Rabbit at Rest

by John Updike

  “Lyle,” Harry says with satisfaction. “How is the old computer whiz?”

  “He seems to be holding his own for the time being.”

  “He’ll outlive me,” Harry says, as a joke, but the real possibility of it stabs him like an icicle. “So Springer Motors,” he goes on, trying to get a handle on it, “went up in coke and pills for a queer.” How queer, he wonders, staring at his middle-aged, fattened-up, rehabilitated son, is the kid? Pru’s answer to that had never quite satisfied him. If Nelson wasn’t queer, how come she let Harry ball her? A lot of pent-up hunger there, her coming twice like that.

  Nelson tells him, in that aggravating tranquillized nothingcan-touch-me tone, “You get too excited, Dad, about what really isn’t, in this day and age, an awful lot of money. You have this Depression thing about the dollar. There’s nothing holy about the dollar, it’s just a unit of measurement.”

  “Oh. Thanks for explaining that. What a relief.”

  “As to Toyota, it’s no big loss. The company’s been stale for years, in my opinion. Look at their TV ads for the Lexus compared with Nissan’s for the Infiniti: there’s no comparison. Infiniti’s are fantastic, there’s no car in them, just birds and trees, they’re selling a concept. Toyota’s selling another load of tin. Don’t be so fixated about Toyota. Springer Motors is still there,” Nelson states. “The company still has assets. Mom and I are working it out, how to deploy them.”

  “Good luck,” Harry says, rolling up his napkin and reinserting it in its ring, a child’s ring of some clear substance filled with tiny needles of varied color. “In our thirty-three years of marriage your mother hasn’t been able to deploy the ingredients of a decent meal on the table, but maybe she’ll learn. Maybe Mr. Lister’ll teach her how to deploy. Pru, that was a lovely meal. Excuse the conversation. You really have a way with fish. Loved those little spicy like peas on top.” As he shakes out a Nitrostat from the small bottle he carries everywhere, he sees his hands trembling in a new way not just a tremor, but jumping, as if with thoughts all their own, that they aren’t sharing with him.

  “Capers,” Pru says softly.

  “Harry, Nelson is coming back to the lot tomorrow,” Janice says.

  “Great. That’s another relief.”

  “I wanted to say, Dad, thanks for filling in. The summer stat sheets look pretty good, considering.”

  “Considering? We pulled off a miracle over there. That Elvira is dynamite. As I guess you know. This Jap that gave us the ax wants to hire her for Rudy over on 422. The inventory is being shifted to his lot.” He turns to Janice and says, “I can’t believe you’re putting this loser back in charge.”

  Janice says, in the calm tone everybody at the table is acquiring, as if to humor a madman, “He’s not a loser. He’s your son and he’s a new person. We can’t deny him a chance.”

  In a voice more wifely than Janice’s, Pru adds, “He really has changed, Harry.”

  “A day at a time,” Nelson recites, “with the help of a higher power. Once you accept that help, Dad, it’s amazing how nothing gets you down. All these years, I think I’ve been seriously depressed; everything seemed too much. Now I just put it all in God’s hands, roll over, and go to sleep. You have to keep up the program, of course. There’re local meetings, and I drive down to Philly once a week to see my therapist and check on some of my old kids. I love counselling.” He turns to his mother and smiles. “I love it, and it loves me.”

  Harry asks him, “These druggy kids you deal with, they all black?”

  “Not all. After a while you don’t even see that any more. White or black, they have the same basic problem. Low selfesteem.”

  Such knowingness, such induced calm and steadiness and virtue: it makes Rabbit feel claustrophobic. He turns to his granddaughter, looking for an opening, a glint, a ray of undoctored light. He asks her, “What do you make of all this, Judy?”

  The child’s face wears a glaze of perfection - perfect straight teeth, perfectly spaced lashes, narrow gleams in her green eyes and along the strands of her hair. Nature is trying to come up with another winner. “I like having Daddy back,” she says, “and not so crazy. He’s more responsible.” Again, he feels that words are being recited, learned at a rehearsal he wasn’t invited to attend. But how can he wish anything for this child but the father she needs?

