Gerald's Party

‘Sally Ann? Is that … you?’

‘Yes, Daddy. Don’t try to talk …!’

‘I’ve had it … this time, kid! It’s the — whoof! hack! — the end!’ He gasped for breath. (‘He’s not got much longer,’ someone said, and Olga asked: ‘Much longer don whoose?’) ‘I never really thought I’d … have to … have to die …’

‘Is that all you can do, Olga, talk funny?’

‘I–I’ve always known what life,’ Vic spluttered, ‘…what life was about …’

‘Yah, vell, it’s sum-ing.’

‘Mmm — goodness, what is this?’

‘And I never kidded myself about — oh damn! it hurts, baby …! — about death …’

‘It’s a sort of pilaf. With yoghurt sauce.’

‘But I could never imagine … that moment …’

‘Gee, I don’t know,’ Teresa was saying (‘Well, it’s delicious! I don’t know how you do it!’), ‘in front of everybody?’

‘… In between …’

‘Don’t, Daddy. You scare me when you talk like that.’

‘Come on, sweetheart! This is your big chance!’

‘The truth’s …’

‘The break you been waiting for!’

‘Just leftovers, I’m afraid.’

‘… Always scary, girl …’

‘Well, if it’s art, I guess it’s all right.’

‘And in any case it’s about all I’ve got left …’

‘Atta girl!’

‘… To give you,’ Vic was mumbling (‘So get in there and tear it down, baby!’). He seemed to be fading again. ‘And what’s inside these fan-tas-tic eggs?’ ‘I’ll give you the recipe,’ my wife said, and Quagg shouted out: ‘Okay, all you lot, into the parlor! It’s time for the apotheosis of Ros!’

‘Tell Mom … I’m sorry, and …’

‘Oh oh,’ somebody cried out (‘I already called her, Dad, and she said she didn’t know who I was talking about …’), ‘here comes that lady guerrilla again!’ I felt someone’s hands in my armpits. ‘You’d better get out of her way, Gerry,’ Jim was saying somewhere behind my ear (‘And do me a favor, baby …’) as I rose, lifted, from the floor: ‘Could you — ngh! — give us a hand, please?’ It was Eileen: she was wearing a trenchcoat with the collar turned up, her hands stuffed in the pockets, a scarf around her head.

‘He’s weak … and frivolous … confused …’

‘Don’t worry, Daddy, I won’t …’

‘Well, we meet again,’ said Mr Waddilow. He was one of those holding me up. The other one (‘… Anyway he’s too old …’) was the older plumber, Goldy; Jim, letting go, was getting dragged away by Quagg’s set-builder Scarborough, who was explaining: ‘We’re using her as part of the scenery, you dig, and we need you to get her ready …’

‘I don’t know …’

‘And hang on to the — kaff! huff! hoo … ! — present, baby! It’s all you’ve—’

‘Oh, Daddy, stop it! You’re spitting blood all over!’

‘No, listen—!’

Eileen stepped up and kicked the glass out of his hands. ‘What are you carrying that fork around for, greedyguts? Nobody’s going to insist on good manners when you’re eating cold mud.’ Vic, grinning, wheezed appreciatively, his hand searching for the lost glass. I realized (‘I’ve never seen Eileen like this before!’) my whole right side had turned to stone. ‘You liked that? Try this one!’ She kicked him in the mouth: his head bounced off the wall, teeth flew.

‘Jesus, that hurt!’ Vic whimpered, laughing.

‘Don’t talk to her, Daddy.’

‘Way to go, sister!’ Goldy grinned, spitting thickly into a plastic cup he was holding in his free hand, and Charley, pushing out his thick soft mitt past my petrified elbow (‘When Jim told her Vic had a bullet in his heart, you know what she said? She said, “Then why don’t you just reach inside his asshole and pull it out!” ’), said: ‘Don’ believe I’ve hadda pleasure. Trainer here, Mushual Life.’

‘This is Mr Waddilow, Charley,’ I gasped, trying to stand alone. ‘New neighbors …’

‘The next one in the goolies, tough guy!’

‘Oh ha ha! Spare me!’ Vic groaned.

‘Neighbors, hunh?’

‘I left your bill on the dishwasher, mister,’ the plumber said around his chaw, squinting up at me. ‘Easy, Eileen, he’s dying,’ Daffie cautioned, touching her forearm. Eileen shook her off. ‘So? Who isn’t? Some just have more fun at it than others, that’s all.’ ‘Thank you,’ I said, gripping the sideboard. ‘You’re welcome to stay … have a drink or something …’ ‘No, thanks.’ He spat another oyster. ‘I got no time for this shit.’

‘In fact he looks good drooling blood like that — it’s like the mask’s finally off the bastard.’

‘Steve’s a young kid, it’s all new to him, he can hang around if he wants to. Me, I seen it all. I got a job to do, that’s it.’ He turned to go. ‘Can I give you a ride somewhere, sister?’

‘No, thanks. I’ll walk.’

‘Hey,’ Kitty asked, ‘where is everybody?’

‘Don’t be stupid, girlie, it’s dangerous out there.’

I looked around. Kitty was right (‘Anatole has written a play,’ Howard was explaining to her — he’d cleaned up some, wore Tania’s glasses on a chain around his neck now, his red tie and the bra, but no shirt, and my white boating cap, ‘you just missed the casting …’): the dining room had emptied out, there were only the few of us clustered around the drinks now like refugees, Mrs Waddilow alone over at the table, Mavis grinning up at us from the floor, Cynthia and Woody in the next room watching television.

‘And relax, sister, I’m off fucking for life. I mean it, I’m into beer, old movies, and model trains. When I’m not unplugging rich guys’ toilets.’ His partner Steve came in with Scarborough and Horner and they commenced to move the dining table out from under Mrs Waddilow. ‘’Scuse us, ma’am.’ ‘So whuzz your poison, Waterloo?’ Charley asked, slumping heavily against the sideboard. ‘You like model trains?’

‘Just a bit of tonic, thank you. Not a drinking man myself.’

‘I don’t know,’ Eileen said, staring down at Goldy, hands stuffed in her pockets, her face swollen and blue with bruises. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Gerry?’ It was Sally Ann, her voice anxious. ‘I think Dad’s getting worse!’

‘You oughta come and see my layout, I got everything, uses up half my basement, whole fucking county in miniature.’

So he was: his head, eyes rolled back, had fallen to one side, blood dribbled down his chin still (‘Just like real life. Only without the horseshit …’), his breath was coming in hoarse erratic gasps. There was a tooth lying loose on his chin like a beached castaway. ‘Vic?’ His lips were moving (‘You’re as bad as this guy,’ Eileen was saying, ‘just another closet idealist!’ and Goldy said: ‘Hey, you like horseshit? I’ll put in horseshit!’), but only the odd word or two were getting out: ‘… nihilistic bastard … what? … and hope, shit … what I hate — kaff! foo! … so goddamn wet—’ ‘I’ll go get Jim,’ I said.

‘Hurry …!’

It wasn’t easy to hurry. I seemed to be carrying a hundred pounds of dead weight on my right side, and my knees were like jelly. I heaved myself to the doorway and leaned dizzily against it, staring into Scarborough’s transformation of our living room. Nothing was in its place, except perhaps my wife, who was vacuuming the rug. It was like some kind of spectacular fusing of the familiar, the whole room tented in sheets, towels, bloody drapes and curtains, all meant to suggest some sort of cave, I supposed (‘I won’t be a moment, Zack,’ my wife shouted from inside it as Quagg flung his cape about in mimed protest, ‘I just want to get up this plaster dust before it gets tracked into the carpet!’), lit from behind — or rather from atop: Scarborough had drilled holes through the ceiling and mounted table and floor lamps up there above the sheeting. At the cavemouth, Teresa stood naked and frightened (‘I feel so stupid,’ she was complaining, trying to cover, not her breasts — which Gudrun was rouging — or her genitals, but the whitened rolls of fat on her tummy), while nearby Jim leaned over Ros’s cadaver, laid out amid pilaf, cheese balls, and sliced salami on our dining room table, a butcher knife in his hand. He seemed shorter than usual. ‘No, no, I want the video camera inside the cave, looking out at the audience!’ Quagg shouted over the sweeper’s roar, and Scarborough cried: ‘Goddamn it, Fats, get outa here! You’re knockin’ everything over!’ ‘I’m just trying to help, Scar!’ ‘Well, go help Gudrun!’ Oddly, this was all reminiscent of something I’d seen before, as though — I was thinking about Inspector Pardew’s whimsical speculations about ‘the geography of time’ — I’d somehow got switched onto some kind of reverse loop (had I just heard Goldy say something about this to Eileen? Now certainly she said: ‘Sounds like the story of my life,’ but perhaps he’d been describing his shunting operations), such that though the space had changed and the approach was from an opposite angle, this was a point on time’s map I’d passed through before. I squeezed my eyes shut, shook my head.

‘They said the dining room table was too high and wanted to saw the legs down,’ my wife said suddenly beside me, ‘but I talked them out of it.’

‘What—?!’ I lurched back, banging my head on the doorframe.

‘I didn’t mean to startle you, Gerald. It’s all right.’ What was happening? It was as though we’d jumped over something! One moment she’d been vacuuming the carpet and Quagg, prancing about in his white unitard, had been shouting over the noise, the next she was in front of me discussing the dining room table, Louise was carting the sweeper off, Fats was on his knees, smearing Teresa’s legs with clown white, and Quagg, wrapped up like a sleeping bat in his purple cape, was quietly explaining to Alison’s husband (‘In theater, dialogue is action, man!’) what the play was all about. What had happened to that moment in between? ‘I made up something off the top of my head about the proper height of altars, and luckily they accepted it.’ Behind her there was a reek of pot and incense. ‘No, no, no, Fats!’ Gudrun was exclaiming. ‘I said not in her bush — now go away, I’ll do it!’ ‘In fact, I overdid it, I’m afraid, and then the table turned out to be too low, so they had to raise it up on some of your records.’

‘Ah. Good.’ I really didn’t know what I was saying. Regina came sweeping in, drew up short when she spied Teresa, cried out: ‘How come she got the part?!’ and went storming out again in a stylized pique I was sure I’d seen before. I was totally confused. I didn’t know whether the night was running forward or backward. I was afraid the doorbell would ring and it would be Ros at the door. Backing out, her cloak wrapping her, her welcoming hug dissolving into a wishful fancy — and then the doorbell did ring! ‘Oh no!’ I cried.

‘Not more people!’ my wife groaned, and took my arm. But it was: little Bunky Baird, the actress who’d played ‘Honeyed Glances’ in The Lover’s Lexicon, one of Lot’s daughters, and Jesus’s nymphomaniac sister in The Beatitudes, escorted by some older guy in his fifties and a young gigolo who might have been partnering either or both. Quagg had just been explaining to Alison’s husband that, ‘So what we’re going for here is the transmutation of stuff from deep down in the inner life, see, into something out front that we can watch, something made outa language and movement, you dig, to show forth the —’ when Bunky let out a terrible shriek from the doorway: ‘Stop him! he’s going to kill her!’

Teresa squealed as though Gudrun, now rouging her bottom, might have jabbed her with something, Olga yelped and dropped her drink, Jim looked up: ‘Don’t be silly,’ he sighed (‘We need a butterfly on that float at the mouth,’ shouted Scarborough), shaking his loose shock of gray hair, ‘I’m only trying to chip this damned plaster off.’

‘It’s all right, Bunky,’ Quagg explained, his arm around her. ‘She’s already dead. It’s Ros.’ ‘Okay, hit it — that’s it, now make it hot!’ ‘She had a big heart, I wanta use it in this production.’

‘It’s getting so confusing,’ my wife murmured, her hand on my leaden elbow (‘Yeah, I heard a rumor you had something going on the boards, Zack — looks fab!’ Bunky was saying, calming down as deftly as she’d aroused herself, and Vachel, flipping irritably through Anatole’s script, complained: ‘Wah, don’t I getta do any fucking?’), ‘I don’t even know a lot of these people.’

‘That’s good, kill it!’

‘Hey, what took you guys so long?’ Quagg asked, as Steve the plumber and Horner came in, lugging the ping-pong table.

‘Catchin’ the reruns in the pit, Zack.’

‘Isn’t that your athletic supporter Vachel is wearing on his head?’

‘Looks like it.’ Also my golf shoes and Bermuda shorts, my ski goggles on his bulbous rump, and Mark’s blue SUPERLOVER sweatshirt.

‘This where you want it?’

‘Yeah.’ They set the table down, still collapsed, at the entrance to the cave: apparently it was meant to serve as a kind of stage. ‘See what you think, Hillie,’ Quagg said, then, shifting his penis from the left to the right side of his unitard crotch, turned to Bunky: ‘What’re you doing these days, kid?’

‘I’m, uh, between shows, Zack.’

‘I–I don’t know what to say,’ I said, and my wife said (‘C’mon,’ Quagg smiled, ‘we’ll spot you in’): ‘I’ll go put the coffee on.’

‘Thanks, Zack,’ said Bunky softly, touching him under the cape. She already had her coat off, her two men bumping past me into the dining room with it, on their way to the sideboard. Back there, I could still hear Vic babbling on helplessly: ‘Turned to salt … what—? … exactly the problem … ice all gone … who — whoof! harff! — wanted that …? No, goddamn it!’ Yes, I thought, feeling a little better, coffee would help.

‘Now lemme see that script, kid.’

I moved out of the traffic toward Jim (he seemed suddenly very weary, his hair in his eyes and square jaw adroop, as he dug away at the plaster on Ros’s breast), Hilario rapping out a vigorous staccato on the ping-pong table as I passed that sounded like machine-gun fire. Behind his fierce rat-a-tat-tat, I could hear Anatole explaining excitedly that his play was really a kind of metaphysical fairy tale, a poetic meditation on the death of beauty and on the beast of violence lurking in all love, Vachel grousing in his squeaky voice: ‘Yeah, but at least I oughta get to squeeze some goddamn tit, hunh, Zack?’ ‘Christ, so much — gasp! — waste … over and over …’ You could hear him all the way in here, growling and spluttering. ‘Got a side for me, honey?’ Bunky asked. ‘Am I right …? story — kaff! snort! — what? kills!’ ‘Vic’s in bad shape, Jim,’ I said. It was a relief to be around a familiar face. ‘I think he needs you.’

Jim sighed, staring down at Ros. ‘Some damn party I’m having,’ he said. One of Ros’s bagged-up hands was in the pilaf. There was a loose scatter of paper napkins, turkey bones (‘Damn it, you gotta dumb it down, kid,’ Quagg was remonstrating, Alison’s husband hovering over his shoulder, trying to read the script, ‘you’re outa school now, so cut the fancy shit — this is theater!’), Alison’s silk sash, chorizo chunks, somebody’s vibrator, used silverware. Like Time’s dropped breadcrumbs, I thought: no, we were not going around in circles, Ros wasn’t anyway. And the sash: it was greasier than ever. There are no reverse loops, it seemed to say. The borders are absolute. Things end. Replay, instant or delayed (the TV cameraman had just moved off Jim’s hands to focus on Teresa, clown white from head to toe, except for her bright red breasts and bottom, now being urged up onto the ping-pong table to dance with Hilario, Scarborough meanwhile nailing my skis to the front corners of the table, apparently creating some kind of proscenium arch, the raps of his hammer syncopating contrapuntally with Hilario’s chattering tapdance and Zack Quagg’s barking lecture to a deflated Anatole: ‘You might as well learn right now, son: keep it simple! The mystery just gets chewed up in all this razzamatazz. If you got something to say, come straight out with it!’), was a manipulation not of time but of matter. Benedetto came in, pulling on Roger’s bloodsoaked business suit (this was new): ‘It’s still sopping!’ he complained (he hadn’t said this before), trying to stretch it around his operatic belly. ‘Gudrun, old sock, could you let this out a bit?’ ‘How’s the shoulder, Gerry?’

‘Stiff …’

‘Just remember, kid, the most mysterious sentence in the world has only three letters in it. Everything else is nothing but a fucking footnote to it, variations on a — hey, why so glum?’

‘There’s only about an inch or so back here,’ Gudrun said, examining the seam in the seat of Roger’s pants, Benedetto peering down at her over his shoulder. ‘Why don’t we just make you a codpiece?’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Quagg. It’s my fault. I guess I really don’t know much about this—’

‘Whaddaya mean, you’re doing great!’

‘I am?’

‘Hey, Scar, look what I found!’ exclaimed Horner, coming in with Mark’s pedalcar. Scarborough was up on a stepladder, his mouth full of pins, hanging our drapes over the ski uprights like theater curtains, so folding them as to make the splotches of blood resemble large crude hearts. ‘Terriff,’ he called down lugubriously, taking a tuck, ‘see if he’ll fit,’ and Vachel squeaked: ‘No, man, I’m not getting in that thing!’ Gudrun was meanwhile measuring Beni for his codpiece and it reminded me, as I settled back against the table, accepting it all now, Ros, Roger, Tania, the police, the wounds and bruises, everything, or almost everything (‘Sure, kid! You got bucketsa talent!’ Quagg was booming), of the time Ros, holding the head of my exhausted member up in the air, said: ‘I don’t care how big it is, Gerry. I don’t even care how hard it is. I just care how here it is …’ Yes, I thought — I was watching Teresa’s crimson cheeks bob like ripe apples as Hilario, looking pained, clapped her along — this is the one sweet thing we have: the eternal present. Our only freedom. It seemed to flatten out beneath me, all resistance crumbling at last.

‘Gerry …?’

‘I mean, I love the fairy tale bit, kid, that old granny in the ice castle, little orphan Ros at the door — like, we’ll put her in a basket maybe, shaking a rattle or sucking a dildo or something — flash all that in the hello frame to key some motifs, ring a few bells, then punch in this torture number to set up the death dance and Last Supper routine: shit, man, it’s a fucking classic!’

‘It is?’

‘No, no, no, Teresita! You are the, how you say? the goddess off loave, no?’

‘And this line about bats in daylight — I mean, wow!’

Clock time might take things — Ros, for example — further and further away, or seem to, but human time (‘So awright, kid, get on with it!’) — what had the Inspector said?

‘Now, anybody here get off on a git-box?’

‘Gerry, you’re, uh …’

‘You muss leeft! and leeft! So!’

Pulsations, yes. Perhaps. (He said.) But flow, no.

‘Whew, I don’t believe this!’

‘How ’bout me, Zack? Gimme a kit, I’m magic, man!’

‘Vic’s daughter plays, I think.’

‘Gerry …? Hey …!’

‘What?’ I realized Jim had been trying to get my attention for some time. I leaned back toward him (‘She’s in the dining room, Zack. Her old man’s got a problem …’), cradling my numb arm in my live one and recalling that game Ros and I used to play with our toes and noses — toeses and noses, we called it — and the delicious pucker of concentration on her lips, the tip of her tongue slithering out between them like an animal’s erection …

‘Okay, sign her on. Now — hey, sweetheart, whaddaya doing—?!’

‘… Sitting on her hand,’ Jim said.

‘Oh—!’ I lurched away from the table, and her arm swung loose. ‘No … !’ I’d almost forgotten she was there. Jim put her hand back. The fingers knuckled, looked more like a bag of marbles inside their plastic wrap.

‘This is not a singalong, baby! We’re not watching the bouncing ball! This is a dance of death! Doesn’t that mean anything to you?’

‘It’s just … I–I’ve never done anything like this before,’ Teresa whimpered, her hands trembling, white on white, on her tummy.

‘That story about Roger and Ros and the old lady, you know, is a complete fabrication,’ Jim added. ‘And Zack knows it.’

I nodded, feeling too weak to stand alone, yet too appalled to lean back against the table again (I still felt her brittle fingers, knuckled into my rump like some kind of summons), or even to look at it, keeping my eyes fixed instead on stubby Teresa, now trying, coached by Hilario and Quagg, to ‘fly like a beard’ (as Hilario said) — ‘No, no, guapa! like a doave, not a tour-key!’

‘Is this what you’d call a metaphor?’ asked Alison’s husband from under his floppy hat. Olga, it seemed to me, had her hand in his pocket.

‘Ros came to see me that day. Somebody had apparently given her a hallucinogen of some kind without her knowing what it was, and she was frightened. Not by the visions, but by the feeling it gave her, she said, of being alone.’

‘Mate a — vot?’

‘Curious …’

‘Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Let’s get serious! This is death we’re talking about, baby, death! — you know, the last fucking call, the deep end, so long forever: now, come on, what does it make you think of?’

‘Why don’t you stick a feather up her butt, Zack, and let her try it on all fours?’

‘Ros hated to be alone. She even wanted someone in the bathroom with her when she was brushing her teeth or …’

‘I know …’

‘I–I once imitated a person flushing herself down a toilet,’ Teresa offered timidly. ‘Of course it was a long time ago …’

‘His blind daughter?’ Bunky asked, studying Anatole’s script. Lloyd Draper had entered the room in his hat and coat, photo albums under his arm, Iris beside him. ‘Yeh heh heh!’ he exclaimed, discovering me, and they came strolling over.

