Rabbit Is Rich

by John Updike

  “How’d you dig Melanie last night?” He tries to keep the smirk out of his voice.

  “Nice girl.” Charlie keeps his pencil moving. “Very straight.”

  Harry’s voice rises indignantly. “What’s straight about her? She’s kooky as a bluebird, for all I can see.”

  “Not so, champ. Very level head. She’s one of those women you worry about, that they see it all so clearly they’ll never let themselves go.”

  “You’re telling me she didn’t let herself go with you.”

  “I didn’t expect her to. At my age - who needs it?”

  “You’re younger than I am.”

  “Not at heart. You’re still learning.”

  It is as when he was a boy in grade school, and there seemed to be a secret everywhere, flickering up and down the aisles, bouncing around like the playground ball at recess, and he could not get his hands on it, the girls were keeping it from him, they were too quick. “She mention Nelson?”

  “A fair amount.”

  “Whatcha think is going on between them?”

  “I think they’re just buddies.”

  “You don’t think anymore they got to be fucking?”

  Charlie gives up, slapping his desk and pushing back from his paperwork. “Hell, I don’t know how these kids have it organized. In our day if you weren’t fucking you’d move on. With them it may be different. They don’t want to be killers like we were. If they are fucking, from the way she talks about him it has about the charge of cuddling a teddy bear before you go to sleep.”

  “She sees him that way, huh? Childish.”

  “Vulnerable is the way she’d put it.”

  Harry offers, “There’s some piece missing here. Janice was dropping hints last night.”

  Stavros delicately shrugs. “Maybe it’s back in Colorado. The piece.”

  “Did she say anything specific?”

  Stavros ponders before answering, pushing up his amber glasses with a forefinger and then resting that finger on the bridge of his nose. “No.”

  Harry tries outright grievance. “I can’t figure out what the kid wants.”

  “He wants to get started at the real world. I think he wants in around here.”

  “I know he wants in, and I don’t want him in. He makes me uncomfortable. With that sorehead look of his he couldn’t sell -“

  “Coke in the Sahara,” Charlie finishes for him. “Be that as it may, he’s Fred Springer’s grandson. He’s engonaki.”

  “Yeah, both Janice and Bessie are pushing, you saw that the other night. They’re driving me wild. We have a nice symmetrical arrangement here, and how many cars’d we move in July?”

  Stavros checks a sheet of paper under his elbow. “Twentynine, would you believe. Thirteen used, sixteen new. Including three of those Celica GTs for ten grand each. I didn’t think it would go, not against all the little sports coming out of Detroit at half the price. Those Nips, they know their market research.”

  “So to hell with Nelson. There’s only one month left in the summer anyway. Why screw Jake and Rudy out of sales commission just to accommodate a kid too spoiled to take a job in the shop? He wouldn’t even have had to dirty his hands, we could have put him in Parts.”

  Stavros says, “You could put him on straight salary here on the floor. I’d take him under my wing.”

  Charlie doesn’t seem to realize he is the one to get pushed out. You try to defend somebody and he undermines you while you’re doing it. But Charlie sees the problem after all; he expresses it: “Look. You’re the son-in-law, you can’t be touched. But me, the old lady is my connection here, and it’s sentimental at that, she likes me because I remind her of Fred, of the old days. Sentiment doesn’t beat out blood. I’m in no position to hang tough. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Furthermore I think I can talk to the kid, do something for him. Don’t worry, he’ll never stick in this business, he’s too twitchy. He’s too much like his old man.”

  “I see no resemblance,” Harry says, though pleased.

  “You wouldn’t. I don’t know, it seems to be hard these days, being a father. When I was a kid it seemed simple. Tell the kid what to do and if he doesn’t do it sock him one. Here’s my thought. When you and Jan and the old lady are taking your weeks in the Poconos, has Nelson been planning to come along?”

  “They’ve asked him, but he didn’t seem too enthusiastic. As a kid he was always lonely up there. Jesus, it’d be hell, in that little space. Even around the house every time you come into a room it seems he’s sitting there with a beer.”

