Rabbit Redux

by John Updike

  “Yeah, I’d love to, but right now, the fact is, I’m running too scared to take on anything else, and anyway Billy’s about to come home.”

  “Sometimes he hangs around Burger Bliss for hours. Ollie thinks he’s getting bad habits.”

  “Yeah, how is old Ollie? You and he getting together at all?”

  She lets her hand down from her hair; the lapel covers her again. “Sometimes he comes by and fucks me, but it doesn’t seem to bring us any closer.”

  “Probably it does, he just doesn’t express it. He’s too embarrassed at having hurt you.”

  “That’s how you would be, but Ollie isn’t like that. It would never enter his head to feel guilty. It’s the artist in him, you know he really can play almost any instrument he picks up. But he’s a cold little bastard.”

  “Yeah, I’m kind of cold too.” He has stood in alarm, since she has come closer another clumsy step.

  Peggy says, “Give me your hands.” Her eyes fork upon him, around him. Her face unchanging, she reaches down and lifts his hands from his sides and holds them to her chest. “They’re warm.” He thinks, Cold heart. She inserts his left hand into her bathrobe and presses it around a breast. He thinks of spilling guts, of a cow’s stomach tumbling out; elastically she overflows his fingers, her nipple a clot, a gumdrop stuck to his palm. Her eyes are closed – veins in her lids, crow’s feet at the corners – and she is intoning, “You’re not cold, you’re warm, you’re a warm man, Harry, a good man. You’ve been hurt and I want you to heal, I want to help you heal, do whatever you want with me.” She is talking as if to herself, rapidly, softly, but has brought him so close he hears it all; her breath beats at the base of his throat. Her heartbeat is sticking to his palm. The skin of her brow is vexed and the piece of her body her bathrobe discloses is lumpy and strange, blind like the brow of an ox, but eased by liquor she has slid into that state where the body of the other is her own body, the body of secretive self-love that the mirror we fill and the bed we warm alone give us back; and he is enclosed in this body of love of hers and against all thought and wish he thickens all over tenderly and the one-eyed rising beneath his waist begins.

  He protests “I’m not good” but is also sliding; he relaxes the hand that is holding her breast to give it air to sway in.

  She insists “You’re good, you’re lovely” and fumbles at his fly; with the free hand he pulls aside the lapel of the bathrobe so the other breast is free and the bathrobe belt falls unknotted.

  An elevator door sucks shut in the hall. Footsteps swell toward their door. They spring apart; Peggy wraps the robe around herself again. He keeps on his retinas the afterimage of a ferny triangle, broader than his palm, beneath a belly whiter than crystal, with silvery stretch-marks. The footsteps pass on by. The would-be lovers sigh with relief, but the spell has been broken. Peggy turns her back, reknots her belt. “You’re keeping in touch with Janice,” she says.

  “Not really.”

  “How did you know I told her about the black?”

  Funny, everybody else has no trouble saying “black.” Or hating the war. Rabbit must be defective. Lobotomy. A pit opens where guilt gnaws, at the edge of his bladder. He must hurry home. “She called me to say a lawyer was starting divorce proceedings.”

  “Does that upset you?”

  “I guess. Sort of. Sure.”

  “I suppose I’m dumb, I just never understood why you put up with Janice. She was never enough for you, never. I love Janice, but she is about the most childish, least sensitive woman I’ve ever known.”

  “You sound like my mother.”

  “Is that bad?” She whirls around; her hair floats. He has never seen Peggy so suddenly soft, so womanly frontal. Even her eyes he could take. In play, mocking the pressure of Billy impending at his back, he rubs the back of his hand across her nipples. Nibs and Dots.

  “Maybe you’re right. We should try out our wavelengths.”

  Peggy flushes, backs off, looks stony, as if an unexpected mirror has shown her herself too harshly. She pulls the blue terrycloth around her so tight her shoulders huddle. “If you want to take me out to dinner some night,” she says, “I’m around,” adding irritably, “but don’t count your chickens.”

