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Robert Coover

Gerald's Party

For John Hawkes, who, standing beside me in a dream one night long ago, long before we’d become friends, and remarking upon another author’s romanticization of autumn (there seemed to be hundreds of them actually, stooped over, on the endless tree-lined streets before us), observed wistfully: ‘It’s so true, people still do that, you know, count the dead leaves. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, three, four …’

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?’