Rabbit at rest (67 page)

For miles in the vicinity of Disney World and beyond, lesser
amusement and theme parks hold out their cups for the tourist
overflow. Waxworks. Wet 'n' Wild, a water slide. Sea World. Circus
World, not the one that's redux down in Sarasota. What a dumb word,
as dumb as faux, you see it everywhere suddenly, faux fur, faux
jewelry.
False is
what they mean. A museum of old dolls
and toys. Old, old, they sell things as antiques now that aren't
even as old as he is, another racket. On Route 27, going due south,
you enter slightly rolling dry pale farm country, bleached by heat,
with pale cattle in wide parched fields and orange groves with
their dark dense irrigated green, and giant tanks holding water,
shaped like giant mushrooms, like spaceships come from beyond. At
the side of the road little wobbly hand-painted signs
offer BOILED
PEANUTS, tiny Mexican girls manning the
stands, and there is, in faint echo of the giant theme parks to the
north, a touching dusty amusement park, spindly structures put
together for a minute's giddy sensation, idle, waiting for the
evening's little customers.

The sun is high now and the morning's tattered gray clouds have
melted away and the heat is serious, crushing, frightening when he
steps out of the Celica at a Texaco to use the facilities because
there is no escape from it, like snow at the South Pole, it even
drifts into the men's room, as humid a heat as in the Pennsylvania
summer but more searing, more wrathful. The road is wide but has
lights and roads coming from the bleached farmland; the small
cities drift by, Lake Wales, Frostproof, Avon Park, Sebring, and he
wonders about the lives led there, away from the coasts, away from
the condos and the fishing charters, by people who wake up and go
to work just like those in Brewer, only everything flattened by the
sun: how did they get here, so near the edge of the world, on this
sand spit that a little rise in sea level because of Antarctica
melting because of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would wash
away? A column of thick smoke appears on his left, toward the
Seminole reservation, thick and poisonous, a disaster, an atomic
bomb, war has been declared while he's been drowning in musical
memories; he expects to run into a forest fire, but nothing
happens, the column of smoke slowly recedes on his left, he'll
never know what it was. A dump most likely. Harry's whole body
feels cramped because of long sitting and he takes a Nitrostat
because of the cute little rush it gives you, the inner loosening,
the tickle.

The land gets less and less settled and more scraggy. The towns
take on funny names like Lake Placid and Venus and Old Venus and
Palmdale; just beyond Palmdale, after you cross the Fisheating
Creek, at Harrisburg no less, the state capital up there but a
nothing down here, you bear right on 29, a narrow road so straight
and flat you can see for miles, trucks coming at you through a
shimmer that cuts off their wheels, rednecks in pickups pushing in
the rearview mirror to pass, hardly any signs, a feeling all around
of swamp, so remote from civilization the radio station fades, its
last song of your life before it finally fades is somebody called
Connie Boswell, way before Rabbit's time, singing "Say It Isn't So"
with a rueful little lisp, quietly as if she's just talking it to
you, "You've found somebody newww," the band behind her soft and
tinny like those that used to play in hotel lobbies with lots of
potted palms, a Twenties feeling, they lived hard, no worry about
smoking and drinking and cholesterol, just do it,
"Ssay
it
isn't sso," he could almost cry, she sounds so sincere, so truly
wounded. What ís Janice's game, anyway? He'll find out soon
enough.

You think 29 will never end, between its ditches of swamp water,
its stiff gray vegetation, but it finally comes into 80, at La
Belle, streaming west just south of the Caloosahatchee, and then
you're almost home, there are signs to the Southwest Florida
Regional Airport and planes roaring low overhead, he could shoot
them down through his windshield if he were the
Vincennes.
For nostalgia's sake, to get back into it, the Florida thing, he
pushes on past Interstate 75 to Route 41. Starvin' Marvin.
Universal Prosthetics. Superteller. STARLITE MOTEL. That time he
and Janice wound up in a motel like they were an illicit couple
when in fact they'd been married for thirteen years. Unlucky number
but they survived it. Thirty-three years married this year.
Thirtyfour since they first fucked. Back in Kroll's he never
realized she'd come into money eventually. She just seemed a
pathetic little mutt behind the nuts counter, "Jan" stitched to her
brown smock, something insecure and sexy about her, a secure
independent woman like Elvira probably isn't so much into sex, Jan
was, she was amazed when he went down on her like he used to for
Mary Ann in the car, only now on a bed. Mom didn't take to Jan;
standing in the kitchen with soapy hands she would say Fred
Springer was a con artist with his used cars. Now Springer Motors
is
kaput, finito.
Down the tubes just like Kroll's.
Nothing is sacred.

