Rabbit at rest (50 page)

"Absolutely. Terrible. Out all night doing God knows what, then
this snivelling and begging for forgiveness afterwards. I hated
that worse than the chasing; my father was a boozer and a chaser,
but then he wouldn't whine to Mom about it, he'd at least let her
do the whining. This immature dependence of Nelson's was totally
outside my experience."

Her cigarette tip glows. A distant concussion of thunder steps
closer. Pru's presence here feels hot in Harry's mind, she is
awkwardly big and all sharp angles in the sac of his
consciousness. Her talk seems angular and tough, the gritty Akron
toughness overlaid with a dismissive vocabulary learned from
professional copers. He doesn't like hearing his son called
immature. "You knew him for some time out at Kent," he points out,
almost hostilely. "You knew what you were taking on."

"Harry, I
didn't," she
says, and the cigarette tip
loops through an agitated arc. "I thought he'd grow, I never
dreamed how enmeshed he was, with you two. He's still trying to
work out what you two did to him, as if you were the only parents
in the world who didn't keep wiping their kid's ass until he was
thirty. I tell him: Get real, Nelson. Lousy parents are par for the
course. My God. Nothing's ideal. Then he gets sore and tells me
what a cold fish I am. He means sex. A thing that goes fast with
coke is shame; these women that are hooked will do anything. I say
to him, You're not going to give me AIDS from one of your coke
whores. So he goes out again. It's a vicious circle. It's been
going on for years."

"How many years, would you say?"

When she shrugs her shoulders, Ma's old bed shakes. "More than
you'd think. That crowd around Slim was always doing pot and uppers
- gays don't give a damn, they have all this money only for
themselves. Maybe two years ago Nelson became a big enough user on
his own to need to steal. At first he just stole from us, money
that should have gone into the house and stuff, and then he started
stealing from you - the company. I hope you send him to jail,
I really do." She has been cupping her hand beneath the cigarette,
to catch the ash, and now she looks around for an ashtray and
sees none and finally flips the butt toward the window, where it
sparks against the screen and sizzles out on the wet sill. Her
voice is hoarsening and finding a certain swing, a welling up. "I
have no use for him any more. I'm scared to fuck him, I'm scared to
be legally associated with him. I've wasted my life. You don't know
what it's like. You're a man, you're free, you can do what you want
in life, until you're sixty at least you're a buyer. A woman's a
seller. She has to be. And she better not haggle too long. I'm
thirty-three. I've had my shot, Harry. I wasted it on Nelson.
I had my little hand of cards and played them and now I'm folded,
I'm through. My husband hates me and I hate him and we don't even
have any money to split up! I'm scared - so scared. And my
kids are scared, too. I'm trash and they're trash and they know
it."

"Hey, hey," he has to say. "Come on. Nobody's trash." But even
as he says it he knows this is an old-fashioned idea he would
have trouble defending. We're all trash, really. Without God to
lift us up and make us into angels we're all trash.

Her sobbing is shaking the bed so badly that in his delicate
postop state he feels queasy. To quiet her big body he
reaches out and pulls her toward him. As if expecting his touch,
she huddles tightly, though a blanket and a sheet are between them,
and continues sobbing in a bitter, lower register, her breath hot
on his chest, where a pajama button has come undone. His chest.
They want to carve it up. "At least you're healthy," he tells her.
"Me, all they need to do is nail down the coffin lid. I can't run,
I can't fuck, I can't eat anything I like, I know damn well they're
going to talk me into a bypass. You're scared? You're still young.
You've got lots of cards still. Think of how scared I feel."

In his arms Pru says in a voice gone calm again, "People have
bypass operations all the time now."

"Yeah, easy for you to say. Like me telling you people are
married to shits all the time. Or you telling me people have
their kids turn out to be dope-addict embezzlers all the
time."

A small laugh. A flash of light outside and, after some seconds,
thunder. Both listen. She asks, "Does Janice say you can't
fuck?"

"We don't talk about it. We just don't do it much lately.
There's been too much else going on."

"What did your doctor say?"

"I forget. My cardiologist's about Nelson's age, we were all too
shy to go into it."

Pru sniffs and says, "I hate my life." She seems to him to be
unnaturally still, like a rabbit in oncoming headlights.

