Gerald's Party

by Robert Coover

  ‘They were probably looking for something. It’s part of their job.’

  ‘Are they the ones who broke my soldiers?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Crawl in here now, it’s late and Grandma’s getting upset.’

  ‘Not without Peedie! I can’t sleep without Peedie!’

  I knew this. He curled round it and put his finger in a hole he’d dug. We had to take the rabbit everywhere we went. ‘Maybe if I told you a story …’

  ‘Gramma already told me one. About a bad man who cut ladies’ heads off. Daddy, what’s “happy the other laughter”?’

  ‘Happily ever after? Nothing, just a way to end a story.’

  ‘Why don’t they just say “the end”?’

  ‘Sometimes they do.’

  ‘Or “hugs and kisses,” like on a letter?’

  I smiled. His grandmother began working on his paint job with the washcloth, and he screwed his face up in disgust: ‘Oww!’ My grandmother used to sign her letters: ‘Please don’t forget me.’ My father: ‘Be brave.’ My mother never wrote. ‘What’s a French letter, Daddy?’

  ‘I suppose, uh, that’s a letter from France.’

  ‘No, it isn’t, it’s a balloon. That girl told me.’

  ‘Well, all right, a balloon.’ I gazed down at him as he sucked his thumb there on the pillow (his grandmother had retired to her rocking chair and was staring furiously at the blank screen of the drawn window shade), recalling a young girl I’d known in Schleswig-Holstein, an afternoon in a wildlife preserve, lying naked in the tall grass out of sight, more or less out of sight (what did it matter, we were young and one with the wildness around us, flesh then was truth, this was a long time ago), teaching each other all the sex words of our respective languages. That day, I’d lost my condom inside her, and she’d exclaimed irritably, fishing for it: ‘Ach, die miserable Franch Post! Fot can you hexpect?’ ‘Well, anyway the delivery’s been made,’ I’d muttered lamely, feeling guilty (the truth of flesh is complex and disturbing and never quite enough, that beautiful oneness with nature ultimately a bed with stones and ants that bit: perhaps, there in the sun, I was beginning to think about this), and she’d shot back: ‘Ja, gut, only zo zere ist no postage due!’

  ‘But it isn’t, is it, Daddy? Ever …’

  ‘What’s that, son?’ As he sucked, he pulled his nose down with his index finger.

  ‘The end.’

  I hesitated. There was such a sadness in his little eyes, his stretched-down nose. I wanted to relieve it with a little joke, but I couldn’t demean his question, even though it meant, I knew, a kind of betrayal. His eyes seemed to widen, then they went dull. ‘Ask Mommy to come up and kiss me good night,’ he said around his thumb.

  ‘Well, she’s … busy, but she’ll—’

  ‘Now,’ said my mother-in-law coldly from her chair.

  ‘Yes, right now, Daddy,’ Mark repeated.

  ‘Of course.’ I could understand her feelings – I hated the police, after all, even more than she hated my guests – but it seemed to me that her expectations of me were not all that different from Mark’s: I’d become in her eyes, as I was naturally in his, a kind of generalized cause.

  ‘And get my Peedie!’

  The sewing room as I passed it was darkened, the door half-closed. ‘Hold on to it!’ someone gasped from behind the door – or ‘to her’ – and there was a muffled sound as though someone were struggling. I stopped short. But then I caught a glimpse of my mother-in-law out of her chair and watching me sternly from Mark’s doorway. ‘I’ll be right back!’ I said to her – and to anyone else who might be listening – and as though in reply, someone whispered from in there: ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’

  In front of the mirror at the foot of the stairs (on the landing, Wilma, showing Teresa Tania’s painting, said: ‘Well, as you can see, she never really tried to flatter herself – but I do think she always looked better with her clothes on …’), Jim was treating Eileen’s left eye, which, puffy and red, now matched the right. ‘Not again!’ I exclaimed, stepping down, and Jim shrugged. ‘She told Vic he was nothing but a utopian sentimentalist, something like that, and he proved it by belting her one.’

  ‘My father’s out of control,’ Sally Ann said, then smiled up at me, her throat coloring.

  ‘It’s going to get worse,’ Eileen muttered. Nearby, Ginger was diapering herself in Pardew’s silk scarf, pinning it front and back to a kind of serape she’d fashioned out of what remained of her kerchiefs. ‘I tried to tell him, to get him to go before it’s too late, but he won’t listen.’

  ‘Mmm. By the way, I tried in the kitchen,’ Jim remarked, glancing up at me, ‘but they won’t listen either.’

  ‘I know. I’ve had enough. I’m going to do something about it right now.’

  ‘If you need any help …’

  ‘Thanks, Jim. I’ll let you know.’

