Rabbit at rest (51 page)

"You could still do that," Benny says, with that Italian
huskiness, faintly breathless. "In fact, I bet your doc advises it.
That's what mine advises, exercise. You know, for my weight."

"I probably should do something," Harry agrees, "to keep the
circulation going. But, I don't know, golf suddenly seemed stupid.
I realized I'd never get any better at it, at this point. And the
guys I had my old foursome with have pretty well moved away. It's
all these blond beefy yuppie types up at the club, and they all
ride carts. They're in such a fucking hurry to get back to making
money they ride around in carts, wearing the grass off the course.
I used to like to walk and carry. You'd strengthen your legs.
That's where the power of a golf swing is, believe it or not. In
the legs. I was mostly arms. I knew the right thing to do, I could
see it in the other guys and the pros on TV, but I couldn't make
myself do it."

The length and inward quality of this speech make Benny uneasy.
"You ought to be getting some exercise," he says. "Especially with
your history."

Rabbit doesn't know if he means his recent medical history, or
his ancient history of high-school athletics. The framed
blowups of his old basketball photos have come out of Nelson's
office and back onto the walls, rose-colored though they are,
above the performance board. That was something he did carry
through on, unlike the rotting bark mulch. ANGSTROM HITS FOR 42.
"When Schmidt quit, that got to me," he tells Benny, even though
the guy keeps saying he is no sports nut. Maybe he enjoys bullying
him with it, boring him. He wonders how much Benny was in on
Nelson's shenanigans, but didn't have the heart or energy to fire
him when he came back to run the lot. Get through the day, and the
cars sell themselves. Especially the Carnry and Corolla. Who could
ask for anything more?

"All he had to do," he explains to Benny, "to earn another half
million was stay on the roster until August fifteenth. And he began
the season like a ball of fire, two home runs the first two games,
coming off that rotator-cuff surgery. But, like Schmidt
himself said, it got to the point where he'd tell his body to do
something and it wouldn't do it. He knew what he had to do and
couldn't do it, and he faced the fact and you got to give him
credit. In this day and age, he put honor over money."

"Eight errors," Elvira Ollenbach calls in her deep voice from
over in her booth, on the wall toward Paraguay, where she has been
filling out the bill of sale and NV-1 for an ivory Corolla LE
she sold yesterday to one of these broads that come in and ask to
deal with her. They have jobs, money, even the young ones that used
to be home making babies. If you look, more and more, you see women
driving the buses, the delivery trucks. It's getting as bad as
Russia; next thing we'll have women coalminers. Maybe we already
do. The only difference between the two old superpowers is they
sell their trees to Japan in different directions. "An error each
in the last two games against the Giants," Elvira inexorably
recites. "And hitting .203, just two hits his last forty-one
at bats." Her head is full, between her pretty little jug ears,
with figures. Her father was a sports addict, she has explained,
and to communicate with him she followed all this stuff and now
can't break the habit.

"Yeah," Rabbit says, he feels weakly, taking some steps toward
her desk. "But still, it took a lot of style. Just a week ago, did
you see, there was this interview in some Philadelphia paper where
he said how great he felt and he was only in a slump like any
overeager kid? Then he was man enough to change his mind. When all
he had to do was hang around to collect a million and a half total.
I like the way he went out," Rabbit says, "quick, and on his own
nickel."

Elvira, not looking up from her paperwork, her pendulous gold
earrings bobbing as she writes, says, "They would have cut him by
August, the way he was going. He spared himself the
humiliation."

"Exactly," Harry says, still weakly, torn between a desire to
strike an alliance with this female and an itch to conquer her, to
put her in her place. Not that she and Benny have been difficult to
deal with. Docile, rather, as if anxious that they not be swept out
of the lot along with Lyle and Nelson. It was easiest for Harry to
accept them as innocents and not rock the agency worse than it was
being rocked. Both of them have connections in Brewer and move
Toyotas, and if the conversations during idle time "down" time,
young people called it now - weren't as satisfying, as
clarifying, as those he used to have with Charlie Stavros, perhaps
the times were less easy to clarify. Reagan left everybody in a
daze, and now the Communists were acting confused too. "How about
those elections in Poland?" he says. "Voting the Party out -
who ever would have thought we'd live to see the day? And Gorby
telling all the world the contractors who put up those sand castles
in Armenia were crooks? And in China, what's amazing isn't the
crackdown but that the kids were allowed to run the show for a
month and nobody knew what to do about it! It's like nobody's in
charge of the other side any more. I miss it," he says. "The cold
war. It gave you a reason to get up in the morning."

