by John Updike
"O.K., that's enough," Rabbit says.
"Read a little bitty bit more," Skeeter begs.
"You get carried away."
"That damn child of yours, thinks he owns this cunt."
"Stop calling her a cunt."
"Man, wasn't this Jesus gave her one." Skeeter cackles.
"You're horrible," Jill tells him, drawing the torn cloth together.
He flips one piece aside. "Moo."
"Harry, help me."
"Read the book, Chuck, I'll be good. Read me the next paper clip."
Above them, Nelson's footsteps cross the floor. If he reads, the boy will be safe. "Alas, that the one?"
"That'll do. Little Jilly, you love me, right?"
"Alas, this immense wealth, this gilded splendor, this profusion of luxury, this exemption from toil, this life of ease, this sea of plenty, were not the pearly gates they seemed -"
"You're my pearly gate, girl."
"The poor slave, on his hard pine plank, scantily covered with his thin blanket, slept more soundly than thefeverish voluptuary who reclined upon his downy pillow. Food to the indolent is poison, not sustenance. Lurking beneath the rich and tempting viands were invisible spirits of evil, which filled the self-deluded gormandizer with aches and pains, passions uncontrollable, fierce tempers, dyspepsia, rheumatism, lumbago, and gout, and of these the Lloyds had a full share."
Beyond the edge of the page Skeeter and Jill are wrestling; in gray flashes her underpants, her breasts are exposed. Another flash, Rabbit sees, is her smile. Her small spaced teeth bare in silent laughter; she is liking it, this attack. Seeing him spying, Jill starts, struggles angrily out from under, hugs the rags of her dress around her, and runs from the room. Her footsteps flicker up the stairs. Skeeter blinks at her flight; he resettles the great pillow of his head with a sigh. "Beautiful," is the sigh. "One more, Chuck. Read me the one where he fights back." His carved chest melts into the beige sofa; its airfoam is covered in a plaid of green and tan and red that have rubbed and faded toward a single shade.
"You know, I gotta get up and go to work tomorrow."
"You worried about your little dolly? Don't you worry about that. The thing about a cunt, man, it's just like a Kleenex, you use it and throw it away." Hearing silence, he says, "I'm just kidding, right? To get your goat, O.K.? Come on, let's put it back together, the next paper clip. Trouble with you, man, you're all the time married. Woman don't like a man who's nothin' but married, they want some soul that keeps 'em guessing, right? Woman stops guessing, she's dead."
Rabbit sits on the silverthread chair to read. "Whence came the daring spirit necessary to grapple with a man who, eight-and-forty hours before, could, with the slightest word, have made me tremble like a leaf in a storm, I do not know; at any rate, I was resolved to fight, and what was better still, I actually was hard at it. The fighting madness had come upon me, and I found my strong fingers firmly attached to the throat of the tyrant, as heedless of consequences, at the moment, as f we stood equals before the law. The very color of the man was forgotten. I felt supple as a cat, and was ready for him at every turn. Every blow of his was parried, though I dealt no blows in return. I was strictly on the defensive, preventing him from injuring me, rather than trying to injure him. I flung him on the ground several times when he meant to have hurled me there. I held him so firmly by the throat that his blood followed my nails. He held me, and I held him."
"Oh I love it, it grabs me, it kills me," Skeeter says, and he gets up on one elbow so his body confronts the other man's. "Do me one more. Just one more bit."
"I gotta get upstairs."
"Skip a couple pages, go to the place I marked with double lines."
"Why doncha read it to yourself?"
"It's not the same, right? Doin' it to yourself. Every school kid knows that, it's not the same. Come on, Chuck. I been pretty good, right? I ain't caused no trouble, I been a faithful Tom, give the Tom a bone, read it like I say. I'm gonna take off all my clothes, I want to hear it with my pores. Sing it, man. Do it. Begin up a little, where it goes A man without force." He prompts again, "A man without force," and is fussing with his belt buckle.
"A man without force," Rabbit intently reads, "is without the essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted, that it cannot honor a helpless man, though it can pity him, and even this it cannot do long if signs of power do not arise."
