by John Updike
“I did not say, señor. I did not give myself a name. It is the name of Angstrom that is of concern. My associates are eager to settle with anyone of that excellent name.” This man, it occurred to Harry, loves the English language, as an instrument full of promise, of unexplored resources.
“My son,” Harry tells him, “is an adult and his finances have nothing to do with me.”
“That is your word? Your very final word?”
“It is. Listen, I live half the year in Florida and come back and -‘
But the caller has hung up, leaving Harry with the sensation that the walls of his solid little limestone house are as thin as diet crackers, that the wall-to-wall carpet under his feet is soaked with water, that a pipe has burst and there is no plumber to call.
* * *
He turns to his old friend and associate Charlie Stavros, retired from being Springer Motors’ Senior Sales Representative and moved from his old place on Eisenhower Avenue to a new condominium development on the far north side of the city, where the railroad had sold off an old freight yard, twenty acres of it, it’s amazing what the railroads owned in their heyday. Harry isn’t sure he can find the place and suggests they have lunch at Johnny Frye’s downtown; Johnny Frye’s Chophouse was the original name for this restaurant on Weiser Square, which became the Café Barcelona in the Seventies and then the Crépe House later in the decade and now has changed hands again and calls itself Salad Binge, explaining in signs outside Your Local Lo-Cal Eatery and Creative Soups and Organic Fresh-Food Health Dishes, to attract the health-minded yuppies who work in the glass-skinned office building that has risen across from Kroll’s, which still stands empty, its huge display windows whitewashed from the inside and its bare windowless side toward the mountain exposed in rough-mortared brick above the rubbly parking lot that extends up to the old Baghdad. ELP. SAV ME.
The downtown is mostly parking space now but the strange thing is that the space is all full. Though there is little to shop at downtown any more, except for some discount drugstores and a McCrory’s five and dime that still peddles parakeet food and plastic barrettes to old people who haven’t changed clothes since 1942, the number of trim youngish professionals in lightweight suits and tight linen skirts has ballooned; they work in the banks and insurance companies and state and federal agencies and there is no end of them somehow. On a sunny day they fill the woodsy park the city planners -not local, a fancy architectural firm that came in and won the competition with their design and then flew back to Atlanta - have made out of Weiser Square, where the squeaking, sparking trolley cars used to line up for passengers. They bask, these young paper-pushers, beside the abstract cement fountains, reading The Wall Street Journal with their coats off and neatly folded on the anodized, vandal-proof benches beside them. The women of this race especially fascinate Harry; they wear running shoes instead of high heels but their legs are encased in sheer pantyhose and their faces adorned by big round glasses that give them a comical sexy look, as if their boobs are being echoed above in hard hornrims and coated plastic. They look like Goldie Hawns conditioned by Jane Fonda. The style these days gives them all wide mannish shoulders, and their hips have been pared and hardened by exercise bicycles and those ass-hugging pants that mold around every muscle like electric-colored paint. These women seem visitors from a slimmed-down future where sex is just another exercise and we all live in sealed cubicles and communicate through computers.
You would have thought Charlie would be dead by now. But these Mediterranean types don’t even seem to get gray and paunchy. They hit a plateau around fifty that doesn’t change until they drop off of it suddenly somewhere in their eighties. They use their bodies up neatly, like mopping up a dinner plate with bread. Charlie had rheumatic fever as a kid but, though carrying a heart murmur inside him and subject to angina, he hasn’t ever had an episode as severe as Harry’s down in the Gulf. “How the fuck do you do it, Charlie?” Rabbit asks him.
“You learn to avoid aggravation,” Charlie tells him. “If anything looks to be aggravating, walk away from it. Things over at the lot had got to be aggravating, so I walked away. Christ, am I glad to be away from Toyotas! First thing I did was buy myself an old-fashioned American boat, an Olds Toronado. Soft shocks, single-finger steering, guzzles gas, I’m crazy about it. Five-liter V-8, tomato red with a white padded half-roof.”
