Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

The mess in the hall seemed to be worsening — not just the dirty plates and glasses (picking my way through it, I was reminded of a similiar occasion, stepping gingerly by moonlight through the wreckage of an ancient ruin somewhere in Europe, I was there with some woman, she was Czech, I think, though she said she was French), but pits and crusts, ashes, butts, napkins, toothpicks: I stuffed ten glasses full of debris and picked them up with my fingers in their mouths (I’d been experimenting around a lot and felt the need for tradition, something stable — but the ruin was a terrifying cul-de-sac, capriciously dangerous in the moonlight, and the woman’s sudden wheezing appetite for oral sex scared the blazes out of me; afterward, so I was told, she threw herself down a well), paused a moment to listen at my son’s door. My mother-in-law was reading to him: ‘… endeavoring to appear cheerful, sat down to table, and helped him. Afterward, thought she to herself, Beast surely has a mind to fatten me before he eats me, since he provides such plentiful entertainment …’ The way she read it, it sounded like a Scripture lesson — no wonder Mark had been telling us lately he didn’t like fairy tales. As I listened to her recount the trials of beauty in a world of malice and illusion, I was reminded of my own grandmother’s bedtime stories, variations mostly on a single melancholy theme: that people are generally better off not getting what they think they want most in this world. For her, the Beast’s miserable enchantment would have been paradise compared to the Prince’s eventual regret.

Yvonne howled with pain and swore fiercely. ‘Take a grip on something,’ I could hear Jim grunting, and Yvonne bellowed again: ‘ Waaah! Woody—? Where’s Woody?! ’

I rushed toward the stairs, worried suddenly about my wife — how long had I been gone? what were the police thinking about that? — and crashed into Alison’s husband, just stepping out of the bathroom: two glasses slipped from my fingers and exploded on the floor. ‘Oops, sorry!’ I exclaimed, shaken.

‘It’s occupied,’ he replied flatly, touching his beard. I caught just a glimpse of the drawn shower curtains and what looked like my wife’s apron on a hook as he pulled the door firmly shut behind him (probably I should call a plumber, you could smell it all the way out here) and waited for me to precede him down the stairs. If in fact he meant to follow.

‘It’s okay, Yvonne,’ some woman urged (I’d already turned toward the stairs, as though compelled, as though following some dancestep pattern laid out in footprints on the floor), and Yvonne cried: ‘ Okay—?! What the hell do you mean it’s okay?!’

My knees flexed involuntarily on the top step: it was (like a sudden wash of color, the fall of a memory scrim) the ski slope again — not now the one on which my mother fell (Yvonne lay sprawled on the landing, one foot sticking out at an angle under Jim’s seat as he bent over her, worried onlookers pressed around), but the recurrent ski slope of my dreams, impossibly sheer, breathtaking, ambiguously crosshatched, disasters at the base: my tip (watched always by rows of dark spectators and now as though pushed from behind) into oblivion … ‘Yvonne—!’

‘Gerry!’ Yvonne cried, looking up at me (they all looked up, Iris Draper, Howard, that woman I’d seen with Noble, Anatole, Daffie, Ginger, as though I were something painted on the ceiling — all but Jim, now gripping Yvonne’s foot by its heel and instep). ‘They’re after me, Gerry!’ The dark side of her face, bruised and bloodied, glistened with tears (the skis were off, I was walking down stairs again), but the eye looked dead: it was the near side alone that seemed to be speaking to me: ‘They’re taking me away by pieces!’ As she said this, Jim pulled steadily against Daffie on the leg, twisting it inward (the toes had been sticking out at ninety degrees), actually stretching the leg as though indeed trying to screw it off, and there was a harsh grating sound — ‘ Yowee! Lord love a duck, Jim! ’ she yelped and her free leg kicked out, catching Ginger in the back of the knees and making her sit abruptly, her narrow rump thumping the stair with a crisp little knock. ‘ Use a little grease! ’

‘That’s got it, I think,’ Jim grunted, holding her foot with one hand and wiping his brow with the other. The grating sound echoed in my head like the faint harmonic of some lost memory. Jim pushed her skirt back to study the symmetry of the two legs, and I thought of Ros again, a game we used to play which we called ‘Here’s the church, here’s the steeple …’ I was breathing heavily. ‘All right, let me have those splints, son …’

Anatole, down a few steps behind him, handed him a pair of croquet stakes, the spikes still muddy. I knelt next to them, bracing myself on the glasses I was carrying. ‘It was Vic,’ Daffie panted, squatting alongside (‘Oh, Gerry,’ Ros would say, ‘did we? I just don’t remember!’), and Anatole said: ‘He was after the cops.’ I could hear his stomach gurgling; he didn’t look all that well. ‘He ran straight into the living room and grabbed the fork away from them—!’

‘The fork —! What was he, starving or something?’ Yvonne squawked, her head resting now in the lap of Noble’s friend. Ginger unpinned a kerchief from one shoulder and handed it to Jim, searched her body for another. Over our heads, Howard and Mrs Draper seemed to be arguing about Tania’s painting of ‘The Ice Maiden,’ Iris finding it too unskillful and farfetched. ‘If that’s all he wanted, why the hell didn’t he ask? Do I look like the resisting type?’

Daffie, leaning over the railing (‘But of course there’s distortion,’ Howard was insisting, ‘there’s always distortion!’), called out: ‘Hey, Nay, is that a fresh drink? Bring it up here like a good old dog! We got an avalanche victim who needs it bad!’

‘I wouldn’t,’ said Jim. He was tying Yvonne’s two legs together with Ginger’s kerchiefs. ‘She’s probably got some fever, a drink could make her sick.’

‘Make me sick! Oh boy! That’s a good one!’ Yvonne hooted. ‘Just look at me! Sick would be a goddamn improvement! ’

I looked through the railings and saw Alison in the hallway gazing up at me. She glanced past my shoulder, pursed her lips, then beckoned me with a faint little nod and disappeared from view, replaced by Kitty, rushing past, clutching her shirt front together, a flushed grin on her face. Ginger, perched awkwardly on two steps, her ankles wobbling above the stiletto heels, had meanwhile bent over and run her hand between her knees and up the back of her skirt: she smiled suddenly, her little red pigtails bobbing, and whipped another kerchief out, then grabbed her rear as though it were all falling apart back there, crossed her eyes, and tottered bowlegged down the stairs, past Naomi coming up. ‘It’s just too ambitious,’ Iris Draper said flatly (I glanced into the cluster of glasses under my hands, disconcerted suddenly by the sense of being anchored outside time: I jerked my fingers out of them), and Howard sighed with disgust.

‘Gosh, what happened?! ’ asked Naomi, staring wide-eyed at Yvonne’s bandages. She leaned down to offer Yvonne her drink, provoking a disapproving sigh from Jim, and there was a sound like a paper sack being popped, then a slow soft tear. Naomi smiled sheepishly at me and shrugged, and Yvonne said: ‘Thanks, honey, you just saved an old lady from a fate worse than life!’ She tossed the drink back as Jim, nose twitching, asked: ‘What’s in that thing?’

‘I don’t know,’ Naomi said. ‘I just found it.’