Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘If that don’t beat my grandmaw!’ Fats gasped, and someone belched eloquently, Dolph probably. ‘Vachel! Who’da guessed it?’

‘Guessed what?’

‘Eet wass how you say a brow-eye leefter, no?’ exclaimed Hilario, rolling his eyes.

‘Fucking little degenerate!’ growled Bob, still sore, blood streaming down past one eye, and he gave the dwarf another blow which oddly made his feet bob as well as his head.

‘That’ll do,’ said Pardew. ‘Come along now,’ and my wife, letting go my arm, said: ‘I’ll see them to the door.’

I sat back against the arm of the couch where Regina lay all akimbo in a crumpled white heap, the back of one wrist pressed melodramatically against her brow (‘Goodness, Sally Ann — that dress is still wet!’ my wife remarked in passing, there were people crossing now between us, I could only catch glimpses), taking great heaving bolts of air. I too felt short of breath, one half of me sinking leadenly, the other half dangerously afloat. ‘Do not try to grasp it,’ I could hear Hoo-Sin murmuring to Janny out there somewhere in that unfocused blur of movement before my eyes: the tension in the room had dissolved into a kind of generalized backstage flutter, as people slipped out of folds in the cave wall or crept out from behind one another, exchanging laughter and snorts of relief, ducking off for drinks or helping themselves to the dessert and coffee. ‘Casual thought is for fools. It is the burying of oneself in emptiness.’

‘You said it, Hoo! Juss what I been doin’ for — ruff! haw! (‘Ffoof- hrarf! I swallowed one of those damned — choke! — cookies whole! ’ rasped the guy in the chalkstriped pants) — twenny years!’ laughed Charley, drawing both of them into his arms. My grandmother had had a story about this, or something like this, I remembered, something about a dead cousin. ‘I love it!’

‘ Now what, Mr Quagg?’

Or aunt. I pushed off a canvas shoe, and scratched my foot.

‘ Hroaf! ch-wheeze! ’

Beside me, the cameraman was changing cartridges, Zack Quagg was doing deep kneebends, Gudrun was tying Janny’s hair up in a tight coil, powdering her face white. ‘Don’t worry, kids,’ Quagg panted. ‘We’ll — grunt! — clean it up and recast it, mount the whole uproar again!’ Janny sneezed, Scarborough swore, Regina groaned, and the guy in the chalkstripes — ‘ Pwwfff-FWWOOO! ’ — spewed cookie as Kitty reached round from behind and squeezed his diaphragm. ‘We’ll call it “The Feast of Saint Valentine,” use Mee as the vampire, make it a revue maybe, a kinda funerary tribute to the bourgeois theater …’ ‘That better?’ ‘What happened?’ asked Brenda, standing dim-eyed in the traffic of the dining room doorway, Gottfried peering sheepishly over her shoulder. The green charmeuse dress hung askew on her, one plump arm sticking out of the sleeve’s slash instead of the cuff. She pulled a string of gum out of her mouth, let it droop (‘Write some new tunes, give it some bounce!’), then lifted her chin and nibbled it back in again. ‘We were, um, watching TV.’ Regina sat up and studied her nails. ‘It’s so unfair!’ she said, and Fats, lapping up pie and chocolate sauce, spluttered: ‘You’ll never believe it, Bren!’ ‘You know, uh, I think I’ve lost my tape recorder,’ said Gottfried, reddening. ‘They’ve just took Vachel! ’ ‘Unfair?’ ‘Poor old Vachel, I mean,’ said Regina. ‘Enh,’ Horner shrugged, rolling himself a cigarette, ‘he made a good exit …’ ‘Yeah, but does he know that?’ ‘Oh no! not — snap! — Vachel! ’ yawned Brenda (it was catching, my own jaws began to spread), and Michelle said: ‘I think I’ll put a record on.’

‘That reminds me,’ said the Inspector, turning around at the door. ‘Our ice pick …’

‘I got it,’ said Bob, holding it up, then he tucked it back in his rear pocket.

