Rabbit at Rest

by John Updike

  “Want to change the channel?” he asks Judy, and moves her hand from his bandaged wrist, where it is hurting him, to the hand control for the television set on its beige metal arm. He lies back feeling the white walls stretch all around him just like the ocean yesterday, his bed a raft. Judy flickers the TV through a wrestling match, a parade, a scare commercial with Karl Malden barking that with American Express Traveller’s Checks you can’t be robbed, a man and a woman in black skating in a sparkle of ice, a tonguein-cheek horror movie about being a teenage werewolf in London, and another movie called, they learn from the station break, The Fists of Bruce Lee. The kung-fu violence is arresting enough to hold Judy’s attention for a few minutes. Fragments of what Dr. Ohnan is confidentially yet, in that peppy Australian way, quite audibly telling Janice weave into the action - murderous kicks turned into slow motion by the director, graceful blurs of Oriental color. “. .. preliminary test… pulmonary congestion common after a myocardial infarction … backup of blood, leakage into the lung tissue … hydralazine … inflammation of the pericardium … Dilantin … skin rashes, diarrhea, loss of hair … hate to go to a pacemaker for a man this age …”

  Bruce Lee kicks out, once, twice, thrice, and three handsomely costumed thugs slowly fly toward the corners of the room, furniture shattering like fortune cookies, and suddenly Judy has switched channels again, coming upon a commercial Harry loves, for some skin moisturizer whose name he can never remember, but he could never forget the look on the model’s face, the way she smiles over her naked shoulder as she slinks behind the bathroom door, and then when she comes out the satisfied wicked purr in her expression, her wet hair turbanned in a bulky soft towel, her breasts showing cleavage but the nipples just off the screen, if only the screen were a little wider, if he could only slow the action down like in a kung-fu movie, for a thirtieth of a second there might have been a nipple, and the way she relaxes into a blue velvet sofa as if ever so profoundly satisfied, lovely eyes closed with their greasy lids, her eyebrows slightly thick like Cindy Murkett’s, and then the part coming up where she is dressed to go out for the evening, all moisturized still beneath her gold lam& …. “No, wait, honey”: he senses that Judy is about to change channels and reaches out to stop her but fails, it’s back to the werewolf, the boy’s face is growing fur as he crouches in a telephone booth, and then the ice skaters, the woman sliding backward at you with her little skirt flipped up; and then the back of Harry’s wrist stings from the tug he gave the IV, and a flirtatious ghost of yesterday’s pain plays across his chest. The Demerol must be wearing off. They gave him a little brown bottle of nitroglycerin on his bedside table next to the telephone and a glass of stale water and he shakes one out shakily and puts it beneath his tongue as they have taught him. It burns under his tongue and then, the funny thing, a minute or two later, his asshole tingles.

  “How much junk food does he eat?” Dr. Olman is asking.

  “Oh,” Janice says, with enthusiasm, “he’s a real addict.” His wife is, it occurs to Harry, a channel that can’t be switched. The same slightly too-high forehead, the same dumb stubborn slot of a mouth, day after day, same time, same station. She looks up into the doctor’s big red blond face as if at an instructively beautiful sunset. The two of them make a duo, dividing him up. One takes the inside, the other the outside.

  Now a turquoise Subaru is spinning along one of those steep spiky Western landscapes that the makers of automobile commercials love. A shimmery model, skinny as a rail, dimpled and squarejawed like a taller Audrey Hepburn from the Breakfast at Tiffany’s days, steps out of the car, smiling slyly and wearing a racing driver’s egg-helmet with her gown made up it seems of ropes of shimmering light. Maybe Nelson is right, Toyota is a dull company. Its commercials show people jumping into the air because they’re saving a nickel. The channel jumps back to the Fiesta Bowl Parade. Youth, flowers, a giant Garfield the cat jiggling majestically along. Harry’s internal climate of drugs and their afterwash seems to be undergoing a distant storm, like sunspots or those faint far hurricanes on Jupiter. Along with history, Harry has a superstitious interest in astronomy. Our Father, Who art in Heaven …

  “… tons of fat through his system,” Dr. Olman is saying, “rivers of it, some of it has to stick. Marbled meats, pork sausage, liverwurst, baloney, hot dogs, peanut butter, salted nuts …”

  “He loves all that stuff, he’s a terrible nibbler,” Janice chimes in, anxious to please, courting, betraying her husband. “He loves nuts.”

