Bullet Park (4 page)

It was what Nellie had wanted, but while the stranger went on talking about stuffs the words printed on the picket signs—Fuck and Prick—seemed to burn in her consciousness with a lingering incandescence and she could not forget the actor’s pubic brush and his unwatered
flower. She seemed unable to return to where she had been. The stranger had begun to describe her things and Nellie’s reaction shifted from boredom to irritability. How contemptible was a life weighted down with rugs and chairs, a consciousness stuffed with portables, virtue incarnate in cretonne and evil represented by rep. It seemed more contemptible than the amorous young men in front of her and the asininity of the students. She seemed to have glimpsed an erotic revolution that had left her bewildered and miserable but that had also left her enthusiasm for flower arrangements crippled. She walked east to the station in the rain, passed several newsstands that seemed to specialize in photographs of naked men. Boarding the train was a step in the right direction. She was going home and she would, in the space of an hour, be able to close her door on that disconcerting and rainy afternoon. She would be herself again, Nellie Nailles, Mrs. Eliot Nailles, honest, conscientious, intelligent, chaste, etc. But if her composure depended upon shutting doors, wasn’t her composure contemptible? Contemptible or not, she felt, as the train moved, the symptoms of restoration. When she left the train at her stop and walked through the parking lot to her car she had arrived back at herself. She drove up the hill; opened the door. The cook was stewing mushrooms in butter and the living room smelled of this. “Did you have a nice day,” the cook asked.

“Yes, thank you. Very nice. It was disappointing to have it rain but we do need rain for the reservoirs, don’t
we?” She found the utter artificiality of her sentiments galling, but how close could she come to the truth? Could she say shit to the cook and describe what she had seen on the stage? She climbed the stairs to her pleasant room and took a pleasant bath, but falsehood, confinement, exclusion and a kind of blindness seemed to be her only means of comprehension. She did not tell Nailles about the experience.

After breakfast Nailles climbed the stairs to his son’s room. Nailles had sat up the night before with his son when he and Nellie had come in from a party and found the young man reading.

“Did you have a good time?” Tony had asked.

“Pretty good.”

“You going to have a nightcap,” Tony asked.

“Sure. Why not. Do you want a beer?”

“Yes. I’ll get them.”

“I’ll get them,” Nailles said, not sternly but finally. He did not like to see a man his son’s age tending bar. Some of his friends and neighbors allowed their children to pass drinks and mix drinks. Nailles thought this inefficient and unsuitable. The children usually got the proportions wrong and lost, he thought, through this performance, some desirable innocence. He got the beer and the whiskey and returned to his chair. He seemed intensely absorbed in his thoughts and frowned at the air above the rug. There was between the two men, preparing to speak but still silent, that sense of sanctuary that is the essence of love.

Nailles described the party to Tony, who knew most of the guests. The boy wondered if his mother would have fallen asleep and if he would be spared the carnal demands, encouragements, exclamations and cheers that he heard so often from his parents’ bedroom. He hoped his mother had fallen asleep. There was some preference in the air, some enjoyable and yet self-conscious sense that they were playing out the roles written for them as a Father and a Son. Love was definitely what Nailles felt, and where a more demonstrative man in another country would have embraced his son and declared his love, Nailles would not. Nailles lighted a cigarette and coughed. The cough was racking, phlegmatic, it shook him pitilessly and brought the blood to his face. It declared, much more than anything else, the difference in their ages. Tony wondered why he didn’t stop smoking. If he stopped smoking he might stop coughing. In the discord of his father’s cough, in its power to briefly enfeeble him, the boy was reminded unsentimentally of the facts of sickness, age and death. But his father, he thought proudly, looked and acted much younger than his age; much younger than Don Waltham’s father or Henry Pastor’s father and Herbert Matson’s father. His father played no game admirably but he could still knock his way through a brief ice-hockey scrimmage, score occasionally at touch football and ski intermediate trails. He was forty-two. This time of life seemed to Tony bewildering, antique and hoary. The thought of having lived for so long excited him as an archaeologist is excited
by a Sumerian or a Scythian relic. But his hair was thick and there was no gray in it, his face was lined but it was not puffy, he held himself well and he had a flat stomach. His father was unusual, Tony thought, and went on to think, complacently, that he would inherit this unusualness; he would be the unusual son of an unusual father spared the usualness of gray hair, baldness, obesity and fussiness.

