Rabbit at rest (28 page)

Before the April evening falls, the birds, big and little, that
the feeder attracts flutter and hop to take a drink or splash their
feathers in the blue-bottomed cement pond some earlier owner
of this little place, this snug limestone cottage tucked in among
the bigger Penn Park homes, created. The cement pool is cracked but
still holds water. Like himself, Rabbit thinks, turning toward his
house with its lit windows that seem as far away and yet as
strangely close as his parents' house used to when he was a kid
playing Twentyone or Horse with Mim and the other children of the
neighborhood out at the backboard on the garage in the alley behind
their long narrow yard on Jackson Road. Then as now, waking from
twilit daydreams, he discovered himself nearer a shining presence
than he thought, near enough for it to cast a golden shadow ahead
of his steps across the yard; then it was his future, now it is his
past.

During those spring months with Ruth on Summer Street, he used
to wonder what it would be like to run to the end of the street,
straight as far as the eye could see. In the thirty years since, he
has often driven this way, to Brewer's northwestern edge and
beyond, where the highway with its motels
(Economy Lodge,
Coronet, Safe Haven)
melts into farmland and signs pointing
the way to Harrisburg and Pittsburgh begin to appear. One by one
the farms and their stone buildings, the bank bams put together
with pegs and beams and the farmhouses built square to the compass
with walls two feet thick, are going under to real-estate
developments. Two miles beyond the pike to Maiden Springs, where
the Murketts used to live before they got divorced, there is a
fairly new development called Arrowdale after the old Arrowhead
Farm that was sold off by the nieces and nephews of the old
spinster who lived there so many years and had wanted to leave it
to some television evangelist as a kind of salvation park, a
holy-roller retreat, but whose lawyers kept talking her out
of it. Rabbit as these recent years have gone by has watched the
bulldozed land lose its raw look and the trees and bushes grow up
so it almost seems houses have always been here. The streets curve,
as they did in the Murketts' development, but the houses are more
ordinary - ranch houses and split levels with sides of aluminum
clapboards and fronts of brick varied by flagstone porchlets and
unfunctional patches of masonry facing. Cement walks traverse small
front yards with azaleas not quite in bloom beneath the picture
windows. Bark mulch abounds, and matching porch furniture, and a
tyrannical neatness absent in the older more blue-collar
towns like Mt. Judge and West Brewer.

Ronnie and Thelma Harrison moved to one of these modest new
houses when their three boys grew up and went off. Alex, the
oldest, is an electronics engineer somewhere south of San
Francisco; the middle boy, Georgie, who had had reading problems in
school, is trying to be a dancer and musician in New York City; and
their youngest, Ron junior, has stayed in the county, as a
part-time construction worker, though he put in two years of
college at Lehigh. Thelma doesn't complain about her sons or her
house, though to Harry they seem disappointing, disappointingly
ordinary, for a woman of Thelma's intelligence and, in his
experience of her, passion.

Thelma's disease, systemic lupus erythematosus, has cost a
fortune over the years, even with the benefits from Ronnie's
insurance company's health plan. And it has meant that she has not
been able to go back to teaching elementary school when her boys
were gone, as she had hoped. Her health has been too erratic; it
has kept her at home, where Harry could usually find her. This noon
when he called from a pay phone in Brewer he expected her to answer
and she did. He asked ifhe might drive over and she said he might.
She didn't sound happy to hear from him, but not distressed either:
resigned, merely. He leaves the Celica out front at the curving
curb, though usually over the years she opened the garage for him
and closed the door electronically from within the kitchen, to hide
the evidence. But now that he is as sick as if not sicker than she,
he doesn't know how much they still have to conceal. The
neighborhood is empty during the midday, until the buses bring the
children home from school. A single whining engine is at work
somewhere out of sight in Arrowdale, and the air holds a pervasive
vibration and hum of traffic from the Maiden Springs Pike. Also out
of sight, some birds are chirping, raucous in their nesting frenzy,
though the development is skimpy on trees. A robin hops on the bit
of lawn beside Thelma's cement walk, and thrashes into the air as
Harry approaches. He doesn't remember robins as seeming such big
fierce birds; this one looked the size of a crow. He climbs two
flagstone steps and crosses a little porch; Thelma opens the front
door before he can ring the bell.

