Rabbit Redux r-2

by John Updike

  "Hey, and you're Eccles. Reverend Eccles."

  "Angstrom, yes? Harry Angstrom. How very wonderful. Really." And Eccles takes his hand, in that plump humid grip that feels as if it will never let go. In the clergyman's eyes there is some-thing new, a hardened yet startled something, naked like the pale base of his throat, which lacks a clerical collar. And the shirt, Rabbit sees, is a fancy shirt, with a fine white stitch-stripe and an airy semi-transparent summer weave: he remembers how the man wore not black but a subtly elegant midnight blue. Eccles still has hold of his hand. Harry pulls it free. "Do tell me," Eccles says, with that preening emphasis again, which Rabbit doesn't remember from ten years ago, "how things have gone for you. Are you still with -?"

  "Janice."

  "She didn't seem quite up to you, I can say now, frankly."

  "Well, or vice versa. We never had another child." That had been Eccles' advice, in those first months of reconciliation, when he and Janice were starting fresh and even going to the Episcopal church together. Then Eccles had been called to a church nearer Philadelphia. They had heard a year or two later, by way of Janice's mother, that he had run into some trouble in his new parish; then nothing. And here he was again, grayer but looking no older: if anything, younger, slimmer through the middle, in self-consciously good condition, hard and tan in a way few in Brewer bother to cultivate, and with that young, startled look to his eyes. His hair is long, and curls at the back of his shirt collar. Rabbit asks him, "And what about things with you?" He is wondering where Eccles could have been, to board the bus at the side of the mountain. Nothing there but the gas station, a diner, a view of the viaduct, and some rich men's homes tucked up among the spruces, behind iron fences.

  "Ca va. It goes. I've been buried; and yet I live. I've parted company with the ministry." And his jaw stays open, propped as if to emit a guffaw, though no sound comes, and those strangely purified eyes remain watchful.

  "Why'd you do that?" Rabbit asks.

  Eccles' chuckle, which always had something exploratory and quizzical about it, has become impudent, mocking, if not quite unafraid. "A variety of reasons. I was rather invited to, for one. I wanted to, for another."

  "You no longer believe it?"

  "In my fashion. I'm not sure I believed it then."

  "No?" Rabbit is shocked.

  "I believed," Eccles tells him, and his voice takes on an excessive modulation, a self-caressing timbre, "in certain kinds of human interrelation. I still do. If people want to call what happens in certain relationships Christ, I raise no objection. But it's not the word I choose to use anymore."

  "How'd your father feel about this? Wasn't he a bishop?"

  "My father – God rest his, et cetera – was dead when my decision was reached."

  "And your wife? She was nifty, I forget her name."

  "Lucy. Dear Lucy. She left me, actually. Yes, I've shed many skins." And the mouth of this pale-throated, long-haired man holds open on the possibility of a guffaw, but silently, watchfully.

  "She left ya?"

  "She fled my indiscretions. She remarried and lives in Wilmington. Her husband's a painfully ordinary fellow, a chemist of some sort. No indiscretions. My girls adore him. You remember my two girls."

  "They were cute. Especially the older one. Since we're on the subject, Janice has left me, too."

  Eccles' pale active eyebrows arch higher. "Really? Recently?"

  "The day before the moon shot."

  "She seemed more the left than the leaving type. Look, Harry, we should get together in a more, ah, stationary place and have a real conversation." In his leaning closer for emphasis, as the bus sways, his arm touches Rabbit's. He always had a certain surprising muscularity, but Eccles has become burlier, more himself. His fluffed-up head seems huge.

  Rabbit asks him, "Uh, what do you do now?"

  Again, the guffaw, the held jaw, the watchfulness. "I Eve in Philadelphia, basically. For a while I did youth work with the Y. M. C. A. I was a camp supervisor three summers in Vermont. Some winters, I've chosen just to read, to meditate. I think a very exciting thing is happening in Western consciousness and, laugh if you will, I'm making notes toward a book about it. What I think, in essence, is that, at long last, we're coming out of Plato's cave. How does `Out from Plato's Cave' strike you as a title?"

  "Kind of spooky, but don't mind me. What brings you back to this dirty old burg then?"

