Rabbit is rich (8 page)

"That feels nice." He wishes she wouldn't say this. Nice isn't enough. Without some shadow of assault or outrage it becomes another task, another duty. To think, all along, that Lotty was sitting there itching to be fucked. It wasn't just him. She was holding a dirty yearning between her legs just like the lavatory walls said, those drawings and words put there by the same kids who magnified the ants to death, that little sticky pop they died with, you could hear it, did girls too make a little sticky noise when they opened up? The thought of her
knowing
when she raised her hand that her blouse was tugged into wrinkles all pointing to the tip of her tit and that an edge of bra peeped out through the cotton armhole with those little curly virgin hairs and that he was watching for it all to happen does make blood gather. In the fumbly worried dark, with Ma Springer sleeping off her sulk a thickness of plaster away, Harry as if casually presents his stiffened prick to Janice's hand. Hot stuuuuf.

But wanderings within her own brain have blunted her ardor and her touch conveys this, it is too heavy, so in a desperate mood of self-rescue he hisses "Suck" in her ear, "Suck." Which she does, turning her back, her head heavy on his belly. Diagonal on the bed he stretches one arm as if preparing to fly and caresses her ass, these lower globes of hers less spherical than once they were, and the fur between more findable by his fingers. She learned to blow when she went away with Stavros but doesn't really get her head into it, nibbles more, the top inch or two. To keep himself excited he tries to remember Ruth, that exalted "Hey" and the way she swallowed it once, but the effort brings back with such details the guilt of their months together and, betrayal betrayed, his desertion and the final sour sorrow of it all.

Janice lets him slide from her mouth and asks, "What are you thinking about?"

"Work," he lies. "Charlie worries me. He's taking such good care of himself you hate to ask him to do anything. I seem to handle most of the customers now."

"Well why not? You give yourself twice the salary he gets and he's been there forever."

"Yeah, but I married the boss's daughter. He could have, but didn't."

"Marriage wasn't our thing," Janice says.

"What was?"

"Never mind."

Absentmindedly he strokes her long hair, soft from all that swimming, as it flows on his abdomen. "Pair of kids came into the lot late today," he begins to tell her, then thinks better of it. Now 'that her sexual push is past, his prick has hardened, the competing muscles of anxiety having at last relaxed. But she, she is relaxed all over, asleep with his prick in her face. "Want me inside?" he asks softly, getting no answer. He moves her off his chest and works her inert body around so they lie side by side and he can fuck her from behind. She wakes enough to cry "Oh" when he penetrates. Slickly admitted, he pumps slowly, pulling the sheet up over them both. Not hot enough yet for the fan versus air-conditioner decision, both are tucked around the attic somewhere, back under the dusty eaves, strain your back lifting it out, he has never liked the chill of air-conditioning even when it was only to be had at the movies and thought to be a great treat drawing you in right off the hot sidewalk, the word COOL in blue-green with icicles on the marquee, always seemed to him healthier to live in the air God gave however lousy and let your body adjust, Nature can adjust to anything. Still, some of these nights, sticky, and the cars passing below with that wet-tire sound, the kids with their windows open or tops down and radios blaring just at the moment of dropping off to sleep, your skin prickling wherever it touched cloth and a single mosquito alive in the room. His prick is stiff as stone inside a sleeping woman. He strokes her ass, the crease where it nestles against his belly, must start jogging again, the crease between its halves and that place within the crease, opposite of a nipple, dawned on him gradually over these years that she had no objection to being touched there, seemed to like it when she was under him his hand beneath her bottom. He touches himself too now and then to test if he is holding hard; he is, thick as a tree where it comes up out of the grass, the ridges of the roots, her twin dark moons swallowing and letting go, a little sticky sound. The long slack oily curve of her side, ribs to hip bone, floats under his fingertips idle as a gull's glide. Love has lulled her, liquor has carried her off. Bless that dope. "Jan?" he whispers. "You awake?" He is not displeased to be thus stranded, another consciousness in bed is a responsibility, a snag in the flow of his thoughts. Further on in that issue an article How to
shop for a car loan
he ought to look at for professional reasons though it's not the sort of thing that interests him, he can't get it out ofhis head how they noticed those coffee grounds that jump out of the can when punctured. Janice snores: a single rasp ofbreath taken underwater, at some deep level where her nose becomes a harp. Big as the night her ass unconscious wraps him all around in this room where dabs of streetlight sifted by the beech shuffle on the ceiling. He decides to fuck her, the stiffness in his cock is killing him. His hard-on was her idea anyway. The Japanese beetle he flicked away comes into his mind as a model of delicacy. Hold tight, dream girl. He sets three fingers on her flank, the pinky lifted as in a counting game. He is stealthy so as not to wake her but single in his purpose, quick, and pure. The climax freezes his scalp and stops his heart, all stealthy; he hasn't come with such a thump in months. So who says he's running out of gas?

