by John Updike
“Is a cute little thing,” she finishes, but looks angry saying it. Her hair sticks up in wisps as if it was moussed and abandoned.
“She’ll be down soon,” he almost shouts, embarrassed as much by his secrets, his hopeful lies, as by her dwarfish warped craziness. This is the kind of woman he’s ended up with, after Mary Ann and then Janice and Ruth’s silky-sack heaviness and Peggy Fosnacht’s splayed eyes and Jill’s adolescent breasts and stoned compliance and Thelma with her black casket and Pru glowing dimly in the dark like a tough street in blossom, not to mention that tired whore in Texas with the gritty sugar in her voice and that other paid lay in his life, a girl he once in a great while remembers, at a Verity Press outing in the Brewer Polish-American Club, she was skinny and had a cold and kept her bra and sweater on, there in this room off to the side, where she was waiting on a mattress like a kind of prisoner, young, her belly and thighs sweaty from the cold she had but pure and pale, a few baby-blue veins where the skin molded around the pelvic bones, her pussy an oldfashioned natural dark ferny triangle, flourishing, not shaved at the sides to suit a bathing suit the way you see in the skin magazines. You paid the guy who stood outside the door, ten dollars for ten minutes, he hadn’t shaved very recently, Rabbit assumed he was her brother, or maybe her father. He assumed the girl was Polish because of the name of the club, she might have been eighteen, Mrs. Zabritski would have been that age after getting out of the concentration camp, smooth-skinned, lithe, a young survivor. What time does to people; her face is broken into furrows that crisscross each other like a checkerboard of skin.
“She should wait,” Mrs. Zabritski says.
“I’ll tell her you said so,” he says loudly, fighting the magnetism sucking at him out of the unspoken fact that she is a woman and he is a man and both are alone and crazy, a few doors apart in this corridor like a long peach-colored chute glinting with silver lines in the embossed wallpaper. All his life seems to have been a journey into the bodies of women, why should his journey end now? Say she was eighteen when the war ended, he was twelve, she is only six years older. Sixty-two. Not so bad, can still work up some juice. Beu Gold is older, and sexy.
He tries to watch TV but it makes him restless. The last of the summer reruns are mixed in with previews of new shows that don’t look that much different: families, laugh tracks, zany dropins, those three-sided living-room sets with the stairs coming down in the background like in Cosby, and front doors on the right through which the comical good-natured grandparents appear, bearing presents and presenting problems. The door is on the right in Cosby and on the left in Roseanne. That fat husband’s going to have his cardiovascular problems too. TV families and your own are hard to tell apart, except yours isn’t interrupted every six minutes by commercials and theirs don’t get bogged down into nothingness, a state where nothing happens, no skit, no zany visitors, no outburst on the laugh track, nothing at all but boredom and a lost feeling, especially when you get up in the morning and the moon is still shining and men are making noisy bets on the first tee.
At first he thinks Janice has tried so hard to reach him those four days before the phone got connected on Thursday that she’s lost faith in their old number. Then he begins to accept her silence as a definite statement. I’ll never forgive you. O.K., he’ll be damned if he’ll call her. Dumb mutt. Rich bitch. Working girl yet. Thinks she’s so fucking hot running everybody’s lives with those accountants and lawyers Charlie put her on to, he’s known her so drunk she couldn’t get herself to the bathroom to pee. The few times Harry has weakened, impulsively, usually around four or five when he can’t stand the sound of the golf games beginning up again and it’s still hours to dinner, the telephone in the little limestone house in Penn Park rings and rings without an answer. He hangs up in a way relieved. Nothingness has a purity. Like running. He showed her he still had some kick in his legs and now she’s showing him she can still be stubborn. Her silence frightens him. He fights off images of some accident she might have, slipping in the bathtub or driving the Camry off the road, having had too much to drink over at Nelson’s or at some Vietnamese restaurant with Charlie, without him knowing. Police frogmen finding her drowned in the back seat like that girl from Wilkes-Barre twenty years ago. But no, he’d be notified, if anything were to happen, somebody would call him, Nelson or Charlie or Benny at the lot, if there still is a lot. Each day down here, events in Pennsylvania seem more remote. His whole life seems, as he rotates through the empty condo rooms, each with its view across the parallel fairways to a wilderness of Spanish-tile roofs, to have been unreal, or no realer than the lives on TV shows, and now it’s too late to make it real, to be serious, to reach down into the earth’s iron core and fetch up a real life for himself.
