Rabbit at rest (17 page)

Judy continues to stare at the screen and ply her channel
changer. "Just the first part of
L.A. Law,"
she promises,
but flicks instead to an ABC news special about "American Kids
- Their Diet of Danger." In their bedroom Janice is reading
Elle,
looking at the pictures, of superslim models looking
stoned.

` Janice," he says. "I have something to ask you."

"What? Don't get me stirred up, I'm reading to make myself
sleepy."

"Today," he says. "In that crowd going through the Edison place:
Did I look as though I fit in?"

It takes her a while to shift her focus; then she sees what he
wants. "Of course not, Harry. You looked much younger than the
other men. You looked like one of their sons, visiting."

He decides this is as much reassurance as he dare ask for. "At
least," he agrees with her, "I wasn't in a wheelchair." He reads a
few pages of history, about the fight between the
Bonhomme
Richard
and the
Serapis,
and how when amid the bloody
explosions his chief gunner cried out "Quarter! quarter! for God's
sake!" John Paul Jones
hurled a pistol at the man, felling him.
But the cry had been heard by Pearson, the
Serapis'
commander, who called, "Do you ask for quarter?" Through the
clash of battle, gunshot and crackle offire the famous reply came
faintly back to him: "I have not yet begun to fight!"
The
victorious American ship was so damaged it sank the next day,
and Jones took the captured
Serapis,
shorn of its mast,
into Holland,
exacerbating the British resentment that already
existed.
All this fury and bravery seems more wasted effort.
Rabbit feels as if the human race is a vast colorful jostling
bristling parade in which he is limping and falling behind.
He settles the book on the night table and switches off the lamp.
The bar of light beneath the door transmits distant shots and
shouts from some TV show, any TV show. He falls asleep with unusual
speed, with scarcely a turn into his pillow. His arms, which
usually get in the way, fold themselves up like pieces of blanket.
His dreams include one in which he has come to a door, a door with
a round top to it, and pushes at it. The glass door at McDonald's
except that one you could see the hamburger head through. In his
dream he knows there is a presence on the other side, a presence he
dreads, hungry and still, but pushes nevertheless, and the dread
increases with the pressure, so much that he awakes, his bladder
aching to go to the bathroom. He can't get through the night any
more. His prostate or his bladder, losing stretch like goldenrod
rubber. His mistake was drinking a Schhtz while
channel-surfing with Judy. Falling asleep again is not so
easy, with Janice's deep breathing now and then dipping into a
rasping snore just as he begins to relax and his brain to generate
nonsense. The luminous bar beneath the door is gone but a kind of
generalized lavender light, the light that owls and other animals
of the night see to kill by, picks out the planes and big objects
of the bedroom. A square bureau holds the glassy rectangle of
Nelson's high-school graduation photo; a fat pale chair holds
on one arm Harry's discarded linen trousers, the folds of cloth
suggesting a hollow-eyed skull stretched like chewing gum.
Air admitted from the balcony under the folds of the drawn curtain
grazes his face. A way of going to sleep is to lie on your back and
try to remember the dream you were having. Unease seizes him like a
great scalyfooted parrot claw and puts him down again on his face.
The next thing he knows he is hearing the mowing machines on the
golf course, and the stirred-up seagulls weeping.

The lobby of the Omni Bayview, entered from under a wide maroon
marquee through sliding glass doors tinted opaque like limousine
windows, knocks you out, virtually blinds you with its towering
space and light, its great prismatic chandelier and splashing
fountain and high rear wall of plate glass flooded with the view of
Deleon Bay: beach in the foreground and sea like a scintillating
blue-green curtain hung from a horizon line strung between
two pegs of land, rich men's islands. "Wow," Judy breathes at
Harry's side. Pru and Roy, coming behind them, say nothing; but the
shuffle of their sandals slows and hushes. They feel like four
trespassers. The woman at the black-marble front desk is an
exotic color, her skin mixed of Negro and Indian or Oriental tints
and stretched tight over her cheekbones and nosebone; her eyelids
have been painted a metallic green and her earlobes covered by
ribbed shells of gold.

Harry is so awed he makes a mistake in uttering the magic name
of admission, saying "Silberstein."