  “Right. Well how about buying him a suit and tie and letting him come in here? Give him the minimum wage, no commission and no draw. He wouldn’t be getting on your nerves, or you on his.”

  “How could I be getting on his nerves? He walks all over me. He takes the car all the time and tries to make me feel guilty besides.”

  Charlie doesn’t dignify this with an answer; he knows too much of the story.

  Harry admits, “Well, it’s an idea. Then he’d be going back to college?”

  Charlie shrugs. “Let’s hope. Maybe you can make that part of the bargain.”

  Looking down upon the top of Charlie’s fragile wavy-haired skull, Rabbit cannot avoid awareness of his own belly, an extensive; suit-straining slope; he has become a person and a half, where the same years have pared Charlie’s shape, once stocky, bit by bit. He asks him, “You really want to do this for Nelson?”

  “I like the kid. To me, he’s just another basket case. At his age now they’re all basket cases.”

  A couple has parked out in the glare and is heading for the showroom doors, a well-dressed Penn Park sort of pair that will probably collect the literature and sneak off to buy a Mercedes, as an investment. “Well, it’s your funeral,” Harry tells Charlie. Actually it might be nice all around. Melanie wouldn’t be left alone in that big house all by herself. And it occurs to him that this all may be Melanie’s idea, and Charlie’s way of keeping his move on her alive.

  In bed Melanie asks Nelson, “What are you learning?”

  “Oh, stuff.” They have decided upon her bed in the front room for these weeks when the old people are in the Poconos. Melanie in the month and more of her tenancy here has gradually moved the headless dress dummy to a comer and hidden some of the Springers’ other ugly possessions - slid some rolled-up hall carpeting beneath the bed, tucked a trunkful of old curtains and a broken foot-pedalled Singer into the back of the closet, already crammed with outgrown and outmoded clothes in polyethylene cleaner bags. She has Scotch-taped a few Peter Max posters to the walls and made the room her own. They have used Nelson’s room up to now, but his childhood bed is single and in truth he feels inhibited there. They had not intended to sleep together at all in this house but out of their long and necessary conversations it had been inevitable they sink into it. Melanie’s breasts are indeed, as Charlie had noticed at a glance, large; their laden warm sway sometimes sickens Nelson, reminding him of a more shallowbreasted other, whom he has abandoned. He elaborates: “Lots of things. There’s all these pressures that don’t show, like between the agency and the manufacturer. You got to buy sets of their special tools, for thousands of dollars, and they keep loading their base models with what used to be extras, where the dealer used to make a lot of his profit. Charlie told me a radio used to cost the dealer about thirty-five dollars and he’d add about one-eighty on to the sales price. See then by the manufacturer getting greedy and taking these options away from the dealer the dealers have to think up more gimmicks. Like undercoating. And rustproofing. There’s even a treatment they’ll give the vinyl upholstery to keep it from wearing supposedly. All that stuff. It’s all cutthroat but kind ofjolly at the same time, all these little pep talks people keep giving each other. My grandfather used to have a performance board but Dad’s let it drop. You can tell Charlie thinks Dad’s really lazy and sloppy the way he runs things.”

  She pushes herself more upright in the bed, her bre
asts sluggish and luminous in the half-light the maples filter from the sodium lamps on Joseph Street. There is that something heavy and maternal and mystical in her he cannot escape. “Charlie’s asked me out on another date,” she says.

  “Go,” Nelson advises, enjoying the altered feeling of the bed, Melanie’s lifting her torso above him deepening the rumpled trough in which he lies. When he was a little child and Mom and Dad were living in that apartment high on Wilbur Street and they would come visit here he would be put to bed in this very room, his grandmother’s hair all black then but the patterns of light carved on the ceiling by the window mullions just the same as they are now. Mom-mom would sing him songs, he remembers, but he can’t remember what they were. In Pennsylvania Dutch, some of them. Reide, reide, Geile … .

  Melanie pulls a hairpin from the back of her head and fishes with it in the ashtray for a dead roach that may have a hit or two left in it. She holds it to her red lips and lights it; the paper flares. When she lifted her arm to pull the hairpin, the hair in her armpit, unshaved, has flared in Nelson’s field of vision. Despite himself, to no purpose, his prick with little knocks of blood begins to harden down in the trough of childish warmth. “I don’t know,” Melanie says. “I think with them away, he’s psyched to score.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  “Not so great.”