He lets the hand of the arm around her broad back move up across
the bumps of the quilted robe and enter the silken cave at the nape
of her neck, to toy with the warm hair there. "I know the feeling,"
he says, content to toy, aware through the length of his body of a
cottony sleepiness waiting to claim him.

She tells him, "You were one of the things I liked about Nelson.
Maybe I thought Nelson would grow into somebody like you."

"Maybe he did. You don't get to see what a bastard I can
be."

"I can imagine," she says. "But people provoke you."

He goes on, "I see a lot of myself in the kid." The nape of her
neck tingles under his fingers, the soft hairs rising to his
electricity. "I'm glad you're letting your hair grow long," he
says.

"It gets too long." Her hand has come to rest on his bare chest,
where the button is unbuttoned. He pictures her hands with their
pink-knuckled vulnerable raw look. She is left-handed,
he remembers. The oddity of this excites him further. Not waiting
too long to think about it, he with his free hand lifts hers from
his chest and places it lower, where an erection has surprisingly
sprouted from his half-shaved groin. His gesture has the
pre-sexual quality of one child sharing with another an
interesting discovery - a stone that moves, or a remarkably
thick-bodied butterfly. The eyes widen in the dim face inches
from his on the pillow. Tiny points of light are caught in her
lashes. He lets his face drift, on the tide of blood risen within
him, across those inches to set their mouths together, carefully
testing for the angle, while her fingers caress him in a rhythm
slower than that of his thudding heart. As the space narrows to
nothing he is watchful of his heart, his accomplice in sin.
Their kiss tastes to him of the fish she so nicely prepared, its
lemon and chives, and of asparagus.

Rain whips at the screen. The leak onto the windowsill
accelerates its tapping. A brilliant close flash shocks the
air everywhere and less than a second later a heart-stopping
crack and splintering of thunder crushes the house from above. As
if in overflow of this natural heedlessness, Pru says "Shit," jumps
from the bed, slams shut the window, pulls down the shade, tears
open her bathrobe and sheds it, and, reaching down, pulls her
nightie up over her head. Her tall pale wide-hipped nakedness
in the dimmed room is lovely much as those pear trees in blossom
along that block in Brewer last month were lovely, all his it had
seemed, a piece of Paradise blundered upon, incredible.

III. MI

BY MID-JUNE the weeds have taken over: burdock and chicory
stand three feet tall along the stony dry shoulders of Route 111,
and the struggling little yew hedge meant to dress up the base of
the Springer Motors display window has crabgrass and purslane
spreading through the rotting bark mulch, which hasn't been renewed
for a couple of years. It's one of the things Harry keeps making a
mental note to do: call the landscaping service and renew the mulch
and replace the dead yews, about a third of them, they look like
hell, like missing teeth. Across the four-lane highway, its
traffic thicker and faster than ever though the state still holds
to the fifty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit,
the takeout restaurant called the Chuck Wagon has been replaced by
a Pizza Hut, one of the six or so around Brewer now. What do people
see in it? All those gummy wedges of dough and cheese, that when
you try to eat them pull long strings out in front of your face.
But, on Saturdays when in the weekend mood Benny runs over and
brings back an order for whoever wants it, Harry allows himself a
pepperoni with peppers and onions but no anchovies, please. Like
little snails stuck in the mud.

Today is not Saturday, it is Monday, the day after Father's Day.
Nobody sent Harry a card. He and Janice have visited Nelson twice,
for family therapy at this gloomy big rehab center in North Philly,
full of banisters and bulletin boards and a damp mimeograph
smell that reminds him of the basement Sunday school he went to,
and both times it was like a quarrel around the kitchen table only
with a referee, a lean pale colored woman with fancy spectacles and
one of these sweet churchgoing smiles Harry associates with
the better type of Philadelphia black. They go over the old stuff
-the baby's death, the mess in the Sixties with Janice moving
out and Jill and Skeeter moving in, the crazy way Nelson got
himself married to this Kent State secretary an inch taller and a
year older than he, a Catholic furthermore, and the kind of crazy
way the young couple moved into the old Springer house and the
older couple moved out and in fact lives half the year in Florida,
all so the kid can run wild with the car agency; Harry explains how
from his point of view Nelson's been spoiled rotten by his mother
because of her guilt complex and that's why the kid feels entitled
to live in never-never land with all these fags and druggies
and let his wife and children go around in rags. When he talks, the
mocha-colored therapist's smile gets even more pious and
patient and then she turns to one of the others, Nelson or Janice
or Pru, and asks them how they feel about what they've just heard,
as if what he's saying isn't a description of facts but a set of
noises to be rolled into some general mishmash. All this "talking
through" and "processing" therapists like to do cheapens the
world's facts; it reduces decisions that were the best people could
do at the time to dream moves, to reflexes that have been
"processed" in a million previous cases like so much shredded
wheat. He feels anticipated and discounted in advance, whatever he
says, and increasingly aggravated, and winds up telling Janice and
Pru to go next time without him.