  * * *

  Hurry, hurry. The 12 bus takes forever to come, the walk down Emberly is endless. Yet his house, third from the end of Vista Crescent, low and new and a sullen apple-green on the quarter-acre of lawn scraggly with plantain, is intact, and all around it the unpopulated stretches of similar houses hold unbroken the intensity of duplication. That the blot of black inside his house is unmirrored fools him into hoping it isn’t there. But, once up the three porch steps and through the door of three stepped windows, Rabbit sees, to his right, in the living room, from behind – the sofa having been swung around – a bushy black sphere between Jill’s cone of strawberry gold and Nelson’s square-cut mass of Janice-dark hair. They are watching television. Skeeter seems to have reinstated the box. The announcer, ghostly pale because the adjustment is too bright and mouthing as rapidly as a vampire because there is too much news between too many commercials, enunciates, “. . . after a five-year exile spent in Communist Cuba, various African states, and Communist China, landed in Detroit today and was instantly taken into custody by waiting FBI men. Elsewhere on the racial front, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights sharply charged that the Nixon Administration has made quote a major retreat unquote pertaining to school integration in the southern states. In Fayette Mississippi three white Klansmen were arrested for the attempted bombing of the supermarket owned by newly elected black mayor of Fayette, Charles Evers, brother of the slain civil rights leader. In New York City Episcopal spokesmen declined to defend further their controversial decision to grant two hundred thousand dollars toward black church leader James Forman’s demand of five hundred million dollars in quote reparations unquote from the Christian churches in America for quote three centuries of indignity and exploitation unquote. In Hartford Connecticut and Camden New Jersey an uneasy peace prevails after last week’s disturbances within the black communities of these cities. And now, an important announcement.”

  “Hello, hello,” Rabbit says, ignored.

  Nelson turns and says, “Hey Dad. Robert Williams is back in this country.”

  “Who the hell is Robert Williams?”

  Skeeter says, “Chuck baby, he’s a man going to fry your ass.”

  “Another black Jesus. How many of you are there?”

  “By many false prophets,” Skeeter tells him, “you shall know my coming, right? That’s the Good Book, right?”

  “It also says He’s come and gone.”

  “Comin’ again, Chuck. Gonna fry your ass. You and Nixon’s, right?”

  “Poor old Nixon, even his own commissions beat on him. What the hell can he do? He can’t go into every ghetto and fix the plumbing himself. He can’t give every copped-out junkie a million dollars and a Ph.D. Nixon, who’s Nixon? He’s just a typical flatfooted Chamber of Commerce type who lucked his way into the hot seat and is so dumb he thinks it’s good luck. Let the poor bastard alone, he’s trying to bore us to death so we won’t commit suicide.”

  “Nixon, shit. That honky was put there by the cracker vote, right? Strom Stormtrooper is his very bag. He is Herod, man, and all us black babies better believe it.”

  “Black babies, black leaden, Jesus am I sick of the word black. If I said white one-eightieth as often as you say black you’d scream yourself blue. For Chrissake, forget your skin.”

  “I’ll forget it when you forget it, right?”

  “Lord I’d love to forget not only your skin but everything inside it. I thought three days ago you said you were getting out in three days.”

  “Dad, don‘t.” The kid’s face is tense. Mom was right, too delicate, too nervous. Thinks the world is going to hurt him, so it will. The universal instinct to exterminate the weak.

  Jill rises to shield the other two. Three on one: Rabbit is exhila
rated. Faking and dodging, he says before she can speak, “Tell the darker of your boyfriends here I thought he promised to pull out when he got a stake. I have twenty bucks here to give him. Which reminds me of something else.”

  Skeeter interrupts, addressing the air. “I love him when he gets like this. He is the Man.”

  And Jill is saying her piece. “Nelson and I refuse to live with this quarrelling. Tonight after supper we want to have an organized discussion. There’s a crying need for education in this household.”

  “Household,” Rabbit says, “I’d call it a refugee camp.” He persists in what he has been reminded of. “Hey, Skeeter. Do you have a last name?”

  “X,” Skeeter tells him. “42X.”

  “Sure it’s not Farnsworth?”

  Skeeter’s body sheds its shell, hangs there outfeinted a second, before regathering hardness. “That Super Tom,” he says definitively, “is not the slightest relation of mine.”

  “The Vat had your last name as Farnsworth.”

