by John Updike
Emerging opposite to the closed door of the old sewing room, where Melame used to sleep, Rabbit sneaks down the hall past the half-closed door to the master bedroom - he can hear Janice and Nelson talking, their voices braided into one - and to the room beyond, a back room with a view of the back yard and the little fenced garden he used to tend. This was Nelson’s room in the distant days when he went to high school and wore long hair and a headband like an Indian and tried to learn the guitar that had been Jill’s and spent a small fortune on his collection of rock LPs, records all obsolete now, everything is tapes, and tapes are becoming obsolete, everything will be CDs. This room is now little Roy’s. Its door is ajar; with three fingertips on its cool white wood Harry pushes it open. Light enters it not as sharp slices from the proximate streetlights above Joseph Street but more mistily, from the lights of the town diffused and scattered, a yellow star-swallowing glow arising foglike from the silhouettes of maples and gables and telephone poles. By this dim light he sees Pru’s long body pathetically asleep across Roy’s little bed. One foot has kicked off its fake-furry slipper and sticks out bare from its nightie, so filmy it clings to the shape of her bent full-thighed leg, her short quilted robe ruched up to her waist, rumpled in folds whose valleys seem bottomless in the faint light. One long white hand of hers rests extended on the rumpled covers, the other is curled in a loose fist and fitted into the hollow between her lips and chin; the bruise on her cheekbone shows like a leech attached there and her hair, its carrot-color black in the dark, is disarrayed. Her breath moves in and out with a shallow exhausted rasp. He inhales through his nose, to smell her. Perfumy traces float in her injured aura.
As he bends over for this inspection, Rabbit is startled by the twin hard gleam of open eyes: Roy is awake. Cuddled on his bed by his mother, sung a song that has put the singer to sleep, the strange staring child reaches up through the darkness to seize the loose skin of his grandfather’s looming face and to twist it, his small sharp fingernails digging in so that Harry has to fight crying out. He pulls this fierce little crab of a hand away from his cheek, disembeds it finger by finger, and with a vengeful pinch settles it back onto Roy’s chest. In his animal hurt Harry has hissed aloud; seeing Pru stir as if to awake, her hand making an agitated motion toward her tangled hair, he backs rapidly from the room.
Janice and Nelson are in the bright hall looking for him. With their thinning hair and muddled scowling expressions they seem siblings. He tells them in a whisper, “Pru fell asleep on Roy’s bed.”
Nelson says, “That poor bitch. She’d be O.K. if she’d just get off my case.”
Janice tells Harry, “Nelson says he feels much more like himself now and we should go home to bed.”
Their voices seem loud, after the foglit silence of Roy’s room, and he pointedly keeps his own low. “What have you two settled? I don’t want this to happen again.”
In Nelson’s old room, Roy has begun to cry. He should cry; it’s Harry’s cheek that hurts.
“It won’t, Harry,” Janice says. “Nelson has promised to see a counsellor.”
He looks at his son to see what this means. The boy visibly suppresses a smile of collusion, over the necessity ofplacating women. Harry tells Janice, “I said, Don’t let him con ya.”
Her forehead, which her bangs do not cover, creases in impatience. “Harry, it’s time to go.” She is, as Lyle informed him, the boss.
On the drive back, he vents his indignation. “What did he say? What about the money?” Route 422 shudders with tall trucks, transcontinental eighteen-wheelers. They make better time in the dead of the night.
Janice says, “He’s running the lot and it would be too unmanning to take it from him. I can’t run it and you’re going into the hospital for that angio-thing. Plasty.”
“Not till the week after next,” he says. “We could always put it off.”
“I know that’s what you’d like but we just can’t go on pretending you’re fine. It’s been nearly four months since New Year’s and in Florida they said you should recover enough in three. Dr. Breit told me you’re not losing weight and avoiding sodium the way you were told and you could have a recurrence of what happened on the Sunfish any time.”
