Rabbit at Rest

by John Updike

  Judy’s perfect little hands are shiny with lobster. She asks her mother something and he can see Pru’s mouth move in response but the Godlike voice blocks their words right out with its solemn “Twenty-seven. Two seven.”

  “What’re you saying, sweetie?” he asks, embarrassed. Is his hearing going, or do people talk a little differently, more rapidly and softly, than they used to? On these TV shows that have British actors, there are stretches, especially when they put on the lower-class accents, where he can’t understand a fucking word. And movies, especially in the love scenes, when the stars are establishing their coolness with the teen-age audience, just tossing the phrases away.

  Pru explains, “She’s worried about Daddy not getting anything to eat,” and makes her wry one-sided mouth. Is this grimace a communication to him, a little lament, inviting him to conspire with her against Nelson?

  Judy’s shiny green eyes turn up toward her grandfather, as if she expects him to make an unsympathetic response. Instead he tells her, “Don’t you worry, Judy. People can get served here until nine, and then at Club Nineteen downstairs they have sandwiches until midnight. And you saw Route 41: there’s tons of eating places in Florida for your poor hungry daddy.”

  The girl’s lower lip trembles and she gets out, “He might not have any money.”

  “Why wouldn’t he have any money?”

  The girl explains, “A lot of times he doesn’t have any money. Bills come and even men come to the house and Mommy can’t pay them.” Her eyes shift over to her mother’s face as she realizes she has said too much.

  Pru looks away, wiping a crumb of potato from the corner of Roy’s lips. “Things have been a bit tight,” she admits almost inaudibly.

  Harry wants to pursue it. “Really? That can’t be. He’s making fifty grand a year, with the benefits and bonuses. My father used to support us all on less than two thousand.”

  “Harry,” Janice breaks in, in a voice that sounds like her mother’s, toward the end, when the old widow got into the habit of laying down the law, “people now need more things than your father did. That was a simpler world. I remember it, I was there too. What did we use to do for fun, when we went out for a date? Go to the movies for seventy-five cents apiece or maybe the miniature-golf course out on 422 for even less. And then a soda at the Pensupreme, and that was considered a very adequate good time.”

  More than adequate, he remembers, if in the car after all that kissing and bare tit it took to warm her up Janice let him into herself, her inside warm and wet and softly grainy like a silk slipper. If she was having her period or feeling virtuous, she might hold him in her hand while he supplied the motion and the come, white as lobster meat. A shocking white, really, and tough to mop up. What he loved best in the car with Janice was when she’d sit on him, her ass in his hands and her tits in his face. And tidily take his come away with her. Like mailing a letter.

  Her mind on a track far distant from his, she is going on, “Nelson has to have good suits to make a good presentation of himself at the lot, and children now aren’t just content with blocks and a ball, they have to have these video games -“

  “Jesus - fifty thousand buys a lot of video games, he’ll have enough to open an arcade soon if that’s what he’s spending it all on.”

  “Well, you joke, but that big barn of Mother’s, it’s no end of expense, isn’t that the case, Pru?”

  Hauled back from a politely smiling daze, Pru grins and admits, “It eats up the dollars.”

  They are hiding something from him, Harry sees. The unseen man portentously intones, “Fifty-six. Five six,” and a quavery old voice, so frantic it nearly chokes itself, croaks, “Bingo!” Eff one eleven, Joe Gold had said. Fly ‘em into Libya.

  Harry says, “Well I don’t know what the hell’s going on.”

  No one contradicts him.

  Roy is falling asleep with a sliver of shrimp shell on his slack lower lip. Harry has a sudden hankering for pecan pie. He tries to tease Judy into having dessert to keep him company. “Key-lime pie,” he croons to her. “You can only get it in Florida. The chance of a lifetime.”

  “What makes it so special?”

  He isn’t quite sure. He lies. “Tiny delicate limes that only grow on the Florida Keys. Anywhere else is too coarse for them, too cold and mean.”

  She consents but then only picks nibbles off the crust at the back, so he, having sold it to her, has to eat it for her, on top of his pecan pie topped by a big oozing dip of butter-pecan ice cream. Nelson’s absence grows bigger as their meal wears on. Janice and Pru have decaf coffee and, preoccupied, dying to talk to each other, watch Harry finish Judy’s dessert. In a way, gluttony is an athletic feat, a stretching exercise. Makes your tummy say “howdy!” The waitress in her pleats of gold finally comes with the check and as he signs it with their condo number he feels like a god casually dispatching thunderbolts; the sum will appear on his monthly statement, next year, when the world has moved greatly on. How full he feels, stepping into the night air! A majestic float of a man, in a parade of dependents. Harry carries Roy, who fell asleep during dessert. Janice and Pru hold Judy one by each hand and, because she has been good during the boring long meal, allow her to swing herself between them, giggling as they grunt with the strain.

