Rabbit at Rest

by John Updike

  A nice thing happens. Ronnie and Harry, Harrison and Angstrom, with a precision as if practiced, execute a crisscross. They smile, despite their pink eyelids and raw throats, at the little watching crowd and neatly cross paths as they move toward their kin, Harry toward Janice in her navy-blue suit with white trim and wide shoulders, and Ronnie back to his sons and the center of his sad occasion. Once teammates, always teammates. Rabbit, remembering how Ronnie once screwed Ruth a whole weekend in Atlantic City and then bragged to him about it, can’t feel sorry for him at all.

  I Love What You Do for Me, Toyota. That is the new paper banner the company has sent down to hang in the big display window. At times, standing at the window, when a cloud dense with moisture darkens the atmosphere or an occluding truck pulls up past the yew hedge for some business at the service doors, Harry catches a sudden reflection of himself and is startled by how big he is, by how much space he is taking up on the planet. Stepping out on the empty roadway as Uncle Sam last month he had felt so eerily tall, as if his head were a giant balloon floating above the marching music. Though his inner sense of himself is of an innocuous passive spirit, a steady small voice, that doesn’t want to do any harm, get trapped anywhere, or ever die, there is this other self seen from outside, a six-foot-three ex-athlete weighing two-thirty at the least, an apparition wearing a sleek gray summer suit shining all over as if waxed and a big head whose fluffy shadowy hair was trimmed at Shear Joy Hair Styling (unisex, fifteen bucks minimum) to rest exactly on the ears, a fearsome bulk with eyes that see and hands that grab and teeth that bite, a body eating enough at one meal to feed three Ethiopians for a day, a shameless consumer of gasoline, electricity, newspapers, hydrocarbons, carbohydrates. A boss, in a shiny suit. His recent heart troubles have become, like his painfully and expensively crowned back teeth, part of his respectability’s full-

  blown equipage.

  Harry needs a good self-image today, for the lot is going to be visited at eleven by a representative of the Toyota Corporation, a Mr. Natsume Shimada, hitherto manifested only as a careful signature, each letter individually formed, on creamy stiff stationery from the American Toyota Motor Sales headquarters in Torrance, California. Word of the financial irregularities anatomized by the two accountants Janice hired under Charlie’s direction has filtered upward, higher and higher, as letters from Mid-Atlantic Toyota in Glen Burnie, Maryland, were succeeded by mail from the Toyota Motor Credit Corporation’s offices in Baltimore and then by courteous but implacable communications from Torrance itself, signed with what seems an old-fashioned stub-tipped fountain pen by Mr. Shimada, in sky-blue ink.

  “Nervous?” Elvira asks, sidling up beside him in a slim seersucker suit. For the hot weather she had her hair cut short behind, exposing sexy dark down at the back of her neck. Did Nelson used to boff her? If Pru wasn’t putting out, he had to buff somebody. Unless coke whores were enough, or the kid was secretly gay. Insofar as he can bear to contemplate his son’s sex life, Elvira seems a little too classy, too neuter to go along with it. But maybe Harry is underestimating the amount of energy in the world: he tends to do that, now that his own is sagging.

  “Not too,” he answers. “How do I look?”

  “Very imposing. I like the new suit.”

  “It’s kind of a gray metallic. They developed the fabric while doing the moon shots.”

  Benny is doing a dance of door-opening and hood-popping out on the lot with a couple so young they keep looking at each other for confirmation, both talking at once and then falling silent simultaneously, paralyzed by their wish not to be tricked out of a single dollar. August sales are on and Toyota is offering thousanddollar rebates. In the old days you sold only at their list price, no haggling, take it or leave it, a quality product. Their old purity has been corrupted by American methods. Toyota has stooped to the scramble. “You know,” he tells Elvira, “in all the years the lot has been selling these cars I don’t recall it ever being visited by an actual Japanese. I thought they all stayed over there in Toyota City enjoying the tea ceremony.”

