Gerald's Party

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?’

‘Thanks, Gerry! You know, you’re the only man I know who still remembers how to make these things!’

‘Ah well, the ancient arts are the true arts, my love.’

‘Like poison, he means. Take my advice and stick with the beer.’

‘More in the fridge, Dolph, help yourself. Naomi—?’

‘What? Oh yes, thank you — what is it?’

I poured, glancing across the busy room at Alison, now profiled in a wash of light cast by the hanging globes behind her — like a halo, an aura — and I knew that, crafted by love, that glow of light would be with me always, even if I should lose all the rest, this party, these friends, even Alison herself, her delicate profile, soft auburn hair (‘Ouch, Dolph! Stop that!’), the fine gold loops in her small ears –

‘Hey, golly! That’s enough!’

‘Oops, sorry, Naomi …!’

‘Steady!’ shouted Charley Trainer, charging up to lick at her dripping hand. ‘Yum!’

‘What is this, some new party game?’

‘Ha ha! Me next, Ger!’

I heard the doorbell ring, my wife’s greeting in the hall. Sounded like Fats and Brenda, but my view was blocked by the people pushing in and out of the doorway: Knud’s wife Kitty gave Dickie a hug and he ran his hands between her legs playfully, Yvonne looking wistful, her husband Woody shaking the hand of an old man who said: ‘In Babylonia, y’know, they used to drown folks for sellin’ beer too cheap — we visited the holes they dipped ’em in!’

‘Love the ascot, Gerry! Très chic! Cyril and Peg here yet?’

‘Yes, I think so. In the dining room maybe. Old-fashioned?’

‘Mine’s a stinger.’

‘Ha ha! don’t kid me!’ someone butted in, crowding up behind me.

‘I can show you pictures.’

‘Try it and see!’

Laughter rose lightly above the drone of music and chatter, then ebbed again, throbbing steadily as a heartbeat, as people pressed close, parted, came together again, their movements fluid, almost hypnotic, as though (I thought in my own inebriate and spellbound state) under some dreamy atavistic compulsion. I squeezed, myself compelled, past a group of serious whiskey drinkers hustling a painted-up redhead with pickaninny pigtails (Ginger: one of Dickie’s girls), ignoring their disappointed glances at the vermouth bottle in my hand, and made my way toward Alison (Kitty, flushed and happy, crossed left of me, just as Patrick in immaculate green passed right, someone singing ‘It’s No Wonder’ on the hi-fi), feeling the excitement of her as I drew near.

The glow, profile, it was different now, yet overlaid as though stereoscopically by the way I’d seen her just before. And by that earlier time across the dimming auditorium. We’d met a few weeks earlier in a theater lobby during intermission. Friends of friends. We’d exchanged passing reflections on the play, and Alison and I had found ourselves so intimately attuned to each other that we’d stopped short, blinked, then quickly, as though embarrassed, changed the subject. Her husband had given me his card, my wife had said something about getting up a party, I’d said I’d call. On the way back to our seats, passing down parallel aisles, Alison and I had exchanged furtive glances, and I’d been so disturbed by them that the play was over before I’d realized that I’d not seen or heard any of the rest of it: only by asking my wife her opinion of the last act did I learn how it came out. Now Alison’s glance, as I pressed up beside her at last and refilled her glass with vermouth, was not furtive at all, even though there were several other people standing around, watching us, waiting for refills of their own: she was smiling steadily up at me, her eyes (so they seemed to me just then) deep brown puddles of pure desire …

‘Somehow,’ I said pensively, holding her gaze, seeking the thought that might connect us to that heightened moment at the theater, ‘I feel as though all this has happened before …’

‘It’s an illusion, Gerald,’ she replied, her voice smooth, round, almost an embrace, my name in her mouth like a cherry. She reached into the old-fashioneds pitcher for an ice cube without taking her brown eyes off me. There was a peculiar studied balance in her stance that made me think of those girls in advertisements out on the decks of rushing yachts, topless, their bronzed breasts sparkling with sea spray, hair unfurling, legs spread wide and rigid in their tight white denims like cocked springs — though tonight in fact she was wearing a green-and-gold silk charmeuse dress of almost unbelievable softness. The peculiar thing about love, I thought, gazing deeply into those beckoning pools of hers which yet reflected my own gaze, the reflected gaze itself a reflection of that first numbingly beautiful exchange (that night at the theater she’d been wearing a Renaissance-styled suit of cinnamon panne velvet with a white ruffled blouse, the ruffles at the cuffs like foliage for the expressive flowering of her hands, her auburn hair, now loose, drawn then to her nape by an amber clasp), is that one is overwhelmed by a general sense of wanting before he knows what it is he wants — that’s why the act, though like all others, seems always strange and new, a discovery, an exploration, why one must move toward it silently, without reason, without words, feeling one’s way … ‘You know, I’ll bet you’re the sort of man,’ she said, as though having come to some sort of decision, her voice gloved in intimacy and, yes, a kind of awe (I felt this and drew closer), ‘who used to believe, once upon a time, that every cunt in the world was somehow miraculously different.’

‘Yes — ah, yes, I did!’ I glanced up from her gaze: we were alone. Our thighs were touching. ‘Hot what—?’ someone hooted behind me, and I thought, this may not turn out quite as I’d imagined after all. My wife, in the next room, pointed, her hands high above her head, at Tania’s empty glass. Tania, smiling broadly over the faces between us, held it up like a signpost. ‘Each one a … a unique adventure.’ Alison was licking the ice cube before dropping it into her glass of vermouth, and, watching her, I seemed to remember the ice wagons that used to call at my grandmother’s house, the heavy crystallized blocks that had to be chopped up (this memory was soothing), the ice chips in the truck beds, the little girl next door … ‘But I was young then …’

‘Ah, but it’s true, Gerald!’ She smiled, sucking coyly on the cube. It sparkled like a fat gem between her lips. She let it ooze out like a slow birth and drop — plunk! — into her vermouth. ‘Each one is …’

And just then Roger came through, interrupting everybody, asking if we’d seen Ros.

I understood Roger’s anxiety, I’d witnessed it many times before. Roger loved Ros hopelessly — loved her more no doubt than the rest of us loved anything in the world, if love was the word — and he was, to his despair, insanely jealous of her. He’d found her, as though in a fairy tale, in a chorus line, a pretty blonde with nice legs and breasts, a carefree artless manner, and an easy smile (yet more than that, we’d all been drawn to her, her almost succulent innocence probably, and a kind of unassuming majesty that kept you in crazy awe of her, even in intimacy — during my own moments with her, I’d found myself calling her Princess), and he’d been overwhelmed at his good fortune when she took him to bed with her the same night he met her. That there might be others who shared in his fortune, he could hardly believe; in fact, to the best of his ability, he chose not to believe it, which was the beginning of his grief. Instead, he pursued her with the relentless passion of a man with a mission, striving to fill up her nights so there’d be no room for others, begging her to marry him, and because in the end you could persuade her to do just about anything, she did. And went right on living as she always had, barely noticing she’d even changed her address. Poor Roger. She loved him of course: she loved all men. He was still in law school at the time and had difficulty finding the money for them to live on. Eager to help, she took a job as a nude model for a life-drawing class in a men’s prison, and nearly drove him mad. She’d plan a big surprise for him, take him out to dinner, joined by another man who’d pick up the bill and offer to drive Roger back to the library after. She returned to the theater, to acting, unable to stay away, and so then neither could he, doing his studying in the back rows during rehearsals, almost unable to see the texts through his tears. Backstage, of course, her thighs were pillowing cast, crew, and passing friends alike, but Roger wasn’t even aware of that — just the scripted on-stage intimacies were enough to plunge him into all the desolation he could bear.

So when he came through now with that look of rage and terror and imminent collapse on his face, breaking up conversations, shouting over the music, demanding to know if we’d seen Ros, I smiled patiently and — though in fact I couldn’t remember having seen her since the moment they’d arrived — said, ‘I think she’s in the kitchen with my wife, Roger.’

‘No, she’s not!’ he cried, turning on me. The light gleamed on his damp face almost as if he were drawing it to him. ‘I’ve just come from there!’

Some people were still dancing out in the sunroom, or conversing in remote corners, slipping off to the toilet or wherever, but most of us in here were by now watching Roger. Our relative silence made the music — oddly romantic, nostalgic (a woman was singing about mirrors and memory) — seem to grow louder. I remember Roger’s law partner Woody stepping forward as though to offer consultation, then shrugging, turning away, as a woman sighed. Parties are clocked by such moments: we all knew where we were in the night’s passing when Roger’s anguish was announced. He glanced fearfully from face to face (Dickie, leaning against a doorframe near Vic’s daughter Sally Ann, winked and cast an appraising eye on Alison beside me), then down at the floor. Roger turned pale, his eyes widening. We all looked down: there she was, sprawled face-down in the middle of the room. She must have been there all the time. ‘Ros —!!’ he gasped and fell to his knees.

Alison touched my arm, pressed closer. I could almost feel the warmth of her breath through my shirt. ‘Is she all right?’ she whispered.

I opened my mouth to speak, perhaps (as though obliged) to reassure her, but just then Roger turned Ros over. Ros’s front was bathed with blood — indeed it was still fountaining from a hole between her breasts, soaking her silvery frock, puddling the carpet. I could hardly believe my eyes. I had forgotten that blood was that red, a primary red like the red in children’s paintboxes, brilliant and alive, yet stagy, cosmetic. Her eyes were open, staring vacantly, and blood was trickling from the corners of her mouth. Roger screeched horribly, making us all jump (some cried out, perhaps I did), and threw himself down upon her, covering her bubbling wound with his own heaving breast.

Alison’s hip had slid into the hollow above my thigh, as though, having pushed past me for a moment to see, she was trying now to pull back and hide inside me. It felt good there, her hip, but I was wondering: How has it got so hot in here? Who turned up the lights? Is this one of Ros’s theatrical performances? I glanced inquiringly up at Jim.

Jim was staring down in surprise at Ros like everyone else, his thick square hand on the back of his head, his professional instincts momentarily enthralled. Roger screamed again—‘Ros! Ros, what have you done?!’ — releasing Jim from his stupor: he knelt, felt her wrists, her throat, peered under Roger at the wound, closed the girl’s eyes, concern clouding his face, actually darkening it as though (I thought) in closing Ros’s eyes, some light in the room had been put out. Alison trembled slightly and reached behind her to touch my hand: the thought had not been wholly mine (a responsive tremor made my head twitch), but hers as well. Jim looked up at me, his coarse gray hair falling down over one eyebrow. ‘She’s dead, Gerry,’ he said. ‘She seems to have been stabbed to death.’

I looked around at the shocked faces pressing in, but I couldn’t see her: she must have gone to the kitchen. Even in this crowd of friends, squeezed up against Alison, I felt alone. The house was silent except for the upbeat wail, oddly funereal, of the show tune playing on the hi-fi. Roger shrieked — ‘No! No! No!’ — and someone turned the music down. ‘What’s happening?’ Tania cried, and pushed through the jam-up in the doorway. Jim, standing now, was wiping his bloody hands with a white handkerchief. I saw that his sleeves were rolled up, yet seemed to remember him kneeling beside Ros in his suit jacket still. Memories, I realized (recalling now the sudden gasps, the muttered expletives of disbelief, the cries rushing outward from the body through the door like a wind: ‘It’s Ros! She’s been killed!’), always come before the experiences we attach them to. Comforted somehow by this insight, I brushed past Alison’s hips, bumped gently by each firm buttock, and went to the kitchen, looking for my wife.

She was at the counter, decorating a tray of cold cuts with little sprigs of fresh parsley. She wore a brown apron with purple-and-white flowers on it and held a butcher knife in her left hand. There was no blood on it, but it startled me to see it in her hand just the same. Perhaps she’d been slicing the roast beef with it. ‘Ros has been murdered,’ I said.

My wife looked up in alarm — or maybe the alarm had been there on her face before she turned it toward me. ‘Oh no! Where—?’

‘In the living room,’ I said, though I wasn’t sure that was what she’d meant by the question. I was having trouble breathing. She stared past my shoulder toward the door, her mouth open, little worry lines crossing her forehead. There were plates and glasses in the sink behind her, but the counter was wiped clean. I wondered if she wanted me to hug her reassuringly or something. But I had these things in my hands. ‘What … what do you think we ought to do?’ I asked.

With difficulty, she pulled her gaze back to me. ‘I don’t know, Gerald,’ she said softly, touching her cheek with the back of the hand holding the knife. ‘Probably we should call the police.’

‘Yes. Yes, of course,’ I said, and went back out front, thinking of my wife with a butcher knife in one hand and a bouquet of parsley in the other, and trying to remember the special telephone number for emergencies.

But Alison’s husband was using the phone. He was murmuring secretively into the mouthpiece, his head ducked, a sly grin on his thin bearded face. I tried to interrupt him, but he waved me away without even looking up, puckering his mouth as though blowing a kiss into the phone and chuckling softly. ‘Listen,’ I cried, ‘there’s been a murder!’

‘Yes, I know,’ he said coldly, putting the receiver down. ‘I’ve just called the police.’ I was troubled by the way he stared at me. It occurred to me that I knew almost nothing about him: only his name and address on a white card.

I followed him back into the living room where Roger was still carrying on pathetically over Ros’s corpse. Tania had knelt beside him and was trying to console him, draw him away from the body, but he was beyond her reach. Beyond anybody’s. He was wild with grief, looked a terror, his front now as bloody as Ros’s. His face seemed twisted, as if a putty mask were being torn away from it, and people watching him were twisting up, too. Vic’s girlfriend Eileen had apparently fainted and was lying on the gold couch. Jim was sitting by her, holding one wrist, slapping her face and her palms gently, while Dickie at the end of the couch, keeping her shoes away from his bright white pants and vest, held her legs up so the blood would flow to her head. Vic flung what was left of his drink up her nose and that brought her to with a snort, but she went on lying there, whimpering softly to herself. Vic said something about a ‘stupid cunt,’ and Jim said: ‘Take it easy, Vic. She’s had a severe shock.’

The contrast was there for everyone to see: Roger and Ros, Vic and Eileen. It seemed to bring a kind of ripeness to the room. Alison gripped her husband’s hand tightly and stared over at me as though in supplication, but what was it she wanted? I felt lost and confused, a stranger inside my own house. I did, however, remember now the special phone number for emergencies. Her husband, watching me, withdrew his hand from hers to smooth down the fine black hairs of his beard. ‘There’s nothing we can do until the police come,’ I said at last. Alison seemed helped by this: she sighed, her slender shoulders relaxing slightly, and turned to gaze compassionately across the room at Eileen on the couch. Her dark hair fluttered wispily, as though filmed in slow motion, as she turned her head, and I thought: I understand myself better because of this woman. This was true of my wife, too, of course.

Tania, still trying to comfort Roger, was now completely bespattered with blood herself. ‘Oh my god, Gerry!’ she cried, showing me her bloody dress, her dark expressive eyes full of dismay and sorrow (I felt my own eyes water: I bit down on my lip), her nostrils flaring. ‘This is terrible!’

Roger, as though in response, suddenly tilted far back, clutching his face with bloody hands, and let forth an awful howl, scaring us all, then pitched back down upon Ros’s ruptured breast, still amazingly spouting fresh blood.

Eileen at that same moment cried out. We looked up. Vic was standing over her at the couch, his legs spread, elbows out, the back of his thick neck flushed, and the way she was curled up with one arm flung over her drawn face, I had the impression Vic had just struck her. Dickie had backed away, clearly wanting no part of it. When our eyes met for a moment, I frowned in inquiry, and Dickie, tugging at the ivory-buttoned cuffs of his plaid jacket, shrugged wearily in reply. ‘No …!’ Eileen sniveled.

‘We’ve got to be patient!’ I said sharply, but no one appeared to be listening. Even Alison was distracted. Her husband was studying a Byzantine icon depicting the torture of a saint, a curious piece my wife had bought at an auction. Mr and Mrs Draper came in and began to discuss it with him. He turned away. I felt there was something I should be doing, something absolutely essential, but I couldn’t think what it might be. It didn’t matter: I’d had the same sensation many times before — just a little while ago in the kitchen, for example — and knew it for what it was: the restless paralysis that always attends any affront to habit.

Not always had I read this feeling rightly, I should say. There was the terrible night, for example, of our first son’s stillbirth. Little Gerald. I’d been by my wife’s side throughout the daylong ordeal that preceded it, holding her hand through the ferocious pain that was tearing her apart: a small fineboned woman exploding with this inner force growing increasingly alien to her as it struggled, though we did not yet suspect this, against its own strangulation, having tried, its cord twisted, to breathe too soon — oh, how I’d loved her then, loved her delicacy, her courage, her suffering, her hopes, even the fine cracks disfiguring her belly, the veins thickening in her legs, her swollen teats, fierce grimace, cries of pain. It had been Jim who had suddenly guessed the truth and rushed her into the delivery room. But too late, the child was dead. Afterward, drugged, she’d slept. ‘It’s all so unreal,’ I’d said, contemplating the wreckage of so much natural violence, ‘so unbelievable …’ Jim had given me a sedative to take and, wrapping one arm around me, said I should go home, get some rest, come back early in the morning. Leaving the hospital, then, I’d had this same feeling: that there was something important I should be doing, but I couldn’t think what. Halfway home, dreading the emptiness there, still a bit awed and frightened, I’d thought of a woman I’d been seeing occasionally during the final months of my wife’s pregnancy, and it had occurred to me that she too must be needing solace, understanding, and needing too the opportunity to be needed in this calamity, needed by me, even if only this last time (yes, it was probably the last time), and I’d supposed that this must be the important thing I had to do, that thing I couldn’t put my finger on. And so, full of sorrow and distress and compassion, I’d gone by. But I’d been wrong. She’d been shocked, disgusted even. ‘My god, have you no feelings at all?’ she’d cried, still only half-awake, her face puffy from sleep and her hair loose in front of her eyes. ‘That’s — that’s just it,’ I’d explained, tried to, love (I’d supposed it was love, for someone) thickening my tongue. ‘I need someone to talk to and I thought—’ ‘Christ, Gerry, go find a goddamn shrink!’ she’d shot back, and slammed the door. I’d gone on home, feeling sick with myself (what kind of filth are we made of, I’d wondered miserably, nauseated by my own flesh, its dumb brutalizing appetites and arrogant confusions), and had found my mother-in-law waiting for me there: she’d come to help with the new baby and she was all smiles. It was like a strange nightmare memory: my mother-in-law smiling …

I looked up from Ros’s corpse and saw Jim’s wife, Mavis, standing there like something hung from a hanger, locked in a helpless stupor, her soft red mouth agape, her eyes puffy and staring. I knew how she felt: Ros was like her own daughter, or so she often said. Jim was clearly shaken, too, but had the defenses of his profession: right now, playing the family doctor, he was counseling Vic’s daughter Sally Ann. Sally Ann wore, as usual, a white shirt open down the front and knotted at the waist, and tight faded blue jeans with a heart-shaped patch sewn over her anus that said, ‘KISS ME.’ She’d painted her eyes and lashes to appear grown-up, but had only made herself look more a child. Earlier, Dickie had been moving in on her, but now she was alone with Jim. Maybe they were talking about her father: Vic was sitting heavily on the couch, his large shaggy head in his hands, Eileen stretched out limply behind him, looking less alive than Ros. Jim smiled gently and Sally Ann sighed petulantly and looked away. Tania’s nephew Anatole was hovering furtively at the outer edge of their conversation, a look on his tense angular face that seemed to say: I told you this would happen! But then, he always had that kind of look on his face.

His aunt, still on the floor beside Roger and the body, had sunk back on her heels, her half-lens spectacles dangling on a chain around her neck, her celebrated vitality utterly drained away. The crowd of people around her watched as she rubbed her eyes with the tips of her long bloodstained fingers, pressed her lips together, and looked up at Mavis beside her. Mavis seemed to be trying to speak. She slumped there over Tania, staring bleakly, working her soft mouth fitfully around some difficult word, her squat pillowy body otherwise lifeless. Anatole, noticing this, tugged at Jim’s arm, but Jim was still reasoning patiently with Sally Ann and appeared not to notice. Patrick, taking a seeming interest in Jim’s counsel, had joined them, sidling close to Anatole, a tumbler of vodka and grapefruit juice — Patrick’s famous ‘salty bitch’ — in one hand, French cigarette in the other. Sally Ann glanced over at me suddenly, her eyes flashing, then stamped her foot and left the room. Beyond them, I could see Alison, alone, her head down: was she crying? ‘Who …?’ Mavis finally managed to blurt out, and the other conversations in the room died away. Jim looked toward his wife at last, then away again, focusing on the doorway leading in from the hall. Someone in red moved past it. ‘Wh-who …?’ It was the question, I knew, that had been quietly worming through us all. Patrick took a nervous puff on the cigarette held like a dart between the tips of his fingers, watching Mavis now over Anatole’s shoulder. Dolph came in with a can of beer in his hand and popped it open. Jim was talking with Mr and Mrs Draper, nodding his head in agreement as Mr Draper gesticulated broadly. I had the feeling he was describing some kind of pyramid or temple. Mavis’s plump white arms hung limply at her sides, palms out. She lifted her head slowly and we waited for her question. I felt people crowding up behind me like mustered troops. Or a theatrical chorus. Somebody was chewing potato chips in my ear. Vic stood up. ‘Who—?’

