On the shores of the Atlantic and the Pacific, the Tyrrhenian and the Mediterranean, in catboats, in motorboats, in outboards, cabin cruisers and ocean liners; in hotels, motels, in castles, in tentsj on beds, on sofas, on floors, on grassy hummocks, on pine needles, on stony mountain ledges warm from the sun; at every hour of the day and night; in England, in France, in Germany, Italy and Spain; while I, looking at Marietta, would remember the number of places where I had been rebuffed. In the motel in Stockbridge she had locked herself in the bathroom until I fell asleep. When I took her for a two-week cruise she forgot to pack her contraceptives and the ship's doctor had none for sale. In Chicago she kicked me in the groin. In Easthampton she defended herself with a carving knife. Her menstrual periods seemed frequent and prolonged and on most nights she would hurry into bed and cover her face with a blanket before I could get undressed. I am too tired, she would say, I am too sleepy. I have a head cold. I have a toothache. I have indigestion. I have the flu. On the beach at Nantucket she ran away from me and when I thought I had her cornered in the sailboat she dove overboard and swam to shore.
After a year or two the yellow paint on the walls had begun to crack and discolor, and Marietta called the painter in Blenville and had him bring out some samples. I had never told her about the importance of the yellow walls and so her choice of pink was not malicious but pink was the color she chose. I could have protested but my obsession with yellow had begun to seem absurd. Surely I had enough character to live with a normal spectrum and I let the painter go ahead. Two or three weeks after the painters had finished I woke with the cafard. I suffered, on getting out of bed, all the symptoms of panic. My lips were swollen. I had difficulty breathing and my hands were shaking. I dressed and had two scoops of gin before breakfast, I was drunk most of that day. I had, I knew, to change the pace of my Me and on Friday we flew to Rome.
The cafard followed me throughout that trip but it followed me without much guile either because it was lazy or because it was an assassin so confident of its prey that it had no need to exert itself. On Saturday morning I woke, feeling cheerful and randy. I was just as cheerful on Sunday but on Monday I woke in a melancholy so profound that I had to drag myself out of bed and stumble, step by Step, into the shower. On Tuesday we took a train to Fondi and a cab through the mountains to Sperlonga, where we stayed with friends. I had two good days there but the bête noire caught up with me on the third and we took the train for Naples at Formia. I had four good days in Naples. Had the bête noire lost track of its victim or was it simply moving in the leisurely way of a practiced murderer? My fifth day in Naples was crushing and we took the afternoon train back to Rome. Here again I had three good days but I woke on the fourth in danger of my life and went out to take a walk, putting one foot in front of the other. On some broad and curving street, the name of which I can't remember, I saw coming towards me a line of motorcycle policemen, moving at such a slow pace that they had to keep putting their feet on the paving to keep the engines upright. Behind them were a few hundred men and women carrying signs that said PACE, SPEBANZA and AMORE. It was, I realized, a memorial procession for the communist delegate Mazzacone, who had been shot in his bathtub. All I knew about him was that he had been described as saintly in L'Unitd… I did not know his opinions and had read none of his speeches but I began to cry. There was no question of drying my tears. They splashed down my face and wet my jacket, they were torrential. I joined the procession and as soon as I began to march I felt the cafard take off. There were marshals with armbands to keep the parade in order and we were told not to speak so that as we moved through Rome there was no sound but the shuffle and hiss of shoe leather, much of it worn, and because of our numbers, a loud, weird and organic sound, a sighing that someone with his back to the parade might have mistaken for the sea.
We marched through the Venezia to the Colosseum. We walked proudly, men, women and children, in spite of the shuffling sound. This grief which, in my case, we accidentally shared reminded me of how little else there was that we had in common. I felt the strongest love for these strangers for the space of three city blocks. There was a memorial service in the Colosseum-nothing as moving as the procession but when I went back to the hotel I felt well. We flew back to New York soon afterwards and it was sitting on a beach that following summer (I had already seen the picture in the dental journal) that I decided, on the strength of a kite string, that my crazy old mother's plan to crucify a man was sound and that I would settle in Bullet Park and murder Nailles. Sometime later I changed my victim to Tony.
PART 3
XVI
Nailles asked Hammer to go fishing. It came about this way. Nailles was a member of the Volunteer Fire Department, where he drove the old red LaFrance fire truck. To hell over the hills and dales of Bullet Park late at night, ringing his bell and blowing his siren, seemed to him the climax of his diverse life. Mouthwash, fire trucks, chain saws and touch football! The village seemed upended in the starlight and the only lights that burned burned in bathrooms. It was his finest hour.
The fire company had a meeting and dinner on the first Thursday of the month and Nailles attended this. The red fire truck was parked in front of the building. The garage space had been swept and hosed down and tables covered with sheets had been set up as a buffet and bar. Two apprentice firemen were polishing glasses and Charlie Maddux, the self-appointed firehouse cook, was basting a leg of lamb at a gas range in the corner. Charlie was a used-car dealer. He weighed nearly three hundred pounds. He like to buy food, cook food, eat food, and he very likely dreamed of joints of meat and buckets of shellfish. His wife was, predictably, a spare woman devoted to a diet of blackstrap molasses and wheat germ. He seemed, as a firehouse cook, to enjoy a sense of reality that he did not enjoy either with his wife or his used cars and he stirred, basted, seasoned, tasted and served the dinner with absolute absorption and like most amateur cooks he was incurably premature, getting the meal onto the table a half hour before anyone was ready. Nailles went upstairs to the meeting room.
There were thirty members of the fire department at that time. About twenty had gathered. Some part of the atmosphere of the place was that it had been the firemen themselves who had converted it from a loft into a habitable club room.