Gerald's Party

He sighed, finished off his drink, chewed an ice cube. ‘I can’t imagine. Ecstasy maybe? Belly laughs?’

‘You’re awfully hard on her — why do you even go out with her?’

‘She’s got a comfortable hole I can use. And when I’m done I can go away and she doesn’t complain.’

‘Is that fair?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think about it.’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t think I could enjoy it that way.’

‘Well, you’re more considerate than I am. You give parties, I don’t.’

‘Maybe the trouble, Vic, is that you’ve never been in love.’

His sour laughter boomed out. ‘No, you silly shit, you’re right — I’ve loved, god-damn I’ve loved, but in love is one fucking place I’ve never been! Except …’ He paused, sobering some, ran his broad hand through his hair. ‘Except once maybe …’ He leaned against a bedpost, his craggy face softening.

‘Anyone I know?’

He sighed, rubbed his jaw, lurched away from the bedpost. ‘Yeah.’

I drank in silence while he paced. He was clearly in pain. Not Eileen’s kind of pain, sullen and stoic: it was more disturbing than that. He seemed riven by it, his stride broken, his vision blocked, and I thought: Yes, I’ve known all along — Eileen on the couch, Vic standing over her, his back to the rest of us, his neck flushed, fists doubled … ‘Ros,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘It was right after my wife and I broke up.’ His voice was husky, and as though to cover, he cleared his throat and sucked up another cube to chew. ‘I needed somebody quick and easy,’ he said, the words crunched with ice. ‘No complications.’

‘Like Eileen.’

‘Like Eileen. Only it didn’t turn out that way.’ He sighed: more like a groan — then dropped onto the stool as though undermined. He sat there, his back bent, elbows on his knees, staring mournfully into his empty glass. ‘We ran into each other at a political rally. Roger was defending some prisoners who’d rioted down at the jail—’

‘I know. I read about it.’

He grunted. ‘For some reason, he’d dragged Ros along. Probably afraid to leave her on her own anywhere. The rally was held on the steps of the courthouse, and those of us who were organizing the thing were up on the porch, under the colonnade, facing the crowd. I was pressed up against Ros when we first arrived, and pretty soon we found ourselves holding hands and asses and finally all but jerking each other off — Jesus, I was horny! We must’ve excited everybody within thirty yards of us!’

‘Where was Roger?’

‘Up front with all the main characters. He was pretty nervous about her as usual, but though he kept craning his head around, he couldn’t really see anything — except for the flush on Ros’s face and the way she twitched around.’ He paused, licking idly at the melting ice, his thick brows knitted. ‘You sure you want to listen to this?’

‘Yes …’

‘It’s not just a cheap cocksman’s brag — I mean …’

‘I know.’

He leaned forward again, staring off through the far wall. ‘She was wearing a soft woolen skirt, lambswool maybe. I never notice women’s clothes, but I know every goddamn thing she had on that day. By feel anyway. I don’t remember for sure what color the skirt was — a greenish plaid, I think — but I’ll never forget what it felt like to grip her cunt through it.’ The fingers of his right hand closed around his knee. ‘A fat furry purse, a little soft bristly stuffed animal that you stroked between the ears — Christ, I’m getting a hard-on just thinking about it!’ He scratched his crotch, sucked up a cube, spat it back again. Tears glinted in the corners of his eyes. I screwed the lid on the petroleum jelly. ‘Anyway, it came my turn to speak, and I whispered to Ros before I left her how fucking unhappy I was, and how much I needed something human to happen to me. She was waiting for me when I’d finished — I don’t know what I said out there, but it must have been good, taut and hard and nothing wasted, my whole body working on the message, as it were — and when I got back she pulled me gradually behind the others and finally on into the building, smiling toward Roger all the while. She knew the courthouse pretty well, I guess because of having to go there with Roger at lot. She hurried me up some stairs, down a corridor, through an empty courtroom and into a little cloakroom where the judges’ robes were hung. We could hear the speeches and chanting and applause from in there, so we were able to time it pretty close. Or I could anyway. I don’t think it mattered to her. Probably we weren’t up there more than ten or fifteen minutes, but thinking back on it I feel I spent the best half of my life in that cloakroom, and I left enough seed in Ros and all over those fucking robes to turn a desert green! Jesus! I knew it was crazy, adolescent, unreal, but I didn’t care. I came down out of the goddamn building about three feet off the ground! It’s too bad we weren’t storming the fucking barricades that day, I could’ve died a happy man!’ He smiled broadly, thinking about this, and for a moment, a glow of warmth and innocence lighting up his craggy face, he looked like a different man. Then the skepticism returned, the sour shrewdness, the weariness: he glanced up at me to see how I was taking it, shrugged at my sobriety (oh, I knew it, knew what she could do, knew what I’d lost, what we’d all lost), set his glass down. ‘It was so goddamn beautiful, Gerry …’

‘Yes …’

‘Fucked me up politically though. My head was useless, she blew a hole right through it. No will. Everything was body.’ He seemed, guiltily, to savor the thought. I was thinking about that old joke of Charley’s: making it stand up in court … ‘A weird kind of connection. For me anyhow. The illusion of … owning time …’

‘I know. We have the past, we have the future, but what we never seem to be able to get ahold of is the present.’

‘Yeah, well, the present is in the hands of a very few.’ I could see his jaws grinding under the heavy sideburns.

‘Have you seen a lot of her?’

He peered up at me under his shaggy gray brows, his eyes damp, then back down at his empty glass. ‘We met a few times afterward, but as you know, with Roger it’s not easy. And it was against my principles, in ruins as they were by then, to fuck another man’s wife, so finally I got enough self-control back to bring an end to it. The fucking anyway. I still wanted to be around her whenever I could, even if I had to exercise my imagination a little and get my rocks off in a substitute. I mean, no offense, but Ros was pretty much the reason I came here tonight. Just to be … well … and now …’ He bit his lip, reared up, and began stalking around the room again, rubbing his face with one thick hand, breathing heavily. ‘They’re using a goddamn fork on her down there, Gerry!’ he cried.

‘A fork—?’

‘Those fucking cops!’ He smashed his fist into the wall. I recalled now that view I’d had into the living room over the heads of Daffie and Jim and the others, Inspector Pardew on the floor on his knees, reaching back over his shoulder toward his two assistants like a surgeon asking for a scalpel. Vic whirled around suddenly and bulled out, fists clenched, slamming past some people just outside the door: Dolph and Talbot spun back against the wall, Charley Trainer fell on his arse, his scotch flying, a woman giggled nervously. ‘Beautiful!’ exclaimed Charley from the floor, his face dripping whiskey, and the woman, a rolypoly lady I didn’t know but judged from her rouged cheeks, colorful print dress, bloodied broadly at the belly, short socks and loafers (why did I think of her in a garden?) to be Mrs Earl Elstob, tittered again. There was a crash down on the landing and somebody cried out. ‘Jesus, what was that?’ Dolph asked thickly, bumping up against the back of the fat lady, who looked surprised and moved away.

‘Maybe he forgot about the stairs,’ Talbot said, and licked his palm. His bandaged ear made him look like he was growing a second head.

I gave Charley a hand getting to his feet, hauling him up out of the dirty dishes. He’d sat square in a plateful of Swedish meatballs, but he didn’t seem to care. ‘Physical contact — I love it!’ he declared, weaving, and flung his arm around me, the bottle of scotch at the end of it thumping heavily against my shoulder. ‘You’re a wunnerful guy, Big G!’ He belched sentimentally, his eyes crossed, and Dolph echoed him more prosaically.

‘I heard that one before,’ said Talbot stupidly. They looked like bloated parodies of horny teenagers, papier-mâché caricatures from some carnival parade, and for a moment they seemed to be wearing their mortality on their noses like blobs of red paint: yes, we’re growing old, I thought, and felt a flush of warmth for them.

I started to pull away, but Charley hugged me tight, the neck of the whiskey bottle pressing up cold and wet under my ear. ‘Hey, I love this fella!’ he exclaimed to the fat lady, and she commenced to giggle. ‘Honess t’god, Gladys, he’s my oldess ’n bess friend! He’s a — he’s a prince!’

‘Oh you!’ she tee-heed, her face flushed and blood-flecked.

‘No, s’true, Gladys! He’s a real goddamn prince! And I wanna tell ya something—!’

Oh oh. ‘Listen, Charley, no kidding, I—’

‘Charming,’ said Dolph drily, a bit slow in his beery distance. ‘Prince Charming.’

‘Pleased, I’m sure,’ giggled Gladys, holding out a reddish hand, and Talbot, taking it, said: ‘And this is our fairy godmother, Prince. Make a wish — any wish!’

‘I wish I had another beer,’ said Dolph quietly, his face flattening out, and Charley, laughing loosely and dragging me lower as his knees sagged, said: ‘No, wait a minute! Ha ha! This’ll kill ya! We were out inna country, see—’

‘Keep it clean,’ admonished Talbot, holding a small patch of silk to his nose. He sniffed and, winking, offered me the scrap: I turned away, clamped still in Charley’s grip. Distantly, I could hear Woody’s wife, Yvonne, complaining loudly and drunkenly.

‘I awways keep it clean, Tall-Butt, you know that!’ Charley was rumbling, drooling a bit at the corners of his mouth. ‘I soak it three times a day in hot borax, beat it on Saturdays, n’ hang it out to air on Sundays — how clean can ya get? No, cross my heart — ask Gladys here, she’s seen it!’

‘Oh my!’ she gasped as the others yukked it up. ‘I’ve … I’ve never been to a party like this before!’

‘Firss time fr’evrything, my love!’ Charley declared, the dark pouches of his left eye flexing in a drunken wink. ‘I’ll drink to that!’ said Talbot confusedly, and Charley, staring at us quizzically, mouth adroop and eyes rheumy, asked: ‘Whawere we talkin’ about? Hunh? God-damn it, men!’

‘The … the prince …?’ whispered Gladys.

‘’Ass it! You got it! By God, Gladys, you got it!’ He slumped toward her, pulling me with him (once in a film when the heroine said her lover took her breath away, Charley’s wife Janny had sighed wearily and said she knew just how the lady felt, and I thought of her now, blanched with the terror of some knowledge, as though — could this be it? — as though hugged once too often …), resting his empty glass on her big round shoulder. Down below, Yvonne was hollering something about the sky falling in. ‘You got it,’ he growled, ‘an’ I want it!’

She squealed again, clapping a pudgy hand to her mouth, and the big soft mounds of her bosom bobbled with giggling, watched glassily by Dolph and Talbot. Charley winked at me, hugging me close, but behind all the clowning I saw a soggy sadness well up in his blue eyes, a plea: help me! it’s terrible, old buddy, but this is all I can do …!

‘I think your wife’s about to bust a vessel down there,’ Dolph put in, crumpling his beer can and dropping it in the hallway clothes hamper. ‘She asked me to tell you—’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘You got a goddamn mess downstairs, you wanna know the truth,’ Charley declared, frowning drunkenly down his nose at me. ‘We come up here t’get away from it all, Earl’s sister here’n Doll-Face’n ole Tall-Butt’n me — all us birds of a feather, we gotta, you know, go flock together!’ Talbot grinned sheepishly, glancing toward the head of the stairs, Dolph’s ears turned red (he pulled a spare can of beer out of his back pocket as though in self-defense), Gladys looked blank. ‘ ’N hey! we’d be honored t’have yer company, you ole scutlicker, if you careta join us—?’

‘Thanks, but I have to go see what my wife—’

‘Woops, I feel rain, boys!’ Charley hollered, ducking, as Dolph popped the beer open, and I was able to squeeze out from under his arm at last. ‘We better get under cover! There was a slap, a nervous titter, something about age and beauty, while ahead of me, Yvonne: ‘Just break the goddamn thing off, Jim, and throw it away — what the hell do I need it for anyway?’

‘C’mon back, Ger, when you get a chance! Awways room for one more!’

The mess in the hall seemed to be worsening — not just the dirty plates and glasses (picking my way through it, I was reminded of a similiar occasion, stepping gingerly by moonlight through the wreckage of an ancient ruin somewhere in Europe, I was there with some woman, she was Czech, I think, though she said she was French), but pits and crusts, ashes, butts, napkins, toothpicks: I stuffed ten glasses full of debris and picked them up with my fingers in their mouths (I’d been experimenting around a lot and felt the need for tradition, something stable — but the ruin was a terrifying cul-de-sac, capriciously dangerous in the moonlight, and the woman’s sudden wheezing appetite for oral sex scared the blazes out of me; afterward, so I was told, she threw herself down a well), paused a moment to listen at my son’s door. My mother-in-law was reading to him: ‘… endeavoring to appear cheerful, sat down to table, and helped him. Afterward, thought she to herself, Beast surely has a mind to fatten me before he eats me, since he provides such plentiful entertainment …’ The way she read it, it sounded like a Scripture lesson — no wonder Mark had been telling us lately he didn’t like fairy tales. As I listened to her recount the trials of beauty in a world of malice and illusion, I was reminded of my own grandmother’s bedtime stories, variations mostly on a single melancholy theme: that people are generally better off not getting what they think they want most in this world. For her, the Beast’s miserable enchantment would have been paradise compared to the Prince’s eventual regret.

Yvonne howled with pain and swore fiercely. ‘Take a grip on something,’ I could hear Jim grunting, and Yvonne bellowed again: ‘Waaah! Woody—? Where’s Woody?!’

I rushed toward the stairs, worried suddenly about my wife — how long had I been gone? what were the police thinking about that? — and crashed into Alison’s husband, just stepping out of the bathroom: two glasses slipped from my fingers and exploded on the floor. ‘Oops, sorry!’ I exclaimed, shaken.

‘It’s occupied,’ he replied flatly, touching his beard. I caught just a glimpse of the drawn shower curtains and what looked like my wife’s apron on a hook as he pulled the door firmly shut behind him (probably I should call a plumber, you could smell it all the way out here) and waited for me to precede him down the stairs. If in fact he meant to follow.

‘It’s okay, Yvonne,’ some woman urged (I’d already turned toward the stairs, as though compelled, as though following some dancestep pattern laid out in footprints on the floor), and Yvonne cried: ‘Okay—?! What the hell do you mean it’s okay?!’

My knees flexed involuntarily on the top step: it was (like a sudden wash of color, the fall of a memory scrim) the ski slope again — not now the one on which my mother fell (Yvonne lay sprawled on the landing, one foot sticking out at an angle under Jim’s seat as he bent over her, worried onlookers pressed around), but the recurrent ski slope of my dreams, impossibly sheer, breathtaking, ambiguously crosshatched, disasters at the base: my tip (watched always by rows of dark spectators and now as though pushed from behind) into oblivion … ‘Yvonne—!’

‘Gerry!’ Yvonne cried, looking up at me (they all looked up, Iris Draper, Howard, that woman I’d seen with Noble, Anatole, Daffie, Ginger, as though I were something painted on the ceiling — all but Jim, now gripping Yvonne’s foot by its heel and instep). ‘They’re after me, Gerry!’ The dark side of her face, bruised and bloodied, glistened with tears (the skis were off, I was walking down stairs again), but the eye looked dead: it was the near side alone that seemed to be speaking to me: ‘They’re taking me away by pieces!’ As she said this, Jim pulled steadily against Daffie on the leg, twisting it inward (the toes had been sticking out at ninety degrees), actually stretching the leg as though indeed trying to screw it off, and there was a harsh grating sound — ‘Yowee! Lord love a duck, Jim!’ she yelped and her free leg kicked out, catching Ginger in the back of the knees and making her sit abruptly, her narrow rump thumping the stair with a crisp little knock. ‘Use a little grease!’

‘That’s got it, I think,’ Jim grunted, holding her foot with one hand and wiping his brow with the other. The grating sound echoed in my head like the faint harmonic of some lost memory. Jim pushed her skirt back to study the symmetry of the two legs, and I thought of Ros again, a game we used to play which we called ‘Here’s the church, here’s the steeple …’ I was breathing heavily. ‘All right, let me have those splints, son …’

Anatole, down a few steps behind him, handed him a pair of croquet stakes, the spikes still muddy. I knelt next to them, bracing myself on the glasses I was carrying. ‘It was Vic,’ Daffie panted, squatting alongside (‘Oh, Gerry,’ Ros would say, ‘did we? I just don’t remember!’), and Anatole said: ‘He was after the cops.’ I could hear his stomach gurgling; he didn’t look all that well. ‘He ran straight into the living room and grabbed the fork away from them—!’

‘The fork—! What was he, starving or something?’ Yvonne squawked, her head resting now in the lap of Noble’s friend. Ginger unpinned a kerchief from one shoulder and handed it to Jim, searched her body for another. Over our heads, Howard and Mrs Draper seemed to be arguing about Tania’s painting of ‘The Ice Maiden,’ Iris finding it too unskillful and farfetched. ‘If that’s all he wanted, why the hell didn’t he ask? Do I look like the resisting type?’

Daffie, leaning over the railing (‘But of course there’s distortion,’ Howard was insisting, ‘there’s always distortion!’), called out: ‘Hey, Nay, is that a fresh drink? Bring it up here like a good old dog! We got an avalanche victim who needs it bad!’

‘I wouldn’t,’ said Jim. He was tying Yvonne’s two legs together with Ginger’s kerchiefs. ‘She’s probably got some fever, a drink could make her sick.’

‘Make me sick! Oh boy! That’s a good one!’ Yvonne hooted. ‘Just look at me! Sick would be a goddamn improvement!’

I looked through the railings and saw Alison in the hallway gazing up at me. She glanced past my shoulder, pursed her lips, then beckoned me with a faint little nod and disappeared from view, replaced by Kitty, rushing past, clutching her shirt front together, a flushed grin on her face. Ginger, perched awkwardly on two steps, her ankles wobbling above the stiletto heels, had meanwhile bent over and run her hand between her knees and up the back of her skirt: she smiled suddenly, her little red pigtails bobbing, and whipped another kerchief out, then grabbed her rear as though it were all falling apart back there, crossed her eyes, and tottered bowlegged down the stairs, past Naomi coming up. ‘It’s just too ambitious,’ Iris Draper said flatly (I glanced into the cluster of glasses under my hands, disconcerted suddenly by the sense of being anchored outside time: I jerked my fingers out of them), and Howard sighed with disgust.

‘Gosh, what happened?!’ asked Naomi, staring wide-eyed at Yvonne’s bandages. She leaned down to offer Yvonne her drink, provoking a disapproving sigh from Jim, and there was a sound like a paper sack being popped, then a slow soft tear. Naomi smiled sheepishly at me and shrugged, and Yvonne said: ‘Thanks, honey, you just saved an old lady from a fate worse than life!’ She tossed the drink back as Jim, nose twitching, asked: ‘What’s in that thing?’

‘I don’t know,’ Naomi said. ‘I just found it.’

‘Yum!’ wheezed Yvonne. ‘Pure bourbon!’

‘Smells like a salad.’

Below us, Dickie laughed, and Daffie, saddened by her glance over the railing (‘But please,’ Howard was arguing, ‘there’s not arts and crafts, there’s only art or crafts!’), said: ‘Roger once told me a funny thing. He said all words lie. Language is the square hole we keep trying to jam the round peg of life into. It’s the most insane thing we do. He called it a crime. A fucking crime.’

