Rabbit Redux (50 page)

            "You and me?"

            "You don't have to do anything, it's just we're wasting gas this way."

            "Cheaper to waste gas than pay a motel, for Chrissake. Anyway don't they like you to have luggage?"

            "They don't care. Anyway I think I did put a suitcase in the back, just in case."

            He turns and looks and there it is, the tatty old brown one still with the hotel label on from the time they went to the Shore, Wildwood Cabins. The same suitcase she must have packed to run to Stavros with. "Say," he says. "You're full of sexy tricks now, aren't you?"

            "Forget it, Harry. Take me home. I'd forgotten about you."

            "These guys who run motels, don't they think it's fishy if you check in before suppertime? What time is it, two-thirty."

            "Fishy? What's fishy, Harry? God, you're a prude. Everybody knows people screw. It's how we all got here. When're you going to grow up, even a little bit?"

            "Still, to march right in with the sun pounding down -"

            "Tell him I'm your wife. Tell him we're exhausted. It's the truth, actually. I didn't sleep two hours last night."

            "Wouldn't you rather go to my parents' place? Nelson'll be home in an hour."

            "Exactly. Who matters more to you, me or Nelson?"

            "Nelson."

            "Nelson or your mother?"

            "My mother."

            "You are a sick man."

            "There's a place. Like it?"

            Safe Haven Motel the sign says, with slats strung below it claiming QUEEN SIZE BEDS ALL COLOR TVS SHOWER & BATH TELEPHONES "MAGIC FINGERS"

            A neon VACANCY sign buzzes dull red. The office is a little brick tollbooth; there is a drained swimming pool with a green tarpaulin over it. At the long brick facade bleakly broken by doorways several cars already park; they seem to be feeding, metal cattle at a trough. Janice says, "It looks crummy."

            "That's what I like about it," Rabbit says. "They might take us."

            But as he says this, they have driven past. Janice asks, "Seriously, haven't you ever done this before?"

            He tells her, "I guess I've led a kind of sheltered life."

            "Well, it's by now," she says, of the motel.

            "I could turn around."

            "Then it'd be on the wrong side of the highway."

            "Scared?"

            "Of what?"

            "Me." Racily Rabbit swings into a Garden Supplies parking lot, spewing gravel, brakes just enough to avoid a collision with oncoming traffic, crosses the doubled line, and heads back the way they came. Janice says, "If you want to kill yourself, go ahead, but don't kill me; I'm just getting to like being alive."

            "It's too late," he tells her. "You'll be a grandmother in a couple more years."

            "Not with you at the wheel."

            But they cross the double line again and pull in safely. The VACANCY sign still buzzes. Ignition off. Lever at P. The sun shimmers on the halted asphalt. "You can't just sit here," Janice hisses. He gets out of the car. Air. Globes of ether, pure nervousness, slide down his legs. There is a man in the little tollbooth, along with a candy bar machine and a rack of black-tagged keys. He has wetcombed silver hair, a string tie with a horseshoe clasp, and a cold. Placing the registration card in front of Harry, he pats his chafed nostrils with a blue bandana. "Name and address and license plate number," he says. He speaks with a Western twang.

            "My wife and I are really bushed," Rabbit volunteers. His ears are burning; the blush spreads downward, his undershirt feels damp, his heart jars his hand as it tries to write, Mr. and Mrs. Harold Angstrom. Address? Of course, he must lie. He writes unsteadily, 26 Vista Crescent, Penn Villas, Pa. Junk mail and bills are being forwarded to him from that address. Wonderful service, the postal. Put yourself in one of those boxes, sorted from sack to sack, finally there you go, plop, through the right slot out of millions. A miracle that it works. Young punk revolutionaries, let them try to get the mail through, through rain and sleet and dark of night. The man with the string tie patiently leans on his Formica desk while Rabbit's thoughts race and his hand jerks. "License plate number, that's the one that counts," he peaceably drawls. "Show me a suitcase or pay in advance."

            "No kidding, she is my wife."

            "Must be on honeymoon straight from haah school."

