Gerald's Party

by Robert Coover

  ‘In Greek theater, you know,’ Patrick confided at his elbow, ‘they put these lovely red wigs—’

  ‘What’s happened—?!’ Pardew cried, so startling Patrick that he fell backward onto Knud, who grunted irritably and rolled over. The screen had gone blank just as Ginger in full tilt was revolving feet-first toward the in-zooming camera, and now the Inspector beat on it with his fists: ‘Come on, damn you!’

  ‘I don’t think it’s the CRT,’ Cynthia said. She worked the switches, picked up Mavis (‘ “– is what it’s for, Aunty May,” the sweet child explained, touching me. I … I didn’t even know I had one … !’), then Daffie tapping her gleaming teeth with a spoon, Noble with a straw up his nose, but only a blank screen where Ginger should be. I lowered my arm, which ached now with its dull news.

  ‘It’s a plot!’ Pardew raged, kicking the set and swatting it with Peedie so hard one of the ears flew off.

  ‘Uh … I’ll go check the camera,’ Steve the plumber mumbled, slipping away.

  ‘Where are my officers—?!’

  ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!’ I cried, pointing past his shoulder with the weapon in my hand. But I was pointing in the wrong direction. The two of them were in the doorway behind me.

  ‘Uh, Chief, we got a bit of trouble …’

  ‘Trouble? You don’t know the half of it!’ the Inspector roared. They glanced at me uneasily. Or maybe respectfully, I couldn’t tell. ‘If I don’t get this picture back—!’

  Fred turned to Bob, who shrugged, and they came forward into the room.

  ‘It’s not the set, you imbeciles!’ the Inspector cried, shaking the stuffed rabbit at them. ‘It’s the camera! Out in the hall! MOVE, damn you! We’re missing everything!’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Fred said and they lumbered out, Bob muttering something sullenly under his breath. On the television, Regina clutched her shoulders and stared. Then Mavis, filling the screen, said something about Jim’s tongue. Vic belched, Prissy Loo lifted her toga to show Dolph her military longjohns. ‘I think you were looking for this,’ I insisted, offering Pardew the pick.

  ‘We’ve got it now!’ cried Cynthia.

  ‘Aha … !’

  The fall was over. The camera seemed to be in the living room now. Ginger, wearing the Inspector’s white scarf as a kind of diaper or loincloth beneath what kerchiefs remained, was standing, knees out, in the doorway, trying on his crushed fedora.

  ‘Now what?!’

  ‘I’ll take that,’ Cynthia said, coming over.

  ‘It really doesn’t matter,’ I sighed. ‘I don’t know where it came from anyway.’

  ‘I know. We’ll let Woody handle it.’

  ‘They got the camera going again,’ Fred said in the doorway.

  ‘You think I’m blind?’ the Inspector growled, chewing his lip and digging irritably in Peedie’s hole. ‘Damn her!’

  The fedora lay springily on top of Ginger’s revived pigtails, bobbing above her head as she walked. When she stopped, the hat leaned forward over her eyes, then rocked back. When she stepped forward, it seemed to hesitate a moment before following her.

  ‘Most places I’ve been,’ Lloyd Draper put in, ‘red hair’s pretty unlucky. Folks have a way of choppin’ it off, don’t y’know, head and all …’

  ‘What’s happened to my overcoat—?!’ the Inspector bellowed. Ginger was pulling it on now, her thin arms lost in its long floppy sleeves. It was wrinkled, misshapen, and had huge dark blotches all over it. It seemed to weigh her down, and her knees bowed out another couple of inches.

  ‘You ask any Hindoo, he’ll tell you that red, heh heh, is just bad news. Once when we were up in India, Iris and me, we got tickets to a—’

  ‘They been using it,’ Bob said (Ginger was now staggering about in the coat’s bulk, the fedora bouncing on her head, peering at everything through an oversized magnifying glass that stuck out of one sleeve like an artificial claw), ‘to catch the drip from the upstairs crapper.’

  ‘What—?!’

  ‘I said, when Iris and me were in India—’

  ‘Enough!’ barked Pardew, twisting Peedie’s other ear off. He pointed with it toward the front of the house, and the two officers, unsheathing their clubs, disappeared.

