Bullet Park   ::   Cheever John

When I finished the Montale and took it into New York I discovered that the poetry had already been translated but for some reason this didn't disappointme. It seemed then that nothing could. I don't know when the honeymoon ended… I'll settle for a night in Blenville. Eleven o'clock. Groping, I found Marietta 's side of the bed empty. There was a light on in the kitchen. The shape of the lighted window stretched over the lawn. Was Marietta sick? I sleep naked and I went down the stairs into the kitchen naked. Marietta stood in the center of the floor wearing her wedding ring and nothing else. She was eating, with a bent fork, from a can of salmon. When I embraced her she pushed me away angrily and said: "Can't you see that I'm eating." The salmon gave off a sea smell, fresh and cheerful. I felt like taking a swim. When I touched her again she said: "Leave me alone, leave me alone! Can't a person get something to eat without being molested?" After that night-if that was the night-I saw more of distemper than tenderness and often slept alone; but while Marietta 's distempers were strenuous they had no more permanence than the wind. They seemed at times to be influenced by the wind. Spring and its uncertain zephyrs-any sort of clemency-seemed to create a barometric disturbance in her nature that provoked her deepest discontents. Violence, on the other hand-hurricanes, thunderstorms and buzzards-sweetened her nature. In the autumn when tempests with girls' names lashed the Bermudas and moved up past Hatteras into the northeast, she could be gentle, yielding and wifely. When snows closed the roads and stopped the trains she was angelic, and once, at the height of an epochal blizzard, she said she loved me. She seemed to think of love as a universal dilemma, produced by convulsions of nature and history. I will never forget how tender she was the day we went off the gold standard and her passion was boundless when they shot the King of Parthia. (He was saying his prayers in the basilica.) When our only mutuality was a roof tree and some furnishings she looked at me as if I was a repulsive brute to whom she had been sold by some cruel slavemaster; but when the carts of thunder rolled, when the assassin's knife struck home, when governments fell and earthquakes blasted the city walls she was my glory and my child.

A clinician like Shitz would have said that I had been warned but he was wrong all along. My fault was that I had thought of love as a heady distillate of nostalgia-a force of memory that had resisted analysis by cybernetics. We do not fall in love-I thought-we re-enter love, and I had fallen in love with a memory-a piece of white thread and a thunderstorm. My own true love was a piece of white thread and that was so.