Rabbit at rest (68 page)

He tries to watch TV but it makes him restless. The last of the
summer reruns are mixed in with previews of new shows that don't
look that much different: families, laugh tracks, zany dropins,
those three-sided living-room sets with the stairs
coming down in the background like in
Cosby,
and front
doors on the right through which the comical good-natured
grandparents appear, bearing presents and presenting problems. The
door is on the right in
Cosby
and on the left in
Roseanne.
That fat husband's going to have his
cardiovascular problems too. TV families and your own are hard to
tell apart, except yours isn't interrupted every six minutes by
commercials and theirs don't get bogged down into nothingness, a
state where nothing happens, no skit, no zany visitors, no outburst
on the laugh track, nothing at all but boredom and a lost feeling,
especially when you get up in the morning and the moon is still
shining and men are making noisy bets on the first tee.

At first he thinks Janice has tried so hard to reach him those
four days before the phone got connected on Thursday that she's
lost faith in their old number. Then he begins to accept her
silence as a definite statement. I'll
never forgive you.
O.K.,
he'll be damned if he'll call her. Dumb mutt. Rich
bitch. Working girl yet. Thinks she's so fucking hot running
everybody's lives with those accountants and lawyers Charlie put
her on to, he's known her so drunk she couldn't get herself to the
bathroom to pee. The few times Harry has weakened, impulsively,
usually around four or five when he can't stand the sound of the
golf games beginning up again and it's still hours to dinner, the
telephone in the little limestone house in Penn Park rings and
rings without an answer. He hangs up in a way relieved. Nothingness
has a purity. Like running. He showed her he still had some kick in
his legs and now she's showing him she can still be stubborn. Her
silence frightens him. He fights off images of some accident she
might have, slipping in the bathtub or driving the Camry off the
road, having had too much to drink over at Nelson's or at some
Vietnamese restaurant with Charlie, without him knowing. Police
frogmen finding her drowned in the back seat like that girl from
Wilkes-Barre twenty years ago. But no, he'd be notified, if
anything were to happen, somebody would call him, Nelson or Charlie
or Benny at the lot, if there still is a lot. Each day down here,
events in Pennsylvania seem more remote. His whole life seems, as
he rotates through the empty condo rooms, each with its view across
the parallel fairways to a wilderness of Spanish-tile roofs,
to have been unreal, or no realer than the lives on TV shows, and
now it's too late to make it real, to be serious, to reach down
into the earth's iron core and fetch up a real life for
himself.

The local air down here this time of year is full of violence,
as if the natives are on good behavior during the winter season.
Hurricane alarms
(Gabrielle packs punch),
head-on
car crashes, masked holdups at Publix. The day after Labor Day,
lightning kills a young football player leaving the field after
practice; the story says Florida has more deaths by lightning than
any other state. In Cape Coral, a Hispanic police officer is
charged with beating his cocker spaniel to death with a crowbar.
Sea turtles are dying by the thousands in shrimp nets. A killer
called Petit whose own mother says he looks like Charles Manson is
pronounced mentally fit to stand trial. That Deion Sanders is still
making the front page of the Fort Myers
News-Press:
one day he knocks in four runs and a homer playing baseball for the
Yankees, the next he signs for millions to play football for the
Atlanta Falcons, and the very next he's being sued by the auxiliary
cop he hit last Christmas at that shopping mall, and on Sunday he
bobbles a punt return for the Falcons but runs it back for a
touchdown anyway, the only man in human history to hit a home run
and score a touchdown in pro ball the same week.

Deion has

right stuff

Enjoy it while he can. He calls himself Prime Time and is always
on the TV news wearing sunglasses and gold chains. Rabbit watches
that big kid Becker beat Lendl in the U.S. Tennis Open final and
gets depressed, Lendl seemed old and tired and stringy, though he's
only twenty-eight.