Dr. Breit is his cardiologist at the St. Joseph’s Hospital in Brewer - a fresh-faced freckled kid with big glasses in fleshcolored plastic rims. Janice’s telling him all this in her mother’s matter-of-fact, determined voice carves a dreadful hollowness within him. The sloping park as they cruise through on Cityview Drive seems fragile and papery, the illuminated trees unreal. There is nothing beneath these rocks, these steep lawns and proud row houses, but atoms and nothingness, waiting for him to take his tight-fitting place among them. Dear God, reach down. Pull my bad heart out of me. Thelma said it helped. Janice’s mind, far from prayer, is moving on, her voice decided and a bit defiant. “As for the money, Nelson did allow as there has to be some financial restructuring.”
“Restructuring! That’s what everybody up the creek talks about. South American countries, those Texas S and Ls. Did he really say `restructuring’?”
“Well, it’s not a word I would have thought to use. Though I expect when I start with my courses it’ll be one of the things they teach.”
“Your courses, Jesus,” he says. That tank, painted the wrong green, how much longer before nobody remembered why it was there - the ration stamps, the air-raid drills, the screaming eightcolumn headlines every morning, God versus Satan a simple matter of the miles gained each day on the road to Aachen? “What did he say about himself and Pru?”
“He doesn’t think she’s found another man yet,” Janice says. “So we don’t think she’ll really leave.”
“Well, that’s nice and hard-boiled ofyou both. But what about her, her own welfare? You saw her battered face tonight. How much more should she take? Face it, the kid is utterly gonzo. Do you see the way he was twitching all the time? And throwing up then? Did you hear him offer me a beer? A beer, for Chrissake, when we should have been the cops really. He’s damn lucky the neighbors didn’t call ‘em.”
“He was just trying to be hospitable. It’s a great trial to him, Harry, that you’re so unsympathetic.”
“Unsympathetic! What’s to be sympathetic with? He cheats, he snivels, he snorts or whatever, he’s a lush besides, over at the lot he hires these gangsters and guys with AIDS -“
“Really, you should hear yourself. I wish I had a tape recorder.”
“So do I. Tape me; I’m talking truth. So what’s he going to do about the dope?” Even at this hour, going on four, a few men in sneakers and jeans are awake in the park, conferring behind trees, waiting on benches. “Did he promise to give it up?”
“He promised to see a counsellor,” Janice says. “He admits he might have a problem. I think that’s a good night’s work. Pru has all sorts of names and agencies from these Narc-Anon meetings she’s been going to.”
“Names, agencies, we can’t expect society to run our lives for us, to baby us from cradle to grave. That’s what the Communists try to do. There comes a point when you got to take responsibility.” He fingers his pants pocket to make sure the little hard cylindrical bottle is there. He won’t take a pill now, but save it for when they get home. With a small glass of milk in the kitchen. And a Nutter-Butter cookie to dip into the milk. Shaped like a big peanut, a Nutter-Butter is delicious dipped into milk, first up to the peanut waist, and then the rest for a second bite.
Janice says, “I wish my parents were still alive to hear you talk about responsibility. My mother thought you were the most irresponsible person she ever met.”
This hurts, slightly. He had liked Ma Springer toward the end, and thought she liked him. Hot nights out on the screened porch, pinochle games up in the Poconos. They both found Janice a bit slow.
Out of the park, he heads the slate-gray Celica down Weiser, through the heart of Brewer. The Sunflower Beer Clock says 3:50, above the great deserted city heart. Something cleansing abou
t being awake at this forsaken hour. It’s a new world. A living, crouching shadow - a cat, or can it be a raccoon? - stares with eyes like circular reflectors in his headlights, sitting on the cement stairs of a dry fountain there on the edge of the little woods the city planners have created. At the intersection of Weiser and Sixth, Rabbit has to turn right. In the old days you could drive straight to the bridge. The wild kids in high school liked to drive down the trolley tracks, between the islands where passengers would board.
As his silence lengthens, Janice says placatingly, “Weren’t those children dear? Harry, you don’t want them to live in one of those sad one-parent households.”
