Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

I started. ‘What kind of—?’

But the phone rang and Daffie went to answer it. ‘Who?’

‘ Bren! ’ Fats bellowed from the living room. ‘ It’s Ros! Our little Ros! She’s DEAD! ’

‘ What? Ros—?! ’ she cried and went running in there in her tight red pants (there was a thump, a curse): ‘ Oh NO—!! ’

The tall officer appeared, scowling, in the doorway, leaning on his short leg, and Daffie with the phone said: ‘It’s for your boss, kiddo.’

‘Fucking bastard,’ muttered Anatole under his breath, and Michelle whispered: ‘I once had a dream about something like this.’

Howard came down, his hips swiveling with drunkenness, and announced petulantly: ‘The upstairs toilet is blocked, Gerald!’

‘I know, don’t flush it. I’m going to call a plumber. As soon as the phone’s free.’

‘Only it was at the art school, a boy who’d been painting me — he was dead but he kept on painting and I couldn’t get away …’

‘Have you seen Talbot, Howard? I can’t find him anywhere.’

Inspector Pardew now stood in the living room doorway, thumbs hooked in his vest pockets under the drapery of his white silk scarf, his impeccability marred only by the dark stains and chalk dust on the knees of his trousers. He gazed thoughtfully at Wilma, then at each of us in turn. Anatole brushed past him, thumping his shoulder (the Inspector seemed not to notice, his eyes falling just then on his overturned fedora), and Patrick followed nervously, making little whimpering noises probably meant as apologies. ‘It was so strange,’ Michelle was saying softly, ‘but then it suddenly became a movie we were all watching. Only I still didn’t have any clothes on. I wanted to get out of the movie theater before the lights came up, I was so afraid …’

Pardew picked up the fedora, smoothed out the dent, brushed it on his sleeve, and, glancing casually at the label of Fats’ jacket, placed his hat on top of it. He seemed all the while covertly interested in Michelle’s description of her attempt to push, naked, past all the people in the movie house of her dream (‘I kept hearing them all laugh, but every time I turned around, they’d be like gaping statues, fixed in some kind of awful terror — and the scary thing about it was I couldn’t find any aisles …!’), ignoring Daffie behind him, holding the phone at her crotch like a dildo and blowing smoke at the back of his head. ‘Is that for me?’ Iris Draper asked, leaning over the banister, her spectacles dangling on a golden chain, and Wilma said: ‘That reminds me of the time Talbot took me to a professional wrestling match, and Wolfman threw Tiny Tim, who weighed about five hundred pounds, right in our laps.’ Yes, the trouble with ritual, I thought, is that it commits you to identifying the center (Pardew, staring at the front door, seemed momentarily nonplussed), which is — virtually by its own definition — never quite where or what you think it is …

‘But then I was in the film again that I’d been watching and I was crying over the dead boy, yet all the time I felt like I had to go to the bathroom …’

‘I know what you mean, dear! When Tiny Tim came crashing down—’

‘Yes, yes,’ Inspector Pardew was saying (he had the phone now and Daffie had vanished), ‘I’m doing everything I can.’ Howard, hands outspread for balance, wobbled past us into the dining room, muttering something about ‘that stupid boy,’ and Michelle, taking my arm, her hand like gossamer, whispered: ‘It’s so eery down here without any music. It makes everybody feel lost or something …’

‘Put something on if you like,’ I said.

‘Well, because it’s very complicated,’ Pardew barked. Ginger crossed behind him, tiptoeing springily toward the toilet, her red pigtails trembling, kerchief tails lifting and dipping. She tried the door but it was locked. ‘Yes, yes … in her chambers. Just an agonal phenomenon probably. We’ll get prints later. No, that’s smashed up.’

‘Do you think it — it would be all right?’

‘Sure, Michelle, why not?’ I touched her hand gently: so frail, yet the knuckles were sharp and hard. I was thinking of Susanna in Tania’s painting, that fixed artificial way she stood, and then Alison, miming it, the puzzled look on her face — and now Michelle, who’d posed for the painting in the first place, soft beside me, so light, almost wraithlike, yet brittle: a sequence, as it were, of interlocking figures, ‘Susanna’ a kind of primal outline, like Pardew’s pale chalk drawings on my living room floor (he glanced up at me, phone at his ear, and I heard the cries from in there: such an emptiness under them, yes, music might help), for the subsequent incarnations … ‘Something quiet.’

‘It’s a problem of dynamics, you see. She was a blonde and — what? How should I know?’ Pardew turned and, picking his nose, watched absently as Ginger pressed an ear against the toilet door, both hands pinched between her thighs, mouth puckered, kerchiefs dangling loosely like bits of laundry. ‘No, she was married. Probably. Yes, of course I did, but we got nothing from him we could use.’

A kerchief fluttered to the floor, and Ginger, her thin legs tensed above her high stiletto heels, bent stiffly to pick it up just as Earl Elstob banged out of the toilet, wiping his shoes on his pantlegs: ‘Woops!’ he exclaimed as the door batted her behind and sent her flying. He watched her bellyflop and, eyes agoggle, pink mouth pertly agape, skid across the hall, then he looked up, blinked, and grinned toothily. ‘Hey, uh, didja hear about the ole lady who — shlup! — backed into the airplane propeller?’

‘Well, I know it’s too bad,’ the Inspector snapped, scowling at his fingertip as he turned away, ‘but it can’t be helped!’

Michelle pulled me on toward the living room, saying something about my being forgiven (I was worried about this: where had the time gone?), or someone wishing to be forgiven. ‘What’s that?’

‘Fiona. She told me all about it.’

‘She did?’

‘Well, a dipping refractometer maybe, if you have one — we can see what’s going down here …’

‘She said she knows how upset you were that night and she should have been more understanding, but her own guilt feelings made her fly off the handle like that.’ Elstob’s got the word for it all right, I thought, as we stepped into the front room (he was yuk-yukking dopily behind us, helping Ginger back up on her spiky stilts, the Inspector meanwhile describing someone as a ‘spoiled weak-willed ladies’ man with a propensity for dare-deviltry and an inflated ego’ and outlining his equipment needs): all these violent displacements, this strange light, these shocked and bloodied faces — it was as though we’d all been dislodged somehow, pushed out of the frame, dropped into some kind of empty dimensionless gap like that between film cuts, between acts …

‘Waah! I’m getting reamed by those goddamn posts, Jim!’

‘It’s your big ass, Yvonne, it’s too heavy!’ Noble grunted.

‘It’s terrible , Bren! I can’t believe it!’

‘Hang on, we’ll get you braced up.’

People stood in hushed awkward clusters, gripping drinks, cigarettes, crushed napkins, watching Yvonne get settled noisily onto the couch, or Fats and Brenda keening unabashedly over Ros’s body in the far corner, or just staring at the people drifting uneasily in and out of the room. The blood, drying, seemed to have sunk back slightly from the surface of things, giving them another dimension. Like visual echoes, hints of hidden selves. It was almost as if (footprints had trampled Ros’s outlines, disturbing the contours, laying down around them tracks of checks and arrows, a patina of graying chalkdust) the room had aged somehow … ‘She knows it was never meant as unkind — if anyone was being cruel that night, she said, she was — but under the circumstances, you know, after what had just happened, where you were coming from and all, and then with your penis moving inside her and her face, wet, on your cheek, almost like something had been skipped over, well, suddenly she—’