by John Updike
Roy whimpers against her neck, and two younger nurses behind the counter in the desk area ostentatiously rustle papers as if to avoid overhearing.
“You shitty dumb bitch,” Nelson says in a soft voice, lightly smiling as if what he’s saying is pleasant, “I don’t do needles and I don’t fuck coke whores. I don’t know what a coke whore is and you don’t either.”
“Call them what you want, just don’t give me their diseases.”
His voice stays low, almost caressing. “Where did you get so goddamn high and mighty, that’s what I’d love to know. What makes you so fucking pure, you weren’t too pure to get yourself knocked up when it suited you. And then to send Melanie back home to Brewer with me to keep putting out ass so I wouldn’t run away somehow. That was really the cold-blooded thing, pimping for your own girlfriend.”
Nelson finds a certain chronic comfort in his wife’s fairskinned, time-widened face, with its mustache of rage crinkles and its anger-creased triangular brow, pressing upon him, limiting his vision. It shuts out all the threatening things at the rim. She says, faltering as if she knows she is being put through a hoop, “We’ve been through this a million times, Nelson Angstrom, and I had no idea you’d hop into bed with Melanie, I was foolish enough to think you were in love with me and trying to work things out with your parents.” This cycle of complaint is stale and hateful yet something familiar he can snuggle into. At night, when both are asleep, it is she who loops her arm, downy and long, around his sweating chest and he who curls closer to the fetal position, pressing his backside into her furry lap.
“I was,” he says, plainly teasing now, “I did work them out. So what were you starting to say?”
“About what?”
“What you were going to tell me but couldn’t because I fell asleep because according to you I wasn’t as wired as usual.” He leans his head against the bench’s headrest and sighs in this new blood-clean weariness of his. Coming down makes you realize how high up you usually are. “God,” he says, “it’ll be good to get back to the real world. You’re sort of right about yesterday, I was stuck, with Mom grabbing the car as soon as you got back. All you can deal for around Valhalla Village is Geritol.”
Her voice in marital sympathy softens. “I like you like this,” she confides. “Just yourself. No additives.” He looks, with his tidy taut profile sealed upon his tired thoughts, his thinning temples balanced by his jutting little mustache, almost handsome. The scattered gray hairs in his rat’s-tail haircut touch her, as if they are her fault.
Wearily in Pru’s forgiving tone of voice he hears that she is not yet ready to let this marriage go. He has plenty of margin still. “I’m always the same,” he disagrees. “I can take or leave the stuff. Yesterday, maybe you’re right, out of respect for the old guy, or something. I just decided to do without. What nobody seems to understand is, it’s not addictive.”
“Wonderful,” Pru says, the softness in her voice ebbing. “My husband the exception that proves the rule.”
“Don’t we have any other topic?”
“This story,” she decides to begin, “of Judy’s being trapped under the sail. Aren’t the sails awfully small? You know what a good swimmer she is. Do you possibly think -?”
“Think what?”
“That she was just pretending, hiding from your father as a sort of game, and then it got out of hand?”
“So it just about killed him? What a thought. Poor Dad.” Nelson’s profile smiles; his mustache lifts closer to the underside of his small straight irritated nose. “I don’t think so,” he says. “She wouldn’t be that cool. Think of how far out there it must have seemed to her, surrounded by sharks in her mind. She wouldn’t be playing games.”
“We don’t know really how it was out there, or how many seconds it all took. Children’s minds don’t work exactly like ours, and your father’s way with her is to be teasing, the way he talks to her. It’s something she could have done not to be cruel but a child’s idea, you know, of teasing back.”
His smile now shows his small inturned teeth, which always look a little gray no matter how hard he brushes them, and flosses, and uses those handles with rubber tips once he gets into his pajamas. “I knew it was a bad idea, him taking her out there when he doesn’t know shit about boats,” he says. “You say he acted proud of saving her life?”