‘You mean he … he thought it was a crime to be insane?’ Naomi gasped, looking distressed, and Yvonne, smacking her lips, declared hoarsely: ‘My oh my! That oughta put some chest on my hair!’

The woman cradling Yvonne’s head winced and exchanged a sorrowful glance with Jim, who said: ‘The thing now is to get you more comfortable. Here, son, you’re young and strong, you take that side and I’ll — can you manage the legs, Gerry?’

‘Sure,’ I said as the doorbell rang. ‘Ah …’

Jim glanced up from under Yvonne’s right arm, a shock of gray hair in his eyes. ‘That may be the ambulance …’

‘Ambulance?’

‘The police wanted an autopsy on Ros.’ Anatole, under the other arm, looked startled and annoyed. Jim pivoted toward the foot of the stairs just as Woody appeared there, coming in from the back. The doorbell rang again. ‘They said here and now, but I told them this was not the place for it …’

‘Woody!’ Yvonne wailed, breaking into the tears she’d been holding back.

I nodded and set her feet down gently. ‘Thanks, Jim. Just a minute, I’ll let them in.’

‘Where’ve you been, for chrissake?!’

‘I’m sorry, I was in conference,’ her husband said, hurrying up the steps with his cousin Noble. As they brushed past me, Noble took a last impatient drag, then flicked his cigarette butt over the railing (Patrick, below, ducked, glaring — behind him: a line of people at the toilet door). ‘I just heard — are you all right?’

‘All right?! Are you crazy?’ She was bawling now, all bravura swept away in the sudden flood. Wilma had started for the door, but hesitated when she saw me coming, turned to check herself in the hallway mirror instead. ‘It’s gonna take three goddamn trips just to get all of me home, Woody! Baw haw haw! How can I be all right?!’

‘She’s had a rough time,’ the woman who’d been holding her said, her voice sharp, and Woody, behind and above me, muttered something apologetic about an interrogation: ‘I’m sorry, the police needed help opening some drawers — I think they’re on to something …’

‘It’s the ambulance,’ I explained to Wilma’s reflection, but when I opened the door it wasn’t. It was Fats and Brenda.

‘Ta-daa-aa-ah!’ Fats sang out, his arms outspread like a cheerleader’s, a big grin on his face, and Brenda, squeezed into a bright red pants suit, did a little pirouette there on the porch, one hand over her head, and, snapping her gum, asked: ‘Hey, am I beautiful? Am I beautiful?’

‘But … what are you guys doing out there?’ I asked in confusion.

‘I give up, man,’ Fats replied, rolling his eyes and thrusting a bottle in a paper bag at me. ‘What are you guys doin’ in there?’

‘But I thought — I thought you’d already—’

‘Sorry we’re late, lover,’ Brenda said breathlessly, pushing in and pecking my cheek (‘She’s too heavy for him,’ Patrick was complaining through the banister rails), ‘but it took — hi, Wilma! — it took me an hour to get into this goddamn pants suit!’

‘It’s gorgeous!’ Wilma exclaimed, holding her breasts. ‘Where’d you ever—?’

‘And I got so turned on watchin’ her,’ Fats rumbled with a grin, unzipping his down jacket, ‘that I made her get out of it again!’

‘Which was damn near as hard as getting in — God help me if I—pop! — have to pee!’

‘Never mind, I can’t wear pants anyway,’ Wilma sighed ruefully, turning back to the mirror and giving her hair a pat. ‘The last time I tried it, Talbot said I reminded him of an airbag.’

‘Gettin’ in,’ Fats admitted, jabbing a stiff thick finger at us (‘Or maybe it was Archie who told me that …,’ Wilma mused), ‘it was pretty hard, okay.’ The finger drooped: ‘But gettin’ out …’

‘Or Miles …’

‘Listen,’ I broke in, ‘you have to know, something terrible has—’

‘What? Do I hear somebody at the dartboard?’ boomed Fats, tossing his jacket on the chair over the Inspector’s overcoat: the fedora (now dented as well as spotted, I noticed) fell brim-up to the floor. Above us, glasses kicked, clattered and tumbled. ‘Lemme at ’em!’

‘Talbot likes to do it with mirrors,’ Wilma added, turning away from her reflection. Fats, over her shoulder, was slicking down his pate, someone was hammering on the toilet door: ‘The police are here, Brenda. Ros has been—’

‘Hey, baby!’ Fats boomed out over our heads. ‘Whatta they done to you?!’

‘It’s been a helluva ballgame, Fats!’ Yvonne declared from halfway down the stairs, her arms around Jim and Anatole, Woody carrying her bound legs, Noble cradling the middle: ‘Don’t let it sag, Noble!’ Jim gasped. Patrick’s face was screwed up, his body tense, as though sharing the burden.

‘He says it makes him feel like a movie star,’ Wilma explained to no one in particular. ‘It only makes me feel depressed.’

‘Well, old Fats is here now, honey — you just point out the bad asses who done this to you!’

‘Easy!’ puffed Jim as they reached the bottom, crunching glass underfoot, and Michelle came over to see what was going on. Up on the landing, Alison’s husband was expounding on something to Howard and Mrs Draper, pointing into the depths of the Ice Maiden’s mouth.

‘Say, Gerry, your wife—’

‘Yes, yes, I know, Michelle—’

‘Wait a minute, what’s all that red stuff all over everybody?’ Brenda cried.

‘It’s just what it looks like,’ said Wilma. ‘Wait’ll you see the living room …’

‘All I can say,’ said Noble darkly (Daffie, stepping down, turned her back to the hallway mirror, presenting us with a mocking before-and-after contrast that seemed almost illusory: a time trick that Tania might have used), ‘is it had better come out!’

The downstairs toilet door opened just then: and it wasn’t Janice Trainer who emerged, but the short cop, shirttails dangling, still struggling with his buttons: ‘Awright, awright! Christ!’ he muttered, his face flushed, and ducked into the living room.

‘Blood always does …’

‘They still won’t give them back to me,’ Patrick was whispering to Woody. Woody nodded, grunting sympathetically: ‘See me about it later, Patrick. We’ll see what we can do.’

‘Roger went crazy,’ Michelle explained to Fats, but he wasn’t listening: ‘Here, man, you ain’t lookin’ so good,’ he said, taking over from Anatole. ‘How ’bout lettin’ ole Fats have a cuddle now?’

Anatole, starkly pale, gave up his burden gladly, and as they carted Yvonne off to the living room (‘I’m okay! Send me in again, coach! I’m not finished yet!’ she was declaiming), he turned to Brenda and said, his breath catching: ‘That woman was there when they killed him. He gave her something.’

‘Who, sweetie?’ Brenda asked, smiling up at him (Patrick, behind the boy’s shoulder, bristled). ‘Killed who?’ She blew a teasing bubble, popped it, sucked it in.

‘It was nothing,’ Daffie shrugged. She held her elbow cradled in her palm, cheroot dangling before her face. ‘I saw it. He gave her a small gold earring, that’s all.’

I started. ‘What kind of—?’

But the phone rang and Daffie went to answer it. ‘Who?’

‘Bren!’ Fats bellowed from the living room. ‘It’s Ros! Our little Ros! She’s DEAD!’

‘What? Ros—?!’ she cried and went running in there in her tight red pants (there was a thump, a curse): ‘Oh NO—!!’

The tall officer appeared, scowling, in the doorway, leaning on his short leg, and Daffie with the phone said: ‘It’s for your boss, kiddo.’

‘Fucking bastard,’ muttered Anatole under his breath, and Michelle whispered: ‘I once had a dream about something like this.’

Howard came down, his hips swiveling with drunkenness, and announced petulantly: ‘The upstairs toilet is blocked, Gerald!’

‘I know, don’t flush it. I’m going to call a plumber. As soon as the phone’s free.’

‘Only it was at the art school, a boy who’d been painting me — he was dead but he kept on painting and I couldn’t get away …’

‘Have you seen Talbot, Howard? I can’t find him anywhere.’

Inspector Pardew now stood in the living room doorway, thumbs hooked in his vest pockets under the drapery of his white silk scarf, his impeccability marred only by the dark stains and chalk dust on the knees of his trousers. He gazed thoughtfully at Wilma, then at each of us in turn. Anatole brushed past him, thumping his shoulder (the Inspector seemed not to notice, his eyes falling just then on his overturned fedora), and Patrick followed nervously, making little whimpering noises probably meant as apologies. ‘It was so strange,’ Michelle was saying softly, ‘but then it suddenly became a movie we were all watching. Only I still didn’t have any clothes on. I wanted to get out of the movie theater before the lights came up, I was so afraid …’

Pardew picked up the fedora, smoothed out the dent, brushed it on his sleeve, and, glancing casually at the label of Fats’ jacket, placed his hat on top of it. He seemed all the while covertly interested in Michelle’s description of her attempt to push, naked, past all the people in the movie house of her dream (‘I kept hearing them all laugh, but every time I turned around, they’d be like gaping statues, fixed in some kind of awful terror — and the scary thing about it was I couldn’t find any aisles …!’), ignoring Daffie behind him, holding the phone at her crotch like a dildo and blowing smoke at the back of his head. ‘Is that for me?’ Iris Draper asked, leaning over the banister, her spectacles dangling on a golden chain, and Wilma said: ‘That reminds me of the time Talbot took me to a professional wrestling match, and Wolfman threw Tiny Tim, who weighed about five hundred pounds, right in our laps.’ Yes, the trouble with ritual, I thought, is that it commits you to identifying the center (Pardew, staring at the front door, seemed momentarily nonplussed), which is — virtually by its own definition — never quite where or what you think it is …

‘But then I was in the film again that I’d been watching and I was crying over the dead boy, yet all the time I felt like I had to go to the bathroom …’

‘I know what you mean, dear! When Tiny Tim came crashing down—’

‘Yes, yes,’ Inspector Pardew was saying (he had the phone now and Daffie had vanished), ‘I’m doing everything I can.’ Howard, hands outspread for balance, wobbled past us into the dining room, muttering something about ‘that stupid boy,’ and Michelle, taking my arm, her hand like gossamer, whispered: ‘It’s so eery down here without any music. It makes everybody feel lost or something …’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Fiona. She told me all about it.’

‘She did?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Hang on, we’ll get you braced up.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I don’t think so …’

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

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

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

‘Fiona—? But I’m sure we didn’t—’

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

‘I think she came with Gottfried.’

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

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

‘I know. I’m sorry.’ I watched her as she untied the kerchief from around her hair and stuffed it in one of the red hearts in the apron, the brilliant kerchief making the heart seem dull. There was a thick smell of chili and warm chocolate. ‘I’m going to call a plumber, but right now the police are using the phone.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes, I’m sure …’

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

‘What—?’

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

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

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

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

‘Did she have any clothes on?’

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

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

‘Wilma, he meant.’

‘Was Dolph with Wilma?’

‘No, but …’

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

‘You mean Wilma—?’

‘Louise and Dolph.’

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

‘Who, Yvonne and Woody?’

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

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

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

‘Well, and Ros, too, of course.’

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

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

‘You mean Ros? She’s—’

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

‘NOW she’s broke the OTHER one!’

‘Easy, Yvonne, You’re all right …’

‘Waahhh!’

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

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

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

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

‘Well, maybe that’s all there was.’

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

‘The Beatitudes, you mean …’ She was right, of course, and it was true. Noble turned his glass upside down, making Brenda gasp, but nothing poured out; then he took a long slow drink.

‘It’s that kind of openness, directness, that’s the hardest to understand, to really know.’ Alison glanced up at me and seemed about to make some gesture or other (Noble had just turned his empty glass over, pouring what seemed like pitchers of whiskey out on Ros and the floor), but just then the tall officer returned, blocking my view of her, and told Anatole to get out of the easy chair. He was threatening him, or so it seemed, with a pair of scissors. Anatole grumbled but dragged himself weakly to his feet, and Brenda, watching him, said something that made Fats laugh and turn his head to watch. ‘It was what you said about amateurs and professionals, how it was easy to see how people learned their parts, but the mystery was the part that wasn’t learned, the innerness, the — what did you call it?’ Lloyd Draper clumped through in all his golden armor: ‘Time passes!’ he called out with a kind of leaden cheerfulness. Reflexively I glanced again at my naked wrist, reminded of Alison’s slender hand when I stripped her watch from it, that mischievous grin under her freckled nose (I was recalling my thoughts about blocked views now, the special chanciness of live theater, the uniqueness of each spectator’s three-dimensional experience, the creative effort, as in life, to see past sight’s limits, all those things I’d wanted to talk to her about), the taut excitement of her body as her finger circled my nipple, its pad brushing it lingeringly across the top, the nail in turn underscoring it as though to italicize it with some gently ambivalent threat …

‘Gerald …?’

‘Ah, the … the innateness?’

‘Yes. What’s in the sack?’

‘I don’t know, a bottle of something. Fats brought it.’ I handed it to her, and she peered inside, saying: ‘Fats? But I thought they’d already …?’ I had apparently missed seeing the short cop, Fred, leave the room, but he entered from the dining room now with a freshly made sandwich, just as his gimpy partner, tugging his cap brim down over his brow, went lurching out: they collided in the doorway, the sandwich popping out of Fred’s hand onto the floor, and Bob, backing up with his scissors uplifted like a sword, stepped in it with his short leg (there was distant applause: the folk album was a recording from a live theatrical performance), squirting catsup and mustard out over the carpet. I felt my wife wince as his foot came down. ‘I hope we have enough food,’ she murmured. Alison was distracted by Brenda and Anatole. ‘Everyone seems to have starved himself before coming tonight, and those two are the worst of all.’ Bob scraped the mess off his boot on the rung of a chair, as, out in the hall, the doorbell rang again.

‘Oh no, not more …!’

‘Maybe that’s the ambulance.’

‘I’ve got everything for moussaka, I think. And I could fix some eggrolls and chicken wings …’

‘Can I help clean up?’ asked Naomi, rushing up with an ashtray full of cigarette butts and olive pits. She cast me a meaningful glance (I could hear new voices out in the hallway, loud and insistent, and there were quick bursts of light) and dropped the ashtray. ‘Woops!’

‘Oh, Naomi! I just cleaned in here!’

‘Honest, I’m all thumbs!’ She squatted to gather up the litter, smiling at me and nodding toward Alison.

My wife knelt in front of her, reaching toward a little constellation of spilled pits (‘You know, I think I’m beginning to like other people’s parties better than my own,’ she sighed), then paused, her hand outstretched, sniffing curiously.

‘I’ll see who it is,’ I said, pulling away (someone was shouting: ‘As if it weren’t bad enough—!’), just as Soapie, an old acquaintance of ours from the city newspaper, painstakingly seedy in his sweaty press hat, black horn-rimmed spectacles, tweed sports jacket and frayed tennis shoes, came striding in with his photographer Leonard: ‘There she is, Leonard! Beautiful! Looks like she’s screaming or something! Don’t miss that bottle of pills! Or — wow! — the pinking shears!’ He greeted Woody and Patrick — ‘No, hold it! Just like that! Got it, Leonard?’ — then waved at Noble, slapped Fats on his paunch (‘Howzit goin’ champ?’ ‘Not so dusty, Soap …’), lit a smoke, watching Alison slip around behind Woody and Patrick, aimed Leonard at Brenda. ‘Holy moley, Yvonne!’ he cried. ‘What kinda party games you been playing? Leonard, get a picture of that mess!’

‘Get my good side, Leonard! The back one!’

Leonard, dipping and twisting, fired away, Soapie instructing. Some ducked, some smiled painfully, others turned away as though to ignore the newsmen. Behind me, over the simple throbbing chords on the hi-fi, I could hear my wife laugh and say: ‘Darts! Goodness, Naomi, I don’t know which end you throw at the target!’

‘Whoo-eee,’ exclaimed Soapie, rubbing his finger along a blotch on the wall and tasting it, as Leonard crouched for a shot, through legs, of the soles of Ros’s feet, ‘this is the real stuff! Did she get it with her socks down like that?’

‘No, she—’

‘She just got a part in some new play, didn’t she? I heard that somewhere — something about a rapist who turns out to be the President or God or the Pope maybe, I forget which—’

‘She said it was about a private eye who—’

‘Yeah, you think there’s any connection, Ger?’

‘You mean with the murder?’

‘Not likely, hunh? Nothing private about our gal Ros, right? I’ll never forget that toyland musical where she was a limp puppet with strings tied to her bazongas, but nothing else! What was it—?’

‘The Naughty Dollies’ Night—’

‘Right! Sensational! Just so long as she didn’t have to act, eh? Why was she carting around all this junk, by the way?’

‘Well, actually that’s not—’

‘I mean, like pipe cleaners? Wacko!’ He scratched out a note, his cigarette between his teeth like a blowgun. ‘Best ever, though, was that pillar-of-salt thing — remember that, Leonard?’

Leonard licked the thick brush under his nose and rolled his eyes, then focused again on Yvonne, who, pulling some strands of stiff gray hair under her nose, said: ‘What would you say to a pillar of blood blisters, Leonard?’

‘Yummy,’ Soapie remarked absently, watching Brenda put her arm around a wobbly Anatole, Howard trying to hide himself in the shadows of the drapes. Soapie picked up a fallen ashtray, stubbed his butt out in it, then tossed the ashtray over in a pile of swept-up debris, fished his pack out for another smoke. I saw we didn’t have to worry about how to get the stains out in the white easy chair: they’d been cut out. ‘This is where you found her?’

‘No, more like …’ Suddenly we were all looking around on the floor. ‘Here!’ I said, pointing down to her chalk outline. It was almost completely trampled away, a ghost drawing.

‘Are you kidding?’ argued Noble. ‘That’s where I was standing.’

‘She was over — here!’ said Wilma, pointing down at another outline, this one of Ros spread-eagled. ‘Here’s the place!’ Yvonne stretched round in her bindings, trying to see, winced, sat back hurt and frustrated. I was afraid she might start crying again. ‘Then what about this one?’ Fats asked, standing over a third, and Lloyd Draper, disencumbered now of his timepieces, came in and, thumbs hooked in his red suspenders, pointed down at yet another, this one of Ros curled up, near the foot of Yvonne’s couch. ‘Here’s where she was, young fella, the poor thing.’

Soon everyone was arguing about this, moving around the room from outline to outline as though on a guided tour, plumping for one chalk outline or another, even Dickie, winking at me and grinning around a toothpick, pointing at the place where Roger had knocked me down. ‘You can see the bloodstains here at the heart.’

Yvonne reached out and took my hand, slipping something into it. ‘Listen, do me a favor, Gerry,’ she whispered (‘So what, they’ve all got bloodstains!’): a small gold loop, an earring …

‘Sure, Yvonne—’

‘Whatever happens, just don’t let them take me away!’

‘But no one’s—’

‘Please?’ She squeezed my hand, held it tight, her own hand trembling. ‘Promise?’

‘Of course I promise. But nobody’s going to—’

‘I love you, Gerry,’ she whispered, while around us the argument raged on: ‘Her legs were together! Like this one!’ ‘No, apart! Here!’ ‘You care …’

‘Do you like this one better, Leonard? Okay? Then, let’s get started!’ By a kind of vote, they’d chosen the one chalk drawing I knew to be impossible, for, until Roger had knocked it over running wild, our brass coffee table had stood there. Now, Soapie instructing, Fats, Woody, his cousin Noble, and Alison’s husband began shifting the body. ‘Easy—!’

