by John Updike
It is strange that this girl (hardly that, she would be only three years younger than Nelson) should offer to bring him her mother, for last night he dreamed about Ruth. As the world around him goes gray, his dreams have taken on intense color. Ruth - Ruth as she had been, the spring they lived and slept together, both of them twenty-six, she fleshy, cocky, pretty in a coarse heavy careless way - was wearing a sea-blue dress, with small white polka dots, and he was pressing his body against it, with her body inside it, and telling her how lovely a color it was on her, while the hair on her head glistened red, brown, and gold, close to his eyes. Ruth had turned her head not, he felt, in aversion from him but in natural embarrassment at the situation, for she seemed to be living with him and Janice, all together, and Janice was somewhere near them -upstairs, though the furniture around them was sunstruck floral-patterned wicker, as from their Florida condo, which has no upstairs. His embrace of Ruth felt semi-permitted, like an embrace of a legal relation, and his praise of her vivid dress was meant to urge her into his own sense of well-being, of their love being at last all right. He hid his face beside her throat, in the curtain of her many-colored hair, and knew he could fuck her forever, on and on, bottomlessly spilling himself into her solid beauty. When he awoke it was with the kind of absolute hard-on he almost never has while awake, what with the anti-hypertensive medicine and his generally gray mood. He saw while the dream still freshly clung to him in sky-blue shreds that the white polka dots were the confettilike bits of blossom that littered the sidewalk a month ago on that street of Bradford pear trees up near Summer, where he had once lived with Ruth, and that the splashy sunlight was what used to pour in on Ma Springer’s iron table of ferns and African violets, in the little sunroom across the foyer from the gloomy living room. For though the furniture of the dream was Florida, the house they were all sharing had certainly been the old Springer manse.
Harry asks the round-faced nurse, “How much do you know about me and your mother?”
The blush deepens a shade. “Oh, nothing. She never lets on about the time before she settled down with my father.” It now sounds rather conventional, Ruth’s time as a single woman; but at the time she was beyond the pale, a lost soul scandalous to the narrow world of Mt. Judge. “I figure you were a special friend.”
“Maybe not that special,” Harry tells her.
He feels bad, because there is nothing much she can say to that, his lie, just stand there polite with her puffy upper lip, a nurse being patient with a patient. He is leaving her out on a limb. He loves her; love flows through him like a blind outpouring, an anesthesia. He tells his possible daughter, “Look, it’s a cute idea, but if she came up it would be because you asked her to rather than she wanted to on her own, and, frankly, Annabelle” - he has never called her by her name before - “I’d just as soon she didn’t see me like this. You say she’s lost weight and looks snappy. I’m fat and a medical mess. Maybe she’d be too much for me.”
The girl’s face returns to being pale and prim. Boundaries have been restored, just as he’s getting to feel paternal. “Very well,” Annabelle says. “I’ll tell her you’ve been released, if she asks.”
“Might she ask? Wait. Don’t get prissy. Tell me, why did you want to get us together?”
“You seem so interested in her. Your face comes to life when I mention her.”
“It does? Maybe it’s looking at you that does it.” He dares go on, “I’ve been wondering, though, if you should still be living with her. Maybe you ought to get out from under her wing.”
“I did, for a while. I didn’t like it. Living alone is tough. Men can get nasty.”
“Can we really? I’m sorry to hear it.”
Her face softens into a dear smile, that curls her upper lip at the edges and buckles the plump part in the middle. “Anyway, she says just what you say. But I like it, for now. It’s not like she’s my mother any more, she’s a roommate. Believe me, bad things can happen to women who live alone in this city. Brewer isn’t New York but it isn’t Penn Park, either.”
Of course. She can read his address right off the chart at the foot of the bed. To her he is one of those Penn Park snobs he himself has always resented. “Brewer’s a rugged town,” he agrees, sinking back into his pillow. “Always was. Coal and steel. Bars and cathouses all along the railroad tracks right through the middle of the city, when I was young.” He glances away, at the ornamental brickwork, the hurrying dry dark clouds. He tells his nurse, “You know best how to live your own life. Tell your mother, if she asks, that maybe we’ll meet some other time.” Under the pear trees, in Paradise.
