by John Updike
Ronnie has tilted his head to bore in at a different angle. “You know I’m in client service at Schuylkill Mutual and my boss told me the other day, ‘Ron, you cost this company eight thousand seven hundred last year.’ That’s not salary, that’s benefits. Retirement, health insurance, participation options. How do you handle that in your operation? If you don’t have employerfinanced insurance and retirement in this day and age, you’re in the soup. People expect it and without it they won’t perform.”
Ollie says, “Well, I’m my own employer in a way. Me and my partners -“
“How about Keogh? You gotta have Keogh.”
“We try to keep it simple. When we started out -“
“You gotta be kidding, Ollie. You’re just robbing yourself. Schuylkill Mutual offers a terrific deal on Keogh, and we could plug you in, in fact we advise plugging you in, on the corporate end so not a nickel comes out of your personal pocket, it comes out of the corporate pocket and there’s that much less for Uncle to tax. These poor saps carrying their own premiums with no company input are living in the dark ages. There’s nothing shady about rigging it this way, we’re just using the laws the government has put there. They want people to take advantage, it all works to up the gross national product. You know what I mean by Keogh, don’t you? You’re looking kind of blank.”
“It’s something like social security.”
“A thousand times better. Social security’s just a rip-off to benefit the freeloaders now; you’ll never see a penny of what you put in. In the Keogh plan, up to seventy-five hundred goes untaxed, every year; you just set it aside, with our help. Our usual suggestion is, depending on circumstances - how many dependents you got? -“
“Two, if you count the wife. My son Billy’s out of college and up in Massachusetts studying specialized dentistry.”
Ronnie whistles. “Boy, you were smart. Limiting yourself to one offspring. I saddled myself with three and only these last few years am I feeling out of the woods. The older boy, Alex, has taken to electronics but the middle boy, Georgie, needed special schools from the start. Dyslexia. I’d never heard of it, but I’ll tell you I’ve heard of it now. Couldn’t make any goddam sense at all out of anything written, and you’d never know it from his conversation. He could outtalk me at this job, that’s for certain, but he can’t see it. He wants to be an artist, Jesus. There’s no money there, Ollie, you know that better than I do. But even with just the one kid, you don’t want him to starve if you were suddenly out of the picture, or the good woman either. Any man in this day and age carrying less than a hundred, a hundred fifty thousand dollars straight life just isn’t being realistic. A decent funeral alone costs four, five grand.”
“Yeah, well
“Lemme get back to the Keogh a minute. We generally recommend a forty-sixty split, take the forty per cent of seventy-five hundred in straight life premiums, which generally comes to close to the hundred thou, assuming you pass the exam that is. You smoke?”
“Off and on.”
“Uh-oh. Well, lemme give you the name of a doctor who gives an exam everybody can live with.”
Ollie says, “I think my wife wants to go.”
“You’re kidding, Foster.”
“Fosnacht.”
“You’re kidding. This is Saturday night, man. You got a gig or something?”
“No, my wife - she needs to go to some anti-nuclear meeting tomorrow morning at some Universalist church.”
“No wonder she’s down on the Pope then. I hear the Vatican and Three-Mile Island are hand-in-glove, just ask friend Harry here. Ollie, here’s my card. Could I have one of yours please?”
“Uh -“
“That’s O.K. I know where you are. Up there next to the fuck movies. I’ll come by. No bullshit, you really owe it to yourself to listen to some of these opportunities. People keep saying the economy is shot but it isn’t shot at all from where I sit, it’s booming. People are begging for shelters.”
Harry says, “Come on, Ron. Ollie wants to go.”
“Well, I don’t exactly but Peggy -“
“Go. Go in peace, man.” Ronnie stands and makes a hamhanded blessing gesture. “Gott pless Ameri-ca,” he pronounces in a thick slow foreign accent, loud, so that Peggy, who has been conferring with the Murketts, patching things up, turns her back. She too went to high school with Ronnie and knows him for the obnoxious jerk he is.
“Jesus, Ronnie,” Rabbit says to him when the Fosnachts have gone. “What a snow job.”
“Ahh,” Ronnie says. “I wanted to see how much garbage he could eat.”
“I’ve never been that crazy about him either,” Harry confesses. “He treats old Peggy like dirt.”
