Rabbit at rest (41 page)

He's glad she asked. He tells her, "They stuck a long thin thing
into me and I could see it on television in my heart. Right on the
screen, my own poor heart, while it was pumping to keep me alive.
They shouldn't be allowed to go into your heart like that. They
should just let people die."

"Darling, what a stupid way to talk. It's modern science, you
should be grateful. You're going to be fine. Mim called all
worried and I told her how minor it was and gave her your
number here."

"Mim." Just the syllable makes him smile. His sister. The one
other survivor of that house on Jackson Road, where Mom and Pop set
up their friction, their heat, their comedy, their parade of days.
At nineteen Mim took her bony good looks and went west, to Las
Vegas. One of her gangster pals with a sentimental streak set her
up with a beauty parlor when her looks began to go, and now she
owns a Laundromat as well as the hairdresser's. Vegas must be a
great town for Laundromats. Nobody lives there, everybody is just
passing through, leaving a little bit of dirt like on the pale
Antron carpets back at 14Y2 Franklin Drive. Harry and Janice
visited Mim once, seven or eight years ago. These caves of glowing
slot machines, no clocks anywhere, just a perpetual two o'clock in
the morning, and you step outside and to your surprise the sun is
blazing, and the sidewalks so hot a dog couldn't walk on them. What
with Sinatra and Wayne Newton, he expected a lot of glitz, but in
fact the gambling addicts were no classier than the types you see
pulling at the one-armed bandits down in Atlantic City. Only
there was a Western flavor, their voices and faces lined with
little tiny cracks. Mim's face and voice had those tiny cracks too,
though she had had a face-lift, to tighten up what she called
her "wattles." Life is a hill that gets steeper the more you
climb.

"Harry." Janice has been telling him something. "What did I just
say?"

"I have no idea." Irritably he adds, "Why bother to talk to me
when you've got Charlie back advising you, to say the least?"

She flares a little; her lips pinch in and her face comes
forward. "Advising me is all he's doing and he's doing that because
you asked him to. Because he loves you."

She wouldn't have spoken this way before going to Florida and
those women's groups, of "love" as something that is all over the
map, like oil drips from speeding automobiles. She is trying to
stir him, he dimly recognizes, back into life, into the fray. He
tries to play along. "Me?"

"Yes, you, Harry Angstrom."

"Why would he, for Chrissake?"

"I have no idea," Janice says. "I've never understood what men
see in each other." She tries a joke. "Maybe he's gone gay in his
old age."

"He's never married," Harry admits. "You think he'd be
interested in coming back to work for Springer Motors?"

She is gathering up her things - a black leather
pocketbook packed like a bomb, the old-fashioned round kind
people used to throw and not the flattened Semtex that terrorists
smuggle into suitcases in airplanes, and her real-estate
textbook and photocopied sample documents stapled together, for her
class tonight, and a new spring coat she's got herself, a kind of
jonquil-yellow gabardine with a broad belt and wide
shoulders. She looks girlish, fluffyhaired, putting it on. "I asked
him," she says, "and he says absolutely not. He says he's into
these partnerships with his cousins, rental properties in the north
end of the city and over toward the old fairgrounds, and a
rug-cleaning business his nephew started up with another boy
and they needed backers, and Charlie says that's enough for him, he
couldn't stand to go back into a salaried job and all that
withholding tax and the aggravation of being expected somewhere
like at the lot every day. He likes his freedom."

"We all do," sighs Rabbit. "Hey, Janice. I was thinking just the
other day we ought to get the wall-to-wall carpets in
our house cleaned. No fault of yours, but they're filthy,
honey."

Dr. Breit comes in Sunday morning and tells him, "Harold, you're
looking A-1. Ray does beautiful work. They say around the OR,
`He could tickle a tapeworm under the chin with that catheter."'
Breit looks up through his furry eyelashes for the expected laugh,
doesn't get it, and perches on the edge of the bed for extra
intimacy. "I've been reviewing our own films plus the stuff the
jerks down at Deleon Community finally got around to sending us.
Your lumen in the LAD has gone up from fifteen per cent of normal
to sixty. But I can't say I'm crazy about your RCA, the right
coronary artery; it shows I'd put it at about eightyper-cent
blockage, which is fine and dandy as long as the welldeveloped
collateral is supplying the right ventricle from the circumflex.
But a lesion is developing at the bifurcation of the circumflex and
the LAD, and a lesion at a bifurcation is tougher to treat with
angioplasty. Same thing - I assume you're interested in this
- if the lesion is too long, or in a hyperkinetic AV groove,
or in a situation where in the middle of the procedure you might
get stranded without enough collateral circulation. In those kinds
of cases, it can get hairy."

