‘Not now, Knud,’ my wife panted, letting me go and twisting round to look up at him. Her buttocks spread a bit, giving me a clearer view of Knud: he was puffy-eyed and rumpled, tie undone, shirttail out, pants damp and sticky, and he looked like he needed a shave.
‘No, listen, it was a lot longer. And really weird. Since you couldn’t be sure who anybody was, see, just to be safe you naturally had to kill everyone – right? Ha ha! you wouldn’t believe the blood and gore! And all in 3-D and full color, too, I kid you not! I kept running into people and asking them: “Where am I?” They’d say: “What a loony,” or something like that – and then I’d chop their heads off, right?’
‘Please, Knud—?’
He glanced down at my penis withering in my wife’s hand, at her buttocks flattening out in front of my face. ‘Oh, right … sorry …’ He gazed around at the living room, running his hand through his snarled hair. ‘Say, do you remember, was I wearing a watch when I came here tonight?’
‘Well …’ my wife began tentatively, raising herself up on one elbow, and I cut in: ‘I can’t remember, Knud.’
He seemed to accept that. He squinted up at the lights on the ceiling for a moment, yawning. ‘Kitty been gone long?’
‘No, you can probably catch her.’ I was beginning to feel my wife’s weight: I gave a little push and she lifted herself off my face.
‘Don’t get up,’ Knud insisted. ‘I can find my own way out.’ He stumbled away, stuffing his shirttail in. My wife, sitting up, let her hand fall idly on my hip. We could hear Knud peeing noisily in the toilet bowl. It was a lonely sound, but not so lonely as the silence all around it. ‘At least it’s working,’ my wife said. She picked up her stockings and panty girdle, toweled between her legs with them. ‘Hey, thanks,’ said Knud from the doorway. ‘See you at the next one.’
‘Flush it, please, Knud!’ my wife called, but he was already out the door. ‘Oh well.’ I curled around her from behind, hugging her close, and she patted my hip with sleepy affection. My penis nuzzled between her cheeks. It felt good there. It was something to think about. ‘Do you notice a kind of chill in here?’ she murmured sleepily.
‘Well, all the windowpanes are out,’ I said. I ran my hand along her thigh where it met the couch. ‘We could try the TV room now that Knud’s vacated it …’
She smiled, a bit wearily, then took my good hand and pulled me to my feet. I kicked off the trousers, still tangled around one foot, and, holding hands, we stepped out from under the tented drapes and linens into the glare and wreckage of what was once our living room. She drew close to me suddenly, pressing her naked hip against mine. I was feeling it, too. As though the house had not been emptying out so much as filling up. The windows, stripped bare and paneless, seemed to crowd in on us, letting the dark night at their edges leak in like some kind of deadly miasma. Hugging each other’s waists, we picked our way barefoot through the shards of broken pots and glassware, the food squashed into the carpet, the chalk outlines and bent cocktail skewers. The wall next to the dining room doorway was splattered and streaked with a mince pie someone must have thrown, and even that, innocent as it was, seemed to add to our feelings of apprehension and melancholy.
The wall above the dining room sideboard was eloquently vacant, the picture hooks sitting on it like a pair of pinned insects. Bottles lay tipped like fallen soldiers, liquor still, amazingly enough, gurgling from one of the open mouths. ‘What exactly happened to Vic?’ my wife whispered.
‘He … got shot …’
‘He makes you think of Tania’s painting, doesn’t he? The one with the eyes …’
‘Well …’
I tugged her on into the TV room. We seemed safer in here somehow. Maybe because the lights were softer (‘Our antique lamps are missing,’ she remarked quietly as though in explanation) or because the drapes were still on the windows and the furniture more or less where it ought to be. Or just the soothing blueness of the walls. I could feel my wife’s hip soften and I too seemed to walk less stiffly, my knees unlocking, my scrotum sliding back into place. Snow played on the TV screen, making a scratchy noise like a needle caught on the outer lip of a record, but I didn’t want to turn it off. It was company of sorts. ‘I’ll put a cassette on,’ I said, letting go her waist, and she sat down on the sofa to wait. ‘Don’t be long, Gerald,’ she yawned.
I couldn’t seem to find any of our old tapes, but there were plenty of new ones scattered about to choose from. ‘How about “The Ancient Arse?” ’ I proposed, reading the labels. ‘Or “Cold Show at the Ice Palace” – or here’s one: “The Garden Peers.” ’
‘I think that’s pee-ers. I’ve seen that one. I don’t want to see it again.’ Ah. I understood now. ‘Below the Stairs,’ ‘Butcherblock Blues,’ ‘Party Time,’ ‘Life’s Mysterious Currents,’ ‘The Host’s Hang-up,’ they all fell dismally into place. ‘Candid Coppers.’ ‘Some Dish.’ ‘Special Favors.’ I felt defeated even before I’d begun. There were tears in my eyes and a strange airy tingling on my exposed behind, like a ghostly remembrance of cold knuckles. I shuddered. ‘Put on “Hidden Treasure,” ’ my wife suggested, unbuttoning her blouse and jacket.
