Rabbit at rest (8 page)

Pru is looking into the cupboards and begging Roy, "How about
some Sugar Pops, honey? Grandpa and Grandma have lots of Sugar
Pops. And jars of dry-roasted peanuts and cashews. Harry, do
you know that nuts are loaded with cholesterol?"

"Yeah, people keep telling me that. But then I read some article
said the body needs cholesterol and the whole scare's been
engineered by the chicken lobby." Janice, in a pink alligator shirt
and a pair of magenta slacks like the women wear down here to go
shopping in, has wedged herself in at the kitchen table with the
News-Press and a sliced-open bagel and plastic
container of cream cheese. In her Florida phase she has taken to
bagels. Lox, too. She has pulled out the Lifestyles section of the
newspaper and Harry, still able to read type in any direction from
his days as a Linotyper, sees sideways the headline (they use a
"down" style and lots of USA Today-style color graphics)

Manwatchers

name the men

with the most

and in caps at the top HUGE LOSS and `WORKING' ON ANOTHER
WEDDING. He cranks his head to look at the page the right way and
sees that they mean Working Girl star Melanie Griffith and the
survivors of the Armenian tragedy and their "unique type of grief."
Funny how your wife reading the newspaper makes every item in it
look fascinating, and then when you look yourself it all turns
dull. The Braun Aromaster percolator, with a little sludgy coffee
lukewarm in its glass half, sits at the end of the counter, past
where Pru is still standing trying to find something Roy might eat.
To let Harry ease his belly by, she goes up on her toes and with a
little soft grunt under her breath presses her thighs tight against
the counter edge. All this family closeness is almost like an
African but where everybody sleeps and screws in full view of
everybody else. But, then, Harry asks himself, what has Western man
done with all his precious privacy anyway? To judge from the
history books, nothing much except invent the gun and
psychoanalysis.

Down here it's necessary to keep bread and cookies in a drawer
holding a big tin box to keep out ants, even up on the fourth
floor. It's awkward to pull the drawer out and then lift the lid
but he does, finding a couple of empty cookie bags, one for
Double-Stuf Oreos and one for Fruit Newtons, which his
grandchildren left with nothing but crumbs inside, and one and a
half stale sugar doughnuts that even they disdained to consume.
Rabbit takes them and his mug full of sludgy coffee and squeezes
back past Pru, concentrating on the sensation in his groin as her
shorty robe grazes it, and with a wicked impulse gives the kitchen
table a nudge with the back of his thighs to get Janice's full cup
of coffee rocking so it will slosh and spill. "Harry," she says,
quickly lifting the newspaper. "Shit."

The sound ofthe shower running leaks into the kitchen. "Why the
hell's Nelson so jittery?" he asks the women aloud.

Pru, who must know the answer, doesn't give it, and Janice says,
mopping with a Scott Towel Pru hands her, "He's under stress. It's
a much more competitive car world than it was ten years ago and
Nelson's doing it all himself, he doesn't have Charlie to hide
behind like you did."

"He could have kept Charlie on but he didn't want to, Charlie
was willing to stay part-time," he says, but nobody answers
him except Roy, who looks at him and says, "Grampa looks
ridiculous."

"Quite a vocabulary," Harry compliments Pru.

"He doesn't know what he's saying, he hears these expressions on
television," she says, brushing back hair from her forehead with a
touching two-handed gesture she has developed to go with the
hairdo.

The theme of the kitchen decor is aqua, a creamy frigid color
that looked a little subtler in the paint chart Janice and he
consulted four years ago, when they had the place repainted. He
wondered at the time how it would wear but Janice thought it would
be lighthearted and slightly daring, like their buying a
condominium at all. Even the refrigerator and the Formica
countertops are aqua, and looking at it all, with the creatures and
flowers of seashells Janice has loaded the open shelves toward the
foyer with, makes him feel panicky, shortens his breath. Being
underwater is one ofhis nightmares. A simple off-white like
the Golds next door have would have been less oppressive. He takes
his mug and the doughnut-and-a-half and the rest
of the News-Press into the living room and settles on the
sofa side of the round glass table, since Judy occupies the wicker
armchair that faces the television set. The pictures on the front
page are of Donald Trump (Male call: the year's hottest), the
grimacing sun wringing the clouds (Rainfall 33%
off
average; year is driest since 1927), and Fort Myers' mayor Wilbur
Smith, looking like a long-haired kid younger even than
Nelson, quoted saying that football star Deion Sanders' recent
arrest for assault and battery on a police officer could be
partially blamed upon the unruly crowd that had gathered to watch
the incident. There is a story about an annual government
book-length report on automobiles and consumer complaints: in
a gray box highlighting
The best by the book,
under all
four categories, subcompacts, compacts, intermediate, and minivans,
there isn't a Toyota listed. He feels a small pained slipping in
his stomach.