Nailles put a record on the player. It would, Tony knew, be
Guys and Dolls
. Nailles almost never went to the theater and he was uninterested in music, but for some reason that no one remembered clearly now, it was all so long ago, he had been given a pair of tickets for the opening night of
Guys and Dolls
. Some friend had been taken sick or called out of town. Nailles wanted to pass the tickets on to someone else, he so disliked musicals and had never heard of Loesser or Runyon, but Nellie had a new dress she wanted to wear and for this reason they went to the theater. He listened suspiciously to the overture but his rapture seems to have begun with the opening fugue and to have mounted, number by number. On the final chorus he got to his feet and began to smash his hands together, roaring, “Encore, encore.” When the house lights went on he continued to clap and shout and he was one of the last people to leave the theater.

He thought that he had seen that night the writing of theatrical history and he had evolved some sentimental theory about the tragedy of the sublime. He got Frank Loesser all mixed up with Orpheus and when he read in
the paper that Loesser had divorced he thought—sadly—that this had something to do with the perfection of
Guys and Dolls
. He had no interest in going to any of Loesser’s other shows since he was convinced that they would be tragically inferior. No man—no artist—could repeat such a triumph. He seemed to feel that Loesser, like the architect of St. Basil’s, should have plucked out his eyes. That opening night seemed to him to have had the perfection of a midsummer day whose sublimity hinted at the inevitability of winter and death.

He began to sing along with the recording. He had bought the recording immediately after the opening and had not replaced it, so that its tonal values were faded. He didn’t care. He dispensed with the words and substituted a series of inchoate noises (dadadadad) but on “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” he got to his feet, smashed his fist into his palm and sang the verses he remembered. On the last chorus he made a groping gesture to illustrate a man reaching for stars and when the last note had been played he sighed and said: “That’s a great show, really great. It’s too bad you never saw it. Well, good night.”

   Now on this Sunday morning he seemed to be looking for the boy. Tony’s room was cold. The boy kept the heat turned off and slept with both windows open. The cold made the room seem to have been emptied for more than the morning. He might have been gone for a year, Nailles felt, but why? He looked around with love at the intimate and common clutter: rucked and cleated football
shoes, a football sweater, a pile of books including Stephen Crane, Somerset Maugham, Samuel Butler and Hemingway. Sometime earlier, looking for a dictionary, he had taken one from his son’s bookcase and as he opened the dictionary fifty or more printed photographs of naked women slipped and cataracted to the floor. He had been provoked, it had been his principal reaction. He examined the photographs, bringing his very limited knowledge of women to this gallery of lewd strangers. The paper was cheap and he guessed that the pictures had been cut from those nudist magazines that one finds in some shoeshine parlors and barber shops. He was not in the least dismayed that his beloved son had chosen to collect these pictures instead of stamps, Indian arrowheads, geological specimens or numismatic rarities. He dropped the pictures into a wastebasket and looked up the spelling of the word that had concerned him. Sometime later, perhaps a month later, the boy asked: “Have you been using my dictionary?”

“Why yes,” Nailles said, “and I threw away all those pictures.”

“Oh,” the boy said and neither of them said anything more.

On the table by the window was a tape recorder he had given the boy as a birthday present. He would no more have switched it on than he would have opened the boy’s mail. His sense of these aspects of privacy was scrupulous and immutable; but had he turned on the recorder he would have heard his son’s voice, lowered half
an octave by reproduction, saying: “You dirty old baboon, you dirty old baboon. For as long as I can remember it seems to me that whenever I’m trying to go to sleep I can hear you saying dirty things. You say the dirtiest things in the whole world, you dirty, filthy, horny old baboon.” However he didn’t turn on the recorder.

