Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘God! it’s awful!’ Brenda was saying. She was nearly crying. She and Fats had apparently just come up from the basement. They were leaning on each other and Fats was blinking still in the bright light of the hallway. ‘Just look , Gerry!’ She showed me a photograph: it was Ros on her hands and knees, looking over her shoulder at her raised bum — or rather, not a bum at all, but a rich banker, a snowman capitalist with greedy black-button eyes on each pale cheek, a carrot-nose stuck in her anus, top hat perched on top, and a wet bearded mouth about to ingest a shining gold rod. The photograph was full of holes. ‘They’ve been throwing darts at it, Gerry! Who’d ever do such a thing?’

‘It’s somethin’ else down there, man!’ said Fats, wiping his face with a big bandanna.

Daffie, wandering in from the back with a somewhat dazed Anatole, guiding him toward the stairs, took the photo away and said: ‘That popsicle looks familiar — I think I’ve seen one somewhere just like it.’ She winked at me drunkenly and immediately, as though cued, the telephone rang. I turned to answer it and nearly bumped into Louise, moving heavily toward the back of the house with a fresh bathtowel. Her glance was withering. ‘Have you been out on the mall communing with nature, sweetie?’ Brenda asked, making Anatole blush, and the actor who played the wooden soldier in the toyland melo picked up the phone and said: ‘Hullo? No, Horner’s the name.’

‘If it’s a man, it’s for me,’ called Peg’s sister Teresa, leaning over the railing.

‘No, there’s nobody here named Gerald, fuckface — you must have the wrong number.’ ‘Wait—!’ But he’d already hung up. ‘I could tell right away that shit-for-brains didn’t have your class, baby!’ he said, grinning at Teresa, who, as though in reflex, pushed one knee through the railings (‘I–I’ve already been,’ Anatole was stammering as Brenda hooked her arm in his: ‘Well, you can help me , honey …’), and in the dining room there was a burst of applause.

But then I saw her, free at last, in by the table with Janny Trainer and Hoo-Sin—

‘Hey!’ I exclaimed softly, hugging her from behind.

‘Why, Gerry, what a nice surprise!’ It was Knud’s wife Kitty, her mouth packed with bread and salami.

‘Oh, I’m sorry — I thought it was my wife …!’

‘What’s to be sorry?’ she laughed, spewing food. ‘Oops! See how excited you got me?’ She wiped her chin with a cocktail napkin, examined her front. Though my wife had a dress something like that and they were both about the same size, I was nevertheless amazed that I could have confused the two of them. Alison was gone, as I’d known she would be — Mavis, seated now in a captain’s chair, was surrounded mostly by women. Only Talbot was there among them, his ear bandage dirty and unraveling now like some kind of primitive headdress. ‘I borrowed some of your wife’s clothes, I hope she won’t mind, mine were all …’ Kitty’s chirpy manner faded. She swallowed. ‘Once, at a party, when he was, you know, in one of his moods,’ she said, staring off at Mavis (Janny sighed, Hoo-Sin nodded, Brenda came through from the front, popping gum, a reluctant Anatole in tow), ‘I tried to cheer him up by saying, “Relax, Roger, it’s all just a game, what the hell.” Without taking his eyes off me, Gerry, he bit right through the glass he was drinking from and started chewing up the pieces — God! I nearly fainted!’

‘When the lotus blooms in the midst of a fire, it is never destroyed,’ Hoo-Sin said solemnly.

‘Oh no!’ cried Janny. Brenda and Anatole, trying to push out through the kitchen door, had got stopped by someone trying to push in (‘But I’m in a bigger hurry than you are!’ Brenda laughed, shouting through the door). ‘Don’t tell me there’s going to be a fire! ’

‘Only in my heart,’ crooned Fats, putting his arms around them both: Hoo-Sin elbowed him sharply in the gut and he backed off goggle-eyed and wheezing, bumping into Hilario, just emerging from the TV room, who exclaimed: ‘Eh! Fats! You muss learn to not fock yourself aroun’ weeth the moveeng force off nature!’