  “And the geisha girls,” Elvira says slyly. “Like Mr. Uno.”

  Harry smiles at the topical allusion. This girl - woman - keeps up. “Yeah, he wasn’t Numero Uno very long, was he?”

  Her earrings today are like temple bells, little curved lids of dull silver wired together in trembling oblongs the size of butterfly cocoons. They shiver with a touch of indignation when she tells him, “It’s really Nelson and Lyle should be facing Mr. Shimada.”

  He shrugs. “What can you do? The lawyer got Lyle on the phone finally and the guy just laughed at him. Said he was taking oxygen just to get out of bed and go to the toilet and could die any time. Furthermore he said the disease had spread to his brain and he had no idea what the lawyer was talking about. And he’d had to sell his computer and didn’t keep any of the disks. In other words he told the lawyer to - to go jump in the lake.” Suppressing “fuck himself” like that was maybe a way of courting Elvira, he doesn’t know. Late in the game as it is, you keep trying. He likes her being so thin -she makes Pru and even Janice look thick and there is something cool and quiet about her he finds comforting, like a television screen when you can’t hear the words, just see the flicker. “I had to laugh,” he says, of Lyle’s last communications. “Dying has its advantages.”

  She asks at his side, “Won’t Nelson be home in a week or so?”

  “That’s the schedule,” Harry says. “Summer flies by, doesn’t it? You notice it in the evening now. It’s still warm but gets dark earlier and earlier. It’s a thing you forget from year to year, that latesummer darkness. The cicadas. That smell of baked-out lawns. Except this summer’s been so damn rainy - in my little garden, God, the weeds won’t stop growing, and the lettuce and broccoli are so leggy they’re falling over. And the pea vines have spread like Virginia creeper, up over the fence and into the neighbor’s yard.”

  “At least it hasn’t been so terribly hot like it was the summer before,” Elvira says, “when everybody kept talking about the greenhouse effect. Maybe there is no greenhouse effect.”

  “Oh, there is,” Rabbit tells her, with a conviction he didn’t know he had. Across Route 111, above the red hat-shaped roof of the Pizza Hut, a flock of starlings, already migrating south, speckle the telephone wires like a bar of musical notation. “I won’t live to see it,” he says, “but you will, and my grandchildren. New York, Philly, their docks will be underwater, once Antarctica starts melting. All of the Jersey Shore.” Ronnie Harrison and Ruth: what a shit, that guy.

  “How is he doing, have you heard much? Nelson.”

  “He’s dropped us a couple of cards of the Liberty Bell. He sounded cheerful. In a way, the kid’s been always looking for more structure than we could ever give him, and I guess a rehab program is big on structure. He talks to Pru on the phone, but they don’t encourage too much outside contact at this point.”

  “What does Pru think about everything?” Does Harry imagine it, an edge of heightened interest here, as if the sound on the TV set clicked back in?

  “Hard to know what Pru thinks,” he says. “I have the impression she was about ready to pack it in, the marriage, before he sent himself off. She and Janice and the kids have been up at the Poconos.”

  “That makes it lonely for you,” Elvira Ollenbach says.

  Could this be a feeler? Is he supposed to have her come on over? Have a couple daiquiris in the den, stroke the dark nape of her neck, see if her pussy matches up, up in that slanty spare bedroom where all the old Playboys were stashed in the closet when they moved in - the thought of that wiry young female body seeking to slake its appetites on his affects him like the thought of an avalanche. It would make a wreck of his routine. “At my age I don’t mind it,” he says. “I can watch the TV shows I want. National Geographic, Disney, World of Nature. When Janice is there she makes us watch all these family situation shows with everybody clowning around in the living room. This Roseanne, I asked her w
hat the hell she sees in it, she told me, `I like her. She’s fat and messy and mean, like most of the women in America.’ I watch less and less. I try to have just one beer and go to bed early.”

