Rabbit at rest (37 page)

All the lights being turned on gives the house a panicky
overheated air. They ascend the stairs in the order Judy, Harry,
Janice, and Pru, who maybe regrets having called them by now and
would rather be nursing her face and planning her next move in
solitude. Nelson greets them in the hallway, carrying Roy in his.
"Oh," he says, seeing his father, "the big cheese is here."

"Don't mouth off at me," Harry tells him. "I'd rather be home in
bed."

"It wasn't my idea to call you."

"It was your idea though to go beating up your wife, and scaring
the hell out of your kids, and otherwise acting like a shit." Harry
fishes in the side pocket of his chinos to make sure the little
vial of heart pills is there. Nelson is trying to play it cool,
still wearing the black slacks and white shirt he was out on the
town in, and having the kid on his arm, but his thinning hair is
bristling out from his head and his eyes in the harsh hallway light
are frantic, full of reflected sparks like that time outside the
burning house at 26 Vista Crescent. Even in the bright light his
pupils look dilated and shiny-black and there is a tremor to
him, a shiver now and then as if this night nearly in May is icy
cold. He looks even thinner than in Florida, with that same
unpleasant sore-looking nose above the little half-ass
blur of a mustache. And that earring yet.

"Who are you to go around deciding who's acting like a shit?" he
asks Harry, adding, "Hi, Mom. Welcome home."

"Nelson, this just won't do."

"Let me take Roy," Pru says in a cool neutral voice, and she
pushes past the elder Angstroms and without looking her husband in
the face plucks the sleepy child from him. Involuntarily she grunts
with the weight. The hall light, with its glass shade faceted like
a candy dish, crowns her head with sheen as she passes under it,
into Roy's room, which was Nelson's boyhood room in the old days,
when Rabbit would lie awake hearing Melanie creep along the hall to
this room from her own, the little room at the front of the house
with the dress dummy. Now she's some gastroenterologist. In the
harsh overhead light, Nelson's face, white around the gills, shows
an electric misery and a hostile cockiness, and Janice's a dark
confused something, a retreat into the shadows of her mind; her
capacity for confusion has always frightened Harry. He realizes he
is still in charge. Little Judy looks up at him brightly,
titillated by being awake and a witness to these adult
transactions. "We can't just stand here in the hall," he says. "How
about the big bedroom?"

Harry and Janice's old bedroom has become Nelson and Pru's. A
different bedspread - their old Pennsylvania Dutch quilt of
little triangular patches has given way to a puff patterned with
yellow roses, Pru does like flowered fabrics - but the same
creaky bed, with the varnished knobbed headboard that never hit
your back quite right when you tried to read. Different magazines
on the bedside tables
- Racing Cars
and
Rolling
Stone
instead of
Time
and
Consumer Reports
- but the same cherry table on Harry's old side, with its
sticky drawer. Among the propped-up photographs on the bureau
is one of him and Janice, misty-eyed and lightly tinted,
taken on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in March of
1981. They look embalmed, Rabbit thinks, suspended in that tinted
bubble of time. The ceiling light in this room, glass like the hall
light, is also burning. He asks, "Mind if I switch that off? All
these lights on, I'm getting a headache."

Nelson says sourly, "You're the big cheese. Help yourself."

Judy explains, "Mommy said to turn them all on while Daddy was
chasing her. She said if it got worse I should throw a chair
through a front window and yell for help and the police would
hear."

With the light switched off, Rabbit can see out into the dark
gulf of air where the copper beech used to be. The neighbor's house
is closer than he ever thought, in his ten years of living here.
Their upstairs lights are on. He can see segments of wall and
furniture but no people. Maybe they were thinking of calling the
police. Maybe they already have. He switches on the lamp on the
cherry table, so the neighbors can look in and see that everything
is under control.

"She overreacted," Nelson explains, fitfully gesturing. "I was
trying to make a point and Pru wouldn't hold still. She never
listens to me any more."

"Maybe you don't say enough she wants to hear," Harry tells his
son. The kid in his white shirt and dark trousers looks like a
magician's assistant, and keeps tapping himself on the chest and
back of the neck and rubbing his anus through the white cloth as if
he's about to do a trick. The boy is embarrassed and scared but
keeps losing focus, Rabbit feels; there are other presences for him
in the room besides the bed and furniture and his parents and
daughter, a mob of ghosts which only he can see. A smell comes off
him, liquor and a kind of post-electrical ozone. He is
sweating; his gills are wet.

