Gerald's Party

by Robert Coover

  ‘Very funny,’ Jim said, keeping Charley from tipping over onto Alison’s husband, ‘but the truth is, you’ve had enough.’ I started to follow them, but the space through which they moved seemed to close up behind them. ‘You ought to take it easy. It’s slow poison, you know.’

  ‘ ’Ass okay, Jim, I’m in no hurry …’

  ‘I asked you if you were in love with her.’

  His silhouette, which had dissolved momentarily into the larger mass of the others, now came into sharp focus once more as the light filled in behind him. As though he were honing it, I thought. ‘Don’t you think you’re, well, letting your imagination—?’

  ‘Believe me, I know what it is to be a victim of love.’ Through all of this he hadn’t moved. Not even when Charley and the others had jostled past him (they were in there talking to my wife and the short cop now, Charley shaking his big head and saying something about growing older, or colder, Jim examining a small tool Bob was using) – he could have been a cardboard cutout posted at the kitchen door with a recorded message. He sighed. ‘It’s a kind of madness …’

  ‘Yes, well – I don’t know what you saw, or thought you saw, but in reality—’

  ‘I know, it’s the chemistry of it that most disturbs me. How it warps everything so you can’t trust your senses. It’s like some kind of powerful hallucinogen, transforming our conventional reality into something stark and dangerous – I always feel as though a hole is being opened up in the universe and I’m being pitched into it. Is that what you feel?’

  ‘Well, ah, something like that …’ I didn’t like conversations like this, and felt unfairly singled out. ‘But, honestly, as far as Alison – your wife – is concerned—’

  ‘Inhumane. Utterly amoral. Atavistic. Yet transcendent. I sometimes wonder if it’s what atoms feel as they’re drawn together in molecules – or stars as they burst and implode …’

  I could hear Wilma chatting with someone on the steps behind me, complaining about the discomfort of wet garter belts. Woody and Cynthia came out, still in their underwear, and Woody, sizing things up quickly, nodded back over his shoulder and said: ‘Your wife needs you, Gerry, you’d better get in there.’ ‘I know …’ Fred was attaching something to her ankle; Bob stood by with a pot of Dijonais mustard in his hands.

  ‘Certainly it has nothing to do with marriage, I know that, you can’t tame it, you can’t institutionalize it – the raw force of it just smashes through all that.’ For the first time he moved: he put his pipe – a pale hovering presence between us – in his mouth, drew on it, took it out again. I didn’t know whether to be encouraged by this or not.

  ‘Look, I know what you’re trying to say, and your wife’s very attractive of course, but—’

  ‘I thought at first that marriage might be a way to isolate it, contain it, to give it a time and place, so that at least I could get ahold of the rest of my life – but I was wrong …’

  Behind me, Wilma was expressing her condolences to Woody: ‘She was so brave!’ ‘Yes, I know.’ I had faced situations like this before, of course. All too often perhaps. Always there were misunderstandings … ‘I would have just fallen to pieces!’ ‘We all have to make adjustments. Eh, where’s the best place?’ ‘Well, not where I went!’ The important thing was to keep them talking. ‘You might try back by the swing set.’

  ‘I’ve known all along, I suppose, but it finally came home to me just tonight, watching you and Alison …’

  ‘Hi, Gerry, getting a bit of fresh air?’

  ‘Actually, Wilma, I was just—’

  ‘Say, that’s a smashing shirt! Maybe I could get one of those for Talbot – not that it’d look as good on him as it does on you! By the way, do you know Peg’s sister Teresa?’

  ‘No,’ it was the woman in the yellow dress, ‘but—’

  ‘Pleased, I’m sure!’

  ‘There was a kind of awe, a kind of electricity in the way you looked at each other – especially when you were stroking her inside her tights …’

  ‘Who did?’ Wilma asked.

  ‘No one,’ I said. Maybe if I linked arms with these two, sandwiched myself between them … ‘It’s a … story …’

  ‘Oh, I like stories,’ gushed Teresa. ‘And I like parties!’

  ‘And then, later, when she knelt down to put your member in her mouth—’

  ‘That’s not what—’

  ‘It was like a revelation …’

  ‘Some people have all the fun,’ Wilma sighed, patting her hair. ‘If I knelt down, I’d just pop all my stays.’

  ‘… Like the end of something, innocence for example – and at first I didn’t know what to do with it …’

  ‘And is that your wife in there on the butcherblock?’

