Rabbit Redux

by John Updike

  “Drowsy? Nervous? Taking naps at odd times? What do they do all day while you’re playing hunt and peck? They must do something, fella.”

  “She teaches him how to be polite to scum. Fella. Let me pay for your water.”

  “So what have I learned?”

  “I hope nothing.”

  But Stavros has sneaked in for that lay-up and the game is in overtime. Rabbit hurries to get home, to see Nelson and Jill, to sniff their breaths, look at their pupils, whatever. He has left his lamb with a viper. But outside the Phoenix, in the hazed sunshine held at its September tilt, traffic is snarled, and the buses are caught along with everything else. A movie is being made. Rabbit remembers it mentioned in the Vat (BREWER MIDDLE AMERICA? Gotham Filmmakers Think So) that Brewer had been chosen for a location by some new independent outfit; none of the stars’ names meant anything to him, he forgot the details. Here they are. An arc of cars and trucks mounted with lights extends halfway into Weiser Street, and a crowd of locals with rolled-up shirtsleeves and bag-lugging grannies and Negro delinquents straggles into the rest of the street to get a closer look, cutting down traffic to one creeping lane. The cops that should be unsnarling the tangle are ringing the show, protecting the moviemakers. So tall, Rabbit gets a glimpse from a curb. One of the boarded-up stores near the old Baghdad that used to show M-G-M but now is given over to skin flicks (Sepia Follies, Honeymoon in Swapland) has been done up as a restaurant front; a tall salmon-faced man with taffy hair and a little bronze-haired trick emerge from this pretend-restaurant arm in arm and there is some incident involving a passerby, another painted actor who emerges from the crowd of dusty real people watching, a bumping-into, followed by laughter on the part of the first man and the woman and a slow resuming look that will probably signal when the film is all cut and projected that they are going to fuck. They do this several times. Between takes everybody waits, wisecracks, adjusts lights and wires. The girl, from Rabbit’s distance, is impossibly precise: her eyes flash, her hair hurls reflections like a helmet. Even her dress scintillates. When someone, a director or electrician, stands near her, he looks dim. And it makes Rabbit feel dim, dim and guilty, to see how the spotlights carve from the sunlight a yet brighter day, a lurid pastel island of heightened reality around which the rest of us – technicians, policemen, the straggling fascinated spectators including himself – are penumbral ghosts, suppliants ignored.

  Local Excavations

  Unearth Antiquities

  As Brewer renews itself, it discovers more about itself.

  The large-scale demolition and reconstruction now taking place in the central city continues uncovering numerous artifacts of the “olden times” which yield interesting insights into our city’s past.

  An underground speakeasy complete with wall murals emerged to light during the creation of a parking lot at Ming the creation of a parking lot at Muriel and Greeley Streets.

  Old-timers remembered the hideaway as the haunt of “Gloves” Naugel and other Prohibition figures, as also the training-ground for musicians like “Red” Wenrich of sliding trombone fame who went on to become household names on a nationwide scale.

  Also old sign-boards are common. Ingeniously shaped in the forms of cows, beehives, boots, mortars, plows, they advertise “dry goods and notions,” leatherwork, drugs, and medicines, produce of infinite variety. Preserved underground, most are still easily legible and date from the nineteenth century.

  Amid the old fieldstone foundations, metal tools and grindstones come to light.

  Arrowheads are not uncommon.

  Dr. Klaus Schoerner, vice-president of the Brewer Historical Society, spent a

  At the coffee break, Buchanan struts up to Rabbit. “How’s little Jilly doing for you?”

  “She’s holding up.”

  “She worked out pretty fine for you, didn’t she?”

  “She’s a good girl. Mixed-up like kids are these days, but we’ve gotten used to her. My boy and me.”

  Buchanan smiles, his fine little mustache spreading an em, and sways a half-step closer. “Little Jill’s still keeping you company?”

  Rabbit shrugs, feeling pasty and nervous. He keeps giving hostages to fortune. “She has nowhere else to go.”

