Gerald's Party

  ‘Put something on if you like,’ I said.

  ‘Well, because it’s very complicated,’ Pardew barked. Ginger crossed behind him, tiptoeing springily toward the toilet, her red pigtails trembling, kerchief tails lifting and dipping. She tried the door but it was locked. ‘Yes, yes … in her chambers. Just an agonal phenomenon probably. We’ll get prints later. No, that’s smashed up.’

  ‘Do you think it – it would be all right?’

  ‘Sure, Michelle, why not?’ I touched her hand gently: so frail, yet the knuckles were sharp and hard. I was thinking of Susanna in Tania’s painting, that fixed artificial way she stood, and then Alison, miming it, the puzzled look on her face – and now Michelle, who’d posed for the painting in the first place, soft beside me, so light, almost wraithlike, yet brittle: a sequence, as it were, of interlocking figures, ‘Susanna’ a kind of primal outline, like Pardew’s pale chalk drawings on my living room floor (he glanced up at me, phone at his ear, and I heard the cries from in there: such an emptiness under them, yes, music might help), for the subsequent incarnations … ‘Something quiet.’

  ‘It’s a problem of dynamics, you see. She was a blonde and – what? How should I know?’ Pardew turned and, picking his nose, watched absently as Ginger pressed an ear against the toilet door, both hands pinched between her thighs, mouth puckered, kerchiefs dangling loosely like bits of laundry. ‘No, she was married. Probably. Yes, of course I did, but we got nothing from him we could use.’

  A kerchief fluttered to the floor, and Ginger, her thin legs tensed above her high stiletto heels, bent stiffly to pick it up just as Earl Elstob banged out of the toilet, wiping his shoes on his pantlegs: ‘Woops!’ he exclaimed as the door batted her behind and sent her flying. He watched her bellyflop and, eyes agoggle, pink mouth pertly agape, skid across the hall, then he looked up, blinked, and grinned toothily. ‘Hey, uh, didja hear about the ole lady who – shlup! – backed into the airplane propeller?’

  ‘Well, I know it’s too bad,’ the Inspector snapped, scowling at his fingertip as he turned away, ‘but it can’t be helped!’

  Michelle pulled me on toward the living room, saying something about my being forgiven (I was worried about this: where had the time gone?), or someone wishing to be forgiven. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Fiona. She told me all about it.’

  ‘She did?’

  ‘Well, a dipping refractometer maybe, if you have one – we can see what’s going down here …’

  ‘She said she knows how upset you were that night and she should have been more understanding, but her own guilt feelings made her fly off the handle like that.’ Elstob’s got the word for it all right, I thought, as we stepped into the front room (he was yuk-yukking dopily behind us, helping Ginger back up on her spiky stilts, the Inspector meanwhile describing someone as a ‘spoiled weak-willed ladies’ man with a propensity for dare-deviltry and an inflated ego’ and outlining his equipment needs): all these violent displacements, this strange light, these shocked and bloodied faces – it was as though we’d all been dislodged somehow, pushed out of the frame, dropped into some kind of empty dimensionless gap like that between film cuts, between acts …

  ‘Waah! I’m getting reamed by those goddamn posts, Jim!’

  ‘It’s your big ass, Yvonne, it’s too heavy!’ Noble grunted.

  ‘It’s terrible, Bren! I can’t believe it!’

  ‘Hang on, we’ll get you braced up.’

  People stood in hushed awkward clusters, gripping drinks, cigarettes, crushed napkins, watching Yvonne get settled noisily onto the couch, or Fats and Brenda keening unabashedly over Ros’s body in the far corner, or just staring at the people drifting uneasily in and out of the room. The blood, drying, seemed to have sunk back slightly from the surface of things, giving them another dimension. Like visual echoes, hints of hidden selves. It was almost as if (footprints had trampled Ros’s outlines, disturbing the contours, laying down around them tracks of checks and arrows, a patina of graying chalkdust) the room had aged somehow … ‘She knows it was never meant as unkind – if anyone was being cruel that night, she said, she was – but under the circumstances, you know, after what had just happened, where you were coming from and all, and then with your penis moving inside her and her face, wet, on your cheek, almost like something had been skipped over, well, suddenly she—’

  ‘What in the world are you talking about, Michelle?’

  ‘You know, Fiona. She was telling me about the night you—’

  ‘Yipes!’ Yvonne yelled, jerking upward against her bindings and swatting reflexively at Jim, who, with help from Noble and the woman he was with, was trying to push an extension leaf from our dining table under her: ‘There’s slivers in that goddamn thing, Jim!’