As Brenda got her way and, laughing, dragged Anatole on through to the kitchen (‘I think Uncle Howard needs me!’ he was pleading, trying to hang back), I felt suddenly overtaken by a terrible sadness — I don’t know what it was that brought it on, that image of Roger chewing glass maybe, or Hoo-Sin knocking the wind out of Fats, or perhaps it was just an accumulation of everything that had happened all night, Ros and Roger, Eileen, Tania kneeling at the tub with pink soap scum up to her elbows, the police and all their gear and Ros’s rolled-down stockings, my wife boiling eggs, all these people, my torn-up study, the food mashed in the carpet, the mess in the rec room, the look on Yvonne’s face as she vanished through the front door or on my son’s face just now when I left him or on Daffie’s right this minute — whatever it was, it stopped me cold for a moment, such that when Woody came in from the kitchen with Cynthia (‘Technically maybe,’ she was saying, fingering her medallion at the cross-strap of her bra, ‘but, I don’t know, somehow it just doesn’t seem—’), a sudden look of concern crossed his face and he interrupted her to ask: ‘Is everything all right, Gerry?’

‘You know it’s not,’ I said, my voice catching. ‘You know what they’re doing.’ The door behind him was moving still, chafing subtly the doorjamb. ‘Can you help?’

He observed me closely, one hand gripping a strap of his ribbed undershirt. His counselor’s deadpan calm returned. ‘Sure, Gerry. I can at least try. Don’t worry, there are laws, precedents — things will work out. Why don’t you get Cynthia a drink meanwhile?’

‘Yes, you’ve been neglecting me,’ she said, gazing at me with that same worried look she’d been giving Yvonne earlier. She took my arm and led me like an invalid toward the sideboard. ‘What was that special drink you fixed for me earlier tonight?’

‘An old-fashioned, I think.’

‘No, it had gin in it. It was a funny color.’ Fats, with a pained grin on his face, was moving in on Hoo-Sin once more, Hilario cautioning him from the sidelines: ‘Theenk two times wut you do, my frien’.’

‘A blue moon?’

‘That’s it.’

People seemed to be drifting about without focus. We pushed through them. It was like happy hour back at the ski lodge. Maybe the last play in the world would be like this: an endless intermission. Above us, Susanna stepped out into nothing. No, I was mistaken: there were no gold loops in her ears.

‘All we got is love, baby, in this crazy mazy world,’ Fats rumbled at Hoo-Sin’s back, doing a hopeful little shuffle, and Kitty, joining the crowd gathering now around Mavis (Michelle glanced back over her shoulder at me: the resemblance was still there but she and Susanna had grown apart, the one toward mystery, or the fear of it, the other toward sorrow), said: ‘Tell us again, Mavis, about how you first met Ros …’ We ducked as Fats arched slowly, almost gracefully, into the air over Hoo-Sin and crashed to the floor behind us, and I thought (‘Are those back in fashion?’ Iris Draper inquired, bending down and adjusting her spectacles. ‘I wonder if I threw all mine away …?’), Vic was right, who was I to mix drinks and answer doorbells? I wished I could just go home.

‘I know,’ Cynthia said, patting my arm with a ring-laden hand. Had I been talking out loud? ‘We all feel that way sometimes.’

‘It all began one day when Jim was called to an orphanage to deal with a peculiar medical emergency,’ Mavis said in a hollow portentous tone, and Iris, turning away, whispered: ‘Ah! I don’t want to miss this!’ I dug out the crème Yvette, checked the ice bucket: three cubes, a puddle of discolored water, some soggy cigarette butts … and the wooden-handled pick. ‘He was often called in, of course, for circumcisions, hot douches, infibulations, and the like, when the girls reached puberty, but in this case the child was only ten years old — yet so precocious that they had already lost, through scandal, three tutors, a handyman, and two members of the board of trustees. As for the other girls …’