Rabbit has always been squeamish about things being put into him - dental drills, tongue depressors, little long knives to clean out earwax, suppositories, the doctor’s finger when once a year he sizes up your prostate gland. So the idea of a catheter being inserted at the top of his right leg, and being pushed along steered with a little flexible tip like some eyeless worm you find wriggling out of an apple where you just bit, is deeply repugnant to him, though not as much so as being frozen half to death and sawed open and your blood run through some complicated machine while they sew a slippery warm piece of your leg vein to the surface of your trembling poor cowering heart.
In the hospital in Deleon they gave him some articles to try to read and even showed him a little video: the heart sits in a protective sac, the pericardium, which has to be cut open, snipped the video said cheerfully like it was giving a sewing lesson. It showed it happening: cold narrow scalpels attack the shapeless bloody blob as it lies there in your chest like a live thing in a hot puddle, a cauldron of tangled juicy stew, convulsing, shuddering with a periodic sob, trying to dodge the knives, undressed of the sanitary pod God or whoever never meant human hands to touch. Then when the blood has been detoured to the gleaming pumping machine just like those in those horrible old Frankenstein movies with Boris Karloff the heart stops beating. You see it happen: your heart lies there dead in its soupy puddle. You, the natural you, are technically dead. A machine is living for you while the surgeons’ hands in their condomlike latex gloves fiddle and slice and knit away. Harry has trouble believing how his life is tied to all this mechanics - that the me that talks inside him all the time scuttles like a waterstriding bug above this pond of body fluids and their slippery conduits. How could the flame of him ever have ignited out of such wet straw?
The angioplasty seemed far less deep a violation than the coronary bypass. It was scheduled for a Friday. Youngish-old Dr. Breit, with his painfully fair skin and his plastic-rimmed glasses too big for his button nose, explained the operation - the procedure, he preferred to call it - in the lulling voice of a nightclub singer who has done the same lyrics so often her mind is free to wander as she sings. The cardiologist’s real preference was the bypass, Harry could tell. The angioplasty to Breit was just a sop, kid stuff, until the knives could descend. “The rate of restenosis is thirty per cent in three months’ time,” he warned Harry, there in his office with the framed color photos of a little pale woman who resembled him as one hamster resembles another and of little children arranged in front of their parents like a small stepladder, all with curly fair hair and squints and those tiny pink noses, “and twenty per cent of PTCA patients wind up having a CABG eventually anyway. Sorry -that’s percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty versus coronary artery bypass graft.”
“I guessed,” Harry said. “Still, let’s do the balloon first, and save the knives for later.” A lot later, he thinks to himself.
“Fair enough,” said Dr. Breit, semi-singingly, his tone clipped and grim and even-tempered and resigned. Like a golfer: you lose this match but you’ll play again next week. “You think the way ninety per cent of all heart patients do. They love the idea of the PTCA, and no heart specialist can talk them out of it. It’s irrational, but so’s the human species. Tell you what, Harold.” No one had told him Harry was never called Harold, though that was his legal name. Rabbit let it go; it made him feel a child again. His mother used to call him Hassy. “We’ll give you a treat. You can watch the whole procedure on TV. You’ll be under local anesthetic, it’ll help you pass the time.”
“Do I have to?”
Dr. Breit seemed momentarily bothered. For so fair a man, he sweated a great deal, his upper lip always dewy. “We screen off the monitor usually, for the patients we think are too excitable or frail. There’s always a slight chance of a coronary occlusion and that wouldn’t be too good, to be watching it happen. But you, you’re not frail. You’re no nervous nelly. I’ve sized you up as a pretty tough-minded guy, Harold, with a fair amount of intellectual curiosity. Was I wrong?”
It was like a ten-dollar press, when you’re already thirty dollars down. You can’t refuse. “No,” he told the young doctor. “That’s me all right.”
Dr. Breit actually does not perform the procedure: it needs a specialist, a burly menacing man with thick brown forearms, Dr. Raymond. But Breit is there, his face peeping like a moon - big specs glinting, upper lip dewy with nervous perspiration - over the mountainous lime-green shoulders of Dr. Raymond and the surgical caps of the nurses. The operation takes two attending nurses; this is no little “procedure”; Harry’s been sandbagged. And it takes two rooms of the hospital, the room where it happens and a monitoring room with several TV screens that translate him into jerking bright lines, vital signs: the Rabbit Angstrom Show, with a fluctuating audience as the circulating nurse and Dr. Breit and some others never named to him, lime-green extras, come and watch a while and leave again. There is even, he has been casually told, a surgical team standing by just in case he needs immediate bypass surgery.
