by John Updike
"Hey, Dad," Nelson says, "this is neat. We're singing harmony." "Where did you get the guitar?"
"We hustled."
Jill nudges the boy with a bare foot, but not quick enough to halt the remark.
Rabbit asks him, "How do you hustle?"
"We stood on streetcorners in Brewer, mostly at Weiser and Seventh, but then we moved over to Cameron when a pig car slowed down to look us over. It was a gas, Dad. Jill would stop these people and tell 'em I was her brother, our mother was dying of cancer and our father had lit out, and we had a baby brother at home. Sometimes she said a baby sister. Some of the people said we should apply to welfare, but enough gave us a dollar or so so finally we had the twenty dollars Ollie promised was all he'd charge us for a forty-four dollar guitar. And he threw in the music free after Jill talked to him in the back room."
"Wasn't that nice of Ollie?"
"Harry, it really was. Don't look like that."
He says to Nelson, "I wonder what they talked about."
"Dad, there was nothing dishonest about it, these people we stopped felt better afterwards, for having got us off their conscience. Anyway, Dad, in a society where power was all to the people money wouldn't exist anyway, you'd just be given what you need."
"Well hell, that's the way your life is now."
"Yeah, but I have to beg for everything, don't I? And I never did get a mini-bike."
"Nelson, you get some clothes on and stay in your room. I want to talk to Jill a second."
"If you hurt her, l'll kill you."
"If you don't shut up, l'll make you live with Mommy and Charlie Stavros."
In their bedroom, Rabbit carefully closes the door and in a soft shaking voice tells Jill, "You're turning my kid into a beggar and a whore just like yourself," and, after waiting a second for her to enter a rebuttal, slaps her thin disdainful face with its prim lips and its green eyes drenched so dark in defiance their shade is as of tree leaves, a shufing concealing multitude, a microscopic forest he wants to bomb. His slap feels like slapping plastic: stings his fingers, does no good. He slaps her again, gathers the dry flesh of her hair into his hand to hold her face steady, feels cold fury when she buckles and tries to slither away but, after a fist to the side of her neck, lets her drop onto the bed.
Still shielding her face, Jill hisses up at him, strangely hisses out of her little spaced inturned teeth, until her first words come. They are calm and superior. "You know why you did that, you just wanted to hurt me, that's why. You just wanted to have that kick. You don't give a shit about me and Nelson hustling. What do you care about who begs and who doesn't, who steals and who doesn't?"
A blankness in him answers when she asks; but she goes on. "What have the pig laws ever done for you except screw you into a greasy job and turn you into such a gutless creep you can't even keep your idiotic wife?"
He takes her wrist. It is fragile. Chalk. He wants to break it, to feel it snap; he wants to hold her absolutely quiet in his arms for the months while it will heal. "Listen. I earn my money one fucking dollar at a time and you're living on it and if you want to go back bumming off your nigger friends, go. Get out. Leave me and my kid alone."
"You creep," she says, "you baby-killing creep."
"Put another record on," he says. "You sick bitch. You rich kids playing at life make me sick, throwing rocks at the poor dumb cops protecting your daddy's loot. You're just playing, baby. You think you're playing a great game of happy cunt but let me tell you something. My poor dumb mutt of a wife throws a better piece of ass backwards than you can manage frontwards."
"Backwards is right, she can't stand facing you."
He squeezes her chalk wrist tighter, telling her, "You have no juice, baby. You're all sucked out and you're just eighteen. You've tried everything and you're not scared of nothing and you wonder why it's all so dead. You've had it handed to you, sweet baby, that's why it's so dead. Fucking Christ you think you're going to make the world over you don't have a fucking clue what makes people run. Fear. That's what makes us poor bastards run. You don't know what fear is, do you, poor baby? That's why you're so dead." He squeezes her wrist until he can picture the linked curved bones in it bending ghostly as in an X ray; and her eyes widen a fraction, a hairspace of alarm he can see only because he is putting it there.