‘At … at church camp …’

‘Beautiful!’ enthused Benedetto, admiring the silky patch Gudrun was holding up to his gaping fly. ‘Whose were those?’

‘Awright,’ Zack barked, losing patience (‘Take your pants off,’ Gudrun said around the needle in her mouth, ‘and I’ll sew it on …’), ‘let’s see it!’

‘Everything was just delicious!’ Iris exclaimed, and Lloyd agreed: ‘Yes indeedy! I’ll second that!’ He grabbed my right arm and gave it a painful shake. Someone behind me was tuning up a guitar. ‘God, she’s terrible!’ Zack groaned, hand clapped to his eyes, peeking out between his fingers at Teresa trying to flush herself. ‘We sure been travelin’ first class tonight, haven’t we, Mother?’

‘I didn’t even know he had a daughter!’

‘Yeah,’ laughed Horner. ‘It’s wonderful!’

‘Thank you so much for asking us!’ She was wearing the peckersweater, I saw, pinned to her dress like a corsage or a political button. ‘We looked for your wife …’

‘How is she, Sally Ann?’ Jim asked behind me.

‘She’s probably in the kitchen …’

‘Well, please tell her …’

‘Still about the same.’ She plunked at a guitar, picking out a chord. ‘He doesn’t seem to be bleeding as bad, but his mind’s getting worse.’

‘Can I stop flushing now?’

‘Say, Mother, doesn’t that remind you of those dancers we saw in the East — you remember …’

‘No, guapa, ees byootifool!’

‘Poor Dad. I don’t think he’s got much longer.’

‘Oh yes. The red paint, you mean. It was quite lovely, as I recall, dear, and very skillful — but I didn’t like the heads on the stakes after.’

‘Now theenk like you are toilet all stop opp!’

‘What—?’

‘And flow! Effrywhere! Ffflo-oo-ow!’

Lloyd and Iris Draper, saying their goodbyes along the way, had stopped to talk with Alison’s husband. He pivoted toward them, causing Olga to stumble and fall to her knees. ‘Well, I love my father very much,’ Sally Ann was saying (someone had just asked her why she’d left him alone in his condition, in fact I had), ‘but, after all, Gerry, I do have my own career to think about.’ ‘Don’t worry, I’ll check on him,’ Jim assured her, as Alison’s husband shrugged and glanced over at me. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, or probably said. Olga and the Drapers, following his glance, also peered back over their shoulders.

I turned away, just as Eileen came strolling in in her khaki raincoat, collar up, hands in pockets, staring right at — or through — me. ‘You look ridiculous!’ she said. ‘I know,’ I slumped a bit, and there was an echo just behind me: she’d been speaking, I realized, not to me but to Teresa. ‘Can — can you please find Wilma?’ Teresa whimpered, and Eileen (‘This bearded fruitcake’s driving me nuts, Priss!’ Zack was hissing) said: ‘She and Talbot’ve already gone, Teresa. And we’re going, too.’ She bumped past me, pulling off her raincoat. ‘Put this on.’

‘Why don’t you and Olga take the sonuvabitch up and get him laid?’

‘Who, this boiled hat, Zack?’

‘I don’t know if I can—’

‘Sure you can, Teresa. All it takes is two feet. Come on, I’m fed up with all this cheap sensationalism. Let’s get the hell out of here.’

‘Yeah, he’s loaded, Priss, I’m cultivating him — hey, hold up there! That’s our star! Leave her alone, goddamn it!’

‘You see?’ Teresa shrank into the raincoat that Eileen wrapped around her, as Horner, Scarborough, and Quagg started crowding menacingly around. Goldy, at my elbow, spat into a cup and said: ‘You know, if I was them guys, I wouldn’t fuck with that broad …’

‘That’s far enough, you cold-ass bitch!’ Horner snarled, blocking their exit. Eileen coolly snapped her knee up and Horner crumpled, howling pathetically, the others backing off a step. ‘Like I said,’ laughed Goldy, and — poytt! — shot another gob into the cup.

‘All right,’ said Eileen impassively, ‘who’s next?’

In reply, there was a sudden gasp from the onlookers crowded up near the hallway door, and they all fell back: standing there was a weird naked figure wrapped like a mummy in plastic cleaning bags, with a condom pulled over his head. It was Malcolm Mee. He looked like something from outer space — or inner space, rather: a kind of aborted fetus. He took two bounding steps into the room (Prissy Loo screamed, Fats fell over a coffee table, pulling down part of the cave wall), paused, crouching; in his raised hand: the ice pick! ‘Oh no …!’

‘Hey, man, we’re not ready for this!’ Scarborough protested, and Mee mutely flashed the pick at him as though to strike. He was breathing heavily, erratically, through a tiny puncture in the condom, the rubber snapping in and popping out with each breath. I wasn’t sure, but he seemed to be smiling. The TV cameraman was squatting, shooting up at the flapping rubber under his nostrils. Beni said: ‘What is this?! I haven’t even got my codpiece yet!’ — but he went quickly silent when Mee turned on him, swishing the pick through the air, making it whistle.

‘Christ, I think he’s serious …!’

‘Malcolm—?’

‘You’ve got to stop him, Zack!’ a woman cried out.

‘Shut up!’ Quagg snapped, drawing his purple cape across his body like a shield, and Prissy Loo seemed to faint. Or maybe she just tripped over her heavy galoshes. Horner, clutching his scrotum and grunting painfully, dragged himself off across the carpet, out of the way, watching Mee warily. ‘Shit fire …!’

‘Is this some sort of protest—?’

Mee leaped lithely out of the shadows onto the spotlit stage and posed there rigidly, pick upraised. Everyone crept back except Teresa and Eileen, who were seemingly unable to move. ‘Please …!’ Teresa whimpered, the raincoat falling away from her painted breasts, bright now in the overhead lights. Eileen, clutching the coat to Teresa’s shoulders, watched Mee intently; Quagg knelt; Fats stared goggle-eyed, wrapped in collapsed cave wall.

‘Come on, Mee,’ I said, finding my voice, or some of it anyway. ‘Enough’s enough, damn it!’

He appeared not to hear me, took a lurching step toward Teresa as though losing control, seemingly transfixed (his dilated eyes were clearly visible through the stretched rubber sheath, the flesh around them mashed back like shiny scar tissue) by her heaving red spots, the pick quivering in his poised fist.

Beni, in Roger’s ill-fitting jacket and his own theatrical longjohns, threw his arms open and stepped forward: ‘Malcolm, my old friend!’

‘Don’t, Beni! He knows what he’s doing!’ shouted Quagg.

‘But she’s not one of us,’ Beni argued, ‘she wouldn’t understand!’ Mee’s free hand shot forward and grabbed one of Teresa’s crimson breasts — she squeaked in terror, slumping backward into Eileen’s arms as he drew the breast toward him. Beni tore off his false moustache. ‘Malcolm, my friend, it’s your old comrade Benedetto, remember?’

‘Isn’t this getting a bit dangerous?’ Alison’s husband murmured, his face pale now under the drooping brim of Beni’s hat, his lips pulled back in a frightened grimace. If Beni distracts him, I thought, maybe I can somehow disarm him. Malcolm was stronger than I was, though, I’d need help. I glanced around for the police: amazingly, they were watching me, not Mee!

‘This is theater, man!’ Quagg was saying, his voice a fierce whisper. ‘Theater is hard. It’s real. Did you think we were just fucking around?’

‘But I thought—’

‘Do me a favor, would you, dear friend,’ Beni insisted, interposing himself boldly between Mee and Teresa, ‘and loan me that —’ Mee struck. Beni gasped, disbelievingly, staggered back a step, clutching the handle of the pick that now seemed to grow out of his chest like a thick warty finger, pointing back at Mee. ‘Oh no … !’ he wheezed, and sat back in amazement — splat! — as though someone might have pulled a chair out from under him. Blood began to spread outward from the wound.

‘My god—!’

‘Now see what you’ve done!’ I cried. I didn’t know who I was shouting at — Mee maybe, Quagg, the police, or perhaps the whole damned crowd — but I was suddenly angry, a ferocious rage was boiling up in me: ‘You’ve gone too goddamned far!’ Someone seemed to be crying. I shoved Mee aside brusquely, knelt at Beni’s side: he was bleeding badly now, and when he tried to mutter something about ‘a surprise ending,’ blood bubbled out the corner of his mouth and down his plump chin. ‘Jim—!’ I screamed — I couldn’t seem to stop screaming. ‘Someone get Jim! Hurry, for god’s sake!’ But no one moved: they seemed frozen with shock or fear. I leaped to my feet: ‘Jim! Come in here! Quickly!’ I yelled, then turned on the two cops: ‘Why didn’t you do something, goddamn it? What did you just stand there for?’ They looked utterly bewildered, as though they didn’t even understand the question. The room was silent except for the suppressed whimpering, Beni’s rasping groans, my own labored breathing. I swung on Mee and beat him on the chest with my good arm: ‘You vicious creep!’ He took my blows without response, as though stunned by his own action. ‘Never seem to make it …,’ Beni rasped hoarsely, ‘to the final curtain …!’ ‘You’re a maniac, Mee!’ I screamed, shoving him off the stage. ‘You ought to be locked up!’

‘It’s time … to put a silk on it, friends … lower the asbestos,’ Beni moaned. I turned to him. He was sprawled against one of my wife’s potted plants (had someone moved it there?), his eyes rolled back, blood dribbling profusely from his mouth and stabwound. ‘They’re … yanking the show on … old Benedetto, boys … it’s the last stanza …!’ Oh no … I leaned closer, a new fury intruding on the old: ‘Beni …?’ He rolled his eyes back down, focusing on me, winked, pushed a half-chewed blood capsule between his teeth like a peashooter. ‘Damn you!’ I snatched the pick out of his hands: a stage weapon with a contracting point! The sniggering (I hadn’t been hearing whimpering at all) changed to laughter and a loud burst of applause. I looked up and found myself staring into the lens of the video camera. Mee was peeling off his facemask, smirking toothily. Even Eileen had a grin on her face as she wrapped Teresa up again, and Fats asked: ‘How’d I do, Zack?’ ‘You were fantastic!’ Quagg laughed. ‘Ah, screw you guys!’ I said, hurling the pick across the room, and pushed out, drawing another burst of cheers and applause.

In the dining room doorway, Kitty and that white-haired neighbor lady in the lime pants and pink-and-lemon shirt were laughing at a photo: ‘Look at that cute little thing!’ ‘Is that Gerry?’ I snatched it away from them and ripped it in half: I was tired of this abuse. They stared at me in some astonishment. On looking closer, I saw it was not one of the photographs I’d made with Ros, as I’d supposed, but a picture of Mark being held in my arms. Behind me, Quagg was saying: ‘Okay, now for the second number, whaddaya say we exhume that old gag from Ros’s widow play, the one where she mistakes a pick for a prick and reaches in a guy’s pants—’

‘Isn’t that a bit slapstick for the occasion, Zack?’

‘Excuse me,’ I mumbled, and shouldered on past the two women, feeling like some kind of maimed and brutish fool.

‘We’ll play it straight — you know, reenactment of a sacred legend, take it apart and slow it down, like we did in Bluebeard’s Secret …’

‘Anyway, I thought it was a pecker for a pucker …’

I pulled up short just inside the dining room. Entering, I’d brushed silk. She was standing in the shadows by the doorway. Perhaps she’d been waiting for me. I took no hope from this: I’d betrayed her, after all, in her eyes anyway — and in my own as well (hadn’t I said at the theater that night we met that the last word was, artistically, the inevitable consequence of the first, that truth was an aesthetic principle, beauty moral?), it was a goddamn mess. I couldn’t even look at her. Over by the sideboard, Vic groaned. There were several people around him, but they were talking only to each other — even Jim had turned away to fix himself a drink. Above him, Tania’s ‘Susanna’ stepped out into oblivion. ‘She’s making one mistake,’ Vic once said of her. ‘She’s looking backward, back at the establishment, the elders. She’s turned the pool, the stream of life, into a bottomless pit. What she ought to do is step back, turn around, and kick the shit out of them once and for all. Then she can take her fucking bath in peace.’ But what if the real cause of her terror, I thought, trembling, is that there’s no one back there? That it’s only she who’s watching herself, or rather — what? She was crying! I turned at last and, tears springing to my own eyes, took her in my arms — or arm: my right one was still pretty useless. ‘I–I’m sorry!’ I blurted out. I felt certain, somehow, she’d forgive me.

‘Me too!’ she sobbed. ‘Poor Vic!’ Vic? It was Brenda: I let go her podgy body, naked and lumpy under the silk. ‘Such a super guy, Gerry!’

‘Where’d you get that dress?’

‘Fats found it somewhere. Is it your wife’s? I couldn’t get back into that damned pants suit.’

‘Gerald would never let me buy a dress like that,’ my wife said, passing by with a sponge cake. ‘He doesn’t like silk.’

‘Enough? What’s ever enough?’ Vic moaned. I could tell him. In the living room, someone was singing about ‘the old man,’ Sally Ann maybe, and I could hear Kitty and Mrs Waddilow oohing and ahing over the sponge cake. ‘There are strawberries to go with it,’ my wife said, and Vic broke into a new fit of coughing. ‘You think it’s all some kinda — wheeze! choke! — joke?’

‘He’s such a brave guy,’ snuffled Brenda, blowing her nose in the hem of the dress. I felt utterly wasted. Emptied out. Like Brenda’s nose. Steve the plumber and the character with the pipe and the leather elbow patches came in behind her, talking about Mee’s act (‘You know, he looked a bit like that dead girl, all bagged up like that!’ ‘Well, that was probably his intention …’), laughing when they saw me, and I felt the humiliation of it all over again. Where had all the beauty gone? ‘You probably ate it,’ Vic might have said. That ‘aesthetics of truth’ line I’d used at the theater was his too actually, I’d borrowed it for the occasion. She hadn’t quarreled with it (‘It felt like a lifetime,’ Sally Ann, or whoever, was singing, ‘our little husband-and-wife time …’), but she’d had a reply of course. To wit: that from another perspective (mine had been of her soft lips pursed above a cup of steaming coffee that matched her eyes and velvet suit, and to tell the truth, thoughts of ethics didn’t even enter into it) it was the first word that was the consequence of the last. ‘And he’s still got presence,’ Brenda added, taking a chewed wad of gum from behind her ear and stuffing it in her jaws. She wiped her eyes on a slashed sleeve and took my arm. ‘I know he’s not making a lot of — crack! pop! — sense, but he makes you feel like he is.’

‘God damn you,’ he shouted now as we drew near (there was applause in the living room), and Mr Waddilow, hooking his thumbs in his vest, said: ‘Isn’t that a bit sacrilegious?’ Mavis was sitting up now, propped against a chair, though her eyes were still glazed over and her jaw sagged loosely. Her husband, Jim, some distance away, held his drink up to the light, just under Tania’s ‘Susanna,’ taking her fateful step, and it was almost as though she were stepping into his glass. Steve, smiling, said something to Bunky’s two friends, who stared back dully, and Charley, who’d seemed locked in some kind of elbowbender’s freeze (he often went rigid before falling over at the end of a night), suddenly reared up and seized Mr Waddilow’s lapels. ‘Damned right!’ he bellowed. Mr Waddilow rocked back on his heels in alarm.

‘By the way, Gerry, who’s that cute guy in the tweed jacket?’

‘His name’s Gottfried, that’s all I—’

‘Oh, is that the famous Gottfried …’

‘Where are the lights? Turn on the … goddamn lights!’ Vic begged.

‘Hey, Big Ger!’ Charley boomed out, wheeling around heavily. ‘Where ya been?’ Jim lowered his glass as though pulling the ground out from under Susanna, though of course she didn’t fall. No, that abyss awaited her forever. It wouldn’t even be there without her. This thought somehow picked me up a bit, like something I’d forgotten but finally remembered. ‘It’s been awful here since you been gone!’

Howard in his bra, red tie, half-lens reading glasses, and sailing cap sniffed petulantly as Steve, shrugging, reached in past Bunky’s friends for the gin bottle. I remembered the older guy now: he was the angel who had put up the money for that mock sci-fi film Ros and Bunky had starred in, The Invasion of the Panty Snarfers. The younger one, the gigolo type, had directed it. A terrible film. Or so it had seemed at the time. Now I wished for nothing more than to be able to go sit down somewhere and watch it. Or maybe I only wanted to (I seemed to hear someone telling me to do this: sit down) sit down.

‘We miss ya, ole buddy! Nothin’ happens when ya go away! Eh, Waterloo?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Steve asked, his hand hesitating over the gin bottle, and Gottfried, putting pipe to mouth, said: ‘No, she was with some older gentleman, I believe — the one with the goatee.’

I poured myself a brandy and stared up at the ‘Susanna,’ thinking: My father was right, we’re the products of calamity, metamorphosed by our very will to endure, meshed alive into the unraveling fabric of the universe — that’s where all creation happens. ‘Before I forget it, Howard,’ I said, gazing at Susanna’s small foot poised tenderly over the void, ‘I want to buy Tania’s “Bluebeard” painting.’

‘Cyril? You must be mistaken,’ Brenda was saying to Gottfried, smiling up at him, her jaws working strenuously, as Steve staggered back, shoved by the younger guy. The tall cop limped up with his toolbox, muttering something about a missing dynamometer, and Howard said: ‘I’m afraid you can’t really afford it, Gerald.’

‘What do you mean? It’s not even finished, Howard—’

‘There’s some forceps gone, too,’ Bob grumbled, and Brenda, looking puzzled (Steve also looked puzzled: ‘Who you calling a shitface?’ he asked), said: ‘They’ve what …?’

‘All the more reason,’ replied Howard huffily (‘I think I saw those on the turkey dish,’ Jim said). ‘It’s priceless probably. You’re lucky to have the pieces you own now.’

‘Oh yes?’ Mr Waddilow asked, reaching in his breast pocket for a pair of spectacles. ‘Is this one of them?’

‘Oh no!’ Brenda cried. ‘Not Cyril and Peg!’ Steve, eyes asquint, reached for the gin bottle again, but the gigolo blocked his way. ‘Is that an advertisement, sweetheart?’ the older man asked with a sneer, pointing to the name stitched over Steve’s pocket. ‘I can’t believe it! Fats’?—I felt I understood now what Tania had meant when she said that truth (‘That’s not art, it’s a piece of trash,’ Bob was objecting, ‘she don’t even know how to draw!’), dispersed into the clashing incongruities of the world, returns as beauty: which, with memory, is all we have of substance. ‘You’re not listening!’ Vic yelled, and Brenda, running off (‘Hey, mister, you wanting trouble?’ Steve asked): ‘Fats? Oh my god, Fats—!’

‘Fuck your shadows! Man is — glurgle! splut! — something hard!’

What? Was Vic talking to me? Kitty came over from the doorway with Mrs Waddilow and said: ‘Hey, you guys in here are missing it all!’ ‘Oh yeah?’ yuffhuffed Charley confusedly, and Vic, breathing with great difficulty (‘How much you sell your ass for, working man?’ the gigolo taunted, blowing smoke), gasped out something about ‘the disappearing eye’ or ‘I.’ No, not to me or to anyone else: Vic had fallen through that hole in the world Tania spoke of, he was far away, in another place. I felt a sudden pang of loss, of disconnection from something valuable. Something like the truth. ‘Ah well, what the fuck, it’s all just a — farff! foo! — fiction anyway,’ he babbled now. I turned, sipping brandy, to watch Steve take a halfhearted swing which the gigolo parried. No (‘Yeah,’ Kitty was laughing, ‘they’ve got Vachel rigged out like a kind of walking joystick, smeared all over with petroleum jelly and blowing off about murder and paradox as time’s French ticklers — it’s a scream!’), not the truth so much, but commitment, engagement, the force of life itself: this is what Vic had meant to me. The idea of vocation. The young plumber, wary now, drew himself erect, flexing his strong shoulders. The older guy (‘Look at this interesting painting, dear,’ Mr Waddilow said) knocked his cap off. ‘Yes, it’s very nice. Did you see the icon in the front room?’ ‘We’ve got to have revolutions,’ Vic used to argue, banging his fists on the table, or bar, or lectern, wherever he was, ‘hope’d die if we didn’t!’ It was beautiful (Kitty, speaking of little Bunky Baird’s new makeup job, had just said more or less the same thing): ‘Watch out for art,’ he’d exclaim, ‘it’s a parlor trick for making the world disappear!’ Or: ‘You know what I hate, Gerry? The idea of original sin — in any disguise! Do it new! Don’t be afraid! Change yourself, goddamn it, and you inhabit a renovated world!’ I didn’t believe any of it, of course. But I loved the fervor.

‘No, Bunky’s playing “the Lady in Red,” and she’s really in great form! Regina tried to upstage her by swooping in wrapped in nothing but herself, but unfortunately her birthday suit’s about fifteen years outa fashion!’

