Gerald's Party

by Robert Coover

  ‘Nothing? Nothing? Then how do you explain this?!’ he cried, flinging a valentine onto the table.

  ‘Where did you find that?’ I gasped. It was one I had given my wife long ago – I recognized the ‘honeymoon hotel’ with its heart-shaped shutters, a private joke: there’d been a heart-shaped hole in the door of the outhouse we had to use …

  ‘Next to the body!’

  ‘Ah, that must be the one Naomi—’

  ‘We know what it is! Do you take us for fools? Do you deny you knew the victim?’

  ‘Of course not! She’s—’

  ‘She’s dead! I know that! But I need to know how! And when! Now for the last time: what have you seen? Eh? What have you heard?’

  Bob tightened his grip again; Fred, still wearing the dusty rubber gloves, grabbed my belt with one hand, brought the nightstick crashing down on the table with the other – ‘Dickie!’ I yelped. It was all I could think of. I could hardly breathe. I felt like I’d reflexed my testicles all the way into my ribcage. ‘Somebody said—!’

  ‘Dickie?’

  They eyed me narrowly. I felt betrayed by my own desperation, ashamed of the outburst. I swallowed. ‘Actually—’

  ‘That the lily-dip in the white ducks?’ grunted Bob behind my back.

  ‘Yes,’ I squeaked, ‘but I only … Mrs Trainer said—’

  Fred shook his head. ‘Nothing there, Chief. We checked him out. Double on-tonder.’

  ‘What – ?! More lies?!’ I felt relief, even as Bob threw his free arm around my throat, half-strangling me. ‘I tell you, I can’t stand lies! They turn our consciousness to rot and putrefy the spirit! He waved a photo in front of my face of a round-helmeted cop being buggered by a masked superhero: ‘Now, who is that?’

  Bob squeezed, arching my back, and all I could see was the ceiling. Fred, sucking in wind, drew his arm back. ‘I … I can explain—?’

  ‘Explain? Explain?’ the Inspector raged. The ceiling seemed to be pulsating and a chemical pungency filled the air. ‘Open him up!

  ‘No, just a minute!’ I gasped. I groped for my buckle – ‘In the end, Gerry,’ my father used to say, ‘we reach for the inevitable’ – and Fred took his hand away. ‘I’ll … I’ll do it …’

  They seemed to accept this. Fred lowered his stick. Bob loosened his grip slightly, though he kept his arm around me. ‘Awright,’ he growled, ‘out with it!’

  The three of them pressed round, boxing me in. We were all breathing heavily. On the wall in front of me they’d tacked up their charts for spectrochemical analysis: they looked like indictments, columnar and menacing, with something penciled in across the top. I studied it without seeing it, my hands at my buckle. I might as well get it over with, I thought. Who knows, I might not even be recognized. But I didn’t believe it. I felt betrayed somehow. A kind of inconsolable dismay swept over me, and a loneliness, as I reached, my eyes misting over (I’d had dreams like this: some final crowded-up demand, my will erased), for my zipper.

  Bob and Fred backed off, laughing. The Inspector, too, relaxed, laid a restraining hand on mine. ‘That’s all right,’ he said quietly. ‘We know it’s not you. We showed your wife the photos and she said definitely not.’

  ‘We were just kidding,’ said Fred.

  ‘Ah …’ My heart was still in my throat. I wiped my eyes. The penciled-in notation on the chart read: ‘Never confuse the objective with the subjective sections of the protocol.’ It sounded like a line from a play.

  ‘Naturally, we would appreciate any help you could give us,’ said Pardew, filling his pipe from a small saclike pouch. I settled back. I’d been standing on my toes all this time, and somehow this had added to my sense of isolation and vague nameless guilt.

  Bob had limped away to switch off the lamp on the microscope, shutting down the show there, and now gathered up some little boxes, plastic bags, and tools. ‘Shall I knock the teeth out before we bag her up,’ he asked, ‘or save it till later?’

  ‘Might as well do it now. What about the cast?’

  ‘The stuff’s ready,’ said Fred at the hot plate, stirring (I could hear music now, conversations, people shouting on the stairs: where had they been before?). ‘You want the whole chest or just—?’

  ‘All of it.’ The Inspector tamped the tobacco into the bowl with his little finger. He seemed to be studying one of the odd inky prints the cops had taken. I was still having trouble breathing, and I wasn’t sure my knees were going to hold me; at such times I resented my gentility, yet understood that often as not it had spared me worse. ‘Be sure to get the angle of penetration.’

