Rabbit Redux

by John Updike

  “That’s one thing I miss,” Jill says, “the smell of the sea. Where I grew up, the town is on a peninsula, with sea on three sides.”

  “Hey, shall I make you some French toast? I just learned how.”

  Jealousy, perhaps, makes Rabbit impatient with this scene: his son in spite of his smallness bony and dominating and alert, Jill in her sheet looking like one of those cartoon figures, Justice or Liberty or Mourning Peace. He goes outside to bring in the Sunday Triumph, sits reading the funnies in the sunshine on the porchlet steps until the bugs get too bad, comes back into the living room and reads at random about the Egyptians, the Phillies, the Onassises. From the kitchen comes sizzling and giggling and whispering. He is in the Garden Section (Scorn not the modest goldenrod, dock, and tansy that grow in carefree profusion in fields and roadside throughout these August days; carefully dried and arranged, they will form attractive bouquets to brighten the winter months around the corner) when the kid comes in with milk on his mustache and, wide-eyed, pressingly, with a new kind of energy, asks, “Hey Dad, can she come along on the boat? I’ve called up Billy and he says his father won’t mind, only we have to hurry up. You can come too.”

  “Maybe I mind.”

  “Dad. Don’t.” And Harry reads his son’s taut face to mean, She can hear. She’s all alone. We must be nice to her, we must be nice to the poor, the weak, the black. Love is here to stay.

  Monday, Rabbit is setting the Vat front page. WIDOW, SIXTY-SEVEN, RAPED AND ROBBED. Three Black Youths Held.

  Police authorities revealed Saturday that they are holding for questioning two black minors and Wendell Phillips, 19, of 42B Plum Street, in connection with the brutal assault of an unidentified sywsfyz kmlhs the brutal assault of an unidentified elderly white woman late Thursday night.

  The conscienceless crime, the latest in a series of similar incidents in the Third Ward, aroused residents of the neighborhood to organize a committee of protest which appeared before Friday’s City Council session.

  Nobody Safe

  “Nobody’s safe on the st

  “Nobody’s safe on the streets any more,” said committee spokesman Bernard Vogel to VAT reporters.

  “Nobody’s safe not even in our own homes.”

  Through the clatter Harry feels a tap on his shoulder and looks around. Pajasek, looking worried. “Angstrom, telephone.”

  “Who the hell?” He feels obliged to say this, as apology for being called at work, on Verity time.

  “A woman,” Pajasek says, not placated.

  Who? Jill (last night her hair still damp from the boat ride tickled his belly as she managed to make him come) was in trouble. They had kidnapped her – the police, the blacks. Or Peggy Fosnacht was calling up to offer supper again. Or his mother had taken a turn for the worse and with her last heartbeats had dialled this number. He is not surprised she would want to speak to him instead of his father, he has never doubted she loves him most. The phone is in Pajasek’s little office, three walls of frosted glass, on the desk with the parts catalogues (these old Mergenthalers are always breaking down) and the spindled dead copy. “Hello?”

  “Hi, sweetie. Guess who.”

  “Janice. How was the Shore?”

  “Crowded and muggy. How was it here?”

  “Pretty good.”

  “So I hear. I hear you went out in a boat.”

  “Yeah, it was the kid’s idea, he got me invited by Ollie. We went up the river as far as Eifert’s Island. We didn’t catch much, the state put some trout in but I guess the river’s still too full of coal silt. My nose is so sunburned I can’t touch it.”

  “I hear you had a lot of people in the boat.”

  “Nine or so. Ollie runs around with this musical crowd. We had a picnic up at the old camp meeting ground, near Stogey’s Quarry, you know, where that witch lived so many years. Ollie’s friends all got out guitars and played. It was nice.”

  “I hear you brought a guest too.”

  “Who’d you hear that from?”

  “Peggy told me. Billy told her. He was all turned-on about it, he said Nelson brought a girlfriend.”

  “Beats a mini-bike, huh?”

  “Harry, I don’t find this amusing. Where did you find this girl?”

