Rabbit Is Rich

by John Updike

  “He is one smooth old Polack,” Ollie says, uneasy at this outburst by his wife. He is into cool, you can see. Music, dope. Just on the fringes, but enough to give you the pitch.

  “He sure can kiss those nigger babies,” Ronnie Harrison comes in with, maybe trying to help. It’s fascinating to Rabbit how long those strands of hair are Ronnie is combing over his bald spot these days, if you pulled one the other way it would go below his ear. In this day and age why fight it? There’s a bald look, go for it. Blank and pink and curved, like an ass. Everybody loves an ass. Those wax bullets in the yellow box - could they have been for Cindy? Sore there from, but would Webb? Harry has read somewhere that male homosexuals have a lot of trouble with hemorrhoids. Amazing the things they try to put up - fists, light bulbs. He squirms on his cushion.

  “I think he’s very sexy,” Thelma Harrison states. Everything she says sounds like a schoolteacher, enunciated. He looks at her through the enhancing lens of liquor: thin lips and that unhealthy yellowy color. Harry can hardly ever look at her without seeing Ronnie’s prick, flat like a board on the upper side it’s so thick. “He is a beautiful man,” Thelma insists. Her eyes are half-shut. She’s had a glass or two too many herself. Her throat rises absolutely straight, like a person trying not to hiccup. He has to look down the front ofher dress, velvet that mousy blue of old movie seats, the way she’s holding herself. Nothing much there. That little stocky guy in white with all those gold buttons and different funny hats, to see him as sexy you’d have to be a nun. Ronnie is stocky like that, actually. She likes thick men. He looks down the front of her dress again. Maybe more there than you’d think.

  Janice is saying, she has known Peggy for ages and is trying to save her from herself, “What I liked today, I don’t know if you were watching, Peggy, was when he came out on the balcony of that cathedral in Washington, before he went to the White House, to this crowd that was shouting, `We want the Pope, we want the Pope,’ and he came out on the balcony waving and shouted, `John Paul Two, he wants you!’ Actually.”

  “Actually” because the men had laughed, it was news to them. Three of them had been out on the Flying Eagle course today, summer had made one last loop back to Diamond County, bringing out fat buds on the magnolias by the sixth tee. Their fourth had been the young assistant pro, the same kid who had shot a 73 the day Nelson got married. He hits a long ball, Webb was right, but Harry doesn’t like his swing: too wristy. Give him a few years around his waist he’ll be hooking everything. Buddy Inglefinger had been dropped, lately; his golf was a drag and the wives didn’t like his tarty girlfriends. But Ollie Fosnacht is no substitute. The only thing he plays is the synthesizer, and his sloppy wife won’t stop blabbering.

  “I’d like to find it amusing,” Peggy says, hoisting her voice above the laughter, “but to me the issues he’s trampling on are too damn serious.”

  Cindy Murkett unexpectedly speaks. “He’s been a priest in a Communist country; he’s used to taking a stand. What is it that offends you, Peggy, if you’re not a Catholic and don’t have to listen?”

  A hush has surrounded her words because they all except the Fosnachts know that she was Catholic until she married Webb. Peggy senses this now but like a white sad heifer having charged in one direction cannot turn herself around. “You’re Catholic?” she bluntly asks.

  Cindy tips her chin up, not used to this kind of spotlight, the baby of their group. “I was raised as one,” she says.

  “So was my daughter-in-law, it turns out,” Harry volunteers. He is amused by the idea of his having a daughter-in-law at all, a new branch of his wealth. And he hopes to be distracting. He hates to see women fight, he’d be happy to get these two off the spot. Cindy comes up from that swimming pool like a wet dream, and Peggy was kind enough to lay him when he was down.

  But no one is distracted. “When I married a divorced man,” Cindy explains levelly to the other woman, “I couldn’t take communion anymore. But I still go to Mass sometimes. I still believe.” Her voice softens saying this, for she is the hostess, younger though she is.

  “And do you use birth control?” Peggy asks.