  ‘I’ll help with that, Fred,’ said Bob, tucking his tools in his armpit.

  ‘Careful, it’s hot …’

  ‘I want to thank you for coming in,’ Pardew said as they left. He settled his pipe in under his drooping moustaches (I heard a glass break, laughter, someone said: ‘Don’t try to explain …’), fumbled in his pockets. ‘It’s been good to have someone to talk to, someone who understands …’

  ‘Well, I only—’

  He smiled. ‘You’ve been more help than you know. Got a match?’

  ‘No, sorry …’ I slapped my ribs pointlessly.

  He poked about the shelves, the worktable, finally lit his pipe from a Bunsen burner. I mopped my brow with the handkerchief I realized too late had been the one used by the Inspector, thinking (not for the first time at a party like this): I should make better use of my time than this. ‘Like all intellectual pursuits,’ he said around start-up puffs (there seemed to be a growing agitation outside, as though to set off the deep stillness here in my study), ‘this is a lonely and thankless profession, a daily encounter with depravity, cruelty, and sudden—’

  Fred burst in, looking sweaty, his eyes popping: ‘They’re trying to take the body away!’ he cried, then rushed out again.

  ‘What – ?!’ the Inspector roared, rearing up, his moustaches bristling.

  ‘It’s probably only the ambulance men,’ I offered, but he pushed me aside and strode out in the wake of his assistant, his fists clenched and jaws set, white scarf fluttering.

  People – some of whom I didn’t even know – were piling down the stairs, thumping out of the kitchen, rushing for the living room where there was a great commotion. ‘Stop them!’ they cried. ‘Oh my god!’ ‘He was using a hammer on her mouth!’ In the middle of the room, two white-jacketed men and Jim were trying to lift Ros’s body onto a stretcher, but the two police officers, grabbing a limb each, had engaged them in a kind of grisly tug-of-war. ‘The Inspector – grunt! – says she stays!’

  ‘Sorry, pal! We got orders!’

  ‘Oof!’

  ‘Do something, Gerry! I can’t take this!’

  Talbot and Fats and some guy in a gray chalkstriped suit with a lilac shirt (he was familiar, I’d seen him somewhere before) were already trying to do something, struggling clumsily with the two policemen (‘Talbot! You come out of there right this minute!’ Wilma fussed from the sidelines), and Pardew now stepped into the melee on the other side, straddling one of Ros’s arms (her hands were wrapped now in plastic bags, I saw, her feet as well, and her front was splotched with drying plaster as though someone had hit her with a custard pie), a long finger jabbed at Jim’s lapel: ‘I must warn you that any further interference will be viewed as a criminal breach of the law!’

  ‘I’m not interfering, damn you, I’m trying to –’

  But just then Vic strolled in (‘Oh boy! look out!’ squawked Yvonne, ‘it’s the Grim Raper!’), walked serenely up to Fred in time to the dance tune playing on the hi-fi, and chopped him – kthuck! – in the back of the neck. ‘Yow! Crikey, you didn’t have to do that!’ Fred howled, crumpling.

  Bob let go of the body, whipped out his revolver, backed off in a crouch: ‘Anybody move—!’

  Vic smiled, showing his teeth, then turned and walked nonchalantly away toward the dining room, his back to the cop. It was so quiet you could hear ice clinking somewhere in an empty
glass. ‘Jeez,’ Fred whimpered, all curled up on the floor, hands behind his head (Jim, also ignoring the drawn weapon, knelt to examine his neck), ‘we’re only doing our job, for cripe’s sake!’

  ‘He’s going to go too goddamned far if he doesn’t watch out,’ Noble grumbled to Eileen, standing listlessly by. ‘What?’ she asked absently, and picked up Vic’s drink, which he’d left behind. Bob fired, shattering the glass: Noble threw himself down heavily behind the couch, and someone screamed, but Eileen seemed not to notice what had happened, staring in bruised puzzlement at her dripping hand and what was left of the glass. ‘Give that boy a silver dollar!’ Yvonne applauded from the couch, and Talbot in his drunken stupor (Wilma seemed to be feeding him aspirin by the spoonful) joined in, slapping his hands together loosely like a trained seal. ‘I’m sorry,’ Eileen said, and Fats, watching Bob warily, lit up a thick black cigar. ‘Or maybe … maybe I’m not sorry …’