"Harry, you
must
eat a solid breakfast," Janice calls,
"if you're going to play golf right through lunch. Dr. Morris told
you coffee on an empty stomach is about the worst thing you can do
for hypertension."

"If there's anything makes me hypertense," he calls back, "it's
women telling me all the time what to eat." As he bites into the
stale doughnut the sugar patters down on the paper and dusts the
crimson lapels of his seigneurial bathrobe.

Janice continues to Pru, "Have you been giving any thought to
Nelson's diet? He doesn't look like he's eating anything."

"He never did eat much," Pru says. "He must be where Roy gets
his pickiness from."

Judy has found among all the channels of network and cable an
old Lassie movie; Harry moves to the end of the sofa to get an
angle on it. The collie nudges awake the lost boy asleep in the
haystack and leads him home, down a dirt road toward a purple
Scottish sunset. The music swells like an ache in the throat; Harry
smiles sheepishly at Judy through his tears. Her eyes, that did
their crying earlier, are dry. Lassie is not part of her childhood
past, lost forever.

He tells her when the frog leaves his throat, "I got to go play
golf, Judy. Think you can manage here today with these rude
folks?"

She studies him seriously, not quite sure of the joke. "I guess
so."

"They're good people," he says, not sure this is true. "How
would you like to go Sunfishing some time?"

"What's Sunfishing?"

"It's sailing in a little boat. We'd go off one of the hotel
beaches in Deleon. They're supposed to be just for the guests but I
know the guy who runs the concession. I play golf with his
father."

Her eyes don't leave his face. "Have you ever done it, Grandpa?
Sunfishing."

"Sure. A coupla times." Once, actually; but it was a vivid
lesson. With Cindy Murkett in her black bikini.that showed the
hairs in her crotch. Her breasts slipsloppy in their little black
sling. The wind tugging, the water slapping, the sun wielding its
silent white hammer on their skins, the two of them alone and
nearly naked.

"Sounds neat," Judy ventures, adding, "I got a prize in my camp
swimming class for staying underwater the longest." She returns her
gaze to the television, rapidly flicking through the channels with
the hand control -channel-surfing, kids call it.

Harry tries to imagine the world seen through her clear green
eyes, every little thing vivid and sharp and new, packed full of
itself like a satin valentine. His own vision feels fogged no
matter which glasses he puts on, for reading or far vision. He
wears the latter only for movies and night driving, and refuses to
get bifocals; glasses worn for more than an hour at a time hurt his
ears. And the lenses are always dusty and the things he looks at
all seem tired; he's seen them too many times before. A kind of
drought has settled over the world, a bleaching such as overtakes
old color prints, even the ones kept in a drawer.