The local air down here this time of year is full of violence, as if the natives are on good behavior during the winter season. Hurricane alarms (Gabrielle packs punch), head-on car crashes, masked holdups at Publix. The day after Labor Day, lightning kills a young football player leaving the field after practice; the story says Florida has more deaths by lightning than any other state. In Cape Coral, a Hispanic police officer is charged with beating his cocker spaniel to death with a crowbar. Sea turtles are dying by the thousands in shrimp nets. A killer called Petit whose own mother says he looks like Charles Manson is pronounced mentally fit to stand trial. That Deion Sanders is still making the front page of the Fort Myers News-Press: one day he knocks in four runs and a homer playing baseball for the Yankees, the next he signs for millions to play football for the Atlanta Falcons, and the very next he’s being sued by the auxiliary cop he hit last Christmas at that shopping mall, and on Sunday he bobbles a punt return for the Falcons but runs it back for a touchdown anyway, the only man in human history to hit a home run and score a touchdown in pro ball the same week.
Deion has
right stuff
Enjoy it while he can. He calls himself Prime Time and is always on the TV news wearing sunglasses and gold chains. Rabbit watches that big kid Becker beat Lendl in the U.S. Tennis Open final and gets depressed, Lendl seemed old and tired and stringy, though he’s only twenty-eight.
He talks to nobody, except for Mrs. Zabritski when she catches him in the hall, and the teenage Florida-cracker salesclerks when he buys his food and razor blades and toilet paper, and the people who feel obliged to make chitchat, the other retirees, in the Valhalla dining room; they always ask about Janice so it gets to be embarrassing and he more and more just heats up something frozen and stays in the condo, ransacking the cable channels for something worthy to kill time with. In his solitude, his heart becomes his companion. He listens to it, tries to decipher its messages. It has different rhythms at different times of the day, a thorrumph thorrumph sluggish slightly underwater beat in the morning, and toward evening, when the organism gets tired and excited at once, a more skittish thudding, with the accent on the first beat and grace notes added, little trips and pauses now and then. It twinges when he gets up out of bed and then again when he lies down and whenever he thinks too hard about his situation, having set himself adrift like this. He could have gone over that night and faced the music but how much music is a man supposed to face? So he and Pru did fuck, once. What are we put here in the first place for? These women complain about men seeing nothing but tits and ass when they look at them but what are we supposed to see? We’ve been programmed to tits and ass. Except guys like Slim and Lyle, the tits got left out of their program. One thing he knows is if he had to give parts of his life back the last thing he’d give back is the fucking, even that sniffly girl in the PolishAmerican Club, she hardly said two words, and wiped her nose with a handkerchief while he was on top of her, but nevertheless she showed him something, a flourishing bush, and took him in, where it mattered. A lot of this other stuff you’re supposed to be grateful for isn’t where it matters. When he gets up from the deep wicker chair indignantly - he can’t stand Cheers now that Shelley Long is gone, that guy with the Cro-Magnon
brow he never did like - and goes into the kitchen to refill his bowl of Keystone Corn Chips, which not all of the stores down here carry but you can get over at the Winn Dixie on Pindo Palm Boulevard, Harry’s heart confides to him a dainty little gallop, the kind of lacy riff the old swing drummers used to do, hitting the rims as well as the skins and ending with a tingling pop off the high hat, the music of his life. When this happens he gets an excited, hurried, full feeling in his chest. It doesn’t hurt, it’s just there, muffled inside that mess inside himself he doesn’t like to think about, just like he never cared for rare roast beef, as it used to come on the take-out subs from the Chuck Wagon across Route 111 before it became the Pizza Hut. Any sudden motion now, he feels a surge of circulation, a tilt of surprise in the head that makes one leg feel shorter than the other for a second. And the pains, maybe he imagines it, but the contractions of the bands across his ribs, the feeling of something having been sewn there from the inside, seems to cut deeper, more burningly, as though the thread the patch was sewn with is growing thicker, and red hot. When he turns off the light at night, he doesn’t like feeling his head sink back onto a single pillow, his head seems sunk in a hole then, it’s not that he can’t breathe exactly, he just feels more comfortable, less full, if he has his head up on the two pillows and lies facing the ceiling. He can turn on his side but his old way of sleeping, flat on his stomach with his feet pointing down over the edge, has become impossible; there is a nest of purple slithering half-dead thoughts he cannot bear to put his face in. There is a whole host of goblins, it turns out, that Janice’s warm little tightly knit body, even snoring and farting as it sometimes did, protected him from. In her absence he sleeps with his heart, listening to it race and skip when his rest is disturbed, when kids who have climbed the fence yell on the empty moonlit golf course, when a siren bleats somewhere in downtown Deleon, when a big jet from the north heads in especially low to the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, churning the air. He awakes in lavender light and then lets his heart’s slowing beat drag him back under.