            "Oh, this." Rabbit looks down at his peppermint-and-cream Mt. Judge athletic jacket, and fights the creeping return of his blush. "I haven't worn this for I don't know how many years."

            "Looks to almost fit," the man says, tapping the blank space for the plate number. "Ah'm in no hurry if you're not," he says.

            Harry goes to the show window of the little house and studies the license plate and signals for Janice to show the suitcase. He lifts an imaginary suitcase up and down by the handle and she doesn't understand. Janice sits in their Falcon, mottled and dimmed by window reflections. He pantomimes unpacking; he draws a rectangle in the air; he exclaims, "God, she's dumb!" and she belatedly understands, reaching back and lifting the bag into view through the layers of glass between them. The man nods; Harry writes his plate number (U20-692) on the card and is given a numbered key (17). "Toward the back," the man says, "more quaat away from the road."

            "I don't care if it's quiet, we're just going to sleep," Rabbit says; key in hand, he bursts into friendliness. "Where're you from, Texas? I was stationed there with the Army once, Fort Larson, near Lubbock."

            The man inserts the card into a rack, looking through the lower half of his bifocals, and clucks his tongue. "You ever get up around Santa Fe?"

            "Nope. Never. Sorry I didn't."

            "That's my idea of a goood place," the man tells him.

            "I'd like to go someday. I really would. Probably never will, though."

            "Don't say that, young buck like you, and your cute little lady."

            "I'm not so young."

            "You're yungg," the man absentmindedly insists, and this is so nice of him, this and handing over the key, people are so nice generally, that Janice asks Harry as he gets back into the car what he's grinning about. "And what took so long?"

            "We were talking about Santa Fe. He advised us to go."

            The door numbered 17 gives on a room surprisingly long, narrow but long. The carpet is purple, and bits of backlit cardboard here and there undercut the sense ofsubstance, as in a movie lobby. A fantasy world. The bathroom is at the far end, the walls are of cement-block painted rose, imitation oils of the ocean are trying to adom them, two queen-sized beds look across the narrow room at a television set. Rabbit takes off his shoes and turns on the set and gets on one bed. A band of light appears, expands, jogs itself out of diagonal twitching stripes into The Dating Game. A colored girl from Philly is trying to decide which of three men to take her out on a date; one man is black, another is white, the third is yellow. The color is such that the Chinese man is orange and the colored girl looks bluish. The reception has a ghost so that when she laughs there are many, many teeth. Janice turns it off. Like him she is in stocking feet. They are burglars. He protests, "Hey. That was interesting. She couldn't see them behind that screen so she'd have to tell from their voices what color they were. If she cared."

            "You have your date," Janice tells him.

            "We ought to get a color television, the pro football is a lot better."

            "Who's this we?"

            "Oh - me and Pop and Nelson and Mom. And Mim."

            "Why don't you move over on that bed?"

            "You have your bed. Over there."

            She stands there, firm-footed on the wall-to-wall carpet without stockings, nice-ankled. Her dull wool skirt is just short enough to show her knees. They have boxy edges. Nice. She asks, "What is this, a put-down?"

            "Who am I to put you down? The swingingest broad on Eisenhower Avenue."

            "I'm not so sure I like you anymore."

            "I didn't know I had that much to lose."

            "Come on. Shove over."

            She throws the old camel loden coat over the plastic chair beneath the motel regulations and the fire inspector's certificate. Being puzzled darkens her eyes on him. She pulls off her sweater and as she bends to undo her skirt the bones of her shoulders ripple in long quick glints like a stack of coins being spilled. She hesitates in her slip. "Are you going to get under the covers?"

            "We could," Rabbit says, yet his body is as when a fever leaves and the nerves sink down like veins of water into sand. He cannot begin to execute the energetic transitions contemplated: taking off his clothes, walking that long way to the bathroom. He should probably wash in case she wants to go down on him. Then suppose he comes too soon and they are back where they've always been. Much safer to lie here enjoying the sight of her in her slip; he had been lucky to choose a little woman, they keep their shape better than big ones. She looked older than twenty at twenty but doesn't look that much older now, at least angry as she is, black alive in her eyes. "You can get in but don't expect anything, I'm still pretty screwed up." Lately he has lost the ability to masturbate; nothing brings him up, not even the image of a Negress with nipples like dowel-ends and a Hallowe'en pumpkin instead of a head.

