by John Updike
Harry jerks his head curtly toward the outdoors. “How’s she doing really?”
Benny moves an inch even closer and confides, “She gets ‘em to a certain point, then gets rigid and lets the deal slip away. Like she’s afraid the rest of us will say she’s too soft.”
Harry nods. “Like women are always the stingiest tippers. Money spooks ‘em. Still,” he says, loyal to the changing times and his son’s innovations, “I think it’s a good idea. Like lady ministers. They have a people touch.”
“Yeah,” the jowly small man cautiously allows. “Gives the place a little zing. A little something different.”
“Where is Lyle, did you say?” He wonders how much these two are concealing from him, protecting Nelson. He was aware of eye signals between them as they talked. A maze of secrets, this agency he built up in his own image since 1975, when old man Springer suddenly popped, one summer day, like an overheated thermometer. A lot of hidden stress in the auto business. Chancy, yet you have a ton of steady overhead.
“He was in Nelson’s office ten minutes ago.”
“Doesn’t he use Mildred’s?” Harry explains, “Mildred Kroust was the bookkeeper for years here, when you were just a kid.” In terms of Springer Motors he has become a historian. He can remember when that appliance-rental place up the road had a big sign saying D I S C O remade from a Mr. Peanut in spats and top hat brandishing his stick in neon.
But Benny seems to know all he wants to. He says, “That’s a kind of conference room now. There’s a couch in there if anybody needs all of a sudden to take a nap. Lyle used to, but now he works mostly at home, what with his illness.”
“How long has he had it?”
Benny gets that careful look again, and says, “At least a year. That HIV virus can be inside you for five or ten before you know it.” His voice goes huskier, he comes closer still. “A couple of the mechanics quit when Nelson brought him in as accountant in his condition, but you got to hand it to Nelson, he told them go ahead, quit, if they wanted to be superstitious. He spelled out how you can’t get it from casual contact and told them take it or leave it.”
“How’d Manny go for that?”
“Manny? Oh yeah, Mr. Manning in Service. As I understand it, that was the reason he left finally. He’d been shopping, I hear, at other agencies, but at his age it’s hard to make a jump.”
“You said it,” Harry says. “Hey, looks like another customer out there, you better help Elvira out.”
“Let ‘em look, is my motto. If they’re serious, they’ll come in. Elvira tries too hard.”
Rabbit walks across the display floor, past the performance board and the Parts window and the crash-barred door that leads into the garage, to the green doorway, set in old random-grooved Masonite now painted a dusty rose, of what used to be his office. Elvira was right; the photographic blowups of his basketball headlines and halftone newspaper cuts haven’t been tossed out but are up on Nelson’s walls, where the kid has to look at them every day. Also on the walls are the Kiwanis and Rotary plaques and a citation from the Greater Brewer Chamber of Commerce and a President’s Touch Award that Toyota gave the agency a few years ago and a Playboy calendar, the girl for this month dressed up as a bare-assed Easter bunny, which Harry isn’t so sure strikes quite the right note but at least says the whole agency hasn’t gone queer.
Lyle stands up at Nelson’s desk before Harry is in the room. He is very thin. He wears a thick red sweater under his gray suit. He extends a skeletal bluish hand and an unexpectedly broad smile, his teeth enormous in his shrunken face. “Hello, Mr. Angstrom. I bet you don’t remember me.”
But he does look dimly familiar, like somebody you played basketball against forty years ago. His skull is very narrow, the crewcut hair so evenly blond it looks dyed; the accountant’s half-glasses on his nose are of thin gold wire. He is so pale, light seems to be coming through his skin. Squinting, Harry takes the offered hand in a brief shake and tries not to think of those little HIVs, intricate as tiny spaceships, slithering off onto his palm and up his wrist and arm into the sweat pores of his armpit and burrowing into his bloodstream there. He wipes his palm on the side of his jacket and hopes it looks like he’s patting his pocket.
Lyle tells him, “I used to work in Fiscal Alternatives on Weiser Street when you and your wife would come and trade gold and silver.”
