Rabbit Redux (48 page)

            He had sighed, "You can get it back."

            "I've destroyed my husband. He's in all the newspapers."

            "He can take it. He's a showboat."

            "I've dishonored my parents."

            He had turned his back. With Harry it had been usually she who turned her back. Charlie is hard to snuggle against, too broad; it is like clinging to a rock slippery with hair. He had, for him, apologized: "Tiger, I'm bushed. I've felt rotten all day."

            "Rotten how?"

            "Deep down rotten. Shaky rotten."

            And feeling him slip away from her into sleep had so enraged her she had hurled herself naked from bed, shrieked at him the words he had taught her in love, knocked a dead great-aunt from a bureau top, announced that any decent man would at least have ofered to marry her now knowing she would never accept, did things to the peace of the apartment that now reverberate in her insomnia, so the darkness shudders between pulses of the headlights that tirelessly pass below on Eisenhower Avenue. The view from the back of Charlie's apartment is an unexpected one, of a bend in the Running Horse River like a cut in fabric, of the elephant-colored gas tanks in the boggy land beside the dump, and, around a church with twin blue domes she never knew was there, a little cemetery with iron crosses instead of stones. The traffic out front never ceases. Janice has lived near Brewer all her life but never in it before, and thought all places went to sleep at ten, and was surprised how this city always rumbles with traffic, like her heart which even through dreams keeps pouring out its love.

            She awakes. The curtains at the window are silver. The moon is a cold stone above Mt. Judge. The bed is not her bed, then she remembers it has been her bed since, when? July it was. For some reason she sleeps with Charlie on her left; Harry was always on her right. The luminous hands of the electric clock by Charlie's bedside put the time at after two. Charlie is lying face up in the moonlight. She touches his cheek and it is cold. She puts her ear to his mouth and hears no breathing. He is dead. She decides this must be a dream.

            Then his eyelids flutter as if at her touch. His eyeballs in the faint cold light seem unseeing, without pupils. Moonlight glints in a dab ofwater at the far corner of the far eye. He groans, and Janice realizes this is what has waked her. A noise not freely given but torn from some heavy mechanism of restraint deep in his chest. Seeing that she is up on an elbow watching, he says, "Hi, tiger. Jesus it hurts."

            "What hurts, love? Where?" Her breath rushes from her throat so fast it burns. All the space in the room, from the comers in, seems a crystal a wrong move from her will shatter.

            "Here." He seems to mean to show her but cannot move his arms. Then his whole body moves, arching upward as if twitched by something invisible outside of him. She glances around the room for the unspeaking presence tormenting them, and sees again the lace curtains stamped, interwoven medallions, on the blue of the streetlamp, and against the reflecting blue of the bureau mirroring the square blank silhouettes of framed aunts, uncles, nephews. The groan comes again, and the painful upward arching: a fish hooked deep, in the heart.

            "Charlie. Is there any pill?"

            He makes words through his teeth. "Little white. Top shelf. Bathroom cabinet."

