Rabbit at rest (35 page)

"Boobs," Charlie says. "Great boobs. On a skinny body. That's
sexy. Like Bo Derek after her implant."

"Her hair is what gets me. Tall as she is, she adds six inches
with that hairdo."

"Tall isn't bad. The tall ones don't get the play the cute
little short ones do, and do more for you. Also, being skinny has
its advantages, there's not all that fat to come between you and
the clitoris."

This may be more male bonding than Rabbit needs. He says, "But
all those earrings, don't they look painful? And is it true some
punk girls -"

Charlie interrupts impatiently, "Pain is where it's at for
punks. Mutilation, self-hatred, slam dancing. For these kids
today, ugly is beautiful. That's their way of saying what a lousy
world we're giving them. No more rain forests. Toxic waste. You
know the drill."

"When I came back this spring, I went driving around the city,
all the sections. Some of these Hispanics were practically screwing
on the street."

"Drugs," Charlie says. "They don't know what they're doing
four-fifths of the time."

"Did you see in the
Standard, some
spic truck driver
from West Miami was caught over near Maiden Springs with they
estimate seventy-five million dollars' worth of cocaine, five
hundred kilos packed in orange crates marked `Fragile'?"

"They can't stop dope," Charlie says, aligning his knife and
fork on the edge of his empty plate, "as long as people are willing
to pay a fortune for it."

"The guy was a Cuban refugee evidently, one of those we let
in."

"These countries go Communist, they let us have all their crooks
and crackpots." Charlie's tone is level and authoritative, but
Harry feels he's losing him. It's not quite like the old days, when
they had all day to kill, over in the showroom. Charlie has
finished his Spinach and Crab and Rabbit has barely made a dent in
his own heaping salad, he's so anxious to get advice. He gets a
slippery forkful into his mouth and finds among the oily lettuce
and alfalfa sprouts a whole macadamia nut, and delicately splits it
with his teeth, so his tongue feels the texture of the fissure,
miraculously smooth, like a young woman's body, like a marble
tabletop.

When he swallows, he gets out, "That's the other thing preying
on my mind. I think Nelson is into cocaine."

Charlie nods and says, "So I hear." He picks up the fork he's
just aligned and reaches over with it toward Harry's big breast of
bacon-garnished greenery. "Let me help you out with all that,
champ."

"You've heard he's into cocaine?"

"Mm. Yeah. He's like his granddad, jumpy. He needs crutches. I
never found the kid easy to deal with."

"Me neither," Harry says eagerly, and it comes tumbling out. "I
went over there last week to have it out with him about cocaine,
I'd just got wind of it, and he was off somewhere, he usually is,
but this accountant he's hired, a guy dying of AIDS would you
believe, was there and when I asked to look at the books just about
gave me the up-yours sign and said I had to get Janice's
sayso. And she, the dumb mutt, doesn't want to give it. I think
she's scared ofwhat she'll find out. Her own kid robbing her blind.
The used sales are down, the monthly stat sheets have been looking
fishy to me for months."

"You'd know. Doesn't sound good," Charlie agrees, reaching again
with his fork. A macadamia nut - each one nowadays costs
about a quarter - escapes in Harry's direction and only his
quick reflexes prevent it from falling into his lap and staining
with salad oil the russet slacks he took out of the cleaner's bag
and put on for the first time today, the first spring day that's
felt really warm. The sudden motion gives him a burning pang behind
his rib cage. That evil child is still playing with matches in
there.

He tries to ignore the pain and goes on, "And now we get these
phone calls at funny hours, guys with funny voices asking for
Nelson or even telling me they want money."

"They play rough," Charlie says. "Dope is big business." He
reaches once more.

"Hey, leave me something. How do you stay so skinny? So what
shall I do?"

"Maybe Janice should talk to Nelson."

"That's just what I told her."

"Well then."

"But the bitch won't. At least she hasn't so far that I know
of."

"This is good," Charlie says, "this health stuff, but it's all
like Chinese food, it doesn't fill you up."

"So what did you say your verdict was?"

"Sometimes, between a husband and wife, all the history gets in
the way. Want me to sound old Jan Jan out, see where's she's coming
from?"