‘Yeah, I just saw that on the box!’ laughed the man in the gray chalkstriped suit, joining us from the TV room, an empty glass in his hand. ‘The poor toad!’ Steve, lurching blindly to his feet — reaching down for his cap just a moment before, he’d taken a chop in the neck, a kick in the ribs, a drink thrown in his face — crashed into him. ‘Whoa!’ the man whooped as his glass went flying, and Kitty, ducking (Bob, watching her, reached for his revolver), said: ‘Are they showing it on TV?’

‘Yeah, the best bits anyway, along with — hey! talk of your show stoppers!’ he hooted, picking up his glass and pointing at me. ‘You really tumbled for that old chestnut!’

‘Whuzzat?’ Charley grinned, swiveling his big head back and forth between us: it was the only part of him that still worked, the rest seemed totally immobilized. Bob had relaxed again, was showing Howard some of his own drawings of the crime scene.

‘A stage sticker!’ the guy in the chalkstripes laughed. ‘The old collapsible pick trick — ha ha! he really cut a gut!’

Charley’s face sagged. ‘Whuzz funny ’bout that?’ he wanted to know. ‘ ’Assa fuckin’ trazhedy!’

‘Well, certainly they show skill, sensibility, a consciousness of form and architecture,’ Howard was expounding, peering down at arm’s length through Tania’s narrow spectacles at Bob’s drawings. ‘But they lack, what can I say, a certain density, mythic complexity, innovation …’

‘Argh …,’ groaned Vic as though, were he at all rational, in mockery, ‘say it … kaff! ain’t so!’

‘How about, uh, percipience?’ Bob asked hopefully. The kitchen door swung open and Woody and Cynthia came in, holding hands. ‘If by percipience you mean a discerning eye for detail, yes,’ acknowledged Howard, ‘but true intuitive apperception: not yet.’ Bob looked a bit downcast, but Gottfried, removing his pipe from his mouth (over his shoulder, the gigolo had Steve in a hammerlock, and the other guy was kicking him in the stomach), leaned intently toward Howard and said: ‘Ah! you’re interested in myth, then …?’

‘Gerry, thanks for the party,’ Woody smiled, as Bunky’s older friend took the monkey wrench out of Steve’s back pocket and shoved it in his mouth, ‘but we’ve got to be going.’

‘So soon?’

‘You’ve been very kind,’ Cynthia said, and gave my hand a squeeze, her own hand knobbled with rings. There was a soft flush in her cheeks and just above her cross-strapped bra, partly hidden by the vulgar fur she wore around her shoulders. ‘We both appreciate it.’

‘Hey, you’re not goin’, are ya, Woodpecker?’ Charley protested. Beside him, Howard was talking to Gottfried about orchestral renderings of symbol and prophecy, and the dark roots of creation, Vic wheezing and blowing agonizingly below. ‘Night’s still young, goddamn it! Like you’n me!’

‘I’m afraid so, Charley. I’ve got a big case tomorrow, and now all of Roger’s damned work besides. Sorry.’ Cynthia let my hand go.

‘An immersion into mystery, don’t you see, into pain …’

‘So what’s … next, Howard?’ Vic gasped. ‘The old — hah! harff! — “language of the fucking wound” —?’ He was getting testy again. His face was haggard, bleached out, his mouth gaped, blood stained his blue workshirt darkly and his pants were wet with urine. ‘The artist-as-visionary shuh — whooff! — shit?’ Howard’s eyes were watering up in anger. I too felt unaccountably annoyed (he was still clutching that silly fork) and turned away to watch Bunky’s friends haul Steve, kicking, still eating his monkey wrench, out of the room toward the front door. All that hard-won wisdom, that shrewd and stubborn intellect, turned to pudding in the end: a lesson I really didn’t need tonight. ‘You’re a fuh — fooff! shit! — fucking whore, Howard!’

‘Have you seen Noble, by the way?’ Woody asked, raising his voice to be heard. Bob, staring deadpan at me, winked. As did Earl Elstob, wandering in, when Charley asked him: ‘What? Back awready, Earl?’

‘Ah, I think he—’

‘Yup, well, huh! as one rabbit — shlup! — said t’other: This won’t take long, yuh huck! did it?’

‘Last I saw,’ said the guy in the chalkstripes, ‘your coz was in high gear — even his gold eye was lit up and blinkin’ like a turn signal!’

‘I see. Well, Noble deserves a little fun. If you see him, tell him I’ll call him in the morning.’

‘What I — huff! whoo! — hate,’ Vic rattled on fiercely, ‘is fucking contrivance! Triviality, obfus … obfuscation …’

‘Poor old Jack the Forker,’ said Scarborough morosely, coming in from the living room with Gudrun. ‘Still at it, is he?’ He held a bottle up to the light. ‘Tenor’s farewell,’ remarked Gudrun. She was smeared randomly with greasepaint, though her hands were principally scarlet: as she rubbed her nose (‘ … All that — wheeze! — “all-is-vanity” horseshit!’), she moustachioed herself. ‘Bah!’ Scarborough pitched the empty bottle over his shoulder impatiently. It hit the doorframe, clattered into the TV room.

‘There’s more underneath—’

‘I want … lucidity … Authen — gasp! — ’

‘Uh, huh! you seen sister?’

‘What do you suppose this one could do?’ Gudrun mused, looking Bob over.

‘Ole Glad’s relaxin’, Earl! Don’ worry, you juss zip up there’n ’n joy yourself.’

‘Well, he sure as hell can’t dance,’ muttered Scarborough, squatting.

‘Yuh, I thought I’d just leave it open so’s I don’t hafta — huh! — lose time!’

‘Could you repeat that?’ Gottfried asked, bending toward Vic. It was true, I saw it now: he did have a tape recorder.

‘What I want … in art … is a knowing …’

‘Everything’s … changed …,’ Mavis intoned gravely. She was on her feet now, leaning against the wall, legs spread wide, eyes staring zombielike into some remote distance. Bunky’s young friend, back and breathing heavily, took a swig from the brandy bottle, handed it to the older man. ‘I seem to remember … a statue …’

‘Say, yuh know what’s — yuh huh! — worse’n pecker tracks on your zipper?’

‘… A knowing moral center!’

‘… Of ice … with mirrors for eyes …’

‘Well, who doesn’t?’ snapped Howard, glancing contemptuously down at Vic (‘… And a little man where the heart should be …’), Gottfried sidling in between the two men with his mike. ‘But that’s simply too narrow a view of art. Every act of creation, no matter how frivolous it might seem, is, in its essence, an act of magic!’

‘Ah, that’s very good,’ said Gottfried, stopping up one ear against Mavis behind him. Gudrun clapped her scarlet hands, as Scarborough, rummaging around in the shelves below, came out with a bottle of Tennessee sourmash. ‘But by “magic” do you mean—?’

‘… Showing his behind …’

‘No, goddamn it, that’s … too narrow a view … of action!’ Vic cut in, snorting and spluttering. ‘It takes a long … a long — shit! can’t seem to …’ As he sucked in air, it made an awesome bubbly sound, rattling through him as though ripping everything apart in there. His eyelids fluttered open, but his eyes were rolled back, unseeing, half-screened by his unruly gray hair. ‘… A long time to find out … that the only magic in the world … is action!’

‘… With a wart on it …’ Mavis pushed herself away from the wall and stood there, her feet planted far apart, rocking unsteadily.

‘God, that poor devastated sonuvabitch has had it,’ murmured Bunky’s gigolo friend, taking the brandy bottle back. It was true. Vic looked feverish now, an unnatural flush in his craggy cheeks, his breath coming in abrupt little gasps. The gigolo, taking a deep swig and pushing the bottle away (‘Is there anything left to eat?’ Gudrun asked, accepting a tumbler of whiskey. ‘If I toss this down the void, it’ll take me with it!’), belched and said: ‘He’s gonna get put beddybye tonight with a fucking shovel, that one!’

‘Don’t count on it,’ laughed the older man, picking up the bottle again. Vic tongued his swollen lips — Howard was carrying on grandly about art as ‘man’s transcendence of the specious present, his romance with eternity, with timelessness’ (‘But then what about Malcolm’s tattooed prick?’ Kitty interrupted) — and his eyelids fluttered again. ‘Doesn’t exist!’ he bellowed. ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Gottfried. ‘Yes, it does,’ Kitty insisted. ‘I’ve seen it.’ ‘I think some strawberry shortcake passed me, going into the living room.’ ‘Eternity!’ ‘Doesn’t sound like the right thing to go with bourbon.’ ‘What’re they up to in there now?’ the man in the chalkstriped suit asked Scarborough. ‘Another … fucking illusion!’ Vic yelled. It was pathetic to watch him. ‘I once knew a guy,’ this was Bunky’s older friend, putting the bottle down after a long guzzle (‘And the present is …’) and carrying on, ‘got shot like that and took days to die.’

‘… Is not specious … goddamn it!’

‘Some kid’s grisly visit-to-the-underworld spasm,’ Scarborough replied (‘That guy’s death rattle alone lasted eight hours!’), ‘called “Rec Room Resurrection,” or some such shit,’ and Gudrun reminded him: ‘He’s still just a boy, such things are important to him right now. He’ll grow out of it.’

‘Did I … only imagine it?’ Mavis asked herself, rocking gently.

‘What you’re trying to say, as I understand it,’ Gottfried interposed, leaning toward Vic with his mike, ‘is that action is a sort of rude language, emanating from the reflex centers of the—’

‘I’M NOT FINISHED YET!’ roared Vic, startling us all. ‘Sorry,’ whispered Gottfried, having reared back into Howard, and Mavis, still mumbling hollowly to herself, added: ‘And am I … imagining it now …?’ Earl Elstob was wheeling about, doubled over, yuck-yucking noisily: someone told him to shut up. ‘Huh —?’ We waited. This was it. Or might be. Vic sucked in air, let it rattle out again. There was a trickle of blood at his lips: he licked at it. ‘What was I …?’ His eyelids fluttered open, his eyes rolled down out of their contemplation of the top of his skull, searching for me. ‘Is … is that you, Gerry …?’

I squatted in front of him and his eyes closed again. ‘Yes. Take it easy, old man. It’s all right …’

‘Don’t … shit me it’s all right, goddamn it … I know better. Listen … is one of those — oof! damn …! — one of those cops around?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘This is important, goddamn it!’ Mavis had lumbered slump-shouldered away, rocking heavily from one foot to the other, still half-dazed, but the rest of us were crowding around, watching Vic. He wheezed and snorted laboriously. ‘Ignore him, he’s a stupid and intolerant monomaniac,’ Howard declared petulantly, but in fact it was Howard who was being ignored. ‘Can he … hear me?’

‘Sure.’ I glanced up: Bob watched Vic without emotion, leaning against the sideboard.

‘All right. Tell him … tell him I did it … I killed them!’

‘What? Killed who, Vic?’

‘All of them, goddamn it!’ He struggled to sit up, but his coordination was gone, and the effort seemed to be tearing him apart. ‘Ros, Roger …’

‘Vic, listen, you don’t know what—’

‘Who else?’ he groaned. ‘Who else, goddamn it — I can’t think—!’

‘You mean Tania?’

‘Yeah, that’s right … Tania, stabbed her … too!’

‘She wasn’t stabbed, Vic.’

‘Strangled, I mean!’

‘She was drowned.’

‘Drowned, that’s what I … what I — choke! — said!’

‘Hey, listen, nice try, Vic, but—’

‘No! I held her under, I — just look at my hands …! They’re the hands … of a murderer, they — what —?!’ His chin shot up, one leg straightened, a shoulder twitched. ‘Where are they? My hands, Gerry! Where are my goddamn … hands—?!’

‘Here, Vic, easy …!’

‘You see?’ sniffed Howard.

‘Jesus,’ somebody muttered softly, ‘someone oughta put the poor bastard outa his misery!’

‘Oh shit,’ Vic was weeping, ‘I can’t … I can’t feel them … I can’t feel anything!’

I glanced up at Jim, who shook his head sadly. Howard looked disgusted. ‘You’d be doing him a favor,’ the police officer said.

‘What?’

‘It’s true, Gerry,’ said Jim quietly. Indeed, it was very quiet all around, broken only by Vic’s rasping breath, the ice tinkling brassily in someone’s glass, Earl’s chronic sucking noise. The cop took his revolver out of his holster, checked the chambers. ‘It’ll only get worse for him.’

‘A drink!’ he yelled, making us jump. ‘For chrissake, Gerry—!’

Jim handed me his own glass. I sniffed it. ‘Is it—?’ ‘He won’t know the difference.’

‘Where is everybody—?’

‘Right here, Vic.’ I held the glass to his lips. He sucked and slobbered, most of it ending up as a kind of bloody foam that dribbled down his chin and shirtfront like baby drool. ‘Easy now …’

‘More!’ he demanded, jerking his head about, batting the glass with his nose, thumping his head on the wall. Once, when I was very small (I was thinking of this now, watching Vic try to keep his head up, his eyes open), we found a dead tomcat in my grandmother’s backyard. A few nights later, she incorporated him into her bedtime story about the climb to heaven. The cat was not well-suited for this climb and I probably fell asleep very near the bottom, but I did hear the preamble and remembered it still. Interested in a lady cat next door, the tom had come out to serenade her and had got shot by an irate neighbor who didn’t want his sleep interrupted. At the entrance to the stairway, there was a kind of ticket-taker, like the ones outside carnival rides and circus tents, and the cat complained to him about the injustice of being shot for singing: ‘Is that what you get for bringing a little beauty into the world?’ he protested. ‘It’s not fair!’ ‘What do you mean, you were lucky!’ the ticket-taker replied. ‘There’s no big deal in a long life — what counts is the quality of the departure. Yours was beautiful! You died quickly, more or less painlessly, and at the moment of your greatest happiness!’ ‘No, you don’t understand,’ the cat objected, ‘the singing was only the preparations.’ ‘Exactly!’ smiled the ticket-taker. Indeed, now that I thought about it, I’d said something very much like this to someone earlier tonight, only …

‘Ah, listen!’ Vic barked.

‘What—?!’

‘I said, listen, damn it! I’m talking … about what’s happening … here tonight …’

‘Ah …’ My heart was pounding. Bob, I realized, was holding his gun out to me, butt first. Jim took the empty glass. ‘But … do you really think—?’

‘You know … what kind … what kind of a world … we live in …!’

‘You can see for yourself,’ said Jim. ‘The size of the wound, the blood lost, kidney and bowel dysfunction, numbness in the extremities—’

‘So why … are they letting you …?’

‘And that rattle means his lungs are filling up: he’s slowly choking to death, Gerry. Then, as he loses oxygen, the brain — well, just listen to him …’

‘… Letting you even … have parties like this?’

‘The poor guy,’ said Gudrun. Howard snorted scornfully. ‘Yeah? Whuzzamatter?’ asked Charley blearily.

‘I–I’ve never …’

‘Here,’ said Bob, showing me the safety catch. ‘It’s easy.’ There was a soft whirring noise behind me and the lights brightened: the guy with the video camera again. ‘Angle’s bad,’ he said. ‘Hang on, I’ll get a chair.’

‘Damn it, Gerry! I … asked you—!’ Vic burbled.

‘What? I don’t know, Vic. Maybe they don’t know any better.’ The weight of the thing surprised me: I nearly dropped it. It seemed nose-heavy or something. ‘Oh, I love the cowboy boots!’ Patrick was gushing behind me in his swollen lisp. ‘They’re so well tooled!’ My sudden shadow, which had been clouding Vic’s chest, now fell off him below my knees. Certainly he was a mess, I couldn’t deny that. ‘Grip it a little higher up the handle,’ the cop said, and Gudrun asked: ‘How are the skin tones?’

‘Don’t … underestimate them …!’

‘Not bad — could use a touch at the back maybe,’ said a voice high above me. ‘Under the hairline.’

‘Whoa! Whoozat tall sumbitch?’ Charley asked.

‘He’s not tall, Charley, he’s on a—’

‘No? Jesus, then maybe’s me! Maybe I’m shrinkin’!’

My shoulder ached with this sudden awkward weight. Vic looked ghastly in the hot glare: it hurt to see him like this. ‘I’ve got a lot of things to do. I don’t think I like this …’

‘You’re okay, just hold it steady.’

‘Grrr-rrr-rr-rr!’ said Patrick, drawing a nervous laugh or two.

‘That’s it. Now all you have to do is squeeze.’

‘I just want to eat them!’

‘You get any goddamn spit on my boots, you old tart, and you’ll get one of ’em down your fucking throat — now get that mike outa the way!’

Gottfried ducked down beside me, squatting into my shadow. ‘Oh, what a brute!’ exclaimed Patrick giddily. ‘Isn’t he simply fe-ro-cious!’

‘Don’t pull on it or jerk it, just close your fist, easy-like,’ said Bob.

‘In some way or other,’ Vic gasped, his shaggy head lolling under the bright lights (‘Hey, where you off to — is it getting too much for you?’ somebody asked), ‘you’re … useful to them …’

‘No, I wanta catch it live on the tube.’ Someone was stroking the back of my neck (‘It’s live here …’), taking the pain away. ‘I–I don’t think they know I exist, Vic,’ I sighed (‘Yeah, but I miss the zooms!’), and Bob said: ‘Listen, maybe you oughta use both hands.’

‘And pivot about thirty degrees, so I can see your cannon!’ the guy on the chair called down. ‘Wow! Funkybuns! C’mere! Lemme see ya!’ ‘Whaddaya mean …?’ Vic growled, just as little Bunky Baird, stark naked and painted a gleaming scarlet from head to toe (stark, that is, because even her hair was shaved away, her skull a gleaming red dome, her pubis sleek as a creased plum), pranced into the light between us. ‘Hey—!’ ‘Isn’t it just smashing?’ she exclaimed breathlessly, one hand on hip, the other behind her ear (‘They’re here, Gerry,’ came the gravelly voice between her legs, ‘it’s a matter of record …!’), switching through a sequence of fluid poses to make the paint sparkle. ‘Gudrun here did it! It’s a masterpiece!’ I stepped back out of her way, gave my arm a rest. She was bound loosely with a fine metallic thread that made her flesh bulge in peculiar places, and decorated with little silver ribbons, randomly attached to the thread. She looked like someone who’d got tangled up in the tail of a kite. ‘It’s for Zack’s terrific new show! It’s called Party Time, and I’ve got this great part — it’s so exciting!’ She glanced up at the lights as though discovering them for the first time, flashed a bright innocent smile (‘Watch out you don’t shoot your foot,’ Bob muttered irritably in my ear): ‘Oh, hello! Am I interrupting something?’

‘Yeah, stop catching flies, sweetie, and move your fat act! We got something heavy going down here!’

‘What—?’ She turned to gaze down at Vic, gasped audibly, her hands before her face. She held this pose rigidly a moment, then let her fingertips slide slowly down her seamed body (‘Even pleasure …,’ he was muttering on the other side, ‘has its fucking consequences …’), coming to rest just at the crease between thighs and shiny buttocks, her shoulders bowed but back straight, bare feet straddling his body. When she turned around, two tears glistened in the corners of her uplifted eyes.

‘Oh yeah!’ applauded her younger friend (‘Gesture, stylized gesture,’ I’d remarked that night at the theater — perhaps it was her uplifted eyes that had reminded me of this, or else the heavy weapon in my hand — ‘is really a disguise for uncertainty: which is why we’re so attracted to it’ — but perhaps I’d been wrong about this), and the older one said: ‘Ha ha, come over here, baby, and see what your old man’s got for you!’

Because it might just as well be said (I wish I’d thought of this at the time) that what fascinates us is not the ritualized gestures themselves — for, in a sense, no gesture is original, or can be — but rather that strange secondary phenomenon which repetition, the overt stylization of gesture, creates: namely, those mysterious spaces in between. ‘What … what are you going … to do, Gerry …?’

‘Pardon?’ His eyes were open. One of them anyway: it was fixed on the revolver in my hand. ‘Ah. I’m sorry, Vic,’ I said, waggling it about ambiguously (‘God, it’s gorgeous!’ Bunky was raving behind me, and Howard, staring grimly at my hand, said: ‘Would you watch where you’re pointing that thing, Gerald?’), ‘I’m only, you know …’ I lowered it. His open eye (‘Is it a sapphire?’) rolled up to meet mine briefly, then closed. ‘Ah well, it … it beats … senility, I guess,’ he wheezed, and effected a jerky little movement with one shoulder that was perhaps meant as a shrug. ‘Yeah, a little something to celebrate your new success, baby — slip it on your pinkie, there!’ ‘Anyway, it’s — it’s almost over, Vic, and I thought—’

‘No, goddamn it, it’s not!’ he blustered, spewing blood. ‘The sooner you get it over with, the better it’s gonna be for everyone,’ Bob growled in my ear. ‘It’s so big!’ ‘More’s … more’s gonna happen, but I won’t … be here … to see it … and that … that scares me …’ I shared his dread: that door closed forever. Not being. Eternal absence. ‘Well, you’re a big star, sweetheart!’ It made me shudder just to think about it. This consciousness was what I had and, like him, I didn’t want it to — ‘I don’t … want it … to end!’