  Back to nowhere, Fosnachts. Harry is just as pleased; he liked his little crowd the way it was.

  Cindy hesitates. She can go all girlish and slide and giggle away from the question, or she can sit still and get dignified. With just the smallest of dignified smiles she says, “I’m not sure that’s any of your business.”

  “Nor the Pope’s either, that’s my point!” Peggy sounds triumphant, but even she must be feeling the battle slipping away. She will not be invited here again.

  Webb, always the gentleman, perches on the arm of the easy chair in which cumbersome Peggy has set herself up as anti-Pope and leans down a deft inch to say to his guest alone, “I think Cindy’s point, as I understand it, is that John Paul is addressing the doctrinal issues for his fellow Catholics while bringing good will to every American.”

  “He can keep his good will along with the doctrine as far as -I’m concerned,” Peggy says, trying to shut up but unable. Rabbit remembers how her nipples had felt like gumdrops and how sad her having gotten good at screwing since Ollie left her had seemed to him at the time, ten years ago.

  Cindy attacks a little now, “But he sees the trouble the church has got into since Vatican Two. The priests -“

  “The church is in trouble because it’s a monument to a lie, run by a bunch of antiquated chauvinists who don’t know anything. I’m sorry,” Peggy says, “I’m talking too much.”

  “Well, this is America,” Harry says, coming to her rescue, somewhat, “Let’s all sock it to each other. Today I said goodbye to the only friend I’ve ever had, Charlie Stavros.”

  Janice says, “Oh, Harry,” but nobody else takes him up on it. The men were supposed to say they were his friends.

  Webb Murkett tilts his head, his eyebrows working toward Ronnie and Ollie. “Did either ofyou see in the paper today where Nixon finally bought a house in Manhattan? Right next to David Rockefeller. I’m no great admirer of tricky Dick’s, but I must say the way he’s been excluded from apartment houses in a great city is a disgrace to the Constitution.”

  “If he’d been a spade,” Ronnie begins, “every civil rights -“

  “Well how would you like,” Peggy Fosnacht has to say, “a lot of secret service men checking your handbag every time you came back from the store?”

  The chair Peggy sits in is squared-off ponderous modern with a pale fabric thick as plywood; it matches another chair and a long sofa set around that kind of table with no overhang to the top they call a Parsons table, which is put together in alternating blocks of light and dark wood with a curly knotty grain such as they make golf club heads of. The entire deep space of the room, which Webb added on when he and Cindy acquired this house in the pace-setting development of Brewer Heights, gently brims with appointments chosen all to harmonize. Its tawny wallpaper has vertical threads of texture in it like the vertical folds of the slightly darker pull drapes, and reproductions of Wyeth watercolors lit by spots on track lighting overhead echo with scratchy strokes the same tints, and the same lighting reveals little sparkles, like mica on a beach, in the overlapping arcs of the rough-plastered ceiling. When Harry moves his head these sparkles in the ceiling change location, wave upon wave of hidden silver. He announces, “I heard a kind of funny story at Rotary the other day involving Kissinger. Webb, I don’t think you were there. There were these five guys in an airplane that was about to crash - a priest, a hippie, a policeman, somebody else, and Henry Kissinger. And only four parachutes.”

  Ronnie says, “And at the end the hippie turns to the priest and says, `Don’t worry, Father. The Smartest Man in the World just jumped out with my knapsack.’ We’ve all heard it. Speaking of which, Thel and I were wondering if you’d seen this.” He hands him a newspaper clipping, from an Ann Landers column printed in the Brewer Standard, the respectable paper, not the Vat. The second paragraph is marked in tidy b
allpoint. “Read it aloud,” Ronnie demands.

  He doesn’t like being given orders by sweaty skinheads like Harrison when he’s come out for a pleasant low-key time with the Murketts, but all eyes are on him and at least it gets them off the Pope. He explains, more to the Fosnachts than the others, since the Murketts seem to be in on the joke already, “It’s a letter to Ann Landers from somebody.. The first paragraph tells about a news story about some guy whose pet python bit him in the stomach and wouldn’t let go, and when the paramedics came he yelled at them to get out of his apartment if they’re going to hurt his snake.” There is a little laughter at that and the Fosnachts, puzzled, try to join in. The next paragraph goes:

  The other news story was about a Washington,

  D.C., physician who beat a Canadian goose to death

  with his putter on the 16th green of a country club.

