by John Updike
Harry and Peggy return to the living room and watch the week’s news roundup. The weekend commentator is fairer-haired and less severe in expression than the weekday one. He says there has been some good news this week. American deaths in Vietnam were reported the lowest in three years, and one twenty-four-hour period saw no American battle deaths at all. The Soviet Union made headlines this week, agreeing with the U.S. to ban atomic weapons from the world’s ocean floors, agreeing with Red China to hold talks concerning their sometimes bloody border disputes, and launching Soyuz 6, a linked three-stage space spectacular bringing closer the day of permanent space stations. In Washington, Hubert Humphrey endorsed Richard Nixon’s handling of the Vietnam war and Lieutenant General Lewis B. Hershey, crusty and controversial head for twenty-eight years of this nation’s selective service system, was relieved of his post and promoted to four-star general. In Chicago, riots outside the courtroom and riotous behavior within continued to characterize the trial of the so-called Chicago Eight. In Belfast, Protestants and British troops clashed. In Prague, Czechoslovakia’s revisionist government, in one of its sternest moves, banned citizens from foreign travel. And preparations were under way: for tomorrow’s Columbus Day parades, despite threatened protests from Scandinavian groups maintaining that Leif Ericson and not Columbus was the discoverer of America, and for Wednesday’s Moratorium Day, a nationwide outpouring of peaceful protest. “Crap,” says Rabbit. Sports. Weather. Peggy rises awkwardly from her chair to turn it off. Rabbit rises, also stiff. “Great supper,” he tells her. “I guess I’ll get back to the ranch.”
The television off, they stand rimmed by borrowed light: the bathroom door down the hall left ajar for the boys, the apartment-house corridor a bright slit beneath the door leading out, the phosphorescence of Brewer through the windows. Peggy’s body, transected and rimmed by those remote fires, does not quite fit together; her arm jerks up from darkness and brushes indifferently at her hair and seems to miss. She shrugs, or shudders, and shadows slip from her. “Wouldn’t you like,” she asks, in a voice not quite hers, originating in the dim charged space between them, and lighter, breathier, “to cash me in?”
Yes, it turns out, yes he would, and they bump, and fumble, and unzip, and she is gumdrops everywhere, yet stately as a statue, planetary in her breadth, a contour map of some snowy land where he has never been; not since Ruth has he had a woman this big. Naked, she makes him naked, even kneeling to unlace his shoes, and then kneeling to him in the pose of Jill to Skeeter, so he has glided across a gulf, and stands where last night he stared. He gently unlinks her, lowers her to the floor, and tastes a salty swamp between her legs. Her thighs part easily, she grows wet readily, she is sadly unclumsy at this, she has indeed been to bed with many men. In the knowing way she handles his prick he feels their presences, feels himself competing, is put off, goes soft. She leaves off and comes up and presses the gumdrop of her tongue between his lips. Puddled on the floor, they keep knocking skulls and ankle bones on the furniture legs. The puppy, hearing their commotion, thinks they want to play and thrusts his cold nose and scrabbling paws among their sensitive flesh; his fern-furry busy bustlingness tickles and hurts. This third animal among them re-excites Rabbit; observing this, Peggy leads him down her hall, the dark crease between her buttocks snapping tick-tock with her walk. Holding her rumpled dress in front of her like a pad, she pauses at the boys’ door, listens, and nods. Her hair has gone loose. The puppy for a while whimpers at their door and claws the floor as if to dig there; then he is eclipsed by the inflammation of their senses and falls silent beneath the thunder of their blood. Harry is afraid with this unknown woman, of timing her wrong, but she tells him, “One sec.” Him inside her, she does something imperceptible, relaxing and tensing the muscles of her vagina, and announces breathily “Now.” She comes one beat ahead of him, a cool solid thump of a come that lets him hit home without fear of hurting her: a fuck innocent of madness. Then slides in that embarrassment of afterwards – of returning discriminations, of the other re-emerging from the muddle, of sorting out what was hers and what was yours. He hides his face in the hot cave at the side of her neck. “Thank you.”
“Thank you yourself,” Peggy Fosnacht says, and, what he doesn’t especially like, grabs his bottom to give her one more deep thrust before he softens. Both Jill and Janice too ladylike for that. Still, he is at home.