The front doorbell rang.

‘Ah! they’re here!’ I exclaimed, and went to answer it, greatly relieved. The thick clusters of guests parted, murmuring, as I passed through. I could hear Roger moaning behind me, Tania speaking gently with Mavis. Old Mr Draper stepped forward and clutched my forearm with his gnarled white hand, surprisingly powerful. He tipped his head back to peer down his lumpy nose at me and said: ‘There’s someone at the door, son!’

‘I know …’

There were people filling up the hallway, too, watching expectantly. I’d forgotten we’d asked so many. I could see my wife trying to squeeze in from the dining room, wiping her hands on the bib of her flowered apron. ‘Can you get it, Gerald?’ she pleaded from the back of the hall.

‘Yes,’ I called over the heads between us as the bell rang again. ‘Don’t worry, it’s all right!’

Dickie, stepping out of the downstairs toilet, still zipping up, seemed incongruously amused by this exchange. The tank refilled noisily behind him. He glanced up at Vic’s daughter Sally Ann, staring down at me from the staircase landing over his head, her tanned belly pressed against the balustrade. ‘Hey,’ he grinned, fingering the buttons on his white vest, ‘it’s free now.’

‘Never mind,’ she snapped and continued up the stairs, switching her fanny huffily.

My wife backed away toward the dining room, looking momentarily defeated, lost in the crowd. Mrs Draper, standing near me, touched my sleeve and said: ‘She’s so pale, the poor dear. She needs a little sunshine.’ The Drapers, complete strangers to me, had been belaboring everyone all night with tales of their retirement-age tourist travels, such a tonic, they’d said, and I’d found myself wondering earlier if my party might be part of some package tour they’d bought. But it was true, we hadn’t had a holiday in years …

The bell rang a third time and I reached hastily for the doorknob, only to discover I was still carrying the bottle of vermouth and pitcher of old-fashioneds. I looked around for some place to set them down, but the door opened and a tall moustachioed man in a checked overcoat and gray fedora entered, followed by two uniformed policemen. ‘May we come in?’ he asked politely, but more as a statement of fact than a question: he was already in.

‘Of course. I’m sorry, I was just—’

‘Inspector Pardew,’ he explained with a slight nod of his head. ‘Homicide.’ He removed his gloves carefully, finger by finger, tucked them in his pockets, unbuttoned his overcoat. The two officers watched us impassively, but not impolitely. They were armed but their weapons were holstered and the holsters fastened. The taller one carried photographic equipment and what looked like a paintbox, cables and cords looped over his narrow shoulders; the short one had a toolkit and a tripod. ‘Now, I understand there has been a murder …’

‘Yes, a girl—’

‘Ah.’ He slipped out of his overcoat, reached for his fedora, gazing thoughtfully at Dickie’s girl Ginger, who had just, as though prodded from behind, stepped up beside me. ‘Of course …’

Ginger, under his steady gaze, kept shifting her weight nervously from foot to foot, fumbling at my elbow to keep her balance. Her long lashes seemed almost to click metallically when she blinked them and her pickaninny-style pigtails quivered like little red Martian antennae.

Inspector Pardew handed his coat and hat to me, but, glancing away from Ginger, saw that my hands were full. This caused him to frown briefly and study my face. There was something incisive and probing about every move he made, and his gaze chilled and reassured me at the same time. I tried to explain: ‘I was serving drinks. I–I’m the host and I—’ But he stopped me with an impatient flick of his hand, a disinterested smile. He folded his coat on the seat of a hall chair, placed his fedora on top of it, smoothed down the few hairs he had left on the top of his head, and, still wearing his white silk scarf, strode on into the living room, his thumbs hooked in his vest pockets.

The hallway emptied out as the others, rapt, curious, followed him in, some circling through the dining room to get there ahead of the rest. Ginger, made awkward by her own self-consciousness, picked out her steps behind the others as though negotiating a minefield. Or maybe it was just the exaggerated height of her glittering red stiletto heels that made her walk that way. The two police officers paused in the doorway to watch her go. It was hard not to watch. She wore an alarmingly eccentric costume which seemed to be hand-sewn from printed kerchiefs of Oriental design, intricately multicolored but primarily in tones of mauve, crimson, emerald, and gold. They were stretched tight in some places, hung loose and gaping in others. Sort of like Ginger herself. Dickie called her a walking paradox: ‘More cunt inside than body out, Ger. Fucking her’s like pulling a prick on over your condom.’ I watched, too (‘What’s within’s without,’ as Tania would say, ‘without within …’), but when I looked back at the policemen, a faint smile on my face, it was me they were staring at. Nothing malevolent about their stare, but something was clearly bothering them. They bulked large and alien in the living room doorway, their brass buttons and leather straps stranger to me than Ginger’s kerchiefs, their noses twitching, and, though nothing was said, it felt like an interrogation. I found myself running over the night’s events in my mind as though hunting for dangerous gaps in the story (but it was the gaps I seemed to remember, the events having faded), my smile stiffening on my face. It was like crossing a border: what might they look for? what might they find?

But then Roger started bellowing wildly again and, touching their hands to their holsters, they whirled around and, in a crouch, the tall one bobbing on a leg that seemed shorter than the other, left me.

I released a long wheezing sigh, aware that I’d been holding my breath for some time. My arms ached with the weight of the bottle and pitcher, and I could feel sweat in my armpits and on my upper lip. Tania’s husband Howard came down the stairs behind me. ‘What’s going on, Gerald?’ he asked softly, looking a little flushed, his hand at the knot of his red silk tie.

‘Ros has been murdered,’ I said. I felt like I’d just been the victim of something. Or might have been.

‘Is that so …!’

I went into the dining room to leave the vermouth and old-fashioneds on the sideboard with the rest of the drinks. I noticed that all the ice in the pitcher of old-fashioneds had melted and, recalling Alison licking the ice cube, shuddered at the world’s ephemerality. I looked at my hands as if to see time falling through them like water. My wife came in with the cold cuts. ‘Can you move that empty tray, Gerald?’ she said.

‘It was the police,’ I told her, my voice catching in my throat. ‘They’re in looking at Ros now.’

She nodded. She seemed paler than usual and her hands were taut, the blue veins showing. I thought of her stubborn taciturn mother upstairs and wondered whether my wife, drifting prematurely into sullen stoicism, was a victim of her genes, her mother, or of me. I took the empty tray away and she set the cold cuts down, cautiously, as though afraid they might leap from her hands. There were four different kinds of cold cuts, laid out in perfect rows, lapped like roof tiles and spaced with parsley and sliced tomatoes. Perhaps I should find someone to be with her. ‘Don’t bother Mother just yet,’ she said, as though reading my mind. ‘There’s no need to upset her, and there’s nothing she can do.’

‘No,’ I agreed. It felt like a recitation, and I remembered something my grandmother, a religious woman, had once said about freedom. ‘Besides, Mark’s just getting settled down and …’

She nodded again, leaning over the cold cuts as though studying a dummy hand in bridge, her slender nape under the tightly rolled hair (free to do what we must, my child, she’d said with her sweet clenched smile, free to do what we must) sliced by the thin pallor of the fluorescent light from the kitchen behind her. ‘You’d better go back in there, Gerald,’ she said without looking up. ‘You might be needed.’

Once, somewhere, long ago, I recalled, her nape had shone that way from the light of the moon: was it on the Riviera? during a transatlantic cruise? The memory, what was left of it, saddened me. It’s not enough, I thought, as I left her there — it’s beautiful, but it’s just not enough.

On the way back in, I passed Vic coming out. He looked terrible, his large-boned face ashen and collapsed, thick hair snarled, eyes damp, movements clumsy, his blue workshirt sweaty. ‘You already out?’ he asked sourly, poking an empty whiskey bottle at me. I pointed toward the sideboard, clustered round now with other guests (through the door into the TV room I could see Dickie arguing with Charley Trainer’s wife Janny: ‘Me? You’re crazy!’ he shouted — she was biting her little pink lip and there were tears starting in the corners of her mascaraed eyes, but she continued to stare straight at him), and again found myself with something in my hand, this time the empty tray. I seem to be having trouble letting go of things tonight, I said to myself (to Vic I said, ‘Down below, on the left …’), and set the tray down behind the antique prie-dieu. ‘What a fucking mess,’ Vic grumbled, and gave the doorjamb a glancing blow as he bulled through. I didn’t think he was drunk: it was still early and Vic could hold his liquor. It was more like some final exasperation.

In the living room, Inspector Pardew, ringed round by a crowd of gaping faces, was crouching beside Ros’s body, examining the wound, while the two officers, their criminalistic gear beside them, held Roger up a few feet away. Roger was apparently in a state of shock, eyes crossed, head lolling idiotically on his bloodstained chest, legs sagging outward at the knees like an unstrung puppet’s. One side of him hung lower than the other, due to the mismatched sizes of the two policemen supporting him, adding to the poignancy of his grief. Tania, who was now kneeling by Mavis, watched Roger with concern. Mavis was sitting lotuslike in the spot where before she’d been standing, her legs apparently having ceased to hold her up. She stared dull-eyed at Ros’s corpse, but seemed to be gazing far beyond it. It was as though, in her quiet matronly way, she had guessed something that none of the rest of us had become aware of yet, and the knowledge, as visions have been known to do, had struck her dumb. Ros’s wound had at last stopped flowing, but the blood seemed almost to be spreading on its own: through the carpet under Mavis’s bottom to Roger’s feet, up the shoes and uniforms of the two policemen, down Tania’s front and Kitty’s knees, even turning up on Jim’s white shirt, Michelle’s cheek, the Inspector’s drooping moustache.

‘Ah!’ the Inspector exclaimed now. ‘What’s this—?!’

He asked for a pair of tweezers and the women scrambled about, looking for their handbags. Naomi, another of Dickie’s entourage, a bigboned girl over six feet tall with naturally flushed cheeks and long blond hair clasped at the nape, lurched forward impulsively and emptied out her shoulderbag all over the floor: compacts, cigarettes, lipstick, earrings and bracelets and spare hairclasps, postcards, safety pins, a handkerchief, combs and coins, birth-control pills, antacids, ticket stubs, zippers and buttons, a driver’s license, body and hair sprays, maps, matches, tampons and timetables, thread, newspaper clippings, breath sweeteners, photographs, chewing gum, a ladies’ switchblade, addresses, tranquillizers, credit cards, hormone cream, shopping lists, a toothbrush, candy bars, a dog-eared valentine, flashlight, vial of petroleum jelly, sunglasses, paper panties, and little balls of hair and dust all tumbled out — even a tube of athlete’s foot ointment, a half-completed peckersweater, one knitting needle, and one of my Mexican ashtrays — but no tweezers. ‘I’m just sure I had some,’ she insisted, scratching around at the bottom of her bag, turning it upside down and shaking it. My wife, I knew, kept a pair in the upstairs bathroom, and I wondered if I should go get them. ‘I have a fingernail file,’ offered Mrs Draper. Tania stood with a grunt, putting her spectacles on and fishing through her pockets, but then Patrick produced a silver pair from his keyholder.

The Inspector studied Patrick skeptically a moment, squinted down his nose at the tweezers, then with a shrug bent over the body once more, his white scarf falling over Ros’s breasts like theater curtains. Jim knelt beside him, observing critically. Working with meticulous care, the Inspector extracted what looked like a bloody hair, or a thread maybe, from Ros’s wound. He held it up to the light a moment, then sandwiched it carefully between two glass slides he’d been carrying in his pocket. Watching him, I had a sudden recollection of my biology teacher in high school, fastidiously tugging on a pair of transparent gloves, finger by finger, before dissecting for us the fetus of a pig. The gloves, I remembered, had made his hands look as wet and translucent as the pickled fetus, and when he’d had them on, what he’d said was, ‘All right, boys and girls, ready for our little party?’

Dickie came in, but without Janice, and stepped up beside me, toothpick in his teeth, hands stuffed in the pockets of his crisp white pants. He looked harassed, chewing fiercely on his pick. It was ironic to see him so unsettled by a person as simple as Janice Trainer — even Chooch, her husband, liked to say that under all that makeup there was nothing but a doublejointed flytrap on a broomstick, and most people supposed he was being generous. ‘Hey, Ger, what the hell’s going on?’ he whispered around the toothpick.

‘Pardew is examining the body.’

‘No, I mean, what’s Naomi doing down there on her hands and knees with her shit all over the floor?’

‘Sshh!’ Howard admonished. Others were glaring.

Indeed it had become very quiet. The Inspector, bending closely, was probing the wound again with Patrick’s tweezers (Patrick, flushing, winced, his teeth showing), and there was an attentive stillness, almost breathless, in the room. Jim stood with a frown on his square face, troubled about something. Is the hole the empty part in the middle, Daddy, Mark once asked me, or the hard part all around? I didn’t know the answer then and I didn’t know it now. Distantly, I could hear the thuck of darts hitting the dart board down in the rec room. Almost like the ticking of a slow clock. The chopping of ice. The bib of Ros’s bloodstained frock was in the Inspector’s way: he pulled part of it aside and one white breast slid free.

Whereupon Roger started screaming wildly again, shattering the silence and making us all jump. Patrick squeaked and dropped his drink, Mavis groaned, and Tania cried, ‘Oh my god!’ sinking to her knees again.

Roger, eyes starting as though to fly from their sockets, struggled desperately to reach Ros’s body, the two police officers hanging on, grappling for balance and handholds, their veins popping. ‘Kee-rist!’ hissed Dickie between his teeth, and Naomi, picking up her things, dropped them again. One of the officers lost his hat and the other stumbled once to his knees, but they managed to subdue Roger and pin him back against a wall. ‘Easy now, fella, easy!’ gasped the shorter one, pressing his knee into Roger’s bloodsoaked groin, then, glancing at me over his shoulder, he shook his head as though sharing something privately with me and blew his cheeks out.

Inspector Pardew, absorbed in his examination, noticed little of it. Using the glass slides as a makeshift magnifying glass, he peered closely at the wound, poking and probing, muttering enigmatically from time to time. He picked Ros’s breast up once by the nipple to peer under and around it, but he seemed disinterested in the breast itself — if anything, it was an obstacle to him. I couldn’t get my eyes off it. Ros was famous for her breasts, and seeing the exposed one there now, so soft and vulnerable, its shrunken nipple looking like a soft pierced bruise, pecked fruit, I felt the sorrow I’d been holding back rise like hard rubber in my throat. I glanced up and found Alison watching me, tears running down her cheeks. She smiled faintly, and it was a smile so full of love and understanding that for a moment I could see nothing else in the room, not even Roger in his despair or poor, drained Ros, such that when I heard the Inspector ask, shouting over Roger, ‘How long ago did this happen?’ I realized that it was at least the second time he had asked it and that he was looking straight at me.

‘I–I can’t remember,’ I stammered hoarsely. I looked at my watch but I couldn’t see the dial.

‘Here, use mine,’ said Dickie.

‘Wait a minute—!’ barked Pardew, rising.

Dickie smiled, shrugged, took his watch back. I rubbed at my eyes: there were tears in them.

‘Hey! Where’s Sally Ann?’ shouted Vic, blundering in. He seemed to be asking Eileen, who was sitting up now, face buried in her hands, looking distraught, and I was invaded by the same feeling I’d had earlier with Alison: that all this had happened before. But then it went away as Sally Ann appeared in the doorway and said: ‘What do you want, Dad?’ I glanced across the room at Alison, still watching me, damp-eyed and gently smiling, looking almost fragile now in her soft satiny dress with its slashed sleeves, its frail silken folds. She touched the glass of vermouth to her lips. No, I thought, as Vic grunted ambiguously and shoved his way out of the room again, I hadn’t really had that feeling with Alison before. I’d only wished to.

‘The time,’ the Inspector was insisting. ‘This is important—!’

‘How long,’ I asked, turning to him, not really thinking about what I was saying, my mind on an earlier Alison, playful and mischievous, now nearly as remote to me as that girl from Italy (and I recalled now from that night, as though my memory were being palpated, the splatter of a pot on a cobbled street, a wail, something about gypsies in another country, and the way the girl’s pubic hair branched apart like brown bunny ears: discoveries like that were important then), ‘does it take ice to melt in a pitcher?’

‘Ice?’ exclaimed the Inspector, genuinely astonished.

‘I’m sorry. What I mean is—’

‘Ice—?!’

‘When you came in,’ I tried to explain, ‘I was—’

‘Ah yes,’ interrupted the Inspector, ‘so you were.’ He drew a large Dutch billiard pipe and tobacco pouch from his pockets. Roger’s ravings had subsided to a soft whimper, and he’d sagged lopsidedly into the arms of the policemen once more. The tall one stared at me coldly, leaning on his short leg, a dark line of sweat staining the collar of his shirt. The short one had unbuttoned his blue coat, and his shirtfront, stretched over his bulging low-slung belly, was soaked with blood. He nodded me back to the Inspector, who asked: ‘I wonder … has the murder weapon been found?’

‘No,’ I replied. He peered at me closely, one finger in the bowl of his pipe like an accusation. Inexplicably, I felt my face reddening. ‘We left her exactly—’

‘Yes, yes, I’m sure.’ He lifted his gaze to the ceiling as though studying something there, and involuntarily, the rest of us looked up as well. Nothing to see: a plain white ceiling, overlapping circles of light cast on it by the various lamps in the room. In some odd way, in its blankness, it seemed to be looking down on us, dwarfing us. I wondered, staring at it, if Alison might not be thinking the same thing — or, knowing I’d be having such thoughts, refuting me: there is no audience, Gerald, that’s what makes it so sad. Hadn’t I said much the same thing the night we met: that the principal invention of playwrights was not plays or actors but audiences? ‘Curious …,’ mused the Inspector. He was gazing down at Ros again. As though directed, so then did we. Her breast was covered by the frock once more, but now her legs seemed farther apart, the silvery skirt riding halfway up her stockinged thighs, and she had some kind of apparatus stuck in her mouth. An X-ray unit maybe. ‘You’d think a girl like her …’ He paused thoughtfully, zipping up the tobacco pouch. What had he meant? There was a heavy stillness in the room, broken only by Roger’s muffled sob, a low hum (the hi-fi? or that thing in Ros’s mouth?), and the labored breathing of the two police officers. Inspector Pardew sighed as though in regret, then looked up at me: ‘But excuse me, you were speaking of an ice pick, I believe …’

I started. ‘No … ice!’ It was a cheap trick. Not to say a complete absurdity. And yet (I was finding it hard to catch my breath), hadn’t I just been …? ‘There — there was ice in the pitcher I was carrying when you—’

‘Of course.’ He smiled, making an arch pretense of believing me. He tamped the tobacco into the bowl of his pipe, returned the pouch to his pocket, withdrew a lighter. ‘So you’ve said …’

‘You think she might have been killed with an ice pick, do you?’ I shot back, though I felt I was blustering, inventing somehow my own predicament. Where did all this come from?

‘I don’t know,’ he replied, tucking the pipe in his mouth, watching me closely. Behind him, Jim was shaking his head at me. Most of the others simply looked amazed. Or distracted. ‘Do you?’

‘We — we don’t even have an ice pick, Inspector,’ I replied. This seemed more sensible, but I still felt like I had lost my place somehow. ‘Our refrigerator has an automatic unit which—’

‘One moment!’ cried Pardew, his attention drawn suddenly to something at the other side of the room. ‘Unless I am very much mistaken, we shall find what we are looking for in that white chair over there!’ Pocketing his unlit pipe, he strode over to it, guests parting to form a corridor. We all saw it now: something glinting just behind the cushion at the back, red stains on the creamy velvet. ‘Aha!’ he exclaimed as he lifted the cushion. I half-expected him to produce an ice pick from under it, absurd as that seemed, but there was only a knife. I recognized it: it was my wife’s butcher knife. Just as I’d seen it in the kitchen. ‘It’s been wiped clean, I see,’ he observed, picking it up with a handkerchief from his trousers pocket. ‘But there are streaks on it still of something like blood …!’

