Gerald's Party

by Robert Coover

  ‘Take your tonsils out,’ Jim smiled. ‘Now just settle back …’

  ‘I haven’t seen one of these things in years,’ Woody murmured. His shorts, still on backward, bagged up oddly above his thighs.

  ‘Come, I’ll show you our guest room,’ said my wife.

  ‘When you think about it,’ Cynthia whispered, gently separating with ringed fingers Sally Ann’s spongy outer lips, ‘it’s really a kind of packaging problem.’

  ‘Though actually right now it’s being used by my mother.’

  ‘Catch you later,’ Mr Waddilow called, following my wife out, and Gottfried tucked his long bent pipe in his mouth and waved again. ‘Oh, do you have your mother staying with you?’ someone said out in the hall. ‘You’re very fortunate!’

  ‘I’m going to make a very tiny incision,’ Jim explained, and I felt her flinch again. ‘And then you can do the rest with your fingers.’

  ‘Won’t it hurt … ?’

  ‘Only a little.’ He pulled a stick of gum out of his pocket and handed it to her. ‘Here, this will take your mind off it.’

  Sally Ann lay back and unwrapped the gum, her eyes dark with worry and smeared makeup. ‘Is she no longer a virgin then?’ the cameraman asked, zooming in as Jim leaned forward.

  ‘Who can say? Technically, she’s neither one thing nor the other, but—’

  ‘Yow!!’ I cried.

  ‘Sorry, Gerry.’

  Woody cleared his throat. ‘Well, legally—’

  ‘Something stabbed me!’

  ‘I know. Here, hold this up for me, will you?’ he said to Cynthia, pincering the shaft gently between thumb and forefinger. ‘Don’t let it sag …’ Sally Ann’s jaws snapped at the gum as though trying to speed up time, and for a brief moment I felt a certain empathy with the child, roughly but intimately linked with her as I was, as though I’d been giving birth to her and the navel string had knotted up and needed cutting. Not (I shuddered, and Cynthia patted my member gently: ‘Won’t be long now …’) that the image was a comforting one.

  ‘A little more …’

  Sally Ann groaned. Her jaws were clamped now, her teeth bared, a little bubble of gum sticking up between them like a fleshy growth: she gasped as Jim broke through and the gum disappeared. ‘Oh my gosh,’ she choked, ‘I think I swallowed it!’

  ‘You’re doing fine,’ Jim said, guiding her hands down. ‘Now just take hold here and slowly stretch yourself apart …’

  ‘I thought this was supposed to be fun,’ she whimpered. Over on the couch, Daffie laughed and said: ‘You been going to the wrong church, kiddo.’

  Our midwife Cynthia, jiggling the key again, gave a quick tug and I was free, sliding out through Sally Ann’s clenched knuckles as though on rails. I fell back, struggling to unbend my legs. One of them was still tangled in my trousers: Cynthia pulled my shoe off and stripped the rest away. I stretched out, ignoring the cameraman who hovered above me, thinking: So this is what it comes to, all the artful preparations, all the garnering of experience and sensual fine-tuning, and you’re just another curiosity, a kind of decorous monster who pees on his wife’s flowers and hurts children.

  Sally Ann was crying, curled up on her side with her hands between her thighs, the cameraman moving in over her blood-streaked buttocks onto her tear-streaked face, then switching off. He unbelted the camera, took the weight off his shoulder: ‘Good show,’ he grunted, and put a lens cap on. ‘I don’t really think that’s necessary, Woody,’ Jim was saying, and Woody, holding hands with Cynthia above me, said: ‘Perhaps not, but he’s a client. I have an ethical responsibility to let him know.’

  Jim shook his head as they left, then stooped to put his gear back in the bag. ‘Here, put this between your legs,’ he said, handing Sally Ann one of our kitchen curtains. ‘If you’ll come to see me, I’ll teach you how to pass graduated heated pneumatic dilators up to half a foot or so, then you won’t have any more problems.’ Sally Ann only moaned, doubled up there in her nest of laundry and clutching the curtain to her fork like a child its security blanket, but the cameraman said: ‘I wonder if you’d look at this cut on my face, Doc.’

  ‘Hmm. I hadn’t noticed it there, under the beard. It’s quite deep—’

  ‘Yeah, stiletto heels. Very sharp.’

  ‘I think there’s some antibacterial cream in the bathroom.’

