Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘Can’t you tell them to be a little more quiet?’ my mother-in-law scolded, standing sentinel at the doorway of my son’s room.

I smiled at her, then edged past a stack of dirty plates and crumpled cocktail napkins into our bedroom and closed the door.

The room was quiet, hushed almost, lit only by the dense yellow glow cast by the bedside lamp, and I felt the jitteriness ebb away. I crossed the room to draw the curtains shut, catching a glimpse of myself in the wall mirror as I passed it. Hmm. Once I’d cleaned up, I should go say good night to Mark again so he wouldn’t carry that face into his sleep with him. Unless, of course (recalling Naomi’s valentine), he needed it.

Tania’s ‘Susanna and the Elders’ had hung where the mirror was until something she said one night made us move it to the dining room. Her husband, Howard, writing on a painter he disliked, had called his work ‘bedroom art,’ meaning too private and self-indulgent. I’d argued that all good art, being a revelation of the innermost self, and thus a kind of transcended dream, was ‘bedroom art,’ but Howard would have none of it. ‘This widespread confusion of art and dreams is a romantic fallacy,’ he’d said, ‘derived from their common exercise of the brain’s associative powers — but where dreams protect one’s sleep, art disturbs it.’ Tania had agreed: ‘I don’t paint in bedrooms, I don’t even think about painting in bedrooms, and I certainly wouldn’t hang one of my paintings in one, any more than I’d go to a party in haircurlers and pajamas.’ So we’d put the mirror there and moved ‘Susanna’ down to the dining room (admittedly, we’d hung it in the bedroom in the first place for no better reason than that the forest colors went well with the curtains and russet-canopied four-poster), and truth to tell, it did seem to take on more power down there.

Tania and Howard had arrived with Anatole tonight just minutes before Roger and Ros — in fact, I was still taking their coats when I heard Ros laughing on the porch — so we were all there in the hallway together for a moment, a moment that now in retrospect seemed almost magical. Ros had given each of us a big hug (I remembered Anatole blushing and staring at the ceiling as she smashed her breasts against him, Howard adjusting his spectacles knocked askew) and announced she’d just got a new part in a play — I’d had the impression at the time that it was news to Roger as well, and dismaying news at that — and then off she’d gone, the last time I’d seen her alive, best I could remember, to pass her hugs around. Ros was a great hugger. She always made you feel, for about five seconds, like you were her last friend on earth and she’d found you in the nick of time, and now, as I searched through the clothes hanging in the closet for something to wear, I found myself remembering all her hugs like one composite one: not a girl hugging, but hugging, girl-shaped. I picked out some soft linen slacks and a rust-colored open-collared wrap-tie shirt, tossed them over the back of a chair. Have to change shoes too. And socks: I was wearing blue.

Ros sometimes asked us, if we were visiting her backstage, to help her change costumes. I say ‘us’: I was seldom lucky enough to have her all alone. And anyway, somehow you were never really quite alone with Ros even when there wasn’t anyone else around. But it didn’t matter. One of the best times I ever had with her, in fact, was the day I arrived to find a photographer there shooting stills. I was married by then and so was she, so we’d seen each other only rarely, but her greeting was the same as if we’d been actively lovers. That is to say, exactly as it always was. What the photographer was after were simple straightforward publicity stills of Ros in rapture, but whenever she tried to act ecstatic, she always looked like she had a fly up her nose. The photographer said he’d be glad to help her work up the real thing himself, but he wasn’t loose enough, as he put it, to shoot pix and jism at the same time, so he asked me if I’d do him the favor of pulling Ros’s trigger for her. For the sake of art, he added with a professional grin. I protested — weakly, as Ros had just thrown her soft arms around me and given me another breathless hug: oh yes! let’s! — that my wife had slightly less magnanimous notions about art and duty, and I couldn’t take the risk of an uncropped photo turning up somewhere. Ros, of course, didn’t understand this at all, but the photographer, a married man thrice over, thought about it for a moment, then suggested: why not wear a mask? So we got the keys to the costume trunks, locked ourselves in a rehearsal room where they had some colored lights, mirrored walls, and a few loose props, and enjoyed an enchanted hour of what I came to think of as an erotic exploration of my own childhood. I was severally a clown, a devil, a scarecrow, skeleton, the back half of a horse, Napoleon, a mummy, blackamoor, and a Martian. I played Comedy to Ros’s Tragedy, Inquisitor to her Witch, Sleeping Beauty to her Prince Charming, Jesus Christ to her Pope. Sometimes the mirrored images actually scared or excited me, altered my behavior and my perception of what it was I was doing, but Ros was just the same, whether as a nymph, a dragon, an old man or the Virgin Mary: in short, endlessly delicious. The photographer occasionally joined in — just to keep his hand steady, as he put it — and once we balled her together without masks, dressed only in red light and jesters’ bells. I probably learned more about theater in that hour or so — theater as play , and the power of play to provoke unexpected insights, unearth buried memories, dissolve paradox, excite the heart — than in all the years before or since. After the third orgasm, it all became very dreamlike, and if I didn’t have a set of prints locked away down in my study to prove that it actually happened, I probably wouldn’t believe it myself. I enjoyed no particular costume so much as the strange sequence of them — a kind of odd stuttering tale that refused to unfold, but rather became ever more mysterious and self-enclosed, drawing us sweetly toward its inner profundities — but from the photographer’s viewpoint, the best was probably one of the simplest, a variation on Beauty and the Beast in which Ros wore only a little strip of diaphanous white cheesecloth and I dressed up in a gorilla suit. He said her astonished expression as she gazed up at the monstrous black hairy belly with a little white pecker poking out was exactly what he’d been looking for.

I smiled, feeling grateful. My bruises hurt less. I felt I could stay here forever, wrapped round by memory and the soft light and fabrics of my bedroom; but then I heard my mother-in-law scolding someone out in the corridor. I sighed, kicked my shoes off, peeled off the socks, removed my belt and laid it over the chairback with the clean clothes, lowered my trousers (all that blood in the crotch, hers: I shuddered, pained by this sad final gift), and had one leg out when Vic’s daughter came in. ‘Hey, I’m changing, Sally Ann!’

‘That’s all right, don’t mind me — I just want to sew this patch on.’ She peeked back out into the hallway (I heard someone protesting, something like a scuffle on the stairs — what I read on Sally Ann’s hindend was ‘SEAT OF BLISS’), then eased the door shut. ‘Everywhere else, there’s always somebody bothering me.’

She padded barefoot across the room to my wife’s dressing table, pausing there to admire her navel in the mirror. I’d pulled my trousers back up, partly to hide the erection I had from thinking about Ros, and stood holding them. ‘Come on, I’ve got a houseful of guests! I’ve got to get dressed and—’

‘Well, go ahead, for goodness’ sake,’ she said with an ingenuous smile, studying my open fly, ‘don’t let me stop you!’ She turned her back to me, pushed her blue jeans down, her little bikini pants getting dragged along with them. She stepped out of her jeans, very slowly pulled her panties back up, then sat down on the dressing-table stool, her little bum stuck out like she was trying to get rid of it. ‘I mean, we do know what men and women look like, don’t we, Gerry?’ She laid her blue jeans across her lap, took up her needle and thread as though conducting me with a baton. I noticed now the two whiskey glasses on the dressing table, the half-eaten sandwich, open jar of petroleum jelly, smelled the alien perfumes, the sweat and smoke. Even here then … ‘Look, I won’t even watch if that’s what’s bothering you,’ she added, gazing at me mischievously in the dressing-table mirror.