Lying there these days, Harry thinks fondly of those dead bricklayers who bothered to vary their rows at the top of the three buildings across the street with such festive patterns of recess and protrusion, diagonal and upright, casting shadows in different ways at different times of the day, these men of another century up on their scaffold, talking Pennsylvania Dutch among themselves, or were Italians doing all the masonry even then? Lying here thinking of all the bricks that have been piled up and knocked down and piled up again on the snug square streets that lift toward Mt. Judge, he tries to view his life as a brick of sorts, set in place with a slap in 1933 and hardening ever since, just one life in rows and walls and blocks of lives. There is a satisfaction in such an overview, a faint far-off communal thrill, but hard to sustain over against his original and continuing impression that Brewer and all the world beyond are just frills on himself, like the lace around a plump satin valentine, himself the heart of the universe, like the Dalai Lama, who in the news lately - Tibet is still restless, after nearly forty years of Chinese rule - was reported to have offered to resign. But the offer was greeted with horror by his followers, for whom the Dalai Lama can no more resign godhood than Harry can resign selfhood.
He watches a fair amount of television. It’s right there, in front of his face; its wires come out of the wall behind him, just like oxygen. He finds that facts, not fantasies, are what he wants: the old movies on cable AMC seem stiff and barky in their harshly lit black and white, and the old TV shows on NIK impossibly tinny with their laugh tracks and spray-set Fifties hairdos, and even the incessant sports (rugby from Ireland, curling from Canada) a waste of his time, stories told people with time to kill, where he has time left only for truth, the truth of DSC or Channel 12, MacNeilLehrer so gravely bouncing the news between New York and Washington and reptiles on Smithsonian World flickering their forked tongues in the desert blaze or the giant turtles of Galápagos on World of Survival battling for their lives or the Russians battling the Nazis in the jumpy film clips of World War II as narrated by Sir Laurence Olivier (“Twenty million dead,” he intones at the end, as the frame freezes and goes into computer-blur and the marrow-chilling theme music comes up, thrilling Harry to think he was there, on the opposite side of the Northern Hemisphere, jumping on tin cans and balling up tin foil for his anti-Hitler bit, a ten-year-old participant in actual history) and War and Peace in the Nuclear Age and Nature’s Way and Portraits of Power and Wonders of the World and Wildlife Chronicles and Living Body and Planet Earth and struggle and death and cheetahs gnawing wildebeests and tarantulas fencing with scorpions and tiny opossums scrambling for the right nipple under the nature photographer’s harsh lights and weaverbirds making the most intricate damn nests just to attract one little choosy female and the incredible cleverness and variety and energy and waste of it all, a kind of crash course he is giving himself in the ways of the world. There is just no end to it, no end of information.
The nightly news has a lot of China on it - Gorbachev visiting, students protesting in Tiananmen Square, but not protesting Gorbachev, in fact they like him, all the world likes him, despite that funny mark on his head shaped like Japan. What the Chinese students seem to want is freedom, they want to be like Americans, but they look like Americans already, in blue jeans and T-shirts. Meanwhile in America itself the news is that not only President George Bush but Mrs. Bush the
First Lady take showers with their dog Millie, and if that’s all the Chinese want we should be able to give it to them, or something close, though it makes Harry miss Reagan slightly, at least he was dignified, and had that dream distance; the powerful thing about him as President was that you never knew how much he knew, nothing or everything, he was like God that way, you had to do a lot of it yourself. With this new one you know he knows something, but it seems a small something. Rabbit doesn’t want to have to picture the President and middle-aged wife taking showers naked with their dog. Reagan and Nancy had their dignity, their computer-blur, even when their bowel polyps and breasts were being snipped off in view of billions.