"O.K., O.K.," Nelson says. "I treated myself to a bender
tonight, I admit it. It's been a helluva week at the lot.
California wants to have this nationwide Toyotathon to go with a
TVcommercial blitz and they expect to see a
twenty-per-cent increase of new sales to go with the
discounts they're offering. They let me know they haven't been
liking our figures lately."

"Them and who else?" Harry says. "Did your buddy Lyle tell ya I
was over there the other day?"

"Snooping around last week, yeah, he sure did. He hasn't come to
work since. Thanks a bunch. You put Elvira into a snit, too, with
all your sexist flirtatious stuff:"

"I wasn't sexist, I wasn't flirtatious. I was just surprised to
see a woman selling cars and asked her how it was going. The cunt,
I was just as pleasant as I could be."

"She didn't think so."

"Well screw her, then. From my look at her she can take care of
herself. What's your big huff for - you boffing her?"

"Dad, when are you going to get your mind off boffing? You're
what, fifty-seven? -"

"Fifty-six."

"- and you're so damn adolescent. There's more things in
the world than who's boffing who."

"Tell me about it. Tell me about how the me generation has a
bender. You can't keep snorting this stuff every half-hour to
keep high, your nose'd burn out. Yours looks sort of shot already.
What do you do with crack? How do you take it in? It's just little
crystals, isn't it? Do you need all that fancy burning stuff and
tubes they show on TV? Where do you do it, then? You can't just
haul all that paraphernalia into the Laid-Back or whatever
they call it now, or can you?"

"Harry, please," Janice says.

Judy contributes, bright-eyed at three in the morning,
"Daddy has lots of funny little pipes."

"Shut up honey, would you mind?" Nelson says. "Go find Mommy and
she'll put you to bed."

Harry turns on Janice. "Let me ask him. Why should we all go
around on tiptoe forever pretending the kid's not a hophead? Face
it, Nellie, you're a mess. You're a mess and you're a menace. You
need help."

Self-pity focuses the boy's features for a second. "People
keep telling me I need help but
they're
no help is what I
notice. A wife who doesn't give me shit, a father who's no kind of
father at all and never was, a mother..." He trails off, not daring
offend his one ally.

"A mother," Harry finishes for him, "who's letting you rob her
blind."

This gets to him a little, burns through the jittery buzz in his
eyes. "I'm not robbing anybody," he says, numbly, as though a voice
in his head told him to say it. "Everything's been worked out. Hey,
I feel sick. I think I have to throw up."

Harry raises his hand in lofty blessing. "Go to it. You know
where the bathroom is."

The bathroom door is to the right of the dresser with the color
snapshots of the kids at various stages of growing and the tinted
one of Harry and Janice looking embalmed, mistily staring at the
same point in space. Looking in, Harry sees all sorts of litter on
the floor. Prell, Crest, pills. Luckily most things come in plastic
containers these days so there isn't much breakage. The door
closes.

Janice tells him, "Harry, you're coming on too strong."

"Well, hell, nobody else is coming on at all. You expect it to
go away by itself. It won't. The kid is hooked."

"Let's just not talk about the money," she begs.

"Why not? Just what is so fucking sacred about money, that
everybody's scared to talk about it?"

The tip of her tongue peeks from between her worried lips. "With
money you get into legal things."

Judy is still with them and has been listening: her clear young
eyes with their bluish whites, her reddish-blonde eyebrows
with their little cowlick, her little face pale as a clock's face
and as precise pluck at Harry's anger, undermine his
necessary indignation. Retching noises from behind the bathroom
door now frighten her. Harry explains, "It'll make your daddy feel
better. He's getting rid of poison." But the thought of
Nelson being sick upsets him too, and those bands of constriction
around his chest, the playful malevolent singeing deep within,
reassert their threat. He fishes in his pants pocket for the
precious brown vial. Thank God he remembered to bring it. He
unscrews the top and shakes out a small white Nitrostat and places
it, as debonairly as he used to light a cigarette, beneath his
tongue.

