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Bullet Park :: Cheever John
Страница: 126 из 131I have said a hundred times that I am sitting in a house by the sea at four o'clock and that it is raining but I know that it is half past five and I am sitting inan old chair over a funeral parlor."
"You remember Tony Nailles?"
"Yes."
"I am going to kill him," Hammer said. "I am going to burn him on the altar of Christ's Church."
"Get out of here," the swami said. "Get out of the Temple of Light."
The Lewellens' guests had been invited for seven thirty. Tommy Lewellen stood on his terrace. His idea of a party was a day and a night he had spent in West Berlin with three Kurfürstendamm whores. That was a party. Things were different in Bullet Park, he thought, as he watched the caterer's waiters set tables for fifty under a tent lighted with paper lanterns. "The Amalgamated Development Corporation and Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Lewellen cordially request the pleasure…". The business name on the invitation was put there so Lewellen could claim the party as a tax exemption. If the claim was accepted the party would cost him nothing and he would net a thousand. Lewellen was more interested in the financial arrangements of his wife's parties than in anything else. He sometimes got so bored that he seemed to see straight through the display of elegance to the bills, canceled checks, even the nails in the floor. What was wrong with friendly talk and well-dressed men and women eating ham and chicken? Nothing, nothing, nothing at all except that the blandness of the scene would be offensive. No one would get drunk, no one would fight, no one would likely get screwed, nothing would be celebrated, commemorated or advanced. If the gathering he awaited stood at the brink of anything it stood at the brink of licentiousness. Sheer niceness, he thought, might drive a man to greet his guests wearing nothing but a cockwig. Gross and public indecencies would cure the evening of its timelessness and relate it vigorously to death. The waiters were setting out bowls of flowers. The flowers looked fresh enough but Lewellen guessed they had spent the afternoon at a wedding reception and would, after a night in the refrigerator, wilt during a fund-raising lunch in Greenwich, Connecticut.
The energies of change were almost unknown to Lewellen, but that the scene that was about to begin would claim to be totally innocent of change made it half a scene, half a loaf, half an anything, a picture cut from a magazine and pasted against the evening sky, and what a miserable thing was the sky-thought Lewellen-a boring reach of blue with some thunderclouds stacked up in the west like the towers of an old-fashioned West Side apartment hotel, the last abode of funky Hungarian widows who left their dirty dishes in the hallway. What a bore was the sky! Thunder sounded.
"You remember Tony Nailles?"
"Yes."
"I am going to kill him," Hammer said. "I am going to burn him on the altar of Christ's Church."
"Get out of here," the swami said. "Get out of the Temple of Light."
The Lewellens' guests had been invited for seven thirty. Tommy Lewellen stood on his terrace. His idea of a party was a day and a night he had spent in West Berlin with three Kurfürstendamm whores. That was a party. Things were different in Bullet Park, he thought, as he watched the caterer's waiters set tables for fifty under a tent lighted with paper lanterns. "The Amalgamated Development Corporation and Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Lewellen cordially request the pleasure…". The business name on the invitation was put there so Lewellen could claim the party as a tax exemption. If the claim was accepted the party would cost him nothing and he would net a thousand. Lewellen was more interested in the financial arrangements of his wife's parties than in anything else. He sometimes got so bored that he seemed to see straight through the display of elegance to the bills, canceled checks, even the nails in the floor. What was wrong with friendly talk and well-dressed men and women eating ham and chicken? Nothing, nothing, nothing at all except that the blandness of the scene would be offensive. No one would get drunk, no one would fight, no one would likely get screwed, nothing would be celebrated, commemorated or advanced. If the gathering he awaited stood at the brink of anything it stood at the brink of licentiousness. Sheer niceness, he thought, might drive a man to greet his guests wearing nothing but a cockwig. Gross and public indecencies would cure the evening of its timelessness and relate it vigorously to death. The waiters were setting out bowls of flowers. The flowers looked fresh enough but Lewellen guessed they had spent the afternoon at a wedding reception and would, after a night in the refrigerator, wilt during a fund-raising lunch in Greenwich, Connecticut.
The energies of change were almost unknown to Lewellen, but that the scene that was about to begin would claim to be totally innocent of change made it half a scene, half a loaf, half an anything, a picture cut from a magazine and pasted against the evening sky, and what a miserable thing was the sky-thought Lewellen-a boring reach of blue with some thunderclouds stacked up in the west like the towers of an old-fashioned West Side apartment hotel, the last abode of funky Hungarian widows who left their dirty dishes in the hallway. What a bore was the sky! Thunder sounded.