The Deer Park: A Play

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  WHAT 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.

  After she came to live with him, he found himself riding quickly in directions he could not see, until to his horror and to his pride he came to understand himself at a moment his body was curled next to hers, seeking warmth on the chill of his limbs. A thought came into his brain, a frequent thought, “She’ll kill herself one of these days,” and before he had even done considering this, his mind like an iron monarch inflicting an alien will added cruelly, “You have to make her do it.” Faye protested as he had protested against his decision to leave the door unlocked; he had pleaded with himself, he had begged, “No, that’s too much,” only to hear the taunt with which he had always been lashed another step, “If you can’t do this, you’ll never be able to do the other things,” and he had shuddered in the dark. His command seemed more awful and more valuable than if he had ordered himself to murder Elena. Murder was nothing. Men murdered one another by the million,
and found it easier than love. To make Elena kill herself, however, would be truly murder and so he shuddered at his fascination and knew he was bound to it.

  But how to succeed? He doubted himself, disbelieved that he was serious, while for all this time his mind ticked forward like the clock of a bomb, set beyond his control. Faye had the feeling so deep in himself that this was finally the situation where he could push beyond anything he had ever done, push to the end as he had promised me so many nights ago, and come out—he did not know where, but there was experience beyond experience, there was something. Of that, he was certain.

  Therefore, Elena had been in his house not even an hour when he asked her to marry him, not knowing at the moment why he did this. “We might as well,” he said. “You want to, and it’s all the same to me.”

  Even though she was drunk, she laughed carefully. “Life is screwy,” she said.

  “Sure it is.”

  “I went with Collie three years and he never took me to a party.”

  “And Eitel never asked you to marry him.”

  When she did not answer, only swallowing her drink, he continued to stare at her, and murmured, “What do you say, Elena, many me.”

  “Marion, I feel funny being here.”

  He laughed then. “I’ll ask you tomorrow.”

  They began the few weeks of their life together in that way. Elena and he passed days when they were never sober, never completely, and yet they were not drunk either, at least not Faye. He would watch Elena with disgust for she had no capacity to drink, and so she passed from gaiety to high excitement to illness to depression and back to the liquor again. Most of the time she talked a lot and laughed with his friends and told Faye how she felt free with him and how with Eitel she always felt ignored.

  But occasionally she would be in panic, and several afternoons and evenings when he left her alone and went out to arrange some date, she seemed to have a terror of being alone. “Do you have to go out?” she would ask.

  “That business won’t run by itself.”

  Elena would sulk. “I might as well be one of your call-girls. I’d see more of you.”

  “Maybe you would at that.”

  “Marion, I want to be a call-girl,” she would say out of her drunkenness.

  “Not yet.”

  Her eyes would narrow in an effort to give dramatic effect. “Just what do you mean by that?” she would say. “Are you calling me a whore?”

  “What’s in a word?” he would say to her.

  Before he would be out the door, Elena would be clinging to him. “Marion, come back soon,” she would beg. When he would return several hours later, she would announce as if she had thought the thing for the first time, “You think I love you?” She would laugh a little. “I want to be a call-girl.”

  “You’re drunk, baby.”

  “Get wise to yourself, Marion,” Elena would shout. “Why do you think I’m living with you? It’s cause I’m too lazy to live alone. What do you think of that?”

  “Everybody’s scared,” he would say.

  “Except you. You’re so high and mighty. Well, I don’t think you’re anything.”

  These spells would pass and she would weep, ask him to forgive her, tell him she had not meant what she said, and perhaps she did love him, she didn’t know, and he would say, “Let’s stop knocking ourselves out and get married.”

  Elena would shake her head. “I want to be a call-girl,” she would say.

  “You’re not the kind who could make it,” he would tell her. “Let’s get married first and then we’ll see.”

  He had no idea of how he felt about her. He thought he hated her, he considered Elena as no more than a test for his nerves, and in their bed he loathed her; indeed if it were not for the pleasure of studying this loathing, of noticing how he was incapable of losing himself for even an instant, and how she was determined to lose herself, it would have been difficult for him, cheated of loathing, to go near her at all. He was urged to lead her through a series of parties, at Don Beda’s, at his own home, with some of his girls, with strange men, with Jay-Jay, with anyone who was ready to meet him.