Janice, who has been consulting with Thelma Harrison about something, God knows what, their lousy children, overhears this and turns and tells Ronnie, “Harry screwed her years ago, that’s why he minds Ollie.” Nothing like a little booze to freshen up old sore points.
Ronnie laughs to attract attention and slaps Harry’s knee. “You screwed that big pig, funny eyes and all?”
Rabbit pictures that heavy glass egg with the interior teardrop of air back in Ma Springer’s living room, its smooth heft in his hand, and imagines himself making the pivot from pounding it into Janice’s stubborn dumb face to finishing up with a onehanded stuff straight down into Harrison’s pink brainpan. “It seemed a good idea at the time,” he has to admit, uncrossing his legs and stretching them in preparation for an extended night. The Fosnachts’ leaving is felt as a relief throughout the room. Cindy is tittering to Webb, clings briefly to his coarse gray sweater in her rough loose Arab thing, like a loving pair advertising vacations abroad. “Janice had run off at the time with this disgusting Greek smoothie Charlie Stavros,” Harry explains to anybody who will listen.
“O.K. O.K.,” Ronnie says, “you don’t need to tell us. We’ve all heard the story, it’s ancient history.”
“What isn’t so ancient, you twerpy skinhead, is I had to kiss Charlie goodbye today because Janice and her mother got him canned from Springer Motors.”
“Harry likes to say that,” Janice said, “but it was as much Charlie’s idea as anybody’s.”
Ronnie is not so potted he misses the point. He tips his head and looks at Janice with a gaze that from Harry’s angle is mostly furry white eyelashes. “You got your old boyfriend fired?” he asks her.
Harry amplifies, “All so my shiftless son who won’t even finish college with only one year to go can take over this job he’s no more qualified for than, than -“
“Than Harry was,” Janice finishes for him - in the old days she would never have been quick with sass like that - and giggles. Harry has to laugh too, even before Ronnie does. His cock isn’t the only thick thing about Harrison.
“This is what I like,” Webb Murkett says in his gravelly voice above them. “Old friends.” He and Cindy side by side stand presiding above their circle as the hour settles toward midnight. “What can I get anybody? More beer? How about a light highball? Scotch? Irish? A CC and seven?” Cindy’s tits jut out in that caftan or burnoose or whatever like the angle of a tent. Desert silence. Crescent moon. Put the camel to bed. “We-ell,” Webb exhales with such pleasure he must be feeling that Greensleeves, “and what did we think of the Fosnachts?”
“They won’t do,” Thelma says. Harry is startled to hear her speak, she has been so silent. If you close your eyes and pretend you’re blind, Thelma has the nicest voice. He feels melancholy and mellow, now that the invasion from the pathetic world beyond the Flying Eagle has been repelled.
“Ollie’s been a sap from Day One,” he says, “but she didn’t used to be such a blabbermouth. Did she, Janice?”
Janice is cautious, defending her old friend. “She always had a tendency,” she says. “Peggy never thought of herself as attractive, and that was a problem.”
“You did, huh?” Harry accuses.
She stares at him, having not followed, her face moistened as by a fine
spray.
“Of course she did,” Webb gallantly intervenes, “Jan is mighty attractive, at least to this old party,” and goes around behind her chair and puts his hands on her shoulders, close to her neck so that her shoulders hunch.
Cindy says, “She was a lot pleasanter just chatting with me and Webb at the door. She said she sometimes just gets carried away.”
Ronnie says, “Harry and Janice I guess see a lot of ‘em. I’ll have a brew as long as you’re up, Webb.”
“We don’t at all. Nelson’s best friend is their obnoxious son Billy, is how they got to the wedding. Webb, could you make that two?”
Thelma asks Harry, her voice softly pitched for him alone, “How is Nelson? Have you heard from him in his married state?”
“A postcard. Janice has talked to them on the phone a couple times. She thinks they’re bored.”
Janice interrupts, “I don’t think, Harry. He told me they’re bored.”
Ronnie offers, “If you’ve done all your fucking before marriage, I guess a honeymoon can be a drag. Thanks, Webb.”
Janice says, “He said it’s been chilly in the cabin.”
“Too lazy no doubt to carry the wood in from the stack outside,” Harry says. “Yeah, thanks.” The pffft of opening a can isn’t near as satisfying since they put that safety tab on to keep idiots from choking themselves.
“Harry, he told us they’ve been having a fire in the wood stove all day long.”
