by John Updike
“With a lot of luck it does,” Charlie says. “And a year later you’re back in the same boat, plugged up with macadamia nuts and beer yet.”
Beer has come on the end of Jennifer’s lean arm, in a frosted glass mug, golden and foam-topped and sizzling with its own excited bubbles. “If I can’t have a single beer now and then, I’d just as soon be dead,” Harry lies. He sips, and with a bent forefinger wipes the foam from under his nose. That gesture of Nelson’s. He wonders when she fucks how protective Jennifer has to be of that wobbly Mohawk. Some punk girls, he’s read, put safety pins through their nipples.
“Coronary bypass is what you want,” Charlie is telling him. “These balloons, they can only do one artery at a time. Bypass grafts, they can do four, five, six once they get in there. Whaddeyou care if they pull open your rib cage? You won’t be there. You’ll be way out of it, dreaming away. Actually, you don’t dream. It’s too deep for that. It’s a big nothing, like being dead.”
“I don’t want it,” Harry hears himself say sharply. He softens this to, “Not yet anyway.” Charlie’s word pull has upset him, made it too real, the physical exertion, pulling open these resistant bone gates so his spirit will fly out and men in pale-green masks will fish in this soupy red puddle with their hooks and clamps and bright knives. Once on television watching by mistake over Janice’s shoulder one of these PBS programs on childbirth - they wouldn’t put such raunchy stuff on the networks - he saw them start to cut open a woman’s belly for a Caesarean. The knife in the rubber-gloved hand made a straight line and on either side yellow fat curled up and away like two strips of foam rubber. This woman’s abdomen, with a baby inside, was lined in a material, just like foam rubber. “Down in Florida,” he says, “I had a catheterization” - the word makes trouble in his mouth, as if he’s become the waitress - “and it wasn’t so bad, more boring than anything else. You’re wide awake, and then they put like this big bowl over your chest to see what’s going on inside. Where the dye is being pumped through, it’s hot, so hot you can hardly stand it.” He feels he’s disappointing Charlie, being so cowardly about bypasses, and to deepen his contact with the frowning, chewing other man confides, “The worst thing of it, Charlie, is I feel half dead already. This waitress is the first girl I’ve wanted to fuck for months.”
“Boobs,” Charlie says. “Great boobs. On a skinny body. That’s sexy. Like Bo Derek after her implant.”
“Her hair is what gets me. Tall as she is, she adds six inches with that hairdo.”
“Tall isn’t bad. The tall ones don’t get the play the cute little short ones do, and do more for you. Also, being skinny has its advantages, there’s not all that fat to come between you and the clitoris.”
This may be more male bonding than Rabbit needs. He says, “But all those earrings, don’t they look painful? And is it true some punk girls -“
Charlie interrupts impatiently, “Pain is where it’s at for punks. Mutilation, self-hatred, slam dancing. For these kids today, ugly is beautiful. That’s their way of saying what a lousy world we’re giving them. No more rain forests. Toxic waste. You know the drill.”
“When I came back this spring, I went driving around the city, all the sections. Some of these Hispanics were practically screwing on the street.”
“Drugs,” Charlie says. “They don’t know what they’re doing four-fifths of the time.”
“Did you see in the Standard, some spic truck driver from West Miami was caught over near Maiden Springs with they estimate seventy-five million dollars’ worth of cocaine, five hundred kilos packed in orange crates marked `Fragile’?”
“They can’t stop dope,” Charlie says, aligning his knife and fork on the edge of his empty plate, “as long as people are willing to pay a fortune for it.”
“The guy was a Cuban refugee evidently, one of those we let in.”
“These countries go Communist, they let us have all their crooks and crackpots.” Charlie’s tone is level and authoritative, but Harry feels he’s losing him. It’s not quite like the old days, when they had all day to kill, over in the showroom. Charlie has finished his Spinach and Crab and Rabbit has barely made a dent in his own heaping salad, he’s so anxious to get advice. He gets a slippery forkful into his mouth and finds among the oily lettuce and alfalfa sprouts a whole macadamia nut, and delicately splits it with his teeth, so his tongue feels the texture of the fissure, miraculously smooth, like a young woman’s body, like a marble tabletop.
When he swallows, he gets out, “That’s the other thing preying on my mind. I think Nelson is into cocaine.”
Charlie nods and says, “So I hear.” He picks up the fork he’s just aligned and reaches over with it toward Harry’s big breast of bacon-garnished greenery. “Let me help you out with all that, champ.”
