Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘A little more …’

Sally Ann groaned. Her jaws were clamped now, her teeth bared, a little bubble of gum sticking up between them like a fleshy growth: she gasped as Jim broke through and the gum disappeared. ‘Oh my gosh,’ she choked, ‘I think I swallowed it!’

‘You’re doing fine,’ Jim said, guiding her hands down. ‘Now just take hold here and slowly stretch yourself apart …’

‘I thought this was supposed to be fun,’ she whimpered. Over on the couch, Daffie laughed and said: ‘You been going to the wrong church, kiddo.’

Our midwife Cynthia, jiggling the key again, gave a quick tug and I was free, sliding out through Sally Ann’s clenched knuckles as though on rails. I fell back, struggling to unbend my legs. One of them was still tangled in my trousers: Cynthia pulled my shoe off and stripped the rest away. I stretched out, ignoring the cameraman who hovered above me, thinking: So this is what it comes to, all the artful preparations, all the garnering of experience and sensual fine-tuning, and you’re just another curiosity, a kind of decorous monster who pees on his wife’s flowers and hurts children.

Sally Ann was crying, curled up on her side with her hands between her thighs, the cameraman moving in over her blood-streaked buttocks onto her tear-streaked face, then switching off. He unbelted the camera, took the weight off his shoulder: ‘Good show,’ he grunted, and put a lens cap on. ‘I don’t really think that’s necessary, Woody,’ Jim was saying, and Woody, holding hands with Cynthia above me, said: ‘Perhaps not, but he’s a client. I have an ethical responsibility to let him know.’

Jim shook his head as they left, then stooped to put his gear back in the bag. ‘Here, put this between your legs,’ he said, handing Sally Ann one of our kitchen curtains. ‘If you’ll come to see me, I’ll teach you how to pass graduated heated pneumatic dilators up to half a foot or so, then you won’t have any more problems.’ Sally Ann only moaned, doubled up there in her nest of laundry and clutching the curtain to her fork like a child its security blanket, but the cameraman said: ‘I wonder if you’d look at this cut on my face, Doc.’

‘Hmm. I hadn’t noticed it there, under the beard. It’s quite deep—’

‘Yeah, stiletto heels. Very sharp.’

‘I think there’s some antibacterial cream in the bathroom.’

‘Too bad she didn’t get him in the eye,’ Daffie grumbled, as Jim led the cameraman out. ‘If it hadn’t been for him, Dickie and the others’d still be here.’ I was searching around for my clothes, but all I could find were my shirt and socks. ‘Your pants are over here, Ger.’

I struggled to my feet and crossed the room, but my knees were so weak I could hardly walk. ‘Do you mind?’

‘Sit down, sit down …’

My trousers were all knotted up and inside out. It was as if someone had tried to make a cat’s cradle out of them. Just getting the underwear separated from the pants was like a Chinese puzzle. ‘Dickie’s gone then, it’s true,’ I said.

‘Yeah. Between the cops, the mess his pretty clothes were in, and little young bung’s maniacal old man …’ She took a pull on her cheroot and then sighed, expelling the dark smoke past my hip. Sally Ann was also beginning to stir, pushing up on one elbow to examine the curtains between her legs, the three of us alone now in the room.

‘Why didn’t you go along?’

‘He had a full load.’ So that was it then. No point in asking who he’d taken in her place. I sighed, surrendering to the inevitable as though learning a new habit. ‘Why all these preparations? ’ Ros had once asked me. ‘What are we waiting for?’ I should have been listening. Sally Ann, waddling about now in her bikini underpants with extra padding in the crotch, had discovered a mirror (the frame was a cartoonish clown’s face, the mirror his laughing — or gaping — mouth: little Gerald, I thought, was with us still) and was wiping the eye paint out of her eyes with a pillowcase. ‘You wanna know the truth, Ger?’ Daffie said, her voice constricted. ‘I hate this fucking piece of meat. It makes me a lot of money, but I hate it.’ She stubbed her glowing cigar out on her pubis.