‘Jesus, she’s so fucking cold!’ Noble complained, letting go and wiping his hands on his trousers, and Lloyd, patting him on the shoulder, took over for him. ‘That’s right, old man,’ grumped Noble, ‘it’s more in your line.’

‘Really? In a swoon?’ his girlfriend asked, fingering her medallion, and Patrick, commanding a small group with his tale of Roger and the old hag, nodded gravely: ‘That’s what he said.’

‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ Brenda butted in (she was clinging to Anatole, or maybe holding him up), and Patrick went red, his eyes narrowing. ‘You always overdramatize, Patrick.’

‘By the way, Yvonne,’ I whispered, rubbing the little golden earring gently between my fingers (I’d just, averting my gaze from the resettling of poor Ros, caught a glimpse of Alison past the bent back of her husband: she’d also turned away and was now watching the tall police officer, Bob, scrape dried blood off the walls into little pillboxes, and I thought, captured once more by the illusion of pattern: What love shares with theater is the poetry of space …), ‘who’s that woman who came with Noble? I missed her name when—’

‘Who, Cynthia?’ Yvonne hollered out, and the whole room seemed to stiffen. ‘With that one-eyed pig? Come on, Gerry, give the lady credit — that’s my husband’s new mistress!’

‘Oh, I’m sorry—!’

‘Sorry? What’s to be sorry?’ What had Tania said earlier about Yvonne? I should have been listening. The earring seemed to be dissolving between my fingers like a melting coin. ‘I mean, what the hell, you can’t blame him — who wants to poke his little whangdoodle in me and catch a goddamn cancer?’ Her voice was breaking. ‘Right, Soapie?’

‘Right,’ replied Soapie absently, tipping his hat back and lighting up. ‘Okay, that looks terrific — don’t worry about the stockings, just leave them down like that, it’s a nice touch. So what do you think, Leonard?’

Yvonne burst into tears again, and Cynthia, holding her hand, cradled her head against her stomach. ‘I’m so goddamn miserable, Cynthia!’

‘I know. It’s okay …’

‘Reminds me of a sailor I once saw clapped in bilboo-boots,’ Lloyd Draper drawled, staring down his long lumpy nose from the foot of the couch.

‘Hey, Ger!’ Soapie called, arm outstretched. ‘Come over here a minute!’

‘Iris and me were in Singapore at the time, thought bilboos had gone out of fashion, but nothing does really. Let an idea come into the world and you’re stuck with it till the cows come home, seems like.’

‘You weren’t here! You didn’t see him! How do you know what he said?’ Patrick cried, becoming a bit hysterical as Brenda linked her plump fingers with Anatole’s and smiled icily back at him, grinding her jaws.

Soapie guided me around behind Ros’s body, then stepped back (something cracked under his sneakered foot, he kicked it aside: glass, it glittered) to peer at me through a frame made by his thumbs and index fingers: ‘That’s it, Ger, just — no, turn a little to the right, your right!’ While Soapie focused on me through his fingers (I tightened the ties on my rust-colored shirt which had fallen loose, the earring pressed to the hollow of my palm with two oily fingers), Leonard knelt behind my ankles shooting Ros’s profile against the lights. ‘Okay, good — now where’s your wife?’

Michelle, hands crossed at her shoulders and elbows tucked in, danced alone in the sunroom now, swaying trancelike to the whining nervous music. ‘I guess she’s gone back to the—’

‘That’s okay, never mind.’ Soapie pulled Alison away from her husband to stand beside me. ‘Just need a warm body.’ Her husband went over to watch Leonard, who was setting up a tripod about fifteen feet away, the tall cop complaining: ‘Somebody has stepped on my X-ray unit …!’ ‘I’m telling you, Patrick, I know. I was the one who sent that old lady to him! She’s a welfare client of mine.’ Brenda popped her gum, Patrick bit his lip; Anatole, looking confused, gazed through both of them, letting himself be fondled. ‘No, not like tin soldiers — relax, you two! More like you’re talking or joking about something!’

Woody started to slip away, but Soapie clutched his sleeve and guided him behind Alison, jostling her slightly, so that, having tried not to, we touched.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, clearing my throat, but Alison was looking the other way: yes, the left one was missing.

‘I feel so exposed,’ she muttered between her teeth, tugging at the green silk sash at her waist.

‘Hey, Doc—?’

‘I can see now why the old lady came away convinced that Roger had a goddamn screw loose!’ Brenda laughed behind us, and Patrick hissed: ‘That’s stupid!’

‘Well, he wasn’t stupid,’ Wilma said, ‘he certainly wasn’t.’

‘Somebody’s going to pay for this,’ the cop swore as he limped past us, and Anatole said: ‘Can I sit down again?’

Jim had come over and, directed by Soapie, had removed his jacket once more and rolled up his shirtsleeves. He plugged the stethoscope into his ears, knelt down in front of Ros: ‘Like this?’

‘You got it, Doc — but sit back so’s you don’t block the view! And here — let’s open her up in front like you’re listening to her heart or something.’

‘Jesus, Soapie! Do we need that?’

‘Leonard needs it. Flesh keeps him awake. Besides, how else will all her fans recognize her?’ Leonard pretended to doze off until the breasts appeared, then perked up and started fiddling with his camera with jerky speeded-up motions. ‘Barfo! What did they ram in there, a steam drill?’

‘It wasn’t that large before,’ said Jim, glaring up at Bob, who was back with a miniature vacuum cleaner, sucking dust samples up through little filter papers from cuffs, hems, pockets, shoes: I closed my fist around the golden earring. ‘Someone’s made it worse.’ His gray hair lifted and fell as Bob’s vacuum sweeper passed over it.

I heard the thin rattle of applause again, as Soapie plumped up the shrunken breast by pulling the cloth tight under it: Michelle, alone in the sunroom, no longer danced but stood impaled as it were by her own trance, eyes closed, clutching her shoulders as though trying to hold herself in. ‘Okay, the rest of you people back there: step in closer, come on, crowd around—!’

‘What? Are we having our picture taken?’

‘Hey, leave a little room for ole Fats!’

‘You know, it’s curious,’ I murmured, ‘we’ve had that painting in the dining room hanging there for years, and only tonight did I notice for the first time that Susanna was wearing gold loops in her ears …’

Alison caught her breath, glanced up. ‘I’ve got to see you,’ she whispered, letting the hand between us curl around my thigh for a moment, as the others pushed up around us. I wanted to show her what I had in my hand (I was sure it was in there, though in fact I’d lost the feel of it), but we were ringed round with spectators. ‘As soon as this is over …’

‘I look such a fright,’ Wilma was protesting, primping nervously at my shoulder. ‘But then I guess that’s nothing new.’

Photos, Tania believed (Soapie had pulled the shades off some lamps, bent others up to aim the light at us, using Cynthia and Alison’s husband to hold the shades in position), did not preserve the past, they only distorted it. Memory, left alone, even as it purged and invented, was always right. Photography could only be defended, she felt (I understood this, recalling the collection of old postcards my grandmother used to let me play with as a child), as a fantastic art form.

‘Okay, we’re getting there!’ Soapie dropped his butt on the carpet, ground it out with his heel. ‘Why’s it getting so cold in here?’ Yvonne, left to herself, wanted to know. ‘Howard? Come out from behind those drapes! Don’t be shy, press up in there — say, what’s wrong with that kid?’

‘He’s not feeling so great, Soapie.’

‘Well, hold him up!’

‘This reminds me of the time Archie took me to one of his high school reunions,’ Wilma said.

‘I’ve told you, Patrick, they’re yours,’ Woody was murmuring just behind my ear. ‘If you want them, take them. You’re perfectly within your rights.’

‘Only I ended up in their group photo somehow and Archie didn’t.’

Bob came over, pulled a thermometer out of a hole in Ros’s side I hadn’t noticed before, and left the room, scowling at it. Alison had felt me flinch and now gave a little squeeze. ‘They couldn’t get it into her behind,’ she whispered, ‘there was something in there. They had to punch a hole through to her liver.’

‘Ah …’ Was this what I’d wanted to know?

Jim, sighing, put an adhesive strip on the hole and covered it with a loose tatter of her dress. ‘We oughta get Cyril and his goatee into this picture,’ somebody remarked, and Wilma said: ‘Did you know Peg had a tattoo?’

‘Come on now, frenzied neighbors,’ Soapie called out, ‘let’s show a little life there! We don’t wanna make our readers have to guess which one’s the victim!’

‘A little red heart — right where you usually get your flu shots …’

‘What’s that about Cyril?’

‘My old corpus delicious isn’t good for much anymore, but — heh heh — if you need another bystander—’

‘Not that badly, old-timer. But I tell you what, if you can find one of those cops for me —’ Anatole burped ominously. ‘Woops! Hang on, kid! Are we ready, Leonard?’

‘Who, Fiona—?’

Jim stood, unlocked his knees, and paced around in a little circle. ‘Foot went to sleep,’ he explained apologetically.

‘Hold it, Leonard! Fats, stop crossing your eyes like that! You got no respect!’

‘You mean the one with the big nose?’

‘Sshh! She’s around here somewhere!’

‘Are you ready, Doc?’

‘That’s really hard to believe!’

‘Whoa, look what’s just blowed in! Get in here, gorgeous, and show these amateurs how it’s done!’ It was Regina, leaning in the doorway behind Leonard, gripping the doorjamb, looking drained as though she might have coldcreamed her face and just wiped it off. Her black hair and costume were limp, her lips still drooling. Slowly she lifted her head and found herself staring directly at Anatole, staring helplessly back. Briefly they reflected each other, gasping, eyes watering, hands sliding upward to clutch at their gaping mouths — then Anatole, swallowing hard against the bubbling sounds in his throat, lurched forward, falling over Ros’s body (‘Unf!’ Jim grunted), picked himself up and staggered out of the room, hand to mouth, Regina having just, with a muffled gargle, preceded him. ‘Hey, you clowns, come back here!’ exclaimed Soapie, his press hat flying, as Leonard struggled with his tipped camera, and Brenda asked: ‘Who is that boy anyhow?’

‘Tania’s nephew.’

‘Oh yeah?’ She cracked her gum. ‘Cute!’

‘Awright, just straighten the knees out where he hit her, Doc,’ Soapie shouted (I heard a hissed whisper: ‘Bitch!’), ‘we haven’t got all night.’ I glanced into my hand: yes, it was still there. I held it between my fingertips, letting my palm air out, recalling the little magic shows I used to do for my grandmother with coins and cards and little balls. The trick, always, depended on distraction, a lesson, as it were, in the way the world worked. Lloyd Draper had returned meanwhile with the short cop in tow, Fred now carrying a big steaming slice of pizza in both hands, and Soapie, flicking away the cigarette he’d just lit up, pulled Fred over to join us around the body. ‘Here by the head maybe … yeah, that’s — listen, gimme that garbage! Now, one step back … right, hold it! That’s terrific!’

‘Should I have my gun out maybe?’

‘What do you think, Leonard?’ Soapie asked around a mouthful of pizza, his head cocked (behind the lights, the doorbell rang again), and Fats said: ‘Say, is there eats?’

‘Yeah, all right, why not?’ Soapie mused, handing the rest of Fred’s drippy pizza to Leonard. Leonard folded it up and stuffed it all in his mouth, then wiped his hands on Yvonne’s bindings (‘Psst! Do me a favor, Leonard,’ she whispered, ‘go get me a drink!’) and, oozing oily juices from under his scruffy clump of moustache, bent down (he bugged his eyes at her and winked: ‘Ah, you’re a nut case, Leonard,’ she grumped) behind his viewfinder again. ‘Come on, let’s get a hump on, Soap, while there’s still some groceries left!’ Fats whined, and Soapie said: ‘No, don’t point that wart remover at the body, sarge! What kinda sense does that make? Aim it more toward Ger there!’

‘Hey—!’

‘I got the safety on,’ Fred assured me with a wink.

‘Talbot! Come on in here! You can take the kid’s place — make room for him there, Bren!’

‘How ’bout if we move this tab in round the table and do a little in-terior dec-oratin’ at the same time?’ Fats suggested hopefully.

‘At least you might tuck your shirt in,’ sniffed Wilma as Talbot wobbled over, a dippy smile on his face. He had his own jacket on, but the pants he was wearing now — agape at the waist and baggy at the ankles — were mine.

I glanced down at Alison, feeling vaguely apologetic, and caught her looking up at me. She blushed. ‘I was thinking about that play we saw,’ she whispered, ‘what you said that night about happy endings …’

Talbot, weaving blowzily in front of us and accompanied by a nimbus of sweat and bathpowder, belched. He seemed puzzled by the sight of Ros’s body at his feet, Fred’s upraised revolver. He braced himself on Jim’s shoulder and lifted his feet high over Ros’s body, as though straddling a fence. Alison, leaning back against me to make room, scratched furtively at the back of my thigh, her hair aglow with a light that was almost magical — except that it came from the lamp her husband, lost in the shadows behind it, was beaming at her. Talbot stumbled into our midst, peered blearily up at me. ‘Your can’s leakin’ all over the goddamn place,’ he announced loudly, and Patrick whispered: ‘Now?’

‘It’s as good a time as any,’ said Woody.

‘Stinks, too.’

‘I know, I’m going to call a plumber, Talbot,’ I said, excited by Alison’s hand, her pressing thigh, her toe on mine beneath the body: I squeezed the earring in my palm, recalling for some reason the wetness of that beggar’s tongue as he stacked the coins. A kind of unappeasable hunger … ‘As soon as we’re done here—’

‘Oh yeah, the plumber. Met him on the stairs when I was comin’ down.’

‘What?’

‘Okay, lazy gents, let’s watch the little birdie!’

‘Love to! Pull it out there where we can see it, Talbot!’

‘You saw a plumber—?’

‘Cockadoodle-doo!’

‘Talbot—!’

‘That’s putting your best half-foot forward, Talbot,’ Yvonne cawed, as Soapie went on, Leonard beginning to click away: ‘Come on, everybody halo around there, squeeze up — you’re not paying attention, Ger! I’ve never seen you like this! Give us a hug or a smooch or something! Talbot’s got the idea — what’s the matter with the rest of you lot? This is a goddamn party, isn’t it — Pat, where are you going?’

‘I–I’ll be right back—!’

‘That’s disgusting, Talbot!’

‘Oh, it’s not so bad,’ Brenda laughed, smacking her gum (Wilma, leaning toward Talbot in an effort to help him zip his spreading fly, had jostled us, and, as I gripped Alison’s buttock for support, she gasped and said: ‘I’ll meet you by the cellar stairs!’), ‘but there’s one over there that beats it!’

We turned to look at Earl Elstob, his hand in Michelle’s blouse, an erection pushing his pants out in front of him, like a plow — we all laughed, even Woody: a peculiar little barking noise — but I was wondering at the strange intense beauty of this charge between us, brief, sudden, even (we knew this, it lent poignancy, passion, to our furtive touches) ephemeral, yet at the same time somehow ageless: a cathectic brush, as it were, with eternity, numbing and profound …

‘Don’t laugh at him, it may be a tumor!’

‘Terrific!’ exclaimed Soapie as Leonard cranked and fired at us. ‘You got it now! Ha ha! Hold it!’

Fred, grinning over his shoulder at Elstob, had lowered his gun, but now he raised it again. ‘You’d be doing your little ball-and-chain a favor,’ he said, holding the smile for Soapie, but staring ominously at me, ‘if you told her to stop interfering with our investigation.’

‘Interfering?’ Alison was stroking my finger as though trying to peel back a foreskin.

‘How can you even see me, Soapie, past that wad on Talbot’s ear?’

‘Yeah, sweeping up, moving things, covering up the evidence — it can get her in a lotta trouble.’ I started to explain (Janny had appeared in the doorway, her pink skirt creased horizontally and makeup smeared, holding something up), but Woody was distracting the cop, muttering something in his ear about the protection of forensic evidence; to give him room (but I was thinking about my wife, how to get a message to her), I leaned toward Alison’s breast. ‘He what —?!’ roared Fred.

‘I think Janny’s got something for you,’ Talbot mumbled. I saw it now: the ice pick, my ascot knotted around the tip — in reflex, I jerked away from Alison. She too pulled back in alarm: ‘What — what’s the matter?’

‘Whoa! Hold the horses!’ Soapie shouted. Janny was picking her way past the lights and camera, waggling the pick and ascot like a little flag. ‘Only a couple more!’

‘No—!’

But it was Fred who broke up the picture-taking, leaping past us to smash Patrick in the face with the butt of his gun just as he was leaning into the pile of scattered criminalistic gear in the corner. ‘Hey!’ Lamps tipped, Soapie shouted something at Leonard, Patrick screamed (‘[Not in here, Janny!]’ I mouthed, backing off), Fats seized the cop by his collar and pulled him away.

‘A-a-gift from my m-mother …!’ Patrick bawled, his lip split, blood streaming from his nose and mouth as though a pipe had burst.

‘Now, what’d you go and do that for?’ Fats wanted to know, his big arm around Fred’s throat (I’d managed to get several people between me and Janny, but she came on, smiling dimly, holding the pick high): then Bob came rocking in, cocked revolver in an extended two-handed grip, shouting: ‘FREEZE!’ and Fats let go. ‘Awright, awright, I can take a hint …’

The two officers pried the tweezers out of Patrick’s clenched fist, then dragged him out, still blubbering bloodily, Bob covering us with his revolver. ‘Stupid little nance,’ Noble grumbled in the doorway, watching them go, and we all relaxed: I was on the move again.

‘Here, Gerry!’ Janny called, circling wide around Ros’s abandoned body in her stocking feet as I ducked behind Leonard. ‘We found it! It was under the bed!’

I scowled at her and shook my head, I was nearly at the door, but there she was, passing the pick on to me like a relay baton — what could I do? I grabbed it and tucked it inside my shirt. ‘Thanks! I–I was just looking for it!’

She smiled wanly, a little breathlessly, her face a blank (had someone put her up to this? I glanced over at Talbot: Wilma was fussing with his clothes and he grinned dopily at me over her bent back), then suddenly, spying something past my shoulder, she yanked me back against the wall, threw her arms around my neck, straddled my thigh, and kissed me, her greasy mouth yawning, in undisguised panic. ‘It’s that horrible Earl Elstob,’ she breathed. ‘Stick your finger in me, Gerry — quick!’

‘Eh, huh! Can I cut in?’

‘Can’t you see we’re busy?’ Janny panted, her thigh twitching mechanically between my legs as though pumping a treadle. ‘Well, nothing works like it used to, old-timer,’ Soapie was saying a few feet away, while across the room, Fats, giving Woody some money, seemed momentarily stunned: ‘Who, Roger—?’ Janny’s tongue dipped in and out of my ear like a swab. ‘You can’t find his lower lip, Gerry!’ she gasped. ‘It’s like kissing only half a mouth! I felt like I was falling over the edge of something!’

