Rabbit at rest (29 page)

A shadow has crossed Thelma's face, a flinching as if he has
consigned her to merely remembering, to the sealed and
unrepeatable past like the photographs on the silent
television set. But he had meant it more comfortably, settling in
his rocker opposite the one person who for these last ten years has
given him nothing but what he needed. Sex. Soul food.

"You too," she says, her eyes lowered to the items on the tray,
which she hasn't touched, "have things to remember, I hope."

"I just was. Remembering. You seem sad," he says, accusing, for
his presence should make her glad, in spite of all.

"You don't seem quite you yet. You seem - more
careful."

"Jesus, you'd be too. I'll have some more macadamia nuts, if
that'll please you." He eats them one by one and between bouts of
chewing and feeling their furry nuggets part so smoothly in his
mouth tells her about his heart attack - the boat, the Gulf,
little Judy, the lying on the beach feeling like a jellyfish, the
hospital, the doctors, their advice, his attempts to follow it.
"They're dying to cut into me and do a bypass. But there's this
less radical option they can do first and I'm supposed to see a guy
up here at St. Joseph's about having it done this spring. It's
called an angioplasty. There's a balloon on the end of a
catheter a yard long at least they thread up into your heart from a
cut they make just under your groin, the artery there. I had it
done kind of in Florida but instead of a balloon it was a bunch of
dyes they put in to see what my poor old ticker actually looked
like. It's a funny experience: it doesn't exactly hurt but
you feel very funny, demoralized like, while it's being done and
terrible for days afterward. When they put the dye in, your chest
goes hot like you're in an oven. Deep, it feels too deep. Like
having a baby but then no baby, just a lot of computerized bad news
about your coronary arteries. Still, it beats open-heart,
where they saw through your sternum for starters" - he
touches the center of his chest and thinks of Thelma's breasts,
their nipples so perfect to suck, waiting behind her blouse,
waiting for him to make his move - "and then run all your
blood through a machine for hours. I mean, that machine is you, for
the time being. It stops, you die. A guy I play golf with down
there had a quadruple and a valve replacement and a pacemaker while
they were at it and he says he's never been the same, it was like a
truck ran over him and then backed up. His swing, too, is terrible;
he's never got it back. But enough, huh? What about you? How's your
health?"

"How do I look?" She sips the Coke but leaves all the nuts in
their twin bowls for him. The pattern imitates sampler stitch,
squarish flowers in blue and pink.

"Good to me," he lies. "A little pale and puffy but we all do at
the end of winter."

"I'm losing it, Harry," Thelma tells him, looking up until he
meets her eyes. Eyes muddier than Pru's but also what they call
hazel, eyes that have seen him all over, that know him as well as a
woman's can. A wife fumbles around with you in the dark; a mistress
you meet in broad daylight, right on the sofa. She used to tease
him about his prick wearing a bonnet, with the foreskin still on.
"My kidneys are worse and the steroid dose can't go any higher. I'm
so anemic I can hardly drag around the house to do the work and
have to take naps every afternoon - you're right in the
middle of my nap time, as a matter of fact." He makes an
instinctive motion, tightening his hands on the chair arms to pull
himself up, and her voice lifts toward anger. "No. Don't go. Don't
you dare. For God's sake. I don't see you at all for nearly six
months and then you're up here a week before you bother to
call."

"Thelma,
she's
around, I can't just wander off. I was
getting reacclimated. I have to take it more easy on myself
now."

"You've never loved me, Harry. You just loved the fact that I
loved you. I'm not complaining. It's what I deserve. You make your
own punishments in life, I honest to God believe that. You get
exactly what you deserve. God sees to it. Look at my hands. I used
to have pretty hands. At least I thought they were pretty. Now half
the fingers - look at them! Deformed. I couldn't even get my
wedding ring off if I tried now."

He looks, leaning forward so the rocker tips under him, to
examine her extended hands. The knuckles are swollen and shiny, and
some of the segments with the fingernails go off at a slight angle,
but he wouldn't have noticed without her calling his attention to
it. "You don't want to get your wedding ring off" he tells her. "As
I remember, you and Ronnie are stuck together with glue. You even
eat the glue sometimes, I seem to remember your telling me."

