Rabbit at rest (12 page)

The pillar on two of its broad sides bears giant muddy ceramic
murals about the Vikings: broadswords and horned helmets and
dragon-headed ships protrude from the enamelled mass in its
numerous blotchy colors, but the men wielding and wearing and
sailing these protrusions are swallowed up in a crazy weave of anus
and legs and lightning bolts, a kind ofbloody basketwork in honor
of history. "Seventy-one," the lugubrious male voice hidden
behind the pillar intones. It repeats, "Seven one."

It is hard to carry on a conversation with the numbers blaring
from the loudspeakers. Pru mothers Roy and coaxes a little baked
potato and a single stir-fried shrimp into him. Janice talks
Judy into ordering a lobster and then has to show her how to crack
it, how to push out the big curved piece of white meat with a
finger up through the poor boiled creature's ass, how to suck the
little tail segments, the same way you suck artichoke leaves.
Rabbit, who has ordered eye-of-round steak, can hardly
bear to watch; to him, eating lobster - its many little
feathery legs, its eyes on stalks, its antennae roasted red like
the rest - is nightmarish, a descent back into the squirmy
scrabbly origins of life. Crabs, too, and oysters and clams: all
around him in Florida he sees old people stuffing their faces with
this filthy gluey unspeakable stuff; and telling you furthermore
it's good for you, better than steak and hamburger, which is what
he usually orders, though he doesn't mind a breaded pork chop or
piece of veal, or a slice of ham with a pineapple ring or some
moon-shaped snitzes of baked apple and on the side some
greasy Dutch fries like a slipping stack of poker chips. That's how
ham comes in Pennsylvania. You can't get sausage down here, at
least not the spicy pork sausage he was raised on, or scrapple
drenched in maple syrup, or apple pie with enough cinnamon in it,
or shoo-fly pie at all. Janice went to a nutrition group a
few winters ago and came back telling him how he was clogging his
arteries with all this fat and dough. So for a while there was a
rash of salads and low-cal pasta and fish and fowl back in
the condominium; but whenever he gets into the Mead Hall he can
order what he wants. With steak, you have to specify
well-done or it comes rubbery and blue-rare.
Disgusting. All the things that satisfy your appetite and seem so
beautiful are disgusting when you don't have the appetite.
Disposable meat.

Judy's perfect little hands are shiny with lobster. She asks her
mother something and he can see Pru's mouth move in response but
the Godlike voice blocks their words right out with its solemn
"Twenty-seven. Two seven."

"What're you saying, sweetie?" he asks, embarrassed. Is his
hearing going, or do people talk a little differently, more rapidly
and softly, than they used to? On these TV shows that have British
actors, there are stretches, especially when they put on the
lower-class accents, where he can't understand a fucking
word. And movies, especially in the love scenes, when the stars are
establishing their coolness with the teen-age audience, just
tossing the phrases away.

Pru explains, "She's worried about Daddy not getting anything to
eat," and makes her wry one-sided mouth. Is this grimace a
communication to him, a little lament, inviting him to conspire
with her against Nelson?

Judy's shiny green eyes turn up toward her grandfather, as if
she expects him to make an unsympathetic response. Instead he tells
her, "Don't you worry, Judy. People can get served here until nine,
and then at Club Nineteen downstairs they have sandwiches until
midnight. And you saw Route 41: there's tons of eating places in
Florida for your poor hungry daddy."

The girl's lower lip trembles and she gets out, "He might not
have any money."

"Why wouldn't he have any money?"

The girl explains, "A lot of times he doesn't have any money.
Bills come and even men come to the house and Mommy can't pay
them." Her eyes shift over to her mother's face as she realizes she
has said too much.

Pru looks away, wiping a crumb of potato from the corner of
Roy's lips. "Things have been a bit tight," she admits almost
inaudibly.

Harry wants to pursue it. "Really? That can't be. He's making
fifty grand a year, with the benefits and bonuses. My father used
to support us all on less than two thousand."