I searched through the pile of cassettes, intent on doing my best, getting through it somehow, but my appetite had faded. ‘It … it will never be the same again,’ I muttered, my throat tight.
‘Tsk. You said that last time, Gerald. After Archie and Emma and …’
‘Yes, well …’ It was true, I’d all but forgotten. ‘But Ros, Vic, Tania …’
‘Roger, Noble …’
‘Yes, that’s right, Roger …’
‘Fiona …’
‘Fiona—?’ I took off the cassette labeled ‘The Wayward Finger,’ and inserted ‘Hidden Treasure,’ rewound it to the beginning, punched the ‘Play’ button, wishing it were all so easy as that.
‘Yes, that was why Cyril was so upset.’ She was completely naked now, stretched out on the sofa, hands behind her head, eyes half-closed, scratching the bottom of her foot with one toe. ‘How do you think Peg found out?’
‘Found out what?’ I took off my shirt, folded it neatly over the back of the sofa, stalling for time. On the TV, my mother-in-law was getting Mark into his pajama bottoms. ‘That’s better,’ she was saying. Mark was holding Peedie, which now had one of Sally Ann’s patches sewn on its underside. ‘HOT TWOT,’ it said.
‘Well, she was pregnant.’
‘Peg was?’
‘No, Fiona.’ I sat down beside her and stroked her thighs, pushing into the warm place between her legs, but my heart wasn’t in it. Mark, on the television screen, was asking: ‘What’s a “twot,” Gramma?’ Behind him, his bedroom door was all smashed in. ‘That’s the whole point, Gerald. Didn’t you notice? It was very obvious.’
‘It’s a … a faraway place,’ my mother-in-law was explaining. ‘A kind of secret garden …’
‘I’m not sure I saw her all night,’ I said. Maybe it was the scar, cold and bluish in the light from the flickering TV image, that was bothering me. I looked around, spied one of her aprons hanging over the edge of the games table.
‘Is it always hot, Gramma?’
‘But you heard Peg carrying on when she left – she was telling everybody!’
‘No, it’s warm. Like a bed. Now you crawl up into yours there, young man.’
‘I guessed I missed that.’ I brought the apron over: ‘Listen, do you mind—?’
‘But then that’s why everyone was feeling so sorry for Cyril after.’ She raised her hips so I could tie the apron on. ‘Will I ever go there someday?’ Mark was asking. ‘You know, to lose them both in one night …’
‘Both—?’
‘It seems inevitable, child …’
‘Yes – my goodness, Gerald, where were you?’ I slid my hand up under the apron: yes, this was better. There was a faint stirring at last between my legs, which my mother-in-law appeared to be overseeing from the TV screen, her face marked by a kind of compassion
ate sorrow mixed with amusement. ‘Tell me a story about it, Gramma,’ Mark was pleading sleepily, as she led him to the bed. ‘You missed just about everything!’
‘About what?’ she asked.
‘You know, the Twot,’ said Mark, as my hand reached my wife’s pubis. I let my fingers scratch gently in the hair there, while my thumb slid between her thighs and curled into her vagina. ‘Well, once upon a time,’ she began, lifting Mark onto the bed, and I too lifted slightly, then let her down again. ‘You know … sometimes, Gerald …,’ she sighed, closing her hands gently over mine, ‘… it’s almost as if …’ ‘There was a young prince …’
‘… You were at a different party …’
‘Was his name Mark?’
I edged closer to my wife’s hips, my thumb working rhythmically against the ball of my index finger (‘Oh yes … good …’), and she took my wilted organ in her hand. On the television screen, my mother-in-law was tucking Mark in. ‘All right then, a young prince named Mark – but get down under the covers, or I won’t tell it.’
I pushed my thumb as deep as it would go, while at the same time stretching my fingers up her belly, her pubis thrusting at me under the apron, closing around my thumb, her own hand (my mother-in-law had already launched Prince Mark out on his ‘unique adventure,’ but Mark wanted to know: ‘Where’s his mommy and daddy? Is he a orphan?’) stroking me with a gentle but insistent cadence, slowly helping me forget what I’d seen sticking out from under the games table a moment ago when I’d reached for her apron: a foot, wrapped in a plastic bag, one toe poking out. Its nail painted. Cherry red. ‘No, he was the little boy of Beauty and the – her husband … ,’ my mother-in-law was saying, as the prospect of orgasm swelled in my mind like a numbing intuition. I gazed down at my wife, her hair unrolled now and loose about her pale shoulders, her thin lips parted, nostrils flared, and thought I could hear Ros whispering: Oh yes, lets!
