Rabbit at rest (22 page)

He laughs, superior. "They're called lines, Mom, if you snort
them. You chop up this powder with a razor blade on a mirror
usually and make them into lines about an eighth of an inch wide
and an inch or two long. You inhale them into your nose with a
straw or a glass tooter you can buy at these places down in Brewer
near the bridge. Some of the guys use a rolled-up dollar
bill; if say it's a hundred-dollar bill, that's considered
cool." He smiles, remembering these crisp, glittering procedures,
among friends in their condos and apartments in the high
northeastern section of Brewer, backing up to Mt. Judge.

His mother asks, "Does Pru do this with you?"

His face clouds. "She used to, but then stopped when she was
pregnant with Roy, and then didn't take it up again. She's become
quite rigid. She says it destroys people."

"Is she right?"

"Some people. But not really. Those people would have gone under
to something. Like I say, it's better for you physically than
alcohol. You can do a line at work quick in the john and nobody can
tell the difference, except you feel like Superman. Sell like
Superman, too. When you feel irresistible, you're hard to resist."
He laughs again, showing small grayish teeth like hers. His face is
small like hers, as if not wanting to put too much up front where
the world can damage it. Whereas Harry in his middle age has
swelled, his face a moon above it all. People down here, these
smart Jews, like to kid him and take advantage, like the three in
that foursome.

She touches her upper lip with her tongue, not certain where to
take this interview now. She knows she will not be able to pry
Nelson this open soon again. He is flying back tomorrow afternoon,
to make a New Year's party. She asks, "Do you do crack, too?"

He becomes more guarded. He lights a Camel and throws his head
back to drink the last of the coffee. A nerve in his temple is
twitching, under the gray transparent skin. "Crack's just coke
that's been freebased for you - little pebbles, they call
them rock. You smoke them in a kind of pipe, usually." He gestures;
smoke loops around his face. "It's a nice quick lift, quicker than
snorting. But then you crash quicker. You need more. You get in a
run."

"You do this, then. Smoke crack."

"I've been known to. What's the diff? It's handy, it's all over
the street these last couple years, it's dirt cheap, what with the
competition between the gangs. Fifteen, even ten dollars a rock.
They call it candy. Mom, it's no big
deal. People
your age
are superstitious about drugs but it's just a way of relaxing, of
getting your kicks. People since they lived in caves have had to
have their kicks. Opium, beer, smack, pot - it's all been
around for ages. Coke's the cleanest of them all, and the people
who use it are successful by and large. It
keeps
them
successful, actually. It keeps them sharp."

Her hand has come to rest on her own bare foot there on the sofa
cushion. She gives her toes a squeeze, and spreads them to feel air
between. "Well you see how stupid I am," she says. "I thought it
was all through the slums and behind most of the crime we read
about."

"The papers exaggerate. They exaggerate everything, just to sell
papers. The government exaggerates, to keep our minds off what
morons they are."

She bleakly nods. Daddy used to hate it, when people blamed the
government. She unfolds first one leg, resting her heel on the
round glass table, and then brings the other parallel, so the bare
calves touch; she arches her brown, tendony insteps as if to invite
admiration. Her legs still look young, and her face never did. She
jackknifes her legs down and sets her feet on the rug, all business
again. "Let me heat up the coffee. And wouldn't you like to split
that stale Danish with me? Just to keep it out ofyour father's
stomach?"

"You can have it all," he tells her. "Pru doesn't let me eat
junk like that." Janice finds this rude. She's his mother, not Pru.
As she stands in the kitchen waiting for the coffee to heat, Nelson
calls in to her comfortably, finding another subject, "Here's an
off duty assistant fire chief hit a motorcycle with his blinkers
and siren on - probably stoned. And they think it might rain
on New Year's."

"We need it," Janice says, returning with the Aromaster and the
Danish cut in half on a plate. "I like the weather warm, but this
December has been unreal."

"Did you notice in the kitchen what time it was?"

"Getting toward noon, why?"

"I was thinking what a pain in the ass it is to have only one
car down here. If nobody minds, when they get back, I could run
some errands."

"What sort of errands would they be?"

"You know. Stuff at the drugstore. I could do with some Sominex.
Roy has a rash from leaving his wet bathing suit on after swimming
in all that chlorine; isn't there some ointment I could get
him?"