  “The Vat,” Skeeter pronounces mincingly, “is a Fascist rag.”

  Having scored, you put your head down and run back up the floor; but with that feeling inside, of having made a mark that can’t be rubbed out. “Just wondering,” Rabbit smiles. He stretches out his arms as if from wall to wall. “Who wants a beer besides me?”

  After supper, Nelson washes the dishes and Skeeter dries. Jill tidies up the living room for their discussion; Rabbit helps her swing the sofa back into place. On the shelves between the living room and the breakfast nook that he and Janice had kept empty Rabbit notices now a stack of tired paperbacks, their spines chafed and biased by handling. The Selected Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, The Wretched of the Earth, Soul on Ice, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, others, history, Marx, economics, stuff that makes Rabbit feel sick, as when he thinks about what surgeons do, or all the plumbing and gas lines there are under the street. “Skeeter’s books,” Jill explains. “I went into Jimbo’s today for them, and his clothes. Babe had them.”

  “Hey Chuck,” Skeeter calls from the sink, through the shelves, “know where I got those books? Over in Nam, at the Longbinh base bookstore. They love us to read, that crazy Army of yours. Teach us how to read, shoot, dig pot, sniff scag, black man’s best friend, just like they say!” He snaps his towel, pap!

  Rabbit ignores him and asks Jill, “You went in there? It’s full of police, they could easy tail you.”

  Skeeter shouts from the kitchen, “Don’t you worry Chuck, those poor pigs’ve bigger niggers than me to fry. You know what happened over in York, right? Brewer’s gone to make that look like the Ladies Aid ball!” Pap!

  Nelson washing beside him asks. “Will they shoot every white person?”

  “Just the big old ugly ones, mostly. You stay away from that gruesome Billy and stick next to me, Babychuck, you’ll be all right.”

  Rabbit pulls down a book at random and reads,

  Government is for the people’s progress and not for the comfort of an aristocracy. The object of industry is the welfare of the workers and not the wealth of the owners. The object of civilization is the cultural progress of the mass of workers and not merely of an intellectual elite.

  It frightens him, as museums used to frighten him, when it was part of school to take trips there and to see the mummy rotting in his casket of gold, the elephant tusk filed into a hundred squinting Chinamen. Unthinkably distant lives, abysses of existence, worse than what crawls blind on ocean floors. The book is full of Skeeter’s underlinings. He reads,

  Awake, awake, put on thy strength, O Zion! Reject the weakness of missionaries who teach neither love nor brotherhood, but chiefly the virtues of private profit from capital, stolen from your land and labor. Africa, awake! Put on the beautiful robes of Pan-African socialism.

  Rabbit replaces the book feeling better. There are no such robes. It is all crap. “What’s the discussion about?” he asks, as they settle around the cobbler’s bench.

  Jill says nervously, blushing, “Skeeter and Nelson and I were talking about it today after school and agreed that since there seems to be such a painful communications problem –”

  “Is that what it is?” Rabbit asks. “Maybe we communicate too well.”

  “– a structured discussion might be helpful and educational.”

  “Me being the one who needs to be educated,” Rabbit says.

  “Not necessarily.” The care with which Jill speaks makes Rabbit feel pity; we are too much for her, he thinks. “You’re older than we are and we respect your experience. We all agree, I think, that your problem is that you’ve never been given a chance to formulate your views. Because of the competitive American context, you’ve had to convert everything into action too rapidly. Your life has no reflective content; it’s all instinct, and when your instincts let you down, you have nothing to trust. That’s what makes you cynical. Cynicism, I’ve seen it said somewhere, is tired pragmatism. Pragmatism suited a certain moment here, the frontier moment; it did the work, very wastefully and ruthlessly, but it did it.”

  “On behalf of Daniel Boone,” Rabbit says, “I thank you.”