She seems smaller, and her hair grayer. Her prim, rather plain
face always had a sallow tinge, and this jaundice has deepened, he
can observe through the makeup she uses to soften her butterfly
rash, a reddening the disease has placed like a soreness across her
nose and beneath her eyes. Nevertheless, her deeply known presence
stirs him. They lightly kiss, when she has closed the door, a long
light-blocking green shade pulled down over its central pane
of bevelled glass. Her lips are cool, and faintly greasy. She stays
a time within his embrace, as if expecting something more to
happen, her body relaxed against his in unspeakable confession.

"You're thin," she says, drawing at last away.

"A little less fat," he tells her. "I've a long way to go before
I satisfy the doctors and Janice." It seems only natural to mention
Janice, though he had to make his tongue do it. Thelma knows the
score, and did from the start. The whole affair was her idea,
though he grew used to it over the years, and built it in. Her walk
as she moves away from him into the living room seems stiff, a bit
of a waddle; arthritis is part of the lupus.

"Janice," she repeats. "How is Wonder Woman?" Once he confided
that he called Janice that and Thelma has never forgotten. Women
don't forget, especially what you wish they would.

"Oh, no different. She keeps busy in Florida with all these
different groups, she's kind of the baby of our condo, and a shiksa
besides. You'd hardly know her, she's so on the ball. Her tennis is
terrific, the people who play tell me." He is getting too
enthusiastic, he realizes. "But we were happy to leave. It got
cold. March was miserable. At least up here you expect it and have
the clothes."

"You never told us about your heart attack." That "us" is a
little payback for his mentioning Janice right off: You trail your
spouses after you like shadows, right into bed; they becloud the
sheets.

"It didn't seem worth bragging about."

"We heard about it from little Ron, who knows a boy who knows
Nelson. The kiddie network. Imagine how I felt, learning about it
that way. My lover nearly dies and never tells me."

"How would we, I, whoever, tell you? It's not the kind of thing
they have cards for in the drugstore."

In recent years he and Janice have seen less and less of the
Harrisons. Rabbit and Ron were Mt. Judge boys together and played
on the high-school basketball varsities that, coached by
Marty Tothero, were league champions for two out of their three
years in senior high. But he has never liked Ronnie: loudmouthed,
pushy, physically crude, always playing with himself in the locker
room, flicking towels, giving redbellies, terrorizing the JVs.
Women don't mind this kind of prick as much as Harry does. Part of
Thelma's fascination for him has been that she could stand the guy,
put up with his sexual tricks and remain outwardly such a prim,
plain schoolteacher-type. Not really plain: with her clothes
off her body is somehow better than her clothes have led you to
expect. The first time they ever slept together, her breasts seemed
like a girl's in Playboy - nipples like perfect little
doorbells.

"What can I offer you?" Thelma asks. "Coffee. A beer?"

"Both are no-nos for the new me. Do you have anything like
a Diet Coke or Pepsi?" He remembers Judy's little quavering voice
singing
Coke is it
on that long zigzag ride into
shore.

"Sure. We don't drink much any more ourselves, now that we've
resigned from the Flying Eagle."

"You ever coming back?"

"I don't think so. We heard the fees went up again, as you maybe
didn't notice, you're so rich, plus the assessment for repairs to
the two greens close to the road that are always being vandalized.
Even three years ago Ronnie figured it was costing him over eighty
dollars a round, it wasn't worth it. There's a whole new younger
crowd out at the Eagle now that dominates everything. They've
changed the tone. It's gotten too yuppie."

"Too bad. I miss playing with old Ronnie."

"Why? You can't stand him, Harry."

"I like beating him."

Thelma nods, as if acknowledging her own contribution to Harry's
beating Ronnie. But she can't help it, she loves this man, his soft
pale bemusement and cool hard heart, his uncircumcised prick, his
offhand style, and in her slow dying has not denied herself the
pleasure of expressing this love, as much as Harry has been able to
bear it. She has kept her strongest feelings contained, and the
affair has enriched her transactions with God, giving her something
to feel sinful about, to discuss with Him. It seems to explain her
lupus, if she's an adulteress. It makes it easier on Him, if she
deserves to be punished.