  ‘Too bad she didn’t get him in the eye,’ Daffie grumbled, as Jim led the cameraman out. ‘If it hadn’t been for him, Dickie and the others’d still be here.’ I was searching around for my clothes, but all I could find were my shirt and socks. ‘Your pants are over here, Ger.’

  I struggled to my feet and crossed the room, but my knees were so weak I could hardly walk. ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Sit down, sit down …’

  My trousers were all knotted up and inside out. It was as if someone had tried to make a cat’s cradle out of them. Just getting the underwear separated from the pants was like a Chinese puzzle. ‘Dickie’s gone then, it’s true,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah. Between the cops, the mess his pretty clothes were in, and little young bung’s maniacal old man …’ She took a pull on her cheroot and then sighed, expelling the dark smoke past my hip. Sally Ann was also beginning to stir, pushing up on one elbow to examine the curtains between her legs, the three of us alone now in the room.

  ‘Why didn’t you go along?’

  ‘He had a full load.’ So that was it then. No point in asking who he’d taken in her place. I sighed, surrendering to the inevitable as though learning a new habit. ‘Why all these preparations?’ Ros had once asked me. ‘What are we waiting for?’ I should have been listening. Sally Ann, waddling about now in her bikini underpants with extra padding in the crotch, had discovered a mirror (the frame was a cartoonish clown’s face, the mirror his laughing – or gaping – mouth: little Gerald, I thought, was with us still) and was wiping the eye paint out of her eyes with a pillowcase. ‘You wanna know the truth, Ger?’ Daffie said, her voice constricted. ‘I hate this fucking piece of meat. It makes me a lot of money, but I hate it.’ She stubbed her glowing cigar out on her pubis.

  ‘Daffie—! Hey!’ I pushed her hand away. There was a fresh pink wound just above her mound, and in the air the faint aroma of burnt hair and flesh. There were a lot of scars there, I saw. ‘I … I wondered why you never did full frontal poses,’ I said, touching them. They were glossy and unyielding, nubbly, rippling across her abdomen like faults, as though the flesh had been strip-mined. Her navel was blurred with overlaid scar tissue like the scratched-out face in Tania’s painting.

  ‘I wanna believe that the mind is something unique, Ger, that there’s something called spirit or soul in me that’s all my own and different from the body, and that someday it can somehow get out of it: it’s my main desire. And it’s all just a fucking fairy tale, isn’t it? Her old man is right. And poor dumb Roger. Body is what we got. A bag of worms …’

  Her act had sent a chill through me. It was as though she were trying to turn her flesh to stone. Tania liked to say that the idea of emptiness consoled her. Which I took as an ultimate form of madness: the mind rising to its nadir. I squeezed Daffie’s hand. ‘Maybe,’ I said, the tears starting. ‘But yours is more beautiful than most. For our sake, you should keep it that way.’

  Sally Ann, standing beside us, also had a glitter in her eyes, though maybe it was just from scrubbing the paint away. She had a patch on the thigh of her jeans now that said ‘OPEN FOR BUSINESS’ – probably she’d been saving it. ‘Thank you, Gerry,’ she said tenderly, knotting her shirttails. ‘It was beautiful. It was the most beautiful moment of my life.’ She stared charitably down at my limp organ. ‘And don’t try to explain. I understand. Honest, Gerry, I wasn’t at all disappointed, it was more than—’

  ‘It was a cheap trick, Sally Ann. I ought to tan your britches!’

  ‘Oh groan,’ she said, unwrapping another stick of gum, ‘all you dirty old men are just alike! Well, go ahead then!’ She fold
ed the gum into her mouth, switched around and arched her fanny up in front of my face: I couldn’t resist. I reared back and cracked it with all my might. She yelped in surprise, then started gagging. ‘Oh pee, Gerry!’ she wailed. ‘You made me swallow my gum again!’ She took a wild swing at me, which I parried, then she went running, bawling, out of the room. ‘Boy, that felt good!’ I said.

  Daffie laughed, then raised herself up on one elbow and picked up my penis to have a look. ‘Anyway, it hasn’t been husked.’ She slid the foreskin back with a deft finger.

  ‘Ouch!’

