Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘ Hold it, Fred! ’ gasped the other one. ‘ It’s the host! ’

‘ Wha—? ’ The officer on top of me, snorting and blowing, leaned toward my face, pushing his hat up with the barrel of his pistol. ‘ Whoof — sorry, fe — fah! — fellah!’ he wheezed, letting go my arm. His face was smeared with blood and sweat like warpaint and his shirtfront had popped its buttons, his blood-red belly pushing out in front of him like a grisly shield. He holstered the gun he had pressed to my head. ‘I thought it was the— poo! — bereaved!’

Roger had got as far as Inspector Pardew, who was holding him calmly away from Ros’s body with one hand, while brushing irritably at the specks of blood on his white scarf and three-piece suit with the other, muttering something about ‘a stupid waste of energy.’ He frowned impatiently at the two policemen and, abashed, they got off me and (the short cop kicked the toolkit off his foot, there was a clatter of wrenches, glass cutters, and hammers, Kitty exclaiming: ‘Knud will never believe this!’) took hold of Roger, dragging him away, still screaming, into the next room. I sat up, massaged my twisted arm. My head was ringing, and there was a sullen pain deep in my stomach where Roger had kneed me. The others were picking themselves up, mumbling, coughing (Janny, snuffling, said: ‘Where’s my shoe?’), surveying the damage.

‘Jesus! Remind me not to ask you any more favors!’ groaned Dickie in my ear. ‘That one fucking near killed me!’

He sat beside me, wiping his face with his shirttail, his bright white vest and trousers peppered with blood as though riddled with punctures. His redheaded girlfriend Ginger, who had somehow kept her feet through it all, now fell down. I saw Alison in a corner, straightening her tights under the softly drawn folds of her skirt. Her husband seemed not to be around, had apparently missed it all. Had I seen him stroll disdainfully out when Roger launched forth? Or perhaps he’d gone before. Alison looked so vulnerable. I wanted to touch her, be touched, and just thinking about that eased the pain some. ‘She sure has a sweet ass on her,’ acknowledged Dickie, following my gaze. ‘Tight and soft at the same time, like bandaged fists.’ As though to model it for us, Alison turned her back and smoothed her silk skirt down. I sighed. Between us, in debris and rubble, Ros lay like a somber interdict. ‘Reminds me of a dancer I used to know who could pull corks with hers. Who is she anyhow, Ger?’

‘People we met,’ I said noncommittally. Dickie had energy, but no subtlety. He was like an artisan who had the craft, but no serious ideas, and what he didn’t finish, he often spoiled. ‘What do you think’s the matter with Naomi?’ I asked.

We watched her, looking utterly stricken, go hobbling out of the room taking little baby steps, clutching her skirts tight around her knees, her shoulderbag spilled out behind her. ‘Christ,’ Dickie muttered, struggling to his feet, ‘she must’ve shit her pants!’ And he followed her out.

Across the room, near the fireplace, Tania’s husband, Howard, held his spectacles up for me to see: both lenses cracked. Like everyone else, he was splattered all over with blood, making him look like his red tie had sprung a leak. The indignant expression on his flushed face seemed to suggest that he blamed me for the broken lenses.

‘Now then, one thing I don’t understand,’ insisted Inspector Pardew calmly, one hand at the knot of his tie as though to draw himself erect: ‘Why did you speak of an ice pick?’

‘Not an ice pick,’ I replied wearily, looking up at him from the floor. ‘Ice.’ Even as I spoke, my words seemed, like the punchline to one of Charley Trainer’s shaggy dog stories, stupid, yet compulsory. Something Tania had once said about art as the concretizing of memory lurked like a kind of nuisance (we’d been talking about her ‘Ice Maiden’ and the paradoxes of the ‘real’) at the back of my mind, back where it was still throbbing from the revolver’s knock on the skull. I hoped both would go away at the same time. The knife was nowhere to be seen, though it could have been anywhere amid all that wreckage. ‘I was trying to get at the time, working backward …’

‘Gerald was serving drinks,’ Alison said, coming over through the clutter to stand above me. Her voice was clear and musical, and it mellowed somewhat the Inspector’s expression. She let her hand fall softly into my hair, her silk dress caressing my ear like a blown kiss. Legs passed my head, moving toward the dining room. ‘Did you ever notice how blood smells? ’ someone whispered. ‘It was about an hour ago.’

‘Ah, that’s better!’ The Inspector reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a fob watch. Beyond him, Mavis lay on her belly still, staring vacantly, Tania kneeling beside her, speaking softly into her ear. Smashed film gear lay scattered around them, the tripod’s legs bent double at the joints like broken ski poles. I rose achingly to my feet, helped by Alison. The touch of her hands on me was wonderfully comforting. My wife’s fat friend Louise passed us on her way toward the back of the house, disapproval darkening her face like a bruise. The Inspector, his chin doubling, stared down at the body (I was thinking about Ros again, those gentle body massages she loved to give and receive between orgasms, the way she held your face in both her hands when she kissed you, even in greeting, and the soft silky almost phantasmal touch of her finger as she slipped it dreamily up your anus), idly winding his fob watch; then, pocketing it, he looked up and said: ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask everyone to turn their watches in to me, if you don’t mind.’ I sighed when Alison took her hands away, and in response she smiled. Her nose and cheeks were freckled with blood, and there were larger spots between her breasts, but she wore them gracefully, like beauty marks. ‘Come along, hurry it up, please!’

My own watch was on an expansion band and simply slipped off, but Alison’s band was a complicated green leather affair with three different buckles. ‘Here, let me help,’ I said, taking her hand in mine. A warm flush of nostalgia swept over me as, like a boy again with bra hooks, I fumbled with the buckles, her fingers teasing my wrists, her free hand falling between our thighs.

I wanted to hold on to this moment, but Pardew interrupted it. ‘I’ll need someone to collect them,’ he said. I knew he was looking at me, and I smiled apologetically at Alison. Her eyes seemed to be penetrating mine, reading feverishly behind them, while her free hand stroked the inside of my thigh as though scribbling an oath there. Or an invocation. ‘And I’ll want those of all the people outside this room as well.’

‘Allow me,’ offered Mr Draper, stepping in behind us from the dining room with a roast-beef sandwich in his bony fist, and Alison took her hand away. ‘I may not be good for much, old as I am, heh heh, but takin’ up collections is one thing I can still execute, as you might say.’ To my embarrassment, he turned to Alison and presented her with his sandwich, softly mangled at one end. ‘Here, hold this for me, will you, dear?’ he said. ‘Can’t seem to get these new choppers through the durned thing.’ He saw me staring and clacked his teeth once for me as a demonstration. ‘Store teeth, y’know,’ he explained wistfully, removing his suit jacket and rolling up his sleeves. ‘Perils of a long life, son, nothin’ works like it used to.’ And he winked meaninglessly, snapping his braces.

‘Thanks, Mr Draper,’ I said, handing him our watches.

‘My pleasure, sir!’ He strapped mine on his arm, dropped Alison’s into a pocket of his baggy trousers, then went off on his rounds, gathering watches onto his arms and into his pockets, greeting everyone boisterously: ‘I’ll take your watches, please! At my age, I need all the time I can get!’ Followed by a mechanical chuckle like some kind of solemn ratification. Ame-heh-heh-heh-hen.