if for the first time, the unfairness of it – gave anyone any presents), but before I could let go of my son’s hand, Charley Trainer came tumbling noisily down the stairs, my bathrobe stretched tight around his flab, shouting: ‘Whuzz happenin’? Whuzz goin’ on downair?’

  ‘Charley! It’s me! Help!’ Yvonne bawled from the front porch even as the door swung shut behind her, her voice disappearing as though into a tunnel, and Charley yelled: ‘Hole on, Yvonne! God-DAMN it! Ole Chooch is comin’!’ But his knees started to cave about halfway down to the landing and there was no negotiating the right-angle turn there – Woody and Cynthia ducked, clinging to each other, as he went hurtling past behind them, smacking the banister with his soft belly and somersaulting on over the railing to the floor below: ‘PpFOOOFF!’ he wheezed mightily as he landed on his back (I’d managed to jerk Mark out of the way just in time), bathrobe gaping and big soft genitals bouncing between his fat legs as though hurling them to the floor had been his whole intent. ‘Ohh, shit!’ he gasped (Mark was laughing and clapping, my wife’s mother shushing him peevishly), lying there pale and, except for the aftershock vibrations still rippling through his flaccid abdomen, utterly prostrate: ‘Now wha’ve I done … ?!’

  ‘Careful, just lie still a moment,’ Jim cautioned, kneeling by his side and palpating gently his neck and collarbone, while above them Cynthia was saying (Woody seemed to be putting yet another ring on one of her fingers): ‘Woody, you shouldn’t …’

  ‘Who the hell was runnin’ innerference?’ Charley groaned, as Jim reached under and ran his hand slowly down his broad back.

  The phone rang, but as I turned to answer it, Fats and Brenda, tears streaming down their cheeks, came blundering through from the dining room, making us all fall back. ‘Oh my god, Brenda,’ Fats, stuffing the last half of a cheese-dog in his jaws, cried as he stumbled over Charley’s upturned feet (‘Unf! Get his goddamn nummer, coach!’), ‘this is too much! Not Tania—!’ And then, picking himself up, he staggered on up the stairs behind her, Woody and Cynthia pressing up against the banister to let them by. ‘Yeah,’ somebody was saying into the phone (‘Woops! Damn!’ Woody muttered as the ring slipped through the railings and hit the floor near Charley – ‘Gerry, could you pass that up to me?’), ‘it’s Ros! A cold curtain, man – that’s it, gone dark! You comin’ over?’

  ‘Hey, Ger,’ Charley moaned softly as I dug under his ear for the ring: it was elaborately worked with a heavy stone, somehow familiar, ‘I’m in trouble.’

  ‘Right, Hoo-Sin’s already here – just this minute walkin’ on,’ the guy on the phone was saying, out of sight now behind all the people gathering around, concerned about Charley, who still lay flat out, motionless, my bathrobe twisted around his thick torso like a bit of rind. ‘Is it his heart?’

  ‘Has to be – he’s all heart, ole Chooch …’

  ‘But I don’t wanna go! I wanna see Unca Charley do it again!’

  ‘And Gudrun, Prissy Loo, the Scar …’

  ‘You’ll be okay, Charley,’ I said, handing the ring up to Woody (‘Great – and bring Benedetto,’ said the guy on the phone, ‘we’ll need a groaner!’), ‘Jim’s here, he—’

  ‘Naw, I mean – didn’t Tall-butt tell ya?’ He was nearly cr
ying, his eyes puffy, his nose purple. ‘I juss found out … the reason ya can’t take it with ya …’

  ‘Ah,’ said Jim, pausing thoughtfully in his trek down Charley’s spine.

  ‘… Is cuz it dies before you do!’

  ‘He’s got a slipped disc,’ Jim said. ‘We need to double his knees back and see if we can pop it back in place.’ ‘Oh my! let me help!’ exclaimed Patrick, getting a laugh, just as Lloyd Draper stepped up and remarked down his nose: ‘See here now, looks like you’ve had a little tumble, young fella!’