Harry hesitates hardly at all before saying, "Charlie, if you
could, that would be super."

"Would you gentlemen like some dessert?"

Jennifer has materialized. Turning his head in surprise at the
sound of her sweetly impeded voice, Harry sees, inches from his
eyes, that Charlie as usual is right: great boobs, gawky and
selfhating as the rest of her is. Her parents must have put a lot
of protein, a lot of Cheenos and vitamin-enriched bread, into
those boobs. In his fragile freighted mood they seem two more
burdens on his brain. The stretched chest of her green jumper lifts
as she takes in breath to say, "Today our special is a cheesecake
made from low-fat goat's milk topped with delicious creamed
gooseberries."

Rabbit, his eyebrows still raised by the waitress's breasts,
looks over at Charlie. "Whaddeyou think?"

Charlie shrugs unhelpfully. "It's your funeral."

The phone is ringing, ringing, like thrilling cold water poured
into the mossy warm crevices of his dream. He was dreaming of
snuggling into something, of having found an aperture that just
fit. The phone is on Janice's side; he gropes for it across her
stubbornly sleeping body and, with a throat dry from
mouthbreathing, croaks, "Hello?" The bedside clock seems to have
only one hand until he figures out it's ten minutes after two. He
expects one of those men's voices and tells himself they should
take the phone off the hook downstairs whenever they go to bed. His
heart's pounding seems to fill the dark room to its corners,
suffocatingly.

A tremulous young woman's voice says, "Harry? It's Pru.

Forgive me for waking you up, but I -" Shame, fear trip her
voice into silence. She feels exposed.

"Yeah, go on," he urges softly.

"I'm desperate. Nelson has gone crazy, he's already hit me and
I'm afraid he'll start in on the children!"

"Really?" he says stupidly. "Nelson wouldn't do that." But
people do it, it's in the papers, all the time.

"Who on earth is it?" Janice asks irritably, yanked from her own
dreams. "Tell them you have no money. Just hang up."

Pru is sobbing, on the end of the line, ". . . can't
stand
it any more . . . it's been such hell . . . for
years."

"Yeah, yeah," Harry says, still feeling stupid. "Here's Janice,"
he says, and passes the hot potato into her fumbling hand, out from
under the covers. His sudden window into Pru, the hot bright
unhappy heart of her, felt illicit. He switches on his bedside
light, as if that will help clear this all up. The white jacket of
the history book he is still trying to get through, with its
clipper ship in an oval of cloud and sea, leaps up shiny under the
pleated lampshade. Since he began reading the book last Christmas
afternoon, the author herself has died, putting a kind of blight on
the book. Yet he feels it would be bad luck never to finish it.

"Yes," Janice is saying into the phone, at wide intervals. "Yes.
Did he really? Yes." She says, "We'll be right over. Stay away from
him. What about going into Judy's room with her and locking
yourselves in? Mother had a bolt put on the door, it must be still
there."

Still Pru's voice crackles on, like an acid eating into the
night's silence, the peace that had been in the room ten minutes
before. Bits of his interrupted dream come back to him. A visit to
some anticipated place, on a vehicle like a trolley car, yes, it
had been an old-time trolley car, the tight weave of cane
seats, he had forgotten how they looked, the way they smelled
warmed by the sun, and the porcelain loops to hang from, the
porcelain buttons to press, the dusty wire grates at the windows,
the air and light coming in, on old-fashioned straw hats, the
women with paper flowers in theirs, all heading somewhere gay, an
amusement park, a fair, who was with him? There had been a
companion, a date, on the seat beside him, but he can't come up
with her face. The tunnel of love. The trolley car turned into
something carrying them, him, into a cozy tunnel of love. It
fit.

"Could the neighbors help?"

