Gerald's Party

by Robert Coover

  Someone squeezed my hand and I jerked it away. It was Dickie, his white suit glowing spectrally in the dim light. ‘Wondered what she was growing back there,’ he said, lifting Alison’s skirt to peer closer, playing the heckler, the hick in the gallery. ‘Anyhow, I’m glad to see that, as an artist, Ger, you’ve got a good grasp of your subject.’ He slapped her behind as though blessing it. I started to squeak out something, something stupid probably, but he had already turned away. ‘Hey, Hot Pot!’ he laughed, stepping down off the porch. ‘Whaddaya say we go get some grass stains back behind the bushes!’

  ‘It’s filthy back there,’ Sally Ann retorted. ‘Like you, you creep!’

  ‘Gerald,’ Alison gasped hoarsely – she lay collapsed against my chest now, breathing deeply, my arms around her shoulders, hers around my hips, ‘where can we go?’

  ‘I’ll have to think. They’ve taken over my study and—’

  ‘How about the green room upstairs?’

  ‘Green room?’ I was still struggling to find my voice. I felt weirdly suspended, not quite outside time but not in it either.

  ‘Where you kissed me …’

  ‘Yes, the sewing room, okay …’ Sally Ann stood nearby, staring – or probably staring, it was hard to tell – seemingly taken aback at finding us here, and I worried that if we didn’t move, she wouldn’t. ‘But first …’ I unlocked my arms (a titter of laughter floated out and I noticed again the chill in the air) and led Alison down off the porch – we were both a bit unsteady, our bodies still making moves of their own, our legs more or less elsewhere.

  ‘Woops!’

  ‘Steady now!’

  It was a little brighter in the yard, lit up from inside, and I saw that her dress hem was caught in her tights: I pulled it out, smoothed it down, reveling (I don’t like silk) in the feel of silk, and she cuddled closer. ‘Can I hold it for you, Gerald?’ ‘Sure.’ Anyway, she already was, leaning on it like a cane. A swaggerstick. If she’d let go, she’d probably have fallen down. There were others out here, whispering, chatting quietly back in the bushes, grunting, and I felt once more – though not so intensely as a moment ago with my hands between Alison’s legs – that nostalgic flush of country memories: campouts, bike hikes, an all-night picnic back in college (the girl who’d held it for me that night had stupidly pinched it, trying, she’d claimed, to dot an i), sweet harvest evenings along the Rhine and the Douro, our Alpine honeymoon, star-gazing with my father at my grandmother’s place (‘Look, Gerry! there by the Fishes: the Chained Lady!’): there even seemed to be a fragrance of apples in the air.

  I led Alison over toward a shadowy corner near the toolshed (there were muddy tracks everywhere, puddles, wadded-up cocktail napkins, cigarette butts), and she knelt to undo my fly. ‘God! it’s gorgeous!’ she exclaimed softly as she opened up my shorts and let it fall out, pale as a stone pillar, into the night. She stroked it gently. I felt nothing: it was all puffed up, numb with excitement and anticipation. Inside, somebody squealed, and I could hear what sounded like the clacking of spoons, someone blowing on a sweet potato. A tall man stood, shadowed, in one gaping window, looking out as though to mirror me. ‘Where shall we point it?’ ‘Well, away from the flowerbeds –’ But she was gone. ‘Alison—?’

  ‘Hate to tinkle all over your wife’s garden,’ rumbled Lloyd Draper, standing beside me, ‘but I’m an old man and I just can’t hold it in anymore.’ I thought I heard her whispering behind me – I couldn’t be sure, it might have been anyone: ‘Is there room … ?’ ‘Sure, honey, sit down, sit down …’ I looked around, but it was too dark to see anything but a few bushes, squatting like luminous trigrams, black at the roots. ‘What’s the matter, son? For a young lad, you seem to be having trouble making water there,’ Lloyd remarked, squinting down through his bifocals. ‘Oh, I see.’ He spurted briefly, stopped, spurted again. ‘Well, that takes me back a bit …’

  ‘I just hope there isn’t any poison ivy back here …’

  ‘You avvertisin’ that ugly tally-whacker, Big G, or juss givin’ direck-shuns?’ asked Charley, leaning boozily over my shoulder, my wife’s dustmop under his arm as a crutch, Jim helping him at the other elbow.