  Ginger had now discovered Ros’s body (the wake seemed to have started up around her again) and was down on her bony knees with her head under the skirt. She emerged with a look of triumph on her face and the fedora squashed down around her ears. She pushed a thick sleeve back, reached in and fished about, her eyes rolling, then began to pull on something: she tugged, strained, her eyes crossed – it gave way and she tumbled backward. She held it up: it was the Inspector’s briar pipe. ‘Damn!’ he muttered, slapping his pockets. Ginger gazed at it curiously, sniffed it, then prepared to fit it into the pucker of her mouth – but something over her shoulder alarmed her: she staggered to her feet and went stumbling and tripping through the mourners off-camera, dragging the tail of her thick checkered coat behind her. Bob and Fred appeared on the screen. They looked around in confusion – then, swinging their nightsticks, charged off in pursuit. My heart leaped to my throat. The camera, following the cops’ exit, had come to rest on Alison. Slowly it zoomed in, Alison staring straight at it with that same look of terror and supplication I’d last seen in the dining room. Noble, Dickie, Horner, the man in the chalkstripes, all crowded around her – and beneath her charmeuse skirt there were not two legs but four – Vachel! ‘Now what was it,’ the Inspector asked, turning toward me, ‘that you wanted to—?’

  But I was already out the door, pushing through the pack-up in the dining room (‘ – watching the child’s astonishing performance through the two-way mirror, as if art and life were somehow separate,’ Mavis was saying, breathing heavily now and stroking her pale white thighs below her rucked-up skirt, ‘but then, suddenly, overtaken by excitement and desire …’), fighting my way as though through a briary nightmare toward the living room – but to no purpose. Except for Vic, slumped in an armchair next to Ros, and Malcolm Mee in the sunroom, his head bent solemnly over a handmirror ‘I’ve never done anything like this before,’ some guy was crooning hollowly on the hi-fi), the room was empty. That must have been a tape replay on the TV. In fact, now that I thought about it for a moment, I’d just seen the cops in the dining room, setting out silverware and stacks of plates on the table, and the camera, of course, was on Mavis.

  There were too many lights on in here. The wreckage, the debris, was all too visible. It was like a theater after the play is over, deserted and garish, its illusions exposed. I gathered up some crumpled napkins, fallen ashtrays, half a bun smeared with catsup, a shattered cigar butt, a couple of glasses and a roach holder – but then I didn’t know what to do with them, so I set them down again. This time on the coffee table. There, by one foot, lay Alison’s green silk sash. I picked it up, held it to my lips.

  ‘Mustn’t take it too hard,’ Vic said, but I wasn’t sure whether he was talking to me or to himself. He was staring down at Ros, unrecognizable now except for the tatters of her silvery frock. ‘It’s fucking sad, but what the hell, there’s nothing tragic about it.’

  ‘No …’

  ‘Life’s too horrible to be tragic. We all know that. That’s for adolescents who still haven’t adjusted to the shit.’ He shook the ice around in his drink, watching it. ‘Nonetheless …’ He was struggling still with his sense of loss. I understood this. I’d said the same things many times, half-believing them. When I’d found my father, for example. In a room much like this one, his last hotel suite. The consoling overview: catastrophe as the mechanism that makes life possible, sorrow a morbid inflammation of the ego. A line, like any other … ‘You know, I’ve been thinking about that play Ros was in, the pillar of salt thing …’

  ‘You went to that?’

  ‘Yeah. I wasn’t about to make a fool of myself down there on stage, if that’s what you’re wondering, crazy as I was about her, but I watched the others who d
id. And it gave me time to think about that story. God saved Lot, you’ll remember, so Lot afterward could fuck his daughters, but he froze the wife for looking back. On the surface, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. But the radical message of that legend is that incest, sodomy, betrayal and all that are not crimes – only turning back is: rigidified memory, attachment to the past. That play was one attempt to subvert the legend, unfreeze the memory, reconnect to the here and now.’ He scowled into his glass. I was thinking of Ros, salted blue, warming to rose under all those tongues. Ros, who never looked back, not even for a soft place to fall. ‘And maybe … maybe her murder was another …’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Or maybe …’ He grunted, sighed, drank deeply. ‘Who knows?’ He shuddered slightly. ‘Why can’t I shake this off, Gerry?’