Harry comes to his turning off 41. The plumes of pampas grass,
the flowering shrubs along the curving streets look different this
time of year, more florid. He has never been down here at this time
of year before. It seems emptier, fewer cars in the driveways, more
curtains drawn, the sidewalks looking less walked-on than
ever, the traffic thinner even though this is rush hour, with that
late-afternoon pall in the air, like tarnish on silver. He
doesn't see a single squashed armadillo on Pindo Palm Boulevard.
The guard at the security gate of Valhalla Village, a lean
bespectacled black Harry hasn't seen before, doesn't know him, but
finds his name on the list of tenants and waves him through without
a smile, all efficiency, probably college-educated,
over-qualified.

The code on the inner entrance door of Building B doesn't work.
So many numbers in his life, he may be getting it wrong. But after
the third time it fails to click him in, he figures it's not him,
the code has been changed. And so, limping from a stiffness in his
right leg from pushing on the accelerator for over three days,
Harry has to hobble over across the carpeted traffic island and the
asphalt, in the dazing heat, through the rush of
half-forgotten tropical aromas, hibiscus, bougainvillea, dry
palm thatch, crunchy broad-bladed St. Augustine grass, to the
management office in Building C to get it, the new code.

They say they sent the notice to his summer address up north; he
tells them, "My wife must have torn it up or lost it or
something." His voice talking to people again sounds odd and
croaky, coming from several feet outside himself, like the
to-one-side echo or chorus that sometimes startles you
on the car stereo system. He feels awkward and vulnerable out
of the car: a sea snail without its shell. On his way by, he looks
into Club Nineteen and is surprised to see nobody at the tables,
inside or out, though a couple of foursomes are waiting on the
first tee, in the lengthening shadows. You don't play, he
guesses, in the middle of the day this time of year.

The elevator has a different color inspection card in the
slip-in frame, the peach-colored corridor smells of a
different air freshener, with a faint nostalgic tang of
lemonade. The door of 413 opens easily, his two keys scratch into
their wiggly slots and turn, there are no cobwebs to brush against
his face, no big brown hairy spiders scuttling away on the carpet.
He imagines all sorts of spooky things lately. The condo is like it
always was, as absolutely still as a reconstruction of
itself- the see-through shelves, the birds and flowers
Janice made of small white shells, the big green glass egg that
used to sit in Ma Springer's living room, the blond square sofa,
the fake-bamboo desk, the green-gray dead television
screen. Nobody bothered to disturb or rob the place: kind of a
snub. He carries his two bags into the bedroom and opens the
sliding door onto the balcony. The sound of his footsteps
makes deep dents in the silence of the place. An electric charge of
reproach hangs in the stagnant air. The condo hadn't expected him,
he is early. Having arrived at it after such a distance makes
everything appear magnified, like the pitted head of a pin under a
microscope. The whole apartment-its furniture, its aqua
cabinets and Formica countertop, its angles of fitted door frame
and baseboard - seems to Rabbit a tight structure carefully
hammered together to hold a brimming amount of fear.

A white telephone sits waiting to ring. He picks it up. There is
no buzz. God on the line. Disconnected for the season. Today is
Sunday, tomorrow is Labor Day. The old familiar riddle: how do you
telephone the phone company without a telephone?

