Gerald's Party

by Robert Coover

  ‘Yeah, well, I admit I’m only second best. You’ve got the touch, Ger – she’s taken a real shine to you, as you might say.’ It was a relief to know she was all right. What had I been thinking? ‘I don’t know if it’s over,’ the vocalist was singing, ‘or if it’s just begun …’ Quagg had found Alison’s husband somewhere and now dragged him over to meet the newcomers. One of the women kissed him. Benedetto gave him a big hug and planted his floppy wide-brimmed hat on his head. He flushed and, pulling on his beard, grinned sheepishly underneath it. Vic watched benignly, seeming to hover at some empyrean remove. I felt his detachment like a kind of balm and began, myself (‘… but tonight,’ came the song, ‘you’re the only one …’), to disengage. After all, I thought, what else was there to do? ‘She says you’re the kindest sweetest man she’s ever known.’

  ‘All I did was oil her behind, Dickie.’

  ‘Well, you know what they say in showbiz, Ger, it’s not the egg—’

  ‘I know …’ It’s how you lay it. Or crack it. But sometimes, as my wife would say (‘It’s how you scramble it,’ Dickie was saying distantly, not to me but, off-mike as it were, to someone there in the room with him), it is the egg. Woody had joined Vic in the living room doorway, watching me over Vic’s shoulder. I smiled and nodded, but he didn’t return it. Vic was toying wistfully with a fork in his hand, looking as resigned and serene as I’d seen him all night. I remembered something he’d told me about so-called ‘waves of silence’ in the brain – perceived by some apparently as a kind of local conspiracy at the cellular level to shut down briefly and rest up – which he’d denounced as an example of ‘ideological biology,’ but which I saw, having more faith in chemistry than in will, as fundamentally applicable to all behavior, human and otherwise. I felt momentarily suspended in such a wave right now, in fact, as though this quiescent mood were not in me but in the hall itself, maybe the whole house, a conspiratorial nourishing, as it were, of the appetite for tranquility.

  ‘Hold on a sec, Ger! I got another beautiful lady here who wants to say hello!’ I could hear her shushing him. I’d supposed he’d have to rub it in. Her husband, Benedetto’s plumed hat down around his ears and a look of flushed infatuation on his face, was now preening for Quagg, who was peering at him through a circle of thumb and index finger as though giving him a screen test. I saw this as though peering through a lens myself, as though watching it on an editing table or in some darkened theater. ‘So, for the skeet, we use the faht lady, no?’ ‘She’s been holding out on us, Ger.’

  ‘The Arctic explorer? Nah, she’s in there purring like a cat, Hilly, but we can work in her crazy story – a kind of initiation bit, the sacred cave—’

  ‘She’s terrific …’

  ‘I’m sure,’ I said and swallowed. ‘Sacred cave?’ her husband asked from under the brim of Beni’s hat. He didn’t seem to know. Or if he did, he accepted it. Maybe I wasn’t the only one he’d struck a deal with. My head was starting to ache. ‘Yeah, it’s a symbol for the unconscious,’ Quagg was explaining to him. He looked pained. ‘You know, where all the action takes place.’ I closed my eyes. ‘Give her … my love,’ I whispered, remembering something she’d said that night we met: beauty in the theater is not a question of language or action, she’d insisted (I’d tried to argue it was a balance of both), but of the hidden voice and the mysterious illusion of crossed destinies. Yes (I opened my eyes), I could see that … Vic, his gray head tilted toward Woody (he was still peering at me, past Vic’s hunched shoulder), seemed to be boiling up again: perhaps the wave was passing. I turned to look into the dining room (‘You won’t believe what she’s got tattooed on her handsome little ass, Ger!’), but caught a glimpse of (‘What?!’ Vic roared – ‘With Sally Ann—?!’) Horner, mouth agape, eyes startled: ‘Duck!’ he yelped.

  ‘You! You goddamn traitorous sonuvabitch – YOU were the one!’

  I whirled around just in time to see Vic lunging toward me, a terrible look on his ravaged face I’d never seen before, not frontally like this, his bloodshot eyes ablaze, lips drawn back, fist clenched around the fork, raised to strike – ‘Vic! Wait—!’

  Two shots rang out, something hit me in the shoulder, there was a shriek and a tumble, people falling all around me – Vic slumped to one knee, a look of awe and wonder erasing his rage, then pitched forward and fell into my arms. The tall cop, Bob, crouched in the living room doorway (Woody had vanished), the smoking barrel of his revolver staring me in the face. ‘Oh my god! Vic—!’

  I felt something warm and wet on my hands. Vic groaned, his shaggy head heavy on my chest. The cop limped toward us, keeping his gun on him. ‘What have you done—?’, I cried.

