Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘I know. I heard. I’m still not completely over it.’ Behind me, Naomi was telling Tania about her childhood, her mother’s cruelty and the cruelty of all her mother’s lovers.

‘Didn’t you expect it?’ Alison whispered, licking my lips.

‘I guess I did. That’s not what upset me. It was—’

‘Learning something you already knew — you said that during the intermission that night we met.’

I recognized now the source of that feeling I’d had since she came up the stairs. She stroked my chest gently, and I (I peeked past the doorframe — Noble was into another act down there now, making his cigarette vanish, then, with a bulge of his false eye, reappear from inside his mouth, now lit at both ends) pulled her closer to me, curled my hand around both firm cheeks, amazed at the familiarity of them. I disbelieved in fate, hated plays and novels whose plots were governed by it, but now, with Alison’s silky bottom filling my hand like an idea the mind … Naomi was telling Tania about being tied up and locked all day in a closet without a potty, then getting whipped with a belt for wetting on her mother’s pink suede pumps. Alison nibbled at my throat.

‘But it was more than that even,’ I whispered into her ear, a gold loop glinting there like a wish. Or a promise. I heard somebody grunt hoarsely in the sewing room shadows, then a soft stifled whimpering sound. Alison found a nipple, drew a gentle circle around it as though inscribing a target. ‘I think what struck me was not so much learning something I already knew, as the sudden recognition that in fact it had to be learned. ’

Alison gasped softly, her bottom flexing in my grip as though to squeeze my hand, and looked up at me, her brown eyes swimmingly wide in a kind of awe, excitement, wonder. Her fingers tugged at my nipple. ‘That’s funny! I was just thinking the—!’

The bathroom door banged open behind us and my son came bounding out, calling my name — I let go of Alison and turned, squatting (my shirt jerked against her hand, a button ripped), just in time to catch him up. ‘Good night!’ he shouted, giving me a big kiss. There was a large white ‘SUPERLOVER’ emblazoned on his sweatshirt.

‘Good night is right, chum! You know what time it is?’

‘Daddy, do I look like Little Boy Blue?’

‘Well, you don’t look much like Red Ridinghood, do you?’

‘But Little Boy Blue’s a little boy!’

‘Not really. They just put that in the poem to make it sound better. He doesn’t like it either.’ Naomi, still holding on to the two ends of the towel through the skirt, rocked stiffly back and forth on her way back into the bathroom. ‘And you know, it wouldn’t hurt you to imitate Boy Blue and go crawl under—’

‘That’s a funny lady! Does she always walk that way?’

‘I don’t think so. She must have got wound up too tight.’

‘Daddy …?’

‘Yes?’

‘Daddy, somebody’s broke all my soldiers!’

‘What—?’ Why did that startle me so? ‘Hey, don’t cry!’

‘They took all the heads off! All my best ones! From the Waterloo! ’

‘Easy, pal! We’ll get new ones! Here, wipe your eyes with this …’ My mother-in-law was glaring impatiently down on us, her arms folded.

Alison ran her fingers into the hair above my nape. ‘I’ll see you in a few minutes,’ she murmured, and Mark smiled up at her through his tears.

‘Not you, mister!’ I said, getting to my feet and handing him over to his grandmother. ‘You’re off to bed!’

He blinked, surprised. ‘You look scary, Daddy!’ he exclaimed, backing away.

‘We’ve been playing monsters,’ I laughed, and made a face.

‘Can I play?’

‘Not yet. When you grow up.’ I winked at my mother-in-law, but she turned her head away, her lips pinched shut.

‘Oh gosh, help!’ Naomi called from the bathroom. ‘I’ve dropped part of it!’

I turned to touch Alison’s fingertips in farewell, but she was already at the head of the stairs. She waggled her hand behind her back and waved at someone down on the landing, and I heard my son’s door slam. The heads?

In the bathroom, Tania was sliding open the shower curtain which my mother-in-law had apparently drawn shut. ‘Like variations on a theme or something,’ she said, and Naomi, in some distress, replied: ‘Well, that’s exactly the problem! It seemed so unfair!’

‘Here, let me help.’ I knelt and reached up under her skirt to hold the towel against her buttocks, but it had dropped down in front and I accidentally stuck my finger in her vagina. ‘Oop, sorry, Naomi …’ I found the loose end. ‘Okay, now pull your skirt up, I’ve got it …’

She hiked her skirt and, gripping it with her elbows, straddled the toilet stiffly once more. ‘Ouch,’ she complained as she leaned low onto the watertank, keeping her rear high so the skirt wouldn’t fall back over it. ‘I think it’s getting hard!’

‘Heavens!’ exclaimed Tania, casting a professional eye upon the sight. ‘Red, green, brown, yellow — what have you been eating tonight, Naomi?’

‘Just what was out on the table.’

‘Look, there’s even a little piece of string!’

‘It’s a shame to wash it away,’ I said, dipping the dirty towel under the hot water faucet in the sink. ‘Maybe we ought to frame it and hang it on the wall.’ A monster: yes, I was: there was blood at the edge of my mouth.

Tania, smiling, knelt to her task, wrapped still in the bathtowel, which slowly loosened as she squeezed and kneaded the dress. My grandmother, rolling out pie dough, would tell me stories about the wilderness, about the desperate, almost compulsive struggle against it as though it were some kind of devil: ‘We had to domesticate it, now look what we got for it.’ I could still see her old hands, dusted with flour, gnarled around the handgrips of the wooden rolling pin, her thin wrinkled elbows pumping in and out as she talked. Once she’d told me the story of a man in love with his own reflection who went out ice-fishing one day and drowned himself. She’d said it was her cousin. Tania held the sudsy dress up to study it. ‘By the way, Naomi, where did you get this switchblade?’

‘Switchblade?’ I touched my throat: a tiny red toothmark.

‘It was in your shoulderbag.’

‘Golly, I don’t know — I don’t know half the things in that bag!’

‘My favorite Mexican ashtray, too!’ I scolded, turning away from the sink and clapping the hot towel against her backside. Naomi oohed gratefully. ‘And, say, what’s this about a valentine?’

‘Did I have a valentine in there, too?’

‘Somebody said it was from me.’

‘Did you give me a valentine?’

‘No, dummy, that’s just the point.’ I took the compress away: it seemed to be softening up. I rinsed the towel out and applied it again, molding it to the curves of her moony cheeks. ‘What I want to know is who was it from?’

‘Honest, I don’t understand a thing you’re saying. I don’t think I ever got a valentine in my whole life.’ She sighed tragically. ‘Except once, a long time ago. And then it was more like giving it than getting it.’ She shuddered at the recollection. Or maybe at the chill when I took the towel away for another rinse. ‘My mother let one of her men friends spank me. It wasn’t the only time, but this time she didn’t even pretend I’d done anything wrong. Mother said it was a valentine, for him or for me, I don’t know which she meant, but he could slap it until it was bright red, a little bright red heart. They laughed and laughed all the time they smacked it.’

‘That’s what I like,’ said Tania, ‘a happy ending.’ She had a painting by that name, the darkest, most depressing piece she’d ever done, her vision of the lust for survival. ‘A cartoon,’ she called it.