by John Updike
He likes motel rooms - the long clammy slot of hired space, the two double beds, the television set with its invitation to buy an R-rated movie, the shag carpet, the framed prints of big birds, the sanitized towels, the hush of anonymity, the closeted echo of old sex. He sleeps well, as if he has slipped off his body with its troubles and left it lying on the other double bed. In his dream he is back at the lot, with a young woman who seems to be in charge. She wears a white cap and dangly earrings but when he leans close and tries to explain himself to her, to convey his indispensable usefulness to the enterprise, contrary to what she may have heard from Janice, she makes a wry mouth and her face melts under his eyes in a kind of visual scream.
For breakfast, he succumbs to the temptation and has two fried eggs, though the yolks are terrible for your arteries, with bacon on the side. Rabbit likes the very American moment of packing up his car in sleepy unspeaking companionship with the other motel guests, elderly couples, cranky families, as they drift from the breakfast room across the parking lot with its long milky morning shadows. On the road again, with the radio again. The same news as the night before, amplified by the final baseball scores (Phils lost, five to one) and the news from Asia, where it is already afternoon for the busy Japanese currency speculators, the restive Chinese students, the doll-like Filipino hookers, the unhappily victorious Vietnamese, the up-and-coming although riotous Koreans, the tottering Burmese socialists, the warring Cambodian factions including the mindless Khmer Rouge minions of the most atrocious national leader since Hitler and Stalin, the infamous Pol Pot. Like, wow! Wake up, songbirds! The d .j., not last night’s but just as crazy and alone with himself, plays some rockabilly song Rabbit likes, about getting down, “make a little love, get down tonight.” It occurs to Harry he didn’t even jerk off last night, though motel rooms usually excite him. Boy, is he showing his age.
As Baltimore nears, the condominiums multiply, thicken, entire hills and valleys loaded with them, pastel gingerbread staircases containing invisible people. 83 ends seamlessly at 695 and with all the commuters in their neckties he drones around the Beltway, jostling for his space in the world as if he still deserves it. Then he takes up 95, which will be his home all the way to Florida. There are two ways around Washington, he and Janice have tried them both, the boringly expert travellers down in the condo like the Silbersteins say 495 passing to the north and west is actually quicker, but he likes the little glimpse of the monuments you get by staying east on 95 and crossing the Potomac on a broad bridge into Alexandria. The frozen far heart, ice-cream white, of the grand old republic.
After all that megalopolis, Virginia feels bucolically vacant. The fields look bigger than those in Pennsylvania, the hills gentler and more open, with meadows and horses, a gracious mist in the air, once in a while a pillared manse on a pale-green rise like something embroidered on a sampler by a slaveowner’s spinster daughter. A military tinge: Fort Belvoir Engineer Proving Ground, Quantico Marine Corps Base. Harry thinks of his Army time and it comes back as a lyric tan, a translucent shimmer of aligned faceless men, the curious peace of having no decisions to make, of being told entirely what to do. War is a relief in many ways. Without the Cold War, what’s the point of being an American? Still, we held them off. We creamed those oafs. Hitler, Stalin, and now Gorby. History will remember that, if not thank us. There is very little thanks in history. Dog eat dog. It becomes hard now to find stations on the radio that are not country music or religion. “Pray for difficult marriages,” one preacher says, his grainy molasses-brown voice digging so deep into himself you can picture his shut eyes, the sweat on his temples, “pray for Christian husbands under stress, for Christian wives worried about their men; pray for all hostages, for prisoners in prison, for victims of the ghetto, for all those with AIDS.” Rabbit switches the station and resolves to call home when he stops for lunch.