  ‘He was going for you, so I shot him.’

  ‘But – he was my best friend!’ The cop grabbed Vic by the collar, threw him backward to the floor. There was a big hole in his chest. ‘All he had was a damned fork!’ I was nearly screaming.

  ‘I missed him once – this time I made fucking sure.’ He kicked Vic but got no response. Vic was breathing in short gasps, his eyelids fluttering.

  The others started picking themselves up. ‘What happened?’ asked Teresa, coming in from the dining room with a dessert plate heaped with turkey stuffing, cheese balls, and pickles. I stared at my bloody hands, my eyes watering, then knelt by Vic. It had all happened so fast … ‘Hey, old man … ?’ There was no reply: his head lolled, his mouth gaped. ‘So that’s it,’ Eileen said stonily, standing framed in the living room doorway. ‘I knew it’d end like this.’ Perhaps she had known. I recalled her oracle on the toilet and even before that I remembered thinking, when she was lying on the couch in the living room, Vic having just struck her, that she had glimpsed something that none of the rest of us were aware of yet. Maybe Vic had seen it, too, and had merely been swinging blindly at a truth that enraged him. ‘I tried to warn him, and the sonuvabitch beat me up.’

  Cynthia eased past her, squatted by Vic (‘You can come on back now, tiger,’ Daffie was saying, having picked up the fallen phone receiver, ‘they just shot that little girl’s old man …’), touched his throat. This seemed to help for some reason: he closed his mouth, blinked, tried to focus. When he saw me, a pained look crossed his face, then faded. ‘Get Sally Ann …’ he whispered.

  ‘Sure, Vic, but—’

  ‘And a drink.’

  ‘Listen, I’m sorry, but—’

  ‘Fuck sorry! Get me a goddamn drink!’ he croaked.

  ‘Vic—?’

  ‘He won’t listen to you,’ Eileen said dully. The others watched us now at a distance, keeping a wary eye at the same time on the cop, who was reloading his revolver. ‘He’s a smart guy. He knows it all.’

  ‘I’ll get him something,’ Teresa offered, sucking a pickle. ‘What’s his—?’

  ‘Bourbon.’

  ‘The kid? Nah, last I saw, that chirpy fatassed welfare worker was taking him out on the back patch to get his stake tolled,’ said Daffie glumly on the phone. ‘I’ve had nothing but the goddamn losers, Dickie, I don’t like it here.’

  ‘Where the hell am I?’ Vic wheezed. He groped weakly for his chest as though looking for something in his pocket there.

  ‘You’re at my house, Vic. A party—’

  ‘Jesus Christ! I’m bleeding! Oh, shit, Gerry! What have you done … ?’

  ‘Hey, maybe we can work this in,’ mused Quagg, squinting down at Vic, as he slumped there against Cynthia (‘Well, who knows … maybe it’s the – gasp! – the way I wanted it …’), clutching his wound. ‘I like the fast action!’ Malcolm Mee, who’d joined him, nodded, then mimed the draw. ‘Right! Blue lightning, man!’ laughed Quagg.

  ‘Yeah, well, when you’re done, you can kiss mine,’ Daffie mumbled tearfully, and banged the receiver in its cradle.

  ‘Only maybe the guy who gets his lights blown out is the one playing Roger on the stage, and it’s Roger himself, out in the audience, who does the shooting!’

  ‘Roger’s dead, Zack.’

 
‘Listen, I know, you think I’m crazy? I’m talking about the play, man!’

  ‘Roger—?’

  ‘It’s been a long night, Prissy Loo.’

  Teresa returned with a tumbler of iced bourbon. ‘Here,’ she said and, bending over, spilled her plate of food in Vic’s lap. ‘Oops! Darn, that’s all the stuffing there was left!’

  Cynthia took the glass and held it to his lips – he slurped at it greedily, choking and spluttering, then knocked it to the floor; it rolled across the hall, the ice cubes scattering like thrown dice.

  ‘Hey,’ warned Bob, waggling his revolver.

  ‘Do you mind?’ asked Teresa, picking the food off his lap with her fingers and eating it. ‘It’s a shame to waste it.’

  ‘The way I see it, we got Ros playing herself – we use the corpse, I mean – but the rest of the cast interacts with it like she’s alive, you dig? The trick being to make the audience get the sense she really is alive!’

  Vic peered up at us under his shaggy gray brows, his eyes crossing. ‘Another one!’ he demanded, and broke into a fit of coughing.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ Regina objected. ‘It’s like abusing the dead or something.’

  ‘I think he’s going …’

  ‘We’re not abusing Ros, baby, we’re abusing death itself through Ros – really, it’s an affirmation!’

