Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘Hey, everybody!’ Janny cried, bouncing up and down. ‘Let’s hear it for Choo-Choo Trainer!’ She hiked her skirt and dropped into her cheerleader’s squat, one arm out stiffly in front of her, the other cocked behind, and slowly, as Patrick and Jim took a grip on Charley’s fat knees, got the old school locomotive going again. ‘ CHOO-oo-oo! ’ Pause. ‘ CHOO-oo-oo! ’ Yes, I thought as I watched Jim and Patrick, grunting, press Charley’s knees back against his chest, the crowd in the hall all joining Janny now as she started to get up steam — ‘Come on, everybody! Choo-oo! Choo-oo! That’s it! Choo-oo! Choo-oo!’ — time may or may not be passing, who’s to say, but damn it, something is. ‘ Choo! Choo! Choo! Choo! ’ Above us, Woody and Cynthia were kissing now, Woody holding her hips firmly yet somehow chastely in his square hairy hands, her hands resting on his shoulders as though knighting him with all her rings and bangles, and though there was an undeniable tenderness in their embrace and even a certain touching vulnerability in the plainness of their underwear, the neatness of their carefully combed hair, the very narrowness of the step on which they stood, there above the chugging Choo-Choo Trainer locomotive — ‘ CHOO-choo! CHOO-choo! CHOO-choo! CHOO-choo! ’ — Charley himself now out of sight behind his upraised rump, Dolph helping out, lending his weight — ‘ CHOO-choo-CHOO-choo! CHOO-choo-CHOO-choo! ’ — there was also something disturbing, almost shocking, about their imperturbable composure as they kissed so discreetly, so properly, that seemed suddenly to make Ros’s death ( Oh! Oh! Oh! I was thinking to the cheer’s beat, what have we lost—?! ) all the more poignant and immediate, and I might well have started to get, joining red-nosed Charley, truly maudlin, had I not spied Naomi’s cock sock on Alison’s middle finger, beckoning me from the dining room doorway. ‘ CHOO-choo-CHOO-choo CHOO-CHOO-CHOO-CHOO! ’ the crowd roared, Janny’s arm working like a flying piston. ‘Oh god, it hurts!’ Charley cried, farting explosively (‘Naughty boy!’ exclaimed Patrick to everyone’s delight) — and then in the sudden momentary silence that followed there was a hollow KRR-POP! , a burst of cheers and laughter, and from Charley as they lowered his mass to the floor and covered him up with the robe, a grateful ‘Oh, yeah …!’ ‘WHEE-EE-EE-ee-oo-OO-OO! ’ the crowd shrilled in imitation of a train whistle, as Janny spun around then dropped into a still fairly passable split: ‘ CHOO-CHOO TRAINER! ’

While the crowd around Charley whistled and clapped, I slipped away toward the back, nearly bumping into Steve the plumber coming up from the basement with a big monkey wrench in his hand. ‘Hold on, hold on!’ Inspector Pardew demanded behind me. ‘Is that someone having a game of darts down there?’

‘A couple of women, sir,’ said Steve, ‘if you can call it a game.’

‘Hey, there,’ breathed Alison (‘One of them’s probably her, all right,’ Bob was saying in back of me, while at our feet, Anatole, squatting down, asked: ‘You all right, Uncle Howard?’), ‘I’ve been looking for you, Superlover!’

‘Ah, that must be my son you want.’

‘I assumed it ran in the family.’ The crowd around Charley was breaking up, many of them headed past us into the dining room (‘No, no, no, no, no! ’ Howard blurted out petulantly, as though waking suddenly from a bad dream, or perhaps just talking in his sleep — Iris Draper was there, trying to feed him some soup), where Jim’s wife Mavis was holding court, seemingly her old self once more. I could see people slipping in and out of the TV room with big grins on their faces and pausing, as they passed, to hear what Mavis had to say. Soapie was filling a brown bag with food from the table.

‘Hey, Prissy Loo! I thought you took the veil!’

‘No, some guy held me in escrow a while, that’s all. Where’d you find the bug broth?’

‘Yup,’ said Bob. ‘We’re all set up for her.’

‘In here, there’s buckets of it …’

Alison drilled my chest with her stiffened peckersweatered finger, parodying recruitment posters: ‘I want you , Gerald!’ she declared throatily, clutching my belt with her free hand and knocking her pubes on mine. Which seemed to set off the phone: Regina answered it, Pardew saying: ‘Very well, you’d best get on with it then.’ ‘It’s show time, Mister Bones! When do we open?’

‘As soon as we can get off centerstage.’ I lifted the pointing finger to my mouth to tongue the base of it, under the sweater. I realized it had the same pattern as one of my ski caps. She spread her fingers and her breasts rose and fell in their silk pockets, as her eyes, sparkling, searched mine. ‘Hey, what’s goin’ down here, Vagina?’ cried someone, banging in through the front door behind us, his voice small and squeaky. ‘Show me the card!’ ‘In the living room, Vachel! It’s Ros!’ ‘ Ros—? ’ ‘Only one problem,’ I murmured through her fingers, ‘I have to use the bathroom so badly my teeth are chiming!’

‘Me, too,’ she admitted, letting go my belt to give her crotch a demonstrative little squeeze, ‘but they’ve turned this one into a darkroom, and upstairs …’

‘Hey, that’s cute,’ said Soapie, taking the sock off Alison’s finger and peeking inside, then handing it back. ‘I could use one of those to keep my pencils warm.’ He was cradling a greasy paper sack full of food and an unopened bottle of scotch. Alison had curled round under my far arm, and now ran her hand up my back under my shirt ( ‘We can go out back ,’ I whispered: ‘ Yes, let’s! ’ she urged), as Soapie poked his nose down the basement steps and asked: ‘What’s going on down below, d’you suppose?’

But we were already away, slipping through the kitchen door, Alison snatching up some paper cocktail napkins en route (‘I always like something to read,’ she smiled), Woody saying something as we passed about ‘a lesson.’ ‘Yeah? Don’t you believe it!’ growled Vic, as the door whumped to behind us.

The kitchen seemed closed down for the night: things put away, counters clean, lights off and the room in shadows except for the nightlight on the oven and the fluorescent over the butcherblock table, pots and pans hung up, appliances set back under the cabinets. ‘Your wife’s such a great housekeeper,’ Alison said, still whispering. ‘I really envy her!’ ‘Well, this is a bit unusual,’ I allowed. The general tidiness of the place was marred somewhat by the muddy tracks in and out of the back door: we were not the first, it seemed, to think of using the backyard. Also, now that I looked more closely, I could see that there was a pot simmering on a burner in the shadows, something cooking in the oven, some boiled eggs cooling on the counter near the sink, knives and tools laid out on the butcherblock, an apron — oilcloth, imprinted with foreign baggage stickers — draped over the breakfast bench. ‘It’s strange,’ Alison murmured, turning to me as I paused, touched by some distant memory (but not of my wife, no — waiting for Ros in the wings during a performance of that toyland play, the toybox spotlit centerstage into which the other toys were all vanishing, Ros left on the floor outside, arms akimbo, as though forgotten …), ‘but I feel as though I were standing at some crossroads — or, rather, that I am a crossroads in some odd way, through which the world is passing. Does that sound silly?’ She put her arms around my neck. ‘No.’ I took her small silken waist in my hands. Blinking, she tongued her lips, which seemed to have swollen. There was a soft blush on her skin, a warm fragrance, and her breath came in quick little gasps. ‘In fact, it’s funny, but I was just thinking …’ I let my hands slide down over her hips — then took them away again as her husband came in through the door behind her.