  Out on the curb, he asks Janice to drive the Celica, though it means adjusting the seat and the mirrors. Heading back around the mountain, he asks her, “You really don’t want me back at the lot?” He looks down at his hands. Their jumping has subsided but is still fascinating.

  “I think for now, Harry. Let’s give Nelson the space. He’s trying so hard.”

  “He’s full of AA bullshit.”

  “It’s not bullshit if you need it to live a normal life.”

  “He doesn’t look like himself.”

  “He will as you get used to him.”

  “He reminds me of your mother. She was always laying down the law.”

  “Everybody knows he looks just like you. Only not as tall, and he has my eyes.”

  The park, its shadowy walks, its decrepit tennis courts, its memorial tank that will never fire another shot. You can’t see these things so clearly when you’re driving. They go by like museum exhibits whose labels have all peeled off. He tries to climb out of his trapped and angry mood. “Sorry if I sounded ugly at dinner, in front of the grandchildren.”

  “We were prepared for much worse,” she says serenely.

  “I didn’t mean to bring up the money or any of that stuff at all. But somebody has to. You’re in real trouble.”

  “I know,” Janice says, letting the streetlights of upper Weiser wash over her -her stubborn blunt-nosed profile, her little hands tight on the steering wheel, the diamond-and-sapphire ring she inherited from her mother. “But you have to have faith. You’ve taught me that.”

  “I have?” He is pleasantly surprised, to think that in thirty-three years he has taught her anything. “Faith in what?”

  “In us. In life,” she says. “Another reason I think you should stay away from the lot now, you’ve been looking tired. Have you been losing weight?”

  “A couple pounds. Isn’t that good? Isn’t that what the hell I’m supposed to be doing?”

  “It depends on how you do it,” Janice says, so annoyingly full of new information, new presumption. She reaches over and gives his inner upper thigh, right where they inserted the catheter and he could have bled to death, a squeeze. “We’ll be fine,” she lies.

  Now August, muggy and oppressive in its middle weeks, is bringing summer to a sparkling distillation, a final clarity. The fairways at the Flying Eagle, usually burnt-out and as hard as the cartpaths this time of year, with all the rain they’ve had are still green, but for the rough of reddish-brown buckgrass, and an occasional spindly maple sapling beginning to show yellow. It’s the young trees that turn first - more tender, more attuned. More fearful.

  Ronnie Harrison still swings like a blacksmith: short backswing, ugly truncated follow-through, sometimes a grunt in the middle. No longer needed at the lot, needing a partner if he was going to take up golf again, Rabbit remembered Thelma’s saying how they had had to resign from the club because of her medical bills. Over the phone, Ronnie had seemed surprised - Harry had surprised himself, dialling the familiar digits trained into his fingers by the dead affair - but had accepted, surprisingly. They were making peace, perhaps, over Thelma’s body. Or reviving a friendship - not a friendship, an involvement - that had existed since they were little boys in knickers and hightop sneakers scampering through the pebbly alleys of Mt. Judge. When Harry thinks back through all those years, to Ronnie’s pugnacious thick-upped dulleyed face as it loomed on the elementary-school playground, to Ronnie crowingly playing with his big pale cucumber of a prick (circumcised, and sort of flat on its upper side) in the locker room, and then to Ronnie on the rise and on the make in his bachelor years around Brewer, one of the guys it tu
rned out who had gone with Ruth before Rabbit did, Ronnie in those years full of smartass talk and dirty stories, a slimy operator, and then to Ronnie married to Thelma and working for Schuylkill Mutual, a kind of a sad sack really, plugging along doggedly, delivering his pitch, talking about “your loved ones” and when you’re “out of the picture,” slowly becoming the wanly smiling bald man in the photo on Thelma’s dresser whom Harry could feel looking up his ass, so once to Thelma’s amusement he got out of bed and put the photo flat on the bureau top, so afterwards she always turned it away before he arrived of an afternoon, and then to Ronnie as a widower, with the face of a bleached prune, pulled-looking wrinkles down from his eyes, an old guy’s thin skin showing pink at the cheekbones, Harry feels that Ronnie has always been with him, a presence he couldn’t avoid, an aspect of himself he didn’t want to face but now does. That clublike cock, those slimy jokes, the blue eyes looking up his ass, what the hell, we’re all just human, bodies with brains at one end and the rest just plumbing.

