Rabbit at Rest

by John Updike

  “Too bad. I miss playing with old Ronnie.”

  “Why? You can’t stand him, Harry.”

  “I like beating him.”

  Thelma nods, as if acknowledging her own contribution to Harry’s beating Ronnie. But she can’t help it, she loves this man, his soft pale bemusement and cool hard heart, his uncircumcised prick, his offhand style, and in her slow dying has not denied herself the pleasure of expressing this love, as much as Harry has been able to bear it. She has kept her strongest feelings contained, and the affair has enriched her transactions with God, giving her something to feel sinful about, to discuss with Him. It seems to explain her lupus, if she’s an adulteress. It makes it easier on Him, if she deserves to be punished.

  She goes into the kitchen for the soft drinks. Rabbit roams quietly in the living room; in preparation for his visit she has pulled not only the narrow shade on the front door but the wide one on the picture window. He pities the room - its darkness as if even weak windowlight would penetrate her skin and accelerate the destruction of her cells, its hushed funereal fussiness. Wild though she can be, with a streak of defiance as though daring to be damned, Thelma maintains a conventional local decor. Stuffed flowered chairs with broad wooden arms, plush chocolate-brown sofa with needlepointed scatter pillows and yellowing lace antimacassars, varnished little knickknack stands and taborets, a footstool on which an old watermill is depicted, symmetrical lamps whose porcelain bases show English hunting dogs in gilded ovals, an oppressively patterned muddy neo-Colonial wallpaper, and on every flat surface, fringed runners and semi-precious glass and porcelain elves and parrots and framed photographs of babies and graduating sons and small plates and kettles of hammered copper and pewter, objects to dust around but never to rearrange. This front room, but for the television set hulking in its walnut cabinet with its powdery gray-green face wearing a toupee of doilies and doodads, could have come out of Harry’s adolescence, when he was gingerly paying calls on girls whose mothers came forward from the kitchen, drying their hands on their aprons, to greet him in motionless stuffed rooms such as this. The houses he has kept with Janice have had in comparison a dishevelled, gappy quality that has nevertheless given him room to breathe. This room is so finished, he feels in it he should be dead. It smells of all the insurance policies Ron sold to buy its furnishings.

  “So tell me about it,” Thelma says, returning with a round painted tray holding along with the two tall glasses of sparkling dark soft drink two matching small bowls of nuts. She sets the tray down on a glass-topped coffee table like an empty long picture frame.

  He tells her, “For one thing, I’m not supposed to have stuff like that - salted nuts. Macadamia nuts yet! The worst thing for me, and they cost a fortune. Thel, you’re wicked.”

  He has embarrassed her; her jaundiced skin tries to blush. Her basically thin face today looks swollen, perhaps from the cortisone she takes. “Ronnie buys them. They just happened to be around. Don’t eat them if you can’t, Harry. I didn’t know. I don’t know how to act with you, it’s been so long.”

  “A couple won’t kill me,” he reassures her, and to be polite takes a few macadamia nuts into his fingers. Nuggets, they are like small lightweight nuggets with a fur of salt. He especially loves the way, when he holds one in his mouth a few seconds and then gently works it between his crowned molars, it breaks into two halves, the surface of the fissure as smooth to the tongue as glass, as baby skin. “And cashews, too,” he says. “The second-worst thing for me. Dry-roasted yet.”

  “I seem to remember you like dry-roasted.”

  “There’s a lot I bet you seem to remember,” he says, taking a tasteless sip of his Diet Coke. First they take the cocaine out, then the caffeine, and now the sugar. He settles back with a small handful of cashews; dry-roasted, they have a little acid sting to them, the tang of poison that he likes. He has taken the rocking chair, painted black with stencilled red designs and a red-and-yellow flat pillow tied in place, to sit in, and she the plush brown sofa, not sinking into it but perching on the edge, her knees together and touching the raised edge of the coffee table. They have made love on that sofa, which was not long enough to stretch out on but long enough if both parties kept their knees bent. In a way he preferred it to one of the beds, since she seemed to feel guiltier and less free with herself in a real bed, a bed her family used, and her unease would spread to him. Moving the table, he could kneel beside the sofa and have the perfect angle for kissing her cunt. On and on, deeper into her darkness where things began to shudder and respond, it got to be an end in itself. He loved it when she would clamp his face between her damp thighs like a nut in a nutcracker and come. He wondered if a man ever got his neck broken that way.