  The young woman silently offers to move away, back to her cubicle in the direction of Paraguay. But he likes her near him, and abruptly asks, “You know who I’m sick of hearing about?”

  “Who?”

  “Pete Rose. ‘Djou read in the Standard the other day how he’s been in hot water before, in 1980 when he and a lot of the other Phils were caught taking amphetamines and the club traded away Randy Leach, the only player who admitted to it, and the rest of ‘em just brazened it through?”

  “I glanced at it. It was a Brewer doctor supplying the prescriptions.”

  “That’s right, our own little burg. So that’s why he thinks he can bluff it through now. Nobody else has to pay for what they do, everybody else gets away with everything. Ollie North, drug dealers, what with the jails being full and everybody such a bleeding heart anyway. Break the law, burn the flag, who the fuck cares?”

  “Don’t get yourself upset, Harry,” she says, in her maternal, retreating mode. “The world is full of cheaters.”

  “Yeah, we should know.”

  She makes no response at all, having turned her back. Maybe she had been balling Nelson after all.

  “I always thought he was an ugly ballplayer, anyway,” he feels compelled to say, concerning Rose. “If you have to do it all with hustle and grit, you shouldn’t be out there.”

  Out there, in the dog-days outdoors whose muggy alternation of light and shadow flickeringly gives him back his own ominous reflection, Harry notices that the refurbished yew hedge - he had a lawn service replace the dead bushes and renew the bark mulch - has collected a number of waxpaper pizza wrappers and Styrofoam coffee cups that have blown in from Route 111. He can’t have their Japanese visitor see a mess like that. He goes outside, and the hot polluted air, bouncing off the asphalt, takes his breath away. The left side of his ribs gives a squeeze. He puts a Nitrostat to melt beneath his tongue before he begins to stoop. The more wastepaper he gathers, the more it seems there is candy wrappers, cigarette-pack cellophane, advertising fliers and whole pages of newspaper wrinkled by rain and browned by the sun, big soft-drink cups with the plastic lid still on and the straw still in and the dirty water from melted ice still sloshing around. There is no end of crud in the world. He should have brought out a garbage bag, he has both hands full and can feel his face getting red as he tries to hold yet one more piece of crumpled sticky cardboard in his fanned fingers. A limousine cracklingly pulls into the lot while Harry is still picking up the trash, and he has to run inside to cram it all into the wastebasket in his office. Puffing, his heart thudding, his metallic-gray suit coat pulling at the buttons, he rushes back across the showroom to greet Mr. Shimada at the entrance, shaking his hand with a hand unwashed of street grit, dried sugar, and still-sticky pizza topping.

  Mr. Shimada is an impeccable compact man of about five six, carrying an amazingly thin oxblood-red briefcase and wearing a smoke-blue suit with an almost invisible pinstripe, tailored to display a dapper breadth of his gold-linked French cuffs and high white collar, on a shirt with a pale-blue body. He looks dense, like a beanbag filled to the corners with buckshot, and in good physical trim, though stocky, with a burnish of California tan on his not unfriendly face. “Is very nice meeting you,” he says. “Area most nice.” He speaks English easily, but with enough of an accent to cost Harry a second’s response time answering him.

  “Well, not around here exactly,” he answers, instantly thinking that this is tactless, for why would Toyota want to locate its franchise in an ugly area? “I mean, the farm country is what we’re famous for, barns with hex signs and all that.” He wonders if he should explain “hex sign” and decides it’s not worth it. “Would you like to look around the facility? At the setup?” In case “facility” didn’t register. Talking to foreigners really makes you think about the language.

  Mr. Shimada slowly, stiffly turns his head and shoulders together, one way and then the other, to take in the showroom. “I see,” he smiles. “Also in Torrance I study many photos and froor pran. Oh! Rovely rady!”

