Gerald's Party

by Robert Coover

  Beni, in Roger’s ill-fitting jacket and his own theatrical longjohns, threw his arms open and stepped forward: ‘Malcolm, my old friend!’

  ‘Don’t, Beni! He knows what he’s doing!’ shouted Quagg.

  ‘But she’s not one of us,’ Beni argued, ‘she wouldn’t understand!’ Mee’s free hand shot forward and grabbed one of Teresa’s crimson breasts – she squeaked in terror, slumping backward into Eileen’s arms as he drew the breast toward him. Beni tore off his false moustache. ‘Malcolm, my friend, it’s your old comrade Benedetto, remember?’

  ‘Isn’t this getting a bit dangerous?’ Alison’s husband murmured, his face pale now under the drooping brim of Beni’s hat, his lips pulled back in a frightened grimace. If Beni distracts him, I thought, maybe I can somehow disarm him. Malcolm was stronger than I was, though, I’d need help. I glanced around for the police: amazingly, they were watching me, not Mee!

  ‘This is theater, man!’ Quagg was saying, his voice a fierce whisper. ‘Theater is hard. It’s real. Did you think we were just fucking around?’

  ‘But I thought—’

  ‘Do me a favor, would you, dear friend,’ Beni insisted, interposing himself boldly between Mee and Teresa, ‘and loan me that –’ Mee struck. Beni gasped, disbelievingly, staggered back a step, clutching the handle of the pick that now seemed to grow out of his chest like a thick warty finger, pointing back at Mee. ‘Oh no … !’ he wheezed, and sat back in amazement – splat! – as though someone might have pulled a chair out from under him. Blood began to spread outward from the wound.

  ‘My god—!’

  ‘Now see what you’ve done!’ I cried. I didn’t know who I was shouting at – Mee maybe, Quagg, the police, or perhaps the whole damned crowd – but I was suddenly angry, a ferocious rage was boiling up in me: ‘You’ve gone too goddamned far!’ Someone seemed to be crying. I shoved Mee aside brusquely, knelt at Beni’s side: he was bleeding badly now, and when he tried to mutter something about ‘a surprise ending,’ blood bubbled out the corner of his mouth and down his plump chin. ‘Jim—!’ I screamed – I couldn’t seem to stop screaming. ‘Someone get Jim! Hurry, for god’s sake!’ But no one moved: they seemed frozen with shock or fear. I leaped to my feet: ‘Jim! Come in here! Quickly!’ I yelled, then turned on the two cops: ‘Why didn’t you do something, goddamn it? What did you just stand there for?’ They looked utterly bewildered, as though they didn’t even understand the question. The room was silent except for the suppressed whimpering, Beni’s rasping groans, my own labored breathing. I swung on Mee and beat him on the chest with my good arm: ‘You vicious creep!’ He took my blows without response, as though stunned by his own action. ‘Never seem to make it …,’ Beni rasped hoarsely, ‘to the final curtain … !’ ‘You’re a maniac, Mee!’ I screamed, shoving him off the stage. ‘You ought to be locked up!’

  ‘It’s time … to put a silk on it, friends … lower the asbestos,’ Beni moaned. I turned to him. He was sprawled against one of my wife’s potted plants (had someone moved it there?), his eyes rolled back, blood dribbling profusely from his mouth and stabwound. ‘They’re … yanking the show on … old Benedetto, boys … it’s the last stanza … !’ Oh no … I leaned closer, a new fury intruding on the old: ‘Beni … ?’ He rolled his eyes back down, focusing on me, winked, pushed a half-chewed blood capsule between his teeth like a peashooter. ‘Damn you!’ I snatched the pick out of his hands: a stage weapon with a contracting point! The sniggering (I hadn’t been hearing whimpering at all) changed to laughter and a loud burst of applause. I looked up and found myself staring into the lens of the video camera. Mee was peeling off his facemask, smirking toothily. Even Eileen had a grin on her face as she wrapped Teresa up again, and Fats asked: ‘How’d I do, Zack?’ ‘You were fantastic!’ Quagg laughed. ‘Ah, screw you guys!’ I said, hurling the pick across the room, and pushed out, drawing another burst of cheers and applause.

  In the dining room doorway, Kitty and that white-haired neighbor lady in the lime pants and pink-and-lemon shirt were laughing at a photo: ‘Look at that cute little thing!’ ‘Is that Gerry?’ I snatched it away from them and ripped it in half: I was tired of this abuse. They stared at me in some astonishment. On looking closer, I saw it was not one of the photographs I’d made with Ros, as I’d supposed, but a picture of Mark being held in my arms. Behind me, Quagg was saying: ‘Okay, now for the second number, whaddaya say we exhume that old gag from Ros’s widow play, the one where she mistakes a pick for a prick and reaches in a guy’s pants—’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit slapstick for the occasion, Zack?’