Distantly, in another room, half-lost in shadows, I saw my wife, slipping back toward the kitchen again. She was gazing tenderly at me over the heads of our guests, through the bluish haze of cigarette smoke and what seemed almost like steam (I wiped my brow with a shirtsleeve), looking more serene than I’d seen her for months. Yet pained, too, and a bit forlorn. Love is not an art, Gerald, she had once shouted at me in rare anger but common misunderstanding: It is a desperate compulsion! Like death throes! ‘What? What did you say?’ I asked.

The Inspector was holding the knife up in front of my face. The handkerchief in which he cradled it was wrinkled and discolored, clotted with dried and drying mucus. ‘I said, do you recognize it?’

‘Yes, it’s ours.’ I looked up into his penetrating gaze. ‘It’s from our kitchen.’

‘I see … and who would have access—?’

‘Anybody. It hangs on a wall by the oven.’

‘Hmmm.’ He stared down at the knife, lips pursed, twisting one end of his moustache meditatively — then he arched his brows and, handing the knife to Anatole, blew his nose in the handkerchief. Anatole studied the knife skeptically, weighed it in his palm, tightened his fingers around the handle, tested the cutting edge with his thumb, and then, while the Inspector stared absently into his filthy handkerchief, passed it on to Patrick, crowding in at his elbow. Patrick jumped. Someone said: ‘Is that it?’ Patrick, panicking, held it at arm’s length between thumb and forefinger as though it might contaminate him. He pushed it toward the distracted Inspector, back at Anatole who shrugged it off, then thrust it at Dickie. Laughing, Dickie tossed it up in the air, caught it by the handle, wiped the blade on the seat of Patrick’s green trousers (‘Naughty boy!’ squeaked Patrick, twisting about, trying to see over his hip where Dickie had wiped), and handed it on to Charley Trainer, who had just come in with his wife, Janice, she still looking a bit weepy. Charley said: ‘What is it, huh, some kinda joke?’

And so it went around the room, passing from hand to hand as though seeking recognition, approval, community, and, as I watched, it suddenly and finally came home to me: Ros, our own inimitable Ros, was dead. All those breathless hugs: gone forever. And now everything was different. Fundamentally different. I felt as though I were witnessing the hardening of time. And the world, ruptured by it, turning to jelly.

‘Tell me,’ said Inspector Pardew, looking up from his handkerchief, ‘is your wife here?’

‘Yes, of course, in the kitchen — but she had nothing to do with this!’

‘Who said she did?’ asked the Inspector, eyeing me narrowly. He stuffed the wad of yellowed handkerchief back in his pocket. The knife was still moving like a message around the room. It reached Tania on the floor, who explored it dreamily with both hands, her eyes closed. ‘All the same, we’d better interview her,’ said the Inspector to his assistants, nodding toward the back of the house.

‘Yessir,’ said the shorter one, as the Inspector set up a tripod, unwrapped some film. ‘Can you handle him, Bob?’

The tall one, Bob, nodded grimly and gave an extra twist on Roger’s arm, but just then Tania opened her eyes, lifted her spectacles onto her nose, and, frowning curiously at the knife in her hands, leaned over and touched its tip to Ros’s wound. ‘WrraAARGHH!’ screamed Roger and broke free.

‘Oh no—!’

‘Stop him!’ somebody shouted.

The two policemen managed to cut him off from the body, but they were unable to lay hold of him. He lurched violently about the room in a wild whinnying flight, blind to all obstacles, slapping up against walls and furniture, tangling himself in curtains, leaving not mere fingerprints behind but whole body blotches, and howling insanely as he went. People tried to duck out of his way, but he slammed into them just the same, knocking them off their feet, sloshing them with Ros’s blood, making them yell and shriek and lash out in terror. I saw Mavis tip backward on her round bottom, her thick white legs looping gracefully over her head like surfacing porpoises. Some guy behind her crashed into the fireplace in a cloud of dust and ashes, still holding his drink aloft, big Louise slipped on Ros’s blood, Howard hit the wall like a beanbag, spectacles flying. Roger was a man possessed. The police chased him, stumbling through the wreckage, knocking down what Roger missed, but there was no catching him. Glasses were spilling and smashing, tables tipping, potted plants splattering like little bombs, lamps whirling, camera gear flying like shrapnel; someone screamed: ‘Get down! Get down!’ I was glad my wife was well out of it, but I was afraid for Alison. She was standing in the middle of the uproar as though chained there, her eyes locked on mine, the tears drying on her cheeks, her smile fading. And then I couldn’t see her anymore as Roger pitched suddenly toward Ros again, tripped over Tania ducking the wrong way, and fell upon Naomi, who was trying desperately in the confusion to get everything back in her bag again. Naomi squealed as she sprawled under his weight and all her stuff went flying again. Before the police could reach him, Roger was back on his feet, half-galloping, half-flying through a flurry of paper and toilet gear, plowing into Patrick, caroming off big Chooch Trainer, whose eyes popped and crossed at the force of the blow, and sending Woody and Yvonne, who’d just come in with fresh drinks in their hands, scrambling back through the door again on their hands and knees.

‘Hey, listen, Ger, do me a favor,’ whispered Dickie in my ear as we watched all this (Anatole and Janice were just being knocked over like toy soldiers, Anatole’s black jacket and Janny’s pink skirt billowing behind their fall like lowering flags), ‘tell that silly slit to get off my case, will you?’

I looked up at him (the short officer was clomping about furiously, his foot caught in the toolbox), standing tall and trim in his white vest and trousers, dark plaid sports jacket, blue tie, his blond hair swept back with care, a cool half-smile on his lips, yet a kind of loose panic in his eyes. ‘Who, you mean—?’ And just then Roger hit me. I felt the blood spray up my nose like wet rust and I crumpled to the floor under a creature moist and cold as a slug, but with roaring breath and flailing crablike limbs, and massive with its own furious but mindless energy. It was some kind of monster I was grappling with, not Roger, and the sheer bloody reality of it terrified me. Maybe I was even screaming. I saw the police grab at him, but he leaped away, kneeing me in the stomach, and they fell on me instead. The short cop’s hat had slipped down over his eyes, and in his blindness he seized my wrist, threw me over onto my face, and twisted my arm up to my neck, nearly breaking it. ‘Hey!’ I cried, and something cold and hard knocked up behind my ear.

‘Hold it, Fred!’ gasped the other one. ‘It’s the host!’

‘Wha—?’ The officer on top of me, snorting and blowing, leaned toward my face, pushing his hat up with the barrel of his pistol. ‘Whoof — sorry, fe — fah! — fellah!’ he wheezed, letting go my arm. His face was smeared with blood and sweat like warpaint and his shirtfront had popped its buttons, his blood-red belly pushing out in front of him like a grisly shield. He holstered the gun he had pressed to my head. ‘I thought it was the—poo! — bereaved!’

Roger had got as far as Inspector Pardew, who was holding him calmly away from Ros’s body with one hand, while brushing irritably at the specks of blood on his white scarf and three-piece suit with the other, muttering something about ‘a stupid waste of energy.’ He frowned impatiently at the two policemen and, abashed, they got off me and (the short cop kicked the toolkit off his foot, there was a clatter of wrenches, glass cutters, and hammers, Kitty exclaiming: ‘Knud will never believe this!’) took hold of Roger, dragging him away, still screaming, into the next room. I sat up, massaged my twisted arm. My head was ringing, and there was a sullen pain deep in my stomach where Roger had kneed me. The others were picking themselves up, mumbling, coughing (Janny, snuffling, said: ‘Where’s my shoe?’), surveying the damage.

‘Jesus! Remind me not to ask you any more favors!’ groaned Dickie in my ear. ‘That one fucking near killed me!’

He sat beside me, wiping his face with his shirttail, his bright white vest and trousers peppered with blood as though riddled with punctures. His redheaded girlfriend Ginger, who had somehow kept her feet through it all, now fell down. I saw Alison in a corner, straightening her tights under the softly drawn folds of her skirt. Her husband seemed not to be around, had apparently missed it all. Had I seen him stroll disdainfully out when Roger launched forth? Or perhaps he’d gone before. Alison looked so vulnerable. I wanted to touch her, be touched, and just thinking about that eased the pain some. ‘She sure has a sweet ass on her,’ acknowledged Dickie, following my gaze. ‘Tight and soft at the same time, like bandaged fists.’ As though to model it for us, Alison turned her back and smoothed her silk skirt down. I sighed. Between us, in debris and rubble, Ros lay like a somber interdict. ‘Reminds me of a dancer I used to know who could pull corks with hers. Who is she anyhow, Ger?’

‘People we met,’ I said noncommittally. Dickie had energy, but no subtlety. He was like an artisan who had the craft, but no serious ideas, and what he didn’t finish, he often spoiled. ‘What do you think’s the matter with Naomi?’ I asked.

We watched her, looking utterly stricken, go hobbling out of the room taking little baby steps, clutching her skirts tight around her knees, her shoulderbag spilled out behind her. ‘Christ,’ Dickie muttered, struggling to his feet, ‘she must’ve shit her pants!’ And he followed her out.

Across the room, near the fireplace, Tania’s husband, Howard, held his spectacles up for me to see: both lenses cracked. Like everyone else, he was splattered all over with blood, making him look like his red tie had sprung a leak. The indignant expression on his flushed face seemed to suggest that he blamed me for the broken lenses.

‘Now then, one thing I don’t understand,’ insisted Inspector Pardew calmly, one hand at the knot of his tie as though to draw himself erect: ‘Why did you speak of an ice pick?’

‘Not an ice pick,’ I replied wearily, looking up at him from the floor. ‘Ice.’ Even as I spoke, my words seemed, like the punchline to one of Charley Trainer’s shaggy dog stories, stupid, yet compulsory. Something Tania had once said about art as the concretizing of memory lurked like a kind of nuisance (we’d been talking about her ‘Ice Maiden’ and the paradoxes of the ‘real’) at the back of my mind, back where it was still throbbing from the revolver’s knock on the skull. I hoped both would go away at the same time. The knife was nowhere to be seen, though it could have been anywhere amid all that wreckage. ‘I was trying to get at the time, working backward …’

‘Gerald was serving drinks,’ Alison said, coming over through the clutter to stand above me. Her voice was clear and musical, and it mellowed somewhat the Inspector’s expression. She let her hand fall softly into my hair, her silk dress caressing my ear like a blown kiss. Legs passed my head, moving toward the dining room. ‘Did you ever notice how blood smells?’ someone whispered. ‘It was about an hour ago.’

‘Ah, that’s better!’ The Inspector reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a fob watch. Beyond him, Mavis lay on her belly still, staring vacantly, Tania kneeling beside her, speaking softly into her ear. Smashed film gear lay scattered around them, the tripod’s legs bent double at the joints like broken ski poles. I rose achingly to my feet, helped by Alison. The touch of her hands on me was wonderfully comforting. My wife’s fat friend Louise passed us on her way toward the back of the house, disapproval darkening her face like a bruise. The Inspector, his chin doubling, stared down at the body (I was thinking about Ros again, those gentle body massages she loved to give and receive between orgasms, the way she held your face in both her hands when she kissed you, even in greeting, and the soft silky almost phantasmal touch of her finger as she slipped it dreamily up your anus), idly winding his fob watch; then, pocketing it, he looked up and said: ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask everyone to turn their watches in to me, if you don’t mind.’ I sighed when Alison took her hands away, and in response she smiled. Her nose and cheeks were freckled with blood, and there were larger spots between her breasts, but she wore them gracefully, like beauty marks. ‘Come along, hurry it up, please!’

My own watch was on an expansion band and simply slipped off, but Alison’s band was a complicated green leather affair with three different buckles. ‘Here, let me help,’ I said, taking her hand in mine. A warm flush of nostalgia swept over me as, like a boy again with bra hooks, I fumbled with the buckles, her fingers teasing my wrists, her free hand falling between our thighs.

I wanted to hold on to this moment, but Pardew interrupted it. ‘I’ll need someone to collect them,’ he said. I knew he was looking at me, and I smiled apologetically at Alison. Her eyes seemed to be penetrating mine, reading feverishly behind them, while her free hand stroked the inside of my thigh as though scribbling an oath there. Or an invocation. ‘And I’ll want those of all the people outside this room as well.’

‘Allow me,’ offered Mr Draper, stepping in behind us from the dining room with a roast-beef sandwich in his bony fist, and Alison took her hand away. ‘I may not be good for much, old as I am, heh heh, but takin’ up collections is one thing I can still execute, as you might say.’ To my embarrassment, he turned to Alison and presented her with his sandwich, softly mangled at one end. ‘Here, hold this for me, will you, dear?’ he said. ‘Can’t seem to get these new choppers through the durned thing.’ He saw me staring and clacked his teeth once for me as a demonstration. ‘Store teeth, y’know,’ he explained wistfully, removing his suit jacket and rolling up his sleeves. ‘Perils of a long life, son, nothin’ works like it used to.’ And he winked meaninglessly, snapping his braces.

‘Thanks, Mr Draper,’ I said, handing him our watches.

‘My pleasure, sir!’ He strapped mine on his arm, dropped Alison’s into a pocket of his baggy trousers, then went off on his rounds, gathering watches onto his arms and into his pockets, greeting everyone boisterously: ‘I’ll take your watches, please! At my age, I need all the time I can get!’ Followed by a mechanical chuckle like some kind of solemn ratification. Ame-heh-heh-heh-hen.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said to Alison, trying to disassociate myself from him, ‘I’ve never seen him before tonight.’ Certainly he was out of place here, he and his wife both. I supposed my wife had invited them. ‘The old fellow’s been badgering me all night to look at some snapshots from his tourist travels. I think he’s a bit—’

‘I know, I’ve seen them all.’ She smiled, but when I reached for her hand, she pulled it away. Absently, she began eating the old man’s sandwich. Dolph came by with a can of beer in one hand, gazing at something across the room, and Alison winced, bumping me with her hip. She reached into her teeth and pulled out a little piece of string. ‘Tell me about her, Gerald. The girl …’

‘Ros?’ I looked down at the body. Inspector Pardew was chalking out an outline of her. It occurred to me that she’d been jostled somewhat during Roger’s recent rampage. One arm and leg had shifted and her head was tilted a different way. Did that matter? Exposed film plates lay beside her like last words and the apparatus had fallen out of her gaping mouth. ‘She was an actress. Not a very good one. Her problem was, she could never be anyone on stage but herself. Mostly she was in chorus lines or shows where they needed naked girls with good bodies.’ Roger seemed to have quieted down. ‘Did you see Lot’s Wife, by any chance?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’ She chewed, watching me closely, eager, it seemed, merely to hear me speak, no matter what about. The Inspector, having completed his chalk outline of the corpse and some of the stuff around it — including, I noticed, some of the junk that had fallen out of Naomi’s bag and out of the toolbox — was now moving Ros’s limbs about as though looking for something under them. Mr Draper’s croaky old voice could be heard out in the hallway, saying: ‘Watches, please! Take time off! Thank you, thank you! Your time is my time! Yeh heh heh …’

‘She had the title role, probably her best part, one of them anyway. She’d been getting little but walk-ons before then, back row of the chorus, even nonparts like one of Bluebeard’s dead wives or the messenger at the door who never enters, and mainly because Roger blew up such a storm whenever something a little more adventurous came along. So when the chance came to do Lot’s Wife, she could hardly turn it down.’ I felt as though I were shaping the words for her, rounding them, smoothing them, curling them in over the little gold loops: and that she felt them there, sliding in, caressing her inner ear, and that it made her breathe more deeply. ‘The play was a kind of dionysian version of the Bible story in which, after being turned to salt and abandoned by Lot, she was supposed to get set upon by ecstatic Sodomites, stripped, stroked, licked from top to bottom, and quite literally reimpregnated with life. At the end, Lot returns, sees his mistake, repents, and joins the Sodomites, now no longer as her husband of course, but just one of her many worshipers, which is supposedly an improvement for him.’

‘And Roger, I take it, was not so wise.’

‘I’m afraid not — of course, Lot probably had some help from the director.’

‘Roger had not seen the script.’

‘Oh, he’d seen it all right.’ I smiled. ‘That was exactly the problem.’

Pardew was down on his hands and knees now, fishing about under Ros’s skirt with the tweezers. He had filter papers in one hand, empty pillboxes, tape, and a pick glass on the floor beside him. Alison watched him a moment, distracted, the last bite of her sandwich held out absently like a coin about to be dropped in a meter. The two policemen had returned and the short one was holding Ros’s limbs in various positions at the Inspector’s instructions, while he nosed around. The other was making sketches of the scene. They seemed a bit subdued.

Alison turned back to me, her face softened by a momentary sorrow. ‘The problem—?’

‘He turned up at the first rehearsal with a gun at his head, saying he’d pull the trigger if she didn’t leave the play and come home with him, and since Ros couldn’t say no, that’s what she did.’

‘Turned back. Like Lot’s wife, after all.’ She popped the last bite in. I saw a neat row of gleaming white teeth sunk into red flesh, crisp green lettuce, dark rye painted with yellow mustard. If even that arouses me, I thought, I’m pretty far gone … ‘Yet you said—?’

‘Well, the author refused to let the play go on without her. He insisted she’d inspired him to write it, a dream he’d had or something, and she had to play the lead. So they talked Ros into having Roger temporarily committed. Because of the suicide attempt. For his own good, they said, and it probably was.’

‘Until the show closed.’

‘That’s right. Ros visited him every day in the ward to cheer him up, never told him she was in the play, and he never asked.’

‘An old trouper, after all. And so,’ she added, not wryly, just sadly, staring down at her hands, ‘everybody lived happily ever after.’ She brushed the crumbs away, tongued a bit of sandwich from her teeth. For some reason I thought: Am I forgetting something? What I remembered was an old beggar in Cadiz who did tricks with coins. His last trick always was to stack as many coins on his tongue as people would put there, then swallow them. Or seem to. I made some remark at the time about ‘pure theater’ and the woman I was with said: ‘I know a better trick but it is not so practical.’ The old fellow climaxed his act by belching loudly and producing a paper note in ‘change,’ and the truth about the woman was that she was mistaken. ‘And was the play a success?’

‘It had a good run.’

In fact, she packed them in. But mainly because they invited the audience to join in, and the same crowd kept coming back night after night to lick the salt. True believers. Her breast, I saw, had fallen out of the dress again. It seemed less important now. The Inspector, peeling down one stocking, had found a run, which he peered at now through his pick glass. ‘There’s another one here at the back, Chief.’ Alison touched my hand. ‘You loved her very much.’

‘Yes. Along with a thousand other guys.’ I watched Pardew and his two assistants tugging her dead weight this way and that, watched her breast and head flop back and forth together as though in protest at the mockery of it, thinking: How quiet it has grown! I lowered my voice: ‘She had something … very special …’

‘I might have guessed,’ Alison said. She was grinning. ‘Unique, I think you said before…’

I smiled, leaning toward her touch. ‘Mm, but hers really was, you see,’ I said, brushing at the specks of blood on Alison’s nose, letting the truth slip away now, or at least that kind of truth, letting myself be led, ‘and not just in the eye, so to speak, of the beholder …’

‘Ah, poor Gerald!’ she laughed. ‘When will you ever learn?’

She stifled her laughter: people were staring at us. Even the police had glanced up from the body. She covered her mouth, forced a solemn expression onto her face, peeked up at me guiltily. She waited until the others had looked away again (‘Calipers, please,’ the Inspector muttered), then whispered: ‘But it was her breast that made you want to cry.’

I nodded, conscious of Alison’s own breasts, tender and provocative under the soft silken folds of her dress, the nipples rising hard now like excited little fingers, seeming to reach through the bloodstains in the delicate jacquard pattern as though to point hopefully beyond. ‘Her sex was a secret, known only to millions, her dark side, you might say … her buried treasure …’ No longer: the police had their noses down there now, arguing about something. Her thighs had been pulled apart and the curled tip-ends of little straw-colored pubic hairs could be seen fringing the legbands of her panties. For some reason, it was making me dizzy. The glossiness of her panties or something. ‘But her … her breasts,’ I continued, taking a deep breath, forcing my gaze away (somewhere a toilet flushed; down in the rec room, the darts players were still at it), managing to draw myself back to Alison’s eyes once more, ‘her breasts were her public standard, what we knew her by …’ The placid depths of Alison’s eyes calmed me. I felt certain that everything was going to be all right. Somehow. ‘Her innocence and her light, you might say. The good white flag she flew.’ I smiled as our legs met: she touched her throat. ‘Flags …’

‘In the dark and dangerous land of make-believe,’ whispered Alison, not so much completing my thought for me as marrying her thought to mine in a kind of voluptuous melodrama.