  “Uh, she’s a go-go dancer in here at the shop. For the lunch hour. The union demands it.”

  “Where, Harry?”

  Her weary dismissive insistence pleases him. She is growing in confidence, like a child at school. He confesses, “I sort of picked her up in a bar.”

  “Well. That’s being honest. How long is she going to stay?”

  “I haven’t asked. These kids don’t make plans the way we used to, they aren’t so scared of starving. Hey, I got to get back to the machine. Pajasek doesn’t like our being called here, by the way.”

  “I don’t intend to make a practice of it. I called you at work because I didn’t want Nelson to overhear. Harry, now are you listening to me?”

  “Sure, to who else?”

  “I want that girl out of my home. I don’t want Nelson exposed to this sort of thing.”

  “What sort of thing? You mean the you and Stavros sort of thing?”

  “Charlie is a mature man. He has lots of nieces and nephews so he’s very understanding with Nelson. This girl sounds like a little animal out of her head with dope.”

  “That’s how Billy described her?”

  “After she talked to Billy Peggy called up Ollie for a better description.”

  “And that was his description. Gee. They got along famously at the time. She was better-looking than those two old crows Ollie had along, I tell ya.”

  “Harry, you’re horrible. I consider this a very negative development. I suppose I have no right to say anything about how you dispose of your sexual needs, but I will not have my son corrupted.”

  “He’s not corrupted, she’s got him to help with the dishes, that’s more than we could ever do. She’s like a sister to him.”

  “And what is she to you, Harry?” When he is slow to answer, she repeats, her voice taunting, aching, like her mother’s, “Harry, what is she to you? A little wifey?”

  He thinks and tells her, “Come on back to the house, I’m sure she’ll go.”

  Now Janice thinks. Finally she states: “If I come back to the house, it’ll be to take Nelson away.”

  “Try it,” he says, and hangs up.

  He sits a minute in Pajasek’s chair to give the phone a chance to ring. It does. He picks it up. “Yeah?”

  Janice says, near tears, “Harry, I don’t like to tell you this, but if you’d been adequate I would never have left. You drove me to it. I didn’t know what I was missing but now that I have it I know. I refuse to accept all the blame, I really do.”

  “O.K. No blame assigned. Let’s keep in touch.”

  “I want that girl away from my son.”

  “They’re getting along fine, relax.”

  “I’ll sue you. I’ll take you to court.”

  “Fine. After the stunts you’ve been pulling, it’ll at least give the judge a laugh.”

  “That’s my house legally. At least half of it is.”

  “Tell me which my half is, and I’ll try to keep Jill in it.”

  Janice hangs up. Maybe using Jill’s name had hurt. He doesn’t wait for another ring this time, and leaves the cubicle of frosted glass. The trembling in his hands, which feel frightened and inflated, merges with the clatter of the machines; his body sweat is lost in the smell of oil and ink. He resettles himself at his Mergenthaler and garbles three lines before he can put her phone call in the back of his mind. He supposes Stavros can get her legal advice. But, far from feeling Stavros as one of the enemy camp, he counts on him to keep this madwoman, his wife, under control. Through her body, they have become brothers.

  Jill through the succession of nights adjusts Rabbit’s body to hers. He cannot overcome his fear of using her body as a woman’s – her cunt stings, is part of it; he never for
ces his way into her without remembering those razor blades – but she, beginning the damp-haired night after the boat ride, perfects ways with her fingers and mouth to bring him off. Small curdled puddles of his semen then appear on her skin, and though easily wiped away leave in his imagination a mark like an acid-burn on her shoulders, her throat, the small of her back; he has the vision of her entire slender fair flexible body being eventually covered with these invisible burns, like a napalmed child in the newspapers. And he, on his side, attempting with hands or mouth to reciprocate, is politely dissuaded, pushed away, reassured she has already come, serving him, or merely asked for the mute pressure of a thigh between hers and, after some few minutes during which he can detect no spasm of relief, thanked. The August nights are sticky and close; when they lie on their backs the ceiling of heavy air seems a foot above their faces. A car, loud on the soft tar and loose gravel, slides by. A mile away across the river a police siren bleats, a new sound, more frantic than the old rising and falling cry. Nelson turns on a light, makes water, flushes the toilet, turns out the light with a snap close to their ears. Had he been listening? Could he even be watching? Jill’s breath saws in her throat. She is asleep.