  ‘Yup, vanished days and all that …’

  ‘Don’t laugh, Charley. It hurts.’

  ‘Seen a lot of ’em like that in my day,’ sighed Lloyd, still squirting from time to time. ‘They weren’t workin’ too well either, of course …’

  ‘Who’s laughin’? I’ll trayja even’n throw in m’new alligator golfshoes b’sides!’

  ‘Whoo-EEEE! Jes’ call me Pipi’ ’cuz Ah’m all your’n!’ hooted Earl Elstob, joining us (‘Thieves’ hangouts, we called ’em in the trade …’), shooting a stream out over the flowerbeds and – thrummm! – against the toolshed wall. Jim and Charley were already firing away at shorter range and I was able at last to join in as well. Our radiant streams gleamed in the pallid glow from the windows (the man who had been standing there had disappeared) like a row of footlights. Tania had once spent six months on a painting she’d called ‘The Garden,’ trying to capture this glow, this strange yearning (she’d related it to what she’d called ‘the sleeping dragon, the hidden force of nature’), and what she’d ended up with, she’d said, was a fair facsimile of an illustration from a children’s book she’d had as a little girl.

  ‘Hey, Earl,’ laughed Charley, ‘didja hear the one about the guy who takes his wife to the theater, ’n atta – ha ha! – innermission—’

  ‘The thee-ater?’

  ‘Move over, ladies,’ said Fats, joining us, ‘I gotta re-hearse the scenery here!’

  ‘Yeah, ’n atta innermission he’s gotta take a leak, so he hurries off to the can. But he goes through a wrong door somehow ’n ends up inna goddamn garden!’

  ‘Oh yeah? Huh huh,’ snorted Elstob from under his overbite, still managing to hit the wall but no longer threatening to drill a hole through it, and Fats, crossing Earl’s stream with one of his own, said: ‘Too-chay!’

  ‘Well, the garden’s very fancy, y’know – inna French style, as y’might say—’

  ‘Yuh huh hee,’ Earl sniggered, jiggling around. Lloyd had left us, but his place was taken almost immediately by a guy in corduroys and a tweed jacket with suede elbows: ‘This the place?’ he asked, smiling apologetically around his bent briar pipe, and someone in the bushes behind us, grunting, said: ‘Well – ungh! – there goes a little bit of eternity …’

  ‘And in a fancy garden like ’at, Earl, he don’ wanna weewee onna lotuses nor leave no nasty puddles around, right? So, real careful-like, he lifts a plant out of a flowerpot ’n unloads in ’at, ’n’en putsa plant back ’n – hoff! – tippytoes back to his seat—’

  ‘Sounds like the one about the audience catharsis at the tragical farces,’ remarked Jim, winding down.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, meaning something else. Alison had made some remark about intermissions that night at the theater, giving them an importance that haunted me now. ‘Exactly …’

  ‘Onlya goddamn play’s awready started up again when he gess back to his seat, see—’

  ‘My name’s Gottfried,’ the man beside me offered, extending his free hand. I changed hands and took it.

  ‘Oh yes – you came with Fiona.’

  ‘’N he leans over to his ole lady,’ Charley rumbled, leaning over toward Earl, ‘’n he says to her, he says (‘Fiona—?’): “Hey, sugarpuss, whuzz happen so far iniss act?” ’ What Alison had said that night we met, smiling up at me over her fresh cup of coffee, was that perhaps without intermissions there could be no catharsis in modern theater – and only much later did it occur to me (‘I feel like all my energy’s just leaking away,’ someone murmured behind us, ‘and it gives me a very mystical feeling, like I’m in tune with the universe or something …’) that what she’d really said was ‘intromissions’ … ‘ “You oughta know, you dumb shit,” his wife says,’ Charley was saying, ‘all scrunched down ’n mad as a bear with a bee up its ass: “you
were in it!” ’

  Earl staggered backward, yaw-hawing uncontrollably, making us all duck, just as Leonard skipped out from behind the toolshed in front of us and started popping photos: ‘Help! I’m blind!’ wailed Fats, shooting straight up in the air.

