Rabbit at rest (23 page)

Janice, wearing a soft salmon-colored running suit with
powder-blue sleeves and pants stripes, leads, and
Nelson, Roy, Pru, and Judy, all in their airplane clothes, follow,
hurrying to keep up. In just one day Janice has acquired a widow's
briskness, the speed afoot of a woman with no man to set the pace
for her. Also some remnant of old love - of old animal
magnetism revived in this thronged institutional setting not so
different from the high-school corridors where she first
became aware of Rabbit Angstrom, he a famous senior, tall and
blond, and she a lowly ninth-grader, dark and plain -
pulls her toward her man, now that his animal fragility has
reawakened her awareness of his body. His, and her own. Since his
collapse she is proudly, continuously conscious of her body's
elastic health, its defiant uprightness, the stubborn miracle of
its functioning.

The children are frightened. Roy and Judy don't know what they
will see in this visit. Perhaps their grandfather has been
monstrously transformed, as by a wicked witch in a fairy
story, into a toad or a steaming puddle. Or perhaps a monster is
what he has been all along, underneath the friendly kindly pose and
high coaxing voice he put on for them like the wolf in
grandmother's clothes who wanted to eat Little Red Riding Hood. The
sugary antiseptic smells, the multiplicity of elevators and closed
doors and directional signs and people in white smocks and white
stockings and shoes and plastic badges, the hollow purposeful sound
their own crowd of feet makes on the linoleum floors, scrubbed and
waxed so shiny they hold moving ripples like water, widens the
ominous feeling in their childish stomachs, their suspicion of a
maze there is no escaping from, of a polished expensive trap whose
doors and valves only open one way. The world that grownups
construct for themselves seems such an extravagant creation that
malice might well be its motive. Within a hospital you feel there
is no other world. The palm trees and jet trails and drooping wires
and blue sky you can see through the windows seem part of the
panes, part of the trap.

The vaulted lobby holds two murals - at one end, happy
people of many colors work in orange groves above which the sun
seems one more round orange and, at the other, bearded Spaniards in
armor woodenly exchange obscure gifts with nearly naked Indians,
one of whom crouches with a bow and arrow behind a spiky jungle
bush. This Indian scowls with evil intent. The explorer will
be killed.

A skinny strict woman at the main desk consults a computer
printout and gives them a floor number and directions to the
correct elevator. This family of five crowds onto it among a
man who holds a bouquet and keeps clearing his throat, a Hispanic
boy carrying a clinking tray of vials, and a big jawed
bushy-haired middle-aged woman pushing an ancient
version of herself, only the hair not so thick or so brightly dyed,
in a wheelchair. She drags her mother out to let other people off
and on and then forces the wheelchair's way back in. Judy rolls her
clear green eyes heavenward in protest of how obnoxious and clumsy
grownups are.

Their floor is the fourth, the topmost. Janice is struck by how
much less elaborate the nurses' station is here than in the
intensive cardiac-care unit. There, the uniformed women sat
barricaded behind a bank of heart monitors each giving in a
twitching orange line the imperfect beats from the rows of
individual rooms, on three sides, with glass front walls, some
doors open so you could see a dazed patient sitting up under his
spaghetti of tubes, some of them closed but the curtains not drawn
so you can see the two dark nostrils and triangular dying mouth of
an unconscious head, and yet others with the curtains ominously
drawn, to hide some desperate medical procedure in progress. She
has home two babies and escorted both of her parents into the grave
so she is not a total stranger to hospitals. Here, on Floor Four,
there is just a single high counter, and a few desks, and a waiting
area with a hard wood settee and a coffee table holding magazines
titled
Modern Health
and
Woman's Day
and
The
Watchtower
and
The Monthly Redeemer.
A big black
woman, with waxy tight-woven corn rows looped beneath her
white cap, stops the anxious herd of Angstroms with a smile. "Only
two visitors in the room at a time, please. Mr. Angstrom came out
of the ICCU this morning and he's still not ready for too much
fuhnn."

