Robert Coover: Gerald's Party

‘Pardew is examining the body.’

‘No, I mean, what’s Naomi doing down there on her hands and knees with her shit all over the floor?’

‘ Sshh! ’ Howard admonished. Others were glaring.

Indeed it had become very quiet. The Inspector, bending closely, was probing the wound again with Patrick’s tweezers (Patrick, flushing, winced, his teeth showing), and there was an attentive stillness, almost breathless, in the room. Jim stood with a frown on his square face, troubled about something. Is the hole the empty part in the middle, Daddy, Mark once asked me, or the hard part all around? I didn’t know the answer then and I didn’t know it now. Distantly, I could hear the thuck of darts hitting the dart board down in the rec room. Almost like the ticking of a slow clock. The chopping of ice. The bib of Ros’s bloodstained frock was in the Inspector’s way: he pulled part of it aside and one white breast slid free.

Whereupon Roger started screaming wildly again, shattering the silence and making us all jump. Patrick squeaked and dropped his drink, Mavis groaned, and Tania cried, ‘ Oh my god! ’ sinking to her knees again.

Roger, eyes starting as though to fly from their sockets, struggled desperately to reach Ros’s body, the two police officers hanging on, grappling for balance and handholds, their veins popping. ‘Kee-rist!’ hissed Dickie between his teeth, and Naomi, picking up her things, dropped them again. One of the officers lost his hat and the other stumbled once to his knees, but they managed to subdue Roger and pin him back against a wall. ‘Easy now, fella, easy!’ gasped the shorter one, pressing his knee into Roger’s bloodsoaked groin, then, glancing at me over his shoulder, he shook his head as though sharing something privately with me and blew his cheeks out.

Inspector Pardew, absorbed in his examination, noticed little of it. Using the glass slides as a makeshift magnifying glass, he peered closely at the wound, poking and probing, muttering enigmatically from time to time. He picked Ros’s breast up once by the nipple to peer under and around it, but he seemed disinterested in the breast itself — if anything, it was an obstacle to him. I couldn’t get my eyes off it. Ros was famous for her breasts, and seeing the exposed one there now, so soft and vulnerable, its shrunken nipple looking like a soft pierced bruise, pecked fruit, I felt the sorrow I’d been holding back rise like hard rubber in my throat. I glanced up and found Alison watching me, tears running down her cheeks. She smiled faintly, and it was a smile so full of love and understanding that for a moment I could see nothing else in the room, not even Roger in his despair or poor, drained Ros, such that when I heard the Inspector ask, shouting over Roger, ‘ How long ago did this happen? ’ I realized that it was at least the second time he had asked it and that he was looking straight at me.

‘I–I can’t remember,’ I stammered hoarsely. I looked at my watch but I couldn’t see the dial.

‘Here, use mine,’ said Dickie.

‘Wait a minute—!’ barked Pardew, rising.

Dickie smiled, shrugged, took his watch back. I rubbed at my eyes: there were tears in them.

‘Hey! Where’s Sally Ann?’ shouted Vic, blundering in. He seemed to be asking Eileen, who was sitting up now, face buried in her hands, looking distraught, and I was invaded by the same feeling I’d had earlier with Alison: that all this had happened before. But then it went away as Sally Ann appeared in the doorway and said: ‘What do you want, Dad?’ I glanced across the room at Alison, still watching me, damp-eyed and gently smiling, looking almost fragile now in her soft satiny dress with its slashed sleeves, its frail silken folds. She touched the glass of vermouth to her lips. No, I thought, as Vic grunted ambiguously and shoved his way out of the room again, I hadn’t really had that feeling with Alison before. I’d only wished to.

‘The time ,’ the Inspector was insisting. ‘This is important—! ’

‘How long,’ I asked, turning to him, not really thinking about what I was saying, my mind on an earlier Alison, playful and mischievous, now nearly as remote to me as that girl from Italy (and I recalled now from that night, as though my memory were being palpated, the splatter of a pot on a cobbled street, a wail, something about gypsies in another country, and the way the girl’s pubic hair branched apart like brown bunny ears: discoveries like that were important then), ‘does it take ice to melt in a pitcher?’

‘Ice?’ exclaimed the Inspector, genuinely astonished.

‘I’m sorry. What I mean is—’

‘ Ice—?! ’

‘When you came in,’ I tried to explain, ‘I was—’

‘Ah yes,’ interrupted the Inspector, ‘so you were.’ He drew a large Dutch billiard pipe and tobacco pouch from his pockets. Roger’s ravings had subsided to a soft whimper, and he’d sagged lopsidedly into the arms of the policemen once more. The tall one stared at me coldly, leaning on his short leg, a dark line of sweat staining the collar of his shirt. The short one had unbuttoned his blue coat, and his shirtfront, stretched over his bulging low-slung belly, was soaked with blood. He nodded me back to the Inspector, who asked: ‘I wonder … has the murder weapon been found?’

‘No,’ I replied. He peered at me closely, one finger in the bowl of his pipe like an accusation. Inexplicably, I felt my face reddening. ‘We left her exactly—’

‘Yes, yes, I’m sure.’ He lifted his gaze to the ceiling as though studying something there, and involuntarily, the rest of us looked up as well. Nothing to see: a plain white ceiling, overlapping circles of light cast on it by the various lamps in the room. In some odd way, in its blankness, it seemed to be looking down on us, dwarfing us. I wondered, staring at it, if Alison might not be thinking the same thing — or, knowing I’d be having such thoughts, refuting me: there is no audience, Gerald, that’s what makes it so sad. Hadn’t I said much the same thing the night we met: that the principal invention of playwrights was not plays or actors but audiences? ‘Curious …,’ mused the Inspector. He was gazing down at Ros again. As though directed, so then did we. Her breast was covered by the frock once more, but now her legs seemed farther apart, the silvery skirt riding halfway up her stockinged thighs, and she had some kind of apparatus stuck in her mouth. An X-ray unit maybe. ‘You’d think a girl like her …’ He paused thoughtfully, zipping up the tobacco pouch. What had he meant? There was a heavy stillness in the room, broken only by Roger’s muffled sob, a low hum (the hi-fi? or that thing in Ros’s mouth?), and the labored breathing of the two police officers. Inspector Pardew sighed as though in regret, then looked up at me: ‘But excuse me, you were speaking of an ice pick, I believe …’

I started. ‘No … ice!’ It was a cheap trick. Not to say a complete absurdity. And yet (I was finding it hard to catch my breath), hadn’t I just been …? ‘There — there was ice in the pitcher I was carrying when you—’

‘Of course.’ He smiled, making an arch pretense of believing me. He tamped the tobacco into the bowl of his pipe, returned the pouch to his pocket, withdrew a lighter. ‘So you’ve said …’

‘You think she might have been killed with an ice pick, do you?’ I shot back, though I felt I was blustering, inventing somehow my own predicament. Where did all this come from?

‘I don’t know,’ he replied, tucking the pipe in his mouth, watching me closely. Behind him, Jim was shaking his head at me. Most of the others simply looked amazed. Or distracted. ‘Do you?’