“Sounds great. You park it close by?”
“I tried and couldn’t. Circled up around Spring Street twice and finally gave up and left it in a lot up past the old Baghdad and took a bus the three blocks down. So it costs a few pennies. Avoid aggravation, champ.”
“I still don’t understand it. Downtown Brewer’s supposed to be dead and there’s nowhere to park. Where are all the cars coming from?”
“They breed,” Charlie explains. “These cars get pregnant as teenagers and go on welfare. They don’t give a damn.”
One of the things Harry has always enjoyed about Charlie is the man’s feel for the big picture; the two of them used to stand by the display window over at the lot on dull mornings and rehash the day’s news. Rabbit has never gotten over the idea that the news is going to mean something to him. As they seat themselves at one of the tile-topped tables that remain from the days when this was the Café Barcelona, he says, “How about Schmidt last night?” Against the Pirates in Three Rivers Stadium, the Phillies’ veteran third baseman had doubled twice and surpassed Richie Ashburn’s team record for total hits.
“This is still spring,” Charlie tells him. “Wait till the pitchers’ arms warm up. Schmidt’ll wilt. He’s old, not compared to you and me but in the game he’s in he’s old, and there’s no hiding from the young pitchers over the long season.”
Harry finds it salutary, to have his admiration for Schmidt checked. You can’t live through these athletes, they don’t know you exist. For them, only the other players exist. They go to the ballpark and there’s thirty thousand there and a big bumbly roar when their names are announced and that’s all of you they need. “Does it seem to you,” he asks Charlie, “there’s a lot of disasters lately? That Pan Am plane blowing up, and then those soccer fans in England the other day getting crushed, and now this gun exploding on the battleship for no apparent reason.”
“Apparent’s the key word,” Charlie says. “Everything has some little tiny reason, even when we can’t see it. A little spark somewhere, a little crack in the metal. Also, champ, look at the odds. How many people in the world now, five billion? With the world jammed up like it is the wonder is more of us aren’t trampled to death. There’s a crush on, and it’s not going to get better.”
Rabbit’s heart dips, thinking that from Nelson’s point of view he himself is a big part of the crowding. That time he screamed outside the burning house at 26 Vista Crescent, I’ll kill you. He didn’t mean it. A spark, a crack in metal. A tiny flaw. When you die you do the world a favor.
Charlie is frowning down into the menu, which is enormous, printed in photocopy in green ink on rough flecked acid-free paper. The things they can do with Xerox now. Who still uses a place like Verity Press? First letterpress went, then photo-offset. Charlie no longer wears thick squarish hornrims that set a dark bar across his eyebrows but gold aviator frames that hold his thick lavender-tinted lenses to his nose like fingers pinching a wineglass. Charlie used to be thickset but age has whittled him so his Greek bones show - the high pinched arch to his nose, the wide slanting brow below his dark hairline. His sideburns are gray but he is shaving them shorter. Studying the menu, he chuckles. “Beefsteak Salad,” he reads. “Pork Kabob Salad. What kind of salads are those?”
When the waitress comes, Charlie kids her about it. “What’s with all this high-cal high-fat meat?” he asks. “You giving us a beefsteak with a little lettuce on the side?”
“The meat is shoelaced and worked in,” the waitress says. She is tall and almost pretty, with her hair bleached and trained up in a fluffy Mohawk, and a row of little earrings all aroun
d the edge of one ear, and dark dusty-rosy spots rouged behind her eyes. Her tongue has some trouble in her mouth and it’s cute, the earnest, deliberate way her lips move. “They found there was a call for these, you know, heartier ingredients.”
So underneath everything, Rabbit thinks, it’s still Johnny Frye’s Chophouse. “Tell me about the Macadamia and Bacon Salad,” he says.
“It’s one of people’s favorites,” she says. “The bacon is crisp and in, like, flakes. Most of the fat has been pressed out of it. Also there’s alfalfa sprouts, and some radishes and cucumber sliced real thin, and a couple kinds of lettuce, I forget the different names, and I don’t know what all else, maybe some chuba - that’s dried sardines.”
