by John Updike
“Hey, hey,” Buchanan protests. “The night hasn’t even got itself turned around to get started yet.”
“I ought to be home in case my kid can’t stand the kid he’s staying with. I promised I’d visit my parents tomorrow, if they didn’t keep my mother in the hospital for more tests.”
“Babe will be sad, you sneaking out. She took a shine to you.”
“Maybe that other guy she took a shine to will be back. My guess is Babe takes a shine pretty easy.”
“Don’t you get nasty.”
“No, I love her, Jesus. Tell her. She plays like a whiz. This has been a terrific change of pace for me.” He tries to stand, but the table edge confines him to a crouch. The booth tilts and he rocks slightly, as if he is already in the slowly turning cold house he is heading toward. Jill stands up with him, obedient as a mirror.
“One of these times,” Buchanan continues beneath them, “maybe you can get to know Babe better. She is one good egg.”
“I don’t doubt it.” He tells Jill, “Sit down.”
“Aren’t you going to take me with you? They want you to.”
“Gee. I hadn’t thought to.”
She sits down.
“Friend Harry, you’ve hurt the little girl’s feelings. Nasty must be your middle name.”
Jill says, “Far as creeps like this are concerned, I have no feelings. I’ve decided he’s queer anyway.”
“Could be,” Buchanan says. “It would explain that wife.”
“Come on, let me out of the booth. I’d like to take her –”
“Then help yourself, friend. On me.”
Babe is playing “Time After Time.” I tell myself that I’m.
Harry sags. The table edge is killing his thighs. “O.K., kid. Come along.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“You’ll be bored,” he feels in honesty obliged to add.
“You’ve been had,” she tells him.
“Jilly now, be gracious for the gentleman.” Buchanan hastily pushes out of the booth, lest the combination tumble, and lets Harry slide out and leans against him confidentially. Geezers. His breath rises bad, from under the waxed needles. “Problem is,” he explains, the last explaining he will do tonight, “it don’t look that good, her being in here, under age and all. The fuzz now, they aren’t absolutely unfriendly, but they hold us pretty tight to the line, what with public opinion the way it is. So it’s not that healthy for anybody. She’s a poor child needs a daddy, is the simple truth of it.”
Rabbit asks her, “How’d he die?”
Jill says, “Heart. Dropped dead in a New York theater lobby. He and my mother were seeing Hair.”
“O.K. Let’s shove.” To Buchanan Rabbit says, “How much for the drinks? Wow. They’re just hitting me.”
“On us,” is the answer, accompanied by a wave of a palm the color of silver polish. “On the black community.” He has to wheeze and chuckle. Struggling for solemnity: “This is real big of you, man. You’re a big man.”
“See you at work Monday.”
“Jilly-love, you be a good girl. We’ll keep in touch.”
“I bet.”
Disturbing, to think that Buchanan works. We all work. Day selves and night selves. The belly hungers, the spirit hungers. Mouths munch, cunts swallow. Monstrous. Soul. He used to try to picture it when a child. A parasite like a tapeworm inside. A sprig of mistletoe hung from our bones, living on air. A jellyfish swaying between our lungs and our liver. Black men have more, bigger. Cocks like eels. Night feeders. Their touching underbelly smell on buses, their dread of those clean dry places where Harry must be. He wonders if he will be sick. Poison in those Stingers, on top of moonburgers.
Babe shifts gears, lays out six chords like six black lead slugs slapping into the tray, and plays, “There’s a Small Hotel.” With a wishing well.
With this Jill, then, Rabbit enters the street. On his right, toward the mountain, Weiser stretches sallow under blue street lights. The Pinnacle Hotel makes a tattered blur, the back of the Sunflower Beer clock shows yellow neon petals; otherwise the great street is dim. He can remember when Weiser with its five movie marquees and its medley of neon outlines appeared as gaudy as a carnival midway. People would stroll, children between them. Now the downtown looks deserted, sucked dry by suburban shopping centers and haunted by rapists. LOCAL HOODS ASSAULT ELDERLY, last week’s Vat had headlined. In the original version of the head LOCAL had been BLACK.
