John Cheever: Bullet Park

The play was performed in a loft before a small audience. The air was close. Towards the end of the first act one of the cast took off his shoes, his shirt, his trousers and then, with his back to the, audience, his underpants. Nellie could not believe her eyes. Had she protested by marching out of the theater, as her mother would have done, she would seem to be rejecting the facts of life. She intended to be a modern woman and to come to terms with the world. Then the actor turned slowly around, yawning and stretching himself unselfconsciously. It was all true to life but some violent series of juxtapositions, concepts of propriety and her own natural excitability threw her into an emotional paroxysm that made her sweat. If these were merely the facts of life why should her eyes be riveted on his thick pubic brush from which hung, like a discouraged and unwatered flower, his principal member. The lights faded. The cast remained, dressed for the rest of the play but Nellie was unnerved. When she left the theater it was rainy and humid. She crossed Washington Square to catch a bus. Some students from the university were circling the pool carrying picket signs on which were written Fuck, Prick and Cunt. Had she gone mad? She watched the procession until it wound out of sight. Shit was the last placard she saw. She was weak. Boarding the bus she looked around for the reassuring faces of her own kind, looked around desperately for honest mothers, wives, women who took pride in their houses, their gardens, their flower arrangements, their cooking. Two young men in the seat in front of her were laughing. One of them threw his arms around the other and kissed him on the ear. Should she thrash them with her umbrella? At the next stop what she was looking for-an honest woman-took the seat beside her. She smiled at the stranger, who returned the smile and said, wearily: "I've been looking everywhere for English cretonne, good English cretonne, and there doesn't seem to be a yard of it available in the city of New York. I have good English things and an English-type house and nubbly, stretchy reps look completely out of place in my decorating scheme, but nubbly, stretchy reps are all you can get. I suppose there must be some cretonne somewhere but I haven't been able to find it. My old cretonne is perfectly beautiful but it's showing signs of wear. Iris, peonies and cornflowers on a blue background. I have a sample here. She opened her bag and took out a scrap of printed linen.

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 bill; 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.