Rabbit at Rest

by John Updike

  “Sounds neat,” Judy ventures, adding, “I got a prize in my camp swimming class for staying underwater the longest.” She returns her gaze to the television, rapidly flicking through the channels with the hand control -channel-surfing, kids call it.

  Harry tries to imagine the world seen through her clear green eyes, every little thing vivid and sharp and new, packed full of itself like a satin valentine. His own vision feels fogged no matter which glasses he puts on, for reading or far vision. He wears the latter only for movies and night driving, and refuses to get bifocals; glasses worn for more than an hour at a time hurt his ears. And the lenses are always dusty and the things he looks at all seem tired; he’s seen them too many times before. A kind of drought has settled over the world, a bleaching such as overtakes old color prints, even the ones kept in a drawer.

  Except, strangely, the first fairway of a golf course before his first swing. This vista is ever fresh. There, on the tee’s earth platform, standing in his large white spiked Footjoys and blue sweat socks, drawing the long tapered steel wand of his Lynx Predator driver from the bag, he feels tall again, tall the way he used to on a hardwood basketball floor when after those first minutes his growing momentum and lengthening bounds and leaps reduced the court to childlike dimensions, to the size of a tennis court and then a Ping-Pong table, his legs unthinkingly eating the distances up, back and forth, and the hoop with its dainty skirtlike net dipping down to be there on the layups. So, in golf, the distances, the hundreds of yards, dissolve to a few effortless swings if you find the inner magic, the key. Always, golf for him holds out the hope ofperfection, of a perfect weightlessness and consummate ease, for now and again it does happen, happens in three dimensions, shot after shot. But then he gets human and tries to force it, to make it happen, to get ten extra yards, to steer it, and it goes away, grace you could call it, the feeling of collaboration, of being bigger than he really is. When you stand up on the first tee it is there, it comes back from wherever it lives during the rest of your life, endless possibility, the possibility of a flawless round, and a round without a speck of bad in it, without a missed two-footer or a flying right elbow, without a pushed wood or pulled iron; the first fairway is in front ofyou, palm trees on the left and water on the right, flat as a picture. All you have to do is take a simple pure swing and puncture the picture in the middle with a ball that shrinks in a second to the size of a needle-prick, a tiny tunnel into the absolute. That would be it.

  But on his practice swing his chest gives a twang of pain and this makes him think for some reason of Nelson. The kid jangles in his mind. As he stands up to the ball he feels crowded but is impatient and hits it outside in, trying too hard with his right hand. The ball starts out promisingly but leaks more and more to the right and disappears too close to the edge of the long scummy pond of water.

  ” ‘Fraid that’s alligator territory,” Berme says sadly. Berme is his partner for the round.

  “Mulligan?” Harry asks.

  There is a pause. Ed Silberstein asks Joe Gold, “What do you think?”

  Joe tells Harry, “I didn’t notice that we took any mulligans.”

  Harry says, “You cripples don’t hit it far enough to get into trouble. We always give mulligans on the first drive. That’s been our tradition.”

  Ed says, “Angstrom, how’re you ever going to live up to your potential if we keep babying you with mulligans?”

  Joe says, “How much potential you think a guy with a gut like that still has? I think his potential has all gone to his colon.”

  While they are thus ribbing him Rabbit takes another ball from his pocket and tees it up and, with a stiff half-swing, sends it safely but ingloriously down the left side of the fairway. Perhaps not quite safely: it seems to hit a hard spot and keeps bouncing toward a palm tree. “Sorry, Bernie,” he says. “I’ll loosen up.”

  “Am I worried?” Bernie asks, putting his foot to the electric-cart pedal a split-second before Harry has settled into the seat beside him. “With your brawn and my brains, we’ll cream these oafs.”

