Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘I tell you she was there , man!’ It was the guy who’d played the wooden soldier, standing near the telephone: ‘Didn’t you catch her smell? That could only be Ros!’

‘You’ll never believe it, Fats …!’

‘I didn’t smell anything, but I could feel her,’ sighed Michelle below me as I took the steps three at a time. ‘It was like she was blowing through my clothes!’

‘But I thought Mee’s cock was tattooed like a serpent …?’

Just as I hit the top, Ginger came wobbling out of the bathroom, looking unwell. She glanced up, met wide-eyed my startled gaze, and, as though in shock, all the stiff little pigtails ringing her face went limp. She snatched a kerchief away from one breast, clutched it to her mouth, covering her breast with her other hand, and went clattering down the stairs.

When I reached my son’s room, I found there was no blood on the door after all, maybe I’d been mistaken — but inside, the room was, as I’d seen it on the TV, all torn up. And the bed was empty, there were stains—! ‘ Mark—?! ’

‘Stick ’em up, Daddy! It’s the Red Pimple!’ he cried, jumping out from behind the closet door.

‘Hey—!’

‘Did I scare you, Daddy?’ he giggled, as my mother-in-law came in with a glass of milk. His face was painted bright red and he had a towel tied around his neck for a cape. My heart was pounding.

‘Boy, you sure did! ’

‘The police were in here,’ his grandmother said without looking at me. The room was a mess, things strewn about everywhere, books, toys, bedding, unwound balls of yarn.

‘I’m sorry …’

‘They took Peedie away!’

‘They’ll bring him back, son.’ What had I been afraid of? I didn’t want to think about it.

‘They better! That’s my Peedie!’

‘Now they are in the kitchen.’ She seemed to be talking to the closet. She handed Mark his milk.

‘I know. I’ve just come from—’

‘That towel is filthy, Mark. And what have you done to your face?’

‘Yuck! This stuff tastes like soap!’ He now had a white moustache on his crimson face.

His grandmother gathered up the sheets and blankets, spread them on the bed, her movements slow and forced, as if causing her physical pain. ‘I’ll get a washcloth,’ she said, taking the towel with her as she went.

‘Why did the policemen throw all my things on the floor?’

‘They were probably looking for something. It’s part of their job.’

‘Are they the ones who broke my soldiers?’

‘I don’t think so. Crawl in here now, it’s late and Grandma’s getting upset.’

‘Not without Peedie! I can’t sleep without Peedie!’

I knew this. He curled round it and put his finger in a hole he’d dug. We had to take the rabbit everywhere we went. ‘Maybe if I told you a story …’

‘Gramma already told me one. About a bad man who cut ladies’ heads off. Daddy, what’s “happy the other laughter”?’

‘Happily ever after? Nothing, just a way to end a story.’

‘Why don’t they just say “the end”?’

‘Sometimes they do.’

‘Or “hugs and kisses,” like on a letter?’

I smiled. His grandmother began working on his paint job with the washcloth, and he screwed his face up in disgust: ‘Oww!’ My grandmother used to sign her letters: ‘Please don’t forget me.’ My father: ‘Be brave.’ My mother never wrote. ‘What’s a French letter, Daddy?’

‘I suppose, uh, that’s a letter from France.’

‘No, it isn’t, it’s a balloon. That girl told me.’

‘Well, all right, a balloon.’ I gazed down at him as he sucked his thumb there on the pillow (his grandmother had retired to her rocking chair and was staring furiously at the blank screen of the drawn window shade), recalling a young girl I’d known in Schleswig-Holstein, an afternoon in a wildlife preserve, lying naked in the tall grass out of sight, more or less out of sight (what did it matter, we were young and one with the wildness around us, flesh then was truth , this was a long time ago), teaching each other all the sex words of our respective languages. That day, I’d lost my condom inside her, and she’d exclaimed irritably, fishing for it: ‘Ach, die miserable Franch Post! Fot can you hexpect?’ ‘Well, anyway the delivery’s been made,’ I’d muttered lamely, feeling guilty (the truth of flesh is complex and disturbing and never quite enough, that beautiful oneness with nature ultimately a bed with stones and ants that bit: perhaps, there in the sun, I was beginning to think about this), and she’d shot back: ‘Ja, gut, only zo zere ist no postage due!’

‘But it isn’t, is it, Daddy? Ever …’

‘What’s that, son?’ As he sucked, he pulled his nose down with his index finger.

‘The end.’

I hesitated. There was such a sadness in his little eyes, his stretched-down nose. I wanted to relieve it with a little joke, but I couldn’t demean his question, even though it meant, I knew, a kind of betrayal. His eyes seemed to widen, then they went dull. ‘Ask Mommy to come up and kiss me good night,’ he said around his thumb.

‘Well, she’s … busy, but she’ll—’

‘Now,’ said my mother-in-law coldly from her chair.

‘Yes, right now , Daddy,’ Mark repeated.

‘Of course.’ I could understand her feelings — I hated the police, after all, even more than she hated my guests — but it seemed to me that her expectations of me were not all that different from Mark’s: I’d become in her eyes, as I was naturally in his, a kind of generalized cause.

‘ And get my Peedie! ’

The sewing room as I passed it was darkened, the door half-closed. ‘ Hold on to it! ’ someone gasped from behind the door — or ‘ to her ’ — and there was a muffled sound as though someone were struggling. I stopped short. But then I caught a glimpse of my mother-in-law out of her chair and watching me sternly from Mark’s doorway. ‘I’ll be right back!’ I said to her — and to anyone else who might be listening — and as though in reply, someone whispered from in there: ‘ Do you know what you’re doing? ’

In front of the mirror at the foot of the stairs (on the landing, Wilma, showing Teresa Tania’s painting, said: ‘Well, as you can see, she never really tried to flatter herself — but I do think she always looked better with her clothes on …’), Jim was treating Eileen’s left eye, which, puffy and red, now matched the right. ‘Not again!’ I exclaimed, stepping down, and Jim shrugged. ‘She told Vic he was nothing but a utopian sentimentalist, something like that, and he proved it by belting her one.’

‘My father’s out of control,’ Sally Ann said, then smiled up at me, her throat coloring.

‘It’s going to get worse,’ Eileen muttered. Nearby, Ginger was diapering herself in Pardew’s silk scarf, pinning it front and back to a kind of serape she’d fashioned out of what remained of her kerchiefs. ‘I tried to tell him, to get him to go before it’s too late, but he won’t listen.’

‘Mmm. By the way, I tried in the kitchen,’ Jim remarked, glancing up at me, ‘but they won’t listen either.’

‘I know. I’ve had enough. I’m going to do something about it right now.’

‘If you need any help …’

‘Thanks, Jim. I’ll let you know.’

Ginger, Pardew’s fedora perched on her wiry pigtails, her fingertips at the brim to keep it from falling off, went tottering into the front room on her high red heels, watched leeringly by Vachel the dwarf. Vachel was chewing a fat black cigar nearly as big as he was. ‘ Gudjus! ’ he piped.