Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘In the dark and dangerous land of make-believe,’ whispered Alison, not so much completing my thought for me as marrying her thought to mine in a kind of voluptuous melodrama.

‘Yes … yes, that’s it …’

There was something truly extraordinary about Alison’s eyes. Sometimes they seemed to penetrate my head as though copulating with it like a man, and then as quickly they’d go soft, almost opaque, inviting me in. Or they’d suddenly seem to pick up light from somewhere and cast it twinkling back at me, suggestively, mischievously — then just as suddenly withdraw it again, hide it, daring me to come and look for it. ‘Bewitching …’

‘Pardon?’

‘Your eyes, Alison …’

‘Ah, that must be the wormwood.’ She grinned. There was a simple gaiety in them again, and I could feel her releasing me.

‘Wormwood?’

‘The vermouth. That’s where the name comes from.’

‘I always thought it was just some kind of wine, I didn’t know I was giving you wormwood—’

‘Oh yes. The flowers anyway. And sweetflag root and cinchona bark and coriander seeds and sandalwood — shall I go on?’

‘I take it you’re trying to tell me something.’

‘Mmm, after that sandwich—’

‘I’ll be right back,’ I said and lightly touched her hip. ‘Don’t move.’

‘ Nobody moves!’ barked the Inspector, glancing sharply up at me from under Ros’s skirt. ‘Nobody leaves this house without my permission!’

‘I’m not — it’s only — just an errand,’ I stammered. ‘The dining room …’

Pardew studied me closely a moment, hooded by Ros’s silver skirt like a monk. He stroked his thick moustache, glanced thoughtfully at Alison, then nodded and returned to his work, snipping through the legband of Ros’s panties now with a tiny pair of manicure scissors. He made two crosswise cuts, an inch or two deep, then peeled away the little flap of silk as though easing a stamp from an envelope. Jim came in with his black bag and handed the Inspector a probe with a light on the end of it, and the others in the room pressed closer. The Inspector looked up at me and frowned: ‘Off you go, then!’

Something, as I turned away, was worrying me, something just at the edge of my vision. The way Ros’s stockings had been rolled down to her ankles like doughnuts maybe, making her seem pinioned, the stark face-powder whiteness of her bare thighs under their silvery canopy, the shadows beyond, Jim shaking down a thermometer … Or was it that tube of lipstick I’d noticed, its greasy red tip extended as though in sudden excitement, lying not far from Mavis in the chalked outline of one of my wife’s fallen plants like a child’s crayon on a colouring book drawing? Or Tania, scrambling out of Roger’s way a moment ago, still clutching the—?

‘Boy, they sure tore up jack in here,’ remarked Daffie in the doorway: one of Dickie’s girls, regal tonight in her sleek indigo sheath. Her drink looked like pink lemonade, but I knew it to be straight gin tinted with juice from the maraschino cherries jar. ‘Your whole house looks like it’s suffering from a violent nosebleed, Ger.’

‘Well, it just goes to show,’ I said vaguely.

‘You mean never hire a lip as an interior decorator?’ She smiled, drawing deeply on a small black cigarillo. Over her shoulder, just inside the dining room, I could see Dolph’s burry head with its bass clef ears, and beyond him a crowd of people jammed up around the food and drink. At the sideboard, under one of his wife Tania’s paintings (a conventional subject, ‘Susanna and the Elders,’ yet uniquely Tania’s: a gawky self-conscious girl stepping over a floating hand mirror into a bottomless pit, gazing anxiously over her shoulder at a dark forest crowding up on her — no elders to be seen, yet something is watching her), Howard was stirring up a fresh pitcher of martinis. I was afraid he might use up all the dry vermouth, but Daffie had taken a gentle grip on my forearm, holding me back. ‘You know, Ger,’ she said softly, smoke curling off her lower lip as she spoke, ‘there’s something funny about those cops.’

‘What’s that, Daffie?’

‘Scratching around in Ros’s drawers like that,’ she said. Daffie was a model, one of the best, but in the soft-focus photos you never saw the worry lines, the dark hollows under her eyes, the nervous twitching of her nostrils. ‘I don’t know, but it’s, well — it’s like they’ve been there before.’

‘They’re professional. They’ve seen a lot of murders.’

‘No, I mean …’ She hesitated, withdrew her hand, took a stiff jolt of iced gin. ‘I want you to do me two favors, Ger.’

‘Sure, Daffie. If I can …’

‘One, tell that pint-sized ham-fisted ape behind me to stop messing around behind the scenes,’ she said loudly, Dolph’s ears reddening like dipped litmus paper as he disappeared around the corner, ‘and two …’ She leaned close, touched my arm again, lowered her husky voice: ‘Be careful, Ger …’ Then, bracing herself, her elbows tucked in, she drifted on into the living room (both the Inspector and the short cop, Fred, had their heads under Ros’s skirt now, Bob standing by with a test tube), moving with exaggerated elegance as though to demonstrate for me her sobriety. What she showed me, though, was a backside splattered head to foot with blood, a split skirt, and tights laddered from cheek to heel like torn curtains.

Most of the people in the dining room were crowded around the chafing dish on the table, spearing miniature sausages out of a barbecue sauce that bubbled lazily over a low blue flame. Squeezing through them on my way to the sideboard, Daffie’s warning still echoing in my ear, I was reminded (I felt flushed through by fear as though it were a sudden passion) of a night at the theater when we went backstage to see Ros after a play. On that occasion, too, I’d been cautioned, but by my wife, who, seeing Roger standing guard at Ros’s door and looking utterly demented, had clutched my arm, whispered her warning (‘Be care-ful …’), shouted at Roger to give Ros our love and blown him a kiss, and then had dragged me away through the frothy bustle of actors and their friends and hangers-on and on out the backstage exit. I’d thought she’d seen something more specific than Roger’s monstrous but by then familiar affliction — and indeed perhaps she had, for what she’d said when we got outside was: ‘I sometimes get the feeling, Gerald, that the world is growing colder and colder.’ Having just watched a corny but loving play about a houseful of prostitutes with an innocent virgin and old-fashioned boy-meets-girl romance on their hands, I’d wanted to say that, yes, and Ros was the flame at which all chilled men might well warm themselves; but instead, sensing my wife’s deep disquiet, what I’d come out with was: ‘You think Roger’s going crazy?’ ‘No,’ she’d replied, drawing me closer to her as we came out onto the street, pressing her cheek against my shoulder, ‘what scares me is I think he’s going sane.’

I greeted Howard at the sideboard and, noticing that the pitcher of martinis he was stirring was only about half-full, asked him (the flush had passed; I thought: a passion, yes, but passion’s passion) how the vermouth was holding out, but before he could answer, his wife’s nephew Anatole, hovering crowlike beside him, shot me a dark long-lashed glance and asked bluntly, his voice breaking: ‘How much longer are you going to put up with this horseshit?’ Then he glared at his tumbler of bourbon and ginger ale as though discovering something trenchant there and, flinging back his long black hair with a toss of his head, promptly drank down most of it.

‘The vermouth’s not the problem , Gerald!’ his uncle Howard snapped. ‘But there’s no ice and the gin is all gone!’ He seemed unusually peevish. His cracked specs maybe. Behind them, when he looked up at me, his eyes appeared broken up and scattered like little cubist exercises, and probably the world seen through them looked a bit that way as well.