She tugs her wrist free and rubs it, not lowering her eyes from his. "People've run on fear long enough," Jill says. "Let's try love for a change."
"Then you better find yourself another universe. The moon is cold, baby. Cold and ugly. If you don't want it, the Commies do. They're not so fucking proud."
"What's that noise?"
It is Nelson crying, outside the door, afraid to come in. It had been the same way with him and Janice, their fights: just when they were getting something out of them, the kid would beg them to stop. Maybe he imagined that Becky had been killed in just such a quarrel, that this one would kill him. Rabbit lets him in and explains, "We were talking politics."
Nelson squeezes out in the spaces between his sobs. "Daddy, why do you disagree with everybody?"
"Because I love my country and can't stand to have it knocked."
"If you loved it you'd want it better," Jill says.
"If it was better I'd have to be better," he says seriously, and they all laugh, he last.
Thus, through lame laughter – she still rubs her wrists, the hand he hit her with begins to hurt – they seek to reconstitute their family. For supper Jill cooks a filet of sole, lemony, light, simmered in sunshine, skin flaky brown; Nelson gets a hamburger with wheatgerm sprinkled on it to remind him of a Nutburger. Wheatgerm, zucchini, water chestnuts, celery salt, Familia: these are some of the exotic items Jill's shopping brings into the house. Her cooking tastes to him of things he never had: candlelight, saltwater, health fads, wealth, class. Jill's family had a servant, and it takes her some nights to understand that dirtied dishes do not clear and clean themselves by magic, but have to be carried and washed. Rabbit, still, Saturday mornings, is the one to vacuum the rooms, to bundle his shirts and the sheets for the laundry, to sort out Nelson's socks and underwear for the washer in the basement. He can see, what these children cannot, dust accumulate, deterioration advance, chaos seep in, time conquer. But for her cooking he is willing to be her servant, part-time. Her cooking has renewed his taste for life. They have wine now with supper, a California white in a half-gallon jug. And always a salad: salad in Diamond County cuisine tends to be a brother of sauerkraut, fat with creamy dressing, but Jill's hands serve lettuce in an oily film invisible as health. Where Janice would for dessert offer some doughy goodie from the Half-A-Loaf, Jill concocts designs of fruit. And her coffee is black nectar compared to the watery tar Janice used to serve. Contentment makes Harry motionless; he watches the dishes be skimmed from the table, and resettles expansively in the living room. When the dishwashing machine is fed and chugging contentedly, Jill comes into the living room, sits on the tacky carpet, and plays the guitar. What does she play? "Farewell, Angelina, the sky is on fire," and a few others she can get through a stanza of. She has maybe six chords. Her fingers on the frets often tighten on strands of her hanging hair; it must hurt. Her voice is a thin instrument that quickly cracks. "All my tri-als, Lord, soon be o-over," she sings, quitting, looking up for applause.
Nelson applauds. Small hands.
"Great," Rabbit tells her and, mellow on wine, goes on, in apology for his life, "No kidding, I once took that inner light trip and all I did was bruise my surroundings. Revolution, or whatever, is just a way of saying a mess is fun. Well, it is fun, for a while, as long as somebody else has laid in the supplies. A mess is a luxury, is all I mean."
Jill has been strumming for him, between sentences, part helping him along, part poking fun. He turns on her. "Now you tell us something. You tell us the story of your life."
"I've had no life," she says, and strums. "No man's daughter, and no man's wife."
"Tell us a story," Nelson begs. From
the way she laughs, showing her roundish teeth and letting her thin cheeks go dimply, they see she will comply.
"This is the story of Jill and her lover who was ill," she announces, and releases a chord. It's as if, Rabbit thinks, studying the woman-shape of the guitar, the notes are in there already, waiting to fly from the dovecote of that round hole. "Now Jill," Jill goes on, "was a comely lass, raised in the bosom of the middle class. Her dad and mother each owned a car, and on the hood of one was a Mercedes star. I don't know how much longer I can go on rhyming." She strums quizzically.