“You’ve heard he’s into cocaine?”
“Mm. Yeah. He’s like his granddad, jumpy. He needs crutches. I never found the kid easy to deal with.”
“Me neither,” Harry says eagerly, and it comes tumbling out. “I went over there last week to have it out with him about cocaine, I’d just got wind of it, and he was off somewhere, he usually is, but this accountant he’s hired, a guy dying of AIDS would you believe, was there and when I asked to look at the books just about gave me the up-yours sign and said I had to get Janice’s sayso. And she, the dumb mutt, doesn’t want to give it. I think she’s scared ofwhat she’ll find out. Her own kid robbing her blind. The used sales are down, the monthly stat sheets have been looking fishy to me for months.”
“You’d know. Doesn’t sound good,” Charlie agrees, reaching again with his fork. A macadamia nut - each one nowadays costs about a quarter - escapes in Harry’s direction and only his quick reflexes prevent it from falling into his lap and staining with salad oil the russet slacks he took out of the cleaner’s bag and put on for the first time today, the first spring day that’s felt really warm. The sudden motion gives him a burning pang behind his rib cage. That evil child is still playing with matches in there.
He tries to ignore the pain and goes on, “And now we get these phone calls at funny hours, guys with funny voices asking for Nelson or even telling me they want money.”
“They play rough,” Charlie says. “Dope is big business.” He reaches once more.
“Hey, leave me something. How do you stay so skinny? So what shall I do?”
“Maybe Janice should talk to Nelson.”
“That’s just what I told her.”
“Well then.”
“But the bitch won’t. At least she hasn’t so far that I know of.”
“This is good,” Charlie says, “this health stuff, but it’s all like Chinese food, it doesn’t fill you up.”
“So what did you say your verdict was?”
“Sometimes, between a husband and wife, all the history gets in the way. Want me to sound old Jan Jan out, see where’s she’s coming from?”
Harry hesitates hardly at all before saying, “Charlie, if you could, that would be super.”
“Would you gentlemen like some dessert?”
Jennifer has materialized. Turning his head in surprise at the sound of her sweetly impeded voice, Harry sees, inches from his eyes, that Charlie as usual is right: great boobs, gawky and selfhating as the rest of her is. Her parents must have put a lot of protein, a lot of Cheenos and vitamin-enriched bread, into those boobs. In his fragile freighted mood they seem two more burdens on his brain. The stretched chest of her green jumper lifts as she takes in breath to say, “Today our special is a cheesecake made from low-fat goat’s milk topped with delicious creamed gooseberries.”
Rabbit, his eyebrows still raised by the waitress’s breasts, looks over at Charlie. “Whaddeyou think?”
Charlie shrugs unhelpfully. “It’s your funeral.”
The phone is ringing, ringing, like thrilling cold water poured into the mossy warm crevices of his dream. He was dreaming of snuggling into something, of having found an aperture that just fit. The phone i
s on Janice’s side; he gropes for it across her stubbornly sleeping body and, with a throat dry from mouthbreathing, croaks, “Hello?” The bedside clock seems to have only one hand until he figures out it’s ten minutes after two. He expects one of those men’s voices and tells himself they should take the phone off the hook downstairs whenever they go to bed. His heart’s pounding seems to fill the dark room to its corners, suffocatingly.
A tremulous young woman’s voice says, “Harry? It’s Pru.
Forgive me for waking you up, but I -” Shame, fear trip her voice into silence. She feels exposed.
“Yeah, go on,” he urges softly.
“I’m desperate. Nelson has gone crazy, he’s already hit me and I’m afraid he’ll start in on the children!”
“Really?” he says stupidly. “Nelson wouldn’t do that.” But people do it, it’s in the papers, all the time.
“Who on earth is it?” Janice asks irritably, yanked from her own dreams. “Tell them you have no money. Just hang up.”
Pru is sobbing, on the end of the line, “… can’t stand it any more … it’s been such hell … for years.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Harry says, still feeling stupid. “Here’s Janice,” he says, and passes the hot potato into her fumbling hand, out from under the covers. His sudden window into Pru, the hot bright unhappy heart of her, felt illicit. He switches on his bedside light, as if that will help clear this all up. The white jacket of the history book he is still trying to get through, with its clipper ship in an oval of cloud and sea, leaps up shiny under the pleated lampshade. Since he began reading the book last Christmas afternoon, the author herself has died, putting a kind of blight on the book. Yet he feels it would be bad luck never to finish it.