Judy smiles upward. "Those pills fix that bad heart I gave
you."

"You didn't give me my bad heart, honey, I wish you'd get that
out of your mind." He is bothered by Janice's remark about money
and legal things and the implication that they are getting in over
their heads. ANGSTROM, SON INCARCERATED. Joint Scam Sinks Family
Concern. The lights in the neighbor's upstairs windows have
gone off and that relieves some pressure. He could feel Ma Springer
turning in her grave at the possibility that her old house has
become a bother to the neighborhood. Nelson comes out of the
bathroom looking shaken, wide-eyed. The poor kid has seen
some terrible things in his day: Jill's body carried from the
burned-out house in a rubber bag, his mother hugging the
little dead body of his baby sister. You can't really blame him for
anything. He has washed his face and combed his hair so his
pallor has this gleam. He lets a shudder run from his head down
into his body, like a dog shaking itself dry after running in a
ditch.

For all his merciful thoughts Harry goes back on the attack.
"Yeah," he says, even as the kid is closing the bathroom door, "and
another new development over there I wasn't crazy about is this fat
Italian you've hired. What are you letting the Mafia into the lot
for?"

"Dad, you are incredibly prejudiced."

"I don't have prejudices, just facts. The Mafia is a fact. It's
being scared out of the drug trade, too violent, and is getting
into more and more legitimate businesses. It was all on 60
Minutes."

"Mom, get him off me."

Janice gets up her courage and says, "Nelson, your father's
right. You need some help."

"I'm fine," he whines. "I need some sleep, is what I need. You
have any idea what time it is? - it's after three. Judy, you
should go back to bed."

"I'm too wired," the child says, smiling, showing her perfect
oval teeth.

Harry asks her, "Where'd you learn that word?"

"I'm too jazzed," she says. "Kids at school say that."

Harry asks Nelson, "And who're these guys keep calling our house
at all hours asking for money?"

"They think I owe them money," Nelson answers. "Maybe I do. It's
temporary, Dad. It'll all work out. Come, Judy. I'll put you to
bed."

"Not so fast," Harry says. "How much do you owe, and how're you
going to pay 'em?"

"Like I said, I'll work it out. They shouldn't be calling your
number, but they're crude guys. They don't understand term
financing. Go back to Florida if you don't like your phone ringing.
Change your number, that's what I did."

"Nelson, when will it end?" Janice asks, tears making her voice
crack, just from looking at him. In his white shirt with his
electric movements Nelson has the frailty and doomed alertness of a
cornered animal. "You must get off this stuff"

"I am, Mom. I am off. Starting_tonight."

"Ha," Harry says.

Nelson insists to her, "I can handle it. I'm no addict. I'm a
recreational user."

"Yeah," Harry says, "like Hitler was a recreational killer." It
must be the mustache made him think of Hitler. If the kid would
just shave it off, and chuck the earring, he maybe could feel some
compassion, and they could make a fresh start.

But, then, Harry thinks, how many fresh starts for him are left?
This room, where he spent ten years sleeping beside Janice,
listening to her snore, smelling her nice little womanly sweat, her
unconscious releases of gas, making some great love sometimes, that
time with the Krugerrands, and other times disgustedly watching her
stumble in tipsy from a night downstairs sipping sherry or Campan,
this room with the copper beech outside the window leafing in and
changing the light and then losing its leaves and giving the light
back and the beech nuts popping like little firecrackers and Ma
Springer's television mumbling on and making the bedside lamp
vibrate when a certain pitch was reached on the
program-ending surge of music, Ma sound asleep and never
hearing it, this room soaked in his life, how many more times will
he see it? He hadn't expected to see it tonight. Now all at once,
as happens at his age, fatigue like an inner overflowing makes him
feel soggy, dirty, distracted. Little sparks are going off and on
in the corners of his eyes. Avoid aggravation. He'd better sit
down. Janice has sat down on the bed, their old bed, and Nelson has
pulled up the padded stool patterned with yellow roses Pru must use
to perch on in her underwear when she sits putting on makeup at her
dresser mirror before going out with him to the LaidBack or some
yuppie buddies' party in northeast Brewer. How sorry is he supposed
to feel for his son when the kid has a big tall hippy dish like
that to boff?