“Sounds good,” Rabbit says, before it doesn’t and he has to choose again.
Charlie points out, “Nuts and bacon aren’t exactly what the doctor ordered.”
“You heard her, the fat’s been squeezed out. Anyway a little bit can’t kill you. It’s more a matter of internal balance. Come on, Charlie. Loosen up.”
“What’s in the Seaweed Special?” Charlie asks the waitress, because both men like to hear her talk.
“Oh, hijiki of course, and wakame, and dulse and agar in with a lot of chickpeas and lentils, and leafy greens, it’s wonderful if you’re going macrobiotic seriously and don’t mind that slightly bitter taste, you know, that seaweed tends to have.”
“You’ve done talked me out of it, Jennifer,” Charlie says, reading her name stitched onto the bodice of the lime-green jumper they wear for a uniform at Salad Binge. “I’ll take the Spinach and Crab.”
“For salad dressing, we have Russian, Roquefort, Italian, Creamy Italian, Poppyseed, Thousand Island, Oil and Vinegar, and Japanese.”
“What’s in the Japanese?” Harry asks, not just to see her lips curl and pucker around the little difficulty in her mouth, but because the Japanese interest him professionally. How do they and the Germans do it, when America’s going down the tubes?
“Oh, I could ask in the kitchen if you really care, but umeboshi, I think, and tamari, of course - we don’t use that commercial soy sauce - and sesame oil, and rice vinegar.” Her eyes harden as she senses that these men are flirtatiously wasting her time. Feeling apologetic, they both order Creamy Italian and settle to each other.
It has been a long time, their rapport has grown rusty. Charlie does seem older, drier, when you look. The thin gold aviator frames take out of his face a lot of that masculine certainty that must have appealed to Janice twenty years ago. “Cute kid,” Charlie says, arranging the silver around his plate more neatly, square to the edges of the paper placemat.
“Whatever happened to Melanie?” Rabbit asks him. Ten years ago, they had sat in this same restaurant and Melanie, a friend of Nelson’s and Pru’s living at the time at Ma Springer’s house, had been their waitress. Then she became Charlie’s girlfriend, old as he was, relatively. At least they went to Florida together. One of the things maybe that had made Florida seem attractive. But no bimbo there had offered herself to Harry. The only flickers he got were from women his own age, who looked ancient.
“She became a doctor,” Charlie says. “A gastroenterologist, to be exact, in Portland, Oregon. That’s where her father wound up, you’ll recall.”
“Just barely. He was a kind of late-blooming hippie, wasn’t he?” “He settled down with the third wife and has been a big support to Melanie. It was her mother, actually, who was flipping out, back in Mill Valley. Alcohol. Guys. Drugs.”
The last word hurts Harry’s stomach. “How come you know all this?”
Charlie shrugs minimally, but cannot quite suppress his little smile of pride. “We keep in touch. I was there for her when she needed a push. I told her, `Go for it.’ She still had a bit of that poor-little-me-I’m-only-a-girl thing. I gave her the boost she needed. I told her to go out there where her dad was living with his squaw and kick ass.”
“Me you tell avoid aggravation, her you told to go for it.”
“Different cases. Different ages. You her age, I’d tell you, `Go for it.’ I’ll still tell you. As long as you avoid aggravation.”
“Charlie, I have a problem.”
“That’s news?”
“A couple of ‘em, actually. For one, I ought to do something about my heart. I just can’t keep drifting along waiting for my next MI.”
“You’re losing me, champ.”
“You know. Myocardial infarction. Heart attack. I was lucky to get away with the one I did have. The docs tell me I ought to have an open-heart, a multiple bypass.”
“Go for it.”
“Sure. Easy for you to say. People die having those things. I notice you never had one.”