"You wouldn't be going back to the people you were with in the
fish restaurant the night before last? People who can sell you some
lines, or rocks, or whatever you call them?"

"Come on, Mom, don't play detective. You can't grill me, I'm an
adult. I'm sorry I told you half of what I did."

"You didn't tell me what really interests me, which is how much
this habit is costing you."

"Not much, honest. Do you know, computers and cocaine are about
the only items in the economy that are coming down in price? In the
old days it cost a fortune, nobody but pop musicians could afford
it, and now you can get a whole gram for a lousy seventy-five
dollars. Of course, you don't know how much it's been cut, but you
learn to get a dealer you can trust."

"Did you have any this morning? Before you came out ofyour
bedroom to face me?"

"Hey, give me a break. I'm trying to be honest, but this is
ridiculous."

"I think you did," she says, stubbornly.

He disappoints her by not denying even this. Children, why are
they afraid of us? "Maybe a sniff of what was left over in the
envelope, to get me started. I don't like this idea of Dad taking
Judy off on a little sailboat - he can't sail for shit, and
seems sort of dopey anyway these days. He seems depressed, have you
noticed?"

"I can't notice everything at once. What I do notice about you,
Nelson, is that you're not at all yourself. You're in what my
mother used to call a state. This dealer you trust so much, do you
owe him any money? How much?"

"Mom, is that any business of yours?"

He is enjoying this, she sadly perceives; he is glad to have it
wormed out of him, and to place his shameful burden on her. He
shows relief in just the way his voice is loosening, the way his
shoulders sag in his fancy paisley bathrobe. She tells him, "Your
money comes from the lot and the lot's not yours yet; it's mine,
mine and your father's."

"Yeah, in a pig's eye it's his."

"How much money, Nelson?"

"There's a credit line I've developed, yeah."

"Why can't you pay your bills? You get forty-five thousand
a year, plus the house."

"I know to your way of thinking that's a lot of jack, but
you're

thinking in pre-inflation dollars."

"You say this coke is seventy-five a gram or ten dollars a
rock. How many grams or rocks can you use a day? Tell me, honey,
because I want to help you."

"You do? What kind of help?"

"I can't say unless I know what kind of trouble you're in."

He hesitates, then states, "I owe maybe twelve grand."

"Oh, my." Janice feels an abyss at her feet; she had envisioned
this conversation as confession and repentance and, at the end, her
generous saving offer of a thousand or two. The ease with which he
named a much bigger figure indicates a whole new scale of things.
"How could you do it, Nelson?" she asks lamely, limply, all of
Bessie Springer's righteous stiffness scared out of her.

Nelson's pale little face, sensing her shock, begins to panic,
to get pink. "What's such a big deal? Twelve grand is less than a
stripped Camry costs. What do you think your liquor bill runs to a
year?"

"Nothing like that. Your father has never been a drinker, though
back in the Murkett days he used to try."

"Those Murkett days - you know what was in them for him,
doncha? Getting into Cindy Murkett's pants, that's all he cared
about."

Janice stares and almost laughs. How young he is, how long ago
that was, and how different from what Nelson thinks. She feels a
hollowness spreading inside her. She wishes she had something to
sip, a little orange juice glass of blood-red Campari, not
weakened by soda the way the women down here like to have
spritzers, for luncheon or out by the pool. Her half of the
cherryfilled Danish feels heavy on her stomach and now in her
nervousness she can't stop picking the sugar icing off Nelson's
half. His refusal to eat - his acting so superior to the mild
poisons she and Harry like - is the most annoying thing about
him. She tells him, stiffly, "Whatever our bill is,
we pay it.
We have the
money and can afford
it."
She holds
out
a hand toward him and twiddles two fingers. "Could I
bum one cigarette?"

"You don't smoke," he tells her.

"I don't, except when I'm around you and your wife." He shrugs
and takes his pack of Camels from the table and tosses it toward
her. Their complicity is complete now. The lightness of it all
- the cigarette itself, the dry tingling in her nostrils as
she exhales - restores matters to a scale that she can
manage. She asks, "What do these men do, these dealers, when you
don't pay?" She could bite her lips - she has gone over into
his territory, where he is an innocent victim.

