Rabbit at rest (42 page)

"Maybe l'll come in the fall if you can last it out," Mim tells
him.

"Oh I can last," he says. "You aren't going to get rid of big
brother so easy." But the connection feels strained, and he can
sense Mim groping, in the little pauses, for what to say next.
"Hey, Mim," he says. "Do you remember if Pop complained of chest
pains?"

"He had emphysema, Harry. Because he wouldn't stop smoking. You
stopped. You were smart. Me, I'm down to a pack a day. But I don't
think I ever really inhaled."

"I seem to remember him complaining of feeling full in the
chest. He'd sneak his hand inside his shirt and rub his chest."

"Maybe he itched. Harry, Pop died because he couldn't breathe.
Mom died because of her Parkinson's. I suppose their hearts failed
in the end but so does everybody's, because that's what life is, a
strain on the heart."

His little sister has become so dogmatic, everything cut and
dried. She's mad at something, too. Just like little Roy. "Hey," he
says, not wanting to let go however, "and another thing I was
wondering about. Remember how you used to always sing,
`Shoo-fly pie and apple pan dowdy?"'

"Yeah. Kind of."

"What's the line that comes after `Makes your eyes light up,
your tummy say "howdy" '?"

In the silence he can hear chatter in the background,
beautyparlor chatter, and a hair dryer whirring. "I have no fucking
idea," she says finally. "Are you sure I used to sing this
song?"

"Well, I was, but never mind. How's
your
life?" he
asks. "Any new irons in the fire? When're we going to marry you
off?"

"Harry, come off it. The only reason anybody out here'd marry an
old bag like me would be as some kind of cover. Or a tax dodge, if
the accountant could figure one."

"Speaking of accountants," he begins, and he might have told her
all about Nelson and Lyle and Janice, and the voices on the phone,
but she doesn't want to hear him; she says hurriedly, in a lowered
voice, "Harry, a real special customer has just come in, even
you've
heard of her, and I got to hang up. You take care
of yourself, now. You sound on the mend. Any time they get to be
too much for you, you can come on out here for some sun and
fun."

What sort of fun, he would have liked to ask - in the old
days she was always offering to get a girl for him if he came out
alone, though he never did - and he would have liked to have
heard more of why she thinks he is on the mend. But Mim has hung
up. She has a life to get on with. His arm hurts in its crook from
holding the phone. Ever since they invaded his arteries with dyes
and balloons, he has aches and pains in remote and random joints,
as if his blood is no longer purely his own. Once you break the cap
on a ginger-ale bottle, there is never again as much
fizz.

The nurse with the round pale face - a country kind of
face comes in Monday evening and says to him, "My mother is having
to drop something off for me tonight. Should I ask her to come up
and see you for a second?"

"Did she say she'd be willing?"
When 1 think of you thinking
she's

your daughter it's like rubbing her all over with shit,
Ruth had said the

last time they talked.

The young woman in her folded cap smiles. "I mentioned the other
night, casual-like, that you were here, and I think she would
be. She didn't say anything rude or anything." There is on her face
a trace of a blush, a simper, a secret. If something does not soon
happen to her, it will become a silly empty face. Innocence is just
an early stage of stupidity.

This has not been the best day for Harry. The sounds of traffic
and work resuming on the street outside reminded him of how out of
it he still is. Janice didn't visit, and now her evening class has
begun. All day gray clouds packed the sky, in long rolls of nimbus,
and trailed black wisps above the brick chimneys, but no rain has
actually fallen. The view from his window consists of several
intricately notched bands of ornamental brickwork capping the third
stories of narrow buildings that hold at street level a coffee
shop, a dry cleaner's, an office-supplies store. The corner
building is painted gray, the middle one blue, and the third, with
the most ornate window framing, beige. It has slowly dawned upon
the people of Brewer that you can paint over brick with any color
you choose, not just brick red. People live behind the upper
windows across the street, but though Harry faithfully stares he
has not yet been rewarded with the sight of a woman undressing, or
even of anyone coming to the window to look out. Further depressing
him, he has not been able to have a bowel movement since entering
St. Joseph's three days ago. The first day, he blamed the
awkwardness of the bedpan and his solicitude for the nurses who
would have to carry what he produced away, and the second day, the
change of diet from what he usually eats - the food the
hospital dieticians conjure up looks pretty good but tastes like
wet cardboard and chews like chaff, so bland as to shut down his
salivary glands - but on the third day, when he can wander
the halls and use the bathroom behind a closed door in his room, he
blames himself, his decrepitude, his drying up, the running down of
his inner processes. Running out of even gas.