‘I know,’ I said through the catch in my throat. ‘In fact, oddly, I was just—’

‘If I had a wish,’ he spluttered (‘Hey, don’t get that red stuff all over me!’ laughed the gigolo behind me, as Bunky passed out thanksgiving hugs and kisses), ‘I’d wish always to have … one … more … minute …!’ Of course, death itself caused no suffering, only this gnawing terror of it — it was, more or less, what I was saving him from. ‘Is … is my daughter …?’

‘She’s in the next room, Vic. She’s got a part in Zack’s play. Shall I —?’

‘No … just tell her for me … tell her to watch out for words like … like mind and … and soul, spirit …’

‘You better point it a little higher,’ Bob murmured, ‘or you’ll just cause him more useless damage.’

Jim knelt and tipped Vic’s head to one side. ‘The best place, Gerry, is here behind the ear …’

‘All that junk … just … just a metaphor, tell her … old animistic habit …’

‘That way, you’ll penetrate the medulla at the top of the spine, which is the center for regulating all the internal functions …’

‘ ’Assa pretty bad sunburn, li’l lady,’ Charley was rumbling behind me.

‘… There’s nothing in there, goddamn it … no me, no I …’

‘Breathing, for example.’

‘… The brain … just makes all that up … the first person …’

‘Or speaking.’

‘Iss even got scabs!’

‘… Is a hoax, an arrogant sham … the first person …’

‘That little place does it all?’

‘Yes, the smallest damage to it causes death in a few minutes.’

‘… Is no person … at all! Tell her …’

‘So what’s all this baloney about thinking with the whole body, old man?’ I muttered hoarsely to myself as I took off the safety.

‘Did I say that?’ He looked up at me, cocking one yellowish eye (this startled me), and a wet sardonic grin formed at one corner of his mouth. He seemed disconcertingly alert all of a sudden. ‘Well, just watch me … twitch after …!’ he grunted.

‘Vic?’ But he was delirious again, rumbling on about ‘militant time’ and ‘the living organic arena …’ (‘That often happens,’ Jim was explaining softly, ‘a kind of involuntary hypoglossal reflex …’) ‘… of choice and freedom …’ I heard someone behind me say something about ‘the host,’ then ask for a drink. Or perhaps offer one. ‘Yeah, he’s a sweet guy …’ Vic was fondling his knee with his free hand (he clutched the fork in the other still like some kind of credo) and I supposed he was thinking about Ros again. Well, why not? For all his dogma about the oppression of the past: who was I, locked even now in reverie (that quiet talk we’d had earlier in my bedroom, now so poignant: it was ancient history!), to hold him to it? This unexpected weakness had in fact endeared him to me even more. ‘One in a million,’ someone murmured, and my wife called out from somewhere back there: ‘Gerald, can you help with the coffee, please?’

‘Yes, in a minute.’ My shoulder throbbed, and something was blurring my vision. Tears maybe. I couldn’t see his face at all, it was like that face in Tania’s painting.

‘Why don’t you … wise up, old buddy?’ he gasped. I found the place. I hoped Jim was right. ‘There’s not … much time …!’

‘To tell the truth, Vic,’ I sighed, ‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’

‘Famous last words,’ he grunted, and I squeezed the trigger.

There was less kick than I’d expected, less noise. I’d been braced for worse. And Vic was mistaken. I waited patiently (no, that’s not true, it wasn’t patience: I was rooted to the spot, frozen, a waxworks figure, legs spread, body and neck rigid, arm outstretched, lips pulled back over my clenched teeth — I wasn’t any good at this), watching him, but nothing twitched. Except my shoulder, after the cop pried the gun out of my hand. ‘That wasn’t so bad, was it?’ he said. Jim, kneeling by Vic with his stethoscope, looked up at me and nodded solemnly. He reached for Vic’s eyes, now wide open as though startled by something he’d just seen (or remembered?), and closed them. ‘Okay!’ someone said, a chair scraped, the lights dimmed — then brightened again and wheeled around: ‘Daddy—?’ My arm dropped and my fossilized spine unlocked and sagged as the light spun away. ‘Oh no! Daddy—!’

As Jim rose, concern pinching his tired face, to gaze over my shoulder toward the living room door, I turned the other way, weary of concern itself. ‘How do you feel about nihilism, then, as a viable art form?’ Gottfried was asking, the mike thrust in front of my face, but I pushed away, out past Scarborough and Patrick and the guy on the chair, across the room (‘Gerry, your wife —’ ‘I know, I know …’), and on through the swinging door into the kitchen.

‘Ah, just in time, Gerald,’ she said, switching off the oven timer. ‘The coffee’s ready. Could you take that tray of cups in, please? We’ll get the chocolates and the whipped cream—’

‘In a minute!’ I snapped. I’d made it as far as the butcherblock table in the middle of the room, and stood there now, leaning against it. The stains were gone, it had been scrubbed clean.

‘You look exhausted, Gerald.’ At least she was able to see that much. I could feel her ego, callous and swollen, billowing out of her, packing the kitchen, crushing me. Or perhaps that was my own ego, her own infuriating in its evanescence. Or maybe Vic was right, maybe it had nothing to do with egos. ‘Is Vic …?’

‘He’s dead,’ I shot back.

‘Well,’ she sighed, ‘it’s probably for the best.’ She brought the bowl of whipped cream over and set it on the butcherblock. I clutched my head in my hands. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Gerald, I forgot about your shoulder — don’t worry about the cups. Instead, why don’t you —’

‘My god!’ I cried. ‘What’s the matter with you? He’s dead, I tell you, his life is ended, it’s all over!’

‘I know, you just—’

‘But how can it be for the best? That’s crazy!’

‘Yes, I’m probably mistaken, Gerald, please don’t shout at me.’ She glanced back over her shoulder. ‘Maybe what you could do is bring in the brandy. And anything else people might like with their—’

‘You get the damned brandy! I’ll — I’ll—’ I felt like picking up the bowl in front of me and heaving it across the room. I had to struggle to get control of myself. ‘I’ll bring the whipped cream!’ I yelled.

‘Well, if you wish, but Alison had offered—’

‘What?’ All along I’d been seeing Louise over at the breakfast bench, as usual. But it was Alison. She sat there, watching sullenly, huddled up in a heavy checkered overcoat. ‘Ah …’ I wiped my eyes with my sleeve. Her hair was snarled, her makeup gone, her eye shadow smudged. As she got up, I saw she was barefooted as well, and there were welts on her ankles. ‘I’m sorry, it’s all right, I’ll, uh, take this in, then—’

‘No, I’m the novelty act here tonight, allow me,’ she cut in acidly and snatched up the bowl of whipped cream. She glanced briefly at me as she padded by, her brown eyes hard and dull like hammers.

‘Does she always walk that way,’ my wife wondered as the door whumped shut behind her, ‘or is it just the funny coat …?’

‘Does the Inspector know she—?’

‘Oh, is that whose it is? She came in hungry and cold, so I fixed her something to eat, while Woody went to find her a wrap. She seems to have misplaced all her own things.’ She put on mitts, opened the oven door, and took out a pie, set it on the counter, reached in for another. ‘I must say, Gerald, I’ve never known anyone to have such an uncharitable view of you.’

‘Well … I probably deserve it.’

‘Oh no. She feels slighted, but I’m sure you’ve done everything you could, Gerald. It’s all these extra guests.’ She sliced the pies, ran her fingers along the knife blade and licked them, wiped them on her apron (it was that handwoven red-green-rye-and-gold one that we’d bought at a mountainside roadstand on our way back from Delphi), sprinkled some powdered sugar on. ‘Just because she didn’t get enough attention, that’s no reason to blame you for everything that’s happened! Even poor Roger, and Cyril and Peg — really, she got quite nasty about it, said it was all your fault, you were no better than a petty thief!’

‘Yes …’ She’d mentioned thievery that night at the play. Or I had. The theatrical transaction …

‘She might have been talking about her watch, I don’t remember, but it got Louise so upset she went storming out of the kitchen!’ She filled a large basket with fresh fruit from the refrigerator, brought in some boxes of chocolates from the pantry, got down a stack of dessert plates from the cabinets, stood on a chair to reach a pair of silver bowls on the top shelf. ‘Honestly, I’d just fixed her a nice hot soup and some fresh spinach crêpes; you’d think no matter what had happened to make her so grouchy, she might have been a little more gracious.’ She topped up the sugar canister, filled the cream pitcher — ‘But some people are just never satisfied!’ — then touched the coffeepot gingerly. ‘Good, still hot. If you can bring in the coffee and the fruit, I can carry the rest.’

‘Sure. Is that all?’ I felt much subdued now.

‘I think so. For now. Except … well …’ She smiled up at me, wrinkling her nose slightly as though looking into the sun. ‘I know Alison’s acting rather unpleasant, Gerald, but she is our guest. I think you should try to make it up to her somehow.’

‘I don’t know really … what I could do …’ I tried to recall that happier time, now so long ago, when her eyes had another look in them, but all I could think of was her husband on the back porch, blocking my way into the house. What had he said? ‘It was as if the very geography of the world had shifted.’ Yes, ‘something anarchical and dangerous’ — it was coming back to me now. ‘You were stroking her thighs,’ he’d said, ‘she bent down to put your—’ ‘But I’ll try,’ I said.

‘And please forgive me for what I said before. I’m truly sorry about Vic.’

‘Vic?’ I looked down at her. She was smiling still, but there were tears in the corners of her eyes. ‘Oh, right …’

‘Hey, you two lovebugs!’ Fats sang out, thumping grandly in through the dining room door, the Inspector’s gray fedora, its crown punched out, perched on top of his big head like a party hat, Scarborough, Gudrun, Michelle, Benedetto, Earl Elstob, and others in his wake. ‘You get outa here now and go enjoy yourselves! Ole Fats is takin’ over!’

‘Oh dear. Fats, I’ve just cleaned up in here—!’

‘No backtalkin’, little lady! We got some citizens with a desp’rate belly-wrinkles crisis, but you has done did your duty!’ He warbled out a striptease tune while untying my wife’s apron, jigging around her as he peeled it off. ‘La-la-la-la-la-la-la!’ sang Beni, practicing his scales and strutting around in his silken codpiece. ‘We is gettin’ up a do!’ He tied on the apron on his way to the refrigerator, tipped the fedora down over his nose as he peered inside. ‘Whaddawe got? Cottage cheese? Good! Cocktail onions, grape jelly, ketchup — what’s in these little tin cans?’ ‘Why are we here?’ Michelle asked vaguely, looking around, and Beni, a halftone higher than before, responded: ‘La-la-la-LA-la-la-la!’

My wife glanced at me, shrugged helplessly, picked up the tray of cups. ‘What’s that you’re tracking in, Mr Elstob?’

‘Huh? Aw — yuh! — whuppin’ cream!’

‘I’m afraid it’s all over your hallway floor,’ Dolph said, lifting a foot to show us. ‘I think they’re trying to ski in it or something.’

‘Oh dear … I think that was the last of the cream …’

‘Here, Gerry, I’ll help with that, if you’ll rescue Zack,’ said Gudrun, picking up the bowl of pink pears and melon balls in her scarlet hands and bumping out backward through the door ahead of me. ‘Come on, there’s some old bawd in here queering the pitch, and Zack’s going bonkers.’

‘Ho-boy! Get ready to sink your pegs into the real bony fido, friends! Ole Fats is homin’ in on the range!’

‘La-la-la-LA-la-la-la!’

Out in the hall, people were laughing and cheering: ‘Go get her, gangbusters!’ they shouted up the stairs. ‘Hair wut?’ I glanced hopefully into the dining room where the brandy bottles were (‘Can-busters, more like! Ha ha!’), but she wasn’t there: only Sally Ann, wearing Tania’s heavy peasant dress now and wistfully cradling her dead father in her arms in front of the cameraman’s bright lamps and video lens; Patrick was helping with the lights, and Gottfried seemed to be interviewing Brenda, or vice versa — they were drifting, heads bent over the mike, past the abandoned sideboard toward the TV room — but all the rest were gone, and it seemed peculiarly barren and lonely in there. Some awful absence … ‘Okay!’ the cameraman barked. ‘Now tip his head the other way!’

‘It’s nice to have those guys around, they add a little color!’ Horner laughed, turning away from the foot of the stairs, and Mr Waddilow, standing on the landing, blushed perceptibly. Or perhaps he was trying to lift something up. Beneath him, Daffie stepped out of the toilet, holding her forearm pressed against one bare breast. ‘Hey,’ she said with a vague glittering smile. Malcolm Mee was still in there behind her, under the red darkroom bulb, back to the open door. ‘Eet wass like night off fool moon, no?’ grinned Hilario, picking up the fallen overcoat, just as Zack Quagg came fuming out of the living room, sliding through the floor’s flocking of whipped cream, his dark cape flying: ‘Where the hell’s Hoo-Sin? Hillie—? Jesus! What am I working with here, a buncha amateurs? We got a fucking show on the boards in there, goddamn it! Where’s that extra grip? Horner—?’

‘Easy, Zack,’ Horner said, ‘that mudlark’s been pulped.’

‘What—?! Holy shit, Jacko! We’ve lost our goddamn band, half the deck crew, our new end-man’s off banging tail, that bearded dude’s pulled his lens outa the show — we’re gonna die standing up in there, if we don’t move our ass!’ He kicked the fallen cream bowl across the hallway in pale-faced anger.

‘Awright, screw your tits on, Zack, we’re doin’ what we—’

‘Aha!’ Quagg cried, grabbing my arm. ‘I been looking for you!’ He dragged me toward the living room. ‘There’s some old scud in here murdering our production! She’s up the fucking flue, man, and taking me with her! You gotta do something!’

My mother-in-law stood calmly on the collapsed ping-pong table, her arms folded. That’s what it was now: a collapsed ping-pong table. Her presence had quite effortlessly disenchanted our living room. The sacred cave had become a bunch of dirty laundry, the altar a table with a dead body on it (this latter, most of the skirt now cut away, was being removed by Vachel and Gudrun to make some room, my wife, bracing one edge of the tray of cups and plates against the table, instructing), the proscenium arch merely my skis with nailholes in them. I half-expected the lamps to drop off the ceiling in sheer embarrassment. ‘It’s time to go home,’ my mother-in-law said flatly.

‘Put it down! Put it down!’ Vachel screamed, his head slick still with petroleum jelly. ‘Yeu-uck!’

‘You see what I mean?’ moaned Zack, waving his arms around wildly. My mother-in-law only set her jaws tighter. ‘Thank you, Vachel,’ my wife was saying. ‘I know it’s not pleasant, but it can’t be helped. Now could you move that bowl of fruit nearer the center, Louise?’ ‘You gotta get this dry hole outa here, man!’

I glanced questioningly at my wife, now spreading the cups and dessert plates out on the table: she smiled toward her mother and shook her head, sent Louise off to the kitchen for the pies, slapped at Vachel’s fingers as he dipped them in the chocolate sauce. ‘I’m afraid there’s not much I can do, Zack,’ I said. ‘She’s not going to budge.’

‘You can’t be serious!’ He clutched at his hair (‘God! I’m starved!’ said Gudrun, peeling a banana) as though to tear it out. ‘We’ve just hit the nub, man, the weenie, the payoff! This is everything we’ve been working for tonight! What are we going to do—?!’

‘Well, Zack,’ my wife put in, taking the coffeepot from Michelle, who stood dazedly by, ‘I suppose you’ll just have to exercise your imagination. Could you please move the strawberries, Gerald, so I can set the coffee down?’

‘Maybe we oughta fold it up, Zack,’ grumbled Gudrun around her mouthful of half-chewed banana.

‘No, wait,’ he said, gazing thoughtfully at my mother-in-law (‘That’s funny,’ said my wife, lifting up the sponge cake: ‘where did the plate go?’), ‘if the old bat wants to become part of the set, then, goddamn it, we’ll just build the show around her!’

‘Actually, there’s an old lady in the next scene,’ Anatole pointed out. ‘It’s the dream sequence in which—’

‘Hey, you’re right! Lemme see that script a minute!’ My mother-in-law looked disconcerted, but stubbornly held her ground. ‘Meanwhile, kid, go in there and get our guitarist back — even if you have to pick her ass up and haul it in here—!’

‘Yes sir, Mr Quagg!’

‘I once had a dream about an old woman,’ Michelle remarked languidly. ‘She was standing on a mountain, or some high place. She said she’d been there for a long time.’

‘Do you suppose someone took it?’ my wife asked. I gazed down at the cake, sitting there on the bare table as though after a pratfall, trying to think what it was that was bothering me.

‘Her clothes were all worn away and her skin was covered with sores and scabs and a thick dust almost like sand …’ Michelle touched her breast, her privates—

‘Oh no …!’

‘What is it, Gerald? What’s the matter?’

‘This woman in the dream, I mean …’

I turned toward the dining room: yes, it had been nagging at me since I left the kitchen — that peculiar sensation of barrenness, of erasure …

‘ “But the worst thing about getting old,” she said,’ Michelle was saying, ‘ “is what happens to your navel …” ’

‘Right! The Ice Palace, the wet dream stuff, free will versus necessity, the Old Lady — this script is terrific! The kid’s got talent!’

‘The “Susanna” …!’ I whispered.

‘What? What are you talking about, Gerald?’

‘It keeps getting deeper and deeper …’

‘Hey, Jack! Go find the Scar! Tell him we want the panes out of all the windows in the house and as many mirrors as he can lay his hands on! We still got a show here!’

‘It’s gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘Yum!’ enthused Bunky, stepping over Ros’s body and plucking a melon ball.

‘Tania’s painting,’ I explained, my throat constricted.

‘I saw it now. The navel. In the middle of the old woman’s tummy. Like a nailhole.’

‘I just realized—’

‘Only much bigger …’

‘It isn’t there anymore.’

‘What—?!’

‘… Like a kind of tunnel, going nowhere …’

‘And Gudrun! Listen, go strip all this red shit off Bunky!’

‘ “You can go in and look around if you want to,” she said, but I was afraid.’

My wife rushed over to the doorway. Those thoughts of oblivion I’d had when entering from the kitchen, glancing toward Vic (I’d been looking for something): almost as though she had somehow, after all, completed that terrible step …

‘I want her midnight blue now, top to bot! With a scatter of sequins if you can find some — and a silver skullcap!’

‘Right, Zack,’ Gudrun stuffed the end of one banana in her mouth, picked up another and pointed with it. ‘Wha’ you wahme do wiwode wady?’

‘What?’

‘But I did see lots of things crawling in and out of her navel,’ Michelle said now, scratching idly, ‘and at the very back there was a little spot of light, like when you turn the TV off …’

Such an emptiness, that wall: it wasn’t even a wall in my mind’s eye, but infinite space, appallingly indifferent. I felt her disappearance as if it were, in part, my own, and great relief when my wife came back (‘Ah, the old lady — leave her like she is, Gud! This is gonna be the weirdest goddamn peel you ever saw in showbiz!’) and took my hand: ‘Do you suppose … it’s been stolen?’

‘That’s where heaven is,’ someone said — ‘I think it was one of those things crawling in and out …’

‘Hey, that was Prissy Loo’s part!’ Vachel was objecting (she released my hand as though I’d answered her — in fact, I had), and Zack said: ‘She’s off doing a little business for me, Vaych, she’ll never know — now listen, you said you wanted a sex scene, right?’

‘… But I didn’t believe it.’

‘Someone must have overheard you,’ my wife suggested (‘Yeah! Hey, can I have the guitarist? Hunh, Zack?’), ‘when you were negotiating with Howard.’

‘Yes …’

‘No, she’s the only orchestra we got, Vaych — I was figuring we’d use Bunky for the—’

‘Bunky?’

‘When I looked closer,’ Michelle went on, ‘I saw that these little things crawling in and out of her navel were tiny people …’ I gazed at her there, clutching her thin arms, lost in her dream story (‘Okay! Great! Luff-ly! Thanks, Zack! I get Bunky!’ ‘Well, not exactly, Vaych …’), thinking: she seems younger suddenly, as though she were shrinking back into her vanished image … ‘And whenever they turned their heads and looked at me …’

‘Actually, this is a kind of dream sequence …’

‘… They curled up like waterbugs and dropped off somewhere below …’

‘No kidding!’ grinned Anatole as he came through the door with Sally Ann (‘At first it seems like Bunky, you see — or what she stands for,’ Zack was explaining, my mother-in-law looking on with increasing apprehension), her guitar slung round her neck: ‘You too? Tonight?’

‘But when I tried to see where the little things fell to,’ Michelle murmured, ‘I discovered I was standing there all by myself …’

‘Oh no—! Wait a minute, wait a minute!’ squawked Vachel, backing off. ‘Not this moldy old crowbait—!’

