by John Updike
This pink tremor takes the weight off Ruth’s face. She sits across from him. He tries to picture the kind of life she was leading; a creepy place like this probably seems as friendly to her as a locker room would to him. But just the thought of it that way makes him nervous; her sloppy life, like his having a family, is something he’s tried to keep behind them. He was happy just hanging around her place at night, her reading mysteries and him running down to the delicatessen for ginger ale and some nights going to a movie but nothing like this. That first night he really used that Daiquiri but since then he didn’t care if he ever had another and hoped she was the same way. For a while she was but lately something’s been eating her; she’s heavy in bed and once in a while looks at him as if he’s some sort of pig. He doesn’t know what he’s doing different but knows that somehow the ease has gone out of it. So tonight her so-called friend Margaret calls up. It scares him out of his skin when the phone rings. He has the idea lately it’s going to be the cops or his mother or somebody; he has the feeling of something growing on the other side of the mountain. A couple times after he first moved in, the phone rang and it was some thick-voiced man saying “Ruth?” or just hanging up in surprise at Rabbit’s voice answering. When they hung on, Ruth just said a lot of “No’s” into the receiver and they never had any trouble luckily. She knew how to handle them and anyway there were only about five that ever called. Like the past was a vine hanging on by just these five shallow roots and it tore away easily, leaving her clean and blue and blank. But tonight it’s Margaret out of this past and she wants them to come down to the Castanet and Ruth wants to and Rabbit goes along. Anything for a little change. He’s bored.
He asks her, “What do you want?”
“A Daiquiri.”
“You’re sure? You’re sure now it won’t make you sick?” He’s noticed that, that she seems a little sick sometimes, and won’t eat, and sometimes eats the house down.
“No, I’m not sure but why the hell shouldn’t I be sick?”
“Well I don’t know why you shouldn’t. Why shouldn’t anybody?”
“Look let’s not be a philosopher for once. Just get me the drink.”
A colored girl in an orange uniform that he guesses from the frills is supposed to look South American comes and he tells her two Daiquiris. She flips shut her pad and walks off and he sees her back is open halfway down her spine. So a little bit of black bra shows. Compared with this her skin isn’t black at all, just a nice thick soft color that brings a little honest life into here. Purple shadows swing on the flats of her back where the light hits. She has a pigeon-toed way of sauntering, swinging those orange frills. She doesn’t care about him; he likes that, that she doesn’t care. The thing about Ruth is lately she’s been trying to make him feel guilty about something.
“Don’t fall in,” she tells him.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re right you’re not doing anything.”
If this is a threat, he doesn’t like threats.
Margaret comes and the guy with her, he isn’t very happy to see, is Ronnie Harrison. Margaret says to him, “Hello, you. Are you still hanging on?”
“Hell,” Harrison says, “it’s the great Angstrom,” as if he’s trying to take Tothero’s place in every way. “I’ve been hearing about you,” he adds slimily.
“Hearing what?”
“Oh. The word.”
Harrison was never one of Rabbit’s favorites and has not improved. In the locker room he was always talking about making out and playing with himself under his little hairy pot of a belly and that pot has really grown. Harrison is fat. Fat and half bald. His kinky brass-colored hair has thinned and the skin of his scalp shows, depending on how he tilts his head. This pink showing through seems obscene to Rabbit, like the pink bald idea that is always showing through Harrison’s talk. Still, he remembers one night when Harrison came back into the game after losing two teeth to somebody’s elbow and tries to be glad to see him. There were just five of you out there at one time and the other four for that time were unique in the world.
But it seems long ago, and every second Harrison stands there smirking it seems longer. He is wearing a narrow-shouldered summer suit of some linen imitation and having this nifty self-satisfied cloth hanging beside his ear annoys Rabbit. He feels hemmed in. The problem is, who shall sit where? He and Ruth have gotten on opposite sides of the table, which was the mistake. Harrison decides, and ducks down to sit beside Ruth, with a little catch in the movement that betrays the old limp from his football injury. Rabbit becomes obsessed by Harrison’s imperfections. He’s ruined the effect of his Ivy League suit by wearing a black wool tie like a wop. When he opens his mouth the two false teeth don’t quite match the others.