  Their first round, playing as a twosome, they have a good enough time that they schedule another, and then a third. Ronnie has his old clients but he’s no longer out there generating new business among the young husbands, he can take an afternoon off with a little notice. Their games are rusty and erratic, and the match usually comes down to the last hole or two. Will Harry’s fine big free swing deliver the ball into the fairway or into the woods? Will Ronnie look up and skull an easy chip across the green into the sand trap, or will he keep his head down, his hands ahead, and get the ball close, to save a par? The two men don’t talk much, lest the bad blood between them surface; the sight of the other messing up is so hilariously welcome as to suggest affection. They never mention Thelma.

  On the seventeenth, a long par-four with a creek about one hundred ninety yards out, Ronnie plays up short with a four-iron. “That’s a chickenshit way to play it,” Harry tells him, and goes with a driver. Concentrating on keeping his flying right elbow close to his body, he catches the ball sweet, clearing the creek by thirty yards. Ronnie, compensating, tries too hard on his next shot: needing to take a three-wood, he roundhouses a big banana ball into the pine woods on the Mt. Pemaquid side of the fairway. Thus relieved of pressure, Rabbit thinks Easy does it on his six-iron and clicks off a beauty that falls into the heart of the green as if straight down a drainpipe. His par leaves him one up, so he can’t lose, and only has to tie to win. Expansively he says to Ronnie as they ride the cart to the eighteenth tee, “How about that Voyager Two? To my mind that’s more of an achievement than putting a man on the moon. In the Standard yesterday I was reading where some scientist says it’s like sinking a putt from New York to Los Angeles.”

  Ronnie grunts, sunk in a losing golfer’s self-loathing.

  “Clouds on Neptune,” Rabbit says, “and volcanos on Triton. What do you think it means?”

  One of his Jewish partners down in Florida might have come up with some angle on the facts, but up here in Dutch country Ronnie gives him a dull suspicious look. “Why would it mean anything? Your honor.”

  Rabbit feels rubbed the wrong way. You try to be nice to this guy and he snubs you. He is an ugly prick and always was. You offer him the outer solar system to think about and he brushes it aside. He crushes it in his coarse brain. Harry feels a fine excessiveness in that spindly machine’s feeble but true transmissions across billions of miles, a grace of sorts that chimes with the excessive beauty of this crystalline late-summer day. He needs to praise. Ronnie must know some such need, or he and Thelma wouldn’t have attended that warehouse of a no-name church. “Those three rings nobody ever saw before,” Harry insists, “just like drawn with a pencil,” echoing Bernie Drechsel’s awe at the thinness of flamingo legs.

  But Ronnie has moved off, over by the ball washer, pretending not to hear. He has a bum knee from an old football injury and begins to limp toward the end of a round. He takes a series of vicious practice swings, anxious to begin the hole and avenge his previous poor showing. Disappointed, distracted by thoughts of brave Voyager, Rabbit lets his right elbow float at the top of the backswing and cuts weakly across the ball, slicing it, on a curve as uncanny as if plotted by computer, into the bunker in the buckgrass to the right of the fairway. The eighteenth is a par-five that flirts with the creek coming back but should be an easy par; in his golfing prime he more than once birdied it. Yet he has to come out of the bunker sideways with a wedge and then hits his three-iron not his best club but he needs the distance - fat, trying too hard just like Ronnie on the last hole, and winds up in the creek, his yellow Pinnacle finally found under a patch of watercress. The drop consumes another stroke and he’s so anxious to nail his nine-iron right to the pin he pulls it, so he lies five on the deep fringe to the left of the green. Ronnie has been poking along, hitting ugly low shots with his blacksmith swing but staying out of trouble, on in four; so Rabbit’s only hope is to chip in. It’s a grassy lie and he fluffs it, like the worst kind of moronic golfing coward he forgets to hit down and through, and the ball moves maybe two feet, onto the froghair short of the green in six, and Ronnie has a sure two putts for a six and a crappy, crappy win. If there’s one thing Harry hates, it’s losing to a bogey. He picks up his Pinnacle and with a sweeping heave throws the ball into the pine woods. Something in his chest didn’t like the big motion but it is bliss of sorts to see the tormenting orb disappear in a distant swish and thud. The match ends tied.

