Rabbit at rest (72 page)

"Just think. He'll be four."

"He is four. He'll be five."

"Time for kindergarten," Harry says. "Incredible. I understand
you and little Nellie are working on a third. Terrific."

"Well, we're just seeing what happens."

"No more condoms, huh? What about him and AIDS?"

"Harry, please. This is none of your business. But he was
tested, if you must know, and is HIV-negative."

"Terrific. One more thing off my mind. The kid's straight, and
the kid's clean. Pru, I think I'm going crazy down here. My dreams
- they're like cut-up comic strips."

He can picture her smiling wryly at this, her mouth tugging down
on one side, her free hand pushing back from her forehead with two
fingers stray strands of carrot-colored hair. Sexy; but what
has it got her? A would-be social worker for a husband,
living space in another woman's house, and a future of
drudging and watching her looks fade away in the mirror. Her voice
in his ear is like a periscope glimpse, blurred by salt spray, of
the upper world. She is up there, he is down here.

Her tone is changing, sinking toward friendliness. Once you've
fucked them, their voices ever hold these warm grainy traces.
"Harry, what are you doing down there for amusement?"

"Oh, I walk around a lot, getting to know the town. Nice old
town, Deleon. Tell Janice if you ever see her that there's a rich
Jewish widow giving me the eye."

"She's right here for dinner, actually. We're celebrating
because she sold a house. Not your house, she can't sell that until
you agree, but a house for the real-estate company, for
Pearson and Schrack. She's showing houses for them weekends, till
she gets her license."

"That's fantastic! Put her on and I'll congratulate her."

Pru hesitates. "I'll have to ask her if she wants to talk to
you."

His stomach feels hollow suddenly, scared. "You don't have to do
that. I called to talk to the kids, honest."

"I'll put Judy on, she's right at my elbow, all excited about
the hurricane. You take care of yourself, Harry."

"Sure. You know me. Careful."

"I know you," she says. "A crazy man." She sounded Dutch, the
cozy settled way she said that. She's assimilating. One more
middle-aged Brewer broad.

There is a clatter and whispering and now Judy has the phone and
cries, "Oh Grandpa, we're all so worried about you and the
hurricane!"

He says, "Who's all so worried? Not my Judy. Not after she
brought me in on that crippled Sunfish. The TV says Hugo is going
to hit the Carolinas. That's six hundred miles away. It was sunny
here today, mostly. I played a little basketball with some kids not
much older than you."

"It rained here. All day."

"And you're having Grandma to dinner tonight," he tells her.

Judy says, "She says she doesn't want to talk to you. What did
you do to make her so mad?"

"Oh, I don't know. Maybe I channel-surfed too much. Hey,
Judy, know what? On the way down I drove right by Disney World, and
I promised myself that the next time you're here we'll all go."

"You don't have to. A lot of the kids at school have been, and
they say it gets boring."

"How's school going?"

"I like the teachers and all but I can't stand the other kids.
They're all assholes."

"Don't say that. Such language. What's the matter, do they
ignore you?"

"I wish they would. They tease me about my freckles. They call
me Carrottop." Her little voice breaks.

"Well, then. They like you. They think you're terrific. Just
don't wear too much lipstick until you're fifteen. Remember what I
told you last time we talked?"

"You said don't force it."

"Right. Don't force it. Let nature do its work. Do what your
mommy and daddy tell you. They love you very much."

She wearily sighs, "I know."

"You're the light of their lives. You ever hear that expression
before, `the light of their lives'?"

"No."

"Well then, you've learned something. Now go do your thing,
honey. Could you put Roy on?"

"He's too dumb to talk."

"No he's not. Put him on. Tell him his grandpa wants to give him
some words of wisdom."

The phone clatters down and in the background there is a kind of
shredded wheat of family noises - he thinks he even hears
Janice's voice, sounding decisive the way Ma Springer's used to.
Footsteps approach through the living room he knows so well -
the Barcalounger, the picture windows with the drawn curtains, the
piecrust-edged knickknack table, though the green glass egg,
with the teardrop of emptiness inside, that used to sit on it is
now on the shelves here, a few feet from his eyes. Pru's voice
says, "Janice says she doesn't want to talk to you, Harry, but
here's Roy."

"Hi, Roy," Harry says.