Except, strangely, the first fairway of a golf course before his
first swing. This vista is ever fresh. There, on the tee's earth
platform, standing in his large white spiked Footjoys and blue
sweat socks, drawing the long tapered steel wand of his Lynx
Predator driver from the bag, he feels tall again, tall the way he
used to on a hardwood basketball floor when after those first
minutes his growing momentum and lengthening bounds and leaps
reduced the court to childlike dimensions, to the size of a tennis
court and then a Ping-Pong table, his legs unthinkingly
eating the distances up, back and forth, and the hoop with its
dainty skirtlike net dipping down to be there on the layups. So, in
golf, the distances, the hundreds of yards, dissolve to a few
effortless swings if you find the inner magic, the key. Always,
golf for him holds out the hope ofperfection, of a perfect
weightlessness and consummate ease, for now and again it does
happen, happens in three dimensions, shot after shot. But then he
gets human and tries to force it, to make it happen, to get ten
extra yards, to steer it, and it goes away, grace you could call
it, the feeling of collaboration, of being bigger than he really
is. When you stand up on the first tee it is there, it comes back
from wherever it lives during the rest of your life, endless
possibility, the possibility of a flawless round, and a round
without a speck of bad in it, without a missed two-footer or
a flying right elbow, without a pushed wood or pulled iron; the
first fairway is in front ofyou, palm trees on the left and water
on the right, flat as a picture. All you have to do is take a
simple pure swing and puncture the picture in the middle with a
ball that shrinks in a second to the size of a needle-prick,
a tiny tunnel into the absolute. That would be it.

But on his practice swing his chest gives a twang of pain and
this makes him think for some reason of Nelson. The kid jangles in
his mind. As he stands up to the ball he feels crowded but is
impatient and hits it outside in, trying too hard with his right
hand. The ball starts out promisingly but leaks more and more to
the right and disappears too close to the edge of the long scummy
pond of water.

" 'Fraid that's alligator territory," Berme says sadly. Berme is
his partner for the round.

"Mulligan?" Harry asks.

There is a pause. Ed Silberstein asks Joe Gold, "What do you
think?"

Joe tells Harry, "I didn't notice that we took any
mulligans."

Harry says, "You cripples don't hit it far enough to get into
trouble. We always give mulligans on the first drive. That's been
our tradition."

Ed says, "Angstrom, how're you ever going to live up to your
potential if we keep babying you with mulligans?"

Joe says, "How much potential you think a guy with a gut like
that still has? I think his potential has all gone to his
colon."

While they are thus ribbing him Rabbit takes another ball from
his pocket and tees it up and, with a stiff half-swing, sends
it safely but ingloriously down the left side of the fairway.
Perhaps not quite safely: it seems to hit a hard spot and keeps
bouncing toward a palm tree. "Sorry, Bernie," he says. "I'll loosen
up."

"Am I worried?" Bernie asks, putting his foot to the
electric-cart pedal a split-second before Harry has
settled into the seat beside him. "With your brawn and my brains,
we'll cream these oafs."

Bernie Drechsel, Ed Silberstein, and Joe Gold are all older than
Harry, and shorter, and usually make him feel good about himself.
With them, he is a big Swede, they call him Angstrom, a comical pet
gentile, a big pale uncircumcised hunk of American white bread. He
in turn treasures their perspective; it seems more manly than his,
sadder and wiser and less shaky. Their long history has put all
that suffering in its pocket and strides on. Harry asks Bernie, as
the cart rolls over the tamped and glistening grass toward their
balls, "Whaddeya think about all this fuss about this Deion
Sanders? In the paper this morning he even has the mayor of Fort
Myers making excuses for him."

Bernie shifts the cigar in his mouth an inch and says, "It's
cruel, you know, to take these black kids out of nowhere and give
'em all this publicity and turn them into millionaires. No wonder
they go crazy."

"The paper says the crowd kept the cops from giving him room: He
had flipped out at some salesclerk who said he had stolen a pair of
earrings. He even took a pop at her."

"I don't know about Sanders," Bernie says, "but a lot of it's
drugs. Cocaine. The stuff is everywhere."

"You wonder what people see in it," Rabbit says.

"What they see in it," Bernie says, stopping the cart and
resting his cigar on the edge of the plastic ledge for holding
drinks or beer cans, "is instant happiness." He squares up to his
second shot with that awful stance of his, his feet too close
together, his bald head dipping down in a reverse
weight-shift, and punches the ball with a four-iron:
all arms and wrists. It stays straight, though, and winds up within
an easy chip in front of the elevated green. "There are two routes
to happiness," he continues, back at the wheel of the cart. "Work
for it, day after day, like you and I did, or take a chemical
shortcut. With the world the way it is, these kids take the
shortcut. The long way looks too long."

"Yeah, well, it is long. And then when you've gone the distance,
where's the happiness?"

"Behind you," the other man admits.