  She was morose, she was gay, and he led her moods like a circus master tapping his whip; she was a trained animal and he could wipe his fingers in her hair. There seemed endless energy in the thought, and he would swear to himself that he was serious, sensing how each new trick broke the old limit until he would exhaust her energy, her pleasure itself, and she would be left with nothing. So he would separate the soul from the body by teaching the body that it may never attain the soul, and the greatest sin is to believe the two may live together.

  She tried to call a halt. One morning after they had spent a night at Beda’s and Marion asked her to marry him, she said, “I’m getting out of here soon.”

  “And where are you going?” he asked.

  “You think you hate me,” she said to him. “If I really believed that, I wouldn’t stay with you.”

  “I love you,” he said, “why do you think I ask you to marry me?”

  “Cause you think it’s a big joke.”

  He laughed at that. “There’s a lot of contradictions in me,” he said, his face boyish for the instant he smiled.

  Yet, one night unable to sleep he got up and walked around the bed, looking at her, mourning her as if she were already dead, and from some unwilling pocket of his mind there came compassion for her; despite himself it had worked free, a pure lump of painful compassion wrenched from him as cruelly as miscarried flesh, alive but not alive, its pain severe.

  She had come to live with the idea she could marry him, and he could even grieve for her since she did not realize how much she depended on his promise. He thought it humorous that the only part of their life which was like marriage was the way she spoiled his house. She was always strewing her clothing through his rooms, spilling food in the kitchen, dropping glasses, burning cigarette holes, and then apologizing or breaking into a rage when he would tell her to tidy a room. He had lived in absolute order before she arrived with her two pieces of luggage, but once she was there and spilled the nervous spoil of her belongings over his home, he lived in a state of mortal exasperation. They had a maid, a middle-aged Mexican woman with a stolid face who came in for two hours every morning and put the place together just long enough for Elena to scatter it again. About the maid they had fights. Elena insisted the woman hated her. “I heard her call me a puta,” she told him.

  “She was probably praying.”

  “Marion, I’m going or she’s going.”

  “Then get out of here,” he would tell her. More and more often he would say this, confident that Elena could not leave, and he would taunt her with the fact. “Who are you fooling?” he would say. “Where do you think you’ll go?”

  Elena surprised him. She began to make friends with the Mexican servant. In the late morning, he could hear the two women chatting, and occasionally one of them would laugh. Elena began to say she had misjudged the woman. “She has a good heart,” Elena told him. He watched with amusement, convinced this was only a passing enthusiasm. She could never be friends, he thought, with a Mexican peasant who would remind her that she too was a peasant. Still, it went too far. The day that the servant brought Elena a wooden napkin ring and Elena hugged her, Faye gave the woman a week’s salary and told Elena to clean the house herself. After that they lived in disorder and had quarrels about Elena’s visits to the Mexican woman. “Dirt always looks for dirt,” he told her and that was successful. Elena stayed home.

  After a time, he would leave her alone for hours. When he would return, she would be helpless with jealousy. He chose one of these occasions to tell Elena that he could not help it, but he found her less exciting. “This is temporary, of course,” he said. “I’m getting too much outside.” Two days later he moved into the other bedroom and all the hours he lay awake he could hear her stirring. Once he listened to her crying, his body moist with the effort to ignore her.
r />   They had one last party. Zenlia had left Don Beda and gone back to the East, and one night Marion invited Beda to come alone. Beda was in a bad mood these days.

  “You got a hurt for Zenlia?” Marion asked him.

  Beda laughed. “I haven’t had a hurt for a woman in fifteen years. But where I live, you get to suffer from the altitude.”

  Elena said in a sullen voice, “I dig Beda. I dig a man who doesn’t hurt.”

  “Honey, I dig you,” Beda said. “You’re lovelier than you think.”

  Elena looked at Faye. “What do you want?” she asked.

  “Leave me out of it tonight,” Faye answered.

  “Then stay out of it,” she said to him, and Faye sat in the living room while Elena and Beda were in the other end of the house, Faye sipping at his stick of tea while he repeated to himself the thought which he found endlessly humorous, “I got a young face and an old body.”

  Beda came out at last, leaving Elena behind, and combed his hair while he talked to Marion. “Your girl is on the edge,” Beda said. He looked pale.

  “She’s just a little high.”

  “Marion, don’t ride her. She’s a brave girl in her way.”