Rabbit at Rest

by John Updike

  “For me, I think a choked-up six,” Bernie says.

  But in trying to take something off the shot he takes off too much and leaves it short, over the water but on the bank where it’s hard to take a stance. “Tough chip from there,” Harry says, unable to resist a gentle needle. He still blames Bernie for parking the cart so close on that attempted deliberate hook.

  Bernie accepts the needle. “Especially after that last shitty chip of mine, huh?” he says, pushing his cut-up, deflated, humpbacked old body into the cart, Harry having slid over into the driver’s seat. The guy who’s on the green has earned the right to drive. Harry feels momentum building, they’re going to cream these oafs. He glides over the water on an arched wooden bridge with red rubber treads laid over the planks. “From where you are,” Bernie tells him as they get out, “the green slopes down. Hit your putt too hard, you’ll slide miles beyond.”

  Ed with a ball in the water is out of it. Bernie’s stance on the steep bank is so awkward he whiffs the ball once, shanks it sideways on his next swing, and picks up. But sandy Joe Gold, in his element, waggles his feet to plant himself and manages a good blast shot out of the pot bunker. With Bernie’s advice preying on his mind, interfering with his own instincts, Harry strokes his long approach putt tentatively and leaves it four feet short. He marks it with a Valhalla Village marker while Joe two-putts for his bogey. Joe takes his time and gives Harry too long to study his four-footer. He sees a break, then doesn’t see it. In trying to avoid upping out on the left like he did on the last hole, he loses his par putt, very makable, an inch to the right. “Son of a son of a bitch,” he says, frustration pressing from behind his eyes so hard he thinks he might burst into tears. “On in one, and a fucking three-putt.”

  “It happens,” Ed says, writing down the 4 with his trained accountant’s primness. “Tie hole.”

  “Sorry, Bern,” Harry says, climbing back into the cart, on the passenger side.

  “I screwed you up,” his partner says. “Should have kept my yap shut about the green being downhill.” He unwraps another cigar and, pushing the pedal, leans back into a long day.

  Not Harry’s day. The Florida sun seems not so much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination. Even directly under palm trees and right up against the twelve-foot pine fences that separate the Village from the rest of the world, the sun fords you, reddening the tip of Rabbit’s nose and baking his forearms and the back of his non-gloved hand, which is already dotted with little white bumps of keratosis. He carries a tube of number-15 sunscreen in his golf bag and is always dabbing it on but the ultraviolet gets through anyway, cooking his squamous cells into skin cancer. The three men he plays with never use anything and just get a comfortable tan, even the bald top of Bernie’s head, as smooth as an ostrich egg with only a few small specks on it as he bends over his shots with that awful reverse-shift, squeezed-feet stance of his. Harry feels Bernie’s steady, mechanically repeating ineptitude short shots, chunked chips - a burden today, since he can’t quite carry him, and wonders why somebody who exudes suffering wisdom the way Bernie does never learns a thing about golf or even seems to try. To him, Harry supposes, it’s just a game, a way of killing time in the sun at this stage of his life. Bernie was a boy once and then a man making money and children (a carpet business in Queens; two daughters who married nice solid guys and a son who went to Princeton and the Wharton School in Philadelphia and became a hostile-takeover specialist on Wall Street) and now he’s at the other end of life’s rainbow, and this is what you do: Bernie endures retirement fun in Florida the way he’s endured his entire life, sucking that same acrid wet-cigar taste out of it. He doesn’t see what Harry sees in the game infinity, an opportunity for infinite improvement. Rabbit doesn’t see it himself today. Around the eleventh hole - a dogleg parfive that he butchers, slicing his second shot, a four-wood, so wildly it winds up in a condo’s side yard, between some plastic trash cans and a concrete slab with some rusting steel clothesline poles sunk in it (a German shepherd chained to the clothesline barks at him, lunging toward him so the taut wire sings, and Gold and Silberstein loafing in their cart cackle, and Bernie chomps deeper and looks morose), taking the out-of-bounds drop for a four while the dog keeps barking and barking, trying to hit a three-iron so hard he digs six inches behind and sprays sand all over his shoes and into the tops of his socks, pulling the next iron to the left into a bed of parched and shedding azaleas beside the twelfth tee, taking a drop for another stroke, skulling the chip clear across over the green (all three playing partners keeping a ghastly silence now, shocked, mourning for him, or is it holding in their glee?), plunking the next sand shot against the trap lip so it dribbles back, and picking up in disgust, and even hitting himself on the knee when after raking he flips the sand rake to one side - after this hole, the game and day begin to eat him into a state of depression. The grass looks greasy and unreal, every other palm tree is dying from the drought and dropping stiff brown fronds, the condos line every fairway like tall stucco outhouses, and even the sky, where your eyes can usually find relief, is dirtied by jet trails that spread and wander until they are indistinguishable from God’s pure clouds.

