Rabbit at rest (44 page)

"Process?"

"Talk thins through."

"You can talk them through with me. I'm just lying here with
nothing to do, I've already missed the sports section of the
news."

She makes that mmmm mouth women make after putting on lipstick,
rolling her lips together in a complacent serious way, and tells
him, "You're not impartial. You have your own agenda with Nelson,
and with me for that matter."

"What's so impartial about Charlie, he wants to get into your
pants again. If he hasn't already."

She pops the lipstick back into her bomb-shaped pocketbook
and touches up her new hairdo with her fingers, glancing from
several angles at herself in the mirror, and snaps the lid shut.
She says, "That's sweet of you, Harry, to pretend to think I'm
still interesting to anybody in that way, but in fact I'm not,
except maybe once in a while to my own husband, I hope."

He says, embarrassed, for he knows he's been letting her down in
that department lately, "Sure, but you know, for a man, it's all a
matter of blood pressure, and -"

"We'll talk about it when you're home. I told Charlie I'd meet
him at seven -"

"Where? The salad bar that used to be Johnny Frye's? It's only
two blocks from here. You can walk."

"No, actually. There's a new Vietnamese place out near Maiden
Springs he wanted to try. It's a bit of a drive and, you know me,
I'll probably get lost. And then on top of everything I have fifty
pages of a book on British realty law, full of all these funny old
obsolete words, I have to read before class tomorrow night."

"You won't be home tomorrow night? My first night home?" He is
making a complaint of it, scoring points, but he wishes she'd go
and leave him alone with the television screen.

"We'll see," Janice says, rising. "I have an idea." Then she
asks, "Aren't you proud of me?" She bends forward to press her hot
busy face against his. "Managing everything the way I am?"

"Yeah," he lies. He preferred her incompetent. She leaves with
her jonquil-yellow new coat over her arm and he thinks she is
gaining weight behind, she has that broad-beamed look women
of the county wear when they come into their own.

* * *

Harry watches what is left of Tom Brokaw and is settling into a
seven-o'clock show on life in Antarctica when, of all people,
the Harrisons come visiting. Not just Thelma - she's brought
Ron along, or Ron has brought her, since she is thinner and
sallower than he has ever seen her, and moves as if every step
might break a bone. She smiles regretfully; her eyes apologize for
the shape she's in, for Ronnie's being with her, for her being
unable to stay away. "We were here in the hospital seeing my
doctor," she explains, "and Ron junior had heard you were in."

"For what they call a little procedure," he says, and gestures
toward the chair Janice has pulled up to the bed and that's
probably still warm from her broad beam. "Ron, there's that big
padded chair over in the corner if you want to pull it over; it's
on wheels."

"I'll stand," he says. "We can only stay a minute."

He is sullen, but Rabbit didn't ask the Harrisons to come visit
and doesn't see why he should be bullied. "Suit yourself." He asks
Thelma, "How are you?"

Thelma sighs elaborately. "You know doctors. They never admit
they don't have an answer. I'm on home dialysis twice a week,
Ronnie's a saint to put up with me. He took a course on how to cope
with the machine."

"Ronnie always was a saint," Harry tells her, everybody in the
room knowing that Ronnie Harrison was just about his least favorite
person in the world, though he had known him from kindergarten. A
dirty-mouthed plug-ugly even at the age of five, and
now bald as a prick's tip, with wisps above his big droopy ears.
Ronnie in high school and afterward had a certain chunkiness, but
the approach of old age has pulled the chunks like taffy, leaving
hollows in his face and lumps and a painful stringiness around the
throat. Harry says, as if she doesn't already know, "Janice is
taking courses too, to learn how to sell real estate. I guess so
she has a trade in case I pop off."

Thelma's eyelids flutter, a bony hand wearing a wedding ring
gestures the possibility away. The sicker she gets, the more
driedout and schoolteacherish she looks. That was one of the jokes
of her being his mistress, her looking so prim and being so wild in
bed, but maybe the real her was the schoolteacher and the other was
put on purely for him. "Harry, you're not going to pop off" she
tells him urgently, afraid for him. That strange way women have, of
really caring about somebody beyond themselves. "They do wonderful
things with hearts now, they stitch and mend them just like rag
dolls." She manages a thin smile. "Want to see what I have?"

