by John Updike
“Why is it lousy?” Nelson asks anxiously. There is a look his face gets, bloating his lips and slightly sucking his eyes back into their sockets, that hasn’t changed since his infancy, when his bottle would go dry.
Stavros relents. “Nellie, for you it’ll be great. It’s all toys. For me, it just wasn’t sexy. I guess I don’t find technology that sexy.”
“Does everything have to be sexy?” Janice asks.
“It doesn’t have to be, it tends to be,” Stavros tells her. To Rabbit he says, “Have some souvlakia. You’ll love it, and it’s quick.” And in an admirable potent little gesture, he moves his hand, palm outward as if his fingers had been snapped, without lifting his elbow from the table, and the motherly woman comes running to them.
“Yasou.”
“Kale spera,” she answers.
While Stavros orders in Greek, Harry studies Janice, her peculiar glow. Time has been gentle to her. As if it felt sorry for her. The something pinched and mean about her mouth, that she had even in her teens, has been relaxed by the appearance of other small wrinkles in her face, and her hair, whose sparseness once annoyed him, as another emblem of his poverty, she now brings down over her ears from a central parting in two smooth wings. She wears no lipstick and in certain lights her face possesses a gypsy severity and the dignity present in newspaper photographs of female guerrilla fighters. The gypsy look she got from her mother, the dignity from the Sixties, which freed her from the need to look fluffy. Plain is beautiful enough. And now she is all circles in happiness, squirming on her round bottom and dancing her hands through arcs of exaggeration quick white in the candelight. She tells Stavros, “If you hadn’t shown up we would have starved.”
“No,” he says, a reassuring factual man. “They would have taken care of you. These are nice people.”
“These two,” she says, “are so American, they’re helpless.”
“Yeah,” Stavros says to Rabbit, “I see the decal you put on your old Falcon.”
“I told Charlie,” Janice tells Rabbit, “I certainly didn’t put it there.”
“What’s wrong with it?” he asks them both. “It’s our flag, isn’t it?”
“It’s somebody’s flag,” Stavros says, not liking this trend and softly bouncing his fingertips together under his sheltered bad eyes.
“But not yours, huh?”
“Harry gets fanatical about this,” Janice warns.
“I don’t get fanatical, I just get a little sad about people who come over here to make a fat buck –”
“I was born here,” Stavros quickly says. “So was my father.”
“– and then knock the fucking flag,” Rabbit continues, “like it’s some piece of toilet paper.”
“A flag is a flag. It’s just a piece of cloth.”
“It’s more than just a piece of cloth to me.”
“What is it to you?”
“It’s –”
“The mighty Mississippi.”
“It’s people not finishing my sentences all the time.”
“Just half the time.”
“That’s better than all the time like they have in China.”
“Look. The Mississippi is very broad. The Rocky Mountains really swing. I just can’t get too turned-on about cops bopping hippies on the head and the Pentagon playing cowboys and Indians all over the globe. That’s what your little sticker means to me. It means screw the blacks and send the CIA into Greece.”
“If we don’t send somebody in the other side sure as hell will, the Greeks can’t seem to manage the show by themselves.”
“Harry, don’t make yourself ridiculous, they invented civilization,” Janice says. To Stavros she says, “See how little and tight his mouth gets when he thinks about politics.”
“I don’t think about politics,” Rabbit says. “That’s one of my Goddam precious American rights, not to think about politics. I just don’t see why we’re supposed to walk down the street with our hands tied behind our back and let ourselves be blackjacked by every thug who says he has a revolution going. And it really burns me up to listen to hotshot crap-car salesmen dripping with Vitalis sitting on their plumped-up asses bitching about a country that’s been stuffing goodies into their mouth ever since they were born.”
Charlie makes to rise. “I better go. This is getting too rich.”
“Don’t go,” Janice begs. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying. He’s sick on the subject.”
“Yeah, don’t go, Charlie, stick around and humor the madman.”
Charlie lowers himself again and states in measured fashion, “I want to follow your reasoning. Tell me about the goodies we’ve been stuffing into Vietnam.”