  “Yes, man, she must be working out real fine for you.” Still he doesn’t walk away, going out to the platform for his whisky. He stays and, still smiling but letting a pensive considerate shadow slowly subdue his face, says, “You know, friend Harry, what with Labor Day coming on, and the kids going back to school, and all this inflation you see everywhere, things get a bit short. In the financial end.”

  “How many children do you have?” Rabbit asks politely. Working with him all these years, he never thought Buchanan was married.

  The plump ash-gray man rocks back and forth on the balls of his feet. “Oh . . . say five, that’s been counted. They look to their daddy for support, and Labor Day finds him a little embarrassed. The cards just haven’t been falling for old Lester lately.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rabbit says. “Maybe you shouldn’t gamble.”

  “I am just tickled to death little Jilly’s worked out to fit your needs,” Buchanan says. “I was thinking, twenty would sure help me by Labor Day.”

  “Twenty dollars?”

  “That is all. It is miraculous, Harry, how far I’ve learned to make a little stretch. Twenty little dollars from a friend to a friend would sure make my holiday go easier all around. Like I say, seeing Jill worked out so good, you must be feeling pretty good. Pretty generous. A man in love, they say, is a friend to all.”

  But Rabbit has already fished out his wallet and found two tens. “This is just a loan,” he says, frightened, knowing he is lying, bothered by that sliding again, that sweet bladder running late to school. The doors will be shut, the principal Mr. Kleist always stands by the front doors, with their rattling chains and push bars rubbed down to the yellow of brass, to snare the tardy and clap them into his airless office, where the records are kept.

  “My children bless you,” Buchanan says, folding the bills away. “This will buy a world of pencils.”

  “Hey, whatever happened to Babe?” Rabbit asks. He finds, with his money in Buchanan’s pocket, he has new ease; he has bought rights of inquiry.

  Buchanan is caught off guard. “She’s still around. She’s still doing her thing as the young folks say.”

  “I wondered, you know, if you’d broken off connections.”

  Because he is short of money. Buchanan studies Rabbit’s face, to make certain he knows what he is implying. Pimp. He sees he does, and his mustache broadens. “You want to get into that nice Babe, is that it? Tired of white meat, want a drumstick? Harry, what would your Daddy say?”

  “I’m just asking how she was. I liked the way she played.”

  “She sure took a shine to you, I know. Come up to Jimbo’s some time, we’ll work something out.”

  “She said my knuckles were bad.” The bell rasps. Rabbit tries to gauge how soon the next touch will be made, how deep this man is into him; Buchanan sees this and playfully, jubilantly slaps the palm of the hand Rabbit had extended, thinking of his knuckles. The slap tingles. Skin.

  Buchanan says, “I like you, man,” and walks away. A plum-pudding-colored roll of fat trembles at the back of his neck. Poor diet, starch. Chitlins, grits.

  fascinating hour with the VAT reporter, chatting informally concerning Brewer’s easliest days as a trading post with er’s earliest days as a trading post with the Indian tribes along the Running Horse River.

  He showed us a pint of log huts

  He showed us a print of log huts etched when the primitive settlement bore the name of Greenwich, after Greenwich, England, home of the famed observatory.

  Also in Dr. Kleist’s collection were many fascinating photos of Weiser Street when it held a few rude shops and inns. The most famous of these inns was the Goose and Feathers, where George Washington and his retinue tarried one night on their way west to sup
press the Whisky Rebellion in 1720. suppress the Whisky Rebellion in 1799.

  The first iron mine in the vicinity was the well-known Oriole Furnace, seven miles south of the city. Dr. Kleist owns a collection of original slag and spoke enthusiastically about the methods whereby these early ironmakers produced a sufficiently powerful draft in

  Pajasek comes up behind him. “Angstrom. Telephone.” Pajasek is a small tired bald man whose bristling eyebrows increase the look of pressure about his head, as if his forehead is being pressed over his eyes, forming long horizontal folds. “You might tell the party after this you have a home number.”

  “Sony, Ed. It’s probably my crazy wife.”

  “Could you get her to be crazy on your private time?”

  Crossing from his machine to the relative quiet of the frosted-glass walls is like ascending through supportive water to the sudden vacuum of air. Instantly, he begins to struggle. “Janice, for Christ’s sake, I told you not to call me here. Call me at home.”

