Rabbit at rest (13 page)

A gnashing sound, the greens being mowed by kids on those big
ugly reel mowers. Excited seagulls weeping. The Norfolk pine, its
branches as regularly spaced as the thin metal balusters of his
balcony rail. Amazing. He is still in Florida, still alive.
Morning-chilly salt air wafts from the Gulf through the
two-inch crack that the sliding door was left open. Janice is
asleep in bed beside him. The warmth of her body is faintly rank;
night sweat has pasted dark wiggly hairs to the nape of her neck.
Her hair is least gray at the nape, a secret nest of her old dark
silky self. She sleeps on her stomach turned away from him, and if
the night is cool pulls the covers off him onto herself, and if hot
dumps them on top of him, all this supposedly in her sleep. Rabbit
eases from the king-size bed, goes into their bathroom with
its rose-colored one-piece Fiberglas tub and shower
stall, and urinates into the toilet of a matching rose porcelain.
He sits down, as it is quieter, splashing against the front of the
bowl. He brushes his teeth but is too curious to shave; if he takes
the time to shave Janice might get away from him and hide among the
others as she has been doing. He slides back into bed, stealthily
but hoping that the unavoidable rustling of sheets and the soft
heaving of the mattress might wake her. When it doesn't, he nudges
her shoulder. ` Janice?" he whispers. "Dreamboat?"

Her voice comes mufed. "What? Leave me alone."

"What time 'dyou come to bed?"

"I didn't dare look. One."

"Where had Nelson been? What was his explanation?"

She says nothing. She wants him to think she has fallen back to
sleep. He waits. Lovingly, he caresses her shoulder. His glimpse of
that French movie last night had stirred him with the idea of a
wife as a total stranger, of moving right in, next to her little
warm brown body. A wife can be as strange as a whore, that's the
beauty of male-female relations. She says, still without
turning her head, "Harry, touch me once more and I'll kill
you."

He thinks this over and decides upon counteraggression. "Where
the hell had he been?" he asks.

She rolls over, giving up. Her breath has stale tobacco in it.
She has given up smoking supposedly but whenever she's around
Nelson with his Camels and Pru with her Pall Malls she takes it up
again. "He didn't know exactly. Just driving around. He said he
needed to get out, Florida is so claustrophobic."

The kid is right: life down here is confined to the narrow paths
you make. To Winn Dixie, to the Loew's cineplex and the shops in
the Palmetto Palm Mall, to the doctor's, to the pro shop and back.
Between these paths there's somehow nothing, a lot of identical
palm trees and cactus and thirsty lawn and empty sunshine, hotels
you're not staying at and beaches you're not admitted to and inland
areas where there's never any reason to go. In Pennsylvania, at
least in Diamond County, everything has been paved solid by memory
and in any direction you go you've already been there.

Licking her lips and making a face as if her throat aches,
Janice goes on, "He drove on 41 as far as what sounds like Naples
and stopped at a restaurant when he got hungry and called us but
the phone didn't answer, I wondered at the time if we shouldn't
have waited to go over but you said you were starving -'

"That's right. Blame me."

"I wasn't, honey. It wasn't just you. The children were antsy
and worried and I thought, Life must go on, dinner will distract
us; but then he says he did call just about when we were heading
out the door and where he was one beer led to another and on the
way back he got a little lost, you know yourself how if you miss
the Pindo Palm turnoff everything looks identical, for miles."

"I can't believe it," Harry says. He feels rage coming to boil
in his chest and sits up in bed to relieve the pressure. "Without
so much as a fucking word to anybody he disappears for, what, eight
hours? He is really becoming crazy. He's always been moody but this
is crazy behavior. The kid needs help."

Janice says, "He was perfectly sober when he came back and
brought a bunch of those little tiny stuffed alligators they make
for souvenirs; Pru and I had to laugh. One for each of the children
and even one for you, where they've made it stand and put a golf
club in its little feet." She flicks the blanket back from his lap
and touches his drowsy penis in his open pajama fly. "How're we
doing down there? We never make love any more."

But now he is out of the mood. He slaps her hand primly and tugs
up the blanket and says, "We just
did
make love. Before
Christmas."