  “He’s a pretty nice guy,” Nelson says, snuggling deeper beside her abstracted body, enjoying the furtive growth of his erection. “Even if he did screw Mom.”

  “Suppose it kills him, how would I feel then? I mean, one of the reasons for my coming with you was to clean my head of all this father-figure shit.”

  “You came along because Pru told you to.” Saying the other’s name is delicious, a cool stab in the warmth. “So I wouldn’t get away.”

  “Well, yeah, but I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t had reasons of my own. I’m glad I came. I like it here. It’s like America used to be. All these brick houses built so solid, one against the other.”

  “I hate it. Everything’s so humid and stuffy and, so closed.”

  “You really feel that Nelson?” He likes it when she kind of purrs his name. “I thought you acted frightened, in Colorado. There was too much space. Or maybe it was the situation.”

  Nelson loses Colorado in awareness of his erection, like a piece of round-ended ridged ivory down there, and of the womanly thick cords in her throat swelling as she sucks one last hit from the tiny butt held tight against her painted lips. Melanie always wears makeup, lipstick and touches of red to her cheeks to make her complexion less olive, where Pru never wore any, her lips pale as her brow, and everything about her face precise and dry as a photograph. Pru: the thought of her is a gnawing in his stomach, like somebody rolling a marble around over grits of sand. He says, “Maybe what I mind about around here is Dad.” At the thought of Dad the abrasion intensifies. “I can’t stand him, the way he sits there in the living room hogging the Barcalounger. He” - he can hardly find words, the discomfort is so great - “just sits there in the middle of the whole fucking world, taking and taking. He doesn’t know anything the way Charlie does. What did he ever do, to build up the lot? My granddad was grubbing his way up while my father wasn’t doing anything but being a lousy husband to my mother. That’s all he’s done to deserve all this money: be too lazy and shiftless to leave my mother like he wanted to. I think he’s queer. You should have seen him with this black guy I told you about.”

  “You loved your granddad, didn’t you Nelson?” When she’s high on pot her voice gets husky and kind of trancy, like one of these oracles sitting over her tripod they talked about in anthro at Kent. Kent: more sand rubbing in his stomach.

  “He liked me,” Nelson insists, writhing a little and noticing with his hand that his erection has slightly wilted, possessing no longer the purity of ivory but the compromised texture of flesh and blood. “He wasn’t always criticizing me because I wasn’t some great shakes athlete and ten feet tall.”

  “I’ve never heard your father criticize you,” she says, “except when you cracked up his car.”

  “Goddam it I didn’t crack it up, I just dented the bastard and he’s going through this whole big deal, weeks in the body shop while I’m supposed to feel guilty or inept or something. And there was an animal in the road, some little thing I don’t know what it was, a woodchuck, I would have seen the stripes if it had been a skunk, I don’t know why they don’t make these dumb animals with longer legs, it waddled. Right into the headlights. I wish I’d killed it. I wish I’d smashed up all Dad’s cars, the whole fucking inventory.”

  “This is really crazy talk Nelson,” Melanie says from within her amiable trance. “You need your father. We all need fathers. At least yours is where you can find him. He’s not a bad man.”

  “He is bad, really bad. He doesn’t know what’s up, and he doesn’t care, and he thinks he’s so great. That’s what gets me, his happiness. He is so fucking happy.” Nelson almost sobs. “You think of all the misery he’s caused. My little sister dead because of him and then this Jill he let die.”

  Melanie knows these stories. She says in a patient singsong, “You mustn’t forget the circumstances. Your father’s not God.” Her hand follows down inside the bedsheet where his has been exploring. She smiles. Her teeth are perfect. She’s had orthodontia, and poor Pru never did, her people were too poor, so she hates to smile, though the irregularity isn’t really that noticeable, just a dog tooth slightly overlapping on one side. “You’re feeling frustrated right now,” Melanie tells him, “because of your situation. But your situation is not your father’s fault.”

