Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘A fucking mess,’ Dickie agreed, taking a swift drag on his joint and handing it to me: I pulled off the oven mitts and joined him (‘I wonder if all that adds up to something …?’ Iris mused, and Vic grunted: ‘The question to ask is, what’s she selling?’), sucking the sweet smoke deep into my lungs as though, I felt, to mark some turning, the completion of something, or the beginning, something perhaps not quite present yet nearby … ‘All the style’s gone out of your parties, Ger’ (‘That’s not a very generous view of art,’ Iris remarked, peering over her spectacles), ‘there’s too much shit and blood.’

‘Maybe you’re just growing up,’ Vic growled, wheeling around slowly. ‘Unlikely as that seems.’ I caught a glimpse of Ros, her extremities concealed in translucent bags, being carried around on a kind of litter made of one of our living room drapes tied at the corners to three croquet mallets and a golfclub (it looked like a five-iron), held high, Hoo-Sin in her kimono wheeling around below, eyes closed, keening rhythmically. ‘Ritualized lives need ritualized forms of release. Parties were invented by priests, after all — just another power gimmick in the end.’

‘Not for me, old man,’ said Dickie with a cold smile, taking the joint back. ‘For me, they’re like solving a puzzle — I keep thinking each time I’ll find just the little piece I’m looking for.’ Vic’s jaw tightened — Dickie turned toward me and winked, then glanced back over his shoulder toward the living room, seeing what I saw: Alison among the mourners, looking frightened, hemmed in by Noble and that guy in the chalkstriped suit and some of Zack Quagg’s crowd — Vachel the dwarf, that actor who played the wooden soldier, Hilario the Panamanian tapdancer — ‘Speaking of which,’ Dickie murmured (‘Please, Vic,’ Eileen whispered), moving away, hand fluttering at his bald spot once more. ‘Like so many open but unenterable doors,’ I thought I heard Mavis say, just as Dolph, scratching now with both hands, said: ‘The top cop’s there in the TV room, Gerry, if that’s who you’re looking for.’

‘Yes …’ I’d lost sight of her. Fats was doing a kind of dance in the front room around Hoo-Sin, who was down on her knees now, twisting her torso round and round, moaning ecstatically, some guy with a camera circling around her, getting it all on videotape. They’d lowered Ros to the floor and Hoo-Sin swept the corpse with her long shiny hair, back and forth, wailing something repetitive through her nose, while the others chanted and clapped or slapped the walls and furniture. Hilario banged a tambourine, Vachel clacked spoons, Fats danced, eyes closed, smiling toothily, his big body bobbing around the room above the others as though afloat on the rhythms.

While Quagg — directing the camera crew, shifting the lights, calling the angles — pulled the others into a circle around Ros, Regina swooped into the center, eyes and hands raised as though in supplication. She called out Ros’s name in a hollow stage whisper, and the others picked it up as a kind of chant. Alison (I saw her now) made a move in my direction, but Quagg stopped her, led her back into the circle, in a gap between Dickie and that wooden soldier actor. I tried to catch her eye, but she was peering anxiously back over her shoulder, where Noble and Talbot, digging at his crotch as though looking for the switch, were squeezing up behind her.

Malcolm Mee appeared then, as if from nowhere, in his ragged jeans and striped sailor shirt: he knelt solemnly beside Ros’s body, bent stiffly forward, and pressed his head against her breast. When he staightened up there was fresh blood dripping down his forehead between his eyes. Regina let out a shriek and fell to the floor, her eyes rolled back (I’d seen her do this as ‘Tendresse’ in The Lover’s Lexicon ), Fats paused, the music stopped. ‘Ros!’ Fats whispered, and the others picked it up once more, chanting airily as though taking deep breaths together.

‘What’s all this supposed to mean?’ asked Alison’s husband, who’d stepped up unnoticed beside me, but Quagg shushed him angrily, pointing at the camera.

All eyes were on Mee, who knelt beside Ros still, back arched, staring up at the ceiling as though in a trance. His pants seemed to have opened up by themselves, and now his penis crept out like a worm, looking one way, then the other, finally rearing up in the lights like a flower opening to the sun. There were gasps mingled with the whispered chants of ‘Ros! Ros! Ros!’ Mee’s eyes closed and his lips drew back as though in pain. The head of his penis began to move in and out of its foreskin like a piston, plunging faster and faster — or perhaps it was the foreskin that was moving. ‘Look!’ someone rasped. ‘It’s getting wet!’ This was true: it was glistening now as though with sweat. Or saliva. Mee’s hips were jerking uncontrollably, his head thrown back, bloodstreaked face contorted, the scar on his cheek livid, his penis pumping. The others, still chanting, pressed round — I too found myself squeezing closer to watch. Suddenly Malcolm bucked forward, went rigid: the swollen head of his member, now wet and empurpled, thrust up out of its fleshy sleeve at full stretch, seemed to pucker up, and then let fly — but even as his sperm spewed forth (we all shrank back) it seemed to disappear into thin air. There were gasps of amazement and people fell to the floor. Regina, emerging from her own trance, searched her dress: it was dry. The carpet too. It had been like an explosion of yoghurt and now we couldn’t see a trace of it. Mee lay there, gasping, quivering, his eyes squeezed shut, the blood dripping down between them. Regina, with gestures grand and devotional, tucked his penis away and zipped his jeans up. ‘All right!’ exclaimed Zack Quagg, beaming, and he slapped the cameraman on the shoulder. ‘All right! ’

‘I may be thick or insensitive or something,’ sighed Alison’s husband, ‘but I just don’t get it. I mean, is that what theater’s supposed to be about, communication with the dead?’

She was gone. Mee had distracted me. And Noble as well, Talbot, that guy in the lilac shirt and gray chalkstripes, they’d all vanished. Dickie was still there: he’d spied Sally Ann nearby, staring at me, one hand in her blue jeans as though playing with herself. Holding my gaze, she withdrew her hand, held her fingertips in front of her lips, and blew — Dickie reached out as though to intercept her dispatch, closing his hand around it and drawing it, grinning, toward his nose. She made a face, pushed around him, and came toward me. ‘Whoa there, Greased Crease!’ he laughed, and caught her by a back pocket. ‘At heart, theater doesn’t entertain or instruct, goddamn it — it’s an atavistic folk rite,’ Quagg was explaining, somewhat irritably. ‘Oh, I see,’ said Alison’s husband, adding in a whisper to me: ‘She went out through that door to the dining room …’ ‘Ah …’ It was over on the other side of the room. How had I wandered so far away from it? It was as though the room itself had circled around me. ‘Jesus, Cyril and Peg shoulda seen that one!’ ‘Weren’t they just here?’ Regina was mopping the blood from Malcolm’s forehead and nose with a white scarf. ‘ That , bison gulls, is what you call ad -lipping it!’ Vachel squeaked, drawing tense laughter (‘Off the elbow , man!’ ‘No, haven’t you heard?’), and Fats, his bald dome shiny with sweat, stopped me in the doorway: ‘Doggone! What happened, Ger? I had my eyes closed!’

But she wasn’t in the dining room either. There were some people in there eating and drinking, and Mavis was carrying on still in her hollow and melancholic way, but neither Alison nor the guys chasing her around were to be seen. ‘Death came to me there as a woman,’ Mavis was saying — some of her audience had drifted to the doorway to catch Malcolm’s act, but were now drifting back — while behind me, Wilma sighed and said: ‘Dear me, what a waste!’