Rabbit at Rest

by John Updike

  On an impulse he decides to take the Celica and drive downtown and park at a meter near the First Federal Bank and walk toward the black section. This afternoon, he thinks, he might feel like trying to get in some holes of golf. The pro shop called up a few days ago and said they found his shoes.

  At the recreation field beyond the empty ochre high school, a lone tall boy in denim cutoffs is shooting baskets by himself. His tank top is an electric turquoise stencilled with a snarling tiger head - orange-and-white-striped fur, yellow eyes, the tongue and end of the nose an unreal violet. On this boy, though, the outfit has a certain propriety, the dignity of a chosen uniform. Older than the kids yesterday, eighteen at least, he is a deliberate performer, making good serious economical moves, dribbling in, studying the ground, staring at the hoop, sizing up the shot with two hands on the ball, letting go with the left hand underneath only at the last while shooting. He wears ankle-high black sneakers and no socks; his haircut is one of those muffin-shapes on the top of the skull, with a series of X’s along the sides and back where the shaved part begins. Sitting on the bench, the opposite end from a small red knapsack the boy has evidently left there, Rabbit watches him a good while, while the sun shines and the glassy wind blows and passing clouds dip the dirt field and the surrounding frame houses in shadow. The houses have the colors of sun-faded wash and seem remote and silent. You don’t see people going in and out.

  To vary his attitude Harry sometimes tips his white face back as if to sunbathe, coating his vision in red, letting photons burn through his translucent eyelids. One time when he opens his eyes the boy is standing close, darker than a cloud. There is something matte about his blackness, and his high cheekbones and the thinness of his lips hint at Indian blood.

  “You want sumpin’?” His voice is light, level, unsmiling. It seems to come out of the tiger’s snarling violet mouth.

  “No, nothing,” Rabbit says. “My sitting here bother you?”

  “You after no Scotty?” With the hand not holding the basketball against his hip he makes the smallest, most delicate little motion of cracking a whip. Rabbit darts his eyes at the knapsack and brings them back to the tiger’s mouth.

  “No, thanks,” he says. “Never touch it. How about a little one-on-one, though? Since you seem to be out here alone.”

  “I heard some cheesecake come here yesterday was foolin’ around.”

  `Just foolin’, that’s what I do. I’m retired.”

  “How come you come out here to do your foolin’? Lot of foolin’-around places over there in your end of Deleon.” He pronounces it the local way, Dealya-in.

  “It’s pretty boring over there,” Harry tells him. “I like it here, where there isn’t so much glitz. D’ya mind?”

  The boy, taken a bit off balance, thinks for an answer, and Rabbit’s hands dart out and rest on the basketball, a more worn one than the boys yesterday had, and not leather-colored but scuffed red, white, and blue. Its rough-smooth surface feels warm. “Come on,” he begs, growling the “on.” “Gimme the ball.”

  Tiger’s expression doesn’t change, but the ball comes loose. With it, Harry strides onto the packed dirt. He feels precariously tall, as when this summer he stepped out alone onto the macadam street. He put on Bermuda shorts this morning, in case he got to play. Dust and reflected sun caress his bare calves, his chalky old man’s calves that never had much hair and now have almost none - actually none, where socks have rubbed for over fifty years.

  He goes for a jumper from pretty far out and it lucks in. He and Tiger take shots alternately, careful not to touch and bouncing their passes to each other. “You played once,” the tall boy says.

  “Long time ago. High school. Never got to college. Different style then than you guys have now. But if you feel like practicing your moves one-on-one, I’m game. Play to twenty-one. Honor system - call fouls on yourself.”

  There seems a leaden sadness in Tiger’s stare, but he nods, and takes the ball bounced to him. He walks with a cocky slump shoulders down, butt out -out to the half-court line scratched in the dirt with the heels of sneakers. From the back, the kid is all bones and tendons, polished by sweat but not too much, the sloped shoulders matte beneath the turquoise straps.

  “Wait,” Harry says. “I better take a pill first. Don’t mind me.”