Something in her wide gleaming face and elaborately braided hair
transfixes little Roy; suddenly he begins under the stress of
accumulating strangeness to cry. His inky eyes widen and then
squeeze shut; his rubbery lips are pulled down as if by a terrible
taste. His first cry turns a number of heads in the corridor, where
attendants and doctors are busy with the routines of early
afternoon.

Pru takes him from Nelson's arms and presses his face into her
neck. She tells her husband, "Why don't you take Judy in?"

Nelson's face, too, undergoes a displeased, alarmed stretching.
"1 don't want to be the first. Suppose he's delirious or something.
Mom, you ought to go in first."

"For heaven's sake," she says, as if Harry's burden of
exasperation with their only living child has passed to her. "I
talked to him two hours ago over the phone and he was perfectly
normal." But she takes the little girl by the hand and they go down
the shiny rippled corridor looking for the room number, 326. The
number rings a faint bell with Janice. Where before? In what
life?

Pru sits on the hard settee - uncushioned perhaps to
discourage loiterers - and tries to murmur and joggle Roy
into calm again. In five minutes, with a sob like a hiccup, he
falls asleep, heavy and hot against her, rumpling and making feel
even more oppressive the checked suit which she put on for
disembarking into the Northern winter. The air-conditioning
in here feels turned off; the local temperature has again climbed
into the eighties, ten degrees warmer than normal this time of
year. They have brought this morning's
News-Press
as
a present to Harry and while they are waiting on the bench Nelson
begins to read it.
Reagan, Bush get subpoenas,
Pru reads
over his shoulder.
Regional killings decrease in 1988. Team
owner to pay for Amber's funeral.
Unlike the Brewer
Standard
this one always has color on the page and today
features a green map of Great Britain with Lockerbie pinpointed and
insets of a suitcase and an exploding airplane.
Report
describes sophisticated bomb.
"Nelson," Pru says softly, so as
not to wake Roy or have the nurses hear what she wants to say.
"There's been something bothering me."

"Yeah? Join the crowd."

"I don't mean you and me, for a change. Do you possibly think
-? I can't make myself say it."

"Say what?"

"Shh. Not so loud."

"Goddamn it, I'm trying to read the paper. They think they know
now exactly what kind of bomb blew up that Pan Am flight."

"It occurred to me immediately but I kept trying to put it out
of my mind and then you fell asleep last night before we could
talk."

"I was beat. That's the first good night's sleep I've had in
weeks."

"You know why, don't you? Yesterday was the first day in weeks
you've gone without cocaine."

"That had nothing to do with it. My body and blow get along
fine. I crashed because my father suddenly near-died and it's
damn depressing. I mean, if he goes, who's next in line? I'm too
young not to have a father."

"You crashed because that chemical was out of your system for a
change. You're under terrible neurological tension all the time and
it's that drug that's doing it."

"It's my fucking whole neurological life doing it and has been
doing it ever since you and I got hitched up; it's having a
holierthan-thou wife with the sex drive of a frozen yogurt
now that she's got all the babies she wants."

Pru's mouth when she gets angry tenses up so the upper lip
stiffens in vertical wrinkles almost like a mustache. You see that
she does have a faint gauzy mustache; she is getting whiskery. Her
face when she's sore becomes a kind of shield pressing at him, the
crépey skin under her eyes as dead white as the parting in her
hair, her whisper furious and practiced in its well-worn
groove. He has heard this before: "Why should I risk my life
sleeping with you, you addict, you think I want to get AIDS from
your dirty needles when you're speedballing or from some cheap coke
whore you screw when you're gone until two in the morning?"

Roy whimpers against her neck, and two younger nurses behind the
counter in the desk area ostentatiously rustle papers as if to
avoid overhearing.

"You shitty dumb bitch," Nelson says in a soft voice, lightly
smiling as if what he's saying is pleasant, "I don't do needles and
I don't fuck coke whores. I don't know what a coke whore is and you
don't either."

"Call them what you want, just don't give me their
diseases."

His voice stays low, almost caressing. "Where did you get so
goddamn high and mighty, that's what I'd love to know. What makes
you so fucking pure, you weren't too pure to get yourself knocked
up when it suited you. And then to send Melanie back home to Brewer
with me to keep putting out ass so I wouldn't run away somehow.
That was really the cold-blooded thing, pimping for your own
girlfriend."

