Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘By the way, Ger, that guy with the French tickler on his chin said he had something he wanted to tell you. He — no, stop, Howard! Wait’ll I get it out! ’

‘Cyril?’

‘He probably wanted to tell you about the body in the basement,’ Jim said. ‘You about ready, Charley?’

‘Body? What body—?!’

‘Goddamn it, Howard … now see what you’ve done …’

‘Down in the rec room, you mean,’ said Dolph, joining us as Gottfried strolled away (‘Whuzzat guy got a tape recorder for?’ Charley asked), and lifting his stream into a wheelbarrow back beside the toolshed. ‘I wondered about that. I saw the feet sticking out behind the ping-pong table, but I didn’t look closer — thought I might be interrupting something.’

‘Just as well you didn’t,’ Jim said. ‘It wasn’t a pleasant sight.’

‘I think he’s a sociologist …’

‘But what are you saying — the rec room —? ’

‘That’s right. The dart pierced the back of the head and penetrated the medulla, and that always makes for a rather pathetic disorganized death, I’m afraid. Probably just an accident but —’

‘But — my wife was—!’

‘Your wife’s all right!’ Dolph assured me. ‘She’s in there in the kitchen. The cops are, uh, with her …’

‘Assholes!’ Anatole muttered under his breath, as I hurried away (she’d been trying to tell me something about an interview, I remembered this now, I hadn’t been listening), and Howard whined: ‘My panz’re all wet!’

‘Of course they are, Howard — what do you expect?’

At the steps I caught a glimpse of something glittering in the grass, a little ring of light: Ah, she’s dropped it again, I thought as I reached down to pick it up, this time just for me perhaps. I smiled. Or had Noble—? Someone cried out — I thought it might have been Alison, or else my wife, and I rushed forward (that bastard! I was thinking, meaning no one in particular), but at the kitchen door a man was blocking my way. ‘Excuse me—!’

‘My wife,’ the man said stonily. It was Alison’s husband. He stood rigidly in the open doorway, silhouetted against the kitchen lights (yes, my wife was in there, I saw her, the two policemen as well, both looking flushed and sweaty, their clothes disheveled, Fred still in his bulky neckbrace, Bob’s tie undone), one hand in his jacket pocket, the other gripping the carved bowl of his meerschaum. ‘Where is she?’

‘I don’t know,’ I gasped. ‘Inside someplace, I think, I was just—’

‘No.’

I couldn’t see his face at all, and it made his voice, cold, uncompromising, seem alarmingly disembodied. It was important that I reach my wife (‘We better get some blood, too, Fred,’ the tall cop was muttering, and Fred, struggling with some pulleys above the butcherblock table, nodded stiffly), but I knew better than to try to push past him.

‘You came out here together.’

‘Yes, we, uh, sort of ran into each other — but then of course we separated—’

‘You touched her breasts—’

‘No—’

‘And other parts.’ It was like a recitation, an arraignment, distant, mechanical, menacing. And utterly (I thought, chilled by it) insane.

‘Listen, you’ve got it all wrong,’ I explained, tried to, ‘it’s only a party—’

‘Yes, I know about parties.’ I could hear Charley clambering heavily up the steps behind me, assisted by Dolph and Jim. ‘You brought her out here — now what have you done with her?’

‘I told you—’

‘Have you raped her?’

‘ No—! ’

‘Raped who?’ wheezed Charley at my shoulder.

‘Whom,’ Dolph corrected.

‘I can smell her on you,’ said Alison’s husband.

‘We all can,’ said Dolph. ‘Worse than a damn barnyard. No accounting for some people’s tastes!’

‘Say,’ Charley yuff-huffed amiably, ‘speakin’ a that, didja heara one ’bout the two actors out inna sticks playin’ the front ’n back end of a cow—?’

‘Are you in love with her?’

‘What?’

‘They get chased offa goddamn stage, see, ’n — haw haw! — they get separated—’

‘I asked you—’

‘C’mon, Charley,’ said Dolph, leading him away. ‘I think Ger’s about to get the punchline without our help.’

‘Awright, awright,’ sighed Charley, limping. ‘Foo! I’m feelin’ awful! Whereza booze? I think I got too much blood’n my alcohol stream!’

‘Very funny,’ Jim said, keeping Charley from tipping over onto Alison’s husband, ‘but the truth is, you’ve had enough.’ I started to follow them, but the space through which they moved seemed to close up behind them. ‘You ought to take it easy. It’s slow poison, you know.’

‘ ’Ass okay, Jim, I’m in no hurry …’

‘I asked you if you were in love with her.’

His silhouette, which had dissolved momentarily into the larger mass of the others, now came into sharp focus once more as the light filled in behind him. As though he were honing it, I thought. ‘Don’t you think you’re, well, letting your imagination—?’

‘Believe me, I know what it is to be a victim of love.’ Through all of this he hadn’t moved. Not even when Charley and the others had jostled past him (they were in there talking to my wife and the short cop now, Charley shaking his big head and saying something about growing older, or colder, Jim examining a small tool Bob was using) — he could have been a cardboard cutout posted at the kitchen door with a recorded message. He sighed. ‘It’s a kind of madness …’

‘Yes, well — I don’t know what you saw, or thought you saw, but in reality—’

‘I know, it’s the chemistry of it that most disturbs me. How it warps everything so you can’t trust your senses. It’s like some kind of powerful hallucinogen, transforming our conventional reality into something stark and dangerous — I always feel as though a hole is being opened up in the universe and I’m being pitched into it. Is that what you feel?’

‘Well, ah, something like that …’ I didn’t like conversations like this, and felt unfairly singled out. ‘But, honestly, as far as Alison — your wife — is concerned—’

‘Inhumane. Utterly amoral. Atavistic. Yet transcendent. I sometimes wonder if it’s what atoms feel as they’re drawn together in molecules — or stars as they burst and implode …’

I could hear Wilma chatting with someone on the steps behind me, complaining about the discomfort of wet garter belts. Woody and Cynthia came out, still in their underwear, and Woody, sizing things up quickly, nodded back over his shoulder and said: ‘Your wife needs you, Gerry, you’d better get in there.’ ‘I know …’ Fred was attaching something to her ankle; Bob stood by with a pot of Dijonais mustard in his hands.

‘Certainly it has nothing to do with marriage, I know that, you can’t tame it, you can’t institutionalize it — the raw force of it just smashes through all that.’ For the first time he moved: he put his pipe — a pale hovering presence between us — in his mouth, drew on it, took it out again. I didn’t know whether to be encouraged by this or not.

‘Look, I know what you’re trying to say, and your wife’s very attractive of course, but—’

‘I thought at first that marriage might be a way to isolate it, contain it, to give it a time and place, so that at least I could get ahold of the rest of my life — but I was wrong …’

Behind me, Wilma was expressing her condolences to Woody: ‘She was so brave! ’ ‘Yes, I know.’ I had faced situations like this before, of course. All too often perhaps. Always there were misunderstandings … ‘I would have just fallen to pieces!’ ‘We all have to make adjustments. Eh, where’s the best place?’ ‘Well, not where I went!’ The important thing was to keep them talking. ‘You might try back by the swing set.’