Bullet Park (18 page)

I seemed, looking up at them from the sidewalk, to be standing at the threshold of a new life. This was not a sanctuary, this was the vortex of things, but this was a place where the cafard could not enter. The door of the building was open and I climbed some stairs. The pair of yellow rooms was on the second floor. They were unfurnished, as I knew they would be, and freshly painted. Everything was ready for my occupancy. There was a man putting up shelves for my books. I spoke to the man and asked him who the rooms belonged to. He said they were his. I asked if they were for sale or for rent and he smiled and said no. Then I said I wanted them and would pay whatever he asked for them but he went on smiling and saying no. Then I heard some men in the hallway, carrying something heavy. I could hear their strained voices, their breathing, and the object, whatever it was, bumping against the wall. It was a large bed, which they carried into the second of the yellow rooms. The owner explained to me then that this was his marriage bed. He was going to be married next day in the chapel of the cathedral and begin his married life here. I was still so convinced that the rooms were, spiritually at least, my property that I asked him if he wouldn’t prefer
to live in one of the new apartments in the lower town. I would pay the difference in the rent and was prepared to give him a large present for the wedding. He was impervious, of course. Like any groom, he had imagined so many hundreds of times the hour when he would bring his bride back to the yellow rooms that no amount of money would dislodge the memory from its place in his mind. I wished him well anyhow and went down the stairs. I had found my yellow rooms and I had lost them. I left Orvieto in the morning for Rome and left Rome the next day for New York.

I spent one night in my apartment during which I drank a quart of whiskey. The next afternoon I drove out to Pennsylvania to visit a classmate of mine—Charlie Masterson—and his wife. There were heavy drinkers and we ran out of gin before dinner. I drove into the little village of Blenville and bought a fresh supply at the liquor store and started back. I made a wrong turn and found myself on a narrow red dirt lane that seemed to lead nowhere. Then on my left, set back from the road and a little above it, I saw the yellow walls for the third time.

I turned off the motor and the lights and got out of the car. There was a brook between the road and the house and I crossed this on a wooden bridge. A lawn or a field—the grass needed cutting—sloped up to a terrace. The house was stone—rectangular—an old Pennsylvania farmhouse, and the yellow room was the only room lighted. The walls were the same color I had seen in Orvieto. I
went up onto the terrace, as absorbed as any thief. A woman sat in the yellow room, reading a book. She wore a black dress and high-heeled shoes and had a glass of whiskey on a table at her side. Her face was pale and handsome. I guessed she was in her twenties. The black dress and the high-heeled shoes seemed out of place in the country and I wondered if she had just arrived from town or were just about to leave, although the size of the whiskey glass made this seem unlikely. But it was not the woman but the room I wanted—square, its lemon-yellow walls simply lighted—and I felt that if I could only possess this I would be myself again, industrious and decent. She looked up suddenly as if she sensed my presence and I stepped away from the window. I was very happy. Walking back to the car I saw the name Emmison painted on a mailbox at the end of the driveway. I found my way back to the Mastersons’ and asked Mrs. Masterson if she knew anyone named Emmison. “Sure,” she said. “Dora Emmison. I think she’s in Reno.”

“Her house was lighted,” I said.

“What in the world were you doing at her house?”

“I got lost.”

“Well she was in Reno. I suppose she’s just come back. Do you know her?” she asked.

“No,” I said, “but I’d like to.”

“Well if she’s back I’ll ask her for a drink tomorrow.”

She came the next afternoon, wearing the black dress and the same high heels. She was a little reserved but I found her fascinating, not because of her physical and
intellectual charms but because she owned the yellow rooms. She stayed for supper and I asked about her house. I presently asked if she wouldn’t like to sell it. She was not at all interested. Then I asked if I could see the house and she agreed indifferently. She was leaving early and if I wanted to see the place I could come back with her and so I did.