“Christ, exactly. We’d turn it into another Japan if they’d let us. That’s all we want to do, make a happy rich country full of highways and gas stations. Poor old LBJ, Jesus, with tears in his eyes on television, you must have heard him, he just about offered to make North Vietnam the fifty-first fucking state of the damn Union if they’d just stop throwing bombs. We’re begging them to rig some elections, any elections, and they’d rather throw bombs. What more can we do? We’re trying to give ourselves away, that’s all our foreign policy is, is trying to give ourselves away to make little yellow people happy, and guys like you sit around in restaurants moaning, ‘Jesus, we’re rotten.’ ”
“I thought it was us and not them throwing the bombs.”
“We’ve stopped; we stopped like all you liberals were marching for and what did it get us?” He leans forward to pronounce the answer clearly. “Not shit.”
The whispering couple across the room look over in surprise; the family two booths away have hushed their noise to listen. Nelson is desperately blushing, his eyes sunk hot and hurt in his sockets. “Not shit,” Harry repeats more softly. He leans over the tablecloth, beside the trembling daisies. “Now I suppose you’re going to say ‘napalm.’ That frigging magic word. They’ve been burying village chiefs alive and tossing mortars into hospitals for twenty years, and because of napalm they’re candidates for the Albert F. Schweitzer peace prize. S, H, it.” He has gotten loud again; it makes him frantic, the thoughts of the treachery and ingratitude befouling the flag, befouling him.
“Harry, you’ll get us kicked out,” Janice says; but he notices she is still happy, all in circles, a cookie in the oven.
“I’m beginning to dig him,” Stavros tells her. “If I get your meaning,” he says to Rabbit, “we’re the big mama trying to make this unruly kid take some medicine that’ll be good for him.”
“That’s right. You got it. We are. And most of ’em want to take the medicine, they’re dying for it, and a few madmen in black pajamas would rather bury ’em alive. What’s your theory? That we’re in it for the rice? The Uncle Ben theory.” Rabbit laughs and adds, “Bad old Uncle Ben.”
“No,” Stavros says, squaring his hands on the checked tablecloth and staring level-browed at the base of Harry’s throat – gingerly with him, Harry notices: Why? – “my theory is it’s a mistaken power play. It isn’t that we want the rice, we don’t want them to have it. Or the magnesium. Or the coastline. We’ve been playing chess with the Russians so long we didn’t know we were off the board. White faces don’t work in yellow countries anymore. Kennedy’s advisers who thought they could run the world from the dean’s office pushed the button and nothing happened. Then Oswald voted Johnson in who was such a bonehead he thought all it took was a bigger thumb on the button. So the machine overheated, you got inflation and a falling market at one end and college riots at the other and in the middle forty thousand sons of American mothers killed by shit-smeared bamboo. People don’t like having Sonny killed in the jungle anymore. Maybe they never liked it, but they used to think it was necessary.”
“And it isn’t?”
Stavros blinks. “I see. You say war has to be.”
“Yeah, and better there than here. Better little wars than big ones.”
Stavros says, his hands on edge,
ready to chop, “But you like it.” His hands chop. “Burning up gook babies is right where you’re at, friend.” The “friend” is weak.
Rabbit asks him, “How did you do your Army bit?”
Stavros shrugs, squares his shoulders. “I was 4-F. Tricky ticker. I hear you sat out the Korean thing in Texas.”
“I went where they told me. I’d still go where they told me.”
“Bully for you. You’re what made America great. A real gunslinger.”
“He’s silent majority,” Janice says, “but he keeps making noise,” looking at Stavros hopefully, for a return on her quip. God, she is dumb, even if her ass has shaped up in middle age.
“He’s a normal product,” Stavros says. “He’s a typical good-hearted imperialist racist.” Rabbit knows, from the careful level way this is pronounced, with that little tuck of a sold-car smile, that he is being flirted with, asked – his dim feeling is – for an alliance. But Rabbit is locked into his intuition that to describe any of America’s actions as a “power play” is to miss the point. America is beyond power, it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains and darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible. He fights back, “I don’t follow this racist rap. You can’t turn on television now without some black face spitting at you. Everybody from Nixon down is sitting up nights trying to figure out how to make ’em all rich without putting ’em to the trouble of doing any work.” His tongue is reckless; but he is defending something infinitely tender, the low flame of loyalty lit with his birth. “They talk about genocide when they’re the ones planning it, they’re the ones, the Negroes plus the rich kids, who want to pull it all down; not that they can’t run squealing for a lawyer whenever some poor cop squints funny at ’em. The Vietnam war in my opinion – anybody want my opinion? –”
“Harry,” Janice says, “you’re making Nelson miserable.”
