Rabbit at rest (32 page)

This other man's attempt to open him up has made Lyle more erect
behind the desk, more hostile. He stares at Harry with those
eroded-around eyes, beneath eyebrows the same metallic blond
as his hair. "One good thing about it," he offers, "is you become
harder to frighten. By minor things. By threats like yours, for
example."

"I'm not making any threats, Lyle, I'm just trying to find out
what the fuck is going on. I'm beginning to think this company is
being ripped off. If I'm wrong and it's all on the up and up,
you've nothing to be frightened of." Poor guy, he's biting the
bullet, and less than half Harry's age. At his age, what was Harry
doing? Setting type the old-fashioned way, and dreaming about
ass. Ass, one way or another, does us in: membrane's too thin,
those little HIVs sneak right through. Black box of nothingness, is
what it felt like with Thelma. Funny appetite, for a steady diet.
Being queer isn't all roses.

Lyle moves his anns around again with that brittle caution. His
body has become a collection of dead sticks. "Don't make
allegations, Mr. Angstrom, you wouldn't want to defend in
court."

"Well, is it an allegation or a fact that you refuse to let me
and an impartial accountant examine your books?"

"Mildred's not impartial. She's furious at me for replacing her.
She's furious because I and my computer can do in a few hours what
took her all week."

"Mildred's an honest old soul."

"Mildred's senile."

"Mildred's not the point here. The point is you're defying me to
protect my son."

"I'm not defying you, Mr. Angstrom

"You can call me Harry."

"I'm not defying you, sir. I'm just telling you I can't accept
orders from you. I have to get them from Nelson or Mrs.
Angstrom."

"You'll get 'em. Sir." A smiling provocative hovering in Lyle's
expression goads Harry to ask, "Do you doubt it?"

"I'll be waiting to hear," Lyle says.

"Listen. You may know about a lot of things I don't but you
don't know shit about marriage. My wife will do what I tell her to.
Ask her to. In a business like this we're absolutely one."

"We'll see," Lyle says. "My parents were married, as a matter of
fact. I was raised in a marriage. I know a lot about marriage."

"Didn't do you much good."

"It showed me something to avoid," Lyle says, and smiles as
broadly, as guilelessly, as when Harry came in. All teeth. Now
Harry does recall him from the old days at Fiscal Alternatives
- the stacks of gold and silver, and flawless cool Marcia
with her long red nails. Poor beauty, did herself in. She and
Monroe. Rabbit admits to himself the peculiar charm queers have, a
boyish lightness, a rising above all that female muck, where life
breeds.

"How's Slim?" Harry asks, rising from the chair. "Nelson used to
talk a lot about Slim."

"Slim," Lyle says, too weak or rude to stand, "died. Before
Christmas."

"Sorry to hear it," Harry lies. He holds out his hand over the
desk to be shaken and the other man hesitates to take it, as if
fearing contamination. Feverish loose-jointed bones: Rabbit
gives them a squeeze and says, "Tell Nelson if you ever see him I
like the new decor. Kind of a boutique look. Cute. Goes with the
new sales rep. You hang loose, Lyle. Hope China comes through for
you. We'll be in touch."

On the radio on the way home, he hears that Mike Schmidt, who
exactly two years ago, on April 18, 1987, slugged his five
hundredth home run, against the Pittsburgh Pirates in Three Rivers
Stadium, is closing in on Richie Ashburn's total of 2,217 hits to
become the hittingest Phillie ever. Rabbit remembers Ashburn. One
of the Whiz Kids who beat the Dodgers for the pennant the fall
Rabbit became a high-school senior. Curt Simmons, Del Ennis,
Dick Sisler in center, Andy Semmick behind the plate. Beat the
Dodgers the last game of the season, then lost to the Yankees four
straight. In 1950 Rabbit was seventeen and had led the county B
league with 817 points his junior season. Remembering these
statistics helps settle his agitated mood, stirred up by seeing
Thelma and Lyle, a mood of stirred-up unsatisfied desire at
whose fringes licks the depressing idea that nothing matters very
much, we'll all soon be dead.

