Rabbit, Run (7 page)

Rabbit is startled to feel and to see in Tothero’s mirror that the shirt fits. Their difference must be all in their legs. With the rattling tongue of a proud mother Tothero watches him dress. His talk makes more sense, now that the embarrassment of explaining what they’re going to do is past. “It does my heart good,” he says. “Youth before the mirror. How long has it been, Harry, now tell me truly, since you had a good time? A long time?”

“I had a good time last night,” Rabbit says. “I drove to West Virginia and back.”

“You’ll like my lady, I know you will, a city flower,” Tothero goes on. “The girl she’s bringing I’ve never met. She says she’s fat. All the world looks fat to my lady—how she eats, Harry: the appetite of the young. That’s a fascinating knot, you young people have so many tricks I never learned.”

“It’s just a Windsor.” Dressed, Rabbit feels a return of calm. Waking up had in a way returned him to the world he deserted. He had missed Janice’s crowding presence, the kid and his shrill needs, his own walls. He had wondered what he was doing. But now these reflexes, shallowly scratched, are spent, and deeper instincts flood forward, telling him he is right. He feels freedom like oxygen everywhere around him; Tothero is an eddy of air, and the building he is in, the streets of the town, are mere stairways and alleyways in space. So perfect, so consistent is the freedom into which the clutter of the world has been vaporized by the simple trigger of his decision, that all ways seem equally good, all movements will put the same caressing pressure on his skin, and not an atom of his happiness would be altered if Tothero told him they were not going to meet two girls but two goats, and they were going not to Brewer but to Tibet. He adjusts his necktie with infinite attention, as if the little lines of this juncture of the Windsor knot, the collar of Tothero’s shirt, and the base of his own throat were the arms of a star that will, when he is finished, extend outward to the rim of the universe.
He
is the Dalai Lama. Like a cloud breaking in the corner of his vision Tothero drifts to the !window. “Is my car still there?” Rabbit asks.

“Your car is blue. Yes. Put on your shoes.”

“I wonder if anybody saw it there. While I was asleep, did you hear anything around town?” For in the vast blank of his freedom Rabbit has remembered a few imperfections, his home, his wife’s, their apartment, clots of concern. It seems impossible that the passage of time should have so soon dissolved them, but Tothero’s answer implies it.

“No,” he says. He adds, “But then of course I didn’t go where there would have been talk of you.”

It annoys Rabbit that Tothero shows no interest in him except as a partner on a joyride. “I should have gone to work today,” he says in a pointed voice, as if blaming the old man.

“What do you do?”

“I demonstrate a kitchen gadget called the MagiPeel Peeler in five-and-dime stores.”

“A noble calling,” Tothero says, and turns from the window. “Splendid, Harry. You’re dressed at last.”

“Is there a comb anywhere, Mr. Tothero? I ought to use the can.”

Under their feet the men in the Sunshine Athletic Association laugh and catcall at some foolishness. Rabbit pictures passing among them and asks, “Say, should everybody see me?”

Tothero becomes indignant, as he used to now and then at practice, when everybody was just fooling around the basket and not going into the drills. “What are you afraid of, Harry? That poor little Janice Springer? You overestimate people. Nobody cares what you do. Now we’ll just go down there and don’t be too long in the toilet. And I haven’t heard any thanks from you for all I’ve done for you, and all I
am
doing.” He takes the comb stuck in the brush bristles and gives it to Harry.

A dread of marring his freedom blocks the easy gesture of expressing gratitude. Rabbit pronounces “Thanks” thin-lipped.

They go downstairs. Contrary to what Tothero had promised, all of the men—old men, mostly, but not very old, so that their impotence has a nasty vigor—look up with interest at him. Insanely, Tothero introduces him repeatedly: “Fred, this is my finest boy, a wonderful basketball player, Harry Angstrom, you probably remember his name from the papers, he twice set a county record, in 1950 and then he broke it in 1951, a wonderful accomplishment.”

“Is that right, Marty?”

“Harry, an honor to meet you.”

