by John Updike
“Did you have any this morning? Before you came out ofyour bedroom to face me?”
“Hey, give me a break. I’m trying to be honest, but this is ridiculous.”
“I think you did,” she says, stubbornly.
He disappoints her by not denying even this. Children, why are they afraid of us? “Maybe a sniff of what was left over in the envelope, to get me started. I don’t like this idea of Dad taking Judy off on a little sailboat - he can’t sail for shit, and seems sort of dopey anyway these days. He seems depressed, have you noticed?”
“I can’t notice everything at once. What I do notice about you, Nelson, is that you’re not at all yourself. You’re in what my mother used to call a state. This dealer you trust so much, do you owe him any money? How much?”
“Mom, is that any business of yours?”
He is enjoying this, she sadly perceives; he is glad to have it wormed out of him, and to place his shameful burden on her. He shows relief in just the way his voice is loosening, the way his shoulders sag in his fancy paisley bathrobe. She tells him, “Your money comes from the lot and the lot’s not yours yet; it’s mine, mine and your father’s.”
“Yeah, in a pig’s eye it’s his.”
“How much money, Nelson?”
“There’s a credit line I’ve developed, yeah.”
“Why can’t you pay your bills? You get forty-five thousand a year, plus the house.”
“I know to your way of thinking that’s a lot of jack, but you’re
thinking in pre-inflation dollars.”
“You say this coke is seventy-five a gram or ten dollars a rock. How many grams or rocks can you use a day? Tell me, honey, because I want to help you.”
“You do? What kind of help?”
“I can’t say unless I know what kind of trouble you’re in.”
He hesitates, then states, “I owe maybe twelve grand.”
“Oh, my.” Janice feels an abyss at her feet; she had envisioned this conversation as confession and repentance and, at the end, her generous saving offer of a thousand or two. The ease with which he named a much bigger figure indicates a whole new scale of things. “How could you do it, Nelson?” she asks lamely, limply, all of Bessie Springer’s righteous stiffness scared out of her.
Nelson’s pale little face, sensing her shock, begins to panic, to get pink. “What’s such a big deal? Twelve grand is less than a stripped Camry costs. What do you think your liquor bill runs to a year?”
“Nothing like that. Your father has never been a drinker, though back in the Murkett days he used to try.”
“Those Murkett days - you know what was in them for him, doncha? Getting into Cindy Murkett’s pants, that’s all he cared about.”
Janice stares and almost laughs. How young he is, how long ago that was, and how different from what Nelson thinks. She feels a hollowness spreading inside her. She wishes she had something to sip, a little orange juice glass of blood-red Campari, not weakened by soda the way the women down here like to have spritzers, for luncheon or out by the pool. Her half of the cherryfilled Danish feels heavy on her stomach and now in her nervousness she can’t stop picking the sugar icing off Nelson’s half. His refusal to eat - his acting so superior to the mild poisons she and Harry like - is the most annoying thing about him. She tells him, stiffly, “Whatever our bill is, we pay it. We have the money and can afford it.” She holds out a hand toward him and twiddles two fingers. “Could I bum one cigarette?”
“You don’t smoke,” he tells her.
“I don’t, except when I’m around you and your wife.” He shrugs and takes his pack of Camels from the table and tosses it toward her. Their complicity is complete now. The lightness of it all - the cigarette itself, the dry tingling in her nostrils as she exhales - restores matters to a scale that she can manage. She asks, “What do these men do, these dealers, when you don’t pay?” She could bite her lips - she has gone over into his territory, where he is an innocent victim.
“Oh,” he says, enjoying posing as casually brave, shaping the ash of his cigarette on the edge of a lovely Macoma tellin he uses as an ashtray, “it’s mostly talk. They say they’ll break your legs. Threaten to kidnap your kids. Maybe that’s what makes me so nervous about Judy and Roy. If they threaten you often enough, they have to do something eventually. But, then, they don’t like to lose a good customer. It’s like the banks. You owe enough, they want to keep you in business.”
Janice says, “Nelson. If I gave you the twelve thousand, would you swear off drugs for good?” She strives to make eye contact.
She expects at least an eager vow from him to cinch her gift, but the boy has the audacity, the shamelessness, to sit there and say, without giving her a glance, “I could try, but I can’t honestly promise. I’ve tried before, to please Pru. I love coke, Mom. And it loves me. I can’t explain it. It’s right for me. It makes me feel right, in a way nothing else does. It’s like the bank. You owe enough, they want to keep you in business.”
She finds herself crying, without sobs, just the dry-straw ache in the throat and the wetness on her cheeks, as if a husband were calmly confessing his love for another woman. When she gets her voice together enough to speak she says, clearly enough, “Well then I’d be foolish to contribute to your ruining yourself.”
He turns his head and looks her full in the face. “I’ll give it up, sure. I was just thinking out loud.”
“But, baby, can you?”
“Cinchy. I often go days without a hit. There’s no withdrawal, is one of the beautiful things - no heaves, no DTs, nothing. It’s just a question of making up your mind.”
“But is your mind made up? I don’t get the feeling it is.”