  The hours pile on, noon comes and goes, the klieg lights begin to dim but the heat is turned up higher. They finish at quarter to three, Harry and Bernie twenty dollars down-both sides of a fivedollar nassau plus the eighteen and a press on the second nine that they lost. “We’ll get ‘em next time,” Harry promises his partner, not really believing it.

  “You weren’t quite yourself today, my friend,” Bernie admits. “You got girlftiend trouble or something?”

  Horny, Jews are: he once read a history of Hollywood about their womanizing. Harry Cohn, Groucho Marx, the Warner Brothers, they went crazy out there with the sunshine and swimming pools and all the Midwestern shiksas who’d do anything to be movie stars - participate in orgies, blow a mogul while he was talking on the telephone - yet his golf partners are all married to the same women, forty, fifty years, women with big dyed hair and thick bangles and fat brown upper arms who can’t stop talking when you see them all dolled up at dinner, Bernie and Ed and Joe -sitting smilingly silent beside them as if all this talking their women do is sex, which it must be - pep, life. How do they do it? Wear life like a ready-made suit that fits exactly. “I guess I told you,” Harry tells Bernie, “my son and his family are visiting.”

  “There’s your problem, Angstrom: you felt guilty horsing around with us. You should have been entertaining your loved ones.”

  “Yeah, entertain ‘em. They just got here yesterday and are acting bored already. They want us to live next door to Disney World.”

  “Take ‘em to jungle Gardens. Up in Sarasota, down 41 from the Ringling Museum. Fern and I go there two, three times a winter and never get bored. I could watch those flamingos sleep for hours - how do they do it? Balanced on one leg two feet long and thinner than my finger.” He holds up a finger and it seems thick. “Thinner than that,” he swears.

  “I don’t know, Bernie. When I’m around, my kid acts like he doesn’t want my own grandchildren to have anything much to do with me. The little boy, he’s four, is pretty much a stranger, but the girl and I could get along. She’s almost nine. I was even thinking I should bring her out in a cart sometime and let her try to hit the ball. Or maybe rent a Sunfish, Ed, if your son over at the Bayview could write me up as a guest.”

  The foursome is having beers and free munchies in Club Nineteen, next to the pro shop, on the bottom floor of Building A of Valhalla Village. The darkness inside - the dark panels and beams in the style of an English pub - is intensified by the subtropical brightness outside, at the round white tables under umbrellas saying Coors. You can hear the splashing from the pool, between Buildings A and B, and the throbbing of a generator housed on the other side of the wall, beyond the rest rooms and dart boards and video games. At night sometimes Harry imagines he can hear the g
enerator throbbing through all the intervening apartments, carpets, air-conditioners, conversations, mattresses, and peach-colored hall wallpaper. Somehow the noise curves around and clings to the walls and comes in his big sliding window, the crack that’s left open to the Gulf air.

  “No problem,” Ed says, as he totals their scores. “Just show up at the front desk and ask for Gregg Silvers. That’s what he calls himself, don’t ask me why. They’ll let you walk through the lobby and downstairs to the changing rooms. I don’t advise wearing bathing suits into the lobby; they try to discourage that. Do you have a day I can tell him to expect you?”