            "I'll say," Janice says. "Don't expect anything from me either. I just don't want to have to shout between the beds."

            With heroic effort Rabbit pushes himself up and walks the length of the rug to the bathroom. Returning naked, he holds his clothes in front of him and ducks into the bed as if into a burrow, being chased. He feels particles of some sort bombarding him. Janice feels skinny, strange, snaky-cool, the way she shivers tight against him immediately; the shock on his skin makes him want to sneeze. She apologizes: "They don't heat these places very well."

            "Be November pretty soon."

            "Isn't there a thermostat?"

            "Yeah. I see it. Way over in the corner. You can go turn it up if you want."

            "Thanks. The man should do that."

            Neither moves. Harry says, "Hey. Does this remind you of Linda Hammacher's bed?" She was the girl who when they were all working at Kroll's had an apartment in Brewer she let Harry and Janice use.

            "Not much. That had a view."

            They try to talk, but out of sleepiness and strangeness it only comes in spurts. "So," Janice says after a silence wherein nothing happens. "Who do you think you are?"

            "Nobody," he answers. He snuggles down as if to kiss her breasts but doesn't; their presence near his lips drugs him. All sorts of winged presences exert themselves in the air above their covers.

            Silence resumes and stretches, a ballerina in the red beneath his eyelids. He abruptly asserts, "The kid really hates me now."

            Janice says, "No he doesn't." She contradicts herself promptly, by adding, "He'll get over it." Feminine logic: smother and outlast what won't be wished away. Maybe the only way. He touches her low and there is moss, it doesn't excite him, but it is reassuring, to have that patch there, something to hide in.

            Her body irritably shifts; him not kissing her breasts or anything, she puts the cold soles of her feet on the tops of his. He sneezes. The bed heaves. She laughs. To rebuke her, he asks innocently, "You always came with Stavros?"

            "Not always."

            "You miss him now?"

            "No."

            "Why not?"

            "You're here."

            "But don't I seem sad, sort of?"

            "You're making me pay, a little. That's all right."

            He protests, "I'm a mess," meaning he is sincere: which perhaps is not a meaningful adjustment over what she had said. He feels they are still adjusting in space, slowly twirling in some gorgeous ink that filters through his lids as red. In a space of silence, he can't gauge how much, he feels them drift along sideways deeper into being married, so much that he abruptly volunteers, "We must have Peggy and Ollie over sometime."

            "Like hell," she says, jarring him, but softly, an unexpected joggle in space. "You stay away from her now, you had your crack at it."

            After a while he asks her - she knows everything, he realizes -"Do you think Vietnam will ever be over?"

            "Charlie thought it would, just as soon as the big industrial interests saw that it was unprofitable."

            "God, these foreigners are dumb," Rabbit murmurs.

            "Meaning Charlie?"

            "All ofyou." He feels, gropingly, he should elaborate. "Skeeter thought it was the doorway into utter confusion. There would be this terrible period, of utter confusion, and then there would be a wonderful stretch of perfect calm, with him ruling, or somebody exactly like him."

            "Did you believe it?"

            "I would have liked to, but I'm too rational. Confusion is just a local view of things working out in general. That make sense?"

            "I'm not sure," Janice says.

            "You think Mom ever had any lovers?"

            "Ask her."

            "I don't dare."

            After another while, Janice announces, "If you're not going to make love, I might as well turn my back and get some sleep. I was up almost all night worrying about this - reunion."

            "How do you think it's going?"

            "Fair."

            The slither of sheets as she rotates her body is a silver music, sheets of pale noise extending outward unresisted by space. There was a grip he used to have on her, his right hand cupping her skull through her hair and his left hand on her breasts gathering them together, so the nipples were an inch apart. The grip is still there. Her ass and legs float away. He asks her, "How do we get out of here?"