  Bernie Drechsel, Ed Silberstein, and Joe Gold are all older than Harry, and shorter, and usually make him feel good about himself. With them, he is a big Swede, they call him Angstrom, a comical pet gentile, a big pale uncircumcised hunk of American white bread. He in turn treasures their perspective; it seems more manly than his, sadder and wiser and less shaky. Their long history has put all that suffering in its pocket and strides on. Harry asks Bernie, as the cart rolls over the tamped and glistening grass toward their balls, “Whaddeya think about all this fuss about this Deion Sanders? In the paper this morning he even has the mayor of Fort Myers making excuses for him.”

  Bernie shifts the cigar in his mouth an inch and says, “It’s cruel, you know, to take these black kids out of nowhere and give ‘em all this publicity and turn them into millionaires. No wonder they go crazy.”

  “The paper says the crowd kept the cops from giving him room: He had flipped out at some salesclerk who said he had stolen a pair of earrings. He even took a pop at her.”

  “I don’t know about Sanders,” Bernie says, “but a lot of it’s drugs. Cocaine. The stuff is everywhere.”

  “You wonder what people see in it,” Rabbit says.

  “What they see in it,” Bernie says, stopping the cart and resting his cigar on the edge of the plastic ledge for holding drinks or beer cans, “is instant happiness.” He squares up to his second shot with that awful stance of his, his feet too close together, his bald head dipping down in a reverse weight-shift, and punches the ball with a four-iron: all arms and wrists. It stays straight, though, and winds up within an easy chip in front of the elevated green. “There are two routes to happiness,” he continues, back at the wheel of the cart. “Work for it, day after day, like you and I did, or take a chemical shortcut. With the world the way it is, these kids take the shortcut. The long way looks too long.”

  “Yeah, well, it is long. And then when you’ve gone the distance, where’s the happiness?”

  “Behind you,” the other man admits.

  “What interests me about Sanders and kids like that,” Rabbit says, as Ben-lie speeds along down the sun-baked fairway, dodging fallen brown fronds and coconuts, “is I had a little taste of it once. Athletics. Everybody cheering, loving you. Wanting a piece.”

  “Sure you did. It sticks out all over. Just the way you waggle the club. ‘Fraid you made the palm tree, though. You’re stymied, my friend.” Bernie stops the cart, a little close to the ball for Harry’s comfort.

  “I think I can hook it around.”

  “Don’t try it. Chip it out. You know what Tommy Armour says: take your stroke in a situation like this, and go for the green on the next one. Don’t attempt a miracle.”

  “Well, you’re already up there for a sure bogey. Let me try to bend it on.” The palm tree is one of those whose trunk looks like a giant braid. It breathes on him, with its faint rustle, its dim smell like that of a friendly attic full of dried-out old school papers and love letters. There’s a lot of death in Florida, if you look. The palms grow by the lower branches dying and dropping off. The hot sun hurries the life cycles along. Harry takes his stance with his hip almost touching the jagged rough trunk, hoods the fiveiron, and imagines the curving arc of the miracle shot and Bernie’s glad cry of congratulation.

  But in fact the closeness of the tree and maybe of Bernie in the cart inhibits his swing and he pulls the ball with the hooded club, so it hits the top of the next palm along the fairway and drops straight down into the short rough. The rough, though, in Florida isn’t like the rough up north; it’s just spongy pale grass a half-inch longer than fairway. They tailor these courses for the elderly and lame. They baby you down here.

  Bernie sighs. “Stubborn,” he says as Harry gets back in. “You guys think the world will melt if you whistle.” Harry knows that “guys” is polite for “goys.” The thought that he might be wrong, that obstacles won’t melt if he whistles,
renews that dull internal ache of doom he felt in the airport. As he stands up to his third shot with an eight-iron, Bernie’s disapproval weighs on his arms and causes him to hit a bit fat, enough to take the click out of the ball and leave it ten yards short.

  “Sorry, Bernie. Chip up close and get your par.” But Bernie fluffs the chip -all wrists again, and too quick - and they both get sixes, losing the hole to Ed Silberstein’s routine bogey. Ed is a wiry retired accountant from Toledo, with dark upright hair and a slender thrusting jaw that makes him look as if he’s about to smile all the time; he never seems to get the ball more than ten feet off the ground, but he keeps it moving toward the hole.

