Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘Hey, man, we’re not ready for this!’ Scarborough protested, and Mee mutely flashed the pick at him as though to strike. He was breathing heavily, erratically, through a tiny puncture in the condom, the rubber snapping in and popping out with each breath. I wasn’t sure, but he seemed to be smiling. The TV cameraman was squatting, shooting up at the flapping rubber under his nostrils. Beni said: ‘What is this?! I haven’t even got my codpiece yet!’ — but he went quickly silent when Mee turned on him, swishing the pick through the air, making it whistle.

‘Christ, I think he’s serious …!’

‘Malcolm—?’

‘You’ve got to stop him, Zack!’ a woman cried out.

‘Shut up!’ Quagg snapped, drawing his purple cape across his body like a shield, and Prissy Loo seemed to faint. Or maybe she just tripped over her heavy galoshes. Horner, clutching his scrotum and grunting painfully, dragged himself off across the carpet, out of the way, watching Mee warily. ‘Shit fire …!’

‘Is this some sort of protest—?’

Mee leaped lithely out of the shadows onto the spotlit stage and posed there rigidly, pick upraised. Everyone crept back except Teresa and Eileen, who were seemingly unable to move. ‘Please …!’ Teresa whimpered, the raincoat falling away from her painted breasts, bright now in the overhead lights. Eileen, clutching the coat to Teresa’s shoulders, watched Mee intently; Quagg knelt; Fats stared goggle-eyed, wrapped in collapsed cave wall.

‘Come on, Mee,’ I said, finding my voice, or some of it anyway. ‘Enough’s enough, damn it!’

He appeared not to hear me, took a lurching step toward Teresa as though losing control, seemingly transfixed (his dilated eyes were clearly visible through the stretched rubber sheath, the flesh around them mashed back like shiny scar tissue) by her heaving red spots, the pick quivering in his poised fist.

Beni, in Roger’s ill-fitting jacket and his own theatrical longjohns, threw his arms open and stepped forward: ‘Malcolm, my old friend!’

‘Don’t, Beni! He knows what he’s doing!’ shouted Quagg.

‘But she’s not one of us,’ Beni argued, ‘she wouldn’t understand!’ Mee’s free hand shot forward and grabbed one of Teresa’s crimson breasts — she squeaked in terror, slumping backward into Eileen’s arms as he drew the breast toward him. Beni tore off his false moustache. ‘Malcolm, my friend, it’s your old comrade Benedetto, remember?’

‘Isn’t this getting a bit dangerous?’ Alison’s husband murmured, his face pale now under the drooping brim of Beni’s hat, his lips pulled back in a frightened grimace. If Beni distracts him, I thought, maybe I can somehow disarm him. Malcolm was stronger than I was, though, I’d need help. I glanced around for the police: amazingly, they were watching me, not Mee!

‘This is theater, man!’ Quagg was saying, his voice a fierce whisper. ‘Theater is hard. It’s real. Did you think we were just fucking around?’

‘But I thought—’

‘Do me a favor, would you, dear friend,’ Beni insisted, interposing himself boldly between Mee and Teresa, ‘and loan me that —’ Mee struck. Beni gasped, disbelievingly, staggered back a step, clutching the handle of the pick that now seemed to grow out of his chest like a thick warty finger, pointing back at Mee. ‘ Oh no … !’ he wheezed, and sat back in amazement — splat! — as though someone might have pulled a chair out from under him. Blood began to spread outward from the wound.

‘My god—!’