  A shadow has crossed Thelma’s face, a flinching as if he has consigned her to merely remembering, to the sealed and unrepeatable past like the photographs on the silent television set. But he had meant it more comfortably, settling in his rocker opposite the one person who for these last ten years has given him nothing but what he needed. Sex. Soul food.

  “You too,” she says, her eyes lowered to the items on the tray, which she hasn’t touched, “have things to remember, I hope.”

  “I just was. Remembering. You seem sad,” he says, accusing, for his presence should make her glad, in spite of all.

  “You don’t seem quite you yet. You seem - more careful.”

  “Jesus, you’d be too. I’ll have some more macadamia nuts, if that’ll please you.” He eats them one by one and between bouts of chewing and feeling their furry nuggets part so smoothly in his mouth tells her about his heart attack - the boat, the Gulf, little Judy, the lying on the beach feeling like a jellyfish, the hospital, the doctors, their advice, his attempts to follow it. “They’re dying to cut into me and do a bypass. But there’s this less radical option they can do first and I’m supposed to see a guy up here at St. Joseph’s about having it done this spring. It’s called an angioplasty. There’s a balloon on the end of a catheter a yard long at least they thread up into your heart from a cut they make just under your groin, the artery there. I had it done kind of in Florida but instead of a balloon it was a bunch of dyes they put in to see what my poor old ticker actually looked like. It’s a funny experience: it doesn’t exactly hurt but you feel very funny, demoralized like, while it’s being done and terrible for days afterward. When they put the dye in, your chest goes hot like you’re in an oven. Deep, it feels too deep. Like having a baby but then no baby, just a lot of computerized bad news about your coronary arteries. Still, it beats open-heart, where they saw through your sternum for starters” - he touches the center of his chest and thinks of Thelma’s breasts, their nipples so perfect to suck, waiting behind her blouse, waiting for him to make his move - “and then run all your blood through a machine for hours. I mean, that machine is you, for the time being. It stops, you die. A guy I play golf with down there had a quadruple and a valve replacement and a pacemaker while they were at it and he says he’s never been the same, it was like a truck ran over him and then backed up. His swing, too, is terrible; he’s never got it back. But enough, huh? What about you? How’s your health?”

  “How do I look?” She sips the Coke but leaves all the nuts in their twin bowls for him. The pattern imitates sampler stitch, squarish flowers in blue and pink.

  “Good to me,” he lies. “A little pale and puffy but we all do at the end of winter.”

  “I’m losing it, Harry,” Thelma tells him, looking up until he meets her eyes. Eyes muddier than Pru’s but also what they call hazel, eyes that have seen him all over, that know him as well as a woman’s can. A wife fumbles around with you in the dark; a mistress you meet in broad daylight, right on the sofa. She used to tease him about his prick wearing a bonnet, with the foreskin still on. “My kidneys are worse and the steroid dose can’t go any higher. I’m so anemic I can hardly drag around the house to do the work and have to take naps every afternoon - you’re right in the middle of my nap time, as a mat
ter of fact.” He makes an instinctive motion, tightening his hands on the chair arms to pull himself up, and her voice lifts toward anger. “No. Don’t go. Don’t you dare. For God’s sake. I don’t see you at all for nearly six months and then you’re up here a week before you bother to call.”

  “Thelma, she’s around, I can’t just wander off. I was getting reacclimated. I have to take it more easy on myself now.”

