Rabbit Is Rich

by John Updike

  “Are you satisfied with the job Charlie does for you?”

  “Absolutely. He knows the ropes better than I do. He knows half the county.”

  “Yeah, but his health. How much energy you think he has?”

  The question has a certain collegiate tilt to it. He hasn’t asked Nelson enough about college, maybe that’s the way through to him. All these women around, it’s too easy for Nelson to hide. “Energy? He has to watch himself and take it easy, but he gets the job done. People don’t like to be hustled these days, there was too much of that, the way the car business used to be. I think a salesman who’s a little - what’s the word? - laid back, people trust more. I don’t mind Charlie’s style.” He wonders if Melanie does. Where are they, in some restaurant? He pictures her face, brighteyed almost like a thyroid bulge and her cheeks that look always rouged, rosy with exertion even before she bought the Fuji, her young face dense and smooth as she smiles and keeps smiling opposite old Charlie’s classic con-man’s profile, as he puts his move on her. And then later that business down below, his thick cock that blue-brown of Mediterranean types and, he wonders if her hair there is as curly as the hair on her head, in and out, he can’t believe it will happen, while the rest of them sit here listening to the rain.

  Nelson is saying, “I was wondering if something couldn’t be done with convertibles.” A heavy shamed diffidence thickens his words so they seem to drop one by one from his face, downturned where he sits in the tired gray sofa with his muskrat cut.

  “Convertibles? How?”

  “You know, Dad, don’t make me say it. Buy ‘em and sell ‘em. Detroit doesn’t make ‘em anymore, so the old ones are more and more valuable. You could get more than you paid for Mom’s Mustang.”

  “If you don’t wreck it first.”

  This reminder has the effect Rabbit wants. “Shit,” the boy exclaims, defenseless, darting looks at every comer of the ceiling looking for the escape hatch, “I didn’t wreck your damn precious Corona, I just gave it a little dent.”

  “It’s still in the shop. Some dent.”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose, Christ, Dad, you act like it was some divine chariot or something. You’ve gotten so uptight in your old age.”

  “Have I?” He asks sincerely, thinking this might be information.

  “Yes. All you think about is money and things.”

  “That’s not good, is it?”

  “No.”

  “You’re right. Let’s forget about the car. Tell me about college.” “It’s yukky,” is the prompt response. “It’s Dullsville. People think because of that shooting ten years ago it’s some great radical place but the fact is most of the kids are Ohio locals whose idea of a terrific time is drinking beer till they throw up and having shaving cream fights in the dorms. Most of ‘em are going to go into their father’s business anyway, they don’t care.”

  Harry ignores this, asking, “You ever have reason to go over to the big Firestone plant? I keep reading in the paper where they kept making those steel-belted radial five hundreds even after they kept blowing up on everybody.”

  “Typical,” the boy tells him. “All the products you buy are like that. All the American products.”

  “We used to be the best,” Harry says, staring into the distance as if toward a land where he and Nelson can perfectly agree.

  “So I’m told.” The boy looks downward into his book.

  “Nelson, about work. I told your mother we’d make a summer job for you over there on wash-up and maintenance. You’d learn a lot, just watching Manny and the boys.”

  “Dad, I’m too old for wash-up. And maybe I need more than a summer job.”

  “Are you trying to tell me you’d drop out of college with one lousy year to go?”

  His voice has grown loud and the boy looks alarmed. He stares at his father open-mouthed, the dark ajar spot making with his two eyesockets three holes, in a hollow face. The rain drums on the porch roof spout. Janice and her mother come down from The Waltons weeping. Janice wipes at her eyes with her fingers and laughs. “It’s so stupid, to get carried away. It was in People how all the actors couldn’t stand each other, that’s what broke up the show.”

  “Well, they have lots of reruns,” Ma Springer says, dropping onto the gray sofa beside Nelson, as if this little trip downstairs has been all her legs can bear. “I’d seen that one before, but still they get to you.”