  ‘I dunno, Zack, somehow it’s like that time you pulled that onstage autopsy—’

  ‘He needs help,’ said Cynthia. ‘Is that doctor—?’

  Bob twirled the revolver on his index finger (‘But that was beautiful, Vadge!’), slapped it into the holster. ‘I think I seen him in the kitchen.’

  ‘Yeah, if you could stop from throwing up.’

  ‘I’ll get him,’ I said.

  Before I could reach the kitchen door, though (‘Say, where’s that sewer hog?’ Quagg turned to ask as I passed him. ‘We could use him as an extra grip to help the Scar.’ ‘There’s two of ’em here now, Zack,’ said Horner, ‘him and his partner …’), Talbot, Dolph, and the guy in the chalkstriped suit came whooping and hallooing through it, bearing Anatole on their shoulders. ‘Ta-DAHH!’ they cried. Anatole, half-dressed and grinning sheepishly, begged to be put down, but his porters only hooted the louder, parading him around the room, getting everyone to clap and join in on a chorus of ‘Pop! Goes the Weasel!’ The door whumped open behind them and Brenda came streaking through, holding her red pants in front of her face – ‘Hip hip HIP!’ they shouted – and I slipped through behind her.

  Jim was at the kitchen stove, sterilizing a needle in what looked like a sardine can. ‘Jim!’ I cried. The room had dimmed, things had been put away, a kind of calm had descended here. Or been imposed. But I did not feel calm. I made it to the butcherblock and leaned against it. Fred, the short cop, sat in his shirtsleeves and neckbrace at the breakfast bench, eating sausage with chilled vodka from the fridge, my wife on a chair nearby sewing the brass button on his coat. There was something incongruously domestic, almost emblematic, about the three of them – cooking, sewing, eating there in the stillness, the subdued light; behind me the others reveled as though at some other party. ‘It’s Vic! He’s been shot!’

  ‘All right,’ he said wearily. ‘Won’t be a minute.’

  ‘It’s urgent, Jim!’ I held up my bloody hands.

  He glanced over at me. ‘Yes, I know, it’s always – say, what’s the matter with your shoulder?’

  My wife looked up in alarm. ‘It’s nothing, a scratch—’

  ‘Come here, let me take a look at it.’

  The other policeman stuck his head in the door behind me. ‘Got him, Fred.’

  ‘Yeah, thanks, I just heard.’

  ‘Looks like you’ve been grazed by a bullet. Were you near Vic when—?’

  ‘Yes, I was on the phone, but—!’

  ‘Mmm. That explains it.’ He turned the fire off under the needle, knelt to search through the black bag at his feet. ‘Do you need help, Jim?’ my wife asked.

  ‘No …’

  ‘I do wish people wouldn’t use guns in the house.’ There was a tremor in her voice.

  ‘Vic’s been hit bad, Jim. I think you ought to—’

  ‘First things first, Gerry. That’s not a serious wound, but it should be cleaned up right away.’ He came up with a bottle of iodine, a swab, and some bandages, and set them on the stove, then went to the sink and rinsed a gray dishrag out under hot water.

  ‘If I had my way, I’d outlaw the things, ma’am,’ said Fred around a mouthful of garlic sausage, ‘but you might as well outlaw eating and sh – uh, shaving.’ Louise stepped out from a dark corner – I hadn’t noticed her there before – and, as though pursued, rushed on out of the room, watched sorrowfully by my wife. Fred washed the sausage down with vodka. ‘I hope I didn’t say nothing—’

  ‘No …’

  ‘Now let’s see what we’ve got here,’ said Jim, ripping my shirt away from the wound. ‘This may sting a bit …’

  ‘Yes – OW!’

  ‘He’s such a baby,’ my wife smiled. This was true. I dreaded the iodine to come more than being shot again – just the gritty dishrag was bringing tears to my eyes.

  ‘A millimeter more,’ Jim said, the gray lock flopping over his brow, ‘and you might have lost some bone.’

  ‘You gave me a button like this once, Gerald. Do you remember?’

  ‘No …’ Instead I remembered, for some reason, Naomi bent over the toilet, Dickie looking frazzled, Tania saying something (and there was this strange sensation of having just completed some kind of antiphonal figure, like a round of passed bids: echoes as it were of those shots still ringing in my ears) about cowardice and hysteria. Maybe it was the musty-smelling rag in Jim’s hand …

  ‘You know, you should stop worrying about others so much, Gerry,’ he counseled now, ‘and start thinking a little about yourself for a change.’

  ‘My wages, you said.’ She turned to Fred. ‘He said if I gave him a good time I’d get a second one.’ She sighed. ‘But I never did.’

  Fred chuckled, winking at me. Jim dipped the swab in the iodine. ‘He got it in the chest, Jim. At least twice. I really think you ought to – YOW!’