It is strange that this girl (hardly that, she would be only
three years younger than Nelson) should
offer to
bring him
her mother, for last night he dreamed about Ruth. As the world
around him goes gray, his dreams have taken on intense color. Ruth
- Ruth as she had been, the spring they lived and slept
together, both of them twenty-six, she fleshy, cocky, pretty
in a coarse heavy careless way - was wearing a sea-blue
dress, with small white polka dots, and he was pressing his body
against it, with her body inside it, and telling her how lovely a
color it was on her, while the hair on her head glistened red,
brown, and gold, close to his eyes. Ruth had turned her head not,
he felt, in aversion from him but in natural embarrassment at the
situation, for she seemed to be living with him and Janice, all
together, and Janice was somewhere near them -upstairs,
though the furniture around them was sunstruck
floral-patterned wicker, as from their Florida condo, which
has no upstairs. His embrace of Ruth felt semi-permitted,
like an embrace of a legal relation, and his praise of her vivid
dress was meant to urge her into his own sense of well-being,
of their love being at last all right. He hid his face beside her
throat, in the curtain of her many-colored hair, and knew he
could fuck her forever, on and on, bottomlessly spilling himself
into her solid beauty. When he awoke it was with the kind of
absolute hard-on he almost never has while awake, what with
the anti-hypertensive medicine and his generally gray mood.
He saw while the dream still freshly clung to him in sky-blue
shreds that the white polka dots were the confettilike bits of
blossom that littered the sidewalk a month ago on that street of
Bradford pear trees up near Summer, where he had once lived with
Ruth, and that the splashy sunlight was what used to pour in on Ma
Springer's iron table of ferns and African violets, in the little
sunroom across the foyer from the gloomy living room. For though
the furniture of the dream was Florida, the house they were all
sharing had certainly been the old Springer manse.

Harry asks the round-faced nurse, "How much do you know
about me and your mother?"

The blush deepens a shade. "Oh, nothing. She never lets on about
the time before she settled down with my father." It now sounds
rather conventional, Ruth's time as a single woman; but at the time
she was beyond the pale, a lost soul scandalous to the narrow world
of Mt. Judge. "I figure you were a special friend."

"Maybe not that special," Harry tells her.

He feels bad, because there is nothing much she can say to that,
his lie, just stand there polite with her puffy upper lip, a nurse
being patient with a patient. He is leaving her out on a limb. He
loves her; love flows through him like a blind outpouring, an
anesthesia. He tells his possible daughter, "Look, it's a cute
idea, but if she came up it would be because you asked her to
rather than she wanted to on her own, and, frankly, Annabelle"
- he has never called her by her name before - "I'd
just as soon she didn't see me like this. You say she's lost weight
and looks snappy. I'm fat and a medical mess. Maybe she'd be too
much for me."

The girl's face returns to being pale and prim. Boundaries have
been restored, just as he's getting to feel paternal. "Very well,"
Annabelle says. "I'll tell her you've been released, if she
asks."

"Might she ask? Wait. Don't get prissy. Tell me, why did you
want to get us together?"

"You seem so interested in her. Your face comes to life when I
mention her."

"It does? Maybe it's looking at you that does it." He dares go
on, "I've been wondering, though, if you should still be living
with her. Maybe you ought to get out from under her wing."

"I did, for a while. I didn't like it. Living alone is tough.
Men can get nasty."

"Can we really? I'm sorry to hear it."

Her face softens into a dear smile, that curls her upper lip at
the edges and buckles the plump part in the middle. "Anyway, she
says just what you say. But I like it, for now. It's not like she's
my mother any more, she's a roommate. Believe me, bad things can
happen to women who live alone in this city. Brewer isn't New York
but it isn't Penn Park, either."