Janice comes in at six on Tuesday while he is eating his last bland supper - he is being released tomorrow. She is wearing her new coat and a gray skirt and a low-cut magenta blouse almost as vivid as the polka-dot dress Ruth wore in his dream. His wife looks energized, businesslike, her salt-and-pepper hair trimmed and given body by a hairdresser who has eliminated the bangs, gelled them back into a softly bristling mass, parted low on one side. Janice reminds him of those heightened and rapid-talking women on television who give the news. She in fact is brimming with news. Her eyes seem to be wearing contact lenses of an unnatural glitter until he realizes those are tears, prepared for him during the station break.
“Oh Harry,” she begins, “it’s worse than we thought! Thousands and thousands!”
“Thousands of what?”
“Of dollars Nelson stole! Charlie and I and this accountant his nephew knows - Mildred says she was too old for doing an audit and anyway is too busy in the nursing home - went over there today, Charlie said I had to be there, he and the accountant weren’t enough, and I asked to see the books, Nelson was there for once, and he looked at me in this heartbreaking hopeless way I’ll never forget as long as I live and said, Sure, Mom, what did I want to know? He told us everything. At first, when he needed money so desperately for the, you know, the cocaine, he would just write himself a check marked `Expenses’ or `Operating Cash,’ but Mildred, she was still around then, questioned him about it and he got scared. Anyway, these little amounts, a hundred or even two at a time, weren’t really enough to keep him going, so he got the idea of offering people a discount on the used cars if they paid in cash or with a check written directly out to him.”
“I told you there weren’t enough used sales on the statements,” Harry says, in a triumph that feels rather flat. Ever since they poked that catheter in, there’s been something drained about his emotional responses. “How many cars did he pull this stunt with?”
“Well, he doesn’t really remember, but Charlie says we can reconstruct it from the records, the NV-is and so on, it will just take time. Of course, Nelson didn’t approach every customer with this sort of shady deal, he had to pick and choose, the ones that looked poor enough not to look a gift horse in the face. He was clever about it, Nelson is much more clever than you ever gave him credit for.”
“I never said the kid wasn’t clever.”
“Oh, but Harry” - the shell of tears is refreshed, the brown eyes spill, shiny trails glitter beside her blunt little knob of a nose, a nose with no more character than a drawer pull. She tugs a paper facial tissue from the box the hospital puts on his night table - as she leans forward he glimpses the tops of her tidy breasts through the loose neck of the magenta peasant-style blouse he has never seen before, something she has bought for the real-estate course and these meetings with Charlie and her general stepping-out into the world, without him. He feels a flash of unpleasant heat, as in catheterization. His own wife’s tits, surprising him like that. Janice dabbles at her face, her muddled mutt’s face, and leans even farther forward, so he feels her breath on his face, smells some faint mint of a Life Saver. To hide the tobacco on her breath. Her tears shine under his eyes; her shaky voice is low so only he can hear. “- he didn’t even stop with that. He was doing crack by this time and the amount of money he needed was incredible. He and Lyle worked out this scheme, here it gets very technical -“
“Wait,” he tells her. The culinary aide has come in to remove his tray. She is a plump Hispanic woman with long red fingernails and a distinct mustache.
“You no eat enough,” she scolds, with her shy smile of pearlsize teeth.
“Enough,” he says. “For now. Very good. Bueno.”
She has a notebook on which she writes the percentages of the food he has consumed. A third of the overcooked watery string beans, half the pale oval of tasteless veal, scarcely a leaf of the coarse green salad drowned in an orange grease, a bite of the tapioca pudding, whose wobbly texture in his mouth made him shudder. “For breakfast,” she reads from her clipboard, “pieces pineapple, cream of wheat, whole-wheat toast, coffee decal”
“I can hardly wait,” he tells her.
“Eat more now,” she suggests.
He holds firm. “No thanks, too cold now. My wife’s here.”
She reads from the chart. “Says here last day tomorrow.”