  ‘My goodness, Gerald – you’re worse than Mark when he’s having a sliver out!’

  ‘Don’t let him fool you, he’s braver than you think, ma’am,’ said Fred with another wink.

  ‘Come on, Jim, that’s enough!’

  ‘Easy! A little more …’

  ‘Did you see the look on Cyril’s face when Peg told him she was leaving him?’ my wife asked as though to distract me.

  ‘I don’t know if I’ve seen them all night,’ I gasped, and Jim said: ‘You’re kidding! Not Cyril and Peg—?!’

  ‘Yes, I don’t understand it at all, do you, Gerald?’

  ‘What? No! Yes! Ow! I’m not sure!’

  ‘What are you trying to say, Gerald?’

  ‘I think Tania told me,’ I explained, pushing the words out through gritted teeth. Was this true? It seemed unlikely, even as the words came to me. Cyril and Peg? ‘Or was about to. Oh! Ah! It has something to do with Ros, the lines from some play and wanting to ad-lib or something, I don’t know – OUCH!’

  ‘Well, that certainly makes it all clear as pie,’ my wife remarked wryly, raising her eyebrows at Fred, who laughed and forked another hunk of sausage in his mouth.

  ‘I really find it hard to believe,’ said Jim. He had stopped molesting the wound with his swab and was now unrolling a bandage. He pressed a fold of gauze to my shoulder. ‘Hold that, Gerry.’

  ‘Anyway, I guess that’s one party we’ll miss out on,’ said my wife. She bit the thread off, pinned the needle in her calico apron, held the coat up. ‘That must make you and Mavis the real veterans here tonight, Jim.’

  ‘I think probably Charley and Janny …’

  ‘Well, they may not be doing so well either,’ she said, folding the coat gently and laying it on the bench across from the policem
an. ‘From what I’ve heard …’

  ‘Thanks, ma’am.’

  Jim was taping the bandage to my shoulder, muttering, ‘It’s strange, they were almost a legend …’ I was staring out at the backyard, where a dark heavy hush had settled, pressing up against the back door as though to embrace us. Ah well … I recalled the soft furry V of her pubes as they thrust against my fingers out there, the nubbly caress of her tongue as it coiled between my teeth, her hands scrabbling over me like hungry little crabs – but it was not an erotic memory, no, it was more like a solemn meditation on memory itself: the warm slippery stuff of time, the dry but somehow radiant impressions that remained. Like the muddy tracks (the voices were stilled now, the traipsing in and out) on the kitchen floor.

  ‘I cleaned it all up,’ my wife said, following my gaze, ‘but then Anatole and Brenda and all that crowd came through.’

  ‘I know, I saw him on exhibit in there …’

  ‘Yes, that was nice. I think he’d been feeling a bit lonely, especially since … since his aunt …’ She stared at her hands, her eyes watering. Jim capped the iodine and fit it back in the bag, rolled up the bandage, snapped the protective metal ring around the tape. ‘We should invite more young people next time.’

  ‘Maybe it’ll milk some of the piss and vinegar outa the little jerk,’ grumped Fred, ‘pardon the French, ma’am. He’s been giving the Chief a lotta stick, and we’re pretty darn tired of it.’

  ‘He’s still very young,’ my wife reminded him.

  ‘Yeah, but he don’t appreciate the difficulties – it ain’t an easy job.’

  ‘I think the Inspector makes his own difficulties,’ I said.

  Fred bristled momentarily, but then, thinking it over, cut himself another hunk of sausage. ‘Well, the Old Man’s got his weaknesses, I admit. We all do. He spent all that time in there with them watches, for example, just to figure out the murder took place exactly thirty minutes after we got here. Huh huh!’ Jim fit one of the sterilized needles in a syringe, put the others in a plastic box, emptied the little pan in the sink, then tossed it in the garbage. ‘Bob and me bailed him outa that one by taking a temperature fix with that stabhole in the liver, but it ain’t always so simple like that – he’s a pretty ingenious fella, like you seen, and sometimes we don’t have a clue how to clean things up after. Sometimes we don’t even know what the hell he’s talking about. But, listen, loopy as he may seem, old Nigel’s solved a lotta crimes. He’s got a special knack.’ He poured himself a shot of vodka and tossed it down, smacked his lips, poured another. ‘He does it by somehow sinking into the heart of the crime itself, making a kinda transmitter outa hisself, don’t ask me how. As far as he’s concerned, see, there ain’t no such thing as a isolated crime, it’s always part of something bigger, and he figures the only way to get at this bigger thing is to use, not just the brain, but the whole waterworks – it’s what he calls “seeing through” a crime. He’s a artist at it, best I ever seen!’