Until she says, “Would you mind rolling off? You’re squeezing the breath out of me.”
“Am I so heavy?”
“After a while.”
“Actually, I better go.”
“Why? It’s only midnight.”
“I’m worried about what they’re doing back at the house.”
“Nelson’s here. The others, what do you care?”
“I don’t know. I care.”
“Well they don’t care about you and you’re in bed with someone who does.”
He accuses her: “You’re taking Ollie back.”
“Have any better ideas? He’s the father of my child.”
“Well that’s not my fault.”
“No, nothing’s your fault,” and she tumbles around him, and they make solid sadly skillful love again, and they talk and he dozes a little, and the phone rings. It shrills right beside his ear.
A woman’s arm, plump and elastic and warm, reaches across his face to pluck it silent. Peggy Gring’s. She listens, and hands it to him with an expression he cannot read. There is a clock beside the telephone; its luminous hands say one-twenty. “Hey. Chuck? Better get your ass over here. It’s bad. Bad.”
“Skeeter?” His throat hurts, just speaking. Fucking Peggy has left him dry.
The voice at the other end hangs up.
Rabbit kicks out of the bedcovers and hunts in the dark for his clothes. He remembers. The living room. The boys’ door opens as he runs down the hall naked. Nelson’s astonished face takes in his father’s nakedness. He asks, “Was it Mom?”
“Mom?”
“On the phone.”
“Skeeter. Something’s gone wrong at the house.”
“Should I come?”
They are in the living room, Rabbit stooping to gather his clothes scattered over the floor, hopping to get into his underpants, his suit pants. The puppy, awake again, dances and nips at him.
“Better stay.”
“What can it be, Dad?”
“No idea. Maybe the cops. Maybe Jill getting sicker.”
“Why didn’t he talk longer?”
“His voice sounded funny, I’m not sure it was our phone.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“I told you to stay here.”
“I must, Dad.”
Rabbit looks at him and agrees, “O.K. I guess you must.”
Peggy in blue bathrobe is in the hall; more lights are on. Billy is up. His pajamas are stained yellow at the fly, he is pimply and tall. Peggy says, “Shall I get dressed?”
“No. You’re great the way you are.” Rabbit is having trouble with his tie: his shirt collar has a button in the back that has to be undone to get the tie under. He puts on his coat and stuffs the tie into his pocket. His skin is tingling with the start of sweat and his penis murmuringly aches. He has forgotten to do the laces of his shoes and as he kneels to do them his stomach jams into his throat.
“How will you get there?” Peggy asks.
“Run,” Rabbit answers.
“Don’t be funny, it’s a mile and a half. I’ll get dressed and drive you.”
She must be told she is not his wife. “I don’t want you to come. Whatever it is, I don’t want you and Billy to get involved.”
“Mo-om,” Billy protests from the doorway. But he is still in stained pajamas whereas Nelson is dressed, but for bare feet. His sneakers are in his hand.
Peggy yields. “I’ll get you my car keys. It’s the blue Fury, the fourth slot in the line against the wall. Nelson knows. No, Billy. You and I will stay here.” Her voice is factual, secretarial.
Rabbit takes the keys, which come into his hand as cold as if they have been in the refrigerator. “Thanks a lot. Or have I said that before? Sorry about this. Great dinner, Peggy.”
“Glad you liked it.”
“We’ll let you know what’s what. It’s probably nothing, the son of a bitch is probably just stoned out of his mind.”
Nelson has put his socks and sneakers on. “Let’s go, Dad. Thank you very much, Mrs. Fosnacht.”
“You’re both very welcome.”
“Thank Mr. Fosnacht in case I can’t go on the boat tomorrow.”
Billy is still trying. “Mo-om, let me.”
“No.”
“Mom, you’re a bitch.”
Peggy slaps her son: pink leaps up on his cheek in stripes like fingers, and the child’s face hardens beyond further controlling. “Mom, you’re a whore. That’s what the bridge kids say. You’ll lay anybody.”
