Rabbit at rest (34 page)

"This is still spring," Charlie tells him. "Wait till the
pitchers' arms warm up. Schmidt'll wilt. He's old, not compared to
you and me but in the game he's in he's old, and there's no hiding
from the young pitchers over the long season."

Harry finds it salutary, to have his admiration for Schmidt
checked. You can't live through these athletes, they don't know you
exist. For them, only the other players exist. They go to the
ballpark and there's thirty thousand there and a big bumbly roar
when their names are announced and that's all of you they need.
"Does it seem to you," he asks Charlie, "there's a lot of disasters
lately? That Pan Am plane blowing up, and then those soccer fans in
England the other day getting crushed, and now this gun exploding
on the battleship for no apparent reason."

"Apparent's the key word," Charlie says. "Everything has some
little tiny reason, even when we can't see it. A little spark
somewhere, a little crack in the metal. Also, champ, look at the
odds. How many people in the world now, five billion? With the
world jammed up like it is the wonder is more of us aren't trampled
to death. There's a crush on, and it's not going to get
better."

Rabbit's heart dips, thinking that from Nelson's point of view
he himself is a big part of the crowding. That time he screamed
outside the burning house at 26 Vista Crescent, I'll kill you. He
didn't mean it. A spark, a crack in metal. A tiny flaw. When you
die you do the world a favor.

Charlie is frowning down into the menu, which is enormous,
printed in photocopy in green ink on rough flecked acid-free
paper. The things they can do with Xerox now. Who still uses a
place like Verity Press? First letterpress went, then
photo-offset. Charlie no longer wears thick squarish hornrims
that set a dark bar across his eyebrows but gold aviator frames
that hold his thick lavender-tinted lenses to his nose like
fingers pinching a wineglass. Charlie used to be thickset but age
has whittled him so his Greek bones show - the high pinched
arch to his nose, the wide slanting brow below his dark hairline.
His sideburns are gray but he is shaving them shorter. Studying the
menu, he chuckles. "Beefsteak Salad," he reads. "Pork Kabob Salad.
What kind of salads are those?"

When the waitress comes, Charlie kids her about it. "What's with
all this high-cal high-fat meat?" he asks. "You giving
us a beefsteak with a little lettuce on the side?"

"The meat is shoelaced and worked in," the waitress says. She is
tall and almost pretty, with her hair bleached and trained up in a
fluffy Mohawk, and a row of little earrings all around the edge of
one ear, and dark dusty-rosy spots rouged behind her eyes.
Her tongue has some trouble in her mouth and it's cute, the
earnest, deliberate way her lips move. "They found there was a call
for these, you know, heartier ingredients."

So underneath everything, Rabbit thinks, it's still Johnny
Frye's Chophouse. "Tell me about the Macadamia and Bacon Salad," he
says.

"It's one of people's favorites," she says. "The bacon is crisp
and in, like, flakes. Most of the fat has been pressed out of it.
Also there's alfalfa sprouts, and some radishes and cucumber sliced
real thin, and a couple kinds of lettuce, I forget the different
names, and I don't know what all else, maybe some chuba -
that's dried sardines."

"Sounds good," Rabbit says, before it doesn't and he has to
choose again.

Charlie points out, "Nuts and bacon aren't exactly what the
doctor ordered."

"You heard her, the fat's been squeezed out. Anyway a little bit
can't kill you. It's more a matter of internal balance. Come on,
Charlie. Loosen up."

"What's in the Seaweed Special?" Charlie asks the waitress,
because both men like to hear her talk.

"Oh, hijiki of course, and wakame, and dulse and agar in with a
lot of chickpeas and lentils, and leafy greens, it's wonderful if
you're going macrobiotic seriously and don't mind that slightly
bitter taste, you know, that seaweed tends to have."

"You've done talked me out of it, Jennifer," Charlie says,
reading her name stitched onto the bodice of the lime-green
jumper they wear for a uniform at Salad Binge. "I'll take the
Spinach and Crab."

"For salad dressing, we have Russian, Roquefort, Italian, Creamy
Italian, Poppyseed, Thousand Island, Oil and Vinegar, and
Japanese."

"What's in the Japanese?" Harry asks, not just to see her lips
curl and pucker around the little difficulty in her mouth, but
because the Japanese interest him professionally. How do they and
the Germans do it, when America's going down the tubes?