But the phone, once it is connected, still doesn't ring. The
days go by empty. The Golds next door are back in Framingham.
Bernie and Fern Drechsel are up north bouncing between their two
daughters' houses, one in Westchester County and the other still in
Queens, and their son's lovely home in Princeton and a
cottage he has in Manahawkin. The Silbersteins have a place
in North Carolina they go to from April to November. Once when
Harry asked Ed why they didn't go back to Toledo, Ed looked at him
with that smartass squint and asked, "You ever been to Toledo?" The
Valhalla dining room is spooky - empty tables and an echoing
click of silver on china and Bingo only once a week. The golf
course has noisy foursomes on it early in the morning, waking Harry
up with the moon still bright in the sky - younger men, local
Deleon business types who buy cut-rate off-season
memberships - and then the fairways from ten to about four
bake in the mid-nineties heat, deserted but for the stray dog
cutting diagonally across or the cats scratching in the sand traps.
When Harry one morning gets up his nerve for a round by himself,
planning to take a cart, he discovers the pro shop has lost his
golf shoes. The kid at the counter - the pro and assistant
pro are both still up north at country clubs that don't close down
until late October says he's sure they're somewhere, it's just that
this time of year there's a different system.

The only other person in the fourth-floor corridor who
seems to be here is the crazy woman in 402, Mrs. Zabritski, a widow
with wild white hair, pinned up by two old tortoise-shell
combs that just add to the confusion. The Golds have told him she
survived one of the concentration camps when a girl. She looks at
Harry as if he's crazy too, to be here.

He explains to her one day, since they meet at the elevator and
she looks at him funny, "I had this sudden impulse to come down
early this year. My wife's just starting up in the
real-estate business and I got bored hanging around the
house."

Mrs. Zabritski's little neckless head is screwed around at an
angle on her shoulder, as if she's bracing an invisible telephone
against her ear. She stares up at him furiously, her lips baring
her long false teeth in a taut oval that reminds him of that Batman
logo you saw everywhere this summer. Her eyes have veiny reds to
them, stuck hot and round in their skeletal sockets, that
wasting-away look Lyle had. "It's hell," the tiny old lady
seems to pronounce, her lips moving stiffly, trying to keep her
teeth in.

"It's what? What is?"

"This weather," she says. "Your wife -" She halts, her lips
working.

"My wife what?" Rabbit tries to curb his tendency to shout,
since hearing doesn't seem to be one of her problems, regardless of
that pained way her head is cocked.

"Is a cute little thing," she finishes, but looks angry saying
it. Her hair sticks up in wisps as if it was moussed and
abandoned.

"She'll be down soon," he almost shouts, embarrassed as much by
his secrets, his hopeful lies, as by her dwarfish warped craziness.
This is the kind of woman he's ended up with, after Mary Ann and
then Janice and Ruth's silky-sack heaviness and Peggy
Fosnacht's splayed eyes and Jill's adolescent breasts and stoned
compliance and Thelma with her black casket and Pru glowing dimly
in the dark like a tough street in blossom, not to mention that
tired whore in Texas with the gritty sugar in her voice and that
other paid lay in his life, a girl he once in a great while
remembers, at a Verity Press outing in the Brewer
Polish-American Club, she was skinny and had a cold and kept
her bra and sweater on, there in this room off to the side, where
she was waiting on a mattress like a kind of prisoner, young, her
belly and thighs sweaty from the cold she had but pure and pale, a
few baby-blue veins where the skin molded around the pelvic
bones, her pussy an oldfashioned natural dark ferny triangle,
flourishing, not shaved at the sides to suit a bathing suit the way
you see in the skin magazines. You paid the guy who stood outside
the door, ten dollars for ten minutes, he hadn't shaved very
recently, Rabbit assumed he was her brother, or maybe her father.
He assumed the girl was Polish because of the name of the club, she
might have been eighteen, Mrs. Zabritski would have been that age
after getting out of the concentration camp, smooth-skinned,
lithe, a young survivor. What time does to people; her face is
broken into furrows that crisscross each other like a checkerboard
of skin.

"She should wait," Mrs. Zabritski says.

"I'll tell her you said so," he says loudly, fighting the
magnetism sucking at him out of the unspoken fact that she is a
woman and he is a man and both are alone and crazy, a few doors
apart in this corridor like a long peach-colored chute
glinting with silver lines in the embossed wallpaper. All his life
seems to have been a journey into the bodies of women, why should
his journey end now? Say she was eighteen when the war ended, he
was twelve, she is only six years older. Sixty-two. Not so
bad, can still work up some juice. Beu Gold is older, and sexy.