Rabbit says, “You two take it easy,” and turns; they flee, father and son, down the hall, down the steel stairwell, not waiting for an elevator, to a basement of parked cars, a polychrome lake caught in a low illumined grotto. Rabbit blinks to realize that even while he and Peggy were heating their little mutual darkness a cold fluorescent world surrounded them in hallways and down stairwells and amid unsleeping pillars upholding their vast building. The universe is unsleeping, neither ants nor stars sleep, to die will be to be forever wide awake. Nelson finds the blue car for him. Its dashlights glow green at ignition. Almost silently the engine comes to life, backs them out, sneaks them along past the stained grotto walls. In a corner by the brickwork of a stairwell the all-chrome mini-bike waits to be repaired. An asphalt exitway becomes a parking lot, becomes a street lined with narrow houses and great green signs bearing numbers, keystones, shields, the names of unattainable cities. They come onto Weiser; the traffic is thin, sinister. The stoplights no longer regulate but merely wink. Burger Bliss is closed, though its purple oven glows within, plus a sallow residue of ceiling tubes to discourage thieves and vandals. A police car nips by, bleating. The Acme lot at this hour has no horizon. Are the few cars still parked on it abandoned? Or lovers? Or ghosts in a world so thick with cars their shadows like leaves settle everywhere? A whirling light, insulting in its brilliance, materializes in Rabbit’s rear-view mirror and as it swells acquires the overpowering grief of a siren. The red bulk of a fire engine plunges by, sucking the Fury toward the center of the street, where the trolley-track bed used to be. Nelson cries, “Dad!”
“Dad what?”
“Nothing, I thought you lost control.”
“Never. Not your Dad.”
The movie marquee, unlit and stubby, is announcing, BACK BY REQST – 2001. All these stores along Weiser have burglar lights on and a few, a new defense, wear window grilles.
“Dad, there’s a glow in the sky.”
“Where?”
“Off to the right.”
He says, “That can’t be us. Penn Villas is more ahead.”
But Emberly Avenue turns right more acutely than he had ever noticed, and the curving streets of Penn Villas do deliver them toward a dome of rose-colored air. People, black shapes, race on silent footsteps, and cars have run to a stop diagonally against the curbs. Down where Emberly meets Vista Crescent, a policeman stands, rhythmically popping into brightness as the twirling fire-engine lights pass over him. Harry parks where he can drive no further and runs down Vista, after Nelson. Fire hoses lie across the asphalt, some deflated like long canvas trouser legs and some fat as cobras, jetting hissingly from their joints. The gutter gnashes with swirling black water and matted leaves; around the sewer drain, a whirlpool widens out from the clogged center. Two houses from their house, they encounter an odor akin to leaf-smoke but more acrid and bitter, holding paint and tar and chemicals; one house away, the density of people stops them. Nelson sinks into the crowd and vanishes. Rabbit shoulders after him, apologizing, “Excuse me, this is my house, pardon me, my house.” He says this but does not yet believe it. His house is masked from him by heads, by searchlights and upward waterfalls, by rainbows and shouts, by something magisterial and singular about the event that makes it as hard to see as the sun. People, neighbors, part to let him through. He sees. The garage is gone; the charred studs still stand, but the roof has collapsed and the shingles smolder with spurts of blue-green flame amid the drenched wreckage on the cement floor. The handle of the power mower pokes up intact. The rooms nearest the garage, the kitchen and the bedroom above it, the bedroom that had been his and Janice’s and then his and Jill’s, flame against the torrents of water. Flame sinks back, then bursts out again, through roof or window, in tongues. The apple-green aluminum clapboards do not themselves burn; rather, they seem to shield the fire from the water. Abrupt gaps in the shifting weave of struggling elements let shreds show through of the upstairs wallpaper, of the kitchen shelves; then these gaps shut at a breath of wind. He scans the upstairs window for Jill’s face, but glimpses only the stained ceiling. The roof above, half the roof, is a field of smoke, smoke bubbling up and coming off the shadow-line shingles in serried billows that look combed. Smoke pours out of Nelson’s windows, but that half of the house is not yet aflame, and may be saved. Indeed, the house burns spitefully, spitting, stinkingly: the ersatz and synthetic materials grudge combustion its triumph. Once in boyhood Rabbit saw a barn burn in the valley east of Mt. Judge; it was a torch, an explosion of hay outstarring the sky with embers. Here there is no such display.