They turn left, toward the Weiser Street Bridge. River moisture cools his brow. He decides he will not be sick. Never, even as an infant, could stand it; some guys, Ronnie Harrison for one, liked it, throw up after a few beers or before a big game, joke about the corn between their teeth, but Rabbit needed to keep it down, even at the cost of a bellyache. He still carries from sitting in Jimbo’s the sense of the world being inside him; he will keep it down. The city night air. The ginger of tar and concrete baked all day, truck traffic lifted from it like a lid. Infrequent headlights stroke this girl, catching her white legs and thin dress as she hangs on the curb hesitant.
She asks, “Where’s your car?”
“I don’t have any.”
“That’s impossible.”
“My wife took it when she left me.”
“You didn’t have two?”
“No.” This is really a rich kid.
“I have a car,” she says.
“Where is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“How can you not know?”
“I used to leave it on the street up near Babe’s place off of Plum, I didn’t know it was somebody’s garage entrance, and one morning they had taken it away.”
“And you didn’t go after it?”
“I didn’t have the money for any fine. And I’m scared of the police, they might check me out. The staties must have a bulletin on me.”
“Wouldn’t the simplest thing for you be to go back to Connecticut?”
“Oh, please,” she says.
“What didn’t you like about it?”
“It was all ego. Sick ego.”
“Something pretty egotistical about running away, too. What’d that do to your mother?”
The girl makes no answer, but crosses the street, from Jimbo’s to the beginning of the bridge. Rabbit has to follow. “What kind of car was it?”
“A white Porsche.”
“Wow.”
“My father gave it to me for my sixteenth birthday.”
“My father-in-law runs the Toyota agency in town.”
They keep arriving at this place, where a certain symmetry snips their exchanges short. Having crossed the bridge, they stand on a little pond of sidewalk squares where in this age of cars few feet tread. The bridge was poured in the Thirties – sidewalks, broad balustrades, and lamp plinths – of reddish rough concrete; above them an original light standard, iron fluted and floral toward the top, looms stately but unlit at the entrance to the bridge, illumined since recently with cold bars of violet on tall aluminum stems rooted in the center of the walkway. Her white dress is unearthly in this light. A man’s name is embedded in a bronze plaque, illegible. Jill asks impatiently, “Well, how shall we do?”
He assumes she means transportation. He is too shaky still, too frill of smoke and Stinger, to look beyond that. The way to the center of Brewer, where taxis prowl and doze, feels blocked. In the gloom beyond Jimbo’s neon nimbus, brown shadows, local hoods, giggle in doorways, watching. Rabbit says, “Let’s walk across the bridge and hope for a bus. The last one comes around eleven, maybe on Saturdays it’s later. Anyway, if none comes at all, it’s not too far to walk to my place. My kid does it all the time.”
“I love walking,” she says. She touchingly adds, “I’m strong. You mustn’t baby me.”
The balustrade was poured in an X-pattern echoing rail fences; these Xs click past his legs not rapidly enough. The gritty breadth he keeps touching runs tepid. Flecks as if of rock salt had been mixed into it. No
t done that way anymore, not done this color, reddish, the warmth of flesh, her hair also, cut cedar color, lifting as she hurries to keep up.
“What’s the rush?”
“Shhh. Dontcha hear ’em?”
Cars thrust by, rolling balls of light before them. An anvil-drop below, to the black floor of the river: white shards, boat shapes. Behind them, pattering feet, the press of pursuit. Rabbit dares stop and peek backwards. Two brown figures are chasing them. Their shadows shorten and multiply and lengthen and simplify again as they fly beneath the successive mauve angles, in and out of strips of light; one man is brandishing something white in his hand. It glitters. Harry’s heart jams; he wants to make water. The West Brewer end of the bridge is forever away. LOCAL MAN STABBED DEFENDING OUT-OF-STATE GIRL. Body Tossed From Historic Bridge. He squeezes her arm and tries to make her run. Her skin is smooth and narrow yet tepid like the balustrade. She snaps, “Cut it out,” and pulls away. He turns and finds, unexpectedly, what he had forgotten was there, courage; his body fits into the hardshell blindness of meeting a threat, rigid, only his eyes soft spots, himself a sufficient shield. Kill.