He says these things to be provocative, to get a rise out of
Benny or Elvira, but his words drift away like the speech of old
people on the porches when he was a boy. Not for the first time
since returning to the lot does he feel he is not really there, but
is a ghost being humored. His words are just noises. In Nelson's
old office, and the office next to it where Mildred used to be, the
accountant Janice has hired on Charlie's advice is going through
the books, a task so extensive he has brought a full-time
assistant. These two youngish men, who dress in gray suits of which
they hang up the jackets when arriving, putting them on again when
they depart, feel like the real management of the firm.

"Elvira," he says, always enjoying pronouncing her name, "did
you see this morning in the paper where four men were charged with
a felony for chaining themselves to a car in front of an abortion
clinic? And with contributing to the delinquency of a minor since
they had a seventeen-year-old boy along?" He knows
where she stands: pro-choice. All these independent bimbos
are. He takes a kind of pro-life tilt to gall her but his
heart isn't really in it and she knows it. She leaves her desk and
comes striding toward him, thrillingly thin, holding the completed
NV-1s, her wide jawed little head balanced with its
pulled-back shiny-brown hair on her slender neck, her
dangling big gold earrings shaped like Brazil nuts. He retreats a
step and the three of them stand together at the window, Harry
between them and a head taller.

"Wouldn't you
know,"
she says, "it would be all men.
Why do they care so much? Why are they so passionate about what
some women they don't even know do with their bodies?"

"They think it's murder," Harry says. "They think the fetus is a
little separate person from the morning after on."

His way ofputting it feeds into her snort of disgust. "Tccha,
they don't know what they think," she says. "If men could get
knocked up this wouldn't even be a debate. Would it, Benny?"

She is bringing him in to dilute whatever Harry is trying to do
to her with this provocative topic. Benny says carefully, huskily,
"My church says abortion is a sin."

"And you believe them, until you want to do it, right? Tell us
about you and Maria - you use birth control? Seventy per cent
of young married Catholics do, you know that?"

A strange aspect of his encounter with Pru, Harry remembers, had
been the condom she had produced, out of the pocket of her shorty
bathrobe. Either she always kept one there or had foreseen fucking
him before coming into the room. He wasn't used to them, not since
the Army, but went along with it without a protest, it was her
show. The thing had been a squeeze, he had been afraid he couldn't
keep up his own pressure against it, and his pubic hair, where he
had some left after the angioplasty, the way they shaved him, got
caught at the base in the unrolling, a little practical fussing
there, she helped in the dim light, it maybe had made him slower to
come, not a bad thing, as she came twice, under him once and then
astraddle, rain whipping at the window behind the drawn shade, her
hips so big and broad in his hands he didn't feel fat himself, her
tits atwitter as she jiggled in pursuit of the second orgasm, he
near to fainting with worry over joggling his defective heart. A
certain matter-of-fact shamelessness about Pru reduced
a bit the poetry of his first sight of her naked and pale like that
street of blossoming trees. She did it all but was blunt about it
and faintly wooden, as if the dressmaker's dummy in the dark behind
him had grown limbs and a head with swinging
carrot-colored hair. To keep his prick up he kept
telling himself, This
is the first time I've ever fucked a
left-handed woman.

Benny is blushing. He's not used to talking this way with a
woman. "Maybe so," he admits. "If it's not a mortal sin, you don't
have to confess it unless you want to."