Brenda was holding a little handkerchief of some kind to her nose, her eyes watering. She offered it to Howard (‘I mean, French-kissing him is worse than painting a ceiling, Gerry!’), but he shrank back, Fats clutching her elbow in pained alarm: ‘They killed him, Bren!’ ‘Oh no! Not Roger —!’ And then, as they rushed out past Noble (the doorbell was ringing), someone on the stairs shouted down: ‘You the guy who lives here?’ He was leaning over the railing to peer in at us in the living room, a bulky man in cap and overalls, monkey wrench in his fist, the name STEVE stitched over his pocket. There were new voices in the hallway, the slap and bang of doors.

I eased Janny away. ‘Yes …?’

‘Well, I can’t do much with the stool, mister, I didn’t bring the right tools — but it’s easy to see what’s fouling up your tub.’

‘The tub? But I didn’t know it was—’

‘Yeah, some poor broad just took her last drink in it.’

‘What?’ I felt the pick slip, pinched it nervously against my ribs with my elbow. People were passing between us, greeting each other, pulling off wraps, asking about Ros (‘In here!’ one of them shouted, a woman in a yellow knit dress), there was a lot of confusion. ‘Who …?’ But I knew, yes, even before Anatole came tumbling down the stairs behind the plumber, wheyfaced and woebegone, I knew — and the others knew, too, knew something, for there was a sudden awestruck silence as at the raising of a baton. Even the comings and goings had stopped, the greetings, the music, the footsteps, the whisper of clothing against clothing had stopped. There was only, in another room somewhere, the solitary clink of a fork against a dish.

‘Uncle Howard!’ Anatole cried.

We all turned to look: Howard was in the middle of the room, alone, down on his plump haunches alongside Ros, his hand under her silvery skirt; he gaped back at us, aghast, seemingly transfixed there in an intersection of beamed lamps, his cracked spectacles aglitter with a confusion of tiny lights as though his eyes were bursting. ‘My god, what are you doing, Howard—?!’ a woman asked.

His mouth worked but all that came out was a little squeak. A flush, seeming to rise from the well of his dangling tie, flooded up through his throat and into his cheeks, crept behind his eyes and into his scalp. ‘My, ah … tiepin!’ he managed to stammer at last. ‘I … eh … dropped—’

‘It’s Aunt Tania, Uncle Howard! She’s dead!’

A sudden spasm jerked Howard’s lips back into a terrible clenched grin, the flush draining away as though some plug had been pulled — then he fainted and, anchored by the hand still locked in Ros’s thighs, fell over her body, Leonard’s flashgun popping.

There was a pause, then a rush for the stairs, people shouting, crying, swearing. The plumber, catching my eye as they clambered past him, shrugged apologetically. ‘Christ! When did all this happen?’ somebody asked behind me, and Soapie said: ‘That’s it, Leonard! That’s our story!’

‘We’re not exactly sure, there’s an Inspector here from Homicide trying to work it out now.’

‘Notch it!’

‘Woody—?’

I stood, rooted in turmoil, clasping the ice pick to my breast like precious treasure and staring down at my feet, invaded by a fearful sense of some kind of ultimate déjà vu. I was standing, I saw, in one of the police team’s chalk drawings of Ros, the fetal one: what had Tania said about primal outlines? Life, she’d said (I seemed to see her again, kneeling at the tub, her arms scabbed with pink suds, peering at me over her pale turned shoulder as though to offer me something: love perhaps, or a vision of it), was nothing but a sequence of interlocking incarnations, an interminable effort to fill the unfillable outline. Yes, vague chalk drawings, that’s what genetic codes were, the origin of life: questions with no answers, just endless inadequate guesses. Art, she believed, attempted to reproduce not the guesses, but the questions; this was how beauty differed from decoration — or indeed from truth, in her father’s sense of the word — which was why Tania always claimed that, contrary to the common opinion, she was in fact a realist. But art was therefore dangerous: the heart of beauty was red-hot (she’d once tried, in that notorious self-portrait, to paint this heat directly) and it could burn your eyes out, sear your flesh away. Like she said tonight: ‘Something almost monstrous …’

‘Jesus, did they both die like that?’ someone asked behind me. ‘It’s like a goddamn fairy tale!’

‘No, you don’t understand …’

‘Gerald …?’

I looked up, meeting my wife’s gaze. There was, as always, a touch of worry in her eyes, a touch of uncertainty: even as she smiled it was there, though now she wasn’t smiling. In her arms she carried a bundle of dirty clothes, and I saw that she had changed aprons again. This one was an icy blue with pink pears and yellow apples in it. ‘Where did everybody go?’ Yvonne wanted to know. ‘Cynthia …?’ ‘It’s Tania,’ I said, swallowing. ‘She’s dead.’

‘I know.’ She turned to look at the people on the stairs, holding the soiled laundry in her arms like a gift received but still unopened. She shuddered and the sleeve of my bloodstained shirt dropped and wagged from her bundle like a spotted tail. ‘Can you get his finger out of there, Jim?’ someone asked behind me. ‘I don’t know, I think she’s getting hard.’ She touched a hand to her brow, gazing past me: a towel uncoiled as though to slip away, a blue sock fell to the floor, someone’s underwear, a handkerchief, all falling — I stopped to scoop it up for her. It lay scattered in and around Ros’s outline like conjectural apprehensions of form, like Mark’s drawings of Christmas trees (yes, I felt myself in a child’s world down here, disassociated, unseen: it slid out from under my shirt like a duty shed and I folded my soiled shorts around it): even a pillowcase: had she been changing the bedding? ‘Thank you, Gerald. I thought I’d do a load … before we got too far behind …’

‘Whose handkerchief is this?’ It was almost too filthy to pick up: I pinched it by one corner, dropped it loosely on top.

‘His.’ She nodded back over her shoulder toward my study. Daffie had paused to speak to Anatole, now lying on the stairs, staring blankly out through the railings, and Noble, passing, whispered something in her ear. She threw her glass of pink gin at him. ‘Gerald, they’ve got Patrick in there now. I’m afraid.’

I kissed her forehead, clasping a hand to each shoulder: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll go check on him,’ I said, and stepped by her, freeing myself from Ros’s outline as I did so. ‘I believe it,’ someone said as I pressed through the jostle in the doorway toward the downstairs toilet (Daffie was rubbing her arm where Noble had struck her and she exchanged a commiserating glance with me), ‘but there’s one goddamn thing I just don’t understand …’

‘Wait, don’t go in there,’ Woody cautioned, touching my arm. ‘They’re using it for a darkroom.’ He glanced back over his shoulder, just as Cynthia came out of my study. ‘Everything okay?’

She nodded, businesslike. ‘I loaned him my calculator, which should help, but he still has a long way to go.’ She handed Woody a gold watch which he pulled on, then she took his arm, looked up at me. ‘I’m sorry if we caused you any embarrassment in there—?’

‘No, it was my—’

‘How’s Patrick?’ Woody interrupted, placing a hand over hers, a hand stubbier than her own.

‘You’d be surprised. He has a split lip, some bruises, he’s going to be pretty sore — but I think he’s fallen in love.’

‘Patrick—?’ I couldn’t help smiling, and she returned it: I thought of teachers I’d had, bank managers, a doctor who treated me once for trenchmouth in Rouen. A man in lilac and gray passed us, muttering something about ‘a good run’ or ‘cut one.’ ‘I mean, is anyone noticing?’ he asked.

‘They discovered a set of photos of the girl — the victim — being raped by some man in disguise. It’s true, I’ve seen a couple of them — they’re pretty offensive, and there’s even a dagger or something in one of them. The only clue to the rapist’s identity, it seems, is his exposed genitalia, so they’re taking measurements, checking for peculiar marks, scars, circumcision, and so on, as you might expect.’ My smile was gone. She watched me serenely. ‘Anyway, when they took hold of your friend’s member, it erected on them. This enraged one of the officers for some reason and he struck it with his nightstick. Quite firmly, I must say — you may have heard the scream.’

‘Aha,’ smiled Woody. The photos: had someone just been telling me …

‘The Inspector reprimanded the officer and apologized to your friend, even patting him on the shoulder as he put his bruised organ away — then he returned the tweezers to him and with that the little fellow simply melted, started telling them everything he knows. When I left, it was something about a fabulously wealthy old woman who presumably came to Roger with what was a kind of parable about love and jealousy, if I understood it correctly.’

‘Close enough. I remember the day Roger came into the office with that stupid story,’ Woody said, shaking his head. ‘He was very talented, Roger. Sometimes, in a courtroom, he could be downright brilliant, an artist in his way. But he was too ego-centered ever to make a really good lawyer.’

‘I always had the feeling it was his loss of ego that got him into trouble,’ I said, recalling Tania’s account of Roger concussed by love.

‘Maybe.’ Woody pursed his lips like a skeptical prosecuting attorney confronting a dubious plea. It was almost as though he were preparing a case against his ex-partner. ‘But maybe ego is absence, that bottomless hole in the center that egomaniacs like Roger keep throwing themselves into.’

Cynthia, on his arm, her gaze steady, seemed neutral, but there was something disquieting about her, too. Something odd. Now, fingering her medallion, she turned to Woody and said: ‘If we’re going up to see the body, we should do it soon, before Yvonne starts missing us.’

‘I know — but first, damn it, there’s something I have to …’ He glanced toward the study, his face clouded, just as Fats and Brenda, in tears, holding each other up, came staggering out. ‘God, it’s awful, Bren!’ ‘I can’t believe it! Did you see his eyes —?’ ‘Gerry, listen, could you do me a small favor?’

‘Sure, Woody, only first I—’

He laid a hand on my shoulder, leaned close. Through the doorway into the dining room, I caught a glimpse of Alison with Dickie, his arm around her, both of them laughing — she didn’t seem to see me. ‘Would you go in there with me? I’d really appreciate it …’

‘Well …’ I looked around. What was it my wife had wanted? Something from the freezer, a stepladder, fruit knife? I couldn’t remember. There was a lot of activity on the stairs and I could feel it inside myself like a kind of abdominal turmoil. Alison, I saw, had both hands at her ear, her head tipped toward them — what? My hand was empty: I must have dropped it! Dickie smiled and she gave him a little kiss on his cheek. ‘I’ve got a lot to do, Woody — my wife …’ Woody was gazing at me intently, as though through me, more than just an appeal somehow. ‘But, I suppose, if you really—’

‘Thanks, Gerry. I knew I could count on you. We’ll be right back, Cyn.’

‘That’s right, it nearly slipped my mind,’ Cynthia said, as Woody pulled me away. ‘The police were talking about your wife. I’m not sure — I think they found something in the laundry.’

‘The laundry—! But I just left her!’

‘Well, I don’t know when,’ she called back over her shoulder. ‘I really don’t have much time, Woody,’ I insisted, though by now it was too late, we were already at my study door.

I blinked, drew back, bumping into Woody in the doorway. I was almost unable to believe what I saw in there. Everything had been turned inside out. The desk drawers and filing cabinets had been broken open and emptied out on the floor, books dumped from the shelves. The walls, seen only insubstantially through the haze of pipesmoke and shadows (the lamps had been moved about, it was hard even to get my bearings), were smeared now with what was no doubt blood, most of the pictures torn away so violently there were holes in the plaster. There were sketches of the crime pinned up in their stead, procedural charts and instructions, a diagram of what looked like an amusement-park maze. They’d set up a lot of strange equipment, turning the place into a kind of crime lab with test tubes and burners, sieves, calipers, inkpads and rollers, odd measuring gadgets — even now the tall cop, Bob, sat at a microscope holding up between his fingers what looked like a piece of bloody flesh — ah no, the swatch he’d cut out of our white easy chair … Fred, wearing translucent rubber gloves, worked at a hot plate. He seemed to be boiling up some kind of soup. Photographs hung from strung-up lines like dance decorations, and brightly tagged objects — I saw knives, drinking glasses, an ax, swimming trunks, Mark’s paintbox, knotted-up pantyhose, a tin of anchovies, pillboxes and specimen bottles, a blackstriped croquet ball, a pink shoe — lined the swept-out bookshelves like museum exhibits. I had the feeling my whole house was reinventing itself. ‘What have you done—?!’ I gasped, and Woody said: ‘Here he is.’

Inspector Pardew looked up from his paperwork. He sat at my desk behind a heap of watches, calculator in hand and dead pipe in mouth, Patrick hunched nearby, hands between his legs, muttering something about ‘the woman in red.’ The Inspector looked me over carefully, passed a folded bill to Woody. ‘Very well.’

‘Let me know if you need any help, Gerry,’ Woody whispered in my ear. ‘We’ll be upstairs.’

‘Hey, wait a minute, I thought you—!’

‘Here! Just look at this!’ Inspector Pardew commanded, holding up a little heart-shaped watch on a gold chain. In his other hand, I saw, he now held Alison’s watch with its three opened buckles, the straps dangling from either side of its digital face like green plaited locks, the numbers blinking between them like a part. ‘I tell you, time is not a toy!’

‘Actually, I was only, uh, passing by, I have to get back to—’

‘It is not a mere decoration!’

‘It certainly is not!’ echoed Patrick, scowling at me like a judge. His mouth where Fred had hit him was puffed up and purple, and there was a big bloody gap just under his nose that made him look like he was metamorphosing into a frog or something. Woody was gone, vanished in that moment that Alison’s watch had distracted me, and the short cop, tracking through the correspondence and check stubs, travel brochures, books, photos, and old newspaper clippings that littered the floor, had moved over between me and the door. He wore his rubber gloves still, white powder down his front. I seemed to have trouble thinking clearly, my mind confused by all this … this confusion.

‘It is the very content and shape of the world,’ Pardew was saying. ‘Look! This one doesn’t even have a face! It doesn’t have hands! It’s like a theater marquee, reflecting nothing but our pathetic vanity!’

Turning back to him, I now saw, past Fred’s abandoned hot plate, what I hadn’t seen before: Roger, sprawled upside down in the far corner like a broken doll, limbs akimbo, legs listing against the walls as though he’d slid down from the ceiling, his right leg bent sideways at the knee, forming a kind of aleph of the whole. His face was smeared with blood, his hair matted with it, his eyes below the gaping mouth starting minstrel-like from their sockets. I gaped my own mouth (I was thinking suddenly about Tania, what she’d said: ‘Like a newborn child …!’) to suck in air. ‘Are you just — just leaving him there—?!’

‘Time,’ Pardew was insisting, wagging the heart-shaped watch at me (I’d turned just in time to see him hurl Alison’s watch behind him as though it were contaminating him: ‘It’s a mockery! A corruption!’), ‘we’re talking about time!’ With a sweep of his other hand, his white silk scarf fluttering about his neck as though in awe and wonder, he indicated the glittering mound of watches on the desk, and it was then, noticing a heavy ring he wore with a large red stone in it, that I realized what it was that had seemed odd about Cynthia just now: her rings. She had been wearing four of them, all uncharacteristically ostentatious, on one hand, none on the other. ‘It’s the key to it all, it always is, the key to everything!’

‘Yes, pay attention, Gerald.’

The Inspector sighed, sat back, nodded at Fred. ‘If you don’t mind, please,’ he said to Patrick.

‘But I haven’t finished telling you about—!’

‘I know, we’ll discuss it later. Now I have to speak with this gentleman.’

‘But I’ll be quiet! I won’t be in the way! I promise!’

‘Sergeant …?’

‘Please! Wait! My tweezers!’ Patrick cried, fumbling in his pocket as Fred took his arm.

‘I gave them back to you.’

‘Yes, but —’ He fished them forth, thrust them at Pardew. There were tears welling up in his eyes. ‘There was a little silver chain — it’s not there anymore!’

‘Oh, I see. Well, you’ll have to fill out a claim form,’ the Inspector said, his moustaches lifting and falling with a dismissive smile as he handed the tweezers back. Bob was stapling a tag to the patch from our easy chair. ‘We’ll leave one with you before we go.’

Patrick hesitated, tugged at by Fred in his dusty rubber gloves, then plunged recklessly forward and planted a wet crimson kiss on Pardew’s cheek. ‘Thank you!’ he burbled, his split lip bleeding afresh, as Fred collared him. ‘You’re so … so kind!’

The Inspector winced faintly, narrowing his eyes at Fred, and the policeman led Patrick away, still twittering and squeaking, holding himself as he hobbled along. ‘In the old days,’ Pardew muttered icily, ‘we used to strip perverts like that in the middle of winter and scourge them in the marketplace.’ He caught my frown and added: ‘Well, a long time ago, of course. That old gent was telling me …’ He touched his cheek, glanced at his fingertips. ‘Do you perhaps have a handkerchief I could borrow?’

‘Sure, here, I won’t—’

‘Thank you.’ He folded it into a little pad, dabbed at his cheek with it as though at a wound. ‘Your wife took mine. Said she’d wash it for me.’ Bob looked up at us from his microscope, lip between his teeth like a thought he might be chewing on, then (the alarm went off on one of the wristwatches in Pardew’s heap: he located it, depressed the button that turned it off) bowed his head again. ‘Does your wife usually do the laundry during a party?’

‘Sometimes. It depends. Why do you ask?’

He shrugged, staring at the stained handkerchief, then refolded it and applied it to his cheek again. ‘I’m interested in patterns. And the disruption of patterns. That’s my job. I solve crimes. Do you understand?’

I nodded. I was trying to be civil, but his bluntness and cold piercing gaze made civility seem like evasion. I felt unfairly singled out, he at my desk, I before it as though at a dressing down, but when I turned away from him, there was only poor battered Roger staring back, the preoccupied cop at his microscope (he was working now with a piece of material from the heap of rumpled clothing at his feet, and as I watched him bend to his lens, I thought of my wife at the kitchen stove, lifting the pan lid to peer in at the boiling water — I realized I should have gone over right then and taken her in my arms, but the moment was gone, what had been done could not be undone — or rather, undone done — and I felt a flush of sorrow penetrate my chest, spread, pulsing, through my body, and leak away like time itself, like hope, like Being, that great necromantic illusion …), close-ups of Ros’s corpse hanging from the line, the room upended and strewn with the debris of my dislodged past. What they’d done here reminded me of a line Ros once had to deliver in a film called The Invasion of the Panty Snarfers: ‘When they stuck their noses in, it felt like everything just changed its shape!’ Pardew waited still. Watching. ‘I mean, patterns, and, uh, crime — murder — as … you know …’ I was struggling. The Inspector narrowed his eyes: I supposed I was an open book. ‘A … disturbance of things, and so—’

‘Not necessarily. On another scale, this party of yours is the true disturbance. Maybe all conventions are, all efforts at social intercourse.’ He sighed, and sighing, seemed more human. There was still a trace of blood on his cheek where Patrick had kissed him, but he’d ceased rubbing at it. ‘Since I was a child, I have been troubled by, let’s call it the irrational, and have been trying to find an order, a logic, behind what is given to us as madness and disorder. That hidden commonality, you see. Well, I have been in homicide a very long time now, and I can tell you, the more I run into all the surface codes and structures — as we say in the business — that people invent for themselves, the more it seems to me that the one common invariant behind them all is, quite frankly, murder itself!’

I felt he was confiding in me and I smiled politely, hoping only to get out of here. What I’d thought was a maze, I saw now, was only a diagram of the brain, showing the consequences of injury to the various parts. ‘That’s interesting, but I don’t believe anyone here could possibly—’

‘What? What—?! You think I can’t see what’s going on here?’ he roared, bolting up out of his chair in a sudden rage that sent me staggering back a step. ‘I live in the filth of the world! I live at the heart of absolute evil and degradation! It’s my profession, and certain things I am good at! I have an eye for them! Hatred, for example! No matter how deeply it is buried, I can see it! Lust, doubt, fear, greed: I can see these things like color painted on people’s faces, washed into their movements, their words, and believe me, this place is screaming with it!’

