Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘Well, it was so … so humiliating!’ Naomi’s bottom did seem to be blushing at the memory, but mainly it was the warmth that was turning it rosy. ‘And there were others — an old man, I remember, who used a thing he called his “stinger,” and another one—’

Tania laughed, pushing the dress under. ‘All these family stories! They remind me of my own father the day he gave me my first box of paints.’ She lifted her dress out of the water to examine it, her arms bubbly with pink suds up to the elbows. ‘ “Tatiana,” he said, “there are no lies in the world, so everything you paint will be true. But not everything will be beautiful.” ’ She glanced at me over her pale fleshy shoulder, then plunged her dress back into the ruddled suds once more.

‘Ow,’ said Naomi, trying to peer past her bunched-up skirt at her behind, ‘it feels all prickly now like when you skin your knees!’

‘It’s a little raw. I wonder if we still have any baby oil around …?’ There was none in the medicine cabinet or on the shelves below the sink, but I found half a bottle at the back of the linen cupboard: thus life provides these little markers, I thought — then closed the door quickly. I’d nearly forgotten. How was I going to get that thing out of here? Should I even try? And what would I do with it? In my palm, the oil felt like sweat. I spread oil on one buttock, my mind racing through the house like a scanner (the clothes basket at the bottom of the chute? the loose floorboard in my mother-in-law’s room? the deep freeze?), then puddled out another palmful for the other one.

‘Actually, spankings and valentines go together,’ Tania remarked. ‘Saint Valentine was himself whipped before they beheaded him, and the Church has got a special kick out of beating lovers ever since.’

‘Beheaded—?’ gasped Naomi. Her buttocks clenched, and I thought of Alison, the way her hips had flexed in my grip, and a wave of anxiety swept over me. It was as though something were rushing down upon me which I wasn’t ready for, and I remembered my own mother, hurtling down a ski slope toward a broad bulge of mud — we’d hit an unusual dry spell that winter, and the snow had got worn off in places; the rest of us could ski round the muddy patches, but my mother still hadn’t progressed beyond the snow plow. We could see her streaking down a ridge toward the big glistening mud patch, a sickly smile on her face, and there was nothing we could do. ‘Sit down! Sit down!’ my father had cried, but she just kept coming, her eyes getting bigger and bigger. And then suddenly she’d stopped. I didn’t remember the fall, I must have looked away, but it was terrible, and she was in the hospital for a long time afterward. It was not only our last ski trip. It was the last time we ever went anywhere as a family.

‘Well,’ said Tania with a sigh (of course, I could simply turn it over to the police — why did that seem so impossible?), ‘they had to chop something off …’

I rubbed the baby oil into those big cheeks, bigger than my own, thinking back on my son when he was tiny, his little bottom like two fat knuckles, narrow and pointed, his life still simple then, his memories wholly utilitarian and unfocused. Now … One of his drawings was stuck up on the wall over the clothes hamper. It was a picture of a castle with a war going on, blood and flags flying, bodies scattered like jacks. There was a big figure up on top that was presumably Daddy. He had a long thing hanging down between his legs which Mark said was for killing the bad guys, and he was throwing somebody off the ramparts. Mark said sometimes the picture made him laugh and sometimes it made him afraid, but he wouldn’t tell me who it was that was getting thrown off. ‘The only Saint Valentine story I remember,’ I said, dribbling a little more oil into my hand and spreading it into the creases of the thighs and the furrow between her cheeks (I could feel her muscles relax as I worked the oil in — her tummy sagged and her thighs gaped a little as though her pelvis had distended), ‘was how he restored the sight of a blind girl.’

‘That’s nice …’ she whispered. I oiled the surface of her anus in little circles as though polishing a button (perhaps, I was thinking, recalling my son’s question, it’s neither the hard part nor the empty part, but something in between), then pushed my fingertip in, twisting it gently; she groaned and squeezed her cheeks together in pleasure and gratitude as I pulled it out: ‘I — oh! — like stories like that …’

‘Yes, well, naturally both she and her father got converted, and so consequently got their heads chopped off, too, bright eyes and all.’

‘Yuck! Why’d you have to go and spoil it?’

‘Ah, well, who’s to judge him?’ Tania sighed. She was wearing pink suds now all the way to her armpits. ‘Probably, like all of us, he only wanted company …’

I capped the oil, set it aside, then gave Naomi’s buttocks one final vigorous rub, making them gleam rosily, buffing away their playing-card pallor. If I could get that thing out of the house, I thought, I could bury it in the garden. ‘You like that girl, don’t you, the one with the pretty hair …?’ she asked softly, her voice jiggly from the massage.

‘How’s that?’

‘You were-her thi-hi-hinking about her ju-hust now, I-hi-hi could tell-ll-ll …’

‘Actually I was thinking about all those pee-hee-heople downstairs, and what they’re going to do-hoo-hoo to me if I don’t get back down there.’ This was a lie. I was thinking about Alison. She was all I’d been thinking about all night. Except for Ros of course. I spread the excess oil around the sides of Naomi’s hips and down her thighs, gave her cheeks a final slap, straightened up. And my wife. ‘There! that should—’

‘You want to make love to her, don’t you, Geoffrey?’

‘Gerry.’ I wrung out the towel, tossed it in the hamper, washed up.

‘Gerry …’ Naomi seemed to have grown fond of her position, or maybe she was falling asleep. Her voice was just a drowsy murmur. ‘How would your wife feel about it?’

I glanced at Tania in the mirror, her broad back to me like a stone tablet. A soft sympathetic stone tablet. ‘She wouldn’t like it.’ I wiped my hands, combed my fingers through my hair. ‘I’ll go get something for you to wear, Naomi.’

But when I opened the door, there was Howard kneeling down behind it, his eye where the keyhole had been — the package of paper panties hit the floor. He snatched at them. ‘I–I’m sorry, I, eh, just dropped — they slipped …’

‘Is that you, Howard?’ Tania called, and he popped erect as though on wires. She wrapped herself in the bathtowel, pulled the door open. ‘Well! look at you!’

He stood there in the doorway holding the package of panties in his chubby fist, weaving slightly, knees bent, a silly smile on his flushed blood-flecked face, one shirttail out, red silk tie dangling loose. ‘I just — hic! — brought these — this, you see. Dickie, eh …’ He thrust the package at me, but it had been opened and what reached me was only the cellophane wrapping: the panties lay in a soft heap at his feet. Tania picked them up, glanced at them curiously, then handed them to me with a wink. ‘Howard, Howard!’ she clucked, tucking in his shirttail. He giggled idiotically. ‘You’ve popped all your buttons!’

‘Here, Naomi, Howard’s — Naomi? Hey! ’

She started up with a snort, blinking her eyes, her skirt slipping down her shiny bottom. ‘Oh …’ I could hear Tania asking her husband for his scout knife: ‘Which one’s the leather punch, Howard?’ Naomi smiled sleepily, leaned her head on my shoulder, looping her arms softly around my neck. ‘Can you help me,’ she yawned, ‘just one more time.’