Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘I’m sorry,’ I said to Alison, trying to disassociate myself from him, ‘I’ve never seen him before tonight.’ Certainly he was out of place here, he and his wife both. I supposed my wife had invited them. ‘The old fellow’s been badgering me all night to look at some snapshots from his tourist travels. I think he’s a bit—’

‘I know, I’ve seen them all.’ She smiled, but when I reached for her hand, she pulled it away. Absently, she began eating the old man’s sandwich. Dolph came by with a can of beer in one hand, gazing at something across the room, and Alison winced, bumping me with her hip. She reached into her teeth and pulled out a little piece of string. ‘Tell me about her, Gerald. The girl …’

‘Ros?’ I looked down at the body. Inspector Pardew was chalking out an outline of her. It occurred to me that she’d been jostled somewhat during Roger’s recent rampage. One arm and leg had shifted and her head was tilted a different way. Did that matter? Exposed film plates lay beside her like last words and the apparatus had fallen out of her gaping mouth. ‘She was an actress. Not a very good one. Her problem was, she could never be anyone on stage but herself. Mostly she was in chorus lines or shows where they needed naked girls with good bodies.’ Roger seemed to have quieted down. ‘Did you see Lot’s Wife , by any chance?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’ She chewed, watching me closely, eager, it seemed, merely to hear me speak, no matter what about. The Inspector, having completed his chalk outline of the corpse and some of the stuff around it — including, I noticed, some of the junk that had fallen out of Naomi’s bag and out of the toolbox — was now moving Ros’s limbs about as though looking for something under them. Mr Draper’s croaky old voice could be heard out in the hallway, saying: ‘Watches, please! Take time off! Thank you, thank you! Your time is my time! Yeh heh heh …’

‘She had the title role, probably her best part, one of them anyway. She’d been getting little but walk-ons before then, back row of the chorus, even nonparts like one of Bluebeard’s dead wives or the messenger at the door who never enters, and mainly because Roger blew up such a storm whenever something a little more adventurous came along. So when the chance came to do Lot’s Wife , she could hardly turn it down.’ I felt as though I were shaping the words for her, rounding them, smoothing them, curling them in over the little gold loops: and that she felt them there, sliding in, caressing her inner ear, and that it made her breathe more deeply. ‘The play was a kind of dionysian version of the Bible story in which, after being turned to salt and abandoned by Lot, she was supposed to get set upon by ecstatic Sodomites, stripped, stroked, licked from top to bottom, and quite literally reimpregnated with life. At the end, Lot returns, sees his mistake, repents, and joins the Sodomites, now no longer as her husband of course, but just one of her many worshipers, which is supposedly an improvement for him.’

‘And Roger, I take it, was not so wise.’

‘I’m afraid not — of course, Lot probably had some help from the director.’

‘Roger had not seen the script.’

‘Oh, he’d seen it all right.’ I smiled. ‘That was exactly the problem.’

Pardew was down on his hands and knees now, fishing about under Ros’s skirt with the tweezers. He had filter papers in one hand, empty pillboxes, tape, and a pick glass on the floor beside him. Alison watched him a moment, distracted, the last bite of her sandwich held out absently like a coin about to be dropped in a meter. The two policemen had returned and the short one was holding Ros’s limbs in various positions at the Inspector’s instructions, while he nosed around. The other was making sketches of the scene. They seemed a bit subdued.

Alison turned back to me, her face softened by a momentary sorrow. ‘The problem—?’

‘He turned up at the first rehearsal with a gun at his head, saying he’d pull the trigger if she didn’t leave the play and come home with him, and since Ros couldn’t say no, that’s what she did.’

‘Turned back. Like Lot’s wife, after all.’ She popped the last bite in. I saw a neat row of gleaming white teeth sunk into red flesh, crisp green lettuce, dark rye painted with yellow mustard. If even that arouses me, I thought, I’m pretty far gone … ‘Yet you said—?’

‘Well, the author refused to let the play go on without her. He insisted she’d inspired him to write it, a dream he’d had or something, and she had to play the lead. So they talked Ros into having Roger temporarily committed. Because of the suicide attempt. For his own good, they said, and it probably was.’

‘Until the show closed.’

‘That’s right. Ros visited him every day in the ward to cheer him up, never told him she was in the play, and he never asked.’

‘An old trouper, after all. And so,’ she added, not wryly, just sadly, staring down at her hands, ‘everybody lived happily ever after.’ She brushed the crumbs away, tongued a bit of sandwich from her teeth. For some reason I thought: Am I forgetting something? What I remembered was an old beggar in Cadiz who did tricks with coins. His last trick always was to stack as many coins on his tongue as people would put there, then swallow them. Or seem to. I made some remark at the time about ‘pure theater’ and the woman I was with said: ‘I know a better trick but it is not so practical.’ The old fellow climaxed his act by belching loudly and producing a paper note in ‘change,’ and the truth about the woman was that she was mistaken. ‘And was the play a success?’

‘It had a good run.’

In fact, she packed them in. But mainly because they invited the audience to join in, and the same crowd kept coming back night after night to lick the salt. True believers. Her breast, I saw, had fallen out of the dress again. It seemed less important now. The Inspector, peeling down one stocking, had found a run, which he peered at now through his pick glass. ‘There’s another one here at the back, Chief.’ Alison touched my hand. ‘You loved her very much.’

‘Yes. Along with a thousand other guys.’ I watched Pardew and his two assistants tugging her dead weight this way and that, watched her breast and head flop back and forth together as though in protest at the mockery of it, thinking: How quiet it has grown! I lowered my voice: ‘She had something … very special …’

‘I might have guessed,’ Alison said. She was grinning. ‘Unique, I think you said before…’

I smiled, leaning toward her touch. ‘Mm, but hers really was, you see,’ I said, brushing at the specks of blood on Alison’s nose, letting the truth slip away now, or at least that kind of truth, letting myself be led, ‘and not just in the eye, so to speak, of the beholder …’

‘Ah, poor Gerald!’ she laughed. ‘When will you ever learn?’

She stifled her laughter: people were staring at us. Even the police had glanced up from the body. She covered her mouth, forced a solemn expression onto her face, peeked up at me guiltily. She waited until the others had looked away again (‘Calipers, please,’ the Inspector muttered), then whispered: ‘But it was her breast that made you want to cry.’

I nodded, conscious of Alison’s own breasts, tender and provocative under the soft silken folds of her dress, the nipples rising hard now like excited little fingers, seeming to reach through the bloodstains in the delicate jacquard pattern as though to point hopefully beyond. ‘Her sex was a secret, known only to millions, her dark side, you might say … her buried treasure …’ No longer: the police had their noses down there now, arguing about something. Her thighs had been pulled apart and the curled tip-ends of little straw-colored pubic hairs could be seen fringing the legbands of her panties. For some reason, it was making me dizzy. The glossiness of her panties or something. ‘But her … her breasts,’ I continued, taking a deep breath, forcing my gaze away (somewhere a toilet flushed; down in the rec room, the darts players were still at it), managing to draw myself back to Alison’s eyes once more, ‘her breasts were her public standard, what we knew her by …’ The placid depths of Alison’s eyes calmed me. I felt certain that everything was going to be all right. Somehow. ‘Her innocence and her light, you might say. The good white flag she flew.’ I smiled as our legs met: she touched her throat. ‘Flags …’