He talks to nobody, except for Mrs. Zabritski when she catches
him in the hall, and the teenage Florida-cracker salesclerks
when he buys his food and razor blades and toilet paper, and the
people who feel obliged to make chitchat, the other retirees, in
the Valhalla dining room; they always ask about Janice so it gets
to be embarrassing and he more and more just heats up something
frozen and stays in the condo, ransacking the cable channels for
something worthy to kill time with. In his solitude, his heart
becomes his companion. He listens to it, tries to decipher its
messages. It has different rhythms at different times of the day, a
thorrumph thorrumph
sluggish slightly underwater beat in
the morning, and toward evening, when the organism gets tired and
excited at once, a more skittish thudding, with the accent on the
first beat and grace notes added, little trips and pauses now and
then. It twinges when he gets up out of bed and then again when he
lies down and whenever he thinks too hard about his situation,
having set himself adrift like this. He could have gone over that
night and faced the music but how much music is a man supposed to
face? So he and Pru did fuck, once. What are we put here in the
first place for? These women complain about men seeing nothing but
tits and ass when they look at them but what are we supposed to
see? We've been programmed to tits and ass. Except guys like Slim
and Lyle, the tits got left out of their program. One thing he
knows is if he had to give parts of his life back the last thing
he'd give back is the fucking, even that sniffly girl in the
PolishAmerican Club, she hardly said two words, and wiped her nose
with a handkerchief while he was on top of her, but nevertheless
she showed him something, a flourishing bush, and took him in,
where it mattered. A lot of this other stuff you're supposed to be
grateful for isn't where it matters. When he gets up from the deep
wicker chair indignantly - he can't stand
Cheers
now
that Shelley Long is gone, that guy with the Cro-Magnon brow
he never did like - and goes into the kitchen to refill his
bowl of Keystone Corn Chips, which not all of the stores down here
carry but you can get over at the Winn Dixie on Pindo Palm
Boulevard, Harry's heart confides to him a dainty little gallop,
the kind of lacy riff the old swing drummers used to do, hitting
the rims as well as the skins and ending with a tingling pop off
the high hat, the music of his life. When this happens he gets an
excited, hurried, full feeling in his chest. It doesn't hurt, it's
just there, muffled inside that mess inside himself he doesn't like
to think about, just like he never cared for rare roast beef, as it
used to come on the take-out subs from the Chuck Wagon across
Route 111 before it became the Pizza Hut. Any sudden motion now, he
feels a surge of circulation, a tilt of surprise in the head that
makes one leg feel shorter than the other for a second. And the
pains, maybe he imagines it, but the contractions of the bands
across his ribs, the feeling of something having been sewn there
from the inside, seems to cut deeper, more burningly, as though the
thread the patch was sewn with is growing thicker, and red hot.
When he turns off the light at night, he doesn't like feeling his
head sink back onto a single pillow, his head seems sunk in a hole
then, it's not that he can't breathe exactly, he just feels more
comfortable, less full, if he has his head up on the two pillows
and lies facing the ceiling. He can turn on his side but his old
way of sleeping, flat on his stomach with his feet pointing down
over the edge, has become impossible; there is a nest of purple
slithering half-dead thoughts he cannot bear to put his face
in. There is a whole host of goblins, it turns out, that Janice's
warm little tightly knit body, even snoring and farting as it
sometimes did, protected him from. In her absence he sleeps with
his heart, listening to it race and skip when his rest is
disturbed, when kids who have climbed the fence yell on the empty
moonlit golf course, when a siren bleats somewhere in downtown
Deleon, when a big jet from the north heads in especially low to
the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, churning the air. He awakes
in lavender light and then lets his heart's slowing beat drag him
back under.