  ‘Since Ros died, Ger, I juss can’t … can’t …’

  ‘For goodness’ sake, Charley!’ cried his wife, Janice, padding in breathlessly, zipping up the side of her pink skirt. ‘What have you been doing – trying to fly again?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he mumbled, winking at me through his tears (‘Ros is the only one,’ he used to say while reproaching himself, with that comical hangdog look in his eyes, for his clumsy haste and artlessness in lovemaking – ‘The nicest thing about Charley,’ Janice liked to say, ‘is that there’s none of that wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am stuff with him – it’s always quicker than that!’ – ‘who’s ever thanked me after …’), ‘I awmoss had it there f’ra minute!’

  ‘Hey, everybody!’ Janny cried, bouncing up and down. ‘Let’s hear it for Choo-Choo Trainer!’ She hiked her skirt and dropped into her cheerleader’s squat, one arm out stiffly in front of her, the other cocked behind, and slowly, as Patrick and Jim took a grip on Charley’s fat knees, got the old school locomotive going again. ‘CHOO-oo-oo!’ Pause. ‘CHOO-oo-oo!’ Yes, I thought as I watched Jim and Patrick, grunting, press Charley’s knees back against his chest, the crowd in the hall all joining Janny now as she started to get up steam – ‘Come on, everybody! Choo-oo! Choo-oo! That’s it! Choo-oo! Choo-oo!’ – time may or may not be passing, who’s to say, but damn it, something is. ‘Choo! Choo! Choo! Choo!’ Above us, Woody and Cynthia were kissing now, Woody holding her hips firmly yet somehow chastely in his square hairy hands, her hands resting on his shoulders as though knighting him with all her rings and bangles, and though there was an undeniable tenderness in their embrace and even a certain touching vulnerability in the plainness of their underwear, the neatness of their carefully combed hair, the very narrowness of the step on which they stood, there above the chugging Choo-Choo Trainer locomotive – ‘CHOO-choo! CHOO-choo! CHOO-choo! CHOO-choo!’ – Charley himself now out of sight behind his upraised rump, Dolph helping out, lending his weight – ‘CHOO-choo-CHOO-choo! CHOO-choo-CHOO-choo!’ – there was also something disturbing, almost shocking, about their imperturbable composure as they kissed so discreetly, so properly, that seemed suddenly to make Ros’s death (Oh! Oh! Oh! I was thinking to the cheer’s beat, what have we lost—?!) all the more poignant and immediate, and I might well have started to get, joining red-nosed Charley, truly maudlin, had I not spied Naomi’s cock sock on Alison’s middle finger, beckoning me from the dining room doorway. ‘CHOO-choo-CHOO-choo CHOO-CHOO-CHOO-CHOO!’ the crowd roared, Janny’s arm working like a flying piston. ‘Oh god, it hurts!’ Charley cried, farting explosively (‘Naughty boy!’ exclaimed Patrick to everyone’s delight) – and then in the sudden momentary silence that followed there was a hollow KRR-POP!, a burst of cheers and laughter, and from Charley as they lowered his mass to the floor and covered him up with the robe, a grateful ‘Oh, yeah … !’ ‘WHEE-EE-EE-ee-oo-OO-OO!’ the crowd shrilled in imitation of a train whistle, as Janny spun around then dropped into a still fairly passable split: ‘CHOO-CHOO TRAINER!’

  While the crowd around Charley whistled and clapped, I slipped away toward the back, nearly bumping into Steve the plumber coming up from the basement with a big monkey wrench in his hand. ‘Hold on, hold on!’ Inspector Pardew demanded behind me. ‘Is that someone having a game of darts down there?’

  ‘A couple of women, sir,’ said Steve, ‘if you can call it a game.’

