Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘Me too!’ she sobbed. ‘Poor Vic!’ Vic? It was Brenda: I let go her podgy body, naked and lumpy under the silk. ‘Such a super guy, Gerry!’

‘Where’d you get that dress?’

‘Fats found it somewhere. Is it your wife’s? I couldn’t get back into that damned pants suit.’

‘Gerald would never let me buy a dress like that,’ my wife said, passing by with a sponge cake. ‘He doesn’t like silk.’

‘Enough? What’s ever enough?’ Vic moaned. I could tell him. In the living room, someone was singing about ‘the old man,’ Sally Ann maybe, and I could hear Kitty and Mrs Waddilow oohing and ahing over the sponge cake. ‘There are strawberries to go with it,’ my wife said, and Vic broke into a new fit of coughing. ‘You think it’s all some kinda — wheeze! choke! — joke? ’

‘He’s such a brave guy,’ snuffled Brenda, blowing her nose in the hem of the dress. I felt utterly wasted. Emptied out. Like Brenda’s nose. Steve the plumber and the character with the pipe and the leather elbow patches came in behind her, talking about Mee’s act (‘You know, he looked a bit like that dead girl, all bagged up like that!’ ‘Well, that was probably his intention …’), laughing when they saw me, and I felt the humiliation of it all over again. Where had all the beauty gone? ‘You probably ate it,’ Vic might have said. That ‘aesthetics of truth’ line I’d used at the theater was his too actually, I’d borrowed it for the occasion. She hadn’t quarreled with it (‘It felt like a lifetime,’ Sally Ann, or whoever, was singing, ‘our little husband-and-wife time …’), but she’d had a reply of course. To wit: that from another perspective (mine had been of her soft lips pursed above a cup of steaming coffee that matched her eyes and velvet suit, and to tell the truth, thoughts of ethics didn’t even enter into it) it was the first word that was the consequence of the last. ‘And he’s still got presence,’ Brenda added, taking a chewed wad of gum from behind her ear and stuffing it in her jaws. She wiped her eyes on a slashed sleeve and took my arm. ‘I know he’s not making a lot of — crack! pop! — sense, but he makes you feel like he is.’

‘God damn you,’ he shouted now as we drew near (there was applause in the living room), and Mr Waddilow, hooking his thumbs in his vest, said: ‘Isn’t that a bit sacrilegious?’ Mavis was sitting up now, propped against a chair, though her eyes were still glazed over and her jaw sagged loosely. Her husband, Jim, some distance away, held his drink up to the light, just under Tania’s ‘Susanna,’ taking her fateful step, and it was almost as though she were stepping into his glass. Steve, smiling, said something to Bunky’s two friends, who stared back dully, and Charley, who’d seemed locked in some kind of elbowbender’s freeze (he often went rigid before falling over at the end of a night), suddenly reared up and seized Mr Waddilow’s lapels. ‘ Damned right! ’ he bellowed. Mr Waddilow rocked back on his heels in alarm.

‘By the way, Gerry, who’s that cute guy in the tweed jacket?’

‘His name’s Gottfried, that’s all I—’

‘Oh, is that the famous Gottfried …’

‘Where are the lights? Turn on the … goddamn lights!’ Vic begged.

‘ Hey, Big Ger! ’ Charley boomed out, wheeling around heavily. ‘Where ya been? ’ Jim lowered his glass as though pulling the ground out from under Susanna, though of course she didn’t fall. No, that abyss awaited her forever. It wouldn’t even be there without her. This thought somehow picked me up a bit, like something I’d forgotten but finally remembered. ‘It’s been awful here since you been gone!’

Howard in his bra, red tie, half-lens reading glasses, and sailing cap sniffed petulantly as Steve, shrugging, reached in past Bunky’s friends for the gin bottle. I remembered the older guy now: he was the angel who had put up the money for that mock sci-fi film Ros and Bunky had starred in, The Invasion of the Panty Snarfers. The younger one, the gigolo type, had directed it. A terrible film. Or so it had seemed at the time. Now I wished for nothing more than to be able to go sit down somewhere and watch it. Or maybe I only wanted to (I seemed to hear someone telling me to do this: sit down) sit down.

