Robert Coover: Gerald's Party

But then Roger started bellowing wildly again and, touching their hands to their holsters, they whirled around and, in a crouch, the tall one bobbing on a leg that seemed shorter than the other, left me.

I released a long wheezing sigh, aware that I’d been holding my breath for some time. My arms ached with the weight of the bottle and pitcher, and I could feel sweat in my armpits and on my upper lip. Tania’s husband Howard came down the stairs behind me. ‘What’s going on, Gerald?’ he asked softly, looking a little flushed, his hand at the knot of his red silk tie.

‘Ros has been murdered,’ I said. I felt like I’d just been the victim of something. Or might have been.

‘Is that so …!’

I went into the dining room to leave the vermouth and old-fashioneds on the sideboard with the rest of the drinks. I noticed that all the ice in the pitcher of old-fashioneds had melted and, recalling Alison licking the ice cube, shuddered at the world’s ephemerality. I looked at my hands as if to see time falling through them like water. My wife came in with the cold cuts. ‘Can you move that empty tray, Gerald?’ she said.

‘It was the police,’ I told her, my voice catching in my throat. ‘They’re in looking at Ros now.’

She nodded. She seemed paler than usual and her hands were taut, the blue veins showing. I thought of her stubborn taciturn mother upstairs and wondered whether my wife, drifting prematurely into sullen stoicism, was a victim of her genes, her mother, or of me. I took the empty tray away and she set the cold cuts down, cautiously, as though afraid they might leap from her hands. There were four different kinds of cold cuts, laid out in perfect rows, lapped like roof tiles and spaced with parsley and sliced tomatoes. Perhaps I should find someone to be with her. ‘Don’t bother Mother just yet,’ she said, as though reading my mind. ‘There’s no need to upset her, and there’s nothing she can do.’

‘No,’ I agreed. It felt like a recitation, and I remembered something my grandmother, a religious woman, had once said about freedom. ‘Besides, Mark’s just getting settled down and …’

She nodded again, leaning over the cold cuts as though studying a dummy hand in bridge, her slender nape under the tightly rolled hair (free to do what we must, my child, she’d said with her sweet clenched smile, free to do what we must) sliced by the thin pallor of the fluorescent light from the kitchen behind her. ‘You’d better go back in there, Gerald,’ she said without looking up. ‘You might be needed.’

Once, somewhere, long ago, I recalled, her nape had shone that way from the light of the moon: was it on the Riviera? during a transatlantic cruise? The memory, what was left of it, saddened me. It’s not enough, I thought, as I left her there — it’s beautiful, but it’s just not enough.

On the way back in, I passed Vic coming out. He looked terrible, his large-boned face ashen and collapsed, thick hair snarled, eyes damp, movements clumsy, his blue workshirt sweaty. ‘You already out?’ he asked sourly, poking an empty whiskey bottle at me. I pointed toward the sideboard, clustered round now with other guests (through the door into the TV room I could see Dickie arguing with Charley Trainer’s wife Janny: ‘Me? You’re crazy!’ he shouted — she was biting her little pink lip and there were tears starting in the corners of her mascaraed eyes, but she continued to stare straight at him), and again found myself with something in my hand, this time the empty tray. I seem to be having trouble letting go of things tonight, I said to myself (to Vic I said, ‘Down below, on the left …’), and set the tray down behind the antique prie-dieu. ‘What a fucking mess,’ Vic grumbled, and gave the doorjamb a glancing blow as he bulled through. I didn’t think he was drunk: it was still early and Vic could hold his liquor. It was more like some final exasperation.

In the living room, Inspector Pardew, ringed round by a crowd of gaping faces, was crouching beside Ros’s body, examining the wound, while the two officers, their criminalistic gear beside them, held Roger up a few feet away. Roger was apparently in a state of shock, eyes crossed, head lolling idiotically on his bloodstained chest, legs sagging outward at the knees like an unstrung puppet’s. One side of him hung lower than the other, due to the mismatched sizes of the two policemen supporting him, adding to the poignancy of his grief. Tania, who was now kneeling by Mavis, watched Roger with concern. Mavis was sitting lotuslike in the spot where before she’d been standing, her legs apparently having ceased to hold her up. She stared dull-eyed at Ros’s corpse, but seemed to be gazing far beyond it. It was as though, in her quiet matronly way, she had guessed something that none of the rest of us had become aware of yet, and the knowledge, as visions have been known to do, had struck her dumb. Ros’s wound had at last stopped flowing, but the blood seemed almost to be spreading on its own: through the carpet under Mavis’s bottom to Roger’s feet, up the shoes and uniforms of the two policemen, down Tania’s front and Kitty’s knees, even turning up on Jim’s white shirt, Michelle’s cheek, the Inspector’s drooping moustache.

‘Ah!’ the Inspector exclaimed now. ‘What’s this—?!’

He asked for a pair of tweezers and the women scrambled about, looking for their handbags. Naomi, another of Dickie’s entourage, a bigboned girl over six feet tall with naturally flushed cheeks and long blond hair clasped at the nape, lurched forward impulsively and emptied out her shoulderbag all over the floor: compacts, cigarettes, lipstick, earrings and bracelets and spare hairclasps, postcards, safety pins, a handkerchief, combs and coins, birth-control pills, antacids, ticket stubs, zippers and buttons, a driver’s license, body and hair sprays, maps, matches, tampons and timetables, thread, newspaper clippings, breath sweeteners, photographs, chewing gum, a ladies’ switchblade, addresses, tranquillizers, credit cards, hormone cream, shopping lists, a toothbrush, candy bars, a dog-eared valentine, flashlight, vial of petroleum jelly, sunglasses, paper panties, and little balls of hair and dust all tumbled out — even a tube of athlete’s foot ointment, a half-completed peckersweater, one knitting needle, and one of my Mexican ashtrays — but no tweezers. ‘I’m just sure I had some,’ she insisted, scratching around at the bottom of her bag, turning it upside down and shaking it. My wife, I knew, kept a pair in the upstairs bathroom, and I wondered if I should go get them. ‘I have a fingernail file,’ offered Mrs Draper. Tania stood with a grunt, putting her spectacles on and fishing through her pockets, but then Patrick produced a silver pair from his keyholder.

The Inspector studied Patrick skeptically a moment, squinted down his nose at the tweezers, then with a shrug bent over the body once more, his white scarf falling over Ros’s breasts like theater curtains. Jim knelt beside him, observing critically. Working with meticulous care, the Inspector extracted what looked like a bloody hair, or a thread maybe, from Ros’s wound. He held it up to the light a moment, then sandwiched it carefully between two glass slides he’d been carrying in his pocket. Watching him, I had a sudden recollection of my biology teacher in high school, fastidiously tugging on a pair of transparent gloves, finger by finger, before dissecting for us the fetus of a pig. The gloves, I remembered, had made his hands look as wet and translucent as the pickled fetus, and when he’d had them on, what he’d said was, ‘All right, boys and girls, ready for our little party?’

Dickie came in, but without Janice, and stepped up beside me, toothpick in his teeth, hands stuffed in the pockets of his crisp white pants. He looked harassed, chewing fiercely on his pick. It was ironic to see him so unsettled by a person as simple as Janice Trainer — even Chooch, her husband, liked to say that under all that makeup there was nothing but a doublejointed flytrap on a broomstick, and most people supposed he was being generous. ‘Hey, Ger, what the hell’s going on?’ he whispered around the toothpick.