Bullet Park Read Online Free Page A

wayward housewife attacked him, his male member would take a painful attitude of disinterest. It would seem to summon him home. It was a domesticated organ with a love of home cooking, open fires and the thighs of Nellie. Had he any talent he would have written a poem to the thighs of Nellie. The idea had occurred to him. He sincerely would have liked to commemorate his spiritual and fleshly love. The landscapes that he beheld when he raised her nightgown made his head swim. What beauty; what incredible beauty. Here was the keystone to his love of the visible world.
    They ate breakfast in the dining room. Nailles went to the hallway and shouted up the stairs to his son: “Breakfast’s ready, Tony.”
    “But he isn’t here, darling,” Nellie said. “He’s at the Pendletons’. You drove him over on your way to church.”
    “Oh yes,” said Nailles, but he seemed bewildered. He never seemed quite to understand that the boy was free to move in and out of his house, in and out of his orbit and his affections. Knowing that the boy was away, having in fact driven him to an airport and put him on a plane, he would then return home and look for him in thegarden. The love Nailles felt for his wife and his only son seemed like some limitless discharge of a clear amber fluid that would surround them, cover them, preserve them and leave them insulated but visible like the contents of an aspic.
    Sitting at their breakfast table Nailles and Nellie seemed to have less dimension than a comic strip, but why was this? They had erotic depths, origins, memories, dreams and seizures of melancholy and enthusiasm. Nailles sighed. He was thinking of his mother. She had suffered a stroke four months ago and had never quite regained consciousness. She was a patient in a nursing home in the west end of the village. Nailles visited her every Sunday and remembered uneasily his visit of a week ago.
    The nursing home was one of those large places, the favorite of undertakers, that had been made obsolete by the disappearance of a servant class. There was a crystal chandelier and a marble floor in the vestibule but the furniture seemed to have been gathered from some ancient porch and the flowers on the table were made of wax. The director was a Swede and must have been a prosperous Swede since his rates began at one hundred and fifty dollars a week; but he did not spend his money on clothes. His trousers shone and he wore a shapeless brown jacket of cotton. He spoke without an accent but in the pleasant, singing way of Scandinavians. “Dr. Powers was here yesterday,” he sang, “but he had nothing to report. Her blood pressure is a hundred andseventy-two. Her heart is damaged but still very strong. She is getting twenty-two cc’s of PLM six times a day and the usual anticoagulants.” The director had received no medical education but he displayed the medical information that had rubbed onto him with the same flair with which a green soldier will display his military nomenclature. “The hairdresser came on Wednesday but I didn’t have her hair touched up. You asked me not to.”
    “My mother never dyed her hair,” Nailles said.
    “Yes, I know,” the director said, “but most of my clients like to see their parents looking well. I call them my dolls,” he said, speaking with genuine tenderness. “They look like people and yet they’re really not.” Nailles wondered darkly if the director had played with dolls. How else could he have hit on this comparison. “We dress them. We undress them. We have their hair arranged. We talk with them but of course they can’t answer. I think of them as my dolls.”
    “Could I see her,” Nailles asked.
    “Certainly.”
    The director led him up the marble stairs and opened the door to his mother’s room. It was a small bedroom with a single window. It would have been a child’s bedroom when the house contained a family. “She spoke last Thursday,” the director said. “The nurse was feeding