Rabbit at rest (40 page)

"How're ya doing?" Dr. Raymond asks him, in one of those
marbles-in-the-mouth voices muscular men
sometimes have, Pennsylvanians especially.

"Still here," Harry says, in a brave voice that sounds high in
his ears, as if out of a woman's throat.

The tense insufflation repeats, and so do the images on the TV
screen, silent like the bumping of molecules under the microscope
on a nature program, or like computer graphics in an insurance
commercial, where fragments flickeringly form the logo. It seems as
remote from his body as the records of his sins that angels are
keeping. Were his heart to stop, it would be mere shadowplay. He
sees, when the catheter's bulge subsides a second time, that the
Rice Krispies have been pushed to the sides of his LAD. He feels
blood flowing more freely into his heart, rich in combustible
oxygen; his head in gratitude and ecstasy grows faint.

"Looking good," Dr. Breit says, sounding nervous.

"Whaddya mean?" Dr. Raymond responds - "looking great,"
like those voices on television that argue about the virtues of
Miller Lite.

The nurse who that evening comes into his room (a private room,
$160 more a day, but it's worth it to him; in Florida the guy in
the bed next to him finally died, gurgling and moaning all day and
then shitting all over himself as a last pronouncement) and takes
Harry's temperature and blood pressure and brings his allotment of
pills in a little paper cup has a round kind face. She is a bit
overweight but it's packed on firm. She looks familiar. She has
pale-blue eyes in sockets that make a dent above the
cheekbones in the three-quarters view, and her upper lip has
that kind of puffy look he likes, like Michelle Pfeiffer. Her hair
shows under her nurse's cap as browny-red,
many-colored, with even a little gray, though she is young
enough to be his daughter.

She lifts the strange plastic rocket-shaped thermometer
that gives its reading in red segmented numbers from his mouth and
enwraps his left arm with the Velcro-fastened
blood-pressure cuff. As she inflates it she asks, "How's the
Toyota business?"

"Not bad. The weak dollar doesn't help. My son runs the place
now, basically. How'd you know I sold Toyotas?"

"My boyfriend then and I bought a car from you about ten years
ago." She lifts those bleached blue eyes mockingly. "Don't you
remember?"

"It's you! Yes. Of course. Of course I remember. An orange
Corolla." She is his daughter; or at least he imagines she is,
though Ruth out of spite would never admit it to him. As the girl
stands close to his bed, he reads her badge: ANNABELLE BYER; R.N.
She still has her maiden name.

Annabelle frowns, and deflates the blood-pressure cuff, as
tight around his arm as a policeman's grip. "Let's try that again
in a minute. It shot up while we were talking."

He asks her, "How'd the Corolla work out? How'd the boyfriend
work out, for that matter? What the hell was his name? Big
red-eared country kid."

"Don't talk, please, until I've got my reading. I'll be quiet.
Try to think of something soothing."

He thinks of Ruth's farm, the Byer place, the slope down through
the orchard from the line of scrub trees he used to spy behind
- the little square stone house, the yellow shells of the
abandoned school buses, the dark collie that tried to herd him down
there, as though he knew Harry belonged there with the others.
Fritzie, that was that dog's name. Sharp teeth, black gums. Oo boy,
scary. Calm down. Think of the big sky of Texas, above the hot low
barracks at Fort Larson, himself in fresh khaki, with a pass for
the evening. Freedom, a soft breeze, a green sunset on the low
horizon. Think of playing basketball against Oriole High, that
little country gym, the backboards flush against the walls, before
all the high schools merged into big colorless regionals and
shopping malls began eating up the farmland. Think of sledding with
Mim in her furry hood, in Mt. Judge behind the hat factory, on a
winter's day so short the streetlights come on an hour before
suppertime calls you home.

"That's better," the nurse says. "One forty over
ninety-five. Not great, but not bad. In answer to your
questions: the car lasted longer than the boyfriend. I traded in
the car after eight years; it had a hundred twenty thousand miles
on the speedometer. Jamie moved out about a year after we moved
into town. He went back to Galilee. Brewer was too tough for
him."