‘Yes … yes, that’s it …’

There was something truly extraordinary about Alison’s eyes. Sometimes they seemed to penetrate my head as though copulating with it like a man, and then as quickly they’d go soft, almost opaque, inviting me in. Or they’d suddenly seem to pick up light from somewhere and cast it twinkling back at me, suggestively, mischievously — then just as suddenly withdraw it again, hide it, daring me to come and look for it. ‘Bewitching …’

‘Pardon?’

‘Your eyes, Alison …’

‘Ah, that must be the wormwood.’ She grinned. There was a simple gaiety in them again, and I could feel her releasing me.

‘Wormwood?’

‘The vermouth. That’s where the name comes from.’

‘I always thought it was just some kind of wine, I didn’t know I was giving you wormwood—’

‘Oh yes. The flowers anyway. And sweetflag root and cinchona bark and coriander seeds and sandalwood — shall I go on?’

‘I take it you’re trying to tell me something.’

‘Mmm, after that sandwich—’

‘I’ll be right back,’ I said and lightly touched her hip. ‘Don’t move.’

‘Nobody moves!’ barked the Inspector, glancing sharply up at me from under Ros’s skirt. ‘Nobody leaves this house without my permission!’

‘I’m not — it’s only — just an errand,’ I stammered. ‘The dining room …’

Pardew studied me closely a moment, hooded by Ros’s silver skirt like a monk. He stroked his thick moustache, glanced thoughtfully at Alison, then nodded and returned to his work, snipping through the legband of Ros’s panties now with a tiny pair of manicure scissors. He made two crosswise cuts, an inch or two deep, then peeled away the little flap of silk as though easing a stamp from an envelope. Jim came in with his black bag and handed the Inspector a probe with a light on the end of it, and the others in the room pressed closer. The Inspector looked up at me and frowned: ‘Off you go, then!’

Something, as I turned away, was worrying me, something just at the edge of my vision. The way Ros’s stockings had been rolled down to her ankles like doughnuts maybe, making her seem pinioned, the stark face-powder whiteness of her bare thighs under their silvery canopy, the shadows beyond, Jim shaking down a thermometer … Or was it that tube of lipstick I’d noticed, its greasy red tip extended as though in sudden excitement, lying not far from Mavis in the chalked outline of one of my wife’s fallen plants like a child’s crayon on a colouring book drawing? Or Tania, scrambling out of Roger’s way a moment ago, still clutching the—?

‘Boy, they sure tore up jack in here,’ remarked Daffie in the doorway: one of Dickie’s girls, regal tonight in her sleek indigo sheath. Her drink looked like pink lemonade, but I knew it to be straight gin tinted with juice from the maraschino cherries jar. ‘Your whole house looks like it’s suffering from a violent nosebleed, Ger.’

‘Well, it just goes to show,’ I said vaguely.

‘You mean never hire a lip as an interior decorator?’ She smiled, drawing deeply on a small black cigarillo. Over her shoulder, just inside the dining room, I could see Dolph’s burry head with its bass clef ears, and beyond him a crowd of people jammed up around the food and drink. At the sideboard, under one of his wife Tania’s paintings (a conventional subject, ‘Susanna and the Elders,’ yet uniquely Tania’s: a gawky self-conscious girl stepping over a floating hand mirror into a bottomless pit, gazing anxiously over her shoulder at a dark forest crowding up on her — no elders to be seen, yet something is watching her), Howard was stirring up a fresh pitcher of martinis. I was afraid he might use up all the dry vermouth, but Daffie had taken a gentle grip on my forearm, holding me back. ‘You know, Ger,’ she said softly, smoke curling off her lower lip as she spoke, ‘there’s something funny about those cops.’

‘What’s that, Daffie?’

‘Scratching around in Ros’s drawers like that,’ she said. Daffie was a model, one of the best, but in the soft-focus photos you never saw the worry lines, the dark hollows under her eyes, the nervous twitching of her nostrils. ‘I don’t know, but it’s, well — it’s like they’ve been there before.’

‘They’re professional. They’ve seen a lot of murders.’

‘No, I mean …’ She hesitated, withdrew her hand, took a stiff jolt of iced gin. ‘I want you to do me two favors, Ger.’

‘Sure, Daffie. If I can …’

‘One, tell that pint-sized ham-fisted ape behind me to stop messing around behind the scenes,’ she said loudly, Dolph’s ears reddening like dipped litmus paper as he disappeared around the corner, ‘and two …’ She leaned close, touched my arm again, lowered her husky voice: ‘Be careful, Ger …’ Then, bracing herself, her elbows tucked in, she drifted on into the living room (both the Inspector and the short cop, Fred, had their heads under Ros’s skirt now, Bob standing by with a test tube), moving with exaggerated elegance as though to demonstrate for me her sobriety. What she showed me, though, was a backside splattered head to foot with blood, a split skirt, and tights laddered from cheek to heel like torn curtains.

Most of the people in the dining room were crowded around the chafing dish on the table, spearing miniature sausages out of a barbecue sauce that bubbled lazily over a low blue flame. Squeezing through them on my way to the sideboard, Daffie’s warning still echoing in my ear, I was reminded (I felt flushed through by fear as though it were a sudden passion) of a night at the theater when we went backstage to see Ros after a play. On that occasion, too, I’d been cautioned, but by my wife, who, seeing Roger standing guard at Ros’s door and looking utterly demented, had clutched my arm, whispered her warning (‘Be care-ful …’), shouted at Roger to give Ros our love and blown him a kiss, and then had dragged me away through the frothy bustle of actors and their friends and hangers-on and on out the backstage exit. I’d thought she’d seen something more specific than Roger’s monstrous but by then familiar affliction — and indeed perhaps she had, for what she’d said when we got outside was: ‘I sometimes get the feeling, Gerald, that the world is growing colder and colder.’ Having just watched a corny but loving play about a houseful of prostitutes with an innocent virgin and old-fashioned boy-meets-girl romance on their hands, I’d wanted to say that, yes, and Ros was the flame at which all chilled men might well warm themselves; but instead, sensing my wife’s deep disquiet, what I’d come out with was: ‘You think Roger’s going crazy?’ ‘No,’ she’d replied, drawing me closer to her as we came out onto the street, pressing her cheek against my shoulder, ‘what scares me is I think he’s going sane.’

I greeted Howard at the sideboard and, noticing that the pitcher of martinis he was stirring was only about half-full, asked him (the flush had passed; I thought: a passion, yes, but passion’s passion) how the vermouth was holding out, but before he could answer, his wife’s nephew Anatole, hovering crowlike beside him, shot me a dark long-lashed glance and asked bluntly, his voice breaking: ‘How much longer are you going to put up with this horseshit?’ Then he glared at his tumbler of bourbon and ginger ale as though discovering something trenchant there and, flinging back his long black hair with a toss of his head, promptly drank down most of it.

‘The vermouth’s not the problem, Gerald!’ his uncle Howard snapped. ‘But there’s no ice and the gin is all gone!’ He seemed unusually peevish. His cracked specs maybe. Behind them, when he looked up at me, his eyes appeared broken up and scattered like little cubist exercises, and probably the world seen through them looked a bit that way as well.

I laid a consoling hand on his shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, Howard, there’s ice in the kitchen and more gin down here below. Excuse me, Anatole.’ I knelt for the gin, and the boy jerked backward, thumping up against Vic, just coming for a refill of his own. Vic swore, Anatole stammered an apology, and Howard said: ‘And someone’s stolen the fruit knife for the lemons!’ Looking up, I saw then that he’d been using his scout knife. His hands, stained and soiled, were trembling.

‘Those three dicks probably borrowed it,’ said Vic sourly, his speech beginning to slur. ‘I think they’re in there now, trying to peel Ros’s cunt with it.’

Anatole laughed, took a nervous puff on his French cigarette, and said: ‘That’s just it, those stupid turds can’t see what they’re looking straight at!’

‘I’m afraid the whole fucking species has much the same problem, son,’ Vic growled, cocking one shaggy eyebrow at Anatole. ‘Like bats in daylight, we can’t even see when we’re pissing on ourselves.’ Vic was a hardnosed guy with a spare intellect, but he had a weakness for grand pronouncements, especially with a few shots under his belt. I handed Howard a new bottle of gin, pushed the cabinet door shut with my knee, poured a wineglass full of vermouth for Alison, and then, on reflection, one for myself as well.

‘Here’s a good one,’ said Anatole. He was reading the cocktail napkins Kitty and Knud had given us, which were decorated with the usual party gags based on lines like ‘Please don’t grind your butts into the carpet,’ or ‘Thou shalt not omit adultery.’ The one he showed us was of a policeman frisking a girl bankrobber. He had her face up against the wall, her skirt lifted and her pants pulled down (as though on cue, the cop with the test tube limped in, pushing people aside, and snatched the salt away from Mrs Draper, went bobbing out again), from which heaps of banknotes were tumbling out, and what he was saying was: ‘Now, let’s get to the bottom of this!’

‘Tell me,’ said Vic, plunging his fist into Howard’s martini pitcher for a couple of ice cubes, Howard sputtering in protest, ‘where do you think the cop got that line? Did it come natural to him as a simple horny human, or did it get thrust on him somehow?’

Anatole flushed, a nervous grin twitching on his thin lips. ‘You mean about free will or—?’

‘I mean, has he emptied his own incorrigibly shitty nature into the vacuum of an occupation here, or has the job and society made him, innocent at birth, into the crude bullying asshole that he’s become?’

‘I–I don’t know … I guess a little of both—’

‘Just as I thought,’ grunted Vic, ‘another goddamn liberal.’ And he turned away as though in contempt, sucking the ice cubes, squinting down at some of the other cocktail napkins, held at arm’s length.

Anatole, badly stung, looked to Howard for support, but his uncle, absently stirring the martinis, was distracted, his head bent toward the TV room where several couples were necking. Ah. Probably the true cause of his bad temper: I’d interrupted his little spectacle. Howard the art critic. At the far wall, Charley Trainer’s wife, Janice, was in a stand-up clinch with some guy whose back was to us, her arms wrapped round his neck schoolgirl-style, her pink skirt rucked up over her raised thigh. Our eyes met for a moment and what I saw there, or thought I saw, was terror. ‘I guess I’ll get something to eat,’ Anatole muttered clumsily and slouched off toward the dining table, looking gangly and exposed. ‘I’m feeling drunk or something …’

Ginger was over there, jabbing clumsily at the sausages in the chafing dish with a toothpick. She caught the tip end of one, lifted it shakily toward her little comic-book ‘O’ of a mouth. It fell off. As she bent over, stiff-legged above her heels, to pick it up, Dolph stepped up behind her and, as though by accident, his eyes elsewhere, let his cupped palm fall against her jutting behind. Anatole saw this, spun away, found himself moving on through the doorway into the living room, puffing shallowly on his cigarette stub.

‘You were pretty hard on him, Vic.’

‘He’s all right. But he’s all style and no substance. He needs to grow up.’ Ginger rose, holding painfully with her fingertips the hot sausage, furry now with dust and lint. She looked around desperately for some place to put it, finally gave up and popped it in her mouth, then brushed at her rear end as though flicking away flies. ‘Isn’t she the one that cunt-hungry fashion plate brought here tonight?’

‘One of them.’ Dolph took his hand away and (Vic, moving like an aging lion, now stalked off into the TV room, flinging open doors, peering behind furniture) rubbed his nose with it. Poor Dolph. Bachelorhood, since his break-up with Louise, had not sat well on him. Ginger blew out her cheeks around the hot sausage and bobbed up and down on her high heels, her halo of carroty little pigtails quivering around her heart-shaped face like nerve ends.

‘Hey,’ I said when Vic returned (Howard had left us, taking up a position over near the dining table where he still had a view into the TV room, his fractured lenses aglitter with myriad reflections of the candles on the table), ‘fatherhood doesn’t last forever, you know.’

‘She’s a fucking innocent, Gerry, and I’m telling you, if that cocksucker gets his filthy hands on her, so help me’ — he ripped a wadded-up cocktail napkin apart in demonstration — ‘I’ll tear his balls off!’

I believed him. It was what made Vic more than just an armchair radical: he could kill. ‘I’ll get some more ice,’ I said, taking the bucket along with me, dumping the empty bottles in it, and Vic called after me: ‘If you see Sally Ann, damn it, tell her I want to talk to her. Right now!’ Alison’s husband came through just then with Roger’s law partner Woody and his wife, Yvonne, and as I passed them I heard them laugh together behind me. All three were carrying croquet mallets: had they been playing out there in the dark?

Louise stood up suddenly when I entered the kitchen, almost as though I’d caught her at something. She’d been squeezed in at the breakfast bench, watching my wife whip up what looked like an avocado dip — or perhaps helping with some of the chopping: there was a little cheese board and knife in front of her — and she nearly took the buttons off the front of her dress trying to jump out of there.

Patrick, halving a grapefruit at the counter with a small steak knife, exclaimed: ‘My goodness, Louise! I felt that all the way over here!’

‘You don’t have to leave, Louise,’ I said, raising my voice as the dishwasher thumped suddenly into its wash cycle. ‘I’ve only come for some ice and mix.’

‘Let her go, Gerald,’ my wife called out, getting to her feet. ‘She’s just eating up all my potato chips anyway.’

‘Are you still making more food?’ There was a huge platter of freshly prepared canapés on the counter, empty tuna cans and cracker boxes scattered about, dip mix packets, bread from the freezer, the wrappers still frosty, home-canned pickles and relishes up from the cellar, smoked oysters on toast squares. And something was cooking in the oven. ‘I thought you had everything ready before the party.’

‘So did I. But it’s all going so fast.’ Louise glanced suspiciously past the bucket of empty bottles I was carrying to the two full wineglasses in my other hand, as without a word but accompanied by the splashy grind of the dishwasher, she shifted heavily toward the dining room. ‘Did you notice how many sausages were left in the chafing dish?’

‘Not many. Should I turn the flame off?’

‘No, I’ve got more.’ She went to the refrigerator and brought out a ceramic bowlful, bumping the door closed with her hips. ‘Louise, would you mind?’ she called, stopping her at the door.

‘My, what cute little weenies,’ Patrick remarked as Louise, flushing, took the bowl from my wife’s hands.

‘Can I fix you a drink before you go, Louise?’ I called, but, averting her face darkly, she backed out through the dining room door without replying. ‘What’s the matter with her?’

‘She was badly bruised in there,’ my wife said, speaking up over the dishwasher. She brought the avocado dip over and set it on the butcherblock worktable in the middle of the room, under the big fluorescent lamp, and I thought of Alison again, that play we’d seen. ‘Don’t you notice? Everything that happens,’ she’d said that night, ‘happens where the light is.’ ‘Didn’t you see her face?’

‘Ah, was that a bruise …?’ I poked my nose in the fridge: about a dozen cans of beer left — Dolph must be drinking them six at a time. They were squeezed in there among dishes and dishes of prepared foods, tins of sardines, anchovies, pimentos, bags of sliced and chopped vegetables, pâtés, and dozens of sausages and wrapped cheeses.

‘She said Roger bumped her cheek with his elbow,’ my wife explained over her shoulder, pulling hot bread out of the oven, hurrying it gingerly to the butcherblock.

‘I’m afraid her face isn’t all that’s bruised,’ Patrick announced archly. ‘It’s a good thing for you this house has firm foundations!’

‘Now, Patrick,’ my wife scolded playfully (her busy hands, slender, a bit raw, stirred dips, arranged biscuits and crackers, sliced bread), winking at me as I dragged a case of beer up to the fridge, ‘she’s not that heavy!’

‘My dear,’ declared Patrick, one hand on his hip, the other holding his glass up as though in a toast, ‘I had already fallen when Louise went down, and when she hit the floor I skidded three feet in her direction!’

My wife laughed and waggled an admonishing finger. ‘Patrick, you’re a scandal!’ Patrick, looking smug, lit up one of his French cigarettes, and she put a saucepan of water on to boil.

‘By the way,’ I said, realizing that this had been bothering me for some time now — in fact since I’d talked to Daffie — ‘where did they take Roger?’ This last was shouted out in relative silence, as the dishwasher timer suddenly clicked over, and it made my wife and Patrick start. Frightened me, too, in a way. They turned away. I lowered my voice. ‘I, uh, didn’t see him in the dining room.’

‘They took him into your study,’ my wife explained. She put a lid on the saucepan, staring at it as though estimating its contents. ‘They said the TV bothered them.’

‘Really?’ I pulled the cold beers forward, packing the warm cans in at the back. ‘I don’t even think it’s on.’

‘Knud was watching something.’

‘He fell asleep.’

‘You know, he told me a really weird story tonight,’ said Patrick, sucking up some of the crushed ice from his salty bitch.

‘Knud?’

‘No, Roger, of course. Before the — before …’

Shoving things around to make room for the beer, I discovered at the back an old bottle of tequila, still about a third full. Must have been in there for years.

‘He said he came home one night and Ros was gone.’

‘Nothing weird about that. The weird thing was to find her at home. Say, how long’s it been since we were last in Mexico?’

‘Eight and a half years, Gerald — but don’t interrupt. Tell us about the story, Patrick. What happened …?’

‘Well, it’s very peculiar,’ said Patrick, stubbing out his cigarette, his bright eyes squinting from the smoke, his voice losing some of its mincing distance, mellowing toward intimacy. ‘He said he arrived home from the office late one night and Ros was gone, but there in her place, sitting in a chair by the window, was a strange old lady. Roger said the only word for her was “hag.” An old hag. She had long scraggly white hair, wild piercing eyes, a hunched back, and she was dressed in pitiful old rags. He said he felt a strange presentiment about her as though he were in the presence of some dreadful mystery. He asked her why she’d come, and she replied that she’d been told he was a great lawyer and could help her in her misfortune. She claimed to possess a fabulous wealth which she wished to share with all the world, but which had been taken away from her by a wicked and spiteful son and locked in a secret vault. Moreover, her son was seeking to have her declared mentally insane and put away, and she wanted Roger to force the son to release the fortune for the benefit of all and to prevent her unjust incarceration. Well! Roger said he understood immediately that it was a parable she’d been speaking, one meant for him alone, he was the selfish son, and his treasure — well, he told the strange old woman that though he sympathized with her plight he was unable to do as she asked. “For shame!” hissed the old woman. “You’ll burn in hell for your lack of charity!” Mortified by his own weakness, he buried his head in his hands, and when he looked up again the hag was gone. He ran to the door and found Ros, lying in a swoon in the corridor outside, her hair loose and wild, her clothes torn.’

‘In a swoon—?’

‘That’s what he said. You should have seen his eyes when he told us! He said he carried her into the bedroom, fearing for her very life. He sat up with her all night, weeping buckets, kissing her feverishly, pleading for her forgiveness, until at last she came around. He begged her to tell him all that had happened, but she said she couldn’t remember a thing since she’d left the bank that afternoon.’

We were both staring at Patrick in silence when the dishwasher popped suddenly into its rinse cycle, making us all jump. I laughed. My wife said: ‘It must have been a dream, don’t you think, Gerald?’

Even over the noisy churning of the dishwasher, we could hear Mr Draper’s booming voice on the other side of the door: ‘Yes, heh heh, you might say I’ve got a lot of time on my hands!’ Patrick started up uneasily. ‘Probably,’ I said. ‘Or maybe a play Ros was in …’

‘Time, heels! Yeh heh heh!’

‘Do you think they’ll keep my tweezers?’ Patrick asked anxiously, tugging his cuffs down over his wrists, his eye on the door. ‘They’re real silver!’

‘Speaking of silver, I forgot to tell you, we’re invited to Cyril and Peg’s big anniversary party,’ my wife said, peeking into the kettle of water. The way she held the lid made me think of the Inspector hooded by Ros’s skirt.

‘Are they here yet?’

‘A — a gift from my mother—!’

‘Cyril and Peg? I think so.’ She poked around in the refrigerator and found a carton of eggs. ‘Didn’t they come with Fats and Brenda?’

‘It’s Old Man Time here, soaks! I mean, folks!’ Mr Draper sang out jovially, bumping in through the door, and Patrick slipped stealthily out behind him. Mr Draper wore wristwatches chockablock up both arms like sleeves of armor and his pants bagged low, their thin suspenders stretched tight, weighted down by his deep bulging pockets. ‘Come along now, heh heh, no present like the time!’

My wife, using a ladle, dropped the last of the eggs into the boiling water, checked her watch, then peeled it off and handed it to him. ‘Mine was your first, Mr Draper,’ I said, showing him my empty wrist.

‘Call me Lloyd, son! You — oops, nearly forgot!’ The old man reached into his hip pocket and pulled out the butcher knife the Inspector had found. ‘Iris said to return this to you.’

