Gerald's Party

by Robert Coover

‘Oh no … !’

  ‘What is it, Gerald? What’s the matter?’

  ‘This woman in the dream, I mean …’

  I turned toward the dining room: yes, it had been nagging at me since I left the kitchen – that peculiar sensation of barrenness, of erasure …

  ‘ “But the worst thing about getting old,” she said,’ Michelle was saying, ‘ “is what happens to your navel …” ’

  ‘Right! The Ice Palace, the wet dream stuff, free will versus necessity, the Old Lady – this script is terrific! The kid’s got talent!’

  ‘The “Susanna” … !’ I whispered.

  ‘What? What are you talking about, Gerald?’

  ‘It keeps getting deeper and deeper …’

  ‘Hey, Jack! Go find the Scar! Tell him we want the panes out of all the windows in the house and as many mirrors as he can lay his hands on! We still got a show here!’

  ‘It’s gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Yum!’ enthused Bunky, stepping over Ros’s body and plucking a melon ball.

  ‘Tania’s painting,’ I explained, my throat constricted.

  ‘I saw it now. The navel. In the middle of the old woman’s tummy. Like a nailhole.’

  ‘I just realized—’

  ‘Only much bigger …’

  ‘It isn’t there anymore.’

  ‘What—?!’

  ‘… Like a kind of tunnel, going nowhere …’

  ‘And Gudrun! Listen, go strip all this red shit off Bunky!’

  ‘ “You can go in and look around if you want to,” she said, but I was afraid.’

  My wife rushed over to the doorway. Those thoughts of oblivion I’d had when entering from the kitchen, glancing toward Vic (I’d been looking for something): almost as though she had somehow, after all, completed that terrible step …

  ‘I want her midnight blue now, top to bot! With a scatter of sequins if you can find some – and a silver skullcap!’

  ‘Right, Zack,’ Gudrun stuffed the end of one banana in her mouth, picked up another and pointed with it. ‘Wha’ you wahme do wiwode wady?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘But I did see lots of things crawling in and out of her navel,’ Michelle said now, scratching idly, ‘and at the very back there was a little spot of light, like when you turn the TV off …’

  Such an emptiness, that wall: it wasn’t even a wall in my mind’s eye, but infinite space, appallingly indifferent. I felt her disappearance as if it were, in part, my own, and great relief when my wife came back (‘Ah, the old lady – leave her like she is, Gud! This is gonna be the weirdest goddamn peel you ever saw in showbiz!’) and took my hand: ‘Do you suppose … it’s been stolen?’

  ‘That’s where heaven is,’ someone said – ‘I think it was one of those things crawling in and out …’

  ‘Hey, that was Prissy Loo’s part!’ Vachel was objecting (she released my hand as though I’d answered her – in fact, I had), and Zack said: ‘She’s off doing a little business for me, Vaych, she’ll never know – now listen, you said you wanted a sex scene, right?’

  ‘… But I didn’t believe it.’

  ‘Someone must have overheard you,’ my wife suggested (‘Yeah! Hey, can I have the guitarist? Hunh, Zack?’), ‘when you were negotiating with Howard.’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘No, she’s the only orchestra we got, Vaych – I was figuring we’d use Bunky for the—’

  ‘Bunky?’

  ‘When I looked closer,’ Michelle went on, ‘I saw that these little things crawling in and out of her navel were tiny people …’ I gazed at her there, clutching her thin arms, lost in her dream story (‘Okay! Great! Luff-ly! Thanks, Zack! I get Bunky!’ ‘Well, not exactly, Vaych …’), thinking: she seems younger suddenly, as though she were shrinking back into her vanished image … ‘And whenever they turned their heads and looked at me …’

  ‘Actually, this is a kind of dream sequence …’

  ‘… They curled up like waterbugs and dropped off somewhere below …’

  ‘No kidding!’ grinned Anatole as he came through the door with Sally Ann (‘At first it seems like Bunky, you see – or what she stands for,’ Zack was explaining, my mother-in-law looking on with increasing apprehension), her guitar slung round her neck: ‘You too? Tonight?’

  ‘But when I tried to see where the little things fell to,’ Michelle murmured, ‘I discovered I was standing there all by myself …’

  ‘Oh no—! Wait a minute, wait a minute!’ squawked Vachel, backing off. ‘Not this moldy old crowbait—!’

  ‘Yeah, well, almost,’ said Sally Ann, glancing darkly up at me as she passed, and my wife, breaking out of her worried silence, exclaimed: ‘Oh, Louise!’ She stood there behind us, her round face red as a beet, holding two steaming hot pies in her bare hands. ‘Why don’t you use the oven gloves, for goodness’ sake?’

  ‘What is this shit, Vachel? I thought you were a goddamn pro!’