  “Worst thing for him, absolutely the worst,” Dr. Olman responds, his voice speeding up, losing its drawl, `full of fat, not to mention sodium, and cashews, macadamia nuts, they’re the worst, macadamia nuts, but it’s all bad, bad.” In his intensity he has begun to crouch above her, as if over a slippery putt. “Anything made with hydrogenated vegetable shortenings, coconut oil, palm oil, butter, lard, egg yolk, whole milk, ice cream, cream cheese, cottage cheese, any organ meats, all these frozen TV dinners, commercial baked goods, almost anything you buy in a package, in a waxpaper bag, any of it, ma’am, is poison, bloody poison. I’ll give you a list you can take home.”

  “You can, but my daughter-in-law is studying nutrition. She has a lot of lists already.” On cue, Pru appears, hesitantly filling the doorway with her womanly-wide frame in its nappy travelling suit of three-dimensional checks. Unawares, Janice goes on buttering up Dr. Olman. “She’s been saying everything you’ve been saying for years to Harry, but he just won’t listen. He think’s he’s above it all, he thinks he’s still a teenager.”

  The doctor snorts. “Even the teenagers with their supercharged metabolism aren’t burning up the fats and sugars this country’s food industry is pumping into them. We’re having adolescent heart attacks all over” - his voice softens to Southerliness again - “God’s green creation.”

  Pru steps forward, in her three dimensions. ` Janice, I’m sorry,” she says, still shy of using her mother-in-law’s name, “I know he shouldn’t have so many visitors at once but Nelson is getting frantic, he’s afraid we’re going to miss the plane.”

  Janice stands, so briskly the wheelchair recoils under her. She staggers but keeps her feet. “I’ll leave. You say hello and bring Judy when you come. Harry, I’ll drop by on my way back when I’ve put them on the plane. But there’s an origami demonstration tonight at the Village I don’t want to miss. The man has come all the way from Japan.” She exits, and Judy switches off the television in the middle of an especially amusing slapstick commercial for Midas mufflers, and exits with her.

  Dr. Olman shakes Pru’s hand fiercely and tells her, baring his shark-white teeth, “Ma’am, teach this stubborn bastard to eat.” He turns and punches Harry with a loosened fist on the shoulder. “For half a century, my friend,” he says, “you’ve been pouring sludge through your gut.” Then he, too, is gone.

  He and Pru, suddenly alone together, feel shy. “That guy,” Harry says, “keeps attacking America. If he doesn’t like the food here, why doesn’t he go back where he came from and eat kangaroos?”

  His tall daughter-in-law fiddles with her long red hands, twisting at her wedding ring, yet moves forward, to the foot of the bed. “Harry,” she says. “Listen. We’re stricken at what’s happened to you.”

  “You and who else?” he asks, determined to be debonair Bogie at the airport in Casablanca, Flynn at Little Big Horn, George Sanders in the collapsing temple to Dagon, Victor Mature having pushed apart the pillars.

  “Nelson, obviously. I don’t think he slept a wink last night, you were so much on his mind. He can’t say it, but he loves you.”

  Harry laughs, gently, since there is this valentine inside him that might rip. “The kid and I have something going between us. Not sure love is what you’d call it.” Since she hesitates in replying, looking at him with those staring mud-flecked greenish eyes that Judy’s clearer paler eyes were distilled from, he goes on, “I love him all right, but maybe it’s a him that’s long gone. A little tiny kid, lo
oking right up to you while you’re letting him down - you never forget it.”

  “It’s still there, under it all,” Pru assures him, without saying what ‘`it all” is. Her Sphinx-do hair is slightly wild, Harry sees in the brilliant hospital light -colorless stray filaments stand out all around her head. He feels there is a lot she wants to say but doesn’t dare. He remembers how she appeared hovering above him as he lay breathless on the beach, in her white suit with its spandex crotch, anxious and womanly, her face in shadow, unlookable at, and right beside it like a thunder-head the face of Ed Silberstein’s son, his salt-stiffened black curls, his butternut skin, his prick making its bump in his tight black trunks, beside the five-sided Omni logo - a smoothie, on the make, on the rise. Hi-ho, Silvers.