"Harry," Janice breaks in, in a voice that sounds like her
mother's, toward the end, when the old widow got into the habit of
laying down the law, "people now need more things than your father
did. That was a simpler world. I remember it, I was there too. What
did we use to do for fun, when we went out for a date? Go to the
movies for seventy-five cents apiece or maybe the
miniature-golf course out on 422 for even less. And then a
soda at the Pensupreme, and that was considered a very adequate
good time."

More than adequate, he remembers, if in the car after all that
kissing and bare tit it took to warm her up Janice let him into
herself, her inside warm and wet and softly grainy like a silk
slipper. If she was having her period or feeling virtuous, she
might hold him in her hand while he supplied the motion and the
come, white as lobster meat. A shocking white, really, and tough to
mop up. What he loved best in the car with Janice was when she'd
sit on him, her ass in his hands and her tits in his face. And
tidily take his come away with her. Like mailing a letter.

Her mind on a track far distant from his, she is going on,
"Nelson has to have good suits to make a good presentation of
himself at the lot, and children now aren't just content with
blocks and a ball, they have to have these video games -"

"Jesus - fifty thousand buys a lot of video games, he'll
have enough to open an arcade soon if that's what he's spending it
all on."

"Well, you joke, but that big barn of Mother's, it's no end of
expense, isn't that the case, Pru?"

Hauled back from a politely smiling daze, Pru grins and admits,
"It eats up the dollars."

They are hiding something from him, Harry sees. The unseen man
portentously intones, "Fifty-six. Five six," and a quavery
old voice, so frantic it nearly chokes itself, croaks, "Bingo!" Eff
one eleven,
Joe Gold had said. Fly 'em into Libya.

Harry says, "Well I don't know what the hell's going on."

No one contradicts him.

Roy is falling asleep with a sliver of shrimp shell on his slack
lower lip. Harry has a sudden hankering for pecan pie. He tries to
tease Judy into having dessert to keep him company. "Key-lime
pie," he croons to her. "You can only get it in Florida. The chance
of a lifetime."

"What makes it so special?"

He isn't quite sure. He lies. "Tiny delicate limes that only
grow on the Florida Keys. Anywhere else is too coarse for them, too
cold and mean."

She consents but then only picks nibbles off the crust at the
back, so he, having sold it to her, has to eat it for her, on top
of his pecan pie topped by a big oozing dip of butter-pecan
ice cream. Nelson's absence grows bigger as their meal wears on.
Janice and Pru have decaf coffee and, preoccupied, dying to talk to
each other, watch Harry finish Judy's dessert. In a way, gluttony
is an athletic feat, a stretching exercise.
Makes your tummy
say "howdy!"
The waitress in her pleats of gold finally comes
with the check and as he signs it with their condo number he feels
like a god casually dispatching thunderbolts; the sum will appear
on his monthly statement, next year, when the world has moved
greatly on. How full he feels, stepping into the night air! A
majestic float of a man, in a parade of dependents. Harry carries
Roy, who fell asleep during dessert. Janice and Pru hold Judy one
by each hand and, because she has been good during the boring long
meal, allow her to swing herself between them, giggling as they
grunt with the strain.

Between Buildings A and B, several of the overhead sodium lights
on their tall burnished wands of aluminum have been mysteriously
smashed: they're out there, the criminals, watching and waiting for
the security guards to nod, so the fortress of sleeping retirees
can be stormed. In this gap of unillumination, the stars leap down
at them out of the black warm sky. At night Florida recovers
something of its old subtropical self, before men tamed its teeming
flatness. Being here is exciting, like being on the deck of a ship;
the air tastes of salt, of rotting palm thatch, of swamp. The stars
are moister here, more plummy. The St. Augustine grass has its
strange spongy matted texture and each blade seems darkly metallic;
the lawn snugly conceals round sprinkler heads. The skin that men
have imposed on nature is so thin it develops holes, which
armadillos wriggle through, the pathetic intricate things appearing
in the middle of Pindo Palm Boulevard at dawn and being squashed
flat by the first rush of morning traffic, they don't even have the
sense to curl up into balls but jump straight into the air. Harry,
Roy's breath moist on his neck and the child's head heavy as a
stone on his shoulder, looks up at the teeming sky and thinks,
There is no mercy.
The stark plummy stars press down and
the depth of the galactic void for an instant makes him feel
suspended upside down. The entrance to Building Blooms alluringly
with its cabined yellow glow. The five Angstroms each cope in their
way with the sore place inside them, Nelson's gnawing absence. They
fumble through the protected entrances, the elevator, the
peachand-silver hallway, avoiding each other's eyes in
embarrassment.