  ‘Please,’ I urged, but no one seemed to be listening. I felt locked into one of Pardew’s space–time configurations, where the only thing moving was my perception of it. The Inspector had knelt beside Jim and the injured officer (Jim was fitting him with a kind of neckbrace, using a pillow from the couch and attaching it with a woman’s garter belt – might have been my wife’s), and Bob, covering us with his gun, now loped over to join them, leaving the two ambulance men free to carry on with removing Ros’s corpse. But even as they heaved the body onto the stretcher (so light: she seemed almost to float, her torso rising and falling airily), Regina appeared in the doorway with her friends Zack Quagg, the playwright-director, and the actor Malcolm Mee, Quagg with his famous purple cape pulled on over a white unitard, Malcolm in faded blue jeans and a striped sailor shirt. Quagg was normal enough (not that my wife thought so: once in a performance he had stepped down into the audience and slapped her face with a dead fish), but Mee always struck me as dangerously homicidal. Just the parts he tended to play maybe, but his cold glassy stare and the scar on his cheek always sent a chill down my spine. Regina, hand to mouth and face averted, was pointing across the room at Ros, long white finger quivering, and Quagg, following it, swept into the room, his eyes ablaze. ‘What kinda two-bit tank show is this?’ he cried, shoving the ambulance men aside. ‘That’s my star!’

  ‘Hey, wait a minute—!’

  ‘Get these greaseballs outa here!’ Quagg yelled, swinging wildly, but before he could hit anything, Fats locked him in a bearhug: ‘Whoa! Cool it, Zack!’

  ‘Whose company you in, Fats?’ Quagg grunted, as Talbot staggered blearily away from Wilma and threw himself at everybody: Mee, his face icily deadpan, lashed out with a whistling left hook and knocked him cold. Anatole was there too now, thin and pale in his all-black get-up, Earl Elstob grinning stupidly at his elbow with his fists cocked. On the hi-fi, somebody was singing something about ‘needing someone to talk to,’ and I thought: maybe it would help if I just changed the record. ‘The doc wants her tucked away outa the lights, Zack – it’s no good for her here!’ Fats gasped around his cigar, and the woman in yellow came up and kicked him in the shins. ‘OW!’

  I stepped forward to explain, somewhat disquieted by the odd sensation of walking through a grid of intersecting vectors, just as Bob sprang up out of his half-crouch next to Fred, swinging the butt of his pistol: he’d have got me had not Ginger at that same moment crossed between us, wobbling on her high heels and holding the tattered remains of her costume together with both hands, and short-circuited the cop, who fell between her legs like trapped game. I ducked and they struck Anatole in their fall, propelling him into a scuffle between Mee and one of the ambulance men (‘Stop that! Stop that!’ I could hear Patrick shrieking over the uproar). Ginger, when she hit the carpet with Bob on her, squeaked airily as though getting her noise button squeezed, the officer cursing when his head knocked bonily on hers. ‘Yuh huh,’ said Earl Elstob, stumbling over Talbot, tangled up in Quagg’s cape. Dolph wandered in sleepily, wearing one of my ski sweaters and opening a beer can: ‘Christ, what’s been going on down here?’ Leonard, who’d been taking cheesecake shots of Daffie straddling the back of an easy chair as though horsed over it, turned away to get one of Ginger with her eyes crossed, lips puckered, and skinny legs straight up in the air like spiky red signposts, Bob between them seemingly humping away, but really just trying, in vain, to get his short leg under him. Daffie slid off the chair, walked over (Noble from behind the couch was telling someone to shut up), and kicked the cop in the face, and his gun went off again, shooting the cigar out of Fats’ mouth.

  ‘Wha—?!’ Fats exclaimed, feeling the bulb of his nose speculatively, and some guy in the doorway threw his hands up and whooped: ‘Hey, I like the pitch!’ I recognized him: the actor who’d played the wind-up sergeant-major in Quagg’s soft-core production of The Naughty Dollies’ Nightmare. Gudrun the makeup artist and a plump actress in a toga and a pair of oversize rubber galoshes, worn like slap-shoes, crowded up behind him. Knud’s wife, Kitty, shouting something about official rape, had meanwhile leaped on the cop between Ginger’s legs and was pulling on his ears, and now Earl Elstob, seemingly misreading everything, jumped on Kitty, pushing her skirt up. ‘Can you use some talent, Zack?’ hollered the actor, as he elbowed in.

  ‘Yeah,’ shouted Quagg, trying to wrest the stretcher grips away from the man in the lilac shirt, ‘but first get the word out, Jacko: Ros has been ragged! Go call Hoo-Sin and Vachel and get them over here! And anyone else you can think of!’