  “So, no blood,” Ronnie says, having rolled his twelve-footer to within a gimme.

  “Good match,” Harry grunts, deciding against shaking hands. The shame of his collapse clings to him. Who says the universe isn’t soaked in disgrace?

  As they transfer balls and tees and sweaty gloves to the pocket of their bags, Ronnie, now that it’s his turn to feel expansive, volunteers, “Didja see last night on Peter Jennings, the last thing, they showed the photographs of the rings and the moon moving away and then a composite they had made of the various shots of Neptune projected onto a ball and twirled, so the whole planet was there, like a toy? Incredible,” Ronnie admits, “what they can do with computer graphics.”

  The image faintly sickens Harry, of Voyager taking those last shots of Neptune and then sailing off into the void, forever. How can you believe how much void there is?

  The golf bags in the rack here by the pro shop throw long shafts of shadow. These days are drawing in. Harry is thirsty, and looks forward to a beer on the club patio, at one ofthe outdoor tables, under a big green-and-white umbrella, beside the swimming pool with its cannonballing kids and budding bimbos, while the red sun sinks behind the high horizon of Mt. Pemaquid. Before they head up for the beets, the two men look directly at each other, by mistake. On an unfortunate impulse, Rabbit asks, “Do you miss her?”

  Ronnie gives him an angled squint. His eyelids look sore under his white eyelashes. “Do you?”

  Ambushed, Rabbit can barely pretend he does. He used Thelma, and then she was used up. “Sure,” he says.

  Ronnie clears his ropy throat and checks that the zipper on his bag is up and then shoulders the bag to take to his car. “Sure you do,” he says. “Try to sound sincere. You never gave a fuck. No. Excuse me. A fuck is exactly what you gave.”

  Harry hangs between impossible alternatives - to tell him how much he enjoyed going to bed with Thelma (Ronnie’s smiling photo watching) or to claim that he didn’t. He answers merely, “Thelma was a lovely woman.”

  “For me,” Ronnie tells him, dropping his pugnacious manner and putting on his long widower’s face, “it’s like the bottom of the world has dropped out. Without Thel, I’m just going through the motions.” His voice gets all froggy, disgustingly. When Harry invites him up on the patio for the beers, he says, “No, I better be getting back. Ron junior and his newest significant other are having me over for dinner.” When Harry tries to set a date for the next game, he says, “Thanks, old bunny, but you’re the member here. You’re the one with the rich wife. You know the Fly
ing Eagle rules - you can’t keep having the same guest. Anyway, Labor Day’s coming. I better start getting back on the ball, or Schuylkill’ll think I’m the one who died.”

  He drives his slate-gray Celica home to Penn Park. Janice’s Camry is not in the driveway and he thinks the phone ringing inside might be her. She’s almost never here any more - off at her classes, or over in Mt. Judge babysitting, or at the lot consulting with Nelson, or in Brewer with her lawyer and those accountants Charlie told her to hire. He works the key in the lock - maddening, the scratchy way the key doesn’t fit in the lock instantly, it reminds him of something from way back, something unpleasant that hollows his stomach, but what? - and shoves the door open with his shoulder and reaches the hall phone just as it’s giving what he knows will be its dying ring. “Hello.” He can hardly get the word out.

  “Dad? What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. Why?”

  “You sound so winded.”

  “I just came in. I thought you were your mother.”

  “Mom’s been here. I’m still at the lot, she suggested I call you. I’ve got this great idea.”