  ‘Yes, in fact I was about to—’

  ‘Come on, Teresa,’ said Wilma. ‘I’ll introduce you.’

  ‘I thought of a lot of things I might do – violent things mostly …’ They were gone, I was alone with him again, the chance lost – almost as though I’d never had it. I heard soft mutterings behind me, near the porch, something about being afraid of the dark. Or the dart. I’d caught the word ‘violent’ – it had seemed to key a new tension in his voice, a slightly higher pitch. ‘The worst part, I realized, was not the way you played with each other’s genitals – a mere appetite, after all, we all go through that – but rather the peculiar rapport between you, that strange intense sympathy you seem to share. I sensed this already that night we met at the theater. It was as though, when you spoke to each other, the very geography of the world had shifted, moving her to a place I could not reach.’

  He was completely mad, that was obvious. It was dangerous, I knew, to ignore him – impossible in fact (‘Come along, Teresa,’ Wilma was saying in the kitchen, ‘it’s best not to interfere …’) – but you couldn’t reason with him either. ‘All right,’ I said (‘Well, what I’m saying,’ Teresa argued – all I could see of my wife were her feet above Teresa’s head – as Bob frowned and slid a knife back and forth through our electric sharpener, ‘is that it seems a silly way to go about it!’), ‘what do you want me to do?’

  ‘I hate these destructive feelings. They’re completely contrary to my life’s work. I want you to help me free myself from them.’ I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I didn’t like the sound of it. In the kitchen Peg’s sister Teresa leaned down to my wife and said: ‘Anyway, I’m delighted to meet you! It’s a wonderful party!’ I couldn’t hear my wife’s reply, if there was one, but I was thinking, maybe Vic was right, maybe these parties were a mistake. Perhaps we should travel more instead, or take up some hobby … ‘I want you to give Alison what she wants,’ her husband said. ‘Or thinks she wants …’

  ‘But I—’

  ‘On one condition.’ I settled back on my heels. He’d startled me at first, but I knew where I was now. There was always a condition … ‘I want you to teach me about theater,’ he said.

  ‘I see …’ I had been right of course, but not in the way I’d imagined. ‘The theater, you say.’ Ros, I recalled, had once, while sucking me off, paused for a moment, looked up, and asked me to teach her (‘There must be an easier way to make a living,’ Fred was complaining in the kitchen, as he wiped his flushed brow with a dishtowel) about marriage, and I had felt as inadequate then as I did now. ‘It’s … it’s a complicated subject.’

  ‘I want to find my way back to her,’ he said simply. ‘And I feel somehow it’s the key to it all.’ He had pivoted slightly and light from the kitchen now fell on half his face. I could see the worry and fatigue in his eyes as he studied me. ‘From what I’ve heard about you,’ he added, stepping aside to allow me to enter, ‘I’m sure you will help.’

  It seemed to me, as I stepped over the threshold, that an age had passed since I’d crossed it going the other way, and for some reason I thought of that phrase that Tania had been so fond of and had concealed in several of her paintings – in ‘Orthodoxy,’ for example, and in (or on) ‘Gullive
r’s Peter’: ‘What was without’s within, within, without.’ ‘Awright, ma’am, try to be a little more helpful if you can,’ Fred was saying, more or less echoing Alison’s husband (I felt him close behind me like an arbiter, a referee), and I thought: Tania was right, everything – even going out for a pee in the garden – was full of mystery. ‘We’d hate to have to bring in the old exploding sausage …’

  ‘Just a moment,’ I protested. ‘This really isn’t necessary. My wife had nothing to do with—’

  ‘It’s all right, Gerald,’ she said weakly, craning her head around under the bright fluorescent lamp. ‘It’s only a routine—’

  ‘That’s right, so just move along now, fella—’

  ‘But I tell you, you’re wasting your time! She doesn’t know anything!’

  ‘She knows more than you think, sir,’ Bob said, pulling on rubber gloves from the sink, and my wife whispered: ‘Your fly’s undone, Gerald.’

  ‘Ah! Sorry …’

  ‘What’s that … in your hand?’