Their alert colorless eyes, little dark smears like their mouths, feed on the strange sight of him and send acid impressions down to be digested in their disgusting big beer-tough stomachs. Rabbit sees that Tothero is a fool to them, and is ashamed of his friend and of himself. He hides in the lavatory. The paint is worn off the toilet seat and the washbasin is stained by the hot-water faucet’s rusty tears; the walls are oily and the towel-rack empty. There is something terrible in the height of the tiny ceiling: a square yard of a dainty metal pattern covered with cobwebs in which a few white husks of insects are suspended. His depression deepens, becomes a kind of paralysis; he walks out and rejoins Tothero limping and stiffly grimacing, and they leave the place in a dream. He feels affronted, vaguely invaded, when Tothero gets into his car. But, just as in a dream he never stops to question, Rabbit slides in behind the wheel and, in the renewed relation of his arms and legs to the switches and pedals, puts on again the mantle of power. His wet-combed hair feels stiff on his head.

He says sharply, “So you think I should’ve drunk with Janice.”

“Do what the heart commands,” Tothero says. “The heart is our only guide.” He sounds weary and far away.

“Into Brewer?”

There is no answer.

Rabbit drives up the alley, coming to Potter Avenue, where the water from the ice plant used to run down. He goes right, away from Wilbur Street, where his apartment is, and two more turns bring him into Central Street heading around the mountain to Brewer. On the left, land drops away into a chasm floored by the slick still width of the Running Horse River; on the right, gasoline stations glow, twirlers flicker on strings, spotlights protest.

As the town thins, Tothero’s tongue loosens. “The ladies we’re going to meet, now Harry, I have no conception of what the other one will be like, but I know you’ll be a gentleman. And I guarantee you’ll like my friend. She is a remarkable girl, Harry, with seven strikes against her from birth, but she’s done a remarkable thing.”

“What?”

“She’s come to grips. Isn’t that the whole secret, Harry; to come to grips? It makes me happy, happy and humble, to have, as I do, this very tenuous association with her. Harry?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you realize, Harry, that a young woman has hair on every part of her body?”

“I hadn’t thought about it.” Distaste, like an involuntary glandular secretion, has stained his throat.

“Do,” Tothero says. “Do think about it. They are monkeys, Harry. Women are monkeys.”

He says it so solemn, Rabbit has to laugh.

Tothero laughs too, and comes closer on the seat. “Yet we love them, Harry, don’t we? Harry, why do we love them? Answer that, and you’ll answer the riddle of life.” He is squirming around, crossing and uncrossing his legs, leaning over and tapping Rabbit’s shoulder and jerking back and glancing out the side window and turning and tapping again. “I am a hideous person, Harry. A person to be abhorred. Harry, let me tell you something.” As a coach he was always telling you something. “My wife calls me a person to be abhorred. But do you know when it began? It began with her skin. One day in the spring, in nineteen forty-three or four, it was during the war, without warning it was hideous. It was like the hides of a thousand lizards stitched together. Stitched together
clumsily
. Can you picture that? That sense of it being
in pieces
horrified me, Harry. Are you listening? You’re not listening. You’re wondering why you came to me.”

“What you said about Janice this morning kind of worries me.”

“Janice! Let’s not talk about little mutts like Janice Springer, Harry boy. This is the night. This is no time for pity. The real women are dropping down out of the trees.” With his hands he imitates things falling out of trees. “Plippity, plippity.”

Even discounting the man as a maniac, Rabbit becomes expectant. They park the car off Weiser Avenue and meet the girls in front of a Chinese restaurant.

The girls waiting under crimson neon have a floral delicacy; like a touch of wilt the red light rims their fluffy hair. Rabbit’s heart thumps ahead of him down the pavement. They all come together and Tothero introduces Margaret, “Margaret Kosko, Harry Angstrom, my finest athlete, it’s a pleasure for me to be able to introduce two such wonderful young people to one another.” The old man’s manner is queerly shy; his voice has a cough waiting in it.

After Tothero’s build-up, Rabbit is amazed that Margaret is just another Janice—that same sallow density, that stubborn smallness. Scarcely moving her lips, she says, “This is Ruth Leonard. Marty Tothero, and you, whatever your name is.” Ruth is fat alongside Margaret, but not
that
fat. Chunky, more. But tall. She has flat blue eyes in square-cut sockets. Her upper lip pushes out a little, like with an incipient blister, and her thighs fill the front of her dress so that even standing up she has a lap. Her hair, kind of a dirty ginger color, is bundled in a roll at the back of her head.

“Harry,” Rabbit says. “Or Rabbit.”

