Robert Coover: Gerald's Party

None of us noticed the body at first. Not until Roger came through asking if we’d seen Ros. Most of us were still on our feet — except for Knud who’d gone in to catch the late sports results on the TV and had passed out on the sofa — but we were no longer that attentive. I was in the living room refilling drinks, a bottle of dry white vermouth for Alison in one hand (Vic had relieved me of the bourbon), a pitcher of old-fashioneds in the other, recalling for some reason a girl I’d known long ago in some seaside town in Italy. The vermouth maybe, or the soft radiance of the light in here, my own mellowness. The babble. Or just the freshening of possibility. My wife was circulating in the next room with a tray of canapés, getting people together, introducing newcomers, snatching up used napkins and toothpicks, occasionally signaling to me across the distance when she spotted an empty glass in someone’s hand. Strange, I thought. The only thing on my mind that night in Italy had been how to maneuver that girl into bed, my entire attention devoted to the eventual achievement of a perfectly shared climax (I was still deep into my experimental how-to-do-it phase then), and yet, though no doubt I had succeeded, bed and unforgettable climax had been utterly forgotten — I couldn’t even remember her face! — and all I’d retained from that night was a vision of the dense glow of candlelight through a yellow tulip on our restaurant table (a tulip? was it possible?), the high pitch of a complicated family squabble in some alleyway billowing with laundry hung out like bunting, the girl’s taste for anchovies and ouzo, and my own exhilarating sense of the world’s infinite novelty. Not much perhaps, yet had it not been for love, I knew, even that would have been lost. I passed among my guests now with the bottle and pitcher, sharing in the familiar revelations, appraisals, pressing searches, colliding passions, letting my mind float back to those younger lighter times when a technically well-executed orgasm seemed more than enough, feeling pleasurably possessed — not by memory so much as by the harmonics of memory — and working my way through the congestion meanwhile (‘She was great in The House of the Last Hymen ,’ someone remarked, and another, laughing, said: ‘Oh yeah! Is that the one about the widow and the pick?’ No, I thought, that was Vanished Days …) toward a young woman named Alison: not only, uniquely, a vermouth drinker — thus the bottle in my hand — but virtually the sole cause and inspiration for the party itself. Alison. Her name, still fresh to me, played teasingly at the tip of my tongue as I poured old-fashioneds for the others (and not a pick but—): ‘A little more?’

‘Thanks, Gerry! You know, you’re the only man I know who still remembers how to make these things!’

‘Ah well, the ancient arts are the true arts, my love.’

‘Like poison, he means. Take my advice and stick with the beer.’

‘More in the fridge, Dolph, help yourself. Naomi—?’

‘What? Oh yes, thank you — what is it?’

I poured, glancing across the busy room at Alison, now profiled in a wash of light cast by the hanging globes behind her — like a halo, an aura — and I knew that, crafted by love, that glow of light would be with me always, even if I should lose all the rest, this party, these friends, even Alison herself, her delicate profile, soft auburn hair (‘Ouch, Dolph! Stop that!’), the fine gold loops in her small ears –

‘Hey, golly! That’s enough!’

‘Oops, sorry, Naomi …!’

‘Steady!’ shouted Charley Trainer, charging up to lick at her dripping hand. ‘Yum!’

‘What is this, some new party game?’

‘Ha ha! Me next, Ger!’

I heard the doorbell ring, my wife’s greeting in the hall. Sounded like Fats and Brenda, but my view was blocked by the people pushing in and out of the doorway: Knud’s wife Kitty gave Dickie a hug and he ran his hands between her legs playfully, Yvonne looking wistful, her husband Woody shaking the hand of an old man who said: ‘In Babylonia, y’know, they used to drown folks for sellin’ beer too cheap — we visited the holes they dipped ’em in!’

‘Love the ascot, Gerry! Très chic! Cyril and Peg here yet?’

‘Yes, I think so. In the dining room maybe. Old-fashioned?’

‘Mine’s a stinger.’

‘Ha ha! don’t kid me!’ someone butted in, crowding up behind me.

‘I can show you pictures.’

‘Try it and see!’

Laughter rose lightly above the drone of music and chatter, then ebbed again, throbbing steadily as a heartbeat, as people pressed close, parted, came together again, their movements fluid, almost hypnotic, as though (I thought in my own inebriate and spellbound state) under some dreamy atavistic compulsion. I squeezed, myself compelled, past a group of serious whiskey drinkers hustling a painted-up redhead with pickaninny pigtails (Ginger: one of Dickie’s girls), ignoring their disappointed glances at the vermouth bottle in my hand, and made my way toward Alison (Kitty, flushed and happy, crossed left of me, just as Patrick in immaculate green passed right, someone singing ‘It’s No Wonder’ on the hi-fi), feeling the excitement of her as I drew near.

The glow, profile, it was different now, yet overlaid as though stereoscopically by the way I’d seen her just before. And by that earlier time across the dimming auditorium. We’d met a few weeks earlier in a theater lobby during intermission. Friends of friends. We’d exchanged passing reflections on the play, and Alison and I had found ourselves so intimately attuned to each other that we’d stopped short, blinked, then quickly, as though embarrassed, changed the subject. Her husband had given me his card, my wife had said something about getting up a party, I’d said I’d call. On the way back to our seats, passing down parallel aisles, Alison and I had exchanged furtive glances, and I’d been so disturbed by them that the play was over before I’d realized that I’d not seen or heard any of the rest of it: only by asking my wife her opinion of the last act did I learn how it came out. Now Alison’s glance, as I pressed up beside her at last and refilled her glass with vermouth, was not furtive at all, even though there were several other people standing around, watching us, waiting for refills of their own: she was smiling steadily up at me, her eyes (so they seemed to me just then) deep brown puddles of pure desire …

‘Somehow,’ I said pensively, holding her gaze, seeking the thought that might connect us to that heightened moment at the theater, ‘I feel as though all this has happened before …’

‘It’s an illusion, Gerald,’ she replied, her voice smooth, round, almost an embrace, my name in her mouth like a cherry. She reached into the old-fashioneds pitcher for an ice cube without taking her brown eyes off me. There was a peculiar studied balance in her stance that made me think of those girls in advertisements out on the decks of rushing yachts, topless, their bronzed breasts sparkling with sea spray, hair unfurling, legs spread wide and rigid in their tight white denims like cocked springs — though tonight in fact she was wearing a green-and-gold silk charmeuse dress of almost unbelievable softness. The peculiar thing about love, I thought, gazing deeply into those beckoning pools of hers which yet reflected my own gaze, the reflected gaze itself a reflection of that first numbingly beautiful exchange (that night at the theater she’d been wearing a Renaissance-styled suit of cinnamon panne velvet with a white ruffled blouse, the ruffles at the cuffs like foliage for the expressive flowering of her hands, her auburn hair, now loose, drawn then to her nape by an amber clasp), is that one is overwhelmed by a general sense of wanting before he knows what it is he wants — that’s why the act, though like all others, seems always strange and new, a discovery, an exploration, why one must move toward it silently, without reason, without words, feeling one’s way … ‘You know, I’ll bet you’re the sort of man,’ she said, as though having come to some sort of decision, her voice gloved in intimacy and, yes, a kind of awe (I felt this and drew closer), ‘who used to believe, once upon a time, that every cunt in the world was somehow miraculously different.’