Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘Sure, here, I won’t—’

‘Thank you.’ He folded it into a little pad, dabbed at his cheek with it as though at a wound. ‘Your wife took mine. Said she’d wash it for me.’ Bob looked up at us from his microscope, lip between his teeth like a thought he might be chewing on, then (the alarm went off on one of the wristwatches in Pardew’s heap: he located it, depressed the button that turned it off) bowed his head again. ‘Does your wife usually do the laundry during a party?’

‘Sometimes. It depends. Why do you ask?’

He shrugged, staring at the stained handkerchief, then refolded it and applied it to his cheek again. ‘I’m interested in patterns. And the disruption of patterns. That’s my job. I solve crimes. Do you understand?’

I nodded. I was trying to be civil, but his bluntness and cold piercing gaze made civility seem like evasion. I felt unfairly singled out, he at my desk, I before it as though at a dressing down, but when I turned away from him, there was only poor battered Roger staring back, the preoccupied cop at his microscope (he was working now with a piece of material from the heap of rumpled clothing at his feet, and as I watched him bend to his lens, I thought of my wife at the kitchen stove, lifting the pan lid to peer in at the boiling water — I realized I should have gone over right then and taken her in my arms, but the moment was gone, what had been done could not be undone — or rather, undone done — and I felt a flush of sorrow penetrate my chest, spread, pulsing, through my body, and leak away like time itself, like hope, like Being, that great necromantic illusion …), close-ups of Ros’s corpse hanging from the line, the room upended and strewn with the debris of my dislodged past. What they’d done here reminded me of a line Ros once had to deliver in a film called The Invasion of the Panty Snarfers: ‘When they stuck their noses in, it felt like everything just changed its shape!’ Pardew waited still. Watching. ‘I mean, patterns, and, uh, crime — murder — as … you know …’ I was struggling. The Inspector narrowed his eyes: I supposed I was an open book. ‘A … disturbance of things, and so—’

‘Not necessarily. On another scale, this party of yours is the true disturbance. Maybe all conventions are, all efforts at social intercourse.’ He sighed, and sighing, seemed more human. There was still a trace of blood on his cheek where Patrick had kissed him, but he’d ceased rubbing at it. ‘Since I was a child, I have been troubled by, let’s call it the irrational, and have been trying to find an order, a logic, behind what is given to us as madness and disorder. That hidden commonality, you see. Well, I have been in homicide a very long time now, and I can tell you, the more I run into all the surface codes and structures — as we say in the business — that people invent for themselves, the more it seems to me that the one common invariant behind them all is, quite frankly, murder itself! ’

I felt he was confiding in me and I smiled politely, hoping only to get out of here. What I’d thought was a maze, I saw now, was only a diagram of the brain, showing the consequences of injury to the various parts. ‘That’s interesting, but I don’t believe anyone here could possibly—’

‘ What? What—?! You think I can’t see what’s going on here? ’ he roared, bolting up out of his chair in a sudden rage that sent me staggering back a step. ‘I live in the filth of the world! I live at the heart of absolute evil and degradation! It’s my profession , and certain things I am good at! I have an eye for them! Hatred, for example! No matter how deeply it is buried, I can see it! Lust, doubt, fear, greed: I can see these things like color painted on people’s faces, washed into their movements, their words, and believe me, this place is screaming with it!’

‘It — it’s only a party—!’ I protested.

‘ Only! Do you think I’m blind? You’ve got drug addicts here! You’ve got perverts, anarchists, pimps, and peeping toms! Adulterers! You’ve got dipsomaniacs! You’ve got whores, thugs, thieves, atheists, sodomists, and out-and-out lunatics! There isn’t anything they wouldn’t do!’ He seemed almost to have grown. He was rigid, powerful — yet his hand was trembling as he picked up a piece of paper. ‘In this world, nothing — nothing , I tell you — is ever wholly concealed! I know what’s in their sick stinking hearts!’

‘But—!’

‘Look at this! It’s a drawing of the murder scene! Only it was drawn before the murder! We can prove this! Somebody was planning this homicide all along! You see? Somebody here, in this house! Down to the last vile detail — except that they apparently meant to strike her in the womb instead of the breast — at least that must be the true meaning of the crime — you can see here the blood, the hideous weapon between her legs. There’s the killer standing over her. Gloating! One interesting thing: he’s bearded. That might be a clue or it might not, of course. It might be a disguise, for example, or some fantasy image of the self, a displacement of some kind …’ He was calming some and, reluctant to stir him up again, I was tempted to let him have his ‘bearded murderer.’ But then he added: ‘And beside him, this horned figure, his diabolical accomplice, you might say, his own evil conscience! ’ — and I felt obliged to interrupt.

‘I’m afraid that’s the, uh, Holy Family.’

‘The what?’ He looked pained, his eyes widening as he stared at me, as though I might have just grown horns myself and struck him.

‘It’s the Christmas scene. You know, the manger and all that. My son drew it for nursery school.’

He slumped back into his chair, staring at the drawing in disbelief. ‘But — all this blood—! ’

‘There was a childbirth documentary on television the week before that we all watched. Not surprisingly, my son put the two things together. The “weapon” is the baby and the “killer’s” the father, and that, eh, “diabolical accomplice” is a cow.’

The Inspector seemed momentarily deflated, his moustaches drooping, and I was sorry I had had to be the one to tell him. ‘It’s terrible,’ he said. He turned the drawing over, applied a self-adhesive label to the back, and scribbled something on it. ‘It might be worse than I thought. Your son’s name?’

‘His—? Mark, of course, but—’

‘Age?’

‘He’s four, almost five now, but he—’

‘Did you or your wife ever have syphilis?’

‘No!’

He handed the drawing to Bob, who asked: ‘Should we get stats?’

‘Probably a good idea.’

‘Wait a minute! What are you—?’

‘Now as regards the missus and her laundry,’ the Inspector continued icily, turning back to me. I watched Bob add a few notes of his own to the label on Mark’s drawing, then put it on the shelf beside a crushed beer can and what looked like part of a truss. ‘She’s been a busy little lady.’

‘Well …’ It was a mistake, I sensed, to be too frank with this man. Yet, it was difficult to conceal anything from him either. ‘She likes things clean, if that’s what you mean.’

‘I’m afraid it’s not as simple as that. Let me show you something.’ He nodded Bob over. The policeman picked up some jockey shorts lying near his feet, brought them to Pardew. ‘She was just stuffing these into the washing machine when we stopped her. She pretended surprise, of course. Or perhaps she was really surprised. You can see that there is blood on them. Very close to that of the victim, I might say.’