"I hit the ball O.K.," Rabbit says next afternoon, "but damned if I could score." He is sitting in green bathing trunks at a white outdoor table at the Flying Eagle Tee and Racquet Club with the partners of his round and their wives and, in the case of Buddy Inglefinger, girlfriend. Buddy had once had a wife too but she left him for a telephone lineman down near West Chester. You could see how that might happen because Buddy's girlfriends are sure a sorry lot.

"When did you
ever
score?" Ronnie Harrison asks him so loudly heads in the swimming pool turn around. Rabbit has known Ronnie for thirty years and never liked him, one of those locker-room show-offs always soaping himself for everybody to see and giving the JVs redbellies and out on the basketball court barging around all sweat and elbows trying to make up in muscle what he lacked in style. Yet when Harry and Janice joined Flying Eagle there old Ronnie was, with a respectable job at Schuylkill Mutual and this nice proper wife who taught third grade for years and must be great in bed, because that's all Ronnie ever used to talk about, he was like frantic on the subject, in the locker room. His kinky brass-colored hair, that began to thin right after high school, is pretty thoroughly worn through on top now, and the years and respectability have drained some pink out of him; the skin from his temples to the comers of his eyes is papery and bluish, -and Rabbit doesn't remember that his eyelashes were white. He likes playing golf with Ronnie because he loves beating him, which isn't too hard: he has one of those herky jerky punch swings short stocky guys gravitate toward and when he gets excited he tends to roundhouse a big banana right into the woods.

"I heard Harry was a big scorer," Ronnie's wife Thelma says softly. She has a narrow forgettable face and still wears that quaint old-fashioned kind of one-piece bathing suit with a little pleated skirt. Often she has a towel across her shoulders or around her ankles as if to protect her skin from the sun; except for her sunburnt nose she is the same sallow color all over. Her wavy mousy hair is going gray strand by strand. Rabbit can never look at her without wondering what she must do to keep Harrison happy. He senses intelligence in her but intelligence in women has never much interested him.

"I set the B-league county scoring record in 1951," he says, to defend himself, and to defend himself further adds, "Big deal."

"It's been broken long since," Ronnie feels he has to explain. "By blacks."

"Every record has," Webb Murkett interposes, being tactful. "I don't know, it seems like the miles these kids run now have shrunk. In swimming they can't keep the record books up to date." Webb is the oldest man of their regular foursome, fifty and then some - a lean thoughtful gentleman in roofing and siding contracting and supply with a canning gravel voice, his long face broken into longitudinal strips by creases and his hazel eyes almost lost under an amber tangle of eyebrows. He is the steadiest golfer, too. The one unsteady thing about him, he is on his third wife; this is Cindy, a plump brown-backed honey still smelling of high school, though they have two little ones, a boy and a girl, ages five and three. Her hair is cut short and lies wet in one direction, as if surfacing from a dive, and when she smiles her teeth look unnaturally even and white in her tan face, with pink spots of peeling on the roundest part of her cheeks; she has an exciting sexually neutral look, though her boobs slosh and shiver in the triangular little hammocks of her bra. The suit is one of those minimal black ones with only a string or two between the nape of her neck and where her ass begins to divide, a cleft more or less visible depending on the sag of her black diaper. Harry admires Webb. Webb always swings within himself, and gets good roll.