“Burning it all up so somebody else can chop. He’s his mamma’s boy.”
Thelma, tired perhaps of the tone the Angstroms keep setting, lifts her voice and bends her face far back, exposing a startling length of sallow throat. “Speaking of the cold, Webb. Are you and Cindy going away at all this winter?” They usually go to an island in the Caribbean. The Harrisons once went with them, years ago. Harry and Janice have never been.
Webb has been circling behind Thelma getting a highball for someone. “We’ve talked about it,” he tells Thelma. Through the haze of beer laid over brandy there seems an enchanting conspiracy between her bent-back throat and Webb’s arched and lowered voice. Old friends, Harry thinks. Fit like pieces of a puzzle. Webb bends down and reaches over her shoulder to put a tall weak Scotch-and-soda on a dark square in front of her. “I’d like to go,” he is going on, “where they have a golf course. You can get a pretty fair deal, if you shop around for a package.”
“Let’s all go,” Harry announces. “The kid’s taking over the lot Monday, let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Harry,” Janice says, “he’s not taking over the lot, you’re being irrational about this. Webb and Ronnie are shocked, to hear you talk about your son this way.”
“They’re not shocked. Their kids are eating ‘em alive too. I want to go to the Caribbean and play golf this winter. Let’s bust out. Let’s ask Buddy Inglefinger to be the fourth. I hate the winter around here - there’s no snow, you can’t ice-skate, it’s just boring and raw, month after month. When I was a kid, there was snow all the time, what ever happened to it?”
“We had a ton of snow in ‘78,” Webb observes.
“Harry, maybe it’s time to go home,” Janice tells him. Her mouth has turned to a slot, her forehead under her bangs is shiny.
“I don’t want to go home. I want to go to the Caribbean. But first I want to go to the bathroom. Bathroom, home, Caribbean, in that order.” He wonders if a wife like that ever dies of natural causes. Never, those dark wiry types, look at her mother, still running the show. Buried poor old Fred and never looked back.
Cindy says, “Harry, the downstairs john is plugged, Webb just noticed. Somebody must have used too much toilet paper.”
“Peggy Gring, that’s who,” Harry says, standing and wondering why the wall-to-wall carpeting has a curve to it, like the deck of a ship falling away on all sides. “First she attacks the Pope, then she abuses the plumbing.”
“Use the one in our bedroom,” Webb says to him. “At the head of the stairs, turn left, past the two closet doors with the slats.”
“… wiping away her tears… ,” Rabbit hears Thelma Harrison saying dryly as he leaves. Up the two carpeted steps, his head floating far above his feet. Then down a hall and up stairs in different-colored carpeting, a dirty lime, more wear, older part of the house. Someone else’s upstairs always has that hush. Tired nights, a couple talking softly to themselves. The voices below him fade. Turn left, Webb had said. Slatted doors. He stops and peeks in. Female clothes, strips of many colors, fragrant of Cindy. Get her down there in that sand, who can say, talking to him about her diaphragm already. He fords the bathroom. Every light in it is lit. What a waste of energy. Going down with all her lights blazing, the great ship America. This bathroom is smaller than the one downstairs, and of a deeper tint, wall tiles and wallpaper and shag carpeting and towels and tinted porcelain all brown, with touches of tangerine. He undoes his fly and in a stream of blissful relief fills one of this room’s bright bowls with gold. His bubbles multiply like coins. He and Janice took their Krugerrands from the bedside table drawer and together went downtown and into the Brewer Trust with them and nestled them in their little cylinders like bluetinted dollhouse toilets into their stout long safe-deposit box and in celebration had drinks with their lunch at the Crépe House before he went back to the lot. Because he was never circumcised he tends to retain a drop or two, and pats his tip with a piece of lemon-yellow toilet paper, plain, the comic strips were to amuse guests. Who was Thelma saying would wipe away her tears? The shocking flash of long white throat, muscular, the swallowing muscles developed, she must have something, to hold Harrison. Maybe she meant Peggy using toilet paper to wipe away her tears had clogged the toilet. Cindy’s eyes had had a glisten, too shy to like arguing like that with poor Peggy, telling him instead about her diaphragm, Jesus, inviting him to think about it, her sweet red dark deep, could she mean it? Getting there, Harry: her voice more wised-up and throaty than he ever noticed before, her eyes pouchy, sexy when women’s lower lids are like that, up a little like eggcups, his daughter’s lids he noticed that day did that. All around in here are surfaces that have seen Cindy stark naked. Harry looks at his face in this less dazzling mirror, fluorescent tubes on either side, and his lips look less blue, he is sobering up for the drive home. Oh but blue still the spaces in his eyes, encircling the little black dot through which the world flows, a blue with white and gray mixed in from the frost of his ancestors, those beefy blonds in horned helmets pounding to a pulp with clubs the hairy mammoth and the slant-eyed Finns amid snows so pure and widespread their whiteness would have made eyes less pale hurt. Eyes and hair and skin, the dead live in us though their brains are dust and their eyesockets of bone empty. His pupils enlarge as he leans closer to the mirror, making a shadow, seeking to see if there truly is a soul. That’s what he used to think ophthalmologists were looking at when they pressed that little hot periscope of a flashlight tight against your eye. What they saw, they never told him. He sees nothing but black, out of focus, because his eyes are aging.
