Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘Well …’ I looked around. What was it my wife had wanted? Something from the freezer, a stepladder, fruit knife? I couldn’t remember. There was a lot of activity on the stairs and I could feel it inside myself like a kind of abdominal turmoil. Alison, I saw, had both hands at her ear, her head tipped toward them — what? My hand was empty: I must have dropped it! Dickie smiled and she gave him a little kiss on his cheek. ‘I’ve got a lot to do, Woody — my wife …’ Woody was gazing at me intently, as though through me, more than just an appeal somehow. ‘But, I suppose, if you really—’

‘Thanks, Gerry. I knew I could count on you. We’ll be right back, Cyn.’

‘That’s right, it nearly slipped my mind,’ Cynthia said, as Woody pulled me away. ‘The police were talking about your wife. I’m not sure — I think they found something in the laundry.’

‘The laundry—! But I just left her!’

‘Well, I don’t know when,’ she called back over her shoulder. ‘I really don’t have much time, Woody,’ I insisted, though by now it was too late, we were already at my study door.

I blinked, drew back, bumping into Woody in the doorway. I was almost unable to believe what I saw in there. Everything had been turned inside out. The desk drawers and filing cabinets had been broken open and emptied out on the floor, books dumped from the shelves. The walls, seen only insubstantially through the haze of pipesmoke and shadows (the lamps had been moved about, it was hard even to get my bearings), were smeared now with what was no doubt blood, most of the pictures torn away so violently there were holes in the plaster. There were sketches of the crime pinned up in their stead, procedural charts and instructions, a diagram of what looked like an amusement-park maze. They’d set up a lot of strange equipment, turning the place into a kind of crime lab with test tubes and burners, sieves, calipers, inkpads and rollers, odd measuring gadgets — even now the tall cop, Bob, sat at a microscope holding up between his fingers what looked like a piece of bloody flesh — ah no, the swatch he’d cut out of our white easy chair … Fred, wearing translucent rubber gloves, worked at a hot plate. He seemed to be boiling up some kind of soup. Photographs hung from strung-up lines like dance decorations, and brightly tagged objects — I saw knives, drinking glasses, an ax, swimming trunks, Mark’s paintbox, knotted-up pantyhose, a tin of anchovies, pillboxes and specimen bottles, a blackstriped croquet ball, a pink shoe — lined the swept-out bookshelves like museum exhibits. I had the feeling my whole house was reinventing itself. ‘What have you done—?!’ I gasped, and Woody said: ‘Here he is.’

Inspector Pardew looked up from his paperwork. He sat at my desk behind a heap of watches, calculator in hand and dead pipe in mouth, Patrick hunched nearby, hands between his legs, muttering something about ‘the woman in red.’ The Inspector looked me over carefully, passed a folded bill to Woody. ‘Very well.’

‘Let me know if you need any help, Gerry,’ Woody whispered in my ear. ‘We’ll be upstairs.’

‘Hey, wait a minute, I thought you—!’

‘ Here! Just look at this!’ Inspector Pardew commanded, holding up a little heart-shaped watch on a gold chain. In his other hand, I saw, he now held Alison’s watch with its three opened buckles, the straps dangling from either side of its digital face like green plaited locks, the numbers blinking between them like a part. ‘I tell you, time is not a toy!’

‘Actually, I was only, uh, passing by, I have to get back to—’

‘It is not a mere decoration! ’

‘It certainly is not! ’ echoed Patrick, scowling at me like a judge. His mouth where Fred had hit him was puffed up and purple, and there was a big bloody gap just under his nose that made him look like he was metamorphosing into a frog or something. Woody was gone, vanished in that moment that Alison’s watch had distracted me, and the short cop, tracking through the correspondence and check stubs, travel brochures, books, photos, and old newspaper clippings that littered the floor, had moved over between me and the door. He wore his rubber gloves still, white powder down his front. I seemed to have trouble thinking clearly, my mind confused by all this … this confusion.

‘It is the very content and shape of the world,’ Pardew was saying. ‘Look! This one doesn’t even have a face! It doesn’t have hands! It’s like a theater marquee, reflecting nothing but our pathetic vanity! ’

Turning back to him, I now saw, past Fred’s abandoned hot plate, what I hadn’t seen before: Roger, sprawled upside down in the far corner like a broken doll, limbs akimbo, legs listing against the walls as though he’d slid down from the ceiling, his right leg bent sideways at the knee, forming a kind of aleph of the whole. His face was smeared with blood, his hair matted with it, his eyes below the gaping mouth starting minstrel-like from their sockets. I gaped my own mouth (I was thinking suddenly about Tania, what she’d said: ‘Like a newborn child …!’) to suck in air. ‘Are you just — just leaving him there—?!’

‘ Time ,’ Pardew was insisting, wagging the heart-shaped watch at me (I’d turned just in time to see him hurl Alison’s watch behind him as though it were contaminating him: ‘It’s a mockery! A corruption! ’), ‘we’re talking about time! ’ With a sweep of his other hand, his white silk scarf fluttering about his neck as though in awe and wonder, he indicated the glittering mound of watches on the desk, and it was then, noticing a heavy ring he wore with a large red stone in it, that I realized what it was that had seemed odd about Cynthia just now: her rings. She had been wearing four of them, all uncharacteristically ostentatious, on one hand, none on the other. ‘It’s the key to it all, it always is, the key to everything! ’

‘Yes, pay attention, Gerald.’

The Inspector sighed, sat back, nodded at Fred. ‘If you don’t mind, please,’ he said to Patrick.

‘But I haven’t finished telling you about—!’

‘I know, we’ll discuss it later. Now I have to speak with this gentleman.’

‘But I’ll be quiet! I won’t be in the way! I promise! ’

‘Sergeant …?’

‘Please! Wait! My tweezers!’ Patrick cried, fumbling in his pocket as Fred took his arm.

‘I gave them back to you.’

‘Yes, but —’ He fished them forth, thrust them at Pardew. There were tears welling up in his eyes. ‘There was a little silver chain — it’s not there anymore!’

‘Oh, I see. Well, you’ll have to fill out a claim form,’ the Inspector said, his moustaches lifting and falling with a dismissive smile as he handed the tweezers back. Bob was stapling a tag to the patch from our easy chair. ‘We’ll leave one with you before we go.’

Patrick hesitated, tugged at by Fred in his dusty rubber gloves, then plunged recklessly forward and planted a wet crimson kiss on Pardew’s cheek. ‘Thank you!’ he burbled, his split lip bleeding afresh, as Fred collared him. ‘You’re so … so kind! ’

The Inspector winced faintly, narrowing his eyes at Fred, and the policeman led Patrick away, still twittering and squeaking, holding himself as he hobbled along. ‘In the old days,’ Pardew muttered icily, ‘we used to strip perverts like that in the middle of winter and scourge them in the marketplace.’ He caught my frown and added: ‘Well, a long time ago, of course. That old gent was telling me …’ He touched his cheek, glanced at his fingertips. ‘Do you perhaps have a handkerchief I could borrow?’