"Oh," he says, enjoying posing as casually brave, shaping the
ash of his cigarette on the edge of a lovely Macoma tellin he uses
as an ashtray, "it's mostly talk. They say they'll break your legs.
Threaten to kidnap your kids. Maybe that's what makes me so nervous
about Judy and Roy. If they threaten you often enough, they have to
do something eventually. But, then, they don't like to lose a good
customer. It's like the banks. You owe enough, they want to keep
you in business."

Janice says, "Nelson. If I gave you the twelve thousand, would
you swear off drugs for good?" She strives to make eye contact.

She expects at least an eager vow from him to cinch her gift,
but the boy has the audacity, the shamelessness, to sit there and
say, without giving her a glance, "I could try, but I can't
honestly promise. I've tried before, to please Pru. I love coke,
Mom. And it loves me. I can't explain it. It's right for me. It
makes me feel right, in a way nothing else does. It's like the
bank. You owe enough, they want to keep you in business."

She finds herself crying, without sobs, just the dry-straw
ache in the throat and the wetness on her cheeks, as if a husband
were calmly confessing his love for another woman. When she gets
her voice together enough to speak she says, clearly enough, "Well
then I'd be foolish to contribute to your ruining yourself."

He turns his head and looks her full in the face. "I'll give it
up, sure. I was just thinking out loud."

"But, baby, can you?"

"Cinchy. I often go days without a hit. There's no withdrawal,
is one of the beautiful things - no heaves, no DTs, nothing.
It's just a question of making up your mind."

"But is your mind made up? I don't get the feeling it is."

"Sure it is. Like you say, I can't afford it. You and Dad own
the lot, and I'm your wage slave."

"That's a way of putting it. Another way might be that we've
bent Over backwards to give you a responsible job, heading things
up, without our interference. Your father's very bored down here.
Even I'm a little bored."

Nelson takes an abrupt new tack. "Pru's no help, you know," he
says.

"She isn't?"

"She thinks I'm a wimp. She always did. I was the way out of
Akron and now she's out. I get none of the things a man's supposed
to get from a wife."

"What are those?" Janice is truly interested; she has never
heard a man spell them out.

He makes a cross evasive face. "You know - don't play
naive. Reassurance. Affection. Make the guy think he's great even
if he isn't. "

"I may be naive, Nelson, but aren't there things we can only do
for ourselves? Women have their own egos to keep up, they have
their own problems." She hasn't been attending a weekly women's
discussion group down here for nothing. She feels indignant enough,
independent enough, to get up and march into the kitchen and open
the cabinet doors and pull down the Campari bottle and an orange
juice glass. The aqua-enamelled clock on the stove says
12:25. The phone right beside her on the wall rings, startling her
so that the bottle jumps in her hand and some of the Campari
spills, watery red on the Formica counter, like thinned blood.

"Yes . . . yes . . . oh my God. . ." Nelson, sitting in the
wicker chair planning his next move and wondering if twelve thou
was too little to ask for, it sure as hell is less than he owes,
hears his mother's voice make each response with a tightened
breathlessness, and sees by her face when she hangs up and
hurries toward him that the scale of things has changed; a new
order has dawned. His mother's Florida tan has fled, leaving her
face a greenish gray. "Nelson," she says, speaking as efficiently
as a newscaster, "that was Pru. Your father's had a heart attack.
They've taken him to the hospital. They're coming right back so I
can have the car. No point in your coming, he isn't allowed any
visitors except me, and then for only five minutes every hour. He's
in intensive care."

The Deleon Community General Hospital is a modern set of low
white buildings added onto a bisque-colored core, dating from
the Thirties, with a Spanish-tile roof and curved grillework
at the windows. The complex fills two blocks on the southern side
of Tamarind Avenue, which runs parallel to Pindo Palm Boulevard
about a mile to the north. Janice spent most of yesterday
here, so she knows the way into the parking garage, and which
arrows painted on the floor to follow out of the parking garage,
across a glass-enclosed second-story pedestrian bridge,
which takes them above the parking-garage ticket booths and a
breadth ofbusy asphalt and a hexagonal-tiled patio with arcs
of oleander hedge and of convalescents in glinting steel
wheelchairs, and down a halfflight of stairs into a lobby
where street-people, multiracial but the whites among them
dyed on hands and face a deep outdoorsy brown, doze beside the
neatly tied bundles and plastic garbage bags containing all their
possessions. The lobby smells of oleander, urine, and air
freshener.