  ‘Well, sure, but – cheez!’

  ‘… The wind was blowing, it had gotten dark …’

  ‘Well, look at the power in this scene, man! the risks! the levels of meaning!’ He grabbed the hem of my mother-in-law’s skirt and dragged it up past her garter belt: she turned pale, staggered back a step, her jaw dropping. ‘This ain’t beautiful enough for you, goddamn it? Is that it?’

  ‘The old lady was gone, I was all alone.’

  My wife cleared a space on the table and helped Louise set the pies down. Louise clapped her hands in her armpits (‘Actually, my original idea,’ said Anatole, ‘was to take a couple of old archetypes and re—’ ‘Right!’ Quagg rolled on, slapping my mother-in-law’s corseted behind. ‘It’s original, it’s ancient, it’s archetypal – I mean, are you good enough for this or not, Vaych?’), her eyes damp and bulging, and Michelle said, as though from some distant place: ‘All my clothes had blown away somehow …’ My wife glanced up at Michelle, a flicker of a smile curling her lips. ‘… And now mine was the navel with the hole in it …’

  ‘I think this is where I came in,’ my wife said. ‘I’ll go see if I can win the kitchen back from Fats.’

  ‘No one,’ said a commanding voice from the hallway door, ‘goes anywhere!’ It was Inspector Pardew, clutching his lapels, white scarf draped loosely around his neck, thick moustaches bristling. ‘Oh oh,’ someone said. ‘Where’s the, uh, toilet?’ ‘It’s all right, m’um,’ Pardew added, nodding firmly, and my mother-in-law took a deep breath, smoothed her skirt down with trembling hands. ‘We have all we need now. Thank you for your assistance.’

  ‘Wait a minute—!’ objected Zack Quagg. My mother-in-law straightened her back, drew her chin in, and, glaring at Quagg, stepped down off the ping-pong table. ‘Hey—! You can’t do this! We’re just climaxing this spasm!’ Others had started drifting in, some shepherded by the two police officers, Bob and Fred. ‘I’ll check upstairs,’ said Fred. My wife, taking my arm, whispered: ‘I’m afraid the coffee’s going to get cold,’ and the Inspector glanced up sharply: ‘Did someone say something?’ ‘Yeah, I did, you hick dick! This is our pitch, man, get outa here, this space is booked—!’ Bob lashed out with his baton: ‘Whuff-ff-FF-FOOO!’ Quagg wheezed, crumpling to the floor, curled up in his purple cape. ‘I hope,’ said the Inspector, withdrawing his briar pipe from a jacket pocket and tapping it in the palm of his hand as he gazed around at us all (Anatole interposed himself between Zack and the cop, Sally Ann kneeling to whisper: ‘You okay, Mr Quagg?’), ‘there will be no further disturbances.’

  He filled the pipe from his leather pouch, cupping his hand around the bowl to form a funnel, then, tugging the drawstrings of the pouch closed with his teeth (Quagg groaned and stretched out: ‘Ow, something’s … caught … !’ he gasped), stepped aside as Fred came down the stairs behind him, herding a group of people toward us, Hilario leading the pack and showing off with a complicated set of hops and pirouettes down the steps, followed by Kitty, Dolph, Janny and Hoo-Sin in each other’s clot
hes, Charley, Regina, the guy in the chalkstriped suit – or pants rather: down to an undershirt on top now and a towel around his neck. His jaw gleamed as though he might have been shaving. Regina, wrapped up in one of our sheets (Sally Ann, on her knees, was tugging speculatively at the seam of Zack’s white crotch: ‘Here, you mean, Mr Quagg?’), swept past Hilario into the room, eyes rolled up and the back of one wrist clapped to her pale forehead, crying: ‘Is nothing sacred?’ ‘Caught her jerking off,’ Fred explained to the Inspector behind his hand, Dolph meanwhile slipping off behind him, unnoticed, toward the kitchen. ‘There’s a few more upstairs’ll be down in a minute, Chief. Meantime I’ll go check out back.’ Pardew nodded, slapped his pockets for a light. Bunky’s gigolo friend took a wooden match from behind his ear, popped it ablaze with his thumb, and held it, shielded with his cupped hand, over Pardew’s pipebowl. ‘Ah! Thank you,’ said the Inspector, Zack Quagg echoing him throatily from the floor (Sally Ann, stretching the crotch of his unitard down, was carefully easing his testicles to one side). ‘Now, I’ve gathered you all together here in this—’

  ‘Hey, big Ger!’ Charley boomed out, stumbling heavily into the room through a tangle of collapsed cave wall, his arms wrapped around Janny and Hoo-Sin. Janny looked radiant in her kimono, Hoo-Sin in the wrinkled pink outfit oddly weathered and innocent at the same time. ‘I’ve riz up in the world again, ole son! I’m standin’ firm! Thanks to these two lovely ladies, I got a bone t’pick with anyone!’