“Sure it is. Like you say, I can’t afford it. You and Dad own the lot, and I’m your wage slave.”
“That’s a way of putting it. Another way might be that we’ve bent Over backwards to give you a responsible job, heading things up, without our interference. Your father’s very bored down here. Even I’m a little bored.”
Nelson takes an abrupt new tack. “Pru’s no help, you know,” he says.
“She isn’t?”
“She thinks I’m a wimp. She always did. I was the way out of Akron and now she’s out. I get none of the things a man’s supposed to get from a wife.”
“What are those?” Janice is truly interested; she has never heard a man spell them out.
He makes a cross evasive face. “You know - don’t play naive. Reassurance. Affection. Make the guy think he’s great even if he isn’t. “
“I may be naive, Nelson, but aren’t there things we can only do for ourselves? Women have their own egos to keep up, they have their own problems.” She hasn’t been attending a weekly women’s discussion group down here for nothing. She feels indignant enough, independent enough, to get up and march into the kitchen and open the cabinet doors and pull down the Campari bottle and an orange juice glass. The aqua-enamelled clock on the stove says 12:25. The phone right beside her on the wall rings, startling her so that the bottle jumps in her hand and some of the Campari spills, watery red on the Formica counter, like thinned blood.
“Yes … yes … oh my God…” Nelson, sitting in the wicker chair planning his next move and wondering if twelve thou was too little to ask for, it sure as hell is less than he owes, hears his mother’s voice make each response with a tightened breathlessness, and sees by her face when she hangs up and hurries toward him that the scale of things has changed; a new order has dawned. His mother’s Florida tan has fled, leaving her face a greenish gray. “Nelson,” she says, speaking as efficiently as a newscaster, “that was Pru. Your father’s had a heart attack. They’ve taken him to the hospital. They’re coming right back so I can have the car. No point in your coming, he isn’t allowed any visitors except me, and then for only five minutes every hour. He’s in intensive care.”
The Deleon Community General Hospital is a modern set of low white buildings added onto a bisque-colored c
ore, dating from the Thirties, with a Spanish-tile roof and curved grillework at the windows. The complex fills two blocks on the southern side of Tamarind Avenue, which runs parallel to Pindo Palm Boulevard about a mile to the north. Janice spent most of yesterday here, so she knows the way into the parking garage, and which arrows painted on the floor to follow out of the parking garage, across a glass-enclosed second-story pedestrian bridge, which takes them above the parking-garage ticket booths and a breadth ofbusy asphalt and a hexagonal-tiled patio with arcs of oleander hedge and of convalescents in glinting steel wheelchairs, and down a halfflight of stairs into a lobby where street-people, multiracial but the whites among them dyed on hands and face a deep outdoorsy brown, doze beside the neatly tied bundles and plastic garbage bags containing all their possessions. The lobby smells of oleander, urine, and air freshener.
Janice, wearing a soft salmon-colored running suit with powder-blue sleeves and pants stripes, leads, and Nelson, Roy, Pru, and Judy, all in their airplane clothes, follow, hurrying to keep up. In just one day Janice has acquired a widow’s briskness, the speed afoot of a woman with no man to set the pace for her. Also some remnant of old love - of old animal magnetism revived in this thronged institutional setting not so different from the high-school corridors where she first became aware of Rabbit Angstrom, he a famous senior, tall and blond, and she a lowly ninth-grader, dark and plain - pulls her toward her man, now that his animal fragility has reawakened her awareness of his body. His, and her own. Since his collapse she is proudly, continuously conscious of her body’s elastic health, its defiant uprightness, the stubborn miracle of its functioning.
The children are frightened. Roy and Judy don’t know what they will see in this visit. Perhaps their grandfather has been monstrously transformed, as by a wicked witch in a fairy story, into a toad or a steaming puddle. Or perhaps a monster is what he has been all along, underneath the friendly kindly pose and high coaxing voice he put on for them like the wolf in grandmother’s clothes who wanted to eat Little Red Riding Hood. The sugary antiseptic smells, the multiplicity of elevators and closed doors and directional signs and people in white smocks and white stockings and shoes and plastic badges, the hollow purposeful sound their own crowd of feet makes on the linoleum floors, scrubbed and waxed so shiny they hold moving ripples like water, widens the ominous feeling in their childish stomachs, their suspicion of a maze there is no escaping from, of a polished expensive trap whose doors and valves only open one way. The world that grownups construct for themselves seems such an extravagant creation that malice might well be its motive. Within a hospital you feel there is no other world. The palm trees and jet trails and drooping wires and blue sky you can see through the windows seem part of the panes, part of the trap.
The vaulted lobby holds two murals - at one end, happy people of many colors work in orange groves above which the sun seems one more round orange and, at the other, bearded Spaniards in armor woodenly exchange obscure gifts with nearly naked Indians, one of whom crouches with a bow and arrow behind a spiky jungle bush. This Indian scowls with evil intent. The explorer will be killed.