  Harry gets the impression this may be a realer favor than he thought, a bigger deal than it’s worth. “Friday, if ever,” he says.

  “Does Gregg have to know for sure? Tomorrow I thought we’d head up Sarasota way.”

  “Jungle Gardens,” Bernie insists.

  “Lionel Train Museum,” Joe Gold contributes. “And right across from the Ringling Museum there’s Bellm’s Cars and Music of Yesterday, is I think what they call it. Over a thousand music machines, can you imagine? Antique cars from 1897, I never knew there were cars then. You’re in the car business, aren’t you, Angstrom? You and your boy. You’ll both go ape in there.”

  “I don’t know,” Harry begins, groping to express the curious cloud that Nelson carries with him, that dampens any outing.

  “Harry, this is interesting,” Ed says. “Giving you a seven, two over par for handicap purposes, on the eleventh where you picked up, and a courtesy six on the sixteenth where you put two balls in the water, you scored an even ninety even so. You weren’t playing as bad as it looked. Waste a few less drives and long irons, and you’ll be in the eighties every time.”

  “I couldn’t get my ass into it, I couldn’t release,” Harry says. “I couldn’t let go.” He has an unaskable question for these three wise Jewish men: how about death? He asks them, “Hey, how about that Pan Am jet?”

  There is a pause. “It has to be a bomb,” Ed says. “When you’ve got splinters of steel driven right through leather luggage and wreckage strewn across fifty miles of Scotland, it has to be a bomb.”

  Bernie sighs, “It’s them again. The Shiiteheads.”

  “Arabs,” Joe Gold says. A patriotic glee lights his wobbling eyes. “Once we got proof, the F-111s’ll be flying into Libya again. What we ought to do is keep going right into Eye-ran and stick it to the old Ayatollah.”

  But their tongues are less quick than usual; Harry has made them uneasy, with what he hadn’t meant to be so much a political question. With Jews, everything in the papers comes back to Israel.

  “I mean,” he says, “how the hell do you think it feels? Sitting there and having the plane explode?”

  “Well, I bet it wakes you up,” Ed says.

  “They didn’t feel a thing,” Bernie says, considerately, sensing Harry’s personal worry. “Zero. It was over that quick.”

  Joe says to Harry, “You know what the Israelis say, don’t you, Angstrom? `If we got to have enemies, thank God they’re Arabs.’ “

  Harry has heard this before but tries to laugh. Bernie says, “I think Angstrom could use a new partner. I depress him.”

  “It wasn’t you, Bernie. I came depressed.”

  Club Nineteen puts out a wonderful array of nibbles, in little china bowls monogrammed with Valhalla Village’s logo, two seablue intertwined V’s. Not just dry-roasted peanuts and almonds and hazelnuts but tiny pretzel sticks and salted pumpkin seeds and tight curls resembling Corn Chips, only finer and sharper in the mouth in that blissful instant while the tongue works one around to be crunched between the molars. The other men take only a pinch of this starchy salty salad now and then but soon the bowl is empty, Rabbit doing eighty per cent of the eating.

  “That crap’s loaded with sodium,” Bernie warns him.

  “Yeah, but it’s good for the soul,” Harry says, about as religious a remark as he dares put forth. “Who else is ready for another beer?” he asks. “Losers buy this round.”

  He is beginning to feel expansive: his dark mood is thinning like a squirt of ink in alcohol’s gentle solvent. He waves for the waiter and asks him to bring along with four more beers another bowl of munchies. The waiter, a faunlike young Hispanic with an earring bigger than Nelson’s and gold chains on both wrists, nods in a timid way; Harry must seem enormous to him, menacingly white and pink and sodden with sodium-retained water. The whole quartet must seem loud and potentially unruly: ugly old gringos. Another squirt of ink. Harry feels heavy again. Good times in Florida are never as good as those boozy late afternoons at his old club back in Diamond County, the Flying Eagle, before Buddy Inglefinger married that lanky crazy hippie Valerie and moved to Royersford and Thelma Harrison got too sick with lupus ever to show up and they dropped their membership and Cindy Murkett got fat and Webb divorced her so you never saw anybody any more. In Florida the people are so cautious, as if on two beers they might fall down and break a hip. The whole state is brittle.