  Between Buildings A and B, several of the overhead sodium lights on their tall burnished wands of aluminum have been mysteriously smashed: they’re out there, the criminals, watching and waiting for the security guards to nod, so the fortress of sleeping retirees can be stormed. In this gap of unillumination, the stars leap down at them out of the black warm sky. At night Florida recovers something of its old subtropical self, before men tamed its teeming flatness. Being here is exciting, like being on the deck of a ship; the air tastes of salt, of rotting palm thatch, of swamp. The stars are moister here, more plummy. The St. Augustine grass has its strange spongy matted texture and each blade seems darkly metallic; the lawn snugly conceals round sprinkler heads. The skin that men have imposed on nature is so thin it develops holes, which armadillos wriggle through, the pathetic intricate things appearing in the middle of Pindo Palm Boulevard at dawn and being squashed flat by the first rush of morning traffic, they don’t even have the sense to curl up into balls but jump straight into the air. Harry, Roy’s breath moist on his neck and the child’s head heavy as a stone on his shoulder, looks up at the teeming sky and thinks, There is no mercy. The stark plummy stars press down and the depth of the galactic void for an instant makes him feel suspended upside down. The entrance to Building Blooms alluringly with its cabined yellow glow. The five Angstroms each cope in their way with the sore place inside them, Nelson’s gnawing absence. They fumble through the protected entrances, the elevator, the peachand-silver hallway, avoiding each other’s eyes in embarrassment.

  As her mother tucks her brother in, Judy settles before the television and flicks from The Wonder Years to Night Court to a French movie, starring that lunky Depardieu who is in all of them, this time about a man who comes to a village and usurps another man’s identity, including his wife. In a moment’s decision the young widow, besmirched and lonely, accepts him as her husband, and this thrills Harry; there ought to be a law that we change identities and families every ten years or so. But Judy keeps flicking away from the story and Pru finally yells at the kid and tells her to get ready for bed on the sofa, they’ll all clear out of the living room for her sake, though why she didn’t accept Grandma and Grandpa’s nice offer of a little room of her own is beyond her, Pru’s, understanding. The girl breaks into tears and this is a relief for all of them, giving vent to their common unspoken sense of abandonment.

  Janice tells Harry, “You go to bed, hon. You look beat. I’m too jazzed up by the coffee to sleep, Pru and I will sit in the kitchen.”

  “I thought the coffee was decal” He had looked forward to having her, her little firm brown body, in bed beside him; with these other people here they don’t have a second to themselves. His memori
es had stirred him. Fifty-two years old and she still has a solid ass. Not like Thelma, who’s been losing it lately.

  “That’s what I ordered,” Janice says, “but I never trust them really. I think a lot of the time now they just tell you it’s decaf to shut you up.”

  “Don’t sit up too late.” On an impulse he adds to reassure her, “The kid’s all right, he’s just having some kind of a toot.”

  Pru glances at him in surprise, as if he’s said more than he knows.

  He feels goaded to elaborate: “Both me and Toyota give him a royal pain in the ass for some reason.”

  Again, he is not contradicted.

  Fantasies about America produced two strongly contradictory conclusions that in the end came to the same point of injecting some caution into the golden dreams, he reads in bed. It’s a history book Janice gave him for Christmas, by a woman historian yet, about the Dutch role in the American Revolution, which he hadn’t thought up to ‘now had been much. According to one school, America was too big, too divided, ever to become a single country, its communications too distended for the country ever to be united. Just that sentence makes him feel enormous, slack, distended. The beautiful thing about history is it puts you right to sleep. He looks back up the page for something amusing he remembered reading last night. Climate in the New World, according to a best-selling French treatise translated into Dutch in 1775, made men listless and indolent; they might become happy but never stalwart. America, armed this scholar, “was formed for happiness, but not for empire.” Another European scholar reported that the native Indians “have small organs of generation” and “little sexual capacity.”

  Maybe if Nelson had been bigger he’d be happier. But being big doesn’t automatically make you happy. Harry was big enough, and look at him. At times the size of his reflection in a clothingstore mirror or plate-glass window startles him. Appalls him, really: taking up all that space in the world. He pushes on for a few more pages: Expectation of lucrative commerce … Combat at sea … tangled issue … increased tension … neutral bottoms … French vigorously … Debate in the provincial states … Unlimited convoy would become another test of ego as a casus belli. He rereads this last sentence twice before realizing he has no idea what it means, his brain is making those short-circuit connections as in dreams. He turns out the light. This conjures up a thin crack of light under the door like a phosphorescent transmitter, emitting sounds. He hears Janice and Pru murmuring, a clink of glass, a footstep, and then a buzzer rasping, and hasty footsteps, a woman’s voice in the nervous pitch you use for talking over a loudspeaker, not trusting it, and then in a later fold of his restless, distended consciousness the door opening, Nelson’s voice, deep among the women’s, and most dreamlike of all, laughter, all of them laughing.