‘Why, thank you, Lloyd. Looks like it needs a good washing.’ As she turned to put it in the sink, our eyes met. ‘Are you all right, Gerald?’ she asked, smiling at me as she might at our young son.

‘Yes, only I–I keep forgetting things …’

‘Wasn’t there someone else here when I came in?’ asked Mr Draper, peering over his spectacles, just as Dolph came thumping in for another beer.

‘He left,’ said my wife, turning her bottom away from Dolph as he passed. She winked at me.

‘Christ, have I got a thirst!’ Dolph exclaimed, swinging open the refrigerator door.

‘Gerald just put some in, Dolph.’

‘Cold ones to the front,’ I said. It was coming back to me, the knife, loose in the room like a taunt, then someone reaching for it, picking it up …

Dolph pulled a beer out and popped it open, took a long guzzle, all the while holding the door agape.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ smiled Mr Draper, coming forward (yes, Naomi, Naomi picking it up and putting it in her bag, Mrs Draper making her take it out again — it must have been just before Roger hit me). ‘It’s time—’

‘You already got mine, Dropper,’ grumped Dolph, wiping his mouth with his sleeve (and some big woman, fallen among my wife’s potted plants, greenery in her hair like laurel, a silly look on her face as though she’d just remembered something she wished she’d forgot). ‘That one with the gold band halfway up your arm — don’t lose it!’ He belched and the dishwasher shut down. ‘That’s better!’

‘Time is never lost,’ Mr Draper declared, lifting his chin so as to peer grandly down over his long warty nose, ‘only mislaid!’

‘Jesus, what a night,’ wheezed Dolph, ignoring the old man. He shook his burry head as though in amazement, hauled out another beer. ‘It’s starting to look like a goddamn packing house in there, Gerry!’

My wife blushed, wiped her hands on her checkered apron. ‘I’ll go tidy up in a minute, Dolph.’

‘Is this guacamole?’ Mr Draper asked at the butcherblock.

The two glasses of vermouth sat there, pools of pale green light on the maple top beside the dark pudding of mashed avocado. Like two halves of an hourglass. I hurried over to the fridge, filled the bucket with ice. ‘You’re right, Gerry,’ Dolph said, watching me (‘Well, it has avocados in it,’ my wife was explaining, ‘but it’s not as spicy — would you like to try some?’), ‘you sure as hell couldn’t stab anybody with that thing.’

‘Yes indeedy, ma’am — if you have a spoon. I don’t think I can chance those crispy things. New store teeth, you know.’ He grinned sheepishly and pushed them halfway out of his mouth at her.

Dolph squeezed his empty can double and tossed it in the bin, then, belching voluminously, popped the other one open. ‘I’ll take that bucket in for you, Gerry.’

‘Thanks, Dolph. Oh, hey — this bottle of tonic, too.’

Mr Draper smacked his lips generously. ‘A real treat, senyoretta!’ he beamed. She smiled again, but less buoyantly. Her courage was slipping, and I could see the anxiety and weariness crowding back. ‘But I must fyoo-git!’ He lifted his manacled arms: ‘Time, like they say, hangs heavy — yeh heh heh!’ And he left us, Dolph having preceded him without farewell.

‘Are you fyoo-gitting, too?’ my wife asked, her apron twisted up in her hands.

‘Well, duty,’ I said, picking up the two glasses.

‘Someone …’ She hesitated, staring at her hands. ‘Someone said there was a valentine.’

‘What? A valentine?’

‘In Naomi’s bag.’

‘Ah, well, what didn’t she have in there! Even our—’

‘They said it was from you.’

‘From me! What, a valentine to Naomi?’ I didn’t know whether to laugh or be offended. But she seemed to be trembling, so I set the glasses down and took her in my arms. ‘Hey, has Louise been working on you again?’

She turned her head into my chest, wrapped her arms around my neck. At least, I was thinking, she didn’t ask about the cock sock. ‘Gerald, I’m afraid …’

‘Come on, you’re my only valentine. You know that,’ I said, and lifted her chin to kiss her.

But there was a sudden rush of chattery laughter as the door whumped open and in came Charley Trainer with Woody’s wife, Yvonne, and a tall skinny man he introduced as Earl Elstob. We pulled apart. I recognized Earl by the mismatched pants and sports jacket, green socks and two-toned penny loafers, as the guy who’d been in a clinch with Charley’s wife in the TV room a little while ago. What I hadn’t seen before was the awesome overbite that nearly hid his chin from view. One of Charley’s insurance projects no doubt; he often brought them to parties to soften them up.

‘Hey!’ boomed Charley affably, wrapping his free arm around my wife’s waist; the other carried glasses and a half-bottle of scotch. ‘Hey!’

My wife, getting out a fresh handtowel, said, ‘Goodness! I’ve got so much to do!’ and Earl Elstob, grinning toothily, asked us if we knew what a constipated jitterbug was. Charley Trainer har-harred and lumbered over to the fridge for some ice cubes. He grabbed ahold of two, and a half-dozen fell out. ‘You’re lookin’ beautiful!’ he said to the room in general, and Yvonne, a huge splotch of blood over the left side of her face, thrust her empty glass out and cried: ‘You goddamn right!’

My wife picked up the avocado dip and offered it around, Charley slopping half of it out on the floor with his first dip. He stooped with a grunt to wipe it up with his fingers, hit his face on the edge of the bowl in my wife’s hands, came up with a green blob over his right eye like some kind of vegetable tumor. ‘What izziss stuff anyhow?’ he asked, licking his fingers. Big Chooch they called him back in his college football days: Choo-Choo Trainer, last of the steamroller fullbacks. In those days he could sometimes be stopped but rarely brought down; now, any time after happy hour, you could tip him over with your little finger.

‘One who can’t jit!’ Earl Elstob hollered out, just as my mother-in-law came in, looking down her nose at so much noise, to get cookies and milk for Mark. Charley backed out of her way, crunching ice cubes underfoot, and bumped into the cabinets, sending things clattering around inside.

‘There’s some vanilla pudding for him in there, Mother,’ my wife said, exchanging a cautionary glance with me. ‘Behind the bean salad.’

‘Mark’s still not asleep?’ I asked. Yvonne seemed to be crying.

‘Not yet!’ my mother-in-law snapped, giving me a fierce penetrating look which had more in it than mere reproach. She slammed the refrigerator shut, snatched down a box of candies from the cupboard, and, jaws clenched, planted a button of chocolate in the middle of the little bowl of pudding — fplop! — like some kind of immutable judgment.

Charley Trainer, staring down at it, suddenly went limp and morose, his thick jowls sagging. ‘That poor damn kid …,’ he muttered tearfully, the avocado dip now slipping down over his eyebrow as though he were melting, and my wife shook her head at him, her finger at her lips.

Charley stared at her foggily, failing to understand, opened his mouth to speak, and my wife, in desperation, grabbed up the dip again: ‘Charley! A little more …?’ Yvonne stifled a sob.

‘But … but I loved her—!’

‘We all did, Charley. Here …’

I had a catch in my own chest and felt suddenly I had to get out of here (Mavis over the body, working her jaws: it was like trying to turn a key in a stiff lock, my chest felt like a stiff lock) — but as I grabbed up the glasses and turned to go, Tania came bursting in, her bangles jangling, holding her bloodsoaked dress out away from her body as though it were hot soup spilled there, crying: ‘My god, look at this! What am I going to do?’

My mother-in-law took one glance and replied matter-of-factly: ‘It should be soaked in a chloride-of-lime solution. If that doesn’t work, try salts of sorrel.’

‘Protein soap will do just as well,’ my wife said, turning the fire off under the boiling eggs. ‘Just a minute and I’ll get you some, Tania.’

Her mother sniffed scornfully and paraded out with the milk and pudding, her chin high, old dark nylons whistling in deprecation, Earl Elstob holding the door for her, while slurping at his drink. ‘One who — huh! shlup! — can’t jit?’ he repeated hopefully. Yvonne had buried her face in her hands, her short straight hair, rapidly going gray, curtaining her face. It was the first time I’d seen her break down since the day she first learned about her breast cancer.

Tania picked up the steak knife Patrick had used to cut his grapefruit, touched the point with her fingertip. ‘Janny was crying, too,’ she said, peering up at Charley over her half-lens spectacles.

‘Janny’s not very flexible,’ Charley rumbled apologetically, wiping away the green dip in his eye.

Yvonne lifted her head, flicked her hair back from her face (I saw now that the eyelash on the side splashed with blood was thickly clotted and her penciled eyebrow was erased: it looked like that side of her face was disappearing), blew her nose and wailed: ‘God gave me a blue Louie, Charley!’

‘Well, give’m one back, Yvonne! God-damn it!’

Tania had discovered and examined the cheese knife on the breakfast table, and was now poking through the silverware and utensils drawers. My wife glanced up anxiously from the sink where she was draining the water off the eggs. ‘Is there something you need, Tania?’

‘Yes,’ said Tania, closing a drawer, while Charley staggered around the room dropping cubes in drinks and on the floor and pouring scotch, ‘maybe I will rinse this dress out.’

‘The soap’s up in the bathroom,’ my wife said, running cold water over the eggs. ‘In the cabinet under the sink, or else the linen cupboard — Gerald, could you look for it? It’s in a blue box …’

‘Sure …’ A whiff of herbs rose to my nose from the cool sweating glasses in my hands, and that now-familiar sense of urgency washed over me again. ‘As soon as I—’

‘Is that my wife’s drink?’ It was Alison’s husband, standing behind me in the doorway, one hand in his jacket pocket, the thumb pointed at me like a warrant, the other holding a meerschaum pipe at his mouth. ‘She’s been waiting …’

‘Ah! Yes, I was just—’

‘Two of them? Well …’ He clamped the pipe in his teeth, took both glasses as though, reluctantly, claiming booty. ‘I’ll see that she gets them.’

‘Now, there goes a pretty man!’ exclaimed Yvonne as the door slapped to, and Earl Elstob, as though suddenly inspired, asked: ‘Say, huh! yuh know the best way to find out if a girl’s ticklish?’ Charley was fishing about in the refrigerator and things were crashing and tinkling in there. He came out with that bottle I’d noticed earlier, dragging dishes and beer cans with it, and, holding it at arm’s length, stared quizzically at the label, then shrugged and poured some in his glass of scotch. ‘He looks like Don the Wand!’

‘Juan?’

‘Yeah, or the Scarlet Pippin — Pimple — what the hell—?’

‘Hey!’ Charley laughed, waggling the bottle. ‘Y’know why the—?’

‘Pimpernel,’ my wife said.

Tania took my arm. ‘C’mon, Gerry. Let’s go get cleaned up.’

‘No, wait!’ Charley rumbled. ‘Jussa — ha ha! — jussa goddamn minute! Why’da Mexican push his wife till she — hruff! haw! — fell offa cliff?’

‘Uh, that’s sorta — shlup! — like a shotgun weddin’,’ Earl yucked, sucking.

‘Check on the toilet paper while you’re up there, Gerald!’ my wife called as Tania, her arm wrapped in mine, pulled me through the door, whispering: ‘There’s something I have to show you, Gerry — something strange!’

‘You know, huh, a case of wife or—’

‘What cli-iii-iif-fff?’ howled Yvonne.

‘And handtowels!’

‘No — haw haw! — wait …!’

As we pushed through the people around the dining table, making our way toward the hall, Tania said, ‘Just a sec,’ and reached in to inspect some knives and skewers, her dress rustling as it brushed others. Over by the sideboard, Alison, discussing Tania’s painting with Mrs Draper, pointed up at something, then adopted ‘Susanna’s’ pose, one hand down in front, the other, holding the vermouth, at her breast, and looked back over her shoulder. Our eyes met and she smiled brightly, dropping the pose as though, still Susanna, exposing herself. She raised her fresh glass of vermouth at me, invited me over with a jerk of her head ‘(In a moment!)I mouthed silently, pointing at Tania’s broad back (she was slipping something into the pockets of her dress), then blew her a kiss just as her husband, who’d been standing in the TV room doorway, turned around, fitting his pipe into his mouth. He froze for a second, teeth bared around the tooth-white pipe, staring at me, and I wiped my lips with the hand with the kiss in it as though I had something hot in my mouth. Alison looked puzzled. Her husband lit up thoughtfully in the shadows behind her.

‘Hey, these horseradish meatballs are terrific, Ger! Is there any more of the dip?’

‘Uh … probably. In the kitchen, Talbot. Ask my wife.’ Earlier, Iris Draper had remarked on the dimness of the light in here, the relative brightness of the rooms around, comparing it to some mantic ceremony or other she’d come across in her tourist travels, and though at the time I’d found her chatter about ‘secret chambers’ and ‘illumination mysteries’ naively pedantic, now as I gazed at the candlelit faces of my friends gathered around the table (Alison had been drawn back to the painting by Iris and her husband, and now seemed glowingly mirrored there) — bruised, crumpled, bloodied — it all seemed strangely resonant. ‘What’s the matter with your ear, Talbot?’

‘Hit the goddamn fireplace with it.’

‘Whew! Did you show that mess to Jim?’

‘Yeah, he had to put three stitches in. Hurt like hell. Good excuse to soak up more anaesthetic, though — oh, oh, the old ball-and-chain’s calling. I was supposed to bring her one of those fancy whatchamacallits in the seashells. See ya in a minute.’ I noticed one of Ginger’s kerchiefs on the floor where he’d been standing and stooped to pick it up, also some toothpicks, spoons, a mustard knife, parsley sprigs, and a ripped-up cocktail napkin. The joke on the napkin, when I pieced it together, was of a frightened young suitor, his knees knocking together, asking a towering irate father with fumes rising from his head: ‘May I have your d-d-daughter’s hole in h-handy matrimony, s-sir?’

Someone’s breast was touching my elbow. ‘Hi, Gerry.’

‘Hey, Michelle.’ Her breast burrowed into the crook of my arm as if seeking shelter. ‘You all right?’

‘I think so. Awful, isn’t it?’

‘What happened to the fucking scotch, Ger?’

‘Charley’s got it in the kitchen.’

‘Is he sober enough to be trusted with it?’

‘I don’t know, Noble — but there’s more down there in the cabinet.’

‘Listen.’ He leaned close, dead eye toward us, good one keeping watch. There was something not quite clean about Noble’s breath. ‘Chooch’s wife knows something,’ he whispered, and Michelle backed off a step.

‘Janny? She doesn’t know the time of day.’

Noble shrugged, his lids heavy. ‘Maybe. But she’s been talking to the cops. I think she’s naming names. I’d check it out if I were you.’ He took Ginger’s fallen kerchief from my hand, casually popped his false eyeball into it, and knotted it up.

‘Come on,’ said Tania, taking my hand. Across the room (Michelle ‘oh’ed’ as Noble, squinting, unknotted the kerchief and showed it to be empty), Alison and her husband were moving parallel with us toward the living room, and again we found ourselves exchanging furtive glances. What had she said that night we met? I’d been speaking of the invention of audiences, theater as a ruse, a game against time. ‘Yes,’ she’d said, smiling up at me over the ruffles at her throat (I gave Tania’s hand a little squeeze, as I’d no doubt squeezed my wife’s hand that night at the theater), ‘and that’s why the lives of actors, thought frivolous, are essentially tragic, those of the audience, comic.’

The short policeman, the one called Fred, pushed in from the front room, blocking my view of her. At the table, he picked out three or four forks, held them up (Noble was prying his eyelid open, revealing the false eye back in place, gold backside out: Michelle gasped), chose one and turned to go, but got stopped by Woody, Roger’s law partner. They huddled for a moment, watched closely by Tania’s husband, Howard, standing stockstill against the wall, his broken lenses twinkling, and it looked to me, before I lost sight of them, like Woody gave the cop some money.

‘Who’s that playing darts downstairs?’ Tania asked in the hallway.

‘I don’t know.’ I was still thinking about Noble, his pocked face dark with apprehension: Ros had told me he’d been brutal to her once. Down below, the darts could still be heard striking the board, but the conversation, if any, wasn’t carrying up the stairs. ‘Cyril and Peg maybe.’

Tania considered this, twining the laces of her peasant dress around one finger. Noble had tried to shove the handle of a hairbrush up her bottom, she’d said, apparently as part of yet another amateur magic trick, and when it wouldn’t go, he’d beat her with the other end of it. In the doorway of the living room (‘I’m not a prude, Gerry,’ Ros had declared, ‘but it didn’t even have round edges — what was he so mad about?’), Jim was swabbing Daffie’s elbow with a ball of soaked cotton, Anatole and Patrick watching. Daffie made some remark to Anatole that made him blush, then looked up and winked at me.

‘Curiously,’ Tania said, fluttering her arm in a kind of salute at her nephew as she passed, ‘Peg was just talking about Ros. She said she’d always been a little jealous of her because, in spite of the crazy life Ros led, she was never unhappy, as far as anyone could tell, while Peg, talented, well-educated, orderly, comfortably married to Cyril for over twenty-four years now and never a serious quarrel or a single infidelity, could not truly claim to have been happy a single day of her life. It seemed so unfair, she said, like all the things you get born with and can’t help.’ Tania paused at the foot of the stairs to look back at me, one hand, knobby with heavy jeweled rings, resting on the banister, and I thought of Ros, bouncing goofily down a broad ornate staircase in a play in which she was supposed to be a stately middle-aged matron, descending to receive the news of the death of her husband, whom she herself had poisoned. ‘But then one day Peg saw Ros in a terrible state, all in a frazzle and close to tears, and the cause of it was simply that Ros was trying to learn her lines for a new play, something she always found almost impossible. She said it was a revelation, not about Ros, but about herself: she said she’d never see her own marriage in quite the same way again!’ Tania’s dark eyes crinkled with amusement as she thought about this, her lower lip caught in her bright white teeth, then she said: ‘The wound — it wasn’t made by that knife, you know. It was more like a puncture than a gash …’

‘Yes, that’s how it looked to me, too.’

From the stairs as we climbed them, I could see over Jim and Daffie and their audience into the living room, where Inspector Pardew seemed to be demonstrating something to his two assistants. Ros was out of sight, but her chalked outline, blood-drenched at the heart, was clearly visible, ringed about by the legs of watchers-on. Things still looked pretty smashed up and scattered in there, but from this angle the peculiar thing was the complex arrangement of chalked outlines, which reminded me of the old star charts with their dot-to-dot drawings of the constellations.

On the landing, in front of another of her paintings, Tania paused and raised her spectacles to her nose. ‘Look,’ she said. It was a painting of ‘The Ice Maiden,’ an extraordinary self-portrait in glacial greens and crystalline blues, viewed as though from the surface of an icy mountain lake. The Ice Maiden — Tania — was swimming up toward the viewer, her dramatic highboned face distorted with something between lust and terror, a gold ring deep in the throat of her gaping mouth, her right arm stretched out, sapphire-ringed finger reaching toward the hand of an unseen swimmer, like Adam’s toward God’s in all those European paintings. Behind her — below her — swirling up from the buried city streets of her childhood through a fantastic tapestry of crystal ice: blind frozen images from her other paintings up to then — ‘The Thief of Time,’ ‘The Dead Boy,’ our ‘Susanna,’ the tortured ‘Saint Valentine’ with his bloody erection, the orgiastic couples of ‘Orthodoxy’ and the dancing ‘Unclean Persons,’ ‘The Executioner’s Daughter’ in her pratfall, the pettifogging privy councilors holding a meeting on ‘Gulliver’s Peter,’ plus a number I didn’t know — and one of these, a woman poised in astonishment, had had her face scratched out.

‘My god!’ I cried. ‘Who’s done this—?’

‘It’s what I wanted to show you.’

‘It’s — it’s terrible!’ I touched the scarred area.

‘Gives you a funny feeling, doesn’t it? Like somebody’s made a hole in the world …’

‘But then that girl, I was never sure — it was Ros, wasn’t it?’

Tania nodded. ‘It wasn’t a very good likeness. I did it from memory and from other sketches.’

‘Do I know the painting it’s from?’