"And you? Is it too tough for you?"

"No, I like it. I like the action."

Action like her mother used to get? You were a real
hooer?
Dusk and May's fully arrived leafiness soften his
private room; it is a quiet time on the hospital floor, after
dinner and the post-work surge of visitors. Harry dares ask,
"You married now? Or live with a guy?"

She smiles, her natural kindness contending a moment with
surprise at his curiosity, his presumption, and then smoothing her
face into calm again. The dusk seems to be gathering it closer, the
pale round glimmer of her face. But her voice discloses a city
dryness, a guardedness that might rise up. "No, as a matter of fact
I live with my mother. She sold the farm we inherited from my
father and moved in with me after Jamie moved out."

"I think I know that farm. I've passed it on the road." Harry's
violated, tired heart feels weighted by so much information, as his
groin had been weighted down, literally sandbagged, in the hours
after the angioplasty. To think of that other world, with all its
bushes and seasons and green days and brown, where this child's
life had passed without him. "Does Ruth -" he begins, and ends,
"What does she do? Your mother."

The girl gives him a look but then answers readily, as if the
question passed some test. "She works for one of these investment
companies from out of state, money markets and mutual funds and all
that, that have branch offices in the new glass building downtown,
across from where Kroll's used to be."

"A stenographer," Rabbit remembers. "She could take dictation
and type."

The girl actually laughs, in surprise at his groping command of
the truth. She is beginning to be pert, to drop her nurse's manner.
She has backed off a step from his bed, and her full thighs press
against the crisp front of her white uniform so that even standing
up she has a lap. Why is Ruth turning this girl into a spinster?
She tells him, "She was hired for that but being so much older than
the other women they've let her have some more responsibility.
She's a kind of junior exec now. Did you know my mother, ever?"

"I'm not sure," he lies.

"You must have, in the days when she was single. She told me she
knew quite a few guys before meeting up with my father." She
smiles, giving him permission to have known her mother.

"I guess she did," Harry says, sad at the thought. Always he has
wanted to be every woman's only man, as he was his mother's only
son. "I met her once or twice."

"You should see her," Annabelle goes on pertly. "She's lost a
lot of weight and dresses real snappy. I kid her, she has more
boyfriends than I do."

Rabbit closes his eyes and tries to picture it, at their age.
Come on. Work.
Dressing snappy. Once a city girl, always a
city girl. Her hair, that first time he saw her, rimmed with red
neon like wilt.

The girl he thinks is his daughter goes on, "I'll tell her
you're in here, Mr. Angstrom." Though he is trying now to withdraw,
into his evening stupor, an awakening affinity between them has
stirred her to a certain forwardness. "Maybe she'll remember more
than you do."

Outside the sealed hospital windows, in the slowly thickening
dusk, sap is rising, and the air even in here feels languid with
pollen. Involuntarily Harry's eyes close again. "No," he says,
"that's O.K. Don't tell her anything. I doubt if she'd remember
anything." He is suddenly tired, too tired for Ruth. Even if this
girl is his daughter, it's an old story, going on and on, like a
radio nobody's listening to.

* * *

They keep him in the hospital for five nights. Janice visits him
Saturday. She is very busy on the outside; the classes she has to
take to be a real-estate salesman have begun to meet, "The
Laws of Real Property and Conveyancing" for three hours one night,
and the other, "Procedures of Mortgages and Financing," on another.
Also, she has been spending a lot of daytime hours with Pru and the
grandchildren, and Charlie Stavros called her up and took her out
to lunch.

Rabbit protests, "The bastard, he did? I'm not even dead
yet."

"Of course not, darling, and nobody expects you to be. He said
it was your idea, from when you had lunch together. Charlie's
concerned about us, is all. He thinks I shouldn't just be letting
things slide but should get an outside accountant and our lawyer
and look at the books over at the lot, just like you wanted."

"You believe it when Charlie tells you, but not when I do."

"Honey, you're my husband, and husbands get wives all confused.
Charlie's just an old friend, and he has an outsider's
impartiality. Also, he loved my father, and feels protective toward
the firm."