"Oh, I could ask in the kitchen if you really care, but
umeboshi, I think, and tamari, of course - we don't use that
commercial soy sauce - and sesame oil, and rice vinegar." Her
eyes harden as she senses that these men are flirtatiously wasting
her time. Feeling apologetic, they both order Creamy Italian and
settle to each other.

It has been a long time, their rapport has grown rusty. Charlie
does seem older, drier, when you look. The thin gold aviator frames
take out of his face a lot of that masculine certainty that must
have appealed to Janice twenty years ago. "Cute kid," Charlie says,
arranging the silver around his plate more neatly, square to the
edges of the paper placemat.

"Whatever happened to Melanie?" Rabbit asks him. Ten years ago,
they had sat in this same restaurant and Melanie, a friend of
Nelson's and Pru's living at the time at Ma Springer's house, had
been their waitress. Then she became Charlie's girlfriend, old as
he was, relatively. At least they went to Florida together. One of
the things maybe that had made Florida seem attractive. But no
bimbo there had offered herself to Harry. The only flickers he got
were from women his own age, who looked ancient.

"She became a doctor," Charlie says. "A gastroenterologist, to
be exact, in Portland, Oregon. That's where her father wound up,
you'll recall."

"Just barely. He was a kind of late-blooming hippie,
wasn't he?" "He settled down with the third wife and has been a big
support to Melanie. It was her mother, actually, who was flipping
out, back in Mill Valley. Alcohol. Guys. Drugs."

The last word hurts Harry's stomach. "How come you know all
this?"

Charlie shrugs minimally, but cannot quite suppress his little
smile of pride. "We keep in touch. I was there for her when she
needed a push. I told her, `Go for it.' She still had a bit of that
poor-little-me-I'm-only-a-girl
thing. I gave her the boost she needed. I told her to go out there
where her dad was living with his squaw and kick ass."

"Me you tell avoid aggravation, her you told to go for it."

"Different cases. Different ages. You her age, I'd tell you, `Go
for it.' I'll still tell you. As long as you avoid
aggravation."

"Charlie, I have a problem."

"That's news?"

"A couple of 'em, actually. For one, I ought to do something
about my heart. I just can't keep drifting along waiting for my
next MI."

"You're losing me, champ."

"You know. Myocardial infarction. Heart attack. I was lucky to
get away with the one I did have. The docs tell me I ought to have
an open-heart, a multiple bypass."

"Go for it."

"Sure. Easy for you to say. People die having those things. I
notice you never had one."

"But I did. In '87. December, you were in Florida. They replaced
two valves. Aortic and mitral. When you have rheumatic fever as a
kid, it's the valves that go. They don't close right. That's what
gives you the heart murmur, blood running the wrong way."

Rabbit can hardly bear these images, all these details inside
him, valves and slippages and crusts on the pipe. "What'd they
replace them with?"

"Pig heart valves. The choice is that or a mechanical valve, a
trap with a ball. With the mechanical, you click all the time. I
didn't want to click if I could help it. They say it keeps you
awake."

"Pig valves." Rabbit tries to hide his revulsion. "Was it
terrible? They split your chest open and ran your blood through a
machine?"

"Piece of cake. You're knocked out cold. What's wrong with
running your blood through a machine? What else you think you are,
champ?"

A God-made one-of-a-kind with an
immortal soul breathed in. A vehicle of grace. A battlefield of
good and evil. An apprentice angel. All those things they tried to
teach you in Sunday school, or really didn't try very hard to teach
you, just let them drift in out of the pamphlets, back there in
that church basement buried deeper in his mind than an
air-raid shelter.

"You're just a soft machine," Charlie maintains, and lifts his
squarish hands, with their white cuffs and rectangular gold links,
to let Jennifer set his salad before him. He saw her coming with
eyes in the back of his head. She circles the table gingerly
- these men are doing something to her, she doesn't know what
- and puts in front of Harry a bacon-flecked green
mound bigger than a big breast. It looks rich, and more than he
should eat. The tall awkward girl with her strange white
rooster-comb trembling in the air still hovers, the
roundnesses in her green uniform pressing on Rabbit's awareness as
he sits at the square tiled table trying to frame his dilemmas.

"Is there anything more I can get you gentlemen?" Jennifer asks,
her lips gently struggling to articulate. It's not a lisp she has,
quite; it's like her tongue is too big. "Something to drink?"