  ‘What—? Oh yes, nothing …’ I’d almost forgotten it was there. I realized I must have been rubbing it like a talisman throughout my encounter with Alison’s husband, who now leaned closer to see what it was. ‘Just something I, uh, found outside—’

  ‘Looks like one of my buttons,’ said Fred. We all looked: indeed it was. He searched his jacket, which gaped still around his bloodstained belly. ‘Yeah, there it is. Musta come off when I was trying to button up out there in the dark …’

  ‘Outside … ?’ my wife asked faintly, her face puffy. Bob was holding a damp tab of litmus paper up to the light. ‘Are my … flowers all right?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘I guess I owe you one,’ Fred acknowledged, pocketing the button. Alison’s husband had pulled back, but I could smell his pipe still (I was thinking about hidden fortunes, something a woman had once said to me down in some catacombs: ‘All these bones – like buried pearls, dried semen …’ – whatever happened to that woman?), its aroma hovering like a subtle doubt. ‘The Old Man woulda raised hell with me if I’d lost it!’

  ‘You could start,’ I suggested, ‘by letting her down.’

  Fred hesitated, glancing at his partner. Bob shrugged, nodded: Fred loosened the ropes and eased her down, though he kept her legs still in their shackles, a foot or so off the table. My wife looked greatly relieved and exchanged a tender glance with me. How tired she looked! ‘Some more people have arrived,’ she said with a pained sigh.

  ‘Yes.’ I could hear them wailing in the next room. ‘Ros’s friends mostly.’ The blood, which had before rushed to her head, now drained away, and the old pallor returned, making the bruises there seem darker. Or maybe it was just the cold light of the fluorescent lamp. ‘Listen, love, when this is all over, let’s take a few days off, have an old-fashioned holiday – we can go away somewhere, somewhere where there’s sun – even Mrs Draper said …’ She smiled faintly.

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ said Fred, rigging up a lamp with an odd-shaped bulb (‘Ultraviolet,’ he added when he saw me staring: ‘certain, um, substances usually always fluoresce …’), while his partner fiddled with a little rubber tube of some sort.

  Eileen came in for some ice: For Vic,’ she said. The bruises on her face made her seem wistful and sullen at the same time. ‘He’s just been down to the rec room, he needs a drink.’

  ‘That sonuvabitch,’ Fred muttered, touching his neckbrace, and Bob grunted: ‘Don’t worry, pardner. We’ll get him.’

  ‘Have you been up … to see Tania?’ my wife asked, as though to change the subject.

  It was strange. As I started to speak, I felt everything that had happened during the evening roll up behind me to feed my reply – and then, even before I got the words out, it faded … ‘Not … not—’

  ‘It’s like … she was trying to … to put the fire out,’ she added. I felt as though something were unfinished, like an interrupted sneeze. As though (‘Ouch!’ she cried, wincing, and I felt my own eyes screw up in sympathy) I’d been preparing all night to do something – and then forgot what it was. My wife closed her eyes for a moment while Bob put his mouth to one end of the tube. ‘It must have been happening – ngh! – all night. I don’t know why I … didn’t notice …’

  ‘Well, we all see only what we want to see …’

  ‘Maybe she just got tired of waiting,’ said Eileen wearily.

  ‘I … I let the water … out of the tub …’ Her knuckles, clenched tight, were white as burnished salt. Eileen had left. ‘If you do go up, Gerald …’ she added, then gasped and held her breath a moment, ‘could you – oh! … check on Mark? He … can’t seem to settle down.’

  ‘Of course …’ Iris Draper pushed through the dining room door now with Michelle, the chants from the other side augmenting momentarily. They seemed to be parading around the table in there. ‘It was the same day,’ Michelle was saying, ‘that Roger had that dream about the old hunchback with her drawers full of gold.’ ‘Was that a dream?’

  ‘He dropped a bag of water on Louise’s head. It …’ She gulped for air. I stared down at the bald spot on the top of Bob’s head and thought about the Inspector’s view of time and what he called – how did he put it? – the specious present …

  ‘Yes, and apparently what happened, you see, is that Ros just opened the door and stepped out.’

  ‘It … made her cry …’

  ‘Really!’ Iris exclaimed, as they stepped outside. ‘She might have been killed!’

  … The mysterious spread toward futurity …

  ‘Well, she was on acid or something …’

  ‘Perhaps, in the end, all self-gratification leads to tragedy,’ Alison’s husband murmured behind my shoulder. Fred was looking for a wall plug. ‘We’ll have to use an extension cord,’ he muttered, and Bob, peering closely at a little bottle, wiped his mouth and grunted. ‘But then, what doesn’t … ?’

  ‘It was so sad. In the old days, I’m sure … she would have laughed.’ She opened her eyes again. There were tears in them. ‘Do you remember that big jolly laugh Louise used to have … ?’

