Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘Yes … He said you were playing monsters with Uncle Dolph and some silly lady who said he was little.’

‘Wilma, he meant.’

‘Was Dolph with Wilma?’

‘No, but …’

‘Peg said it wouldn’t last. I guess she was right.’ She sighed. ‘I wish they were still together.’

‘You mean Wilma—?’

‘Louise and Dolph.’

‘Ah.’ I had the peculiar sensation, briefly, that this conversation was both unlikely (Jim showed the tall cop the shard of glass he’d found: the officer shook his head and handed it back) and, word for word, one we’d just been having a few moments before. Of course, all conversations were encased in others, spoken and unspoken, I knew that. It was what gave them their true dimension, even as it made their referents recede. It was like something Alison had said to me about the play we were seeing that night we met — or rather, not about the play itself, but the play-within-the-play, in which the author’s characters had taken on the names of the actors playing them (‘self-consciousness reified,’ Alison had called it — or perhaps she’d been reading from the program notes: I watched her now as she scratched at something on the bare flesh of her chest between the silken halters of her dress, overseen approvingly by Dickie, Jim and the cop having parted between us like curtains) and then had improvised a sketch based on what had supposedly happened to them that day out in the so-called real world: ‘If that’s what life is, Gerald, just a hall of mirrors,’ she’d mused, blowing lightly on her cup of intermission coffee, the tender V of her chin framed in ruffles and brown velvet like an Elizabethan courtier’s, ‘then what are we doing out here in the lobby?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I said (Alison was laughing now at some remark of Dickie’s — he was pointing at his own behind — and her husband, rejoining them with drinks for Fats and Brenda, licked his fingers and smiled with them), ‘they never seemed very happy.’

‘Who, Yvonne and Woody?’

‘No …’ I realized that she had changed the subject and had just been telling me about Yvonne’s crying jag, brought on by Earl Elstob’s joke about the retired brassiere salesman who liked to keep a hand in the business (my wife said: the brassiere salesman who wanted to keep working but had already retired): ‘She couldn’t stop, it just kept pouring out, so she’d gone running upstairs to be by herself, and she’d just reached the top when Vic hit her and knocked her right back down again.’

‘She seems almost to be seeking out her own catastrophes,’ I said, although I wasn’t sure the line was my own. ‘Vic was upset about Sally Ann. I’m sure he meant no harm.’

‘That’s what you always say.’ She tipped her head against my shoulder, the broom handle cradled in the crook of her far elbow, index fingers linked. She yawned. ‘But why did he want the fork?’

‘Well, and Ros, too, of course.’

‘I feel I should know what you mean, Gerald,’ my wife said after a moment, lifting her head and unlatching her fingers to tug briefly at her bra strap, ‘but I don’t.’

The doorbell rang and the tall officer, unsnapping his holster, bobbed out into the hall. ‘I’ll get it,’ I said, starting to disengage myself, but before I could move, a tall woman in a frilly black gown came swooping in like a huge bird, trailing feathery chiffon wisps, her hands clasped at her breast: one of Ros’s actress friends, the one who’d played the Madame in the bordello play and Nancy Cock in The Mother Goose Murders , though she’d once been an opera singer. ‘I came over just as soon as I heard!’ she cried breathlessly. ‘Where is she?’

‘You mean Ros? She’s—’

‘Good God! I’d never have recognized her!’ she gasped, staring in amazement at Yvonne on the couch. Yvonne, speechless for once and equally amazed, stared rigidly back as though into a mirror. ‘ Ros! What have they done to you—?!’ She threw herself on Yvonne, who now found her voice and used it for screaming blue murder, Jim dragging the woman off and redirecting her.

‘ NOW she’s broke the OTHER one! ’

‘Easy, Yvonne, You’re all right …’

‘ Waahhh! ’

‘ Ros, love! It’s me, Regina! ’ the woman wailed, pitching herself, arms outflung, through the people around the body (Fats’ face was screwing up again as though to cry, and Brenda, gum in her teeth, was grimacing) and — though she seemed frantically to be trying to arrest herself in mid-air — on down on Ros: there was a windy rattling sound and Ros’s head bounced up off the floor briefly, then hit it again, jaw sagging slackly at an angle. ‘ Oh Christ, no!! ’ Regina rasped, stepping on her dress and tearing it in her haste to scramble to her feet. She looked around desperately and found herself staring at Anatole, slowly going green in the white chair, lips pulling back, his eyes agog with a horror reflecting her own. Then she clutched her mouth and ran teary-eyed out of the room: ‘Nobody told me she was dead —!’ she gurgled as she passed.

‘My goodness! Poor Regina!’ my wife whispered, drawing closer. ‘I hope she makes it to the bathroom!’ Ros lay wide-eyed and gaping as though frozen in perpetual astonishment, truer than any she could ever have play-acted, her limbs now disjointedly akimbo, her wound thick and dark between her breasts. ‘I just like to be looked at,’ she used to say. I could hear the sweet childish lilt in her voice. ‘Do you think they’re … they’re simply going to leave her there …?’

‘No, Jim has called an ambulance,’ I said, a catch in my throat. Alison, following Regina’s flight, had — as though cued by the folk music starting up softly around us — discovered me at last: the pained shock on her face gave way to a gentle sadness, and she turned to her husband and took his hand. I felt my own shoulders relax as, not unlike mockery, the stringed instruments behind me tensed and slackened. I gave my wife a little reassuring hug and said: ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be here soon.’

‘Sometimes I feel I hardly knew her. Ros, I mean. She seemed so obvious, there was always something so direct, so immediate about her — and yet …’

‘Well, maybe that’s all there was.’

‘How can you say that, Gerald? Even bare skin is a kind of mask …’ Dickie, never one to patronize melodrama, had, even while Regina was still clawing the air helplessly in her grim descent, left the group around the body, but they were joined now by Noble and his girlfriend. Noble, fresh drink in his hand and cigarette dangling in his thick lips, seemed almost intentionally to scuff through the chalked outlines as he wandered over, to kick at objects on the floor. ‘Don’t you remember? You told me that the night we went to see that awful incest play about Jesus and his family.’

‘ The Beatitudes , you mean …’ She was right, of course, and it was true. Noble turned his glass upside down, making Brenda gasp, but nothing poured out; then he took a long slow drink.

‘It’s that kind of openness, directness , that’s the hardest to understand, to really know. ’ Alison glanced up at me and seemed about to make some gesture or other (Noble had just turned his empty glass over, pouring what seemed like pitchers of whiskey out on Ros and the floor), but just then the tall officer returned, blocking my view of her, and told Anatole to get out of the easy chair. He was threatening him, or so it seemed, with a pair of scissors. Anatole grumbled but dragged himself weakly to his feet, and Brenda, watching him, said something that made Fats laugh and turn his head to watch. ‘It was what you said about amateurs and professionals, how it was easy to see how people learned their parts, but the mystery was the part that wasn’t learned, the innerness , the — what did you call it?’ Lloyd Draper clumped through in all his golden armor: ‘Time passes!’ he called out with a kind of leaden cheerfulness. Reflexively I glanced again at my naked wrist, reminded of Alison’s slender hand when I stripped her watch from it, that mischievous grin under her freckled nose (I was recalling my thoughts about blocked views now, the special chanciness of live theater, the uniqueness of each spectator’s three-dimensional experience, the creative effort, as in life, to see past sight’s limits, all those things I’d wanted to talk to her about), the taut excitement of her body as her finger circled my nipple, its pad brushing it lingeringly across the top, the nail in turn underscoring it as though to italicize it with some gently ambivalent threat …