There is space around him. The spectators, the neighbors, in honor of his role, have backed off. Months ago Rabbit had seen that bright island of moviemakers and now he is at the center of this bright island and still feels peripheral, removed, nostalgic, numb. He scans the firelit faces and does not see Showalter or Brumbach. He sees no one he knows.
The crowd stirs, ooh. He expects to see Jill at the window, ready to leap, her white dress translucent around her body. But the windows let only smoke escape, and the drama is on the ground. A policeman is struggling with a slight lithe figure; Harry thinks eagerly, Skeeter, but the struggle pivots, and it is Nelson’s white face. A fireman helps pin the boy’s arms. They bring him away from the house, to his father. Seeing his father, Nelson clamps shut his eyes and draws his lips back in a snarl and struggles so hard to be free that the two men holding his arms seem to be wildly operating pump handles. “She’s in there, Dad!”
The policeman, breathing hard, explains, “Boy tried to get into the house. Says there’s a girl in there.”
“I don’t know, she must have gotten out. We just got here.”
Nelson’s eyes are frantic; he screeches everything. “Did Skeeter say she was with him?”
“No.” Harry can hardly get the words out. “He just said things were bad.”
In listening, the fireman and policeman loosen their grip, and Nelson breaks away to run for the front door again. Heat must meet him, for he falters at the porchlet steps, and he is seized again, by men whose slickers make them seem beetles. This time, brought back, Nelson screams up at Harry’s face: “You fucking asshole, you’ve let her die. I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you.” And, though it is his son, Harry crouches and gets his hands up ready to fight.
But the boy cannot burst the grip of the men; he tells them in a voice less shrill, arguing for his release, “I know she’s in there. Let me go, please. Please let me go. Just let me get her out, I know I can. I know I can. She’d be upstairs asleep. She’d be easy to lift. Dad, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I swore at you. I didn’t mean it. Tell them to let me. Tell them about Jill. Tell them to get her out.”
Rabbit asks the firemen, “Wouldn’t she have come to the window?”
The fireman, an old rodent of a man, with tufty eyebrows and long yellow teeth, ruminates as he talks. “Girl asleep in there, smoke might get to her before she properly woke up. People don’t realize what a deadly poison smoke is. That’s what does you in, the smoke not the fire.” He asks Nelson, “O.K. to let go, so
nny? Act your age now, we’ll send men up the ladder.”
One beetle-backed fireman chops at the front door. The glass from the three panes shatters and tinkles on the flagstones. Another fireman emerges from the other side of the roof and with his ax picks a hole above the upstairs hall, about where Nelson’s door would be. Something invisible sends him staggering back. A violet flame shoots up. A cannonade of water chases him back over the roof ridge.
“They’re not doing it right, Dad,” Nelson moans. “They’re not getting her. I know where she is and they’re not getting her, Dad!” And the boy’s voice dies in a shuddering wail. When Rabbit reaches toward him he pulls away and hides his face. The back of his head feels soft beneath the hair: an overripe fruit.
Rabbit reassures him, “Skeeter would’ve gotten her out.”
“He wouldn’t of, Dad! He wouldn’t care. All he cared about was himself. And all you cared about was him. Nobody cared about Jill.” He writhes in his father’s fumbling grasp.
A policeman is beside them. “You Angstrom?” He is one of the new style of cops, collegiate-looking: pointed nose, smooth chin, sideburns cut to a depth Rabbit still thinks of as antisocial.
“Yes.”
The cop takes out a notebook. “How many persons were in residence here?”
“Four. Me and the kid –”
“Name?”
“Nelson.”
“Any middle initial?”
“F for Frederick.” The policeman writes slowly and speaks so softly he is hard to hear against the background of crowd murmur and fire crackle and water being hurled. Harry has to ask, “What?”
The cop repeats, “Name of mother?”
“Janice. She’s not living here. She lives over in Brewer.”
“Address?”
Harry remembers Stavros’s address, but gives instead, “Care of Frederick Springer, 89 Joseph Street, Mt. Judge.”
“And who is the girl the boy mentioned?”
