Bullet Park (21 page)

“I bought Dora Emmison’s place.”

“I’ll get a coat. I feel like a prisoner here.”

Back at my house I lighted a fire, made some drinks and we sat in the yellow room while she told me her story. She was twenty-three and had never married. She had lived in France until she was twelve when her parents were killed in an accident and her grandfather became
her guardian. She had gone to Bennington. When her grandfather moved to the country she took an apartment and got a job as a receptionist at Macy’s. She was bored and lonely in the city and had come out to Blenville in the autumn with the hope of finding a job, but the only industry in Blenville was the motel and she didn’t want to be either a prostitute or a chambermaid.

While she was talking there was a loud crack of thunder. Thunder was unusual at that time of year—the late winter—and at the first explosion I thought a plane had broken the sound barrier. The second peal—rolling and percussive—was unmistakably thunder. “Dammit,” she said.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m afraid of thunder. I know it’s absurd but that doesn’t make any difference. When I was working at Macy’s and living alone I used to hide in the closet when there was a thunderstorm. I finally went to a psychiatrist to see if he could do anything and he said the reason I was afraid of thunder was because I was a terrible egocentric. He said I thought I was so important that the thunder would seek me out for extermination. All of this may be true but it doesn’t keep me from trembling.” She was trembling then and I took her in my arms and we became lovers before the storm had passed over my land. “That felt good,” she said, “that felt very good. That was a nice thing to do.”

“I’ve never had it better,” I said. “Let’s get married.”

Six weeks later we were married in the church in Blenville.
Marietta wore a gray suit with a white thread on the lapel. (Where did all those threads come from? Later, when we traveled in Europe, she would sometimes appear with a white thread on her shoulder.) After the wedding we flew to Curaçao and spent two weeks at St. Martha’s Bay. It was lovely and when we returned to Blenville I seemed to possess everything in the world that I wanted. When I finished the Montale and took it into New York I discovered that the poetry had already been translated but for some reason this didn’t disappoint me. It seemed then that nothing could. I don’t know when the honeymoon ended … I’ll settle for a night in Blenville. Eleven o’clock. Groping, I found Marietta’s side of the bed empty. There was a light on in the kitchen. The shape of the lighted window stretched over the lawn. Was Marietta sick? I sleep naked and I went down the stairs into the kitchen naked. Marietta stood in the center of the floor wearing her wedding ring and nothing else. She was eating, with a bent fork, from a can of salmon. When I embraced her she pushed me away angrily and said: “Can’t you see that I’m eating.” The salmon gave off a sea smell, fresh and cheerful. I felt like taking a swim. When I touched her again she said: “Leave me alone, leave me alone! Can’t a person get something to eat without being molested?” After that night—if that was the night—I saw more of distemper than tenderness and often slept alone; but while Marietta’s distempers were strenuous they had no more permanence than the wind. They seemed at times to be
influenced by the wind. Spring and its uncertain zephyrs—any sort of clemency—seemed to create a barometric disturbance in her nature that provoked her deepest discontents. Violence, on the other hand—hurricanes, thunderstorms and blizzards—sweetened her nature. In the autumn when tempests with girls’ names lashed the Bermudas and moved up past Hatteras into the northeast, she could be gentle, yielding and wifely. When snows closed the roads and stopped the trains she was angelic, and once, at the height of an epochal blizzard, she said she loved me. She seemed to think of love as a universal dilemma, produced by convulsions of nature and history. I will never forget how tender she was the day we went off the gold standard and her passion was boundless when they shot the King of Parthia. (He was saying his prayers in the basilica.) When our only mutuality was a roof tree and some furnishings she looked at me as if I was a repulsive brute to whom she had been sold by some cruel slavemaster; but when the carts of thunder rolled, when the assassin’s knife struck home, when governments fell and earthquakes blasted the city walls she was my glory and my child.

A clinician like Shitz would have said that I had been warned but he was wrong all along. My fault was that I had thought of love as a heady distillate of nostalgia—a force of memory that had resisted analysis by cybernetics. We do not fall in love—I thought—we re-enter love, and I had fallen in love with a memory—a piece of white thread and a thunderstorm. My own true love was a piece of white thread and that was so.