Janice's idea of a low-sodium diet for him is to get these
frozen dinners in plastic pouches called Low-Cal. Most of
this precooked chicken and beef is full of chemicals so it doesn't
go bad on the shelf. To work it all through his system he usually
has a second beer. Janice is distracted these days, full of
excitement about taking real-estate courses at the Penn State
extension. "I'm not sure I totally understand it, though the woman
at the office over on Pine Street - hasn't
that
neighborhood gone downhill, since you and your father used to work
at Verity! - she was very patient with my questions. The
classes meet three hours a week for ten weeks, and there are two
required and four electives to get this certificate, but I don't
think you need the certificate to take the licensing exam, which
for a salesperson - that's what I'd be - is given
monthly and for a broker, which maybe I'd try to be later, only
quarterly. But the gist of it is I could begin with two this April
and then take two more from July to September and if all goes well
get my license in September and start selling, strictly on a
commission basis at first, for this firm that Doris Eberhardt's new
brother-in-law is one of the partners in. She says
she's told him about me and he's interested. It's in your favor
evidently to be middle-aged, the clients assume you're
experienced."

"Honey, why do you need to do this? You have the lot."

"I don't have the lot. Nelson has the lot."

"Does he? I dropped over there today and he wasn't there, just
these kids he's hired. One fag, one wop, and a skirt."

"Harry. Now who's sounding prejudiced?"

He doesn't push ahead with his story, he wants to save it for
when they both can focus. After dinner Janice likes to watch
Jeopardy!
even though she never knows any of the answers,
and then the Phillies are playing the Mets on Channel 11. The
little stone house with its fractional number on Franklin Drive
draws darkling about them, just them, in the evening as the gradual
Northern dusk (in Florida the sun just suddenly shuts down, and the
moon takes over) seeps into the still-bare trees, quelling
the birdsong, and a lemon tinge of sky in the west beyond the
craggy chimneys of the big clinker-brick house deepens to an
incendiary orange and then the crimson of last embers. Another few
weeks, the trees will leaf in, and there won't be any sunset to see
from the lozenge-pane windows of his den, when he turns his
eyes aside from watching the television screen.

In the third inning, with two men on, Schmidt hits a home run,
his fourth of the young season and the five hundred fortysixth of
his career. It puts the Phils ahead five to zero, and Rabbit starts
switching channels, finding no basketball playoffs, only
Matlock
and
The Wonder Years.
Much as Janice
irritates him when she's with him, when she isn't in the room with
him, or when he can't hear her knocking around in the kitchen or
upstairs above his head, he grows uneasy. He switches off the set
and goes looking for her, full of his troubling news as once he was
full of gold Krugerrands.

She is already in one of her nighties, upstairs, and those
infuriating Florida sandals that go
f lip-flop
as she walks around when he is still trying to sleep in the
morning. Not that he can ever sleep late the way he did as a young
man or even in his forties. He wakes around six with a little start
and ever since his heart attack there is a gnawing in his stomach
whose cause he can't locate until he realizes it is the terror of
being trapped inside his perishing body, like being in a prison
cell with a madman who might decide to kill him at any moment. She
is paddling back and forth,
flop-flop,
carrying
small stacks of folded cloth, laundry she has brought up the back
stairs; one square stack he recognizes as folded handkerchiefs,
another, less trim, as his jockey shorts with their slowly
slackening elastic waists, a third as her own underthings,
which still excite him, not so much when they are on her as when
empty and laundry-clean. He doesn't know how to begin.
He throws his big body across the bed diagonally and lets the
nubbles ofits bedspread rub his face. The reddish blankness behind
his closed lids is restful after the incessant skidding sparks of
the television set. "Harry, is anything the matter?" Janice's voice
sounds alarmed. His fragility gives him a new hold over her.

He rolls over and can't help smiling at the lumpy figure she
cuts in her nightie. She looks not so different from how Judy looks
in hers and not very much larger. Her scant bangs don't quite hide
her high forehead, its Florida tan dulling, and her tired eyes look
focused elsewhere. He begins, "There's something going wrong over
at the lot. When I was over there today I asked to see the books
and this fag with AIDS Nelson has put in as bookkeeper instead of
Mildred told me he couldn't show them to me unless you authorized
it. You're the boss, according to him."

