Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘We’re not exactly sure, there’s an Inspector here from Homicide trying to work it out now.’

‘Notch it!’

‘Woody—?’

I stood, rooted in turmoil, clasping the ice pick to my breast like precious treasure and staring down at my feet, invaded by a fearful sense of some kind of ultimate déjà vu. I was standing, I saw, in one of the police team’s chalk drawings of Ros, the fetal one: what had Tania said about primal outlines? Life, she’d said (I seemed to see her again, kneeling at the tub, her arms scabbed with pink suds, peering at me over her pale turned shoulder as though to offer me something: love perhaps, or a vision of it), was nothing but a sequence of interlocking incarnations, an interminable effort to fill the unfillable outline. Yes, vague chalk drawings, that’s what genetic codes were, the origin of life: questions with no answers, just endless inadequate guesses. Art, she believed, attempted to reproduce not the guesses, but the questions; this was how beauty differed from decoration — or indeed from truth, in her father’s sense of the word — which was why Tania always claimed that, contrary to the common opinion, she was in fact a realist. But art was therefore dangerous: the heart of beauty was red-hot (she’d once tried, in that notorious self-portrait, to paint this heat directly) and it could burn your eyes out, sear your flesh away. Like she said tonight: ‘Something almost monstrous …’

‘Jesus, did they both die like that?’ someone asked behind me. ‘It’s like a goddamn fairy tale!’

‘No, you don’t understand …’

‘Gerald …?’

I looked up, meeting my wife’s gaze. There was, as always, a touch of worry in her eyes, a touch of uncertainty: even as she smiled it was there, though now she wasn’t smiling. In her arms she carried a bundle of dirty clothes, and I saw that she had changed aprons again. This one was an icy blue with pink pears and yellow apples in it. ‘Where did everybody go?’ Yvonne wanted to know. ‘Cynthia …?’ ‘It’s Tania,’ I said, swallowing. ‘She’s dead.’

‘I know.’ She turned to look at the people on the stairs, holding the soiled laundry in her arms like a gift received but still unopened. She shuddered and the sleeve of my bloodstained shirt dropped and wagged from her bundle like a spotted tail. ‘Can you get his finger out of there, Jim?’ someone asked behind me. ‘I don’t know, I think she’s getting hard.’ She touched a hand to her brow, gazing past me: a towel uncoiled as though to slip away, a blue sock fell to the floor, someone’s underwear, a handkerchief, all falling — I stopped to scoop it up for her. It lay scattered in and around Ros’s outline like conjectural apprehensions of form, like Mark’s drawings of Christmas trees (yes, I felt myself in a child’s world down here, disassociated, unseen: it slid out from under my shirt like a duty shed and I folded my soiled shorts around it): even a pillowcase: had she been changing the bedding? ‘Thank you, Gerald. I thought I’d do a load … before we got too far behind …’

‘Whose handkerchief is this?’ It was almost too filthy to pick up: I pinched it by one corner, dropped it loosely on top.

‘His.’ She nodded back over her shoulder toward my study. Daffie had paused to speak to Anatole, now lying on the stairs, staring blankly out through the railings, and Noble, passing, whispered something in her ear. She threw her glass of pink gin at him. ‘Gerald, they’ve got Patrick in there now. I’m afraid.’

I kissed her forehead, clasping a hand to each shoulder: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll go check on him,’ I said, and stepped by her, freeing myself from Ros’s outline as I did so. ‘I believe it,’ someone said as I pressed through the jostle in the doorway toward the downstairs toilet (Daffie was rubbing her arm where Noble had struck her and she exchanged a commiserating glance with me), ‘but there’s one goddamn thing I just don’t understand …’

‘Wait, don’t go in there,’ Woody cautioned, touching my arm. ‘They’re using it for a darkroom.’ He glanced back over his shoulder, just as Cynthia came out of my study. ‘Everything okay?’

She nodded, businesslike. ‘I loaned him my calculator, which should help, but he still has a long way to go.’ She handed Woody a gold watch which he pulled on, then she took his arm, looked up at me. ‘I’m sorry if we caused you any embarrassment in there—?’

‘No, it was my—’

‘How’s Patrick?’ Woody interrupted, placing a hand over hers, a hand stubbier than her own.

‘You’d be surprised. He has a split lip, some bruises, he’s going to be pretty sore — but I think he’s fallen in love.’

‘Patrick—?’ I couldn’t help smiling, and she returned it: I thought of teachers I’d had, bank managers, a doctor who treated me once for trenchmouth in Rouen. A man in lilac and gray passed us, muttering something about ‘a good run’ or ‘cut one.’ ‘I mean, is anyone noticing?’ he asked.

‘They discovered a set of photos of the girl — the victim — being raped by some man in disguise. It’s true, I’ve seen a couple of them — they’re pretty offensive, and there’s even a dagger or something in one of them. The only clue to the rapist’s identity, it seems, is his exposed genitalia, so they’re taking measurements, checking for peculiar marks, scars, circumcision, and so on, as you might expect.’ My smile was gone. She watched me serenely. ‘Anyway, when they took hold of your friend’s member, it erected on them. This enraged one of the officers for some reason and he struck it with his nightstick. Quite firmly, I must say — you may have heard the scream.’

‘Aha,’ smiled Woody. The photos: had someone just been telling me …

‘The Inspector reprimanded the officer and apologized to your friend, even patting him on the shoulder as he put his bruised organ away — then he returned the tweezers to him and with that the little fellow simply melted, started telling them everything he knows. When I left, it was something about a fabulously wealthy old woman who presumably came to Roger with what was a kind of parable about love and jealousy, if I understood it correctly.’

‘Close enough. I remember the day Roger came into the office with that stupid story,’ Woody said, shaking his head. ‘He was very talented, Roger. Sometimes, in a courtroom, he could be downright brilliant, an artist in his way. But he was too ego-centered ever to make a really good lawyer.’

‘I always had the feeling it was his loss of ego that got him into trouble,’ I said, recalling Tania’s account of Roger concussed by love.

‘Maybe.’ Woody pursed his lips like a skeptical prosecuting attorney confronting a dubious plea. It was almost as though he were preparing a case against his ex-partner. ‘But maybe ego is absence, that bottomless hole in the center that egomaniacs like Roger keep throwing themselves into.’

Cynthia, on his arm, her gaze steady, seemed neutral, but there was something disquieting about her, too. Something odd. Now, fingering her medallion, she turned to Woody and said: ‘If we’re going up to see the body, we should do it soon, before Yvonne starts missing us.’

‘I know — but first, damn it, there’s something I have to …’ He glanced toward the study, his face clouded, just as Fats and Brenda, in tears, holding each other up, came staggering out. ‘God, it’s awful , Bren!’ ‘I can’t believe it! Did you see his eyes — ?’ ‘Gerry, listen, could you do me a small favor?’

‘Sure, Woody, only first I—’

He laid a hand on my shoulder, leaned close. Through the doorway into the dining room, I caught a glimpse of Alison with Dickie, his arm around her, both of them laughing — she didn’t seem to see me. ‘Would you go in there with me? I’d really appreciate it …’