"Way before Christmas," Janice says, not moving her head, and
for a second he has the mad hope she will turn the blanket down
again and simply, quickly, take his prick in her mouth, like Thelma
used to do almost first thing when they would secretly meet in this
last decade; but blowing has never been Janice's style. She has to
be very drunk, and he never did like her drunk, a kind of chaos
wells up within her that threatens him, that threatens to swamp the
whole world. She says, "O.K. for you, buster," to register with him
that she's been rejected, in case he wants her later, and pushes
out of her side of the bed. Her damp nightie is stuck up above her
waist and before she tugs it down he admires the taut pale buttocks
above the tan backs of her thighs. Guiltily he hears her flush the
toilet in the bathroom and with an angry rattle and rush of water
start to run the shower. He pictures exactly how she looks stepping
out of the shower, with her hair in a transparent shower cap and
her bottom rosy and her pussy all whitened with dew, and regrets
that they must live, he and his little dark woman, his stubborn shy
mutt of a Springer, in a world of mostly missed signals. Down here
they have been thrown together more than at any time of their lives
and they have coped by turning their backs and growing thicker
skins. He plays golf three or four times a week and she has her
tennis and her groups and her errands. When she comes back from the
bathroom, in a terrycloth robe, he is still in the bed, reading in
his book about British interference with Dutch merchant ships and
France needing to build up her decayed fleet with Baltic timber
delivered by Dutch vessels, in case Janice wants to try at sex
again, but now from the other end of the condo the sounds of
children can be heard, and of Pru hushing them in her burdened
maternal voice.

Harry says to jamce, "Let's try to concentrate on Judy and Roy
today. They seem sort of woebegone, don't they?"

She doesn't answer, guardedly. She takes his remark as a slam at
Nelson's parenting. Maybe it is. Nelson's the one who needs
parenting; he always did and never got enough. When you don't get
enough of something at the right biological moment, Rabbit has read
somewhere, you keep after it until you die. He asks, "What do you
and Pru talk about all the time?"

She answers, thin-upped, "Oh, women things. You'd find
them boring."Janice always gets a funny intense frowny look on her
face when she's dressing herself. Even if it's just slacks and a
blouse to go to Winn Dixie in, she pinches off an accusatory stare
into the mirror, to face down the worst.

"Maybe so," he agrees, ending the conversation, and knowing this
will make Janice want to continue it.

Sure enough, she volunteers, "She's worried about Nelson," and
falters for the next words, the tip of her tongue sneaking out and
pressing on her upper lip in the effort of thought.

But Rabbit says curtly, "Who wouldn't be?" He turns his back to
put on his underpants. He still wears Jockey shorts. Ruth was
amused by them that night ages ago, and he always thinks of it.
Today he wants to be a grandfather and tries to dress for the role.
Long eggshell-colored linen pants with cuffs, instead of his
dirty old plaid bell-bottom golf slacks, and instead of a
polo knit a real shirt, 100-per-cent cotton, with blue
pinstripes and short sleeves. He looks at himself in the mirror
that Janice's image has vacated and is stunned, deep inside, by the
bulk of what he sees - face swollen to a kind of moon, with
his little sunburned nose and icy eyes and nibbly small mouth
bunched in the center, above the jowls, boneless jowls that come up
and put a pad of fat even in front of his ears, where Judy has a
silky shine. Talk about Nelson - Harry's own hair, its
blondness dirtied and dulled by gray, is thinning back from his
temples. Tall as he is, there is no carrying the slope under his
shirt as anything other than a loose gut, a paunch that in itself
must weigh as much as a starving Ethiopian child. He must start to
cut down. He can feel, every motion he makes, his weight tugging at
his heart - that singeing sensation he gets as if a child
inside him is playing with lighted matches.

On the breakfast table, today's
News-Press
has
the color photograph of a tiny sickly one-year-old girl
who died last night for lack of a liver transplant. Her name was
Amber. Also a headline saying that according to Scotland Yard Pan
Am Flight 103 was definitely bombed, just like Ed Silberstein and
Judy say. Fragments of metal. Luggage compartment. Plastic
explosive, can be molded into any form, probably a
high-performance Czech type called Semtex: Harry can hardly
bear to read about it, the thought of all those conscious bodies
suddenly with nothing all around them, freezing,
Ber-nie,
Ber-nie,
and Lockerbie a faint spatter of stars below,
everything in one split second upside-down and void of merry.
Also the mayor of Fort Myers now thinks his police acted properly
in the arrest of Deion Sanders. Also
Deadly pollution infects
Lake Okeechobee.
Also
Partly cloudy, Highs in low to
mid-80s.
"Today's the day," he announces, "Grandpa's
going to take you to amazing places!"