"Yes," Skeeter says, and the blur of him is scuffling and slithering, and a patch of white flashes from the sofa, above the white of the printed page.
"He can only understand," Rabbit reads, finding the words huge, each one a black barrel his voice echoes in, "the eject of this combat on my spirit, who has himself incurred something, or hazarded something, in repelling the unjust and cruel aggressions of a tyrant. Covey was a tyrant and a cowardly one withal. After resisting him, I felt as I had never felt before."
"Yes," Skeeter's voice calls from the abyss of the unseen beyond the rectangular island of the page.
"It was a resurrection from the dark and pestiferous tomb of slavery, to the heaven of comparative freedom. I was no longer a servile coward, trembling under the frown of a brother worm of the dust, but my long-cowed spirit was roused to an attitude of independence. I had reached a point at which I was not afraid to die." Emphasis.
"Oh yes. Yes."
"This spirit made me a freeman in fact, though I still remained a slave
in form. When a slave cannot befogged, he is more than half free."
"A-men."
"He has a domain as broad as his own manly heart to defend, and he is really `a power on earth.' "
"Say it. Say it."
"From this time until my escape from slavery, I was never fairly whipped. Several attempts were made, but they were always unsuccessful. Bruised I did get, but the instance I have described was the end of the brutification to which slavery had subjected me."
"Oh, you do make one lovely nigger," Skeeter sings.
Lifting his eyes from the page, Rabbit sees there is no longer a patch of white on the sofa, it is solidly dark, only moving in a whispering rhythm that wants to suck him forward. His eyes do not dare follow down to the hand the live line of reflected light lying the length of Skeeter's rhythmic arm. Long as an eel, feeding. Rabbit stands and strides from the room, dropping the book as if hot, though the burning eyes of the stippled Negro on the cover are quick to follow him across the hard carpet, up the varnished stairs, into the white realm where an overhead frosted fixture burns on the landing. His heart is hammering hard.
* * *
Light from the driftwood lamp downstairs floods the little maple from underneath, its leaves red like your fingers on a flashlight face. Its turning head half-fills their bedroom window. In bed Jill turns to him pale and chill as ice. "Hold me," she says. "Hold me, hold me, hold me," so often it frightens him. Women are crazy, they contain this ancient craziness, he is holding wind in his arms. He feels she wants to be fucked, any way, without pleasure, but to pin her down. He would like to do this for her but he cannot pierce the fright, the disgust between them. She is a mermaid gesturing beneath the skin of the water. He is floating rigid to keep himself from sinking in terror. The book he has read aloud torments him with a vision of bottomless squalor, of dead generations, of buried tortures and lost reasons. Rising, working, there is no reason any more, no reason for anything, no reason why not, nothing to breathe but a sour gas bottled in empty churches, nothing to rise by; he lives in a tight well whose dank sides squeeze and paralyze him, no, it is Jill tight against him, trying to get warm, though the night is hot. He asks her, "Can you sleep?"
"No. Everything is crashing."
"Let's try. It's late. Shall I get another blanket?"
"Don't leave me for even a second. I'll fall through."
"I'll turn my back, then you can hug me."
Downstairs, Skeeter flicks the light off. Outside, the little maple vanishes like a blown-out flame. Within himself, Rab
bit completes his motion into darkness, into the rhythmic brown of the sofa. Then terror returns and squeezes him shut like an eyelid.
Her voice sounds tired and wary, answering. "Brewer Fealty, Mrs. Fosnacht. May I help you?"
"Peggy? Hi, it's Harry Angstrom."
"So it is." A new sarcastic note. "I don't believe it!" Overexpressive. Too many men.
"Hey, remember you said about Nelson and Billy going fishing this Sunday and inviting me for Saturday dinner?"
"Yes, Harry, I do remember."
"Is it too late? For me to accept?"
"Not at all. What's brought this about?"
"Nothing special. just thought it might be nice."
"It will be nice. I'll see you Saturday."
"Tomorrow," he clarifies. He would have talked on, it was his lunch hour, but she cuts the conversation short. Press of work. Don't count your chickens.