She goes into the kitchen for the soft drinks. Rabbit roams
quietly in the living room; in preparation for his visit she has
pulled not only the narrow shade on the front door but the wide one
on the picture window. He pities the room - its darkness as
if even weak windowlight would penetrate her skin and accelerate
the destruction of her cells, its hushed funereal fussiness. Wild
though she can be, with a streak of defiance as though daring to be
damned, Thelma maintains a conventional local decor. Stuffed
flowered chairs with broad wooden arms, plush chocolate-brown
sofa with needlepointed scatter pillows and yellowing lace
antimacassars, varnished little knickknack stands and taborets, a
footstool on which an old watermill is depicted, symmetrical lamps
whose porcelain bases show English hunting dogs in gilded ovals, an
oppressively patterned muddy neo-Colonial wallpaper, and on
every flat surface, fringed runners and semi-precious glass
and porcelain elves and parrots and framed photographs of babies
and graduating sons and small plates and kettles of hammered copper
and pewter, objects to dust around but never to rearrange. This
front room, but for the television set hulking in its walnut
cabinet with its powdery gray-green face wearing a toupee of
doilies and doodads, could have come out of Harry's adolescence,
when he was gingerly paying calls on girls whose mothers came
forward from the kitchen, drying their hands on their aprons, to
greet him in motionless stuffed rooms such as this. The houses he
has kept with Janice have had in comparison a dishevelled, gappy
quality that has nevertheless given him room to breathe. This room
is so finished, he feels in it he should be dead. It smells of all
the insurance policies Ron sold to buy its furnishings.

"So tell me about it," Thelma says, returning with a round
painted tray holding along with the two tall glasses of sparkling
dark soft drink two matching small bowls of nuts. She sets the tray
down on a glass-topped coffee table like an empty long
picture frame.

He tells her, "For one thing, I'm not supposed to have stuff
like that - salted nuts. Macadamia nuts yet! The worst thing
for me, and they cost a fortune. Thel, you're wicked."

He has embarrassed her; her jaundiced skin tries to blush. Her
basically thin face today looks swollen, perhaps from the cortisone
she takes. "Ronnie buys them. They just happened to be around.
Don't eat them if you can't, Harry. I didn't know. I don't know how
to act with you, it's been so long."

"A couple won't kill me," he reassures her, and to be polite
takes a few macadamia nuts into his fingers. Nuggets, they are like
small lightweight nuggets with a fur of salt. He especially loves
the way, when he holds one in his mouth a few seconds and then
gently works it between his crowned molars, it breaks into two
halves, the surface of the fissure as smooth to the tongue as
glass, as baby skin. "And cashews, too," he says. "The
second-worst thing for me. Dry-roasted yet."

"I seem to remember you like dry-roasted."

"There's a lot I bet you seem to remember," he says, taking a
tasteless sip of his Diet Coke. First they take the cocaine out,
then the caffeine, and now the sugar. He settles back with a small
handful of cashews; dry-roasted, they have a little
acid sting to them, the tang of poison that he likes. He has taken
the rocking chair, painted black with stencilled red designs and a
red-and-yellow flat pillow tied in place, to sit in,
and she the plush brown sofa, not sinking into it but perching on
the edge, her knees together and touching the raised edge of the
coffee table. They have made love on that sofa, which was not long
enough to stretch out on but long enough if both parties kept their
knees bent. In a way he preferred it to one of the beds, since she
seemed to feel guiltier and less free with herself in a real bed, a
bed her family used, and her unease would spread to him. Moving the
table, he could kneel beside the sofa and have the perfect angle
for kissing her cunt. On and on, deeper into her darkness where
things began to shudder and respond, it got to be an end in itself.
He loved it when she would clamp his face between her damp thighs
like a nut in a nutcracker and come. He wondered if a man ever got
his neck broken that way.