Harry laughs, remembering. “We damn near broke our backs, lugging one load of silver dollars up the street to the fucking bank.”
“You were smart,” Lyle says. “You got out in time. I was impressed.”
This last remark seems a touch impertinent, but Harry says amiably, “Dumb luck. That place still functioning?”
“In a very restricted way,” Lyle says, overemphasizing, for Harry’s money, the “very.” It seems if you’re a fag you have to exaggerate everything, to bring it all up to normal pitch. “The whole metals boom was a fad, really. They’re very depressed now.”
“It was a nifty little place. That beauty who used to do the actual buying and selling. I could never figure out how she could run the computer with those long fingernails.”
“Oh, Marcia. She committed suicide.”
Rabbit is stunned. She had seemed so angelic in her way. “She did? Why?”
“Oh, the usual. Personal problems,” Lyle says, flicking them away with the back of his transparent hand. In Rabbit’s eyes globules of blurred light move around Lyle’s margins, like E.T. in the movie. “Nothing to do with the metals slump. She was just the front, the money behind it came out of Philadelphia.”
As Lyle talks airily, Harry can hear his intakes of breath, a slight panting that goes with the bluish shadows at the temples, the sense of him having come from space and about to go back to space. This guy’s even worse off than 1 am, Rabbit thinks, and likes him for it. He sees no signs of the Kaposi’s spots, though, just a general radiant aura of a body resisting life, refusing sustenance, refusing to go along with its own system. There is a sweetish-rotten smell, like when you open the door of the unused refrigerator in a vacation place, or maybe Rabbit imagines it. Lyle suddenly, limply, sits down, as if standing has been too much effort.
Harry takes the chair across the desk, where the customers usually sit, begging for easier terms. “Lyle,” Harry begins. “I’d like to inspect the books. Bank statements, receipts, payments, loans, inventory, the works.”
“Why on earth why?” Lyle’s eyes, as the rest of his face wastes away, stand out, more in the round than healthy people’s eyes. He sits erect, one fleshless forearm for support laid in its gray sleeve parallel to the edge of Nelson’s desk. Either to conserve his energy or protect the truth, he has set himself to give minimal answers.
“Oh, human curiosity. Frankly, there’s something fishy about the statements I’ve been getting in Florida.” Harry hesitates, but can’t see that being specific would do any harm at this point. He still has the hope that everything can be explained away, that he can go back to not thinking about the lot. “There aren’t enough used-car sales, proportionally.”
“There aren’t?”
“You could argue it’s a variable, and with the good economy under Reagan people can afford to buy new; but in my years here there’s always been a certain proportion, things average out over the course of a couple months, and that hasn’t been happening in the statements since November. In fact, it’s been getting weirder.”
“Weirder.”
“Funnier. Phonier. Whatever. When can I see the books? I’m no accountant; I want Mildred Kroust to go over them with me.”
Lyle makes an effort and shifts his arm off the desk and rests both hands out of sight, on his lap. Harry is reminded by the way he moves of the ghostly slowness of the languid dead floppy bodies at Buchenwald being moved around in the post-war newsreels. Naked, loose-jointed, their laps in plain view, talk about obscene, here was something so obscene they had to show it to us so we’d believe it. Lyle tells Harry, “I keep a lot of the data at
home, in my computer.”
“We have a computer system here. Top of the line, an IBM. I remember our installing it.”
“Mine’s compatible. A little Apple that does everything.”
“I bet it does. You know, frankly, just because you’re sick and have to stay home a lot’s no reason the Springer Motors accounts should be scattered all over Diamond County. I want them here. I want them here tomorrow.”
This is the first acknowledgment either has made that Lyle is sick, that Lyle is dying. The boy stiffens, and his lips puff out a little. He smiles, that skeleton-generous grin. “I can only show the books to authorized persons,” he says.
“I’m authorized. Who could be more authorized than me? I used to run the place. That’s my picture all over the walls.”
Lyle’s eyelids, with lashes darker than his hair, lower over those bulging eyes. He blinks several times, and tries to be delicate, to keep the courtesies between them. “My understanding from Nelson is that his mother owns the company.”