  Harry announces, “The kid here says he may not go back to Kent.”

  Janice had been about to walk into the kitchen for a touch of Campari but freezes, standing. She is wearing just her short seethrough nightie over underpants in the heat. “You knew that, Harry,” she says.

  Red bikini underpants, he notices, that show through as dusty pink. At the height of the heat wave last week she got her hair cut in Brewer by a man Doris Kaufinann goes to. He exposed the back of her neck and gave her bangs; Harry isn’t used to them yet, it’s as if a strange woman was slouching around here nearly naked. He almost shouts, “The hell I did. After all the money we’ve put into his education?”

  “Well,” Janice says, swinging so her body taps the nightie from within, “maybe he’s got what he can out of it.”

  “I don’t get all this. There’s something fishy going on. The kid comes home with no explanation and his girlfriend goes out with Charlie Stavros while he sits here hinting to me I should can Charlie so I can hire him instead.”

  “Well,” Ma Springer pronounces peacefully, “Nelson’s of an age. Fred made space for you, Harry, and I know if he was here he’d make space for Nelson.”

  In on the dining-room sideboard, dead Fred Springer listens to the rain, misty-eyed.

  “Not at the top he wouldn’t,” Harry says. “Not to somebody who quits college a few lousy credits short of graduating.”

  “Well Harry,” Ma Springer says, as calm and mellow as if the TV show had been a pipe of pot, “some would have said you weren’t so promising when Fred took you on. More than one person advised him against it.”

  Out in the country, under the ground, old Farmer Byer mourns his fleet of school buses, rotting in the rain.

  “I was a forty-year-old man who’d lost his job through no fault of his own. I sat and did Linotype as long as there was Linotype.”

  “You worked at your father’s trade,” Janice tells him, “and that’s what Nelson’s asking to do.”

  “Sure, sure,” Harry shouts, “when he gets out of college if that’s what he wants. Though frankly I’d hoped he’d want more. But what is the rush? What’d he come home for anyway? If I’d ever been so lucky at his age to get to a state like Colorado I’d sure as hell have stayed at least the summer.”

  Sexier than she can know, Janice drags on a cigarette. “Why don’t you want your own son home?”

  “He’s too big to be home! What’s he running from?” From the look on their faces he may have hit on something, he doesn’t know what. He’s not sure he wants to know what. In the silence that answers him he listens again to the downpour, an incessant presence at the edge of their lamplight domain, gentle, insistent, unstoppable, a million small missiles striking home and running in rivulets from the face of things. Skeeter, Jill, and the Kent State Four are out there somewhere, bone dry.

  “Forget it,” Nelson says, standing up. “I don’t want any job with this creep.”

  “What’s he so hostile for?” Harry beseeches the women. “All I’ve said was I don’t see why we should fire Charlie so the kid can peddle convertibles. In time, sure. In 1980, even. Take over, young America. Eat me up. But one thing at a time, Jesus. There’s tons of time.”

  “Is there?” Janice asks strangely. She does know something. Cunts always know something.

  He turns to her directly. “You. I’d think you’d be loyal to Charlie at least.”

  “More than to my own son?”

  “I’ll tell you this. I’ll tell you all this. If Charlie goes, I go.” He -struggles to stand, but the Barcalounge
r has a sticky grip.

  “Hip, hip hooray,” Nelson says, yanking his denim jacket from the clothes tree inside the front door and shrugging it on. He looks humpbacked and mean, a rat going out to be drowned.

  “Now he’s going out to wreck the Mustang.” Harry struggles to his feet and stands, taller than them all.

  Ma Springer slaps her knees with open palms. “Well this discussion has ruined my mood. I’m going to heat up water for a cup of tea, the damp has put the devil in my joints.”

  Janice says, “Harry, say goodnight to Nelson nicely.”