  ‘Excuse me,’ I mumbled, and shouldered on past the two women, feeling like some kind of maimed and brutish fool.

  ‘We’ll play it straight – you know, reenactment of a sacred legend, take it apart and slow it down, like we did in Bluebeard’s Secret …’

  ‘Anyway, I thought it was a pecker for a pucker …’

  I pulled up short just inside the dining room. Entering, I’d brushed silk. She was standing in the shadows by the doorway. Perhaps she’d been waiting for me. I took no hope from this: I’d betrayed her, after all, in her eyes anyway – and in my own as well (hadn’t I said at the theater that night we met that the last word was, artistically, the inevitable consequence of the first, that truth was an aesthetic principle, beauty moral?), it was a goddamn mess. I couldn’t even look at her. Over by the sideboard, Vic groaned. There were several people around him, but they were talking only to each other – even Jim had turned away to fix himself a drink. Above him, Tania’s ‘Susanna’ stepped out into oblivion. ‘She’s making one mistake,’ Vic once said of her. ‘She’s looking backward, back at the establishment, the elders. She’s turned the pool, the stream of life, into a bottomless pit. What she ought to do is step back, turn around, and kick the shit out of them once and for all. Then she can take her fucking bath in peace.’ But what if the real cause of her terror, I thought, trembling, is that there’s no one back there? That it’s only she who’s watching herself, or rather – what? She was crying! I turned at last and, tears springing to my own eyes, took her in my arms – or arm: my right one was still pretty useless. ‘I – I’m sorry!’ I blurted out. I felt certain, somehow, she’d forgive me.

  ‘Me too!’ she sobbed. ‘Poor Vic!’ Vic? It was Brenda: I let go her podgy body, naked and lumpy under the silk. ‘Such a super guy, Gerry!’

  ‘Where’d you get that dress?’

  ‘Fats found it somewhere. Is it your wife’s? I couldn’t get back into that damned pants suit.’

  ‘Gerald would never let me buy a dress like that,’ my wife said, passing by with a sponge cake. ‘He doesn’t like silk.’

  ‘Enough? What’s ever enough?’ Vic moaned. I could tell him. In the living room, someone was singing about ‘the old man,’ Sally Ann maybe, and I could hear Kitty and Mrs Waddilow oohing and ahing over the sponge cake. ‘There are strawberries to go with it,’ my wife said, and Vic broke into a new fit of coughing. ‘You think it’s all some kinda – wheeze! choke! – joke?’

  ‘He’s such a brave guy,’ snuffled Brenda, blowing her nose in the hem of the dress. I felt utterly wasted. Emptied out. Like Brenda’s nose. Steve the plumber and the character with the pipe and the leather elbow patches came in behind her, talking about Mee’s act (‘You know, he looked a bit like that dead girl, all bagged up like that!’ ‘Well, that was probably his intention …’), laughing when they saw me, and I felt the humiliation of it all over again. Where had all the beauty gone? ‘You probably ate it,’ Vic might have said. That ‘aesthetics of truth’ line I’d used at the theater was his too actually, I’d borrowed it for the occasion. She hadn’t quarreled with it (‘It felt like a lifetime,’ Sally Ann, or whoever, was singing, ‘our little husband-and-wife time …’), but she’d had a reply of course. To wit: that from another perspective (mine had been of her soft lips pursed above a cup of steaming coffee that matched her eyes and velvet suit, and to tell the truth, thought
s of ethics didn’t even enter into it) it was the first word that was the consequence of the last. ‘And he’s still got presence,’ Brenda added, taking a chewed wad of gum from behind her ear and stuffing it in her jaws. She wiped her eyes on a slashed sleeve and took my arm. ‘I know he’s not making a lot of – crack! pop! – sense, but he makes you feel like he is.’

  ‘God damn you,’ he shouted now as we drew near (there was applause in the living room), and Mr Waddilow, hooking his thumbs in his vest, said: ‘Isn’t that a bit sacrilegious?’ Mavis was sitting up now, propped against a chair, though her eyes were still glazed over and her jaw sagged loosely. Her husband, Jim, some distance away, held his drink up to the light, just under Tania’s ‘Susanna,’ taking her fateful step, and it was almost as though she were stepping into his glass. Steve, smiling, said something to Bunky’s two friends, who stared back dully, and Charley, who’d seemed locked in some kind of elbowbender’s freeze (he often went rigid before falling over at the end of a night), suddenly reared up and seized Mr Waddilow’s lapels. ‘Damned right!’ he bellowed. Mr Waddilow rocked back on his heels in alarm.

  ‘By the way, Gerry, who’s that cute guy in the tweed jacket?’

  ‘His name’s Gottfried, that’s all I—’

  ‘Oh, is that the famous Gottfried …’

  ‘Where are the lights? Turn on the … goddamn lights!’ Vic begged.