How many rivers there are! After the Potomac, the Accotink, the Pohick, the Occoquan, the Rappahannock, the Pamunkey, the Ni, the Po, the Matta, the South Anna. The bridges thus marked are mere moments of the highway. Unseen towns are named: Massaponax, Ladysmith, Cedar Forks. North of Richmond, shacks in a thickening scatter mark the beginning of the true South, of rural blacks. Harry pulls into a Howard Johnson’s on the Richmond outskirts. His ears ring, the ankle of his accelerator foot aches, his neck is stiff; the heat has gone up several notches since the motel parking lot this morning. Inside the air-conditioned restaurant, salesmen with briefcases are at all the pay phones. He eats too much lunch, consuming the last French fry that came with his tasteless hamburger, mopping up salt with it in his fingers like his grandson Roy does, and then ordering apple pie to see if it’s any different in Virginia. It’s sweeter and gluier; it lacks that cinnamon they sprinkle on in Pennsylvania. A phone is available after he pays the check and with three dollars’ worth of quarters ready he dials not the gray limestone house on Franklin Drive but the house where he used to live, the Springer house in Mt. Judge.
A little girl answers. The operator breaks in and Rabbit inserts three n-linutes’ worth of quarters. He says, “Hi, Judy. It’s Grandpa.”
“Hi, Grandpa,” she says, very calmly. Perhaps nothing of last night’s revelation has filtered down to her yet. Or perhaps children this young are so innocent of what adulthood involves that nothing surprises them.
“How’s it going?” he asks.
“O.K.”
“You looking forward to school starting next week?”
“Kind of. Summer gets kind of boring.”
“How’s Roy? Is he bored by summer too?”
“He’s so stupid he doesn’t know what boring is. He’s been put down for his nap now but is still bawling. Mommy’s flipping out.” Since Harry seems stuck for a response, she volunteers, “Daddy’s not here, he’s over at the lot.”
“That’s O.K., I’d just as soon talk to your mommy actually. Could you get her for me? Judy,” he impulsively adds, before the child can leave the phone.
“Yeah?”
“You study hard, now. Don’t you worry about those kids who think they’re so much. You’re a very lovely girl and everything will come to you if you wait. Don’t force it. Don’t force growing up. Everything will be fine.”
This is too much to try to cram into her. She is only nine. Ten more years before she can go west like Mim and break out. “I know,” Judy says, with a sigh, and perhaps she does. After a rattle of thereceiver on wood and voices in the background and footsteps hastily enlarging, Pru arrives at the telephone, breathless.
“Harry! “
“Hi there, Teresa. How’s it going?” This seductive nonchalant tone, all wrong, but it just came out.
“Not so good,” she says. “Where on earth are you?”
“Far away, where everybody wants me. Hey. Whajou tell for?”
“Oh Harry, I had to.” She starts to cry. “I couldn’t let Nelson not know, he’s trying to be so straight. It’s pathetic. He’s been confessing all this dreadful stuff to me, I can’t tell you or anybody the half of it, and at night we pray together, pray aloud kneeling by the bed, he’s just so desperate to lick the drugs and be a decent father and husband, just be normal.”
“He is, huh? Well, great. Still, you didn’t need to turn us in, it only happened once, and there wasn’t any follow-up, in fact I thought you’d totally forgotten about it.”
“How could you think I’d forgotten? You must think I’m a real slut.”
“Well, no, but, you know, you’ve been having a lot on your mind. For me, it was almost like I’d dreamed it.” He means this as a compliment.
But Pru’s voice hardens. “Well, it meant a little more to me than that.” Women: you never know which side they want to dance on. “It was a terrible betrayal of my husband,” she pronounces solemnly.
“Well,” Rabbit says, “he hasn’t been all that great a husband, as far as I can see. Hey, is Judy listening to all this?”
“I’m on the upstairs phone. I asked her to
hang up downstairs.”
“And did she? Judy!” Harry shouts. “I see you there!”
There is a fumbling soft rattle and a new clarity in the connection. Pru says, “Shit.”
Rabbit reassures her. “I forget exactly what we said but I doubt if she understood much.”
“She understands more than she lets on. Girls do.”
“Well, anyway,” he says. “Did he confess to affairs with men as well as women? Nelson.”
“I can’t possibly answer that question,” she says, in a flat dry voice forever closed to him. Another woman’s voice, warmer, courteous, faintly lazy, probably black, breaks in, saying, “Sir, yore three minutes are u-up. Please deposit a dollar ten saints if you wish continuation.”