His dreams are delicious, like forbidden candy - intensely colored overpopulated rearrangements of old situations stored in his brain cells, rooms like the little living room at 26 Vista Crescent, with the fireplace they never used and the lamp with the driftwood base, or the old kitchen at 303 Jackson, with the wooden ice box and the gas stove with its nipples of blue flame and the porcelain table with the worn spots, skewed and new and crowded with people at the wrong ages, Mim with lots of green eye makeup at the age Mom was when they were kids, or Nelson as a tiny child sliding out from under a car in the greasy service section of Springer Motors, looking woebegone and sickly with his smudged face, or Marty Tothero and Ruth and even that nitwit Margaret Kosko, he hasn’t thought of her name for thirty years, but there she was in his brain cells, just as clear with her underfed city pallor as she was that night in the booth of the Chinese restaurant, Ruth next to him and Margaret next to Mr. Tothero whose head looks lopsided and gray like that of a dying rhinoceros, the four of them eating now in the Valhalla dining room with its garbled bas-relief of Vikings and sumptuous salad bar where the dishes underneath the plastic sneeze guard are bright and various as jewels, arranged in rainbow order like the crayons in the Crayola boxes that were always among his birthday presents in February, a little stadium of waxy-smelling pointed heads there in the bright February window-light, filtered through icicles and the stunned sense of being a year older. Harry wakes from these dreams reluctantly, as if their miniaturized visions are a substance essential to his nutrition, or a whirring finely fitted machine he needs to reinsert himself into, like poor Thelma and her dialysis machine. He awakes always on his stomach, and only as his head clears and re-creates present time, establishing the felt-gray parallel lines he sees as the dawn behind the curved slats of Venetian blinds and the insistent pressure on his face as the cool Gulf breeze coming in where he left the sliding door ajar, does his solitude begin to gnaw again, and his heart to talk to him. At times it seems a tiny creature, a baby, pleading inside him for attention, for rescue, and at others a sinister intruder, a traitor muttering in code, an alien parasite nothing will expel. The pains, when they come, seem hostile and deliberate, the knives of a strengthening enemy.
He makes an appointment with Dr. Morris. He is able to get one surprisingly soon, the day after next. These doctors are scrambling down here, a glut of them, too many miners at the gold rush, the geriatric immigrants still hanging up north this time of year. The office is in one of those low stucco clinics along Route 41. Soothing music plays constantly in the waiting room, entwining with the surf-sound of traffic outside. The doctor has aged since the last appointment. He is bent-over and shufliy, with arthritic knuckles. His shrivelled jaw looks not quite clean-shaven; his nostrils are packed with black hair. His son, young Tom, pink and sleek in his mid-forties, gives Harry a freckled fat hand in the hall, and is wearing his white clinical smock over kelly-green golf slacks. He is established in an adjacent office, primed to take over the full practice. But for now the old doctor clings to his own patients. Harry tries to describe his complex sensations. Dr. Morris, with an impatient jerk of his arthritic hand, waves him toward the examination room. He has him strip to his jockey undershorts, weighs him, tut-tuts. He seats him on the examination table and listens to his chest through his stethoscope, and taps his naked back with a soothing, knobby touch, and solemnly, silently takes Harry’s hands in his. He studies the fingernails, turns them over, studies the palms, grunts. Close up, he gives off an old man’s sad leathery, moldy smell.