  “You’ve never loved me, Harry. You just loved the fact that I loved you. I’m not complaining. It’s what I deserve. You make your own punishments in life, I honest to God believe that. You get exactly what you deserve. God sees to it. Look at my hands. I used to have pretty hands. At least I thought they were pretty. Now half the fingers - look at them! Deformed. I couldn’t even get my wedding ring off if I tried now.”

  He looks, leaning forward so the rocker tips under him, to examine her extended hands. The knuckles are swollen and shiny, and some of the segments with the fingernails go off at a slight angle, but he wouldn’t have noticed without her calling his attention to it. “You don’t want to get your wedding ring off” he tells her. “As I remember, you and Ronnie are stuck together with glue. You even eat the glue sometimes, I seem to remember your telling me.”

  Her hands have made Thelma angry and he is fighting back, as if she blames her hands on him. She says, “You always minded that, that I was a wife to Ronnie, along with serving you whenever it suited. But who were you to mind that, stuck fast to Janice and her money? I never tried to take you away from her, though it would have been easy at times.”

  “Would it?” He rocks back. “I don’t know, something about that little mutt still gets to me. She won’t give up. She never really figured out how the world is put together but she’s still working at it. Now she’s got the idea she wants to be a working girl. She’s signed up at the Penn State annex over on Pine Street for those courses you have to take to get a real-estate broker’s license. At Mt. Judge High I don’t think she ever got over a C, even in home ec. Come to think of it, I bet she flunked home ec., the only girl in the history of the school.”

  Thelma grudgingly smiles; her sallow face lights up in her shadowy living room. “Good for her,” she says. “If I had my health, I’d be getting out myself. This being a homemaker - they sold us a bill of goods, back there in home ec.”

  “How is Ronnie, by the way?”

  “The same,” she says, with a note of that languid, plaintive music the women of the county inject into their saga of their stoic days. “Not hustling so hard for the new customers now, coasting along on the old. He’s out from under the children’s educations, so his only financial burden is me and the doctor bills. Not that he wouldn’t be willing to pay for little Ron to finish up at Lehigh if he wanted; it’s been a disappointment, his becoming a kind of hippie the way he has. The funny thing was he was the cleverest of the three at school. Things just came too easy to him, I guess.”

  Harry has heard this before. Thelma’s voice is dutiful and deliberately calm, issuing small family talk when both know that what she wants to discuss is her old issue, that flared up a minute ago, ofwhether he loves her or not, or why at least he doesn’t need her as much as she does him. But their relationship at the very start, the Caribbean night they first slept together, was established with her in pursuit of him, and all the years since, of hidden meetings, of wise decisions to end it and thrilling abject collapses back into sex, have not disrupted the fundamental pattern of her giving and his taking, of her fearing their end more than he, and clinging, and disliking herself for clinging, and wanting to punish him for her dislike, and him shrugging and continuing to bask in the sun of her love, that rises every day whether he is there or not. He can’t believe it, quite, and has to keep testing her.

  “These kids,” he says, taking a bluff tone as if they are making small talk in public instead of enjoying this stolen intimacy behind drawn shades in Arrowdale, “they break your heart. You ought to see Nelson when he’s down there in Florida and has to live with me a little. The poor kid was jumping out of his skin.”

  Thelma makes an annoyed motion with her hands. “Harry, you’re not actually God, it just feels that way to you. Do you really think Nelson was jumpy because of you?”

  “Why else?”

  She knows something. She hesitates, but cannot resist, perhaps, a bit of revenge for his taking her always for granted, for his being in Pennsylvania a week before calling. “You must know about Nelson. My boys say he’s a cocaine addict. They’ve all used it, that generation, but Nelson they tell me is really hooked. As they say, the drug runs him, instead of him just using the drug.”

