Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

I gazed at her mirrored image, unable to see her shadowed back between us. A great pity welled up in me. ‘You are too willful …’

‘You can goddamn well say that again!’ growled Vic, looking up. ‘Now the rest of the night I want you downstairs where I can—’

‘Oh, pee!’ she pouted, clenching her little fists to her sides. ‘Both of you can kiss my elbow!’

Vic lunged at her: ‘Why, you little—!’ But she was out the door. He stood there glaring furiously for a moment, his broad sweat-darkened shoulders hunched; then the strength seemed to go out of him and he sank down again on the dressing-table stool. I sat on the edge of the bed to pull the clean socks on, tie my shoes, and relieve the tingling between my cheeks. I was thinking still about death and parody and mirrors and the essential formlessness of love (my mother-in-law appeared in the doorway, glared at us, and snapped the door shut), and about how I might explain it all to Alison. And then: how she’d gaze up at me … ‘You keep a bottle up here somewhere? Under the mattress or something?’

‘You might find some hair tonic in one of those drawers …’ And so what about marriage then, Gerald? Just another parody? I seemed to hear Alison ask me that.

Vic grunted. His face was in shadows, but his shaggy white hair was rimmed with light right down into his sideburns. He spied the two glasses on the dressing table, sniffed them, chose one, dumped the cubes from his own glass into it. I transferred the things from the pockets of the old pants to the new, shocked again at the obscenity of the bloodstains (and how had I come to pocket a can-opener, this medicine dropper, these shriveled oysters and bumpy little marbles?), then threaded my belt through the linen loops. ‘Jesus, what am I going to do, Gerry?’

‘I don’t know, do you ever talk to her?’

‘Talk to her! What the fuck about? My father was a happy-go-lucky tough-ass illiterate coal miner, hers is a sour bourgeois overeducated drunk — what could we possibly have in common? Hell, she understands my old man better than I can understand either of them!’

‘That figures.’

‘Come on, don’t get supercilious with me, pal—!’

‘I only meant—’

‘You meant what we all know: love blinds. I ruined myself as a thinker the day I knocked up my wife. I haven’t been worth stale piss ever since.’ I couldn’t argue with him. He hadn’t written a thing since Sally Ann was about six years old, and had slacked off long before that. But I didn’t believe it was that simple. It’s one thing to reduce the world to a mindless mechanism, another to live in it. Flow had surprised him, offended him, dragged his feet out from under him. Even now, as he reared up and paced the room restlessly, he seemed to slip and weave. ‘Let me tell you something about my old man. Just because he could belt the shit out of you, he thought he was tough. And smart. The sonuvabitch was full of cocky aphorisms, proverbs — he had the secret. And you know what it was? Power. This cringing yoyo, who spent his whole life slaving away down in the nation’s asshole when he wasn’t in the breadlines, believed in power like kids believe in fairy godmothers. He still does. Still talks tough and acts smart and lies there in his goddamned hospital bed in the old folks’ home waiting to be blessed with it. With Sally Ann, on the other hand, it’s experience. Spoiled, naive, unable to grasp anything more complicated than a goddamned confession magazine, a girl who wouldn’t recognize the real world if it rolled over her, and what she believes in — guides her whole life by — is experience!’

‘What are you trying to tell me, Vic?’

‘That I know what my fucking problem is, goddamn you — but what burns my ass is that I can’t seem to do anything about it!’

‘Well, you’re coming around in your old age …’

‘What, to paradox? Hell, no, I’ve always accepted that — I just don’t make a religion out of it like you do, that’s all.’

I took a sip at the drink Vic had turned down: something between a Manhattan and a gin rickey. Awful. Against the light: lipstick smears on the far rim. Full lips. Cherry red. ‘And what do you suppose Eileen believes in, Vic?’

He sighed, finished off his drink, chewed an ice cube. ‘I can’t imagine. Ecstasy maybe? Belly laughs?’

‘You’re awfully hard on her — why do you even go out with her?’

‘She’s got a comfortable hole I can use. And when I’m done I can go away and she doesn’t complain.’

‘Is that fair?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think about it.’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t think I could enjoy it that way.’

‘Well, you’re more considerate than I am. You give parties, I don’t.’

‘Maybe the trouble, Vic, is that you’ve never been in love.’