  “I don’t want to talk to your little answering service. Just the thought of her voice makes me go cold all over.”

  “Nelson usually answers the phone. She never answers it.”

  “I don’t want to hear her, or see her, or hear about her. I can’t describe to you, Harry, the disgust I feel at just the thought of that person.”

  “Have you been on the bottle again? You sound screwed-up.”

  “I am sober and sane. And satisfied, thank you. I want to know what you’re doing about Nelson’s back-to-school clothes. You realize he’s grown three inches this summer and nothing will fit.”

  “Did he, that’s terrific. Maybe he won’t be such a shrimp after all.”

  “He will be as big as my father and my father is no shrimp.”

  “Sorry, I always thought he was.”

  “Do you want me to hang up right now? Is that what you want?”

  “No, I just want you to call me someplace else than at work.”

  She hangs up. He waits in Pajasek’s wooden swivel chair, looking at the calendar, which hasn’t been turned yet though this is September, and the August calendar girl, who is holding two ice-cream cones so the scoops cover just where her nipples would be, one strawberry and one chocolate, Double Dips! being the caption, until the phone rings.

  “What were we saying?” he asks.

  “I must take Nelson shopping for school clothes.”

  “O.K., come around and pick him up any time. Set a day.”

  “I will not come near that house, Harry, as long as that girl is in it. I won’t even go near Penn Villas. I’m sorry, it’s an uncontrollable physical revulsion.”

  “Maybe you’re pregnant, if you’re so queasy. Have you and Chas been taking precautions?”

  “Harry, I don’t know you any more. I said to Charlie, I can’t believe I lived thirteen years with that man, it’s as if it never happened.”

  “Which reminds me, what shall we get Nelson for his birthday? He’s going to be thirteen this fall.”

  She begins to cry. “You never forgave me for that, did you? For getting pregnant.”

  “I did, I did. Relax. It worked out great. I’ll send Nelson over to your love next to go shopping. Name the day.”

  “Send him to the lot Saturday morning. I don’t like him coming to the apartment, it seems too terrible when he leaves.”

  “Does it have to be Saturday? There was some talk of Jill driving us both down to Valley Forge; the kid and I’ve never seen it.”

  “Are you poking fun of me? Why do you think this is all so funny, Harry? This is life.”

  “I’m not, we were. Seriously.”

  “Well, tell her you can’t. You two send Nelson over. Only send him with some money, I don’t see why I should pay for his clothes.”

  “Buy everything at Kroll’s and charge it.”

  “Kroll’s has gone terribly downhill, you know it has. There’s a nice little new shop now up near Perley, past that submarine place that used to be Chinese.”

  “Open another charge account. Tell him you’re Springer Motors and offer a Toyota for security.”

  “Harry, you mustn’t be so hostile. You sent me off myself. You said, that night, I’ll never forget it, it was the shock of my life, ‘See him if you want to, just so I don’t have to see the bastard.’ Those were your words.”

  “Hey, that reminds me, I did see him the other day.”

  “Who?”

  “Chas. Your dark and swarthy lover.”

  “How?”

  “He ambushed me after work. Waiting in the alley with a dagger. Oog, I said, you got me, you Commie rat.”

  “What did he want?”

  “Oh, to talk about you.”

  “What about me? Harry, are you lying, I can’t tell any more. What about me?”

  “Whether or not you were happy.”

  She makes no comeback, so he goes on, “We concluded you were.”

  “Right,” Janice says, and hangs up.

  the days before the Bessemer furnace.

  Old faded photographs of Weiser Street show a prosperous-appearing avenue of tasteful, low brick buildings with horsedrawn trolly tracks promi- with horse-drown trolley traks prami- with horsed-rawn trolleyyyfff etaoin etaoinshrdlu etaoinshrdlucmfwpvbgkqjet

  * * *

  He asks her, “What did you and the kid do today?”

  “Oh, nothing much. Hung around the house in the morning, took a drive in the afternoon.”

  “Where to?”

  “Up to Mt. Judge.”

  “The town?”