  ‘Come on, Leonard, what’re you doing?’

  ‘This goin’ in the sports pages or the church announcements?’

  ‘God, all I see are spots!’

  ‘The hard thing sometimes,’ sighed Gottfried beside me sucking on his drooping pipe, ‘is just letting go …’

  ‘Obishuaries, mos’ like …’

  ‘Jesus, I thought those two yoyos left when they took Yvonne away!’

  ‘Yvonne—?’ cried Fats (‘…And then, other times, there’s nothing to it …’). ‘Who did?’

  ‘Hurry!’ Alison whispered urgently behind me, rushing past. ‘I’m almost done!’ I gasped, trying to blink away my momentary blindness, but she was already gone, vanished like an apparition. ‘Wait!’ Then Leonard’s flashgun went off again and I saw her, running barefoot toward the back porch (how small she looked!), clutching her tights like a spare wrap, her green sash loose and fluttering behind, pursued by Dickie and that guy in the chalkstriped suit – ‘Hey!’ I shouted, just as Dickie caught a toe in a croquet wicket and slapped into the mud. Leonard missed it, shooting instead at a confused and bedraggled Howard being helped down the porch steps by Daffie and Anatole (‘Ugh! just don’t look back,’ someone muttered behind me), Noble following them out, holding his crotch, his glass eye lighting up with the pop of the flash. ‘Oh Christ,’ Dickie swore, brushing futilely at the dark stains on his bright white trousers, as Alison, with a desperate backward glance, crashed into Noble, ‘not shit—!’ ‘Yvonne?’ Fats was blubbering. ‘I can’t believe it!’ Leonard’s flashgun went off again (Howard stuck his tongue out at it, Anatole threw his hand up): Alison, Noble, and the guy in the chalkstripes had disappeared.

  ‘Well, folks – shlup! – Godspeed!’ announced Earl Elstob with a toothy self-congratulating grin, doing himself up and wandering off. He headed toward the porch, but seemed to lose his way, circling back into the bushes behind us instead.

  ‘No need for you guys to rush away on our account,’ Daffie announced, her tongue slurred with gin, as she and Anatole dragged Howard over and propped him up beside us (Fats had just gone charging off, crying: ‘Bren! My god, Bren! It’s Yvonne! They’ve took our Yvonne … !’ and Jim was zipping up). ‘Nothing going on in there but a goddamn funeral.’

  ‘ ’Ass pretty much whuzz goin’ on out here,’ remarked Charley, shaking his member out. ‘Well, anyway I won’ be hard to find inna dark …’

  ‘Funeral?’

  ‘… Juss feel around, it won’ be hard …’

  ‘Yeah, for Ros. Fucking ghost festival, they’re calling it, talking to spirits – they’re outa their conks.’ She opened up Howard’s pants, fished around inside. She was having trouble keeping her footing. Someone shrieked back in the bushes, Elstob sniggered giddily, there was a thump, and Earl reappeared, doubled over, making his way once more toward the back porch. ‘Jesus, Howard, where is the damned thing – ?’

  ‘Can I help?’ offered Jim.

  ‘I c’n do’t myself!’ Howard cried out, but it was all bravado, he was helpless. Distantly there were squeals and laughter coming from the upstairs bedroom, largely drowned out by the squeals and laughter behind us as Leonard’s flash went off in the bushes.

  ‘By the way, Ger, that guy with the French tickler on his chin said he had something he wanted to tell you. He – no, stop, Howard! Wait’ll I get it out!’

  ‘Cyril?’

  ‘He probably wanted to tell you about the body in the basement,’ Jim said. ‘You about ready, Charley?’

  ‘Body? What body—?!’