  ‘Oh yeah, I see. It’s all raw there under the nub as if somebody’d tried to bite the nozzle off. Well, it’s pretty, Ger, you know that, but it’s just not callused enough.’ She dropped it and pushed herself up off the couch, stood there weaving, her feet planted wide apart. I’d got one pantleg free from the shorts, but the other was bound up in some kind of hitch knot. I untied it and turned the pantlegs rightside out. ‘You got anything here I can wear? My rig’s all assed up.’

  ‘Whatever you find, help yourself.’ I pulled the shorts on, watching her stagger through the clutter (she dipped to one knee briefly, but got back up again), remembering the time we first fixed this room up as a nursery: everything in its place then like stage props. So long ago. And so much had happened. But then, I thought, recalling my wife in the doorway just now (she’d seemed her old self, hardly affected by all I’d seen her having to go through in the kitchen – that was coming back to me now, as I drew my trousers on, as though from some circuitous journey: the dark bruises on the backs of her thighs, for example, her tummy fanfolding, the faint trickle of blood radiating across her pale nether cheeks – like cracked porcelain, I’d thought at the time, overwhelmed just then by an inexpressible compassion … or at least it had seemed inexpressible, and probably it was), not so much. What had Pardew said? Change is an illusion of the human condition, something like that. The passing images our senses delivered to us on our obligatory exploration of the space–time continuum, pieced together like film frames to create the fiction of movement and change, thereby inventing motive. Like this frame in front of me now of Daffie’s internationally famous derrière, glittering with perspiration, as she bent drunkenly from the waist to muddle about in the scattered laundry: a way-station on the trajectory like any other. Just the same, I was glad not to have missed it.

  She held up a pair of my pale blue stretch denims that my wife had up here for mending. ‘These okay?’

  ‘Sure.’

  She got one foot on all right, but had trouble managing the other, stumbling and loping through the pillows and laundry until she hit a wall that propped her up. ‘Tell me something, Ger,’ she panted, ‘that was your joystick in the photos with Ros, wasn’t it?’ I nodded, feeling a prickling in my eyes again. ‘I thought I recognized it when you were outside hosing down the roses. Who took the shots?’

  ‘Some guy. We spent all afternoon at it.’ Daffie had the jeans up past her thighs but was having difficulty, in spite of the give in the material, squeezing the rest in. ‘A funny thing, there was a matinee on that afternoon, and Ros was supposed to make a final brief appearance as one of a group of resistance fighters, which she forgot about until she heard them shouting for her. She went drifting dreamily away from us and, through the wrong entrance, out onto the set, wearing luminous green paint, some feathers on her tail, and a golden crown, which of course brought the house down. Then, apropos of nothing happening on stage, she delivered her one line: ‘Follow me, brothers, we have lost the battle, but we have not lost the war!’ Daffie laughed, but she was crying too. I wiped at my own eyes with my shirtsleeves. ‘Probably her finest hour …’

  Daffie took my arm. The jeans were stretched so tightly around her hips they seemed almost to glow, but the waistband gaped above like an open barrel. ‘Come on, Ger, stop your snuffling, let’s go get juiced.’

  ‘Do you want a shirt?’

  ‘Nah, it’s too hot …’

  Earl Elstob came dragging a dazed Michelle into the room as we left it. ‘Huh!’ he slobbered, weaving a bit, his eyes crossing. ‘Yuh know how tuh – shlup! – make a gal’s eyes light up?’

  ‘Listen, Michelle,’ Daffie said, reaching for her free hand, ‘let’s go suck a turkey leg.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Michelle murmured, ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘Yeah, but come on, honey, this birdseed?’

  ‘Yuh plug her in!’ Elstob hollered, falling back against the doorjamb. Steve the plumber and some older guy, I saw, were trying to repair the door into my son’s room, watched grimly by my mother-in-law; Janny stood by, looking bored, chatting with Hoo-Sin.

  ‘I know how he feels,’ Michelle said gently. ‘I had a dream once that I had teeth like that in my vagina.’ Hoo-Sin was sweeping her hands about as though describing a vast space: ‘In the West you think of it as a river, but in the East it is a placid silent pool,’ she said. Mark seemed to have settled down at last. ‘Everybody laughed at me and pushed awful things up me to watch me chew. My Daddy took me to an orthodontist, but when he pointed to the problem, I ate my Daddy’s finger off.’ She sighed. ‘Yuh huh huh!’ Earl snorted, slapping his knee, and Janny said: ‘I guess I mostly think of it as a leaky faucet.’ ‘After that, the teeth weren’t there anymore, it was a different dream …’

  ‘Hey – huh! – yuh know what a bedspring is?’