He thinks he knows what she has, all of it, but she unbuttons
her sleeve and with that matter-of-fact baring which
was her style Thelma shows him the underside of her bared arm. Two
purple bruised patches on her slender wrist are connected by a
translucent U of some plastic tubing taped flat against the
jaundiced skin. "That's called my shunt," she says, pronouncing the
last word carefully. "It connects an artery and vein and when I
have the dialysis we take it off and connect me to the
machine."

"Pretty," seems all he can say. He tells them about his
angioplasty, but is already tired of describing it, and trying to
convey the creepy business of seeing the dark shadow of the
catheter like a snaky forefinger inch ever more intimately into his
heart's paler, trembling shades. "My coronary artery could have
occluded and I would have gone into CA. Cardiac arrest."

"But you didn't, you jerk," Ronnie says, standing erect and
abandoning his shadow on the wall. "The Old Master," he says, a
sardonic phrase he used to kid Harry with in their
basketball-playing days. Funny, all of his life Harrison has
been shadowing Harry with his ugly flesh, a reminder of everything
sweaty and effortful in life Rabbit squeamishly hoped to glide over
and avoid. "Nobody lays a finger on the Old Master. He makes it all
look easy." Ronnie used to resent how Marty Tothero would put him,
Ronnie, into the game when the bruisers on the other side were
roughing Harry up, to give rough stuff back. An enforcer, they call
it now.

"It was never as easy as I made it look," Rabbit tells him. He
turns to Thelma, wanting to be tender, since she had braved her
husband's anger by bringing him here. She had never balked at
humiliating Ronnie to give Harry her gift of love, and indeed, sick
as the two lovers are, her nearness does give him that socketed
feeling you have with certain women, that graceful feeling you can
do no wrong. "How about you, Thel? Your docs think they're licking
it?"

"Oh, they never say die, but a body gets tired. You can fight
only so long. The pains I can live with, and the weakness all the
time, but the kidneys going is really demoralizing. It takes away
your pleasure in life if you can't take such things for granted.
Harry, you know that part of the Bible they used to read to us in
assembly, before the Bible got outlawed, about a time for
everything? A time to gather up stones, a time to cast them away?
I'm beginning to think there's a time to give up."

"They don't say that," Ronnie says, with an urgency of his own.
He loves this woman too, also calls her Thel. It occurs to Harry
that two men for a woman and vice versa is about right, just as we
need two kinds of days, workdays and holidays, and day and night.
Ronnie sounds angry, that she would talk of giving up, but this May
evening is slowly melting him into the shadowy wall, so it is
beginning to seem that Harry and Thelma are alone together, as in
so many stolen afternoons, their hearts beating, the school buses
braking outside on the curved street signalling that he must go,
and as in that room in the Caribbean, their first time together,
when they stayed awake until dawn and then fell asleep as one body
as the tropical blue air between the louvers paled and the palm
trees ceased their nighttime stirring. Ronnie's disembodied voice
says to her angrily, "You have three boys who want to see you grow
old."

Thelma smiles slyly at Harry, her face colorless and waxy in the
May day fading above the fancy brickwork cornices and chimneys
visible through the windows. "Why would they want to see that,
Ron?" she asks mischievously, not taking her gaze from Harry's
face. "They're grown men. I've done all I can do for them."

Poor Ron has no answer. Maybe he's choked up. Rabbit takes pity
and says to him, "How's the insurance business going, Ron?"

"It's levelled out," his voice says gruffly. "Not bad, not good.
The S and L mess hurt some companies but not ours. At least
people've stopped borrowing against their policies at five per cent
and investing at ten the way they were. That was killing our
figures."

"One of the nice things about getting to be old geezers like
us," Harry says, "is people like you stop trying to sell me
insurance." Footsteps and tingling pans sound from the hall, where
the lights seem bright suddenly. Night has come.

"Not necessarily," Ron is saying. "I could get you a pretty fair
deal on some twenty-payment straight life, if you and Janice
are interested. I know a doctor who doesn't look too close. You've
survived one coronary, that's in your favor. Let me work up some
figures."