Silence. God on the line again.

"How's it going up there? I hear it rained all day."

More silence.

"Are you being a good boy?"

Silence, but with a touch of breathing in it.

"You know," Harry says, "it may not feel like much to you right
now, but these are important years."

"Hi, Grandpa," the child's voice at last pronounces.

"Hi," Harry has to respond, though it puts him back to the
beginning. "I miss you down here," he says.

Silence.

"A little birdie comes to the balcony every morning and asks,
`Where's Roy? Where's Roy?"'

Silence, which is what this lie deserves. But then the child
comes out with the other thing he's perhaps been coached to say: "I
love you, Grandpa."

"Well, I love you, Roy. Happy Birthday, by the way, for next
month. Five years old! Think of it."

"Happy Birthday," the child's voice repeats, in that oddly deep,
manlike way it sometimes has.

Harry finds himself waiting for more but then realizes there is
no more. "O.K.," he says, "I guess that does it, Roy. I've loved
talking with you. Give everybody my love. Hang up now. You can hang
up."

Silence, and then a clumsy soft clatter, and the buzz of a dead
line. Strange, Rabbit thinks, hanging up his own receiver, that he
had to make the child do it first. Chicken in a suicide pact.

Alone, he is terrified by the prospect of an entire evening in
these rooms. It is seven-thirty, plenty of time to still make
the buffet, though his mouth feels tender from all that hot lasagna
and the bagful of onion potato chips, full of sharp edges and salt.
He will just go down and pick a few low-cal items off the
buffet table. Talking to his family has exhilarated him; he feels
them all safely behind him. Without showering, he puts on a shirt,
coat, and tie. Mrs. Zabritski isn't at the elevator. In the
half-empty Mead Hall, under the berserk gaze of the Viking
warriors in the big ceramic mural, he helps himself generously to,
among other items, the scallops wrapped in bacon. The mix of
textures, of crisp curved bacon and rubbery yielding scallops, in
his sensitive mouth feels so delicious his appetite becomes
bottomless. He goes back for more, and more creamed asparagus and
potato pancakes, then suddenly is so full his heart feels squeezed.
He takes a Nitrostat and skips dessert and coffee, even decal
Carefully he treads back across the alien texture of that Florida
grass and the carpeted traffic island beneath the warm dome of
stars, really a deep basin we are looking down into, he saw that
this afternoon when he did the upside-down set shot, we are
stuck fast to the Earth like flies on a ceiling. He feels stuffed
and dizzy. The air is thick, the Milky Way just barely shows, like
the faint line of fair hair up the middle of some women's
bellies.

He gets back into the condo in time for the last fifteen minutes
of
Grouting Pains,
the only show on TV where every member
of the family is repulsive, if you count Roseanne's
good-old-boy husband as not repulsive. Then he flips
back and forth between
Unsolved Mysteries
on Channel 20
and an old Abbott and Costello on 36 that must have been funnier
when it came out, the same year he graduated from high school.
Costello's yips seem mechanical and aggravating, and Abbott looks
old, and cruel when he slaps his fat buddy. People yelled and
snapped at one another like animals then. Maybe the Sixties did
some good after all. Among the commercials that keep interrupting
is that Nissan Infiniti one of crickets and lily ponds, no car at
all, just pure snob Nature. The Lexus commercials he's seen are
almost as vague - an idyllic road shiny with rain. They're
both skirting the issue: can the Japanese establish a luxury image?
Or will people with thirty-five thousand to burn prefer to
buy European? Thank God, Harry no longer has to care. Jake down
toward Pottstown has to care, but not Harry.