  “It is,” Nelson insists. “Everything’s his fault, it’s his fault I’m so fucked up, and he enjoys it, the way he looks at me sometimes, you can tell he’s really eating it up, that I’m fucked up. And then the way Mom waits on him, like he’s actually done something for her, instead of the other way around.”

  “Come on Nelson, let it go,” Melanie croons. “Forget everything for now. I’ll help you.” She flips down the sheet and turns her back. “Here’s my ass. I love being fucked from behind when I have a buzz on. It’s like I’m occupying two planes of being.”

  Melanie hardly ever tries to come when they make love, takes it for granted she is serving the baby male and not herself. With Pru, though, the woman was always trying, breathing “Wait” in his ear and squirming around with her pelvis for the right contact, and even when he couldn’t wait and failed, this was somehow more flattering. Remembering Pru this way he feels the nibble of guilt in the depths of his stomach take a sharper bite, like the moment in Jaws when the girl gets pulled under.

  Water. Rabbit distrusts the element though the little brown hourglass-shaped lake that laps the gritty beach in front of the Springers’ old cottage in the Poconos seems friendly and tame, and he swims in it every day, taking a dip before breakfast, before Janice is awake, and while Ma Springer in her quilty bathrobe fusses at the old oil stove to make the morning coffee. On weekdays when there aren’t so many people around he walks down across the coarse imported sand wrapped in a beach towel and, after a glance right and left at the cottages that flank theirs back in the pines, slips into the lake naked. What luxury! A chill silver embrace down and through his groin. Gnats circling near the surface shatter and reassemble as he splashes through them, cleaving the plane of liquid stillness, sending ripples right and left toward muddy rooty banks city blocks away. A film of mist sits visible on the skin of the lake if the hour is early enough. He was never an early-to-rise freak but sees the point of it now, you get into the day at the start, before it gets rolling, and roll with it. The film of mist tastes of evening chill, of unpolluted freshness in a world waking with him. As a kid Rabbit never went to summer camps, maybe Nelson is right they were too poor, it never occurred to them. The hot cracked sidewalks and dusty playground of Mt. Judge were summer enough, and the few trips to the Jersey Shore his parents organized stick up in his reme
mbrance as almost torture, the hours on poky roads in the old Model A and then the mudbrown Chevy, his sister and mother adding to the heat the vapors of female exasperation, Pop dogged at the wheel, the back of his neck sweaty and scrawny and freckled while the flat little towns of New Jersey threw back at Harry distorted echoes of his own town, his own life, for which he was homesick after an hour. Town after town numbingly demonstrated to him that his life was a paltry thing, roughly duplicated by the millions in settings where houses and porches and trees mocking those in Mt. Judge fed the illusions of other little boys that their souls were central and important and invisibly cherished. He would look at the little girls on the sidewalks they drove alongside wondering which of them he would marry, for his idea of destiny was to move away and marry a girl from another town. The traffic as they neared the Shore became thicker, savage, metropolitan. Cars, he has always found cars, their glitter, their exhalations, cruel. Then at last arriving in a burst of indignities - the parking lot full, the bathhouse attendant rude - they would enter upon a few stilted hours on the alien beach whose dry sand burned the feet and scratched in the crotch and whose wet ribs where the sea had receded had a deadly bottomless smell, a smell of vast death. Every found shell had this frightening faint stink. His parents in bathing suits alarmed him. His mother didn’t look obscenely fat like some of the other mothers but bony and long and hard, and as she stood to call him or little Mim back from the suspect crowds of strangers or the dangerous rumor of undertow her arms seemed to be flapping like featherless wings. Not Rabbit then, he would be called as “Hassy! Hassy!” And his father’s skin where the workclothes always covered it seemed so tenderly white. He loved his father for having such whiteness upon him, secretly, a kind of treasure; in the bathhouse he and Pop changed together rapidly, not looking at one another, and at the end of the day changed again. The ride back to Diamond County was always long enough for the sunburn to start hurting. He and Mim would start slapping each other just to hear the other yell and to relieve the boredom of this wasted day that could have been spent among the fertile intrigues and perfected connections of the Mt. Judge playground.