  He finds her when he comes back from work sitting and reading, sitting and sewing, sitting and playing Monopoly with Nelson. Her books are spooky: yoga, psychiatry, zen, plucked from racks at the Acme. Except to shop, she reluctantly goes outdoors, even at night. It is not so much that the police of several states are looking for her – they are looking as well for thousands like her – as that the light of common day, and the sights and streets that have been the food of Rabbit’s life, seem to nauseate her. They rarely watch television, since she leaves the room when they turn the set on, though when she’s in the kitchen he sometimes sneaks himself a dose of six-o’clock news. Instead, in the evenings, she and Nelson discuss God, beauty, meaning.

  “Whatever men make,” she says, “what they felt when they made it is there. If it was made to make money, it will smell of money. That’s why these houses are so ugly, all the corners they cut to make a profit are still in them. That’s why the cathedrals are so lovely; nobles and ladies in velvet and ermine dragged the stones up the ramps. Think of a painter. He stands in front of the canvas with a color on his brush. Whatever he feels when he makes the mark – if he’s tired or bored or happy and proud – will be there. The same color, but we’ll feel it. Like fingerprints. Like handwriting. Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.”

  “What’s the point?” Nelson asks.

  “The point is ecstasy,” she says. “Energy. Anything that is good is in ecstasy. The world is what God made and it doesn’t stink of money, it’s never tired, too much or too little, it’s always exactly full. The second after an earthquake, the stones are calm. Everywhere is play, even in thunder or an avalanche. Out on my father’s boat I used to look up at the stars and there seemed to be invisible strings between them, tuned absolutely right, playing thousands of notes I could almost hear.”

  “Why can’t we hear them?” Nelson asks.

  “Because our egos make us deaf. Our egos make us blind. Whenever we think about ourselves, it’s like putting a piece of dirt in our eye.”

  “There’s that thing in the Bible.”

  “That’s what He meant. Without our egos the universe would be absolutely clean, all the animals and rocks and spiders and moon-rocks and stars and grains of sand absolutely doing their thing, unself-consciously. The only consciousness would be God’s. Think of it, Nelson, like this: matter is the mirror of spirit. But it’s three-dimensional, like an enormous room, a ballroom. And inside it are these tiny other mirrors tilted this way and that and throwing the light back the wrong way. Because to the big face looking in, these little mirrors are just dark spots, where He can’t see Himself.”

  Rabbit is entranced to hear her going on like this. Her voice, laconic and dry normally, moves through her sentences as through a memorized recitation, pitched low, an underground murmur. She and Nelson are sitting on the floor with the Monopoly board between them, houses and hotels and money, the game has been going on for days. Neither gives any sign of knowing he has come into the room and is towering above them. Rabbit asks, “Why doesn’t He just do away with the spots then? I take it the spots are us.”

  Jill looks up, her face blank as a mirror in this instant. Remembering last night, he expects her to look burned around the mouth; it had been like filling a slippery narrow-mouthed pitcher from an uncontrollable faucet. She answers, “I’m not sure He’s noticed us yet. The cosmos is so large and our portion of it so small. So small and recent.”

  “Maybe we’ll do the erasing ourselves,” Rabbit offers helpfully. He wants to help, to hold his end up. Never too late for education. With Janice and old man Springer you could never have this kind of conversation.

  “There is that death-wish,” Jill concedes.

  Nelson will talk only to her. “Do you believe in life on other planets? I don’t.”

  “Why Nelson, how ungenerous of you! Why not?”

  “I don’t know, it’s silly to say –”

  “Say it.”

  “I was thinking, if there was life on other planets, they would have killed our moon men when they stepped out of the space ship. But they didn’t, so there isn’t.”

