Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

I looked up from Ros’s corpse and saw Jim’s wife, Mavis, standing there like something hung from a hanger, locked in a helpless stupor, her soft red mouth agape, her eyes puffy and staring. I knew how she felt: Ros was like her own daughter, or so she often said. Jim was clearly shaken, too, but had the defenses of his profession: right now, playing the family doctor, he was counseling Vic’s daughter Sally Ann. Sally Ann wore, as usual, a white shirt open down the front and knotted at the waist, and tight faded blue jeans with a heart-shaped patch sewn over her anus that said, ‘KISS ME.’ She’d painted her eyes and lashes to appear grown-up, but had only made herself look more a child. Earlier, Dickie had been moving in on her, but now she was alone with Jim. Maybe they were talking about her father: Vic was sitting heavily on the couch, his large shaggy head in his hands, Eileen stretched out limply behind him, looking less alive than Ros. Jim smiled gently and Sally Ann sighed petulantly and looked away. Tania’s nephew Anatole was hovering furtively at the outer edge of their conversation, a look on his tense angular face that seemed to say: I told you this would happen! But then, he always had that kind of look on his face.

His aunt, still on the floor beside Roger and the body, had sunk back on her heels, her half-lens spectacles dangling on a chain around her neck, her celebrated vitality utterly drained away. The crowd of people around her watched as she rubbed her eyes with the tips of her long bloodstained fingers, pressed her lips together, and looked up at Mavis beside her. Mavis seemed to be trying to speak. She slumped there over Tania, staring bleakly, working her soft mouth fitfully around some difficult word, her squat pillowy body otherwise lifeless. Anatole, noticing this, tugged at Jim’s arm, but Jim was still reasoning patiently with Sally Ann and appeared not to notice. Patrick, taking a seeming interest in Jim’s counsel, had joined them, sidling close to Anatole, a tumbler of vodka and grapefruit juice — Patrick’s famous ‘salty bitch’ — in one hand, French cigarette in the other. Sally Ann glanced over at me suddenly, her eyes flashing, then stamped her foot and left the room. Beyond them, I could see Alison, alone, her head down: was she crying? ‘Who …?’ Mavis finally managed to blurt out, and the other conversations in the room died away. Jim looked toward his wife at last, then away again, focusing on the doorway leading in from the hall. Someone in red moved past it. ‘Wh-who …?’ It was the question, I knew, that had been quietly worming through us all. Patrick took a nervous puff on the cigarette held like a dart between the tips of his fingers, watching Mavis now over Anatole’s shoulder. Dolph came in with a can of beer in his hand and popped it open. Jim was talking with Mr and Mrs Draper, nodding his head in agreement as Mr Draper gesticulated broadly. I had the feeling he was describing some kind of pyramid or temple. Mavis’s plump white arms hung limply at her sides, palms out. She lifted her head slowly and we waited for her question. I felt people crowding up behind me like mustered troops. Or a theatrical chorus. Somebody was chewing potato chips in my ear. Vic stood up. ‘ Who—? ’

The front doorbell rang.

‘Ah! they’re here!’ I exclaimed, and went to answer it, greatly relieved. The thick clusters of guests parted, murmuring, as I passed through. I could hear Roger moaning behind me, Tania speaking gently with Mavis. Old Mr Draper stepped forward and clutched my forearm with his gnarled white hand, surprisingly powerful. He tipped his head back to peer down his lumpy nose at me and said: ‘There’s someone at the door, son!’

‘I know …’

There were people filling up the hallway, too, watching expectantly. I’d forgotten we’d asked so many. I could see my wife trying to squeeze in from the dining room, wiping her hands on the bib of her flowered apron. ‘Can you get it, Gerald?’ she pleaded from the back of the hall.

‘Yes,’ I called over the heads between us as the bell rang again. ‘Don’t worry, it’s all right!’

Dickie, stepping out of the downstairs toilet, still zipping up, seemed incongruously amused by this exchange. The tank refilled noisily behind him. He glanced up at Vic’s daughter Sally Ann, staring down at me from the staircase landing over his head, her tanned belly pressed against the balustrade. ‘Hey,’ he grinned, fingering the buttons on his white vest, ‘it’s free now.’

