Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘ Wha—?! ’ Fats exclaimed, feeling the bulb of his nose speculatively, and some guy in the doorway threw his hands up and whooped: ‘Hey, I like the pitch! ’ I recognized him: the actor who’d played the wind-up sergeant-major in Quagg’s soft-core production of The Naughty Dollies’ Nightmare. Gudrun the makeup artist and a plump actress in a toga and a pair of oversize rubber galoshes, worn like slap-shoes, crowded up behind him. Knud’s wife, Kitty, shouting something about official rape, had meanwhile leaped on the cop between Ginger’s legs and was pulling on his ears, and now Earl Elstob, seemingly misreading everything, jumped on Kitty, pushing her skirt up. ‘Can you use some talent, Zack?’ hollered the actor, as he elbowed in.

‘Yeah,’ shouted Quagg, trying to wrest the stretcher grips away from the man in the lilac shirt, ‘but first get the word out, Jacko: Ros has been ragged! Go call Hoo-Sin and Vachel and get them over here! And anyone else you can think of!’

‘I’ll do it!’ said Regina, appearing in the doorway at the actor’s elbow, and, released, he came bounding over, eyes aglitter and a smile on one side of his mouth — ‘ Ha ha! Hold up the exits! ’ he howled — and flung himself at the lilac-shirted man.

Brenda, bending over to drag Elstob off Kitty (she’d let go the cop’s ears and was struggling to keep her underpants on), suddenly yelped, spun around, and laid into Patrick. ‘ You little creep! ’ she screamed, her fists flying.

‘ It wasn’t me! ’ he blubbered, his split mouth bleeding anew, as Dolph slipped away (I felt Alison near me again and wondered if she understood, relative stranger here though she herself was, what was happening, and if that was why she’d drawn close to me again), sipping beer. Mee, standing on Anatole’s face (‘Can’t somebody do something?’ Wilma was wailing: Talbot was under there somewhere, too), seemed to be strangling one of the ambulance men — the other one had tackled Quagg and they had fallen over Ros, her plastic-mittened extremities flopping, her face masked in chipped plaster which bearded her throat and chest as well, and I felt (as a soft belly pressed up against my buttocks) newly sorrowed: ‘It’s almost sad,’ she used to say after oral sex, ‘that it tastes so good.’

‘That’s enough!’ someone cried. ‘You don’t know what you’re doing!’

‘Someone should go get Cyril!’

‘Hold the bimbo down, Malcolm, while I—’

‘Wait a minute! I — unff! — I got an idea!’

The word ‘crepitus’ came to me just then, the word I’d been trying to recall since I’d first seen Yvonne on the landing (they were talking about her now, the punch-up was slackening and there were negotiations under way), and with it came a general sense of loss that embraced Ros, Tania, Yvonne, my mother and grandmother, life itself in its fleeting brevity, its ruthless erosions. Yes, I thought as arms encircled my waist, a hand slid under my shirt (Bob was getting to his feet at last, using Ginger’s legs for crutches, exposing the fat little red purse between them: it was expanding and contracting rhythmically like someone chewing), it’s true: love is indeed, as a woman once whispered to me (from our balcony we could hear mullahs in minarets singing the sun down: the setting, coming back to me now like a fragrance in the air, was ripe for such sentiments), the tragic passion — not for her reasons of course (she had just left her husband to spend a strange, fleeting, but beautiful week with me in Istanbul, which was perhaps, though I’d forgotten it until now, the most beautiful week of my life), but because of its ultimate inadequacy: for all its magic, love was not, in this abrasive and crepitant world, enough. And was that, I wondered as one gentle hand caressed my nipple, the other burrowed below my belt (Ros had been abandoned and with her the free-for-all as well, people were picking themselves up, groaning, laughing — ‘ Hoo-eee! that was a real dingdong!’ — and the ambulance men, breathing heavily, had turned their attentions to Yvonne: ‘Sure, why not? They told us to — whoof! — pick up a body, but they — gasp! — didn’t say which!’), the source of its strangely powerful appeal: its own tragic inadequacy? The question itself was resonant with passionate implications, tragic or otherwise, but even as I turned to share them (out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed my son Mark, one of my ski caps down around his ears, eating things off the floor, my mother-in-law dragging him over toward me, something clutched in her white fist), Yvonne cursing raucously, screaming for help, Jim distracted by his efforts to bring Talbot around, I realized that it was not vermouth I’d been smelling (Alison in fact was watching me from the dining room doorway, looking somewhat startled), but bubble gum. ‘Damn it, Sally Ann, this is no time for adolescent vamping!’ I exclaimed, tearing her hands away. ‘People are hurt here! Your own father—!’

‘Oh, crumbs, Gerry! Stop treating me like a child! I mean, I only want to make love with you — is that so awful?’

‘I just won’t have it!’ my mother-in-law snapped, glaring at Sally Ann’s hands on my belt. She held up the ice pick like a denunciation: ‘He was playing with this! ’

‘Ah—!’

‘I’ll take it,’ said Sally Ann quietly, dropping it in her shirt. There was a patch now over the breast pocket that said: ‘HANDS OFF UNLESS YOU MEAN BUSINESS.’ I glanced over at Alison, but she was watching the ambulance men, a pained look in her eyes.

‘Where did it come from, Daddy?’

‘I–I’m not sure …’ Fred was turning round and round, trying to get used to his neckbrace; at his feet, the Inspector was tying a plastic bag around Ros’s head. ‘Hey, man, what gig you working here?’ Quagg wanted to know. ‘What’s that you’re eating, son?’

‘Hormone tablets,’ my mother-in-law replied icily, speaking up to be heard over Yvonne’s bawling as the ambulance men stretchered her away. ‘And before that it was some kind of foot ointment!’

‘No, hey, I like it, it’s got something!’

‘Ow, what happened?’ Talbot moaned, then coughed and gagged. Jim was holding something to his nose. ‘Who did I hit?’

‘All you hit was that young man’s fist with your silly face,’ sniffed Wilma. ‘And then the floor.’

‘Hard, though — right? Hard! Ooohh …!’

‘Take another whiff of this,’ Jim said, and Talbot snorted and gagged again.

‘ Gerry —? Do something! Help me! ’ I caught just a glimpse of the terror on her stricken face (‘You know what I hate most, Gerald?’ my mother once exclaimed — maybe the expression on Yvonne’s face had made me think of it — ‘What I really hate is having a good time !’) as they squeezed her through the door into the hall, past the new arrivals pressing in. ‘Man, somebody really chewed up the scenery in here!’ one of them said: Scarborough, Quagg’s lugubrious baggy-eyed set designer. He looked around as though measuring the space.

‘If this is a party, Daddy, why aren’t there any balloons?’

‘Yeah, there was some guy went crazy, Scar …’

‘ I’ll be good! I won’t complain! ’

‘I didn’t realize it would hurt so much,’ Anatole whimpered, holding his mouth as though to keep his teeth from falling out.

‘Here, try this, Mark,’ Sally Ann suggested, picking up one of the condoms Naomi had dropped earlier in the evening. Alison had vanished, and in her place Ginger was just wobbling out of the room on her high red heels, her pigtails bent askew, the cheeks of her narrow behind peeping out through gaps in her costume, looking carpet-burned, others drifting away as well.