Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘Ah well, spunk’s cheap,’ someone answered her, and Mavis said: ‘Her hair seemed to float around her head as though caught in a wind. She had a large fleshy mouth, and when she opened it the inside glowed with a strange fluorescent light.’ I turned back, but Alison’s husband was standing in the doorway, also looking puzzled. ‘Her breath smelled of wormwood and gentian root and her eyes were shriveled like dried mushrooms. Bruised fruit. She looked … like my mother …’

‘ What—?! ’ bellowed Vic, whirling around and staring fiercely past my shoulder, just as the man in the chalkstriped suit came, grinning, out of the TV room.

‘She was blind and clumsy and the labyrinth of ice was impenetrable even for one who could see — it was easy to lose her—’

‘ That goddamn sonuvabitch—! ’

‘You got buried treasure down there, Dolph?’

‘Look at him go! Moves like a man half his age!’

‘He’s ripe for a coronary …’

‘I think I musta caught something …’

‘But then, after I’d escaped from her, I grew lonely and longed, even in my awful fright, to see her again …’

Nor in the TV room, where Jim sat facing the Inspector across the games table (‘It’s a problem of dynamics, a subject — object relation,’ Pardew was saying, ‘for in a sense it is the victim who shapes and molds the criminal …’), Patrick just behind him, old Lloyd Draper over in the easy chair, sleepily watching the TV screen, Knud snoring on the sofa. There was a technician working behind the set, rigging up some kind of switcher between the cassette recorder on top, a lot of gear strewn around on the floor, and the tube itself, where now Mavis appeared in extreme close-up as though being interviewed, saying: ‘I went searching for her but I couldn’t find her …’ The technician flicked a switch and the image of Mavis gave way to a static wide-angle shot of a man in high-heeled boots, a leather vest, and a thick black beard, coming through the front door with a tripod over his shoulder: it was the technician himself, I realized, as humorless on the screen as he was at his work. ‘Did the victim suffer perhaps from extreme sensibility?’ the Inspector asked.

Jim smiled, glanced up at me — ‘Hardly,’ he said with a wink — and the Inspector peered around. ‘Ah,’ he exclaimed, waving at me with what looked like a knitting needle, ‘perhaps you can help!’

‘Well, I was just looking for—’

‘The good doctor here seems reluctant to provide us with the full medical history of the victim on the rather unprofessional grounds that it is not relevant,’ he went on snappishly. Some of Mark’s toy soldiers had been set up on the table in front of him, apparently to illustrate some theory or other, and it occurred to me suddenly what those ‘marbles’ were I’d found in my pocket. There was also another of Mark’s drawings there — the one Mark said was of Santa Claus killing the Indians — as well as Peedie, his stuffed bunny. ‘And I am trying to persuade him that there is a definite mutuality here, that the criminal and his prey are working on each other constantly, long before the moment of disaster, before they’ve even met each other, and that, in the war against crime, to know the one,’ here he pointed with the knitting needle at one of the little soldiers, ‘we must know the other!’ He pointed at another soldier, then gave a sharp little thrust and tipped it over. ‘By the way, why are all the heads gone off these things?’

‘I don’t know …’

‘All that may be very well with wolves and tigers,’ Jim said, ‘but it has nothing whatsoever to do with human beings.’

‘I can see that you have a higher — and a lower — estimation of humanity than I have,’ replied the Inspector, setting the needle down and lighting his pipe. Without the scarf, the back of his neck looked raw and naked. I caught a glimpse now of Janny Trainer behind the open closet door, her pink skirt hiked above her waist, some guy’s hand in her heart-shaped bikini panties. On the TV screen there was a wide-angle shot of my study with Roger’s lifeless body upside down in the far corner. Nothing moved. Yet the relentless intensity of the unblinking shot was almost unbearable. Pardew turned around to look at me, holding up the needle. ‘Does your boy knit , by the way?’

‘No—!’

‘There he is,’ Wilma said, leading Peg’s sister Teresa into the room and over to the sofa.

‘We found it in his room.’

‘Oh my! I’d like to be in his dreams!’

‘Kitty says you probably wouldn’t like it.’

‘It’s probably his grandmother’s, my wife’s—’

‘Who was the victim’s mother?’

‘Look, Wilma!’ exclaimed Teresa, pointing. ‘There’s Talbot on the TV!’

‘Ros? She was an orphan—’

‘Aha!’ He banged the table with the needle, sending the little soldiers flying. Jim looked pained and shook his head at me (my wife, I recalled, had been trying to tell me something about Mark), and Wilma said: ‘I wish at least the ninny’d stop scratching his pants!’ ‘An orphan! Now it’s all coming clear! ’

Charley entered, groaning lugubriously with each slow step, and the guy with Janny — it was Steve the plumber — hurried over to help the bearded technician behind the TV, fumbling abashedly with his overall buttons. What was Teresa saying? Something about a ‘little boy’ or ‘little boys.’ ‘’Sno good, Janny! I’m all — I’m all washed up …!’

‘Oh, Charley, stop blubbering! Why don’t you just push a cocktail stirrer in it or something?’

The camera, which had followed Talbot and Dolph and the others (Talbot, in response to an interviewer’s question, had been describing his appetite for reflected sex) to the door of our master bedroom, now panned back down the hallway to the bathroom, and I saw as it slid past my son’s door that it was ajar: the room was apparently empty, toys and bedclothes flung violently about — and was that a foot stretched out behind the closet door? ‘Now about the hole in this stuffed rabbit,’ Pardew was saying and the TV camera had entered the bathroom, where the shower curtain was being pulled aside, but I was already on my way out of the room: I remembered now, there’d been a bloody handprint on Mark’s door when I’d passed it before — how had I failed to register it at the time?! — there was not a moment to lose!

I bumped up against Hilario in the doorway — ‘ Oops!’ ‘Perdón! ’ he exclaimed. ‘I am all left foots! ’ — and over his shoulder ruffles I spied Alison in the group around Mavis: Noble was there, too, Earl Elstob, Dolph … ‘I saw her at last,’ Mavis was saying, ‘but she was trapped behind a high wall of shimmering ice — she was hideous, yet pathetic, and I felt a terrible closeness and a terrible distance at the same time.’ Alison mouthed something with a questioning look on her face — it looked like ‘the green room?’ — and pointed down at her crotch. ‘( Just be a minute! )’ I mouthed in return, and Dolph, cupping a hand to his ear (the other hand was out of sight), mouthed back: ( What? ) ‘And then, suddenly ,’ Mavis intoned as Alison, wincing, lurched slightly and cast me a panicked glance — but what could I do? there was the bloody handprint, my son’s torn-up room ( ‘What—?! Down in the rec room? ’ cried Brenda. ‘Oh no! ’) — ‘ everything began to melt …! ’

‘Wasn’t Malcolm’s number something else?’ someone at the table remarked as I pushed past it — Quagg’s crowd were all in here pressing around the food now — and Hoo-Sin replied (‘Fats! Fats! ’): ‘It was like the meeting of clouds and rain, tall mountains piercing the soft mist of the valley!’