Rabbit at rest (30 page)

Two ailing old friends, he and Thelma sit for half an hour,
talking symptoms and children, catching up on the fate of common
acquaintances - Peggy Fosnacht dead, Ollie down in New
Orleans she heard, Cindy Murkett fat and unhappy working in a
boutique in the new mall out near Oriole, Webb married for the
fourth time to a woman in her twenties and moved from that fancy
modern house in Brewer Heights with all his home carpentry to an
old stone farmhouse in the south of the county, near Galilee, that
he has totally renovated.

"That Webb. Anything he wants to do, he does. He really knows
how to live."

"Not really. I was never as impressed with him as you and Janice
were. I always thought he was a smartass
know-it-all."

"You think Janice was impressed?"

Thelma is slightly flustered, and avoids his eye. "Well, there
was that one night at least. She didn't complain, did she?"

"Neither did I," he says gallantly, though what he chiefly
remembers is how tired he was the next morning, and how weird golf
seemed, with impossible jungle and deep coral caves just off the
fairway. Janice got Webb, and Ronnie sweet Cindy. Thelma told Harry
that night she had loved him for years.

She nods in sarcastic acknowledgment of the compliment, and
says, returning to an earlier point in their conversation, "About
being mortal - I suppose it affects different people
different ways, but for me there's never been a thinning out. Being
alive, no matter how sick I feel, feels absolute. You're absolutely
alive and when you're not you'll be absolutely something else. Do
you and Janice ever go to church?"

Not too surprised, since Thelma has always been religious in her
way, it goes with her conventional decor and secretive sexiness, he
answers, "Rarely, actually. The churches down there have this
folksy Southern thing. And most of our friends happen to be
Jewish."

"Ronnie and I go every Sunday now. One of these new
denominations that goes back to fundamentals. You know -
we're lost, and we're saved."

"Oh yeah?" These marginal sects depress Harry. At least the
moldy old denominations have some history to them.

"I believe it, sometimes," she says. "It helps the panic, when
you think of all the things you'll never do that you always thought
vaguely you might. Like go to Portugal, or get a master's
degree."

"Well, you did some things. You did Ronnie, and me, me up brown
I'd say, and you did raise three sons. You might get to Portugal
yet. They say it's cheap, relatively. The only country over there
I've ever wanted to go to is Tibet. I can't believe I won't make
it. Or never be a test pilot, like I wanted to when I was ten. As
you say, I still think I'm God."

"I didn't mean that unkindly. It's charming, Harry."

"Except maybe to Nelson."

"Even to him. He wouldn't want you any different."

"Here's a question for you, Thel. You're smart. What ever
happened to the Dalai Lama?"

In her clinical appraising mood, nothing should surprise her,
but Thelma laughs. "He's still around, isn't he? In fact, hasn't he
been in the news a little, now that the Tibetans are rioting again?
Why, Harry? Have you become a devotee of his? Is that why you don't
go to church?"

He stands, not liking being teased about this. "I've always kind
of identified with him. He's about my age, I like to keep track of
the guy. I have a gut feeling this'll be his year." As he stands
there, the rocking chair on the rebound taps his calves and his
medications make him feel lightheaded. "Thanks for the nuts," he
says. "There's a lot we could still say."

She stands too, stiffly fighting the plushy grip of the sofa,
and with her arthritic waddle steps around the table, and places
her body next to his, her face at his lapel. She looks up at him
with that presumptuous solemnity of women you have fucked. She
urges him, "Believe in God, darling. It helps."

He squirms, inside. "I don't not believe."

"That's not quite enough, I fear. Harry, darling." She likes the
sound of "darling." "Before you go, let me see him at least."

"See who?"

"Him, Harry. You. With his bonnet."

Thelma kneels, there in her frilled and stagnant dim living
room, and unzips his fly. He feels the clinical cool touch of her
fingers and sees the gray hairs on the top of her head, radiating
from her parting; his heart races in expectation of her warm mouth
as in the old days.

But she just says, "Just lovely," and tucks it back, half hard,
into his jockey shorts, and rezips his fly and struggles to her
feet. She is a bit breathless, as if from a task of housework. He
embraces her and this time it is he who clings.