‘It — it’s only a party—!’ I protested.

‘Only! Do you think I’m blind? You’ve got drug addicts here! You’ve got perverts, anarchists, pimps, and peeping toms! Adulterers! You’ve got dipsomaniacs! You’ve got whores, thugs, thieves, atheists, sodomists, and out-and-out lunatics! There isn’t anything they wouldn’t do!’ He seemed almost to have grown. He was rigid, powerful — yet his hand was trembling as he picked up a piece of paper. ‘In this world, nothing — nothing, I tell you — is ever wholly concealed! I know what’s in their sick stinking hearts!’

‘But—!’

‘Look at this! It’s a drawing of the murder scene! Only it was drawn before the murder! We can prove this! Somebody was planning this homicide all along! You see? Somebody here, in this house! Down to the last vile detail — except that they apparently meant to strike her in the womb instead of the breast — at least that must be the true meaning of the crime — you can see here the blood, the hideous weapon between her legs. There’s the killer standing over her. Gloating! One interesting thing: he’s bearded. That might be a clue or it might not, of course. It might be a disguise, for example, or some fantasy image of the self, a displacement of some kind …’ He was calming some and, reluctant to stir him up again, I was tempted to let him have his ‘bearded murderer.’ But then he added: ‘And beside him, this horned figure, his diabolical accomplice, you might say, his own evil conscience!’ — and I felt obliged to interrupt.

‘I’m afraid that’s the, uh, Holy Family.’

‘The what?’ He looked pained, his eyes widening as he stared at me, as though I might have just grown horns myself and struck him.

‘It’s the Christmas scene. You know, the manger and all that. My son drew it for nursery school.’

He slumped back into his chair, staring at the drawing in disbelief. ‘But — all this blood—!’

‘There was a childbirth documentary on television the week before that we all watched. Not surprisingly, my son put the two things together. The “weapon” is the baby and the “killer’s” the father, and that, eh, “diabolical accomplice” is a cow.’

The Inspector seemed momentarily deflated, his moustaches drooping, and I was sorry I had had to be the one to tell him. ‘It’s terrible,’ he said. He turned the drawing over, applied a self-adhesive label to the back, and scribbled something on it. ‘It might be worse than I thought. Your son’s name?’

‘His—? Mark, of course, but—’

‘Age?’

‘He’s four, almost five now, but he—’

‘Did you or your wife ever have syphilis?’

‘No!’

He handed the drawing to Bob, who asked: ‘Should we get stats?’

‘Probably a good idea.’

‘Wait a minute! What are you—?’

‘Now as regards the missus and her laundry,’ the Inspector continued icily, turning back to me. I watched Bob add a few notes of his own to the label on Mark’s drawing, then put it on the shelf beside a crushed beer can and what looked like part of a truss. ‘She’s been a busy little lady.’

‘Well …’ It was a mistake, I sensed, to be too frank with this man. Yet, it was difficult to conceal anything from him either. ‘She likes things clean, if that’s what you mean.’

‘I’m afraid it’s not as simple as that. Let me show you something.’ He nodded Bob over. The policeman picked up some jockey shorts lying near his feet, brought them to Pardew. ‘She was just stuffing these into the washing machine when we stopped her. She pretended surprise, of course. Or perhaps she was really surprised. You can see that there is blood on them. Very close to that of the victim, I might say.’

‘Yes, but everybody—’

‘And feces, which we haven’t yet identified’ — he sniffed meditatively — ‘as well as oil and alcohol stains, what might be lipstick, the usual. Or so we thought. But then, under the microscope, we discovered a fleck of old blue paint and a—’

‘Blue?’

He smiled flickeringly. Bob, watching us, scratched out a note. ‘Mmm, or green, gray, something like that, and a touch of rust. Curious, isn’t it? Of course, blood, paint, rust — just a pair of dirty shorts, you might say. But we found something else. Look: do you see that hole? Well! You’ll agree, only one instrument could make a perforation like that! If we find the weapon that did it, we’ll have our … our perpetrator …’

I knew there was something I should be doing, or saying (at my feet lay a photo of Ros on her back, dressed in a pith helmet and gunbelt, and sucking off a tiger that crouched over her, lapping at her sex with a huge rough tongue — how did we do that? I couldn’t remember, but I did remember the one we shot with Ros as the tiger: that one scared me to this day …), but before I could get my thoughts in order (some vague sense of entrapment: I was trying to play back the recent exchanges), Fred came back in behind me with a fresh sandwich and Howard: ‘We caught him with his thumb in the old pudding,’ Fred reported around a half-chewed mouthful, and the Inspector raised his brows at me as though to say: Haven’t I just told you so?

Howard, sagging flabbily in Fred’s grip — shirttails out, broken glasses hooked over one ear and the tip of his pink nose, thin gray-blond hair falling loosely over his brow like a lowered scrim — held his stained finger up in front of his nose, trying to focus his weak eyes on it. ‘Something … spesh …,’ he mumbled and put it in his mouth. Fred clipped him ferociously behind the ears, kicked him in the belly as he hit the floor.

‘Stop!’ I protested. ‘You’ve got to understand — he just lost his wife—!’

Fred whirled round on me, whipping out his nightstick, sandwich clamped in his jaws, Bob unsnapped his holster, elbow crooked behind his back. ‘All right, all right,’ said Pardew, ‘that will do!’ The cops eased up, their hunched shoulders dropping, backs straightening, though they continued to watch me with narrowed eyes. Howard gurgled miserably into the carpet at my feet, his horn-rimmed spectacles crushed once and for all beneath him. Poor Howard. I understood what the others could not: that there was nothing mischievous or prurient about what he had done, that for him it was simply a matter of aesthetic need. He was an art critic. A good one. He had to know.

On a signal from Pardew, Bob and Fred hauled Howard to his feet and dragged him, weak-kneed and drooling, over to their work area. ‘The important thing,’ the Inspector was saying, his finger in his nose, ‘is to keep your eyes open, to miss nothing, not just to look, but to see — true percipience is an art, but you must work at it, it’s the first thing you learn in this game.’ He fished a long string of mucus from his nose like a snail from its shell and laid it in my handkerchief. His two assistants were taking caliper measurements of Howard’s head and face. ‘I’ve solved crimes with my ears, my mouth, even my toes and the seat of my pants, but mostly I’ve solved them up here. In the old conk.’

‘Well, he’s got the thick lips and swollen eyelids, all right,’ Fred was saying, putting the last of the sandwich in his mouth and mumbling around it, ‘but the hair’s too thin and the jaw’s not right.’

‘How about bumps?’

‘It’s a little like sorting out the grammar of a sentence,’ the Inspector went on. He was studying the string of mucus in my handkerchief. ‘You have the object there before you and evidence at least of the verb.’ He folded the mucus into the handkerchief and handed it back to me. ‘But you have to reach back in time to locate the subject. I say, locate—’

‘Ah, you can keep it, I have—’

‘Take it!’

‘What about the left one?’ Bob was asking, and Fred, chewing, said: ‘Definitely different from the right.’

‘It — he is what I came in here to tell you about,’ I said, and wiped my hands on my shirt. Fred had grabbed a hank of Howard’s hair and jerked his head forward: ‘Crikey, look! He’s wearing somebody’s flopper-stoppers!’ ‘Fucking weirdo.’ Fred plucked a strand of hair, scraped some dirt from Howard’s ear, made him spit on a glass slide, while Bob scratched away in a notepad, muttering to himself. ‘It’s about his wife, you see — she’s up in the bathtub, we just—’

‘One thing at a time!’ The Inspector rapped his briar pipe smartly against the ashtray. ‘We’re scientists here, not sightseers!’

‘Say, speaking of your old chamber of commerce,’ Fred put in over his shoulder (they had pulled Howard over to the inkpad and roller and were undoing his pants), ‘you got a real problem up there!’

‘I know. There’s a plumber—’

‘Come on, apeshit, stand up straight!’ Bob growled, kneeing Howard in the butt.

‘Or if sightseers,’ the Inspector added thoughtfully, fitting the empty pipe into his mouth, ‘then sightseers of a very special kind.’

‘Pardon?’

‘Is that a hernia scar?’ Bob asked.

Fred leaned closer. ‘Looks like it.’

‘I mean, sightseers not of place, but of time.’ Pardew picked up some watches from the pile and began laying them out in single file. ‘We tend to think of time as something that passes by,’ he said around his pipe, ‘a kind of endless flow, like a river, coming out of nowhere and going into nowhere, with space the theater in which this drama of pure process is acted out, as it were.’ When he ran out of room on the desk, he added five or six watches at a forty-five degree angle to the last one, turning it into a kind of checkmark. ‘But what if it’s the other way around? What if it’s the world that’s insubstantial, time the immovable stage for its ghostly oscillations? Eh?’ The checkmark had become an arrow. From my perspective it was pointed from right to left.

‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ said Fred, ‘that ain’t the one in the photos.’

‘And if it’s a stage,’ the Inspector continued, picking up a large gold pocketwatch and pointing to its face, ‘if it’s there in its entirety, the script all written, so to speak, a kind of cyclorama which seems to move only because we, like these hands here, move through it, then it should be possible, if we could just overcome our perceptual limitations, to visit any part of it, including the no-longer and the not-yet!’ He was jabbing at these places on the watch, and it brought to mind a play Ros was in called Vanished Days, the one in which, having poisoned her husband, she descended the stairs to receive the news of his death. ‘This idea first came to me — and you can imagine the potential consequences for criminalistics! — when I was working on the case of the West Indian omphaloclast, wherein I ran into the problem of the exact — what are you smiling about?’

‘I’m sorry. I was thinking of …’

‘You wouldn’t think it was funny if you’d been one of his victims!’

‘No …’ At the first rehearsal, she’d come bouncing down the stairs and crossed over to the guy who’d brought the news, reached into his pants, and given him a twist that had sent him yowling and stumbling into the wings. ‘No, no, Ros!’ the director had shouted. ‘You’re supposed to grab up the clock and wind it!’ Or such at least was the legend. One of them …

‘He actually cut them out and ate the bloody things!’ As though finding it distasteful, the Inspector took the cold pipe out of his mouth. ‘The point was, I couldn’t pin down the exact moment when it happened. I could not even imagine it! One moment the knife was outside the flesh’ — he demonstrated this, using his pipestem against his stomach — ‘and then it was inside: but what was that moment in between when it was neither?’ I too could not imagine this. I could not even make the effort. Ros was wholly on my mind again, and I could only recall the poignancy of her hugs, the taut silkiness of the flesh around her own navel, the rich juicy flow that filled my mouth as her clitoris stabbed my tongue, and now (in another version, of course, it was not a clock, but —) — ‘Stabbed!’ he cried. ‘What does it mean? If we say, he, the murderer, is stabbing her, there are at least twenty ways of verifying it, but if we say he …’ I had started violently with his first word, thinking I must have been talking out loud, and now he watched me intently. ‘Is something—?’

‘No! Sorry, I … I was just thinking about your idea of time …’ Trying to anyway. I couldn’t seem to concentrate. The two policemen were putting Howard’s shoes back on. His crushed spectacles stared up at me from the carpet beside a roadmap of Provence and a torn zipper. ‘A stage, you said, a kind of space — like a fourth dimension—’

‘Not fourth — first!’

‘Yes, well, I mean the idea of events just being there, waiting for us, like stations we keep pulling into—’

‘That’s correct. Crimes, for example …’ He peered up at me over his handlebar moustache and white silk scarf, his pate gleaming in the subdued light. He had returned his pipe to the ashtray and seemed to be shuffling watches like cards. We were alone, his two assistants having hauled Howard from the room, feet first, like an old sack. ‘Murders …’

‘And — and their solutions.’ It was very quiet. Fred’s soup bubbled. Roger, fallen on his neck, stared at us vacantly. I lowered my voice. ‘Or not: the failure to solve them. Also there waiting. Which would make us just passive observers, and you seem, well … more willful than that …’

‘On the contrary. Will, free or otherwise, is just as much a hallucination as flowing time is, or change or meaning. Detectives, like criminals, are born, not made, for even the social forces that might be said to shape them are also part of their birthright. When we in the trade speak, for example, of the “perpetrator” of a crime, we are really speaking not of this or that actor like some character in a play, but rather of certain innate traits and tendencies borne by various individuals like seed, like wavelengths, like the properties of theorems — my curiosity, for instance, or your solicitude and hedonism.’

‘I don’t think that’s—’

‘Don’t take offense. I’m merely trying to say that I am swept along by the seeming restlessness of matter like everyone else. My investigative labors may define me, but they do not account for my success. Indeed, my most famous solutions to crimes have come to me quite unexpectedly, like gifts. Visions. I use science as a discipline, but only to prepare myself as a vessel for intuition. This is the secret of all great detective work, I might say, and the most important clues, therefore, are not facts, but rather what you might call ‘impressions of radiance’ — like my rather luminous apprehension here tonight of some unspeakable crime-within-a-crime, some dalliance, as it were — or so I feel — with oblivion itself!’ He watched me with that same close intensity as before, and I felt my mouth twitch involuntarily into a half-smile.

‘But then—’

He looked away as though dismissing me, concentrating instead on his watches, enlarging upon his diagram: he was crossing his arrow now with a perpendicular row. ‘I don’t know what it is that perceives these things. I don’t feel any personal identity — any “I” or “me” — I feel simply that I stand at a crossroads on this map of time — that I am a crossroads, that we all are — do you follow?’ He glanced up, transfixing me with the vehemence of his gaze. ‘I realize that it is not easy, that it takes an exceptional mind …’ I chose not to contradict him, but as he returned to his display, sliding the watches from the arrow’s leading edge into the middle, adding others to form a kind of field, fretted with straps and chains and buckles, I recalled a history teacher we once had who accused us of ‘attending to the head of the arrow to the neglect of its tail’ — which at the time we all took as a dirty joke. ‘What I want — all I want, really — is to see time!’ He hovered tensely above the field of watches, his hands outspread as though to scoop them all up, seeming almost to tremble with greed — and indeed they did give an illusion, all ticking, clicking, or pulsing away, of a plenitude. ‘Yes …’ He concentrated on them, his eyes narrowing. ‘Now …’ Beads of perspiration appeared on his brow and the top of his head. I, too, concentrated, afraid to move. ‘Eeny,’ he intoned gravely, his hands quivering rigidly in fiercely contested restraint, ‘meeny, miny …’ He reached, as though through some dense magnetic storm, for a watch. ‘Mo!’ My wife’s.

‘Hey, look, Leonard! It’s our old buddy Nigel!’ Soapie shouted from the doorway, blowing in like a sudden gale: the Inspector stiffened momentarily as though buffeted, then sat back, folding his arms. Fred and Bob, who had dragged Howard out, now dragged him in again: ‘Excuse us, Chief — they wanta restage this guy’s examination so as to get some photos.’ Pardew, his brow damp, nodded his permission, watching Soapie warily as the reporter kicked through the papers on the floor in his tattered sneakers, picked up a Mexican rattle — a dried gourd that looked like a tattooed testicle — and shook it, peered into Bob’s microscope, and sniffed specimen bottles, the two policemen meanwhile hauling Howard, his feet trailing behind him, over to the work area and opening him up again. Soapie tested a magnet out on a row of needles and probes, then on Leonard’s crotch — Leonard rolled his eyes, still firing away, his feet seeming to lift off the floor and fall back again — finally on the display of watches on the desk between Pardew and me. ‘What’s old shortcake trying to palm off on you here, Ger?’ Soapie laughed as a watch jumped to his magnet. He pocketed the watch and magnet and, admiring the photos hanging from the line, lit up a cigarette, Leonard’s flashgun popping away the while like magnesium bubbles. ‘So whaddaya got, Nige? Who done it?’

‘We have several leads,’ replied the Inspector frostily, ‘but we are still pursuing our inquiries.’

‘Yeah? Well, what about fatty here with the red tie and inky dingdong?’

‘What about him?’

‘You know, abusing the habeas corpus like that, like maybe he was returning to what you might call the scene of the crime — and then, he’s obviously banged to the bung—’

Inspector Pardew leaped to his feet. ‘We are not jumping to any half-baked conclusions! We are not peddling headlines here — we are seeking the truth!’

‘Awright, awright, calm down—!’

‘Holistic criminalistics rejects these narrow localized cause-and-effect fictions popularized by the media! Do you think that poor child in there died because of some arbitrary indeterminate and random act? Oh no, nothing in the world happens that way! It is just by such simple atavistic thinking that we fill our morgues and prisons, missing the point, solving nothing!’ Pardew stormed about the room, waving his arms. Soapie whipped out his notebook. ‘Murder, like laughter, is a muscular solution of conflict, biologically substantial and inevitable, a psychologically imperative and, in the case of murder, death-dealing act that must be related to the total ontological reality!’

‘Hold up, hold up!’ cried Soapie, scribbling away frantically, hat tipped back and cigarette between his teeth. ‘Jesus! How do you spell “interterminant”?’

‘This death tonight was a violent but dynamically predetermined invasion of what we criminologists call a self-contained system of ritually proscribed behavior in which the parts are linked by implacable forces and the behavior of the whole is precisely defined by the laws of social etiology — and I assure you, we are not going to be pressured by any hack scandalmongers into abrogating our broader responsibilities and jumping to unwarranted and even irrelevant parochial conclusions!’

‘Whoa-ho-ho!’ laughed Soapie, his pencil waggling frantically across the pad in his hand. ‘Violent total antilogical, uh, irreverent system … whew! I don’t know what any of this malarkey’s about, Nigel, by golly, but it should knock ’em out on the funny pages!’ He dotted a few i’s, flicked his butt away, and, slapping his notebook shut, nodded at Leonard, who had been photographing the Inspector’s bristly tirade through a foreground of test tubes and beakers. ‘C’mon, Leonard, let’s go get a coupla skin shots of these impeccable faucets, and then have us something to eat. Ger’s old lady puts out a handsome spread.’

‘Stick around,’ Fred urged, coming back in with Bob, the two of them having just dumped Howard outside the door, ‘this one’s next!’

‘Nah,’ grinned Soapie, winking at me. ‘He’s old hat.’

‘Those shameless egotistical frauds!’ shrieked the Inspector when the two newsmen had left, and then, in a fit of decompressed rage, he began to beat his head against the far wall. ‘Filthy bloated mythomaniacs who feed like dogs off the excrement of their own vile lies!’ I thought this might be a good moment to slip away, but before I could make my move, the Inspector whirled around and cried: ‘Seize him!’

‘No, wait—!’ But they had already grabbed me, twisted my arm behind my back, and were highstepping me over to their work area, my feet barely touching the floor. ‘Don’t—!’

‘Easy, pal!’

‘We don’t want to have to get rough!’

The Inspector, who was striking his temples with his fists and groaning something about ‘dark fissures of the soul’ and ‘massive spiritual deformity,’ now threw a sheaf of photographs on the table in front of me and, jabbing a tremulous finger at the erected penis that Ros, dressed as a telephone operator, was holding in her ear, cried: ‘Whose is that?!’