  ‘Well, perhaps,’ I suggested, recalling the feel, on the back porch, of Alison’s sash giving way, thinking then of love as a kind of affectionate surrender, an alternative to both resignation and confrontation (Mee floated past us on his way to the dining room, wearing my soggy ascot now as a headband), ‘you should stop fighting it.’

  ‘Hmpf, you’re as bad as that dead battery I’m with tonight,’ he grumped. ‘Know what she called me? A fucking sentimental humanist! Hah! A goddamn affront to the universe, she said!’ The faint trace of a wry smile flickered across his craggy features. ‘That’s not bad, I have to admit … but goddamn it, Gerry, I hate sentimentality! I hate fantasy, mooning around – I hate confused emotions!’

  ‘Too bad,’ said Jim, coming in from the hallway, his jacket on once more, a drink in his hand, ‘that’s probably the only kind there are.’ My own now were mixed with guilt: that terrified appeal on her face on the TV screen just moments ago, and then before that in the dining room – or was it in here? – and in the kitchen … ‘How’s your wife, Gerry?’

  ‘What? Oh, I don’t know, Jim. The police …’

  ‘The police what?’ Vic wanted to know, looking up.

  ‘You know, their inquiries, a while ago they were—’

  ‘What – your wife? Those goddamn fucking – what have you done about it?’

  ‘Well, I spoke to Woody—’

  ‘Ah. Good …’ He seemed lost again in his own thoughts, his elbows on his knees, staring into his glass. Jim watched him with concern. I was thinking of something my father said; it was the last time I saw him alive, about six months before he’d, as he liked to put it, reached for the inevitable. ‘Why don’t you let me check your blood pressure, Vic?’

  ‘What – with that gizmo they were blowing up around Ros’s neck a while ago? No, thanks!’

  ‘They were just getting a fingerprint. Trying to. They had to use it to clamp the X-ray film cassette to the skin, that’s all.’ He smiled. ‘What’s the problem? Figure it might be catching?’

  ‘It’s not that …’

  ‘Yneh!’ groaned Regina, sweeping into the room in her wispy gown, her hands upraised as though in protest. ‘That lady in there is too much!’

  ‘Lady—?’

  ‘That – that child molester! That geed-up dip with her fat hands in her pants! I can’t believe it!’ Time is hard and full of calamities, my father had said, but man is soft and malleable. If he chooses to endure, then he also chooses metamorphosis, perhaps of an unexpected and even unimaginable nature, such that choice itself may no longer be part of his condition. A signal, of course, which I hadn’t heeded. I draped the sash around my neck, thinking about my own metamorphoses, my diffluent condition. ‘She’s giving a blow-by-blow description – and I choose my mots carefully! – of a frantic three-way grope, featuring her, her old man, and Ros when she wasn’t ten years old yet and hadn’t even got her hair! Oh my God! Poor Ros!’

  ‘It didn’t seem to do her any harm,’ Jim said quietly. Lloyd Draper came in with a screen and slide projector and started setting up in the sunroom. ‘Oh yes, many children,’ he was saying. ‘One feller strung ten of ’em up at a time, called it a warnin’ to men and a – heh heh – spectacle for the angels! I got pictures here, you’ll see!’ ‘We’re probably too emotional about pedophilia. In a lot of societies, children have sex with their parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, all the time, and as far as we can tell they don’t seem adversely affected.’

  ‘I believe it,’ said Vic, his temples throbbing, hand squeezing his glass as though to crush it like one of Dolph’s beer cans, ‘but I don’t believe it.’

  ‘In fact, sex with their grandparents is probably good for them.’

  ‘Blah! Mine would’ve given me the clap!’ Regina retorted, crossing her hands over her breast. ‘I gotta admit, though, that little kid in there is sure eating it up!’ The telephone rang. ‘I’ll get it, it may be Beni!’

  ‘What little kid?’ I called after her.

  ‘I think she means Mark,’ Jim said, sipping at his drink. ‘He came down looking for his rabbit, he said.’

  ‘What—?!’

  At the door (how many times had I been through here? I felt like I was chasing after lost luggage in an airport or something) I bumped into Alison’s husband, who turned pale when he saw the silk sash around my neck. ‘Is it … over?’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said and sneezed. ‘I haven’t even—’

  ‘Sshh!’ someone scolded.