He changed out of the business suit he wore to church into work clothes. He had once suggested to the vestry that early communicants be encouraged to attend church in the sports and work clothing most of them wore on Sunday, but Father Ransome had countered by asking if he would be expected to serve the sacraments in tennis shorts. He went to the cellar, where he fueled the chain saw with gasoline and oil. South of the house was a small valley in which a grove of twelve elms had been lingeringly destroyed by the elm beetle. Nailles spent his weekends felling the dead trees and cutting and splitting the wood into fireplace lengths. The trees had preserved no trace of their lachrymose beauty. They had dropped their upper branches and shed their bark and the wood shone like bone in the winter light, half truncated and ungainly, the landscape for some nightmare or battlefield. He chose a tree and planned his cut. He was proud, in fact complacent, about his expertness with a chain saw and enjoyed maneuvering the howling, screaming engine and its murderous teeth. The valley was protected and was, that morning, so unseasonably warm that the dead wood had released some fragrance—a smell of spice that reminded him of the cold churches in Rome. Spring. He
heard the belling of a wood dove or an owl. The air was soft but seemed much less than idyllic—a troubled softness—the unease of all change. Sexagesima. The Epistle? What was it? Then he remembered. “Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in the deep; in journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren; in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness.”

Nellie then heard the howling of the saw.

O
ne morning Tony refused to get out of bed.

“I’m not sick,” he said when his mother took his temperature. “I just feel terribly sad. I just don’t feel like getting up.”

His parents decided to let him take the day off.

Five days later he was still in bed.

Nellie was to think of the three doctors who came to treat him as suitors in some myth or legend where a choice of three caskets—Gold, Silver and Lead—was offered to the travelers. In one of the caskets there would be the key to some great fortune—jewels and a bride. It was the element of guesswork that reminded her of the legendary princes. One by one they stood over her son trying to divine or guess the force that had stricken him. Gold? Silver? Lead? The first to come was the general practitioner.

Dr. Mullin came unwillingly since at this time doctors
never visited their patients at home. When critical illness struck, the victim was taken to the hospital in an ambulance where residents and interns performed the final rites. Dr. Mullin urged Nellie to bring Tony to the office. It was difficult for Nellie to explain that Tony refused to get out of bed. When this was finally made clear Mullin agreed to come to the house at noon.

He arrived in an unwashed Volkswagen with a dented fender. He was a young man—younger than Nellie—with an optimism, a brightness, that seemed untouched and uninformed by what he must have learned about the inalienable power of sickness, disease and death. This had actually harmed his practice, since patients, faced with the grave, did not like a healer so inexperienced in grief. He was not a blustering man and he was not a fool but the forcefulness of his optimism was a kind of disturbance like those sudden winds that fling open doors and scatter papers. Nellie showed him up to Tony’s room and waited downstairs. She could hear Mullin’s resonant and cheerful voice and Tony’s quiet replies.

“There’s absolutely nothing wrong with him,” the doctor said when he came down. “I’ve taken a specimen and some blood and I’ll have the laboratory check these. If he gets up tomorrow I’ll give him a cardiogram but I’m pretty sure there’s nothing wrong. As a matter of fact I haven’t seen as perfect a specimen in a long time. Of course he’s a young man but he’s certainly enjoying all the benefits of his time of life. This doesn’t get him out of bed but it may be a passing depression. If he doesn’t get
out of bed tomorrow I’ll give you some pills that ought to do the trick.” He wrote a prescription and smiled at Nellie. Our relationships with healers are swift, intimate and in some ways tender, and for a moment Nellie loved the doctor. He asked her to call him in the morning at around eleven and she did.

“He wouldn’t get up again,” Nellie said. “He’s been in bed six days now. I gave him one of the pills in a glass of orange juice at about ten. A little later I heard him get up and take a shower and then he came down into the kitchen. He was dressed but I saw right away that something was wrong. He was staggering a little and laughing and the pupils of his eyes were like pinpoints. I asked if he wanted some breakfast and he said he wanted six fried eggs and six slices of toast and a quart of milk. He said he’d never been so hungry in his life. He was very restless. He wandered around the kitchen laughing and once he bumped into a table like a drunken man. After he’d eaten all his breakfast he said: ‘I feel strong. I’ve never felt so strong in my life. I’d better get out of the house before I tear it down.’ That’s what he said. Then he went out of the kitchen door and started running up the path towards Courtland. It’s an old bridle path that cuts through the woods there for about six miles. He used to run it when he was on the track team. Well, I couldn’t keep up with him of course so I drove around to Route 64 where the path comes out. I waited there for about an hour, I guess, and then he came running along the path. He seemed to have sweated out the drug because he
didn’t seem drunk any more but he seemed to have lost his memory. He couldn’t remember eating breakfast and he didn’t seem very clear in his mind about how he’d gotten out to Route 64. I drove him home. He went to sleep in the car. Then he took another shower and went back to bed.”