Rabbit at Rest

by John Updike

  “Honey, why do you need to do this? You have the lot.”

  “I don’t have the lot. Nelson has the lot.”

  “Does he? I dropped over there today and he wasn’t there, just these kids he’s hired. One fag, one wop, and a skirt.”

  “Harry. Now who’s sounding prejudiced?”

  He doesn’t push ahead with his story, he wants to save it for when they both can focus. After dinner Janice likes to watch Jeopardy! even though she never knows any of the answers, and then the Phillies are playing the Mets on Channel 11. The little stone house with its fractional number on Franklin Drive draws darkling about them, just them, in the evening as the gradual Northern dusk (in Florida the sun just suddenly shuts down, and the moon takes over) seeps into the still-bare trees, quelling the birdsong, and a lemon tinge of sky in the west beyond the craggy chimneys of the big clinker-brick house deepens to an incendiary orange and then the crimson of last embers. Another few weeks, the trees will leaf in, and there won’t be any sunset to see from the lozenge-pane windows of his den, when he turns his eyes aside from watching the television screen.

  In the third inning, with two men on, Schmidt hits a home run, his fourth of the young season and the five hundred fortysixth of his career. It puts the Phils ahead five to zero, and Rabbit starts switching channels, finding no basketball playoffs, only Matlock and The Wonder Years. Much as Janice irritates him when she’s with him, when she isn’t in the room with him, or when he can’t hear her knocking around in the kitchen or upstairs above his head, he grows uneasy. He switches off the set and goes looking for her, full of his troubling news as once he was full of gold Krugerrands.

  She is already in one of her nighties, upstairs, and those infuriating Florida sandals that go f lip-flop as she walks around when he is still trying to sleep in the morning. Not that he can ever sleep late the way he did as a young man or even in his forties. He wakes around six with a little start and ever since his heart attack there is a gnawing in his stomach whose cause he can’t locate until he realizes it is the terror of being trapped inside his perishing body, like being in a prison cell with a madman who might decide to kill him at any moment. She is paddling back and forth, flop-flop, carrying small stacks of folded cloth, laundry she has brought up the back stairs; one square stack he recognizes as folded handkerchiefs, another, less trim, as his jockey shorts with their slowly slackening elastic waists, a third as her own underthings, which still excite him, not so much when they are on her as when empty and laundry-clean. He doesn’t know how to begin. He throws his big body across the bed diagonally and lets the nubbles ofits bedspread rub his face. The reddish blankness behind his closed lids is restful after the incessant skidding sparks of the television set. “Harry, is anything the matter?” Janice’s voice sounds alarmed. His fragility gives him a new hold over her.

  He rolls over and can’t help smiling at the lumpy figure she cuts in her nightie. She looks not so different from how Judy looks in hers and not very much larger. Her scant bangs don’t quite hide her high forehead, its Florida tan dulling, and her tired eyes look focused elsewhere. He begins, “There’s something going wrong over at the lot. When I was over there today I asked to see the books and this fag with AIDS Nelson has put in as bookkeeper instead of Mildred told me he couldn’t show them to me unless you authorized it. You’re the boss, according to him.”

  The tip of her little tongue creeps out and presses on her upper lip. “That was silly,” she says.

  “I thought so, but I kept my cool. Poor guy, he’s just covering up for Nelson.”

  “Covering up for Nelson why?”

  “Well” - Harry sighs heavily, and arranges himself on the bed like an odalisque, with a hippy twist to his body - “you really want to hear this?”

  “Of course.” But she keeps moving around the room with her little stacks.

  “I have a new theory. I think Nelson takes cocaine, and that’s why he’s so shifty and jumpy, and kind of paranoid.”

  Janice moves carefully to the bureau, flop and then flop, carrying what Harry recognizes as her salmon-colored running suit with the blue sleeves and stripes, which she never wears on the street around here, where the middle-aged are more careful about looking ridiculous. “Who told you this?” she asks.

  He squirms on the bed, pulling up his legs and pushing off his suede shoes so as not to dirty the bedspread of white dotted Swiss.

  “Nobody told me,” he says. “I just put two and two together. Cocaine’s everywhere and these yuppie baby boomers Nelson’s age are just the ones who use it. It takes money. Lots of money, to maintain a real habit. Doesn’t Pru keep complaining about all these bills they can’t pay?”

  Janice comes close to the bed and stands; he sees through her cotton nightie shadows of her nipples and her pubic hair. From his angle she looks strangely enormous, and in his diagonal position he undergoes one of those surges of lightheadedness as when he stands up too fast; it is not clear who is upright and who is not. Her body has kept the hard neatness it had when they were kids working at Kroll’s but underneath her chin there are ugly folds that ramify into her neck. She was determined not to get fat like her mother but age catches you anyway. Janice says carefully, “Most young couples have bills they can’t pay.”