“That’s right!” Tothero cries. “The other boys used to call you Rabbit. I had forgotten.” He coughs.

“Well you’re a big bunny,” Ruth remarks. Beyond her the parking meters with their red tongues recede along the curb, and at her feet, pinched in lavender straps, four sidewalk squares meet in an x.

“Just big outside,” he says.

“That’s me too,” she says.

“God I’m hungry,” Rabbit tells them all, just to say something. From somewhere he’s got the jitters.

“Hunger, hunger,” Tothero says, as if grateful for the cue. “Where shall my little ones go?”

“Here?” Harry asks. He sees from the way the two girls look at him that he is expected to take charge. Tothero is moving back and forth like a crab sideways and bumps into a middle-aged couple strolling along. His face shows such surprise at the collision, and he is so elaborately apologetic, that Ruth laughs; her laugh rings on the street like a handful of change thrown down. At the sound Rabbit begins to loosen up; the space between the muscles of his chest feels filled with warm air. Tothero pushes into the glass door first, Margaret follows, and Ruth takes his arm and says, “I know you. I went to West Brewer High and got out in fifty-one.”

“That’s
my
class.” Like the touch of her hand on his arm, her being his age pleases him, as if, even in high schools on opposite sides of the city, they have learned the same things and gained the same view of life. The Class of ‘51 view.

“You beat us,” she says.

“You had a lousy team.”

“No we didn’t. I went with three of the players.”

“Three at once?”

“In a way.”

“Well. They looked tired.”

She laughs again, the coins thrown down, though he feels ashamed of what he has said, she is so good-natured and maybe was pretty then. Her complexion isn’t good now. But her hair is thick. A young Chinaman in a drab linen coat blocks their way past the glass counter where an American girl in a kimono sits counting threadbare bills. “Please, how many?”

“Four,” Rabbit says, when Tothero is silent.

Unexpected, generous gesture, Ruth slips off her short white coat and gives it to Rabbit: soft, bunched cloth. The motion stirs up a smell of perfume on her.

“Four, yes please this way,” and the waiter leads them to a red booth. The place has just recently reopened as Chinese; pink paintings of Paris are still on the wall. Ruth staggers a little; Rabbit sees from behind that her heels, yellow with strain, tend to slip sideways in the net of lavender straps that pin her feet to the spikes of her shoes. But under the shiny green stretch of her dress her broad bottom packs the cloth with a certain composure. Her waist tucks in trimly, squarely, like the lines of her face. The cut of the dress bares a big V-shaped piece of her fat fair back. In arriving at the booth, he bumps against her; the top of her head comes to his nose. The prickly smell of her hair stitches the store-bought scent behind her ears. They bump because Tothero is ushering Margaret into her seat so ceremoniously, a gnome at the mouth of his cave. Standing there waiting, Rabbit is elated to think that a stranger passing outside the restaurant window, like himself last night outside that West Virginia diner, would see him with a woman. He seems to be that stranger, staring in, envying himself his body and his woman’s body. Ruth bends down and slides over. The skin of her shoulders gleams and then dims in the shadow of the booth. Rabbit sits down too and feels her rustle beside him, settling in, the way women do, fussily, as if making a nest.

He discovers he has held on to her coat. Pale limp pelt, it sleeps in his lap. Without rising be reaches up and hangs it on the coat-pole hook above him.

“Nice to have a long arm,” she says, and looks in her purse and takes out a pack of Newports. “Tothero says I have short arms.”

“Where’d you meet that old bum?” This so Tothero can hear if he cares.

“He’s not a bum, he’s my old coach.”

“Want one?” A cigarette.

 He wavers. “I’ve stopped.”

“So that old bum was your coach,” she sighs. She draws a cigarette from the turquoise pack of Newports and hangs it between her orange lips and frowns at the sulphur tip as she strikes a match, with curious feminine clumsiness, away from her, holding the paper match sideways and thus bending it. It flares on the third scratch.

Margaret says, “
Ruth
.”

“Bum?” Tothero says, and his heavy face looks unwell and lopsided in cagey mirth, as if he’s started to melt. “I am, I am. A vile old bum fallen among princesses.”

Margaret sees nothing against her in this and puts her hand on top of his on the table and in a solemn dead voice insists, “You’re nothing like a bum.”