“On the beach, before the paramedics came - it seemed to take forever but they said it was only seven minutes - he seemed happy, relieved somehow even with the terrible pain and struggling for breath. He kept trying to make jokes and get us to laugh. He told me I should put new polish on my toenails.”
Nelson’s eyes open and he stares, not at the opposite wall where a dead benefactor’s oil portrait preens, but unseeing into the past. “I had that baby sister, you know,” he says, “who drowned.”
“I know. How could any of us ever forget it?”
He stares some more, and says, “Maybe he was happy to have saved this one.”
And indeed to Harry, as he lies on his back drugged and tied down by tubes and wires in what seems a horizonless field of white, the sight of little Judy alive and perfect in each reddishbrown hair and freckle, her long eyelashes spaced as if by a Linotype machine with two-point spaces, is a pure joy. She had tangled with the curse and survived. She is getting out of Florida, death’s favorite state, alive.
His collapse twenty-six hours ago did have its blissful aspect: his sense, beginning as he lay helpless and jellyfishlike under a sky of red, of being in the hands of others, of being the blind, pained, focal point of a world of concern and expertise, at some depth was a coming back home, after a life of ill-advised journeying. Sinking, he perceived the world around him as gaseous and rising, the grave and affectionate faces of paramedics and doctors and nurses released by his emergency like a cloud of holiday balloons. His many burdens have been lifted away in this light-drenched hospital, this businesslike emporium where miracles are common if not cheap. They have relieved him of his catheter, and his only problem is a recurrent need to urinate - all this fluid they keep dripping into him - sideways into a bed pan, without pulling loose the IV tube and the wires to the heart monitor and the oxygen tubes in his nostrils.
Another small problem is fog: a football game he has been looking forward to seeing, the NFC playoff game between the Eagles and the Bears at Soldier Field in Chicago, is on the television set that comes out on a tan enamelled metal arm not two feet from his face, but the game, which began at twelve-thirty, as it goes on has become dimmer and dimmer, swallowed by an unprecedented fog blowing in off Lake Michigan. Television coverage has been reduced to the sideline cameras; people up in the stands and the announcers in their booth can see even less than Rabbit lying doped-up here in bed. “Heck of a catch by somebody,” said one color commentator, Terry Bradshaw as a matter of fact, Bradshaw who in the Super Bowl at the beginning of the decade was bailed out by a circus catch by that lucky stiff Stallworth. The crowd, up high in the fog, rumbles and groans in poor sync with the television action, trying to read the game off the electronic scoreboard. The announcers - a black guy with froggy pop eyes, maybe that same guy who married Bill Cosby’s television wife, and a white guy with a lumpy face - seem indignant that God could do this, mess with CBS and blot out a TV show the sponsors are paying a million dollars a minute for and millions are watching. They keep wondering aloud why the officials don’t call off the game. Harry finds the fog merciful, since before it rolled in the Eagles looked poor, two perfectly thrown TD passes by Cunningham called back because of bonehead penalty plays by Anthony Toney, and then this rookie Jackson dropping a pass when he was a mile open in the end zone. The game flickering in the fog, the padded men hulking out of nothingness and then fading back again, has a peculiar beauty bearing upon Rabbit’s new position at the still center of a new world, personally. The announcers keep saying they’ve never seen anything like it.
He has trouble at first realizing he must perform for his visit
ors, that it’s not enough to lie here and accept the apparition of them like another channel of television. During the commercial, the one for Miller that shows the big black guy lifting the pool table so all the balls roll into the pocket supposedly, he lowers his eyes to Judy’s eager face, bright and precise as watchworks free of dust and rust, and says to her, “We learned, didn’t we, Judy? We learned how to come about.”
“It’s like a scissors,” the girl says, showing with her hands. “You push toward the sail.”
“Right,” he says. Or is it away from? His thinking is foggy. His voice, nasal and husky, doesn’t sound like his; his throat feels raw from something they did to him when he was brought into the hospital, something with oxygen, he was half out of it and then all the way out thanks to something they slipped into him in the confusion.