“Yeah, but I’m her husband. Half of what’s hers is mine.”
“In some circumstances, perhaps, and perhaps in some states. But not, I think, in Pennsylvania. If you wish to consult a lawyer -” His breathing is becoming difficult; it is almost a mercy for Harry to interrupt.
“I don’t need to consult any lawyer. All I need is to have my wife call you and tell you to show me the books. Me and Mildred. I want her in on this.”
“Miss Kroust, I believe, resides now in a nursing home. The Dengler Home in Penn Park.”
“Good. That’s five minutes from my house. I’ll pick her up and come back here tomorrow. Let’s set a time.”
Lyle’s lids lower again, and he awkwardly replaces his arm on the desktop. “When and if I receive your wife’s authorization, and Nelson’s go-ahead -“
“You’re not going to get that. Nelson’s the problem here, not the solution.”
“I say, even if, I would need some days to pull all the figures together.”
“Why is that? The books should be up-to-date. What’s going on here with you guys?”
Surprisingly, Lyle says nothing. Perhaps the struggle for breath is too much. It is all so wearying. His hollow temples look bluer. Harry’s heart is racing and his chest twingeing but he resists the impulse to pop another Nitrostat, he doesn’t want to become an addict. He slumps down lower in the customer’s chair, as if negotiations for now have gone as far as they can go. He tries another topic. “Tell me about it, Lyle. How does it feel?”
“What feel?”
“Being so close to, you know, the barn. The reason I ask, I had a touch of heart trouble down in Florida and still can’t get used to it, how close I came. I mean, most of the time it seems unreal, I’m me, and all around me everything is piddling along as normal, and then suddenly at night, when I wake up needing to take a leak, or in the middle of a TV show that’s sillier than hell, it hits me, and wow. The bottom falls right out. I want to crawl back into my parents but they’re dead already.”
Lyle’s puffy lips tremble, or seem to, as he puzzles out this new turn the conversation has taken. “You come to terns with it,” he says. “Everybody dies.”
“But some sooner than others, huh?”
A spasm of indignation animates Lyle. “They’re developing new drugs. All the time. The French. The Chinese. Trichosanthin. TIBO derivatives. Eventually the FDA will have to let them in, even if they are a bunch of Reaganite fascist homophobes who wouldn’t mind seeing us all dead. It’s a question of hanging on. I have hope.”
“Well, great. More power to you. But medicine can only do so much. That’s what I’m learning, the hard way. You know, Lyle, it’s not as though I’d never thought about death, or never had people near to me die, but I never, you could say, had the real taste of it in my mouth. I mean, it’s not kidding. It wants it all.” He wants that pill. He wonders if Nelson keeps a roll of Life Savers in the desk the way he himself used to. Just something to put in your mouth when you get nervous. Harry finds that every time he thinks of his death it makes him want to eat - that’s why he hasn’t lost more weight.
This other man’s attempt to open him up has made Lyle more erect behind the desk, more hostile. He stares at Harry with those eroded-around eyes, beneath eyebrows the same metallic blond as his hair. “One good thing about it,” he offers, “is you become harder to frighten. By minor things. By threats like yours, for example.”
“I’m not making any threats, Lyle, I’m just trying to find out what the fuck is going on. I’m beginning to think this company is being ripped off. If I’m wrong and it’s all on the up and up, you’ve nothing to be frightened of.” Poor guy, he’s biting the bullet, and less than half Harry’s age. At his age, what was Harry doing? Setting type the old-fashioned way, and dreaming about ass. Ass, one way or another, does us in: membrane’s too thin, those little HIVs sneak right through. Black box of nothingness, is what it felt like with Thelma. Funny appetite, for a steady diet. Being queer isn’t all roses.
Lyle moves his anns around again with that brittle caution. His body has become a collection of dead sticks. “Don’t make allegations, Mr. Angstrom, you wouldn’t want to defend in court.”
“Well, is it an allegation or a fact that you refuse to let me and an impartial accountant examine your books?”