“Yes,” Janice is saying into the phone, at wide intervals. “Yes. Did he really? Yes.” She says, “We’ll be right over. Stay away from him. What about going into Judy’s room with her and locking yourselves in? Mother had a bolt put on the door, it must be still there.”
Still Pru’s voice crackles on, like an acid eating into the night’s silence, the peace that had been in the room ten minutes before. Bits of his interrupted dream come back to him. A visit to some anticipated place, on a vehicle like a trolley car, yes, it had been an old-time trolley car, the tight weave of cane seats, he had forgotten how they looked, the way they smelled warmed by the sun, and the porcelain loops to hang from, the porcelain buttons to press, the dusty wire grates at the windows, the air and light coming in, on old-fashioned straw hats, the women with paper flowers in theirs, all heading somewhere gay, an amusement park, a fair, who was with him? There had been a companion, a date, on the seat beside him, but he can’t come up with her face. The tunnel of love. The trolley car turned into something carrying them, him, into a cozy tunnel of love. It fit.
“Could the neighbors help?”
More crackling, more sobbing. Rabbit gives Janice the “cut” signal you see on TV - a finger across the throat - and gets out of bed. The aroma of his old body lifts toward him as he rests his bare feet on the carpet, a stale meaty cheesy scent. Their bedroom in the limestone house has pale-beige Antron broadloom; a houseful of unpatterned wall-to-wall seemed snug and modern to him when they ordered it all, but in their ten years of living here certain spots -inside the front door, the hall outside the door down to the cellar, the bedroom on either side of the bed - have collected dirt from shoes and sweat from feet and turned a gray no rug shampoo could remove, a grimy big fingerprint your life has left. Patterned carpets like people had when he was a boy - angular flowers and vines and mazes he would follow with his eyes until he felt lost in a jungle - swallowed the dirt somehow, and then the housewives up and down Jackson Road would beat it out of them this time of year, on their back-yard clotheslines, making little swirling clouds in the cool April air, disappearing into the dust of the world. He collects clean underwear and socks from the bureau and then is a bit stumped, what to wear to an assault. Formal, or rough and ready? Harry’s brain is skidding along like a surfer on the pumping of his heart.
“Hi honey,” Janice is saying in another tone, high-pitched and grandmotherly. “Don’t be scared. We all love you. Your daddy loves you, yes he does, very much. Grandpa and I are coming right over. You must let us get dressed now so we can do that. It’ll take just twenty minutes, honey. We’ll hurry, yes. You be good till then and do whatever your mother says.” She hangs up and stares at Harry from beneath her skimpy rumpled bangs. “My God,” she says. “He punched Pru in the face and smashed up everything in the bathroom when he couldn’t find some cocaine he thought he hid in there that he wanted.”
“He wants, he wants,” Harry says.
“He told her we’re all stealing from him.”
“Ha,” Harry says, meaning it’s the reverse.
Janice says, “How can you laugh when it’s your own son?”
Who is this woman, this little nut-hard woman, to chasten him? Yet he feels chastened. He doesn’t answer but instead says in a measured, mature manner, “Well, it’s probably good this is coming to a head, if we all survive it. It gets it out in the open at least.”
She puts on what she never wears in the daylight up north, her salmon running suit with the powder-blue sleeves and stripe. He opts for a pair of pressed chinos fresh from the drawer and the khaki shirt he puts on to do light yard chores, and his oldest jacket, a green wide-wale corduroy with leather buttons: kind of a casual Saturday-afternoon look. Retirement has made them both more clothes-conscious than before; in Florida, the retirees play dress-up every day, as if they’ve become their own paper dolls.