  “Tell me about you, Pru,” Rabbit says, the words gliding out of his hoarse throat as if his being in bed and chemically relaxed has moved them to a new level of intimacy. “How’s it going for you, with the kid? With Nelson.”

  People do respond, surprisingly, to the direct approach, as if we’re all just waiting in our burrows to be ferreted out. She says without hesitation, “He’s a wonderful father to the children. That I can say sincerely. Protective and concerned and involved. When he can focus.”

  “Why can’t he always focus?”

  Now she hesitates, unthinkingly revolving the ring on her finger.

  As if all of Florida is made up of interchangeable parts, a Norfolk pine stands outside his hospital window and holds an invisible bird that makes the sound of wet wood squeaking. He heard it this morning and he hears it now. His chest seems to echo with a twinge. Just to be on the safe side he takes another nitroglycerin.

  Pru blurts out, “The lot worries him, I think. Sales have been off these last years with the weaker dollar and all, and what he says are boring models, and I think he’s afraid Toyota might lift the dealership.”

  “It would take a bomb to make them do that. We’ve done O.K. by Toyota over the years. When Fred Springer got that franchise Japanese products were still considered a joke.”

  “That was a long time ago, though. Things don’t stand still,” Pru says. “Nelson has trouble being patient, and to tell the truth I think it scares him to have none of the old-timers around any more, Charlie and then Manny and now Mildred, even though he fired her, and you down here half the year, and f Jake gone over to Volvo-Olds over near that new mall in Oriole, and Rudy opening his own Toyota-Mazda over on 422. He feels alone, and all he has for company are these flaky types from north Brewer.”

  At the thought of “these flaky types” more of her hairs, glowing like electric filaments here in Florida’s fluorescent light, stand out from her head in agitation. She is trying to tell him something, something is slipping, but how can a man tied up helpless in bed track it down? Rabbit has his heart to nurse. This is life and death. His drugs must be wearing off. The deadly awfulness of his situation is beginning to rise in his throat, burning like an acid regurgitation. His asshole tingles, right on schedule. He has something evil and weak inside him that might betray him at any minute into that icy blackness Bernie talked about.

  Pru shrugs her wide shoulders in delayed answer to his question about how it was going. “What’s a life supposed to be? They don’t give you another for comparison. I love the big house, and Pennsylvania. In Akron we only ever had apartments, and the rent was always behind, and it seemed like the toilet bowl always leaked.”

  Rabbit tries to lift himself onto her level, out of his private apprehension of darkness, its regurgitated taste. “You’re right,” he says. “We ought to be grateful. But it’s hard, being grateful. It seems like from the start you’re put here in a kind of fix, hungry and scared, and the only way out is no good either. Hey, listen. Listen to me. You’re still young. You’re great-looking. Smile. Smile for me, Teresa.”

  Pru smiles and comes around the end of the bed and bends down to give him a kiss, not on the mouth this time like in the airport, but on the cheek, avoiding the tubes feeding oxygen into his nose. Her close presence feels huge, checked, clothy, a cloud come over him like the shadow of that hull on its side out there on the Gulf, where it was cold and hot both at once. He feels sick; the facts of his case keep wanting to rise in his throat, burning, on the verge of making him gag. “You’re a sweet man, Harry.”

  “Yeah, sure. See you in the spring up there.”

  “It seems terrible, us leaving like this, but there’s this party in Brewer Nelson’s determined to go to tonight and changing plane reservations is impossible anyway, everything’s jammed this time of year, even into Newark.”

  “What can you do?” he asks her. “I’ll be fine. This is probably a blessing in disguise. Put some sense into my old head. Get me to lose some weight. Go for walks, eat less crap. The doc says I gotta become a new man.”

  “And I’ll paint my toenails.” Pru, standing tall again, says in a level low voice he has not exactly heard before, aimed flat at him as a man, “Don’t change too much, Harry.” She adds, “I’ll send Nelson in.”

