Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘Hey, keep the door closed,’ someone muttered from across the room. ‘Alison!’ She pulled me inside and threw her arms around me with a whimper almost of pain. I felt it too: a constriction in my chest (the peckersweater was what she was dressed in!) that took my breath away. ‘At last!’ I cried, clasping her flesh in my arms, flooding over with the joy of it, the familiarity, the suppleness — ‘I can’t believe it! I thought you’d—!’ ‘ Sshh! ’ she hissed, and pressed her mouth against mine, running her hands up inside my shirt, loosening the tie, fumbling with the belt, her excitement making her almost childish in her clumsiness: I was clumsy, too, my hands trembling, my breath coming in short gulps — this was it then! it was happening! ‘ Hurry! ’ she whispered, dragging me toward the sewing area (the studio couch in the corner was taken, I could hear rustlings and mumblings: ‘Well, it’s different ,’ someone acknowledged) where pillows had been tossed down and heaped with clean laundry. I was shackled by my trousers: I managed to kick one canvas shoe off and free a leg. I felt rushed, as though something important (distantly Mark was screaming, I didn’t hear him) had been passed over, but I understood it — it was like what Tania used to say about painting: you plan and you plan, but when it happens, it’s a total shock, sudden and overwhelming, and you have to take it as it comes, trust your craft and surrender to the unexpected. She held my penis with her bare hand (I surrendered it, not at all wistfully, the unexpected encasing me like a condom), stroking my testicles with the furry cock sock, her mouth at my throat. I buried my face in her hair which was almost crackly with excitement, its sweet smell mingling with the deeper aroma now wafting up between her legs, she was spending freely, if that was the word, it sounded too commercial, my hands wallowed there, reaching as it were for that magic moment on the back porch, though everything was harder now, more real, no, for all the familiarity of it, this had not happened before, this was new — and now: the comings and goings were over, it was on! ’ ‘Oh yes! good boy!’ gasped some woman in the corner. ‘That’s not him, it’s me,’ another woman said, her voice muffled. I knelt, sliding my mouth (Craft! Craft! I was shouting at my exploding mind) down her taut trembling body toward that sweet flow below, but she pulled away, sinking back onto the pile of pillows and laundry and dragging me with her. Yes, true, it was not to be wasted — she was coming, her whole body was shaking as I rolled between her legs, and my own excitement was surging toward hers — we were rushing pell-mell toward that denouement we’d share, the cracker, as Quagg would say, the blow-off, the final spasm. Which in the end is achieved, as I might have said that night at the theater and perhaps did, neither by art nor by nature, but by a perfect synthesis (I could still remember such words: synthesis) of both. There was such an abundance of secretions between her legs that I slipped right past the entry, squeezing down the greasy aisle between the cheeks of her behind: she reached under (she was clutching my neck tightly with her other hand, her mouth at my ear, the fragrant laundry billowing around us like some kind of magical cloud) and guided me in: she was amazingly tight as though resisting her own mounting excitement, holding back, waiting for me. I thrust fiercely at her (the people on the studio couch were climaxing, too, I could hear them gasping and grunting — ‘God, I’m hot!’ one of them wheezed), just as she pitched upward to meet me, driving her thighs up under my arms, whimpering: ‘Oh, I love you, Gerry! I love you!’ in my ear.

‘ Sally Ann—!! ’ I bellowed, with such a shout that, startled, her whole body constricted in a violent spasm, locking me into her, my penis gripped just under the crown by the knifelike edge of her half-ruptured hymen. ‘ For god’s sake, let go! ’ I cried.

‘ I can’t! ’ she wailed. ‘ Owww!! ’

‘ Damn you, Sally Ann! You’re hurting me!’

‘What’s going on?’ asked one of the women on the studio couch.

‘Are you all the way in, Gerry?’ Sally Ann choked, her voice squeaky with shock and pain.

‘No — ow! — I’m not in or out, it’s much worse than that!’

‘That’s all right, I’m all done anyway,’ a man said. ‘I’ll go splash ’em.’ I could hear him padding across the room toward the door.

‘ Please , Gerry! Don’t stop now! I don’t care how it hurts!’

The lights came on, blinding us for a moment. Sally Ann, in anguish, continued to pump away, hugging me tight, trying to lodge me deeper, but I’d long since gone limp with pain.

‘Well, well, what have we here?’ It was Horner, that wooden soldier, at the light switch, one hand holding his pants up. Teresa was frantically pulling on her yellow knit dress, Daffie stretched out naked on the studio couch beside her, legs wearily aspraddle. ‘You could have waited a minute!’ Teresa called out from inside the dress, jerking the hem down past the swell of her midriff.

I had torn Sally Ann’s hands away and was trying to extricate myself, but the door, as they say, had swung shut on that domain. ‘I didn’t know it would be like this, Gerry! I’m sorry! ’ she groaned, her eye paint-smudged, making her look like some theatrical parody of the living dead. I drew my knees up under her thrashing rear and leaned back on my haunches — not very comfortable, but I could hold her down that way, keep her from scissoring the thing off.

The door opened and Zack Quagg poked his nose in from the hall — ‘Hey, Horn, I been looking for you, what’s going on?’ — followed by Woody and Cynthia (Horner, winking, licked his thumb as though to turn a page), holding hands: ‘Oh no,’ Woody said, his eyes crinkling up with compassion when he saw me. ‘I’ll go get Jim.’

‘Yes, please!’ I gasped. ‘ Hurry! ’ I could hear Mark again — his wailing was now sleepy and rhythmical, dirgelike. ‘Stay still, Sally Ann!’

‘I want to — but it’s all moving by itself! ’

‘For goodness’ sake! What have you been doing?! ’ asked Wilma, arriving short of breath as though after a run. ‘Lloyd Draper’s giving a slide show downstairs, Teresa, and we’ve been waiting for you!’ Cynthia knelt beside us, holding back my pubic hairs to have a closer look. ‘Can you relax a bit?’ she asked, and Sally Ann wailed: ‘I am relaxing!’ Quagg was pulling Horner (‘This place looks too busy,’ said Janny Trainer, peeping in, our plumber Steve in tow), still blowing kisses back over his shoulder, out the door: ‘Come on, we got something on the boil, man — something great! ’ ‘Yeah, okay, Zack, but first lemme get something to eat …’

‘He said he was casting me for a part,’ explained Teresa, smoothing down her skirt, looking around on the floor for something more, and Wilma said: ‘Well, just try telling that to Peg!’ ‘What? Is my sister still here?’ Cynthia was wriggling my member back and forth as though trying to free a key from a broken lock: ‘Ow, don’t!’ I cried. ‘That’s not helping!’

‘You’re bleeding, Sally Ann,’ Cynthia observed, looking at her fingers. ‘Am I?’ Sally Ann lifted herself up on her elbows to see for herself. ‘Yeah!’ she gasped, and lay back smiling, her face wet with sweat. ‘God! I’m bleeding!’

‘It may be me! ’ I whimpered.

‘And this is our sewing room,’ my wife said. ‘Soyng?’ She stood in the doorway with Iris Draper, Alison’s husband, Hilario the Panamanian tapdancer (‘Ah! Zo-eeng! Weeth the leetle, how you say, pointed theeng!’), that guy with the elbow patches I’d met out in the backyard, and two people I’d never seen before. ‘It hasn’t been redecorated for a few years, I’m afraid.’