‘Yeah, well, almost,’ said Sally Ann, glancing darkly up at me as she passed, and my wife, breaking out of her worried silence, exclaimed: ‘Oh, Louise!’ She stood there behind us, her round face red as a beet, holding two steaming hot pies in her bare hands. ‘Why don’t you use the oven gloves, for goodness’ sake?’

‘What is this shit, Vachel? I thought you were a goddamn pro!’

‘Well, sure, but — cheez!’

‘… The wind was blowing, it had gotten dark …’

‘Well, look at the power in this scene, man! the risks! the levels of meaning!’ He grabbed the hem of my mother-in-law’s skirt and dragged it up past her garter belt: she turned pale, staggered back a step, her jaw dropping. ‘This ain’t beautiful enough for you, goddamn it? Is that it?’

‘The old lady was gone, I was all alone.’

My wife cleared a space on the table and helped Louise set the pies down. Louise clapped her hands in her armpits (‘Actually, my original idea,’ said Anatole, ‘was to take a couple of old archetypes and re—’ ‘Right!’ Quagg rolled on, slapping my mother-in-law’s corseted behind. ‘It’s original, it’s ancient, it’s archetypal — I mean, are you good enough for this or not, Vaych?’), her eyes damp and bulging, and Michelle said, as though from some distant place: ‘All my clothes had blown away somehow …’ My wife glanced up at Michelle, a flicker of a smile curling her lips. ‘… And now mine was the navel with the hole in it …’

‘I think this is where I came in,’ my wife said. ‘I’ll go see if I can win the kitchen back from Fats.’

‘No one,’ said a commanding voice from the hallway door, ‘goes anywhere!’ It was Inspector Pardew, clutching his lapels, white scarf draped loosely around his neck, thick moustaches bristling. ‘Oh oh,’ someone said. ‘Where’s the, uh, toilet?’ ‘It’s all right, m’um,’ Pardew added, nodding firmly, and my mother-in-law took a deep breath, smoothed her skirt down with trembling hands. ‘We have all we need now. Thank you for your assistance.’

‘Wait a minute—!’ objected Zack Quagg. My mother-in-law straightened her back, drew her chin in, and, glaring at Quagg, stepped down off the ping-pong table. ‘Hey—! You can’t do this! We’re just climaxing this spasm!’ Others had started drifting in, some shepherded by the two police officers, Bob and Fred. ‘I’ll check upstairs,’ said Fred. My wife, taking my arm, whispered: ‘I’m afraid the coffee’s going to get cold,’ and the Inspector glanced up sharply: ‘Did someone say something?’ ‘Yeah, I did, you hick dick! This is our pitch, man, get outa here, this space is booked—!’ Bob lashed out with his baton: ‘Whuff-ff-FF-FOOO!’ Quagg wheezed, crumpling to the floor, curled up in his purple cape. ‘I hope,’ said the Inspector, withdrawing his briar pipe from a jacket pocket and tapping it in the palm of his hand as he gazed around at us all (Anatole interposed himself between Zack and the cop, Sally Ann kneeling to whisper: ‘You okay, Mr Quagg?’), ‘there will be no further disturbances.’

He filled the pipe from his leather pouch, cupping his hand around the bowl to form a funnel, then, tugging the drawstrings of the pouch closed with his teeth (Quagg groaned and stretched out: ‘Ow, something’s … caught …!’ he gasped), stepped aside as Fred came down the stairs behind him, herding a group of people toward us, Hilario leading the pack and showing off with a complicated set of hops and pirouettes down the steps, followed by Kitty, Dolph, Janny and Hoo-Sin in each other’s clothes, Charley, Regina, the guy in the chalkstriped suit — or pants rather: down to an undershirt on top now and a towel around his neck. His jaw gleamed as though he might have been shaving. Regina, wrapped up in one of our sheets (Sally Ann, on her knees, was tugging speculatively at the seam of Zack’s white crotch: ‘Here, you mean, Mr Quagg?’), swept past Hilario into the room, eyes rolled up and the back of one wrist clapped to her pale forehead, crying: ‘Is nothing sacred?’ ‘Caught her jerking off,’ Fred explained to the Inspector behind his hand, Dolph meanwhile slipping off behind him, unnoticed, toward the kitchen. ‘There’s a few more upstairs’ll be down in a minute, Chief. Meantime I’ll go check out back.’ Pardew nodded, slapped his pockets for a light. Bunky’s gigolo friend took a wooden match from behind his ear, popped it ablaze with his thumb, and held it, shielded with his cupped hand, over Pardew’s pipebowl. ‘Ah! Thank you,’ said the Inspector, Zack Quagg echoing him throatily from the floor (Sally Ann, stretching the crotch of his unitard down, was carefully easing his testicles to one side). ‘Now, I’ve gathered you all together here in this—’

‘Hey, big Ger!’ Charley boomed out, stumbling heavily into the room through a tangle of collapsed cave wall, his arms wrapped around Janny and Hoo-Sin. Janny looked radiant in her kimono, Hoo-Sin in the wrinkled pink outfit oddly weathered and innocent at the same time. ‘I’ve riz up in the world again, ole son! I’m standin’ firm! Thanks to these two lovely ladies, I got a bone t’pick with anyone!’

‘Easy, Charley,’ I cautioned, nodding toward Bob, who was just behind him, scowling darkly, club at the ready.

Charley reared up heedlessly, swung round, his big head swiveling. ‘Who, ole Bobbers here? Nah, he’s one a my bess clients, Ger! Him’n his pardner both, I give ’em a fantastic deal! A — yaw haw! — joint policy!’ He grinned expectantly, his head bobbing drunkenly. ‘C’mon, ole scout, ’sbeen a long night, give us a smile! A joint policy!’

Bob had turned toward the dining room door, through which Fred was now prodding another group of guests: ‘Whoa, man, you gonna make me char the hash!’ Fats was protesting, the Inspector’s gray fedora rocking back and forth on top of his head.

Pardew, pipe clamped in his jaws, was smoking vehemently. ‘Now, as I say, I have called you all here, here to the scene of the crime, in order to —’

‘All I’m sayin’ is you guys got no respect for the inner man!’ Fats complained, then ‘Rrnkh-HH!’ grunted as Fred suddenly jabbed him fiercely in his aproned belly with the end of his nightstick, doubling him over: the hat fell off, Fred caught it, handed it to the Inspector. ‘Ah … yes …’

‘’Swhut I love about you, ole buddy,’ Charley rumbled, wrapping a fat arm around me, ‘you laugh at my jokes. Goddamn it, ole son, you lissen!’

‘What?’

‘Where do you want these, Zack?’ called out Scarborough, carrying in, with Benedetto helping, a stack of windowpanes, and Earl Elstob asked: ‘Hey, huh! yuh hear about the gal who couldn’t tell putty from Vaseline?’ Charley winked at my wife, Regina flung herself on the couch in seeming despair, Dolph popped the top on a can of beer, and Kitty, helping Fats straighten up, said: ‘Well, that’s one way to kill an appetite!’ Pardew, brushing irritably at his hat, looked up as though about to speak, but just then Charley hollered out: ‘Whoa! I smell coffee, girls!’ and pushed away, startling Louise, who, backing off, stepped crunchingly on Fred’s foot. ‘Oww! SHIT!’ he yelled, and whirled on Louise, nightstick flashing — Dolph reached up, almost casually it seemed, and caught it on the upswing, stopping it dead. He handed his beer to Earl and slowly, Fred resisting, brought the club toward him, gripped the end of it with his other hand, and — crok! — snapped it in two. ‘Thanks, Dolph,’ Louise said softly, her face flushed. Fred, scratching the back of his head above the neckbrace, gaped in amazement at the shattered stub of nightstick in his hand, and Earl said: ‘Yuh, well, huh! all her windows fell out!’

‘Ah, fuck everything,’ said Daffie vaguely, and left the room.

Pardew, biting down on his pipe, continued to fuss with his fedora, but, attempting to put the crease back in, chopped at it so fiercely in his rage that he knocked it out of his own hand. Angrily, he reached down for it, but somehow managed to step on it at the same time. ‘Damnation!’ he mumbled around the pipe. ‘Cream ’n sugar, girls?’ Charley called out. ‘SSSHH!’ Patrick hissed. ‘Hunh?’ Charley looked around blearily at the quiet that had descended. We were all watching the Inspector. He was trying to lift his foot off the hat, but it seemed stuck to his shoe. He studied the situation, one hand in a jacket pocket, the other holding the bowl of the pipe in his mouth. Bob approached him, but he waved him away, knelt, untied the shoe, took his foot out. Except for a light titter from some of the women at the holes in his sock, the room was hushed. Regina was sitting up now, watching; Zack, too, helped by Sally Ann and Horner. The Inspector lifted the shoe off the hat: no problem. He gazed quizzically at the sole of the shoe, shrugged, put it back on, tied it. Unfortunately, he was stepping on the hat as he did so, and when he lifted his foot, he found the hat was stuck again. He scratched at the back of his neck, under the scarf, thinking about this. He stepped on the hat with the other foot to hold it down, tried to lift the first foot off but without success. Then he discovered that the second one was stuck as well. He struggled with his problem for a moment, doing a kind of sticky shuffle, peevishly muttering something about the sense he’d had all night of having ‘intruded on some accursed place, some forbidden domain, which was not what it seemed to be.’ Finally he looked up at the taller cop and nodded toward his holster: Bob handed him the gun. The Inspector checked the chamber, sucking thoughtfully on the pipe: ‘One thing about homicides I’ve learned to watch out for,’ he said around the stem, his pate gleaming under the overhead lights, ‘is the murderer’s attempt to conceal the fact that what we’ve got is indeed a murder.’ He took a firm grip on the revolver with his right hand, took the pipe out of his mouth with his left. ‘There’s been no limit to the ingenuity of murderers in masquerading their act — or even of removing all evidence of both victim and act. Bodies have been burned, blasted, buried, embedded in concrete, dissolved in acid, disassembled, and devoured.’ Sighting down the barrel, he let his arm fall in a slow arc until pointing between his feet. ‘You name it, it’s been tried.’ There was a terrific explosion that startled us all, even though we’d been expecting it. ‘Of course, in this case, we’ve not only got a victim plain to see,’ the Inspector went on, handing the revolver back to the policeman, taking his feet off the hat, and reaching down to pick it up, ‘she’s also got a hole in her’ — he held it up and brushed at it lightly — ‘as big as your hat!’ This got a burst of applause and laughter, led by Patrick (even Zack Quagg was joining in, if reluctantly), and the Inspector, handing the hat to Bob, nodded curtly.

‘Damn! I missed it!’ whispered the cameraman, staring at the equipment in his hand.

‘Nothing, however,’ Pardew continued, beginning to move slowly about the room, gazing first at one of us, then another (Scarborough and Benedetto, grunting, set the windowpanes down against the table), ‘is ever so straightforward as it seems on the face of it. We have facts, yes, a body, a place and a time, and all this associative evidence we’ve so painstakingly collected — but facts in the end are little more than surface scramblings of a hidden truth whose vaporous configuration escapes us even as it draws us on, insisting upon itself, absorbing our attention, compelling revelation.’ He peered abruptly up at the guy in the chalkstriped pants and undershirt, who was wiping his face with the towel but now stopped. ‘Yes, compelling!’ Pardew repeated, raising one bony index finger, and the man stepped back a step. ‘Deduction, I am convinced, is linked au fond in an intimate but mysterious relation to this quest for the invariant, the hidden but essential core truth, this compulsive search for the nut.’ Dolph, who had just picked one up from the bowl, put it back. ‘It is, at any rate, my main desire,’ the Inspector went on, continuing his rounds, followed now by the TV cameraman, ‘and in pursuit of it, I had to ask myself’ — and now, pausing for effect, taking a contemplative puff on his pipe, he glanced up at my wife (her hand tightened on my arm, I clasped it, he watched this) — ‘why? Eh? Whatever possessed — and I choose my words with care — whatever possessed our perpetrator, or perpetrators’ — he squinted briefly up at me, then turned to the others — ‘to commit this foul deed, this useless insolent vanity? I ask you!’ He had, moving on (my wife’s hand had relaxed and dropped away: ‘Were those once mine, Beni?’ she whispered over her shoulder), stopped in front of Regina, who, startled, shrank back, cronelike, in her bedsheet. ‘Was it fear? Jealousy? Moral outrage? Cupidity?’ Regina made a little squeaky noise and shook her head. Beni was whispering something to my wife about the inexpressible gratitude of his pudenda. ‘Well, I hope they were clean,’ she said. Pardew cocked his head up toward the rest of us. ‘Of course, all crime — even fraud, perfidy, indecent exposure, excessive indulgence’ — he was staring at each of us in turn, as the cameraman panned past the gaping faces — ‘all crime is at heart a form of life depreciation, a kind of psychic epilepsy, and so, in a real sense, there is always only one motive. Nevertheless …’ He gazed off, drawing meditatively on his pipe, then pinched the back of his neck under the white scarf. He studied his fingers and, smiling faintly, pressed a thumbnail against the pad of his index finger. ‘I was reminded,’ he said around the pipestem, brushing his hands together (‘They take an empty fist as containing something real,’ Hoo-Sin was murmuring to Janny, ‘and the pointing finger as the object pointed …’ ‘Really?!’), ‘of a curious case I had some years ago in which the murderer, as it turned out, was an unborn fetus. The victim was its putative father, who in a drunken rage had struck the pregnant woman several times in the stomach. The fetus used the only weapon at its command: false labor. It was a wintry night, the man was heavily inebriated, there was a terrible accident on the way to the hospital. The woman, who survived for a time, spoke of maddening pains en route, and it seems likely she grabbed the steering wheel in her delirium or lashed out with her foot against the accelerator. Was the fetus attacking its assailant or its host? This was perhaps a subtlety which, in its circumstances, escaped it. Certainly it achieved its ends, and though it could be argued that it had acted in self-defense, it seemed obvious to me that the true motive, as so often, was revenge.’ He paused to let that sink in, striking a fresh match to his pipebowl. ‘The strawberries are starting to go soft,’ my wife whispered. ‘In any event, we’ll never know. Prosecution was impossible because the fetus — a harelip — was stillborn. But the point—’

‘Wait a minute,’ Dolph interrupted. ‘You trying to suggest Ros was killed out of revenge?’ Pardew watched Dolph without expression, holding the match over his pipebowl. ‘I dunno, I just can’t see that, not Ros.’

‘Nor can I,’ said Pardew, looking around for some place to drop the match; he chose one of the potted plants Scarborough had lined up around the cavemouth. ‘No, revenge is a noble passion, an instinctive search for order, the effort to restore a certain balance in the universe. Our murder here tonight seems much more sinister than that: a search for disjunction, a corrupt desire to disturb, distort — a murder committed perhaps out of curiosity or impudence’ — my wife, watched by a frowning Pardew, stifled a yawn (‘Sorry,’ she murmured) — ‘or even love, which is well known for its destructive powers. No, what reminded me of the Case of the Vengeful Fetus was the sense that the motive here was not merely irrational, it was prerational, atavistic, shared by all, you might say, and thus criminal in the deepest sense of the word. Once I recognized this, my task was eased. It was simply a matter of recalling certain ancient codes, making the obvious associations, then following the discretionary principles of professional criminalistics. Whereupon our crime was, for all practical purposes, solved.’ He nodded toward his two assistants, and they fanned out, blocking the two doorways, cutting Fats off from one, Bunky’s boyfriends from the other. ‘Yikes,’ someone said. The TV guy lowered his camera, looked around as though for an exit. Suddenly it wasn’t amusing anymore. ‘Who …?’ Howard shrank back toward the far window, Michelle seemed to offer herself up. Earl Elstob was trying to close his lips around his buckteeth as though to draw a curtain. The Inspector, spotlit from above, watched all this, hands in pockets, pipe in mouth, as though, silently, weaving the final strands of his web — then, glancing toward Fred and turning his back, he jerked his thumb toward the rest of us. ‘Now!’ ‘Ah, shit,’ Charley groaned, slumping a bit, and Fats whimpered: ‘Hey, wait a minute, anybody seen Bren?’ Fred, hand on holster, pushed past him (he yipped reflexively), headed in my direction. Ours, rather: my wife tightened her grip again. ‘It’s all right,’ I muttered huskily (others were ducking, stumbling back) — and so it was: Fred broke past us in pursuit of Vachel, who, squeaking in alarm, went scrambling behind pots and props. ‘It’s a frame-up! I been skunked!’ he screamed, shoving the pedalcar in Fred’s direction. Fred went crashing, but Bob had joined him in the chase and now tackled the dwarf cleanly (Charley in confusion cheered him, and Regina wheezed, falling back: ‘God! I thought it was going to be me!’) near the back wall. Vachel, greasy with petroleum jelly, slipped a foot free, brained the cop with the fireplace poker, and took off running, but by now Fred was on his feet again and had him in a bearhug: Vachel’s little legs churned in midair, going nowhere. Bob, enraged, holding his bloodied head, staggered toward them. ‘Let me go, you shitheads!’ Vachel shrieked, feet and fists flying. ‘You can’t do this to me!’ ‘Pop him one on the gourd there, Bob!’ Fred grunted, hanging on desperately, and Bob, leaning into it on his short leg (‘Oh dear,’ my wife said, wincing), brought his stick down so hard that it did indeed sound like he’d crushed a pumpkin. ‘Shit,’ Quagg sighed from the floor, ‘there goes our show,’ and Fred, now holding the unconscious Vachel under one arm like a duffelbag and picking up his hat with the other, said: ‘Whew!’

‘If that don’t beat my grandmaw!’ Fats gasped, and someone belched eloquently, Dolph probably. ‘Vachel! Who’da guessed it?’

‘Guessed what?’

‘Eet wass how you say a brow-eye leefter, no?’ exclaimed Hilario, rolling his eyes.

‘Fucking little degenerate!’ growled Bob, still sore, blood streaming down past one eye, and he gave the dwarf another blow which oddly made his feet bob as well as his head.

‘That’ll do,’ said Pardew. ‘Come along now,’ and my wife, letting go my arm, said: ‘I’ll see them to the door.’

I sat back against the arm of the couch where Regina lay all akimbo in a crumpled white heap, the back of one wrist pressed melodramatically against her brow (‘Goodness, Sally Ann — that dress is still wet!’ my wife remarked in passing, there were people crossing now between us, I could only catch glimpses), taking great heaving bolts of air. I too felt short of breath, one half of me sinking leadenly, the other half dangerously afloat. ‘Do not try to grasp it,’ I could hear Hoo-Sin murmuring to Janny out there somewhere in that unfocused blur of movement before my eyes: the tension in the room had dissolved into a kind of generalized backstage flutter, as people slipped out of folds in the cave wall or crept out from behind one another, exchanging laughter and snorts of relief, ducking off for drinks or helping themselves to the dessert and coffee. ‘Casual thought is for fools. It is the burying of oneself in emptiness.’

‘You said it, Hoo! Juss what I been doin’ for — ruff! haw! (‘Ffoof-hrarf! I swallowed one of those damned — choke! — cookies whole!’ rasped the guy in the chalkstriped pants) — twenny years!’ laughed Charley, drawing both of them into his arms. My grandmother had had a story about this, or something like this, I remembered, something about a dead cousin. ‘I love it!’

‘Now what, Mr Quagg?’

Or aunt. I pushed off a canvas shoe, and scratched my foot.

‘Hroaf! ch-wheeze!’

Beside me, the cameraman was changing cartridges, Zack Quagg was doing deep kneebends, Gudrun was tying Janny’s hair up in a tight coil, powdering her face white. ‘Don’t worry, kids,’ Quagg panted. ‘We’ll — grunt! — clean it up and recast it, mount the whole uproar again!’ Janny sneezed, Scarborough swore, Regina groaned, and the guy in the chalkstripes — ‘Pwwfff-FWWOOO!’ — spewed cookie as Kitty reached round from behind and squeezed his diaphragm. ‘We’ll call it “The Feast of Saint Valentine,” use Mee as the vampire, make it a revue maybe, a kinda funerary tribute to the bourgeois theater …’ ‘That better?’ ‘What happened?’ asked Brenda, standing dim-eyed in the traffic of the dining room doorway, Gottfried peering sheepishly over her shoulder. The green charmeuse dress hung askew on her, one plump arm sticking out of the sleeve’s slash instead of the cuff. She pulled a string of gum out of her mouth, let it droop (‘Write some new tunes, give it some bounce!’), then lifted her chin and nibbled it back in again. ‘We were, um, watching TV.’ Regina sat up and studied her nails. ‘It’s so unfair!’ she said, and Fats, lapping up pie and chocolate sauce, spluttered: ‘You’ll never believe it, Bren!’ ‘You know, uh, I think I’ve lost my tape recorder,’ said Gottfried, reddening. ‘They’ve just took Vachel!’ ‘Unfair?’ ‘Poor old Vachel, I mean,’ said Regina. ‘Enh,’ Horner shrugged, rolling himself a cigarette, ‘he made a good exit …’ ‘Yeah, but does he know that?’ ‘Oh no! not — snap! — Vachel!’ yawned Brenda (it was catching, my own jaws began to spread), and Michelle said: ‘I think I’ll put a record on.’