“But I did. In ‘87. December, you were in Florida. They replaced two valves. Aortic and mitral. When you have rheumatic fever as a kid, it’s the valves that go. They don’t close right. That’s what gives you the heart murmur, blood running the wrong way.”
Rabbit can hardly bear these images, all these details inside him, valves and slippages and crusts on the pipe. “What’d they replace them with?”
“Pig heart valves. The choice is that or a mechanical valve, a trap with a ball. With the mechanical, you click all the time. I didn’t want to click if I could help it. They say it keeps you awake.”
“Pig valves.” Rabbit tries to hide his revulsion. “Was it terrible? They split your chest open and ran your blood through a machine?”
“Piece of cake. You’re knocked out cold. What’s wrong with running your blood through a machine? What else you think you are, champ?”
A God-made one-of-a-kind with an immortal soul breathed in. A vehicle of grace. A battlefield of good and evil. An apprentice angel. All those things they tried to teach you in Sunday school, or really didn’t try very hard to teach you, just let them drift in out of the pamphlets, back there in that church basement buried deeper in his mind than an air-raid shelter.
“You’re just a soft machine,” Charlie maintains, and lifts his squarish hands, with their white cuffs and rectangular gold links, to let Jennifer set his salad before him. He saw her coming with eyes in the back of his head. She circles the table gingerly - these men are doing something to her, she doesn’t know what - and puts in front of Harry a bacon-flecked green mound bigger than a big breast. It looks rich, and more than he should eat. The tall awkward girl with her strange white rooster-comb trembling in the air still hovers, the roundnesses in her green uniform pressing on Rabbit’s awareness as he sits at the square tiled table trying to frame his dilemmas.
“Is there anything more I can get you gentlemen?” Jennifer asks, her lips gently struggling to articulate. It’s not a lisp she has, quite; it’s like her tongue is too big. “Something to drink?”
Charlie asks her for a Perrier with lime. She says that San Pellegrino is what they have. He says it’s all the same to him. Fancy water is fancy water.
Harry after an internal struggle asks what kinds of beer they have. Jennifer sighs, feeling they are putting her on, and recites, “Schlitz, Miller, Miller Lite, Bud, Bud Light, Michelob, Lowenbrau, Corona, Coors, Coors Light, and Ballantine ale on draft.” All these names have an added magic from being tumbled a bit in her mouth. Not looking Charlie in the eye, Harry opts for a Mick. Jennifer nods unsmiling and goes away. If she doesn’t want to excite middle-aged men, she shouldn’t wear all those earrings and go so heavy on the makeup.
“Piece of cake, you were saying,” he says to Charlie.
“They freeze you. You don’t know a thing.”
“Guy I know down in Florida, not much older than we are, had an open-heart and he says it was hell, the recuperation took forever, and furthermore he doesn’t look so great even so. He swings a golf club like a cripple.”
Charlie does one of his tidy small shrugs. “You got to have the basics to work with. Maybe the guy was too far gone. But you, you’re in good shape. Could lose a few pounds, but you’re young - what, Fifty-five?”
“That’s young, Champ. I’m getting there myself.” Charlie is Janice’s age.
“The way I’m going l’ll be happy to hit sixty. I look at all these old crocks down in Florida, shrivelled-up mummies toddling right into their nineties in their shorts and orthopedic sneakers, perky as bejesus, and I want to ask ‘em, `What makes you so great? How did you do it?’ “
“A day at a time,” Charlie suggests. “One day at a time, and don’t look down.” Harry can tell he’s getting bored with issuing reassurances, but Charlie’s all he’s got, now that he and Thelma are on hold. He’s embarrassed to call her, now that he can’t seem to deliver. He says:
“There’s this other thing they can do now. An angioplasty. They cut open an artery in your groin -“
“Hey. I’m eating.”
“- and poke it up all the way to your heart, would you believe. Then they pop out this balloon in the narrow place of the coronary artery and blow the damn thing up. Not with air, with saltwater somehow. It cracks the plaque. It stretches the artery back to the way it was.”