  ‘Spare me!’ begged Daffie, pulling me toward the stairs, where we nearly crashed into our new neighbor, Mrs Waddilow, stumbling pale-faced out of the bathroom, her eyes popping from their sockets: ‘For the love of God, why didn’t somebody tell me—?!’ she croaked, and went clambering weak-kneed down the stairs ahead of us. ‘I know what a buzz you get outa your wonky guest lists, Ger, but where’d you ever dig up that squirrelly suck-egg?’

  ‘Charley brought him …’

  The porch door flew open at the foot of the stairs and in strode Benedetto and four or five friends, all dressed up still in their Renaissance theater costumes. Discovering me on the landing, Beni flung his arms wide and cried: ‘Sir! What sort of affair is this? There’s a body out there in the bushes!’

  ‘What—?’

  Daffie seemed to stumble and she clutched my arm. ‘Was he … dressed in white?’

  ‘Madame, I am not even certain it was a he! Which is not, I hasten to add, a present dilemma … !’ He twirled the tip of his false moustache, ogling her bosom grandly, then swept off his plumed hat and bowed.

  ‘I’ll give him a call,’ I said, pulling away. Hilario, standing at the foot with two drinks in his hands – a highball and what looked like dregs from the bottom of a mop bucket – said: ‘Beni, you haff see anytheeng yet, I theenk!’

  I remembered a play I’d seen, Ros wasn’t in it, in which the actors, once on stage – it was ostensibly some sort of conventional drawing-room comedy – couldn’t seem to get off again. The old pros in the cast had tried to carry on, but the stage had soon got jammed up with bit actors – messengers, butlers, maids and the like – who, trapped and without lines, had become increasingly panic-stricken. In the commotion, the principal actors had got pushed upstage and out of sight, only a few scattered lines coming through as testimony to their professionalism. Some had tried to save the show, some each other, most just themselves. It was intended to produce a kind of gathering terror, but though I hadn’t felt it then (a stage is finally just a stage), I was suddenly feeling it now.

  I dialed the number, turned to Daffie, who’d been stopped by Hilario: ‘I cannot find peenk, so I meex violent and green – hokay?’

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Benedetto!’ cried Quagg, brushing past me, his cape flying.

  ‘Zachariah! My friend!’

  ‘Hello? Is that you, Dickie?’ Daffie, without looking at the drink, tossed half of it back – then, wheezing, held it out at arm’s length, bugging her eyes at it. Zack was carrying on noisily about the act he was getting up (‘We got this wild frame, man, about a j
ealous old hag who spooked Roger and cast a spell on Ros – a kind of fairy godmother, ancient sex queen, and death-demon all in one, see …’), Beni approving exclamatorily and booming out introductions, while behind me people were clambering up and down the cellar stairs, or coming in from the backyard, there was music pouring out of the living room – I couldn’t hear a thing. ‘Dickie—?’

  ‘Who is this? Ger?’

  ‘Benedetto!’ cried Regina, sweeping past.

  ‘Dickie! Are you all right?’ I shouted. Daffie, her damp breasts drooping with relief, slumped back against the stairway and, wrinkling her nose up (‘Regina! My little dumpling!’), carried on with her drinking.

  ‘Hell, I dunno, I think I drank too much. Listen, Ger, call me in the morning when I’m feeling better, okay?’

  ‘Ach! Regina!’

  ‘Olga!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Dickie, there’s a … a body outside – and we thought—’

  ‘Yeah, I saw it. Hey, what did you do to my little Nay, Ger?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I glanced at the traffic on the basement stairs. Noble came up holding his crotch, his good eye dilated from the dark, the mock one apparently having fallen out. ‘Christ!’ he groaned happily, ‘I think my goddamn balls are turning blue!’ He was wearing my new herringbone shirt – I hadn’t even taken the pins out yet; it was stretched out of shape and already sweaty in the armpits. I turned away.

  ‘Well, she’s over the moon, Ger, you’re all she talks about.’

  ‘She’s there with you?’ Vic had appeared in the living room doorway, looking rumpled and tired, ready to go home probably. The song on the hi-fi was a melancholic old showtune, ‘It’s All Happened Before,’ a song from one of Ros’s plays, The Lover’s Lexicon.