Harry has to chuckle, though he doesn't like to laugh now or do
anything that might joggle his heart, that delicate web of
jumping shadow he saw on the radiograph monitor during his
operation. Sometimes, when shows like Cosby or
Perfect
Strangers
or
Golden Girls
begin to tickle him too
much, he switches off the set, rather than stress his heart with a
laugh. These shows are all idiotic but not as totally stupid as
this new one everybody raves about,
Roseanne,
starring
some fat woman whose only talent as far as he can see is talking
fast without moving her mouth. "Janice," he says seriously, "I
think the only person who ever loved your father was you. And maybe
your mother, at the beginning. Though it's hard to picture."

"Don't be rude to the dead," she tells him, unrufed. She looks
plumped up, somehow; without that steady diet of tennis and
swi
mmin
g Valhalla Village provides she is maybe gaining
weight. They are still members up at the Flying Eagle, but haven't
made it out that way as much as in past springs. They had enjoyed
good friendly times up there without realizing they would end. And,
with his heart, Harry doesn't quite know how much to get into golf
again. Even with a cart, you can be out there on the seventh hole
and keel over and by the time they bring you in, through the other
foursomes, there's been no oxygen to the brain for ten
minutes. Five minutes is all it takes, and you're a
vegetable.

"Well, are you going to do it? Call in another
accountant."-

"I've done it already" she announces, the proud secret she's
been waiting for the conversation to elicit. "Charlie had called up
Mildred on his own already and we went over there to this very nice
nursing home right near us, she's perfectly sensible and
competent, just a little unsteady on her legs, and we went
over to the lot and this Lyle who was so mean to you wasn't there
but I was able to reach him over the phone at his home number. I
said we wanted to look over the accounts since October and he said
the accounts were mostly in these computer disks he keeps at his
house and he was too sick to see us today, so I said maybe he was
too sick to be our accountant then."

"You said that?"

"Yes I did. The first thing they teach you in this class on
conveyancing is never to pussy-foot around, you do
somebody and a potential sale more harm by not being clear than by
speaking right out, even if they might not like hearing it at
first. I told him he was fired and he said you can't fire somebody
with AIDS, it's discrimination, and I said he should bring in
his books and disks tomorrow or a policeman would be out to get
them."

"You said all that?" Her eyes are bright and her hair bushes out
from her little nut of a face, getting tan again, with a touch of
double chin now that she's putting on weight. Harry admires her as
you admire children you have raised, whose very success pulls them
away, into the world's workings, into distance and
estrangement.

"Maybe not as smoothly as I'm saying it to you, but I got it all
out. Ask Charlie, he was right there. I don't like what these
queers have done to Nelson. They've corrupted him."

"Gay," Harry says wearily. "We call them gay now." He is still
trying to keep up with America, as it changes styles and costumes
and vocabulary, as it dances ahead ever young, ever younger. "And
what did Lyle say then?"

"He said we shall see. He asked whether I'd consulted with
Nelson about all this. I said no but I wasn't sure Nelson was fit
to consult with these days. I said in my opinion he and his friends
were milking Nelson for all he was worth and had turned him into a
human wreck and a dope addict and Charlie wrote on a pad of paper
for me to see, `Cool it.' Elvira and Benny were out in the showroom
all ears even though the office door was closed. Oh, but that fairy
got me mad," Janice explains, "he sounded so
aboveit-all and bored on the phone, as if dealing with
women like me was just more than his poor sensitive body and spirit
could bear."

Rabbit is beginning to know how Lyle felt. "He probably was
tired," he says in his defense. "That disease he has does an awful
job on you. Your lungs fill up."

"Well, he should have kept his penis out of other men's
bottoms then," Janice says, lowering her voice though, so the
nurses and orderlies in the hall don't hear.

Bottoms. Thelma. That casket of nothingness. Probing the void.
"And I don't know," Rabbit wearily pursues, "in a situation like
Nelson's, who corrupts who. Maybe 1 corrupted the poor kid, twenty
years ago."

"Oh Harry, don't be so hard on yourself. It's depressing to see
you like this. You've changed so. What have they done to you, these
doctors?"