  “It’s wrong,” Jill goes on gently, “when you say Americans are exploiters, to forget that the first things they exploit are themselves. You,” she says, lifting her face, her eyes and freckles and nostrils a constellation, “you’ve never given yourself a chance to think, except on techniques, basketball and printing, that served a self-exploitative purpose. You carry an old God with you, and an angry old patriotism. And now an old wife.” He takes breath to protest, but her hand begs him to let her finish. “You accept these things as sacred not out of love or faith but fear; your thought is frozen because the first moment when your instincts failed, you raced to the conclusion that everything is nothing, that zero is the real answer. That is what we Americans think, it’s win or lose, all or nothing, kill or die, because we’ve never created the leisure in which to take thought. But now, you see, we must, because action is no longer enough, action without thought is violence. As we see in Vietnam.”

  He at last can speak. “There was violence in Vietnam before we ever heard of the fucking place. You can see by just the way I’m sitting here listening to this crap I’m a pacifist basically.” He points at Skeeter. “He’s the violent son of a bitch.”

  “But you see,” Jill says, her voice lulling and nagging, with just a teasing ragged hem showing of the voice she uses in bed, “the reason Skeeter annoys and frightens you is you don’t know a thing about his history, I don’t mean his personal history so much as the history of his race, how he got to where he is. Things that threaten you like riots and welfare have jumped into the newspapers out of nowhere for you. So for tonight we thought we would just talk a little, have a kind of seminar, about Afro-American history.”

  “Please, Dad,” Nelson says.

  “Jesus. O.K. Hit me. We were beastly to the slaves so why do so few American Negroes want to give up their Cadillacs and, excuse the expression, colored televisions and go back to Africa?”

  “Dad, don’t.”

  Skeeter begins. “Let’s forget the slavery, Chuck. It was forever ago, everybody used to do it, it was a country kind of thing, right? Though I must say, the more it began to smell like shit, the more you crackers rolled around in it, right?”

  “We had more country.”

  “Easy, sit back. No arguments, right? You had cotton come along, right? Anybody but black folks die working those cotton swamps, right? Anyhoo, you had this war. You had these crazies up North like Garrison and Brown agitating and down South a bunch of supercrackers like Yancy and Rhett who thought they could fatten their own pie by splitting, funny thing is” – he chuckles, wheezes, Rabbit pictures him with a shaved head and sees Farnsworth – “they didn’t, the Confederacy sent ’em away on a ship and elected all play-it-safes to office! Same up North with cats like Sumner. Come to the vote, people scared of the man with the idea, right? Do you know, suppose you don’t,
dude called Ruffin, bright as could be, invented modern agriculture or next thing to it, hated the Yankees so much he pulled the string on the first cannon at Sumter and shot himself in the head when the South lost? Wild men. Beautiful, right? So anyhoo, Lincoln got this war, right, and fought it for a bunch of wrong reasons – what’s so sacred about a Union, just a power trust, right? – and for another wrong reason freed the slaves, and it was done. God bless America, right? So here I begin to get mad.”

  “Get mad, Skeeter,” Rabbit says. “Who wants a beer?”

  “Me, Dad.”

  “Half a one.”

  Jill says, “I’ll split it with him.”

  Skeeter says, “That stuff rots the soul. Mind if I burn some good Red?”

  “It’s not legal.”

  “Right. But everybody does it. All those swish cats over in Penn Park, you think they have a Martini when they come home at night? That’s yesterday. They blow grass. Sincerely, it is more in than chewing gum. Over in Nam, it was the fighting boy’s candy.”

  “O.K. Light up. I guess we’ve gone this far.”

  “There is far to go,” Skeeter says, rolling his joint, from a rubber pouch he produces from within the sofa, where he sleeps, and thin yellow paper, licking it rapidly with that fat pale tongue, and twisting the ends. When he lights it, the twisted end flames. He sucks in hungrily, holds it in as if about to dive very deep, and then releases the sweet used smoke with a belch. He offers the wet end to Rabbit. “Try?”

  Rabbit shakes his head, watching Nelson. The kid’s eyes are bird-bright, watching Skeeter. Maybe Janice is right, he’s letting the kid see too much. Still, he didn’t do the leaving. And life is life, God invented it, not him. But he looks at Nelson fearful that his presence in the room will be construed as a blessing. He says to Skeeter, “Get on with your song. Lincoln won the war for the wrong reasons.”