  “Your boy play golf?” Joe is asking him.

  “Not really. He’s never had the temperament. Or the time, he says.” And, Rabbit might have added, he never really invited him.

  “What does he do, for fun?” Ed asks. These men, it dawns on Harry, are being polite. By ordering another round of beers he has stretched the nineteenth-hole camaraderie beyond where it’s effortless. These guys’ sexy elderly wives are waiting. Gossip to catch up on. Letters from dutiful, prospering children to read. Interest to add up. Torah to study.

  “Beats me,” Harry says. “Hangs around with a bunch of Brewer creeps, swinging singles sort of. I never see him having much fun. He never went in for sports.”

  “The way you talk about him,” Bernie said, “he could be the father and you the son.”

  Rabbit agrees enthusiastically; with a boost from the second beer he almost has a vision. “Yeah, and a delinquent son at that. That’s how he sees me, an old juvenile delinquent. His wife looks miserable.” Where did that come from? Was it true? Help me, guys. Tell me how you’ve got on top of sex and death so they don’t bother you. He goes on, “The whole family, the two kids too, seem on edge. I don’t know what’s up.”

  “Your wife, does she know what’s up?”

  That mutt. Harry ignores the question. “Just last night I tried to talk to the kid in a friendly fashion and all he did was bitch about Toyotas. The company that feeds us, that saved him and his old man and his shady little crook of a grandfather from being bums, and all he does is complain about how Toyotas aren’t Lamborghinis! Jesus, that beer went down fast. It felt like the Gobi Desert out there.”

  “Harry, you don’t want another beer.”

  “You want to get home and tell your family about Bellm’s. B, E, L, L, M, apostrophe, S. I know it sounds like I can’t spell. Every old car you could imagine. From before steering wheels. Before gears, even.”

  “To be honest, guys, I’ve never been that much into cars. I drive ‘em, I sell ‘em, but I’ve never really understood the damn things. To me they’re all alike. Great if they go, lousy if they don’t.” The other men are standing up.

  “I want to see you out here tomorrow afternoon with your little granddaughter. Teach her the basics. Head down, slow takeaway.

  That was Bernie talking; Ed Silberstein tells him:

  “Work on shortening that backswing, Harry. You don’t need all that above the shoulders. The hit is right in here, right by your pecker. Best advice I ever had from a golf pro was, Imagine you’re hitting it with your pecker.”

  They have sensed his silent cry for help, for consolation, and are becoming more Jewish on Harry’s behalf, it seems to him as he sits there.

  Bernie has pushed up from the table and towers over Harry with his gray skin, his loose dewlaps full of shadows. “We have an expression,” he says downward. “Tsuris. Sounds to me, my friend, like you got some tsuris. Not full-grown yet, not gehoketh tsuris, but tsuris.”

  P
leasantly dazed with alcohol, his chest distantly stinging, the tip of his nose beginning to feel sunburn, Harry has no inclination to move, though the world around him is in motion. Two young college-kid hotshots who were pressing them from behind all afternoon have finished and are making the video games over by the rest rooms warble, zing, whistle, and bleat. Animated automatons in many colors appear and disappear on the screen. He sees his white fingers, with the big moons on their fingernails, absentmindedly dabble at the bottom of the bowl of munchies, as if he is trying to pick up the intertwined V’s. The junk food has been consumed. He cannot be absolutely sure, in memory, if the waiter ever brought a new bowl.

  Joe Gold, his hair a sandy mane, his magnified eyes surging back and forth within his squarish spectacles, bends down a bit, as if rooting his feet again in a trap, and says, “Here’s a Jewish joke for you. Abe meets Izzy after a long time no see. He asks, `How many children do you have?’ Izzy says, `None.’ Abe says, `None! So what do you do for aggravation?”’