The woman blinks her amazing metallic lids, then graciously
tells him, "You must mean Mr. Silvers. He is this morning's beach
supervisor." With merciful disdain she directs them across the
lobby, her ringed hand gesturing like a Balinese dancer's, without
letting go of a slim gold pen. He leads his little party into the
vast air-conditioned space, across a floor of black marble
inset with strips of brass that radiate out like rays of the sun
from an aluminum fountain suggesting a pipe organ, beneath a remote
ceiling of hanging rectangles of gilded metal like those glittering
strips farmers hang to-scare away birds. A flight of downward
stairs is marked To POOL AND BEACH in solemn letters such as you
see on post-office facades. After taking a wrong turn in the
milky-green terrazzo corridors on the ground floor and
confronting a door marked STAFF ONLY, Harry and his group find Ed
Silberstein's son Gregg in a glassed-in, straw-matted
area on the way to the hotel swimming pool - pools, since
Harry sees there are three, fitted together like the blobs in an
intelligence test, one for waders, one for divers, and a long one
marked in lanes. Gregg is a curlyhaired man brown as an Arab from
being off and on the beach all day. In little black elastic
European-style trunks and a hooded sweatshirt bearing the
five-sided Omni logo, he stands less tall than his father,
and his inherited sharp-chinned accountant's jaw has been
softened by a mother's blood and a job of holiday facilitation He
smiles, showing teeth as white as Ed's but rounder: Ed's were so
square they looked false, but Harry has never seen them slip. When
Gregg speaks, his voice seems too young for his age; his curls hold
bits of gray and his smile rouses creases in the sunbeaten face. He
shouldn't still be horsing around on the 'beach.

"My father said you'd be coming. This is Mrs. Angstrom?" He
means Pru, who has come instead of Janice, who after all that
tramping around yesterday wanted to stay home and catch up on her
errands and go to her aerobics class and bridge group and spend a
little time with Nelson before he goes home. Harry is stunned that
Ed's son could make this blunder but then thinks he must deal all
the time with men in advanced middle age who have younger wives.
And anyway Pru is no longer that young. Tall and fairskinned like
he is, she might well be his.

"Thanks for the compliment, Gregg," Harry says, pretty smoothly,
considering, "but this is my daughter-in-law, Teresa."
Teresa, Pru - she is like him even in having two names, an
inner and an outer. "And these are my two handsome grandchildren,
Judy and Roy."

Gregg tells Judy, "So you're the one who wants to be a sailor
girl."

Her eyes when she lifts them to Gregg's face flood here by the
pools with a skyey light that washes out their green and makes her
pupils small as pencil leads. "Sort of."

Moving and speaking in a relaxed thorough way that suggests his
whole day could happily be devoted to them, Ed's son leads them
back into the terrazzo corridors and arranges for locker keys for
them with a boy at a desk - a young black with his hair
shaved into one of those muffin-tops they do now, an ugly
style, with bald sides - and then leads them to the
locker-room doors, and tells them how to exit directly onto
the beach, where he will meet them and manage the Sunfish rentals.
"How much do I owe you for all this?" Harry asks,
half-expecting it will be free, arranged for by Ed in
compensation for the twenty Harry dropped to him at Wednesday's
golf.

But Gregg sheds a little amiability and says, "The boats are
exclusively for the use of hotel guests and get included in their
charges, but I think about a hundred twenty for the four of you
would cover it, with the lockers and beach access and two Sunfish
for an hour each."

Pru speaks up. "We don't want two. I'd be terrified."

He looks her up and down and says with a new thrust in his
voice, a little friendly lean in from a guy who deals with a lot of
women in this job, "No need to be terrified, Teresa. They can't
sink, and lifesavers are compulsory. Worst case and you feel you
have no control, just let go of the sail and we'll come out for you
in the launch."

"Thanks but no thanks," Pru says, a bit perkily Harry thinks,
but, then, she and this guy are about the same age. Baby boomers.
Rock and roll, dope,
Leave It to Beaver,
physical fitness.
And wait till they discover they both come from Ohio.

Gregg Silvers turns to him and says, "Ninety should about do it,
then."

