The Deer Park (42 page)

I got up all my courage, which is to say I showed more courage than I had. “If you’re going to question me,” I said, “I want to use my tape recorder.”

The guard stopped. The smile went off his face and the flushed eager look, and he sat there looking puzzled. It was the last expression I wished to see on his face. For a moment I was certain I had gone too far, and that when it was all over, and I was in a hospital bed with a broken jaw, and a cast over my collarbone, they would pinch my flesh awake long enough for me to mumble to a police stenographer, “Yes, I admit I was dead-drunk and rolled off a table.”

The guard reached forward from his chair, and poked a finger into my thigh. “We hear you wear a lavender shirt that Teddy Pope gave you,” he said. “You don’t look lavender, boy, but I guess you like lavender.”

“When did they promote you from the vice squad?” I asked.

Greene entered into it then. He looked at the space between my eyes. “Say one more thing like that,” he said.

I was closer to being hysterical than I care to admit, but there is a curious calm this side of hysteria. At least for me. I was that near to breaking down, and yet my voice came out quietly and evenly and slowly. “Greene,” I said, “I’ve got three thousand dollars in the bank, and I’ll use those three thousand dollars for a lawyer. So try and think about the publicity your committee is going to get when it comes out that you’ve pulled a rock with an Air Force flier.” It sounded good to me and I did not mention the medical discharge.

“You’re a subversive and a pervert,” Greene said.

“Put that in writing and I’ll sue you for slander.”

“Don’t you just talk a lot?” Greene said.

I suppose I would have been something of a hero if I had invited him to come downstairs, but instead I smiled again. “Everybody talks a lot,” I said.

They got up then to go—I remember thinking with a little amazement that maybe they were a little afraid of me, too—and at the door, Greene stopped and turned around and said, “Don’t leave town without notifying us.”

“Yes, you send me a paper to that effect.”

“Just don’t leave town,” he said, and he went out the door, and I waited a minute, and went over to lock it so they would not come back on me, and then I lay down on my bed and let myself go.

Because these finally were the kind of men I had grown up with—their shadow had been over the orphanage—and when all was said I knew that I was not so different from them, not nearly so different as I liked to think. All the while they had been in my room and we had talked, I had been nervously and crucially divided, and much of me had been agreeing with everything they said. So I had another inkling of the kind of secret dialogues which had been going on in me through the years, and I lay there for more than one night, exhausted and empty after
washing dishes, and I began to think, at least I learned how to try to think, for to do that, one must be ready to live in a hunt for the most elusive game—our real motive or motives and not the ostensible reason—and therefore I would have to look into myself. But that was not the easiest thing to do, for what did I have to discover? I was nothing, a false Irishman from a real orphanage, a boxer without a punch, a flier whose reflexes were gone, a potential stool-pigeon for every policeman who would use his knuckle, and worst of all, a preliminary boy in the bedroom—that was something to stop thought forever. For who can know more, when to know more is to say to oneself, “It is not going to be very good for me if I keep on thinking.” What was the worst, if I did not watch out, I would be a patsy in the world, that was the worst which could happen to a graduate from the orphanage. Too many men and too much history seemed to add up to no more than the death of the patsies. And then of course I knew no history, that too occurred to me, and if I was going to speak up to the rough world out there, it was time for me to open a book.

So with the grace of a cow kicking flop, and with the old private worry that perhaps I had taken a punch too many on the head and would never be able to think that well after all, I stumbled into the kind of things which everybody has wrestled with, one way and then another; I thought of courage and of cowardice, and how we are all brave and all terrified each in our own way and our private changing proportion, and I thought of honesty and deception, and the dance of life they make, for it is exactly when we come closest to another that we are turned away with a lie, and blunder forward on a misconception, moving to understand ourselves on the platitudes and lies of the past. And, vaguely, thinking of certain words not as words but as the serious divisions of my experience, and every man’s experience is serious to himself, I thought of such couples as love and hate, and victory and defeat, and what it was to feel warm and what it was to be cool. I explored with humility and early
arrogance, lying on that lumpy bed, reduced to heat rash and to panic, knowing I was weak and wondering if I would ever be strong. For I touched the bottom myself, there was a bottom that time. I returned to it, I wallowed in it, I looked at myself, and the longer I looked the less terrifying it became and the more understandable. I began then to make those first painful efforts to acquire the most elusive habit of all, the mind of the writer, and though I could hardly judge from my early pages whether I were a talent or a fool, I continued, I went on for a little while, until I ended with an idea that many men have had, and many will have again—and indeed I started with that idea—but I knew that finally one must do, simply do, for we act in total ignorance and yet in honest ignorance we must act, or we can never learn for we can hardly believe what we are told, we can only measure what has happened inside ourselves. So I wrote a few poor pages and gave them up and knew I would try again.

