by John Updike
“Now comes the tricky part,” Dr. Breit breathes, like a golf commentator into the mike as a crucial putt is addressed. Harry feels and then sees on the monitor his heart beat faster, twist as if to escape, twist in that convulsive spiral motion Dr. Olman in Florida demonstrated with his fist; the shadowy fist is angry, again and again, seventy times a minute; the anger is his life, his soul, mind over matter, electricity over muscle. The mechanically precise dark ghost of the catheter is the worm of death within him. Godless technology is fucking the pulsing wet tubes we inherited from the squid, the boneless sea-cunts. He feels again that feathery touch of nausea. Can he possibly throw up? It would jar and jam the works, disrupt the concentrating green tummocks he is buried beneath. He mustn’t. He must be still.
He sees, on the monitor, behind the inquisitive tip, a segment of the worm thicken and swell, pressing the pallid Rice Krispies together against the outlines of the filmy crimped river descending down his heart, and stay inflated, pressing, filling; it has been explained to him that if the LAD has not developed any collateral arteries the blood flow will cease and another heart attack begin, right on camera. You are there.
“Thirty seconds,” Dr. Breit breathes, and Dr. Raymond deflates the balloon. “Looking good, Ray.” Harry feels no pain beyond the knifelike sweet pressure in his bladder and a soreness in the far back of his throat as if from swallowing all that saltwater out on the Gulf. “Once more, Harold, and we’ll call it a day.”
“How’re ya doing?” Dr. Raymond asks him, in one of those marbles-in-the-mouth voices muscular men sometimes have, Pennsylvanians especially.
“Still here,” Harry says, in a brave voice that sounds high in his ears, as if out of a woman’s throat.
The tense insufflation repeats, and so do the images on the TV screen, silent like the bumping of molecules under the microscope on a nature program, or like computer graphics in an insurance commercial, where fragments flickeringly form the logo. It seems as remote from his body as the records of his sins that angels are keeping. Were his heart to stop, it would be mere shadowplay. He sees, when the catheter’s bulge subsides a second time, that the Rice Krispies have been pushed to the sides of his LAD. He feels blood flowing more freely into his heart, rich in combustible oxygen; his head in gratitude and ecstasy grows faint.
“Looking good,” Dr. Breit says, sounding nervous.
“Whaddya mean?” Dr. Raymond responds - “looking great,” like those voices on television that argue about the virtues of Miller Lite.
The nurse who that evening comes into his room (a private room, $160 more a day, but it’s worth it to him; in Florida the guy in the bed next to him finally died, gurgling and moaning all day and then shitting all over himself as a last pronouncement) and takes Harry’s temperature and blood pressure and brings his allotment of pills in a little paper cup has a round kind face. She is a bit overweight but it’s packed on firm. She looks familiar. She has pale-blue eyes in sockets that make a dent above the cheekbones in the three-quarters view, and her upper lip has that kind of puffy look he likes, like Michelle Pfeiffer. Her hair shows under her nurse’s cap as browny-red, many-colored, with even a little gray, though she is young enough to be his daughter.
She lifts the strange plastic rocket-shaped thermometer that gives its reading in red segmented numbers from his mouth and enwraps his left arm with the Velcro-fastened blood-pressure cuff. As she inflates it she asks, “How’s the Toyota business?”
“Not bad. The weak dollar doesn’t help. My son runs the place now, basically. How’d you know I sold Toyotas?”
“My boyfriend then and I bought a car from you about ten years ago.” She lifts those bleached blue eyes mockingly. “Don’t you remember?”
“It’s you! Yes. Of course. Of course I remember. An orange Corolla.” She is his daughter; or at least he imagines she is, though Ruth out of spite would never admit it to him. As the girl stands close to his bed, he reads her badge: ANNABELLE BYER; R.N. She still has her maiden name.
Annabelle frowns, and deflates the blood-pressure cuff, as tight around his arm as a policeman’s grip. “Let’s try that again in a minute. It shot up while we were talking.”
He asks her, “How’d the Corolla work out? How’d the boyfriend work out, for that matter? What the hell was his name? Big red-eared country kid.”
“Don’t talk, please, until I’ve got my reading. I’ll be quiet. Try to think of something soothing.”
He thinks of Ruth’s farm, the Byer place, the slope down through the orchard from the line of scrub trees he used to spy behind - the little square stone house, the yellow shells of the abandoned school buses, the dark collie that tried to herd him down there, as though he knew Harry belonged there with the others. Fritzie, that was that dog’s name. Sharp teeth, black gums. Oo boy, scary. Calm down. Think of the big sky of Texas, above the hot low barracks at Fort Larson, himself in fresh khaki, with a pass for the evening. Freedom, a soft breeze, a green sunset on the low horizon. Think of playing basketball against Oriole High, that little country gym, the backboards flush against the walls, before all the high schools merged into big colorless regionals and shopping malls began eating up the farmland. Think of sledding with Mim in her furry hood, in Mt. Judge behind the hat factory, on a winter’s day so short the streetlights come on an hour before suppertime calls you home.
