The Deer Park (48 page)

Authors: Norman Mailer

Tags: #Fiction, #General

BOOK: The Deer Park

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“Is that fair?”

“Maybe it isn’t, but what I’m trying to say is, I mean, we have the baby, and we’ll probably have another baby, and I have good relations with the servants and I do love the dancing classes, and Charley, I love you, I can tell because I still get scared at the thought of losing you, but Charley, listen to me, I don’t know if you understand how much I love Vickie, I keep worrying that I won’t be a good enough mother to him, but is that enough? Is Vickie enough? I mean where do I go? I don’t want to complain, but what am I going to do with my life?”

Eitel caressed her. “Sweetheart,” he said, and his voice throbbed with a little emotion, “you’ve grown more than anybody
in the time I’ve known you, and I won’t be worried about you, I can’t be worried about you, because I just know that whatever you do, you’re going to get better and more good all your life.”

There were tears in her eyes. He had spent the evening watching women cry. “No, Charley,” Elena said, “you see, that doesn’t answer it. I can’t talk to you unless you’ll understand this. What am I going to do with my life?”

He held her to him, and fondled her hair, feeling a sense of protection which bid her to stop here and ask no more; for of all the distance she had come, and he had helped her to move, and there were times like this when he felt the substance of his pride to depend upon exactly her improvement as if she were finally the only human creation in which he had taken part, he still knew that he could help her no longer, nor could anyone else, for she had come now into that domain where her problems were everyone’s problems and there were no answers and no doctors, but only that high plateau where philosophy lives with despair. He felt a portent in himself that she would grow away from him, and in years to come, many years to be sure, it might be that he would need her, and would she be forced to stay out of kindness and loyalty and boredom too?

“I’m sorry, Charley,” she said. “You’re tired and it’s not fair to bother you,”

But he was indeed too tired for enthusiasm, and he had a moment holding her in his arms where he entered into himself, and with a bleak hatred he thought of Elena, and was maniacal with the contempt he felt for what he had said to her. It was nonsense, it was the weak cowardly cheek-blossomed flower of his sentimentality, for the future was unknown, and it was equally possible that Elena would go on with him until in her slow way she had learned a little more of becoming a lady, and then loyalty or no, Victor or no, memories—what they were—or no, she would begin, biologically, imperatively,
to look for another mate, some young crude producer whom she could try to train to be a gentleman while the producer was training her to be still more a lady, and he, Eitel, would be left … he smiled with his dry sour eighteenth-century smile, he would be free at last to look for a nurse and a servant. And Victor would come to visit. Everyone who stayed alive had at the least a consolation prize. But this was much too far to go, and so he stopped and said good-bye to the unused artist’s depths of his intelligence, noticing with what perceptive comfort it provided him that on this night it was Elena who fell asleep first.

Long after he had failed to be lulled by the quiet rhythms of her breathing, Eitel got up and visited Victor’s room, and looked at his child sleeping, but there was only a small emotion he could feel, and so putting on an overcoat, he stepped out on the balcony of their house and looked down to the checkerwork of houses and streets which filled the valley of the capital, and beyond, far in the distance was the ocean and the lights of automobiles on the highway which bordered it. He had come along that road tonight on the drive back to his house, and he remembered how at a stoplight, just before the neon signs and the hamburger stands and the tourist camps which threw up their shoddy skirts to the capital, he had stared out across the water and seen a freighter with its hold-lights and its mast-lamps moving away to the horizon. It was off on a voyage and the men who sailed it would look for adventure.

Almost idly, for the first time in many months, Eitel thought of me then, and wondered, “Is Sergius possibly on that boat?”

Then the light changed to green and he raced his motor and rode away and forgot the freighter, but now, standing on the balcony of his house, Eitel set out on another voyage, and made the nostalgic journey back to Desert D’Or, thinking wistfully of how once he had adored Elena’s body in that unhappy time which marked—could he say it so?—the end of his overextended youth. It was gone now, gone as the miles on the boulevard past
that intersection where he had watched the ship go down the horizon, and with a pang for what is lost forever, he remembered the knowledge he wanted to give to me, suffering the sad frustration of his new middle age, since experience when it is not told to another must wither within and be worse than lost.

“One cannot look for a good time, Sergius,” he whispered in his mind to me, thinking of how I first had come to Desert D’Or, “for pleasure must end as love or cruelty”—and almost as an afterthought, he added—“or obligation.” In that way, Eitel thought of me, and with a kindly sadness he wondered, “Sergius, what does one ever do with one’s life?” asking in the easy friendship of memory, “Are you one of those who know?”

And in the passing fire of his imagination, he made up my answer across the miles and had me say good-bye to him. “For you see,” he confessed in his mind, “I have lost the final desire of the artist, the desire which tells us that when all else is lost, when love is lost and adventure, pride of self, and pity, there still remains that world we may create, more real to us, more real to others, than the mummery of what happens, passes, and is gone. So, do try Sergius,” he thought, “try for that other world, the real world, where orphans burn orphans and nothing is more difficult to discover than a simple fact. And with the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists, the small trumpet of your defiance.”

It was his speech, and he said it well. But I would have told him that one must invariably look for a good time since a good time is what gives us the strength to try again. For do we not gamble our way to the heart of the mystery against all the power of good manners, good morals, the fear of germs, and the sense of sin? Not to mention the prisons of pain, the wading pools of pleasure, and the public and professional voices of our sentimental land. If there is a God, and sometimes I believe there is one, I’m sure He says, “Go on, my boy. I don’t know that I can help you, but we wouldn’t want all
those
people to tell you what to do.”

There are hours when I would have the arrogance to reply to the Lord Himself, and so I ask, “Would You agree that sex is where philosophy begins?”

But God, who is the oldest of the philosophers, answers in His weary cryptic way, “Rather think of Sex as Time, and Time as the connection of new circuits.”

Then for a moment in that cold Irish soul of mine, a glimmer of the joy of the flesh came toward me, rare as the eye of the rarest tear of compassion, and we laughed together after all, because to have heard that sex was time and time the connection of new circuits was a part of the poor odd dialogues which give hope to us noble humans for more than one night.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in 1923 in Long Branch, NJ, and raised in Brooklyn, N
ORMAN
M
AILER
was one of the most influential writers of the second half of the twentieth century and a leading public intellectual for nearly sixty years. He is the author of more than thirty books.
The Castle in the Forest
, his last novel, was his eleventh New York Times bestseller. His first novel,
The Naked and the Dead
, has never gone out of print. His 1968 nonfiction narrative,
The Armies of the Night
, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He won a second Pulitzer for
The Executioner’s Song
and is the only person to have won Pulitzers in both fiction and nonfiction. Five of his books were nominated for National Book Awards, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2005. Mr. Mailer died in 2007 in New York City.