“Well, how’s life treating the old Master?” he says. “The word is you got it made.” His eyes make his meaning by flicking sideways to Ruth, who sits there like a lump, her hands folded around the Daiquiri. Her knuckles are red from washing dishes. When she lifts the glass to drink, her chin shows through distorted.
Margaret wriggles at Rabbit’s side. She feels somehow like Janice: jumpy. Her presence in the left corner of his vision feels like a dark damp cloth approaching that side of his face.
“Where’s Tothero?” he asks her.
“Totherwho?”
Ruth giggles, damn her. Harrison bends his head toward her, pink showing, and whispers a remark. Her lips tuck up in a smile; it’s just like that night in the Chinese place, anything he says will please her, except that tonight he is Harrison and Rabbit sits across from them married to this girl he hates. He’s sure what Harrison whispers is about him, “the old Master.” From the second there were four of them it was clear he was going to be the goat. Like Tothero that night.
“You know damn well who,” he tells Margaret. “Tothero.”
“Our old coach, Harry!” Harrison cries, and reaches across the table to touch Rabbit’s fingertips. “The man who made us immortal!”
Rabbit curls his fingers an inch beyond Harrison’s reach and Harrison, with a satisfied smirk, draws back, pulling his palms along the slick-top table so they make a slippery screech of friction.
“Me, you mean,” Rabbit says. “You were nothing.”
“Nothing. That seems a little stern. That seems a little stern, Harry old bunny. Let’s cast our minds back. When Tothero wanted a guy roughed up, who did he send in to do it? When he wanted a hot shot like you guarded nice and close, who was his boy?” He slaps his chest. “You were too much of a queen to dirty your hands. No, you never touched anybody, did you? You didn’t play football either, and get your knee scrambled, either, did you? No sir, not Harry the bird; he was on wings. Feed him the ball and watch it go in.”
“It went in, you noticed.”
“Sometimes. Sometimes it did. Harry now don’t wrinkle your nose. Don’t think we all don’t appreciate your ability.” From the way he’s using his hands, chopping and lifting with practiced understatement, getting a quiet symphony of sarcasm and patience and emphasis out of the play of his palms, Rabbit thinks he must do a lot of talking around a table. Yet there’s a tremor; and in seeing that Harrison is afraid of him, Rabbit loses interest. The waitress comes—Harrison orders Bourbon-on-the-Rocks for himself and Margaret and another Daiquiri for Ruth—and Rabbit watches her back recede as if it is the one real thing in the world: the thick notched rope of her spine between two blue-brown pillows of muscle. He wants Ruth to see him looking.
Harrison is losing his salesman’s composure. “Did I ever tell you what Tothero once said to me about you? Ace, are you listening?”
“What did Tothero say?” God this guy is a middle-aged bore.
“He said to me, ‘This is in confidence, Ronnie, but I depend on you to spark the team. Harry is not a team player.’ ”
Rabbit looks down at Margaret and over at Ruth. “Now I’ll tell ya what really happened,” he says to them. “Old Harrison here w
ent in to Tothero and he said, ‘Hey, I’m a real spark plug, ain’t I coach? A real play-maker, huh? Not like that lousy showboat Angstrom, huh?’ And Tothero was probably asleep and didn’t answer, so Harrison goes through the rest of his life thinking, ‘Gee, I’m a real hero. A real playmaker.’ On a basketball team, you see, whenever you have a little runty clumsy guy that can’t do anything he’s called the play-maker. I don’t know where he’s supposed to be making all these plays. In his bedroom I guess.” Ruth laughs; he’s not sure he wanted her to.
“That’s not true.” Harrison’s practiced palms flicker more hastily. “He volunteered it to me. Not that it was anything I didn’t know; the whole school knew it.”
Did it? Nobody ever told him.
Ruth says, “God, let’s not talk basketball. Every time I go out with this bastard we talk nothing but.”
He wonders, Did doubt show on his face, and she say that to reassure him? Does she in any part of her pity him?
Harrison perhaps thinks he’s been uglier than befits his sales-conference suavity. He takes out a cigarette and a lizard-skin Ronson.