His dreams are delicious, like forbidden candy - intensely
colored overpopulated rearrangements of old situations stored in
his brain cells, rooms like the little living room at 26 Vista
Crescent, with the fireplace they never used and the lamp with the
driftwood base, or the old kitchen at 303 Jackson, with the wooden
ice box and the gas stove with its nipples of blue flame and the
porcelain table with the worn spots, skewed and new and crowded
with people at the wrong ages, Mim with lots of green eye makeup at
the age Mom was when they were kids, or Nelson as a tiny child
sliding out from under a car in the greasy service section of
Springer Motors, looking woebegone and sickly with his smudged
face, or Marty Tothero and Ruth and even that nitwit Margaret
Kosko, he hasn't thought of her name for thirty years, but there
she was in his brain cells, just as clear with her underfed city
pallor as she was that night in the booth of the Chinese
restaurant, Ruth next to him and Margaret next to Mr. Tothero whose
head looks lopsided and gray like that of a dying rhinoceros, the
four of them eating now in the Valhalla dining room with its
garbled bas-relief of Vikings and sumptuous salad bar where
the dishes underneath the plastic sneeze guard are bright and
various as jewels, arranged in rainbow order like the crayons in
the Crayola boxes that were always among his birthday presents in
February, a little stadium of waxy-smelling pointed heads
there in the bright February window-light, filtered through
icicles and the stunned sense of being a year older. Harry wakes
from these dreams reluctantly, as if their miniaturized visions are
a substance essential to his nutrition, or a whirring finely fitted
machine he needs to reinsert himself into, like poor Thelma and her
dialysis machine. He awakes always on his stomach, and only as his
head clears and re-creates present time, establishing the
felt-gray parallel lines he sees as the dawn behind the
curved slats of Venetian blinds and the insistent pressure on his
face as the cool Gulf breeze coming in where he left the sliding
door ajar, does his solitude begin to gnaw again, and his heart to
talk to him. At times it seems a tiny creature, a baby, pleading
inside him for attention, for rescue, and at others a sinister
intruder, a traitor muttering in code, an alien parasite nothing
will expel. The pains, when they come, seem hostile and deliberate,
the knives of a strengthening enemy.

He makes an appointment with Dr. Morris. He is able to get one
surprisingly soon, the day after next. These doctors are scrambling
down here, a glut of them, too many miners at the gold rush, the
geriatric immigrants still hanging up north this time of year. The
office is in one of those low stucco clinics along Route 41.
Soothing music plays constantly in the waiting room, entwining with
the surf-sound of traffic outside. The doctor has aged since
the last appointment. He is bent-over and shufliy, with
arthritic knuckles. His shrivelled jaw looks not quite
clean-shaven; his nostrils are packed with black hair. His
son, young Tom, pink and sleek in his mid-forties, gives
Harry a freckled fat hand in the hall, and is wearing his white
clinical smock over kelly-green golf slacks. He is
established in an adjacent office, primed to take over the full
practice. But for now the old doctor clings to his own patients.
Harry tries to describe his complex sensations. Dr. Morris, with an
impatient jerk of his arthritic hand, waves him toward the
examination room. He has him strip to his jockey undershorts,
weighs him, tut-tuts. He seats him on the examination table
and listens to his chest through his stethoscope, and taps his
naked back with a soothing, knobby touch, and solemnly, silently
takes Harry's hands in his. He studies the fingernails, turns them
over, studies the palms, grunts. Close up, he gives off an old
man's sad leathery, moldy smell.

"Well," Harry asks, "what do you think?"

"How much do you exercise?"

"Not much. Not since I got down here. I do a little gardening up
north. Golfbut I've kind of run out of partners."

Dr. Morris ponders him through rimless glasses. His eyes, once a
sharp blue, have that colorless sucked look to the irises. His
eyebrows are messy tangled tufts of white and reddish-brown,
his forehead and cheeks are flecked with small blotches and bumps.
His projecting eyebrows lift, like turrets taking aim. "You should
walk."

"Walk?"

"Briskly. Several miles a day. What sorts of food are you
eating?"

"Oh - stuff you can heat up. TV-dinner kind of
thing. My wife is still up north but she doesn't cook that much
even when she's here. Now, my daughter-in-law -"

"You ever eat any of this salty junk that comes in bags?"

"Well - once in a great while."

"You should watch your sodium intake. Snack on fresh vegetables
if you want to snack. Read the labels. Stay away from salt and
animal fats. I think we've been through all this, when you were in
the hospital" - he lifts his forearm and checks his record
- "nine months ago."

"Yeah, I did for a while, I still do, it's just that day to day,
it's easier -"

"To poison yourself. Don't. Don't be lazy about it. And you
should lose forty pounds. Without the salt in your diet you'd lose
ten in retained water in two weeks. I'll give you a diet list, if
you've lost the one I gave you before. You may get dressed."