“How about that?” Harry asks her. “The big wide world. I’ll miss you. And all your healthy eats. Your comestibles.”
As she removes his plastic tray, her long red fingernails scrape on its underside with a noise that puts his teeth on edge. He is reminded ofthat platinum-haired bimbo who used to tickle the computer keys at Fiscal Alternatives. Her fingernails were too long too. Dead, Lyle said. If there is an afterlife where the dead all gather, would he get a chance to deepen their acquaintance? But without money around, what would they talk about?
When the woman goes, Janice resumes. The tip of her tongue protrudes a second or two between her lips as she tries to think. “I’m not sure I understand it entirely, but you know how we keep a rolling inventory - so many trucks and vans and cars a month from Mid-Atlantic Toyota in Maryland.”
“Between twenty and twenty-five a month is how it’s been running,” Harry tells her, to let her know he may be flat on his back but knew his business. “We haven’t been able to move three hundred new units a year except that one year, ‘86, after Nelson first took over. The strong yen’s been killing us, and Honda and Nissan taking a bigger bite. Ford Ranger put a real dent in our one-ton pickup last year.”
“Harry, try to focus. The way it was explained to me is that there’s this Toyota Motors Credit Corporation in California that finances our inventory direct with Mid-Atlantic and gets paid when we sell a car and adds to our credit account when we order one for the lot. What Nelson was doing, each month he’d report one or two sales fewer than there actually were and so Toyota would roll over the indebtedness on these cars while he and Lyle put the proceeds in a separate account they’d opened up in the company name, you know how banks now are always offering you all these different accounts, savings and checking with savings and capital accounts with limited checks and so on. So every month we’d owe this TMCC for one or two more cars than were actually on the lot and our debt to them kept getting bigger and our actual inventory was getting smaller; in two or three years if nothing had happened we would have had no new cars in stock at all and owed Mid-Atlantic Toyota a fortune!”
“How much do we actually owe ‘em?” His mind can’t quite assign weight to these facts, these phantom Toyotas, yet. He is still thinking hospital thoughts -the pineapple he’s been promised for breakfast, and whether or not he has taken his digitalis for the evening.
“Nobody knows, Harry. Nelson doesn’t exactly remember and Lyle says a lot of the disks he was keeping the accounts on have been accidentally erased.”
“Accidentally on purpose, as they used to say,” he says. “What a shit. What a pair of shits.”
“I know, it’s horrible,” Janice says, “and Lyle is horrible on the phone. He says he’s dying and doesn’t care what we do to him! He sounded kind of crazy in the head; isn’t that one of the things that happens?” The weight of the facts hits her and bears her suddenly down into hysteria; the tears flow accompanied by sobs and she tries to re
st her wet face on his blanketed chest, but she is too short, perched on the chair beside his high bed, and instead presses her eyes and mouth against the hard mattress edge, burbling her disbelief that he would do this to her.
“He” means Nelson; Harry is off the hook for once. In her grief her whole head is hot, even the top of her skull, like a pot come to boil. He comfortingly rubs it, through her little new hairdo, and tries not to smile. Serve them both right, he thinks. Springers. Her dark hair is so fine it sticks to his fingers like cobwebs. For a good five minutes he massages her warm unhappy head with his fingertips while staring at the blank television screen and thinking that he is missing the six-o’clock news, followed by national news at six-thirty. Somehow he can’t believe that what Janice is trying to tell him ranks with the national news, for reality. She may be his wife but she’s no Connie Chung, let alone Diane Sawyer with her wide-apart blue eyes and melting mouth and stunned look like some beautiful blonde ox. “So what’s going to happen?” he asks Janice at last.
She lifts her tear-smeared face and, surprisingly, has some answers. Charlie must have been coaching her. “Well, once we find out how much we owe TMCC we’ll have to settle up. We’ve been paying interest on the inventory so they shouldn’t care too much, it’s like a mortgage, only Nelson has sold the house without telling them.”