Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘I’ve known all along, I suppose, but it finally came home to me just tonight, watching you and Alison …’

‘Hi, Gerry, getting a bit of fresh air?’

‘Actually, Wilma, I was just—’

‘Say, that’s a smashing shirt! Maybe I could get one of those for Talbot — not that it’d look as good on him as it does on you! By the way, do you know Peg’s sister Teresa?’

‘No,’ it was the woman in the yellow dress, ‘but—’

‘Pleased, I’m sure!’

‘There was a kind of awe, a kind of electricity in the way you looked at each other — especially when you were stroking her inside her tights …’

‘Who did?’ Wilma asked.

‘No one,’ I said. Maybe if I linked arms with these two, sandwiched myself between them … ‘It’s a … story …’

‘Oh, I like stories,’ gushed Teresa. ‘And I like parties! ’

‘And then, later, when she knelt down to put your member in her mouth—’

‘That’s not what—’

‘It was like a revelation …’

‘Some people have all the fun,’ Wilma sighed, patting her hair. ‘If I knelt down, I’d just pop all my stays.’

‘… Like the end of something, innocence for example — and at first I didn’t know what to do with it …’

‘And is that your wife in there on the butcherblock?’

‘Yes, in fact I was about to—’

‘Come on, Teresa,’ said Wilma. ‘I’ll introduce you.’

‘I thought of a lot of things I might do — violent things mostly …’ They were gone, I was alone with him again, the chance lost — almost as though I’d never had it. I heard soft mutterings behind me, near the porch, something about being afraid of the dark. Or the dart. I’d caught the word ‘violent’ — it had seemed to key a new tension in his voice, a slightly higher pitch. ‘The worst part, I realized, was not the way you played with each other’s genitals — a mere appetite, after all, we all go through that — but rather the peculiar rapport between you, that strange intense sympathy you seem to share. I sensed this already that night we met at the theater. It was as though, when you spoke to each other, the very geography of the world had shifted, moving her to a place I could not reach.’

He was completely mad, that was obvious. It was dangerous, I knew, to ignore him — impossible in fact (‘Come along, Teresa,’ Wilma was saying in the kitchen, ‘it’s best not to interfere …’) — but you couldn’t reason with him either. ‘All right,’ I said (‘Well, what I’m saying,’ Teresa argued — all I could see of my wife were her feet above Teresa’s head — as Bob frowned and slid a knife back and forth through our electric sharpener, ‘is that it seems a silly way to go about it!’), ‘what do you want me to do?’

‘I hate these destructive feelings. They’re completely contrary to my life’s work. I want you to help me free myself from them.’ I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I didn’t like the sound of it. In the kitchen Peg’s sister Teresa leaned down to my wife and said: ‘Anyway, I’m delighted to meet you! It’s a wonderful party!’ I couldn’t hear my wife’s reply, if there was one, but I was thinking, maybe Vic was right, maybe these parties were a mistake. Perhaps we should travel more instead, or take up some hobby … ‘I want you to give Alison what she wants,’ her husband said. ‘Or thinks she wants …’

‘But I—’

‘On one condition.’ I settled back on my heels. He’d startled me at first, but I knew where I was now. There was always a condition … ‘I want you to teach me about theater,’ he said.

‘I see …’ I had been right of course, but not in the way I’d imagined. ‘The theater, you say.’ Ros, I recalled, had once, while sucking me off, paused for a moment, looked up, and asked me to teach her (‘There must be an easier way to make a living,’ Fred was complaining in the kitchen, as he wiped his flushed brow with a dishtowel) about marriage, and I had felt as inadequate then as I did now. ‘It’s … it’s a complicated subject.’

‘I want to find my way back to her,’ he said simply. ‘And I feel somehow it’s the key to it all.’ He had pivoted slightly and light from the kitchen now fell on half his face. I could see the worry and fatigue in his eyes as he studied me. ‘From what I’ve heard about you,’ he added, stepping aside to allow me to enter, ‘I’m sure you will help.’

It seemed to me, as I stepped over the threshold, that an age had passed since I’d crossed it going the other way, and for some reason I thought of that phrase that Tania had been so fond of and had concealed in several of her paintings — in ‘Orthodoxy,’ for example, and in (or on) ‘Gulliver’s Peter’: ‘ What was without’s within, within, without. ’ ‘Awright, ma’am, try to be a little more helpful if you can,’ Fred was saying, more or less echoing Alison’s husband (I felt him close behind me like an arbiter, a referee), and I thought: Tania was right, everything — even going out for a pee in the garden — was full of mystery. ‘We’d hate to have to bring in the old exploding sausage …’

‘Just a moment,’ I protested. ‘This really isn’t necessary. My wife had nothing to do with—’

‘It’s all right, Gerald,’ she said weakly, craning her head around under the bright fluorescent lamp. ‘It’s only a routine—’

‘That’s right, so just move along now, fella—’

‘But I tell you, you’re wasting your time! She doesn’t know anything!’

‘She knows more than you think, sir,’ Bob said, pulling on rubber gloves from the sink, and my wife whispered: ‘Your fly’s undone, Gerald.’

‘Ah! Sorry …’

‘What’s that … in your hand?’

‘What—? Oh yes, nothing …’ I’d almost forgotten it was there. I realized I must have been rubbing it like a talisman throughout my encounter with Alison’s husband, who now leaned closer to see what it was. ‘Just something I, uh, found outside—’

‘Looks like one of my buttons,’ said Fred. We all looked: indeed it was. He searched his jacket, which gaped still around his bloodstained belly. ‘Yeah, there it is. Musta come off when I was trying to button up out there in the dark …’

‘Outside …?’ my wife asked faintly, her face puffy. Bob was holding a damp tab of litmus paper up to the light. ‘Are my … flowers all right?’

‘Well …’

‘I guess I owe you one,’ Fred acknowledged, pocketing the button. Alison’s husband had pulled back, but I could smell his pipe still (I was thinking about hidden fortunes, something a woman had once said to me down in some catacombs: ‘All these bones — like buried pearls, dried semen …’ — whatever happened to that woman?), its aroma hovering like a subtle doubt. ‘The Old Man woulda raised hell with me if I’d lost it!’

‘You could start,’ I suggested, ‘by letting her down.’

Fred hesitated, glancing at his partner. Bob shrugged, nodded: Fred loosened the ropes and eased her down, though he kept her legs still in their shackles, a foot or so off the table. My wife looked greatly relieved and exchanged a tender glance with me. How tired she looked! ‘Some more people have arrived,’ she said with a pained sigh.

‘Yes.’ I could hear them wailing in the next room. ‘Ros’s friends mostly.’ The blood, which had before rushed to her head, now drained away, and the old pallor returned, making the bruises there seem darker. Or maybe it was just the cold light of the fluorescent lamp. ‘Listen, love, when this is all over, let’s take a few days off, have an old-fashioned holiday — we can go away somewhere, somewhere where there’s sun — even Mrs Draper said …’ She smiled faintly.