Rabbit at Rest

by John Updike

  In the condo, the phone is silent. The evening news is all Hugo and looting in St. Croix and St. Thomas in the wake of the devastation and a catastrophic health-plan repeal in Washington that gets big play down here because of all the elderly and a report on that French airliner that disappeared on the way from Chad to Paris. The wreckage has been found, scattered over a large area of the Sahara desert. From the wide distribution of the debris it would appear to have been a bomb. Just like that plane over Lockerbie, Rabbit thinks. His cockiness ebbs. Every plane had a bomb ticking away in its belly. We can explode any second.

  The rooms and furniture of the condo in these days he’s been living here alone have taken on the tension and menace of a living person who is choosing to remain motionless. At night he can feel the rooms breathe and think. They are thinking about him. The blank TV, the blond sofa, the birds made of small white shells, the taut bedspread in the room where Nelson and Pru stayed last New Year’s, the aqua kitchen cabinets that seemed too intense once they were painted and still do, the phone that refuses to ring all have a certain power, the ability to outlast him. He is flesh, they are inanimate things. The well-sealed hollow space that greeted his arrival seventeen days ago now does brim with fear, with a nervous expectancy that the babble of the TV, the headlines in the paper, the ticking warmth of the oven and the minutes ticking down on the timer panel, even the soft scuffle and rustle of his body’s own movements hold at bay for their duration; but when these small commotions are over the silence comes back, the presence of absence, the unanswerable question that surrounds his rustling upright stalk of warm blood. The lasagna is gluey and like napalm on the tongue but he eats it all, a portion for two, while flipping channels between Jennings and Brokaw looking for the best clips of hurricane damage and wind, wild wet wind screaming through rooms just like this one, knocking out entire glass sliding doors and skimming them around like pie plates. Everything flies loose, the world is crashing, nothing in life can be nailed down. Terrific.

  He suddenly needs, as suddenly as the need to urinate comes upon a man taking diuretics, to talk to his grandchildren. He is a grandfather, they can’t deny him that. He has to look up Nelson’s number in the address book on the fake-bamboo desk, it was changed last winter, he’s forgotten it already, your mind at Harry’s age lets all sorts of things slip. He finds the book, kept in Janice’s half-formed schoolgirl hand, in a variety of slants. He dials, having to hang up once when he thinks he might have dialled an 8 for a 9. Pru answers. Her voice is casual, light, tough. He almost hangs up again.

  “Hi,” he says. “It’s me.”

  “Harry, you really shouldn’t be -“

  “I’m not. I don’t want to talk to you. I want to talk to my grandchildren. Isn’t it about time for Roy’s birthday?”

  “Next month.”

  “Just think. He’ll be four.”

  “He is four. He’ll be five.”

  “Time for kindergarten,” Harry says. “Incredible. I understand you and little Nellie are working on a third. Terrific.”

  “Well, we’re just seeing what happens.”

  “No more condoms, huh? What about him and AIDS?”

  “Harry, please. This is none of your business. But he was tested, if you must know, and is HIV-negative.”

  “Terrific. One more thing off my mind. The kid’s straight, and the kid’s clean. Pru, I think I’m going crazy down here. My dreams - they’re like cut-up comic strips.”

  He can picture her smiling wryly at this, her mouth tugging down on one side, her free hand pushing back from her forehead with two fingers stray strands of carrot-colored hair. Sexy; but what has it got her? A would-be social worker for a husband, living space in another woman’s house, and a future of drudging and watching her looks fade away in the mirror. Her voice in his ear is like a periscope glimpse, blurred by salt spray, of the upper world. She is up there, he is down here.

  Her tone is changing, sinking toward friendliness. Once you’ve fucked them, their voices ever hold these warm grainy traces. “Harry, what are you doing down there for amusement?”

  “Oh, I walk around a lot, getting to know the town. Nice old town, Deleon. Tell Janice if you ever see her that there’s a rich Jewish widow giving me the eye.”