As her mother tucks her brother in, Judy settles before the
television and flicks from
The Wonder Years
to
Night
Court
to a French movie, starring that lunky Depardieu who is
in all of them, this time about a man who comes to a village and
usurps another man's identity, including his wife. In a moment's
decision the young widow, besmirched and lonely, accepts him as her
husband, and this thrills Harry; there ought to be a law that we
change identities and families every ten years or so. But Judy
keeps flicking away from the story and Pru finally yells at the kid
and tells her to get ready for bed on the sofa, they'll all clear
out of the living room for her sake, though why she didn't accept
Grandma and Grandpa's nice offer of a little room of her own is
beyond her, Pru's, understanding. The girl breaks into tears and
this is a relief for all of them, giving vent to their common
unspoken sense of abandonment.

Janice tells Harry, "You go to bed, hon. You look beat. I'm too
jazzed up by the coffee to sleep, Pru and I will sit in the
kitchen."

"I thought the coffee was decal" He had looked forward to having
her, her little firm brown body, in bed beside him; with these
other people here they don't have a second to themselves. His
memories had stirred him. Fifty-two years old and she still
has a solid ass. Not like Thelma, who's been losing it lately.

"That's what I ordered," Janice says, "but I never trust them
really. I think a lot of the time now they just tell you it's decaf
to shut you up."

"Don't sit up too late." On an impulse he adds to reassure her,
"The kid's all right, he's just having some kind of a toot."

Pru glances at him in surprise, as if he's said more than he
knows.

He feels goaded to elaborate: "Both me and Toyota give him a
royal pain in the ass for some reason."

Again, he is not contradicted.

Fantasies about America produced two strongly contradictory
conclusions that in the end came to the same point of injecting
some caution into the golden dreams,
he reads in bed. It's a
history book Janice gave him for Christmas, by a woman historian
yet, about the Dutch role in the American Revolution, which he
hadn't thought up to 'now had been much.
According to one
school, America was too big, too divided, ever to become a single
country, its communications too distended for the country ever to
be united.
Just that sentence makes him feel enormous, slack,
distended. The beautiful thing about history is it puts you right
to sleep. He looks back up the page for something amusing he
remembered reading last night.
Climate in the New World,
according to a best-selling French treatise translated into
Dutch in 1775, made men listless and indolent; they might become
happy but never stalwart. America, armed this scholar, "was formed
for happiness, but not for empire."
Another European scholar
reported that
the native Indians "have small organs of
generation" and "little sexual capacity."

Maybe if Nelson had been bigger he'd be happier. But being big
doesn't automatically make you happy. Harry was big enough, and
look at him. At times the size of his reflection in a clothingstore
mirror or plate-glass window startles him. Appalls him,
really: taking up all that space in the world. He pushes on for a
few more pages:
Expectation of lucrative commerce . . . Combat
at sea . . . tangled issue . . . increased tension . . . neutral
bottoms . . . French vigorously . . . Debate in the provincial
states . . . Unlimited convoy would become another test of ego as
a
casus belli. He rereads this last sentence twice before
realizing he has no idea what it means, his brain is making those
short-circuit connections as in dreams. He turns out the
light. This conjures up a thin crack of light under the door like a
phosphorescent transmitter, emitting sounds. He hears Janice and
Pru murmuring, a clink of glass, a footstep, and then a buzzer
rasping, and hasty footsteps, a woman's voice in the nervous pitch
you use for talking over a loudspeaker, not trusting it, and then
in a later fold of his restless, distended consciousness the door
opening, Nelson's voice, deep among the women's, and most dreamlike
of all, laughter, all of them laughing.