‘Never mind,’ she snapped and continued up the stairs, switching her fanny huffily.

My wife backed away toward the dining room, looking momentarily defeated, lost in the crowd. Mrs Draper, standing near me, touched my sleeve and said: ‘She’s so pale, the poor dear. She needs a little sunshine.’ The Drapers, complete strangers to me, had been belaboring everyone all night with tales of their retirement-age tourist travels, such a tonic, they’d said, and I’d found myself wondering earlier if my party might be part of some package tour they’d bought. But it was true, we hadn’t had a holiday in years …

The bell rang a third time and I reached hastily for the doorknob, only to discover I was still carrying the bottle of vermouth and pitcher of old-fashioneds. I looked around for some place to set them down, but the door opened and a tall moustachioed man in a checked overcoat and gray fedora entered, followed by two uniformed policemen. ‘May we come in?’ he asked politely, but more as a statement of fact than a question: he was already in.

‘Of course. I’m sorry, I was just—’

‘Inspector Pardew,’ he explained with a slight nod of his head. ‘Homicide.’ He removed his gloves carefully, finger by finger, tucked them in his pockets, unbuttoned his overcoat. The two officers watched us impassively, but not impolitely. They were armed but their weapons were holstered and the holsters fastened. The taller one carried photographic equipment and what looked like a paintbox, cables and cords looped over his narrow shoulders; the short one had a toolkit and a tripod. ‘Now, I understand there has been a murder …’

‘Yes, a girl—’

‘Ah.’ He slipped out of his overcoat, reached for his fedora, gazing thoughtfully at Dickie’s girl Ginger, who had just, as though prodded from behind, stepped up beside me. ‘Of course …’

Ginger, under his steady gaze, kept shifting her weight nervously from foot to foot, fumbling at my elbow to keep her balance. Her long lashes seemed almost to click metallically when she blinked them and her pickaninny-style pigtails quivered like little red Martian antennae.

Inspector Pardew handed his coat and hat to me, but, glancing away from Ginger, saw that my hands were full. This caused him to frown briefly and study my face. There was something incisive and probing about every move he made, and his gaze chilled and reassured me at the same time. I tried to explain: ‘I was serving drinks. I–I’m the host and I—’ But he stopped me with an impatient flick of his hand, a disinterested smile. He folded his coat on the seat of a hall chair, placed his fedora on top of it, smoothed down the few hairs he had left on the top of his head, and, still wearing his white silk scarf, strode on into the living room, his thumbs hooked in his vest pockets.

The hallway emptied out as the others, rapt, curious, followed him in, some circling through the dining room to get there ahead of the rest. Ginger, made awkward by her own self-consciousness, picked out her steps behind the others as though negotiating a minefield. Or maybe it was just the exaggerated height of her glittering red stiletto heels that made her walk that way. The two police officers paused in the doorway to watch her go. It was hard not to watch. She wore an alarmingly eccentric costume which seemed to be hand-sewn from printed kerchiefs of Oriental design, intricately multicolored but primarily in tones of mauve, crimson, emerald, and gold. They were stretched tight in some places, hung loose and gaping in others. Sort of like Ginger herself. Dickie called her a walking paradox: ‘More cunt inside than body out, Ger. Fucking her’s like pulling a prick on over your condom.’ I watched, too (‘What’s within’s without,’ as Tania would say, ‘without within …’), but when I looked back at the policemen, a faint smile on my face, it was me they were staring at. Nothing malevolent about their stare, but something was clearly bothering them. They bulked large and alien in the living room doorway, their brass buttons and leather straps stranger to me than Ginger’s kerchiefs, their noses twitching, and, though nothing was said, it felt like an interrogation. I found myself running over the night’s events in my mind as though hunting for dangerous gaps in the story (but it was the gaps I seemed to remember, the events having faded), my smile stiffening on my face. It was like crossing a border: what might they look for? what might they find?