The Negroes halt under the near purple moon and back a step, frightened. They are young, their bodies liquid. He is bigger than they. The white flash in the hand of one is not a knife but a pocketbook of pearls. The bearer shambles forward with it. His eyewhites and the pearls look lavender in the light. “This yours, lady?”
“Oh. Yes.”
“Babe sent us after.”
“Oh. Thank you. Thank her.”
“We scare somebody?”
“Not me. Him.”
“Yeah.”
“Dude scared us too.”
“Sorry about that,” Rabbit volunteers. “Spooky bridge.”
“O.K.”
“O.K.” Their mauve eyeballs roll; their purple hands flip as their legs in the stitched skin of Levis seek the rhythm of leaving. They giggle together; and also at this moment two giant trailer trucks pass on the bridge, headed in opposite directions: their rectangles thunderously overlap and, having clapped the air between them, hurtle each on its way, corrosive and rumbling. The bridge trembles. The Negro boys have disappeared. Rabbit walks on with Jill.
The pot and brandy and fear in him enhance the avenue he knows too well. No bus comes. Her dress flutters in the corner of his eye as he tries, his skin stretched and his senses shuffling and circling like a cloud of gnats, to make talk. “Your home was in Connecticut.”
“A place called Stonington.”
“Near New York?”
“Near enough. Daddy used to go down Mondays and come back Fridays. He loved to sail. He said about Stonington it was the only town in the state that faces the open sea, everything else is on the Sound.”
“And he died, you said. My mother – she has Parkinson’s Disease.”
“Look, do you like to talk this much? Why don’t we just walk? I’ve never been in West Brewer before. It’s nice.”
“What’s nice about it?”
“Everything. It doesn’t have a past like the city does. So it’s not so disappointed. Look at that, Burger Bliss. Isn’t it beautiful, all goldy and plasticky with that purple fire inside?”
“That’s where I ate tonight.”
“How was the food?”
“Awful. Maybe I taste everything too much, I should start smoking again. My kid loves the place.”
“How old did you say he was?”
“Twelve. Thirteen this October. He’s small for his age.”
“You shouldn’t tell him that.”
“Yeah. I try not to ride him.”
“What would you ride him about?”
“Oh. He’s bored by things I used to love. I don’t think he’s having much fun. He never goes outdoors.”
“Hey. What’s your name?”
“Harry.”
“Hey, big Harry. Would you mind feeding me?”
“Sure, I mean No. At home? I don’t know what we have in the icebox. Refrigerator.”
“I mean over there, at the burger place.”
“Oh, sure. Terrific. I’m sorry. I assumed you ate.”
“Maybe I did, I tend to forget material details like that. But I don’t think so. All I feel inside is lemonade.”
She selects a Cashewburger for 85¢ and a strawberry milkshake. In the withering light she devours the burger, and he orders her another. She smiles apologetically. She has small inturned teeth, roundish and with tiny gaps between them like a printer’s hairline spaces. Nice. “Usually I try to rise above eating.”
“Why?”
“It’s so ugly. Don’t you think, it’s one of the uglier things we do?”
“It has to be done.”
“That’s your philosophy, isn’t it?” Even in this garishly lit place her face has about it something shadowy and elusive, something that’s skipped a stage. Finished, she wipes her fingers one by one on a paper napkin and says decisively, “Thank you very much.” He pays. She clutches the purse, but what is in it? Credit cards? Diagrams for the revolution?
He has had coffee, to keep himself awake. Be up all night fucking this poor kid. Upholding the honor of middle-aged squares. Different races. In China, they used to tell you in the Army, the women put razor blades in their cunts in case the Japanese tried rape. Rabbit’s scrotum shrivels at the thought. Enjoy the walk. They march down Weiser, the store windows dark but for burglar lights, the Acme parking lot empty but for scattered neckers, the movie marquee changed from 2001 to TRUE GRIT. Short enough to get it all on. They cross the street at a blinking yellow to Emberly Avenue, which then becomes Emberly Drive, which becomes Vista Crescent. The development is dark. “Talk about spooky,” she says.