"That saves the priest a lot of embarrassment," Elvira tells
him. "Suppose no matter what you two use Maria kept getting knocked
up, what would you do? You don't want that precious little girl of
yours to feel crowded, you can give her the best the way things
are. What's more important, quality of life for the family you
already have, or a little knot of protein the size of a
termite?"

Benny has a kind of squeaking girlish voice that excitement can
bring out. "Lay off, Ellie. Don't make me think about it. You're
offending my religion. I wouldn't mind a couple more kids, what the
hell. I'm young."

Harry tries to help him out. "Who's to say what's the quality of
life?" he asks Elvira. "Maybe the extra kid is the one that's going
to invent the phonograph."

"Not out of the ghetto he isn't. He's the kid that mugs you for
crack money sixteen years later."

"You don't have to get racist about it," Harry says, having been
mugged in a sense by a white kid, his own son.

"It's the opposite of racist, it's realistic," Elvira tells him.
"It's the poor black teenage mother whose right to abortion these
crazy fundamentalist jerks are trying to take away."

"Yeah," he responds, "it's the poor black teenage mother who
wants to have the baby, because she never had a doll to play with
and she loves the idea of sticking the taxpayer with another
welfare bill. Up yours, Whitey - that's what the birth
statistics are saying."

"Now who's sounding racist?"

"Realistic, you mean."

Relaxed in the aftermath of love, and grateful to be still
alive, he had asked Pru how queer she thought Nelson was, with all
this palling around with Lyle and Slim. Her breath, in the watery
light from the window, was made visible by fine jets of inhaled
cigarette smoke as she thoughtfully answered, only a little taken
aback by the question, "No, Nelson likes girls. He's a mamma's boy
but he takes after you that way. They just look bigger to him than
to you." Coming into the room less than an hour later, Janice had
sniffed the cigarette smoke but he had pretended to be too sleepy
to discuss it. Pru took the second butt away with the condom but
the first one, drowned over on the windowsill, was by next
morning so saturated and flattened it could have been there
for ages, a historical relic of Nelson and Melanie. Rabbit sighs
and says, "You're right, Elvira. People should have a choice. Even
if they make bad ones." From the room he was in with Pru his mind
moves to the one he had shared with Ruth, one flight up on Summer
Street, and the last time he saw it: she told him she was pregnant
and called him Mr. Death and he begged her to have the baby.
Have it, have it you say: how? Will you marry me?
She
mocked him, but pleaded too, and in the end, yes, to be realistic,
probably did have the abortion. If
you can't work it out, I'm
dead to you; I'm dead to you and this baby of yours is dead
too.
That nurse with the round face and sweet disposition in
St. Joseph's had nothing to do with him, just like Ruth told him
the last time he saw her, in her farmhouse ten years ago. He had
had one daughter and she died; God didn't trust him with another.
He says aloud, "Schmidt did what Rose is too dumb to: quit, when
you've had it. Take your medicine, don't prolong the agony with all
these lawyers."

Benny and Elvira look at him, alanned by how his mind has
wandered. But he enjoys his sensation, of internal roaming. When he
first came to the lot as Chief Sales Rep, after Fred Springer had
died, he was afraid he couldn't fill the space. But now as an older
man, with his head so full of memories, he fills it without even
trying.

Through the plate glass he sees a couple in their thirties,
maybe early forties, everybody looks young to him now, out on the
lot among the cars, stooping to peek into the interiors and at the
factory sticker on the windows. The woman is plump and white
and in a halter top showing her lardy arms, and the man darker,
much darker - Hispanics come in all these shades - and
skinny, in a grape-colored tank top cut off at the midriff:
Their ducking heads move cautiously, as if afraid of an Indian
ambush out in the prairie of glittering car roofs, a pioneer couple
in their way, at least in this part of the world where the races
don't much mix.

Benny asks Elvira, "You want 'em, or do I?"

She says, "You do. If the woman needs a little extra, bring her
in and I'll chat her up. But don't aim it all at her, just because
she's white. They're both going to be miffed if you snub the
man."

"Whaddeya think I am, a bigot?" Benny says mock-comically,
but his demeanor is sad and determined as he walks out of the
air-conditioning into the June humidity and heat.