Bullet Park   ::   Cheever John

They finally got some dinner and in the taxi on the way home his father fell into a drunken sleep. Nailles had helped him up the steps to the house, grateful to be able to play out this much of his role as a son. He ardently wanted to love the old man but this was his only filial opportunity. His father went on up to his room and Nailles was greeted by his mother's faint, pained, knowledgeable and winsome smile.

A fresh pillow lay on the only other chair in the room. He could, by taking a step, lift it, press it to her face firmly and end her pain in a few minutes. He took the step, he lifted the pillow off the chair and returned to his seat, but suppose she struggled, suppose, in spite of her pain and her cavernous loss of consciousness she still instinctively and tenaciously loved what remained of her life; suppose she regained consciousness long enough to see that her son was a matricide. These were Nailles's memories at the breakfast table.

Nellie was not the sort of hostess who, greeting you at a dinner party, would get her tongue halfway down your throat before you'd hung up your hat. She was winsome. She wore lace that morning and smelled of carnations. She was a frail woman with reddish hair whose committee work, flower arrangements and moral views would have made the raw material for a night-club act. She was interested in the arts. She had painted the three pictures in the dining room. The canvas came printed with a maze of blue lines like a geodetic survey map. The areas within the lines were numbered-one for yellow, two for green and so forth- and by following the instructions carefully she was able to raise, on the lifeless cloth, the depth and brilliance of an autumn afternoon in Vermont or (over the sideboard) Gainsborough's portrait of the daughters of Major Gillespie. This was vulgar and she guessed as much, but it pleased her. She had recently enrolled-genuinely curious and anxious to be informed-in a class on the modern theater. One of her assignments had been to go to New York and report on a play that was being performed in the Village. She had planned to go with a friend but her friend was taken sick and she made the journey alone.

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.