  He sits up, to shake the lightness in his head, and because her body is there puts his arms around her hips. On second thought he reaches under her nightie and cups his hands around her solid, slightly gritty buttocks. He says, looking up past her breasts to her face, “The worst of it is, honey, I think he’s been bleeding the company. I think he’s been stealing and Lyle has been helping him, that’s why they let Mildred go.”

  Her buttocks under his hands tense; he feels them squeeze together and become more spherical, with the tension of a basketball a few pounds under regulation pressure. A watery glimmer of arousal winks below his waist. Her blurred eyes look down upon him with somber concentration, the skin of her face sagging downward from the bone. He nuzzles one breast and closes his eyes again, smelling the faintly sweaty cotton, hiding from her intent downward eyes. Her voice asks, “What evidence do you have?”

  This irritates him. She is dumb. “That’s what I was saying. I asked to look at the accounts and bank statements today and they wouldn’t let me, unless you authorized it. All you have to do is call up this Lyle.”

  He hears in her chest a curious stillness, and feels in her body a tension of restraint. Her nightie is transparent but she is opaque. “If you did see these figures,” she asks, “would you know enough to understand them?”

  He flicks her nipple with his tongue through the cotton. The glimmer below has grown to a steady glow, a swelling warmth. “Maybe not altogether,” he says. “But even the monthly statements we got in Florida didn’t look quite right to me. I’d take Mildred with me, and if she’s too far gone - he said she’s senile and over at Dengler’s - I think we should hire somebody, a professional accountant in Brewer. You could call our lawyer for who he’d recommend. This may be something we have to bring the cops in on eventually.” A nice April shower has started up outdoors, kindled by the slow sunset.

  Her body has stiffened and jerked back an inch. “Harry! Your own son!”

  “Well,” he says, irritated again, “his own mother. Stealing from his own mother.”

  “We don’t know anything for sure,” Janice tells him. “It’s only your theory.”

  “What else could Lyle have been hiding today? Now they’ll have the wind up so we should start moving or they’ll shred everything like Ollie North.”

  Now Janice is getting agitated, backing out ofhis arms and rubbing the back of one hand with the other, standing in the center of the carpet. He sees that the sex isn’t going to happen, the first time in weeks he’s really had the urge. Damn that Nelson. She says, “I think I should talk to Nelson first.”

  “You should? Why not we?”

  “According to Lyle, I’m the only one who counts.”

 
; This hurts. “You’re too soft on Nelson. He can do anything he wants with you.”

  “Oh, Harry, it used to be so awful, that time I ran off with Charlie! Nelson was only twelve, he’d come over on his bicycle all the way into Eisenhower Avenue and he’d stand there for an hour across the street, looking up at our windows, and a couple of times I saw him and I hid, I hid behind the curtain and let him just stand there until he got exhausted and rode away.” Staring over Harry’s head, seeing her little boy across the street, so patient and puzzled and hopeful, her dark eyes fill with tears.

  “Well, hell,” Rabbit says, “nobody asked him to go over there spying on you. 1 was taking care of him.”

  “With that poor crazy girl and perfectly hideous black man you were. It’s just dumb luck the house didn’t bum down with Nelson in it too.”

  “I would have got him out. If I’d been there I would have got them all out.”

  “You don’t know,” she says, “you don’t know what you would have done. And you don’t know now what the real story is, it’s all just your suspicions, somebody’s been poisoning your mind against Nelson. I bet it was Thelma.”

  “Thelma? We never see her anymore, we ought to have the Harrisons over sometime.”

  “Pfaa!” She spits this refusal, he has to admire her fury, the animal way it fluffs out her hair. “Over my dead body.”

  “Just a thought.” This is not a good topic. He reverts: “I don’t know what the real story is, but you do, huh? What has Nelson told you?”

  She pinches her mouth shut so she seems to have no lips at all, like Ma Springer used to look. “Nothing really,” she lies.

  “Nothing really. Well O.K. then. You know more than I do. Good luck. It’s you he’s ripping off. It’s your father’s company he and his queer buddies are taking down the tube.”

  “Nelson wouldn’t steal from the company.”

  “Honey, you don’t understand the power of drugs. Read the papers. Read People, Richard Pryor tells all. Just the other day they pulled Yogi Berra’s kid in. People who are into coke will kill their grandmother for a fix. It used to be heroin was the bottom of the barrel but crack makes heroin look mild.”

  “Nelson doesn’t do crack. Much.”

  “Oh. Who says?”

  She almost tells him, but gets frightened. “Nobody. I just know my own son. And from what Pru lets drop.”

  “Pru talks, does she? What does she say?”

  “She’s miserable. And the children too. Little Roy acts very odd, you must have noticed. Judy has nightmares. Ifit weren’t for the children, Pru confessed to me, she would have left Nelson long ago.”

  Harry feels evaded. “Let’s keep to the subject. Pru’s got her problems, you’ve got yours. You better get your man-child out of Springer Motors fast.”