‘That reminds me,’ said the Inspector, turning around at the door. ‘Our ice pick …’

‘I got it,’ said Bob, holding it up, then he tucked it back in his rear pocket.

Fred must have seen my gape of surprise (I’d been caught mid-yawn) as I rose up off the couch arm, because he winked and came over (I pressed my jaws together), wagging Vachel under his arm. ‘One of the Old Man’s favorite tricks,’ he grinned. ‘His probe, he calls it. Stick it in, see what surfaces. You know.’

‘I thought somehow I–I’d—!’

‘But of course we couldn’t fool you! Oh, and by the way …’ He leaned closer, switching Vachel to his other arm. It was my bloated self I saw in Vachel’s goggles, dwarfed twice over by the lenses’ convexity. ‘I just wanted to tell you: you know that ultraviolet exam …’ He nodded toward the hall door, where my wife stood, smiling wearily. She was waiting for the Inspector, who, stopped now by Patrick, was patting his pockets helplessly. ‘Well, sir, clean as a whistle!’ He gave me a knowing nudge. ‘Just thought you’d like to know …’ He sidled closer. Kitty, poking around at Vachel’s head behind his back, scrunched up her nose and said: ‘Ouch!’ ‘And listen, that wasn’t blood on the knife the Chief found, it was tomata juice — we knew that, we knew it all the time.’ He slapped my butt with his free hand. ‘You got a great little lady, fella. Hang on to her!’

Vachel’s dripping head bobbed at Fred’s rear under the blue SUPERLOVER sweatshirt as the officer walked away through what was left of the proscenium arch. One of my skis, cracked at the binding, tipped forward now at a crazy angle, making it seem as if the stage were reaching out to stop him, and Scarborough, trying to right it, snapped it in two. ‘Piss on it,’ he grumped and planted the broken end impatiently in a fern pot.

‘Forget it, Scar, we’re blowing this stand,’ said Zack.

‘Hey, where’s ole Earl?’

‘We’re moving the show up-country!’

‘Yeah? Who’s providin’ the nut?’

‘Cyril? Out back with Malcolm, I think, Charley.’

‘Probably getting stoned, the poor bastard.’

‘Don’t worry, I got somebody. We’re working on him now.’

‘Naw, I meant—’

‘Is it true Peg left him because he liked to do it with mirrors?’

‘No, that was someone else.’

‘I hear it was because she wanted to surprise him on their silver wedding anniversary, and it was the only thing she could think of.’

‘I love it!’ Charley yuff-huffed. ‘’Ass like the ole folks who went back t’their honeymoon hotel, an’ …’

‘You mean Peg and—?’

‘You know, I don’t think that guy’s playin’ with a full deck!’

‘Lissen, this’ll knock your pants off! They went back t’the goddamn hotel, see …’

‘Well, according to Cyril …’

‘Say, did you hear about that play Ros was in where she was supposed to pick up this deck of cards and cut it?’

‘’N — hee hoff! — the ole fella says …’

‘That’s not the way I heard it …’

‘Ros?’

‘Yeah, and — ha ha! — the director says—’

‘Well then …’

‘No …’

‘He says …’

‘He said …’

I was tired of stories and moved away. Perhaps my wife needed me. I remembered her hand on my arm a few moments ago, clutching at it as though for strength, and then the paleness of her face a little later as she smiled vacantly, sorrowfully, into the room past Pardew before she led him out. As I crossed to the door, little particolored Bunky Baird came bouncing through it, shouting: ‘Zack! Zack! they’ve done something to Vachel!’ ‘Yeah, I know, they popped his blister, Bunko — and ours too. The show’s blown, kid. So get outa your skin, we’re pulling stakes!’ A proscenium arch, I thought, passing under it, is like a huge mouth, but the sensation that it is the audience that is being fed through it is just another of theater’s illusions. Theater is never a stripping down (Bunky was bright blue and pimpled with sequins from the waist up, scarlet still from the thighs down, but in between a damp fleshy smear, ugly and shockingly naked), but always a putting on: theater fattened on boxed time. To be a member of the audience, then (so many thoughts, one after another, I staggered on, feeling myself consumed by my own consciousness), was a form of martyrdom …

Gudrun as I lumbered past gave me an understanding glance as though in sympathy with my troubled thoughts (‘Okay, before we go, everyone together for the flash!’ Zack shouted) and rubbed her nose with a blue finger. ‘I think someone stole your wife’s dressing table,’ she said.

‘Come on! Curtain calls!’

‘What—?’

‘This is exciting! You know, Mr Quagg, I really love the theater life!’

I leaned up against the doorframe. Even the dressing table … My wife was at the front door, saying good night to Inspector Pardew and Fred. They didn’t seem to want to leave. Or maybe they didn’t know how. She wanted me near, I knew — I caught it in her sorrowful gaze as she glanced up at me from Vachel’s lifeless and begoggled buttocks — but between us the tall cop Bob had Patrick slap up against the wall, jabbing him with his stick, cursing him out for being a nuisance and a whore, and I lacked the will, or maybe even the courage, to push on past. ‘If you don’t stop bugging the Inspector, you scummy little poufta, you’re gonna get your goddamn place of business tweezed!’ ‘Well! Is that a promise?’ Patrick simpered brazenly, twitching his puffy lips up at the black-bearded TV cameraman now looming beind the cop’s shoulder. ‘You goddamn pervert—!’ ‘You got problems, little buddy?’ asked the cameraman, taking a fierce grip on Bob’s neck that made the cop whistle and drop his nightstick. In the living room (to be at a crossroads, I realized, was actually to be nowhere: there was unexpected comfort in this) applause erupted as the actors took their curtain calls, Mee joining them now, sliding spookily past me out of the toilet, as though sucked in by the slapping hands. Scarborough focused the lights, Regina doffed her bedsheet (there was a lot of good-natured booing), Zack dragged Fats on stage to take a bow. Fats, feigning shyness, shuffled up doing a little hunched-shoulders soft-shoe routine, hands in his pockets and rolling his eyes. ‘Spread it, sweetie!’ laughed Brenda, clapping the loudest: ‘Let’s hear it for him, folks! the one and lonely!’ ‘Now if you’ll just pick up my gear there, pardner, and haul it along with us,’ the cameraman said beside me, making Patrick gasp and flutter his lashes (‘Oh my! yes!’), then he highstepped the cop to the front door, one hand gripping his skinny nape, the other the seat of his pants, Bob’s gimpy leg brushing through the scum of whipped cream on the floor like a dangling plummet. ‘Hot it up, Scar!’ shouted Quagg. My wife opened the door and the cameraman heaved the cop through it, then turned to wait for Patrick. ‘Okay, strike it and take it away, crew, we’re sloughing this dime museum!’ People were starting to head out this way: I joined my wife.

‘Such in the main are the degenerate dregs of humanity, whom we have never, I regret to admit, learned to curb or eliminate,’ Pardew was saying, as though into some kind of closing recitation, ‘characterized chiefly by their stupidity and depravity and their inability to play the game—’

‘Oh yes?’ said my wife vaguely.

Patrick, his hands full of camera gear, paused at the door to pucker his battered lips at me and wink, then pranced out after the cameraman, my wife still holding the door open. Her lips moved as though she might be counting. Behind us, the actors, laughing and shouting (‘And their, eh, deformed personalities, you see …’), were flowing into the hallway. ‘Well, back to selling pencils!’ ‘Christ, Vadge, get those things in a hammock before somebody steps on ’em!’ ‘No, believe me, baby, we got a backer!’ ‘I believe you, Zack. Call me at the beach.’ ‘Somebody gimme a chaser!’ Fats called out, hauling on his down jacket. ‘A tailpiece for ole Fats — lemme hear it from the heart!’ The Inspector had long since fallen silent. He peered down at my wife, nibbling his moustache. ‘Thank you so much for coming,’ she said.

Fats chasséd past us, waggling his hands beside his face and singing, ‘You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone,’ my wife pushing the storm door open just in time to keep him from crashing through it. ‘Ta-DAAA-AA-aa-aaa …’ The police marched out behind him. ‘Watch where you step,’ I could hear the Inspector mutter peevishly, his voice echoey in the night. ‘It’s really too bad about Vachel,’ my wife said with a sigh.

‘Yes, well … I never did like him very much, though.’

‘I know.’ The actors had applauded Fats’ exit and Brenda was now giving them all a hug. ‘But he was always good with children.’

‘Next party at our house, everybody! Promise!’

Hilario leaned toward us and said: ‘Your keetchen, do you know, she ees smokeeng!’

‘What —?!’ Yes, I could see it, rolling in from the back like some kind of mephitic vapors.

‘It’s all right, Gerald,’ my wife said. ‘Fats just left some things on the burner. As usual.’

‘Ees what you call a bloody mass, no?’

‘Shall I go see if—?’

‘No.’ She took my arm. ‘I already turned it off.’ There was a peculiar gentle flush in her cheeks. ‘Dolph and Louise are back there, making up,’ she whispered.

‘Ah …’

‘Bren!’ cried Fats, staggering wide-eyed back in through the front door, making us all jump. ‘My god, Bren! It’s that plumber! Whatsisface!’

‘What—? Oh no! No—?!’ She came rushing silkily past us, but paused to give us both a hug — ‘You’re a super guy, Ger,’ she breathed in my ear, her gum snapping, ‘you’ve got a great heart … and wonderful hands!’ — then clambered on out behind Fats: ‘God! I can’t believe it, Fats!’

‘Hey, poison curls!’ Zack Quagg exclaimed. ‘Our angel descends!’

I looked up, we all did: it was Alison’s husband, escorting Alison down the stairs in front of him, followed by Olga and Prissy Loo. Alison was dressed now in Brenda’s red pants suit, a couple of sizes too big for her, stained at the knees, the cuffs flopping around her bare feet. The actors all applauded. Alison, her makeup smeared across her face, hair snarled, stumbled when she saw me. Her eyes searched mine. Was her lip quivering? She held the baggy-kneed red pants up with one hand. There was a patch sewn on the crotch now, probably one of Sally Ann’s, which, even from here, I could see was in the shape of a road sign.

‘And have we got a show for you!’

Alison’s husband sniffed. ‘Theater,’ he said frostily, ‘is dead.’

‘What—?’ Zack laughed, staggering back a step. ‘I told you, Zack.’ ‘Is it time for my part?’ asked Prissy Loo. She was wearing Beni’s plumed hat and false moustache, my fingerless golfing gloves, and one of my mother-in-law’s girdles, ornamented with what looked like rolled-up bloody socks. Olga was trying to stretch my wife’s yellow nightie down below her high muscular croup. Zack spread wide his caped arms as though unfolding a curtain. ‘Hey, ha ha! you gotta be kidding, man!’

Alison’s husband shook his head. ‘No, it’s dead. All over. I see that now.’ He prodded Alison on down the stairs.

‘Aw, goddamn it, Prissy, you overdid it!’

‘Well, that was a short run.’

‘Don’t blame me, Zack, it was Olga’s idea.’

‘What idea?’

‘Yah, goot! In a minute!’

‘DANGER: BUSY CROSSROADS,’ the patch said. She stood there in front of me, echoed dismally in the hall mirror, clutching the baggy pants, looking lost. ‘Did you bring a coat?’ my wife asked politely. ‘It’s boring, it’s repetitious, and it’s dead-ended,’ said Alison’s husband. ‘And it’s a lie.’

‘Wait a minute, what do you know about theater, you dumb fuck?’ Quagg exploded.

‘Hell, he’s nothing but a goddamn preacher, Zack.’

‘One goddamn night of pissing around, and you think you’ve seen it all? You weren’t even in at the death, fer chrissake!’

‘Don’t tell me it’s all over!’ Prissy Loo wailed, her moustache listing. ‘Zack, you promised!’

‘What do you know about blocking and backing, asshole? Glue guns and gobos?’ Alison’s husband only smiled faintly. ‘What about conventions, eh? Peripety, goddamn it? Teasers, timing—’

‘Timing?’ Alison’s husband gazed round at us, stroking his beard. ‘Peripety?’ He reached forward suddenly and yanked at the top half of the red pants suit as though to whip it off: Alison clutched at it and her pants fell down. He stepped on them and, as she bent over to grab them up, he shoved his hand in under his shirt and cracked a mock fart in his armpit. She blushed, tugging frantically at the trapped pants; he reached forward and grasped the nape of his wife’s neck, pressing her head down. He poked his finger up her rectum, felt around, came out with one of Ginger’s kerchiefs — in fact a whole string of them, knotted together: out they came, one after another, fluttering in the air as he tossed them high, more kerchiefs than you could imagine there’d be room for in there. And at the end, knotted to the last kerchief: the Inspector’s white silk scarf! The door opened behind us: it was Fred. ‘Excuse me, the Chief seems to have left his — ah! thank you …’ There was a burst of applause and whistles (Fred backed out with the scarf, hand to holster, looking nonplussed, or pretending to), even Zack had to join in. ‘You know, I think that sonuvabitch was just using me!’ he laughed.

‘You!’ cried Prissy Loo.

‘Yah?’ said Olga.

My wife was giggling beside me; I think it was the first time I’d seen her laugh all night. I smiled: just as Alison straightened up, flushed and hurt, to stare at me. I tried to erase the smile, but it seemed frozen there, as though stretched forcibly over my teeth. ‘The bright moon is serenely reflected on the stream,’ Hoo-Sin said, gazing into the hall mirror behind Alison: ‘What is it for?’ Well. I could only hope she understood. I tried to think of some way of explaining it all to her (‘Gosh, I give up,’ Janny yawned, ‘can you give me a hint?’), or at least of deflecting some of her anger, something about theater perhaps, or time, but before I could come up with anything, she had stumbled out past me, red pants binding her ankles, had tripped at the threshold, and completed her exit on her hands and knees, chased by another round of laughter and applause.

‘Whoo-hoo!’

‘Look at them blue hereafters!’

‘Just as well her parents missed that,’ my wife murmured.

‘That was somethin’ special!’

Alison’s husband paused at the door, all eyes on him still, his on me. Out in the front yard, someone shouted: ‘Hey hey! What wuzzat just creeped past?’ ‘I dunno, Dugan, but it was wearin’ the biggest smile I ever seen!’ ‘I believe you still have our watches,’ he said.

‘Oh yes, sorry! I’ll get them!’ But my wife stopped me: ‘I’m afraid someone … they’re not there anymore, Gerald.’

‘The watches, too—?!’

‘This way, squad! I think we found the source!’

Alison’s husband snorted disdainfully and touched his beard. Outside there was drunken laughter, curses, stumbling on the steps: ‘Wah! Look out! This place is alive!’

‘However, if they turn up later—’ my wife began, reaching forward to take his hand, but he turned his back on her and strode stiffly out the door, a final ripple of appreciative applause trailing in his wake.

‘Whoa!’ exclaimed someone outside who, from the sound of it, had just tumbled down the porch stairs.

‘Down boy!’

‘Yowzer!’

‘Where was that dude goin’?’

‘Hard to say, Doog, but he was either awful sober — or awful drunk!’

‘I dunno when I’ve had so much fun!’ Charley Trainer laughed, throwing his arms around us both. Janny stood by with her hands pressed together below her chin, eyes closed, listening to Hoo-Sin, while around us, some people I’d never seen before were pounding and clattering through the door, singing, shouting greetings, brandishing bottles and bits of clothing. ‘Oh dear,’ my wife sighed, shrinking into Charley’s arms. One guy was carrying a woman, wall-eyed with drink, on his shoulders: she failed to see the doorframe as he passed under it and smacked it with her face. ‘Somebody knock?’ asked the guy confusedly, swinging around, still holding the woman’s ankles and so wearing her collapsed body over his shoulders like a cape. ‘Ha ha! Who’s there?’ called another and Charley hugged us close: ‘You guys’re the cream!’

‘Leda!’

‘Leda who, Moose?’

‘I mean it, Big G! My heart is full!’

I could feel my wife’s heart emptying out, but she smiled and said, her voice catching: ‘I–I’m so glad you could all come …’ No one heard her but me — and Charley Trainer, who, pitching forward drunkenly, knocked his head on hers and growled: ‘Me too — but lemme tell ya, I hadda work like hell!’

‘Hey hey hey! Izzat little Bunky Baird?’

‘Leda horse to water?’

‘Axel!’

‘Do we know these people?’ I whispered.

‘Naw! Guess again!’

‘And I’ll tell you no lies?’

‘I think we may have met some of them at Wilma’s house a long time ago, when she was still married to Miles …’

‘Miles?’

‘Benedetto!’

‘A Leda goes a long way?’

‘Gwendoline! My love!’

‘Love the silk pocket, Beni! Très charmant!’

The new arrivals were spreading recklessly through the house, as though the place itself were hemorrhaging. ‘Please,’ I said, but no one was listening, they were all (‘Ha ha, we give up, Moose!’) hooting and laughing. ‘My oh my, look what’s not in that nightie!’ ‘Hey, I’m looking for Serena!’ ‘Is that rhubarb pie?’ ‘She ain’t here, Ralphie!’ ‘Vot’s hoo-bob?’ asked Olga, grinning stupidly and pushing the nightie down past her navel: at the back, it climbed halfway to her shoulders. ‘… Like so many particles of dust …,’ Hoo-Sin was murmuring in Janny’s ear, and Charley (‘Am I drunk, or are those lamps up onna ceiling?’), dipping his heavy head, smirked hopefully: ‘Hey, Ger, heard any good jokes lately?’ At the back, they were fanning the kitchen door (‘Leda me beside distilled waters—!’) to clear the smoke. I could hear the refrigerator door whumping, drawers being opened and closed like marching feet.

‘… Floating, rising …’

‘You’re drunk, Claudine — and the lamps are on the ceiling!’

‘… Disappearing like clouds …’

‘ — Before da party’s SOBER!’

‘Send your ole dad home with a l’il chuckle, whaddaya say?’

‘Haw haw!’

‘I’m fresh out, Charley. Nothing’s funny.’

‘… In the vast emptiness of unending space …’

‘Moose, you’re a scream!’

‘Aw, c’mon, Big G, have a heart!’ Charley pleaded, and Janny, her head tipping to Hoo-Sin’s shoulder, sighed: ‘You’ve got such a nice voice, Hoo-Sin …’

‘Do you think they’ll want something to eat, Gerald?’

‘No!’

‘… It nearly puts me to sleep …’

‘Well, y’don’ hafta be sore about it, buddy!’

‘Sorry, Charley, I meant—’

‘Whatever thoughts you have, they are not to dwell on anything,’ Hoo-Sin said softly as Janny’s head snuggled in under her chin and her hands dropped to her sides. ‘That’s easy, Hoo-Sin …’

‘Why don’t you tell him the one about giving the testicles to the girl, Gerald,’ my wife suggested, looking small and vulnerable under Charley’s arm.

‘Testicles?’ Charley grinned broadly.

‘You already have,’ I said.

Hoo-Sin reached down under Janny’s sagging knees to pick her up. ‘We return to the origin,’ she whispered, as Janny wriggled closer, ‘and remain where we have always been …’

‘Flo! Where’d you find the fodder?’

‘No, the one about how you find out if she’s ticklish or not.’

‘In the back there, Rocco, but you gotta scrape it off the pans …’

‘How you find out — oh Jesus!’ Charley doubled up, roaring with laughter.

‘You find that funny?’ I asked in some amazement. At the foot of the stairs, Prissy Loo shook her plumed hat (‘Chet!’) and stamped her foot. ‘But you said you’d wait, Zack!’

‘I guess — whoosh! hah! — I guess it’s all,’ Charley wheezed, falling back on the hall bench, holding his quaking sides (‘Ha ha! Not Chet!’), ‘in how you tell it!’

‘I knew he’d like it, Gerald,’ my wife said. ‘Now go ahead and tell it.’ Whereupon Charley, tears in his eyes (‘You’re a real heel, Zack!’), nearly fell off the bench.

‘You kids off?’

‘Careful, Charley, you’ll hurt your back again.’

‘Oh shit! — hoo ha hah—!’

‘Yes, thanks a lot, Mr Quagg! As soon as we’re in our new place—’

‘— I awready did!’

‘Better come quick, Zack! One of those drunken yobs gave Olga something heavy and she’s freaking! She thinks she’s a bird and keeps throwing herself at all the walls!’

‘What am I, some kinda nursemaid?’ Zack protested.

‘Say, where’d you hide your sewing machine?’ asked Prissy Loo, slapping over (‘Well, keep in touch, kid—!’) in her big galoshes. ‘I went in there to sew these sanitary napkins on my costume and—’

‘You mean it isn’t there?’ my wife exclaimed.

‘And let me see what you write!’

‘It probably cost me my part!’

‘That’s right,’ someone said (‘You bet!’), ‘your dressing table was gone, too,’ I said.

‘Unh, Big G …? I — hoof! — I can’ get up …!’

‘The dressing table! But that old thing is worthless!’

