Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘Come on,’ said Tania, taking my hand. Across the room (Michelle ‘oh’ed’ as Noble, squinting, unknotted the kerchief and showed it to be empty), Alison and her husband were moving parallel with us toward the living room, and again we found ourselves exchanging furtive glances. What had she said that night we met? I’d been speaking of the invention of audiences, theater as a ruse, a game against time. ‘Yes,’ she’d said, smiling up at me over the ruffles at her throat (I gave Tania’s hand a little squeeze, as I’d no doubt squeezed my wife’s hand that night at the theater), ‘and that’s why the lives of actors, thought frivolous, are essentially tragic, those of the audience, comic.’

The short policeman, the one called Fred, pushed in from the front room, blocking my view of her. At the table, he picked out three or four forks, held them up (Noble was prying his eyelid open, revealing the false eye back in place, gold backside out: Michelle gasped), chose one and turned to go, but got stopped by Woody, Roger’s law partner. They huddled for a moment, watched closely by Tania’s husband, Howard, standing stockstill against the wall, his broken lenses twinkling, and it looked to me, before I lost sight of them, like Woody gave the cop some money.

‘Who’s that playing darts downstairs?’ Tania asked in the hallway.

‘I don’t know.’ I was still thinking about Noble, his pocked face dark with apprehension: Ros had told me he’d been brutal to her once. Down below, the darts could still be heard striking the board, but the conversation, if any, wasn’t carrying up the stairs. ‘Cyril and Peg maybe.’

Tania considered this, twining the laces of her peasant dress around one finger. Noble had tried to shove the handle of a hairbrush up her bottom, she’d said, apparently as part of yet another amateur magic trick, and when it wouldn’t go, he’d beat her with the other end of it. In the doorway of the living room (‘I’m not a prude, Gerry,’ Ros had declared, ‘but it didn’t even have round edges — what was he so mad about?’), Jim was swabbing Daffie’s elbow with a ball of soaked cotton, Anatole and Patrick watching. Daffie made some remark to Anatole that made him blush, then looked up and winked at me.

‘Curiously,’ Tania said, fluttering her arm in a kind of salute at her nephew as she passed, ‘Peg was just talking about Ros. She said she’d always been a little jealous of her because, in spite of the crazy life Ros led, she was never unhappy, as far as anyone could tell, while Peg, talented, well-educated, orderly, comfortably married to Cyril for over twenty-four years now and never a serious quarrel or a single infidelity, could not truly claim to have been happy a single day of her life. It seemed so unfair, she said, like all the things you get born with and can’t help.’ Tania paused at the foot of the stairs to look back at me, one hand, knobby with heavy jeweled rings, resting on the banister, and I thought of Ros, bouncing goofily down a broad ornate staircase in a play in which she was supposed to be a stately middle-aged matron, descending to receive the news of the death of her husband, whom she herself had poisoned. ‘But then one day Peg saw Ros in a terrible state, all in a frazzle and close to tears, and the cause of it was simply that Ros was trying to learn her lines for a new play, something she always found almost impossible. She said it was a revelation, not about Ros, but about herself: she said she’d never see her own marriage in quite the same way again!’ Tania’s dark eyes crinkled with amusement as she thought about this, her lower lip caught in her bright white teeth, then she said: ‘The wound — it wasn’t made by that knife, you know. It was more like a puncture than a gash …’

‘Yes, that’s how it looked to me, too.’

From the stairs as we climbed them, I could see over Jim and Daffie and their audience into the living room, where Inspector Pardew seemed to be demonstrating something to his two assistants. Ros was out of sight, but her chalked outline, blood-drenched at the heart, was clearly visible, ringed about by the legs of watchers-on. Things still looked pretty smashed up and scattered in there, but from this angle the peculiar thing was the complex arrangement of chalked outlines, which reminded me of the old star charts with their dot-to-dot drawings of the constellations.