"Better nutrition, don't you think that's it?" Buddy Inglefinger's girl pipes up, in a little-girl reedy voice that doesn't go with her pushed-in face. She is some kind of physical therapist, though her own shape isn't too great. The girls Buddy brings around are a good lesson to Harry in the limits of being single -hard little secretaries and restaurant hostesses, witchy-looking former flower children with grizzled ponytails and flat chests full of Navajo jewelry, overweight assistant heads of personnel in one of those grim new windowless office buildings a block back from Weiser where they spend all day putting computer print-outs in the wastebasket. Women pickled in limbo, their legs chalky and their faces slightly twisted, as if they had been knocked into their thirties by a sideways blow. They remind Harry somehow ofpirates, jaunty and maimed, though without the eye patches. What the hell was this one's name? She had been introduced around not a half hour ago, but when everybody was still drunk on golf.

Buddy brought her, so he can't let her two cents hang up there while the silence gets painful. He fills in, "My guess is it's mostly in the training. Coaches at even the secondary level have all these techniques that in the old days only the outstanding athlete would discover, you know, pragmatically. Nowadays the outstanding isn't that outstanding, there's a dozen right behind him. Or her." He glances at each of the women in a kind of dutiful tag. Feminism won't catch him off guard, he's traded jabs in too many singles bars. "And in countries like East Germany or China they're pumping these athletes full of steroids, like beef cattle, they're hardly human." Buddy wears steel-rimmed glasses of a style that only lathe operators used to employ, to keep shavings out of their eyes. Buddy does something with electronics and has a mind like that, too precise. He goes on, to bring it home, "Even golf. Palmer and now Nicklaus have been trampled out of sight by these kids nobody has heard of, the colleges down south clone 'em, you can't keep their names straight from one tournament to the next."

Harry always tries to take an overview. "The records fall because they're there," he says. "Aaron shouldn't have been playing, they kept him in there just so he could break Ruth's record. -I can remember when a five-minute mile in high school was a miracle. Now girls are doing it."

"It is amazing," Buddy's girl puts in, this being her conversation, "what the human body can do. Any one of us women here could go out now and pick up a car by the front bumper, if we were motivated. If say there was a child of ours under the tires. You read about incidents like that all the time, and at the hospital where I trained the doctors could lay the statistics of it right out on paper. We don't use half the muscle-power we have."

Webb Murkett kids, "Hear that, Cin? Gas stations all closed down, you can carry the Audi home. Seriously, though. I've always marvelled at these men who know a dozen languages. If the brain is a computer think of all the gray cells this entails. There seems to be lots more room in there, though."

His young wife silently lifts her hands to twist some water from her hair, that is almost too short to grab. This action gently lifts her tits in their sopping black small slings and reveals the shape of each erect nipple. A white towel is laid across her lap as if to relieve Harry from having to think about her crotch. What turns him off about Buddy's girl, he realizes, is not only does she have pimples on her chin and forehead but on her thighs, high on the inside, like something venereal. Georgene? Geraldine? She is going on in that reedy too-eager voice, "Or the way these yogas can lift themselves off the ground or go back in time for thousands of years. Edgar Cayce has example after example. It's nothing supernatural, I can't believe in God, there's too much suffering, they're just using human powers we all have and never develop. You should all read the Tibetan Book of the Dead."

"Really?" Thelma Harrison says dryly. "Who's the author?"

Now silence does invade their group. A greenish reflective wobble from the pool washes ghostly and uneasy across their faces and a child gasping as he swims can be heard. Then Webb kindly says, "Closer to home now, we've had a spooky experience lately. I bought one of these Polaroid SX-70 Land Cameras as kind of a novelty, to give the kids a charge, and all of us can't stop being fascinated, it is supernatural, to watch that image develop right under your eyes."

"The kind," Cindy says, "that spits it out at you like this." She makes a cross-eyed face and thrusts out her tongue with a thrrupping noise. All the men laugh, and laugh.

"Consumer
Reports had
something on it," Harry says.

"It's magical," Cindy tells them. "Webb gets really turned on." When she grins her teeth look stubby, the healthy gums come so babyishly low.

"Why is my glass empty?" Janice asks.