‘I–I don’t know,’ I stammered, mine being the one she was speaking into.

‘And that!!’ he demanded, pointing now at Ros’s pumping fist in a photo of the Pietà, then at one of Little Miss Muffet with what looked like a lamb under her skirt: ‘And this!’

‘Actually, uh, that one’s from a show, I believe — a publicity still — The Mother Goo—’

‘What are you trying to hide?’ he screamed, banging his fists on the table, making the photos fly.

Bob tightened his grip on my arm, Fred whipped out his nightstick. ‘Nothing!’

‘Nothing? Nothing? Then how do you explain this?!’ he cried, flinging a valentine onto the table.

‘Where did you find that?’ I gasped. It was one I had given my wife long ago — I recognized the ‘honeymoon hotel’ with its heart-shaped shutters, a private joke: there’d been a heart-shaped hole in the door of the outhouse we had to use …

‘Next to the body!’

‘Ah, that must be the one Naomi—’

‘We know what it is! Do you take us for fools? Do you deny you knew the victim?’

‘Of course not! She’s—’

‘She’s dead! I know that! But I need to know how! And when! Now for the last time: what have you seen? Eh? What have you heard?’

Bob tightened his grip again; Fred, still wearing the dusty rubber gloves, grabbed my belt with one hand, brought the nightstick crashing down on the table with the other — ‘Dickie!’ I yelped. It was all I could think of. I could hardly breathe. I felt like I’d reflexed my testicles all the way into my ribcage. ‘Somebody said—!’

‘Dickie?’

They eyed me narrowly. I felt betrayed by my own desperation, ashamed of the outburst. I swallowed. ‘Actually—’

‘That the lily-dip in the white ducks?’ grunted Bob behind my back.

‘Yes,’ I squeaked, ‘but I only … Mrs Trainer said—’

Fred shook his head. ‘Nothing there, Chief. We checked him out. Double on-tonder.’

‘What —?! More lies?!’ I felt relief, even as Bob threw his free arm around my throat, half-strangling me. ‘I tell you, I can’t stand lies! They turn our consciousness to rot and putrefy the spirit! He waved a photo in front of my face of a round-helmeted cop being buggered by a masked superhero: ‘Now, who is that?’

Bob squeezed, arching my back, and all I could see was the ceiling. Fred, sucking in wind, drew his arm back. ‘I … I can explain—?’

‘Explain? Explain?’ the Inspector raged. The ceiling seemed to be pulsating and a chemical pungency filled the air. ‘Open him up!

‘No, just a minute!’ I gasped. I groped for my buckle — ‘In the end, Gerry,’ my father used to say, ‘we reach for the inevitable’ — and Fred took his hand away. ‘I’ll … I’ll do it …’

They seemed to accept this. Fred lowered his stick. Bob loosened his grip slightly, though he kept his arm around me. ‘Awright,’ he growled, ‘out with it!’

The three of them pressed round, boxing me in. We were all breathing heavily. On the wall in front of me they’d tacked up their charts for spectrochemical analysis: they looked like indictments, columnar and menacing, with something penciled in across the top. I studied it without seeing it, my hands at my buckle. I might as well get it over with, I thought. Who knows, I might not even be recognized. But I didn’t believe it. I felt betrayed somehow. A kind of inconsolable dismay swept over me, and a loneliness, as I reached, my eyes misting over (I’d had dreams like this: some final crowded-up demand, my will erased), for my zipper.

Bob and Fred backed off, laughing. The Inspector, too, relaxed, laid a restraining hand on mine. ‘That’s all right,’ he said quietly. ‘We know it’s not you. We showed your wife the photos and she said definitely not.’

‘We were just kidding,’ said Fred.

‘Ah …’ My heart was still in my throat. I wiped my eyes. The penciled-in notation on the chart read: ‘Never confuse the objective with the subjective sections of the protocol.’ It sounded like a line from a play.

‘Naturally, we would appreciate any help you could give us,’ said Pardew, filling his pipe from a small saclike pouch. I settled back. I’d been standing on my toes all this time, and somehow this had added to my sense of isolation and vague nameless guilt.

Bob had limped away to switch off the lamp on the microscope, shutting down the show there, and now gathered up some little boxes, plastic bags, and tools. ‘Shall I knock the teeth out before we bag her up,’ he asked, ‘or save it till later?’

‘Might as well do it now. What about the cast?’

‘The stuff’s ready,’ said Fred at the hot plate, stirring (I could hear music now, conversations, people shouting on the stairs: where had they been before?). ‘You want the whole chest or just—?’

‘All of it.’ The Inspector tamped the tobacco into the bowl with his little finger. He seemed to be studying one of the odd inky prints the cops had taken. I was still having trouble breathing, and I wasn’t sure my knees were going to hold me; at such times I resented my gentility, yet understood that often as not it had spared me worse. ‘Be sure to get the angle of penetration.’

‘I’ll help with that, Fred,’ said Bob, tucking his tools in his armpit.

‘Careful, it’s hot …’

‘I want to thank you for coming in,’ Pardew said as they left. He settled his pipe in under his drooping moustaches (I heard a glass break, laughter, someone said: ‘Don’t try to explain …’), fumbled in his pockets. ‘It’s been good to have someone to talk to, someone who understands …’

‘Well, I only—’

He smiled. ‘You’ve been more help than you know. Got a match?’

‘No, sorry …’ I slapped my ribs pointlessly.

He poked about the shelves, the worktable, finally lit his pipe from a Bunsen burner. I mopped my brow with the handkerchief I realized too late had been the one used by the Inspector, thinking (not for the first time at a party like this): I should make better use of my time than this. ‘Like all intellectual pursuits,’ he said around start-up puffs (there seemed to be a growing agitation outside, as though to set off the deep stillness here in my study), ‘this is a lonely and thankless profession, a daily encounter with depravity, cruelty, and sudden—’

Fred burst in, looking sweaty, his eyes popping: ‘They’re trying to take the body away!’ he cried, then rushed out again.

‘What —?!’ the Inspector roared, rearing up, his moustaches bristling.

‘It’s probably only the ambulance men,’ I offered, but he pushed me aside and strode out in the wake of his assistant, his fists clenched and jaws set, white scarf fluttering.

People — some of whom I didn’t even know — were piling down the stairs, thumping out of the kitchen, rushing for the living room where there was a great commotion. ‘Stop them!’ they cried. ‘Oh my god!’ ‘He was using a hammer on her mouth!’ In the middle of the room, two white-jacketed men and Jim were trying to lift Ros’s body onto a stretcher, but the two police officers, grabbing a limb each, had engaged them in a kind of grisly tug-of-war. ‘The Inspector — grunt! — says she stays!’

‘Sorry, pal! We got orders!’

‘Oof!’

‘Do something, Gerry! I can’t take this!’

Talbot and Fats and some guy in a gray chalkstriped suit with a lilac shirt (he was familiar, I’d seen him somewhere before) were already trying to do something, struggling clumsily with the two policemen (‘Talbot! You come out of there right this minute!’ Wilma fussed from the sidelines), and Pardew now stepped into the melee on the other side, straddling one of Ros’s arms (her hands were wrapped now in plastic bags, I saw, her feet as well, and her front was splotched with drying plaster as though someone had hit her with a custard pie), a long finger jabbed at Jim’s lapel: ‘I must warn you that any further interference will be viewed as a criminal breach of the law!’

‘I’m not interfering, damn you, I’m trying to —’

But just then Vic strolled in (‘Oh boy! look out!’ squawked Yvonne, ‘it’s the Grim Raper!’), walked serenely up to Fred in time to the dance tune playing on the hi-fi, and chopped him — kthuck! — in the back of the neck. ‘Yow! Crikey, you didn’t have to do that!’ Fred howled, crumpling.

Bob let go of the body, whipped out his revolver, backed off in a crouch: ‘Anybody move—!’

Vic smiled, showing his teeth, then turned and walked nonchalantly away toward the dining room, his back to the cop. It was so quiet you could hear ice clinking somewhere in an empty glass. ‘Jeez,’ Fred whimpered, all curled up on the floor, hands behind his head (Jim, also ignoring the drawn weapon, knelt to examine his neck), ‘we’re only doing our job, for cripe’s sake!’

‘He’s going to go too goddamned far if he doesn’t watch out,’ Noble grumbled to Eileen, standing listlessly by. ‘What?’ she asked absently, and picked up Vic’s drink, which he’d left behind. Bob fired, shattering the glass: Noble threw himself down heavily behind the couch, and someone screamed, but Eileen seemed not to notice what had happened, staring in bruised puzzlement at her dripping hand and what was left of the glass. ‘Give that boy a silver dollar!’ Yvonne applauded from the couch, and Talbot in his drunken stupor (Wilma seemed to be feeding him aspirin by the spoonful) joined in, slapping his hands together loosely like a trained seal. ‘I’m sorry,’ Eileen said, and Fats, watching Bob warily, lit up a thick black cigar. ‘Or maybe … maybe I’m not sorry …’

‘Please,’ I urged, but no one seemed to be listening. I felt locked into one of Pardew’s space — time configurations, where the only thing moving was my perception of it. The Inspector had knelt beside Jim and the injured officer (Jim was fitting him with a kind of neckbrace, using a pillow from the couch and attaching it with a woman’s garter belt — might have been my wife’s), and Bob, covering us with his gun, now loped over to join them, leaving the two ambulance men free to carry on with removing Ros’s corpse. But even as they heaved the body onto the stretcher (so light: she seemed almost to float, her torso rising and falling airily), Regina appeared in the doorway with her friends Zack Quagg, the playwright-director, and the actor Malcolm Mee, Quagg with his famous purple cape pulled on over a white unitard, Malcolm in faded blue jeans and a striped sailor shirt. Quagg was normal enough (not that my wife thought so: once in a performance he had stepped down into the audience and slapped her face with a dead fish), but Mee always struck me as dangerously homicidal. Just the parts he tended to play maybe, but his cold glassy stare and the scar on his cheek always sent a chill down my spine. Regina, hand to mouth and face averted, was pointing across the room at Ros, long white finger quivering, and Quagg, following it, swept into the room, his eyes ablaze. ‘What kinda two-bit tank show is this?’ he cried, shoving the ambulance men aside. ‘That’s my star!’

‘Hey, wait a minute—!’

‘Get these greaseballs outa here!’ Quagg yelled, swinging wildly, but before he could hit anything, Fats locked him in a bearhug: ‘Whoa! Cool it, Zack!’

‘Whose company you in, Fats?’ Quagg grunted, as Talbot staggered blearily away from Wilma and threw himself at everybody: Mee, his face icily deadpan, lashed out with a whistling left hook and knocked him cold. Anatole was there too now, thin and pale in his all-black get-up, Earl Elstob grinning stupidly at his elbow with his fists cocked. On the hi-fi, somebody was singing something about ‘needing someone to talk to,’ and I thought: maybe it would help if I just changed the record. ‘The doc wants her tucked away outa the lights, Zack — it’s no good for her here!’ Fats gasped around his cigar, and the woman in yellow came up and kicked him in the shins. ‘OW!’

I stepped forward to explain, somewhat disquieted by the odd sensation of walking through a grid of intersecting vectors, just as Bob sprang up out of his half-crouch next to Fred, swinging the butt of his pistol: he’d have got me had not Ginger at that same moment crossed between us, wobbling on her high heels and holding the tattered remains of her costume together with both hands, and short-circuited the cop, who fell between her legs like trapped game. I ducked and they struck Anatole in their fall, propelling him into a scuffle between Mee and one of the ambulance men (‘Stop that! Stop that!’ I could hear Patrick shrieking over the uproar). Ginger, when she hit the carpet with Bob on her, squeaked airily as though getting her noise button squeezed, the officer cursing when his head knocked bonily on hers. ‘Yuh huh,’ said Earl Elstob, stumbling over Talbot, tangled up in Quagg’s cape. Dolph wandered in sleepily, wearing one of my ski sweaters and opening a beer can: ‘Christ, what’s been going on down here?’ Leonard, who’d been taking cheesecake shots of Daffie straddling the back of an easy chair as though horsed over it, turned away to get one of Ginger with her eyes crossed, lips puckered, and skinny legs straight up in the air like spiky red signposts, Bob between them seemingly humping away, but really just trying, in vain, to get his short leg under him. Daffie slid off the chair, walked over (Noble from behind the couch was telling someone to shut up), and kicked the cop in the face, and his gun went off again, shooting the cigar out of Fats’ mouth.

‘Wha—?!’ Fats exclaimed, feeling the bulb of his nose speculatively, and some guy in the doorway threw his hands up and whooped: ‘Hey, I like the pitch!’ I recognized him: the actor who’d played the wind-up sergeant-major in Quagg’s soft-core production of The Naughty Dollies’ Nightmare. Gudrun the makeup artist and a plump actress in a toga and a pair of oversize rubber galoshes, worn like slap-shoes, crowded up behind him. Knud’s wife, Kitty, shouting something about official rape, had meanwhile leaped on the cop between Ginger’s legs and was pulling on his ears, and now Earl Elstob, seemingly misreading everything, jumped on Kitty, pushing her skirt up. ‘Can you use some talent, Zack?’ hollered the actor, as he elbowed in.

‘Yeah,’ shouted Quagg, trying to wrest the stretcher grips away from the man in the lilac shirt, ‘but first get the word out, Jacko: Ros has been ragged! Go call Hoo-Sin and Vachel and get them over here! And anyone else you can think of!’

‘I’ll do it!’ said Regina, appearing in the doorway at the actor’s elbow, and, released, he came bounding over, eyes aglitter and a smile on one side of his mouth — ‘Ha ha! Hold up the exits!’ he howled — and flung himself at the lilac-shirted man.

Brenda, bending over to drag Elstob off Kitty (she’d let go the cop’s ears and was struggling to keep her underpants on), suddenly yelped, spun around, and laid into Patrick. ‘You little creep!’ she screamed, her fists flying.

‘It wasn’t me!’ he blubbered, his split mouth bleeding anew, as Dolph slipped away (I felt Alison near me again and wondered if she understood, relative stranger here though she herself was, what was happening, and if that was why she’d drawn close to me again), sipping beer. Mee, standing on Anatole’s face (‘Can’t somebody do something?’ Wilma was wailing: Talbot was under there somewhere, too), seemed to be strangling one of the ambulance men — the other one had tackled Quagg and they had fallen over Ros, her plastic-mittened extremities flopping, her face masked in chipped plaster which bearded her throat and chest as well, and I felt (as a soft belly pressed up against my buttocks) newly sorrowed: ‘It’s almost sad,’ she used to say after oral sex, ‘that it tastes so good.’

‘That’s enough!’ someone cried. ‘You don’t know what you’re doing!’

‘Someone should go get Cyril!’

‘Hold the bimbo down, Malcolm, while I—’

‘Wait a minute! I — unff! — I got an idea!’

The word ‘crepitus’ came to me just then, the word I’d been trying to recall since I’d first seen Yvonne on the landing (they were talking about her now, the punch-up was slackening and there were negotiations under way), and with it came a general sense of loss that embraced Ros, Tania, Yvonne, my mother and grandmother, life itself in its fleeting brevity, its ruthless erosions. Yes, I thought as arms encircled my waist, a hand slid under my shirt (Bob was getting to his feet at last, using Ginger’s legs for crutches, exposing the fat little red purse between them: it was expanding and contracting rhythmically like someone chewing), it’s true: love is indeed, as a woman once whispered to me (from our balcony we could hear mullahs in minarets singing the sun down: the setting, coming back to me now like a fragrance in the air, was ripe for such sentiments), the tragic passion — not for her reasons of course (she had just left her husband to spend a strange, fleeting, but beautiful week with me in Istanbul, which was perhaps, though I’d forgotten it until now, the most beautiful week of my life), but because of its ultimate inadequacy: for all its magic, love was not, in this abrasive and crepitant world, enough. And was that, I wondered as one gentle hand caressed my nipple, the other burrowed below my belt (Ros had been abandoned and with her the free-for-all as well, people were picking themselves up, groaning, laughing — ‘Hoo-eee! that was a real dingdong!’ — and the ambulance men, breathing heavily, had turned their attentions to Yvonne: ‘Sure, why not? They told us to — whoof! — pick up a body, but they — gasp! — didn’t say which!’), the source of its strangely powerful appeal: its own tragic inadequacy? The question itself was resonant with passionate implications, tragic or otherwise, but even as I turned to share them (out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed my son Mark, one of my ski caps down around his ears, eating things off the floor, my mother-in-law dragging him over toward me, something clutched in her white fist), Yvonne cursing raucously, screaming for help, Jim distracted by his efforts to bring Talbot around, I realized that it was not vermouth I’d been smelling (Alison in fact was watching me from the dining room doorway, looking somewhat startled), but bubble gum. ‘Damn it, Sally Ann, this is no time for adolescent vamping!’ I exclaimed, tearing her hands away. ‘People are hurt here! Your own father—!’

‘Oh, crumbs, Gerry! Stop treating me like a child! I mean, I only want to make love with you — is that so awful?’

‘I just won’t have it!’ my mother-in-law snapped, glaring at Sally Ann’s hands on my belt. She held up the ice pick like a denunciation: ‘He was playing with this!’

‘Ah—!’

‘I’ll take it,’ said Sally Ann quietly, dropping it in her shirt. There was a patch now over the breast pocket that said: ‘HANDS OFF UNLESS YOU MEAN BUSINESS.’ I glanced over at Alison, but she was watching the ambulance men, a pained look in her eyes.

‘Where did it come from, Daddy?’

‘I–I’m not sure …’ Fred was turning round and round, trying to get used to his neckbrace; at his feet, the Inspector was tying a plastic bag around Ros’s head. ‘Hey, man, what gig you working here?’ Quagg wanted to know. ‘What’s that you’re eating, son?’

‘Hormone tablets,’ my mother-in-law replied icily, speaking up to be heard over Yvonne’s bawling as the ambulance men stretchered her away. ‘And before that it was some kind of foot ointment!’

‘No, hey, I like it, it’s got something!’

‘Ow, what happened?’ Talbot moaned, then coughed and gagged. Jim was holding something to his nose. ‘Who did I hit?’

‘All you hit was that young man’s fist with your silly face,’ sniffed Wilma. ‘And then the floor.’

‘Hard, though — right? Hard! Ooohh …!’

‘Take another whiff of this,’ Jim said, and Talbot snorted and gagged again.

‘Gerry —? Do something! Help me!’ I caught just a glimpse of the terror on her stricken face (‘You know what I hate most, Gerald?’ my mother once exclaimed — maybe the expression on Yvonne’s face had made me think of it — ‘What I really hate is having a good time!’) as they squeezed her through the door into the hall, past the new arrivals pressing in. ‘Man, somebody really chewed up the scenery in here!’ one of them said: Scarborough, Quagg’s lugubrious baggy-eyed set designer. He looked around as though measuring the space.

‘If this is a party, Daddy, why aren’t there any balloons?’

‘Yeah, there was some guy went crazy, Scar …’

‘I’ll be good! I won’t complain!’

‘I didn’t realize it would hurt so much,’ Anatole whimpered, holding his mouth as though to keep his teeth from falling out.