More crackling, more sobbing. Rabbit gives Janice the "cut"
signal you see on TV - a finger across the throat - and
gets out of bed. The aroma of his old body lifts toward him as he
rests his bare feet on the carpet, a stale meaty cheesy scent.
Their bedroom in the limestone house has pale-beige Antron
broadloom; a houseful of unpatterned wall-to-wall
seemed snug and modern to him when they ordered it all, but in
their ten years of living here certain spots -inside the
front door, the hall outside the door down to the cellar, the
bedroom on either side of the bed - have collected dirt from
shoes and sweat from feet and turned a gray no rug shampoo could
remove, a grimy big fingerprint your life has left. Patterned
carpets like people had when he was a boy - angular flowers
and vines and mazes he would follow with his eyes until he felt
lost in a jungle - swallowed the dirt somehow, and then the
housewives up and down Jackson Road would beat it out of them this
time of year, on their back-yard clotheslines, making little
swirling clouds in the cool April air, disappearing into the dust
of the world. He collects clean underwear and socks from the bureau
and then is a bit stumped, what to wear to an assault. Formal, or
rough and ready? Harry's brain is skidding along like a surfer on
the pumping of his heart.

"Hi honey," Janice is saying in another tone, high-pitched
and grandmotherly. "Don't be scared. We all love you. Your daddy
loves you, yes he does, very much. Grandpa and I are coming right
over. You must let us get dressed now so we can do that. It'll take
just twenty minutes, honey. We'll hurry, yes. You be good till then
and do whatever your mother says." She hangs up and stares at Harry
from beneath her skimpy rumpled bangs. "My God," she says. "He
punched Pru in the face and smashed up everything in the bathroom
when he couldn't find some cocaine he thought he hid in there that
he wanted."

"He wants, he wants," Harry says.

"He told her we're all stealing from him."

"Ha," Harry says, meaning it's the reverse.

Janice says, "How can you laugh when it's your own son?"

Who is this woman, this little nut-hard woman, to chasten
him? Yet he feels chastened. He doesn't answer but instead says in
a measured, mature manner, "Well, it's probably good this is coming
to a head, if we all survive it. It gets it out in the open at
least."

She puts on what she never wears in the daylight up north, her
salmon running suit with the powder-blue sleeves and stripe.
He opts for a pair of pressed chinos fresh from the drawer and the
khaki shirt he puts on to do light yard chores, and his oldest
jacket, a green wide-wale corduroy with leather buttons: kind
of a casual Saturday-afternoon look. Retirement has made them
both more clothes-conscious than before; in Florida, the
retirees play dress-up every day, as if they've become their
own paper dolls.

They take the slate-gray Celica, the more Batmobilelike
and steely car, on this desperate mission in the dead of the night.
Along the stilled curving streets of Penn Park, the oaks are just
budding but the maples are filling in, no longer red in tint but
dense with translucent tender new leaves. The houses have an
upstairs night light on here and there, or a back-porch light
to keep cats and raccoons away from the garbage, but only the
streetlamps compete with the moon. The trimmed large bushes of the
groomed yards, the yews and arborvitae and rhododendrons, look
alert by night, like jungle creatures come to the waterhole to
drink and caught in a camera's flash. It seems strange to think
that while we sleep these bushes are awake, exhaling oxygen,
growing; they do not sleep. Stars do not sleep, but above the
housetops and trees crowns shine in a cold arching dusty sprinkle.
Why do we sleep? What do we rejoin? His dream, the way it fit him
all around. At certain angles the lit asphalt feels in the corners
of his eyes like snow. Penn Park becomes West Brewer and a car or
two is still awake and moving on blanched deserted Penn Boulevard,
an extension of Weiser with a supermarket parking lot on one side
and on the other a low brick row of shops from the Thirties, little
narrow stores selling buttons and bridal gowns and pastry and Zipf
Chocolates and Sony TVs and hobby kits to make model airplanes with
- they still manufacture and sell those in this era when all
the kids are supposedly couch potatoes and all the planes are these
wallowing wide-body jets with black noses like panda bears,
not sleek killing machines like Zeros, Messerschmitts, Spitfires,
Mustangs. Funny to think that with all that world-war effort
manufacturers still had the O.K. to make those little models,
keeping up morale in the kiddie set. All the shops are asleep. A
flower shop shows a violet growing light, and a pet store a dimly
lit aquarium. The cars parked along the curbs display a range of
unearthly colors, no longer red and blue and cream but cindery
lunar shades, like nothing you can see or even imagine by
daylight.

Harry pops a nitroglycerin pill and tells Janice accusingly,
"The doctors say I should avoid aggravation."

"It wasn't me who woke us up at two in the morning, it was your
daughter-in-law."