“Mildred’s not impartial. She’s furious at me for replacing her. She’s furious because I and my computer can do in a few hours what took her all week.”
“Mildred’s an honest old soul.”
“Mildred’s senile.”
“Mildred’s not the point here. The point is you’re defying me to protect my son.”
“I’m not defying you, Mr. Angstrom
“You can call me Harry.”
“I’m not defying you, sir. I’m just telling you I can’t accept orders from you. I have to get them from Nelson or Mrs. Angstrom.”
“You’ll get ‘em. Sir.” A smiling provocative hovering in Lyle’s expression goads Harry to ask, “Do you doubt it?”
“I’ll be waiting to hear,” Lyle says.
“Listen. You may know about a lot of things I don’t but you don’t know shit about marriage. My wife will do what I tell her to. Ask her to. In a business like this we’re absolutely one.”
“We’ll see,” Lyle says. “My parents were married, as a matter of fact. I was raised in a marriage. I know a lot about marriage.”
“Didn’t do you much good.”
“It showed me something to avoid,” Lyle says, and smiles as broadly, as guilelessly, as when Harry came in. All teeth. Now Harry does recall him from the old days at Fiscal Alternatives - the stacks of gold and silver, and flawless cool Marcia with her long red nails. Poor beauty, did herself in. She and Monroe. Rabbit admits to himself the peculiar charm queers have, a boyish lightness, a rising above all that female muck, where life breeds.
“How’s Slim?” Harry asks, rising from the chair. “Nelson used to talk a lot about Slim.”
“Slim,” Lyle says, too weak or rude to stand, “died. Before Christmas.”
“Sorry to hear it,” Harry lies. He holds out his hand over the desk to be shaken and the other man hesitates to take it, as if fearing contamination. Feverish loose-jointed bones: Rabbit gives them a squeeze and says, “Tell Nelson if you ever see him I like the new decor. Kind of a boutique look. Cute. Goes with the new sales rep. You hang loose, Lyle. Hope China comes through for you. We’ll be in touch.”
On the radio on the way home, he hears that Mike Schmidt, who exactly two years ago, on April 18, 1987, slugged his five hundredth home run, against the Pittsburgh Pirates in Three Rivers Stadium, is closing in on Richie Ashburn’s total of 2,217 hits to become the hittingest Phillie ever. Rabbit remembers Ashburn. One of the Whiz Kids who beat the Dodgers for the pennant the fall Rabbit became a high-school senior. Curt Simmons, Del Ennis, Dick Sisler in center, Andy Semmick behind the plate. Beat the Dodgers the last game of the season, then lost to
the Yankees four straight. In 1950 Rabbit was seventeen and had led the county B league with 817 points his junior season. Remembering these statistics helps settle his agitated mood, stirred up by seeing Thelma and Lyle, a mood of stirred-up unsatisfied desire at whose fringes licks the depressing idea that nothing matters very much, we’ll all soon be dead.
Janice’s idea of a low-sodium diet for him is to get these frozen dinners in plastic pouches called Low-Cal. Most of this precooked chicken and beef is full of chemicals so it doesn’t go bad on the shelf. To work it all through his system he usually has a second beer. Janice is distracted these days, full of excitement about taking real-estate courses at the Penn State extension. “I’m not sure I totally understand it, though the woman at the office over on Pine Street - hasn’t that neighborhood gone downhill, since you and your father used to work at Verity! - she was very patient with my questions. The classes meet three hours a week for ten weeks, and there are two required and four electives to get this certificate, but I don’t think you need the certificate to take the licensing exam, which for a salesperson - that’s what I’d be - is given monthly and for a broker, which maybe I’d try to be later, only quarterly. But the gist of it is I could begin with two this April and then take two more from July to September and if all goes well get my license in September and start selling, strictly on a commission basis at first, for this firm that Doris Eberhardt’s new brother-in-law is one of the partners in. She says she’s told him about me and he’s interested. It’s in your favor evidently to be middle-aged, the clients assume you’re experienced.”