  "Well, it's rather curious, Harry. You don't mind my calling you Harry? That all is beginning to seem as if it were only yesterday. What curious people we were then! The ghosts we let bedevil us! Anyway, you know the little town called Oriole, six miles south of Brewer?"

  "I've been there." With his high-school basketball team, a dozen years ago. Junior year. He had one of his great nights there.

  "Well, they have a summer theater, called the Oriole Players."

  "Sure. We run their ads."

  "That's right – you're a printer. I've heard that."

  "Linotyper, actually."

  "Good for you. Well, a friend of mine, he's an absurd person, very egotistical, but nevertheless a wonderful man, is with them as co-director, and has talked me into helping with their P.R. Public relations. It's really being a fund raiser. I was in Mt. Judge just now seeing this impossible old Mahlon Youngerman, that's Sunflower Beer of course, for a donation. He said he'd think about it. That's code for he won't think about it."

  "It sounds a little like what you used to do."

  Eccles glances at him more sharply; a defensive sleepiness masks his face. "Pearls before swine, you mean? Pushing stumblingblocks at the Gentiles. Yes, a little, but I only do it eight hours a day. The other sixteen, I can be my own man."

  Harry doesn't like the hungry way he says man, like it means too much. They are jerking and trembling down Weiser Street; Eccles looks past Harry out the window and blinks. "I must get off here. Could I ask you to get off with me and have me buy you a drink? There's a bar here on the corner that's not too depressing." "No, Jesus, thanks. I got to keep riding. I got to get home. I have a kid there alone."

  "Nelson."

  "Right! What a memory! So thanks a lot. You look great."

  "Delightful to see you again, Harry. Let's do make a more leisurely occasion sometime. Where are you living?"

  "Over in Penn Villas, they put it up since you were here. Things are a little vague right now. . ."

  "I understand," Eccles says, quickly, for the bus is chuffing and groaning to a stop. Yet he finds time to put his hand on Harry's shoulder, up near the neck. His voice changes quality, beseeches, becomes again a preacher's: "I think these are marvellous times to be alive in, and I'd love to share my good news with you at your leisure."

  To put distance between them, Rabbit rides the 16A six blocks further, to where it toms up Greely, and gets off there, walking back to the roasted-peanut place on Weiser to catch the bus to Penn Villas. PIG ATROCITIES STIR CAMDEN says a headline on a rack, a radical black paper out of Philly. Harry feels nervous, looking north along Weiser for a pink shirt coming after him. The place on his bare neck where Eccles touched tickles: amazing how that guy wants to cling, after all these years, with both their lives turned upside down. The bus number 12 comes and pulls him across the bridge. The day whines at the windows, a September brightness empty of a future: the lawns smitten flat, the black river listless and stinking. HOBBY HEAVEN. BUTCH CSSDY & KID. He walks down Emberly toward Vista Crescent among sprinklers twirling in unison, under television aerials raking the same four-o'clock garbage from the sky.

  The dirty white Porsche is in the driveway, halfway into the garage, the way Janice used to do it, annoyingly. Jill is in the brown armchair, in her slip. From the slumped way she sits he sees she has no underpants on. She answers his questions groggily, with a lag, as if they are coming to her through a packing of dirty cotton, of fuzzy memories accumulated this day.

  "Where'd you go so early this morning?"

  "Out. Away from creeps like you."
>
  "You drop the kid off?"

  "Sure."

  "When'd you get back?"

  "Just now."

  "Where'd you spend all day?"

  "Maybe I went to Valley Forge anyway."

  "Maybe you didn't."

  "I did."

  "How was it?"

  "Beautiful. A gas, actually. George was a beautiful dude."

  "Describe one room."

  "You go in a door, and there's a four-poster bed, and a little tasselled pillow, and on it it says, `George Washington slept here.' On the bedside tables you can still see the pills he took, to make himself sleep, when the redcoats had got him all uptight. The walls have some kind of lineny stuff on them, and all the chairs have ropes across the arms so you can't sit down on them. That's why I'm sitting on this one. Because it didn't. O.K.?"

  He hesitates among the many alternatives she seems to be presenting. Laughter, anger, battle, surrender. "O.K. Sounds interesting. I'm sorry we couldn't go."

  "Where did you go?"