He washes his hands. The faucet is one of those single-handed Lavomaster mixers with a knob on the end of the handle like a clown’s nose or big pimple, he can never remember which way is hot and which cold, what was wrong with the old two faucets that said H and C? The basin, though, is good, with a wide lip of several ledges to hold soap without its riding off, these little ridges most basins have now don’t hold anything, dinky cheap pseudomarble, he supposes if you’re in the roofing industry you know plumbing suppliers who can still provide the good stuff, even though there’s not much market for it. The curved lavender bar he has right in his hands must have lost its lettering making lather for Cindy’s suntanned skin, suds in her crotch, her hair must be jet black there, her eyebrows are: you should look at a woman’s eyebrows not the hair on her head for the color of her pussy. This bathroom has not been so cleaned up for guests as the downstairs one, Popular Mechanics on the straw hamper next to the toilet, the towels
slung crooked on the plastic towel holders and a touch of damp to them, the Murketts showering just a few hours ago for this party. Harry considers opening this bathroom cabinet as he did the other one but thinking of fingerprints notices the chrome rim and refrains. Nor does he dry his hands, for fear of touching the towel Webb used. He has seen that long yellow body in the Flying Eagle locker room. The man has moles all across his back and shoulders that probably aren’t contagious but still.
He can’t return downstairs with wet hands. That shit Harrison would make some crack. Ya still got scum on your hands, ya jerkoff. Rabbit stands a moment in the hall, listening to the noise of the party rise, a wordless clatter of voices happy without him, the women’s the most distinct, a kind of throbbing in it like the melody you sometimes hear in a ragged engine idling, a song so distinct you expect to hear words. The hall is carpeted here not in lime but in a hushed plum, and he moves to follow its color to the threshold of the Murketts’ bedroom. Here it happens. It hollows out Harry’s stomach, makes him faintly sick, to think what a lucky stiff Webb is. The bed is low in modern style, a kind of tray with sides of reddish wood, and the covers had been pulled up hastily rather than made. Had it just happened? Just before the showers before the party that left the towels in the bathroom damp? In mid-air above the low bed he imagines in afterimage her damp and perfect toes, those sucky little dabtoes whose print he has often spied on the Flying Eagle flagstones, here lifted high to lay her cunt open, their baby dots mingling with the moles on Webb’s back. It hurts, it isn’t fair for Webb to be so lucky, not only to have a young wife but no old lady Springer on the other side of the walls. Where do the Murketts put their kids? Harry twists his head to see a closed white door at the far other end of the plum carpet. There. Asleep. He is safe. The carpet absorbs his footsteps as, silent as a ghost, he follows its color into the bedroom. A cavernous space, forbidden. Another shadowy presence jars his heart: a man in blue suit trousers and rumpled white shirt with cuffs folded back and a loosened necktie, looking overweight and dangerous, is watching him. Jesus. It is himself, his own full-length reflection in a large mirror placed between two matching bureaus of wood bleached so that the grain shows through as through powder. The mirror faces the foot of the bed. Hey. These two. It hasn’t been just his imagination. They fuck in front of a mirror. Harry rarely sees himself head to toe except when he’s buying a suit at Kroll’s or that little tailor on Pine Street. Even there you stand close in to the three-way mirrors and there’s not this weird surround of space, so he’s meeting himself halfway across the room. He looks mussed and criminal, a burglar too overweight for this line of work.