“Harry, what do the doctors say about you?” Janice asks. “What’s going to happen?” She sits in a chair near his bed, a new kind of vinyl-cushioned wheelchair, like a revved-up version of Fred Springer’s pet Barcalounger. She has that anxious skinned look to her forehead and her mouth is a dumb slot open a dark half-inch. She looks in that two-tone running suit and those bulky Adidas like a senior-league bowling champion, her face hard from too much sun, with two little knobs like welts developing over her cheekbones. The delicate skin beneath her eyebrows is getting puckery. With age we grow more ins and outs.
He tells her, “One doc told me I have an athlete’s heart. Too big. Too big on the outside, that is, and too small on the inside. The muscle is too thick. Apparently the heart isn’t a nice valentine like you’d think, it’s a muscle. It pumps with a kind of twisting motion, like this.” He shows his little audience with a twitching fist: beat, pause, beat, pause. Judy’s face is transfixed by the screen of the heart monitor, which he can’t see; but he supposes the effort of his small demonstration is showing up in his running cardiogram. Janice watches it too, their four eyes shiningly reflecting the electronic jiggle and their two mouths both open to make identical slots of darkness. He has never before seen any sign of heredity between them. He goes on, “They want to put some dye into my heart, by putting a long tube into some artery down at the top of my leg, so they can see exactly what’s going on, but offhand they think at least one of the coronary arteries is plugged. Too many pork chops on top of all that hustle on the court when I was a kid. No problem, though. They can bypass anything, they do it every day now, as simple as plumbing with plastic pipe. They tell me it’s amazing, what they’ve learned to do in the last ten years.”
“You’re going to have open-heart surgery?” Janice asks in alarm.
The fist that impersonated a heart feels cloudy and heavy; he lowers it carefully to his side on the sheet, and momentarily closes his eyes, to spare himself the sight of his worried wife. “Nothing for now. Maybe eventually. It’s an option. Another option is, this catheter has a balloon in it somehow that they inflate when it’s inside the plugged-up artery. It cracks the plaque. That’s what they call it, plaque. I thought a plaque was what you got for winning the championship.” Rabbit has to keep suppressing the impulse to laugh, at his inability to share with Janice the druginduced peace inside his rib cage, the sense of being at last at the still center. Painkiller, blood-thinner, tranquillizer, vasodilator, and diuretic all drip into his system from above, painting the hospital world with rosy tints of benevolence and amusement. He loves the constant action, the visits to extract blood and measure blood pressure and check instruments and drips, and the parade of firm-bodied odorless young females in starchy cotton and colors of skin from every continent who tend to his helpless flesh with a sexy mix of reverence and brutal condescension, with that trained look on their pretty faces like actresses or geisha girls. His little white-walled room seems in his entrancement to be a stage set, crowded with unpredictable exits and entrances. Semi-private, it even has a curtain, which conceals his roommate, who was burbling and vomiting and groaning this morning but has fallen since into a silence that might be death. But for Harry, the play goes on, and on cue another actor enters. “Here’s a doc now,” he announces to Janice. “You ask him whatever you want. I’ll watch the game and Judy’ll watch my heart monitor. Tell me if it stops, Judy.”
“Grandpa, don’t joke,” the dear child scolds.
The cardiologist is a big red-skinned immigrant Australian named Dr. Olman. He has a pink hooked nose, brilliant white teeth, and bleached lank hair. Years of the good life in Florida have overlaid his clipped native accent with a Southern drawl. He takes Janice’s little narrow brown hand into his meaty red one and they become, in Rabbit’s eyes, his cardiac parents - worried little nutbrown mother and outwardly calm and factual father. “He’s been a pretty sick lad,” Dr. Olman tells her, “and we’ve got to teach him how to take better care of himself.”
“What’s wrong with his heart, exactly?” Janice asks.
“The usual thing, ma’am. It’s tired and stiff and full of crud. It’s a typical American heart, for his age and economic status et cetera.”