His legs are a little short for sitting on the bed comfortably;
he bounces his ham a little closer to Harry's legs, and Harry feels
the blood inside his supine body sway. Breit smiles and his voice
grows confidential, like when he was murmuring over Dr. Raymond's
shoulders. "The fact is, Harold, PTCA is a pretty Mickey Mouse
treatment, and what I want you to seriously consider as you lie
here these few days, even though as I say this procedure appears to
have produced good results for the time being, is, now that you've
tested the waters, going ahead with a CABG. Not right away. We're
talking four, six months down the road before we go in again. We'd
bypass both the RCA and the CFX, and the LAD depending on the
restenosis, and you'll be a new man, with damn close to a
brand-new heart. While we're in there we might want to look
at that leaky aortic valve and think about a pacemaker. Frankly, we
may have had a little postoperative MI; your electrocardiogram
shows some new Q waves and there's been an elevation of the CPK
isoenzyme, with positive MB bands."

"You mean," Harry says, not totally snowed, "I've been having a
heart attack just lying here?"

Dr. Breit shrugs daintily. All his gestures have a daintiness
that goes with his milky-pink skin. His voice is a bit
squeaky, piped through his blistered-looking lips. He says,
"PTCA is an invasive procedure, nobody said it wasn't. A little
trauma is to be expected. Your heart shows myocardial scarring from
way back. All a heart attack is is some heart muscle dying. A
little can die without your noticing. It happens to all of us, just
as everybody over a certain age has some emphysema. It's called the
aging process and there's no escaping it. Not in this life."

Harry wonders about the next life, but decides not to ask. He
doubts that Breit knows more than
The
National Enquirer.
"You're telling me I've come into this hospital for I don't know
how many thousands of dollars for a Mickey Mouse operation?"

"Rome wasn't built in a day, Harold, and your heart isn't going
to be rebuilt in a week. Angioplasty does some good, at least for a
while, in about eighty per cent of the cases. But bypass is up to
around ninety-nine per cent initial success. Look. It's the
difference between scrubbing out your toilet bowl with a long brush
and actually replacing the pipes. There are places you can't reach
with a brush, and deposits that have become chemically bonded. A
man your age, in generally good health, shouldn't be thinking twice
about it. You owe it not only to yourself but to your wife and son.
And those cunning little grandchildren I've heard about."

The faster Breit talks, the more constricted Harry's chest
feels. He gets out, "Let me see if I understand it. They rip veins
out of your legs and sew them to your heart like jug handles?"

A frown clouds the young doctor's face. He is overrunning the
allotted time for his visit, Rabbit supposes. With visible patience
he licks his sore-looking lips and explains, "They take a
superficial vein from your leg and in some cases the mammary chest
artery, because arteries hold up better under arterial pressure
than veins. But you don't have to worry about any of that. You're
not the surgeon, it's our bailiwick. This operation is done tens of
thousands of times in the United States every year - believe
me, Harold, it's a piece of cake."

"You'd do it here?"

Breit's eyes behind his flesh-colored glasses are strange
furry slits, with puffy pink lids. "The facilities don't exist yet
in this physical plant," he admits. "You'd have to go to
Philadelphia, I doubt we could slot you into Lancaster, they're
booked solid for months."

"Then it can't be such a very little deal, if you need all these
facilities." Since childhood, Rabbit has had a prejudice against
Philadelphia. Dirtiest city in the world: they live on poisoned
water. And Lancaster is worse - Amish farmers, overwork their
animals to death, inbred so much half are humpbacks and dwarfs. He
saw them in the movie Witness being very quaint, Kelly McGillis
wiping her bare tits with a sponge and everybody chipping in to
build that barn, but it didn't fool him. "Maybe Florida would be
the place," he
offers Dr
. Breit. Florida always seems
unreal to him when he's up here and having the operation there
might be the same as not having it at all.