  “She’s right here for dinner, actually. We’re celebrating because she sold a house. Not your house, she can’t sell that until you agree, but a house for the real-estate company, for Pearson and Schrack. She’s showing houses for them weekends, till she gets her license.”

  “That’s fantastic! Put her on and I’ll congratulate her.”

  Pru hesitates. “I’ll have to ask her if she wants to talk to you.”

  His stomach feels hollow suddenly, scared. “You don’t have to do that. I called to talk to the kids, honest.”

  “I’ll put Judy on, she’s right at my elbow, all excited about the hurricane. You take care of yourself, Harry.”

  “Sure. You know me. Careful.”

  “I know you,” she says. “A crazy man.” She sounded Dutch, the cozy settled way she said that. She’s assimilating. One more middle-aged Brewer broad.

  There is a clatter and whispering and now Judy has the phone and cries, “Oh Grandpa, we’re all so worried about you and the hurricane!”

  He says, “Who’s all so worried? Not my Judy. Not after she brought me in on that crippled Sunfish. The TV says Hugo is going to hit the Carolinas. That’s six hundred miles away. It was sunny here today, mostly. I played a little basketball with some kids not much older than you.”

  “It rained here. All day.”

  “And you’re having Grandma to dinner tonight,” he tells her.

  Judy says, “She says she doesn’t want to talk to you. What did you do to make her so mad?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I channel-surfed too much. Hey, Judy, know what? On the way down I drove right by Disney World, and I promised myself that the next time you’re here we’ll all go.”

  “You don’t have to. A lot of the kids at school have been, and they say it gets boring.”

  “How’s school going?”

  “I like the teachers and all but I can’t stand the other kids. They’re all assholes.”

  “Don’t say that. Such language. What’s the matter, do they ignore you?”

  “I wish they would. They tease me about my freckles. They call me Carrottop.” Her little voice breaks.

  “Well, then. They like you. They think you’re terrific. Just don’t wear too much lipstick until you’re fifteen. Remember what I told you last time we talked?”

  “You said don’t force it.”

  “Right. Don’t force it. Let nature do its work. Do what your mommy and daddy tell you. They love you very much.”

  She wearily sighs, “I know.”

  “You’re the light of their lives. You ever hear that expression before, `the light of their lives’?”

  “No.”

  “Well then, you’ve learned something. Now go do your thing, honey. Could you put Roy on?”

  “He’s too dumb to talk.”

  “No he’s not. Put him on. Tell him his grandpa wants to give him some words of wisdom.”

  The phone clatters down and in the background there is a kind of shredded wheat of family noises - he thinks he even hears Janice’s voice, sounding decisive the way Ma Springer’s used to. Footsteps approach through the living room he knows so well - the Barcalounger, the picture windows with the drawn curtains, the piecrust-edged knickknack table, though the green glass egg, with the teardrop of emptiness inside, that used to sit on it is now on the shelves here, a few feet from his eyes. Pru’s voice says, “Janice says she doesn’t want to talk to you, Harry, but here’s Roy.”

  “Hi, Roy,” Harry says.

  Silence. God on the line again.

  “How’s it going up there? I hear it rained all day.”

  More silence.

  “Are you being a good boy?”

  Silence, but with a touch of
breathing in it.

  “You know,” Harry says, “it may not feel like much to you right now, but these are important years.”

  “Hi, Grandpa,” the child’s voice at last pronounces.

  “Hi,” Harry has to respond, though it puts him back to the beginning. “I miss you down here,” he says.

  Silence.

  “A little birdie comes to the balcony every morning and asks, `Where’s Roy? Where’s Roy?”’

  Silence, which is what this lie deserves. But then the child comes out with the other thing he’s perhaps been coached to say: “I love you, Grandpa.”

  “Well, I love you, Roy. Happy Birthday, by the way, for next month. Five years old! Think of it.”

  “Happy Birthday,” the child’s voice repeats, in that oddly deep, manlike way it sometimes has.

  Harry finds himself waiting for more but then realizes there is no more. “O.K.,” he says, “I guess that does it, Roy. I’ve loved talking with you. Give everybody my love. Hang up now. You can hang up.”

