John Cheever: Bullet Park

They are ranged there like the gods in some pantheon of remorse. Their intent seems to be to force him to his knees and to wring from him some prayer. "Empties, oh empties, most merciful empties have mercy upon me for the sake of Jack Daniels and Seagram Distillers." Their immutable emptiness gives them a look that is cruel and censorious. Their labels-scotch, gin and bourbon-have the ferocity of Chinese demons, but he definitely has the feeling that if he tried to placate them with a genuflection they would be merciless. He drops them into a wastebasket, but this does not dispose of their force. He puts some water on to boil and feeling for the wall like a blind man makes his way back to the bedroom where he can hear his wife's cries of pain. "Oh I wish I were dead," she cries, "I wish I were dead." "There, there, dear," he says thickly. "There, there." He sets out a clean suit, a shirt, a tie and some shoes and then gets back into bed again and pulls the blankets over his face. It is now close to nine and the garden is filled with light. They hear the schoolbus at the corner, sounding its horn for the Marsden boy. The week has begun its splendid procession of days. The kettle begins to whistle.

He gets out of bed for the third time, returns to the kitchen and makes some coffee. He brings a cup for them both. She gets out of bed, washes her face without examining it and then returns to bed. He puts on some underwear and then returns to bed himself. For the next hour they are up and down, in and out, struggling to rejoin the stream of things, and finally he dresses and racked by vertigo, melancholy, nausea and fitful erections he boards his Gethsemane -the Monday-morning 10:48.

There was nothing hypocritical about the Wick-wires' Monday mornings, and so much for the adolescent

The stranger might observe that the. place seems very quiet; they seem to have come inland from the sounds of wilderness-gulls, trains, cries of pain and love, creaking things, hammerings, gunfire- not even a child practices the piano in this precinct of disinfected acoustics. They pass the Howestons (7 bedrooms, 5 baths, $65,000) and the Welchers (3 bedrooms, 1 1/2 baths, $31,000). The wind draws through the beam of their headlight some yellow elm leaves, a credit card, potato chips, bills, checks and ashes. Are there songs for this place, the stranger might wonder; and there are. Songs sung to children and by children, songs for cooking, songs for undressing, water songs, ecclesiastical doggerel (We throw our crowns at Your feet), madrigals, folk songs, and a little native music. Mr. Elmsford (6 bedrooms, 3 baths, $53,000) dusts off his tarnished psalter which is something he never mastered and sings: "Hotchkiss, Yale, an indifferent marriage, three children and twenty-three years with the Universal Tuffa Corporation. Oh, why am I so disappointed," he sings, "why does everything seem to have passed me by." There is a rush for the door before he starts his second verse but he goes on singing. "Why does everything taste of ashes, why is there no brilliance or promise in my affairs." The waiters empty the ashtrays, the bartender locks an iron screen over the bottles and they finally turn off the lights, but he goes on singing, "I tried, I tried, I did the best I knew how to do so why should I feel so sad and blue?" "This place is shut, mister," they tell him, "and you're the guy who shut it." Then there are the affirmative singers: " Bullet Park is growing, growing, Bullet Park is here to stay, Bullet Park shows great improvement, every day in every way…"

Vital statistics? They were of no importance. The divorce rate was way down, the suicide rate was a secret; traffic casualties averaged twenty-two a year because of a winding highway that seemed to have been drawn on the map by a child with a grease pencil. The winters were too inclement for citrus fruit but much too clement for the native white birch.

Hazzard drew his car up in front of a white house with lighted windows. "This is the property I had in mind for you," he said. "I hope she won't be in. She's not much of a saleswoman. She said she was going out." He rang the bell but Mrs. Heathcup opened the door. It appeared that she was preparing to go out but had not quite made it. She was a stocky woman with skewered silver-gilt hair, wearing a bathrobe. On the tip of one of her silk slippers there was a cloth rose; on the other there was none. "Well you're welcome to look," she said in a in hoarse, carrying voice. "I hope you'll like it well enough to buy it. I'm getting a little tired of having people track mud through the place and then decide on something else. It's a lovely house and everything works-you'll have to take my word for that-but I've known people around here to sell houses with dangerous wiring, backed-up septic tanks, obsolete plumbing and leaky roofs. There's nothing like that here. Before my husband passed away he saw that everything was in apple-pie order and the only reason I'm selling is because there's nothing here for me, now that he's gone. Nothing at all. There's nothing in a place like this for any single woman. Speaking of tribes, it's like a regular tribe. Widows, divorcees, single men, the tribal elders give them all the gate. Fifty-seven is my price. That's not my asking price it's my final price. We put twenty thousand into the place and my husband painted it every single year before he passed away. In January he'd paint the kitchen. Saturdays and Sundays and nights, that is. Then he'd paint the hallway and the living room and the dining room and the bedrooms and then next January he'd start all over again in the kitchen. He was painting the dining room the day he passed away. I was upstairs. When I say that he passed away I don't want you to think that he died in his sleep. While he was painting I heard him talking to himself. 'I can't stand it any longer,' he said. I still don't know what he meant. Then he went out into the garden and shot himself. That was when I found out what land of neighbors I had. You can look all over the world but you won't find neighbors as kind and thoughtful as the people in Bullet Park. As soon as they heard about my husband passing away they came over here to comfort me. There must have been ten or twelve of them and we all had something to drink and they were so comforting that I almost forgot what had happened. I mean it didn't seem as though anything had happened. Well here's the living room. Eighteen by thirty-two. We've had fifty guests here for cocktails but it never seems crowded. I'll sell you the rug for half of what I gave for it. All wool. If your wife wants the curtains I'm sure we can work something out. Do you have a daughter? This hallway would be a beautiful place for a wedding. I mean when the bride throws down her bouquet. Now the dining room…"

The dinner table was set for twelve with soup plates, wine glasses, candlesticks and wax flowers. "I always keep my table set," said Mrs. Heathcup. "I haven't entertained for months but Mr. Heathcup hated to see an empty table and so I always keep it set, sort of in memory. An empty table depressed him. I change the setting once or twice a week. There are four churches in the village. I suppose you know about the Gorey Brook Country Club. It has a good eighteen-hole course designed by Pete Ellison, four en tout cas courts and a pool. I hope you're not Jewish. They're very strict about that. I don't have a pool myself and frankly it's something of a limitation. When people start talking about pool chemicals and so forth you'll find yourself left out of the conversation. I've had an estimate made and you can have one put in the back garden for

eight thousand. Maintenance comes to around twenty-five a week and they charge a hundred to open and close it. The neighbors, as I've said, are wonderful people, although they take some knowing. You might think Harry Plutarch, who lives across the street, a little odd unless you knew the whole story. His wife ran off with Howie Jones. What she did was to have a moving van come to the house one morning and take everything out of the place except a chair, a single bed and a parrot cage. When he came home from work he found an empty house and he's been living with a chair, a bed and a parrot ever since. Here's a copy of the evening paper. It might give you some idea of what the place is like…"