"The reason I haven't left Janice and never can now," he
confesses, suddenly near tears, maudlin as she said, "is, without
her, I'm shit. I'm unemployable. I'm too old. All I can be from
here on in is her husband."

He expects sympathy, but perhaps his mention of Janice is one
too many. Thelma goes dead, somehow, in his arms. "I don't know,"
she says.

"About what?"

"About your coming here again."

"Oh let me," he begs, perversely feeling at last in tune with
this encounter and excited by her. "Without you, I don't have a
life."

"Maybe Nature is trying to tell us something. We're too old to
keep being foolish."

"Never, Thelma. Not you and me."

"You don't seem to want me."

"I want you, I just don't want Ronnie's little bugs."

She pushes at his chest to free herself. "There's nothing wrong
with Ronnie. He's as safe and clean as I am."

"Yeah, well, that goes without saying, the way you two carry on.
That's what I'm afraid of. I tell you, Thelma, you don't know him.
He's a madman. You can't see it, because you're his loyal
wife."

"Harry, I think we've reached a point where the more we say, the
worse it'll get. Sex isn't what it used to be, you're right about
that. We must all be more careful. You be careful. Keep brushing
your teeth, and I'll brush mine."

It isn't until he is out on Thelma's curved walk, the door with
its pulled curtain and bevelled glass shut behind him, that he
catches her allusion to toothbrushing. Another slam at him and
Janice. You can't say anything honest to women, they have minds
like the FBI. The robin is still there, on the little lawn. Maybe
it's sick, all these animals around us have their diseases too,
their histories of plague. It gives Rabbit a beady eye and hops a
bit away in Thelma's waxy April grass but disdains to take wing.
Robin, hop. The bold yellow of dandelions has come this week to
join that of daffodils and forsythia. Telltale. Flowers attracting
bees as we attract each other. Our signals. Smells. If only he were
back in her house he'd fuck her despite all the danger. Instead he
finds safety
ins
ide his gray Celica; as he glides away the
stillness of Arrowdale is broken by the return of the lumbering
yellow school buses, and their release, at every corner of the
curved streets, of shrilly yelling children.

THE TOYOTA TOUCH, a big blue banner says in the display windows
of Springer Motors over on Route
111. 36 Months / 36,000 Miles
• Limited Warranty on All New Models,
a lesser poster
proclaims, and another
All-New
CRESSIDAS
•
Powerful New 3.0-Liter Engine • 190 Horsepower •
4-Speed Electronically Controlled Overdrive Transmission
• New Safety Shift Lock.
Nelson isn't in, to Harry's
considerable relief. The day is a desultory Tuesday and the two
salesmen on the floor are both young men he doesn't know, and who
don't know him. Changes have been made since last November. Nelson
has had the office area repainted in brighter colors, pinks and
greens like a Chinese tea-house, and has taken down the old
blown-up photos of Harry in his glory days as a basketball
star, with the headlines calling him "Rabbit."

"Mr. Angstrom left for lunch around one o'clock and said he
might not be back this afternoon," a pudgy salesman tells him. Jake
and Rudy used to have their desks out in the open along the wall,
in the direction of the disco club that failed and when the
Seventies went out became an appliance-rental center. One of
Nelson's bright ideas was to take these desks away and line the
opposite wall with cubicles, like booths in a restaurant. Maybe it
creates more salesman-customer intimacy at the ticklish
moment of signing the forms but the arrangement seems remote from
general business operations and exposed to the noise of the service
garage. In this direction, and behind toward the river and Brewer,
lies the scruffy unpaved area of the lot Harry has always thought
of for some reason as Paraguay, which in reality just got rid of
its old dictator with the German name, Harry read in the papers
recently.

"Yeah, well," he tells this fat stranger, "I'm a Mr. Angstrom
too. Who is here, who knows anything?" He doesn't mean to sound
rude but Thelma's revelation has upset him; he can feel his heart
racing and his stomach struggling to digest the two bowls of
nuts.

