Rabbit at rest (49 page)

On the set in the living room, he and Judy watch the end of ABC
news on Channel 6 (that Peter Jennings: here he is telling
Americans all about America and he still says "aboot" for "about,"
he's so Canadian) and then, with Judy punching the remote control,
they skip back and forth between jeopardy! and Simon and Simon and
the seven-o'clock syndicated reruns of
Cosby
and
Cheers. Pru
drifts downstairs, having put Roy down, and
into the kitchen to tidy up totally after Janice's half-ass
job and then through the dining room checking that all the windows
are shut against the rain and into the sun room where she picks a
few dead leaves off the plants on Ma Springer's old iron table
there. Finally she comes into the living room and sits on the old
sofa beside him, while Judy in the Barcalounger
channel-surfs. On the
Cosby Show
rerun, the
Huxtables are having one of those child-rearing crises bound
to dissolve like a lump of sugar in their warm good humor, their
mutual lovingness: Vanessa and her friends get all excited about
entering a local dance contest, with lip synching, and get
instruction from an old black nightclub pianist and when the time
comes to demonstrate for their parents in their living room they
bump and grind with a sexuality so startling and premature that
Mrs. Huxtable, Claire, in real life the terrific Phylicia Rashad,
married to the frog-eyed black sports commentator, restores
decency, stopping the record and sending the girls back upstairs,
yet with that smile of hers, that wide white slightly lippy black
woman's smile, implying that indecency is all right, in its place,
its wise time, as in one of those mutually ogling Huxtable snuggles
that end many a
Cosby Show.
Beside him on the sofa Pru is
staring at the screen with a jewel, a tear glittering in a comer of
the eye toward him. From the Barcalounger Judy snaps the channel to
a shot of tropical sky and a huge mottled turtle turning its head
slowly while a Godlike voiceover intones,
" . . . determined to
defend its breeding grounds."

"Goddamn it, Judy, put it back to the Cosbys right
now,"
Harry says, furious less for himself than for Pru,
to whom the show seemed to be a vision of lost possibilities.

Judy, startled just like the girls on the show, does put it
back, but by now it's a commercial, and she cries, as the insult
sinks in, "I want Daddy back! Everybody else is mean to me!"

She starts to cry, Pru rises to comfort her, Rabbit retreats in
disgrace. He circles the house, listening to the rain, marvelling
that he once lived here, remembering the dead and the dead versions
of the living who lived here with him, finding a half-full
jar of dry-roasted cashews on a high kitchen shelf and, on
the kitchen television set, a cable rerun of last night's playoff
game between the Knicks and the Bulls. He hates the way Michael
Jordan's pink tongue rolls around in his mouth as he goes up for a
dunk. He has seen Jordan interviewed, he's an intelligent guy, why
does he swing his tongue around like an imbecile? The few white
players there are on the floor look pathetically naked, their pasty
sweat, their fuzzy armpit hair; it seems incredible to Harry that
he himself was ever out there in this naked game, though in those
days the shorts were a little longer and the tank-top
armholes not quite so big. He has finished off the jar of cashews
without noticing and suddenly the basketball-Jordan changing
direction in midair not once but twice and sinking an awkward
fall-back jumper with Ewing's giant hand square in his face
-pains him with its rubbery activity, an extreme of bodily
motion his nerves but not his muscles can remember. He needs a
Nitrostat from the little bottle in the coat jacket in that shallow
closet upstairs. The hauntedness of the downstairs is getting to
him. He turns off the kitchen light and holds his breath passing Ma
Springer's old breakfront in the darkened dining room, where the
wallpaper crawls with the streetlight projections of rain running
down the windows.

In the upstairs hall, he hears from Ma's old room, now Judy's,
the murmur of a television set, and dares tap the door and push in.
The little girl has been put into a sleeveless nightie and, holding
her stuffed dolphin, sits propped up on two pillows while her
mother sits on the bed beside her. The TV set flickering at the
foot of the bed picks out pale patches - the whites of Judy's
eyes, her bare shoulders, the dolphin's belly, Pru's long forearms
laid across the child's flat chest. He clears his throat and says,
"Hey, Judy sorry if I got a bit mean down there."