“I think it’s the flatness,” he says. “The town I grew up in, no two houses were on the same level.”
“There’s such a smell of plumbing somehow.”
“Actually, the plumbing is none too good.”
This smoky creature at his side has halved his weight. He floats up the steps to the porchlet, knees vibrating. Her profile by his shoulder is fine and cool as the face on the old dime. The key to the door of three stepped windows nearly flies out of his hand, it feels so magical. Whatever he expects when he flicks on the inside hall light, it is not the same old furniture, the fake cobbler’s bench, the sofa and the silverthread chair facing each other like two bulky drunks too tired to go upstairs. The blank TV screen in its box of metal painted with wood grain, the see-through shelves with nothing on them.
“Wow,” Jill says. “This is really tacky.”
Rabbit apologizes, “We never really picked out the furniture, it just kind of happened. Janice was always going to do different curtains.”
Jill asks, “Was she a good wife?”
His answer is nervous; the question plants Janice back in the house, quiet in the kitchen, crouching at the head of the stairs, listening. “Not too bad. Not much on organizational ability, but until she got mixed up with this other guy at least she kept plugging away. She used to drink too much but got that under control. We had a tragedy about ten years ago that sobered her up I guess. Sobered me up too. A baby died.”
“How?”
“An accident we caused.”
“That’s sad. Where do we sleep?”
“Why don’t you take the kid’s room, I guess he won’t be back. The kid he’s staying with, he’s a real spoiled jerk, I told Nelson if it got too painful he should just come home. I probably should have been here to answer the phone. What time is it? How about a beer?”
Penniless, she is wearing a little wristwatch that must have cost two hundred at least. “Twelve-ten,” she says. “Don’t you want to sleep with me?”
“Huh? That’s not your idea of bliss, is it? Sleeping with a creep?”
“You are a creep, but you just fed me.”
“Forget it. On the white community. Ha.”
“And you have this sweet funny family side. Always worrying about who needs
you.”
“Yeah, well it’s hard to know sometimes. Probably nobody if I could face up to it. In answer to your question, sure I’d like to sleep with you, if I won’t get hauled in for statutory rape.”
“You’re really scared of the law, aren’t you?”
“I try to keep out of its way is all.”
“I promise you on a Bible – do you have a Bible?”
“There used to be one somewhere, that Nelson got for going to Sunday school, when he did. We’ve kind of let all that go. Just promise me.”
“I promise you I’m eighteen. I’m legally a woman. I am not bait for a black gang. You will not be mugged or blackmailed. You may fuck me.”
“Somehow you’re making me almost cry.”
“You’re awfully scared of me. Let’s take a bath together and then see how we feel about it.”
He laughs. “By then I guess I’ll feel pretty gung-ho about it.”
She is serious, a serious small-faced animal sniffing out her new lair. “Where’s the bathroom?”
“Take off your clothes here.”
The command startles her; her chin dents and her eyes go wide with fright. No reason he should be the only scared person here. Rich bitch calling his living room tacky. Standing on the rug where he and Janice last made love, Jill skins out of her clothes. She kicks off her sandals and strips her dress upward. She is wearing no bra. Her tits tug upward, drop back, give him a headless stare. She is wearing bikini underpants, black lace, in a pattern too fine to read. Not pausing a moment for him to drink her in, she pulls the elastic down with two thumbs, wriggles, and steps out. Where Janice had a springy triangle encroaching on the insides of her thighs when she didn’t shave, Jill has scarcely a shadow, amber fuzz dust darkened toward the center to an upright dainty mane. The horns of her pelvis like starved cheekbones. Her belly a child’s, childless. Her breasts in some lights as she turns scarcely exist. Being naked elongates her neck: a true ripeness there, in the unhurried curve from base of skull to small of back, and in the legs, which link to the hips with knots of fat and keep a plumpness all the way down. Her ankles are less slim than Janice’s. But, hey, she is naked in this room, his room. This really strange creature, too trusting. She bends to pick up her clothes. She treads lightly on his carpet, as if watchful for tacks. She stands an arm’s-length from him, her mouth pouting prim, a fleck of dry skin on the lower lip. “And you?”