  “You guys looked like Dukakis on that one,” he crows. “Blowing it.”

  “Don’t knock the Duke,” Joe says. “He gave us honest government for a change. The Boston pols can’t forgive him for it.” Joe Gold owns a couple of liquor stores in some city in Massachusetts called Framingham. He is stocky and sandy and wears glasses so thick they make his eyes look like they’re trying to escape from two little fishbowls, jumping from side to side. He and his wife, Beu, Ben for Beulah, are very quiet condo neighbors next door; you wonder what they do all the time in there, that never makes any noise.

  Ed says, “He wimped out when it counted. He should have stood up and said, `Sure, I’m a liberal, and damn proud of it.”’

  “Yeah, how would that have played in the South and the Midwest?”Joe asks. “In California and Florida for that matter with all these old farts who all they want to hear is `No more taxes’?”

  “Lousy,” Ed admits. “But he wasn’t going to get their votes anyway. His only hope was to get the poor excited. Knock away that three-footer, Angstrom. I’ve already written down your six.”

  “I need the practice,” Harry says, and strokes it, and watches it rim out on the left edge. Not his day. Will he ever have a day again? Fifty-five and fading. His own son can’t stand to be in the same room with him. Ruth once called him Mr. Death.

  “He was going for those Reagan Democrats,” Joe continues explaining. “Except there aren’t any Reagan Democrats, there’re just cut-and-dried rednecks. Now that I’m down south here, I understand better what it’s all about. It’s all about blacks. One hundred thirty years after Abe Lincoln, the Republicans have got the anti-black vote and it’s bigger than any Democratic Presidential candidate can cope with, barring a massive depression or a boo-boo the size of Watergate. Ollie North doesn’t do it. Reagan being an airhead didn’t do it. Face it: the bulk of this country is scared to death of the blacks. That’s the one gut issue we’ve got.”

  After that episode with Skeeter twenty years ago Rabbit has had mixed feelings about blacks and whenever the subject comes up he tends to hold his tongue lest he betray himself one way or another. “Bernie, what do you think?” Harry asks while they’re watching the two others hit from the second tee, a 136-yard parthree over that same scummy pond. He finds Bernie the wisest of the three, the most phlegmatic and slowest to speak. He never came back totally from some open-heart surgery he had a few years ago. He moves cumbersomely, has emphysema and a bit of a hump back and the slack look of a plump man who lost weight because his doctor told him to. His color isn’t good, his lower lip in profile looks loose.

  “I think,” he says, “Dukakis tried to talk intelligently to the American people and we aren’t ready for it. Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips -can you imagine such crap in this day and age? Ailes and those others, they made him into a beer commercial - head for the mountains.” Bernie sang this last phrase, his voice quavery but touchingly true. Rabbit is impressed by this ability Jews seem to have, to sing and to dance, to give themselves to the moment. They sing at seder, he knows, because Bernie and Fern had them to a seder one April just before heading north. Passover. The angel of death passed over. Harry had never understood the word before. Let this cup pass from me. Bernie concludes, “To my mind there are two possibilities about Bush - he believed what he was saying, or he didn’t. I don’t know which is more terrifying. He’s what we call a pisher.”

  “Dukakis always looked like he was sore about something,” Rabbit offers. This is as close as he can bring himself to admit that, alone in this foursome, he voted for Bush.

  Bernie maybe guesses it. He says, “After eight years of Reagan I would have thought more people would have been sore than were. Ifyou could ever get the poor to vote in this country, you’d have socialism. But people want to think rich. That’s the genius of the capitalist system: either you’re rich, or you want to be, or you think you ought to be.”