  Ginger, Pardew’s fedora perched on her wiry pigtails, her fingertips at the brim to keep it from falling off, went tottering into the front room on her high red heels, watched leeringly by Vachel the dwarf. Vachel was chewing a fat black cigar nearly as big as he was. ‘Gudjus!’ he piped.

  ‘God! it’s awful!’ Brenda was saying. She was nearly crying. She and Fats had apparently just come up from the basement. They were leaning on each other and Fats was blinking still in the bright light of the hallway. ‘Just look, Gerry!’ She showed me a photograph: it was Ros on her hands and knees, looking over her shoulder at her raised bum – or rather, not a bum at all, but a rich banker, a snowman capitalist with greedy black-button eyes on each pale cheek, a carrot-nose stuck in her anus, top hat perched on top, and a wet bearded mouth about to ingest a shining gold rod. The photograph was full of holes. ‘They’ve been throwing darts at it, Gerry! Who’d ever do such a thing?’

  ‘It’s somethin’ else down there, man!’ said Fats, wiping his face with a big bandanna.

  Daffie, wandering in from the back with a somewhat dazed Anatole, guiding him toward the stairs, took the photo away and said: ‘That popsicle looks familiar – I think I’ve seen one somewhere just like it.’ She winked at me drunkenly and immediately, as though cued, the telephone rang. I turned to answer it and nearly bumped into Louise, moving heavily toward the back of the house with a fresh bathtowel. Her glance was withering. ‘Have you been out on the mall communing with nature, sweetie?’ Brenda asked, making Anatole blush, and the actor who played the wooden soldier in the toyland melo picked up the phone and said: ‘Hullo? No, Horner’s the name.’

  ‘If it’s a man, it’s for me,’ called Peg’s sister Teresa, leaning over the railing.

  ‘No, there’s nobody here named Gerald, fuckface – you must have the wrong number.’ ‘Wait—!’ But he’d already hung up. ‘I could tell right away that shit-for-brains didn’t have your class, baby!’ he said, grinning at Teresa, who, as though in reflex, pushed one knee through the railings (‘I – I’ve already been,’ Anatole was stammering as Brenda hooked her arm in his: ‘Well, you can help me, honey …’), and in the dining room there was a burst of applause.

  But then I saw her, free at last, in by the table with Janny Trainer and Hoo-Sin—

  ‘Hey!’ I exclaimed softly, hugging her from behind.

  ‘Why, Gerry, what a nice surprise!’ It was Knud’s wife Kitty, her mouth packed with bread and salami.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry – I thought it was my wife … !’

  ‘What’s to be sorry?’ she laughed, spewing food. ‘Oops! See how excited you got me?’ She wiped her chin with a cocktail napkin, examined her front. Though my wife had a dress something like that and they were both about the same size, I was nevertheless amazed that I could have confused the two of them. Alison was gone, as I’d known she would be – Mavis, seated now in a captain’s chair, was surrounded mostly by women. Only Talbot was there among them, his ear bandage dirty and unraveling now like some kind of primitive headdress. ‘I borrowed some of your wife’s clothes, I hope she won’t mind, m
ine were all …’ Kitty’s chirpy manner faded. She swallowed. ‘Once, at a party, when he was, you know, in one of his moods,’ she said, staring off at Mavis (Janny sighed, Hoo-Sin nodded, Brenda came through from the front, popping gum, a reluctant Anatole in tow), ‘I tried to cheer him up by saying, “Relax, Roger, it’s all just a game, what the hell.” Without taking his eyes off me, Gerry, he bit right through the glass he was drinking from and started chewing up the pieces – God! I nearly fainted!’

  ‘When the lotus blooms in the midst of a fire, it is never destroyed,’ Hoo-Sin said solemnly.

  ‘Oh no!’ cried Janny. Brenda and Anatole, trying to push out through the kitchen door, had got stopped by someone trying to push in (‘But I’m in a bigger hurry than you are!’ Brenda laughed, shouting through the door). ‘Don’t tell me there’s going to be a fire!’

  ‘Only in my heart,’ crooned Fats, putting his arms around them both: Hoo-Sin elbowed him sharply in the gut and he backed off goggle-eyed and wheezing, bumping into Hilario, just emerging from the TV room, who exclaimed: ‘Eh! Fats! You muss learn to not fock yourself aroun’ weeth the moveeng force off nature!’