  “And then he was shot, right?” Skeeter passes the joint to Jill. As she takes it her eyes ask Rabbit, Is this what you want? She holds it the way the experts do, not like a tobacco cigarette, something for Fred Astaire to gesture with, but reverently as food, with as many fingers as she can get around it, feeding the wet end to herself like a nipple. Her thin face goes peaceful, puts on the fat of dreams. Skeeter is saying, “So then you had these four million freed slaves without property or jobs in this economy dead on its feet thinking the halleluiah days had come. Green pastures, right? Forty acres and a mule, right? Goddam green pickles, Chuck, that was the most pathetic thing, the way those poor niggers jumped for the bait. They taught themselves to read, they broke their backs for chickenshit, they sent good men to the fuckhead Yoo Ess Senate, they set up legislatures giving Dixie the first public schools it ever had, how about that now, there’s a fact for your eddi-cayshun, right? Jill honey, hand that stick back, you gonna blow yourself to the moon, that is uncut Red. And all this here while, Chuck and Babychuck, the crackers down there were frothing at the mouth and calling our black heroes baboons. Couldn’t do much else as long as the Northern armies hung around, right? Baboons, monkeys, apes: these hopeful sweet blacks trying to make men of themselves, thinking they’d been called to be men at last in these the Benighted States of Amurrika.” Skeeter’s face is shedding its shell of scorn and writhing as if to cry. He has taken his glasses off. He is reaching toward Jill for the marijuana cigarette, keeping his eyes on Rabbit’s face. Rabbit is frozen, his mind racing. Nelson. Put him to bed. Seeing too much. His own face as he listens to Skeeter feels weak, shapeless, slipping. The beer tastes bad, of malt. Skeeter wants to cry, to yell. He is sitting on the edge of the sofa and making gestures so brittle his arms might snap off. He is crazy. “So what did the South do? They said baboon and lynched and whipped and cheated the black man of what pennies he had and thanked their white Jesus they didn’t have to feed him anymore. And what did the North do? It copped out. It pulled out. It had put on all that muscle for the war and now it was wading into the biggest happiest muck of greed and graft and exploitation and pollution and slum-building and Indian-killing this poor old whore of a planet has ever been saddled with, right? Don’t go sleepy on me Chuck, here comes the interesting part. The Southern assholes got together with the Northern assholes and said, Let’s us do a deal. What’s all this about democracy, let’s have here a dollar-cracy. Why’d we ever care, free versus slave? Capital versus labor, that’s where it’s at, right? This poor cunt of a country’s the biggest jampot’s ever come along so let’s eat it, friend. You screw your black labor and we’ll screw our immigrant honky and Mongolian idiot labor and, whoo-hee! Halleluiah, right? So the Freedman’s Bureau was trashed and the military governors were chased back by crackers on horses who were very big on cutting up colored girls with babies inside ’em and Tilden was cheated out of the Presidency in the one bony-fidey swindle election you can find admitted in every honky history book. Look it up, right? And that was the revolution of 1876. Far as the black man goes, that’s the ’76 that hurt, the one a hundred years before was just a bunch of English gents dodging taxes.” Skeeter has put his glasses back on; the glass circles glitter behind a blueness of smoke. His voice has settled for irony again. “So let’s all sing America the Beautiful, right? North and West, robber barons and slums. Down South, one big nigger barbecue. Hitler bless his sweet soul leastways tried to keep the ovens out of sight. Down Dixieway, every magnolia had a rope. Man, they passed laws if a nigger sneezed within three miles of a white ass his balls were chewed off by sawtoothed beagles. Some nigger didn’t hop off the sidewalk and lick up the tobacco juice whenever the town trash spit, he was tucked into a chain gang and peddled to the sheriffs brother-in-law cheaper than an alligator egg. And if he dared ask for the vote the Fifteenth Amendment had flat-out given him, why, they couldn’t think up ways to skin him slowly enough, they couldn’t invent enough laws to express their dis-approbation, better for a poor black man to go stick his head up Great-aunt Lily’s snatch than try to stick it in a polling booth. Right? Chuck, I got to hand it to you, you had it all ways. The South got slavery back at half the price, it got control of Congress back by counting the black votes that couldn’t be cast, the North got the cotton money it needed for capital, and everybody got the fun of shitting on the black man and then holding their noses. You believe any of this?”