Robert Coover: Gerald's Party

‘We — we don’t even have an ice pick, Inspector,’ I replied. This seemed more sensible, but I still felt like I had lost my place somehow. ‘Our refrigerator has an automatic unit which—’

‘One moment!’ cried Pardew, his attention drawn suddenly to something at the other side of the room. ‘Unless I am very much mistaken, we shall find what we are looking for in that white chair over there!’ Pocketing his unlit pipe, he strode over to it, guests parting to form a corridor. We all saw it now: something glinting just behind the cushion at the back, red stains on the creamy velvet. ‘Aha!’ he exclaimed as he lifted the cushion. I half-expected him to produce an ice pick from under it, absurd as that seemed, but there was only a knife. I recognized it: it was my wife’s butcher knife. Just as I’d seen it in the kitchen. ‘It’s been wiped clean, I see,’ he observed, picking it up with a handkerchief from his trousers pocket. ‘But there are streaks on it still of something like blood …!’

Distantly, in another room, half-lost in shadows, I saw my wife, slipping back toward the kitchen again. She was gazing tenderly at me over the heads of our guests, through the bluish haze of cigarette smoke and what seemed almost like steam (I wiped my brow with a shirtsleeve), looking more serene than I’d seen her for months. Yet pained, too, and a bit forlorn. Love is not an art, Gerald, she had once shouted at me in rare anger but common misunderstanding: It is a desperate compulsion! Like death throes! ‘What? What did you say?’ I asked.

The Inspector was holding the knife up in front of my face. The handkerchief in which he cradled it was wrinkled and discolored, clotted with dried and drying mucus. ‘I said, do you recognize it?’

‘Yes, it’s ours.’ I looked up into his penetrating gaze. ‘It’s from our kitchen.’

‘I see … and who would have access—?’

‘Anybody. It hangs on a wall by the oven.’

‘Hmmm.’ He stared down at the knife, lips pursed, twisting one end of his moustache meditatively — then he arched his brows and, handing the knife to Anatole, blew his nose in the handkerchief. Anatole studied the knife skeptically, weighed it in his palm, tightened his fingers around the handle, tested the cutting edge with his thumb, and then, while the Inspector stared absently into his filthy handkerchief, passed it on to Patrick, crowding in at his elbow. Patrick jumped. Someone said: ‘Is that it?’ Patrick, panicking, held it at arm’s length between thumb and forefinger as though it might contaminate him. He pushed it toward the distracted Inspector, back at Anatole who shrugged it off, then thrust it at Dickie. Laughing, Dickie tossed it up in the air, caught it by the handle, wiped the blade on the seat of Patrick’s green trousers (‘Naughty boy!’ squeaked Patrick, twisting about, trying to see over his hip where Dickie had wiped), and handed it on to Charley Trainer, who had just come in with his wife, Janice, she still looking a bit weepy. Charley said: ‘What is it, huh, some kinda joke?’

And so it went around the room, passing from hand to hand as though seeking recognition, approval, community, and, as I watched, it suddenly and finally came home to me: Ros, our own inimitable Ros, was dead. All those breathless hugs: gone forever. And now everything was different. Fundamentally different. I felt as though I were witnessing the hardening of time. And the world, ruptured by it, turning to jelly.

‘Tell me,’ said Inspector Pardew, looking up from his handkerchief, ‘is your wife here?’

‘Yes, of course, in the kitchen — but she had nothing to do with this!’

‘Who said she did?’ asked the Inspector, eyeing me narrowly. He stuffed the wad of yellowed handkerchief back in his pocket. The knife was still moving like a message around the room. It reached Tania on the floor, who explored it dreamily with both hands, her eyes closed. ‘All the same, we’d better interview her,’ said the Inspector to his assistants, nodding toward the back of the house.

‘Yessir,’ said the shorter one, as the Inspector set up a tripod, unwrapped some film. ‘Can you handle him, Bob?’

The tall one, Bob, nodded grimly and gave an extra twist on Roger’s arm, but just then Tania opened her eyes, lifted her spectacles onto her nose, and, frowning curiously at the knife in her hands, leaned over and touched its tip to Ros’s wound. ‘ WrraAARGHH! ’ screamed Roger and broke free.

‘Oh no—!’

‘ Stop him! ’ somebody shouted.

The two policemen managed to cut him off from the body, but they were unable to lay hold of him. He lurched violently about the room in a wild whinnying flight, blind to all obstacles, slapping up against walls and furniture, tangling himself in curtains, leaving not mere fingerprints behind but whole body blotches, and howling insanely as he went. People tried to duck out of his way, but he slammed into them just the same, knocking them off their feet, sloshing them with Ros’s blood, making them yell and shriek and lash out in terror. I saw Mavis tip backward on her round bottom, her thick white legs looping gracefully over her head like surfacing porpoises. Some guy behind her crashed into the fireplace in a cloud of dust and ashes, still holding his drink aloft, big Louise slipped on Ros’s blood, Howard hit the wall like a beanbag, spectacles flying. Roger was a man possessed. The police chased him, stumbling through the wreckage, knocking down what Roger missed, but there was no catching him. Glasses were spilling and smashing, tables tipping, potted plants splattering like little bombs, lamps whirling, camera gear flying like shrapnel; someone screamed: ‘ Get down! Get down! ’ I was glad my wife was well out of it, but I was afraid for Alison. She was standing in the middle of the uproar as though chained there, her eyes locked on mine, the tears drying on her cheeks, her smile fading. And then I couldn’t see her anymore as Roger pitched suddenly toward Ros again, tripped over Tania ducking the wrong way, and fell upon Naomi, who was trying desperately in the confusion to get everything back in her bag again. Naomi squealed as she sprawled under his weight and all her stuff went flying again. Before the police could reach him, Roger was back on his feet, half-galloping, half-flying through a flurry of paper and toilet gear, plowing into Patrick, caroming off big Chooch Trainer, whose eyes popped and crossed at the force of the blow, and sending Woody and Yvonne, who’d just come in with fresh drinks in their hands, scrambling back through the door again on their hands and knees.

‘Hey, listen, Ger, do me a favor,’ whispered Dickie in my ear as we watched all this (Anatole and Janice were just being knocked over like toy soldiers, Anatole’s black jacket and Janny’s pink skirt billowing behind their fall like lowering flags), ‘tell that silly slit to get off my case, will you?’

I looked up at him (the short officer was clomping about furiously, his foot caught in the toolbox), standing tall and trim in his white vest and trousers, dark plaid sports jacket, blue tie, his blond hair swept back with care, a cool half-smile on his lips, yet a kind of loose panic in his eyes. ‘Who, you mean—?’ And just then Roger hit me. I felt the blood spray up my nose like wet rust and I crumpled to the floor under a creature moist and cold as a slug, but with roaring breath and flailing crablike limbs, and massive with its own furious but mindless energy. It was some kind of monster I was grappling with, not Roger, and the sheer bloody reality of it terrified me. Maybe I was even screaming. I saw the police grab at him, but he leaped away, kneeing me in the stomach, and they fell on me instead. The short cop’s hat had slipped down over his eyes, and in his blindness he seized my wrist, threw me over onto my face, and twisted my arm up to my neck, nearly breaking it. ‘ Hey! ’ I cried, and something cold and hard knocked up behind my ear.