Another double-cross: they shave him, down beside his privates, without warning, where the catheter will go in. They give him a pill to make him light in the head and then when he’s helpless on the operating table under all these lights they scrape away at the right half of his groin area and pubic bush; he’s never had much body hair and wonders if at his age it will ever grow back. The needle that comes next feels bigger and meaner than the Novocain needle the dentist uses; its “pinch” - Dr. Raymond murmurs, “Now you’ll feel a pinch” - doesn’t let go as quickly. But then there’s no pain, just an agony of mounting urinary pressure as the dyes build up in his system, injected repeatedly with a hot surge like his chest is being cooked in a microwave. Jesus. He closes his eyes a few times to pray but it feels like a wrong occasion, there is too much crowding in, of the actual material world. No old wispy Biblical God would dare interfere. The one religious consolation he clings to through his three-and-a-half-hour ordeal is a belief that Dr. Raymond, with his desert tan and long melancholy nose and bearish pack of fat across his shoulders, is Jewish: Harry has this gentile prejudice that Jews do everything a little better than other people, something about all those generations crouched over the Torah and watch-repair tables, they aren’t as distracted as other persuasions, they don’t expect to have as much fun. They stay off booze and dope and have a weakness only (if that history of Hollywood he once read can be trusted) for broads.
The doctors and their satellites murmurously crouch over Harry’s sheeted, strategically exposed body, under a sharp light, in a room whose tiles are the color of Russian salad dressing, on the fourth floor of St. Joseph’s Hospital, where decades ago his two children were born - Nelson, who lived, and Rebecca, who died. In those years nuns ran the place, with their black and white and cupcake frills around their pasty faces, but now nuns have blended into everybody else or else faded away. Vocations drying up, nobody wants to be selfless any more, everybody wants their fun. No more nuns, no more rabbis. No more good people, waiting to have their fun in the afterlife. The thing about the afterlife, it kept this life within bounds somehow, like the Russians. Now there’s just Japan, and technology, and the profit motive, and getting all you can while you can.
Turning his head to the left, Rabbit can see, over the shoulders that crowd around hi
s body like green cotton tummocks, the shadow of his heart on an X-ray monitor screen, a twitching palegray ghost dimly webbed by its chambered structure and darkened in snaky streaks and bulbous oblongs by injections of the opacifying dye. The thin wire tip of the catheter, inquisitive in obedience to Dr. Raymond’s finger on the trigger, noses forward and then slowly eels, in little cautious jerking stabs, diagonally down into a milky speckled passageway, a river or tentacle within him, organic and tentative in shape where the catheter is black and positive, hard-edged as a gun. Harry watches to see if his heart will gag and try to disgorge the intruder. Like a finger down his throat, he thinks, feeling a wave of nausea and yet a test pilot’s detachment from this picture on the screen, blanched and hard to read like a. section of aerial map, and these conferring voices around him. “We’re home,” Dr. Breit murmurs, as if not to awaken something. “That’s your LAD, your left anterior descending. The widow-maker, they call it. By far the most common site oflesions. See how stenotic those walls are? How thickened with plaque? Those little agglutinated specks - that’s plaque. I’d say your luminal narrowing is close to eighty-five per cent.”
“Rice Krispies,” Harry tries to say, but his mouth is too dry, his voice cracks. All he wanted was to acknowledge that yes, he sees it all, he sees his tangled shadowy self laid out like a diagram, he sees the offending plaque, like X-rayed Rice Krispies. He nods a little, feeling even more gingerly than when getting a haircut or having his prostate explored. Too vigorous a nod, and his heart might start to gag. He wonders, is this what having a baby is like, having Dr. Raymond inside you? How do women stand it, for nine months? Not to mention being screwed in the first place? Can they really like it? Or queers being buggered? It’s something you never see really discussed, even on Oprah.