Dr. Breit's sore-looking mouth gets stern; his upper lip
has sweat on it. Why is he selling this so hard? Does he have a
monthly quota, like state cops with speeding tickets? "I haven't
been that impressed by our dealings with Deleon," he says. "But you
think about it, Harold. If I were in your shoes, it's what I'd have
done - without any hesitation. You're just toying with your
life otherwise."

Yeah,
Rabbit thinks when the doctor is gone from the
room,
but you're not in my shoes. And what's life for but to
toy with?

Mim phones. He takes a moment to recognize her voice, it is so
dry and twangy, so whisky-and-cigarette-cracked.
"What are they doing to you now?" she asks. She has always taken
the attitude that he is a lamb among wolves in Diamond County and
he should have gotten out like she did.

"They've got me in the hospital," he tells her. He could almost
cry, like a boy. "They stuck a balloon up through my leg into my
heart and pumped it full of saltwater to open up an artery that was
plugged up with old grease I've been eating. Then afterwards they
put a sandbag on the incision down at my thigh and told me not to
move my leg for six hours or I'd bleed to death. That's how
hospitals are; they tell you what they're going to do is about as
simple as having a haircut and then midway through they tell you
you might bleed to death. And then this morning the doctor comes
around and tells me it was a Mickey Mouse operation and hardly
worth bothering with. He wants me to go for broke and have a
multiple bypass. Mim, they split you right open like a coconut and
rip veins out of your legs."

"Yeah, I know," she says. "You gonna do it?"

Rabbit says, "I suppose they'll talk me into it eventually. I
mean, they've got you by the balls. You're scared, and what else is
there?"

"Guys I know out here have had open-heart and swear by it.
I can't see it made that much difference, they still spend all day
sitting on their fat asses getting manicures and talking on the
phone, but then they weren't such dynamite before either. When you
get to our age, Harry, it's work to stay alive."

"Come on, Mim. You're only fifty."

"For a woman out here, that's ancient. That's cow pasture.
That's hang-it-up time, if you're a woman. You don't
get the stares any more, it's like you've gone invisible."

"Boy, you did use to get the stares," he says proudly. He
remembers her when she was nineteen - dyed-in blonde
streak, big red cinch-in belt, sexy soft sweaters, skinny
arms ending in a clash of bangle bracelets, buck teeth she couldn't
help revealing when she smiled, lips smeared with lipstick like she
had eaten a jam sandwich, a leggy colt of a girl dying to break out
of Brewer, to kick or fuck her way through the fence. She made it,
too. Rabbit never could have made it out there. He was too soft.
Even Florida bakes the spirit out of him. He needed to stay where
they remembered him when. "So when are you coming east?" he asks
Mim.

"Well, how bad are you, Harry?"

"Not that bad. I just complain a lot. All I have to do is stay
away from animal fats and salt and don't get aggravated."

"Who would aggravate you?"

"The usual," he says. "Nellie's been having some problems. Hey,
you'll never guess who's back on the scene squiring Janice around
while I'm laid up. Your old boyfriend, Charlie Stavros."

"Chas was not what I'd ever call a boyfriend. I took him on that
time to get him off your wife's back. Around here you're not a
boyfriend until you at least set the girl up in a condo."

He is striving to keep her interested. People who've made it
like she has, they get bored easily. "How the hell is Vegas?" he
asks. "Is it hot there yet? How about you coming east to get away
from the heat for a couple of weeks? We'll put you up in the guest
room above the den and you'll get to know your great-niece
and -nephew. Judy's a real little lady now. She's gonna be a
looker not like you, but a looker."

"Harry, the last time I came to Pennsylvania I nearly died from
the humidity. I don't know how you people do it, day after day; it
was like being wrapped in warm washcloths. It's that heavy climate
is doing you in. That pollen is off the scale."

"Yeah," he weakly agrees. The phone receiver feels soggy in his
hand. His own capacity to be interested isn't what it should be.
He's free to wander the halls now, and you see amazing things: less
than an hour ago, an amazing visitor, a young Brewer girl, she
couldn't have been more than fifteen, all in black, black jacket,
tight black pants, pointed black boots, and her hair dyed yellowy
white and cut short and mussed every which way so her skull
reminded him of a wet Easter chick, plus a little flowery cruciform
tattoo pricked right beside her eye. But his heart couldn't quite
rise to it, he felt he'd seen even this before, girls doing wicked
things to themselves believing their youth would shine through and
all would heal.