“My opinion is, you have to fight a war now and then to show you’re willing, and it doesn’t much matter where it is. The trouble isn’t this war, it’s this country. We wouldn’t fight in Korea now. Christ, we wouldn’t fight Hitler now. This country is so zonked out on its own acid, sunk so deep in its own fat and babble and laziness, it would take H-bombs on every city from Detroit to Atlanta to wake us up and even then, we’d probably think we’d just been kissed.”
“Harry,” Janice asks, “do you want Nelson to die in Vietnam? Go ahead, tell him you do.”
Harry turns to their child and says, “Kid, I don’t want you to die anyplace. Your mother’s the girl that’s good at death.”
Even he knows how cruel this is; he is grateful to her for not collapsing, for blazing up instead. “Oh,” she says. “Oh. Tell him why he has no brothers or sisters, Harry. Tell him who refused to have another child.”
“This is getting too rich,” Stavros says.
“I’m glad you’re seeing it,” Janice tells him, her eyes sunk deep; Nelson gets that from her.
Mercifully, the food arrives. Nelson balks, discovering the meatballs drenched in gravy. He looks at Rabbit’s tidily skewered lamb and says, “That’s what I wanted.”
“Let’s swap then. Shut up and eat,” Rabbit says. He looks across to see that Janice and Stavros are having the same thing, a kind of white pie. They are sitting, to his printer’s sense, too close, leaving awkward space on either side. To poke them into adjustment he says, “I think it’s a swell country.”
Janice takes it up, Stavros chewing in silence. “Harry, you’ve never been to any other country.”
He addresses himself to Stavros. “Never had the desire to. I see these other countries on TV, they’re all running like hell to be like us, and burning our Embassies because they can’t make it fast enough. What other countries do you get to?”
Stavros interrupts his eating grudgingly to utter, “Jamaica.”
“Wow,” Rabbit says. “A real explorer. Three hours by jet to the lobby of some Hilton.”
“They hate us down there.”
“You mean they hate you. They never see me, I never go. Why do they hate us?”
“Same reason as everywhere. Exploitation. We steal their bauxite.”
“Let ’em trade it to the Russkis for potatoes then. Potatoes and missile sites.”
“We have missile sites in Turkey,” Stavros says, his heart no longer in this.
Janice tries to help. “We’ve dropped two atom bombs, the Russians haven’t dropped any.”
“They didn’t have any then or they would have. Here the Japanese were all set to commit hari-kari and we saved them from it; now look at ’em, happy as clams and twice as sassy, screwing us right and left. We fight their wars for them while you peaceniks sell their tinny cars.”
Stavros pats his mouth with a napkin folded squarely and regains his appetite for discussion. “Her point is, we wouldn’t be in this Vietnam mess if it was a white country. We wouldn’t have gone in. We thought we just had to shout Boo and flash a few jazzy anti-personnel weapons. We thought it was one more Cherokee uprising. The trouble is, the Cherokees outnumber us now.”
“Oh those fucking poor Indians,” Harry says. “What were we supposed to do, let ’em have the whole continent for a campfire site?” Sorry, Tonto.
“If we had, it’d be in better shape than it is now.”
“And we’d be nowhere. They were in the way.”
“Fair enough,” Stavros says. “Now you’re in their way.” He adds, “Paleface.”
“Let ’em come,” Rabbit says, and really is, at this moment, a defiant bastion. The tender blue flame has become cold fire in his eyes. He stares them down. He stares at Janice and she is dark and tense: an Indian squaw. He’d like to massacre her.
Then his son says, his voice strained upward through choked-down tears, “Dad, we’re going to be late for the movie!”
Rabbit looks at his watch and sees they have four minutes to get there. The kid is right.
Stavros tries to help, fatherly like men who aren’t fathers, who think kids can be fooled about essentials. “The opening part’s the dullest, Nellie, you won’t miss any of the space parts. You got to try some baklava for dessert.”