Her hands have made Thelma angry and he is fighting back, as if
she blames her hands on him. She says, "You always minded that,
that I was a wife to Ronnie, along with serving you whenever it
suited. But who were you to mind that, stuck fast to Janice and her
money? I never tried to take you away from her, though it would
have been easy at times."

"Would it?" He rocks back. "I don't know, something about that
little mutt still gets to me. She won't give up. She never really
figured out how the world is put together but she's still working
at it. Now she's got the idea she wants to be a working girl. She's
signed up at the Penn State annex over on Pine Street for those
courses you have to take to get a real-estate broker's
license. At Mt. Judge High I don't think she ever got over a C,
even in home ec. Come to think of it, I bet she flunked home ec.,
the only girl in the history of the school."

Thelma grudgingly smiles; her sallow face lights up in her
shadowy living room. "Good for her," she says. "If I had my health,
I'd be getting out myself. This being a homemaker - they sold
us a bill of goods, back there in home ec."

"How is Ronnie, by the way?"

"The same," she says, with a note of that languid, plaintive
music the women of the county inject into their saga of their stoic
days. "Not hustling so hard for the new customers now, coasting
along on the old. He's out from under the children's educations, so
his only financial burden is me and the doctor bills. Not that he
wouldn't be willing to pay for little Ron to finish up at Lehigh if
he wanted; it's been a disappointment, his becoming a kind of
hippie the way he has. The funny thing was he was the cleverest of
the three at school. Things just came too easy to him, I
guess."

Harry has heard this before. Thelma's voice is dutiful and
deliberately calm, issuing small family talk when both know that
what she wants to discuss is her old issue, that flared up a minute
ago, ofwhether he loves her or not, or why at least he doesn't need
her as much as she does him. But their relationship at the very
start, the Caribbean night they first slept together, was
established with her in pursuit of him, and all the years since, of
hidden meetings, of wise decisions to end it and thrilling abject
collapses back into sex, have not disrupted the fundamental pattern
of her giving and his taking, of her fearing their end more than
he, and clinging, and disliking herself for clinging, and wanting
to punish him for her dislike, and him shrugging and continuing to
bask in the sun of her love, that rises every day whether he is
there or not. He can't believe it, quite, and has to keep testing
her.

"These kids," he says, taking a bluff tone as if they are making
small talk in public instead of enjoying this stolen intimacy
behind drawn shades in Arrowdale, "they break your heart. You ought
to see Nelson when he's down there in Florida and has to live with
me a little. The poor kid was jumping out of his skin."

Thelma makes an annoyed motion with her hands. "Harry, you're
not actually God, it just feels that way to you. Do you
really think Nelson was jumpy because of you?"

"Why else?"

She knows something. She hesitates, but cannot resist, perhaps,
a bit of revenge for his taking her always for granted, for his
being in Pennsylvania a week before calling. "You must know about
Nelson. My boys say he's a cocaine addict. They've all used it,
that generation, but Nelson they tell me is really hooked. As they
say, the drug runs him, instead of him just using the drug."

Harry has rocked back as far as the rocker will take him
without his shoes leaving the rug and remains in that
position so long that Thelma becomes anxious, knowing that this man
isn't sound inside and can have a heart attack. At last he rocks
forward again and, gazing at her thoughtfully, says, "That explains
a lot." He fishes in the side pocket of his tweedy gray sports coat
for a small brown bottle and deftly spills a single tiny pill into
his hand and puts it in his mouth, under his tongue. There is a
certain habituated daintiness in the gesture. "Coke takes
money, doesn't it?" he asks Thelma. "I mean, you can go through
hundreds. Thousands."

She regrets her telling him, now that the satisfaction is past
of shocking him, of waking him up to her existence once again. She
is still at heart too much a schoolteacher; she enjoys
administering a lesson. "I can't believe Janice doesn't know and
hasn't discussed it with you, or that Nelson's wife hasn't come to
you both."

"Pru's pretty close-mouthed," he says. "I don't see them
that much. Even when we're all in the county, it's on opposite
sides of Brewer. Janice is over there at her mother's old place a
fair amount, but not me. She owns it, I don't."

"Harry, don't look so stunned. It's all just rumor, and really
is his business, his and his family's. We all do things our parents
wouldn't approve of, and they know it, and don't want to know, if
you follow me. Oh, Harry, damn it! Now I've made you sad, when I'm
dying to make you happy. Why don't you like me to make you happy?
Why have you always fought it?"