Sleeping alone then, as I often did, I found myself forced into the reveries of an adolescent, a soldier, or a prisoner. To sublimate my physical needs and cure my insomnia I fell into the habit of inventing dream girls. I know the vastness that separates revery from the realities of a robust and a sweaty fuck on a thundery Sunday afternoon, but like some prisoner in solitary confinement I had nothing to go on but my memories and my imagination. I began with my memory and pretended to be sleeping with a girl I had known in Ashburnham. I remembered her dark blondness in detail and seemed to feel her pubic hair against my naked hip. Night after night I summoned up all the girls I had ever romanced. Night after night they came singly and sometimes in pairs so that I lay happily on my stomach with a naked woman on either side. I began by summoning them but after a while they seemed to come of their own volition. Like all lonely men, I fell in love—hopelessly—with the girls on magazine covers and the models who advertise girdles. I did not go so far as to carry their photographs around in my wallet, but I was tempted to, and having fallen in love with these strangers I found that they willingly joined me in bed. Surrounded then by the women I remembered and the women I had seen photographed I was joined by a third group of comforters produced, I suppose, by some chamber in my nature. These were women I had never seen. I woke one midnight to find myself lying beside an imaginary Chinese who had very small breasts and a voluptuous backside. She was followed by a vivacious Negress and she by an amiable but very fat woman with
red hair. I had never romanced a fat woman that I could recall. But they came, they solaced me, they let me sleep, and when I woke in the morning I was moderately hopeful.

I envied men like Nailles who might, I suppose, looking at Nellie, recall the number and variety of places where he had covered her. On the shores of the Atlantic and the Pacific, the Tyrrhenian and the Mediterranean, in catboats, in motorboats, in outboards, cabin cruisers and ocean liners; in hotels, motels, in castles, in tents; on beds, on sofas, on floors, on grassy hummocks, on pine needles, on stony mountain ledges warm from the sun; at every hour of the day and night; in England, in France, in Germany, Italy and Spain; while I, looking at Marietta, would remember the number of places where I had been rebuffed. In the motel in Stockbridge she had locked herself in the bathroom until I fell asleep. When I took her for a two-week cruise she forgot to pack her contraceptives and the ship’s doctor had none for sale. In Chicago she kicked me in the groin. In Easthampton she defended herself with a carving knife. Her menstrual periods seemed frequent and prolonged and on most nights she would hurry into bed and cover her face with a blanket before I could get undressed. I am too tired, she would say, I am too sleepy. I have a head cold. I have a toothache. I have indigestion. I have the flu. On the beach at Nantucket she ran away from me and when I thought I had her cornered in the sailboat she dove overboard and swam to shore.

After a year or two the yellow paint on the walls had begun to crack and discolor, and Marietta called the painter in Blenville and had him bring out some samples. I had never told her about the importance of the yellow walls and so her choice of pink was not malicious but pink was the color she chose. I could have protested but my obsession with yellow had begun to seem absurd. Surely I had enough character to live with a normal spectrum and I let the painter go ahead. Two or three weeks after the painters had finished I woke with the cafard. I suffered, on getting out of bed, all the symptoms of panic. My lips were swollen, I had difficulty breathing and my hands were shaking. I dressed and had two scoops of gin before breakfast. I was drunk most of that day. I had, I knew, to change the pace of my life and on Friday we flew to Rome.

The cafard followed me throughout that trip but it followed me without much guile either because it was lazy or because it was an assassin so confident of its prey that it had no need to exert itself. On Saturday morning I woke, feeling cheerful and randy. I was just as cheerful on Sunday but on Monday I woke in a melancholy so profound that I had to drag myself out of bed and stumble, step by step, into the shower. On Tuesday we took a train to Fondi and a cab through the mountains to Sperlonga, where we stayed with friends. I had two good days there but the bête noire caught up with me on the third and we took the train for Naples at Formia. I had four good days in Naples. Had the bête noire lost track of
its victim or was it simply moving in the leisurely way of a practiced murderer? My fifth day in Naples was crushing and we took the afternoon train back to Rome. Here again I had three good days but I woke on the fourth in danger of my life and went out to take a walk, putting one foot in front of the other. On some broad and curving street, the name of which I can’t remember, I saw coming towards me a line of motorcycle policemen, moving at such a slow pace that they had to keep putting their feet on the paving to keep the engines upright. Behind them were a few hundred men and women carrying signs that said
PACE, SPERANZA
and
AMORE
. It was, I realized, a memorial procession for the communist delegate Mazzacone, who had been shot in his bathtub. All I knew about him was that he had been described as saintly in
L’Unità
. I did not know his opinions and had read none of his speeches but I began to cry. There was no question of drying my tears. They splashed down my face and wet my jacket, they were torrential. I joined the procession and as soon as I began to march I felt the cafarde take off. There were marshals with armbands to keep the parade in order and we were told not to speak so that as we moved through Rome there was no sound but the shuffle and hiss of shoe leather, much of it worn, and because of our numbers, a loud, weird and organic sound, a sighing that someone with his back to the parade might have mistaken for the sea.