  He protests, “He hasn’t said goodnight nicely to me. I was down here trying to talk nicely to him about college and it was like pulling teeth. What’s everything such a secret for? I don’t even know what he’s majoring in now. First it was pre-med but the chemistry was too hard, then it was anthropology but there was too much to memorize, last I heard he’d switched to social science but it was too much bullshit.”

  “I’m majoring in geography,” Nelson admits, nervous by the door, tense to scuttle.

  “Geography! That’s something they teach in the third grade! I never heard of a grownup studying geography.”

  “Apparently it’s a great specialty out there,” Janice says.

  “Whadde they do all day, color maps?”

  “Mom, I got to split. Where’s your car keys?”

  “Look in my raincoat pocket.”

  Harry can’t stop getting after him. “Now remember the roads around here are slippery when wet,” he says. “If you get lost just call up your geography professor.”

  “Charlie’s taking Melanie out really bugs you, doesn’t it?” Nelson says to him.

  “Not at all. What bugs me is why it doesn’t bug you.”

  “I’m queer,” Nelson tells him.

  ` Janice, what have I done to this kid to deserve this?”

  She sighs. “Oh, I expect you know.”

  He is sick of these allusions to his tainted past. “I took care of him, didn’t I? While you were off screwing around who was it put his breakfast cereal on the table and got him off to school?”

  “My daddy did,” Nelson says in a bitter mincing voice.

  Janice intervenes. “Nellie, why don’t you go now if you’re going to go? Did you find the keys?”

  The child dangles them.

  “You’re committing automotive suicide,” Rabbit tells her. “This kid is a car killer.”

  “It was just a fucking dent,” Nelson cries to the ceiling, “and he’s going to make me suffer and suffer.” The door slams, having admitted a sharp gust of the aroma of the rain.

  “Now who else would like some tea?” Ma Springer calls from the kitchen. They go in to her. Moving from the stuffy overfurnished living room to the kitchen with its clean enamelled surfaces provides a brighter perspective on the world. “Harry, you shouldn’t be so hard on the boy,” his mother-in-law advises. “He has a lot on his mind.”

  “Like what?” he asks sharply.

  “Oh,” Ma says, still mellow, setting out plates of comfort, Walton-style, “the things young people do.”

  Janice has on underpants beneath her nightie but no bra and in the bright light her nipples show inside the cloth with their own pink color, darker, more toward wine. She is saying, “It’s a hard age. They seem to have so many choices and yet they don’t. They’ve been taught by television all their lives to want this and that and yet when they get to be twenty they find money isn’t so easy to come by after all. They don’t have the opportunities even we had.”

  This doesn’t sound like her. “Who have you been talking to?” Harry asks scornfully.

  Janice is harder to put down than formerly; she tidies her bangs with a fiddling raking motion of her fingers and answers, “Some of the girls at the club, their children have come home too and don’t know what to do with themselves. It even has a name now, the back-to-the-nest something.”

  “Syndrome,” he says; he is being brought round. He and Pop and Mom sometimes after Mim had been put to bed would settle like this around the kitchen table, with cereal or cocoa if not tea. He feels safe enough to sound plaintive. “If he’d just ask for help,” he says, “I’d try to give it. But he doesn’t ask. He wants to take without asking.”

  “And isn’t that just human nature,” Ma Springer says, in a -spruced-up voice. The tea tastes to her satisfaction and she adds as if to conclude, “There’s a lot of sweetness in Nelson, I think he’s just a little overwhelmed for now.”

  “Who isn’t?” Harry asks.

  In bed, perhaps it’s the rain that sexes him up, he insists they make love, though at first Janice is reluctant. “I would have taken a bath,” she says, but she smells great, deep jungle smell, of precious rotting mulch going down and down beneath the ferns. When he won’t stop, crazy to lose his face in this essence, the cool stem fury of it takes hold of her and combatively she comes, thrusting her hips up to grind her clitoris against his face and then letting him finish inside her beneath him. Lying spent and adrift he listens again to the rain’s sound, which now and then quickens to a metallic rhythm on the window glass, quicker than the throbbing in the iron gutter, where ropes of water twist.