  (The goose honked just as he was about to sink one.) The reason for printing those letters was to demonstrate that truth is stranger than fiction.

  Having read this aloud, he explains to the Fosnachts, “The reason they’re razzing me with this is last summer I heard about the same incident on the radio and when I tried to tell them about it at the club they wouldn’t listen, nobody believed me. Now here’s proof it happened.”

  “You chump, that’s not the point,” Ronnie Harrison says.

  “The point is, Harry,” Thelma says, “it’s so different. You said he was from Baltimore and this says he was from Washington. You said the ball hit the goose accidentally and the doctor put him out of his misery.”

  Webb says, “Remember - `A merry killing, or murder most foul?’ That really broke me up.”

  “You didn’t show it at the time,” Harry says, pleased however.

  “According to Ann Landers, then, it was murder most foul,” Thelma says.

  “Who cares?” Ronnie says, getting ugly. This clipping was clearly her idea. Her touch on the ballpoint too.

  Janice has been listening with that glazed dark look she gets when deep enough into the booze. She and Webb have been trying some new imported Irish liqueur called Greensleeves. “Well not if the goose honked,” she says.

  Ollie Fosnacht says, “I can’t believe a goose honking would make that much difference on a putt.”

  All the golfers there assure him it would.

  “Shit,” he says, “in music, you do your best work at two in the morning, stoned half out of your mind and a lot of drunks acting up besides.”

  His mention of music reminds them all that in the background Webb’s hidden speakers are incessantly performing; a Hawaiian melody at the moment, with Vibra-Harp.

  I “Maybe it wasn’t a goose,” Harry says. “Maybe it was a very little caddy with feathers.”

  “That’s music,” Ronnie sneers, of Ollie’s observation. “Hey Webb, how come there isn’t any beer in this place?”

  “There’s beer, there’s beer. Miller Lite and Heineken’s. What can I get everybody?”

  Webb acts a little jumpy, and Rabbit worries that the party is in danger of flattening out. He misses, whom he never thought he would, Buddy Inglefinger, and tries to say the kind of thing Buddy would if he were here. “Speaking of dead geese,” he says, “I noticed in the paper the other day where some anthropologist or something says about a fourth of the animal species on earth right now will be extinct by the year 2000.”

  “Oh don’t,” Peggy Fosnacht protests loudly, shaking herself ostentatiously, so the fat on her upper arms jiggles. She is wearing a short-sleeved dress, out of season. “Don’t mention the year 2000, just the thought of it gives me the creeps.”

  Nobody asks her why.

  Rabbit at last says, “Why? You’ll still be alive.”

  “No I won’t,” she says flatly, wanting to make an argument even of that.

  The heated flush the papal argument roused in Cindy still warms her throat and upper chest, that with its tiny gold cross sits half-exposed by the unbuttoned two top buttons or stringlatches of the Arab-style robe, her tapering forearms looking childishly fragile within its wide sleeves, her feet bare but for the thinnest golden sandals below the embroidered hem. In the commotion as Webb takes drink orders and Janice wobbles up to go to the john, Harry goes over and sits on a straight chair beside their young hostess. “Hey,” he says, “I think the Pope’s pretty great. He really knows how to use TV.”

  Cindy says, with a sharp quick shake of her face as if stung, “I don’t like a lot of what he says either, but he’s got to draw the line somewhere. That’s his job.”

  “He’s running scared,” Rabbit offers. “Like everybody else.”