  Elvira has left her desk and sashays toward their visitor, sucking in her cheeks to make herself look more glamorous. “Miss Olshima, I mean Mr. Shimada” -Harry had been practicing the name, telling himself it was like Ramada with shit at the beginning, only to botch it in the crunch - “this is Miss Ollenbach, one of our best sales reps. Representatives.”

  Mr. Shimada first gives her an instinctive little hands-at-the-sides bow. When they shake hands, it’s like both of them are trying to knock each other out with their smiles, they hold them so long. “Is good idea, to have both sexes serring,” he says to Harry. “More and more common thing.”

  “I don’t know why it took us all so long to think of it,” Harry admits.

  “Good idea take time,” the other man says, curbing his smile a little, letting an admonitory sternness tug downward his rather full yet flat lips. Harry remembers from his boyhood in World War II how very cruel the Japanese were to their prisoners on Bataan. The first thing you heard about them, after Pearl Harbor, was that they were ridiculously small, manning tiny submarines and planes called Zeros, and then, as those early Pacific defeats rolled in, that they were fanatic in the service of their Emperor, robot-monkeys that had to be torched out of their caves with flame-throwers. What a long way we’ve come since then. Harry feels one of his surges of benevolence, of approval of a world that isn’t asking for it. Mr. Shimada seems to be asking Elvira if she prays.

  “Play tennis, you mean?” she asks back. “Yes, as a matter of fact. Whenever I can. How did you know?”

  His flat face breaks into twinkling creases and, quick as a monkey, he taps her wrist, where a band of relative pallor shows on her sunbrowned skin. “Sweatband,” he says, proudly.

  “That’s clever,” Elvira says. “You must play, too, in California. Everybody does.”

  “All free time. Revel five, hoping revel four.”

  “That’s fabulous,” she comes back, but a sideways upward glance at Harry asks how much longer she has to be a geisha girl.

  “Good fetch, no backhand,” Mr. Shimada tells her, demonstrating.

  “Turn your back to the net, and take the racket back low,” Elvira tells him, also demonstrating. “Hit the ball out front, don’t let it play you.”

  “Talk just as pro,” Mr. Shimada tells her, beaming.

  No doubt about it, Elvira is impressive. You can see how rangy and quick she would be on the court. Harry is beginning to relax. When the phantom tennis lesson is over, he takes their guest on a quick tour through the office space and through the shelved tunnel of the parts department, where Roddy, the Assistant Parts Manager, a viciously pretty youth with long lank hair he keeps flicking back from his face, his face and hands filmed with gray grease, gives them a dirty white-eyed look. Harry doesn’t introduce them, for fear of besmirching Mr. Shimada with a touch of grease. He leads him to the brass-barred door of the rackety, cavernous garage, where Manny, the Service Manager Harry had inherited from Fred Springer fifteen years ago, has been replaced by Arnold, a plump young man with an advanced degree from voke school, where he was taught to wear washable coveralls that give him the figure of a Kewpie doll, or a snowman. Mr. Shimada hesitates at the verge of the echoing garage -men’s curses cut through the hammering of metal on metal - and takes a step backward, asking, “Emproyee moraru good?”

  This must be “morale.” Harry thinks of the mechanics, their insatiable gripes and constant coffee breaks and demands for ever more costly fringe benefits, and their frequent hungover absences on Monday and suspiciously early departures on Friday, and says, “Very good. They clear twenty-two dollars an hour, with bonuses and benefits. The first job I ever took, when I was fifteen, I got thirty-five cents an hour.”

  Mr. Shimada is not interested. “B
rack emproyees, are any? I see none.”

  “Yeah, well. We’d like to hire more, but it’s hard to find qualified ones. We had a man a couple years ago, had good hands and got along with everybody, but we had to let him go finally because he kept showing up late or not showing up at all. When we called him on it, he said he was on Afro-American time.” Harry is ashamed to tell him what the man’s nickname had been - Blackie. At least we don’t still sell Black Sambo dolls with nigger lips like they do in Tokyo, he saw on 60 Minutes this summer.