  ‘Don’t be silly, I’m sliding it under the cushions.’

  Alison and her husband appeared in the dining room doorway: they seemed to be arguing about something, but he was smiling. The two policemen went out past them, then came in again through another door.

  ‘Well, then, something’s biting me, I – OWW!’

  ‘Aha,’ said Jim, reaching under her and pulling out a shard of broken glass, stained with blood, part of a microscope slide maybe (‘How could this be happenin’?!’ Fats was weeping, Brenda hugging him, Woody squatting beside them offering counsel, or perhaps just telling them what he knew: ‘It’s crazy!’ ‘Oh my god, Fats!’), and Yvonne shrieked: ‘Yah – is that blood mine—?!’

  ‘I don’t think so …’

  ‘Fiona said it was sort of like going from one room to the other without using the door,’ Michelle whispered, leaning on my arm (Alison was gone again), ‘but she didn’t mean to—’

  ‘Well, you’ve got it all wrong!’ I snapped angrily, turning on her (poor girl – I hadn’t even been listening), as Yvonne cried out: ‘Honest to god, Jim, I think you guys pulled a fast one on me! This isn’t my body!’

  Startled, Michelle took her hand away, and I saw my wife in the sunroom watching us, a broom in her hands like a flagpole, Louise squatting fatly in front of her with a dustpan (and yes, I was aware now that much had been done: tables and chairs had been righted, debris cleared away, plants repotted – there were even fresh bowls of peanuts and rice crackers here and there, clean cloths on some of the tables). ‘Well, I don’t know, Gerry, it’s what she said. Anyway, she’s here somewhere, you can ask her yourself.’

  ‘Fiona—? But I’m sure we didn’t—’

  ‘I never had this gray hair! And where did this fat ass come from?’

  ‘I think she came with Gottfried.’

  ‘Gottfried—?’ But, with a cautioning glance past my shoulder, she’d slipped away. I turned (‘Fats! Look! Somebody’s stolen her rings!’ Brenda cried, as Woody, suddenly interested in a bowl of black olives on a lamp table, left them, whereupon the tall cop, Bob, appeared in the doorway, one hand on his holster, his eyes asquint, lips tensed; then he relaxed and dipped out again) and kissed my wife on the cheek. She was wearing a blue-and-white apron now with red hearts for pockets, a mauve-and-crimson kerchief around her hair. ‘I was just looking for you,’ I said (‘How come all the hard parts are flopping around now and the nice soft parts have gone hard? Eh, Jim?’), and brushed at a streak of dirt near her eye. ‘Someone said you needed me …’

  ‘Oh no,’ she smiled, stooping to pick up a mashed tamale. She seemed amused, surprised even, but her voice betrayed her. She cleared her throat. ‘Louise is helping.’ As though on cue, Louise came lumbering up behind, but as I turned to thank her, she veered away, rolling off toward the back of the house (‘Hell of a surgeon you are! You left me the rotten tit and took all the rest! I’m not me anymore!’) with her dustpan and bag of garbage. My wife dropped the tamale bits in a pocket, stared at the brown smudges on her fingertips, then wiped them on her apron. ‘The upstairs toilet is stopped up.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry.’ I watched her as she untied the kerchief from around her hair and stuffed it in one of t
he red hearts in the apron, the brilliant kerchief making the heart seem dull. There was a thick smell of chili and warm chocolate. ‘I’m going to call a plumber, but right now the police are using the phone.’

  ‘Have you been into your study … since they … ?’

  ‘I had to get something off my chest, he told me! Make a clean breast of it, he says!’

  ‘No, but I heard. Poor Roger. It’s terrible.’

  ‘Now, hell, it’s the only dirty thing I got left!’