  ‘That was a long time ago.’

  ‘I don’t think you want to watch this,’ Fred said, uncoiling the cord. ‘We’ll let you know—’

  ‘No, I’m not leaving,’ I insisted, but just then Alison came through from the back, barefoot and unbuttoned, hair loose, eyes dilated from the darkness. She shot me a glance full of – love? betrayal? desire? fear? (‘And Dolph was so funny,’ my wife was saying, ‘we always had … such good times then …’) – then padded hastily on into the dining room, Noble and the man in the chalkstriped suit banging in behind her, their shirttails out: ‘Where’d she go?’ they laughed.

  ‘You must hurry!’ whispered Alison’s husband, clearly shaken (we shared this), and my wife reached out to touch my hand. ‘Yes, Gerald,’ she sighed, ‘it’s all right … you might be needed …’

  ‘I’ll – I’ll go find the Inspector!’ I declared (Noble, lumbering through the dining room door, had glanced back to smirk one-eyed at me, a streak of red down one cheek, Alison’s green tights tied round his thick neck like a superhero’s cape). ‘He’ll put a stop to this!’

  ‘Now, now,’ admonished Fred, peering round at me past his neckbrace (I was already at the door), ‘none of that … !’

  ‘Wait, Gerald!’ my wife called out faintly. ‘I nearly forgot … !’ Maybe, I was thinking, I should say something to the Inspector about Noble, the hairbrush and all that – he’s capable of anything. ‘I’ve made some nachos. They’re … they’re on a cookie tray in the oven … Could you … ?’ ‘Nachos! But—?!’

  ‘These what you’re looking for?’ Steve the plumber asked, bumping in behind me with an assortment of small red-handled pliers in his callused hands, and Bob, setting down a can of hairspray, said: ‘That’s them.’

  ‘Please, Gerald … they’ve been in there … too long already!’

  ‘I changed the washers
on the downstairs taps and reset the drum on your dryer,’ Steve said, moving over to the foot of the table, ‘but I haven’t been able to do anything yet about the stool upstairs.’

  ‘Please …’

  From this angle I couldn’t see my wife’s face – my view was blocked by Fred and Steve between her legs – but I knew she must be near to tears. I hurried over to the stove, stuffed my hands impatiently into oven mitts (Alison’s husband was chewing on his beard again), and opened the oven door. ‘Good god!’ I exclaimed as I pulled the tray of nachos out. ‘There’s a turkey in here!’

  ‘Yes … it’s from the freezer,’ she gasped. Steve looked up and said: ‘I’ve rung my partner. He’ll bring the tools we need for the biffy.’ ‘It could use another … twenty minutes or so …’

  ‘But—!’

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll watch the timer,’ Fred assured me, and went over to open the dining room door for me, seemingly eager to get me out of there. I heard the chants still, but more distantly, interspersed with waves of silence: they’d moved off to some other part of the house. ‘And don’t you be bothering the Inspector,’ he added, snatching up a couple of hot nachos and juggling them in his hands (Steve was watching closely as the tall cop plugged in his vacuum cleaner and limped toward my wife with the suction hose), then popping one in his mouth. ‘He’s got a lot on his mind right now.’

  His warning seemed almost a challenge, a dare, and as I carried the tray of nachos into the dining room (Dolph was there at the table, scraping at the remains of a bowl of moussaka, Dickie using a candle to light up a joint), I thought: It’s clear, I’ve got to meet Pardew head-on right now. In fact, hadn’t I already made this decision before coming back in from outside? ‘Dolph, could you move that bowl so I can use the hot plate?’

  ‘Hey, nachos! Your wife finally remembered us beer drinkers!’

  Across the room, Mavis, surrounded by those stragglers not interested in Quagg’s funeral parade in the next room, stretched her arms up, palms out flat, as though pressing them against some unseen wall: I sympathized with this. ‘And that’s coriander she’s traipsing through, if I’m not mistaken, and there’s sweet calamus,’ Iris Draper was saying nearby, identifying the plants in Tania’s painting for Eileen, who stood leaning against a wall, staring puffily into space. ‘And those look like jujube trees, which the ancients got mixed up with something else, and this is probably sandalwood …’ Between them, Vic, looking battered and unsteady but still strong, poured himself another drink. ‘Looks like you stepped pretty deep in the dew, Gerry,’ Dolph remarked around a mouthful of half-chewed nacho. ‘It’s halfway up your pantleg there …’