Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘Uh, Chief, we got a bit of trouble …’

‘ Trouble? You don’t know the half of it! ’ the Inspector roared. They glanced at me uneasily. Or maybe respectfully, I couldn’t tell. ‘ If I don’t get this picture back—! ’

Fred turned to Bob, who shrugged, and they came forward into the room.

‘ It’s not the set, you imbeciles! ’ the Inspector cried, shaking the stuffed rabbit at them. ‘ It’s the camera! Out in the hall! MOVE, damn you! We’re missing everything! ’

‘Yes, sir,’ Fred said and they lumbered out, Bob muttering something sullenly under his breath. On the television, Regina clutched her shoulders and stared. Then Mavis, filling the screen, said something about Jim’s tongue. Vic belched, Prissy Loo lifted her toga to show Dolph her military longjohns. ‘I think you were looking for this,’ I insisted, offering Pardew the pick.

‘We’ve got it now!’ cried Cynthia.

‘Aha …!’

The fall was over. The camera seemed to be in the living room now. Ginger, wearing the Inspector’s white scarf as a kind of diaper or loincloth beneath what kerchiefs remained, was standing, knees out, in the doorway, trying on his crushed fedora.

‘ Now what?!’

‘I’ll take that,’ Cynthia said, coming over.

‘It really doesn’t matter,’ I sighed. ‘I don’t know where it came from anyway.’

‘I know. We’ll let Woody handle it.’

‘They got the camera going again,’ Fred said in the doorway.

‘You think I’m blind?’ the Inspector growled, chewing his lip and digging irritably in Peedie’s hole. ‘ Damn her!’

The fedora lay springily on top of Ginger’s revived pigtails, bobbing above her head as she walked. When she stopped, the hat leaned forward over her eyes, then rocked back. When she stepped forward, it seemed to hesitate a moment before following her.

‘Most places I’ve been,’ Lloyd Draper put in, ‘red hair’s pretty unlucky. Folks have a way of choppin’ it off, don’t y’know, head and all …’

‘ What’s happened to my overcoat—?! ’ the Inspector bellowed. Ginger was pulling it on now, her thin arms lost in its long floppy sleeves. It was wrinkled, misshapen, and had huge dark blotches all over it. It seemed to weigh her down, and her knees bowed out another couple of inches.

‘You ask any Hindoo, he’ll tell you that red, heh heh, is just bad news. Once when we were up in India, Iris and me, we got tickets to a—’

‘They been using it,’ Bob said (Ginger was now staggering about in the coat’s bulk, the fedora bouncing on her head, peering at everything through an oversized magnifying glass that stuck out of one sleeve like an artificial claw), ‘to catch the drip from the upstairs crapper.’

‘ What—?! ’

‘I said, when Iris and me were in India—’

‘ Enough!’ barked Pardew, twisting Peedie’s other ear off. He pointed with it toward the front of the house, and the two officers, unsheathing their clubs, disappeared.

Ginger had now discovered Ros’s body (the wake seemed to have started up around her again) and was down on her bony knees with her head under the skirt. She emerged with a look of triumph on her face and the fedora squashed down around her ears. She pushed a thick sleeve back, reached in and fished about, her eyes rolling, then began to pull on something: she tugged, strained, her eyes crossed — it gave way and she tumbled backward. She held it up: it was the Inspector’s briar pipe. ‘Damn!’ he muttered, slapping his pockets. Ginger gazed at it curiously, sniffed it, then prepared to fit it into the pucker of her mouth — but something over her shoulder alarmed her: she staggered to her feet and went stumbling and tripping through the mourners off-camera, dragging the tail of her thick checkered coat behind her. Bob and Fred appeared on the screen. They looked around in confusion — then, swinging their nightsticks, charged off in pursuit. My heart leaped to my throat. The camera, following the cops’ exit, had come to rest on Alison. Slowly it zoomed in, Alison staring straight at it with that same look of terror and supplication I’d last seen in the dining room. Noble, Dickie, Horner, the man in the chalkstripes, all crowded around her — and beneath her charmeuse skirt there were not two legs but four — Vachel! ‘Now what was it,’ the Inspector asked, turning toward me, ‘that you wanted to—?’

But I was already out the door, pushing through the pack-up in the dining room (‘ — watching the child’s astonishing performance through the two-way mirror, as if art and life were somehow separate,’ Mavis was saying, breathing heavily now and stroking her pale white thighs below her rucked-up skirt, ‘but then, suddenly, overtaken by excitement and desire …’), fighting my way as though through a briary nightmare toward the living room — but to no purpose. Except for Vic, slumped in an armchair next to Ros, and Malcolm Mee in the sunroom, his head bent solemnly over a handmirror ‘I’ve never done anything like this before,’ some guy was crooning hollowly on the hi-fi), the room was empty. That must have been a tape replay on the TV. In fact, now that I thought about it for a moment, I’d just seen the cops in the dining room, setting out silverware and stacks of plates on the table, and the camera, of course, was on Mavis.

There were too many lights on in here. The wreckage, the debris, was all too visible. It was like a theater after the play is over, deserted and garish, its illusions exposed. I gathered up some crumpled napkins, fallen ashtrays, half a bun smeared with catsup, a shattered cigar butt, a couple of glasses and a roach holder — but then I didn’t know what to do with them, so I set them down again. This time on the coffee table. There, by one foot, lay Alison’s green silk sash. I picked it up, held it to my lips.

‘Mustn’t take it too hard,’ Vic said, but I wasn’t sure whether he was talking to me or to himself. He was staring down at Ros, unrecognizable now except for the tatters of her silvery frock. ‘It’s fucking sad, but what the hell, there’s nothing tragic about it.’

‘No …’

‘Life’s too horrible to be tragic. We all know that. That’s for adolescents who still haven’t adjusted to the shit.’ He shook the ice around in his drink, watching it. ‘Nonetheless …’ He was struggling still with his sense of loss. I understood this. I’d said the same things many times, half-believing them. When I’d found my father, for example. In a room much like this one, his last hotel suite. The consoling overview: catastrophe as the mechanism that makes life possible, sorrow a morbid inflammation of the ego. A line, like any other … ‘You know, I’ve been thinking about that play Ros was in, the pillar of salt thing …’

‘You went to that?’

‘Yeah. I wasn’t about to make a fool of myself down there on stage, if that’s what you’re wondering, crazy as I was about her, but I watched the others who did. And it gave me time to think about that story. God saved Lot, you’ll remember, so Lot afterward could fuck his daughters, but he froze the wife for looking back. On the surface, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. But the radical message of that legend is that incest, sodomy, betrayal and all that are not crimes — only turning back is: rigidified memory, attachment to the past. That play was one attempt to subvert the legend, unfreeze the memory, reconnect to the here and now.’ He scowled into his glass. I was thinking of Ros, salted blue, warming to rose under all those tongues. Ros, who never looked back, not even for a soft place to fall. ‘And maybe … maybe her murder was another …’