  "I went to visit my mother, after doing the housework around here."

  "How is she?"

  "She talks better, but seems frailer."

  "I'm sorry. I'm sorry she has that disease. I guess I'll never meet your mother, will I?"

  "Do you want to? You can see my father any time you want, just be in the Phoenix Bar at four-fifteen. You'd like him, he cares about politics. He thinks the System is shit, just like you do."

  "And I'll never meet your wife."

  "Why would you want to? What is this?"

  "I don't know, I'm interested. Maybe I'm falling for you."

  "Jesus, don't do that."

  "You don't think much of yourself, do you?"

  "Once the basketball stopped, I suppose not. My mother by the way told me I should let Janice screw herself and leave town."

  "What'd you say to that?"

  "I said I couldn't."

  "You're a creep."

  Her lack of underpants and his sense that she has already been used today, and his sense of this unique summer, this summer of the moon, slipping away forever, lead him to ask, blushing for the second time this afternoon, "You wouldn't want to make love, would you?"

  "Fuck or suck?"

  "Whichever. Fuck." For he has come to feel that she gives him the end of her with teeth in it as a way of keeping the other for some man not yet arrived, some man more real to her than himself.

  "What about Nelson?" she asks.

  "He's off with Janice, she may keep him for supper. He's no threat. But maybe you're too tired. From all that George Washington."

  Jill stands and pulls her slip to her shoulder and holds it there, a crumpled bag containing her head, her young body all there below, pale as a candlestick, the breasts hardened drippings. "Fuck me," she says coolly, tossing her slip toward the kitchen, and, when under him and striving, continues, "Harry, I want you to fuck all the shit out of me, all the shit and dreariness of this shitdreary world, hurt me, clean me out, I want you to be all of my insides, sweetheart, right up to my throat, yes, oh yes, bigger, more, shoot it all out of me, sweet oh sweet sweet creep." Her eyes dilate in surprise. Their green is just a rim, around pupils whose pure black is muddied with his shadow. "You've gotten little."

  It is true: all her talk, her wild wanting it, have scared him down to nothing. She is too wet; something has enlarged her. And the waxen solidity of her young body, her buttocks spheres too perfect, feels alien to him: he grasps her across a distance clouded with Mom's dry warm bones and Janice's dark curves, Janice's ribs crescent above where the waist dipped. He senses winds playing through Jill's nerve-ends, feels her moved by something beyond him, of which he is only a shadow, a shadow of white, his chest a radiant shield crushing her. She disengages herself and kneels to tongue his belly. They play with each other in a fog. The furniture dims around them. They are on the scratchy carpet, the television screen a mother-planet above them. Her hair is in his mouth. Her ass is two humps under his eyes. She tries to come against his face but his tongue isn't that strong. She rubs her clitoris against his chin upside down until he hurts. Elsewhere she is nibbling him. He feels gutted, silly, limp. At last he asks her to drag her breasts, the tough little tips, across his genitals, that lie cradled at the join of his legs. In this way he arouses himself, and attempts to satisfy her, and does, though by the time she trembles and comes they are crying over secrets far at their backs, in opposite directions, moonchild and earthman. "I love you," he says, and the fact that he doesn't makes it true. She is sitting on him, still working like some angry mechanic who, having made a difficult fit, keeps testing it.

  In the small slipping sound they make he hears their mixed liquids, imagines in the space of her belly a silver machine, spidershaped, spun from the threads of their secretions, carefully spinning. This links them. He says, surrendering, "Oh cry. Do." He pulls her down to him, puts their cheeks together, so their tears will mix.

  Jill asks him, "Why are you crying?"

  "Why are you?"

  "Because the world is so shitty and I'm part of it."

  "Do you think there's a better one?"

  "There must be."

  "Well," he considers, "why the hell not?"

  By the time Nelson comes home, they have both taken baths, their clothes are on, the lights are on. Rabbit is watching the sixo'clock news (the round-up tally on summer riots, the week's kill figures in Vietnam, the estimate of traffic accidents over the coming Labor Day weekend) and Jill is making lentil soup in the kitchen. Nelson spreads over the floor and furniture the unwrapped loot of his day with Janice: snappy new jockey shorts, undershirts, stretch socks, two pairs of slacks, four sports shirts, a corduroy jacket, wide neckties, even cufflinks to go with a lavender dress shirt, not to mention new loafers and basketball sneakers.