‘No, I never finished it.’ She seemed to think about this for a moment, staring at the obliterated face, as though, like the Ice Maiden, being sucked down into it. ‘Did you ever see that play, Bluebeard’s Secret, the one—’

‘Yes, Ros had a bit part. Or nonpart. It was the only reason we went to see it. I … well, I guess I didn’t—’

Tania smiled. ‘I know. All that self-indulgent melodrama, phony symbolism, pompous huffing and puffing about free will and necessity — just a lot of sophomoric mystification for the most part and a few bare bosoms. But I came away from it with an idea for a painting, Gerry — more than an idea: it was like some kind of compulsion, a desperate, almost violent feeling. A painting is like that sometimes. It can start from the most trivial image or idea and suddenly, like those monsters in the movies, transform itself and overwhelm you. That’s what happened to me with “Bluebeard’s Chambers.” I came home with nothing more than the idea of doors, the color blue from the lights they used, and Ros. And yet—’

‘But she hardly—’

‘I know, that was the point. Part of it. I meant to have a lot of doors in my painting, doors of all sizes, some closed, some partly open, some just empty doorframes, no walls, but the various angles of the doors implying a complicated cross-hatching of different planes, and opening onto a great profusion of inconsistent scenes, inconsistent not only in content but also in perspective, dimension, style — in some cases even opening onto other doors, mazes of doors like funhouse mirrors — and the one consistent image was to be Ros. As you see her there.’ As she spoke I could feel the surge of excitement she must have felt as the idea grew in her, filling her out, as though her brain, sixth sense organ, were being erotically massaged. I loved this power she had: to be excited. It was a kind of innocence. ‘Only from all angles, including above and below, sometimes in proportion with the scene around her, sometimes not, sometimes only a portion of her or perhaps strangely distorted in particulars, yet essentially the same basic pose, a being dispossessed of its function. And as she disappeared into her own multiplicity, Bluebeard himself, though not present in the painting except in the color, would hopefully have emerged as the unifying force of the whole.’ She sighed tremulously. ‘But I couldn’t handle it. Too many doors at once, you might say.’ It was like a tide ebbing. Her voice softened. ‘And Ros was not just fidgety — she was almost fluid. Never the exact pose twice — even twice in the same minute. But the colors were good, and eventually they led me to this one, a painting I’d been wanting to try for years.’ She stared now at her own image, beautiful, yet frightening in its intensity. ‘I think now if I tried again … the “Bluebeard,” I mean …’

She didn’t finish, but I felt I knew: she’d try scratching the faces of all the Ros figures, just as it was here. ‘Why not, Tania? Maybe you’re ready for it now.’

She smiled wanly, curling a few strands of her deep black hair around one long pointed fingernail, painted a deep magenta. ‘It’s so late, Gerry …’ In reflex, I glanced at my empty wrist. Below us, people were arguing noisily about what they’d seen or heard before the discovery of Ros’s body, and I heard my own name mentioned. Tania touched my arm. ‘Come on. We’ve come this far, we might as well wash these stains out.’

As we started up, I found myself thinking of that town in Italy again, a staircase, the hotel probably where I took that girl with the bunny-ear pubes — no, wait: some city to the north. Paris. Yes, a walk-up (‘I think of him, you know,’ Tania was saying, she was apparently talking about Bluebeard still, ‘as a man who wished to share all he had with the world … but could not …’), bare bulb on the landing. Over an Algerian restaurant on the Left Bank. Then who was I with? Oddly it seemed like Alison. But later, on the bidet—

‘Sometimes I think art’s so cowardly, Gerry. Shielding us from the truth …’

‘Well … assuming the truth’s worth having …’ We’d had this conversation before. Vic’s daughter Sally Ann slouched against the banister at the top of the stairs, watching us.

‘In other words, scratching that face out was the same thing in the end as painting it in …’

‘No, Tania, the one takes talent, genius, the other—’

‘Ah! But you don’t say which!’

There was a new patch on Sally Ann’s blue jeans, just over the crotch — the first thing I saw, in fact, as we climbed past her — that said ‘SWEET MEAT’ in bright fleshy colors. She was slumped against the rails, body arched, rolling a cigarette. Or maybe a joint. ‘Hey, your father’s looking for you,’ I said, and then, because she was staring so intently at me, I poked my finger in her bare navel and added: ‘Deli Belly.’

She jumped back, dropping her handiwork down the stairs. ‘Oh, Gerry, that’s stupid!’ She slapped at my hand, then pranced on down to the landing.

‘Someone’s got a crush on you, Gerry,’ Tania observed.

‘I always did have more luck with poets than painters,’ I sighed, and stooped to pick up another of Ginger’s kerchiefs on the top stair. In Paris, climbing, I was carrying some books with plain green jackets, a print bought from a stall along the Seine, and I stooped for … for … a coin? a ring? a button maybe, a brass or silver button …

The bathroom door was closed. I started to knock, but Tania with her customary lack of ceremony walked in. ‘Well, that’s pretty,’ she declared, and turned on the ventilator fan. Dickie was in there, cleaning Naomi’s bottom over the toilet. She was straddling the thing, bent over and facing the wall, skirt hiked, elbows resting on the water tank. Dickie looked very unhappy, smoking self-defensively with one hand, dabbing clumsily at her big hindend with the other. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, his plaid jacket hanging on the doorhook. ‘Hey, Ger! Just in time!’ he cried, flinging his butt into the paper-clogged stool. I saw he’d used up all the toilet paper on the roller and a box of tissues besides. ‘You’re the host, you can wipe her goddamn ass!’

‘No, thanks, you’re doing fine,’ I protested, but he was already washing up. Yes, the restaurant smells below, the creaky climb, the bare bulb, the bidet — but cold water. And a smaller fanny, plump but like a little pink pear, softly creased by the bidet lips, not two big melons like this — ah! my wife’s!

‘I’m so embarrassed,’ Naomi said. I was directly behind her, down on my haunches by the linen cupboard, reaching for more toilet paper (these genuflections, these child’s-eye views!), and her voice seemed to be coming out of her high looming behind. ‘I’ve never done anything like this before — you know, poohed at a party. But I was so scared—!’

‘It was what you’d call a moving experience, Nay,’ said Dickie, reaching for a towel. I found Tania’s protein soap down there as well. Only it was in a white box with blue lettering, not a blue box. I noticed a worn wooden handle behind the soap and grabbed it up — an old ice pick! Where had this come from—?! ‘Christ! Even the goddamn towels are covered with shit!’

Dickie came over to get a clean one from the cupboard and I shoved the thing out of sight, covering it up hastily with the nearest cloth to hand. It was uncanny, I hadn’t seen one in years — as best I could remember, the last time was at my grandmother’s house when I was still a boy — it was almost as though …

‘What you need is a bidet in here,’ Tania said, sprinkling soap into the tub and churning the water up with her hands.

‘What—?!’ I gasped. Naomi’s bottom reared above me, seeming to watch me with a suspicious one-eyed stare, pink mouth agape below as though in astonished disbelief.

‘A bidet. It’s what they’re for, you know, washing bottoms.’

‘Yes, sure, but oddly I–I was just thinking about—’

‘Can you beat that,’ said Dickie, tossing the towel over Naomi’s bent back. ‘I always thought they were for cooling the beer in.’ He leaned close to the mirror, scraped at a fleck of blood in front of his golden sideburns. ‘Oh, by the way, Ger, I don’t know if you saw what’s left of the poor bastard on the way up, but Roger’s no longer with us, you know.’

‘Roger—?!’ It was like a series of heavy gates crashing shut, locks closing like meshing gears. I stumbled to my feet.

‘I knew it!’ gasped Tania, clutching her arms with wet hands.

Dickie unzipped his white trousers and tucked his shirttails in, frowning at the bloodstains on his vest. I braced myself on the cupboard shelves. ‘But … but who—?’

He raised his eyebrows at me in the mirror as though to say I already knew. And I did. ‘They used croquet mallets,’ he said with a grimace, zipping up. ‘The grand fucking round, Ger — it was awful.’

‘But did you see it? Couldn’t you do anything about it?’

Dickie, framed in lights, smiled enigmatically. I recalled now the thud of the policemen’s blows, the shrieks, the thrashing about, the sudden stillness: we all knew what they were going to do when they took Roger out of the room. Maybe I’d even been told …

‘Dickie asked them to stop it,’ Naomi said from behind her bottom. ‘But they didn’t pay any attention to him, it was like they couldn’t even hear him, maybe because of the screaming, they were like standing on his head all the time. And we couldn’t stay, I was starting to … to poop again …’

Dickie turned his cuffs down, buttoned them, adjusted his tie. ‘Woody said the cops were claiming self-defense,’ he said, pulling a hair off the fly of his pants. He touched the top of his head, took out a comb.

Tania turned off the taps, got slowly to her feet, using the tub for support. ‘Self-defense. Yes … maybe it was …’ Tears filmed her big dark eyes. She’d been with me in the hallway when the two of them arrived tonight, Ros radiant, all smiles, Roger jittery as usual, trying to swallow down his panic as Ros went bouncing off into the living room, hugging everybody — it seemed so long ago! Like some kind of ancient prehistory, utterly remote, lost, an impossible past … ‘He was the most dangerous thing in the world, after all. A child …’

‘Hullo, folks! It’s your ole ticker taker!’ shouted Mr Draper, pushing heavily in, his glittering arms held out like a robot’s. ‘Just pass the time, please, any old time! Yeh heh heh!’

Dickie, carefully combing his fine blond hair back over the thin spot on top, grunted, slipped off his all-gold wristwatch, and, still checking himself in the mirror, held it out to Mr Draper: just then, one of the light bulbs surrounding the mirror sputtered and went out.

‘Hey!’ Dickie exclaimed, his arm outstretched, watch waggling at the end of it as though on the same circuit as the bulb.

‘Everything I’ve painted so far,’ Tania sighed, staring down at her dress, hands clutching her laces, ‘is shit …’

‘Could you slide it on there for me, son? Can’t bend my doggone arms anymore!’

Once, during a thunderstorm, when the lights had gone out suddenly, my son had asked: ‘Which is real, Daddy? The light or the dark?’ ‘The light,’ I’d replied, just as my wife, entering behind me, had said: ‘The dark.’ Then, as now, I’d felt inexplicably guilty of something I couldn’t define. I found a new bulb on the second shelf, then pushed the linen cupboard door shut behind me, leaned against it.

‘Which … if I am what I’ve painted …’

‘My watch was in my shoulderbag,’ said Naomi, sniffling. ‘I’m sorry …’

‘Now, now, child, don’t cry over lost time! When you get as old as me, you’ll — say! looks like you folks need a plumber there!’

‘I’m going to fix it in a minute, Mr Draper.’ He peered at me over his spectacles as though discovering me for the first time. I was thinking about my wife still. What had she said about the TV? I couldn’t remember. But I felt somehow I shouldn’t leave her alone too long. I held up my arm shakily, as Tania, beside me, began undoing the laces of her dress. ‘You’ve already—’

‘Yep, I’ve got yours, son, I know. I may have lost most everything else, but I still got my marbles. And Lloyd’s the name, lad, or is your memory lettin’ you down in your old age?’ He chortled drily and winked, then gazed pensively at Naomi’s backside. ‘Y’know, a curious thing happened to my wife and me in the catacombs of Calcutta—’

‘You can’t have love or art without the imagination, but it’s dangerous,’ Tania murmured, removing her half-lens reading glasses and setting them on the edge of the tub. ‘Roger said that …’ He had also explained to me once that, in the theater, when business was bad it was brutal, and when it was good it was: murder.

Talbot’s wife Wilma came in just then, asking if we had any aspirin. ‘For Talbot,’ she explained, peering at herself in the mirror over Dickie’s shoulder. ‘His ear’s hurting him so much, I’m afraid the dope’s going to drink himself silly, and you all know how, when Talbot’s looped, it’s goodbye — why, hello there, Lloyd! My, you’ve got quite a collection!’

‘Oh, it’s not my collection! No, I’m — heh heh! — I’m not keepin’ time, I’m just, as you might say, hangin’ on to it for the time bein’!’

Dickie, still primping, stepped aside to let me at the medicine cabinet. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirrored door before I swung it open, and I was shocked at how rumpled and bloody I looked — and how natural it seemed …

‘Oh, Lloyd,’ Wilma was saying, ‘you do pop out with the wittiest things! You ought to be on television! I was just talking to your wife, and she said how you had everybody on the bus out to the pyramids just in stitches about mummies and mommies and—’

‘In stitches, did you say—?’

‘Oh my goodness! It must be catching!’ She fussed at her perm, which had come undone in places, loose curls poking out like released springs.

‘Don’t you mean all wound up? Yeh heh heh!’

In the cabinet, my wife’s manicure set lay scattered on the bottom shelf. The tiny curved scissors were gone. The tweezers, too, for that matter. And was that a bloody hair —? No … no, a piece of red thread. I was overwrought. Dickie puffed his chest and smoothed down his vest, then reached for his plaid jacket.

‘I’ve lost touch,’ Tania muttered. She gazed sorrowfully down at Naomi straddling the toilet and pursed her lips. ‘I’ve got to get back to landscapes again …’

‘You know, by coincidence Talbot and I were just discussing yesterday, Lloyd, the idea of touring the — just give me the whole bottle, Gerry. If I can tranquillize the jerk maybe I’ll have a little fun myself for a change — we were just saying we maybe ought to visit Africa and the Middle East next year, so we must get together! You and Iris can tell us what to take, the good places to eat, nightclubs — Dickie, where are you going? I didn’t mean to chase you out!’

‘Don’t leave me, Dickie!’ Naomi begged.

‘The most important thing about Africa and the Middle East,’ Lloyd Draper was saying, ‘is that they’re two different places …’

‘Dickie, please! What am I going to wear?’

‘Go as you are, Nay, you’ll have them rolling at your feet!’

‘And of course it depends on what you’re keen on. Some folks like the cities, some the countryside, some the resorts.’

‘But what if it all starts up again—!’

‘Didn’t I see some disposable underthings in your shoulderbag, dear?’ Wilma asked.

‘I’m a temples-and-tombs man myself, though Iris goes more for the arts and crafts.’

‘Were there?’

‘Paper panties, Dickie, a package of them,’ I called, unscrewing the dead bulb. ‘You can’t miss them, they’re all chalked out—’

‘You can send Howard up with them, Dickie,’ Tania shouted. In the mirror, I saw her, her laces loosened, emptying her pockets onto the bathtub ledge. ‘I have to talk to him anyway!’

‘All wound up! Lloyd, however do you do it? Say, wasn’t that absolutely horrid about poor Roger! I just heard about it on the way up!’ I unwrapped the new bulb and screwed it in, feeling it pop alight under my fingertips. That hole in Tania’s painting. All along I’d been supposing Roger might have done it. Now I didn’t think so. ‘They say he was very brave, but as I told Talbot, such bravery, Talbot, we can do without! If they want to ask you anything, you just — but then there’s nothing to worry about really, Talbot always makes a good impression in interviews, heaven knows he’s had enough practice! Are you leaving us, Lloyd?’

‘Yes, eh, I’m afraid I mustn’t take any more time — or rather, I must!’ He chuckled, but his heart wasn’t in it. His arms and pants as he lumbered out seemed suddenly to be hanging a couple of inches lower.

‘Dear me, it seems I’m chasing everybody away tonight!’ I took the towel off Naomi’s back, hung it on the rod by the basin, tossed all the other towels into the clothes hamper. ‘Close the door, please,’ she begged, ‘it’s bad enough without everybody—’ ‘Oh, I’m sorry, dear. My, you’re the very model of patience!’

‘With Dickie, you have to be.’

Wilma checked herself quickly in the mirror, turned away in disappointment, fumbling in her handbag for makeup. ‘Do you think those policemen down there know what they’re doing?’ she asked idly, uncapping a tube of lipstick. ‘Well, I suppose they do.’ One night I was backstage talking with Ros in front of her mirror (she liked it best when she could do her lips in a cherry red), when an actor came rushing in, leaned over her shoulder, popped her breasts out of her costume, and kissed them with loud sucking smacks, crying: ‘Yum! I just love them!’ — then dashed out again, shouting: ‘Two minutes, sweetheart!’ She reached over, flushed with excitement, took my face in both her hands, and whispered: ‘Wait for me, Gerry!’ — then gave me her breasts to kiss, tucked them in, and rustled out. But she never came back. Not that night. It was a long way from the stage to her dressing room and, as often happened, she just didn’t get that far.

‘Before you start that, Gerry,’ Tania grunted, ‘could you help me off with this damned dirndl? It’s a bit tight through the middle.’

Of course, if I’d been more patient …

‘Still, poor Roger! Wasn’t it frightful, I still can’t get over it!’

… But in those days I believed in energy and ingenuity: that there was nothing beautiful in the world but what you worked for.

‘Do you think the visit of that old witch had anything to do with it?’

‘What witch?’

Which was a long time ago …

‘I think it’s snagged on my bra!’ Tania called from inside her skirts, as I tugged on them. I could almost hear Ros giggling under there, trying to guess who was behind her by feeling between his legs. Ah, Ros … I was beginning to choke up again. ‘At the back!’ I pushed my hand up under the heavy material and unhooked the bra clasp: her full black-nippled breasts tumbled out of their straitjacket like a landslide and Tania was free. ‘Thanks, Gerry!’ she gasped, and shook the dress out. ‘This damn thing’s worse than a corset!’

‘It’s beautiful, though,’ sighed Wilma. ‘Wherever did you get it, Tania? No, don’t tell me! I’d look as plain in something like that as I do in this. Why is it that no matter how much I spend I always come out looking like a hostess for a ladies’ club?’

Tania fastened her bra back on, hiking her heavy breasts into the cups, then knelt to spread her dress into the soapy water. I was struck by all the color on her face and down into her neck, against the sudden vulnerable milkiness of her naked back, its soft flesh (I was thinking of age, time, loss — Ros’s giggle like a hollow terrifying echo now — and the fruitless efforts to rise above them) deeply imprinted by the checks and crosses of the waistband and bra straps. I unrolled some toilet paper, took a preliminary swipe at Naomi’s behind as though to fight back. ‘I feel so ashamed,’ she said. ‘Dickie shouldn’t have left you to do this—’

‘No, it’s all right.’

‘It’s a crime,’ complained Wilma, patting at her hairdo. ‘Even this movie star mirror doesn’t help!’

There was a sharp knock at the door and I opened it, the pad of soiled toilet paper in my hand. It was my wife’s mother. ‘Mark needs to use the bathroom,’ she said testily.

‘Sure. Tell him to come on in.’

‘Not while you’re in there!’ She glared angrily past my shoulder at the three women.

‘Then why don’t you take him downstairs?’

‘Can’t do that. There’s a dead person down there.’

‘Ah, you … you know, then. I’m sorry …’ She stood there, rigid in her implacable distrust and isolation. I knew it was hard for her here, I wanted to reach out to her, make her feel at home, but she shrank from all such gestures as though to avoid defilement. ‘All right then. Just a minute.’

‘Hurry, Daddy! I can’t wait!’ my son called from behind her.

‘I’m just going anyway,’ said Wilma, squeezing past us. She rattled the aspirin bottle: ‘Gotta give Talbot his fix. Hello there, Mark — say, that’s a handsome sweatshirt! You look like Little Boy Blue! Remember me? Auntie Wilma? No?’

‘What am I going to do?’ Naomi whimpered. ‘I can’t go out there like this! And if I let my skirt down it’ll get all dirty—!’

Tania dried her hands on a large bathtowel, then wrapped it around herself like an Indian blanket. I retrieved the used handtowel from the clothes hamper. ‘Here, put this between your legs, Naomi — I’ll hold it for you, just let your skirt fall over it …’ She straightened up, towering over me as I crouched to hold the towel in place: a big girl.

‘Can I come in now?’

‘Not yet!’ said my mother-in-law as the skirt fell.

‘That’s it — now hold on to it, both sides …!’ She clapped her hands front and back and I came out from under the skirt. Even standing, I had to look up to her.

‘Please tell him not to take too long,’ Naomi pleaded softly as we stepped out, Tania wrapped in her towel, Naomi strutting stiff-legged, feet wide apart like a mechanical soldier, holding her tummy and behind. ‘I feel so stupid …!’

My son rushed past us, one hand inside his pajama pants, followed by my mother-in-law, straight-backed and icily silent. ‘Don’t flush it! It’s all stopped up—!’ The door slammed shut on my warning, and I could hear her snapping the lock into place. At the same moment, across the hall, the door to her room snapped open, and Woody’s cousin Noble came out, tie loose around his neck, buttoning his shirtcuffs, heading for the bathroom. ‘It’s busy,’ I said, and Noble, looking somewhat distant, his good eye as dull as his bad one, nodded and moved on downstairs.

Tania had meanwhile started telling me about Roger and the bad time she’d had when he found out about Ros posing for her — ‘There were just the two of us women in a closed studio, but he couldn’t bear the thought of other men even seeing Ros’s naked image — when he came storming over, he didn’t even knock, Gerry, he just smashed the door down!’ — but I was only able to follow part of it, my eye caught now by Alison. She was with a group of people down on the landing — her husband, Wilma, Lloyd Draper weighted with watches, Woody, Noble still doing himself up, and a handsome dark-suited woman I didn’t know but remembered from Roger’s rampage (the dignity of her fall, even as her pendant rose to strike her on the nose) — and maybe they’d all been looking at Tania’s painting before, or simply had run into each other there on the landing by chance (her husband shook hands now with Noble), but just as I spied her there, she turned, smiled suddenly at discovering me, and then, watching her husband (he was being introduced to the woman beside her, as Lloyd Draper clumped heavily on down the stairs), tossed me a kiss by kissing her hand, putting it behind her back and flipping it up at me from her rear. ‘As it happened, the day he came to wreck my studio, Ros wasn’t even there. Howard was up on a little pedestal, posing for me in a pink leotard as a privy councilor, and he nearly died of shock and mortification when Roger came crashing in.’