  “If the kid’s wild to go, tell him to just go. I’ll catch him later, up there.”

  Her mouth pinches down at one corner, her face goes slightly stiff with the impropriety of his suggestion. “He has to see his father,” she says.

  Pru exits; the white clean world around Harry widens. When everybody leaves, he will give himself the luxury of ringing for the nurse and asking for more Demerol. And see how the Eagles are doing in the fog. And close his eyes for a blessed minute.

  Nelson comes in carrying little Roy in his arms, though visitors under six years old aren’t supposed to be allowed. The kid wears the child like defensive armor: as long as he’s carrying a kid of his own, how much can you say against him? Roy stares at Harry indignantly, as if his grandfather being in bed connected with a lot of machinery is a threatening trick. When Harry tries to beam him a smile and a wink, Roy with a snap of his head hides his face in his father’s neck. Nelson too seems shocked; his eyes keep going up to the monitor, with its orange twitch of onrunning life, and then gingerly back to his father’s face. Cumbersomely keeping his grip on the leaden, staring child, Nelson steps toward the bed and sets a folded copy of the NewsPress on the chrome-edged table already holding the water glass and the telephone and the little brown bottle of nitroglycerin. “Here’s the paper when you feel like reading. There’s a lot in it about that Pan Am crash you’re so interested in. They think they know now exactly what kind of bomb it was - there’s a kind with a barometric device that activates a timer when a certain altitude is reached.”

  Up, up; the air thins, the barometer registers, the timer begins to tick as the plane snugly bores through darkness and the pilot chats on the radio while the cockpit lights burn and wink around him and the passengers nod over their drinks in their slots of pastel plastic. The image, like a seed at last breaking its shell in moist soil, awakens in Harry the realization that even now as he lies here in this antiseptic white fog tangled in tubes and ties of blood and marriage he is just like the people he felt so sorry for, falling from the burst-open airplane: he too is falling, helplessly falling, toward death. The fate awaiting him behind this veil of medical attention is as absolute as that which greeted those bodies fallen smack upon the boggy Scottish earth like garbage bags full of water. Smack, splat, bodies bursting across the golf courses and heathery lanes of Lockerbie drenched in night. What met them was no more than what awaits him. Reality broke upon those passengers as they sat carving their airline chicken with the unwrapped silver or dozing with tubes piping Barry Manilow into their ears and that same icy black reality has broken upon him; death is not a domesticated pet of life but a beast that swallowed baby Amber and baby Becky and all those Syracuse students and returning soldiers and will swallow him, it is truly there under him, vast as a planet at night, gigantic and totally his. His death. His purely own. The burning intensifies in his sore throat and he feels all but suffocated by terror.

  “Thanks,�
�� he hoarsely tells his son. “I’ll read it when you go. Those damn Arabs. I’m nervous about your missing your plane.”

  “Don’t be. We got tons of time still. Even Mom can’t get lost on the way, can she?”

  “Drive east from here to 75 and then south to Exit 21. The road feels like it’s going nowhere but after three miles the airport shows up.” Harry remembers his own drive along that weird highway, the lack of billboards, the palm trees skinny as paint drips, the cocoa-colored chick in the red Camaro convertible and stewardess cap who tailgated him and then didn’t give him a sideways glance, her tipped-up nose and pushed-out lips, and it seems unreal, coated in a fake sunshine like enamel, like that yellow sunlight they make on TV shows from studio lights. He didn’t have a worry in the world back then. He was in paradise and didn’t know it. He feels his body sweating from fear, he smells his own sweat,- clammy like something at the bottom of a well, and sees Nelson standing there bathed in the artificial light of the world that hasn’t broken through into death yet, neat and taut in the puttycolored suit he is wearing instead of the denim jacket he wore on the flight down, but with his shirt collar still open, so he looks like an all-night gambler who took off his tie in a poker game, down here nearly a week and hardly ever saw the sun. The little smudge of his mustache annoys Harry and the kid keeps calling attention to it, sniffing and touching the underside of his nose as if he smells his father’s clammy fear.