"Don't try it," Rabbit advises.
"Her upbringing" – emphasis on the "ging" – "was orthodox enough – sailing and dancing classes and francais and all that stuff."
"Keep rhyming, Jill," Nelson begs.
"Menstruation set in at age fourteen, but even with her braces off Jill was no queen. Her knowledge of boys was confined to boys who played tennis and whose parents with her parents dined. Which suited her perfectly well, since having observed her parents drinking and chatting and getting and spending she was in no great hurry to become old and fat and swell. Ooh, that was a stretch."
"Don't rhyme on my account," Rabbit says. "I'm getting a beer, anybody else want one?"
Nelson calls, "I'll share yours, Dad."
"Get your own. I'll get it for you."
Jill strums to reclaim their attention. "Well, to make a boring story short, one summer" – she searches ahead for a rhyme, then adds, "after her daddy died."
"Uh-oh," Rabbit says, tiptoeing back with two beers.
"She met a boy who became her psycho-physical guide."
Rabbit pulls his tab and tries to hush the pff.
"His name was Freddy -"
He sees there is nothing to do but yank it, which he does so quickly the beer foams through the keyhole.
"And the nicest thing about him was that she was ready." Strum. "He had nice brown shoulders from being a lifeguard, and his bathing suit held something sometimes soft and sometimes hard. He came from far away, from romantic Rhode Island across Narragansett Bay."
"Hey," Rabbit olés.
"The only bad thing was, inside, the nice brown lifeguard had already died. Inside there was an old man with a dreadful need, for pot and hash and LSD and speed." Now her strumming takes a different rhythm, breaking into the middle on the offbeat.
"He was a born loser, though his race was white, and he fucked sweet virgin Jill throughout one sandy night. She fell for him" strum – "and got deep into his bag of being stoned: she freaked out nearly every time the bastard telephoned. She went from popping pills to dropping acid, then" – she halts and leans forward staring at Nelson so hard the boy softly cries, "Yes?"
"He lovingly suggested shooting heroin."
Nelson looks as if he will cry: the way his eyes sink in and his chin develops another bump. He looks, Rabbit thinks, like a sulky girl. He can't see much of himself in the boy, beyond the small straight nose.
The music runs on.
"Poor Jill got scared; the other kids at school would tell her not to be a self-destructive fool. Her mother, still in mourning, was being kept bus-ee, by a divorced tax lawyer from nearby Westerlee. Bad Freddy was promising her Heaven above, when all Jill wanted was his mundane love. She wanted the feel of his prick, not the prick of the needle; but Freddy would beg her, and stroke her, and sweet-talk and wheedle."
And Rabbit begins to wonder if she has done this before, that rhyme was so slick. What hasn't this kid done before?
"She was afraid to die" – strum, strum, pale orange hair thrashing – "he asked her why. He said the world was rotten and insane; she said she had no cause to complain. He said racism was rampant, hold out your arm; she said no white man but him had ever done her any harm. He said the first shot will just be beneath the skin; she said okay, lover, put that shit right in." Strum strum strum. Face lifted toward them, she is a banshee, totally bled. She speaks the next line. "It was hell."
St-r-r-um. "He kept holding her head and patting her ass, and saying relax, he'd been to life-saving class. He asked her, hadn't he shown her the face of God? She said, Yes, thank you, but she would have been happy to settle for less. She saw that her lover with his tan skin and white smile was death; she feared him and loved him with every frightened breath. So what did Jill do?"
Silence hangs on the upbeat.
Nelson blurts, "What?"
Jill smiles. "She ran to the Stonington savings bank and generously withdrew. She hopped inside her Porsche and drove away, and that is how come she is living with you two creeps today."
Both father and son applaud. Jill drinks deep of the beer as a reward to herself. In their bedroom, she is still in the mood, artistic elation, to be rewarded. Rabbit says to her, "Great song. But you know what I didn't like about it?"