  Rabbit Eked Reagan. He liked the foggy voice, the smile, the big shoulders, the way his head kept wagging during the long pauses, the way he floated above the facts, knowing there was more to government than facts, and the way he could change direction while saying he was going straight ahead, pulling out of Beirut, getting cozy with Gorby, running up the national debt. The strange thing was, except for the hopeless down-and-outers, the world became a better place under him. The Communists fell apart, except for in Nicaragua, and even there he put them on the defensive. The guy had a magic touch. He was a dream man. Harry dares say, “Under Reagan, you know, it was like anesthesia.”

  “Ever had an operation? A real operation.”

  “Not really. Tonsils when I was a kid. Appendix when I was in the Army. They took it out in case I was sent to Korea. Then I was never sent.”

  “I had a quadruple bypass three years ago.”

  “I know, Bern. I remember your telling me. But you look great now.”

  “When you come out of anesthesia, it hurts like hell. You can’t believe you can live with such pain. To get at your heart, they split your whole rib cage open. They crack you open like a coconut. And they pull the best veins they can find out of your upper leg. So when you come out of it your groin’s killing you as well as your chest.”

  “Wow.” Harry inappropriately laughs, since while Bernie is talking to him on the cart, Ed, with that pompous fussy setup he has, laying his hands on the club finger by finger like he’s doing flower arrangement, and then peeking toward the hole five or six times before swinging, as if he’s trying to shake loose cobwebs or a tick in his collar, looked up during the swing so the topped ball scuttered into the water, skipping three times before sinking, leaving three expanding, interlocking sets of rings on the water. Alligator food.

  “Six hours I was on the table,” Bernie is urging into his ear. “I woke up and I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even open my eyelids. They freeze you, so your blood flow is down to almost nothing. I was like locked into a black coffin. No. It’s like I was the coffin. And then out of this blackness I hear this weird voice, with a thick Indian accent, the Pakistani anesthetist.”

  Joe Gold, with his partner’s ball in the water, tries to hit it too quick, to get a ball in play, jerking the club back in two stages like he does and then roundhousing with that flat swing stocky guys tend to have. He pushes the shot off so he catches the pot bunker on the right.

  Bernie is doing a high, spacy, Pakistani voice. ” ‘Ber-nie, Bernie,’ this voice says, so honest to God I think maybe it’s the voice of God, `oper-ation a suc-cess!’ “

  Harry has heard the story before but laughs anyway. It’s a good, scary story about the edge of death.

  ” ‘Ber-nie, Ber-nie,’ ” Bernie repeats, “like it came out of the clouds to Abraham, to go cut Isaac’s throat.”

  Harry asks, “Shall we keep the same order?” He feels he disgraced himself on the previous hole.

  “You go first, Angstrom. I think it shakes you up too much to hit last. Go for it. Show these nudniks how it’s done.”

  This is what Rabbit hoped to hear. He takes a seven-iron and tries to think of five things: keeping his head down, keeping his backswing from being too long, moving his hip while the club is still at the top, keeping his downswing smooth, and keeping the clubface
square on the ball, at that point on the sphere where a clockface says 3:15. From the whistly magic way the ball vanishes from the center of his held-down vision he knows the hit is sweet; they all together watch the dark dot rise, hover that little ghostly extra bit that gives the distance, and then drop straight down on the green, a hair to the left but what looks pin high, the ball bouncing right with the slant of the bowl-shaped green.

  “Beauty,” Ed has to admit.

  “How about a mulligan?” Joe asks. “We’ll give you one this time.”

  Bernie asks, pushing himself out of the cart, “What iron was that?”

  “Seven.”

  “Gonna hit ‘em like that, my friend, you should use an eight.”

  “Think I’m past the hole?”

  “Way past. You’re on the back edge.”

  Some partner. There’s no satisfying him. Like Marty Tothero nearly forty years ago. Get twenty-five points a game, Marty wanted thirty-five and would talk about a missed layup. The soldier in Harry, the masochistic Christian, respects men like this. It’s total uncritical love, such as women provide, that makes you soft and does you in.