‘Daffie—! Hey! ’ I pushed her hand away. There was a fresh pink wound just above her mound, and in the air the faint aroma of burnt hair and flesh. There were a lot of scars there, I saw. ‘I … I wondered why you never did full frontal poses,’ I said, touching them. They were glossy and unyielding, nubbly, rippling across her abdomen like faults, as though the flesh had been strip-mined. Her navel was blurred with overlaid scar tissue like the scratched-out face in Tania’s painting.

‘I wanna believe that the mind is something unique, Ger, that there’s something called spirit or soul in me that’s all my own and different from the body, and that someday it can somehow get out of it: it’s my main desire. And it’s all just a fucking fairy tale, isn’t it? Her old man is right. And poor dumb Roger. Body is what we got. A bag of worms …’

Her act had sent a chill through me. It was as though she were trying to turn her flesh to stone. Tania liked to say that the idea of emptiness consoled her. Which I took as an ultimate form of madness: the mind rising to its nadir. I squeezed Daffie’s hand. ‘Maybe,’ I said, the tears starting. ‘But yours is more beautiful than most. For our sake, you should keep it that way.’

Sally Ann, standing beside us, also had a glitter in her eyes, though maybe it was just from scrubbing the paint away. She had a patch on the thigh of her jeans now that said ‘OPEN FOR BUSINESS’ — probably she’d been saving it. ‘Thank you, Gerry,’ she said tenderly, knotting her shirttails. ‘It was beautiful. It was the most beautiful moment of my life.’ She stared charitably down at my limp organ. ‘And don’t try to explain. I understand. Honest, Gerry, I wasn’t at all disappointed, it was more than—’

‘It was a cheap trick, Sally Ann. I ought to tan your britches!’

‘Oh groan,’ she said, unwrapping another stick of gum, ‘all you dirty old men are just alike! Well, go ahead then!’ She folded the gum into her mouth, switched around and arched her fanny up in front of my face: I couldn’t resist. I reared back and cracked it with all my might. She yelped in surprise, then started gagging. ‘Oh pee , Gerry!’ she wailed. ‘ You made me swallow my gum again! ’ She took a wild swing at me, which I parried, then she went running, bawling, out of the room. ‘Boy, that felt good!’ I said.

Daffie laughed, then raised herself up on one elbow and picked up my penis to have a look. ‘Anyway, it hasn’t been husked.’ She slid the foreskin back with a deft finger.

‘Ouch!’

‘Oh yeah, I see. It’s all raw there under the nub as if somebody’d tried to bite the nozzle off. Well, it’s pretty, Ger, you know that, but it’s just not callused enough.’ She dropped it and pushed herself up off the couch, stood there weaving, her feet planted wide apart. I’d got one pantleg free from the shorts, but the other was bound up in some kind of hitch knot. I untied it and turned the pantlegs rightside out. ‘You got anything here I can wear? My rig’s all assed up.’

‘Whatever you find, help yourself.’ I pulled the shorts on, watching her stagger through the clutter (she dipped to one knee briefly, but got back up again), remembering the time we first fixed this room up as a nursery: everything in its place then like stage props. So long ago. And so much had happened. But then, I thought, recalling my wife in the doorway just now (she’d seemed her old self, hardly affected by all I’d seen her having to go through in the kitchen — that was coming back to me now, as I drew my trousers on, as though from some circuitous journey: the dark bruises on the backs of her thighs, for example, her tummy fanfolding, the faint trickle of blood radiating across her pale nether cheeks — like cracked porcelain, I’d thought at the time, overwhelmed just then by an inexpressible compassion … or at least it had seemed inexpressible, and probably it was), not so much. What had Pardew said? Change is an illusion of the human condition, something like that. The passing images our senses delivered to us on our obligatory exploration of the space — time continuum, pieced together like film frames to create the fiction of movement and change, thereby inventing motive. Like this frame in front of me now of Daffie’s internationally famous derrière, glittering with perspiration, as she bent drunkenly from the waist to muddle about in the scattered laundry: a way-station on the trajectory like any other. Just the same, I was glad not to have missed it.