With a hushing impatient hand motion she indicates that her
grandfather is forgiven and ought to come in and watch with them.
In the blue unsteady light, he picks out a child's straight chair
and brings it close to the bed and lowers himself to it; he
virtually squats. Raindrops glint on the panes in the light from
Joseph Street. He looks at Pru's profile for the glint of a tear
but her face is composed. Her nose comes to a sharp point, her lips
are clamped together. They are watching
Unsolved
Mysteries:
pale, overweight American faces float into the
camera's range, earnestly telling of UFOs seen over
sugar-beet fields, above shopping malls, in Navajo
reservations, while their homely rooms and furniture, exposed to
the glaring lights the cameras require, have the detailed hard
weirdness of diatoms seen under a microscope. Harry is struck by
how well, really, these small-town sheriffs and trailercamp
housewives, and even the drifters and dropouts who just happened to
be tripping out on a deserted picnic grounds when the geniuses
commanding the UFOs decided to land and sample the terrestrial
fauna, speak - a nation of performers, of smoothly talking
heads, has sprung up under the lights, everybody rehearsed for
their thirty seconds of nationwide attention. During the
commercials, Judy skips to other channels, to Jacques Cousteau in a
diving suit, to Porky Pig in his big-buttoned blue vest (odd,
those old cartoon animals all going around with bare bottoms), to a
stringy-haired rock singer mouthing his mike in a
lathered-up agony like a female porn star approaching a blow
job, to a courtroom scene where the judge's shifty eyes in a second
show that he is in on a deal, a hummingbird beating its
surprisingly flexible wings in slow motion, Angela Lansbury looking
shocked, Greer Garson looking gently out of focus in black and
white, and back to
Unsolved Mysteries,
now about an infant
who disappeared from a New York hospital, making Robert Stack, in
his mystical raincoat, extra quizzical. Having been rude before,
Rabbit holds his tongue. He feels fragile. The flickering images
bear down upon him, relentless as heartbeats. With the mystery of
the vanished baby still unsolved, he rises and kisses Judy
goodnight, his face gliding past the bigger one next to hers. "Love
you, Grandpa," the child mechanically says, forgiving or
forgetful.

"Lights are off downstairs," he mutters to Pru.

"I need to go down anyway," she says, softly, both of them
fearful of breaking the spell that exists between the child and the
television set.

Her face, as his face glided past it on the way to kiss another,
exuded an aura, shampooey-powdery, just as the trees outside
the house are yielding to the rain a leafy fresh
tree-smell.

This green wet fragrance is present in his room too, the old
sewing room, where the headless dress dummy stands. He changes into
the clean pajamas Janice uncharacteristically had the foresight to
bring. A blooming cottony weariness has overtaken him, enveloping
him like the rain. In the narrow room its sound is more distinct
than elsewhere, and complicated, a conversation involving the porch
roof, the house gutter, the echoing downspout, the yielding leaves
of the maples, the swish of a passing car. Closest to him, periodic
spurts of dripping between the storm window and the wooden sash
suggest some leakage into the walls and an eventual trouble of rot.
Not his problem. Fewer and fewer things are.

The window is open a little for air and stray droplets prick the
skin of his hands as he stands a moment looking out. Mt. Judge
doesn't change much, at least here in the older section, but has
dropped away beneath his life as if beneath a rising airplane. His
life flowed along this shining asphalt, past these tilted lawns and
brick-pillared porches, and left no trace. The town never
knew him, the way he had imagined as a child it did, every pebble
and milkbox and tulip bed eyelessly watching him pass; each house
had been turned inward, into itself. A blurred lit window across
the street displays an empty easy chair, a set of brassheaded
fireplace tools, a brick mantel supporting a pair of oblivious
candlesticks.