  ‘Woody said that they made people come in and confess to things in front of him. Awful things.’ Over in the glow of our carmine-shaded table lamp, Woody now offered a black olive to Patrick, Anatole slumping, hand to stomach, into the white easy chair beside them like a frail shadow. ‘The only thing harmless in this world,’ Roger had once said – we’d been speaking enviously about Dickie’s success with women, Roger had remarked gloomily that for him it would not be success but a catastrophe, and I’d said: ‘We’re not talking about affairs, Roger, emotional engagements, just harmless anonymous sex,’ and he’d burst out in dry laughter, tears in the corners of his eyes, repeating my phrase – ‘is death.’ ‘And they … they showed him the photos …’ Alison had just reappeared. She and her husband had joined Fats and Brenda at the body and were exchanging introductions, Brenda smiling and weeping at the same time, Fats rubbing his big nose, shaking his head sadly. ‘They want to … to talk to me now, Gerald. An interview, they said …’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure …’

  They all gazed down at Ros, their faces crinkling with pain at the sight. I felt my own cheeks pinching up around my nose. I was with Fats and Brenda the night they went to see Lot’s Wife: they’d both stepped forward when the audience was invited up, and Ros had welcomed them to her body like old friends, their faces smoothed out then by a kind of glazed rapture. But theater, I thought, as the four of them raised their heads almost in unison, is not a communion service. No, a communion service may be theatrical, but to perceive theater as anything other than theater (I was talking to Alison now, she was smiling eagerly up at me, her auburn hair falling back from her slender throat) is to debase it. ‘So what did Michelle have to say?’

  ‘What—?’

  My wife sighed. ‘You were talking together when I—’

  ‘Ah, yes, nothing – a dream she had …’

  ‘I might have guessed.’ She touched her brow lightly with the back of her hand and, leaning slightly on her broom as though to steer herself by it, gazed off across the room. ‘Why is it that people always tell you their dreams, Gerald?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe they think I don’t have any of my own.’ I tried to recapture the thought I’d just had about the debasement of theater, but to my annoyance I’d lost the thread. I didn’t remember much of Michelle’s dream either. ‘It was about being trapped in a movie house without exits.’

  ‘Did she have any clothes on?’

  Alison’s husband had left the room, but Dickie, Wilma, and others had joined the little group around Ros. Brenda, her jaws snapping vigorously at the gum, admired Dickie’s white vest, showed off her pants suit. Alison looked around – for me, I felt sure – but her view was blocked (there was something I wanted to tell her about this, something I’d been thinking about all night) by Jim, who was talking quietly in the middle of the room with Howard and Noble’s girlfriend. Jim rolled his sleeves down and buttoned them, lit a cigarette, glanced up at me. ‘Listen, I really am sorry – but, well, I needed a moment to myself. You understand. Alone.’ My wife hooked her free arm in mine. I wanted to tell her about Tania, about the damaged ‘Ice Maiden’ and Eileen’s premonitions, Mark’s headless soldiers, the blood on our bedsheets, what I’d found in the linen cupboard – but she seemed unusually fragile just at that moment, twisting her wedding ring on her finger as though to screw up her flagging courage, so what I said was: ‘Mark’s fine …’

  ‘Yes … He said you were playing monsters with Uncle Dolph and some silly lady who said he was little.’

  ‘Wilma, he meant.’

  ‘Was Dolph with Wilma?’

  ‘No, but …’

  ‘Peg said it wouldn’t last. I guess she was right.’ She sighed. ‘I wish they were still together.’

  ‘You mean Wilma—?’

  ‘Louise and Dolph.’

  ‘Ah.’ I had the peculiar sensation, briefly, that this conversation was both unlikely (Jim showed the tall cop the shard of glass he’d found: the officer shook his head and handed it back) and, word for word, one we’d just been having a few moments before. Of course, all conversations were encased in others, spoken and unspoken, I knew that. It was what gave them their true dimension, even as it made their referents recede. It was like something Alison had said to me about the play we were seeing that night we met – or rather, not about the play itself, but the play-within-the-play, in which the author’s characters had taken on the names of the actors playing them (‘self-consciousness reified,’ Alison had called it – or perhaps she’d been reading from the program notes: I watched her now as she scratched at something on the bare flesh of her chest between the silken halters of her dress, overseen approvingly by Dickie, Jim and the cop having parted between us like curtains) and then had improvised a sketch based on what had supposedly happened to them that day out in the so-called real world: ‘If that’s what life is, Gerald, just a hall of mirrors,’ she’d mused, blowing lightly on her cup of intermission coffee, the tender V of her chin framed in ruffles and brown velvet like an Elizabethan courtier’s, ‘then what are we doing out here in the lobby?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I said (Alison was laughing now at some remark of Dickie’s – he was pointing at his own behind – and her husband, rejoining them with drinks for Fats and Brenda, licked his fingers and smiled with them), ‘they never seemed very happy.’

  ‘Who, Yvonne and Woody?’