“That’s better,” the nurse says. “One forty over ninety-five. Not great, but not bad. In answer to your questions: the car lasted longer than the boyfriend. I traded in the car after eight years; it had a hundred twenty thousand miles on the speedometer. Jamie moved out about a year after we moved into town. He went back to Galilee. Brewer was too tough for him.”
“And you? Is it too tough for you?”
“No, I like it. I like the action.”
Action like her mother used to get? You were a real hooer? Dusk and May’s fully arrived leafiness soften his private room; it is a quiet time on the hospital floor, after dinner and the post-work surge of visitors. Harry dares ask, “You married now? Or live with a guy?”
She smiles, her natural kindness contending a moment with surprise at his curiosity, his presumption, and then smoothing her face into calm again. The dusk seems to be gathering it closer, the pale round glimmer of her face. But her voice discloses a city dryness, a guardedness that might rise up. “No, as a matter of fact I live with my mother. She sold the farm we inherited from my father and moved in with me after Jamie moved out.”
“I think I know that farm. I’ve passed it on the road.” Harry’s violated, tired heart feels weighted by so much information, as his groin had been weighted down, literally sandbagged, in the hours after the angioplasty. To think of that other world, with all its bushes and seasons and green days and brown, where this child’s life had passed without him. “Does Ruth -” he begins, and ends, “What does she do? Your mother.”
The girl gives him a look but then answers readily, as if the question passed some test. “She works for one of these investment companies from out of state, money markets and mutual funds and all that, that have branch offices in the new glass building downtown, across from where Kroll’s used to be.”
“A stenographer,” Rabbit remembers. “She could take dictation and type.”
The girl actually laughs, in surprise at his groping command of the truth. She is beginning to be pert, to drop her nurse’s manner. She has backed off a step from his bed, and her full thighs press against the crisp front of her white uniform so that even standing up she has a lap. Why is Ruth turning this girl into a spinster? She tells him, “She was hired for that but being so much older than the other women they’ve let her have some more responsibility. She’s a kind of junior exec now. Did you know my mother, ever?”
“I’m not sure,” he lies.
“You must have, in the days when she was single. She told me she knew quite a few guys before meeting up with my father.” She smiles, giving him permission to have known her mother.
“I guess she did,” Harry says, sad at the thought. Always he has wanted to be every woman’s only man, as he was his mother’s only son. “I met her once or twice.”
“You should see her,” Annabelle goes on pertly. “She’s lost a lot of weight and dresses real snappy. I kid her, she has more boyfriends than I do.”
Rabbit closes his eyes and tries to picture it, at their age. Come on. Work. Dressing snappy. Once a city girl, always a city girl. Her hair, that first time he saw her, rimmed with red neon like wilt.
The girl he thinks is his daughter goes on, “I’ll tell her you’re in here, Mr. Angstrom.” Though he is trying now to withdraw, into his evening stupor, an awakening affinity between them has stirred her to a certain forwardness. “Maybe she’ll remember more than you do.”
Outside the sealed hospital windows, in the slowly thickening dusk, sap is rising, and the air even in here feels languid with pollen. Involuntarily Harry’s eyes close again. “No,” he says, “that’s O.K. Don’t tell her anything. I doubt if she’d remember anything.” He is suddenly tired, too tired for Ruth. Even if this girl is his daughter, it’s an old story, going on and on, like a radio nobody’s listening to.
* * *
They keep him in the hospital for five nights. Janice visits him Saturday. She is very busy on the outside; the classes she has to take to be a real-estate salesman have begun to meet, “The Laws of Real Property and Conveyancing” for three hours one night, and the other, “Procedures of Mortgages and Financing,” on another. Also, she has been spending a lot of daytime hours with Pru and the grandchildren, and Charlie Stavros called her up and took her out to lunch.
Rabbit protests, “The bastard, he did? I’m not even dead yet.”
“Of course not, darling, and nobody expects you to be. He said it was your idea, from when you had lunch together. Charlie’s concerned about us, is all. He thinks I shouldn’t just be letting things slide but should get an outside accountant and our lawyer and look at the books over at the lot, just like you wanted.”
“You believe it when Charlie tells you, but not when I do.”
“Honey, you’re my husband, and husbands get wives all confused. Charlie’s just an old friend, and he has an outsider’s impartiality. Also, he loved my father, and feels protective toward the firm.”
Harry has to chuckle, though he doesn’t like to laugh now or do anything that might joggle his heart, that delicate web of jumping shadow he saw on the radiograph monitor during his operation. Sometimes, when shows like Cosby or Perfect Strangers or Golden Girls begin to tickle him too much, he switches off the set, rather than stress his heart with a laugh. These shows are all idiotic but not as totally stupid as this new one everybody raves about, Roseanne, starring some fat woman whose only talent as far as he can see is talking fast without moving her mouth. “Janice,” he says seriously, “I think the only person who ever loved your father was you. And maybe your mother, at the beginning. Though it’s hard to picture.”