Fred must have seen my gape of surprise (I’d been caught mid-yawn) as I rose up off the couch arm, because he winked and came over (I pressed my jaws together), wagging Vachel under his arm. ‘One of the Old Man’s favorite tricks,’ he grinned. ‘His probe, he calls it. Stick it in, see what surfaces. You know.’

‘I thought somehow I–I’d—!’

‘But of course we couldn’t fool you! Oh, and by the way …’ He leaned closer, switching Vachel to his other arm. It was my bloated self I saw in Vachel’s goggles, dwarfed twice over by the lenses’ convexity. ‘I just wanted to tell you: you know that ultraviolet exam …’ He nodded toward the hall door, where my wife stood, smiling wearily. She was waiting for the Inspector, who, stopped now by Patrick, was patting his pockets helplessly. ‘Well, sir, clean as a whistle!’ He gave me a knowing nudge. ‘Just thought you’d like to know …’ He sidled closer. Kitty, poking around at Vachel’s head behind his back, scrunched up her nose and said: ‘Ouch!’ ‘And listen, that wasn’t blood on the knife the Chief found, it was tomata juice — we knew that, we knew it all the time.’ He slapped my butt with his free hand. ‘You got a great little lady, fella. Hang on to her!’

Vachel’s dripping head bobbed at Fred’s rear under the blue SUPERLOVER sweatshirt as the officer walked away through what was left of the proscenium arch. One of my skis, cracked at the binding, tipped forward now at a crazy angle, making it seem as if the stage were reaching out to stop him, and Scarborough, trying to right it, snapped it in two. ‘Piss on it,’ he grumped and planted the broken end impatiently in a fern pot.

‘Forget it, Scar, we’re blowing this stand,’ said Zack.

‘Hey, where’s ole Earl?’

‘We’re moving the show up-country!’

‘Yeah? Who’s providin’ the nut?’

‘Cyril? Out back with Malcolm, I think, Charley.’

‘Probably getting stoned, the poor bastard.’

‘Don’t worry, I got somebody. We’re working on him now.’

‘Naw, I meant—’

‘Is it true Peg left him because he liked to do it with mirrors?’

‘No, that was someone else.’

‘I hear it was because she wanted to surprise him on their silver wedding anniversary, and it was the only thing she could think of.’

‘I love it!’ Charley yuff-huffed. ‘’Ass like the ole folks who went back t’their honeymoon hotel, an’ …’

‘You mean Peg and—?’

‘You know, I don’t think that guy’s playin’ with a full deck!’

‘Lissen, this’ll knock your pants off! They went back t’the goddamn hotel, see …’

‘Well, according to Cyril …’

‘Say, did you hear about that play Ros was in where she was supposed to pick up this deck of cards and cut it?’

‘’N — hee hoff! — the ole fella says …’

‘That’s not the way I heard it …’

‘Ros?’

‘Yeah, and — ha ha! — the director says—’

‘Well then …’

‘No …’

‘He says …’

‘ He said …’

I was tired of stories and moved away. Perhaps my wife needed me. I remembered her hand on my arm a few moments ago, clutching at it as though for strength, and then the paleness of her face a little later as she smiled vacantly, sorrowfully, into the room past Pardew before she led him out. As I crossed to the door, little particolored Bunky Baird came bouncing through it, shouting: ‘Zack! Zack! they’ve done something to Vachel!’ ‘Yeah, I know, they popped his blister, Bunko — and ours too. The show’s blown, kid. So get outa your skin, we’re pulling stakes!’ A proscenium arch, I thought, passing under it, is like a huge mouth, but the sensation that it is the audience that is being fed through it is just another of theater’s illusions. Theater is never a stripping down (Bunky was bright blue and pimpled with sequins from the waist up, scarlet still from the thighs down, but in between a damp fleshy smear, ugly and shockingly naked), but always a putting on: theater fattened on boxed time. To be a member of the audience, then (so many thoughts, one after another, I staggered on, feeling myself consumed by my own consciousness), was a form of martyrdom …