  ‘No …’ I realized that she had changed the subject and had just been telling me about Yvonne’s crying jag, brought on by Earl Elstob’s joke about the retired brassiere salesman who liked to keep a hand in the business (my wife said: the brassiere salesman who wanted to keep working but had already retired): ‘She couldn’t stop, it just kept pouring out, so she’d gone running upstairs to be by herself, and she’d just reached the top when Vic hit her and knocked her right back down again.’

  ‘She seems almost to be seeking out her own catastrophes,’ I said, although I wasn’t sure the line was my own. ‘Vic was upset about Sally Ann. I’m sure he meant no harm.’

  ‘That’s what you always say.’ She tipped her head against my shoulder, the broom handle cradled in the crook of her far elbow, index fingers linked. She yawned. ‘But why did he want the fork?’

  ‘Well, and Ros, too, of course.’

  ‘I feel I should know what you mean, Gerald,’ my wife said after a moment, lifting her head and unlatching her fingers to tug briefly at her bra strap, ‘but I don’t.’

  The doorbell rang and the tall officer, unsnapping his holster, bobbed out into the hall. ‘I’ll get it,’ I said, starting to disengage myself, but before I could move, a tall woman in a frilly black gown came swooping in like a huge bird, trailing feathery chiffon wisps, her hands clasped at her breast: one of Ros’s actress friends, the one who’d played the Madame in the bordello play and Nancy Cock in The Mother Goose Murders, though she’d once been an opera singer. ‘I came over just as soon as I heard!’ she cried breathlessly. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘You mean Ros? She’s—’

  ‘Good God! I’d never have recognized her!’ she gasped, staring in amazement at Yvonne on the couch. Yvonne, speechless for once and equally amazed, stared rigidly back as though into a mirror. ‘Ros! What have they done to you—?!’ She threw herself on Yvonne, who now found her voice and used it for screaming blue murder, Jim dragging the woman off and redirecting her.

  ‘NOW she’s broke the OTHER one!’

  ‘Easy, Yvonne, You’re all right …’

  ‘Waah
hh!’

  ‘Ros, love! It’s me, Regina!’ the woman wailed, pitching herself, arms outflung, through the people around the body (Fats’ face was screwing up again as though to cry, and Brenda, gum in her teeth, was grimacing) and – though she seemed frantically to be trying to arrest herself in mid-air – on down on Ros: there was a windy rattling sound and Ros’s head bounced up off the floor briefly, then hit it again, jaw sagging slackly at an angle. ‘Oh Christ, no!!’ Regina rasped, stepping on her dress and tearing it in her haste to scramble to her feet. She looked around desperately and found herself staring at Anatole, slowly going green in the white chair, lips pulling back, his eyes agog with a horror reflecting her own. Then she clutched her mouth and ran teary-eyed out of the room: ‘Nobody told me she was dead – !’ she gurgled as she passed.

  ‘My goodness! Poor Regina!’ my wife whispered, drawing closer. ‘I hope she makes it to the bathroom!’ Ros lay wide-eyed and gaping as though frozen in perpetual astonishment, truer than any she could ever have play-acted, her limbs now disjointedly akimbo, her wound thick and dark between her breasts. ‘I just like to be looked at,’ she used to say. I could hear the sweet childish lilt in her voice. ‘Do you think they’re … they’re simply going to leave her there … ?’

  ‘No, Jim has called an ambulance,’ I said, a catch in my throat. Alison, following Regina’s flight, had – as though cued by the folk music starting up softly around us – discovered me at last: the pained shock on her face gave way to a gentle sadness, and she turned to her husband and took his hand. I felt my own shoulders relax as, not unlike mockery, the stringed instruments behind me tensed and slackened. I gave my wife a little reassuring hug and said: ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be here soon.’

  ‘Sometimes I feel I hardly knew her. Ros, I mean. She seemed so obvious, there was always something so direct, so immediate about her – and yet …’

  ‘Well, maybe that’s all there was.’

  ‘How can you say that, Gerald? Even bare skin is a kind of mask …’ Dickie, never one to patronize melodrama, had, even while Regina was still clawing the air helplessly in her grim descent, left the group around the body, but they were joined now by Noble and his girlfriend. Noble, fresh drink in his hand and cigarette dangling in his thick lips, seemed almost intentionally to scuff through the chalked outlines as he wandered over, to kick at objects on the floor. ‘Don’t you remember? You told me that the night we went to see that awful incest play about Jesus and his family.’