John Cheever: Bullet Park

The specialist tried to explain his profession at dinner but his vocabulary was so highly technical that neither Nellie nor Eliot was very clear about what to expect. At eight o'clock he carried his case of instruments upstairs and said: "Time to get to work." He closed the door. When he came down for breakfast his eyes were red and he seemed to have been up all night. Nailles drove him to the station and he mailed them his findings at the end of the week. The report read: "The patient suspended consciousness at 9:12 with a corresponding drop in body temperature. He slept in the Fanchon position-that is on his abdomen with his right knee bent. At 10:00 he had a two-minute dream sequence that raised his body temperature and generally relaxed his cardiovascular tensions. At 10:03 he changed to the nimbus position, that is he crooked his left leg. His next dream sequence was at 1:15 and lasted three minutes. This caused him to have an erection which woke him briefly but he then shifted to the prenatal position and fell asleep again. His body temperature remained constant. At 3:10 he returned to the Fanchon position and began to snore. The snoring was both oral and nasal and continued for eight and one half minutes…"

The report was five typewritten pages and attached to it was a bill for five hundred dollars.

Nailles thought of pain and suffering as a principality, lying somewhere beyond the legitimate borders of western Europe. The government would be feudal and the country mountainous but it would never lie on his itinerary and would be unknown to his travel agent. Now and then he received postcards from this distant place. There would be a view of the statue of Aesculapius in the public gardens with some snowy mountains in the distance and on the back of the card this message: "Edna is under sedation most of the time and has about three weeks to live but she would like a letter from you." He wrote entertaining letters to the dying and mailed them off to that remote and quaint capital where the figures on the Rathaus Glockenspiel were crippled, where the statues in the park were the grotesques pain can extort from the imagination, where the palace had been converted into a hospital and rivers of blood foamed under the arched bridges. He was not meant to travel here and he was surprised and frightened to wake from a dream in which he had seen, out of a train window, that terrifying range of mountains.

When Tony had been in bed for twelve days Nailles's inexperience with grief was ended. He would not have gone so far as to say that fortune was dealt out like the peanuts at the end of a child's birthday party, but he felt vaguely that one had one's share of brute pleasure, hard work, money and love and that the rank inequities that he saw everywhere were mysteries that did not concern him. Lucky Nailles! Now his son lay close to death. This did not come like a new fact in his life. It was to be his life and he was to learn the obsessiveness of suffering. When he woke in the morning his first thought was that he might hear Tony's step on the stairs. Whatever occupied him- drink, play, work or money-was merely a distraction from the consuming image of his lost son, gripping a pillow. Having observed the obsessiveness of pain he went on to observe the gross jealousy of a man who feels that his luck has run out. Why, of all the young men in Bullet Park, should Tony have been singled out to suffer a mysterious and incurable disease? It was not a question that he asked himself but a question forced onto him pitilessly by the world as it appeared to him from the first thing in the morning until dark. Cheerful and thoughtless laughter on the station platform merely made Nailles wonder angrily and bitterly why the sons of his friends were free to walk and run in the light while his son lay imprisoned. Lunching with friends who spoke inevitably about the successes of their sons would provoke in him such sadness and misgiving that he would seem physically alienated from the company. Seeing a young stranger run down the street he wanted to call after him: "Stop, stop, stop, stop. Tony was once as strong and swift as you." Having been a patriot about his way of life he found himself involved in subversion, espionage and vengefulness.

"Do you know anyone named Hammer," Nellie asked one evening. Nailles explained that he had met the Hammers in church. "Well she called this afternoon," Nellie said, "and asked us to dinner. I don't approve of asking strangers to dinner but perhaps they come from some part of the world where this goes on."

"It does seem strange, doesn't it," Nailles said. "We just said hello on the porch. Perhaps they're lonely…" He was not thinking of the Hammers' probable aloneness but of his own. It was the image of Tony in bed that broke down his rigid sense of social fitness. Tony was sick, Nailles was sad, there was more suffering in life than he had been led to believe and mightn't it be generous to overlook Mrs. Hammer's importunity and accept her invitation. 'If we're not doing anything else why don't we go," he said. "It would be neighborly and we can leave early." A few nights later then they drove up to Powder Hill. It was a starry night-Venus blazed like a light bulb, and going up the walk to the house Nailles bent and kissed his wife. Hammer let them in and introduced them to his wife and the other guests. Marietta Hammer seemed absentminded, unenthusiastic or perhaps drunk. One of Nailles's great liabilities was an inability to judge people on their appearance. He thought all men and women honest, reliable, clean and happy and he was often surprised and disappointed. He could see at once that the optimistic estimate of the Hammers that he had made in church might have to be overhauled. There were three other couples-the Taylors, the Phillipses and the Hazzards. There seemed to be no maid. Hammer mixed the drinks in the pantry and Marietta excused herself and went into the kitchen.

"Have you known the Hammers for long," Eliot asked the others.

"I don't really know them at all," Mr. Taylor said. "I have the Ford agency in the village and when he came in to buy a car he asked me for dinner. I figure they'll be a two-car family- everybody on Powder Hill is-so I'm really here on business."

"I sold them their deep freeze," said Mr. Phillips.

"I sold them the house," said Mr. Hazzard.

"Isn't it a lovely house," said Mrs. Hazzard. "The Heathcups lived here until he passed away."

"He was such a nice fellow," said Mr. Hazzard. "I've never understood why he did it."

"Let's see," Hammer said, coming in from the pantry. "Bourbon for you. Scotch and water…"

"What business are you in, Mr. Hammer," asked Mr. Hazzard.

"I'm president of Paul Hammer Associates," Hammer said. "We do just about everything."

Marietta Hammer laughed. Her laughter was meant to discountenance her husband. It was a musical laugh-half an octave-but it was, Eliot thought, the kind of laughter one hears in women's clubs, at bridge parties and in those restaurants that feature rich desserts. It had no power of sexual arousal as laughter often does. Her blond hair, her earrings and her dress were all long and she had a definite beauty-the kind of beauty you might see on a magazine cover, but it would be an old cover in a dentist's anteroom, a little worn and dating from the year before last. She went into the pantry and helped herself to more whiskey. Taylor did not conceal the fact that he was there on business and during cocktails he spoke of the interesting discounts he could offer Hammer when the time came to buy his second car. The dinner, as things went in Bullet Park, wasn't much. There was some kind of goulash or stew and Marietta picked at it with such obvious distaste that Eliot wondered if Hammer hadn't cooked the meal. "Well I don't suppose you've been in Bullet Park long enough to form any judgments but we do hope you like the place. I've always found it a very nice community."