The tip of her little tongue creeps out and presses on her upper
lip. "That was silly," she says.

"I thought so, but I kept my cool. Poor guy, he's just
covering up for Nelson."

"Covering up for Nelson why?"

"Well" - Harry sighs heavily, and arranges himself on the
bed like an odalisque, with a hippy twist to his body - "you
really want to hear this?"

"Of course." But she keeps moving around the room with her
little stacks.

"I have a new theory. I think Nelson takes cocaine, and that's
why he's so shifty and jumpy, and kind of paranoid."

Janice moves carefully to the bureau, flop and then flop,
carrying what Harry recognizes as her salmon-colored
running suit with the blue sleeves and stripes, which she never
wears on the street around here, where the middle-aged are
more careful about looking ridiculous. "Who told you this?" she
asks.

He squirms on the bed, pulling up his legs and pushing off his
suede shoes so as not to dirty the bedspread of white dotted
Swiss.

"Nobody told me," he says. "I just put two and two together.
Cocaine's everywhere and these yuppie baby boomers Nelson's age are
just the ones who use it. It takes money. Lots of money, to
maintain a real habit. Doesn't Pru keep complaining about all these
bills they can't pay?"

Janice comes close to the bed and stands; he sees through her
cotton nightie shadows of her nipples and her pubic hair. From his
angle she looks strangely enormous, and in his diagonal
position he undergoes one of those surges of lightheadedness
as when he stands up too fast; it is not clear who is upright and
who is not. Her body has kept the hard neatness it had when they
were kids working at Kroll's but underneath her chin there are ugly
folds that ramify into her neck. She was determined not to get fat
like her mother but age catches you anyway. Janice says carefully,
"Most young couples have bills they can't pay."

He sits up, to shake the lightness in his head, and because her
body is there puts his arms around her hips. On second thought he
reaches under her nightie and cups his hands around her solid,
slightly gritty buttocks. He says, looking up past her breasts to
her face, "The worst of it is, honey, I think he's been bleeding
the company. I think he's been stealing and Lyle has been helping
him, that's why they let Mildred go."

Her buttocks under his hands tense; he feels them squeeze
together and become more spherical, with the tension of a
basketball a few pounds under regulation pressure. A watery
glimmer of arousal winks below his waist. Her blurred eyes look
down upon him with somber concentration, the skin of her face
sagging downward from the bone. He nuzzles one breast and
closes his eyes again, smelling the faintly sweaty cotton, hiding
from her intent downward eyes. Her voice asks, "What evidence
do you have?"

This irritates him. She is dumb. "That's what I was saying. I
asked to look at the accounts and bank statements today and they
wouldn't let me, unless you authorized it. All you have to do is
call up this Lyle."

He hears in her chest a curious stillness, and feels in her body
a tension of restraint. Her nightie is transparent but she is
opaque. "If you did see these figures," she asks, "would you know
enough to understand them?"

He flicks her nipple with his tongue through the cotton. The
glimmer below has grown to a steady glow, a swelling warmth. "Maybe
not altogether," he says. "But even the monthly statements we got
in Florida didn't look quite right to me. I'd take Mildred with me,
and if she's too far gone - he said she's senile and over at
Dengler's - I think we should hire somebody, a professional
accountant in Brewer. You could call our lawyer for who he'd
recommend. This may be something we have to bring the cops in on
eventually." A nice April shower has started up outdoors, kindled
by the slow sunset.

Her body has stiffened and jerked back an inch. "Harry! Your own
son!"

"Well," he says, irritated again, "his own mother. Stealing from
his own mother."

"We don't know anything for sure," Janice tells him. "It's only
your theory."

"What else could Lyle have been hiding today? Now they'll have
the wind up so we should start moving or they'll shred everything
like Ollie North."

Now Janice is getting agitated, backing out ofhis arms and
rubbing the back of one hand with the other, standing in the center
of the carpet. He sees that the sex isn't going to happen, the
first time in weeks he's really had the urge. Damn that Nelson. She
says, "I think I should talk to Nelson first."