  As Brenda got her way and, laughing, dragged Anatole on through to the kitchen (‘I think Uncle Howard needs me!’ he was pleading, trying to hang back), I felt suddenly overtaken by a terrible sadness – I don’t know what it was that brought it on, that image of Roger chewing glass maybe, or Hoo-Sin knocking the wind out of Fats, or perhaps it was just an accumulation of everything that had happened all night, Ros and Roger, Eileen, Tania kneeling at the tub with pink soap scum up to her elbows, the police and all their gear and Ros’s rolled-down stockings, my wife boiling eggs, all these people, my torn-up study, the food mashed in the carpet, the mess in the rec room, the look on Yvonne’s face as she vanished through the front door or on my son’s face just now when I left him or on Daffie’s right this minute – whatever it was, it stopped me cold for a moment, such that when Woody came in from the kitchen with Cynthia (‘Technically maybe,’ she was saying, fingering her medallion at the cross-strap of her bra, ‘but, I don’t know, somehow it just doesn’t seem—’), a sudden look of concern crossed his face and he interrupted her to ask: ‘Is everything all right, Gerry?’

  ‘You know it’s not,’ I said, my voice catching. ‘You know what they’re doing.’ The door behind him was moving still, chafing subtly the doorjamb. ‘Can you help?’

  He observed me closely, one hand gripping a strap of his ribbed undershirt. His counselor’s deadpan calm returned. ‘Sure, Gerry. I can at least try. Don’t worry, there are laws, precedents – things will work out. Why don’t you get Cynthia a drink meanwhile?’

  ‘Yes, you’ve been neglecting me,’ she said, gazing at me with that same worried look she’d been giving Yvonne earlier. She took my arm and led me like an invalid toward the sideboard. ‘What was that special drink you fixed for me earlier tonight?’

  ‘An old-fashioned, I think.’

  ‘No, it had gin in it. It was a funny color.’ Fats, with a pained grin on his face, was moving in on Hoo-Sin once more, Hilario cautioning him from the sidelines: ‘Theenk two times wut you do, my frien’.’

  ‘A blue moon?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  People seemed to be drifting about without focus. We pushed through them. It was like happy hour back at the ski lodge. Maybe the last play in the world would be like this: an endless intermission. Above us, Susanna stepped out into nothing. No, I was mistaken: there were no gold loops in her ears.

  ‘All we got is love, baby, in this crazy mazy world,’ Fats rumbled at Hoo-Sin’s back, doing a hopeful little shuffle, and Kitty, joining the crowd gathering now around Mavis (Michelle glanced back over her shoulder at me: the resemblance was still there but she and Susanna had grown apart, the one toward mystery, or the fear of it, the other toward sorrow), said: ‘Tell us again, Mavis, about how you first met Ros …’ We ducked as Fats arched slowly, almost gracefully, into the air over Hoo-Sin and crashed to the floor behind us, and I thought (‘Are those back in fashion?’ Iris Draper inquired, bending down and adjusting her spectacles. ‘I wonder if I threw all mine away … ?’), Vic was right, who was I to mix drinks and answer doorbells? I wished I could just go home.

  ‘I know,’ Cynthia said, patting my arm with a ring-laden hand. Had I been talking out loud? ‘We all feel that way sometimes.’

  ‘It all began one day when Jim was called to an orphanage to deal with a peculiar medical emergency,’ Mavis said in a hollow portentous tone, and Iris, turning away, whispered: ‘Ah! I don’t want to miss this!’ I dug out the crème Yvette, checked the ice bucket: three cubes, a puddle of discolored water, some soggy cigarette butts … and the wooden-handled pick. ‘He was often called in, of course, for circumcisions, hot douches, infibulations, and the like, when the girls reached puberty, but in this case the child was only ten years old – yet so precocious that they had already lost, through scandal, three tutors, a handyman, and two members of the board of trustees. As for the other girls …’

  ‘Here,’ I said, straining the drink into a cocktail glass and handing it to her. My hand was shaking. I glanced past her shoulder, creased by its heavy strap, into the TV room, where Charley had Steve the plumber in a huddle, apparently trying to sell him something. The Inspector stood just behind them, watching the television, his back to the door. Well, I thought, if things seemed out of focus, I could do something about it. I reached into the ice bucket for the pick. The handle felt worn and comfortable in my grip. ‘Now if you don’t mind, my son asked me …’

  ‘I’ll go in with you.’ She didn’t seem to want to let go of me.

  Charley passed us in the doorway, giving the thumbs-up sign. ‘I may get group outa this,’ he growled happily, ‘if I c’n juss fine – hah, there she is!’

  As though this were an announcement, Pardew turned around and said: ‘Good, our engineer! Perhaps she can help!’