“Maybe I’m done,” he says, to both women.
Pru shouts, over their imperilled connection, “Harry, where are you?”
“On the road!” he shouts back. He still has a little stack of change in front of him and inserts four quarters and a dime. As they gong away, he sings a snatch of a song he just heard on the radio, Willie Nelson’s signature: “On the road again…”
This makes Pru sob; it’s as bad as talking to Janice. “Oh don’t,” she cries. “Don’t tease us all, we can’t help it we’re all tied down back here.”
Pity touches him, with the memory of her beauty naked like blossoms that night in the narrow musty room as the rain intensified. She is stuck back there, she is saying, with the living. “I’m tied down too,” he tells her. “I’m tied to my carcass.”
“What shall I tell Janice?”
“Tell her I’m on the way to the condo. Tell her she can come join me whenever she wants. I just didn’t like the squeeze you all put on me last night. I get claustrophobic in my old age.”
“I never should have slept with you, it’s just at the time …”
“It was,” he says. “It was a great idea at the time. Tell me how’d you think I did, looking back on it? For an old guy.”
She hesitates, then says, “That’s it, that’s the trouble. I don’t see you as an old guy, Harry. I never did.”
O.K., he has won this from her. This woman-to-man voice. Who could ask for anything more? Let her go. He says, “Don’t you fret, Pru. You’re a great dish. Tell Nelson to loosen up. Just because he got over crack he doesn’t have to turn into Billy Graham.” Or Jim Bakker. Harry hangs up, and the telephone startles him by returning, with a pang and clatter, the dime and four quarters. That operator with the Southern voice must have been listening and taken a shine to him.
As the afternoon wears on toward Fayetteville, North Carolina, where there is a Comfort Inn he and Janice have stayed at in years past, he hears an amazing thing on the car radio. They interrupt a string of Forties swing classics to announce that Bartlett Giamatti, Commissioner of Baseball and former president of Yale University, died of a heart attack on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, late this afternoon. Pete Rose strikes back, Rabbit thinks. Professor Giamatti, who was only fifty-one years of age, retired after lunch in his summer home in Edgartown, and at three o’clock was found by his wife and son in full cardiac arrest. Only fifty-one, Rabbit thinks. Police took Giamatti to the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital where he was worked upon for an hour and a half, the emergency team several times succeeded in restoring the electric mechanism of the heartbeat, but Giamatti was at last pronounced dead. That little electric twitch: without it we’re so much rotting meat. One of the first things he ought to do in Florida is make an appointment with Dr. Morris, to keep himself out of the hands of that hawk-faced Australian, Dr. Olman. Dying to sink hú knife into me. Giamatti had been an English instructor at Yale, the news says, and became the youngest president in the history of the university, and in eleven years reversed that institution’s trend into red ink and academic mediocrity. As president of the National League, he had aroused some players’ ire by tampering with the strike zone and the balk rule. As commissioner, his brief tenure was dominated by the painful Rose affair, whose settlement a week ago left Giamatti in an apparently strong position. He was a heavy man and a heavy smoker. At least I’m no smoker. And now, a tune our listeners never get tired of requesting, “In the Mood.”
Fayetteville used to be a hot town, with all the soldiers from Fort Bragg, Rabbit remembers from a segment of 60 Minutes he once watched. The downtown had some blocks of triple-X movies and sleazy hotels the city fathers finally in despair tore down entirely and made into a park. After a dinner of deep-fried shrimp, with onion rings and white bread fried on one side, a Southern delicacy he guesses, at the Comfort Inn - one of those restaurants with a salad bar big as a little cafeteria, so you wonder as you sit there waiting for the waitress if you’re missing the boat - Harry cruises in the slate-gray Celica, his private Batmobile, toward the center of wicked Fayetteville. He can find for a hot spot only a shadowy broad street of blacks loitering in doorways here and there, waiting for some message, some event from beyond. No hookers in hotpants or spandex exercise tights, just a big red-bearded white man in studded black leather who keeps revving his motorcycle, twisting the throttle and producing a tremendous noise. The blacks don’t blink. They keep waiting. Even at evening the shadowy air is hot, they move through it languidly like sick fish, their hands flapping at the wrists in that angled black way.