  ‘Easy, Charley,’ I cautioned, nodding toward Bob, who was just behind him, scowling darkly, club at the ready.

  Charley reared up heedlessly, swung round, his big head swiveling. ‘Who, ole Bobbers here? Nah, he’s one a my bess clients, Ger! Him’n his pardner both, I give ’em a fantastic deal! A – yaw haw! – joint policy!’ He grinned expectantly, his head bobbing drunkenly. ‘C’mon, ole scout, ’sbeen a long night, give us a smile! A joint policy!’

  Bob had turned toward the dining room door, through which Fred was now prodding another group of guests: ‘Whoa, man, you gonna make me char the hash!’ Fats was protesting, the Inspector’s gray fedora rocking back and forth on top of his head.

  Pardew, pipe clamped in his jaws, was smoking vehemently. ‘Now, as I say, I have called you all here, here to the scene of the crime, in order to –’

  ‘All I’m sayin’ is you guys got no respect for the inner man!’ Fats complained, then ‘Rrnkh-HH!’ grunted as Fred suddenly jabbed him fiercely in his aproned belly with the end of his nightstick, doubling him over: the hat fell off, Fred caught it, handed it to the Inspector. ‘Ah … yes …’

  ‘’Swhut I love about you, ole buddy,’ Charley rumbled, wrapping a fat arm around me, ‘you laugh at my jokes. Goddamn it, ole son, you lissen!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Where do you want these, Zack?’ called out Scarborough, carrying in, with Benedetto helping, a stack of windowpanes, and Earl Elstob asked: ‘Hey, huh! yuh hear about the gal who couldn’t tell putty from Vaseline?’ Charley winked at my wife, Regina flung herself on the couch in seeming despair, Dolph popped the top on a can of beer, and Kitty, helping Fats straighten up, said: ‘Well, that’s one way to kill an appetite!’ Pardew, brushing irritably at his hat, looked up as though about to speak, but just then Charley hollered out: ‘Whoa! I smell coffee, girls!’ and pushed away, startling Louise, who, backing off, stepped crunchingly on Fred’s foot. ‘Oww! SHIT!’ he yelled, and whirled on Louise, nightstick flashing – Dolph reached up, almost casually it seemed, and caught it on the upswing, stopping it dead. He handed his beer to Earl and slowly, Fred resisting, brought the club toward him, gripped the end of it with his other hand, and – crok! – snapped it in two. ‘Thanks, Dolph,’ Louise said softly, her face flushed. Fred, scratching the back of his head above the neckbrace, gaped in amazement at the shattered stub of nightstick in his hand, and Earl said: ‘Yuh, well, huh! all her windows fell out!’

  ‘Ah, fuck everything,’ said Daffie vaguely, and left the room.

  Pardew, biting down on his pipe, continued to fuss with his fedora, but, attempting to put the crease back in, chopped at it so fiercely in his rage that he knocked it out of his own hand. Angrily, he reached down for it, but somehow managed to step on it at the same time. ‘Damnation!’ he mumbled around the pipe. ‘Cream ’n sugar, girls?’ Charley called out. ‘SSSHH!’ Patrick hissed. ‘Hunh?’ Charley looked around blearily at the quiet that had descended. We were all watching the Inspector. He was trying to lift his foot off the hat, but it seemed stuck to his shoe. He studied the situation, one hand in a jacket pocket, the other holding the bowl of the pipe in his mouth. Bob approached him, but he waved him away, knelt, untied the shoe, took his foot out. Except for a light titter from some of the women at the holes in his sock, the room was hushed. Regina was sitting up now, watching; Zack, too, helped by Sally Ann and Horner. The Inspector lifted the shoe off the hat: no problem. He gazed quizzically at the sole of the shoe, shrugged, put it back on, tied it. Unfortunately, he was stepping on the hat as he did so, and when he lifted his foot, he found the hat was stuck again. He scratched at the back of his neck, under the scarf, thinking about this. He stepped on the hat with the other foot to hold it down, tried to lift the first foot off but without success. Then he discovered that the second one was stuck as well. He struggled with his problem for a moment, doing a kind of sticky shuffle, peevishly muttering something about the sense he’d had all night of having ‘intruded on some accursed place, some forbidden domain, which was not what it seemed to be.’ Finally he looked up at the taller cop and nodded toward his holster: Bob handed him the gun. The Inspector checked the chamber, sucking thoughtfully on the pipe: ‘One thing about homicides I’ve learned to watch out for,’ he said around the stem, his pate gleaming under the overhead lights, ‘is the murderer’s attempt to conceal the fact that what we’ve got is indeed a murder.’ He took a firm grip on the revolver with his right hand, took the pipe out of his mouth with his left. ‘There’s been no limit to the ingenuity of murderers in masquerading their act – or even of removing all evidence of both victim and act. Bodies have been burned, blasted, buried, embedded in concrete, dissolved in acid, disassembled, and devoured.’ Sighting down the barrel, he let his arm fall in a slow arc until pointing between his feet. ‘You name it, it’s been tried.’ There was a terrific explosion that startled us all, even though we’d been expecting it. ‘Of course, in this case, we’ve not only got a victim plain to see,’ the Inspector went on, handing the revolver back to the policeman, taking his feet off the hat, and reaching down to pick it up, ‘she’s also got a hole in her’ – he held it up and brushed at it lightly – ‘as big as your hat!’ This got a burst of applause and laughter, led by Patrick (even Zack Quagg was joining in, if reluctantly), and the Inspector, handing the hat to Bob, nodded curtly.