That strangely intense and slightly embarrassing Gallo-wine commercial, about the guy who has a blind date with a girl who turns out to be the very liquor saleswoman who advised him what bottle to take the date as a present, comes on.
“As best we can tell without cardiac catheterization,” Dr. Olman is saying, “the principal narrowing is the standard one, the left anterior descending, the workhorse of the system. Luckily, he appears to have fairly well-developed collaterals, which have kept him going. You see, ma’am, whenever the heart’s been starving for oxygen, it tries to develop alternative routes to get blood to the muscle. Also, from the murmur we think we hear there may be a fair bit of stenosis around the aortic valve. Not a pretty picture, but by no means the worst we’ve ever seen.”
Janice looks at her husband almost with pride. “Oh, Harry! You would mention the little aches and breathing problems, and I never took you seriously. You didn’t complain hard enough.”
“It was perfect,” the girl in the commercial sighingly says, at the end of their date, starry-eyed and in soft focus; you can see they will fuck, if not this date the next, and marry and live happily ever after, all by the grace of Gallo.
Dr. Olman has sized Janice up as educable and moves into a heavier sell. “Now, if his luck holds and the lesion isn’t located at a bifurcation and there’s not too much calcification a lot of doctors would advise you to begin modestly, with an angioplasty, and wait and see. To my own way of thinking, though, you have to offset the relative lack of trauma and expense - we can’t forget expense, now can we, what with Medicare’s pulling in its horns and this new chappie’s promising no new taxes? - we have to offset those psychological pluses against the minus kicker, the likelihood of recurrent stenosis and having to do it all over again, the odds of which, to be honest about it, are on the shady side of fifty per cent. For my money, not to keep beating about the bush, the artery bypass is the sucker that does the job. What do you say in the States, never send a boy when you can send a man? Now, ma’am, how much do you want to know about the heart?”
“Everything,” Janice says, adoring of this man willing to explain things to her, her tongue peeking through as she prepares to concentrate.
“Way to go,” Dr. Olman gamely says, and makes a big fist with one hand and with the fingers ofthe other begins to show her how the coronary arteries he on the heart’s surface, their branches burrowing into the hardworking muscle. Harry has seen this demonstration earlier in the day and signals Judy to come closer to his bed. She is wearing the pink party dress she came down on the airplane in, and the stiff white ribbon around her braided pigtail. Yesterday’s experience at sea has given her a sunburn on her nostril wings and beneath her clear green eyes, where her freckles are thinnest. She keeps staring at his heart monitor.
“What do you see?” he asks her huskily.
“It’s like a little twitchy worm, that just goes and goes.”
“That’s life,” he
tells her. “That’s your granddad.”
Judy yields to an impulse: leaning against the bed, she tries to embrace the old man, disarraying and tugging at the tubes and wires attached to his upper body. “Oh Grandpa,” she confesses, “it’s all my fault!”
Her breath feels hot on his neck. He hugs her, as best he can, with the arm not pierced by the IV. “Don’t be silly. What’s your fault?”
“Yesterday. I scared you out there.”
“You didn’t scare me, sweetie. The Gulf of Mexico scared me. You weren’t scared?”
Tearily she shakes her head No.
This seems another wonder to him. “Why not?” he asks.
Her smooth little face gets that tiptoe look which in a mature woman signals that she is about to lie. She says, a bit mincingly, “Yon were out there with me, Grandpa. And there were lots of other boats around.”
He renews his trammelled hug and her slender little body is unresisting, something has gone out of it; he feels a roughness in his throat, perhaps from yesterday’s gulps of saltwater. His eyes film over with the hot relief of tears. On television, men with wide shoulders and narrow hips move like gods on Olympus among the clouds. You can’t even see any more who is white and who is black. Blinded though they are, the announcers keep yelling in those straining excited voices they have. A commercial shows a Subaru bumpily climbing a mountain of dead car chassis.