Back in his long room with its watery scent of cement from underneath the rug, with walls painted altogether yellow, moldings and pipes and air-conditioning vents and light-switch plates rollered and sprayed yellow, Rabbit thinks of adding $5.50 to his bill to watch something called Horny Housewives but instead watches, free, bits of Perfect Strangers (it makes him uneasy, two guys living together, even if one of them is a comical Russian) and pre-season football between the Seahawks and 49ers. The trouble with these softcore porn movies on hotel circuits, in case some four-year-old with lawyers for parents happens to hit the right buttons they show tits and ass and even some pubic hair but no real cunt and no pricks, no pricks hard or soft at all. It’s very frustrating. It turns out pricks are what we care about, you have to see them. Maybe we’re all queer, and all his life he’s been in love with Ronnie Harrison. Nice, today, the way Pru burst out with that Shit again and then Don’t tease. That level woman-to-man voice, as if he had his arms about her, her voice relaxing into their basic relation, cock to cunt, doing Nelson in. In bed at last in the dark he jerks off, picturing himself with a pair of coffee-colored hookers from old Fayetteville, to show himself he’s still alive.
The morning radio news is dull. Giamatti’s death, warmed over. Baseball mourns. Economy shows moderate growth. Bombardments in Beirut between Christians and Muslims worse than ever. Ex-HUD aide says files were shredded. Supreme Court ruling against organized prayer before football games is rousing indignation all over the Southland. In Montgomery, Mayor Emory Folmar marched to the fifty-yard line and led a prayer there. His remarks over the public-address system linked football and prayer as American tradition. In Sylacauga, Alabama, local ministers rose in the bleachers and led the crowd of three thousand in the Lord’s Prayer. In Pensacola, Florida, preachers equipped with bullhorns led spectactors in prayer. Fanatics, Rabbit tells himself. Southerners are as scary as the Amish.
From here on down to the Florida line Route 95 is like a long green tunnel between tall pines. Little shacks peek through. A sign offers Pecan Rolls 3 for $ 2 .00. Bigger signs in Hispanic colors, orange and yellow on black, lime green, splashy and loud, miles and miles of them, begin to advertise something called South of the Border. Bear Up a Leetle Longer. You Never Sausage a Place! With a big basketball curving right off the billboard, Have a Ball. When you finally get there, after all these miles of pine tunnel, it’s a junky amusement park just across the South Carolina border: a village of souvenir shops, a kind of a space needle wearing a sombrero. Tacos, tacky. South Carolina is a wild state. The first to secede. The pines get taller, with a tragic feeling. FIREWORKS are offered everywhere for sale. The land gets hillier. Truck
s loaded with great tree trunks rumble unstoppably by on the downslope and labor to nearly a standstill on the up. Rabbit is nervously aware now of his Pennsylvania plates being Northern. Swerve out of line a bit and they’ll throw him in the Pee Dee River. The Lynches River. The Pocatoligo River. Animals on this highway are hit so hard they don’t squash, they explode, impossible to know what they were. Possums. Porcupines. Some dear old Southern lady’s darling pet pussycat. Reduced to fur stains amid the crescent fragments of exploded truck tires. Just think, he lay down for lunch and that was it.
Janice must have got the message from Pru, she may be already at the condo waiting, flying down from Philly and renting a car at the airport, better enjoy his freedom while he has it. He has come upon a black gospel station, an elastic fat voice shouting, “He’ll be there, but you got to call him names.” Endlessly repeated, with unexpected rhythmic variations. “Roll that stone away, do you know the story?” A commercial interrupts at last and, would you believe, it’s for Toyotas. Those Japs don’t miss a trick, you have to hand it to them. Selling right in the slave quarters. Your pruraristic society. Harry’s neck hurts from holding his head in one position so long. He’s beginning to feel bloated on radio, on travel. God’s country. He could have made it smaller and still made the same point.