  ‘Goddamn it, Howard … now see what you’ve done …’

  ‘Down in the rec room, you mean,’ said Dolph, joining us as Gottfried strolled away (‘Whuzzat guy got a tape recorder for?’ Charley asked), and lifting his stream into a wheelbarrow back beside the toolshed. ‘I wondered about that. I saw the feet sticking out behind the ping-pong table, but I didn’t look closer – thought I might be interrupting something.’

  ‘Just as well you didn’t,’ Jim said. ‘It wasn’t a pleasant sight.’

  ‘I think he’s a sociologist …’

  ‘But what are you saying – the rec room – ?’

  ‘That’s right. The dart pierced the back of the head and penetrated the medulla, and that always makes for a rather pathetic disorganized death, I’m afraid. Probably just an accident but –’

  ‘But – my wife was—!’

  ‘Your wife’s all right!’ Dolph assured me. ‘She’s in there in the kitchen. The cops are, uh, with her …’

  ‘Assholes!’ Anatole muttered under his breath, as I hurried away (she’d been trying to tell me something about an interview, I remembered this now, I hadn’t been listening), and Howard whined: ‘My panz’re all wet!’

  ‘Of course they are, Howard – what do you expect?’

  At the steps I caught a glimpse of something glittering in the grass, a little ring of light: Ah, she’s dropped it again, I thought as I reached down to pick it up, this time just for me perhaps. I smiled. Or had Noble—? Someone cried out – I thought it might have been Alison, or else my wife, and I rushed forward (that bastard! I was thinking, meaning no one in particular), but at the kitchen door a man was blocking my way. ‘Excuse me—!’

  ‘My wife,’ the man said stonily. It was Alison’s husband. He stood rigidly in the open doorway, silhouetted against the kitchen lights (yes, my wife was in there, I saw her, the two policemen as well, both looking flushed and sweaty, their clothes disheveled, Fred still in his bulky neckbrace, Bob’s tie undone), one hand in his jacket pocket, the other gripping the carved bowl of his meerschaum. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I gasped. ‘Inside someplace, I think, I was just—’

  ‘No.’

  I couldn’t see his face at all, and it made his voice, cold, uncompromising, seem alarmingly disembodied. It was important that I reach my wife (‘We better get some blood, too, Fred,’ the tall cop was muttering, and Fred, struggling with some pulleys above the butcherblock table, nodded stiffly), but I knew better than to try to push past him.

  ‘You came out here together.’

  ‘Yes, we, uh, sort of ran into each other – but then of course we separated—’

  ‘You touched her breasts—’

  ‘No—’

  ‘And other parts.’ It was like a recitation, an arraignment, distant, mechanical, menacing. And utterly (I thought, chilled by it) insane.

  ‘Listen, you’ve got it all wrong,’ I explained, tried to, ‘it’s only a party—’

  ‘Yes, I know about parties.’ I could hear Charley clambering heavily up the steps behind me, assisted by Dolph and Jim. ‘You brought her out here – now what have you done with her?’

  ‘I told you—’

  ‘Have you raped her?’

  ‘No—!’

  ‘Raped who?’ wheezed Charley at my shoulder.

  ‘Whom,’ Dolph corrected.

  ‘I can smell her on you,’ said Alison’s husband.

  ‘We all can,’ said Dolph. ‘Worse than a damn barnyard. No accounting for some people’s tastes!’

  ‘Say,’ Charley yuff-huffed amiably, ‘speakin’ a that, didja heara one ’bout the two actors out inna sticks playin’ the front ’n back end of a cow—?’

  ‘Are you in love with her?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They get chased offa goddamn stage, see, ’n – haw haw! – they get separated—’

  ‘I asked you—’

  ‘C’mon, Charley,’ said Dolph, leading him away. ‘I think Ger’s about to get the punchline without our help.’

  ‘Awright, awright,’ sighed Charley, limping. ‘Foo! I’m feelin’ awful! Whereza booze? I think I got too much blood’n my alcoh
ol stream!’