            The crowded room pitches and surges with her panic. The floor tilts beneath her bare feet; the nightie she put on after her disgraceful scene taps her burning skin scoldingly. The bathroom door sticks. One side of the frame strikes her shoulder, hard. She cannot find the light cord, her hand flailing in the darkness; then she strikes it and it leaps from her touch and while she waits for it to swing back down out of the blackness Charlie groans again, the worst yet, the tightest-sounding. The cord fords her fingers and she pulls; the light pounces on her eyes, she feels them shrink so rapidly it hurts yet she doesn't take the time to blink, staring for the little white pills. She confronts in the cabinet a sick man's wealth. All the pills are white. No, one is aspirin; another is yellow and transparent, those capsules that hold a hundred little bombs to go off against hayfever. Here: this one must be it; though the little jar is unlabelled the plastic squeeze lid looks important. There is tiny red lettering on each pill but she can't take the time to read it, her hands shake too much, they must be right; she tilts the little jar into her palm and five hurry out, no, six, and she wonders how she can be wasting time counting and tries to slide some back into the tiny round glass mouth but her whole body is beating so hard her joints have locked to hold her together. She looks for a glass and sees none and takes the square top of the Water Pik and very stupidly lets the faucet water run to get cold, wetting her palm in turning it off, so the pills there blur and soften and stain the creased skin they are cupped in. She has to hold everything, pills and slopping Water Pik lid, in one hand to free the other to close the bathroom door to keep the light caged away from Charlie. He lifts his large head a painful inch from the pillow and studies the pills melting in her hand and gets out, "Not those. Little white." He grimaces as if to laugh. His head sinks back. His throat muscles go rigid. The noise he makes now is up an octave, a woman's noise. Janice sees she does not have time to go back and search again, he is being tuned too high. She sees that they are beyond chemicals; they are pure spirits, she must make a miracle. Her body feels leaden on her bones, she remembers Harry telling her she has the touch of death. But a pressure from behind like a cuff on the back of her head pitches her forward with a keening cry pitched like his own and she presses herself down upon his body that has been so often pressed upon hers; he has become a great hole nothing less large than she wild with love can fill. She wills her heart to pass through the walls of bone and give its rhythm to his. He grits his teeth "Christ" and strains upward against her as if coming and she presses down with great calm, her body a sufficiency, its warmth and wetness and pulse as powerful as it must be to stanch this wound that is an entire man, his length and breadth loved, his level voice loved and his clever square hands loved and his whirlpools of hair loved and his buffed fingernails loved and the dark gooseflesh bag of his manhood loved and the frailty held within him like a threat and lock against her loved. She is a gateway of love gushing from higher ground; she feels herself dissolving piece by piece like a little mud dam in a sluice. She feels his heart kick like pinned prey and keeps it pinned. Though he has become a devil, widening now into a hole wider than a quarry and then gathering into a pain-squeezed upward thrust as cold as an icicle she does not relent; she widens herself to hold his edges in, she softens herself to absorb the spike of his pain. She will not let him leave her. There is a third person in the room, this person has known her all her life and looked down upon her until now; through this other pair of eyes she sees she is weeping, hears herself praying, Go, Go, to the devil thrashing inside this her man. "Go!" she utters aloud.

            Charlie's body changes tone. He is dead. No, at his mouth she eavesdrops on the whistle of his breathing. Sudden sweat soaks his brow, his shoulders, his chest, her breasts, her cheek where it was pressed against his cheek. His legs relax. He grunts, "O.K." She dares slide from him, tucking the covers, which she had torn down to bare his chest, back up to his chin.

            "Shall I get the real pills now?"

            "In a minute. Yes. Nitroglycerin. What you brought me was Coricidin. Cold pills."

            She sees that his grimace had meant to be laughter, for he does smile now. Harry is right. She is stupid.

            To ease the hurt look from her face Stavros tells her, "Rotten feeling. Pressure worse than a fist. You can't breathe, move anything makes it worse, you feel your own heart. Like some animal skipping inside you. Crazy."

            "I was scared to leave you."

            "You did great. You brought me back."

            She knows this is true. The mark upon her as a giver of death has been erased. As in fucking, she has been rendered transparent, then filled solid with peace. As if after fucking, she takes playful inventory of his body, feels the live sweat on his broad skin, traces a finger down the line of his nose.

            He repeats, "Crazy," and sits up in bed, cooling himself, gasping safe on the shore. She snuggles at his side and lets her tears out like a child. Absently, still moving his arms gingerly, he fumbles with the ends of her hair as it twitches on his shoulder.

            She asks, "Was it me? My throwing that awful fit about Harry's sister? I could have killed you."

            "Never." Then he admits, "I need to keep things orderly or they get to me."

            "My being here is disorderly," she says.

            "Never mind, tiger," he says, not quite denying, and tugs her 'hair so her head jerks.