The sum seems an invitation to tip him ten, but Harry wonders if
this wouldn't be insulting, since he is here as a family friend,
and waits for Gregg to fetch the bill from the muffin-topped
boy at the desk. When Rabbit and Roy are alone in the locker room,
he tells the child, "Jesus, Roy, that just about cleaned out poor
old Grandpa's wallet!"

Roy looks up at him with frightened inky eyes. "Will they put us
in jail?" he asks, his voice high and precise, like wind
chimes.

Harry laughs. "Where'd you get that idea?"

"Daddy hates jail."

"Well who doesn't!" Harry says, wondering if the child is quite
right in the head. Roy doesn't understand you should loosen the
string of bathing trunks to pull them on, and while he fumbles and
struggles his little penis sticks straight out, no longer than it
is thick, cute as a button mushroom. He is circumcised. Rabbit
wonders what his own life would have been like if he had been
circumcised. The issue comes up now and then in the newspapers.
Some say the foreskin is like an eyelid; without it the constantly
exposed glans becomes less sensitive, it gets thick-skinned
and dull rubbing against cloth all the time. A letter he once read
in a skin magazine was from a guy who got circumcised in midwife
and found his sexual pleasure and responsiveness went so far down
his circumcised life was hardly worth living. If Harry had been
less responsive he might have been a more dependable person.
Getting a hard-on you can feel the foreskin sweetly tug back,
like freezing cream lifting the paper cap on the old-time
milk bottles. From the numb look of his prick Roy will be a solid
citizen. His grandfather reaches down a hand to lead him out to the
beach.

Harry and Janice after their first year or two in Florida, when
in their excitement at being here they bought a telescope for the
balcony and three or four times a week would drive the two miles to
the Deleon public beach for a walk and picnic supper if not a swim,
gradually stopped visiting the Gulf. So it hits him now as
something fresh, unforeseen, this immensity of water, of air, of a
surface of flux battered into a million oscillating dents. The raw
glory of it all overpowers for a moment the nagging aches and
worries in his chest and releases him into
self-forgetfulness. Such light-struck and level
grandeur is like nothing he knew in the Pennsylvania landscape,
hemmed in by woods and hills and housetops, a land dingy with
centuries of use, where even the wild patches, the quarries and
second-growth woodland and abandoned factories and
rnineshafts, had been processed by men and discarded. Here, all
feels virgin, though in fact there is a history too, of Indians and
conquistadores and barefoot mailmen who served the
mosquito-plagued coastal settlements. On the right and left
of the horizon are islands where the millionaires used to come by
private railroad car for the tarpon fishing in April. Spanish and
French pirates once hid among these islands. Gold is still buried
in their sands. They are flat and seem very distant from where
Harry and Roy stand on the beach wall. It is all so bright, so
open, the world feels created anew, in synthetic elements.
Sailboats, windsurfing rigs, those motorcycles that buzz along on
top of the water, plastic paddleboats, and inflated rafts dot the
near water with colors gaudy as a supermarket's. A distance down
the beach, in front of another hotel, someone is flying a kite
-a linked pair of box kites that dip and dive and climb again
in unison, trailing glittering orange ribbons. For a mile in either
direction, a twinkling party of tan flesh and cloth patches is
assembling itself, grainlike live bodies laid on top of the beach
of sand.

Pru and Judy come out of the hotel to join them and they descend
concrete steps. The hour has passed ten o'clock, and at their backs
the tall hotel, shaped like an S fifteen stories high, fringed at
each story with balconies like fine-toothed red combs, still
has its face in shadow, though its shadow has shrunk back to the
innermost of its pools. The sand is freshly raked underfoot;
yesterday's footprints and plastic glasses and emptied lotion
bottles have been taken away and the wooden beach chaises stacked.
Today's sunbathers are arranging themselves and their equipment,
their towels and mystery novels (Ruth used to read those, and what
she got out of them was another mystery) and various colorcoded
numbers of sunscreen. Couples are greasing each other. Old
smoothies already the color of leather are rubbing oil into their
bald heads, the hair of their chests pure white. The smell of
lotion rises to intertwine with the odor of salt air, of dead crab,
of seaweed. As he leads his group across the sand Harry feels heads
lift and eyes behind sunglasses slide; he feels proud and strange
to be seen with this much younger woman and two small children. His
second family. Or his third or fourth. Life moves through us family
after family.