  ‘Damn! I missed it!’ whispered the cameraman, staring at the equipment in his hand.

  ‘Nothing, however,’ Pardew continued, beginning to move slowly about the room, gazing first at one of us, then another (Scarborough and Benedetto, grunting, set the windowpanes down against the table), ‘is ever so straightforward as it seems on the face of it. We have facts, yes, a body, a place and a time, and all this associative evidence we’ve so painstakingly collected – but facts in the end are little more than surface scramblings of a hidden truth whose vaporous configuration escapes us even as it draws us on, insisting upon itself, absorbing our attention, compelling revelation.’ He peered abruptly up at the guy in the chalkstriped pants and undershirt, who was wiping his face with the towel but now stopped. ‘Yes, compelling!’ Pardew repeated, raising one bony index finger, and the man stepped back a step. ‘Deduction, I am convinced, is linked au fond in an intimate but mysterious relation to this quest for the invariant, the hidden but essential core truth, this compulsive search for the nut.’ Dolph, who had just picked one up from the bowl, put it back. ‘It is, at any rate, my main desire,’ the Inspector went on, continuing his roun
ds, followed now by the TV cameraman, ‘and in pursuit of it, I had to ask myself’ – and now, pausing for effect, taking a contemplative puff on his pipe, he glanced up at my wife (her hand tightened on my arm, I clasped it, he watched this) – ‘why? Eh? Whatever possessed – and I choose my words with care – whatever possessed our perpetrator, or perpetrators’ – he squinted briefly up at me, then turned to the others – ‘to commit this foul deed, this useless insolent vanity? I ask you!’ He had, moving on (my wife’s hand had relaxed and dropped away: ‘Were those once mine, Beni?’ she whispered over her shoulder), stopped in front of Regina, who, startled, shrank back, cronelike, in her bedsheet. ‘Was it fear? Jealousy? Moral outrage? Cupidity?’ Regina made a little squeaky noise and shook her head. Beni was whispering something to my wife about the inexpressible gratitude of his pudenda. ‘Well, I hope they were clean,’ she said. Pardew cocked his head up toward the rest of us. ‘Of course, all crime – even fraud, perfidy, indecent exposure, excessive indulgence’ – he was staring at each of us in turn, as the cameraman panned past the gaping faces – ‘all crime is at heart a form of life depreciation, a kind of psychic epilepsy, and so, in a real sense, there is always only one motive. Nevertheless …’ He gazed off, drawing meditatively on his pipe, then pinched the back of his neck under the white scarf. He studied his fingers and, smiling faintly, pressed a thumbnail against the pad of his index finger. ‘I was reminded,’ he said around the pipestem, brushing his hands together (‘They take an empty fist as containing something real,’ Hoo-Sin was murmuring to Janny, ‘and the pointing finger as the object pointed …’ ‘Really?!’), ‘of a curious case I had some years ago in which the murderer, as it turned out, was an unborn fetus. The victim was its putative father, who in a drunken rage had struck the pregnant woman several times in the stomach. The fetus used the only weapon at its command: false labor. It was a wintry night, the man was heavily inebriated, there was a terrible accident on the way to the hospital. The woman, who survived for a time, spoke of maddening pains en route, and it seems likely she grabbed the steering wheel in her delirium or lashed out with her foot against the accelerator. Was the fetus attacking its assailant or its host? This was perhaps a subtlety which, in its circumstances, escaped it. Certainly it achieved its ends, and though it could be argued that it had acted in self-defense, it seemed obvious to me that the true motive, as so often, was revenge.’ He paused to let that sink in, striking a fresh match to his pipebowl. ‘The strawberries are starting to go soft,’ my wife whispered. ‘In any event, we’ll never know. Prosecution was impossible because the fetus – a harelip – was stillborn. But the point—’