Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

She didn’t finish, but I felt I knew: she’d try scratching the faces of all the Ros figures, just as it was here. ‘Why not, Tania? Maybe you’re ready for it now.’

She smiled wanly, curling a few strands of her deep black hair around one long pointed fingernail, painted a deep magenta. ‘It’s so late, Gerry …’ In reflex, I glanced at my empty wrist. Below us, people were arguing noisily about what they’d seen or heard before the discovery of Ros’s body, and I heard my own name mentioned. Tania touched my arm. ‘Come on. We’ve come this far, we might as well wash these stains out.’

As we started up, I found myself thinking of that town in Italy again, a staircase, the hotel probably where I took that girl with the bunny-ear pubes — no, wait: some city to the north. Paris. Yes, a walk-up (‘I think of him, you know,’ Tania was saying, she was apparently talking about Bluebeard still, ‘as a man who wished to share all he had with the world … but could not …’), bare bulb on the landing. Over an Algerian restaurant on the Left Bank. Then who was I with? Oddly it seemed like Alison. But later, on the bidet—

‘Sometimes I think art’s so cowardly, Gerry. Shielding us from the truth …’

‘Well … assuming the truth’s worth having …’ We’d had this conversation before. Vic’s daughter Sally Ann slouched against the banister at the top of the stairs, watching us.

‘In other words, scratching that face out was the same thing in the end as painting it in …’

‘No, Tania, the one takes talent, genius, the other—’

‘Ah! But you don’t say which!’

There was a new patch on Sally Ann’s blue jeans, just over the crotch — the first thing I saw, in fact, as we climbed past her — that said ‘SWEET MEAT’ in bright fleshy colors. She was slumped against the rails, body arched, rolling a cigarette. Or maybe a joint. ‘Hey, your father’s looking for you,’ I said, and then, because she was staring so intently at me, I poked my finger in her bare navel and added: ‘Deli Belly.’

She jumped back, dropping her handiwork down the stairs. ‘Oh, Gerry, that’s stupid!’ She slapped at my hand, then pranced on down to the landing.

‘Someone’s got a crush on you, Gerry,’ Tania observed.

‘I always did have more luck with poets than painters,’ I sighed, and stooped to pick up another of Ginger’s kerchiefs on the top stair. In Paris, climbing, I was carrying some books with plain green jackets, a print bought from a stall along the Seine, and I stooped for … for … a coin? a ring? a button maybe, a brass or silver button …

The bathroom door was closed. I started to knock, but Tania with her customary lack of ceremony walked in. ‘Well, that’s pretty,’ she declared, and turned on the ventilator fan. Dickie was in there, cleaning Naomi’s bottom over the toilet. She was straddling the thing, bent over and facing the wall, skirt hiked, elbows resting on the water tank. Dickie looked very unhappy, smoking self-defensively with one hand, dabbing clumsily at her big hindend with the other. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, his plaid jacket hanging on the doorhook. ‘Hey, Ger! Just in time!’ he cried, flinging his butt into the paper-clogged stool. I saw he’d used up all the toilet paper on the roller and a box of tissues besides. ‘ You’re the host, you can wipe her goddamn ass!’

‘No, thanks, you’re doing fine,’ I protested, but he was already washing up. Yes, the restaurant smells below, the creaky climb, the bare bulb, the bidet — but cold water. And a smaller fanny, plump but like a little pink pear, softly creased by the bidet lips, not two big melons like this — ah! my wife’s!

‘I’m so embarrassed ,’ Naomi said. I was directly behind her, down on my haunches by the linen cupboard, reaching for more toilet paper (these genuflections, these child’s-eye views!), and her voice seemed to be coming out of her high looming behind. ‘I’ve never done anything like this before — you know, poohed at a party. But I was so scared—!’

‘It was what you’d call a moving experience, Nay,’ said Dickie, reaching for a towel. I found Tania’s protein soap down there as well. Only it was in a white box with blue lettering, not a blue box. I noticed a worn wooden handle behind the soap and grabbed it up — an old ice pick! Where had this come from—?! ‘Christ! Even the goddamn towels are covered with shit!’

Dickie came over to get a clean one from the cupboard and I shoved the thing out of sight, covering it up hastily with the nearest cloth to hand. It was uncanny, I hadn’t seen one in years — as best I could remember, the last time was at my grandmother’s house when I was still a boy — it was almost as though …

‘What you need is a bidet in here,’ Tania said, sprinkling soap into the tub and churning the water up with her hands.

‘ What—?! ’ I gasped. Naomi’s bottom reared above me, seeming to watch me with a suspicious one-eyed stare, pink mouth agape below as though in astonished disbelief.

‘A bidet. It’s what they’re for, you know, washing bottoms.’

‘Yes, sure, but oddly I–I was just thinking about—’

‘Can you beat that,’ said Dickie, tossing the towel over Naomi’s bent back. ‘I always thought they were for cooling the beer in.’ He leaned close to the mirror, scraped at a fleck of blood in front of his golden sideburns. ‘Oh, by the way, Ger, I don’t know if you saw what’s left of the poor bastard on the way up, but Roger’s no longer with us, you know.’

‘ Roger—?! ’ It was like a series of heavy gates crashing shut, locks closing like meshing gears. I stumbled to my feet.

‘ I knew it! ’ gasped Tania, clutching her arms with wet hands.

Dickie unzipped his white trousers and tucked his shirttails in, frowning at the bloodstains on his vest. I braced myself on the cupboard shelves. ‘But … but who—?’

He raised his eyebrows at me in the mirror as though to say I already knew. And I did. ‘They used croquet mallets,’ he said with a grimace, zipping up. ‘The grand fucking round, Ger — it was awful.’

‘But did you see it? Couldn’t you do anything about it?’

Dickie, framed in lights, smiled enigmatically. I recalled now the thud of the policemen’s blows, the shrieks, the thrashing about, the sudden stillness: we all knew what they were going to do when they took Roger out of the room. Maybe I’d even been told …

‘Dickie asked them to stop it,’ Naomi said from behind her bottom. ‘But they didn’t pay any attention to him, it was like they couldn’t even hear him, maybe because of the screaming, they were like standing on his head all the time. And we couldn’t stay, I was starting to … to poop again …’

Dickie turned his cuffs down, buttoned them, adjusted his tie. ‘Woody said the cops were claiming self-defense,’ he said, pulling a hair off the fly of his pants. He touched the top of his head, took out a comb.

Tania turned off the taps, got slowly to her feet, using the tub for support. ‘Self-defense. Yes … maybe it was …’ Tears filmed her big dark eyes. She’d been with me in the hallway when the two of them arrived tonight, Ros radiant, all smiles, Roger jittery as usual, trying to swallow down his panic as Ros went bouncing off into the living room, hugging everybody — it seemed so long ago! Like some kind of ancient prehistory, utterly remote, lost, an impossible past … ‘He was the most dangerous thing in the world, after all. A child …’

‘Hullo, folks! It’s your ole ticker taker!’ shouted Mr Draper, pushing heavily in, his glittering arms held out like a robot’s. ‘Just pass the time, please, any old time! Yeh heh heh!’