We marched through the Venezia to the Colosseum. We walked proudly, men, women and children, in spite
of the shuffling sound. This grief which, in my case, we accidentally shared reminded me of how little else there was that we had in common. I felt the strongest love for these strangers for the space of three city blocks. There was a memorial service in the Colosseum—nothing as moving as the procession but when I went back to the hotel I felt well. We flew back to New York soon afterwards and it was sitting on a beach that following summer (I had already seen the picture in the dental journal) that I decided, on the strength of a kite string, that my crazy old mother’s plan to crucify a man was sound and that I would settle in Bullet Park and murder Nailles. Sometime later I changed my victim to Tony.

N
ailles asked Hammer to go fishing. It came about this way. Nailles was a member of the Volunteer Fire Department, where he drove the old red LaFrance fire truck. To hell over the hills and dales of Bullet Park late at night, ringing his bell and blowing his siren, seemed to him the climax of his diverse life. Mouthwash, fire trucks, chain saws and touch football! The village seemed upended in the starlight and the only lights that burned burned in bathrooms. It was his finest hour.

The fire company had a meeting and dinner on the first Thursday of the month and Nailles attended this. The red fire truck was parked in front of the building. The garage space had been swept and hosed down and tables covered with sheets had been set up as a buffet and bar. Two apprentice firemen were polishing glasses and Charlie Maddux, the self-appointed firehouse cook, was basting a leg of lamb at a gas range in the corner. Charlie was
a used-car dealer. He weighed nearly three hundred pounds. He liked to buy food, cook food, eat food, and he very likely dreamed of joints of meat and buckets of shellfish. His wife was, predictably, a spare woman devoted to a diet of blackstrap molasses and wheat germ. He seemed, as a firehouse cook, to enjoy a sense of reality that he did not enjoy either with his wife or his used cars and he stirred, basted, seasoned, tasted and served the dinner with absolute absorption and like most amateur cooks he was incurably premature, getting the meal onto the table a half hour before anyone was ready. Nailles went upstairs to the meeting room.

There were thirty members of the fire department at that time. About twenty had gathered. Some part of the atmosphere of the place was that it had been the firemen themselves who had converted it from a loft into a habitable club room. They had, on Saturdays and Sundays, put down the Vinylite floor, nailed and painted the wall-board and wired the fluorescent lights. They were understandably proud of their work. The meeting was, of course, stag but it was, excepting the locker room at the club, the last stag gathering in the village and its exclusiveness had been challenged. Some members of the ladies’ auxiliary had wanted to attend the monthly meeting if only to supervise the cooking. They felt that Charlie Maddux was a usurper and that his grocery bills were probably scandalous. They had been forestalled but the sense that the maleness of the place was embattled gave it the snugness of a tree house. The atmosphere of a tree house extended to the ceremoniousness that followed.
The chief called the meeting to order with a memorial gavel and the secretary then uncovered an American flag made of stiff silk with a thick fringe of gold. The secretary read the minutes of the last meeting, which were approved, and the treasurer reported that there was eighty-three dollars and fourteen cents in the treasury. All of this and all that followed was performed with an immutable solemnity that could not have been explained by the few facts and figures involved. There was a somber discussion reproaching those firemen who came to the car wash and did nothing but drink beer. Had anyone spoken humorously it would have been a misunderstanding of the gravity of these rites. “We have a new application for membership,” said the secretary. “Mr. Hammer, will you leave the room please while we discuss your application?”