Of course. She can read his address right off the chart at the
foot of the bed. To her he is one of those Penn Park snobs he
himself has always resented. "Brewer's a rugged town," he agrees,
sinking back into his pillow. "Always was. Coal and steel. Bars and
cathouses all along the railroad tracks right through the middle of
the city, when I was young." He glances away, at the ornamental
brickwork, the hurrying dry dark clouds. He tells his nurse, "You
know best how to live your own life. Tell your mother, if she asks,
that maybe we'll meet some other time." Under the pear trees, in
Paradise.

Lying there these days, Harry thinks fondly of those dead
bricklayers who bothered to vary their rows at the top of the three
buildings across the street with such festive patterns of recess
and protrusion, diagonal and upright, casting shadows in different
ways at different times of the day, these men of another century up
on their scaffold, talking Pennsylvania Dutch among themselves, or
were Italians doing all the masonry even then? Lying here thinking
of all the bricks that have been piled up and knocked down and
piled up again on the snug square streets that lift toward Mt.
Judge, he tries to view his life as a brick of sorts, set in place
with a slap in 1933 and hardening ever since, just one life in rows
and walls and blocks of lives. There is a satisfaction in such an
overview, a faint far-off communal thrill, but hard to
sustain over against his original and continuing impression that
Brewer and all the world beyond are just frills on himself, like
the lace around a plump satin valentine, himself the heart of the
universe, like the Dalai Lama, who in the news lately - Tibet
is still restless, after nearly forty years of Chinese rule -
was reported to have offered to resign. But the offer was greeted
with horror by his followers, for whom the Dalai Lama can no more
resign godhood than Harry can resign selfhood.

He watches a fair amount of television. It's right there, in
front of his face; its wires come out of the wall behind him, just
like oxygen. He finds that facts, not fantasies, are what he wants:
the old movies on cable AMC seem stiff and barky in their harshly
lit black and white, and the old TV shows on NIK impossibly tinny
with their laugh tracks and spray-set Fifties hairdos, and
even the incessant sports (rugby from Ireland, curling from Canada)
a waste of his time, stories told people with time to kill, where
he has time left only for truth, the truth of DSC or Channel 12,
MacNeilLehrer so gravely bouncing the news between New York and
Washington and reptiles on
Smithsonian World
flickering
their forked tongues in the desert blaze or the giant turtles of
Galápagos on
World of Survival
battling for their
lives or the Russians battling the Nazis in the jumpy film clips of
World War II as narrated by Sir Laurence Olivier ("Twenty million
dead," he intones at the end, as the frame freezes and goes into
computer-blur and the marrow-chilling theme music comes
up, thrilling Harry to think he was there, on the opposite side of
the Northern Hemisphere, jumping on tin cans and balling up tin
foil for his anti-Hitler bit, a ten-year-old
participant in actual history) and
War and Peace in the Nuclear
Age
and
Nature's Way
and
Portraits of Power
and
Wonders of the World
and
Wildlife Chronicles
and
Living Body
and
Planet Earth
and struggle and
death and cheetahs gnawing wildebeests and tarantulas fencing with
scorpions and tiny opossums scrambling for the right nipple under
the nature photographer's harsh lights and weaverbirds making the
most intricate damn nests just to attract one little choosy female
and the incredible cleverness and variety and energy and waste of
it all, a kind of crash course he is giving himself in the ways of
the world. There is just no end to it, no end of information.

The nightly news has a lot of China on it - Gorbachev
visiting, students protesting in Tiananmen Square, but not
protesting Gorbachev, in fact they like him, all the world likes
him, despite that funny mark on his head shaped like Japan. What
the Chinese students seem to want is freedom, they want to be like
Americans, but they look like Americans already, in blue jeans and
T-shirts. Meanwhile in America itself the news is that not
only President George Bush but Mrs. Bush the First Lady take
showers with their dog Millie, and if that's all the Chinese want
we should be able to give it to them, or something close, though it
makes Harry miss Reagan slightly, at least he was dignified, and
had that dream distance; the powerful thing about him as President
was that you never knew how much he knew, nothing or everything, he
was like God that way, you had to do a lot of it yourself. With
this new one you know he knows something, but it seems a small
something. Rabbit doesn't want to have to picture the President and
middle-aged wife taking showers naked with their dog. Reagan
and Nancy had their dignity, their computer-blur, even when
their bowel polyps and breasts were being snipped off in view of
billions.