After work as he walks home from the bus stop on Weiser, two men accost him, at the corner where Emberly Avenue becomes a Drive, beside a red-white-and-blue mailbox. "Mr. Angstrom?"
"Sure."
"Might we talk to you a minute? We're two of your neighbors." The man speaking is between forty and fifty, plump, in a gray suit that has stretched to fit him, with those narrow lapels of five years ago. His face is soft but pained. A hard little hook nose at odds with the puffy patches below his eyes. His chin is two damp knobs set side by side, between them a dimple where the whiskers hide from the razor. He has that yellow Brewer tint and an agile sly white-collar air. An accountant, a schoolteacher. "My name is Mahlon Showalter. I live on the other side of Vista Crescent, the house, you probably noticed, with the new addition in back we added on last summer."
"Oh, yeah." He recalls distant hammering but had not noticed; he really only looks at Penn Villas enough to see that it isn't Mt. judge: that is, it is nowhere.
"I'm in computers, the hardware end," Showalter says. "Here's my card." As Rabbit glances at the company name on it Showalter says, "We're going to revolutionize business in this town, file that name in your memory. This here is Eddie Brumbach, he lives around the further crescent, Marigold, up from you."
Eddie presents no card. He is black-haired, shorter and younger than Harry. He stands the way guys in the Army used to, all buttoned in, shoulders tucked back, an itch for a fight between their shoulder blades. Only in part because of his brush cut, his head looks flattened on top, like the heads on Rabbit's television set. When he shakes hands, it reminds him of somebody else. Who? One side of Brumbach's face has had a piece of jawbone removed, leaving a dent and an L-shaped red scar. Gray eyes like dulled tool tips. He says with ominous simplicity, "Yessir."
Showalter says, "Eddie works in the assembly shop over at Fessler Steel."
"You guys must have quit work early today," Rabbit says.
Eddie tells him, "I'm on night shift this month."
Showalter has a way of bending, as if dance music is playing far away and he wants to cut in between Rabbit and Eddie. He is saying, "We made a decision to talk to you, we appreciate your patience. This is my car here, would you like to sit in it? It's not too comfortable, standing out like this."
The car is a Toyota; it reminds Harry of his father-in-law and gets a whole set of uneasy feelings sliding. "I'd just as soon stand," he says, "if it won't take long," and leans on the mailbox to make himself less tall above these men.
"It won't take long," Eddie Brumbach promises, hitching his shoulders and coming a crisp step closer.
Showalter dips his shoulder again as if to intervene, looks sadder around the eyes, wipes his soft mouth: "Well no, it needn't. We don't mean to be unfriendly, we just have a few questions."
"Friendly questions," Rabbit clarifies, anxious to help this man, whose careful slow voice is pure Brewer; who seems, like the city, bland and broad and kind, and for the time being depressed.
"Now some of us," Showalter goes on, "were discussing, you know, the neighborhood. Some of the kids have been telling us stories, you know, about what they see in your windows."
"They've been looking in my windows?" The mailbox blue is hot; he stops leaning and stands. Though it is October the sidewalk has a flinty glare and a translucent irritability rests upon the pastel asphalt rooftops, the spindly young trees, the low houses like puzzles assembled of wood and cement and brick and fake-fieldstone siding. He is trying to look through these houses to his own, to protect it.
Brumbach bristles, thrusts himself into Rabbit's attention. "They haven't had to look in any windows, they've had what's going on pushed under their noses. And it don't smell good."
Showalter intervenes, his voice wheedling like a woman's, buttering over. "No now, that's putting it too strong. But it's true, I guess, there hasn't been any particular secret. They've been coming and going in that little Porsche right along, and I notice now he plays basketball with the boy right out front."
"He?"
"The black fella you have living with you," Showalter says, smiling as if the snag in their conversation has been discovered, and all will be clear sailing now.
"And the white girl," Brumbach adds. "My younger boy came home the other day and said he saw them screwing right on the downstairs rug."
