Robert Coover: Gerald's Party

‘Yes — ah, yes, I did!’ I glanced up from her gaze: we were alone. Our thighs were touching. ‘Hot what—? ’ someone hooted behind me, and I thought, this may not turn out quite as I’d imagined after all. My wife, in the next room, pointed, her hands high above her head, at Tania’s empty glass. Tania, smiling broadly over the faces between us, held it up like a signpost. ‘Each one a … a unique adventure.’ Alison was licking the ice cube before dropping it into her glass of vermouth, and, watching her, I seemed to remember the ice wagons that used to call at my grandmother’s house, the heavy crystallized blocks that had to be chopped up (this memory was soothing), the ice chips in the truck beds, the little girl next door … ‘But I was young then …’

‘Ah, but it’s true, Gerald!’ She smiled, sucking coyly on the cube. It sparkled like a fat gem between her lips. She let it ooze out like a slow birth and drop — plunk! — into her vermouth. ‘Each one is …’

And just then Roger came through, interrupting everybody, asking if we’d seen Ros.

I understood Roger’s anxiety, I’d witnessed it many times before. Roger loved Ros hopelessly — loved her more no doubt than the rest of us loved anything in the world, if love was the word — and he was, to his despair, insanely jealous of her. He’d found her, as though in a fairy tale, in a chorus line, a pretty blonde with nice legs and breasts, a carefree artless manner, and an easy smile (yet more than that, we’d all been drawn to her, her almost succulent innocence probably, and a kind of unassuming majesty that kept you in crazy awe of her, even in intimacy — during my own moments with her, I’d found myself calling her Princess), and he’d been overwhelmed at his good fortune when she took him to bed with her the same night he met her. That there might be others who shared in his fortune, he could hardly believe; in fact, to the best of his ability, he chose not to believe it, which was the beginning of his grief. Instead, he pursued her with the relentless passion of a man with a mission, striving to fill up her nights so there’d be no room for others, begging her to marry him, and because in the end you could persuade her to do just about anything, she did. And went right on living as she always had, barely noticing she’d even changed her address. Poor Roger. She loved him of course: she loved all men. He was still in law school at the time and had difficulty finding the money for them to live on. Eager to help, she took a job as a nude model for a life-drawing class in a men’s prison, and nearly drove him mad. She’d plan a big surprise for him, take him out to dinner, joined by another man who’d pick up the bill and offer to drive Roger back to the library after. She returned to the theater, to acting, unable to stay away, and so then neither could he, doing his studying in the back rows during rehearsals, almost unable to see the texts through his tears. Backstage, of course, her thighs were pillowing cast, crew, and passing friends alike, but Roger wasn’t even aware of that — just the scripted on-stage intimacies were enough to plunge him into all the desolation he could bear.

So when he came through now with that look of rage and terror and imminent collapse on his face, breaking up conversations, shouting over the music, demanding to know if we’d seen Ros, I smiled patiently and — though in fact I couldn’t remember having seen her since the moment they’d arrived — said, ‘I think she’s in the kitchen with my wife, Roger.’

‘No, she’s not!’ he cried, turning on me. The light gleamed on his damp face almost as if he were drawing it to him. ‘I’ve just come from there!’

Some people were still dancing out in the sunroom, or conversing in remote corners, slipping off to the toilet or wherever, but most of us in here were by now watching Roger. Our relative silence made the music — oddly romantic, nostalgic (a woman was singing about mirrors and memory) — seem to grow louder. I remember Roger’s law partner Woody stepping forward as though to offer consultation, then shrugging, turning away, as a woman sighed. Parties are clocked by such moments: we all knew where we were in the night’s passing when Roger’s anguish was announced. He glanced fearfully from face to face (Dickie, leaning against a doorframe near Vic’s daughter Sally Ann, winked and cast an appraising eye on Alison beside me), then down at the floor. Roger turned pale, his eyes widening. We all looked down: there she was, sprawled face-down in the middle of the room. She must have been there all the time. ‘ Ros —!! ’ he gasped and fell to his knees.

Alison touched my arm, pressed closer. I could almost feel the warmth of her breath through my shirt. ‘Is she all right?’ she whispered.

I opened my mouth to speak, perhaps (as though obliged) to reassure her, but just then Roger turned Ros over. Ros’s front was bathed with blood — indeed it was still fountaining from a hole between her breasts, soaking her silvery frock, puddling the carpet. I could hardly believe my eyes. I had forgotten that blood was that red, a primary red like the red in children’s paintboxes, brilliant and alive, yet stagy, cosmetic. Her eyes were open, staring vacantly, and blood was trickling from the corners of her mouth. Roger screeched horribly, making us all jump (some cried out, perhaps I did), and threw himself down upon her, covering her bubbling wound with his own heaving breast.

Alison’s hip had slid into the hollow above my thigh, as though, having pushed past me for a moment to see, she was trying now to pull back and hide inside me. It felt good there, her hip, but I was wondering: How has it got so hot in here? Who turned up the lights? Is this one of Ros’s theatrical performances? I glanced inquiringly up at Jim.

Jim was staring down in surprise at Ros like everyone else, his thick square hand on the back of his head, his professional instincts momentarily enthralled. Roger screamed again—‘ Ros! Ros, what have you done?! ’ — releasing Jim from his stupor: he knelt, felt her wrists, her throat, peered under Roger at the wound, closed the girl’s eyes, concern clouding his face, actually darkening it as though (I thought) in closing Ros’s eyes, some light in the room had been put out. Alison trembled slightly and reached behind her to touch my hand: the thought had not been wholly mine (a responsive tremor made my head twitch), but hers as well. Jim looked up at me, his coarse gray hair falling down over one eyebrow. ‘She’s dead, Gerry,’ he said. ‘She seems to have been stabbed to death.’

I looked around at the shocked faces pressing in, but I couldn’t see her: she must have gone to the kitchen. Even in this crowd of friends, squeezed up against Alison, I felt alone. The house was silent except for the upbeat wail, oddly funereal, of the show tune playing on the hi-fi. Roger shrieked — ‘ No! No! No! ’ — and someone turned the music down. ‘What’s happening?’ Tania cried, and pushed through the jam-up in the doorway. Jim, standing now, was wiping his bloody hands with a white handkerchief. I saw that his sleeves were rolled up, yet seemed to remember him kneeling beside Ros in his suit jacket still. Memories, I realized (recalling now the sudden gasps, the muttered expletives of disbelief, the cries rushing outward from the body through the door like a wind: ‘ It’s Ros! She’s been killed!’ ), always come before the experiences we attach them to. Comforted somehow by this insight, I brushed past Alison’s hips, bumped gently by each firm buttock, and went to the kitchen, looking for my wife.

She was at the counter, decorating a tray of cold cuts with little sprigs of fresh parsley. She wore a brown apron with purple-and-white flowers on it and held a butcher knife in her left hand. There was no blood on it, but it startled me to see it in her hand just the same. Perhaps she’d been slicing the roast beef with it. ‘Ros has been murdered,’ I said.