  Silence, and then a clumsy soft clatter, and the buzz of a dead line. Strange, Rabbit thinks, hanging up his own receiver, that he had to make the child do it first. Chicken in a suicide pact.

  Alone, he is terrified by the prospect of an entire evening in these rooms. It is seven-thirty, plenty of time to still make the buffet, though his mouth feels tender from all that hot lasagna and the bagful of onion potato chips, full of sharp edges and salt. He will just go down and pick a few low-cal items off the buffet table. Talking to his family has exhilarated him; he feels them all safely behind him. Without showering, he puts on a shirt, coat, and tie. Mrs. Zabritski isn’t at the elevator. In the half-empty Mead Hall, under the berserk gaze of the Viking warriors in the big ceramic mural, he helps himself generously to, among other items, the scallops wrapped in bacon. The mix of textures, of crisp curved bacon and rubbery yielding scallops, in his sensitive mouth feels so delicious his appetite becomes bottomless. He goes back for more, and more creamed asparagus and potato pancakes, then suddenly is so full his heart feels squeezed. He takes a Nitrostat and skips dessert and coffee, even decal Carefully he treads back across the alien texture of that Florida grass and the carpeted traffic island beneath the warm dome of stars, really a deep basin we are looking down into, he saw that this afternoon when he did the upside-down set shot, we are stuck fast to the Earth like flies on a ceiling. He feels stuffed and dizzy. The air is thick, the Milky Way just barely shows, like the faint line of fair hair up the middle of some women’s bellies.

  He gets back into the condo in time for the last fifteen minutes of Grouting Pains, the only show on TV where every member of the family is repulsive, if you count Roseanne’s good-old-boy husband as not repulsive. Then he flips back and forth between Unsolved Mysteries on Channel 20 and an old Abbott and Costello on 36 that must have been funnier when it came out, the same year he graduated from high school. Costello’s yips seem mechanical and aggravating, and Abbott looks old, and cruel when he slaps his fat buddy. People yelled and snapped at one another like animals then. Maybe the Sixties did some good after all. Among the commercials that keep interrupting is that Nissan Infiniti one of crickets and lily ponds, no car at all, just pure snob Nature. The Lexus commercials he’s seen are almost as vague - an idyllic road shiny with rain. They’re both skirting the issue: can the Japanese establish a luxury image? Or will people with thirty-five thousand to burn prefer to buy European? Thank God, Harry no longer has to care. Jake down toward Pottstown has to care, but not Harry.