Another young salesman, a thinner one, comes toward them, out of
a booth at the Paraguay end, and he sees it's not a man; her hair
being pulled back tight from her ears and her wearing a tan trench
coat to go out onto the lot to a customer fooled him. It's a
female. A female car salesman. Like in that Toyota commercial, only
white. He tries to control his face, so his chauvinism doesn't
show.

"I'm Elvira Ollenbach, Mr. Angstrom," she says, and gives him a
hard handshake that, after Thelma's pasty cold touch a
half-hour ago, feels hot. "I'd know you were Nelson's dad
even without the pictures he keeps on his wall. You look just like
him, especially around the mouth."

Is this chick kidding him? She is a thin taut young woman,
overexercised the way so many of them are now, with deep bony
eyesockets and a deep no-curves voice and thin lips painted a
pale luminous pink like reflecting tape and a neck so slender it
makes her jaws look wide, coming to points under the lobes of her
exposed white ears, which stick out. She wears gold earrings shaped
like snail shells. He says to her, "I guess you've come onto the
job since I was last here."

"Just since January," she says. "But before that I was three
years with Datsun out on Route 819."

"How do you like it, selling cars?"

"I like it very much," Elvira Ollenbach says, and no more. She
doesn't smile much, and her eyes are a little insistent.

He puts himself on the line, telling her, "You don't think of it
usually as a woman's game."

She shows a little life. "I know, isn't that strange, when it's
really such a natural? The women who come in don't feel so
intimidated, and the men aren't so afraid to show their
ignorance as they would be with another man. I love it. My dad
loved cars and I guess I take after him."

"It all makes sense," he admits. "I don't know why it's been so
long in coming. Women sales reps, I mean. How's business been?"

"It's been a good spring, so far. People love the Camry, and of
course the Corolla plugs right along, but we've had surprisingly
good luck with the luxury models, compared to what we hear from
other dealers. Brewer's economy is looking up, after all these
years. The dead industries have been shaken out, and the new ones,
the little specialty and high-tech plants, have been coming
in, and of course the factory outlets have had a fabulous
reception. They're the key to the whole revival."

"Super. How about the used end of it? That been slow?"

Her deeply set eyes - shadowy, like Nelson's, but not
sullen and hurt - glance up in some puzzlement. "Why no, not
at all. One of the reasons Nelson had for hiring a new rep was he
wanted to devote more of his own attention to the used cars, and
not wholesale so many of them out. There was a man who used
to do it, with a Greek name -"

"Stavros. Charlie Stavros."

"Exactly. And ever since he retired Nelson feels the used cars
have been on automatic pilot. Nelson's philosophy is that unless
you cater to the lower-income young or minority buyer with a
buy they can manage you've lost a potential customer for a new
upscale model five or ten years down the road."

"Sounds right." She seems awfully full of Nelson, this girl.
Girl, she may be thirty or more for all he can tell, everybody
under forty looks like a kid to him.

The pudgy salesman, the one who's a man - a nice familiar
Italian type, Brewer is still producing a few, with husky voices,
hairy wrists, and with old-fashioned haircuts close above the
ears - feels obliged to put his two cents in. "Nelson's
really been making the used cars jump. Ads in the Standard,
prices on the windshield knocked lower every two or three
days, discounts for cash. Some people swing by every day to see
what's up for grabs." He has an anxious way of standing too close
and hurrying his words; his cheeks could use a shave and his breath
a Cert or two. Garlic, they use it on everything.

"Discounts for cash, huh?" Harry says. "Where is Nelson,
anyway?"

"He told us he needed to unwind," Elvira says. "He wanted to get
away from the calls."

"Calls?"

"Some man keeps calling him," Elvira says. Her voice drops. "He
sounds kind of foreign." Harry is getting the impression she isn't
as smart as she seemed at first impression. Her insistent eyes
catch a hint of this thought, for she self-protectively adds,
"I probably shouldn't be saying a thing, but seeing as you're
his father. . ."

"Sounds like a dissatisfied customer," Rabbit says, to help her
out of it.

"Toyota doesn't get many of those," the other salesman crowds
in. "Year after year, they put out the lowest-maintenance
machines on the road, with a repair-free longevity that's
absolutely unbelievable."

"Don't sell me, I'm sold," Harry tells him.