"What?"
"Nostalgia. You miss it. Getting stoned with Freddy."
"At least," she says, "I wasn't just playing, what did you call it, happy cunt?"
"Sorry I blew my stack."
"Still want me to go?"
Rabbit, having sensed this would come, hangs up his pants, his shirt, puts his underclothes in the hamper. The dress she has dropped on the floor he drapes on a hook in her half of the closet, her dirty panties he puts in the hamper. "No. Stay."
"Beg me."
He turns, a big tired man, slack-muscled, who has to rise and set type in eight hours. "I beg you to stay."
"Take back those slaps."
"How can I?"
"Kiss my feet."
He kneels to comply. Annoyed at such ready compliance, which implies pleasure, she stiffens her feet and kicks so her toenails stab his cheek, dangerously near his eyes. He pins her ankles to continue his kissing. Slightly doughy, matronly ankles. Green veins on her insteps. Nice remembered locker room taste. Vanilla going rancid.
"Your tongue between my toes," she says; her voice cracks timidly, issuing the command. When again he complies, she edges forward on the bed and spreads her legs. "Now here." She knows he enjoys this, but asks it anyway, to see what she can make of him, this alien man. His head, with its stubborn old-fashioned short haircut – the enemy's uniform, athlete and soldier; bone above the ears, dingy blond silk thinning on top – feels large as a boulder between her thighs. The excitement of singing her song, ebbing, unites with the insistent warmth of his tongue lapping. A spark kindles, a green sprig lengthens in the barren space between her legs. "A little higher," Jill says, then, her voice quite softened and crumbling, "Faster. Lovely. Lovely."
One day after work as he and his father are walking down Pine Street toward their before-bus drink at the Phoenix Bar, a dapper thickset man with sideburns and hornrims intercepts them. "Hey, Angstrom." Both father and son halt, blink. In the tunnel of sunshine, after their day of work, they generally feel hidden.
Harry recognizes Stavros. He is wearing a suit of little beige checks on a ground of greenish threads. He looks a touch thinner, more brittle, his composure more of an effort. Maybe he is just tense for this encounter. Harry says, "Dad, I'd like you to meet a friend of mine. Charlie Stavros, Earl Angstrom."
"Pleased to meet you, Earl."
The old man ignores the extended square hand and speaks to Harry. "Not the same that's ruined my daughter-in-law?"
Stavros tries for a quick sale. "Ruined. That's pretty strong. Humored is more how I'd put it." His try for a smile ignored, Stavros turns to Harry. "Can we talk a minute? Maybe have a drink down at the corner. Sorry to butt in like this, Mr. Angstrom."
"Harry, what is your preference? You want to be left alone with this scum or shall we brush him off?"
"Come on, Dad, what's the point?"
"You young people may have your own ways of working things out, but I'm too old to change. I'll get on the next bus. Don't let yourself be talked into anything. This son of a bitch looks slick."
"Give my love to Mom. I'll try to get over this weekend."
"If you can, you can. She keeps dre
aming about you and Mim."
"Yeah, some time could you give me Mim's address?"
"She doesn't have an address, just care of some agent in Los Angeles, that's the way they do it now. You were thinking of writing her?"
"Maybe send her a postcard. See you tomorrow."
"Terrible dreams," the old man says, and slopes to the curb to wait for the 16A bus, cheated of his beer, the thin disappointed back of his neck reminding Harry of Nelson.
Inside the Phoenix it is dark and cold; Rabbit feels a sneeze gathering between his eyes. Stavros leads the way to a booth and folds his hands on the Formica tabletop. Hairy hands that have held her breasts. Harry asks, "How is she?"
"She? Oh hell, in fine form."
Rabbit wonders if this means what it seems. The tip of his tongue freezes on his palate, unable to think of a delicate way to probe. He says, "They don't have a waitress in the afternoon. I'll get a Daiquiri for myself, what for you?"