‘I should imagine …’

Woody had something he was showing to everybody, and as they all leaned closer to see it, or perhaps to sniff at it (‘I haven’t been able to get him to pose for me since …’), Alison slipped away and came hurrying up the stairs, her hair flowing, her breasts bouncing gently in their silken pockets. ‘I’ve been looking all over for you!’ she whispered. She took my hand, pulled me urgently into the darkened sewing room doorway (or what we called the sewing room), out of sight from those below, and kissed me. There was an incredible taste of something like herbs and mountain air, and a strange feeling, almost of a lost memory, swept over me — but just for a moment: laughter rattling up from below broke in on us. She glanced back over her shoulder, as I licked my lips. ‘He has a piece of that girl’s underwear.’

‘What?’

‘That man down there. The lawyer? He has a piece from her panties.’

‘Woody?’

‘I saw them cutting them up. I thought the policeman — the main one with the moustache — had something in mind. But apparently he forgot and the pieces started getting passed around. Like souvenirs or something …’

‘Ah, that explains …’

‘I’ve heard a thousand stories about her tonight.’ What I was thinking about was the money. And what Ros once said about time and love. ‘You’re right, you certainly weren’t the only one …’ She turned back and gazed up at me as though pained by something, then, unfastening a middle button, ran her hand inside my shirt. ‘When it’s like a river,’ Ros had said, ‘it scares me. What I want it to do is just ooze.’ There was a faint rustling in the sewing room darkness beyond us, a couple, perhaps more than one. I saw something red, a dress probably, and a glimmer of flesh. Alison’s mouth opened under mine and I closed my eyes, let my free hand slide down to grip one supple buttock. She kissed me, tonguing my lips apart, murmured into my mouth: ‘They killed her husband, Gerald. It was terrible.’

‘I know. I heard. I’m still not completely over it.’ Behind me, Naomi was telling Tania about her childhood, her mother’s cruelty and the cruelty of all her mother’s lovers.

‘Didn’t you expect it?’ Alison whispered, licking my lips.

‘I guess I did. That’s not what upset me. It was—’

‘Learning something you already knew — you said that during the intermission that night we met.’

I recognized now the source of that feeling I’d had since she came up the stairs. She stroked my chest gently, and I (I peeked past the doorframe — Noble was into another act down there now, making his cigarette vanish, then, with a bulge of his false eye, reappear from inside his mouth, now lit at both ends) pulled her closer to me, curled my hand around both firm cheeks, amazed at the familiarity of them. I disbelieved in fate, hated plays and novels whose plots were governed by it, but now, with Alison’s silky bottom filling my hand like an idea the mind … Naomi was telling Tania about being tied up and locked all day in a closet without a potty, then getting whipped with a belt for wetting on her mother’s pink suede pumps. Alison nibbled at my throat.

‘But it was more than that even,’ I whispered into her ear, a gold loop glinting there like a wish. Or a promise. I heard somebody grunt hoarsely in the sewing room shadows, then a soft stifled whimpering sound. Alison found a nipple, drew a gentle circle around it as though inscribing a target. ‘I think what struck me was not so much learning something I already knew, as the sudden recognition that in fact it had to be learned.’

Alison gasped softly, her bottom flexing in my grip as though to squeeze my hand, and looked up at me, her brown eyes swimmingly wide in a kind of awe, excitement, wonder. Her fingers tugged at my nipple. ‘That’s funny! I was just thinking the—!’

The bathroom door banged open behind us and my son came bounding out, calling my name — I let go of Alison and turned, squatting (my shirt jerked against her hand, a button ripped), just in time to catch him up. ‘Good night!’ he shouted, giving me a big kiss. There was a large white ‘SUPERLOVER’ emblazoned on his sweatshirt.

‘Good night is right, chum! You know what time it is?’

‘Daddy, do I look like Little Boy Blue?’

‘Well, you don’t look much like Red Ridinghood, do you?’

‘But Little Boy Blue’s a little boy!’

‘Not really. They just put that in the poem to make it sound better. He doesn’t like it either.’ Naomi, still holding on to the two ends of the towel through the skirt, rocked stiffly back and forth on her way back into the bathroom. ‘And you know, it wouldn’t hurt you to imitate Boy Blue and go crawl under—’

‘That’s a funny lady! Does she always walk that way?’

‘I don’t think so. She must have got wound up too tight.’

‘Daddy …?’

‘Yes?’

‘Daddy, somebody’s broke all my soldiers!’

‘What—?’ Why did that startle me so? ‘Hey, don’t cry!’

‘They took all the heads off! All my best ones! From the Waterloo!’

‘Easy, pal! We’ll get new ones! Here, wipe your eyes with this …’ My mother-in-law was glaring impatiently down on us, her arms folded.

Alison ran her fingers into the hair above my nape. ‘I’ll see you in a few minutes,’ she murmured, and Mark smiled up at her through his tears.

‘Not you, mister!’ I said, getting to my feet and handing him over to his grandmother. ‘You’re off to bed!’

He blinked, surprised. ‘You look scary, Daddy!’ he exclaimed, backing away.

‘We’ve been playing monsters,’ I laughed, and made a face.

‘Can I play?’

‘Not yet. When you grow up.’ I winked at my mother-in-law, but she turned her head away, her lips pinched shut.

‘Oh gosh, help!’ Naomi called from the bathroom. ‘I’ve dropped part of it!’

I turned to touch Alison’s fingertips in farewell, but she was already at the head of the stairs. She waggled her hand behind her back and waved at someone down on the landing, and I heard my son’s door slam. The heads?

In the bathroom, Tania was sliding open the shower curtain which my mother-in-law had apparently drawn shut. ‘Like variations on a theme or something,’ she said, and Naomi, in some distress, replied: ‘Well, that’s exactly the problem! It seemed so unfair!’

‘Here, let me help.’ I knelt and reached up under her skirt to hold the towel against her buttocks, but it had dropped down in front and I accidentally stuck my finger in her vagina. ‘Oop, sorry, Naomi …’ I found the loose end. ‘Okay, now pull your skirt up, I’ve got it …’

She hiked her skirt and, gripping it with her elbows, straddled the toilet stiffly once more. ‘Ouch,’ she complained as she leaned low onto the watertank, keeping her rear high so the skirt wouldn’t fall back over it. ‘I think it’s getting hard!’

‘Heavens!’ exclaimed Tania, casting a professional eye upon the sight. ‘Red, green, brown, yellow — what have you been eating tonight, Naomi?’

‘Just what was out on the table.’

‘Look, there’s even a little piece of string!’

‘It’s a shame to wash it away,’ I said, dipping the dirty towel under the hot water faucet in the sink. ‘Maybe we ought to frame it and hang it on the wall.’ A monster: yes, I was: there was blood at the edge of my mouth.

Tania, smiling, knelt to her task, wrapped still in the bathtowel, which slowly loosened as she squeezed and kneaded the dress. My grandmother, rolling out pie dough, would tell me stories about the wilderness, about the desperate, almost compulsive struggle against it as though it were some kind of devil: ‘We had to domesticate it, now look what we got for it.’ I could still see her old hands, dusted with flour, gnarled around the handgrips of the wooden rolling pin, her thin wrinkled elbows pumping in and out as she talked. Once she’d told me the story of a man in love with his own reflection who went out ice-fishing one day and drowned himself. She’d said it was her cousin. Tania held the sudsy dress up to study it. ‘By the way, Naomi, where did you get this switchblade?’

‘Switchblade?’ I touched my throat: a tiny red toothmark.

‘It was in your shoulderbag.’

‘Golly, I don’t know — I don’t know half the things in that bag!’

‘My favorite Mexican ashtray, too!’ I scolded, turning away from the sink and clapping the hot towel against her backside. Naomi oohed gratefully. ‘And, say, what’s this about a valentine?’

‘Did I have a valentine in there, too?’

‘Somebody said it was from me.’

‘Did you give me a valentine?’

‘No, dummy, that’s just the point.’ I took the compress away: it seemed to be softening up. I rinsed the towel out and applied it again, molding it to the curves of her moony cheeks. ‘What I want to know is who was it from?’

‘Honest, I don’t understand a thing you’re saying. I don’t think I ever got a valentine in my whole life.’ She sighed tragically. ‘Except once, a long time ago. And then it was more like giving it than getting it.’ She shuddered at the recollection. Or maybe at the chill when I took the towel away for another rinse. ‘My mother let one of her men friends spank me. It wasn’t the only time, but this time she didn’t even pretend I’d done anything wrong. Mother said it was a valentine, for him or for me, I don’t know which she meant, but he could slap it until it was bright red, a little bright red heart. They laughed and laughed all the time they smacked it.’

‘That’s what I like,’ said Tania, ‘a happy ending.’ She had a painting by that name, the darkest, most depressing piece she’d ever done, her vision of the lust for survival. ‘A cartoon,’ she called it.

‘Well, it was so … so humiliating!’ Naomi’s bottom did seem to be blushing at the memory, but mainly it was the warmth that was turning it rosy. ‘And there were others — an old man, I remember, who used a thing he called his “stinger,” and another one—’

Tania laughed, pushing the dress under. ‘All these family stories! They remind me of my own father the day he gave me my first box of paints.’ She lifted her dress out of the water to examine it, her arms bubbly with pink suds up to the elbows. ‘ “Tatiana,” he said, “there are no lies in the world, so everything you paint will be true. But not everything will be beautiful.” ’ She glanced at me over her pale fleshy shoulder, then plunged her dress back into the ruddled suds once more.

‘Ow,’ said Naomi, trying to peer past her bunched-up skirt at her behind, ‘it feels all prickly now like when you skin your knees!’

‘It’s a little raw. I wonder if we still have any baby oil around …?’ There was none in the medicine cabinet or on the shelves below the sink, but I found half a bottle at the back of the linen cupboard: thus life provides these little markers, I thought — then closed the door quickly. I’d nearly forgotten. How was I going to get that thing out of here? Should I even try? And what would I do with it? In my palm, the oil felt like sweat. I spread oil on one buttock, my mind racing through the house like a scanner (the clothes basket at the bottom of the chute? the loose floorboard in my mother-in-law’s room? the deep freeze?), then puddled out another palmful for the other one.

‘Actually, spankings and valentines go together,’ Tania remarked. ‘Saint Valentine was himself whipped before they beheaded him, and the Church has got a special kick out of beating lovers ever since.’

‘Beheaded—?’ gasped Naomi. Her buttocks clenched, and I thought of Alison, the way her hips had flexed in my grip, and a wave of anxiety swept over me. It was as though something were rushing down upon me which I wasn’t ready for, and I remembered my own mother, hurtling down a ski slope toward a broad bulge of mud — we’d hit an unusual dry spell that winter, and the snow had got worn off in places; the rest of us could ski round the muddy patches, but my mother still hadn’t progressed beyond the snow plow. We could see her streaking down a ridge toward the big glistening mud patch, a sickly smile on her face, and there was nothing we could do. ‘Sit down! Sit down!’ my father had cried, but she just kept coming, her eyes getting bigger and bigger. And then suddenly she’d stopped. I didn’t remember the fall, I must have looked away, but it was terrible, and she was in the hospital for a long time afterward. It was not only our last ski trip. It was the last time we ever went anywhere as a family.

‘Well,’ said Tania with a sigh (of course, I could simply turn it over to the police — why did that seem so impossible?), ‘they had to chop something off …’

I rubbed the baby oil into those big cheeks, bigger than my own, thinking back on my son when he was tiny, his little bottom like two fat knuckles, narrow and pointed, his life still simple then, his memories wholly utilitarian and unfocused. Now … One of his drawings was stuck up on the wall over the clothes hamper. It was a picture of a castle with a war going on, blood and flags flying, bodies scattered like jacks. There was a big figure up on top that was presumably Daddy. He had a long thing hanging down between his legs which Mark said was for killing the bad guys, and he was throwing somebody off the ramparts. Mark said sometimes the picture made him laugh and sometimes it made him afraid, but he wouldn’t tell me who it was that was getting thrown off. ‘The only Saint Valentine story I remember,’ I said, dribbling a little more oil into my hand and spreading it into the creases of the thighs and the furrow between her cheeks (I could feel her muscles relax as I worked the oil in — her tummy sagged and her thighs gaped a little as though her pelvis had distended), ‘was how he restored the sight of a blind girl.’

‘That’s nice …’ she whispered. I oiled the surface of her anus in little circles as though polishing a button (perhaps, I was thinking, recalling my son’s question, it’s neither the hard part nor the empty part, but something in between), then pushed my fingertip in, twisting it gently; she groaned and squeezed her cheeks together in pleasure and gratitude as I pulled it out: ‘I — oh! — like stories like that …’

‘Yes, well, naturally both she and her father got converted, and so consequently got their heads chopped off, too, bright eyes and all.’

‘Yuck! Why’d you have to go and spoil it?’

‘Ah, well, who’s to judge him?’ Tania sighed. She was wearing pink suds now all the way to her armpits. ‘Probably, like all of us, he only wanted company …’

I capped the oil, set it aside, then gave Naomi’s buttocks one final vigorous rub, making them gleam rosily, buffing away their playing-card pallor. If I could get that thing out of the house, I thought, I could bury it in the garden. ‘You like that girl, don’t you, the one with the pretty hair …?’ she asked softly, her voice jiggly from the massage.

‘How’s that?’

‘You were-her thi-hi-hinking about her ju-hust now, I-hi-hi could tell-ll-ll …’

‘Actually I was thinking about all those pee-hee-heople downstairs, and what they’re going to do-hoo-hoo to me if I don’t get back down there.’ This was a lie. I was thinking about Alison. She was all I’d been thinking about all night. Except for Ros of course. I spread the excess oil around the sides of Naomi’s hips and down her thighs, gave her cheeks a final slap, straightened up. And my wife. ‘There! that should—’

‘You want to make love to her, don’t you, Geoffrey?’

‘Gerry.’ I wrung out the towel, tossed it in the hamper, washed up.

‘Gerry …’ Naomi seemed to have grown fond of her position, or maybe she was falling asleep. Her voice was just a drowsy murmur. ‘How would your wife feel about it?’

I glanced at Tania in the mirror, her broad back to me like a stone tablet. A soft sympathetic stone tablet. ‘She wouldn’t like it.’ I wiped my hands, combed my fingers through my hair. ‘I’ll go get something for you to wear, Naomi.’

But when I opened the door, there was Howard kneeling down behind it, his eye where the keyhole had been — the package of paper panties hit the floor. He snatched at them. ‘I–I’m sorry, I, eh, just dropped — they slipped …’

‘Is that you, Howard?’ Tania called, and he popped erect as though on wires. She wrapped herself in the bathtowel, pulled the door open. ‘Well! look at you!’

He stood there in the doorway holding the package of panties in his chubby fist, weaving slightly, knees bent, a silly smile on his flushed blood-flecked face, one shirttail out, red silk tie dangling loose. ‘I just — hic! — brought these — this, you see. Dickie, eh …’ He thrust the package at me, but it had been opened and what reached me was only the cellophane wrapping: the panties lay in a soft heap at his feet. Tania picked them up, glanced at them curiously, then handed them to me with a wink. ‘Howard, Howard!’ she clucked, tucking in his shirttail. He giggled idiotically. ‘You’ve popped all your buttons!’

‘Here, Naomi, Howard’s — Naomi? Hey!’

She started up with a snort, blinking her eyes, her skirt slipping down her shiny bottom. ‘Oh …’ I could hear Tania asking her husband for his scout knife: ‘Which one’s the leather punch, Howard?’ Naomi smiled sleepily, leaned her head on my shoulder, looping her arms softly around my neck. ‘Can you help me,’ she yawned, ‘just one more time.’

‘You’re a big girl, Naomi, you can—’

‘Please, Geoffrey? I always split these things …’

I knelt with a sigh and, clumsily, one hand braced on my back, the other on the sink, she pushed her feet through the legholes. I could see it was going to be a tight fit. ‘Are these your size, Naomi?’

‘How should I know?’

Tania opened the linen cupboard. Maybe she was looking for some place to hide Howard’s knife. There was nothing I could do about it — the panties were caught halfway up Naomi’s thighs and had to be inched the rest of the way. ‘You’d think the oil would help,’ I complained, one eye on Tania.

‘Your wife, ahem, asked me to tell you, Gerald, she needs some things from the top shelf of the pantry and — burp! — can’t find the ladder.’ The ladder was in the pantry, but never mind, I understood. Naomi lifted her skirt out of the way, as I tugged at her flesh, pushed at the band. ‘I think we’re almost there, Naomi … easy now!’

‘Mmf! Whoo — thanks!’ she gasped, helping me at the crotch. Howard’s head was twitching from trying to look at Naomi and not look at her at the same time, making his thick fractured spectacles flutter with reflected light and his pink jowls wobble. ‘Now, just so I don’t have to bend over …!’

‘Also, eh, something about food stuck in the freezer, and the garbage was filling up and, well, she seemed …’

‘Yes, all right, Howard, tell her—’

‘You know, it’s funny,’ Naomi interrupted, ‘but these pants feel like they’ve already been worn by someone.’

Tania smiled; Howard was gone.

Naomi wriggled her hips to let the skirt drop. ‘Maybe I could do something to help, Geoffrey — I mean, if you want to see that girl. Like, you know, I could go talk to your wife for a while maybe, or get her to go to the basement with me and play darts or something …’

‘It’s too dangerous, Naomi,’ I said, wiping my hands. ‘She throws a wild dart. Anyway, I don’t see why you—’

‘Love!’ she said with a kind of sweet breathless tremor in her voice. ‘It should have a chance, wherever and whenever it appears. It’s so rare … and wonderful!’

Tania snorted. ‘Roger once told me he thought love was the most evil thing in the world — and seeing what he got out of it, you can hardly argue with him.’

‘Oh golly—!’

‘Don’t bring up Roger, Tania, I’ve just got her all cleaned up.’

Tania smiled wanly, leaning back against the linen cupboard, wrapped in her towel like a desert mystic, the tip of my ascot peeking out between her feet. I glanced up at her face, but it told me nothing. ‘It was that day he came breaking into my studio. Once he’d calmed down, we had a long talk together. He knew what was happening to him …’

‘But that wasn’t love, that was something … something crazy!’

‘He told me he used to believe, before he met Ros, that love was a kind of literary invention, that people wouldn’t fall in love at all if they didn’t read about it first. He said he always thought that we learned our lines about love, as it were, from fairy tales, then went out in the world and acted them out, not even knowing why it was we had to do it. But he said he forgot all that when he met Ros, forgot everything. He said she left him completely stupid, an illiterate, a wolf-child, a man utterly without a past, she invented him where he stood — it was as if he’d been concussed, suffered some kind of spectacular fusing of his entire nervous system, reducing it to the simple synchronous activity and random explosions of a newborn child.’

‘I can understand that,’ said Naomi softly, staring at me. ‘It’s great …’

‘He was terrified, He said it wasn’t that he needed to possess her, it wasn’t even selfishness, not in the way one would think. And he didn’t feel protective, didn’t feel kind or generous toward her, didn’t especially want her to be happy or successful or feel fulfilled — it was something much more immediate than that, something much more frightening, it was something almost monstrous …!’

‘Oh my …!’ Naomi fled, holding her tummy, brushing past Vic’s girlfriend Eileen, who had just come in behind us, looking dazed still, one whole side of her face now swollen and turning blue.

‘You’d think, after such a colorful childhood,’ I said, wiping the sink, then tossing the towel in with the others (yet I, too, was thinking about love), ‘she’d be a bit more callused.’

Tania laughed drily. ‘My god, Gerry, I knew the girl’s parents. Her father was a teacher and poet, her mother a musician, played the viola, gentlest people in the world. I’m sure Naomi’s never had a real spanking in her life. Not that she couldn’t use one …’ Eileen set her empty glass down on the rim of the basin, stared at us bleakly for a moment as though trying to place us, then dropped the seat of the toilet, lifted her limp skirt, pushed her pants down to her knees, and sat to pee. ‘Or maybe she’s at the wrong party …’

‘It’s blocked, Eileen,’ I said. I noticed that my electric razor was missing. Not (Tania was staring down at her dirndl in the tub of suds, lost in thought, it was as good a moment as any) in the linen cupboard either. ‘You should use the one downstairs.’