In the meantime I did not hear from the detectives, and slowly I came to decide that it was time for me to leave Desert D’Or, and if I was in real trouble with them, which I doubted, well that for that. I would go to Mexico, the idea appealed to me, and I would take a course on a veteran’s allotment in some Mexican art school, or I would study archaeology—a good way to spend one’s life in the sun. The Government owed me something after all, and a man has to live and there are not fourteen-thousand-dollar poker games every year. I even began to play with a very curious idea. The more I thought of Elena the more I disliked myself for the way I acted toward her the last time at Marion’s, and I came to feel my way to the understanding that a part of how I had judged her letter came from whatever it was I had failed to delight in Lulu, and I would leave to the side whose fault it was there, and how much, and from whom. All the while Elena’s letter had its slow effect on me, and I read it over many times, as I had once read Eitel’s testimony, and after a while I decided I owed Elena a debt; that was the way I felt. So I was going to visit her and Marion again, and if I thought she was
not doing so well with him—and in my heart I was certain it was worse than that—well, I was going to make her an offer. She could come to Mexico with me, and we would even make the trip as brother and sister if she wanted it that way, although looking back I know that this last idea was something I could not have meant too seriously. At any rate, the more I thought about it, the better I came to like the prospect, although at other hours I decided I would be mad to take Elena on. Because, looking back, I know that deep in me I had already come to learn that there are not all that many chances in life, and if Elena and I took to each other, it was going to be no casual affair, and so it was a question of whether Elena and I had the characters to begin to bring out the best in each other, and I was doubtful of that, but on the other hand I was probably young enough to take a chance. So, living with the opposites in ourselves, we move to a decision. Only I meandered and debated and enjoyed the idea I was an altruist until a little too much time went by. And then one night as I was coming off my dishwasher’s shift I heard from a waitress about what had happened to Marion and Elena that evening, and it was shocking news. For better or for worse, I had probably waited a little too long.

W
HAT CAN
I say about it? Like his own flesh, Faye knew the loneliness in Elena. It waited for her, the sullen water behind a dike; let a breach be made and she would be carried away over the flooded land of the past. So he knew that she was the material out of which suicides are made.

For months he had been goaded by the thought that his life
had lost its purpose, and in those hours before the dawn when he would lie in bed whipped with a terror of his open door, often convinced that the sounds he heard in the street were finally, finally, the killers he was always expecting, there would be another pain larger than the first because it was made of cowardice alone. “I’m just a pimp. I never made it any further,” he would think to himself and wonder with the frustration of the explorer whose wanderings are from bar to night club and back again, whether all he needed was a point of the compass, any point, and he could follow it on some black heroic safari.

But the trip had never been made. A year had gone by, two years had gone by, and Faye seemed set up in business forever; nobody thought of him any longer as a rich boy with a hobby. Faye was in trade and he knew it. Already, through the logic of commerce he kept two sets of books, he had a lawyer, he gave away percentages, he had even caught himself prancing around one of the executives who ran the syndicate from the capital to the desert. Worse: a week before Elena came to live with him, he had been beaten up by a hoodlum who took a girl and refused to pay. He had not said anything after the beating, he had not complained about the hoodlum to his protection; they would have taken care of it but that was too humiliating. He hated to admit he had become so respectable that hoodlums respected him no longer. “I’m a storekeeper,” Faye thought after the beating and his rage was ridiculous to him.

There had been a time when he was fifteen and sixteen when he had wondered endlessly about the man who was his real father. He thought he hated Dorothea’s boast that the man was European royalty; often enough he liked to believe that his father had been a brilliant and dissolute priest. Today he would flinch when he remembered how he tried to explain the idea to the priest in the confessional box and had only been scolded; week after week he had been scolded. That was the period when he had been religious, had taken fasts, thought of entering a monastery, and to Dorothea’s bewilderment and uncertain pride
had spent a week on a retreat. That week had almost driven him mad; with a razor he had sliced a tiny piece off the corner of the altar cloth and left in a panic.