  Harry has rocked back as far as the rocker will take him without his shoes leaving the rug and remains in that position so long that Thelma becomes anxious, knowing that this man isn’t sound inside and can have a heart attack. At last he rocks forward again and, gazing at her thoughtfully, says, “That explains a lot.” He fishes in the side pocket of his tweedy gray sports coat for a small brown bottle and deftly spills a single tiny pill into his hand and puts it in his mouth, under his tongue. There is a certain habituated daintiness in the gesture. “Coke takes money, doesn’t it?” he asks Thelma. “I mean, you can go through hundreds. Thousands.”

  She regrets her telling him, now that the satisfaction is past of shocking him, of waking him up to her existence once again. She is still at heart too much a schoolteacher; she enjoys administering a lesson. “I can’t believe Janice doesn’t know and hasn’t discussed it with you, or that Nelson’s wife hasn’t come to you both.”

  “Pru’s pretty close-mouthed,” he says. “I don’t see them that much. Even when we’re all in the county, it’s on opposite sides of Brewer. Janice is over there at her mother’s old place a fair amount, but not me. She owns it, I don’t.”

  “Harry, don’t look so stunned. It’s all just rumor, and really is his business, his and his family’s. We all do things our parents wouldn’t approve of, and they know it, and don’t want to know, if you follow me. Oh, Harry, damn it! Now I’ve made you sad, when I’m dying to make you happy. Why don’t you like me to make you happy? Why have you always fought it?”

  “I haven’t. I haven’t fought it, Thel. We’ve had great times. It’s just, we’ve never been exactly set up for a lot of happiness, and now -“

  “Now, dear?”

  “Now I know how you’ve been feeling all these years.”

  She wants for him to explain, but he can’t he is suddenly aficted by tact. She prompts, “Mortal?”

  “Yeah. Close to it. I mean, things wearing thin so you sort of look right through them.”

  “Including me.”

  “Not you. Cut it out, making me jump through this same fucking hoop all the time. Why do you think I’m here?”

  “To make love. To screw me. Go ahead. I mean come ahead. Why do you think I answered the door?” She has leaned forward across the table, her knees white where they press against the edge, and her face has taken on that melting crazy look women get at the decision to go with it, to fuck in spite of all, which frightens him now because it suggests a willing slide down into death.

  “Wait. Thel. Let’s think about this.” On cue, the nitroglycerin has worked its way through and he gets that tingle. He sits back, suppressing it. “I’m supposed to avoid excitement.”

  She asks, amused somehow by the need to negotiate, “Have you made love with Janice?”

  “Once or twice maybe. I kind of forget. You know, it’s like brushing your teeth at night, you forget if you did or didn’t.”

  She takes this in, and decides to tease him. “I made up Alex’s old bed for us.”

  “You didn’t use to like to use real beds.”

  “I’ve become very liberated,” she says, smiling, extracting what pleasure she can out of his evasions.

  He is tempted, picturing Thelma in bed naked, her tallowy willing body, her breasts that have nursed three boy babies and two men at least but look virgi
nal and rosy like a baby’s thumbtips, not bumply and chewed and dark like Janice’s, her buttocks glassy in texture and not finely gritty like Janice’s, her pubic hair reddish and skimpy enough to see the slit through unlike Janice’s opaque thick bush, and her shameless and matter-of-fact mouth, Thelma’s, her frank humorous hunger, amused at being caught in the trap of lust over and over, not holding it against him all these years of off and on, in and out. But then he thinks of Ronnie who knows where that obnoxious prick’s prick has been, Rabbit can’t believe he’s as faithful as Thelma thinks he is, not from the way he used to carry on in the locker room, not from the way he was screwing Ruth before Harry was, and cashing in Cindy that time in the Caribbean - and of AIDS. That virus too small to imagine travelling through our fluids, even a drop or two of saliva or cunt slime, and unlocking our antibodies with its little picks, so that our insides lose their balance and we topple into pneumonia, into starvation. Love and death, they can’t be pried apart any more. But he can’t tell Thelma that. It would be spitting in her wide-open face.

  On her own she sees he isn’t up to it. She asks, “Another Coke?” He has drunk it all, he sees, and consumed without thinking both the little bowls of fatty, sodium-soaked nuts.