“Don’t be rude to the dead,” she tells him, unrufed. She looks plumped up, somehow; without that steady diet of tennis and swimming Valhalla Village provides she is maybe gaining weight. They are still members up at the Flying Eagle, but haven’t made it out that way as much as in past springs. They had enjoyed good friendly times up there without realizing they would end. And, with his heart, Harry doesn’t quite know how much to get into golf again. Even with a cart, you can be out there on the seventh hole and keel over and by the time they bring you in, through the other foursomes, there’s been no oxygen to the brain for ten minutes. Five minutes is all it takes, and you’re a vegetable.
“Well, are you going to do it? Call in another accountant.”-
“I’ve done it already” she announces, the proud secret she’s been waiting for the conversation to elicit. “Charlie had called up Mildred on his own already and we went over there to this very nice nursing home right near us, she’s perfectly sensible and competent, just a little unsteady on her legs, and we went over to the lot and this Lyle who was so mean to you wasn’t there but I was able to reach him over the phone at his home number. I said we wanted to look over the accounts since October and he said the accounts were mostly in these computer disks he keeps at his house and he was too sick to see us today, so I said maybe he was too sick to be our accountant then.”
“You said that?”
“Yes I did. The first thing they teach you in this class on conveyancing is never to pussy-foot around, you do somebody and a potential sale more harm by not being clear than by speaking right out, even if they might not like hearing it at first. I told him he was fired and he said you can’t fire somebody with AIDS, it’s discrimination, and I said he should bring in his books and disks tomorrow or a policeman would be out to get them.”
“You said all that?” Her eyes are bright and her hair bushes out from her little nut of a face, getting tan again, with a touch of double chin now that she’s putting on weight. Harry admires her as you admire children you have raised, whose very success pulls them away, into the world’s workings, into distance and estrangement.
“Maybe not as smoothly as I’m saying it to you, but I got it all out. Ask Charlie, he was right there. I don’t like what these queers have done to Nelson. They’ve corrupted him.”
“Gay,” Harry says wearily. “We call them gay now.” He is still trying to keep up with America, as it changes styles and costumes and vocabulary, as it dances ahead ever young, ever younger. “And what did Lyle say then?”
“He said we shall see. He asked whether I’d consulted with Nelson about all this. I said no but I wasn’t sure Nelson was fit to consult with these days. I said in my opinion he and his friends were milking Nelson for all he was worth and had turned him into a human wreck and a dope addict and Charlie wrote on a pad of paper for me to see, `Cool it.’ Elvira and Benny were out in the showroom all ears even though the office door was closed. Oh, but that fairy got me mad,” Janice explains, “he sounded so aboveit-all and bored on the phone, as if dealing with women like me was just more than his poor sensitive body and spirit could bear.”
Rabbit is beginning to know how Lyle felt. “He probably was tired,” he says in his defense. “That disease he has does an awful job on you. Your lungs fill up.”
“Well, he should have kept his penis out of other men’s bottoms then,” Janice says, lowering her voice though, so the nurses and orderlies in the hall don’t hear.
Bottoms. Thelma. That casket of nothingness. Probing the void. “And I don’t know,” Rabbit wearily pursues, “in a situation like Nelson’s, who corrupts who. Maybe 1 corrupted the poor kid, twenty years ago.”
“Oh Harry, don’t be so hard on yourself. It’s depressing to see you like this. You’ve changed so. What have they done to you, these doctors?”
He’s glad she asked. He tells her, “They stuck a long thin thing into me and I could see it on television in my heart. Right on the screen, my own poor heart, while it was pumping to keep me alive. They shouldn’t be allowed to go into your heart like that. They should just let people die.”
“Darling, what a stupid way to talk. It’s modern science, you should be grateful. You’re going to be fine. Mim called all worried and I told her how minor it was and gave her your number here.”
“Mim.” Just the syllable makes him smile. His sister. The one other survivor of that house on Jackson Road, where Mom and Pop set up their friction, their heat, their comedy, their parade of days. At nineteen Mim took her bony good looks and went west, to Las Vegas. One of her gangster pals with a sentimental streak set her up with a beauty parlor when her looks began to go, and now she owns a Laundromat as well as the hairdresser’s. Vegas must be a great town for Laundromats. Nobody lives there, everybody is just passing through, leaving a little bit of dirt like on the pale Antron carpets back at 14Y2 Franklin Drive. Harry and Janice visited Mim once, seven or eight years ago. These caves of glowing slot machines, no clocks anywhere, just
a perpetual two o’clock in the morning, and you step outside and to your surprise the sun is blazing, and the sidewalks so hot a dog couldn’t walk on them. What with Sinatra and Wayne Newton, he expected a lot of glitz, but in fact the gambling addicts were no classier than the types you see pulling at the one-armed bandits down in Atlantic City. Only there was a Western flavor, their voices and faces lined with little tiny cracks. Mim’s face and voice had those tiny cracks too, though she had had a face-lift, to tighten up what she called her “wattles.” Life is a hill that gets steeper the more you climb.
“Harry.” Janice has been telling him something. “What did I just say?”