  He brushes his teeth, taking care to floss and rinse with Peridex. Without Janice here he is becoming staid in his habits, another old-fogey bachelor fussing with his plumbing and nostril hairs. Nostril hairs: he never wants to look like Dr. Morris. His double dinner burns in his stomach but when he sits on the toilet nothing comes out. Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia, he should get some. Another of their commercials has a black man talking about MOM and that was unfortunate, his color made the shit too real. In bed, on the march to Yorktown, the allied armies come upon British atrocities around Williamsburg. De Grasse’s Swedish aide Karl Gustaf Tomquist, a latter-day Viking, noted in his journal, On a beautiful estate a pregnant woman was found murdered in her bed through several bayonet stabs; the barbarians had opened both of her breasts and written above the bed canopy: “Thou shalt nevergive birth to a rebel. ” In another room, was just as horrible a sight -five cut-off heads arranged on a cupboard in place of plaster-cast-figures which lay broken to pieces on the floor. Dumb animals were no less spared. The pastures were in many places covered with dead horses, oxen, and cows. Harry tries to fall asleep through a screen of agitation bred by these images. He has always thought of the Revolution as a kind of gentlemen’s war, without any of that Vietnam stuff. He begins to have those slippery half-visions, waking dreams that only upon reflection make no sense. He sees a woman’s round stomach, with smooth seams and a shining central fuzz, split open and yield yards and yards of red string, like the inside of a baseball. Then he is lying beside a body, a small man dressed all in black, a body limp and without muscle, a ventriloquist’s dummy, wearing sunglasses. He awakes in the dark, too early for the sound of lawnmowers, for the cheep of the dull brown bird in the Norfolk pine, for the chatter of the young businessmen’s dawn foursomes. He makes his way to the bathroom amid motionless glossy shapes and slants of dim light - the blue oven-timer numerals, the yellowish guard lights on the golfcourse fence. He urinates sitting down, like a woman, and returns to bed. Always he sleeps on his old side of the bed, as if Janice is still on her side. He dreams now of the portal with the round top, but this time it pushes open easily, on noiseless unresistant hinges, upon a bustling brightness within. It is somehow Ma Spnnger’s downstairs, only you step down into it, a kind of basement, brighter than her house ever was, with a many-colored carnival gaudiness, like something in Latin America, like the cruise-ship commercial they keep playing in the middle of the news, and full of welcoming people he hardly knows, or can barely remember: Mrs. Zabritski as a slender young girl, though still with that inviting inquisitive crick in her neck, and wearing a racily short fringed skirt like they wore in the Sixties, and Marty Tothero carrying a mailman’s pouch that matches his lopsided face, and Mom and Pop in their prime, looking tall and rangy in their Sunday best, bringing a baby girl home from the hospital wrapped in a pink blanket, just its tiny tipped-up nose and a single tiny closedeyelid eye showing, and a tall soberly staring dark-eyed man with lacquered black hair like an old ad for Kreml, who gives him a manly handshake, while Janice at his side whispers to him that this of course is Roy, Roy all grown up, and as tall as he. Awaking, Rabbit can still feel the pressure on his hand, and a smile of greeting dying on his face.

  Hugo aims at SE coast. USAir jet crashes in N. Y. river. Bomb probably caused crash of French DC-10. Lee slows boaters in manatee territory. Harry feeds himself oat bran and digests the News-Press. Chaos reigned on St. Croix, as police and National Guardsmen joined machetearmed mobs on a post-Hugo looting spree. Tourists pleaded with reporters landing on the island to get them off: What fucking crybabies. It occurs to him that his dream might relate to all this Caribbean news, the pre-weekend party they have at resort hotels, to welcome the new arrivals and jolly everybody into a melting pot. He steps out onto his narrow balcony to seize the day. The paper said today would be sunny despite Hugo and so it is. The distant blue-green skyscrapers hurl back blobs of light from the morning sun at his back. The Gulf cannot be seen but he can smell it out there. He tries to remember who all was at the party but can’t; dream people don’t stick to the ribs. The plane in New York skidded off the end of the runway and two people were killed. Just two. One hundred seventy-one died in the Sahara. A caller in London gave all the credit to Allah. Harry doesn’t mind that one as much as the Lockerbie Pan Am bomb. Like everything else on the news, you get bored, disasters get to seem a gimmick, like all those TV timeouts in football.

  While other, younger men
shout and kid on the golf course behind the curtained sliding doors, Harry makes the bed and sweeps the kitchen floor, and adds his orange juice glass and cereal bowl to the orderly array in the dishwasher waiting to add up to a load’s worth. Not quite there yet. When Janice shows up at last he wants the state of the place to give her an object lesson in housekeeping.

  At ten, he goes out for his morning walk. He looks at the northeast sky, toward the hurricane that is snubbing Florida, and is struck by the clouds, how intricate they are, tattered, gray on white on blue, with tilted sheets of fishscales and rows of long clouds shaggy underneath but rounded on top as if by action of swiftly running water, like the rhythmic ribs of sand the tide leaves. A glassy wind blows through the sunlight. There is something in the air that makes it slightly difficult to breathe. Lack of ozone? Or too much ozone? It may be his imagination, but the sky seems clean of airplanes. Usually you can see them layered in their slow circling slants, coming in to land at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport. The planes have been chased from the sky. Under the sun a kind of highway of haze in bars recedes to the northeast horizon like the reflections the moon stacks up in a calm ocean.