Oh no …
‘… But he was a big boy now and it was time to leave home and seek his own fortune …’
I was frightened and wanted to stop (‘We are in it, Gerry, we cannot get out of it,’ I seemed to hear Vic mumble right outside the door – had he moved somehow?!), but my wife was blindly pulling me toward her, spreading her legs, the apron wrinkling up between us, and my genitals, it seemed, were quite willing to carry on without the rest of me. ‘We can only stand up to it or chicken out …’
What? Vic—?
‘Was the Beast nice now?’
‘Oh yes, yes … !’ my wife was gasping.
‘Most of the time …’
I’d let go my thumbhold on her pubic handle and, twisting my hand around, my mouth sucking at a breast now (ah, what was it I really wanted? I didn’t want to think about it …), had slid my handful of fingers down there instead, my bodily parts separating out like a houseful of drunken and unruly guests, everybody on his own. She tugged still at that most prodigious member, the host, as it were (‘He paused at the edge of the Enchanted Forest: it was dreary and dangerous and …’), pumping it harder and harder, her other hand grasping my testicles like a doorknob: she gave them a turn, opened, and, going up on my knees as though to offer my behind to the invading emptiness (‘And … dark?’ asked Mark fearfully, hugging his Peedie under the blankets), mouth still at her breast, I crossed over between her legs.
‘Yes … !’
‘Hurry, Gerald!’
‘I’m afraid, Gramma!’
There was a congestion now of fingers and organs, a kind of rubbery crowding up around the portal (‘But he was not alone,’ my mother-in-law was explaining in an encouraging voice), but then she slipped her hands out to snatch at my buttocks, yanking them fiercely toward her as though to keep them from floating away like hot-air balloons – perhaps I’d been worrying about this, I felt like I was coming apart and falling together at the same time – and as her legs jerked upward (‘little Prince Mark was protected by his faithful companion Peedie the Brave Rabbit …’), I dropped in through the ooze as though casting anchor. This, I was thinking with some excitement, and with some bewilderment as well – what is this ‘we’ when the I’s are gone? – is my wife! Under my tongue, her nipple (‘… and by his Magical Blue Shirt … ,’ her mother was saying) had sprung erect like a little mushroom stem (‘… for forfending demons …’), and I moved now – I say I, certainly something moved – across her flushed and heaving chest to suck intrepidly at the other one.
‘… And his good Fairy Godmother, who watched over him wherever he went …’
‘Oh, Gerald! You’re so … so … !’
I gripped her buttocks now, one taut flexing cheek in each hand (‘Did she look like you, Gramma?’), feeling the first distant tremors deep in the black hole of my bowels (‘A bit …’) and remembering one night at the theater when, the stage littered with fornicating couples meant to represent the Forms of Rhetoric (the sketch was called A Meeting of Minds’), she’d leaned toward me and whispered: ‘I know they want us to feel time differently here, Gerald, more like an eternal present than the usual past, present, and future, but the only moment that ever works for me is at the end when the lights go down (‘No, Peedie doesn’t die,’ her mother was saying, ‘not yet …’) and the curtains close. And I’m’ – her feet kicked up over my back, crowding her own hands away, so she reached up to clutch my neck and hair – ‘not sure I like it.’ ‘Great!’ she moaned now, her head tipping back off the edge of the sofa, her back arching, her hips convulsing, and mine too were hammering away, completely (‘Don’t worry …’) out of control – it was a kind of pelvic hilarity, a muscular hiccup (had Pardew compared this to murder?), our pubes crashing together like remote underwater collisions, as ineluctable as punchlines.
‘That’s what fairy godmothers are for …’
Only not too soon, I begged (as did my wife: ‘Wait, Gerald! Not … ooh! ah … ! yet … !’), wanting to hold on to this moment, like so many before, but her vagina seemed to have filled up like a fist and to be clinging to my penis for dear life, pumping and pumping in tight muscular spasms, and even as I was looking forward to its arrival, it was already (‘Yes—!!’ my wife cried out, her head out of sight) gone.