They take the slate-gray Celica, the more Batmobilelike and steely car, on this desperate mission in the dead of the night. Along the stilled curving streets of Penn Park, the oaks are just budding but the maples are filling in, no longer red in tint but dense with translucent tender new leaves. The houses have an upstairs night light on here and there, or a back-porch light to keep cats and raccoons away from the garbage, but only the streetlamps compete with the moon. The trimmed large bushes of the groomed yards, the yews and arborvitae and rhododendrons, look alert by night, like jungle creatures come to the waterhole to drink and caught in a camera’s flash. It seems strange to think that while we sleep these bushes are awake, exhaling oxygen, growing; they do not sleep. Stars do not sleep, but above the housetops and trees crowns shine in a cold arching dusty sprinkle. Why do we sleep? What do we rejoin? His dream, the way it fit him all around. At certain angles the lit asphalt feels in the corners of his eyes like snow. Penn Park becomes West Brewer and a car or two is still awake and moving on blanched deserted Penn Boulevard, an extension of Weiser with a supermarket parking lot on one side and on the other a low brick row of shops from the Thirties, little narrow stores selling buttons and bridal gowns and pastry and Zipf Chocolates and Sony TVs and hobby kits to make model airplanes with - they still manufacture and sell those in this era when all the kids are supposedly couch potatoes and all the planes are these wallowing wide-body jets with black noses like panda bears, not sleek killing machines like Zeros, Messerschmitts, Spitfires, Mustangs. Funny to think that with all that world-war effort manufacturers still had the O.K. to make those little models, keeping up morale in the kiddie set. All the shops are asleep. A flower shop shows a violet growing light, and a pet store a dimly lit aquarium. The cars parked along the curbs display a range of unearthly colors, no longer red and blue and cream but cindery lunar shades, like nothing you can see or even imagine by daylight.
Harry pops a nitroglycerin pill and tells Janice accusingly, “The doctors say I should avoid aggravation.”
“It wasn’t me who woke us up at two in the morning, it was your daughter-in-law.”
“Yeah, because your precious son was beating up on her.”
“According to her,” Janice states. “We haven’t heard Nelson’s side of it.”
The underside of his tongue bums. “What makes you think he has a side? What’re you saying, you think
she’s lying? Why would she lie? Why would she call us up at two in the morning to lie?”
“She has her agenda, as people say. He was a good bet for her when she got herself pregnant but now that he’s in a little trouble he’s not such a good bet and if she’s going to get herself another man she better move fast because her looks won’t last forever.”
He laughs, in applause. “You’ve got it all figured out.” Discreetly, distantly, his asshole tingles, from the pill. “She is good-looking, isn’t she? Still.”
“To some men she would seem so. The kind that don’t mind big tough women. What I never liked about her, though, was she makes Nelson look short.”
“He is short,” Harry says. “Beats me why. My parents were both tall. My whole family’s always been tall.”
Janice considers in silence her responsibility for Nelson’s shortness.
There are any number of ways to get to Mt. Judge through Brewer but tonight, the streets all but deserted and the stoplights blinking yellow, he opts for the most direct, going straight over the Running Horse Bridge, that once he and Jill walked over in moonlight though not so late at night as this, straight up Weiser past the comer building that used to house JIMBO’s Friendly LOUNGE until trouble with the police finally closed it and that now has been painted pastel condo colors and remodelled into a set of offices for yuppie lawyers and financial advisers, past Schoenbaum Funeral Directors with its stately building of white brick on the left and the shoeshine parlor that sells New York papers and hot roasted peanuts, the best peanuts in town, still selling them all those years since he was a kid not much older than Judy now. His idea then of the big time was to take the trolley around the mountain and come into downtown Brewer on a Saturday morning and buy a dime bag of peanuts still warm from the roaster and walk all around cracking them and letting the shells fall where they would, at his feet on the sidewalks of Weiser Square. Once an old bum grumbled at him for littering; even the bums had a civic conscience then. Now the old downtown is ghostly, hollow in lunar colors and closed to traffic at Fifth Street, where the little forest planted by the city planners from Atlanta to make a pedestrian mall looms with ghostly branches under the intense blue lights installed to discourage muggings and sex and drug transactions beneath these trees which grow taller every year and make the downtown gloomier. Rabbit turns left on Fifth, past the post office and the Ramada Inn that used to be the Ben Franklin with its grand ballroom, which always makes him think of Mary Ann and her crinolines and the fragrance between her legs, and over to Eisenhower Avenue, above number 1204 where Janice hid out with Charlie that time, and takes an obtuse-angled turn right, heading up through the Hispanic section, which used to be German working-class, across Winter, Spring, and Summer streets with the blinding lights and occasional moving shadow, spics out looking for some kind of a deal, the nights still a little cool to bring out all the street trash, to Locust Boulevard and the front of Brewer High School, a Latin-inscribed Depression monument, ambitious for the common good like something Communists would put up, the whole country close to Communism in the Thirties, people not so selfish then, built the year Harry was born, 1933, and going to outlast him it looks like. Of pale-yellow brick and granite quoins, it clings to the greening mountainside like a grand apparition.