  The Nitrostat burns under his tongue, and by the time Tiger has come in and has his layup blocked, and Rabbit has dribbled out and missed a twenty-footer, the pill’s little kick has reached his other end. He feels loose and deeply free at first. Tiger has some good herky-jerky moves, and can get a step on the heavier older man whenever he wants, but he wastes a lot of shots. The stopand-pop style doesn’t give you quite the time to get in harmony with the target, and there isn’t enough height to Tiger’s arc. The ball comes off his hands flat and turns the hoop’s circle into a slot. And he is giving Harry an inch or two in height; Rabbit lifts a few close-in jumpers over the boy’s fingertips - soft, high, in, just like that, air balls only right through the netless hoop, a scabby orange circle bent awry by too many show offs practicing slam-dunks and hanging on imitating Darryl Dawkins - and Tiger begins to press tighter, inviting a turn around the corner and a break for the basket if Harry can find the surge. Tiger’s elbows and sharp knees rattle off his body and he has to laugh at the old sensation, the jostle and press. He is aware of his belly being slung up and down by the action and of a watery weariness entering into his knees, but adrenaline and nostalgia overrule. Tiger begins to exploit his opponent’s slowness more cruelly, more knifingly, slipping and slashing by, and Rabbit kicks himself up a notch, feeling his breath come harder, through a narrower passage. Still, the sun feels good, springing sweat from his pores like calling so many seeds into life. The nature of this exertion is to mix him with earth and sky: earth, the packed pink-tan glaring dust printed over and over with the fanned bars of his Nikes and the cagelike grid of Tiger’s black sneakers, stamped earth in the rim of his vision as he dribbles; and sky, wide white sky when he looks up to follow his shot or the other’s. The clouds have gathered in an agitated silvery arena around the blinding sun, a blue bullring. Rabbit accidentally in one twist of upward effort stares straight into the sun and can’t for a minute brush away its blinking red moon of an afterimage. His chest feels full, his head dizzy; his pulse rustles in his ears, the soaked space between his shoulder blades holds a jagged pain. Tiger retrieves his own rebound and holds the ball against his hip in his graceful way and gives Harry a deliberate stare. His skin is like a grinding stone of fine black grits. His ears are small and flat to his head and his hair above the row of X’s is kinked as tight as nature can make it; sun glints from every circular particle.

  “Hey man, you all right?”

  “I’m. Fine.”

  “You puffin’ pretty bad.”

  “You wait. Till you’re my age.”

  “How about coolin’ it? No big deal.”

  This is gracious, Rabbit sees, through the sweat in his eyebrows and the pounding of his blood. He feels as if his tree of veins and arteries is covered with big pink blossoms. No big deal. No big deal you’re too out of shape for this. No big deal you aren’t good even for a little one-on-one. His sweat is starting to cake on his legs, with the dust. He’s afraid he’s going to lose the rhythm, the dance, the whatever it is, the momentum, the grace. He asks, “Aren’t you. Having fun?” He is enjoying scaring Tiger with his big red face, his heaving cheesecake bulk, his berserk icy blue eyes.

  Tiger says, “Sure, man. Medium fun.” At last he smiles. Wonderful even teeth, in lavender gums. Even the ghetto kids get orthodontia now.

  “Let’s keep our bargain. Play to twenty-one. Like we said. Eighteen up, right?”

  “Right.” Neither player has called a foul.

  “Go. Your ball, Tiger.” The pain in Harry’s back is spreading, like clumsy wings. The young black man whips around him for a quick under-the-basket layup. Harry takes the ball out and stops short a step inside the h
alf-court line and, unguarded, lets fly an old-fashioned two-handed set shot. He knows as it leaves his hands it will drop; a groove in the shape of the day guides it down.

  “Man,” Tiger says admiringly, “that is pure horseshit,” and he tries to imitate it with a long one-hander that rockets straight back off the rim, its arc is too low. Rabbit grabs the rebound but then can’t move with it, his body weighs a ton, his feet have lost their connection to his head. Tiger knifes in between him and the basket, leans right in his face with a violet snarl, then eases back a little, so Rabbit feels a gap, a moment’s slackness in the other in which to turn the corner; he takes one slam of a dribble, carrying his foe on his side like a bumping sack of coal, and leaps up for the peeper. The hoop fills his circle of vision, it descends to kiss his lips, he can’t miss.