I lay sprawled across her breasts, my head jammed into the linty corner between the armrest and back of the sofa, trying to conceive of the idea of eternity as a single violent spasm. I couldn’t even imagine it. For that matter I couldn’t imagine much of anything. It was as though I carried my semen in my head and orgasm had sucked it hollow. Distantly, I could hear my mother-in-law describing for Mark the ‘mysterious Walled Garden’ in the middle of the Enchanted Forest, ‘where fairies play and rubies hang from bushes like berries and you never get old or lose your way,’ which might have been quite soothing had she not sounded like she was scolding. We were still linked in a soft aromatic congestion. I wanted to say, ‘I love you,’ but instead found myself saying: ‘You focus … my attention …’ ‘Oh, Gerald,’ she sighed from below, reaching up to pat my hip, ‘your sweet nothings are not always sweet … but at least …’
We slipped apart, my wife’s pelvis sliding away to the floor to join the rest of her. Mark’s grandmother was telling him about a hidden treasure in the Walled Garden, ‘guarded by a wicked and spiteful Tattooed Dragon that breathed both ice and fire.’ As I fell back, I seemed to catch her televised eye: a kind of warning … ‘And what the Prince had to do to reach the treasure,’ she went on as my wife sat up and reached for the off button (‘Sorry, mother …’), ‘was chop –’
Click.
There was a sudden dreadful silence. ‘Goodness,’ my wife murmured, looked around, ‘I almost don’t know where I am …’ Somewhere, I seemed to hear some sort of knocking sound. Like darts hitting a dartboard. ‘Do you think we should … ?’
‘No, leave it all till morning.’ I was thinking about the ice pick, that improbable object. When the officer carried it away, I was glad to see it go – I thought at the time: Free at last! But now I was not
so sure. I seemed to feel its presence again, as though it had got back in the house somehow.
She struggled to her feet, then turned to gaze down at me with a compassionate smile. She was still wearing the apron. It was the one with the candystripes. From Amsterdam. ‘I love you, Gerald.’
‘I know …’ Or Monaco.
‘You might as well stay where you are.’ Her eyes were damp, I saw, the pupils dilated, and her lips were flushed and puffy. ‘I’ll sleep on the studio couch in the sewing room.’ Perhaps I frowned at that, or looked puzzled, because she added: ‘Our bed’s filled up, I’m afraid. Mr and Mrs Elstob are evidently staying the night.’ There seemed something wrong with that, but I couldn’t remember what. ‘It will be a while before we want to use that bed again.’ She leaned over, her breasts brushing my arm, and kissed me. ‘It’s all right, Gerald,’ she whispered, resting one hand on my tummy. I seemed to hear Vic snort at that (‘Don’t shit me it’s all right!’), and I trembled, so she took her hand away. ‘Is any-thing – ?’
‘No … well … it’s like there’s an echo in here. Or …’
‘That’s probably the people out in the backyard,’ she said, rising.
‘The backyard? But what are they doing out there?’
‘Nothing. Just telling stories, as far as I could tell. You know, the usual stragglers. But don’t worry, I’ve locked up. Tomorrow …’ Her voice seemed to be receding. ‘No, wait—!’ I called, but she was already gone. Only the faintest fragrance remained and that, too, was fading. I lay there on my back, alone and frightened, remembering all too well why it was we held these parties. And would, as though compelled, hold another. At least she had turned the TV back on. Perhaps I had asked her to do this. Prince Mark was now riding through the Enchanted Forest. Or maybe this was the Walled Garden, maybe the Tattooed Dragon was dead already, quite likely. ‘’Ass usin’ yer ole gourd, Mark,’ Peedie was saying, with a loose drunken chortle. ‘I think we’re awmoss there, ole son – juss keep it up’n – yuff! huff! – don’ look back!’ ‘Look! There she is! I can see her now! She’s beautiful!’ Yes, this was the Garden, I could see her, too: she was running bouncily toward me through the lotus blossoms, radiant with joy and anticipation, her blond hair flowing behind her, eyes sparkling, arms outstretched, her soft white dress wrapping her limbs like the frailest of gauze. I felt myself awash in glowing sunshine. ‘Gerry!’ she cried, leaping across some impossible abyss, and threw her arms around me. Oh, what a hug! Oh! It felt great! I could hardly get my breath! Tears came to my eyes and I hugged her back with all my strength. But then suddenly she grabbed my testicles and seemed to want to rip them out by their roots! I screamed with pain and terror, fell writhing to the ground. ‘No, no, Ros!’ I heard someone shout. I couldn’t see who it was. I couldn’t even open my eyes. ‘That’s “Grab up the bells and ring them,” goddamn it—!’ Oh my god! Get up! I told myself. (But I couldn’t even move.) Turn it off. ‘Gee, I’m sorry …’ (But I had to!) ‘Now c’mon, let’s try that again! From the beginning!’ No! Now—!