  Steve was squatting behind the TV set once again, assisting the bearded technician. Images were flickering intermittently on the screen, and sometimes in montage, as though the switching cables had somehow fused. ‘Such commotions had a way of flarin’ up at public executions in olden times – and recent ones, too, y’know,’ Lloyd Draper remarked, peering down his nose at the set (I caught fleeting glimpses there of the back of Jim’s head, Noble doing an obscene handkerchief trick, Fats on the floor, the stopped-up toilet, Elstob yipping and snorting, Mee testing a razorblade across the palm of his hand, a patch on Sally Ann’s fly that said ‘OPEN CAREFULLY AND INSERT TAB HERE,’ Horner with her, getting a message in his ear, someone’s fist in a bowl of peanuts, bright lights, out of focus), and Pardew said: ‘I know. Contagious hysteroid reactions of this sort are typical wherever masses are assembled – it’s an imitative ritualization of the bizarre and hallucinatory tendencies of the odd few, and always, I’ve noted, with a tinge of the burlesque. Frankly, it’s the sort of thing I see too much of.’ Patrick, not far from the Inspector’s elbow, gave a sympathetic little sigh.

  ‘I think we’ve got it now,’ Cynthia said, detaching some cables, plugging in others. The image had stabilized on Mavis (‘ – determined that it was best for all concerned to bring the child home to live with my husband and me for a while,’ she was saying into the camera, her gaze intent yet misty, ‘in order to keep her under daily observation, and perhaps to assist her – through close personal guidance and a more precise education – to transcend her singular and somewhat—’) and they switched it now to Quagg, being interviewed, or perhaps interviewing himself.

  ‘Okay,’ said the technician, crawling out from behind the set, adjusting slightly the color. ‘I’ll go pick up the camera.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Quagg was saying, ‘Ros had just got the lead in our new feature spasm, Socialist Head. It’s a radical and theatrically mind-blowing miracle play that examines the modes and variations of oral sex in a revolutionary society – dynamite stuff really, and of course Ros
was like handmade for the part. Howzat? Something special? You betcher ass, baby! We’d really hoped to hit the nut on this one, get our tokus outa the tub, but now … with poor Ros on ice …’ His voice broke. ‘Aw shit …’

  As the camera, hand-held, began to move away from Zack past Vic and Daffie, Eileen, Scarborough in a gloomy hangdog slump, Alison’s husband, the crowd around Mavis (‘ – but little did we imagine –’ I heard her say), and on out into the hall, where Horner and the man in the chalkstriped suit could be seen racing each other for the basement stairs, Teresa peeking into the downstairs toilet (the camera seemed to be headed either out or up: now the front door came into view), the Inspector, clutching my son’s stuffed rabbit in his arms, his finger in its hole, continued his angry harangue about what he called ‘this compulsive attraction for the new, for sensations, thrills, overloaded circuits, the human imagination unchecked by the proper and necessary intervention of sober critical faculties, and so laid open to all manner of excess and delirium.’ Patrick punctuated this monologue with his infatuated yeasaying (‘Oh yes! Absolutely! Dreadful! Utterly insane!’ – his split lip had made his lisp worse), all the while trying to touch the bunny in Pardew’s arms. Staring at the glass eyes of the stuffed bunny, I seemed to see my mother-in-law’s stern demanding gaze. Right now, she’d said. I cleared my throat. ‘Excuse me, Inspector, I—’

  ‘Sshh!’ Pardew hissed, squinting at the set, and Patrick snapped: ‘Yes, Gerald, don’t interrupt!’

  ‘But you must – the police – your two officers – in the kitchen, my—!’

  ‘Not now, damn you!’

  ‘But—!’ My throat was all knotted up, I could hardly speak. ‘My son needs her! It’s not fair!’ I might as well have been shouting into the wind. I held up the ice pick in my trembling fist: ‘Look!’ Cynthia glanced up in alarm. ‘Here’s what you’ve been—!’

  ‘There! You see?!’ Pardew was pointing excitedly at the TV, where Ginger, seemingly in a state of shock, her pigtails collapsed, wavered at the top of the stairs. ‘Who was that man with her just then?’ ‘I didn’t see, we’ll get it on playback …’ Clutching a kerchief to her mouth and a hand to her bared breast, she wobbled forward, but as if unaware of the stairs in front of her: she hovered there a moment with one foot out in space like a divining rod, then came down hard, striking the edge of the first step with her thin stiletto heel, her ankle warping, knee buckling, and down she pitched, looping arse over elbow, kerchiefs flying, limbs outflung in all directions, all of it slowed down and thus mockingly balletic in its effects, like someone tumbling on the moon. ‘A redhead! Of course … !’ Somehow she hit the landing on her feet, sinking softly into a kind of frog squat, her back to the camera, which was slowly zooming in – but not for long: her narrow bottom bounced in slow motion off the floor like the head of a twin-peened hammer and she began to rise again, floating up into space once more, arcing head-first and heels high toward the camera. ‘It should have been obvious to me!’