  ‘Hey, there,’ breathed Alison (‘One of them’s probably her, all right,’ Bob was saying in back of me, while at our feet, Anatole, squatting down, asked: ‘You all right, Uncle Howard?’), ‘I’ve been looking for you, Superlover!’

  ‘Ah, that must be my son you want.’

  ‘I assumed it ran in the family.’ The crowd around Charley was breaking up, many of them headed past us into the dining room (‘No, no, no, no, no!’ Howard blurted out petulantly, as though waking suddenly from a bad dream, or perhaps just talking in his sleep – Iris Draper was there, trying to feed him some soup), where Jim’s wife Mavis was holding court, seemingly her old self once more. I could see people slipping in and out of the TV room with big grins on their faces and pausing, as they passed, to hear what Mavis had to say. Soapie was filling a brown bag with food from the table.

  ‘Hey, Prissy Loo! I thought you took the veil!’

  ‘No, some guy held me in escrow a while, that’s all. Where’d you find the bug broth?’

  ‘Yup,’ said Bob. ‘We’re all set up for her.’

  ‘In here, there’s buckets of it …’

  Alison drilled my chest with her stiffened peckersweatered finger, parodying recruitment posters: ‘I want you, Gerald!’ she declared throatily, clutching my belt with her free hand and knocking her pubes on mine. Which seemed to set off the phone: Regina answered it, Pardew saying: ‘Very well, you’d best get on with it then.’ ‘It’s show time, Mister Bones! When do we open?’

  ‘As soon as we can get off centerstage.’ I lifted the pointing finger to my mouth to tongue the base of it, under the sweater. I realized it had the same pattern as one of my ski caps. She spread her fingers and her breasts rose and fell in their silk pockets, as her eyes, sparkling, searched mine. ‘Hey, what’s goin’ down here, Vagina?’ cried someone, banging in through the front door behind us, his voice small and squeaky. ‘Show me the card!’ ‘In the living room, Vachel! It’s Ros!’ ‘Ros—?’ ‘Only one problem,’ I murmured through her fingers, ‘I have to use the bathroom so badly my teeth are chiming!’

  ‘Me, too,’ she admitted, letting go my belt to give her crotch a demonstrative little squeeze, ‘but they’ve turned this one into a darkroom, and upstairs …’

  ‘Hey, that’s cute,’ said Soapie, taking the sock off Alison’s finger and peeking inside, then handing it back. ‘I could use one of those to keep my pencils warm.’ He was cradling a greasy paper sack full of food and an unopened bottle of scotch. Alison had curled round under my far arm, and now ran her hand up my back under my shirt (‘We can go out back,’ I whispered: ‘Yes, let’s!’ she urged), as Soapie poked his nose down the basement steps and asked: ‘What’s going on down below, d’you suppose?’

  But we were already away, slipping through the kitchen door, Alison snatching up some paper cocktail napkins en route (‘I always like something to read,’ she smiled), Woody saying something as we passed about ‘a lesson.’ ‘Yeah? Don’t you believe it!’ growled Vic, as the door whumped to behind us.

  The kitchen seemed closed down for the night: things put away, counters clean, lights off and the room in shadows except for the nightlight on the oven and the fluorescent over the butcherblock table, pots and pans hung up, appliances set back under the cabinets. ‘Your wife’s such a great housekeeper,’ Alison said, still whispering. ‘I really envy her!’ ‘Well, this is a bit unusual,’ I allowed. The general tidiness of the place was marred somewhat by the muddy tracks in and out of the back door: we were not the first, it seemed, to think of using the backyard. Also, now that I looked more closely, I could see that there was a pot simmering on a burner in the shadows, something cooking in the oven, some boiled eggs cooling on the counter near the sink, knives and tools laid out on the butcherblock, an apron – oilcloth, imprinted with foreign baggage stickers – draped over the breakfast bench. ‘It’s strange,’ Alison murmured, turning to me as I paused, touched by some distant memory (but not of my wife, no – waiting for Ros in the wings during a performance of that toyland play, the toybox spotlit centerstag
e into which the other toys were all vanishing, Ros left on the floor outside, arms akimbo, as though forgotten …), ‘but I feel as though I were standing at some crossroads – or, rather, that I am a crossroads in some odd way, through which the world is passing. Does that sound silly?’ She put her arms around my neck. ‘No.’ I took her small silken waist in my hands. Blinking, she tongued her lips, which seemed to have swollen. There was a soft blush on her skin, a warm fragrance, and her breath came in quick little gasps. ‘In fact, it’s funny, but I was just thinking …’ I let my hands slide down over her hips – then took them away again as her husband came in through the door behind her.