            Janice gets up and fetches the right pills. They had been there all along, on the top shelf, she had looked on the middle shelf. He takes one and shows her how he puts it under his tongue to dissolve. As it dissolves he makes that mouth she loves, lips pushed forward as if concealing a lozenge. When she turns off the light and gets into bed beside him, he rolls on his side to give her a kiss. She does not respond, she is too full of peace. Soon the soft rhythm of his unconscious breathing rises from his side of the bed. On her side, she cannot sleep. Awake in every nerve she untangles her life. The traffic ebbs down below. She and Charlie float motionless above Brewer; he sleeps on the wind, his heart hollow. Next time she might not be able to keep him up. Miracles are granted but we must not lean on them. This love that has blown through her has been a miracle, the one thing worthy of it remaining is to leave. Spirits are insatiable but bodies get enough. She has had enough, he has had enough; more might be too much. She might begin to kill. He calls her tiger. Toward six the air brightens. She sees his square broad forehead, the wiry hair in its tidy waves, the nose so shapely a kind of feminine vanity seems to be bespoken, the mouth even in sleep slightly pouting, a snail-shine of saliva released from one corner. Angel, buzzard, floating, Janice sees that in the vast volume of her love she has renounced the one possible imperfection, its object. Her own love engulfs her; she sinks down through its purity swiftly fallen, all feathers.

            * * *

            Mom has the phone by her bed; downstairs Rabbit hears it ring, then hears it stop, but some time passes before she makes him understand it is for him. She cannot raise her voice above a kind of whimper now, but she has a cane, an intimidating knobby briar Pop brought home one day from the Brewer Salvation Army store. She taps on the floor with it until attention comes up the stairs. She is quite funny with it, waving it around, thumping. "All my life," she says. "What I wanted. A cane."

            He hears the phone ring twice and then only slowly the tapping of the cane sinks in; he is vacuuming the living-room rug, trying to get some of the fustiness up. In Mom's room, the smell is more powerful, the perverse vitality of rot. He has read somewhere that what we smell are just tiny fragments of the thing itself tickling a plate in our nose, a subtler smoke. Everything has its cloud, a flower's bigger than a rock's, a dying person's bigger than ours. Mom says, "For you." The pillows she is propped on have slipped so she sits at a slant. He straightens her and, since the word ` Janice" begins with a sound difficult for her throat muscles to form, she is slow to make him understand who it is.

            He freezes, reaching for the phone. "I don't want to talk to her."

            "Why. Not."

            "O.K., O.K." It is confusing, having to talk here, Janice's voice filling his ear while Mom and her rumpled bed fill his vision. Her blue-knuckled hands clasp and unclasp; her eyes, open too wide, rest on him in a helpless stare, the blue irises ringed with a thin white circle like a sucked Life Saver. "Now what?" he says to Janice.

            "You could at least not be rude right away," she says.

            "O.K., I'll be rude later. Let me guess. You're calling to tell me you've finally gotten around to getting a lawyer."

            Janice laughs. It's been long since he heard it, a shy noise that tries to catch itself halfway out, like a snagged yo-yo. "No," she says, "I haven't gotten around to that yet. Is that what you're waiting for?" She is harder to bully now.

            "I don't know what I'm waiting for."

            "Is your mother there? Or are you downstairs?"

            "Yes. Up."

            "You sound that way. Harry - Harry, are you there?"

            "Sure. Where else?"

            "Would you like to meet me anyplace?" She hurries on, to make it business. "The insurance men keep calling me at work, they say you haven't filled out any of the forms. They say we ought to be making some decisions. I mean about the house. Daddy already is trying to sell it for us."

            "Typical."

            "And then there's Nelson."

            "You don't have room for him. You and your greaseball."

            His mother looks away, shocked; studies her hands, and by an effort of will stops their idle waggling. Janice has taken a quick high breath. He cannot bump her off the line today. "Harry, that's another thing. I've moved out. It's all decided, everything's fine. I mean, that way. With Charlie and me. I'm calling from Joseph Street, I've spent the last two nights here. Harry?"

            "I'm listening. I'm right here. Whatcha think - I'm going to run away?"

            "You have before. I was talking to Peggy yesterday on the phone, she and Ollie are back together, and he had heard you had gone off to some other state, a newspaper in Baltimore had given you a job."

            "Fat chance."