Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘Jesus, that hurt!’ Vic whimpered, laughing.

‘Don’t talk to her, Daddy.’

‘Way to go, sister!’ Goldy grinned, spitting thickly into a plastic cup he was holding in his free hand, and Charley, pushing out his thick soft mitt past my petrified elbow (‘When Jim told her Vic had a bullet in his heart, you know what she said? She said, “Then why don’t you just reach inside his asshole and pull it out!” ’), said: ‘Don’ believe I’ve hadda pleasure. Trainer here, Mushual Life.’

‘This is Mr Waddilow, Charley,’ I gasped, trying to stand alone. ‘New neighbors …’

‘The next one in the goolies, tough guy!’

‘Oh ha ha! Spare me!’ Vic groaned.

‘Neighbors, hunh?’

‘I left your bill on the dishwasher, mister,’ the plumber said around his chaw, squinting up at me. ‘Easy, Eileen, he’s dying,’ Daffie cautioned, touching her forearm. Eileen shook her off. ‘So? Who isn’t? Some just have more fun at it than others, that’s all.’ ‘Thank you,’ I said, gripping the sideboard. ‘You’re welcome to stay … have a drink or something …’ ‘No, thanks.’ He spat another oyster. ‘I got no time for this shit.’

‘In fact he looks good drooling blood like that — it’s like the mask’s finally off the bastard.’

‘Steve’s a young kid, it’s all new to him, he can hang around if he wants to. Me, I seen it all. I got a job to do, that’s it.’ He turned to go. ‘Can I give you a ride somewhere, sister?’

‘No, thanks. I’ll walk.’

‘Hey,’ Kitty asked, ‘where is everybody?’

‘Don’t be stupid, girlie, it’s dangerous out there.’

I looked around. Kitty was right (‘Anatole has written a play,’ Howard was explaining to her — he’d cleaned up some, wore Tania’s glasses on a chain around his neck now, his red tie and the bra, but no shirt, and my white boating cap, ‘you just missed the casting …’): the dining room had emptied out, there were only the few of us clustered around the drinks now like refugees, Mrs Waddilow alone over at the table, Mavis grinning up at us from the floor, Cynthia and Woody in the next room watching television.

‘And relax, sister, I’m off fucking for life. I mean it, I’m into beer, old movies, and model trains. When I’m not unplugging rich guys’ toilets.’ His partner Steve came in with Scarborough and Horner and they commenced to move the dining table out from under Mrs Waddilow. ‘’Scuse us, ma’am.’ ‘So whuzz your poison, Waterloo?’ Charley asked, slumping heavily against the sideboard. ‘You like model trains?’

‘Just a bit of tonic, thank you. Not a drinking man myself.’

‘I don’t know,’ Eileen said, staring down at Goldy, hands stuffed in her pockets, her face swollen and blue with bruises. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Gerry?’ It was Sally Ann, her voice anxious. ‘I think Dad’s getting worse!’

‘You oughta come and see my layout, I got everything, uses up half my basement, whole fucking county in miniature.’

So he was: his head, eyes rolled back, had fallen to one side, blood dribbled down his chin still (‘Just like real life. Only without the horseshit …’), his breath was coming in hoarse erratic gasps. There was a tooth lying loose on his chin like a beached castaway. ‘Vic?’ His lips were moving (‘You’re as bad as this guy,’ Eileen was saying, ‘just another closet idealist!’ and Goldy said: ‘Hey, you like horseshit? I’ll put in horseshit!’), but only the odd word or two were getting out: ‘… nihilistic bastard … what? … and hope, shit … what I hate — kaff! foo! … so goddamn wet—’ ‘I’ll go get Jim,’ I said.

‘Hurry …!’