A skinny strict woman at the main desk consults a computer printout and gives them a floor number and directions to the correct elevator. This family of five crowds onto it among a man who holds a bouquet and keeps clearing his throat, a Hispanic boy carrying a clinking tray of vials, and a big jawed bushy-haired middle-aged woman pushing an ancient version of herself, only the hair not so thick or so brightly dyed, in a wheelchair. She drags her mother out to let other people off and on and then forces the wheelchair’s way back in. Judy rolls her clear green eyes heavenward in protest of how obnoxious and clumsy grownups are.
Their floor is the fourth, the topmost. Janice is struck by how much less elaborate the nurses’ station is here than in the intensive cardiac-care unit. There, the uniformed women sat barricaded behind a bank of heart monitors each giving in a twitching orange line the imperfect beats from the rows of individual rooms, on three sides, with glass front walls, some doors open so you could see a dazed patient sitting up under his spaghetti of tubes, some of them closed but the curtains not drawn so you can see the two dark nostrils and triangular dying mouth of an unconscious head, and yet others with the curtains ominously drawn, to hide some desperate medical procedure in progress. She has home two babies and escorted both of her parents into the grave so she is not a total stranger to hospitals. Here, on Floor Four, there is just a single high counter, and a few desks, and a waiting area with a hard wood settee and a coffee table holding magazines titled Modern Health and Woman’s Day and The Watchtower and The Monthly Redeemer. A big black woman, with waxy tight-woven corn rows looped beneath her white cap, stops the anxious herd of Angstroms with a smile. “Only two visitors in the room at a time, please. Mr. Angstrom came out of the ICCU this morning and he’s still not ready for too much fuhnn.”
Something in her wide gleaming face and elaborately braided hair transfixes little Roy; suddenly he begins under the stress of accumulating strangeness to cry. His inky eyes widen and then squeeze shut; his rubbery lips are pulled down as if by a terrible taste. His first cry turns a number of heads in the corridor, where attendants and doctors are busy with the routines of early afternoon.
Pru takes him from Nelson’s arms and presses his face into her neck. She tells her husband, “Why don’t you take Judy in?”
Nelson’s face, too, undergoes a displeased, alarmed stretching. “1 don’t want to be the first. Suppose he’s delirious or something. Mom, you ought to go in first.”
“For heaven’s sake,” she says, as if Harry’s burden of exasperation with their only living child has passed to her. “I talked to him two hours ago over the phone and he was perfectly normal.” But she takes the little girl by the hand and they go down the shiny rippled corridor looking for the room number, 326. The number rings a faint bell with Janice. Where before? In what life?
Pru sits on the hard settee - uncushioned perhaps to discourage loiterers - and tries to murmur and joggle Roy into calm again. In five minutes, with a sob like a hiccup, he falls asleep, heavy and hot against her, rumpling and making feel even more oppressive the checked suit which she put on for disembarking into the Northern winter. The air-conditioning in here feels turned off; the local temperature has again climbed into the eighties, ten degrees warmer than normal this time of year. They have brought this morning’s News-Press as a present to Harry and while they are waiting on the bench Nelson begins to read it. Reagan, Bush get subpoenas, Pru reads over his shoulder. Regional killings decrease in 1988. Team owner to pay for Amber’s funeral. Unlike the Brewer Standard this one always has color on the page and today features a green map of Great Britain with Lockerbie pinpointed and insets of a suitcase and an exploding airplane. Report describes sophisticated bomb. “Nelson,” Pru says softly, so as not to wake Roy or have the nurses hear what she wants to say. “There’s been something bothering me.”
“Yeah? Join the crowd.”
“I don’t mean you and me, for a change. Do you possibly think -? I can’t make myself say it.”
“Say what?”
“Shh. Not so loud.”
“Goddamn it, I’m trying to read the paper. They think they know now exactly what kind of bomb blew up that Pan Am flight.”
“It occurred to me immediately but I kept trying to put it out of my mind and then you fell asleep last night before we could talk.”
“I was beat. That’s the first good night’s sleep I’ve had in weeks.”
“You know why, don’t you? Yesterday was the first day in weeks you’ve gone without cocaine.”
“That had nothing to do with it. My body and blow get along fine. I crashed because my father suddenly near-died and it’s damn depressing. I mean, if he goes, who’s next in line? I’m too young not to have a father.”
“You crashed because that chemical was out of your system for a change. You’re under terrible neurological tension all the time an
d it’s that drug that’s doing it.”
“It’s my fucking whole neurological life doing it and has been doing it ever since you and I got hitched up; it’s having a holierthan-thou wife with the sex drive of a frozen yogurt now that she’s got all the babies she wants.”
Pru’s mouth when she gets angry tenses up so the upper lip stiffens in vertical wrinkles almost like a mustache. You see that she does have a faint gauzy mustache; she is getting whiskery. Her face when she’s sore becomes a kind of shield pressing at him, the crépey skin under her eyes as dead white as the parting in her hair, her whisper furious and practiced in its well-worn groove. He has heard this before: “Why should I risk my life sleeping with you, you addict, you think I want to get AIDS from your dirty needles when you’re speedballing or from some cheap coke whore you screw when you’re gone until two in the morning?”