‘Somebody’s in there,’ she replied dully. ‘I think it’s Janice Trainer and some guy.’ I hung fresh towels on the racks, got out a washcloth and soaked it in cold water. Eileen looked down at her shoes and, peeing disconsolately, said to them: ‘I’m sorry …’

‘Here, Eileen, hold this against your face.’

‘It’s so sad,’ she said, ‘and there’s nothing we can do about it.’ She blew her nose in the washcloth. ‘And the worst thing is, I don’t feel a thing. That’s what’s horrible. They’re both killed and I don’t feel a thing.’

‘You feel sad.’

‘I felt sad when I came here.’ She’d left the door open: Alison didn’t seem to be around, but the sewing room light was on. I felt vaguely frightened and wanted her close to me again. Eileen twisted her finger in her cotton drawers, looked up at me. ‘Your wife was asking for you, Gerry.’

‘I know. I’m going.’

‘Gerry, do me a favor,’ Tania said, stopping me just as I stepped out the door.

‘It’s … it’s not over, you know,’ Eileen murmured softly behind her, posted there as above some deep abyss. Her urine had dwindled, but now it started up again, rattling against the clog of paper like a disturbing thought.

‘I’m worried about Mavis. Something about that look on her face. I can’t get it out of my mind. Check on her for me, will you?’

‘Sure, Tania. Should I—?’

But something she’d seen past my shoulder had made her frown suddenly and close the door. I turned to look: the two uniformed officers were coming up the stairs. Nobody in the sewing room now except Sally Ann and Dickie. My mother-in-law’s room was locked. The policemen had paused on the landing, hats tipped back, arguing about something around mouthfuls of food: it seemed to be about which sandwich was whose, but the party noises from below drowned them out. In the sewing room (little Gerald’s room actually — left more or less as it was ever since the stillbirth, the walls still a bright green, decals on all the furniture and closet doors, only a couch and a sewing machine added), Sally Ann was trying to thread a needle, and Dickie, cuddling behind her, had reached around and pushed his hand down inside her jeans. She glanced up, saw me watching, pulled his hand out as though to kiss it, and stabbed it with the needle. As the policemen started up the stairs again, alerted by Dickie’s yell, I decided it might be a good moment to get changed. Also I needed time to think. Too much was happening too fast and I was beginning to feel like my mother on that ski slope, sit down, sit down.

‘Can’t you tell them to be a little more quiet?’ my mother-in-law scolded, standing sentinel at the doorway of my son’s room.

I smiled at her, then edged past a stack of dirty plates and crumpled cocktail napkins into our bedroom and closed the door.

The room was quiet, hushed almost, lit only by the dense yellow glow cast by the bedside lamp, and I felt the jitteriness ebb away. I crossed the room to draw the curtains shut, catching a glimpse of myself in the wall mirror as I passed it. Hmm. Once I’d cleaned up, I should go say good night to Mark again so he wouldn’t carry that face into his sleep with him. Unless, of course (recalling Naomi’s valentine), he needed it.

Tania’s ‘Susanna and the Elders’ had hung where the mirror was until something she said one night made us move it to the dining room. Her husband, Howard, writing on a painter he disliked, had called his work ‘bedroom art,’ meaning too private and self-indulgent. I’d argued that all good art, being a revelation of the innermost self, and thus a kind of transcended dream, was ‘bedroom art,’ but Howard would have none of it. ‘This widespread confusion of art and dreams is a romantic fallacy,’ he’d said, ‘derived from their common exercise of the brain’s associative powers — but where dreams protect one’s sleep, art disturbs it.’ Tania had agreed: ‘I don’t paint in bedrooms, I don’t even think about painting in bedrooms, and I certainly wouldn’t hang one of my paintings in one, any more than I’d go to a party in haircurlers and pajamas.’ So we’d put the mirror there and moved ‘Susanna’ down to the dining room (admittedly, we’d hung it in the bedroom in the first place for no better reason than that the forest colors went well with the curtains and russet-canopied four-poster), and truth to tell, it did seem to take on more power down there.

Tania and Howard had arrived with Anatole tonight just minutes before Roger and Ros — in fact, I was still taking their coats when I heard Ros laughing on the porch — so we were all there in the hallway together for a moment, a moment that now in retrospect seemed almost magical. Ros had given each of us a big hug (I remembered Anatole blushing and staring at the ceiling as she smashed her breasts against him, Howard adjusting his spectacles knocked askew) and announced she’d just got a new part in a play — I’d had the impression at the time that it was news to Roger as well, and dismaying news at that — and then off she’d gone, the last time I’d seen her alive, best I could remember, to pass her hugs around. Ros was a great hugger. She always made you feel, for about five seconds, like you were her last friend on earth and she’d found you in the nick of time, and now, as I searched through the clothes hanging in the closet for something to wear, I found myself remembering all her hugs like one composite one: not a girl hugging, but hugging, girl-shaped. I picked out some soft linen slacks and a rust-colored open-collared wrap-tie shirt, tossed them over the back of a chair. Have to change shoes too. And socks: I was wearing blue.

Ros sometimes asked us, if we were visiting her backstage, to help her change costumes. I say ‘us’: I was seldom lucky enough to have her all alone. And anyway, somehow you were never really quite alone with Ros even when there wasn’t anyone else around. But it didn’t matter. One of the best times I ever had with her, in fact, was the day I arrived to find a photographer there shooting stills. I was married by then and so was she, so we’d seen each other only rarely, but her greeting was the same as if we’d been actively lovers. That is to say, exactly as it always was. What the photographer was after were simple straightforward publicity stills of Ros in rapture, but whenever she tried to act ecstatic, she always looked like she had a fly up her nose. The photographer said he’d be glad to help her work up the real thing himself, but he wasn’t loose enough, as he put it, to shoot pix and jism at the same time, so he asked me if I’d do him the favor of pulling Ros’s trigger for her. For the sake of art, he added with a professional grin. I protested — weakly, as Ros had just thrown her soft arms around me and given me another breathless hug: oh yes! let’s! — that my wife had slightly less magnanimous notions about art and duty, and I couldn’t take the risk of an uncropped photo turning up somewhere. Ros, of course, didn’t understand this at all, but the photographer, a married man thrice over, thought about it for a moment, then suggested: why not wear a mask? So we got the keys to the costume trunks, locked ourselves in a rehearsal room where they had some colored lights, mirrored walls, and a few loose props, and enjoyed an enchanted hour of what I came to think of as an erotic exploration of my own childhood. I was severally a clown, a devil, a scarecrow, skeleton, the back half of a horse, Napoleon, a mummy, blackamoor, and a Martian. I played Comedy to Ros’s Tragedy, Inquisitor to her Witch, Sleeping Beauty to her Prince Charming, Jesus Christ to her Pope. Sometimes the mirrored images actually scared or excited me, altered my behavior and my perception of what it was I was doing, but Ros was just the same, whether as a nymph, a dragon, an old man or the Virgin Mary: in short, endlessly delicious. The photographer occasionally joined in — just to keep his hand steady, as he put it — and once we balled her together without masks, dressed only in red light and jesters’ bells. I probably learned more about theater in that hour or so — theater as play, and the power of play to provoke unexpected insights, unearth buried memories, dissolve paradox, excite the heart — than in all the years before or since. After the third orgasm, it all became very dreamlike, and if I didn’t have a set of prints locked away down in my study to prove that it actually happened, I probably wouldn’t believe it myself. I enjoyed no particular costume so much as the strange sequence of them — a kind of odd stuttering tale that refused to unfold, but rather became ever more mysterious and self-enclosed, drawing us sweetly toward its inner profundities — but from the photographer’s viewpoint, the best was probably one of the simplest, a variation on Beauty and the Beast in which Ros wore only a little strip of diaphanous white cheesecloth and I dressed up in a gorilla suit. He said her astonished expression as she gazed up at the monstrous black hairy belly with a little white pecker poking out was exactly what he’d been looking for.

I smiled, feeling grateful. My bruises hurt less. I felt I could stay here forever, wrapped round by memory and the soft light and fabrics of my bedroom; but then I heard my mother-in-law scolding someone out in the corridor. I sighed, kicked my shoes off, peeled off the socks, removed my belt and laid it over the chairback with the clean clothes, lowered my trousers (all that blood in the crotch, hers: I shuddered, pained by this sad final gift), and had one leg out when Vic’s daughter came in. ‘Hey, I’m changing, Sally Ann!’

‘That’s all right, don’t mind me — I just want to sew this patch on.’ She peeked back out into the hallway (I heard someone protesting, something like a scuffle on the stairs — what I read on Sally Ann’s hindend was ‘SEAT OF BLISS’), then eased the door shut. ‘Everywhere else, there’s always somebody bothering me.’

She padded barefoot across the room to my wife’s dressing table, pausing there to admire her navel in the mirror. I’d pulled my trousers back up, partly to hide the erection I had from thinking about Ros, and stood holding them. ‘Come on, I’ve got a houseful of guests! I’ve got to get dressed and—’

‘Well, go ahead, for goodness’ sake,’ she said with an ingenuous smile, studying my open fly, ‘don’t let me stop you!’ She turned her back to me, pushed her blue jeans down, her little bikini pants getting dragged along with them. She stepped out of her jeans, very slowly pulled her panties back up, then sat down on the dressing-table stool, her little bum stuck out like she was trying to get rid of it. ‘I mean, we do know what men and women look like, don’t we, Gerry?’ She laid her blue jeans across her lap, took up her needle and thread as though conducting me with a baton. I noticed now the two whiskey glasses on the dressing table, the half-eaten sandwich, open jar of petroleum jelly, smelled the alien perfumes, the sweat and smoke. Even here then … ‘Look, I won’t even watch if that’s what’s bothering you,’ she added, gazing at me mischievously in the dressing-table mirror.

‘Have it your own way,’ I said, turning my back on her. I saw now that the bed had been rumpled, the covers tossed back over loosely. I lifted them: there was a bloodstain on the sheet, a small brown hole burned by a cigarette, coins, crumbs, a wet spot, and someone’s false eyelashes. Well … and the lamp’s yellow glow: it came from one of my wife’s nighties, draped over it.

I removed my trousers and tossed them on the bed, feeling fundamentally deceived somehow, just as Sally Ann said ‘Ow!’ and came prancing over to show me her thumb, which she said she’d pricked with the needle. ‘Kiss it for me, Gerry,’ she groaned, squeezing up behind me, her voice schoolgirl-sultry.

‘Now, see here, damn it—!’ I snapped, whirling around, and the ice pick, wrapped in my ascot, fell out of my shirt on the floor at our feet.

‘Gerry—! My gosh!’ she squeaked, stepping back, still holding her pricked thumb up with its tiny bead of blood.

‘It’s not mine,’ I said lamely. ‘It just … turned up …’

She squatted to pick it up. ‘It’s so — so sexy!’ she gasped, stroking it gently. She wound it up carefully in the ascot once more and handed it back to me. ‘I’ll never tell, Gerry!’ she whispered gravely and, standing on her tiptoes, threw her arms around my neck and kissed me. ‘Cross my heart!’ I tried to twist away, but she held on to my nape with one small warm hand, pointing down at the hard bulge in my shorts with the other: ‘See, you do like me, Gerry! I felt it pushing on my tummy — you can’t hide it!’

‘Don’t be silly, it gets that way by its—’

‘Can I see it?’

‘What? No, of course not!’ I pried her hand away from my neck.

‘Please, Gerry!’ She blushed, her worldly pretensions evaporating. ‘I’ve never really, you know, seen one …’ She touched the tip of it gingerly through the cotton. ‘Not … not sticking up like that …’

‘Don’t kid me, Sweet Meat, I’ve read your ads.’

‘Don’t make fun of me, Gerry. I was … all that was just for you. You’re so experienced, I thought you’d …’ She ducked her head, sucking at her pricked thumb. ‘I was just showing off …’ Her knotted shirt gaped, showing the firm little bubbles inside with their pink points like new pimples. I could hide it inside one of my wife’s hatboxes, I thought. Or her boot maybe, a sewing basket … ‘I feel so dumb …’ She leaned against me, putting one arm around my waist, pulling my shorts down with the other.

‘Hey—!’

She started back in amazement, holding on to the shorts. ‘Wow! Is that supposed to go in … in me?’ she gasped, cradling it in both hands. ‘Doesn’t it, you know … hurt?’

‘Only when you swallow,’ I said drily, tugging at my shorts with my free hand, trying to back away.

‘Wait, Gerry!’ She held the shorts down firmly with one hand, clutching my rigid member with the other. ‘I’m not as dumb as you think, honest — but in all the pictures they showed us at school, it was always hanging down like a lump of taffy, I never saw one all stiff like this!’

Maybe it was so; but her curiosity both angered and saddened me and I thought again of my walk that night through the laundry-laden streets of that seaside town of Italy: what a fool I was! ‘Sally Ann, please …’

‘But look — there’s the penis and there’s the scrotum, right? And the scrotum contains the epididymis, the seminiferous, uh, somethings, and the vas deferens, which I can just feel, I think, at the back …’ The illusion of novelty, that old shield against time: her fingers stepped tentatively between my thighs like a traveler in a strange city, excited by the possibility of the next turning, poor child … ‘At school, we girls called it the “vast difference” …’

‘Very funny.’ She pushed the shorts down further, thrusting her hand deeper, maneuvering my penis with the other like a lever — and in truth I felt like some kind of antiquated machine, a museum piece, once an amazing invention, the first of its kind, or thought to be, now seen as just another of time’s ceaseless copies, obsolete, worthless except as a child’s toy, disposable. I regretted my sarcasm.

‘And then the perannum—’

‘Perineum.’

‘The perineum, the anus, the — may I try to feel the prostate, Gerry?’ She held my organ gently now, the tip of it resting in her bared navel, as her finger probed speculatively up my rectum, and I thought: yes, the vast difference: a schoolgirl’s titter was what it was worth. Yet: maybe that was enough … ‘It’s all so soft and squishy and—’

‘SALLY ANN!’ roared Vic as he came crashing in, the door slamming back against the wall with a bang, his face pale with rage and anxiety.

Startled, she jerked her finger out — ffpop!: ‘Yow—!’

‘Oh, Dad!’ she groaned. ‘For crying out loud …!’

‘If that goddamn sonuvabitch—!’

‘Daddy, stop it! You’re making a scene!’

‘Holy smoke …!’ I wheezed, touching my anus gingerly: yes, it was still there.

Vic blinked, looked around blearily. ‘Oh, hullo, Gerry. Sorry. I thought — well, I didn’t see that bastard around anywhere, and …’

‘Really! You’d think it was the Middle Ages!’ She sighed petulantly, then, sniffing her finger, tipped my penis up for one last glimpse of it from the underside: ‘It’s all goosebumpy,’ she murmured, sliding the foreskin up and down, ‘just like the neck of an old turkey!’

‘Sally Ann, your father—’

‘I can take care of myself!’

‘Goddam it, you don’t know that guy, baby!’ Vic insisted, stumbling heavily about the room. He looked like a runner who’d just finished a mile and was trying to keep from falling over.

Sally Ann groaned, gave me a sympathetic grimace and a final squeeze, let go at last, as Vic fell heavily on the stool. I pulled my shorts up, caressing away the twinge in my anus. ‘Now, you’ve just sat down on my jeans!’

‘Sorry,’ he muttered, standing again, his eyes averted.

‘You’re drunk, Daddy, and you don’t know what you’re doing,’ Sally Ann scolded, tugging her jeans on. Vic had turned his back momentarily, drinking deeply, so I stuffed the ascot and ice pick under the mattress. There was something else under there already — a meat skewer? More picks? ‘I’m not a child, you know!’

‘You coulda fooled me,’ Vic grumbled, and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. His blue workshirt, half-unbuttoned and bloodstained, was sweaty at the back.

‘Oh, Daddy, you’re such a pain,’ Sally Ann said, checking herself in the dressing-table mirror, pressing one hand against her flat tanned belly, untying and loosely reknotting her shirt when she saw me watching; but it was her mortality, not her childish flirtations, that I saw there. Something Tania had once said about mirrors as the symbol of consciousness or imagination. Maybe we’d been talking about her painting of ‘Saint Lucy’s Lover,’ the one with all the eyes. It had started, I remembered, with one of her little parables on wisdom, her painterly belief in immersion, flow, inner vision, as opposed to technique, structure, reason. Just as mirrors, she’d said, were parodies of the seas, themselves symbols of the unconscious, the unfathomable, the formless and mysterious, so were reason and invention mere parodies of intuition. What one might expect from Tania. What impressed me at the time, however, was her definition of parody: the intrusion of form, or death (she equated them), into life. Thus the mirror, as parodist, did not lie — on the contrary — but neither did it merely reflect: rather, like a camera, it created the truth we saw in it, thereby murdering potentiality. Sally Ann, watching me curiously through it, had clutched the collars of her shirt and tugged them closed as though chilled. ‘What … what’s the matter …?’

I gazed at her mirrored image, unable to see her shadowed back between us. A great pity welled up in me. ‘You are too willful …’

‘You can goddamn well say that again!’ growled Vic, looking up. ‘Now the rest of the night I want you downstairs where I can—’

‘Oh, pee!’ she pouted, clenching her little fists to her sides. ‘Both of you can kiss my elbow!’

Vic lunged at her: ‘Why, you little—!’ But she was out the door. He stood there glaring furiously for a moment, his broad sweat-darkened shoulders hunched; then the strength seemed to go out of him and he sank down again on the dressing-table stool. I sat on the edge of the bed to pull the clean socks on, tie my shoes, and relieve the tingling between my cheeks. I was thinking still about death and parody and mirrors and the essential formlessness of love (my mother-in-law appeared in the doorway, glared at us, and snapped the door shut), and about how I might explain it all to Alison. And then: how she’d gaze up at me … ‘You keep a bottle up here somewhere? Under the mattress or something?’

‘You might find some hair tonic in one of those drawers …’ And so what about marriage then, Gerald? Just another parody? I seemed to hear Alison ask me that.

Vic grunted. His face was in shadows, but his shaggy white hair was rimmed with light right down into his sideburns. He spied the two glasses on the dressing table, sniffed them, chose one, dumped the cubes from his own glass into it. I transferred the things from the pockets of the old pants to the new, shocked again at the obscenity of the bloodstains (and how had I come to pocket a can-opener, this medicine dropper, these shriveled oysters and bumpy little marbles?), then threaded my belt through the linen loops. ‘Jesus, what am I going to do, Gerry?’

‘I don’t know, do you ever talk to her?’

‘Talk to her! What the fuck about? My father was a happy-go-lucky tough-ass illiterate coal miner, hers is a sour bourgeois overeducated drunk — what could we possibly have in common? Hell, she understands my old man better than I can understand either of them!’

‘That figures.’

‘Come on, don’t get supercilious with me, pal—!’

‘I only meant—’

‘You meant what we all know: love blinds. I ruined myself as a thinker the day I knocked up my wife. I haven’t been worth stale piss ever since.’ I couldn’t argue with him. He hadn’t written a thing since Sally Ann was about six years old, and had slacked off long before that. But I didn’t believe it was that simple. It’s one thing to reduce the world to a mindless mechanism, another to live in it. Flow had surprised him, offended him, dragged his feet out from under him. Even now, as he reared up and paced the room restlessly, he seemed to slip and weave. ‘Let me tell you something about my old man. Just because he could belt the shit out of you, he thought he was tough. And smart. The sonuvabitch was full of cocky aphorisms, proverbs — he had the secret. And you know what it was? Power. This cringing yoyo, who spent his whole life slaving away down in the nation’s asshole when he wasn’t in the breadlines, believed in power like kids believe in fairy godmothers. He still does. Still talks tough and acts smart and lies there in his goddamned hospital bed in the old folks’ home waiting to be blessed with it. With Sally Ann, on the other hand, it’s experience. Spoiled, naive, unable to grasp anything more complicated than a goddamned confession magazine, a girl who wouldn’t recognize the real world if it rolled over her, and what she believes in — guides her whole life by — is experience!’

‘What are you trying to tell me, Vic?’

‘That I know what my fucking problem is, goddamn you — but what burns my ass is that I can’t seem to do anything about it!’

‘Well, you’re coming around in your old age …’

‘What, to paradox? Hell, no, I’ve always accepted that — I just don’t make a religion out of it like you do, that’s all.’

I took a sip at the drink Vic had turned down: something between a Manhattan and a gin rickey. Awful. Against the light: lipstick smears on the far rim. Full lips. Cherry red. ‘And what do you suppose Eileen believes in, Vic?’