  ‘Hey, Big Ger!’ Charley boomed out, wheeling around heavily. ‘Where ya been?’ Jim lowered his glass as though pulling the ground out from under Susanna, though of course she didn’t fall. No, that abyss awaited her forever. It wouldn’t even be there without her. This thought somehow picked me up a bit, like something I’d forgotten but finally remembered. ‘It’s been awful here since you been gone!’

  Howard in his bra, red tie, half-lens reading glasses, and sailing cap sniffed petulantly as Steve, shrugging, reached in past Bunky’s friends for the gin bottle. I remembered the older guy now: he was the angel who had put up the money for that mock sci-fi film Ros and Bunky had starred in, The Invasion of the Panty Snarfers. The younger one, the gigolo type, had directed it. A terrible film. Or so it had seemed at the time. Now I wished for nothing more than to be able to go sit down somewhere and watch it. Or maybe I only wanted to (I seemed to hear someone telling me to do this: sit down) sit down.

  ‘We miss ya, ole buddy! Nothin’ happens when ya go away! Eh, Waterloo?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Steve asked, his hand hesitating over the gin bottle, and Gottfried, putting pipe to mouth, said: ‘No, she was with some older gentleman, I believe – the one with the goatee.’

  I poured myself a brandy and stared up at the ‘Susanna,’ thinking: My father was right, we’re the products of calamity, metamorphosed by our very will to endure, meshed alive into the unraveling fabric of the universe – that’s where all creation happens. ‘Before I forget it, Howard,’ I said, gazing at Susanna’s small foot poised tenderly over the void, ‘I want to buy Tania’s “Bluebeard” painting.’

  ‘Cyril? You must be mistaken,’ Brenda was saying to Gottfried, smiling up at him, her jaws working strenuously, as Steve staggered back, shoved by the younger guy. The tall cop limped up with his toolbox, muttering something about a missing dynamometer, and Howard said: ‘I’m afraid you can’t really afford it, Gerald.’

  ‘What do you mean? It’s not even finished, Howard—’

  ‘There’s some forceps gone, too,’ Bob grumbled, and Brenda, looking puzzled (Steve also looked puzzled: ‘Who you calling a shitface?’ he asked), said: ‘They’ve what … ?’

  ‘All the more reason,’ replied Howard huffily (‘I think I saw those on the turkey dish,’ Jim said). ‘It’s priceless probably. You’re lucky to have the pieces you own now.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ Mr Waddilow asked, reaching in his breast pocket for a pair of spectacles. ‘Is this one of them?’

  ‘Oh no!’ Brenda cried. ‘Not Cyril and Peg!’ Steve, eyes asquint, reached for the gin bottle again, but the gigolo blocked his way. ‘Is that an advertisement, sweetheart?’ the older man asked with a sneer, pointing to the name stitched over Steve’s pocket. ‘I can’t believe it! Fats’?—I felt I understood now what Tania had meant when she said that truth (‘That’s not art, it’s a piece of trash,’ Bob was objecting, ‘she don’t even know how to draw!’), dispersed into the clashing incongruities of the world, returns as beauty: which, with memory, is all we have of substance. ‘You’re not listening!’ Vic yelled, and Brenda, running off (‘Hey, mister, you wanting trouble?’ Steve asked): ‘Fats? Oh my god, Fats—!’

  ‘Fuck your shadows! Man is – glurgle! splut! – something hard!’

  What? Was Vic talking to me? Kitty came over from the doorway with Mrs Waddilow and said: ‘Hey, you guys in here are missing it all!’ ‘Oh yeah?’ yuffhuffed Charley confusedly, and Vic, breathing with great difficulty (‘How much you sell your ass for, working man?’ the gigolo taunted, blowing smoke), gasped out something about ‘the disappearing eye’ or ‘I.’ No, not to me or to anyone else: Vic had fallen through that hole in the world Tania spoke of, he was far away, in another place. I felt a sudden pang of loss, of disconnection from something valuable. Something like the truth. ‘Ah well, what the fuck, it’s all just a – farff! foo! – fiction anyway,’ he babbled now. I turned, sipping brandy, to watch Steve take a halfhearted swing which the gigolo parried. No (‘Yeah,’ Kitty was laughing, ‘they’ve got Vachel rigged out like a kind of walking joystick, smeared all over with petroleum jelly and blowing off about murder and paradox as time’s French ticklers – it’s a scream!’), not the truth so much, but commitment, engagement, the force of life itself: this is what Vic had meant to me. The idea of vocation. The young plumber, wary now, drew himself erect, flexing his strong shoulders. The older guy (‘Look at this interesting painting, dear,’ Mr Waddilow said) knocked his cap off. ‘Yes, it’s very nice. Did you see the icon in the front room?’ ‘We’ve got to have revolutions,’ Vic used to argue, banging his fists on the table, or bar, or lectern, wherever he was, ‘hope’d die if we didn’t!’ It was beautiful (Kitty, speaking of little Bunky Baird’s new makeup job, had just said more or less the same thing): ‘Watch out for art,’ he’d exclaim, ‘it’s a parlor trick for making the world disappear!’ Or: ‘You know what I hate, Gerry? The idea of original sin – in any disguise! Do it new! Don’t be afraid! Change yourself, goddamn it, and you inhabit a renovated world!’ I didn’t believe any of it, of course. But I loved the fervor.