On the landing, in front of another of her paintings, Tania paused and raised her spectacles to her nose. ‘Look,’ she said. It was a painting of ‘The Ice Maiden,’ an extraordinary self-portrait in glacial greens and crystalline blues, viewed as though from the surface of an icy mountain lake. The Ice Maiden — Tania — was swimming up toward the viewer, her dramatic highboned face distorted with something between lust and terror, a gold ring deep in the throat of her gaping mouth, her right arm stretched out, sapphire-ringed finger reaching toward the hand of an unseen swimmer, like Adam’s toward God’s in all those European paintings. Behind her — below her — swirling up from the buried city streets of her childhood through a fantastic tapestry of crystal ice: blind frozen images from her other paintings up to then — ‘The Thief of Time,’ ‘The Dead Boy,’ our ‘Susanna,’ the tortured ‘Saint Valentine’ with his bloody erection, the orgiastic couples of ‘Orthodoxy’ and the dancing ‘Unclean Persons,’ ‘The Executioner’s Daughter’ in her pratfall, the pettifogging privy councilors holding a meeting on ‘Gulliver’s Peter,’ plus a number I didn’t know — and one of these, a woman poised in astonishment, had had her face scratched out.

‘My god!’ I cried. ‘Who’s done this—?’

‘It’s what I wanted to show you.’

‘It’s — it’s terrible! ’ I touched the scarred area.

‘Gives you a funny feeling, doesn’t it? Like somebody’s made a hole in the world …’

‘But then that girl, I was never sure — it was Ros , wasn’t it?’

Tania nodded. ‘It wasn’t a very good likeness. I did it from memory and from other sketches.’

‘Do I know the painting it’s from?’

‘No, I never finished it.’ She seemed to think about this for a moment, staring at the obliterated face, as though, like the Ice Maiden, being sucked down into it. ‘Did you ever see that play, Bluebeard’s Secret , the one—’

‘Yes, Ros had a bit part. Or nonpart. It was the only reason we went to see it. I … well, I guess I didn’t—’

Tania smiled. ‘I know. All that self-indulgent melodrama, phony symbolism, pompous huffing and puffing about free will and necessity — just a lot of sophomoric mystification for the most part and a few bare bosoms. But I came away from it with an idea for a painting, Gerry — more than an idea: it was like some kind of compulsion, a desperate, almost violent feeling. A painting is like that sometimes. It can start from the most trivial image or idea and suddenly, like those monsters in the movies, transform itself and overwhelm you. That’s what happened to me with “Bluebeard’s Chambers.” I came home with nothing more than the idea of doors, the color blue from the lights they used, and Ros. And yet—’

‘But she hardly—’

‘I know, that was the point. Part of it. I meant to have a lot of doors in my painting, doors of all sizes, some closed, some partly open, some just empty doorframes, no walls, but the various angles of the doors implying a complicated cross-hatching of different planes, and opening onto a great profusion of inconsistent scenes, inconsistent not only in content but also in perspective, dimension, style — in some cases even opening onto other doors, mazes of doors like funhouse mirrors — and the one consistent image was to be Ros. As you see her there.’ As she spoke I could feel the surge of excitement she must have felt as the idea grew in her, filling her out, as though her brain, sixth sense organ, were being erotically massaged. I loved this power she had: to be excited. It was a kind of innocence. ‘Only from all angles, including above and below, sometimes in proportion with the scene around her, sometimes not, sometimes only a portion of her or perhaps strangely distorted in particulars, yet essentially the same basic pose, a being dispossessed of its function. And as she disappeared into her own multiplicity, Bluebeard himself, though not present in the painting except in the color, would hopefully have emerged as the unifying force of the whole.’ She sighed tremulously. ‘But I couldn’t handle it. Too many doors at once, you might say.’ It was like a tide ebbing. Her voice softened. ‘And Ros was not just fidgety — she was almost fluid. Never the exact pose twice — even twice in the same minute. But the colors were good, and eventually they led me to this one, a painting I’d been wanting to try for years.’ She stared now at her own image, beautiful, yet frightening in its intensity. ‘I think now if I tried again … the “Bluebeard,” I mean …’