It wasn’t easy to hurry. I seemed to be carrying a hundred pounds of dead weight on my right side, and my knees were like jelly. I heaved myself to the doorway and leaned dizzily against it, staring into Scarborough’s transformation of our living room. Nothing was in its place, except perhaps my wife, who was vacuuming the rug. It was like some kind of spectacular fusing of the familiar, the whole room tented in sheets, towels, bloody drapes and curtains, all meant to suggest some sort of cave, I supposed (‘I won’t be a moment, Zack,’ my wife shouted from inside it as Quagg flung his cape about in mimed protest, ‘I just want to get up this plaster dust before it gets tracked into the carpet!’), lit from behind — or rather from atop: Scarborough had drilled holes through the ceiling and mounted table and floor lamps up there above the sheeting. At the cavemouth, Teresa stood naked and frightened (‘I feel so stupid,’ she was complaining, trying to cover, not her breasts — which Gudrun was rouging — or her genitals, but the whitened rolls of fat on her tummy), while nearby Jim leaned over Ros’s cadaver, laid out amid pilaf, cheese balls, and sliced salami on our dining room table, a butcher knife in his hand. He seemed shorter than usual. ‘No, no, I want the video camera inside the cave, looking out at the audience! ’ Quagg shouted over the sweeper’s roar, and Scarborough cried: ‘Goddamn it, Fats, get outa here! You’re knockin’ everything over!’ ‘I’m just trying to help, Scar!’ ‘Well, go help Gudrun!’ Oddly, this was all reminiscent of something I’d seen before, as though — I was thinking about Inspector Pardew’s whimsical speculations about ‘the geography of time’ — I’d somehow got switched onto some kind of reverse loop (had I just heard Goldy say something about this to Eileen? Now certainly she said: ‘Sounds like the story of my life,’ but perhaps he’d been describing his shunting operations), such that though the space had changed and the approach was from an opposite angle, this was a point on time’s map I’d passed through before. I squeezed my eyes shut, shook my head.

‘They said the dining room table was too high and wanted to saw the legs down,’ my wife said suddenly beside me, ‘but I talked them out of it.’

‘ What—?! ’ I lurched back, banging my head on the doorframe.

‘I didn’t mean to startle you, Gerald. It’s all right.’ What was happening? It was as though we’d jumped over something! One moment she’d been vacuuming the carpet and Quagg, prancing about in his white unitard, had been shouting over the noise, the next she was in front of me discussing the dining room table, Louise was carting the sweeper off, Fats was on his knees, smearing Teresa’s legs with clown white, and Quagg, wrapped up like a sleeping bat in his purple cape, was quietly explaining to Alison’s husband (‘In theater, dialogue is action, man!’) what the play was all about. What had happened to that moment in between? ‘I made up something off the top of my head about the proper height of altars, and luckily they accepted it.’ Behind her there was a reek of pot and incense. ‘No, no, no , Fats!’ Gudrun was exclaiming. ‘I said not in her bush — now go away, I’ll do it!’ ‘In fact, I overdid it, I’m afraid, and then the table turned out to be too low, so they had to raise it up on some of your records.’

‘Ah. Good.’ I really didn’t know what I was saying. Regina came sweeping in, drew up short when she spied Teresa, cried out: ‘How come she got the part?!’ and went storming out again in a stylized pique I was sure I’d seen before. I was totally confused. I didn’t know whether the night was running forward or backward. I was afraid the doorbell would ring and it would be Ros at the door. Backing out, her cloak wrapping her, her welcoming hug dissolving into a wishful fancy — and then the doorbell did ring! ‘Oh no!’ I cried.

‘Not more people!’ my wife groaned, and took my arm. But it was: little Bunky Baird, the actress who’d played ‘Honeyed Glances’ in The Lover’s Lexicon , one of Lot’s daughters, and Jesus’s nymphomaniac sister in The Beatitudes , escorted by some older guy in his fifties and a young gigolo who might have been partnering either or both. Quagg had just been explaining to Alison’s husband that, ‘So what we’re going for here is the transmutation of stuff from deep down in the inner life, see, into something out front that we can watch, something made outa language and movement, you dig, to show forth the —’ when Bunky let out a terrible shriek from the doorway: ‘ Stop him! he’s going to kill her!’