Bullet Park by John Cheever

Author:John Cheever
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub, pdf
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780679737872
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1969-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

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After lunch Nellie poured herself a whiskey. I should go to a shrink, she thought, until she remembered the doctor circling his invisible dentist’s chair. She hated him, not for his real-estate business, but because she had always felt vaguely that in any crisis psychiatry could be counted on to work a cure, and he had taken this solace out the door with him. She remembered that the cleaning woman—the thief—had false teeth. Her favorite disinfectant had been a chemical, advertised to smell of mountain pine woods, but this imitation of the sweet mountain air was so crude, flagrant and repulsive that it amounted to an irony. Snowcapped toilet seats. Eliot had asked her to see the guru and so she went.

The slums, the oldest part of the village, were down along the banks of the river. She never had any reason to go there. She had read in the paper that women were mugged and robbed in broad daylight. There were knife fights in saloons. The rain was heavy that afternoon; the light narrow. All rain tastes the same and yet rain fell for Nellie from a diversity of skies. Some rains seemed let down like a net from the guileless heavens of her childhood, some rains were stormy and bitter, some fell like a force of memory. The rain that day tasted as salty as blood. So down into the slums went Nellie, down to Peyton’s funeral parlor. This was a shabby frame building with a peaked door—a stab at holiness under which the dead (murdered in knife fights) entered and departed for the black cemetery at the edge of everything. There was a door on the left leading, she guessed, to the rooms upstairs, and she opened this onto a bare hallway with a staircase.

The strangeness of this environment disturbed her deeply as if she inhaled, in the rooms of her own house, not only the buttressed proprieties but an essence that conditioned her chromosomes and lights. The alien reek of the hallway—the immemorial reek of such places-seemed to strip her of any moral reliability. She looked around for something familiar—a fire extinguisher would have served—but there was nothing in the hallway that belonged to her. Had one of the legendary rapists she read about in the evening paper approached her she would have been helpless. She was lost. She was frightened. Her instinct was to turn and go; her duty was to climb the stairs; and the division between these two forces seemed like a broad river without bridges-seemed to give her some insight into the force of separateness in her life. She seemed to be saying goodbye to herself at a railroad station; standing among the mourners at the edge of a grave. Goodbye Nellie.

She had no role in this place and she felt it keenly. Census taker? Relief worker? An advocate for planned parenthood, distributing free pills? An adviser to unwed mothers? Lady bountiful dividing the proceeds from the church bazaar? She was none of these.

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