  ‘Ah!’ I said and cleared my throat. ‘We were just, eh …’

  ‘You’ve found your earring,’ he said tersely, ignoring me.

  ‘Yes, that nice man in the white pants discovered it for me,’ she replied, turning dreamily toward him. ‘On the living room floor – wasn’t that lucky?’ She smiled, touching the earring as though to show it to him, her free hand slipping into my back pocket to scratch subtly at my buttock, as though to sign her name there. ‘We’re just going out for some fresh air.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said with an abrupt pinched smile, glancing at me, then away again. He seemed to want to look back over his shoulder, but restrained himself, pushing his hands into his jacket pockets, biting briefly at his beard. ‘Watch where you step,’ he added as he marched past us.

  Alison took my hand and pulled me out into the darkness of the back porch. ‘Hurry—!’ She tore my wrap-tie shirt open, flung her arms around my bare back. ‘Kiss me!’ she begged, pulling herself upward to meet my mouth with hers. Her mouth was open, her tongue pushing between my teeth as though to mate there, her perfumed breath mingling with the nostalgic country odors of the backyard and the sweet scents sweeping up from within her dress. I clutched her body tight to mine – it was the right thing to do, I knew, the timing perfect! – and kissed her eyes, her cheeks, her mouth, her throat, my hands burrowing up under the whispering charmeuse skirt, childhood memories of camping trips, midnight hikes, forest dew, Inspiration Points filling my mind (it was a damp night, chilly, dense), and, her sash loosening, down into her tights. ‘Oh Gerald!’ she gasped (her flesh down there was cool, sleek, so smooth it felt powdered, maybe it was, the fluff between her wriggling cheeks as soft as swansdown), jamming her hands inside my waistband, trying to, finally in frustration scrabbling frantically over the outside of my trousers (‘No more rehearsals, Superlover,’ I seemed to hear her say, ‘I want climax, I want the weenie!’ – but her mouth was pressed on mine), digging, fumbling for openings. I slid one hand around the curve of her hip onto her soft belly, and down into the damp velvety thatch between her thighs which heaved up to meet it, her legs spreading as in my mind’s eye (and thus in truth! in truth!) they’d been spreading since the night we met. Yet even bare skin is a kind of mask, I thought wistfully, pushing deeper, my fingertips meeting, fore and aft, in the syrupy depths of her amazing furrow, maybe in fact it was something she had said that night during intermission: that desperate but futile effort (but I was trying, I was trying) to touch what can never be touched. I had suggested that night that theater, like all art, was kind of a hallucination at the service of reality, and that full appreciation of it required total abject surrender – like religion. ‘Yes,’ she’d said, setting her coffee cup down. ‘Or love …’ ‘Oh fuck!’ she whimpered now, tearing wildly at my trousers, clawing my back, tugging at my testicles, while thrusting violently (it was, yes, this incredible impression of wholeness, this impression of radiance, of universal truth, the seeming apprehension of it, that surrender made possible, I thought, almost unable to think at all, unable to breathe – what had I just said?) into the little orifice I’d created with my two fingers and the bent knuckle of my thumb – ‘You’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever met!’ ‘Alison—!’ I groaned, pushing deeper from behind. ‘(Gasp!) A little … more—!’