Harry ignores him. To Thelma he says, "Your boys are in good
shape?"

"We think so. Good enough. Alex has had an offer from a hightech
place in Virginia, outside Washington. Georgie thinks he has a spot
with a musical-comedy troupe in the Catskills this
summer."

"Here's something Janice just told me. She's got Nelson to sign
up for a drug rehab."

"That's nice," Thelma says, so softly and sincerely here in the
gloom that her voice seems to exist not in the air but already in
his blood, inserted intravenously. All the afternoons when their
bodies intertwined and exchanged fluids are not gone but safe
inside him, his cells remembering.

"You're nice to say so," he says, and dares to grasp her cool
hand, the one without the shunt, and move it up from her lap so the
back of his own hand brushes a breast.

Ronnie's voice comes forward from the wall. "We gotta go,
Thel."

"Ron, thanks for bringing her by."

"Anything for the Old Master. We were in the building."

"Master of nothing at this point."

Ronnie grunts. "Who's to say?" He's not all bad.

Thelma has stiffly stood and, bending by his bed, asks, right
out in front of Ronnie, "Darling, can you manage a little
kiss?"

He may imagine it, but Thelma's pale cool departing face,
swiftly pressed against his, their lips meeting a bit askew, gives
off a faint far tang of urine. When he is alone in his room again
he remembers how sometimes when he kissed Thelma goodbye at her
house her mouth would be flavored by the sour-milk taste of
his prick, the cheesy smegma secreted beneath his foreskin. She
would be still all soft and blurred by their lovemaking and
unaware, and he would try to conceal his revulsion, a revulsion at
his own smell on her lips. It was like, another sad thing to
remember, the time when Nixon, with Watergate leaking out all
around him, during one of the oil crunches went on television to
tell us so earnestly to turn our thermostats down, for not only
would it save oil but scientific studies showed that colder houses
were healthier for us. That big scowling scared face on television,
the lips wet and fumbling. Their President, crook or not, going
down in disgrace but trying to say what needed to be said; Harry as
a loyal American did go and turn his thermostat down.

Janice wakes up early out of nervousness; it is going to be a
long and complicated day for her, of seeing Nelson off at nine and
picking Harry up at noon and taking a quiz in British property law
at seven, in the Brewer extension of Penn State in a renovated
disused elementary school on South Pine Street, a section she isn't
too easy about parking the car in at night. In Penn Park in midMay
the day begins with a kiss of coolness as in Florida; the little
limestone house is cozier now that the surrounding trees are fully
leafed. She has enjoyed, enough to add to her feelings of guilt,
these days of Harry's being in the hospital and her being free to
come and go without explanation, and to get into bed as early or
late as she pleases, and to watch what television shows she wants
to. Wednesday nights, for instance, she likes
Unsolved
Mysteries,
but Harry is always sitting beside her in the study
or in bed telling her how ridiculous these so-called
mysteries are and how they always derive, if you think about it,
from the testimony of people who are either mentally unbalanced or
have something to gain financially. The older Harry gets the more
cynical he is; he used to be religious in a funny way. They
couldn't put the show on television if there weren't some truth to
it and that Robert Stack seems ever so sensible. Last night, what
with being out with Charlie at that Vietnamese place along the
Maiden Springs Pike (it was nice, but she never figured out what
she was supposed to do with those bubbly brittle rice things like
warped pancakes that were so tasteless you must be supposed to dip
them in something), she missed all but the last ten minutes of
thirtysomething
which she likes to watch Tuesdays because
it's so different from how she was when she was
thirty-something, all those demands on her, mother wife
daughter, and then being Charlie's mistress for a while and feeling
so inadequate and guilty and having no female friends really except
Peggy Fosnacht who went and slept with Harry anyway and now is
dead, terrible to think, all rotten and parchmenty like a mummy in
her casket, too hideous for the mind to grasp but it happens
anyway, even to people your own age. With Harry gone, she can eat
Campbell's chicken noodle soup cold out of the can if she wants,
with a few Ritz crackers crushed in, and not have to worry about
giving him a good balanced low-fat low-sodium meal that
he complains to her is tasteless. Maybe being a widow won't be so
very bad is the thought she keeps trying not to think.