  He frowned and looked about, pipe clamped in his teeth, craning his head. She wasn’t in here but Mark was: right up front in his SUPERLOVER sweatshirt, sitting on the prie-dieu next to Vachel the dwarf. I had the impression Vachel might have his hands on him, but my view was blocked by all the others pressing around, I couldn’t be sure. Mavis, her skirts dragged up past her marbled thighs now, both hands digging frantically inside her shiny balloon-like drawers, was apparently describing Ros’s childish body (‘ – like cherries, and – unf! – her little cheeks were – ooh! – suffused with the – ah! – tint of roses … !’) as she squatted over Mavis’s face while manipulating her with one hand and stroking Jim with the other, sucking one of them – I couldn’t tell which, maybe both, it didn’t matter – I just wanted to get Mark out of there.

  ‘Hey, come on! Stop pushing!’

  ‘We were here first!’

  ‘Psst! Mark!’

  ‘Ouch!’

  ‘– With her velvety tongue and with her – gasp! – fingers in me like the feet of – oh! – little birds, I felt my mind just explode and spread through my – whoof! – whole body, surrendering, ah – abjectly – an incredible – grunt! – radiance and – and truth!—’

  Vachel leered at me over his shoulder as I pulled on Mark. Mavis was now hauling at her vulva as though scrubbing clothes at a washboard, her hips slapping the chair, head lolling, eyes glazed over, mouth bubbly with drool. ‘I don’t wanna—!’ Mark whined, and some of Quagg’s crowd hissed and booed me playfully, grinning the while in open-faced admiration of Mavis’s mounting orgasm. ‘Go! Go!’ some of them chanted. ‘No, Daddy! I wanna hear the story!’

  ‘It’s all over,’ I insisted, dragging him away as though out of a dense thicket. All but anyway: nothing now but yelps, groans, squeals, a few blurted phrases (something about ‘miracles’ and ‘sweet vapors’ and ‘groves of wild angels’ or ‘dangers’ – Ros, apparently, had changed positions), and the rhythmical whoppety-whop of her huge soft buttocks against the seat of her chair. ‘Hang on to your pajamas!’

  Too late, he’d lost them. He dropped to his hands and knees and went scuttling back in after them, but I pulled him out again – and in the nick of time, for Mavis suddenly shrieked rapturously and fell out of her chair, sending all the people around her staggering backward and all over each other – ‘You might have been stepped on, son!’ I scolded as the others choked and giggled, muttered apologies (‘But my jamapants, Daddy—!’ ‘You’ve got others …’), or caught their breath. ‘Wow—!’

  ‘And then … !’ Mavis gasped from the floor, and the crowd fell silent again. Her breathing was labored, her voice raw and as though
miles away. ‘And then … Jim … Jim kissed me!’

  Her audience, some of them still picking themselves up, whooped and whistled, giving her a big hand. ‘God, that was one helluva moving story!’ someone exclaimed. ‘Wild – but real!’

  ‘Why doesn’t Gramma read me stories like that?’ Mark wanted to know.

  ‘Style, man – some people got it, some don’t.’

  ‘Where is Grandma anyway?’

  ‘She’s with some man.’

  ‘She on the spike, you think?’

  ‘Grandma—?’

  ‘Didn’t you notice when her skirt was up?’

  ‘These yours, Mark?’ Kitty asked, emerging from the crowd now milling about. She held them up in front of her like an apron. ‘One thing for sure, you can tell they’re not mine!’

  Mark laughed, and Kitty knelt to help him put them on, a bit flushed still from Mavis’s tale and none too steady. ‘Been in to see your old man, Kitty?’ Talbot asked, tilting his head toward his good ear.

  ‘What’s there to see?’ The bearded technician in cowboy boots now crouched behind her shoulder, his camera focused on Mark and Kitty’s fumbling hands – I stepped forward to block his view, but just then the two police officers came staggering in from the kitchen, supporting a huge turkey between them, shouting at me: ‘Hey, you! Move that empty tray, will ya? Hurry!’ ‘Just appearance, Talbot – believe me, dreams are never as good as the real thing! Isn’t that right, Mark?’