  Jill admires: "Groovy, groovier, grooviest. Nelson, I just pity those eighth-grade girls, they'll be at your mercy."

  He looks at her anxiously. "You know it's square. I didn't want to, Mom made me. The stores were disgusting, all full of materialism."

  "What stores did she go to?" Rabbit asked. "How the hell did she pay for all this junk?"

  "She opened charge accounts everywhere, Dad. She bought herself some clothes too, a really neat thing that looks like pajamas only it's O.K. to wear to parties if you're a woman, and stuff like that. And I got a suit, kind of grayey-green with checks, really cool, that we can pick up in a week when they make the alterations. Doesn't it feel funny when they measure you?"

  "Do you remember, who was the name on the accounts? Me or Springer?"

  Jill for a joke has put on one of his new shirts and tied her hair in a tail behind with one of his wide new neckties. To show herself off she twirls. Nelson, entranced, can scarcely speak. At her merry.

  "The name on her driver's license, Dad. Isn't that the right one?"

  "And the address here? All those bills are going to come here?"

  "Whatever's on the driver's license, Dad. Don't go heavy on me, I told her I just wanted blue jeans. And a Che Guevara sweatshirt, only there aren't any in Brewer."

  Jill laughs. "Nelson, you'll be the best-dressed radical at West Brewer Junior High. Harry, these neckties are silk!"

  "So it's war with that bitch."

  "Dad, don't. It wasn't my fault."

  "I know that. Forget it. You needed the clothes, you're growing."

  "And Mom really looked neat in some of the dresses."

  He goes to the window, rather than continue to be heavy on the kid. He sees his own car, the faithful Falcon, slowly pull out. He sees for a second the shadow of Janice's head, the way she sits at the wheel hunched over, you'd think she'd be more relaxed with cars, having grown up with them. She had been waiting, for what? For him to come out? Or was she just looking at the house, maybe to spot Jill? Or homesick. By a tug of tension in one cheek he recognizes himself as smiling, seeing that the flag decal is still on the back window, she hasn't let Stavros scrape it off.<
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  III. SKEETER,

  "We've been raped, we've been raped!"

  – BACKGROUND VOICE ABOARD SOYUZ 5

  ONE DAY in September Rabbit comes home from work to find another man in the house. The man is a Negro. "What the hell," Rabbit says, standing in the front hall beside the three chime tubes.

  "Hell, man, it's revolution, right?" the young black says, not rising from the mossy brown armchair. His glasses flash two silver circles; his goatee is a smudge in shadow. He has let his hair grow out so much, into such a big ball, that Rabbit didn't recognize him at first.

  Jill rises, quick as smoke, from the chair with the silver threads. "You remember Skeeter?"

  "How could I forget him?" He goes forward a step, his hand lifted ready to be shaken, the palm tingling with fear; but since Skeeter makes no move to rise, he lets it drop back to his side, unsullied.

  Skeeter studies the dropped white hand, exhaling smoke from a cigarette. It is a real cigarette, tobacco. "I like it," Skeeter says. "I like your hostility, Chuck. As we used to say in Nam, it is my meat."

  "Skeeter and I were just talking," Jill says; her voice has changed, it is more afraid, more adult. "Don't I have any rights?"

  Rabbit speaks to Skeeter. "I thought you were in jail or something."

  "He is out on bail," Jill says, too hastily.

  "Let him speak for himself."

  Wearily Skeeter corrects her. "To be precise, I am way out on bail. I have jumped the blessed thing. I am, as they would say, desired by the local swine. I have become one hot item, right?"

  "It would have been two years," Jill says. "Two years for nothing, for not hurting anybody, not stealing anything, for nothing, Harry."

  "Did Babe jump bail too?"

  "Babe is a lady," Skeeter goes on in this tone of weary mincing precision. "She makes friends easy, right? I have no friends. I am known far and wide for my lack of sympathetic qualities." His voice changes, becomes falsetto, cringing. "Ali is one baad niggeh." He has many voices, Rabbit remembers, and none of them exactly his.