Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘Have it your own way,’ I said, turning my back on her. I saw now that the bed had been rumpled, the covers tossed back over loosely. I lifted them: there was a bloodstain on the sheet, a small brown hole burned by a cigarette, coins, crumbs, a wet spot, and someone’s false eyelashes. Well … and the lamp’s yellow glow: it came from one of my wife’s nighties, draped over it.

I removed my trousers and tossed them on the bed, feeling fundamentally deceived somehow, just as Sally Ann said ‘Ow!’ and came prancing over to show me her thumb, which she said she’d pricked with the needle. ‘Kiss it for me, Gerry,’ she groaned, squeezing up behind me, her voice schoolgirl-sultry.

‘Now, see here, damn it—!’ I snapped, whirling around, and the ice pick, wrapped in my ascot, fell out of my shirt on the floor at our feet.

‘Gerry—! My gosh!’ she squeaked, stepping back, still holding her pricked thumb up with its tiny bead of blood.

‘It’s not mine,’ I said lamely. ‘It just … turned up …’

She squatted to pick it up. ‘It’s so — so sexy! ’ she gasped, stroking it gently. She wound it up carefully in the ascot once more and handed it back to me. ‘I’ll never tell, Gerry!’ she whispered gravely and, standing on her tiptoes, threw her arms around my neck and kissed me. ‘Cross my heart!’ I tried to twist away, but she held on to my nape with one small warm hand, pointing down at the hard bulge in my shorts with the other: ‘See, you do like me, Gerry! I felt it pushing on my tummy — you can’t hide it!’

‘Don’t be silly, it gets that way by its—’

‘Can I see it?’

‘What? No, of course not!’ I pried her hand away from my neck.

‘Please, Gerry!’ She blushed, her worldly pretensions evaporating. ‘I’ve never really, you know, seen one …’ She touched the tip of it gingerly through the cotton. ‘Not … not sticking up like that …’

‘Don’t kid me, Sweet Meat, I’ve read your ads.’

‘Don’t make fun of me, Gerry. I was … all that was just for you. You’re so experienced, I thought you’d …’ She ducked her head, sucking at her pricked thumb. ‘I was just showing off …’ Her knotted shirt gaped, showing the firm little bubbles inside with their pink points like new pimples. I could hide it inside one of my wife’s hatboxes, I thought. Or her boot maybe, a sewing basket … ‘I feel so dumb …’ She leaned against me, putting one arm around my waist, pulling my shorts down with the other.

‘Hey—!’

She started back in amazement, holding on to the shorts. ‘Wow! Is that supposed to go in … in me?’ she gasped, cradling it in both hands. ‘Doesn’t it, you know … hurt?’

‘Only when you swallow,’ I said drily, tugging at my shorts with my free hand, trying to back away.

‘Wait, Gerry!’ She held the shorts down firmly with one hand, clutching my rigid member with the other. ‘I’m not as dumb as you think, honest — but in all the pictures they showed us at school, it was always hanging down like a lump of taffy, I never saw one all stiff like this!’

Maybe it was so; but her curiosity both angered and saddened me and I thought again of my walk that night through the laundry-laden streets of that seaside town of Italy: what a fool I was! ‘Sally Ann, please …’

‘But look — there’s the penis and there’s the scrotum, right? And the scrotum contains the epididymis, the seminiferous, uh, somethings, and the vas deferens, which I can just feel, I think, at the back …’ The illusion of novelty, that old shield against time: her fingers stepped tentatively between my thighs like a traveler in a strange city, excited by the possibility of the next turning, poor child … ‘At school, we girls called it the “vast difference” …’

‘Very funny.’ She pushed the shorts down further, thrusting her hand deeper, maneuvering my penis with the other like a lever — and in truth I felt like some kind of antiquated machine, a museum piece, once an amazing invention, the first of its kind, or thought to be, now seen as just another of time’s ceaseless copies, obsolete, worthless except as a child’s toy, disposable. I regretted my sarcasm.

‘And then the perannum—’

‘Perineum.’

‘The perineum, the anus, the — may I try to feel the prostate, Gerry?’ She held my organ gently now, the tip of it resting in her bared navel, as her finger probed speculatively up my rectum, and I thought: yes, the vast difference: a schoolgirl’s titter was what it was worth. Yet: maybe that was enough … ‘It’s all so soft and squishy and—’

‘ SALLY ANN !’ roared Vic as he came crashing in, the door slamming back against the wall with a bang, his face pale with rage and anxiety.

Startled, she jerked her finger out — ffpop!: ‘Yow—! ’

‘Oh, Dad!’ she groaned. ‘For crying out loud …!’

‘ If that goddamn sonuvabitch—! ’

‘Daddy, stop it! You’re making a scene!’

‘Holy smoke …!’ I wheezed, touching my anus gingerly: yes, it was still there.

Vic blinked, looked around blearily. ‘Oh, hullo, Gerry. Sorry. I thought — well, I didn’t see that bastard around anywhere, and …’

‘Really! You’d think it was the Middle Ages!’ She sighed petulantly, then, sniffing her finger, tipped my penis up for one last glimpse of it from the underside: ‘It’s all goosebumpy,’ she murmured, sliding the foreskin up and down, ‘just like the neck of an old turkey!’

‘Sally Ann, your father—’

‘I can take care of myself!’

‘Goddam it, you don’t know that guy, baby!’ Vic insisted, stumbling heavily about the room. He looked like a runner who’d just finished a mile and was trying to keep from falling over.

Sally Ann groaned, gave me a sympathetic grimace and a final squeeze, let go at last, as Vic fell heavily on the stool. I pulled my shorts up, caressing away the twinge in my anus. ‘ Now , you’ve just sat down on my jeans! ’

‘Sorry,’ he muttered, standing again, his eyes averted.

‘You’re drunk, Daddy, and you don’t know what you’re doing,’ Sally Ann scolded, tugging her jeans on. Vic had turned his back momentarily, drinking deeply, so I stuffed the ascot and ice pick under the mattress. There was something else under there already — a meat skewer? More picks? ‘I’m not a child, you know!’

‘You coulda fooled me,’ Vic grumbled, and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. His blue workshirt, half-unbuttoned and bloodstained, was sweaty at the back.

‘Oh, Daddy, you’re such a pain,’ Sally Ann said, checking herself in the dressing-table mirror, pressing one hand against her flat tanned belly, untying and loosely reknotting her shirt when she saw me watching; but it was her mortality, not her childish flirtations, that I saw there. Something Tania had once said about mirrors as the symbol of consciousness or imagination. Maybe we’d been talking about her painting of ‘Saint Lucy’s Lover,’ the one with all the eyes. It had started, I remembered, with one of her little parables on wisdom, her painterly belief in immersion, flow, inner vision, as opposed to technique, structure, reason. Just as mirrors, she’d said, were parodies of the seas, themselves symbols of the unconscious, the unfathomable, the formless and mysterious, so were reason and invention mere parodies of intuition. What one might expect from Tania. What impressed me at the time, however, was her definition of parody: the intrusion of form, or death (she equated them), into life. Thus the mirror, as parodist, did not lie — on the contrary — but neither did it merely reflect: rather, like a camera, it created the truth we saw in it, thereby murdering potentiality. Sally Ann, watching me curiously through it, had clutched the collars of her shirt and tugged them closed as though chilled. ‘What … what’s the matter …?’