As soon as I stepped into the yellow room I felt that peace of mind I had coveted when I first saw the walls in a walkup near Pennsylvania Station. Sometimes you step into a tackroom, a carpenter’s shop or a country post office and find yourself unexpectedly at peace with the world. It is usually late in the day. The place has a fine smell (I must include bakeries). The groom, carpenter, postmaster or baker has a face so clear, so free of trouble that you feel that nothing bad has ever or will ever happen here, a sense of fitness and sanctity never achieved, in my experience, by any church.

She gave me a drink and I asked again if she would sell the place. “Why should I sell my house,” she asked. “I like my house. It’s the only house I have. If you want a place in the neighborhood the Barkham place is on the market and it’s really much more attractive than this.”

“This is the house I want.”

“I don’t see why you’re so crazy about this place. If I had a choice I’d rather have the Barkham place.”

“Well I’ll buy the Barkham place and exchange it for this.”

“I simply don’t want to move,” she said. She looked at her watch.

“Could I sleep here,” I asked.

“Where.”

“Here, here in this room.”

“But what do you want to sleep here for? The sofa’s hard as a rock.”

“I’d just like to.”

“Well I guess you can if you want to. No monkey business.”

“No monkey business.”

“I’ll get some bedding.”

She went upstairs and came down with some sheets and a blanket and made my bed. “I think I’ll turn in myself,” she said, going towards the stairs. “I guess you know where everything is. If you want another drink there’s some ice in the bucket. I think my husband left a razor in the medicine cabinet. Good night.” Her smile was courteous and no more. She climbed the stairs.

I didn’t make a drink. I didn’t, as they say, need one. I sat in a chair by the window feeling the calm of the yellow walls restore me. Outside I could hear the brook, some night bird, moving leaves, and all the sounds of the night world seemed endearing as if I quite literally loved the night as one loves a woman, loved the stars, the trees, the weeds in the grass as one can love with the same ardor a woman’s breasts and the apple core she has left in an ashtray. I loved it all and everyone who lived. My life had begun again and I could see, from this beginning, how far I had gone from any natural course. Here was the sense of reality—a congenial, blessed and useful construction to which I belonged. I stepped out onto the
terrace. It was cloudy but some stars could still be seen. The wind was shifting and smelled of rain. I walked down to the bridge, undressed and dove into a pool there. The water was buoyant and a little brackish from the bogs in which it rose, but it had, so unlike the disinfected sapphire of a pool, a strong and unmistakably erotic emphasis. I dried myself on my shirttails and walked naked back to the house, feeling as if the earth were paved for my contentment. I brushed my teeth, turned out the light, and as I got into my bed it began to rain.

For a year or more the sound of the rain had meant merely umbrellas, raincoats, rubbers, the wet seats of convertibles, but now it seemed like some enlargement of my happiness, some additional bounty. It seemed to increase my feeling of limberness and innocence and I fended off sleep to listen to it with the attention and curiosity with which we follow music. When I did sleep I dreamed in this order of the mountain, the walled town and the banks of the river and when I woke at dawn there was no trace of the cafard. I dove into the pool again and dressed. In the kitchen I found a melon, made some coffee and fried some bacon. The smell of coffee and bacon seemed like a smell of newness and I ate with a good appetite. She came down later in a bathrobe and thanked me for having made the coffee. When she raised the cup to her lips her hand shook so that the coffee spilled. She went into the pantry, returned with a bottle of whiskey and spiked her coffee. She neither apologized
or explained this but the spike steadied her hand. I asked her if she wouldn’t like me to cut the grass. “Well I would frankly,” she said, “if you don’t have anything better to do. It’s terribly hard to find anyone around here to do anything. All the young men leave home and all the old ones die. The mower’s in the toolshed and I think there’s some gasoline.”

I found the mower and gasoline and cut the grass. It was a big lawn and this took me until noon or later. She was sitting on the terrace reading and drinking something—icewater or gin. I joined her, wondering how I could build my usefulness into indispensability. I could have made a pass at her but if we became lovers this would have meant sharing the yellow room and that was not what I wanted. “If you want a sandwich before you go there’s some ham and cheese in the refrigerator,” she said. “A friend of mine is coming out on the four-o’clock but I suppose you’ll want to go back before then.”