“I’ll miss the cave men,” Nelson says, the choking almost complete, the tears almost risen.
“I guess we should go,” Rabbit tells the two other adults.
“That’s rude to Charlie,” Janice says. “Really rude. Anyway I won’t be able to stay awake during this interminable movie without coffee.” To Nelson: “Baklava is really yummy. It’s honey and flakes of thin dough, just the kind of dry thing you love. Try to be considerate, Nelson, your parents so rarely get to eat in a restaurant.”
Torn, Rabbit suggests, “Or you could try that other stuff you wanted for the main deal, mellow patties or whatever.”
The tears do come; the kid’s tense face breaks. “You promised,” he sobs, unanswerably, and hides his face against the white bare wall.
“Nelson, I am disappointed in you,” Janice tells him.
Stavros says to Rabbit, tucking that pencil behind his ear again, “If you want to run now, she could get her coffee and I’ll drop her off at the movie house in ten minutes.”
“That’s a possibility,” Janice says slowly, her face opening cautiously, a dull flower.
Rabbit tells Stavros, “O.K., great. Thanks. You’re nice to do that. You’re nice to put up with us at all, sorry if I said anything too strong. I just can’t stand to hear the U.S. knocked, I’m sure it’s psychological. Janice, do you have money? Charlie, you tell her how much we owe.”
Stavros repeats that masterful small gesture of palm outward, “You owe zilch. On me.” There can be no argument. Standing, himself in a hurry to see the cave men (raw meat? a bone turning into a spaceship?), Rabbit experiences, among them here, in this restaurant where the Penn Park couple are paying their bill as if laying a baby to rest, keen family happiness: it prompts h
im to say to Janice, to cheer Nelson up further, “Remind me tomorrow to call your father about those baseball tickets.”
Before Janice can intervene, Stavros says, everybody anxious now to please, “He’s in the Poconos.”
Janice thought when Charlie calls Harry “paleface” it’s the end, from the way Harry looked over at her, his eyes a frightening icy blue, and then when Charlie let that slip about Daddy being away she knew it was; but somehow it isn’t. Maybe the movie numbs them. It’s so long and then that psychedelic section where he’s landing on the planet before turning into a little old man in a white wig makes her head hurt, but she rides home resolved to have it out, to confess and dare him to make his move back, all he can do is run which might be a relief. She has a glass of vermouth in the kitchen to ready herself, but upstairs Nelson is shutting the door to his room and Harry is in the bathroom and when she comes out of the bathroom with the taste of toothpaste on top of the vermouth Harry is lying under the covers with just the top of his head showing. Janice gets in beside him and listens. His breathing is a sleeping tide. So she lies there awake like the moon.
In their ten though it became twenty minutes over the coffee together she had told Charlie she had thought it reckless of him to come to the restaurant when he had known she was bringing them and he said, in that way he has of going onto his dignity, his lips pushing out as if holding a lozenge and the hunch of his shoulders a bit gangsterish, that he thought that’s what she wanted, that’s why she told him she was going to talk them into it. At the time she thought silently, he doesn’t understand women in love, just going to his restaurant, eating food that was him, had been enough an act of love for her, he didn’t have to make it dangerous by showing up himself. It even coarsened it. Because once he was physically there all her caution dissolved, if instead of having coffee with her he had asked her to go to his apartment with him she would have done it and was even mentally running through the story she would have told Harry about suddenly feeling sick. But luckily he didn’t ask; he finished the coffee and paid the whole bill and dropped her off under the stumpy marquee as promised. Men are strict that way, want to keep their promises to each other, women are beneath it, property. The way while making love Charlie sells her herself, murmuring about her parts, giving them the names Harry uses only in anger, she resisted at first but relaxed seeing for Charlie they were a language of love, his way of keeping himself up, selling her her own cunt. She doesn’t panic as with Harry, knowing he can’t hold it much longer, Charlie holds back forever, a thick sweet toy she can do anything with, her teddy bear. The fur on the back of his shoulders at first shocked her touch, something freakish, but no, that’s the way many men still are. Cave men. Cave bears. Janice smiles in the dark.