Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘You can’t be serious! ’ He clutched at his hair (‘God! I’m starved!’ said Gudrun, peeling a banana) as though to tear it out. ‘We’ve just hit the nub, man, the weenie, the payoff! This is everything we’ve been working for tonight! What are we going to do—?! ’

‘Well, Zack,’ my wife put in, taking the coffeepot from Michelle, who stood dazedly by, ‘I suppose you’ll just have to exercise your imagination. Could you please move the strawberries, Gerald, so I can set the coffee down?’

‘Maybe we oughta fold it up, Zack,’ grumbled Gudrun around her mouthful of half-chewed banana.

‘No, wait,’ he said, gazing thoughtfully at my mother-in-law (‘That’s funny,’ said my wife, lifting up the sponge cake: ‘where did the plate go?’), ‘if the old bat wants to become part of the set, then, goddamn it, we’ll just build the show around her! ’

‘Actually, there’s an old lady in the next scene,’ Anatole pointed out. ‘It’s the dream sequence in which—’

‘Hey, you’re right! Lemme see that script a minute!’ My mother-in-law looked disconcerted, but stubbornly held her ground. ‘Meanwhile, kid, go in there and get our guitarist back — even if you have to pick her ass up and haul it in here—!’

‘Yes sir, Mr Quagg!’

‘I once had a dream about an old woman,’ Michelle remarked languidly. ‘She was standing on a mountain, or some high place. She said she’d been there for a long time.’

‘Do you suppose someone took it?’ my wife asked. I gazed down at the cake, sitting there on the bare table as though after a pratfall, trying to think what it was that was bothering me.

‘Her clothes were all worn away and her skin was covered with sores and scabs and a thick dust almost like sand …’ Michelle touched her breast, her privates—

‘Oh no …!’

‘What is it, Gerald? What’s the matter?’

‘This woman in the dream, I mean …’

I turned toward the dining room: yes, it had been nagging at me since I left the kitchen — that peculiar sensation of barrenness, of erasure …

‘ “But the worst thing about getting old,” she said,’ Michelle was saying, ‘ “is what happens to your navel …” ’

‘Right! The Ice Palace, the wet dream stuff, free will versus necessity, the Old Lady — this script is terrific! The kid’s got talent!’

‘The “Susanna” …!’ I whispered.

‘What? What are you talking about, Gerald?’

‘It keeps getting deeper and deeper …’

‘Hey, Jack! Go find the Scar! Tell him we want the panes out of all the windows in the house and as many mirrors as he can lay his hands on! We still got a show here!’

‘It’s gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘Yum!’ enthused Bunky, stepping over Ros’s body and plucking a melon ball.

‘Tania’s painting,’ I explained, my throat constricted.

‘I saw it now. The navel. In the middle of the old woman’s tummy. Like a nailhole.’

‘I just realized—’

‘Only much bigger …’

‘It isn’t there anymore.’

‘What—?!’

‘… Like a kind of tunnel, going nowhere …’

‘And Gudrun! Listen, go strip all this red shit off Bunky!’

‘ “You can go in and look around if you want to,” she said, but I was afraid.’

My wife rushed over to the doorway. Those thoughts of oblivion I’d had when entering from the kitchen, glancing toward Vic (I’d been looking for something): almost as though she had somehow, after all, completed that terrible step …

‘I want her midnight blue now, top to bot! With a scatter of sequins if you can find some — and a silver skullcap!’

‘Right, Zack,’ Gudrun stuffed the end of one banana in her mouth, picked up another and pointed with it. ‘Wha’ you wahme do wiwode wady?’

‘What?’

‘But I did see lots of things crawling in and out of her navel,’ Michelle said now, scratching idly, ‘and at the very back there was a little spot of light, like when you turn the TV off …’

Such an emptiness, that wall: it wasn’t even a wall in my mind’s eye, but infinite space, appallingly indifferent. I felt her disappearance as if it were, in part, my own, and great relief when my wife came back (‘Ah, the old lady — leave her like she is, Gud! This is gonna be the weirdest goddamn peel you ever saw in showbiz!’) and took my hand: ‘Do you suppose … it’s been stolen?’

‘That’s where heaven is,’ someone said — ‘I think it was one of those things crawling in and out …’

‘Hey, that was Prissy Loo’s part!’ Vachel was objecting (she released my hand as though I’d answered her — in fact, I had), and Zack said: ‘She’s off doing a little business for me, Vaych, she’ll never know — now listen, you said you wanted a sex scene, right?’

‘… But I didn’t believe it.’

‘Someone must have overheard you,’ my wife suggested (‘Yeah! Hey, can I have the guitarist? Hunh, Zack?’), ‘when you were negotiating with Howard.’

‘Yes …’

‘No, she’s the only orchestra we got, Vaych — I was figuring we’d use Bunky for the—’

‘Bunky?’

‘When I looked closer,’ Michelle went on, ‘I saw that these little things crawling in and out of her navel were tiny people …’ I gazed at her there, clutching her thin arms, lost in her dream story (‘Okay! Great! Luff-ly! Thanks, Zack! I get Bunky!’ ‘Well, not exactly, Vaych …’), thinking: she seems younger suddenly, as though she were shrinking back into her vanished image … ‘And whenever they turned their heads and looked at me …’

‘Actually, this is a kind of dream sequence …’

‘… They curled up like waterbugs and dropped off somewhere below …’

‘No kidding!’ grinned Anatole as he came through the door with Sally Ann (‘At first it seems like Bunky, you see — or what she stands for,’ Zack was explaining, my mother-in-law looking on with increasing apprehension), her guitar slung round her neck: ‘You too? Tonight?’

‘But when I tried to see where the little things fell to,’ Michelle murmured, ‘I discovered I was standing there all by myself …’

‘Oh no—! Wait a minute, wait a minute! ’ squawked Vachel, backing off. ‘ Not this moldy old crowbait—! ’

‘Yeah, well, almost,’ said Sally Ann, glancing darkly up at me as she passed, and my wife, breaking out of her worried silence, exclaimed: ‘ Oh, Louise! ’ She stood there behind us, her round face red as a beet, holding two steaming hot pies in her bare hands. ‘Why don’t you use the oven gloves, for goodness’ sake?’

‘What is this shit, Vachel? I thought you were a goddamn pro!’

‘Well, sure, but — cheez! ’

‘… The wind was blowing, it had gotten dark …’

‘Well, look at the power in this scene, man! the risks! the levels of meaning! ’ He grabbed the hem of my mother-in-law’s skirt and dragged it up past her garter belt: she turned pale, staggered back a step, her jaw dropping. ‘This ain’t beautiful enough for you, goddamn it? Is that it?’

‘The old lady was gone, I was all alone.’

My wife cleared a space on the table and helped Louise set the pies down. Louise clapped her hands in her armpits (‘Actually, my original idea,’ said Anatole, ‘was to take a couple of old archetypes and re—’ ‘Right!’ Quagg rolled on, slapping my mother-in-law’s corseted behind. ‘It’s original, it’s ancient, it’s archetypal — I mean, are you good enough for this or not , Vaych?’), her eyes damp and bulging, and Michelle said, as though from some distant place: ‘All my clothes had blown away somehow …’ My wife glanced up at Michelle, a flicker of a smile curling her lips. ‘… And now mine was the navel with the hole in it …’