"I haven't. I haven't fought it, Thel. We've had great times.
It's just, we've never been exactly set up for a lot of happiness,
and now -"

"Now, dear?"

"Now I know how you've been feeling all these years."

She wants for him to explain, but he can't he is suddenly
aficted by tact. She prompts, "Mortal?"

"Yeah. Close to it. I mean, things wearing thin so you sort of
look right through them."

"Including me."

"Not you. Cut it out, making me jump through this same fucking
hoop all the time. Why do you think I'm here?"

"To make love. To screw me. Go ahead. I mean come ahead. Why do
you think I answered the door?" She has leaned forward across the
table, her knees white where they press against the edge, and her
face has taken on that melting crazy look women get at the decision
to go with it, to fuck in spite of all, which frightens him now
because it suggests a willing slide down into death.

"Wait. Thel. Let's think about this." On cue, the nitroglycerin
has worked its way through and he gets that tingle. He sits back,
suppressing it. "I'm supposed to avoid excitement."

She asks, amused somehow by the need to negotiate, "Have you
made love with Janice?"

"Once or twice maybe. I kind of forget. You know, it's like
brushing your teeth at night, you forget if you did or didn't."

She takes this in, and decides to tease him. "I made up Alex's
old bed for us."

"You didn't use to like to use real beds."

"I've become very liberated," she says, smiling, extracting what
pleasure she can out of his evasions.

He is tempted, picturing Thelma in bed naked, her tallowy
willing body, her breasts that have nursed three boy babies and two
men at least but look virginal and rosy like a baby's thumbtips,
not bumply and chewed and dark like Janice's, her buttocks glassy
in texture and not finely gritty like Janice's, her pubic hair
reddish and skimpy enough to see the slit through unlike Janice's
opaque thick bush, and her shameless and matter-of-fact
mouth, Thelma's, her frank humorous hunger, amused at being caught
in the trap of lust over and over, not holding it against him all
these years of off and on, in and out. But then he thinks of Ronnie
who knows where that obnoxious prick's prick has been, Rabbit can't
believe he's as faithful as Thelma thinks he is, not from the way
he used to carry on in the locker room, not from the way he was
screwing Ruth before Harry was, and cashing in Cindy that time in
the Caribbean - and of AIDS. That virus too small to imagine
travelling through our fluids, even a drop or two of saliva or cunt
slime, and unlocking our antibodies with its little picks, so that
our insides lose their balance and we topple into pneumonia, into
starvation. Love and death, they can't be pried apart any more. But
he can't tell Thelma that. It would be spitting in her
wide-open face.

On her own she sees he isn't up to it. She asks, "Another Coke?"
He has drunk it all, he sees, and consumed without thinking both
the little bowls of fatty, sodium-soaked nuts.

"No. I ought to run. But let me sit here a little longer. Being
with you is such a relief."

"Why? It seems I make claims, like all the others."

A little lightning of pain flickers across his chest, narrowing
his scope of breath. Claims lie heavy around him, squeezing. Now a
sexually unsatisfied mistress, another burden. But he lies, "No you
don't. You've been all gravy, Thel. I know it's cost you, but
you've been terrific."

"Harry,
please.
Don't sound so maudlin. You're still
young. What? Fifty-five? Not even above the speed limit."

"Fifty-six two months ago. That's not old for some guys
- not for a stocky little plug-ugly like Ronnie, he'll
go forever. But if you're the height I am and been overweight as
long, the heart gets tired of lugging it all around." He has
developed, he realizes, an image of his heart as an unwilling
captive inside his chest, a galley slave or one of those blinded
horses that turn a mill wheel. He feels that Thelma is looking at
him in a new way - clinically, with a detached appraising
look far distant from the melting crazy look. He has forfeited
something by not fucking her: he has lost full rank, and she is
moving him out, without even knowing it. Fair enough. With her
lupus, he moved her out a long while ago. If Thelma had been
healthy, why wouldn't he have left Janice for her in this last
decade? Instead he used all the holes she had and then hustled back
into whatever model Toyota he was driving that year and back to
Janice in her stubborn, stupid health. What was there about Janice?
It must be religious, their tie, it made so little other sense.