  ‘I’ll do it!’ said Regina, appearing in the doorway at the actor’s elbow, and, released, he came bounding over, eyes aglitter and a smile on one side of his mouth – ‘Ha ha! Hold up the exits!’ he howled – and flung himself at the lilac-shirted man.

  Brenda, bending over to drag Elstob off Kitty (she’d let go the cop’s ears and was struggling to keep her underpants on), suddenly yelped, spun around, and laid into Patrick. ‘You little creep!’ she screamed, her fists flying.

  ‘It wasn’t me!’ he blubbered, his split mouth bleeding anew, as Dolph slipped away (I felt Alison near me again and wondered if she understood, relative stranger here though she herself was, what was happening, and if that was why she’d drawn close to me again), sipping beer. Mee, standing on Anatole’s face (‘Can’t somebody do something?’ Wilma was wailing: Talbot was under there somewhere, too), seemed to be strangling one of the ambulance men – the other one had tackled Quagg and they had fallen over Ros, her plastic-mittened extremities flopping, her face masked in chipped plaster which bearded her throat and chest as well, and I felt (as a soft belly pressed up against my buttocks) newly sorrowed: ‘It’s almost sad,’ she used to say after oral sex, ‘that it tastes so good.’

  ‘That’s enough!’ someone cried. ‘You don’t know what you’re doing!’

  ‘Someone should go get Cyril!’

  ‘Hold the bimbo down, Malcolm, while I—’

  ‘Wait a minute! I – unff! – I got an idea!’

  The word ‘crepitus’ came to me just then, the word I’d been trying to recall since I’d first seen Yvonne on the landing (they were talking about her now, the punch-up was slackening and there were negotiations under way), and with it came a general sense of loss that embraced Ros, Tania, Yvonne, my mother and grandmother, life itself in its fleeting brevity, its ruthless erosions. Yes, I thought as arms encircled my waist, a hand slid under my shirt (Bob was getting to his feet at last, using Ginger’s legs for crutches, exposing the fat little red purse between them: it was expanding and contracting rhythmically like someone chewing), it’s true: love is indeed, as a woman once whispered to me (from our balcony we could hear mullahs in minarets singing the sun down: the setting, coming back to me now like a fragrance in the air, was ripe for such sentiments), the tragic passion – not for her reasons of course (she had just left her husband to spend a strange, fleeting, but beautiful week with me in Istanbul, which was perhaps, though I’d forgotten it until now, the most beautiful week of my life), but because of
its ultimate inadequacy: for all its magic, love was not, in this abrasive and crepitant world, enough. And was that, I wondered as one gentle hand caressed my nipple, the other burrowed below my belt (Ros had been abandoned and with her the free-for-all as well, people were picking themselves up, groaning, laughing – ‘Hoo-eee! that was a real dingdong!’ – and the ambulance men, breathing heavily, had turned their attentions to Yvonne: ‘Sure, why not? They told us to – whoof! – pick up a body, but they – gasp! – didn’t say which!’), the source of its strangely powerful appeal: its own tragic inadequacy? The question itself was resonant with passionate implications, tragic or otherwise, but even as I turned to share them (out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed my son Mark, one of my ski caps down around his ears, eating things off the floor, my mother-in-law dragging him over toward me, something clutched in her white fist), Yvonne cursing raucously, screaming for help, Jim distracted by his efforts to bring Talbot around, I realized that it was not vermouth I’d been smelling (Alison in fact was watching me from the dining room doorway, looking somewhat startled), but bubble gum. ‘Damn it, Sally Ann, this is no time for adolescent vamping!’ I exclaimed, tearing her hands away. ‘People are hurt here! Your own father—!’

  ‘Oh, crumbs, Gerry! Stop treating me like a child! I mean, I only want to make love with you – is that so awful?’

  ‘I just won’t have it!’ my mother-in-law snapped, glaring at Sally Ann’s hands on my belt. She held up the ice pick like a denunciation: ‘He was playing with this!’

  ‘Ah—!’

  ‘I’ll take it,’ said Sally Ann quietly, dropping it in her shirt. There was a patch now over the breast pocket that said: ‘HANDS OFF UNLESS YOU MEAN BUSINESS.’ I glanced over at Alison, but she was watching the ambulance men, a pained look in her eyes.

  ‘Where did it come from, Daddy?’

  ‘I – I’m not sure …’ Fred was turning round and round, trying to get used to his neckbrace; at his feet, the Inspector was tying a plastic bag around Ros’s head. ‘Hey, man, what gig you working here?’ Quagg wanted to know. ‘What’s that you’re eating, son?’