"Well," Rabbit says, stalling. He feels absurdly taller than these men, he feels he might float away while trying to make out the details of what the boy had seen, a little framed rectangle hung in his head like a picture too high on the wall. "That's the kind of thing you see, when you look in other people's windows."
Brumbach steps neatly in front of Showalter, and Rabbit remembers who his handshake had been reminiscent of the doctor giving Mom the new pills. I twist bodies to my will. I am life, I am death. "Listen, brother. We're trying to raise children in this neighborhood."
"Me too."
"And that's something else. What kind of pervert are you bringing up there? I feel sorry for the boy, it's the fact, I do. But what about the rest of us, who are trying to do the best we can? This is a decent white neighborhood," he says, hitting "decent" weakly but gathering strength for, "that's why we live here instead of across the river over in Brewer where they're letting 'em run wild."
"Letting who run wild?"
"You know fucking well who, read the papers, these old ladies can't even go outdoors in broad daylight with a pocketbook."
Showalter, supple, worried, sidles around and intrudes himself. "White neighborhood isn't exactly the point, we'd welcome a self-respecting black family, I went to school with blacks and I'd work right beside one any day of the week, in fact my company has a recruitment program, the trouble is, their own leaders tell them not to bother, tell them it's a sellout, to learn how to make an honest living." This speech has slid further than he had intended; he hauls it back. "If he acts like a man I'll treat him like a man, am I way out of line on that, Eddie?"
Brumbach puffs up so his shirt pocket tightens on his cigarette pack; his forearms bend at his sides as if under the pull of their veins. "I fought beside the colored in Vietnam," he says. "No 'problems."
"Hey that's funny you're a Viet veteran too, this guy we're kind of talking about -"
"No problems," Brumbach goes on, "because we all knew the rules."
Showalter's hands glide, flutter, touch his narrow lapels in a double downward caress. "It's the girl and the black together," he says quickly, to touch it and get away.
Brumbach says, "Christ those boogs love white ass. You should have seen what went on around the bases."
Rabbit offers, "That was yellow ass, wasn't it? Gook ass?"
Showalter tugs at his arm and takes him aside, some steps from the mailbox. Harry wonders if anybody ever mails a letter in it, he passes it every day and it seems mysterious as a fire hydrant, waiting for its moment that may never come. He never hears it clang. In Mt. Judge people were always mailing Valentines. Brumbach at his little distance stared into space, at TV-aerial level, knowing he's being discussed. Showalter says, "Don't keep riding him."
Showalter tugs harder, so Harry has to bend his ear to the man's little beak and soft unhappy mouth. "He's not that stable. He feels very threatened. It wasn't my idea to get after you, I said to him, The man has his rights of privacy."
Rabbit tries to play the game, whispers. "How many more in the neighborhood feel like him?"
"More than you'd think. I was surprised myself. These are reasonable good people, but they have blind spots. I believe if they didn't have children, if this wasn't a children's neighborhood, it'd be more live and let live."
But Rabbit worries they are being rude to Brumbach. He calls over, "Hey, Eddie. I tell you what."
Brumbach is not pleased to be called in; he had wanted Showalter to settle. Rabbit sees the structure: one man is the negotiator, the other is the muscle. Brumbach barks, "What?"
"I'll keep my kid from looking in your windows, and you keep yours from looking in mine."
"We had a name over there for guys like you. Wiseass. Sometimes just by mistake they got fragged."
"I'll tell you what else," Rabbit says. "As a bonus, I'll try to remember to draw the curtains."
"You better do fucking more than pull the fucking curtains," Brumbach tells him, "you better fucking barricade the place."
Out of nowhere a mail truck, red, white, and blue, with a canted windshield like a display case, squeaks to a stop at the curb; hurriedly, not looking at any of them, a small man in gray unlocks the mailbox front and scoops a torrent, hundreds it seems, of letters into a gray sack, locks it shut, and drives away.
Rabbit goes close to Brumbach. "Tell me what you want. You want me to move out of the neighborhood."
"Just move the black out."
"It's him and the girl together you don't like; suppose he stays and the girl goes?"
"The black goes."
"He goes when he stops being my guest. Have a nice supper."