Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘ So don’t LAUGH … ’

I shoved the door shut, leaned against it, turned the latch. ‘ Whew! ’ I gasped.

‘ What happened to Dolph and Louise? ’ my wife asked, looking around in amazement. ‘ And Charley—! ’

‘ I don’t know! ’ I said. We were still shouting. ‘ They must have joined in! ’ She shrugged, then said something I couldn’t hear. About the kitchen maybe: she wandered off that way. ‘ I’ll go turn the music down! ’

In the empty living room, Michelle danced alone, wan under the bright lights from the ceiling, drifting wraithlike through the wreckage, hands crossed at her breast, eyes closed. When I rejected the tone-arm, the sudden silence was shocking, almost physical in its impact, and I heard her gasp faintly, frozen in her movement. ‘I guess it’s that time, Michelle.’ The deadly silence was eery and I was almost tempted to put another record on. I thought: it used to be more subtle than this.

‘Have you been crying?’ she whispered.

‘Yes, well,’ I said, and wiped my cheek, ‘I hate goodbyes.’

‘Once, when I was modeling for Tania …’ She hesitated. ‘…This was a long time ago … I was young then …’ Her head dipped slightly. ‘… Just a little bit of hair … “like a boy’s moustache,” she said …’ She seemed lost in her own reverie. ‘…Trying to help me feel more … relaxed …’

‘Michelle?’

‘What? Yes …’ She clasped her hands at the back of her neck, her elbows in front of her face. Her intricate lace blouse was unbuttoned, tails out over a wrinkled skirt. ‘That day, she was apologizing for keeping me in the same pose for so long … and it was true … my whole body ached … it was awful … I wanted to fly right out of myself …’ She lifted her head, stretching her neck against her clasped hands, then let her hands separate to slide forward and support her chin. ‘ “But an unfinished painting frightens me,” she said …’ Yes, ‘a bare patch of canvas,’ she’d once remarked to me, ‘is like some terrible ultimate nakedness …’ ‘… I can still see her face as she said it … her eyes …’ ‘… Reality exposing itself obscenely …’ ‘ “I can’t sleep,” she said, “I can’t eat, I can’t even think properly until I’ve completed it … I become cruel to myself and cruel to others …” ’ I remembered how she’d turned away and seemed almost to shudder. ‘… “And then … when it’s suddenly done …” ’ Michelle dropped her hands limply at her sides, lowered her chin. ‘… “There’s this terrible emptiness …” ’

I watched her drift away, stepping barefoot through the butts and crumpled napkins, spilled food, the debris from Scarborough’s set (near the cavemouth, Malcolm Mee’s cast-off plastic wrap lay like an insect’s husk, glittering and dead), and, though I wanted her to leave, I felt abandoned at the same time, left behind in a room (why were the windows so bare, the lights so harsh?) full of grave disquiet. The bloodied drapes and linens had turned dark and dirty. Sticking out from under the collapsed ping-pong table: the chalk drawing of a pair of legs. Scarborough had rigged the cords of all the lamps to a kind of switching system in a box dangling just behind the proscenium arch, but I was afraid to touch it. It had a rickety yet lethal look, as though it might go off. I needed a drink, but I didn’t want to go in where Vic was, so I stepped into the makeshift cave, away from the flat lights and stripped windows, and sniffed at the half-filled glasses. I found one that smelled more or less like scotch, but just as I tipped it back, I noticed what looked like pubic hairs floating in it — I spat it out. But it was only someone’s false eyelashes. I sank back into the gold couch in there, feeling suddenly very tired. We’d have to clean up tomorrow. Outside, in the hallway, I could hear my wife saying good night to Michelle, her voice thin in the hollow silence (‘Goodness, Michelle, where did you — yawn! — get those nasty toothmarks …?’), and it reminded me of the time when, spelunking in Greece, we’d come on this cavernous pit of human bones. What she’d said then — thinly, hollowly — was: ‘Did you notice? None of them have heads …!’

Of course … that wasn’t my wife …

‘Somehow,’ she said now, gazing around wearily (she was standing in front of me, easing her shoes off: I hadn’t seen her come up), ‘parties don’t seem as much fun as they used to.’ She sat down beside me, curling under my arm, the one I could still move, and tucked her feet up. ‘It’s almost as though the parties have started giving us instead of us giving the parties …’ She loosened my shirt, lay her head sleepily against my chest. ‘It gives me a … funny feeling …’

‘Yes …’

‘Still, I guess it’s worth it …’

The woman in Greece had said something much like that about making love. She’d had an appetite for the unusual, the perverse even, and I too was pretty jaded in those days, frustrated by the commonplaces of sex, bored with all its trite conventions — the state of the art, so to speak — and so in need of ever greater novelty, ever greater risk-taking, in order to arouse myself to any kind of performance. What worked for her — and thus for us both — was to be unexpectedly violated in a more or less public place, the key to a successful orgasm being not so much the setting or the use of force, as the element of surprise. It was a kind of essential trigger for her — like having to scare someone out of her hiccups. Thus, I might walk her through public parks, churches, department stores, taunting her with exotic possibility while yet denying her, only to jump on her back in the busy hotel lobby while asking for the key. Or I might arrange a night out at some mysterious destination, coax her into dressing up elaborately, then get her out of the hotel, hail a taxi — and suddenly violate her on the sidewalk just as she was stepping into the cab. I don’t know why I thought that pitful of decayed atrocity victims would work. Perhaps because it seemed so unlikely. But nothing happened. In fact it was a disaster. We got filthy, she hurt her back on the bones, got her nose bloodied, I cracked my elbow, we were both choking with dust, and when it was over — or rather, when there was no point in going on — she told me just to leave her alone and go away. I never saw her again, my last vision of her being sprawled out there in the — ‘ Ouch! ’

‘Sorry, Gerald, is something …?’ She had been stroking me through the trousers and had caught the place where Jim had nicked me. She opened my trousers carefully, eased my shorts down. ‘Oh, I see …’ She licked it gently, then took the crown into her mouth, coating it with warm saliva. ‘Bat’s a bad bwuise, too,’ she observed, touching my tummy, then let her mouth slide gradually down the shaft. I reached for the hem of her dress and she shifted her hips, turning her knees toward the back of the couch.

There was a sudden crash, the whole house shook — I lurched away, reared up — and then a scraping, another crash, a rumble, something rolling in the street. She closed her mouth around my penis again, curled her hands behind my hips, tugged at the back of my trousers.

‘But … my god, what was that—?!’

‘Pwobabwy Chawwey puwwing out ubba dwibe…

‘Ah …’ She eased my trousers down below my hips — outside, there was another crunch, the distant squealing of tires — then pulled them away from between my thighs. She put my hand back on the hem of her dress. There was a tag there, I noticed, stamped by the city police department. ‘Wewacsh, Gewawd,’ she whispered. I liked the pushing of her tongue against the consonants and, surrendering to that, slid down toward her knees. ‘Tell me again …’