‘Well, aw-moss!’ yuffhuffed Charley, struggling clumsily, ‘but, Jesus, don’ go tellin’ everybody!’

Anatole gave me a hand pulling him to his feet, while Hoo-Sin stood patiently by, holding Janny, now breathing deeply, in her arms. Howard had joined us and, peering down through Tania’s half-lens glasses, was trying to button his coat, while at the same time holding on to the sheaf of drawings the tall cop had made of the scene of the crime. ‘Here, let me help, Uncle Howard,’ Sally Ann said.

‘What I don’t understand, Gerald, is how they got all those things out of here?’ In the dining room we could hear Olga crashing around, yelling: ‘Tveet! Tveet!’ ‘Tell her she’s a fucking flower!’ Zack was shouting. ‘Or a stone!’

‘Cute,’ said Prissy Loo, fingering Sally Ann’s dirndl.

‘You gotta catch her first, Zack!’

‘’At wuzza bess laugh I had all night! Hoo!’

‘Do you think they had a truck?’

Anatole cleared his throat. ‘Uh, do you want to tell them, Sally Ann …?’ he said, blushing.

‘Well …’ She took Anatole’s arm, looked at each of us in turn.

‘Tveet — squawk!’

‘Oh oh,’ said Prissy Loo, puckering up.

‘We’re … we’re going to get married.’

‘I knew it!’ wailed Prissy Loo and burst into tears. ‘I always cry at the clinches!’ She planted a blubbery moustachioed kiss on Sally Ann’s cheek and Anatole’s (‘That’s wonderful,’ my wife was saying, ‘I’m so happy for you!’), then went clopping off into the living room in her plumed hat and decorated girdle. ‘Whuzzat? Whuzzat?’ asked Charley blearily, careening around, and I said: ‘But how will you live?’

‘Oh, Gerald!’ my wife scolded, taking my arm. ‘Hush now!’

‘That’s all right,’ said Sally Ann gently. ‘I knew he’d be upset.’

‘I’m going to drop out of school and write for Mr Quagg,’ Anatole explained. ‘And Dickie’s getting Sally Ann a job in one of his massage parlors.’

‘You see, Gerald?’

‘And we’re going to live with Uncle Howard,’ Sally Ann added, taking the older man’s arm. ‘He needs us, and we need him. Now that …’ Her voice broke and Anatole’s eyes began to water up.

‘I assume you are aware, Gerald, that the “Susanna” is missing,’ Howard said in his rigid pedantic way.

I nodded. ‘And not only that, Howard, they even took—’

‘Such carelessness, Gerald, is utterly inexcusable.’

‘Come along now, Uncle Howard,’ Anatole said huskily.

‘Whoa there, young fella!’ exclaimed Charley, holding Anatole back. ‘’Sa tough ole world out there, son — you can’ go get married on nothin’!’

Anatole looked offended. ‘It’s not nothing, Mr Trainer. Mr Quagg says I have a lot of talent and—’

‘No, hell, I know that, but juss hole on, goddamn it!’ He fumbled in his pockets. ‘Art, Gerald,’ Howard harrumphed, scowling at me over the spectacles, ‘is all we have. It is not a joke.’ Olga came bounding through on all fours, more like a lamb or a goat now than a bird, the yellow nightie up around her ears, pursued by Gudrun, Zack, and some of the newcomers. ‘Maaa-aa-aa!’ she bleated, frisking along into the living room, her head stretched high. ‘Come here, Olga! Stop that!’ ‘It is not a decoration, simple bric-a-brac. It is not a mere entertainment.’ ‘Maybe if she thought she was a dog, we could get a leash on her!’ ‘Maaa-aa-aa!’ ‘Just so she don’t start droppin’ pellets!’ panted Horner, limping along behind, and the guy with him stopped and pointed: ‘Hey! I know you jokers! Ha! I seen you in the photos!’ ‘Art, Gerald—’ ‘Photos?’ my wife asked. ‘ — Is the precipitate of the human spirit…’ Charley dumped all his change into the pockets of Sally Ann’s dress — or in that general direction: coins splattered the floor, rolled at our feet. ‘Yeah, some guy from the newspaper’s floggin’ ’em out in your front yard like souvenirs.’ ‘There! ’Sall I got, kids,’ said Charley, emptying his wallet and thrusting the bills at Anatole, ‘but, well — I mean, god-damn it—!’

‘I don’t go much for the shots of stiffs or all the blood and shit …’

‘Oh, Uncle Charley!’ cried Sally Ann, throwing her arms around him.

‘… The repository of the only meaning we have in this world …’

‘… But there’s one of some ole girl peein’ off the teeter-totter out in the backyard that’ll — Christ! — break your heart!’

‘I know, Howard, but—’

‘That must have been Wilma,’ my wife said.

‘In the end, Gerald, and I say this with all seriousness, you are a dangerous person!’

Hoo-Sin, carrying Janny, bowed slightly and backed out the door, Howard (‘I intend therefore to sue you for the remaining pieces in your possession,’ he declared, and my wife said: ‘Yes, you must come again soon!’), Anatole, and then Charley following. Some of the people chasing Olga had peeled off here in the hallway and it was filling up again. Not a familiar face among them. ‘Is that the only bottle you could find, Carmody?’ one of them asked. I recognized it. Alas. Central to the art of love, I knew (‘Yeah’n taze like piss, buh’ this time nigh’, who givshit?’), as to the art of theater, was the essential fusion of process and product, an acknowledgment of the inherent doubleness — one’s particularity, one’s universality, one’s self, one’s persona — of the actor/lover. In fact (‘I’m so glad you found each other,’ my wife was saying, ‘it’s just about the nicest thing that happened all night!’), I’d said something like this to her earlier tonight, and she’d agreed, probably it was while she was fingering my nipple, we’d seemed in perfect harmony, perfect collusion, and yet … ‘Gerry?’ I realized Sally Ann, hanging back from the others, had taken my hand. ‘Try not to be so sad, Gerry, it’s for the best, believe me — but I promise I’ll never forget you!’ Her eyes were full of tears and they were tumbling down her cheeks. ‘I–I was blind until you opened my eyes to love …!’ She tried to say something more, but it was choked off by a stifled sob. She kissed my mouth and went running out the door.

My wife, looking on, smiled and took my arm. There was a loud spewing sound behind us, someone gagging. ‘Young love …!’ she sighed.

‘Goddamn it, Carmody! This is piss!’

‘We’ll have to think of something for a wedding present …’

‘Hey, you guys! Come in here! You don’t wanna miss this!’ I could hear toward the back what sounded like (‘’Fya don’ like it, shifface, giv’t back!’) wild guttural laughter, utterly insane, and the crack of whips. Or belts.

‘Madre de dios! ees getteeng roff!’ Hilario gasped, staggering out of the dining room just as the others (something crashed) went pushing in. He wobbled toward us with his legs exaggeratedly bowed and his eyes bugged out. ‘Now Olga theenk he ees a horse and everybody ees rideeng heem! Hair.’

‘Where have they all come from, Hillie?’ This never used to happen. Michelle’s dream of the old lady’s infested navel came to mind: it’s what comes from growing old. ‘What am I going to do?’

‘You wan’ get reed?’

‘Sure, but—?’

‘Seemple like a tart, Cherry! Don’ cry!’

My wife, rummaging through the hall closet, said: ‘My good fur wrap is missing, too.’

‘La serpiente — what you say the dance-sneak, no?’ He reached forward as though gripping a waist and did a little rumba step. The guy they were calling Carmody, hugging his pale green bottle and muttering, ‘I know wha’m doing, wobbled past us (‘Yippee! Let ’er rip!’ shouted someone in the dining room) and disappeared through the front door.

‘Look out!’

‘Yow—!!’ Crash!

‘Eet always work!’

‘That would be nice, Hillie, I’ll put some music on,’ my wife offered, but just then Charley came banging back through the front door and grabbed us both: ‘Wait, you guys! I forgot!’ ‘Pairmeet me!’ Hilario smiled, bowing from the waist. He shuffled gracefully off toward the living room, hands still on the imaginary waist. ‘I sold my car!’

‘Your car?’

‘Yeah, the big station wagon. Your buddy — travel agent guy. Hey, whaddaya cryin’ about, Ger? I got a fan-tas-tic deal!’ He fished around in his jacket pockets, came up with a crumpled check. The crazy whinnying had stopped. I could hear the music now in the living room. Hilario was turning the volume up. ‘See? Awmoss twice what I paid for it!’

‘Charley, isn’t this check signed “Waterloo”?’

‘’Ass right — hah! ole Waterloo — you ’member! That dumb shit!’

I glanced up at my wife: she sighed and shook her head. ‘I showed them everything …’

‘Whuzzamatter?’ He stared in puzzlement at the check, held it up to the light.

‘Listen, Charley, you take my car for now.’ I handed him the keys. The music was getting louder.

‘Hunh? Oh yeah, thanks, ole buddy!’ He wrapped his arms heavily around me. ‘Hey, I love ya, Ger! I mean it!’ He hauled out his handkerchief and wiped my eyes and then his own. Over his shoulder I could see a line of people, hands on one another’s hips and led by Hilario (he winked and raised his long fingers in a V), come hopping and kicking out of the living room, all singing along with the music, now turned up full volume: ‘Don’t LAUGH, it may be LOVE …!’ The woman who’d hit the door lintel with her face was still out cold, the guy who’d carried her in now dragging her along by one ankle. As they wound toward the back into the dining room (‘Hey! wait for me!’ people shouted, grabbing on to the tail), Dolph and Louise came squeezing out past them, holding hands, looking flustered and confused. Beside me, my wife caught her breath, and Charley, pulling away (‘It’s YOU I’m thinkin’ OF!’), said: ‘Great goddamn party, Big G! Bess I ever wen’ to!’

‘I guess we gotta second that,’ Dolph grinned.

‘Is it true, then?’ asked my wife, and Louise blushed and nodded. They fell into a big tearful embrace and then Dolph hugged my wife and Louise hugged me: she was trembling and I thought I heard her gasp something about ‘love you’ or ‘because of you,’ it was hard to tell because things were getting pretty noisy. They both hugged Charley, who seemed to have no idea what it was all about, then hugged us again (they’d been standing in the smoke too long and smelled a bit charred), Louise now almost unable to breathe for excitement. While Dolph had his arms around me (‘I love it!’ Charley was saying. ‘God-damn it, Louise!’), I stage-whispered in his ear: ‘If you grab my buttocks, Dolph, I’ll bite your ear off!’ Dolph laughed, a squeaky but joyful laugh, unlike any we’d heard in over a year, and my wife, in tears, hugged them both again. ‘I’m so happy for you!’ she cried, and Charley, punching Dolph in the ribs, said: ‘’Sbeaut-iful! I mean it!’

Hilario’s snake dance, meanwhile, had come winding out of the living room again, led now by Olga, who seemed to think she was a frog: she was down on her haunches, hopping along, her big cheeks bouncing rhythmically off the floor, and shouting ‘Borp!’ every time she leaped into the air. The line coiled to the rear of the hall, Olga going ‘Borp! Borp!’ in front of them, then swung round and hopped toward us again.

‘Life is ONLY what you SEE …!’

Dolph said something about influence, but the noise in the hall was deafening. ‘WHAT—?’

‘I SAID YOU GUYS—’

‘Borp!’

‘Here they come!’

‘So come DANCE along with ME!’

‘Look out—!’

My wife flung the door open and we pulled apart to let them by, but Olga, as though in panic, stopped dead at the threshold. Hilario prodded her effectively — ‘BORP!’ — in the behind.

‘You’re a genius, Hillie!’ I shouted.

He laughed, kicking. ‘I promeese dem all w’en we outside we EAT de FROG!’ And then he was gone, the long line hopping and whooping behind: ‘Won’t you TRY to under-STAND …’

My wife seemed to be saying something. ‘WHAT?’ I cried. Horner had his hand up the skirt of the woman in front of him: she bounced rigidly as though on coiled springs, her eyes glazed, mouth agape.

‘I said, I get the feeling half my wardrobe walked out the door tonight!’ She pointed at Beni, who, one hand cupping his silk codpiece affectionately, winked and shouted out a ‘Ciao!’ ‘Or hopped!’

‘If you’re the GLOVE, then I’m the HAND!’

A guy with a runny nose and what looked like dried vomit down his shirtfront staggered out of the line and threw his arms around us. ‘G’nigh’!’ he shouted. ‘’Nkyou fr’inviding us!’ He seemed to be crying. ‘C’mon, Boomer! you’ll get left behind!’ ‘ ’S been so … shit! … so—’ ‘Soup’s on, Boomer!’ ‘So goddamn … I don’ know howta … God! yareally SWELL!’ he sobbed and grabbed up my wife’s hand and kissed it. Or maybe he was only wiping his nose on it. Then he stumbled back into the line, disappearing through the door.

Slowly the sound wound away from us as the dancers snaked past. A guy with an eyepatch waved a bottle at me, Bunky blew a kiss — ‘Noble said to say thanks, Gerry, thanks a lot!’ — Scarborough moved lugubriously out of step. ‘If I’m the HAND, then you’re the GLOVE …!’ they sang, kicking, the music still blasting away. The woman getting dragged along at the tail seemed to be coming around at last. ‘Phil …?’ she asked as her head bumped over the threshold. ‘Where am I, Phil …’

‘So don’t LAUGH …’

I shoved the door shut, leaned against it, turned the latch. ‘Whew!’ I gasped.

‘What happened to Dolph and Louise?’ my wife asked, looking around in amazement. ‘And Charley—!’

‘I don’t know!’ I said. We were still shouting. ‘They must have joined in!’ She shrugged, then said something I couldn’t hear. About the kitchen maybe: she wandered off that way. ‘I’ll go turn the music down!’

In the empty living room, Michelle danced alone, wan under the bright lights from the ceiling, drifting wraithlike through the wreckage, hands crossed at her breast, eyes closed. When I rejected the tone-arm, the sudden silence was shocking, almost physical in its impact, and I heard her gasp faintly, frozen in her movement. ‘I guess it’s that time, Michelle.’ The deadly silence was eery and I was almost tempted to put another record on. I thought: it used to be more subtle than this.

‘Have you been crying?’ she whispered.

‘Yes, well,’ I said, and wiped my cheek, ‘I hate goodbyes.’

‘Once, when I was modeling for Tania …’ She hesitated. ‘…This was a long time ago … I was young then …’ Her head dipped slightly. ‘… Just a little bit of hair … “like a boy’s moustache,” she said …’ She seemed lost in her own reverie. ‘…Trying to help me feel more … relaxed …’

‘Michelle?’

‘What? Yes …’ She clasped her hands at the back of her neck, her elbows in front of her face. Her intricate lace blouse was unbuttoned, tails out over a wrinkled skirt. ‘That day, she was apologizing for keeping me in the same pose for so long … and it was true … my whole body ached … it was awful … I wanted to fly right out of myself …’ She lifted her head, stretching her neck against her clasped hands, then let her hands separate to slide forward and support her chin. ‘ “But an unfinished painting frightens me,” she said …’ Yes, ‘a bare patch of canvas,’ she’d once remarked to me, ‘is like some terrible ultimate nakedness …’ ‘… I can still see her face as she said it … her eyes …’ ‘… Reality exposing itself obscenely …’ ‘ “I can’t sleep,” she said, “I can’t eat, I can’t even think properly until I’ve completed it … I become cruel to myself and cruel to others …” ’ I remembered how she’d turned away and seemed almost to shudder. ‘… “And then … when it’s suddenly done …” ’ Michelle dropped her hands limply at her sides, lowered her chin. ‘… “There’s this terrible emptiness …” ’

I watched her drift away, stepping barefoot through the butts and crumpled napkins, spilled food, the debris from Scarborough’s set (near the cavemouth, Malcolm Mee’s cast-off plastic wrap lay like an insect’s husk, glittering and dead), and, though I wanted her to leave, I felt abandoned at the same time, left behind in a room (why were the windows so bare, the lights so harsh?) full of grave disquiet. The bloodied drapes and linens had turned dark and dirty. Sticking out from under the collapsed ping-pong table: the chalk drawing of a pair of legs. Scarborough had rigged the cords of all the lamps to a kind of switching system in a box dangling just behind the proscenium arch, but I was afraid to touch it. It had a rickety yet lethal look, as though it might go off. I needed a drink, but I didn’t want to go in where Vic was, so I stepped into the makeshift cave, away from the flat lights and stripped windows, and sniffed at the half-filled glasses. I found one that smelled more or less like scotch, but just as I tipped it back, I noticed what looked like pubic hairs floating in it — I spat it out. But it was only someone’s false eyelashes. I sank back into the gold couch in there, feeling suddenly very tired. We’d have to clean up tomorrow. Outside, in the hallway, I could hear my wife saying good night to Michelle, her voice thin in the hollow silence (‘Goodness, Michelle, where did you — yawn! — get those nasty toothmarks …?’), and it reminded me of the time when, spelunking in Greece, we’d come on this cavernous pit of human bones. What she’d said then — thinly, hollowly — was: ‘Did you notice? None of them have heads …!’

Of course … that wasn’t my wife …

‘Somehow,’ she said now, gazing around wearily (she was standing in front of me, easing her shoes off: I hadn’t seen her come up), ‘parties don’t seem as much fun as they used to.’ She sat down beside me, curling under my arm, the one I could still move, and tucked her feet up. ‘It’s almost as though the parties have started giving us instead of us giving the parties …’ She loosened my shirt, lay her head sleepily against my chest. ‘It gives me a … funny feeling …’

‘Yes …’

‘Still, I guess it’s worth it …’

The woman in Greece had said something much like that about making love. She’d had an appetite for the unusual, the perverse even, and I too was pretty jaded in those days, frustrated by the commonplaces of sex, bored with all its trite conventions — the state of the art, so to speak — and so in need of ever greater novelty, ever greater risk-taking, in order to arouse myself to any kind of performance. What worked for her — and thus for us both — was to be unexpectedly violated in a more or less public place, the key to a successful orgasm being not so much the setting or the use of force, as the element of surprise. It was a kind of essential trigger for her — like having to scare someone out of her hiccups. Thus, I might walk her through public parks, churches, department stores, taunting her with exotic possibility while yet denying her, only to jump on her back in the busy hotel lobby while asking for the key. Or I might arrange a night out at some mysterious destination, coax her into dressing up elaborately, then get her out of the hotel, hail a taxi — and suddenly violate her on the sidewalk just as she was stepping into the cab. I don’t know why I thought that pitful of decayed atrocity victims would work. Perhaps because it seemed so unlikely. But nothing happened. In fact it was a disaster. We got filthy, she hurt her back on the bones, got her nose bloodied, I cracked my elbow, we were both choking with dust, and when it was over — or rather, when there was no point in going on — she told me just to leave her alone and go away. I never saw her again, my last vision of her being sprawled out there in the — ‘Ouch!’

‘Sorry, Gerald, is something …?’ She had been stroking me through the trousers and had caught the place where Jim had nicked me. She opened my trousers carefully, eased my shorts down. ‘Oh, I see …’ She licked it gently, then took the crown into her mouth, coating it with warm saliva. ‘Bat’s a bad bwuise, too,’ she observed, touching my tummy, then let her mouth slide gradually down the shaft. I reached for the hem of her dress and she shifted her hips, turning her knees toward the back of the couch.

There was a sudden crash, the whole house shook — I lurched away, reared up — and then a scraping, another crash, a rumble, something rolling in the street. She closed her mouth around my penis again, curled her hands behind my hips, tugged at the back of my trousers.

‘But … my god, what was that—?!’

‘Pwobabwy Chawwey puwwing out ubba dwibe…

‘Ah …’ She eased my trousers down below my hips — outside, there was another crunch, the distant squealing of tires — then pulled them away from between my thighs. She put my hand back on the hem of her dress. There was a tag there, I noticed, stamped by the city police department. ‘Wewacsh, Gewawd,’ she whispered. I liked the pushing of her tongue against the consonants and, surrendering to that, slid down toward her knees. ‘Tell me again …’

‘Wewacsh, Gewawd …?’

‘Yes … good …’ It all comes down to words, as I might have argued with Vic. Or parts of them. ‘Is this a new dress?’

‘Yeumf,’ she said, working my trousers down to my ankles: I lifted one foot out and raised it to the couch. ‘Do woo wike it?’

‘Right now, it’s in my way …’

‘You say the nicest things, Gerald,’ she sighed, taking her mouth away. She located the fastener, unhooked it, pushed at the skirt: I pulled it away and, stretching forward, eased it past her feet. ‘What are you doing with pancake makeup on the back of your neck?’ she asked.

‘I don’t remember.’