‘Here, try this, Mark,’ Sally Ann suggested, picking up one of the condoms Naomi had dropped earlier in the evening. Alison had vanished, and in her place Ginger was just wobbling out of the room on her high red heels, her pigtails bent askew, the cheeks of her narrow behind peeping out through gaps in her costume, looking carpet-burned, others drifting away as well.

‘Whoo! After all that excitement, I think I’m gonna hafta go out back and — wurp! — table a motion!’

Mark puffed futilely into the condom, then handed it back to Sally Ann. ‘The hole’s too big.’

‘What—?!’ Brenda cried.

The tall cop was crawling around on his hands and knees. ‘I lost her goddamn teeth,’ he grumped.

‘It’s also fun to fill them up with water,’ Sally Ann whispered conspiratorially, ‘and drop them like bombs!’ Mark grinned, his eyes lighting up under the woolly fringes of the ski cap, and my mother-in-law said: ‘That’s not clean! It was on the floor!’ She looked up at me accusingly. ‘Daddy, who’s the lady in the bathtub?’

‘No one, pal — now you get to bed.’ I took his hand and led him toward the door, Brenda crying behind me: ‘Oh no! My god, where’s Fats? Fats?!’ just as Yvonne in the hallway in front of us (‘Last Year’s Valentine’ was playing on the hi-fi, a silly nostalgic song about time and loss, and it reminded me somehow of something Tania had once said to me about the way language distorts reality: ‘I know we can’t survive without it, Gerry, probably we even need all those fictions of tense embedded in the goddamn grammar — but art’s great task is to reconcile us to the true human time of the eternal present, which the child in us knows to be the real one!’ — which is why, paradoxically, she had always defended abstraction as the quintessence of realism) cried: ‘Woody—?!’

‘Fats said he was flyin’ light,’ someone said. ‘I think he went to put on the nosebag.’

‘Fats—?!’ Brenda cried, charging off toward the dining room. ‘You won’t believe it!’

‘Don’t let them take me away, Woody! Please!’

Woody and Cynthia were standing on the stairs a step or two below the landing, holding hands in their underwear, Woody in stolid boxer shorts and ribbed undershirt, Cynthia in a heavily cross-strapped brassiere and old-fashioned umbrella-shaped lace drawers, seemingly stunned into a kind of grave compassionate silence. ‘Cyn—?! Christ all Jesus, don’t just stand there!’ There were tears in Cynthia’s eyes now as she took Woody’s stubby hand in both of hers (their heavy ornamentation made her hands now seem more overdressed than ever), sliding partway behind him and nuzzling her pale cheek against his bare dark-tufted shoulder. ‘Help me! WOODY—?!’

‘Daddy, why is the lady all tied up? Did she do something bad—?’

‘No, son, she—’

‘Gerry?!’ Yvonne wailed, spying me past the others, her eyes raw, her gray hair stringy and wild. She had grabbed onto the front doorjamb, and the ambulance men were now prying her hand loose. ‘Goddamn it, Gerry, you promised—!’

‘I–I’ll get Jim,’ I offered (and there was another thing about my mother: you could have anything she had, she was utterly unpossessive, thought of nothing in the world as exclusively her own — but she never, ever — this came to me now, and I felt, oddly as if for the first time, the unfairness of it — gave anyone any presents), but before I could let go of my son’s hand, Charley Trainer came tumbling noisily down the stairs, my bathrobe stretched tight around his flab, shouting: ‘Whuzz happenin’? Whuzz goin’ on downair?’

‘Charley! It’s me! Help!’ Yvonne bawled from the front porch even as the door swung shut behind her, her voice disappearing as though into a tunnel, and Charley yelled: ‘Hole on, Yvonne! God-DAMN it! Ole Chooch is comin’!’ But his knees started to cave about halfway down to the landing and there was no negotiating the right-angle turn there — Woody and Cynthia ducked, clinging to each other, as he went hurtling past behind them, smacking the banister with his soft belly and somersaulting on over the railing to the floor below: ‘PpFOOOFF!’ he wheezed mightily as he landed on his back (I’d managed to jerk Mark out of the way just in time), bathrobe gaping and big soft genitals bouncing between his fat legs as though hurling them to the floor had been his whole intent. ‘Ohh, shit!’ he gasped (Mark was laughing and clapping, my wife’s mother shushing him peevishly), lying there pale and, except for the aftershock vibrations still rippling through his flaccid abdomen, utterly prostrate: ‘Now wha’ve I done …?!’

‘Careful, just lie still a moment,’ Jim cautioned, kneeling by his side and palpating gently his neck and collarbone, while above them Cynthia was saying (Woody seemed to be putting yet another ring on one of her fingers): ‘Woody, you shouldn’t …’

‘Who the hell was runnin’ innerference?’ Charley groaned, as Jim reached under and ran his hand slowly down his broad back.

The phone rang, but as I turned to answer it, Fats and Brenda, tears streaming down their cheeks, came blundering through from the dining room, making us all fall back. ‘Oh my god, Brenda,’ Fats, stuffing the last half of a cheese-dog in his jaws, cried as he stumbled over Charley’s upturned feet (‘Unf! Get his goddamn nummer, coach!’), ‘this is too much! Not Tania—!’ And then, picking himself up, he staggered on up the stairs behind her, Woody and Cynthia pressing up against the banister to let them by. ‘Yeah,’ somebody was saying into the phone (‘Woops! Damn!’ Woody muttered as the ring slipped through the railings and hit the floor near Charley — ‘Gerry, could you pass that up to me?’), ‘it’s Ros! A cold curtain, man — that’s it, gone dark! You comin’ over?’

‘Hey, Ger,’ Charley moaned softly as I dug under his ear for the ring: it was elaborately worked with a heavy stone, somehow familiar, ‘I’m in trouble.’

‘Right, Hoo-Sin’s already here — just this minute walkin’ on,’ the guy on the phone was saying, out of sight now behind all the people gathering around, concerned about Charley, who still lay flat out, motionless, my bathrobe twisted around his thick torso like a bit of rind. ‘Is it his heart?’

‘Has to be — he’s all heart, ole Chooch …’

‘But I don’t wanna go! I wanna see Unca Charley do it again!’

‘And Gudrun, Prissy Loo, the Scar …’

‘You’ll be okay, Charley,’ I said, handing the ring up to Woody (‘Great — and bring Benedetto,’ said the guy on the phone, ‘we’ll need a groaner!’), ‘Jim’s here, he—’

‘Naw, I mean — didn’t Tall-butt tell ya?’ He was nearly crying, his eyes puffy, his nose purple. ‘I juss found out … the reason ya can’t take it with ya …’

‘Ah,’ said Jim, pausing thoughtfully in his trek down Charley’s spine.

‘… Is cuz it dies before you do!’

‘He’s got a slipped disc,’ Jim said. ‘We need to double his knees back and see if we can pop it back in place.’ ‘Oh my! let me help!’ exclaimed Patrick, getting a laugh, just as Lloyd Draper stepped up and remarked down his nose: ‘See here now, looks like you’ve had a little tumble, young fella!’

‘Since Ros died, Ger, I juss can’t … can’t …’

‘For goodness’ sake, Charley!’ cried his wife, Janice, padding in breathlessly, zipping up the side of her pink skirt. ‘What have you been doing — trying to fly again?’

‘Yeah,’ he mumbled, winking at me through his tears (‘Ros is the only one,’ he used to say while reproaching himself, with that comical hangdog look in his eyes, for his clumsy haste and artlessness in lovemaking — ‘The nicest thing about Charley,’ Janice liked to say, ‘is that there’s none of that wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am stuff with him — it’s always quicker than that!’ — ‘who’s ever thanked me after …’), ‘I awmoss had it there f’ra minute!’

‘Hey, everybody!’ Janny cried, bouncing up and down. ‘Let’s hear it for Choo-Choo Trainer!’ She hiked her skirt and dropped into her cheerleader’s squat, one arm out stiffly in front of her, the other cocked behind, and slowly, as Patrick and Jim took a grip on Charley’s fat knees, got the old school locomotive going again. ‘CHOO-oo-oo!’ Pause. ‘CHOO-oo-oo!’ Yes, I thought as I watched Jim and Patrick, grunting, press Charley’s knees back against his chest, the crowd in the hall all joining Janny now as she started to get up steam — ‘Come on, everybody! Choo-oo! Choo-oo! That’s it! Choo-oo! Choo-oo!’ — time may or may not be passing, who’s to say, but damn it, something is. ‘Choo! Choo! Choo! Choo!’ Above us, Woody and Cynthia were kissing now, Woody holding her hips firmly yet somehow chastely in his square hairy hands, her hands resting on his shoulders as though knighting him with all her rings and bangles, and though there was an undeniable tenderness in their embrace and even a certain touching vulnerability in the plainness of their underwear, the neatness of their carefully combed hair, the very narrowness of the step on which they stood, there above the chugging Choo-Choo Trainer locomotive — ‘CHOO-choo! CHOO-choo! CHOO-choo! CHOO-choo!’ — Charley himself now out of sight behind his upraised rump, Dolph helping out, lending his weight — ‘CHOO-choo-CHOO-choo! CHOO-choo-CHOO-choo!’ — there was also something disturbing, almost shocking, about their imperturbable composure as they kissed so discreetly, so properly, that seemed suddenly to make Ros’s death (Oh! Oh! Oh! I was thinking to the cheer’s beat, what have we lost—?!) all the more poignant and immediate, and I might well have started to get, joining red-nosed Charley, truly maudlin, had I not spied Naomi’s cock sock on Alison’s middle finger, beckoning me from the dining room doorway. ‘CHOO-choo-CHOO-choo CHOO-CHOO-CHOO-CHOO!’ the crowd roared, Janny’s arm working like a flying piston. ‘Oh god, it hurts!’ Charley cried, farting explosively (‘Naughty boy!’ exclaimed Patrick to everyone’s delight) — and then in the sudden momentary silence that followed there was a hollow KRR-POP!, a burst of cheers and laughter, and from Charley as they lowered his mass to the floor and covered him up with the robe, a grateful ‘Oh, yeah …!’ ‘WHEE-EE-EE-ee-oo-OO-OO!’ the crowd shrilled in imitation of a train whistle, as Janny spun around then dropped into a still fairly passable split: ‘CHOO-CHOO TRAINER!’

While the crowd around Charley whistled and clapped, I slipped away toward the back, nearly bumping into Steve the plumber coming up from the basement with a big monkey wrench in his hand. ‘Hold on, hold on!’ Inspector Pardew demanded behind me. ‘Is that someone having a game of darts down there?’

‘A couple of women, sir,’ said Steve, ‘if you can call it a game.’

‘Hey, there,’ breathed Alison (‘One of them’s probably her, all right,’ Bob was saying in back of me, while at our feet, Anatole, squatting down, asked: ‘You all right, Uncle Howard?’), ‘I’ve been looking for you, Superlover!’

‘Ah, that must be my son you want.’

‘I assumed it ran in the family.’ The crowd around Charley was breaking up, many of them headed past us into the dining room (‘No, no, no, no, no!’ Howard blurted out petulantly, as though waking suddenly from a bad dream, or perhaps just talking in his sleep — Iris Draper was there, trying to feed him some soup), where Jim’s wife Mavis was holding court, seemingly her old self once more. I could see people slipping in and out of the TV room with big grins on their faces and pausing, as they passed, to hear what Mavis had to say. Soapie was filling a brown bag with food from the table.

‘Hey, Prissy Loo! I thought you took the veil!’

‘No, some guy held me in escrow a while, that’s all. Where’d you find the bug broth?’

‘Yup,’ said Bob. ‘We’re all set up for her.’

‘In here, there’s buckets of it …’

Alison drilled my chest with her stiffened peckersweatered finger, parodying recruitment posters: ‘I want you, Gerald!’ she declared throatily, clutching my belt with her free hand and knocking her pubes on mine. Which seemed to set off the phone: Regina answered it, Pardew saying: ‘Very well, you’d best get on with it then.’ ‘It’s show time, Mister Bones! When do we open?’

‘As soon as we can get off centerstage.’ I lifted the pointing finger to my mouth to tongue the base of it, under the sweater. I realized it had the same pattern as one of my ski caps. She spread her fingers and her breasts rose and fell in their silk pockets, as her eyes, sparkling, searched mine. ‘Hey, what’s goin’ down here, Vagina?’ cried someone, banging in through the front door behind us, his voice small and squeaky. ‘Show me the card!’ ‘In the living room, Vachel! It’s Ros!’ ‘Ros—?’ ‘Only one problem,’ I murmured through her fingers, ‘I have to use the bathroom so badly my teeth are chiming!’

‘Me, too,’ she admitted, letting go my belt to give her crotch a demonstrative little squeeze, ‘but they’ve turned this one into a darkroom, and upstairs …’

‘Hey, that’s cute,’ said Soapie, taking the sock off Alison’s finger and peeking inside, then handing it back. ‘I could use one of those to keep my pencils warm.’ He was cradling a greasy paper sack full of food and an unopened bottle of scotch. Alison had curled round under my far arm, and now ran her hand up my back under my shirt (‘We can go out back,’ I whispered: ‘Yes, let’s!’ she urged), as Soapie poked his nose down the basement steps and asked: ‘What’s going on down below, d’you suppose?’

But we were already away, slipping through the kitchen door, Alison snatching up some paper cocktail napkins en route (‘I always like something to read,’ she smiled), Woody saying something as we passed about ‘a lesson.’ ‘Yeah? Don’t you believe it!’ growled Vic, as the door whumped to behind us.

The kitchen seemed closed down for the night: things put away, counters clean, lights off and the room in shadows except for the nightlight on the oven and the fluorescent over the butcherblock table, pots and pans hung up, appliances set back under the cabinets. ‘Your wife’s such a great housekeeper,’ Alison said, still whispering. ‘I really envy her!’ ‘Well, this is a bit unusual,’ I allowed. The general tidiness of the place was marred somewhat by the muddy tracks in and out of the back door: we were not the first, it seemed, to think of using the backyard. Also, now that I looked more closely, I could see that there was a pot simmering on a burner in the shadows, something cooking in the oven, some boiled eggs cooling on the counter near the sink, knives and tools laid out on the butcherblock, an apron — oilcloth, imprinted with foreign baggage stickers — draped over the breakfast bench. ‘It’s strange,’ Alison murmured, turning to me as I paused, touched by some distant memory (but not of my wife, no — waiting for Ros in the wings during a performance of that toyland play, the toybox spotlit centerstage into which the other toys were all vanishing, Ros left on the floor outside, arms akimbo, as though forgotten …), ‘but I feel as though I were standing at some crossroads — or, rather, that I am a crossroads in some odd way, through which the world is passing. Does that sound silly?’ She put her arms around my neck. ‘No.’ I took her small silken waist in my hands. Blinking, she tongued her lips, which seemed to have swollen. There was a soft blush on her skin, a warm fragrance, and her breath came in quick little gasps. ‘In fact, it’s funny, but I was just thinking …’ I let my hands slide down over her hips — then took them away again as her husband came in through the door behind her.

‘Ah!’ I said and cleared my throat. ‘We were just, eh …’

‘You’ve found your earring,’ he said tersely, ignoring me.

‘Yes, that nice man in the white pants discovered it for me,’ she replied, turning dreamily toward him. ‘On the living room floor — wasn’t that lucky?’ She smiled, touching the earring as though to show it to him, her free hand slipping into my back pocket to scratch subtly at my buttock, as though to sign her name there. ‘We’re just going out for some fresh air.’

‘Yes, of course,’ he said with an abrupt pinched smile, glancing at me, then away again. He seemed to want to look back over his shoulder, but restrained himself, pushing his hands into his jacket pockets, biting briefly at his beard. ‘Watch where you step,’ he added as he marched past us.

Alison took my hand and pulled me out into the darkness of the back porch. ‘Hurry—!’ She tore my wrap-tie shirt open, flung her arms around my bare back. ‘Kiss me!’ she begged, pulling herself upward to meet my mouth with hers. Her mouth was open, her tongue pushing between my teeth as though to mate there, her perfumed breath mingling with the nostalgic country odors of the backyard and the sweet scents sweeping up from within her dress. I clutched her body tight to mine — it was the right thing to do, I knew, the timing perfect! — and kissed her eyes, her cheeks, her mouth, her throat, my hands burrowing up under the whispering charmeuse skirt, childhood memories of camping trips, midnight hikes, forest dew, Inspiration Points filling my mind (it was a damp night, chilly, dense), and, her sash loosening, down into her tights. ‘Oh Gerald!’ she gasped (her flesh down there was cool, sleek, so smooth it felt powdered, maybe it was, the fluff between her wriggling cheeks as soft as swansdown), jamming her hands inside my waistband, trying to, finally in frustration scrabbling frantically over the outside of my trousers (‘No more rehearsals, Superlover,’ I seemed to hear her say, ‘I want climax, I want the weenie!’ — but her mouth was pressed on mine), digging, fumbling for openings. I slid one hand around the curve of her hip onto her soft belly, and down into the damp velvety thatch between her thighs which heaved up to meet it, her legs spreading as in my mind’s eye (and thus in truth! in truth!) they’d been spreading since the night we met. Yet even bare skin is a kind of mask, I thought wistfully, pushing deeper, my fingertips meeting, fore and aft, in the syrupy depths of her amazing furrow, maybe in fact it was something she had said that night during intermission: that desperate but futile effort (but I was trying, I was trying) to touch what can never be touched. I had suggested that night that theater, like all art, was kind of a hallucination at the service of reality, and that full appreciation of it required total abject surrender — like religion. ‘Yes,’ she’d said, setting her coffee cup down. ‘Or love …’ ‘Oh fuck!’ she whimpered now, tearing wildly at my trousers, clawing my back, tugging at my testicles, while thrusting violently (it was, yes, this incredible impression of wholeness, this impression of radiance, of universal truth, the seeming apprehension of it, that surrender made possible, I thought, almost unable to think at all, unable to breathe — what had I just said?) into the little orifice I’d created with my two fingers and the bent knuckle of my thumb — ‘You’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever met!’ ‘Alison—!’ I groaned, pushing deeper from behind. ‘(Gasp!) A little … more—!’

Someone squeezed my hand and I jerked it away. It was Dickie, his white suit glowing spectrally in the dim light. ‘Wondered what she was growing back there,’ he said, lifting Alison’s skirt to peer closer, playing the heckler, the hick in the gallery. ‘Anyhow, I’m glad to see that, as an artist, Ger, you’ve got a good grasp of your subject.’ He slapped her behind as though blessing it. I started to squeak out something, something stupid probably, but he had already turned away. ‘Hey, Hot Pot!’ he laughed, stepping down off the porch. ‘Whaddaya say we go get some grass stains back behind the bushes!’

‘It’s filthy back there,’ Sally Ann retorted. ‘Like you, you creep!’

‘Gerald,’ Alison gasped hoarsely — she lay collapsed against my chest now, breathing deeply, my arms around her shoulders, hers around my hips, ‘where can we go?’

‘I’ll have to think. They’ve taken over my study and—’

‘How about the green room upstairs?’

‘Green room?’ I was still struggling to find my voice. I felt weirdly suspended, not quite outside time but not in it either.

‘Where you kissed me …’

‘Yes, the sewing room, okay …’ Sally Ann stood nearby, staring — or probably staring, it was hard to tell — seemingly taken aback at finding us here, and I worried that if we didn’t move, she wouldn’t. ‘But first …’ I unlocked my arms (a titter of laughter floated out and I noticed again the chill in the air) and led Alison down off the porch — we were both a bit unsteady, our bodies still making moves of their own, our legs more or less elsewhere.

