Robert Coover: Gerald's Party

My wife looked up in alarm — or maybe the alarm had been there on her face before she turned it toward me. ‘Oh no! Where—?’

‘In the living room,’ I said, though I wasn’t sure that was what she’d meant by the question. I was having trouble breathing. She stared past my shoulder toward the door, her mouth open, little worry lines crossing her forehead. There were plates and glasses in the sink behind her, but the counter was wiped clean. I wondered if she wanted me to hug her reassuringly or something. But I had these things in my hands. ‘What … what do you think we ought to do?’ I asked.

With difficulty, she pulled her gaze back to me. ‘I don’t know, Gerald,’ she said softly, touching her cheek with the back of the hand holding the knife. ‘Probably we should call the police.’

‘Yes. Yes, of course,’ I said, and went back out front, thinking of my wife with a butcher knife in one hand and a bouquet of parsley in the other, and trying to remember the special telephone number for emergencies.

But Alison’s husband was using the phone. He was murmuring secretively into the mouthpiece, his head ducked, a sly grin on his thin bearded face. I tried to interrupt him, but he waved me away without even looking up, puckering his mouth as though blowing a kiss into the phone and chuckling softly. ‘Listen,’ I cried, ‘there’s been a murder!’

‘Yes, I know,’ he said coldly, putting the receiver down. ‘I’ve just called the police.’ I was troubled by the way he stared at me. It occurred to me that I knew almost nothing about him: only his name and address on a white card.

I followed him back into the living room where Roger was still carrying on pathetically over Ros’s corpse. Tania had knelt beside him and was trying to console him, draw him away from the body, but he was beyond her reach. Beyond anybody’s. He was wild with grief, looked a terror, his front now as bloody as Ros’s. His face seemed twisted, as if a putty mask were being torn away from it, and people watching him were twisting up, too. Vic’s girlfriend Eileen had apparently fainted and was lying on the gold couch. Jim was sitting by her, holding one wrist, slapping her face and her palms gently, while Dickie at the end of the couch, keeping her shoes away from his bright white pants and vest, held her legs up so the blood would flow to her head. Vic flung what was left of his drink up her nose and that brought her to with a snort, but she went on lying there, whimpering softly to herself. Vic said something about a ‘stupid cunt,’ and Jim said: ‘Take it easy, Vic. She’s had a severe shock.’

The contrast was there for everyone to see: Roger and Ros, Vic and Eileen. It seemed to bring a kind of ripeness to the room. Alison gripped her husband’s hand tightly and stared over at me as though in supplication, but what was it she wanted? I felt lost and confused, a stranger inside my own house. I did, however, remember now the special phone number for emergencies. Her husband, watching me, withdrew his hand from hers to smooth down the fine black hairs of his beard. ‘There’s nothing we can do until the police come,’ I said at last. Alison seemed helped by this: she sighed, her slender shoulders relaxing slightly, and turned to gaze compassionately across the room at Eileen on the couch. Her dark hair fluttered wispily, as though filmed in slow motion, as she turned her head, and I thought: I understand myself better because of this woman. This was true of my wife, too, of course.

Tania, still trying to comfort Roger, was now completely bespattered with blood herself. ‘Oh my god, Gerry!’ she cried, showing me her bloody dress, her dark expressive eyes full of dismay and sorrow (I felt my own eyes water: I bit down on my lip), her nostrils flaring. ‘ This is terrible! ’

Roger, as though in response, suddenly tilted far back, clutching his face with bloody hands, and let forth an awful howl, scaring us all, then pitched back down upon Ros’s ruptured breast, still amazingly spouting fresh blood.

Eileen at that same moment cried out. We looked up. Vic was standing over her at the couch, his legs spread, elbows out, the back of his thick neck flushed, and the way she was curled up with one arm flung over her drawn face, I had the impression Vic had just struck her. Dickie had backed away, clearly wanting no part of it. When our eyes met for a moment, I frowned in inquiry, and Dickie, tugging at the ivory-buttoned cuffs of his plaid jacket, shrugged wearily in reply. ‘No …!’ Eileen sniveled.

‘We’ve got to be patient!’ I said sharply, but no one appeared to be listening. Even Alison was distracted. Her husband was studying a Byzantine icon depicting the torture of a saint, a curious piece my wife had bought at an auction. Mr and Mrs Draper came in and began to discuss it with him. He turned away. I felt there was something I should be doing, something absolutely essential, but I couldn’t think what it might be. It didn’t matter: I’d had the same sensation many times before — just a little while ago in the kitchen, for example — and knew it for what it was: the restless paralysis that always attends any affront to habit.

Not always had I read this feeling rightly, I should say. There was the terrible night, for example, of our first son’s stillbirth. Little Gerald. I’d been by my wife’s side throughout the daylong ordeal that preceded it, holding her hand through the ferocious pain that was tearing her apart: a small fineboned woman exploding with this inner force growing increasingly alien to her as it struggled, though we did not yet suspect this, against its own strangulation, having tried, its cord twisted, to breathe too soon — oh, how I’d loved her then, loved her delicacy, her courage, her suffering, her hopes, even the fine cracks disfiguring her belly, the veins thickening in her legs, her swollen teats, fierce grimace, cries of pain. It had been Jim who had suddenly guessed the truth and rushed her into the delivery room. But too late, the child was dead. Afterward, drugged, she’d slept. ‘It’s all so unreal,’ I’d said, contemplating the wreckage of so much natural violence, ‘so unbelievable …’ Jim had given me a sedative to take and, wrapping one arm around me, said I should go home, get some rest, come back early in the morning. Leaving the hospital, then, I’d had this same feeling: that there was something important I should be doing, but I couldn’t think what. Halfway home, dreading the emptiness there, still a bit awed and frightened, I’d thought of a woman I’d been seeing occasionally during the final months of my wife’s pregnancy, and it had occurred to me that she too must be needing solace, understanding, and needing too the opportunity to be needed in this calamity, needed by me, even if only this last time (yes, it was probably the last time), and I’d supposed that this must be the important thing I had to do, that thing I couldn’t put my finger on. And so, full of sorrow and distress and compassion, I’d gone by. But I’d been wrong. She’d been shocked, disgusted even. ‘My god, have you no feelings at all?’ she’d cried, still only half-awake, her face puffy from sleep and her hair loose in front of her eyes. ‘That’s — that’s just it,’ I’d explained, tried to, love (I’d supposed it was love, for someone) thickening my tongue. ‘I need someone to talk to and I thought—’ ‘Christ, Gerry, go find a goddamn shrink!’ she’d shot back, and slammed the door. I’d gone on home, feeling sick with myself (what kind of filth are we made of, I’d wondered miserably, nauseated by my own flesh, its dumb brutalizing appetites and arrogant confusions), and had found my mother-in-law waiting for me there: she’d come to help with the new baby and she was all smiles. It was like a strange nightmare memory: my mother-in-law smiling …