  “The mountain. We had a Coke in the Pinnacle Hotel and watched a softball game in the park for a while.”

  “Tell me the truth. Do you have the kid smoking pot?”

  “Whatever gave you that idea?”

  “He’s awfully fascinated with you, and I figure it’s either pot or sex.”

  “Or the car. Or the fact that I treat him like a human being instead of a failed little athlete because he’s not six feet six. Nelson is a very intelligent sensitive child who is very upset by his mother leaving.”

  “I know he’s intelligent, thanks, I’ve known the kid for years.”

  “Harry, do you want me to leave, is that it? I will if that’s what you want. I could go back to Babe except she’s having a rough time.”

  “What kind of rough time?”

  “She’s been busted for possession. The pigs came into the Jimbo the other night and took about ten away, including her and Skeeter. She says they asked for a bigger payoff and the owner balked. The owner is white, by the way.”

  “So you’re still in touch with that crowd.”

  “You don’t want me to be?”

  “Suit yourself. It’s your life to fuck up.”

  “Somebody’s been bugging you, haven’t they?”

  “Several people.”

  “Do whatever you want to with me, Harry. I can’t be anything in your real life.”

  She is standing before him in the living room, in her cutoff jeans and peasant blouse, her hands held at her sides slightly lifted and open, like a servant waiting for a tray. Her fingers are red from washing his dishes. Moved to gallantry, he confesses, “I need your sweet mouth and your pearly ass.”

  “I think they’re beginning to bore you.”

  He reads this in reverse: he bores her. Always did. He attacks: “O.K., what about sex, with you and the kid?”

  She looks away. She has a long nose and long chin, and that dry moth mouth that he feels, seeing it in repose, when she is not watching him, as absentmindedly disdainful, as above him and wanting to flutter still higher. Summer has put only a few freckles on her, and these mostly on her forehead, which bulges gently as a milk pitcher. Her hair is twisty from being so much in those little tiny braids hippies make. “He likes me,” she answers, except it is no answer.

  He tells her. “We can’t do that trip to Valley Forge tomorrow. Janice wants Nelson to go shopping with her for school clothes, and I
should go see my mother. You can drive me if you want, or I can take the bus.”

  He thinks he is being obliging, but she gives him her rich-girl sneer and says, “You remind me of my mother sometimes. She thought she owned me too.”

  Saturday morning, she is gone. But her clothes still hang like rags in the closet. Downstairs on the kitchen table lies a note in green magic marker: Out all day. Will drop Nelson at the lot. . So he takes the two bus rides all the way across Brewer. The lawns in Mt. Judge, patches of grass between cement walks, are burned; spatterings of leaves here and there in the maples are already turned gold. There is that scent in the air, of going back to school, of beginning again and reconfirming the order that exists. He wants to feel good, he always used to feel good at every turning of the year, every vacation or end of vacation, every new sheet on the calendar: but his adult life has proved to have no seasons, only changes of weather, and the older he gets, the less weather interests him.

  The house next to his old house still has the FOR SALE sign up. He tries his front door but it is locked; he rings, and after a prolonged shuffle and rumble within Pop comes to the door. Rabbit asks, “What’s this locked door business?”

  “Sorry, Harry, there’ve been so many burglaries in town lately. We had no idea you were coming.”

  “Didn’t I promise?”

  “You’ve promised before. Not that your mother and I can blame you, we know your life is difficult these days.”

  “It’s not so difficult. In some ways it’s easier. She upstairs?”

  Pop nods. “She’s rarely down anymore.”

  “I thought this new stuff was working.”

  “It does in a way, but she’s so depressed she lacks the will. Nine-tenths of life is will, my father used to say it, and the longer I live the more I see how right he was.”

  The disinfected scent of the house is still oppressive, but Harry goes up the stairs two at a time; Jill’s disappearance has left him vigorous with anger. He bursts into the sickroom, saying, “Mom, tell me your dreams.”

  She has lost weight. The bones have shed all but the minimum connective tissue; her face is strained over the bones with an expression of far-seeing, expectant sweetness. Her voice emerges from this apparition more strongly than before, with less hesitation between words.