I was frightened. Go back, go back, go back to the greasy green waters of the Lethe, back to my contemptible cowardice, back to the sanctuary of my bed where I cowered before thin air, back to anesthetizing myself with gin in order to eat a plate of scrambled eggs. I wondered about the sex of her visitor. If it was a woman mightn’t I stay on as a sort of handyman, eating my supper in the kitchen and sleeping in the yellow room? “If there’s anything else you’d like me to do,” I said. “Firewood?”

“I buy my firewood in Blenville.”

“Would you like me to split some kindling?”

“Not really,” she said.

“The screen door in the kitchen is loose,” I said. “I could repair that.”

She didn’t seem to hear me. She went into the house and returned a little later with two sandwiches. “Would you like mustard?” she asked.

“No thank you,” I said.

I took the sandwich as a kind of sacrament since it would be the last thing I could approach with any appetite until I returned to the yellow room and when would that be? I was desperate. “Is your visitor a man or a woman,” I asked.

“I really don’t think that concerns you,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Thank you for cutting the grass,” she said. “That needed to be done but you must understand that I can’t have a strange man sleeping on my sofa without a certain amount of damage to my reputation and my reputation isn’t absolutely invincible.”

“I’ll go,” I said.

I drove back to New York then, condemned to exile and genuinely afraid of my inclination to self-destruction. As soon as I closed the door of my apartment I fell into the old routine of gin, Kilimanjaro, scrambled eggs, Orvieto and the Elysian Fields. I stayed in bed until late the next morning. I drank some gin while I shaved and went out onto the street to get some coffee. In front of my apartment house I ran into Dora Emmison. She wore black—I never saw her in anything else—and said that
she had come in town for a few days to do some shopping and go to the theater. I asked if she’d have lunch with me but she said she was busy. As soon as we parted I got my car and drove back to Blenville.

The house was locked but I broke a pane of glass in the kitchen window and let myself in. To be alone in the yellow room was everything I had expected. I felt happy, peaceful and strong. I had brought the Montale with me and I spent the afternoon reading and making notes. The time passed lightly and the sense that the hands of my watch were procrustean had vanished. At six o’clock I went for a swim, had a drink and made some supper. She had a large store of provisions and I made a note of what I was stealing so that I would replace it before I left. After dinner I went on reading, taking a chance that the lighted windows would not arouse anyone’s curiosity. At nine o’clock I undressed, wrapped myself in a blanket and lay down on the sofa to sleep. A few minutes later I saw the lights of a car come up the drive.

I got up and went into the kitchen and shut the door. I was, of course, undressed. If it was she I supposed I could escape out the back door. If it was not she, if it was some friend or neighbor, they would likely go away. Whoever it was began to knock on the door, which I had left unlocked. Then a man opened the door and asked softly, “Doree, Doree, you sleeping? Wake up baby, wake up, it’s Tony, the old loverboy.” Climbing the stairs he kept asking “Doree, Doree, Doree,” and when he went into her bedroom and found the bed empty he said, “Aw
shit.” He then came down the stairs and left the house and I stayed, shivering in the kitchen, until I heard his car go down the road.

I got back onto the sofa and had been there for perhaps a half hour when another car came up the drive. I retired again to the kitchen and a man named Mitch went through more or less the same performance. He climbed the stairs, calling her name, made some exclamation of disappointment and went away. All of this left me uneasy and in the morning I cleaned up the place, emptied the ashtrays and drove back to New York.

Dora had said that she would be in the city for a few days. Four is what is usually meant by a few and two of these had already passed. On the day that I thought she would return to the country I bought a case of the most expensive bourbon and started back to Blenville, late in the afternoon. It was after dark when I turned up the red dirt road. Her lights were on. I first looked in at the window and saw that she was alone and reading as she had been when I first found the place. I knocked on the door and when she opened it and saw me she seemed puzzled and irritated. “Yes?” she asked. “Yes? What in the world do you want now?”

“I have a present for you,” I said. “I wanted to give you a present to thank you for your kindness in letting me spend the night in your house.”

“That hardly calls for a present,” she said, “but I do happen to have a weakness for good bourbon. Won’t you come in?”