His sour laughter boomed out. ‘No, you silly shit, you’re right — I’ve loved, god -damn I’ve loved, but in love is one fucking place I’ve never been! Except …’ He paused, sobering some, ran his broad hand through his hair. ‘Except once maybe …’ He leaned against a bedpost, his craggy face softening.

‘Anyone I know?’

He sighed, rubbed his jaw, lurched away from the bedpost. ‘Yeah.’

I drank in silence while he paced. He was clearly in pain. Not Eileen’s kind of pain, sullen and stoic: it was more disturbing than that. He seemed riven by it, his stride broken, his vision blocked, and I thought: Yes, I’ve known all along — Eileen on the couch, Vic standing over her, his back to the rest of us, his neck flushed, fists doubled … ‘Ros,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘It was right after my wife and I broke up.’ His voice was husky, and as though to cover, he cleared his throat and sucked up another cube to chew. ‘I needed somebody quick and easy,’ he said, the words crunched with ice. ‘No complications.’

‘Like Eileen.’

‘Like Eileen. Only it didn’t turn out that way.’ He sighed: more like a groan — then dropped onto the stool as though undermined. He sat there, his back bent, elbows on his knees, staring mournfully into his empty glass. ‘We ran into each other at a political rally. Roger was defending some prisoners who’d rioted down at the jail—’

‘I know. I read about it.’

He grunted. ‘For some reason, he’d dragged Ros along. Probably afraid to leave her on her own anywhere. The rally was held on the steps of the courthouse, and those of us who were organizing the thing were up on the porch, under the colonnade, facing the crowd. I was pressed up against Ros when we first arrived, and pretty soon we found ourselves holding hands and asses and finally all but jerking each other off — Jesus, I was horny! We must’ve excited everybody within thirty yards of us!’

‘Where was Roger?’

‘Up front with all the main characters. He was pretty nervous about her as usual, but though he kept craning his head around, he couldn’t really see anything — except for the flush on Ros’s face and the way she twitched around.’ He paused, licking idly at the melting ice, his thick brows knitted. ‘You sure you want to listen to this?’

‘Yes …’

‘It’s not just a cheap cocksman’s brag — I mean …’

‘I know.’

He leaned forward again, staring off through the far wall. ‘She was wearing a soft woolen skirt, lambswool maybe. I never notice women’s clothes, but I know every goddamn thing she had on that day. By feel anyway. I don’t remember for sure what color the skirt was — a greenish plaid, I think — but I’ll never forget what it felt like to grip her cunt through it.’ The fingers of his right hand closed around his knee. ‘A fat furry purse, a little soft bristly stuffed animal that you stroked between the ears — Christ, I’m getting a hard-on just thinking about it!’ He scratched his crotch, sucked up a cube, spat it back again. Tears glinted in the corners of his eyes. I screwed the lid on the petroleum jelly. ‘Anyway, it came my turn to speak, and I whispered to Ros before I left her how fucking unhappy I was, and how much I needed something human to happen to me. She was waiting for me when I’d finished — I don’t know what I said out there, but it must have been good, taut and hard and nothing wasted, my whole body working on the message, as it were — and when I got back she pulled me gradually behind the others and finally on into the building, smiling toward Roger all the while. She knew the courthouse pretty well, I guess because of having to go there with Roger at lot. She hurried me up some stairs, down a corridor, through an empty courtroom and into a little cloakroom where the judges’ robes were hung. We could hear the speeches and chanting and applause from in there, so we were able to time it pretty close. Or I could anyway. I don’t think it mattered to her. Probably we weren’t up there more than ten or fifteen minutes, but thinking back on it I feel I spent the best half of my life in that cloakroom, and I left enough seed in Ros and all over those fucking robes to turn a desert green! Jesus! I knew it was crazy, adolescent, unreal, but I didn’t care. I came down out of the goddamn building about three feet off the ground! It’s too bad we weren’t storming the fucking barricades that day, I could’ve died a happy man!’ He smiled broadly, thinking about this, and for a moment, a glow of warmth and innocence lighting up his craggy face, he looked like a different man. Then the skepticism returned, the sour shrewdness, the weariness: he glanced up at me to see how I was taking it, shrugged at my sobriety (oh, I knew it, knew what she could do, knew what I’d lost, what we’d all lost), set his glass down. ‘It was so goddamn beautiful, Gerry …’