‘Woops!’

‘Steady now!’

It was a little brighter in the yard, lit up from inside, and I saw that her dress hem was caught in her tights: I pulled it out, smoothed it down, reveling (I don’t like silk) in the feel of silk, and she cuddled closer. ‘Can I hold it for you, Gerald?’ ‘Sure.’ Anyway, she already was, leaning on it like a cane. A swaggerstick. If she’d let go, she’d probably have fallen down. There were others out here, whispering, chatting quietly back in the bushes, grunting, and I felt once more — though not so intensely as a moment ago with my hands between Alison’s legs — that nostalgic flush of country memories: campouts, bike hikes, an all-night picnic back in college (the girl who’d held it for me that night had stupidly pinched it, trying, she’d claimed, to dot an i), sweet harvest evenings along the Rhine and the Douro, our Alpine honeymoon, star-gazing with my father at my grandmother’s place (‘Look, Gerry! there by the Fishes: the Chained Lady!’): there even seemed to be a fragrance of apples in the air.

I led Alison over toward a shadowy corner near the toolshed (there were muddy tracks everywhere, puddles, wadded-up cocktail napkins, cigarette butts), and she knelt to undo my fly. ‘God! it’s gorgeous!’ she exclaimed softly as she opened up my shorts and let it fall out, pale as a stone pillar, into the night. She stroked it gently. I felt nothing: it was all puffed up, numb with excitement and anticipation. Inside, somebody squealed, and I could hear what sounded like the clacking of spoons, someone blowing on a sweet potato. A tall man stood, shadowed, in one gaping window, looking out as though to mirror me. ‘Where shall we point it?’ ‘Well, away from the flowerbeds —’ But she was gone. ‘Alison—?’

‘Hate to tinkle all over your wife’s garden,’ rumbled Lloyd Draper, standing beside me, ‘but I’m an old man and I just can’t hold it in anymore.’ I thought I heard her whispering behind me — I couldn’t be sure, it might have been anyone: ‘Is there room …?’ ‘Sure, honey, sit down, sit down …’ I looked around, but it was too dark to see anything but a few bushes, squatting like luminous trigrams, black at the roots. ‘What’s the matter, son? For a young lad, you seem to be having trouble making water there,’ Lloyd remarked, squinting down through his bifocals. ‘Oh, I see.’ He spurted briefly, stopped, spurted again. ‘Well, that takes me back a bit …’

‘I just hope there isn’t any poison ivy back here …’

‘You avvertisin’ that ugly tally-whacker, Big G, or juss givin’ direck-shuns?’ asked Charley, leaning boozily over my shoulder, my wife’s dustmop under his arm as a crutch, Jim helping him at the other elbow.

‘Yup, vanished days and all that …’

‘Don’t laugh, Charley. It hurts.’

‘Seen a lot of ’em like that in my day,’ sighed Lloyd, still squirting from time to time. ‘They weren’t workin’ too well either, of course …’

‘Who’s laughin’? I’ll trayja even’n throw in m’new alligator golfshoes b’sides!’

‘Whoo-EEEE! Jes’ call me Pipi’ ’cuz Ah’m all your’n!’ hooted Earl Elstob, joining us (‘Thieves’ hangouts, we called ’em in the trade …’), shooting a stream out over the flowerbeds and — thrummm! — against the toolshed wall. Jim and Charley were already firing away at shorter range and I was able at last to join in as well. Our radiant streams gleamed in the pallid glow from the windows (the man who had been standing there had disappeared) like a row of footlights. Tania had once spent six months on a painting she’d called ‘The Garden,’ trying to capture this glow, this strange yearning (she’d related it to what she’d called ‘the sleeping dragon, the hidden force of nature’), and what she’d ended up with, she’d said, was a fair facsimile of an illustration from a children’s book she’d had as a little girl.

‘Hey, Earl,’ laughed Charley, ‘didja hear the one about the guy who takes his wife to the theater, ’n atta — ha ha! — innermission—’

‘The thee-ater?’

‘Move over, ladies,’ said Fats, joining us, ‘I gotta re-hearse the scenery here!’

‘Yeah, ’n atta innermission he’s gotta take a leak, so he hurries off to the can. But he goes through a wrong door somehow ’n ends up inna goddamn garden!’

‘Oh yeah? Huh huh,’ snorted Elstob from under his overbite, still managing to hit the wall but no longer threatening to drill a hole through it, and Fats, crossing Earl’s stream with one of his own, said: ‘Too-chay!’

‘Well, the garden’s very fancy, y’know — inna French style, as y’might say—’

‘Yuh huh hee,’ Earl sniggered, jiggling around. Lloyd had left us, but his place was taken almost immediately by a guy in corduroys and a tweed jacket with suede elbows: ‘This the place?’ he asked, smiling apologetically around his bent briar pipe, and someone in the bushes behind us, grunting, said: ‘Well — ungh! — there goes a little bit of eternity …’

‘And in a fancy garden like ’at, Earl, he don’ wanna weewee onna lotuses nor leave no nasty puddles around, right? So, real careful-like, he lifts a plant out of a flowerpot ’n unloads in ’at, ’n’en putsa plant back ’n — hoff! — tippytoes back to his seat—’

‘Sounds like the one about the audience catharsis at the tragical farces,’ remarked Jim, winding down.

‘Yes,’ I said, meaning something else. Alison had made some remark about intermissions that night at the theater, giving them an importance that haunted me now. ‘Exactly …’

‘Onlya goddamn play’s awready started up again when he gess back to his seat, see—’

‘My name’s Gottfried,’ the man beside me offered, extending his free hand. I changed hands and took it.

‘Oh yes — you came with Fiona.’

‘’N he leans over to his ole lady,’ Charley rumbled, leaning over toward Earl, ‘’n he says to her, he says (‘Fiona—?’): “Hey, sugarpuss, whuzz happen so far iniss act?” ’ What Alison had said that night we met, smiling up at me over her fresh cup of coffee, was that perhaps without intermissions there could be no catharsis in modern theater — and only much later did it occur to me (‘I feel like all my energy’s just leaking away,’ someone murmured behind us, ‘and it gives me a very mystical feeling, like I’m in tune with the universe or something …’) that what she’d really said was ‘intromissions’ … ‘ “You oughta know, you dumb shit,” his wife says,’ Charley was saying, ‘all scrunched down ’n mad as a bear with a bee up its ass: “you were in it!” ’

Earl staggered backward, yaw-hawing uncontrollably, making us all duck, just as Leonard skipped out from behind the toolshed in front of us and started popping photos: ‘Help! I’m blind!’ wailed Fats, shooting straight up in the air.

‘Come on, Leonard, what’re you doing?’

‘This goin’ in the sports pages or the church announcements?’

‘God, all I see are spots!’

‘The hard thing sometimes,’ sighed Gottfried beside me sucking on his drooping pipe, ‘is just letting go …’

‘Obishuaries, mos’ like …’

‘Jesus, I thought those two yoyos left when they took Yvonne away!’

‘Yvonne—?’ cried Fats (‘…And then, other times, there’s nothing to it …’). ‘Who did?’

‘Hurry!’ Alison whispered urgently behind me, rushing past. ‘I’m almost done!’ I gasped, trying to blink away my momentary blindness, but she was already gone, vanished like an apparition. ‘Wait!’ Then Leonard’s flashgun went off again and I saw her, running barefoot toward the back porch (how small she looked!), clutching her tights like a spare wrap, her green sash loose and fluttering behind, pursued by Dickie and that guy in the chalkstriped suit — ‘Hey!’ I shouted, just as Dickie caught a toe in a croquet wicket and slapped into the mud. Leonard missed it, shooting instead at a confused and bedraggled Howard being helped down the porch steps by Daffie and Anatole (‘Ugh! just don’t look back,’ someone muttered behind me), Noble following them out, holding his crotch, his glass eye lighting up with the pop of the flash. ‘Oh Christ,’ Dickie swore, brushing futilely at the dark stains on his bright white trousers, as Alison, with a desperate backward glance, crashed into Noble, ‘not shit—!’ ‘Yvonne?’ Fats was blubbering. ‘I can’t believe it!’ Leonard’s flashgun went off again (Howard stuck his tongue out at it, Anatole threw his hand up): Alison, Noble, and the guy in the chalkstripes had disappeared.

‘Well, folks — shlup! — Godspeed!’ announced Earl Elstob with a toothy self-congratulating grin, doing himself up and wandering off. He headed toward the porch, but seemed to lose his way, circling back into the bushes behind us instead.

‘No need for you guys to rush away on our account,’ Daffie announced, her tongue slurred with gin, as she and Anatole dragged Howard over and propped him up beside us (Fats had just gone charging off, crying: ‘Bren! My god, Bren! It’s Yvonne! They’ve took our Yvonne …!’ and Jim was zipping up). ‘Nothing going on in there but a goddamn funeral.’

‘ ’Ass pretty much whuzz goin’ on out here,’ remarked Charley, shaking his member out. ‘Well, anyway I won’ be hard to find inna dark …’

‘Funeral?’

‘… Juss feel around, it won’ be hard …’

‘Yeah, for Ros. Fucking ghost festival, they’re calling it, talking to spirits — they’re outa their conks.’ She opened up Howard’s pants, fished around inside. She was having trouble keeping her footing. Someone shrieked back in the bushes, Elstob sniggered giddily, there was a thump, and Earl reappeared, doubled over, making his way once more toward the back porch. ‘Jesus, Howard, where is the damned thing —?’

‘Can I help?’ offered Jim.

‘I c’n do’t myself!’ Howard cried out, but it was all bravado, he was helpless. Distantly there were squeals and laughter coming from the upstairs bedroom, largely drowned out by the squeals and laughter behind us as Leonard’s flash went off in the bushes.

‘By the way, Ger, that guy with the French tickler on his chin said he had something he wanted to tell you. He — no, stop, Howard! Wait’ll I get it out!’

‘Cyril?’

‘He probably wanted to tell you about the body in the basement,’ Jim said. ‘You about ready, Charley?’

‘Body? What body—?!’

‘Goddamn it, Howard … now see what you’ve done …’

‘Down in the rec room, you mean,’ said Dolph, joining us as Gottfried strolled away (‘Whuzzat guy got a tape recorder for?’ Charley asked), and lifting his stream into a wheelbarrow back beside the toolshed. ‘I wondered about that. I saw the feet sticking out behind the ping-pong table, but I didn’t look closer — thought I might be interrupting something.’

‘Just as well you didn’t,’ Jim said. ‘It wasn’t a pleasant sight.’

‘I think he’s a sociologist …’

‘But what are you saying — the rec room —?’

‘That’s right. The dart pierced the back of the head and penetrated the medulla, and that always makes for a rather pathetic disorganized death, I’m afraid. Probably just an accident but —’

‘But — my wife was—!’

‘Your wife’s all right!’ Dolph assured me. ‘She’s in there in the kitchen. The cops are, uh, with her …’

‘Assholes!’ Anatole muttered under his breath, as I hurried away (she’d been trying to tell me something about an interview, I remembered this now, I hadn’t been listening), and Howard whined: ‘My panz’re all wet!’

‘Of course they are, Howard — what do you expect?’

At the steps I caught a glimpse of something glittering in the grass, a little ring of light: Ah, she’s dropped it again, I thought as I reached down to pick it up, this time just for me perhaps. I smiled. Or had Noble—? Someone cried out — I thought it might have been Alison, or else my wife, and I rushed forward (that bastard! I was thinking, meaning no one in particular), but at the kitchen door a man was blocking my way. ‘Excuse me—!’

‘My wife,’ the man said stonily. It was Alison’s husband. He stood rigidly in the open doorway, silhouetted against the kitchen lights (yes, my wife was in there, I saw her, the two policemen as well, both looking flushed and sweaty, their clothes disheveled, Fred still in his bulky neckbrace, Bob’s tie undone), one hand in his jacket pocket, the other gripping the carved bowl of his meerschaum. ‘Where is she?’

‘I don’t know,’ I gasped. ‘Inside someplace, I think, I was just—’

‘No.’

I couldn’t see his face at all, and it made his voice, cold, uncompromising, seem alarmingly disembodied. It was important that I reach my wife (‘We better get some blood, too, Fred,’ the tall cop was muttering, and Fred, struggling with some pulleys above the butcherblock table, nodded stiffly), but I knew better than to try to push past him.

‘You came out here together.’

‘Yes, we, uh, sort of ran into each other — but then of course we separated—’

‘You touched her breasts—’

‘No—’

‘And other parts.’ It was like a recitation, an arraignment, distant, mechanical, menacing. And utterly (I thought, chilled by it) insane.

‘Listen, you’ve got it all wrong,’ I explained, tried to, ‘it’s only a party—’

‘Yes, I know about parties.’ I could hear Charley clambering heavily up the steps behind me, assisted by Dolph and Jim. ‘You brought her out here — now what have you done with her?’

‘I told you—’

‘Have you raped her?’

‘No—!’

‘Raped who?’ wheezed Charley at my shoulder.

‘Whom,’ Dolph corrected.

‘I can smell her on you,’ said Alison’s husband.

‘We all can,’ said Dolph. ‘Worse than a damn barnyard. No accounting for some people’s tastes!’

‘Say,’ Charley yuff-huffed amiably, ‘speakin’ a that, didja heara one ’bout the two actors out inna sticks playin’ the front ’n back end of a cow—?’

‘Are you in love with her?’

‘What?’

‘They get chased offa goddamn stage, see, ’n — haw haw! — they get separated—’

‘I asked you—’

‘C’mon, Charley,’ said Dolph, leading him away. ‘I think Ger’s about to get the punchline without our help.’

‘Awright, awright,’ sighed Charley, limping. ‘Foo! I’m feelin’ awful! Whereza booze? I think I got too much blood’n my alcohol stream!’

‘Very funny,’ Jim said, keeping Charley from tipping over onto Alison’s husband, ‘but the truth is, you’ve had enough.’ I started to follow them, but the space through which they moved seemed to close up behind them. ‘You ought to take it easy. It’s slow poison, you know.’

‘ ’Ass okay, Jim, I’m in no hurry …’

‘I asked you if you were in love with her.’

His silhouette, which had dissolved momentarily into the larger mass of the others, now came into sharp focus once more as the light filled in behind him. As though he were honing it, I thought. ‘Don’t you think you’re, well, letting your imagination—?’

‘Believe me, I know what it is to be a victim of love.’ Through all of this he hadn’t moved. Not even when Charley and the others had jostled past him (they were in there talking to my wife and the short cop now, Charley shaking his big head and saying something about growing older, or colder, Jim examining a small tool Bob was using) — he could have been a cardboard cutout posted at the kitchen door with a recorded message. He sighed. ‘It’s a kind of madness …’

‘Yes, well — I don’t know what you saw, or thought you saw, but in reality—’

‘I know, it’s the chemistry of it that most disturbs me. How it warps everything so you can’t trust your senses. It’s like some kind of powerful hallucinogen, transforming our conventional reality into something stark and dangerous — I always feel as though a hole is being opened up in the universe and I’m being pitched into it. Is that what you feel?’

‘Well, ah, something like that …’ I didn’t like conversations like this, and felt unfairly singled out. ‘But, honestly, as far as Alison — your wife — is concerned—’

‘Inhumane. Utterly amoral. Atavistic. Yet transcendent. I sometimes wonder if it’s what atoms feel as they’re drawn together in molecules — or stars as they burst and implode …’

I could hear Wilma chatting with someone on the steps behind me, complaining about the discomfort of wet garter belts. Woody and Cynthia came out, still in their underwear, and Woody, sizing things up quickly, nodded back over his shoulder and said: ‘Your wife needs you, Gerry, you’d better get in there.’ ‘I know …’ Fred was attaching something to her ankle; Bob stood by with a pot of Dijonais mustard in his hands.

‘Certainly it has nothing to do with marriage, I know that, you can’t tame it, you can’t institutionalize it — the raw force of it just smashes through all that.’ For the first time he moved: he put his pipe — a pale hovering presence between us — in his mouth, drew on it, took it out again. I didn’t know whether to be encouraged by this or not.

‘Look, I know what you’re trying to say, and your wife’s very attractive of course, but—’

‘I thought at first that marriage might be a way to isolate it, contain it, to give it a time and place, so that at least I could get ahold of the rest of my life — but I was wrong …’

Behind me, Wilma was expressing her condolences to Woody: ‘She was so brave!’ ‘Yes, I know.’ I had faced situations like this before, of course. All too often perhaps. Always there were misunderstandings … ‘I would have just fallen to pieces!’ ‘We all have to make adjustments. Eh, where’s the best place?’ ‘Well, not where I went!’ The important thing was to keep them talking. ‘You might try back by the swing set.’

‘I’ve known all along, I suppose, but it finally came home to me just tonight, watching you and Alison …’

‘Hi, Gerry, getting a bit of fresh air?’

‘Actually, Wilma, I was just—’

‘Say, that’s a smashing shirt! Maybe I could get one of those for Talbot — not that it’d look as good on him as it does on you! By the way, do you know Peg’s sister Teresa?’

‘No,’ it was the woman in the yellow dress, ‘but—’

‘Pleased, I’m sure!’

‘There was a kind of awe, a kind of electricity in the way you looked at each other — especially when you were stroking her inside her tights …’

‘Who did?’ Wilma asked.

‘No one,’ I said. Maybe if I linked arms with these two, sandwiched myself between them … ‘It’s a … story …’

‘Oh, I like stories,’ gushed Teresa. ‘And I like parties!’

‘And then, later, when she knelt down to put your member in her mouth—’

‘That’s not what—’

‘It was like a revelation …’

‘Some people have all the fun,’ Wilma sighed, patting her hair. ‘If I knelt down, I’d just pop all my stays.’

‘… Like the end of something, innocence for example — and at first I didn’t know what to do with it …’

‘And is that your wife in there on the butcherblock?’

‘Yes, in fact I was about to—’

‘Come on, Teresa,’ said Wilma. ‘I’ll introduce you.’

‘I thought of a lot of things I might do — violent things mostly …’ They were gone, I was alone with him again, the chance lost — almost as though I’d never had it. I heard soft mutterings behind me, near the porch, something about being afraid of the dark. Or the dart. I’d caught the word ‘violent’ — it had seemed to key a new tension in his voice, a slightly higher pitch. ‘The worst part, I realized, was not the way you played with each other’s genitals — a mere appetite, after all, we all go through that — but rather the peculiar rapport between you, that strange intense sympathy you seem to share. I sensed this already that night we met at the theater. It was as though, when you spoke to each other, the very geography of the world had shifted, moving her to a place I could not reach.’

He was completely mad, that was obvious. It was dangerous, I knew, to ignore him — impossible in fact (‘Come along, Teresa,’ Wilma was saying in the kitchen, ‘it’s best not to interfere …’) — but you couldn’t reason with him either. ‘All right,’ I said (‘Well, what I’m saying,’ Teresa argued — all I could see of my wife were her feet above Teresa’s head — as Bob frowned and slid a knife back and forth through our electric sharpener, ‘is that it seems a silly way to go about it!’), ‘what do you want me to do?’