Judy and Roy look doubtful but not entirely.

Janice says, "Harry, have another of these cherry Danishes
before they go stale. We bought them thinking mostly of the
children but they both say they hate red runny things."

"Why do you want to kill me with carbos?" he asks, but eats the
Danish anyway, and cleans up the sweet sugary crumbs with his
fingertips.

Pru, tall from Harry's seated angle, her hips level with his
eyes, hesitantly asks, "Would you two possibly enjoy having the
grandchildren to yourselves for this expedition? Nelson couldn't
get to sleep last night and kept me pretty much up too. I just
can't face a day in the car." She does look pale and drawn, the kid
keeping her up all night with his whining and whatever else. Even
her freckles look pale, and her lips, that felt so soft and warm at
the airport, are resigned and tight and wryly pulled down on one
side.

Janice says, "Of course, dear. You get some sleep and then maybe
you and Nellie could do something healthy and fun. If you use the
Valhalla pool remind him he's supposed to shower before
and
after and not to do any diving."

Judy laughs and interrupts: "Daddy does belly flops."

Roy says, "Daddy does
not
flop. You flop."

"Hey Jesus," Harry tells them, "don't start fighting yet. We
aren't even in the car."

In the car by nine-thirty, provisioned with a
triple-barrelled package of Double Stuf Oreos and a sixpack
of Classic Coke, they begin the long day that for years to come
will be known in fond family legend as The Day Grandpa Ate the
Parrot Food, though it wasn't exactly for parrots, and he didn't
eat much of it. They start by driving down Route 41 (PATIOLAND,
Kissin' Kuzzins, Easy Drugs, LAND of SLEEP) to Fort Myers and
visiting the Thomas Alva Edison Winter Home, which nearly does them
in. They park the Canny and pass underneath a giant banyan tree, a
tree (a helpful sign tells them) given to Edison when it was a twig
by some financial giant of the time, Harvey Firestone or Henry
Ford, and that has since become the biggest banyan tree outside of
India, where a single such gigantic tree may shelter an entire
bazaar. Banyans spread by dangling down roots and making new trunks
that become like crutches as the limbs spread out and out -
these creepy trees will go for miles if nobody stops them. Harry
wonders, How
do they die?

It turns out you can't just walk around the house and grounds,
you have to join a tour, for five bucks a pop. Judy and Roy both
freak out when that's explained to them. They see themselves
surrounded by busloads of old retired people wearing baseball caps
and flip-up sunglasses and carrying those little sticks that
open out into a kind of saddle to be one-legged chairs.
Several wrecks in wheelchairs join their accumulating tour group as
it waits to begin. Judy, looking prematurely long-legged in
short pink shorts, with funny red shadows of blusher on her
cheekbones, says, "I don't
care
about any dumb grounds, I
want to see the machine that makes lightning," and Roy, his loose
little mouth dyed by Oreo chocolate, stares with his glazed brown
eyes as if he's going to melt in the heat.

Harry tells Judy, "I don't think there's any machine that makes
lightning, just the very first light bulb ever invented." He tells
Roy, "I'll carry you if you get too tired."

At some signal he misses, so they get caught in the back,
everybody including the wheelchairs pushes out of the shed into a
space of dusty gray earth and outdoor jungle stuffiness and
knifelike leaf shadows. Their guide is a prissy old
blue-haired girl in a billed cap reciting what she's
memorized. First she points out to them
Kigelia pinnata,
the sausage tree of Africa. "The fruit resembles a sausage and that
is why the name. It is not edible, but is used as a medicine by the
natives of Africa and because of their superstitious nature they
worship the tree for its healing power. Just across Memory Garden
is the fried-egg tree. The flower looks very much like an
egg, sunny side up. It was planted there just in case you like eggs
with your sausage."