Rabbit turns to Margaret—something in the way this arranges the nerves in his neck rings a bell, makes him think he turned to her exactly like this a million years ago—and says, “You never answered me.”
“Nuts, I don’t know where he is. I guess he went home. He was sick.”
“Just sick, or—” Harrison’s mouth does a funny thing, smiling and pursing both, as if he is introducing, with deference, this bit of Manhattan cleverness to his rural friends for the first time, and taps his head to make sure they will “get it”—sick, sick, sick?”
“All ways,” Margaret says. A serious shadow crosses her face that seems to remove her and Harry, who sees it, from the others, and takes them into that strange area of a million years ago from which they have wandered; a strange guilt pierces Harry at being here, instead of there, where he never was. Ruth and Harrison across from them, touched by staccato red light, seem specters glimpsed from the heart of damnation.
“Dear Ruth,” Harrison says, “how have you been? I often worry about you.”
“Don’t worry about me,” she says, yet seems pleased. The Negress brings their drinks and Harrison sets his lizard-skin Ronson beside his glass, as if suggesting it’s for sale. “Did you know,” he asks Harry, with a sweet smile, as if he’s chatting with a child, “that Ruth and I once went to Atlantic City together?”
“There was another couple,” she tells Harry.
“A disgusting pair,” Harrison says, “who preferred the shabby privacy of their own bungalow to the golden sunshine outdoors. The male of this twosome later confided to me, with ill-concealed pride, that he had enjoyed the orgasmatic climax eleven times in the all-too-short period of thirty-six hours.”
Margaret laughs. “Honestly, Ronnie, to hear you talk sometimes you’d think you went to Harvard.”
“Princeton,” he corrects. “Princeton is the effect I want to give. Harvard is suspect around here.”
Rabbit looks toward Ruth to see if she is still on his side. With dismay he sees that the second Daiquiri is on its way and the first has been delivered. She titters. “The awful thing about them,” she says, “was that they did it in the car. Here was poor Ronnie, trying to drive through all this Sundaynight traffic, and I looked back at a stoplight and Betsy’s dress was up around her neck.”
“I didn’t drive all the way,” Harrison tells her. “Remember we finally got him to drive.” His head tips toward her for confirmation and his pink scalp glints.
“Yeah.” Ruth looks into her glass and titters again, maybe at the thought of Betsy naked.
Harrison watches narrowly the effect of this on Rabbit. “This guy,” he says, in the pushy-quiet voice of offering a deal, “had an interesting theory. He thought”—Harrison’s hands grip air—“that right at the crucial, how shall I say?—development, you should slap your partner, as hard as you can, right in the face. If you’re in a position to. Otherwise slap what you can.”
Rabbit blinks; he really doesn’t know what to do about this awful guy. And just there, in the space of blinking, with the alcohol vaporizing under his ribs, he feels himself pass over. He laughs, really laughs. They can all go to Hell. “Well what did he think about biting?”
Harrison’s I’ve-got-your-number-buddy grin grows fixed; his reflexes aren’t quick enough to take this sudden turn. “Biting? I don’t know.”
“Well he couldn’t have given it much thought. A good big bloody bite: nothing better. Of course I can see how you’re handicapped, with those two false teeth.”
“Do you have false teeth, Ronnie?” Margaret cries. “How exciting! You’ve never told.”
“Of course he does,” Rabbit tells her. “You didn’t think those two piano keys were his, did you? They don’t even come close to matching.”
Harrison presses his lips together but he can’t afford to give up that forced grin and it sharply strains his face. His talking is hampered too.
“Now there was this place we used to go to in Texas,” Rabbit says, “where there was this girl whose backside had been bitten so often it looked like a piece of old cardboard. You know, after it’s been out in the rain. It’s all she did. She was a virgin otherwise.” He looks around at his audience and Ruth shakes her head minutely, one brief shake, as if to say, “No, Rabbit,” and it seems extremely sad, so sad a film of grit descends on his spirit and muffles him.
Harrison says, “It’s like that story about this whore that had the biggest—ah—you don’t want to hear it, do you?”
“Sure. Go ahead,” Ruth says.