  ‘No, Bunky’s playing “the Lady in Red,” and she’s really in great form! Regina tried to upstage her by swooping in wrapped in nothing but herself, but unfortunately her birthday suit’s about fifteen years outa fashion!’

  ‘Yeah, I just saw that on the box!’ laughed the man in the gray chalkstriped suit, joining us from the TV room, an empty glass in his hand. ‘The poor toad!’ Steve, lurching blindly to his feet – reaching down for his cap just a moment before, he’d taken a chop in the neck, a kick in the ribs, a drink thrown in his face – crashed into him. ‘Whoa!’ the man whooped as his glass went flying, and Kitty, ducking (Bob, watching her, reached for his revolver), said: ‘Are they showing it on TV?’

  ‘Yeah, the best bits anyway, along with – hey! talk of your show stoppers!’ he hooted, picking up his glass and pointing at me. ‘You really tumbled for that old chestnut!’

  ‘Whuzzat?’ Charley grinned, swiveling his big head back and forth between us: it was the only part of him that still worked, the rest seemed totally immobilized. Bob had relaxed again, was showing Howard some of his own drawings of the crime scene.

  ‘A stage sticker!’ the guy in the chalkstripes laughed. ‘The old collapsible pick trick – ha ha! he really cut a gut!’

  Charley’s face sagged. ‘Whuzz funny ’bout that?’ he wanted to know. ‘ ’Assa fuckin’ trazhedy!’

  ‘Well, certainly they show skill, sensibility, a consciousness of form and architecture,’ Howard was expounding, peering d
own at arm’s length through Tania’s narrow spectacles at Bob’s drawings. ‘But they lack, what can I say, a certain density, mythic complexity, innovation …’

  ‘Argh …,’ groaned Vic as though, were he at all rational, in mockery, ‘say it … kaff! ain’t so!’

  ‘How about, uh, percipience?’ Bob asked hopefully. The kitchen door swung open and Woody and Cynthia came in, holding hands. ‘If by percipience you mean a discerning eye for detail, yes,’ acknowledged Howard, ‘but true intuitive apperception: not yet.’ Bob looked a bit downcast, but Gottfried, removing his pipe from his mouth (over his shoulder, the gigolo had Steve in a hammerlock, and the other guy was kicking him in the stomach), leaned intently toward Howard and said: ‘Ah! you’re interested in myth, then … ?’

  ‘Gerry, thanks for the party,’ Woody smiled, as Bunky’s older friend took the monkey wrench out of Steve’s back pocket and shoved it in his mouth, ‘but we’ve got to be going.’

  ‘So soon?’

  ‘You’ve been very kind,’ Cynthia said, and gave my hand a squeeze, her own hand knobbled with rings. There was a soft flush in her cheeks and just above her cross-strapped bra, partly hidden by the vulgar fur she wore around her shoulders. ‘We both appreciate it.’

  ‘Hey, you’re not goin’, are ya, Woodpecker?’ Charley protested. Beside him, Howard was talking to Gottfried about orchestral renderings of symbol and prophecy, and the dark roots of creation, Vic wheezing and blowing agonizingly below. ‘Night’s still young, goddamn it! Like you’n me!’

  ‘I’m afraid so, Charley. I’ve got a big case tomorrow, and now all of Roger’s damned work besides. Sorry.’ Cynthia let my hand go.

  ‘An immersion into mystery, don’t you see, into pain …’

  ‘So what’s … next, Howard?’ Vic gasped. ‘The old – hah! harff!—“language of the fucking wound” – ?’ He was getting testy again. His face was haggard, bleached out, his mouth gaped, blood stained his blue workshirt darkly and his pants were wet with urine. ‘The artist-as-visionary shuh – whooff! – shit?’ Howard’s eyes were watering up in anger. I too felt unaccountably annoyed (he was still clutching that silly fork) and turned away to watch Bunky’s friends haul Steve, kicking, still eating his monkey wrench, out of the room toward the front door. All that hard-won wisdom, that shrewd and stubborn intellect, turned to pudding in the end: a lesson I really didn’t need tonight. ‘You’re a fuh – fooff! shit! – fucking whore, Howard!’