Nelson finds a certain chronic comfort in his wife's
fairskinned, time-widened face, with its mustache of rage
crinkles and its anger-creased triangular brow, pressing upon
him, limiting his vision. It shuts out all the threatening things
at the rim. She says, faltering as if she knows she is being put
through a hoop, "We've been through this a million times, Nelson
Angstrom, and I had no idea you'd hop into bed with Melanie, I was
foolish enough to think you were in love with me and trying to work
things out with your parents." This cycle of complaint is stale and
hateful yet something familiar he can snuggle into. At night, when
both are asleep, it is she who loops her arm, downy and long,
around his sweating chest and he who curls closer to the fetal
position, pressing his backside into her furry lap.

"I was," he says, plainly teasing now, "I did work them out. So
what were you starting to say?"

"About what?"

"What you were going to tell me but couldn't because I fell
asleep because according to you I wasn't as wired as usual." He
leans his head against the bench's headrest and sighs in this new
blood-clean weariness of his. Coming down makes you realize
how high up you usually are. "God," he says, "it'll be good to get
back to the real world. You're sort of right about yesterday, I was
stuck, with Mom grabbing the car as soon as you got back. All you
can deal for around Valhalla Village is Geritol."

Her voice in marital sympathy softens. "I like you like this,"
she confides. "Just yourself. No additives." He looks, with his
tidy taut profile sealed upon his tired thoughts, his thinning
temples balanced by his jutting little mustache, almost handsome.
The scattered gray hairs in his rat's-tail haircut touch her,
as if they are her fault.

Wearily in Pru's forgiving tone of voice he hears that she is
not yet ready to let this marriage go. He has plenty of margin
still. "I'm always the same," he disagrees. "I can take or leave
the stuff. Yesterday, maybe you're right, out of respect for the
old guy, or something. I just decided to do without. What nobody
seems to understand is, it's not addictive."

"Wonderful," Pru says, the softness in her voice ebbing. "My
husband the exception that proves the rule."

"Don't we have any other topic?"

"This story," she decides to begin, "of Judy's being trapped
under the sail. Aren't the sails awfully small? You know what a
good swimmer she is. Do you possibly think -?"

"Think what?"

"That she was just pretending, hiding from your father as a sort
of game, and then it got out of hand?"

"So it just about killed him? What a thought. Poor Dad."
Nelson's profile smiles; his mustache lifts closer to the underside
of his small straight irritated nose. "I don't think so," he says.
"She wouldn't be that cool. Think of how far out there it must have
seemed to her, surrounded by sharks in her mind. She wouldn't be
playing games."

"We don't know really how it was out there, or how many seconds
it all took. Children's minds don't work exactly like ours, and
your father's way with her is to be teasing, the way he talks to
her. It's something she could have done not to be cruel but a
child's idea, you know, of teasing back."

His smile now shows his small inturned teeth, which always look
a little gray no matter how hard he brushes them, and flosses, and
uses those handles with rubber tips once he gets into his pajamas.
"I knew it was a bad idea, him taking her out there when he doesn't
know shit about boats," he says. "You say he acted proud of saving
her life?"

"On the beach, before the paramedics came - it seemed to
take forever but they said it was only seven minutes - he
seemed happy, relieved somehow even with the terrible pain and
struggling for breath. He kept trying to make jokes and get us to
laugh. He told me I should put new polish on my toenails."

Nelson's eyes open and he stares, not at the opposite wall where
a dead benefactor's oil portrait preens, but unseeing into the
past. "I had that baby sister, you know," he says, "who
drowned."

"I know. How could any of us ever forget it?"

He stares some more, and says, "Maybe he was happy to have saved
this one."

And indeed to Harry, as he lies on his back drugged and tied
down by tubes and wires in what seems a horizonless field of white,
the sight of little Judy alive and perfect in each reddishbrown
hair and freckle, her long eyelashes spaced as if by a Linotype
machine with two-point spaces, is a pure joy. She had tangled
with the curse and survived. She is getting out of Florida, death's
favorite state, alive.