  She looks at him, her eyes a bit Chinesey like Mim said, the fatty pouches of her lower lids giving her a kind of squint, as if she’s been beaten or is suffering from ragweed, so she twinkles even as she’s being serious, her pupils large in this shadowy center of the room away from the track lighting. “Oh, I can’t think of him that way, though you’re probably right. I’ve still too much parochial school in me.” The ring of brown around her pupils is smooth chocolate, without flecks or fire. “Webb’s so gentle, he never pushes me. After Betsey was born, and we agreed he’s been father enough, Webb, I couldn’t make myself use a diaphragm, it seemed so evil, and he didn’t want me on the Pill, what he’d read about it, so he offered to get himself fixed, you know, like the men are paid to do in India, what do they call it, a vasectomy. Rather than have him do that and do God knows what to his psyche, I went impulsively one day and got myself fitted for the diaphragm, I still don’t know if I’m putting it in right when I do it, but poor Webb. You know he had five other children by his other wives, and they’re both after his money constantly. Neither has married though they’re living with men, that’s what I would call immoral, to keep bleeding him that way.”

  This is more than Harry had bargained for. He tries to confess back at her. ` “Janice had her tubes cauterized the other year, and I must say, it’s great not to have to worry about it, whenever you want it, night or day, no creams or crap or anything. Still, sometimes she starts crying, for no reason. At being sterile at fortythree.”

  “Well of course, Harry. I would too.” Cindy’s lips are long and in their lipstick lie together with a wised-up closeness of fit, a downward tug at the end of sentences, he has never noticed before tonight.

  “But you’re a baby,” he tells her.

  Cindy gives him a wise slanting look and almost toughly says, “I’m getting there, Harry. I’ll be thirty this April.”

  Twenty-nine, she must have been twenty-two when Webb started fucking her, what a sly goat, he pictures her body all brown with its little silken slopes and rolls of slight excess inside the rough loose garment, shadowy spaces you could put your hand in, for the body to breathe in that desert heat, it goes with the gold threads on her feet and the bangles around her wrists, still small and round as a child’s, veinless. The vehemence of his lust dries his mouth. He stands to go after his brandy but loses his balance so his knee knocks against Peggy Fosnacht’s ponderous square chair. She is not in it, she is standing at the top of the two steps that lead upward out of the living room, with the out-of-date dull plaid coat she came in draped around her shoulders. She looks down at them like one placed above and beyond, driven away.

  Ollie, though, is seated around the Parsons table waiting for Webb to bring the beer and oblivious of his wife’s withdrawal. Ronnie Harrison, so drunk his lips are wet and the long hair he brushes across his bald spot stands up in a loop, asks Ollie, “How goes the music racket these days? I hear the guitar craze is over now there’s no more revolution.”

  “They’re into flutes now, it’s weird. Not just the girls, but guys too, who want to play jazz. A lot of spades. A spade came in the other day wanted to buy a platinum flute for his daughter’s eighteenth birthday, he said he read about some Frenchman who had one. I said, `Man, you’re crazy. I can’t begin to guess what a flute like that would cost.’ He said, `I don’t give a flying fu
ck, man,’ and showed me this roll of bills, there must have been an inch of hundred-dollar bills in it. At least those on top were hundreds.”

  Any more feeling-out with Cindy would be too much for now; Harry sits down heavily on the sofa and joins the male conversation. “Like those gold-headed putters a few years ago. Boy I bet they’ve gone up in value.”

  Like Peggy, he is ignored. Harrison is boring in. These insurance salesmen: they have that way of putting down their heads and just boring in until it’s either scream or say, sure, you’ll take out another fifty thousand of renewable life.

  Ronnie says to Ollie, “How about electric stuff? You see this guy on television even has an electric violin. That stuff must cost.”

  “An arm and a leg,” Ollie says, looking up gratefully as Webb sets a Heineken’s on a light square of the table in front of him. “Just the amplifiers take you into the thousands,” he says, pleased to be talking, pleased to sound rich. Poor sap, when most of his business is selling thirteen-year-old dumplings records to make them wet their pants. What did Nelson used to call it? Lollipop music. Nelson used to be serious about the guitar, that one he saved from the fire and then the one they got him with a big pearl plate on the face, but the chords stopped coming from his room after school when he got his driver’s license.