  “I like having Nelson in the house,” Harry says to his wife. “It’s great to have an enemy. Sharpens your senses.”

  Murmurously beyond their windows, yet so close they might be in the cloud of it, the beech accepts, leaf upon leaf, shelves and stairs of continuous dripping, the rain.

  “Nelson’s not your enemy. He’s your boy and needs you more now than ever though he can’t say it.”

  Rain, the last proof left to him that God exists. “I feel,” he says, “there’s something I don’t know.”

  Janice admits, “There is.”

  “What is it?” Receiving no answer, he asks then, “How do you know it?”

  “Mother and Melanie talk.”

  “How bad is it? Drugs?”

  “Oh Harry no.” She has to hug him, his ignorance must make him seem so vulnerable. “Nothing like that. Nelson’s like you are, underneath. He likes to keep himself pure.”

  “Then what the fuck’s up? Why can’t I be told?”

  She hugs him again, and lightly laughs. “Because you’re not a Springer.”

  Long after she has fallen into the steady soft rasping of sleep he lies awake listening to the rain, not willing to let it go, this sound of life. You don’t have to be a Springer to have secrets. Blue eyes so pale in the light coming into the back seat of that Corolla. Janice’s taste is still on his lips and he thinks maybe it wouldn’t be such a good idea for Sealtest. Twice as he lies awake a car stops outside and the front door opens: the first time from the quietness of the motor and the lightness of the steps on the porch boards, Stavros dropping off Melanie; the next time, not many minutes later, the motor brutally raced before cut-off and the footsteps loud and defiant, must be Nelson, having had more beers than was good for him. From the acoustical quality surrounding the sounds of this second car Rabbit gathers that the rain is letting up. He listens for the young footsteps to come upstairs but one set seems to trap the other in the kitchen, Melanie having a snack. The thing about vegetarians, they seem always hungry. You eat and eat and it’s never the right food. Who told him that, once? Tothero, he seemed so old there at the end but how much older than Harry is now was he? Nelson and Melanie stay in the kitchen talking until the eavesdropper wearies and surrenders. In his dream, Harry is screaming at the boy over the telephone at the lot, but though his mouth is open so wide he can see all his own teeth spread open like in those dental charts they marked your cavities on that looked like a scream, no sound comes out; his jaws and eyes feel frozen open and when he awakes it seems it has been the morning sun, pouring in hungrily after the rain, that he has been aping.

  The display windows at Springer Motors have been recently washed and Harry stands staring through them with not a fleck of dust to show him he is not standing outdoors, in an airconditioned ou
tdoors, the world left rinsed and puddled by last night’s rain, with yet a touch of weariness in the green of the tree across Route 111 behind the Chuck Wagon, a dead or yellow leaf here and there, at the tips of the crowded branches that are dying. The traffic this weekday flourishes. Carter keeps talking about a windfall tax on the oil companies’ enormous profits but that won’t happen, Harry feels. Carter is smart as a whip and prays a great deal but his gift seems to be the old Eisenhower one of keeping much from happening, just a little daily seepage.

  Charlie is with a young black couple wrapping up the sale of a trade-in, unloading a ‘73 Buick eight-cylinder two-tone for three K on good folks too far behind in the rat race to know times have changed, we’re running out of gas, the smart money is into foreign imports with sewing-machine motors. They even got dressed up for the occasion, the wife wears a lavender suit with the skirt old-fashionedly short, her calves hard and high up on her skinny bow legs. They really aren’t shaped like we are; Skeeter used to say they were the latest design. Her ass is high and hard along the same lines as her calves as she revolves gleefully around the garish old Buick, in the drench of sunshine, on the asphalt still wet and gleaming. A pretty sight, out of the past. Still it does not dispel the sour unease in Harry’s stomach after his short night’s sleep. Charlie says something that doubles them both up laughing and then they drive the clunker off. Charlie comes back to his desk in a corner of the cool showroom and Harry approaches him there.