“Well, this guy, see, was making out and he loses his, ahem, device.” Harrison’s face bobbles in the unsteady light. His hands start explaining. Rabbit thinks the poor guy must have to make a pitch five times a day or so. He wonders what he sells; ideas, he guesses; nothing as tangible as the MagiPeel Peeler. “… up to his elbow, up to his shoulder, then he gets his whole head in, and his chest, and starts crawling along this tunnel …” Good old MagiPeel, Rabbit thinks, he can almost feel one in his hand. Its handle came in three colors, turquoise, scarlet, and gold. The funny thing about it, it really did what they said, really took the skin off turnips and stuff as neat and quick—“… sees this other guy and says, ‘Hey, have you seen …’ ” Ruth sits there resigned and with horror be believes it’s all the same to her in her mind there’s no difference between Harrison and him and for that matter is there a difference? The whole interior of the place muddles and runs together red like the inside of a stomach in which they’re all being digested “… and the other guy says, ‘Stripper, hell. I’ve been in here three weeks looking for my motorcycle!’ ”
Harrison, waiting to join the laughter, looks up in silence. He’s failed to sell it. “That’s too fantastic,” Margaret says.
Rabbit’s skin is clammy under his clothes; this makes the breeze from the door opening behind him chilling. Harrison says, “Hey, isn’t that your sister?”
Ruth looks up from her drink. “Is it?” He makes no sign and she says, “They have the same horsy look.”
One glance told Rabbit. Miriam and her escort luckily walk a little into the place, past their table, and wait there to see an empty booth. The place is shaped like a wedge and widens out from the entrance. The bar is in the center, and on either side there is an aisle of booths. The young couple heads for the opposite aisle. Mim wears bright white shoes with very high heels. The boy with her has woolly blond hair cut just long enough to comb, and a self-consciously brown face, a somehow bought tan. I went south this winter, it says.
“Is that your sister?” Margaret says. “She’s attractive. You and her must take after different parents.”
“How do you know her?” Rabbit asks Harrison.
“Oh—” His hand flicks diffidently, as if his fingertips slide across a streak of grease in the air. “You see her around.”
Rabbit�
�s instinct was to freeze at first but this suggestion of Harrison’s that she’s a tramp makes him get up and walk across the orange tile floor and around the bar.
“Mim.”
“Well, hi.”
“What are you doing here?”
She tells the boy with her, “This is my brother. He’s back from the dead.”
“Hi, big brother.” Rabbit doesn’t like the boy’s saying this and he doesn’t like the way the kid is sitting on the inside of the booth with Mim on the outside in the man’s place. He doesn’t like the whole feel of the thing, that Mim is showing him around. The kid is wearing a seersucker coat and a narrow tie and looks very innocent, in a smirched prep-school way. His lips are too thick. Mim doesn’t give his name.
“Harry, Pop and Mom fight all the time about you.”
“Well if they knew you were in a joint like this they’d have something else to talk about.”
“It’s not so bad, for this section of town.”
“It stinks. Why don’t you and Junior get out?”
“Say. Who’s in charge here?” the kid asks, drawing his shoulders up and making his lips thicker.
Harry reaches over, hooks his finger around the kid’s striped necktie, and snaps it up. It flies up and hits his thick mouth and makes his manicured face go slightly fuzzy. He starts to rise and Rabbit puts his hand on top of his tidy narrow head and pushes him down again and walks away, with the hardness of the kid’s head still in his fingertips. At his back he hears the sweetest sound he’s heard that night, his sister calling, “Harry.”
His ears are so good he hears, as he rounds the bar, Junior explain to her, in a voice made husky with cowardice, “He’s in love with you.”
To his own table he says, “Come on, Ruth. Get on your motorcycle.”
She protests, “I’m happy.”
“Come on.”
She moves to collect her things and Harrison, after looking around in doubt, gets out of the booth to let her up. He stands there beside Rabbit and Rabbit on an impulse puts his hand on Ronnie’s unpadded pseudo-Princeton shoulder. In comparison with Mim’s kid he likes him. “You’re right, Ronnie,” he tells him, “you were a real play-maker.” It comes out nasty but he meant it well, for the sake of the old team.