Benny comes over to where Harry stands at the window looking out
and asks, "Whajja do for Father's Day?"

Harry is pleased to have an answer. "Nelson's wife brought our
grandchildren over in the afternoon and I did a cookout for
everybody on the outdoor grill." It sounds ideally American but had
its shaky underside. Their grill, for one thing, is a metal sphere
that
Consumer Reports
said years ago was a classic but
that Harry never has quite the patience for, you must wait until
the briquettes are gray and ashy, but he's afraid of waiting too
long, so there was a lot of staring at the raw hamburger patties
not cooking, with Janice annoying him by offering to cook them in
the kitchen, since the children were being eaten alive by
mosquitoes. For another, the grandchildren brought him cute
grandfather's cards, all right, both by this new artist Gary Larson
that everybody else thinks is so funny, but this uniformity -
they were even signed by the same red pen, Judy's with quite a
girlish flourish to the "y" and Roy's a bunch of aimless but
intense pre-literate stabs - suggested a lack of
planning, a quick stop at the drugstore on the way over from the
Flying Eagle. Pru and the kids arrived with their hair wet from the
pool. She brought a bowl of salad she had made at home.

"Sounds terrific," Benny says, in his husky small voice.

"Yeah," Harry agrees, explaining, as if his image of Pru with
her wet long hair holding this big wooden bowl of lettuce and
sliced radishes on her hip was visible to them both, "we've
arranged a temporary membership for Nelson's wife over at the
country club, and they'd been swimming over there most of the
day."

"Nice," Benny says. "She seems a nice gal, Teresa. Never came
over here to the lot much, but I hate to see a family like that
having a hard time."

"They're managing," Harry says, and changes the subject. "D'jou
watch any of the Open?" Somebody really should go out and pick up
all the wrappers that blow over from the Pizza Hut and get caught
in the struggling little yew hedge. But he doesn't like to bend
over, and doesn't quite feel he can order Benny to do it.

"Naa, I can't get turned on by games," the pudgy young sales
representative says, more aggressively than the question requires.
"Even baseball, a game or two, I'm bored. You know, what's in it
for me? So what?, if you follow me."

There used to be a stately old maple tree across Route 111 that
the Pizza Hut cut down to expand its red-roofed facility. The
roof is shaped like a hat, with two slants. He ought to be
grateful, Harry thinks, to have a lively business along this
struggling little strip. "Well," he tells Benny, not wanting to
argue, "with the Phils in last place you aren't missing much. The
worst record in baseball, and now they've traded away two of their
old all-stars. Bedrosian and Samuel. There's no such thing as
loyalty any more."

Benny continues to explain himself, unnecessarily. "Me, I'd
rather do something
myself
f on a nice Sunday, not sit
there like a couch potato, you know what I mean? Get outdoors with
my little girl at the neighbor's pool, or go take the family for a
walk up the mountain, if it's not too hot, you know."

These people who keep saying "you know": as if if they don't
keep nailing your attention to their words it'll drift off. "That's
the way I used to be," Harry tells him, relaxing as the disturbing
image of Pru holding the great bowl on her hip recedes, and feeling
philosophical and pleasurably melancholic the way he usually does
gazing out this big window. Above his head the big blue paper
banner spelling ArnAUATOYoT with the sun shining through it is
beginning to come unstuck from the glass. "Always doing some sport
as a kid, and up until recently out on the golf course, flogging
the stupid ball."