“Well,” Harry asks, “what do you think?”
“How much do you exercise?”
“Not much. Not since I got down here. I do a little gardening up north. Golfbut I’ve kind of run out of partners.”
Dr. Morris ponders him through rimless glasses. His eyes, once a sharp blue, have that colorless sucked look to the irises. His eyebrows are messy tangled tufts of white and reddish-brown, his forehead and cheeks are flecked with small blotches and bumps. His projecting eyebrows lift, like turrets taking aim. “You should walk.”
“Walk?”
“Briskly. Several miles a day. What sorts of food are you eating?”
“Oh - stuff you can heat up. TV-dinner kind of thing. My wife is still up north but she doesn’t cook that much even when she’s here. Now, my daughter-in-law -“
“You ever eat any of this salty junk that comes in bags?”
“Well - once in a great while.”
“You should watch your sodium intake. Snack on fresh vegetables if you want to snack. Read the labels. Stay away from salt and animal fats. I think we’ve been through all this, when you were in the hospital” - he lifts his forearm and checks his record - “nine months ago.”
“Yeah, I did for a while, I still do, it’s just that day to day, it’s easier -“
“To poison yourself. Don’t. Don’t be lazy about it. And you should lose forty pounds. Without the salt in your diet you’d lose ten in retained water in two weeks. I’ll give you a diet list, if you’ve lost the one I gave you before. You may get dressed.”
The doctor has grown smaller, or his desk has grown bigger, since Harry’s last visit here. He sits down, dressed, at the desk and begins, “The pains -“
“The pains will moderate with better conditioning. Your heart doesn’t like what you’re feeding it. Have you been under any special stress lately?”
“Not really. Just the normal flack. A couple family problems, but they seem to be clearing up.”
The doctor is writing on his prescription pad. “I want you to have blood tests and an EKG at the Community General. Then I want to consult with Dr. Olman. Depending on how the results look, it may be time for another catheterization.”
“Oh Jesus. Not that again.”
The messy eyebrows go up again, the prim dry lips pinch in. Not a clever generous Jewish mouth. A crabby Scots economy in the way he thinks and talks, on the verge of impat
ience, having seen so many hopelessly deteriorating patients in his life. “What didn’t you like? Were the hot flashes painful?”
“It just felt funny,” Harry tells him, “having that damn thing inside me. It’s the idea of it.”
“Well, do you prefer the idea of a life-threatening restenosis of your coronary artery? It’s been, let’s see, nearly six months since you had the angioplasty at” -he reads his records, with difficulty - “St. Joseph’s Hospital in Brewer, Pennsylvania.”
“They made me watch,” Harry tells him. “I could see my own damn heart on TV, full of like Rice Krispies.”
A tiny Scots smile, dry as a thistle. “Was that so bad?”
“It was” - he searches for the word - “insulting.” In fact when you think about it his whole life from here on in is apt to be insulting. Pacemakers, crutches, wheelchairs. Impotence. Once in the Valhalla locker room a very old tall guy - somebody’s guest, he never saw him again - came out of the shower and his muscles were so shrivelled his thighs from the back blended right up into his buttocks so his asshole seemed to flow down into the entire long space between his legs. His ass had lost its cheeks and Harry couldn’t stop staring at the fleshly chasm.
Dr. Morris is making, in a deliberate, tremulous hand, notes to add to his folder. Without looking up, he says, “There are a number of investigative instruments now that don’t involve a catheter. Scans using IV technetium 99 can identify acutely damaged heart muscle. Then there is echocardiography. We won’t rush into anything. Let’s see what you can do on your own, with a healthier regimen.”