What had happened to that, he would wonder now? He had gone through it all, through old documents on the trials of witches and the practice of the Black Mass, through intrigues and poisons and love-cakes baked on the loins of languishing women and the needles of the lady abbess who probed the nuns to learn if they were witches and Satan had entered. He would feel in his adolescence as if he kept the history of a thousand years, but that had passed; he had been eighteen and nineteen and out on the world, his pride that no one could guess how much he read and what he thought.

Since Elena had come to live with him, there were nightmares. He could not get rid of the idea that she was his nun and he would transmute her into a witch. He made up stories in his mind, novels, volumes, drawing on himself the anguish of the priest who begs God to let the devils enter him in order that he alone be burned in Hell so that the others, the nuns, the parish, the castle, the country, indeed the world be spared. Father Marion has been praying for this, he would think, and all the while he prays, what does he do? It is so little and yet he is so damned for he has traduced the choirboys and left pregnant half the rich wives of the village, driven convents to insanity by whipping them with the staff of the Devil in their cloistered beds, giving to suck at such religious breasts the broom of the Witch, and stealing from the most devoted Sister, the purest, the most spiritual, her devotion itself, so that she loves not God but Father Marion, carnally, insanely, and even this is good, he will tell her, for the body and soul are separate, and to be pure one must seek out sin itself, mire the body in offal so the soul may be elevated. Yet it is never enough to make the Sister a Witch; she must be denounced as well, and yet never too soon, for too soon and she is a martyr, too late and she is dead, and therefore ever so carefully, the priest who takes the Devil
to save the world must use the Devil to destroy it, and for that the saintly Sister he has made into Witch must first engulf the others, all the others, the nunnery, the church, the castle and the world, denouncing and accusing unto the point where the others burned, she burns herself and looses a scream from the stake, “Oh, God, have mercy on Father Marion for he is a saint in Hell.” And he is pure when it is done, when they are all burned and he is left only to his prayers and pleads, “Oh, my God, I have labored in Your cause, and have found wanting the souls I have tested and they are not worthy of You.” Yet all the while he prays, he prays in the terror of nightmare, for He, He will punish him, will chase him into Hell and to the Devil, and not for something so small as the seductions and the sodomy, the pious minds of the nuns he has whipped, the burnings he has fired, the accusations, the destructions, but instead a sin so much greater, so terrible and enormous that God Himself must blanch before it, “Oh, My Lord,” prays Father Marion in a cloister of Marion Faye’s brain, “I have sinned and fallen from Grace, for I wish Damnation upon You.”

Jailed in the keep of his bed with Elena beside him, enduring the venial mortification of having his skin itch near her presence, his nostrils repelled by the odor of her body which Eitel had savored so much, Faye would wander by marijuana through the jungle and out along the cold stone floor of the nunnery to where Sister Elena would burn, her body on fire, her feet of ice, until the moment when Faye was certain his head would burst, that no skull could be immured against the furies and the temptations which came ever closer. He could only open his eyes and grind his teeth and mutter to the foot of the bed, to the spirit dancing on his toes, “It’s bullshit, it’s all bullshit. Cut the bullshit. Cut it dead,” as if indeed his thoughts had become needles to probe the Sorcerer in him, and when the dot of his brain was found where the needle entered without pain, then he was damned, he was discovered. Or was he freed? For beyond, in the far beyond, was the heresy that God was the Devil and
the One they called the Devil was God-in-banishment like a noble prince deprived of true Heaven, and God who was the Devil had conquered except for the few who saw the cheat that God was not God at all. So he prayed, “Make me cold, Devil, and I will run the world in your name.” It went on and on, up and down, until in the fever of these thoughts, he would run a hand toward Elena, wake her, and whisper in her ear, “Come on, let’s knock it around.” Elena was a fire to him since she had come, the ashes of the forest seeded new growth only to be burned again. And as he labored, repelled by what she gave him, he whipped himself, a priest in horror, his mind away with images of the monk beneath his cassock punishing the lewd Sister who betrayed the Faith. When they were done, some fleeting image of damnation riding him over the empty moment, he would turn from her and try to sleep while his mind picked at the center of his terror: he must coax Elena to kill herself.