  A gnashing sound, the greens being mowed by kids on those big ugly reel mowers. Excited seagulls weeping. The Norfolk pine, its branches as regularly spaced as the thin metal balusters of his balcony rail. Amazing. He is still in Florida, still alive. Morning-chilly salt air wafts from the Gulf through the two-inch crack that the sliding door was left open. Janice is asleep in bed beside him. The warmth of her body is faintly rank; night sweat has pasted dark wiggly hairs to the nape of her neck. Her hair is least gray at the nape, a secret nest of her old dark silky self. She sleeps on her stomach turned away from him, and if the night is cool pulls the covers off him onto herself, and if hot dumps them on top of him, all this supposedly in her sleep. Rabbit eases from the king-size bed, goes into their bathroom with its rose-colored one-piece Fiberglas tub and shower stall, and urinates into the toilet of a matching rose porcelain. He sits down, as it is quieter, splashing against the front of the bowl. He brushes his teeth but is too curious to shave; if he takes the time to shave Janice might get away from him and hide among the others as she has been doing. He slides back into bed, stealthily but hoping that the unavoidable rustling of sheets and the soft heaving of the mattress might wake her. When it doesn’t, he nudges her shoulder. ` Janice?” he whispers. “Dreamboat?”

  Her voice comes mufed. “What? Leave me alone.”

  “What time ‘dyou come to bed?”

  “I didn’t dare look. One.”

  “Where had Nelson been? What was his explanation?”

  She says nothing. She wants him to think she has fallen back to sleep. He waits. Lovingly, he caresses her shoulder. His glimpse of that French movie last night had stirred him with the idea of a wife as a total stranger, of moving right in, next to her little warm brown body. A wife can be as strange as a whore, that’s the beauty of male-female relations. She says, still without turning her head, “Harry, touch me once more and I’ll kill you.”

  He thinks this over and decides upon counteraggression. “Where the hell had he been?” he asks.

  She rolls over, giving up. Her breath has stale tobacco in it. She has given up smoking supposedly but whenever she’s around Nelson with his Camels and Pru with her Pall Malls she takes it up again. “He didn’t know exactly. Just driving around. He said he needed to get out, Florida is so claustrophobic.”

  The kid is right: life down here is confined to the narrow paths you make. To Winn Dixie, to the Loew’s cineplex and the shops in the Palmetto Palm Mall, to the doctor’s, to the pro shop and back. Between these paths there’s somehow nothing, a lot of identical palm trees and cactus and thirsty lawn and empty sunshine, hotels you’re not staying at and beaches you’re not admitted to and inland areas where there’s never any reason to go. In Pennsylvania, at least in Diamond County, everything has been paved solid by memory and in any direction you go you’ve already been there.

  Licking her lips and making a face as if her throat aches, Janice goes on, “He drove on 41 as far as what sounds like Naples and stopped at a restaurant when he got hungry and called us but the phone didn’t answer, I wondered at the time if we shouldn’t have waited to go over but you said you were starving -‘

  “That’s right. Blame me.”

  “I wasn’t, honey. It wasn’t just you. The children were antsy and worried and I thought, Life must go on, dinner will distract us; but then he says he did call just about when we were heading out the door and where he was one beer led to another and on the way back he got a little lost, you know yourself how if you miss the Pindo Palm turnoff everything looks identical, for miles.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Harry says. He feels rage coming to boil in his chest and sits up in bed to relieve the pressure. “Without so much as a fucking word to anybody he disappears for, what, eight hours? He is really becoming crazy. He’s always been moody but this is crazy behavior. The kid needs help.”

  Janice says, “He was perfectly sober when he came back and brought a bunch of those little tiny stuffed alligators they make for souvenirs; Pru and I had to laugh. One for each of the children and even one for you, where they’ve made it stand and put a golf club in its little feet.” She flicks the blanket back from his lap and touches his drowsy penis in his open pajama fly. “How’re we doing down there? We never make love any more.”

  But now he is out of the mood. He slaps her hand primly and tugs up the blanket and says, “We just did make love. Before Christmas.”

  “Way before Christmas,” Janice says, not moving her head, and for a second he has the mad hope she will turn the blanket down again and simply, quickly, take his prick in her mouth, like Thelma used to do almost first thing when they would secretly meet in this last decade; but blowing has never been Janice’s style. She has to be very drunk, and he never did like her drunk, a kind of chaos wells up within her that threatens him, that threatens to swamp the whole world. She says, “O.K. for you, buster,” to register with him that she’s been rejected, in case he wants her later, and pushes out of her side of the bed. Her damp nightie is stuck up above her waist and before she tugs it down he admires the taut pale buttocks above the tan backs of her thighs. Guiltily he hears her flush the toilet in the bathroom and with an angry rattle and rush of water s
tart to run the shower. He pictures exactly how she looks stepping out of the shower, with her hair in a transparent shower cap and her bottom rosy and her pussy all whitened with dew, and regrets that they must live, he and his little dark woman, his stubborn shy mutt of a Springer, in a world of mostly missed signals. Down here they have been thrown together more than at any time of their lives and they have coped by turning their backs and growing thicker skins. He plays golf three or four times a week and she has her tennis and her groups and her errands. When she comes back from the bathroom, in a terrycloth robe, he is still in the bed, reading in his book about British interference with Dutch merchant ships and France needing to build up her decayed fleet with Baltic timber delivered by Dutch vessels, in case Janice wants to try at sex again, but now from the other end of the condo the sounds of children can be heard, and of Pru hushing them in her burdened maternal voice.