He brushes his teeth, taking care to floss and rinse with
Peridex. Without Janice here he is becoming staid in his habits,
another old-fogey bachelor fussing with his plumbing and
nostril hairs. Nostril hairs: he never wants to look like Dr.
Morris. His double dinner burns in his stomach but when he sits on
the toilet nothing comes out. Phillips' Milk of Magnesia, he
should get some. Another of their commercials has a black man
talking about MOM and that was unfortunate, his color made the shit
too real. In bed, on the march to Yorktown, the allied armies come
upon British atrocities around Williamsburg. De Grasse's Swedish
aide Karl Gustaf Tomquist, a latter-day Viking, noted in his
journal,
On a beautiful estate a pregnant woman was found
murdered in her bed through several bayonet stabs; the barbarians
had opened both of her breasts and written above the bed canopy:
"Thou shalt nevergive birth to a rebel. " In another room, was just
as horrible a sight -five cut-off heads arranged on a
cupboard in place of plaster-cast-figures which lay
broken to pieces on the floor. Dumb animals were no less spared.
The pastures were in many places covered with dead horses, oxen,
and cows.
Harry tries to fall asleep through a screen of
agitation bred by these images. He has always thought of the
Revolution as a kind of gentlemen's war, without any of that
Vietnam stuff. He begins to have those slippery half-visions,
waking dreams that only upon reflection make no sense. He sees a
woman's round stomach, with smooth seams and a shining central
fuzz, split open and yield yards and yards of red string, like the
inside of a baseball. Then he is lying beside a body, a small man
dressed all in black, a body limp and without muscle, a
ventriloquist's dummy, wearing sunglasses. He awakes in the dark,
too early for the sound of lawnmowers, for the cheep of the dull
brown bird in the Norfolk pine, for the chatter of the young
businessmen's dawn foursomes. He makes his way to the bathroom amid
motionless glossy shapes and slants of dim light - the blue
oven-timer numerals, the yellowish guard lights on the
golfcourse fence. He urinates sitting down, like a woman, and
returns to bed. Always he sleeps on his old side of the bed, as if
Janice is still on her side. He dreams now of the portal with the
round top, but this time it pushes open easily, on noiseless
unresistant hinges, upon a bustling brightness within. It is
somehow Ma Spnnger's downstairs, only you step down into it, a kind
of basement, brighter than her house ever was, with a
many-colored carnival gaudiness, like something in Latin
America, like the cruise-ship commercial they keep playing in
the middle of the news, and full of welcoming people he hardly
knows, or can barely remember: Mrs. Zabritski as a slender young
girl, though still with that inviting inquisitive crick in her
neck, and wearing a racily short fringed skirt like they wore in
the Sixties, and Marty Tothero carrying a mailman's pouch that
matches his lopsided face, and Mom and Pop in their prime, looking
tall and rangy in their Sunday best, bringing a baby girl home from
the hospital wrapped in a pink blanket, just its tiny
tipped-up nose and a single tiny closedeyelid eye showing,
and a tall soberly staring dark-eyed man with lacquered black
hair like an old ad for Kreml, who gives him a manly handshake,
while Janice at his side whispers to him that this of course is
Roy, Roy all grown up, and as tall as he. Awaking, Rabbit can still
feel the pressure on his hand, and a smile of greeting dying on his
face.

Hugo aims at SE coast. USAir jet crashes in N. Y. river.
Bomb probably caused crash of French DC-10. Lee slows boaters
in manatee territory.
Harry feeds himself oat bran and digests
the
News-Press. Chaos reigned on St. Croix, as police and
National Guardsmen joined machetearmed mobs on a post-Hugo
looting spree. Tourists pleaded with reporters landing on the
island to get them off:
What fucking crybabies. It occurs to
him that his dream might relate to all this Caribbean news, the
pre-weekend party they have at resort hotels, to welcome the
new arrivals and jolly everybody into a melting pot. He steps out
onto his narrow balcony to seize the day. The paper said today
would be sunny despite Hugo and so it is. The distant
blue-green skyscrapers hurl back blobs of light from the
morning sun at his back. The Gulf cannot be seen but he can smell
it out there. He tries to remember who all was at the party but
can't; dream people don't stick to the ribs. The plane in New York
skidded off the end of the runway and two people were killed. Just
two. One hundred seventy-one died in the Sahara. A caller in
London gave all the credit to Allah. Harry doesn't mind that one as
much as the Lockerbie Pan Am bomb. Like everything else on the
news, you get bored, disasters get to seem a gimmick, like all
those TV timeouts in football.

While other, younger men shout and kid on the golf course behind
the curtained sliding doors, Harry makes the bed and sweeps the
kitchen floor, and adds his orange juice glass and cereal bowl to
the orderly array in the dishwasher waiting to add up to a load's
worth. Not quite there yet. When Janice shows up at last he wants
the state of the place to give her an object lesson in
housekeeping.