  Up he goes, way up toward the torn clouds. His torso is ripped by a terrific pain, elbow to elbow. He bursts from within; he feels something immense persistently fumble at him, and falls unconscions to the dirt. Tiger catches the ball on its fall through the basket and feels a body bump against him as if in purposeful foul. Then he sees the big old white man, looking choked and kind of sleepy in the face, collapse soundlessly, like a rag doll being dropped. Tiger stands amazed above the fallen body - the plaid Bermuda shorts, the brand-new walking Nikes, the blue golf shirt with a logo of intertwined V’s. Adhesive dust of fine clay clings to one cheek of the unconscious flushed face like a shadow, like half of a clown’s mask of paint. Shocked numb, the boy repeats, “Pure horseshit.”

  The impulse to run ripples through him, draining his head of practical thoughts. He doesn’t want to get mixed up with nobody. From the end of the bench he retrieves the knapsack, the kind very small Boy Scouts might use on a one-night camping trip, and, holding it and the basketball close to his chest, walks deliberately away. In the middle of the block, he begins to run, under the high excited sky. An airplane goes over, lowering on a slow diagonal.

  Seen from above, his limbs splayed and bent, Harry is as alone on the court as the sun in the sky, in its arena of clouds. Time passes. Then the social net twitches; someone who in the houses bordering the lonely recreation field has been watching through a curtained window calls 911. Minutes later, several of the elderly poor battened down against danger in their partitioned little rooms, with only television for a friend, mistake the approaching sirens for a hurricane alert, and believe that the storm has veered back from South Carolina toward them.

  “The infarction looks to be transmural,” Dr. Ohnan tells Janice, and clarifies: “Right through the gosh-darn wall.” He tries to show her with the skin and flesh of his fist the difference between this and a sub-endocardial infarction that you can live with. “Ma’am, the whole left ventricle is shot,” he says. “My guess is there was a complete restenosis since this April’s procedure up north.” His big face, with its sunburnt hook nose and jutting Australian jaw, assaults and confuses Janice in her sleeplessness and grief. All this activity of the doctor’s hands, as if he’s trying to turn Harry inside out for her, now that it’s too late. “Too late for a bypass now,” Dr. Olman almost snorts, and with an effort tames his voice into its acquired Southern softness. “Even if by a miracle, ma’am, he were to pull through this present trauma, where you and I have healthy flexible muscle he’d just have a wad of scar tissue. You can replace arteries and valves but there’s no substitute yet for live heart muscle.” He exudes controlled anger, like a golfer who has missed three short putts in a row. He is so young, Janice groggily thinks, he blames people for dying. He thinks they do it to make his job more difficult.

  After last evening’s visit from the Penn Park police (how young they seemed, too, how scared to be bringing their ugly news; the Deleon hospital had called them finally because neither the number of the condo phone nor the number they got for his driver’slicense address from Information would answer, she had been out showing a young couple some properties, one a split-level in Brewer Heights and the other an old sandstone farmhouse over toward Oriole; the police came into her driveway the minute she got home, their twirling blue light licking the limestone walls so all the neighbors must have wondered) and then telephoning to reach Mim, who wasn’t answering her phone either, and to get seats for herself and Nelson on some kind of night flight to Florida, with Eastern still mostly out on strike and everything going in or out of Atlanta cancelled or delayed because of the hurricane, and then the drive to South Philly and the airport, the miles of Schuylkill Expressway under repair, and among all the confusing barrels with reflective tape Nelson’s taking a turn that wound them up in the dead middle of the city right there by Independence Hall - it seemed to happen in a minute - and then the hours of waiting with nothing to do but soothe Nelson and read newspapers people had abandoned on the plastic chairs and remember Harry all the ways he was from the day she first saw him in the high-school corridors and at the basketball games, out there on the court so glorious and blond, like a boy made of marble, and then the empty condo, so tidy except for the stacks of old newspapers he would never throw out and the junk-food crumbs in the wicker easy chair, but no traces of another woman in the bedroom, just that book she got him for last Christmas with the sailing ship on the jacket, and Nelson right beside her overreacting to everything so she almost wished he had let her come alone - after a while the mother in you dies just like heart muscle she supposes - and a few hours of ragged sleep that ended too early when the boys began to mow the greens and the men began to play, with Nelson actually complaining at breakfast that there weren’t any Frosted Flakes, just these bran cereals that taste like horse chow, after all this Janice felt much like her husband did emerging from his long drive on Labor Day weekend, as if her body had been pounded all over with sandbags. In the hall, the newspaper was delivered to the door on this as on every other day:

  Hugo clobbers

  South Carolina

  Dr. Morris, the old one, Harry’s doctor, must have heard she is in the hospital; he comes into the waiting room of the intensive cardiac care unit looking himself not so well, spotty and whiskery, in an unpressed brown suit. He takes her hand and looks her right in the eye through his rimless glasses and tells her, “Sometimes it’s time,” which is fine for him, being near eighty, or at least over seventy-five. “He came in to me some days ago and I didn’t like what I heard in his chest. But with an impairment like his a person can live two weeks or twenty years, there’s no telling. It can be a matter of attitude. He seemed to have become a wee bit morbid. We agreed he needed something to do, he was too young for retirement.”

  Tears are in Janice’s eyes constantly ever since the blue police lights appeared but this remark and the old man’s wise and kind manner freshen them. Dr. Morris paid closer attention to Harry toward the end than she did. In a way since those glimpses of him shining on the basketball court she had slowly ceased to see him, he had become invisible. “Did he mention me?” she asks, wondering if Harry had revealed that they were estranged.

  The old doctor’s sharp Scots gaze pierces her for a second. “Very fondly,” he tells her.

  At this hour in the morning, a little after nine o’clock, with dirty breakfast trays still being wheeled along the halls, there is no one else in the ICCU waiting room, and Nelson in his own agitation keeps wandering off, to telephone Pru, to go to the bathroom, to get a cup of coffee and some Frosted Flakes at a cafeteria he’s discovered in another wing. The waiting room is tiny, with one window looking toward the parking lot, damp at the edges from the lawn sprinklers last night, and a low table of mostly religious magazines, and a hard black settee and chairs and floor lamps of bent pipes and plastic shades, they don’t want you to get too comfortable, they really want the patient all to themselves. While she’s in this limbo alone Janice thinks she should pray for Harry’s recovery, a miracle, but when she closes her eyes to do it she encounters a blank dead wall. From what Dr. Olman said he would never be alive the way he was and as Dr. Morris said, sometimes it’s time. H
e had come to bloom early and by the time she got to know him at Kroll’s he was already drifting downhill, though things did look up when the money from the lot began to be theirs. With him gone, she can sell the Penn Park house. Dear God, dear God, she prays. Do what You think best.

  A young black nurse appears at the open door and says so softly, yet with a beautiful half-smile, “He’s conscious now,” and leads her into the intensive-care unit, which she remembers from last December- the central circular desk like an airport control tower, full of TV sets showing in jumping orange lines each patient’s heartbeat, and on three sides the rows of individual narrow bedrooms with glass front walls. When she sees her Harry lying in one of them as white as his sheets with all these tubes and wires going in and out of him, lying behind the wall of glass, an emotion so strong she fears for a second she might vomit hits her from behind, a crashing wave of sorrow and terrified awareness of utter loss like nothing ever in her life except the time she accidentally drowned her own dear baby. She had never meant never to forgive him, she had been intending one of these days to call, but the days slipped by; holding her silence had become a kind of addiction. How could she have hardened her heart so against this man who for better or worse had placed his life beside hers at the altar? It hadn’t been Harry really, it had been Pru, what man could resist, she and Pru and Nelson had analyzed it to the point of exhaustion. She was satisfied it wouldn’t happen again and she had a life to get on with. Now this. Just when. He called her stupid, it was true she was slower than he was, and slower to come into her own, but he was beginning to respect her, it was hard for him to respect any woman, his mother had done that to him, the hateful woman. Though all four of their parents were alive when they courted at Kroll’s she and Harry were orphans really, he more than she even. He saw something in her that would hold him fast for a while. She wants him back, back from this element he is sinking in, she wants it so much she might vomit, his desertions and Pru and Thelma and all whatever else are washed away by the grandeur of his lying there so helpless, so irretrievable.