Rabbit hurries in bare feet down the hall to the bathroom and
back and into bed, before it is nine o'clock. At the hospital by
now the last visitors would be long gone, the flurry of
bathroom-going and pill-taking that followed their
departure subsided, the lights and nurses' voices in the hall
turned down. There is no reading lamp in his room, just a
paper-shaded overhead he resists switching on. He noticed a
stack of old
Consumer's Digests
in the closet but figures
the products they evaluated will all be off the market by now. The
history book Janice gave him, that he can't get through although he
is more than halfway, is back in the Penn Park den. Nor is the
streetlight enough to read by. It projects rhomboidal ghosts of the
windowpanes, alive with a spasmodic motion as raindrops tremblingly
gather and then break downward in sudden streaks. Like the origins
of life in one of those educational television shows he watches:
molecules collecting and collecting at random and then twitched
into life by lightning. Behind his head, past the old brown
headboard with its jigsaw scrolls and mushroom-topped posts,
his dead mother-in-law's sewing machine waits for her
little swollen foot to press its treadle into life, and her short
plump fingers to poke a wetted thread through its rusted needle.
About as likely that to happen as life just rising up out of
molecules. A smothered concussion, distant thunder, sounds in the
direction of Brewer, and the treetops stir. Harry's head is up on
two pillows so the full feeling in his chest is eased. His heart is
giving him no pain, just floats wounded on the sea of ebbing time.
Time passes, he doesn't know how much, before the door handle turns
and clicks and a slant rod of hall light stabs into the amniotic
isolation of the little borrowed room.

Pru's head, with coppery highlights on the top of her hair,
pokes in. "You awake?" she asks in almost a whisper. Her voice
seems roughened and her face is a milky heart-shaped
shadow.

"Yep," Rabbit says. "Just lying here listening to the rain. You
get Judy settled?"

"Finally," the young woman says, and with the exasperated
emphasis enters the room wholly, standing erect. She is wearing
that shorty bathrobe of hers, her legs cased in a white shadow
descending to her ankles. "She's very upset about Nelson,
naturally."

"Naturally. Sorry I blew up at her," he says. "The last thing
the poor kid needs." He pushes up on his elbows, feeling himself
somehow host, his heart thundering at the strangeness, though after
his days in the hospital he should be used to people seeing him in
bed.

"I don't know," Pru says. "Maybe it was just what she needed. A
little structure. She thinks she has a right to all the TV sets in
the world. Mind if I smoke?"

"Not at all."

"I mean, I see the window's a little bit open, but if it -"

"It doesn't," he says. "I like it. Other people's smoke. Almost
as good as your own. After thirty years, I still miss it. How come
you haven't given it up, with all this health kick?"

"I had," Pru says. Her face in the blue-green flare of her
Bic lighter - a little tube as of lipstick - looks
flinty, determined, a face stripped to essentials, with a long
shadow leaping across her cheek from her nose. The flame goes out.
She loudly exhales. Her voice continues in the renewed shadows.
"Except for maybe one or two at night to keep myself from eating.
But now, this thing with Nelson - why not? What does anything
matter?" Her hovering face shows one profile, then the other.
"There's no place to sit in here. This is an awful room."

He smells not only her cigarette smoke but her femininity, the
faint department-store sweetness that clings to women, in the
lotions they use, the shampoo. "It's cozy," he says, and moves his
legs so she can sit on the bed.

"I bet you were asleep," Pru says. "I'll only stay for this
cigarette. I just need a little adult company." She inhales
like a man, deep, so the smoke comes out thin in a double jet from
her mouth and nostrils, and keeps coming for several breaths. "I
hope putting the kids down with Nelson gone isn't such a nightmare
every night. They need so much reassurance."

"I thought he wasn't here a lot of nights."

"This time of night he usually was. The action over at the
LaidBack doesn't begin until around ten. He'd come home from
work, eat, be with the kids, and then get restless. I honestly
think most nights he didn't plan to go out for a couple hits again,
it just came over him and he couldn't help himself." She takes
another drag. He hears her intake, like a sigh with several levels,
and remembers how it was, to smoke. It was creating out of air an
extension of yourself. "With the kids, he was helpful. However much
of a shit he was to everybody else, he wasn't a bad father. Isn't.
I shouldn't talk about him as if he's dead."

He asks her, "What time is it, anyway?"

"Quarter after nine or so."

Janice would get back at ten-thirty at the earliest. There
was plenty of time to see this through. He relaxes back into his
pillows. Good he had that nap this afternoon. "Is that how you see
it?" he asks. "He was a shit to you?"