‘We miss ya, ole buddy! Nothin’ happens when ya go away! Eh, Waterloo?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Steve asked, his hand hesitating over the gin bottle, and Gottfried, putting pipe to mouth, said: ‘No, she was with some older gentleman, I believe — the one with the goatee.’

I poured myself a brandy and stared up at the ‘Susanna,’ thinking: My father was right, we’re the products of calamity, metamorphosed by our very will to endure, meshed alive into the unraveling fabric of the universe — that’s where all creation happens. ‘Before I forget it, Howard,’ I said, gazing at Susanna’s small foot poised tenderly over the void, ‘I want to buy Tania’s “Bluebeard” painting.’

‘Cyril? You must be mistaken,’ Brenda was saying to Gottfried, smiling up at him, her jaws working strenuously, as Steve staggered back, shoved by the younger guy. The tall cop limped up with his toolbox, muttering something about a missing dynamometer, and Howard said: ‘I’m afraid you can’t really afford it, Gerald.’

‘What do you mean? It’s not even finished, Howard—’

‘There’s some forceps gone, too,’ Bob grumbled, and Brenda, looking puzzled (Steve also looked puzzled: ‘Who you calling a shitface?’ he asked), said: ‘They’ve what …? ’

‘All the more reason,’ replied Howard huffily (‘I think I saw those on the turkey dish,’ Jim said). ‘It’s priceless probably. You’re lucky to have the pieces you own now.’

‘Oh yes?’ Mr Waddilow asked, reaching in his breast pocket for a pair of spectacles. ‘Is this one of them?’

‘ Oh no! ’ Brenda cried. ‘ Not Cyril and Peg! ’ Steve, eyes asquint, reached for the gin bottle again, but the gigolo blocked his way. ‘Is that an advertisement, sweetheart?’ the older man asked with a sneer, pointing to the name stitched over Steve’s pocket. ‘I can’t believe it! Fats ’ ?— I felt I understood now what Tania had meant when she said that truth (‘That’s not art, it’s a piece of trash,’ Bob was objecting, ‘she don’t even know how to draw!’), dispersed into the clashing incongruities of the world, returns as beauty: which, with memory, is all we have of substance. ‘You’re not listening! ’ Vic yelled, and Brenda, running off (‘Hey, mister, you wanting trouble?’ Steve asked): ‘ Fats? Oh my god, Fats—! ’

‘ Fuck your shadows! Man is — glurgle! splut! — something hard! ’

What? Was Vic talking to me? Kitty came over from the doorway with Mrs Waddilow and said: ‘Hey, you guys in here are missing it all!’ ‘Oh yeah?’ yuffhuffed Charley confusedly, and Vic, breathing with great difficulty (‘How much you sell your ass for, working man?’ the gigolo taunted, blowing smoke), gasped out something about ‘the disappearing eye’ or ‘I.’ No, not to me or to anyone else: Vic had fallen through that hole in the world Tania spoke of, he was far away, in another place. I felt a sudden pang of loss, of disconnection from something valuable. Something like the truth. ‘Ah well, what the fuck, it’s all just a — farff! foo! — fiction anyway,’ he babbled now. I turned, sipping brandy, to watch Steve take a halfhearted swing which the gigolo parried. No (‘Yeah,’ Kitty was laughing, ‘they’ve got Vachel rigged out like a kind of walking joystick, smeared all over with petroleum jelly and blowing off about murder and paradox as time’s French ticklers — it’s a scream!’ ), not the truth so much, but commitment, engagement, the force of life itself: this is what Vic had meant to me. The idea of vocation. The young plumber, wary now, drew himself erect, flexing his strong shoulders. The older guy (‘Look at this interesting painting, dear,’ Mr Waddilow said) knocked his cap off. ‘Yes, it’s very nice. Did you see the icon in the front room?’ ‘We’ve got to have revolutions,’ Vic used to argue, banging his fists on the table, or bar, or lectern, wherever he was, ‘hope’d die if we didn’t!’ It was beautiful (Kitty, speaking of little Bunky Baird’s new makeup job, had just said more or less the same thing): ‘Watch out for art,’ he’d exclaim, ‘it’s a parlor trick for making the world disappear!’ Or: ‘You know what I hate, Gerry? The idea of original sin — in any disguise! Do it new! Don’t be afraid! Change yourself, goddamn it, and you inhabit a renovated world!’ I didn’t believe any of it, of course. But I loved the fervor.