  “Don’t be dumb,” Rabbit says. “The moon is right down our block. We’re talking about life in systems millions of light years away.”

  “No, I think the moon was a good test,” Jill says. “If nobody bothered to defend it, it proves how little God is content with. Miles and miles of gray dust.”

  Nelson says, “One guy at school I know says there’s people on the moon but they’re smaller than atoms, so even when they grind the rocks up they won’t find them. He says they have whole cities and everything. We breathe them in through our nostrils and they make us think we see flying saucers. That’s what this one guy says.”

  “I myself,” Rabbit says, still offering, drawing upon an old Vat feature article he set, “have some hopes for the inside of Jupiter. It’s gas, you know, the surface we see. A couple of thousand miles down inside the skin there might be a mix of chemicals that could support a kind of life, something like fish.”

  “It’s your Puritan fear of waste makes you want that,” Jill tells him. “You think the other planets must be used for something, must be farmed. Why? Maybe the planets were put there just to teach men how to count up to seven.”

  “Why not just give us seven toes on each foot?”

  “A kid at school,” Nelson volunteers, “was born with an extra finger. The doctor cut it off but you can still see where it was.”

  “Also,” Jill says, “astronomy. Without the planets the night sky would have been one rigid thing, and we would never have guessed at the third dimension.”

  “Pretty thoughtful of God,” Rabbit says, “if we’re just some specks in His mirror.”

  Jill waves his point away blithely. “He does everything,” she says, “by the way. Not because it’s what He has to do.”

  She can be blithe. After he told her once she ought to go outdoors more, she went out and sunbathed in just her bikini underpants, on a blanket beside the barbecue, in the view of a dozen other houses. When a neighbor called up to complain, Jill justified herself, “My tits are so small, I thought they’d think I was a boy.” Then after Harry began giving her thirty dollars a week to shop with, she went and redeemed her Porsche from the police. Its garage parking fees had quadrupled the original fine. She gave her address as Vista Crescent and said she was staying the summer with her uncle. “It’s a nuisance,” she told Rabbit, “but Nelson ought to have a car around, at his age, it’s too humiliating not to. Everybody in America has a car except you.” So the Porsche came to live by their curb. Its white is dusty and the passenger-side front fender is scraped and one convertible top snap is broken. Nelson loves it so much he nearly cries, finding it there each morning. H
e washes it. He reads the manual and rotates the tires. That crystalline week before school begins, Jill takes him for drives out into the country, into the farmland and the mountains of Brewer County; she is teaching him how to drive.

  Some days they return after Rabbit is home an hour from work. “Dad, it was a blast. We drove way up into this mountain that’s a hawk refuge and Jill let me take the wheel on the twisty road coming down, all the way to the highway. Have you ever heard of shifting down?”

  “I do it all the time.”

  “It’s when you go into a lower gear instead of braking. It feels neat. Jill’s Porsche has about five gears and you can really zoom around curves because the center of gravity is so low.”

  Rabbit asks Jill, “You sure you’re handling this right? The kid might kill somebody. I don’t want to be sued.”

  “He’s very competent. And responsible. He must get that from you. I used to stay in the driver’s seat and let him just steer but that’s more dangerous than giving him control. The mountain was really quite deserted.”

  “Except for hawks, Dad. They sit on all these pine trees waiting for the guys to put out whole carcasses of cows and things. It’s really grungy.”

  “Well,” Rabbit says, “hawks got to live too.”

  “That’s what I keep telling him,” Jill says. “God is in the tiger as well as in the lamb.”

  “Yeah. God really likes to chew himself up.”

  “You know what you are?” Jill asks, her eyes the green of a meadow, her hair a finespun cedar-colored tangle dissolving into windowlight; a captured idea is fluttering in her head. “You are cynical.”

  “Just middle-aged. Somebody came up to me and said, ‘I’m God,’ I’d say, ‘Show me your badge.’ ”

  Jill dances forward, on fire with some fun and wickedness the day has left in her, and gives him a hug that dances off, a butterfly hug. “I think you’re beautiful. Nelson and I both think so. We often talk about it.”