Charlie asks her for a Perrier with lime. She says that San
Pellegrino is what they have. He says it's all the same to him.
Fancy water is fancy water.

Harry after an internal struggle asks what kinds of beer they
have. Jennifer sighs, feeling they are putting her on, and recites,
"Schlitz, Miller, Miller Lite, Bud, Bud Light, Michelob, Lowenbrau,
Corona, Coors, Coors Light, and Ballantine ale on draft." All these
names have an added magic from being tumbled a bit in her mouth.
Not looking Charlie in the eye, Harry opts for a Mick. Jennifer
nods unsmiling and goes away. If she doesn't want to excite
middle-aged men, she shouldn't wear all those earrings and go
so heavy on the makeup.

"Piece of cake, you were saying," he says to Charlie.

"They freeze you. You don't know a thing."

"Guy I know down in Florida, not much older than we are, had an
open-heart and he says it was hell, the recuperation took
forever, and furthermore he doesn't look so great even so. He
swings a golf club like a cripple."

Charlie does one of his tidy small shrugs. "You got to have the
basics to work with. Maybe the guy was too far gone. But you,
you're in good shape. Could lose a few pounds, but you're young
- what, Fifty-five?"

"Wish I was. Fifty-six last February."

"That's young, Champ. I'm getting there myself." Charlie is
Janice's age.

"The way I'm going l'll be happy to hit sixty. I look at all
these old crocks down in Florida, shrivelled-up mummies
toddling right into their nineties in their shorts and orthopedic
sneakers, perky as bejesus, and I want to ask 'em, `What makes you
so great? How did you do it?' "

"A day at a time," Charlie suggests. "One day at a time, and
don't look down." Harry can tell he's getting bored with issuing
reassurances, but Charlie's all he's got, now that he and Thelma
are on hold. He's embarrassed to call her, now that he can't seem
to deliver. He says:

"There's this other thing they can do now. An angioplasty. They
cut open an artery in your groin -"

"Hey. I'm eating."

"- and poke it up all the way to your heart, would you
believe. Then they pop out this balloon in the narrow place of the
coronary artery and blow the damn thing up. Not with air, with
saltwater somehow. It cracks the plaque. It stretches the artery
back to the way it was."

"With a lot of luck it does," Charlie says. "And a year later
you're back in the same boat, plugged up with macadamia nuts and
beer yet."

Beer has come on the end of Jennifer's lean arm, in a frosted
glass mug, golden and foam-topped and sizzling with its own
excited bubbles. "If I can't have a single beer now and then, I'd
just as soon be dead," Harry lies. He sips, and with a bent
forefinger wipes the foam from under his nose. That gesture of
Nelson's. He wonders when she fucks how protective Jennifer has to
be of that wobbly Mohawk. Some punk girls, he's read, put safety
pins through their nipples.

"Coronary bypass is what you want," Charlie is telling him.
"These balloons, they can only do one artery at a time. Bypass
grafts, they can do four, five, six once they get in there.
Whaddeyou care if they pull open your rib cage? You won't be there.
You'll be way out of it, dreaming away. Actually, you don't dream.
It's too deep for that. It's a big nothing, like being dead."

"I don't want it," Harry hears himself say sharply. He softens
this to, "Not yet anyway." Charlie's word pull has upset him, made
it too real, the physical exertion, pulling open these resistant
bone gates so his spirit will fly out and men in pale-green
masks will fish in this soupy red puddle with their hooks and
clamps and bright knives. Once on television watching by mistake
over Janice's shoulder one of these PBS programs on childbirth
- they wouldn't put such raunchy stuff on the networks
- he saw them start to cut open a woman's belly for a
Caesarean. The knife in the rubber-gloved hand made a
straight line and on either side yellow fat curled up and away like
two strips of foam rubber. This woman's abdomen, with a baby
inside, was lined in a
material,
just like foam rubber.
"Down in Florida," he says, "I had a catheterization" - the
word makes trouble in his mouth, as if he's become the waitress
- "and it wasn't so bad, more boring than anything else.
You're wide awake, and then they put like this big bowl over your
chest to see what's going on inside. Where the dye is being pumped
through, it's
hot, so
hot you can hardly stand it." He
feels he's disappointing Charlie, being so cowardly about bypasses,
and to deepen his contact with the frowning, chewing other man
confides, "The worst thing of it, Charlie, is I feel half dead
already. This waitress is the first girl I've wanted to fuck for
months."