  “I’ll talk to him, Harry. I don’t want you to say a word.”

  “Why the fuck not? What’s the fucking harm if I do?”

  “You’ll come on too strong. You’ll drive him deeper into himself. He - he takes you too seriously.”

  “But not you?”

  “He’s sure of me. He knows I love him.”

  “And I don’t?” His eyes water at the thought. The shower outside has already lifted, leaving a trickle in the gutters.

  “You do, Harry, but there’s something else too. You’re another man. Men have this territorial thing. You think of the lot as yours. He thinks of it as his.”

  “It’ll be his some day, if he’s not in jail. I was looking at him down in Florida and there suddenly came into my mind the word criminal. Something about the shape ofhis head. I hate the way he’s going bald. He’ll look like Ronnie Harrison.”

  “Will you promise to let me talk to him and you do nothing?”

  “You’ll just let him weasel out.” But in fact he has no desire to confront Nelson himself.

  She knows this. She says, “No I won’t, I promise.” She stops rubbing the back of one hand with the fingers of the other and moves back toward him, flop flop, as he sits on the bed. She rests her fingers above his ears and by the short hairs there pulls him softly toward her. “I do like the way you want to defend me,” she says.

  He yields to her insistent tug and rests his face on her chest again. Her nightie has a damp spot on it where he diddled her nipple with his tongue. Her nipples are chewed-looking, less perfect, realer than Thelma’s. Being little, Janice’s tits have kept their tilt pretty much, that perky upward thrust through those Forties angora sweaters in the high-school halls. Through the cotton her body gives off a smell, a stirred-up smoky smell. “What’s in it for me?” he asks, his mouth against the wet cloth.

  “Oh, a present,” she says.

  “When do I get it?”

  “Pretty soon.”

  “With the mouth?”

  “We’ll see.” She pushes his face back from her smoky warm body and with her fingers poking under his jaws makes him look up at her. “But if you say another single word about Nelson, I’ll stop, and you won’t get any present.”

  His face feels hot and his heart is racing but in a steady sweet way, contained in his rib cage the way his hard-on is contained in his pants, sweetly packed with blood; he is pleased that the Vasotec may make him lightheaded but leaves him enough blood pressure for one of these unscheduled, once in a while. “O.K., not a word,” Rabbit promises, becoming efficient. “I’ll quick go to the bathroom and brush my teeth and stuff and you turn off the lights. And somebody ought to take the phone off the hook. Downstairs, so we don’t hear the squawking.”

  Strange phone calls have been coming through. Grainy voices with that rich timbre peculiar to black males ask if Nelson Angstrom is there. Harry or Janice responds that Nelson does not live here, that this is the home of his parents. “Well I ain’t had no luck at the number he give me for a home number and at the place he works this here secretary always say the man is out.”

  “Would you like to leave a message?”

  A pause. “You just tell him Julius called.” Or Luther.

  ` Julius?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And what’s it about, Julius? You want to say?”

  “He’ll know what it’s about. You just tell him Julius called.” Or Perry. Or Dave.

  Or the caller would hang up without leaving a name. Or would have a thin, faintly foreign, precise way of speaking, and once wanted to speak not to Nelson but with Harry. “I am regretful to bother you, sir, but this son you have leaves me no recourse but to inform you in person.”

  “To inform me of what?”

  “To inform you that your son has incurred serious debts and gentlemen to which I am associated, against any advice which I attempt to give them, talk of doing physical harm.”

  “Physical harm to Nelson?”

  “Or even to certain of his near and dear. This is sorry to say and I do apologize, but these are not perhaps such gentlemen. I myself am merely the bearer of bad tidings. Do not rest the blame with me.” The voice seemed to be drawing closer to the telephone mouthpiece, closer to Harry’s ear, growing plaintively sincere, attempting to strike up a conspiracy, to become Harry’s friend and ally. The familiar room, the den with its frost-faced TV and two silvery-pink wing chairs and bookshelves holding a smattering mostly of history books and on the upper shelves some china knickknacks (fairies under toadstools, cherubic bald monks, baby robins in a nest of porcelain straws) that used to be in Ma Springer’s breakfront, all this respectable furniture changes quality, becomes murky and fluid and useless, at the insertion of this menacing plaintive voice into his ear, a voice with a heart of sorts, with an understandable human mission, an unpleasant duty to do, calling out of an extensive slippery underground: just so, the balmy blue air above the Gulf of Mexico changed for him, as if a filter had been slipped over his eyes, when the Sunfish tipped over.

  Rabbit asks, treading water, “How did Nelson incur these debts?”

  The voice likes getting his own words back. “He incur
red them, sir, in pursuit of his satisfactions, and that is within his privileges, but he or someone on his behalf must pay. My associates have been assured that you are a very excellent father.”

  “Not so hot, actually. Whajou say your name was?”