‘ Now see what you’ve done!’ I cried. I didn’t know who I was shouting at — Mee maybe, Quagg, the police, or perhaps the whole damned crowd — but I was suddenly angry, a ferocious rage was boiling up in me: ‘ You’ve gone too goddamned far! ’ Someone seemed to be crying. I shoved Mee aside brusquely, knelt at Beni’s side: he was bleeding badly now, and when he tried to mutter something about ‘a surprise ending,’ blood bubbled out the corner of his mouth and down his plump chin. ‘ Jim—!’ I screamed — I couldn’t seem to stop screaming. ‘ Someone get Jim! Hurry, for god’s sake! ’ But no one moved: they seemed frozen with shock or fear. I leaped to my feet: ‘ Jim! Come in here! Quickly! ’ I yelled, then turned on the two cops: ‘Why didn’t you do something, goddamn it? What did you just stand there for?’ They looked utterly bewildered, as though they didn’t even understand the question. The room was silent except for the suppressed whimpering, Beni’s rasping groans, my own labored breathing. I swung on Mee and beat him on the chest with my good arm: ‘ You vicious creep! ’ He took my blows without response, as though stunned by his own action. ‘Never seem to make it …,’ Beni rasped hoarsely, ‘to the final curtain …!’ ‘ You’re a maniac, Mee! ’ I screamed, shoving him off the stage. ‘ You ought to be locked up! ’

‘It’s time … to put a silk on it, friends … lower the asbestos,’ Beni moaned. I turned to him. He was sprawled against one of my wife’s potted plants (had someone moved it there?), his eyes rolled back, blood dribbling profusely from his mouth and stabwound. ‘They’re … yanking the show on … old Benedetto, boys … it’s the last stanza …!’ Oh no … I leaned closer, a new fury intruding on the old: ‘Beni …?’ He rolled his eyes back down, focusing on me, winked, pushed a half-chewed blood capsule between his teeth like a peashooter. ‘ Damn you!’ I snatched the pick out of his hands: a stage weapon with a contracting point! The sniggering (I hadn’t been hearing whimpering at all) changed to laughter and a loud burst of applause. I looked up and found myself staring into the lens of the video camera. Mee was peeling off his facemask, smirking toothily. Even Eileen had a grin on her face as she wrapped Teresa up again, and Fats asked: ‘How’d I do, Zack?’ ‘You were fantastic!’ Quagg laughed. ‘Ah, screw you guys!’ I said, hurling the pick across the room, and pushed out, drawing another burst of cheers and applause.

In the dining room doorway, Kitty and that white-haired neighbor lady in the lime pants and pink-and-lemon shirt were laughing at a photo: ‘Look at that cute little thing!’ ‘Is that Gerry?’ I snatched it away from them and ripped it in half: I was tired of this abuse. They stared at me in some astonishment. On looking closer, I saw it was not one of the photographs I’d made with Ros, as I’d supposed, but a picture of Mark being held in my arms. Behind me, Quagg was saying: ‘Okay, now for the second number, whaddaya say we exhume that old gag from Ros’s widow play, the one where she mistakes a pick for a prick and reaches in a guy’s pants—’

‘Isn’t that a bit slapstick for the occasion, Zack?’

‘Excuse me,’ I mumbled, and shouldered on past the two women, feeling like some kind of maimed and brutish fool.

‘We’ll play it straight — you know, reenactment of a sacred legend, take it apart and slow it down, like we did in Bluebeard’s Secret …’

‘Anyway, I thought it was a pecker for a pucker …’

I pulled up short just inside the dining room. Entering, I’d brushed silk. She was standing in the shadows by the doorway. Perhaps she’d been waiting for me. I took no hope from this: I’d betrayed her, after all, in her eyes anyway — and in my own as well (hadn’t I said at the theater that night we met that the last word was, artistically, the inevitable consequence of the first, that truth was an aesthetic principle, beauty moral?), it was a goddamn mess. I couldn’t even look at her. Over by the sideboard, Vic groaned. There were several people around him, but they were talking only to each other — even Jim had turned away to fix himself a drink. Above him, Tania’s ‘Susanna’ stepped out into oblivion. ‘She’s making one mistake,’ Vic once said of her. ‘She’s looking backward, back at the establishment, the elders. She’s turned the pool, the stream of life, into a bottomless pit. What she ought to do is step back, turn around, and kick the shit out of them once and for all. Then she can take her fucking bath in peace.’ But what if the real cause of her terror, I thought, trembling, is that there’s no one back there? That it’s only she who’s watching herself, or rather — what? She was crying! I turned at last and, tears springing to my own eyes, took her in my arms — or arm: my right one was still pretty useless. ‘I–I’m sorry!’ I blurted out. I felt certain, somehow, she’d forgive me.