I tugged at her panty girdle, stretching it down past her soft hips, and she took my penis in her mouth again, warming it all over, closing one hand tenderly around my testicles. She kneaded them softly, pulling them toward her as though gently pumping them, sliding her other hand around to stroke my buttocks, finger my anus. Only one arm worked for getting her clothes off her: I left the dead one between her legs for the time being and she squeezed her thighs around it. ‘Just … a minute …’ The panties and stockings came off in a tangle. I ran my tongue slowly up her leg from her calf, past her knee, and up the inside of her thigh: she spread her legs and, as I nosed into her vulva, lifted the top one over my head. ‘Mmmmf!’ She had her finger up my anus now and was sucking rhythmically, her mouth full of foamy saliva like a warm bubble bath. I had found the nub of her clitoris with the tip of my tongue and now worked against it as though trying to pry it open. I reached round from behind, dipped my fingers into her moist vagina, pushed one of them up her rectum — ‘Ouch!’ she cried, letting my penis go.

‘Sorry …’ I pushed my nose deeper between her thighs to have a closer look: her anus was drawn up in a tight little pucker, inflamed and cracked, slightly discolored as though rubbed with ashes. ‘How did you—?’

‘You know. The police.’ She paused, holding my penis by the root. Perhaps she was studying it. Or simply reflecting.

I pressed my chin against the hood of her clitoris, gazing thoughtfully at her crinkled anus, remembering now her position on the butcherblock (as though being changed, I’d thought as they lowered her), her thighs stretching back, belly wrinkling, tiny little red lines running down her cheeks. ‘What … what’s an exploding sausage …?’ I asked uneasily.

‘Oh, Gerald!’ she laughed and wagged my penis playfully. ‘Don’t you know a joke when you hear one?’

‘Ah …’ I stroked her buttocks gently as my penis returned to its soothing bath, rubbing my chin rhythmically against her pubic knoll. Like veined marble, they’d seemed to me at the time, as I remembered, something like that, though now they sparkled with a kind of fresh dewy innocence (it was the kind of feeling I had between my own legs now) under the bright overhead light. She was beginning to grind vigorously against my chin, thighs cuffing my ears, so I moved my mouth back over her rosy lips, dipping my tongue into their warm mushy depths — I was aswim in warm mushy depths, we were both—

‘Say, uh … where the hell is everybody?’ someone asked. I peered up between my wife’s convulsing thighs, my own hips bucking against the cushions: it was Knud, standing bleary-eyed over us, rubbing the back of his neck. ‘Crikey!’ he muttered, his voice phlegmy with sleep. ‘You’ll never believe the dream I just had!’

‘Everybody’s gone home, Knud,’ I gasped, my chin sliding now in the dense juices beneath it.

‘Hunh?’ He frowned at his empty wrist. My wife had stopped pumping her head up and down the shaft of my penis, but she was still sucking at it rhythmically and stroking it with her tongue, marking time, as it were, her throbbing clitoris searching for my mouth. ‘Even Kitty? Jeez, what time is it?’

‘Everybody’s gone, Knud. It’s late.’

‘Holy cow, I must have slept through the whole goddam party,’ he rumbled, still staring at his wrist. He yawned, belched. ‘Boy! What a dream, though!’ My wife’s hips had stopped pitching. She held my testicles and one buttock firmly, but had let my penis slide past her teeth into one cheek. ‘I was like in some kind of war zone, see, only everyone was all mixed up and you didn’t know who was on your side—’

‘Not now, Knud,’ my wife panted, letting me go and twisting round to look up at him. Her buttocks spread a bit, giving me a clearer view of Knud: he was puffy-eyed and rumpled, tie undone, shirttail out, pants damp and sticky, and he looked like he needed a shave.

‘No, listen, it was a lot longer. And really weird. Since you couldn’t be sure who anybody was, see, just to be safe you naturally had to kill everyone — right? Ha ha! you wouldn’t believe the blood and gore! And all in 3-D and full color, too, I kid you not! I kept running into people and asking them: “Where am I?” They’d say: “What a loony,” or something like that — and then I’d chop their heads off, right?’

‘Please, Knud—?’

He glanced down at my penis withering in my wife’s hand, at her buttocks flattening out in front of my face. ‘Oh, right … sorry …’ He gazed around at the living room, running his hand through his snarled hair. ‘Say, do you remember, was I wearing a watch when I came here tonight?’

‘Well …’ my wife began tentatively, raising herself up on one elbow, and I cut in: ‘I can’t remember, Knud.’

He seemed to accept that. He squinted up at the lights on the ceiling for a moment, yawning. ‘Kitty been gone long?’

‘No, you can probably catch her.’ I was beginning to feel my wife’s weight: I gave a little push and she lifted herself off my face.

‘Don’t get up,’ Knud insisted. ‘I can find my own way out.’ He stumbled away, stuffing his shirttail in. My wife, sitting up, let her hand fall idly on my hip. We could hear Knud peeing noisily in the toilet bowl. It was a lonely sound, but not so lonely as the silence all around it. ‘At least it’s working,’ my wife said. She picked up her stockings and panty girdle, toweled between her legs with them. ‘Hey, thanks,’ said Knud from the doorway. ‘See you at the next one.’

‘Flush it, please, Knud!’ my wife called, but he was already out the door. ‘Oh well.’ I curled around her from behind, hugging her close, and she patted my hip with sleepy affection. My penis nuzzled between her cheeks. It felt good there. It was something to think about. ‘Do you notice a kind of chill in here?’ she murmured sleepily.

‘Well, all the windowpanes are out,’ I said. I ran my hand along her thigh where it met the couch. ‘We could try the TV room now that Knud’s vacated it …’

She smiled, a bit wearily, then took my good hand and pulled me to my feet. I kicked off the trousers, still tangled around one foot, and, holding hands, we stepped out from under the tented drapes and linens into the glare and wreckage of what was once our living room. She drew close to me suddenly, pressing her naked hip against mine. I was feeling it, too. As though the house had not been emptying out so much as filling up. The windows, stripped bare and paneless, seemed to crowd in on us, letting the dark night at their edges leak in like some kind of deadly miasma. Hugging each other’s waists, we picked our way barefoot through the shards of broken pots and glassware, the food squashed into the carpet, the chalk outlines and bent cocktail skewers. The wall next to the dining room doorway was splattered and streaked with a mince pie someone must have thrown, and even that, innocent as it was, seemed to add to our feelings of apprehension and melancholy.

The wall above the dining room sideboard was eloquently vacant, the picture hooks sitting on it like a pair of pinned insects. Bottles lay tipped like fallen soldiers, liquor still, amazingly enough, gurgling from one of the open mouths. ‘What exactly happened to Vic?’ my wife whispered.

‘He … got shot …’

‘He makes you think of Tania’s painting, doesn’t he? The one with the eyes …’

‘Well …’

I tugged her on into the TV room. We seemed safer in here somehow. Maybe because the lights were softer (‘Our antique lamps are missing,’ she remarked quietly as though in explanation) or because the drapes were still on the windows and the furniture more or less where it ought to be. Or just the soothing blueness of the walls. I could feel my wife’s hip soften and I too seemed to walk less stiffly, my knees unlocking, my scrotum sliding back into place. Snow played on the TV screen, making a scratchy noise like a needle caught on the outer lip of a record, but I didn’t want to turn it off. It was company of sorts. ‘I’ll put a cassette on,’ I said, letting go her waist, and she sat down on the sofa to wait. ‘Don’t be long, Gerald,’ she yawned.

I couldn’t seem to find any of our old tapes, but there were plenty of new ones scattered about to choose from. ‘How about “The Ancient Arse?” ’ I proposed, reading the labels. ‘Or “Cold Show at the Ice Palace” — or here’s one: “The Garden Peers.” ’

‘I think that’s pee-ers. I’ve seen that one. I don’t want to see it again.’ Ah. I understood now. ‘Below the Stairs,’ ‘Butcherblock Blues,’ ‘Party Time,’ ‘Life’s Mysterious Currents,’ ‘The Host’s Hang-up,’ they all fell dismally into place. ‘Candid Coppers.’ ‘Some Dish.’ ‘Special Favors.’ I felt defeated even before I’d begun. There were tears in my eyes and a strange airy tingling on my exposed behind, like a ghostly remembrance of cold knuckles. I shuddered. ‘Put on “Hidden Treasure,” ’ my wife suggested, unbuttoning her blouse and jacket.

I searched through the pile of cassettes, intent on doing my best, getting through it somehow, but my appetite had faded. ‘It … it will never be the same again,’ I muttered, my throat tight.

‘Tsk. You said that last time, Gerald. After Archie and Emma and …’

‘Yes, well …’ It was true, I’d all but forgotten. ‘But Ros, Vic, Tania …’

‘Roger, Noble …’

‘Yes, that’s right, Roger …’

‘Fiona …’

‘Fiona—?’ I took off the cassette labeled ‘The Wayward Finger,’ and inserted ‘Hidden Treasure,’ rewound it to the beginning, punched the ‘Play’ button, wishing it were all so easy as that.

‘Yes, that was why Cyril was so upset.’ She was completely naked now, stretched out on the sofa, hands behind her head, eyes half-closed, scratching the bottom of her foot with one toe. ‘How do you think Peg found out?’

‘Found out what?’ I took off my shirt, folded it neatly over the back of the sofa, stalling for time. On the TV, my mother-in-law was getting Mark into his pajama bottoms. ‘That’s better,’ she was saying. Mark was holding Peedie, which now had one of Sally Ann’s patches sewn on its underside. ‘HOT TWOT,’ it said.

‘Well, she was pregnant.’

‘Peg was?’

‘No, Fiona.’ I sat down beside her and stroked her thighs, pushing into the warm place between her legs, but my heart wasn’t in it. Mark, on the television screen, was asking: ‘What’s a “twot,” Gramma?’ Behind him, his bedroom door was all smashed in. ‘That’s the whole point, Gerald. Didn’t you notice? It was very obvious.’

‘It’s a … a faraway place,’ my mother-in-law was explaining. ‘A kind of secret garden …’

‘I’m not sure I saw her all night,’ I said. Maybe it was the scar, cold and bluish in the light from the flickering TV image, that was bothering me. I looked around, spied one of her aprons hanging over the edge of the games table.

‘Is it always hot, Gramma?’

‘But you heard Peg carrying on when she left — she was telling everybody!’

‘No, it’s warm. Like a bed. Now you crawl up into yours there, young man.’

‘I guessed I missed that.’ I brought the apron over: ‘Listen, do you mind—?’

‘But then that’s why everyone was feeling so sorry for Cyril after.’ She raised her hips so I could tie the apron on. ‘Will I ever go there someday?’ Mark was asking. ‘You know, to lose them both in one night …’

‘Both—?’

‘It seems inevitable, child …’

‘Yes — my goodness, Gerald, where were you?’ I slid my hand up under the apron: yes, this was better. There was a faint stirring at last between my legs, which my mother-in-law appeared to be overseeing from the TV screen, her face marked by a kind of compassionate sorrow mixed with amusement. ‘Tell me a story about it, Gramma,’ Mark was pleading sleepily, as she led him to the bed. ‘You missed just about everything!’

‘About what?’ she asked.

‘You know, the Twot,’ said Mark, as my hand reached my wife’s pubis. I let my fingers scratch gently in the hair there, while my thumb slid between her thighs and curled into her vagina. ‘Well, once upon a time,’ she began, lifting Mark onto the bed, and I too lifted slightly, then let her down again. ‘You know … sometimes, Gerald …,’ she sighed, closing her hands gently over mine, ‘… it’s almost as if …’ ‘There was a young prince …’

‘… You were at a different party …’

‘Was his name Mark?’

I edged closer to my wife’s hips, my thumb working rhythmically against the ball of my index finger (‘Oh yes … good …’), and she took my wilted organ in her hand. On the television screen, my mother-in-law was tucking Mark in. ‘All right then, a young prince named Mark — but get down under the covers, or I won’t tell it.’

I pushed my thumb as deep as it would go, while at the same time stretching my fingers up her belly, her pubis thrusting at me under the apron, closing around my thumb, her own hand (my mother-in-law had already launched Prince Mark out on his ‘unique adventure,’ but Mark wanted to know: ‘Where’s his mommy and daddy? Is he a orphan?’) stroking me with a gentle but insistent cadence, slowly helping me forget what I’d seen sticking out from under the games table a moment ago when I’d reached for her apron: a foot, wrapped in a plastic bag, one toe poking out. Its nail painted. Cherry red. ‘No, he was the little boy of Beauty and the — her husband …,’ my mother-in-law was saying, as the prospect of orgasm swelled in my mind like a numbing intuition. I gazed down at my wife, her hair unrolled now and loose about her pale shoulders, her thin lips parted, nostrils flared, and thought I could hear Ros whispering: Oh yes, lets!

Oh no …

‘… But he was a big boy now and it was time to leave home and seek his own fortune …’

I was frightened and wanted to stop (‘We are in it, Gerry, we cannot get out of it,’ I seemed to hear Vic mumble right outside the door — had he moved somehow?!), but my wife was blindly pulling me toward her, spreading her legs, the apron wrinkling up between us, and my genitals, it seemed, were quite willing to carry on without the rest of me. ‘We can only stand up to it or chicken out …’

What? Vic—?

‘Was the Beast nice now?’

‘Oh yes, yes …!’ my wife was gasping.

‘Most of the time …’

I’d let go my thumbhold on her pubic handle and, twisting my hand around, my mouth sucking at a breast now (ah, what was it I really wanted? I didn’t want to think about it …), had slid my handful of fingers down there instead, my bodily parts separating out like a houseful of drunken and unruly guests, everybody on his own. She tugged still at that most prodigious member, the host, as it were (‘He paused at the edge of the Enchanted Forest: it was dreary and dangerous and …’), pumping it harder and harder, her other hand grasping my testicles like a doorknob: she gave them a turn, opened, and, going up on my knees as though to offer my behind to the invading emptiness (‘And … dark?’ asked Mark fearfully, hugging his Peedie under the blankets), mouth still at her breast, I crossed over between her legs.

‘Yes …!’

‘Hurry, Gerald!’

‘I’m afraid, Gramma!’

There was a congestion now of fingers and organs, a kind of rubbery crowding up around the portal (‘But he was not alone,’ my mother-in-law was explaining in an encouraging voice), but then she slipped her hands out to snatch at my buttocks, yanking them fiercely toward her as though to keep them from floating away like hot-air balloons — perhaps I’d been worrying about this, I felt like I was coming apart and falling together at the same time — and as her legs jerked upward (‘little Prince Mark was protected by his faithful companion Peedie the Brave Rabbit …’), I dropped in through the ooze as though casting anchor. This, I was thinking with some excitement, and with some bewilderment as well — what is this ‘we’ when the I’s are gone? — is my wife! Under my tongue, her nipple (‘… and by his Magical Blue Shirt …,’ her mother was saying) had sprung erect like a little mushroom stem (‘… for forfending demons …’), and I moved now — I say I, certainly something moved — across her flushed and heaving chest to suck intrepidly at the other one.

‘… And his good Fairy Godmother, who watched over him wherever he went …’

‘Oh, Gerald! You’re so … so …!’

I gripped her buttocks now, one taut flexing cheek in each hand (‘Did she look like you, Gramma?’), feeling the first distant tremors deep in the black hole of my bowels (‘A bit …’) and remembering one night at the theater when, the stage littered with fornicating couples meant to represent the Forms of Rhetoric (the sketch was called A Meeting of Minds’), she’d leaned toward me and whispered: ‘I know they want us to feel time differently here, Gerald, more like an eternal present than the usual past, present, and future, but the only moment that ever works for me is at the end when the lights go down (‘No, Peedie doesn’t die,’ her mother was saying, ‘not yet …’) and the curtains close. And I’m’ — her feet kicked up over my back, crowding her own hands away, so she reached up to clutch my neck and hair — ‘not sure I like it.’ ‘Great!’ she moaned now, her head tipping back off the edge of the sofa, her back arching, her hips convulsing, and mine too were hammering away, completely (‘Don’t worry …’) out of control — it was a kind of pelvic hilarity, a muscular hiccup (had Pardew compared this to murder?), our pubes crashing together like remote underwater collisions, as ineluctable as punchlines.

‘That’s what fairy godmothers are for …’

Only not too soon, I begged (as did my wife: ‘Wait, Gerald! Not … ooh! ah … ! yet …!’), wanting to hold on to this moment, like so many before, but her vagina seemed to have filled up like a fist and to be clinging to my penis for dear life, pumping and pumping in tight muscular spasms, and even as I was looking forward to its arrival, it was already (‘Yes—!!’ my wife cried out, her head out of sight) gone.

I lay sprawled across her breasts, my head jammed into the linty corner between the armrest and back of the sofa, trying to conceive of the idea of eternity as a single violent spasm. I couldn’t even imagine it. For that matter I couldn’t imagine much of anything. It was as though I carried my semen in my head and orgasm had sucked it hollow. Distantly, I could hear my mother-in-law describing for Mark the ‘mysterious Walled Garden’ in the middle of the Enchanted Forest, ‘where fairies play and rubies hang from bushes like berries and you never get old or lose your way,’ which might have been quite soothing had she not sounded like she was scolding. We were still linked in a soft aromatic congestion. I wanted to say, ‘I love you,’ but instead found myself saying: ‘You focus … my attention …’ ‘Oh, Gerald,’ she sighed from below, reaching up to pat my hip, ‘your sweet nothings are not always sweet … but at least …’

We slipped apart, my wife’s pelvis sliding away to the floor to join the rest of her. Mark’s grandmother was telling him about a hidden treasure in the Walled Garden, ‘guarded by a wicked and spiteful Tattooed Dragon that breathed both ice and fire.’ As I fell back, I seemed to catch her televised eye: a kind of warning … ‘And what the Prince had to do to reach the treasure,’ she went on as my wife sat up and reached for the off button (‘Sorry, mother …’), ‘was chop —’

Click.

There was a sudden dreadful silence. ‘Goodness,’ my wife murmured, looked around, ‘I almost don’t know where I am …’ Somewhere, I seemed to hear some sort of knocking sound. Like darts hitting a dartboard. ‘Do you think we should …?’

‘No, leave it all till morning.’ I was thinking about the ice pick, that improbable object. When the officer carried it away, I was glad to see it go — I thought at the time: Free at last! But now I was not so sure. I seemed to feel its presence again, as though it had got back in the house somehow.

She struggled to her feet, then turned to gaze down at me with a compassionate smile. She was still wearing the apron. It was the one with the candystripes. From Amsterdam. ‘I love you, Gerald.’

‘I know …’ Or Monaco.

‘You might as well stay where you are.’ Her eyes were damp, I saw, the pupils dilated, and her lips were flushed and puffy. ‘I’ll sleep on the studio couch in the sewing room.’ Perhaps I frowned at that, or looked puzzled, because she added: ‘Our bed’s filled up, I’m afraid. Mr and Mrs Elstob are evidently staying the night.’ There seemed something wrong with that, but I couldn’t remember what. ‘It will be a while before we want to use that bed again.’ She leaned over, her breasts brushing my arm, and kissed me. ‘It’s all right, Gerald,’ she whispered, resting one hand on my tummy. I seemed to hear Vic snort at that (‘Don’t shit me it’s all right!’), and I trembled, so she took her hand away. ‘Is any-thing —?’

‘No … well … it’s like there’s an echo in here. Or …’

‘That’s probably the people out in the backyard,’ she said, rising.

‘The backyard? But what are they doing out there?’

‘Nothing. Just telling stories, as far as I could tell. You know, the usual stragglers. But don’t worry, I’ve locked up. Tomorrow …’ Her voice seemed to be receding. ‘No, wait—!’ I called, but she was already gone. Only the faintest fragrance remained and that, too, was fading. I lay there on my back, alone and frightened, remembering all too well why it was we held these parties. And would, as though compelled, hold another. At least she had turned the TV back on. Perhaps I had asked her to do this. Prince Mark was now riding through the Enchanted Forest. Or maybe this was the Walled Garden, maybe the Tattooed Dragon was dead already, quite likely. ‘’Ass usin’ yer ole gourd, Mark,’ Peedie was saying, with a loose drunken chortle. ‘I think we’re awmoss there, ole son — juss keep it up’n — yuff! huff! — don’ look back!’ ‘Look! There she is! I can see her now! She’s beautiful!’ Yes, this was the Garden, I could see her, too: she was running bouncily toward me through the lotus blossoms, radiant with joy and anticipation, her blond hair flowing behind her, eyes sparkling, arms outstretched, her soft white dress wrapping her limbs like the frailest of gauze. I felt myself awash in glowing sunshine. ‘Gerry!’ she cried, leaping across some impossible abyss, and threw her arms around me. Oh, what a hug! Oh! It felt great! I could hardly get my breath! Tears came to my eyes and I hugged her back with all my strength. But then suddenly she grabbed my testicles and seemed to want to rip them out by their roots! I screamed with pain and terror, fell writhing to the ground. ‘No, no, Ros!’ I heard someone shout. I couldn’t see who it was. I couldn’t even open my eyes. ‘That’s “Grab up the bells and ring them,” goddamn it—!’ Oh my god! Get up! I told myself. (But I couldn’t even move.) Turn it off. ‘Gee, I’m sorry …’ (But I had to!) ‘Now c’mon, let’s try that again! From the beginning!’ No! Now—!