Rabbit at rest (64 page)

He likes motel rooms - the long clammy slot of hired
space, the two double beds, the television set with its invitation
to buy an R-rated movie, the shag carpet, the framed prints
of big birds, the sanitized towels, the hush of anonymity, the
closeted echo of old sex. He sleeps well, as if he has slipped off
his body with its troubles and left it lying on the other double
bed. In his dream he is back at the lot, with a young woman who
seems to be in charge. She wears a white cap and dangly earrings
but when he leans close and tries to explain himself to her, to
convey his indispensable usefulness to the enterprise, contrary to
what she may have heard from Janice, she makes a wry mouth and her
face melts under his eyes in a kind of visual scream.

For breakfast, he succumbs to the temptation and has two fried
eggs, though the yolks are terrible for your arteries, with bacon
on the side. Rabbit likes the very American moment of packing up
his car in sleepy unspeaking companionship with the other motel
guests, elderly couples, cranky families, as they drift from the
breakfast room across the parking lot with its long milky morning
shadows. On the road again, with the radio again. The same news as
the night before, amplified by the final baseball scores (Phils
lost, five to one) and the news from Asia, where it is already
afternoon for the busy Japanese currency speculators, the restive
Chinese students, the doll-like Filipino hookers, the
unhappily victorious Vietnamese, the up-and-coming
although riotous Koreans, the tottering Burmese socialists, the
warring Cambodian factions including the mindless Khmer Rouge
minions of the most atrocious national leader since Hitler and
Stalin, the infamous Pol Pot. Like, wow! Wake up, songbirds! The d
.j., not last night's but just as crazy and alone with himself,
plays some rockabilly song Rabbit likes, about getting down, "make
a little love, get down tonight." It occurs to Harry he didn't even
jerk off last night, though motel rooms usually excite him. Boy, is
he showing his age.

As Baltimore nears, the condominiums multiply, thicken, entire
hills and valleys loaded with them, pastel gingerbread staircases
containing invisible people. 83 ends seamlessly at 695 and with all
the commuters in their neckties he drones around the Beltway,
jostling for his space in the world as if he still deserves it.
Then he takes up 95, which will be his home all the way to Florida.
There are two ways around Washington, he and Janice have tried them
both, the boringly expert travellers down in the condo like the
Silbersteins say 495 passing to the north and west is actually
quicker, but he likes the little glimpse of the monuments you get
by staying east on 95 and crossing the Potomac on a broad bridge
into Alexandria. The frozen far heart, ice-cream white, of
the grand old republic.

After all that megalopolis, Virginia feels bucolically vacant.
The fields look bigger than those in Pennsylvania, the hills
gentler and more open, with meadows and horses, a gracious mist in
the air, once in a while a pillared manse on a pale-green
rise like something embroidered on a sampler by a slaveowner's
spinster daughter. A military tinge: Fort Belvoir Engineer Proving
Ground, Quantico Marine Corps Base. Harry thinks of his Army time
and it comes back as a lyric tan, a translucent shimmer of aligned
faceless men, the curious peace of having no decisions to make, of
being told entirely what to do. War is a relief in many ways.
Without the Cold War, what's the point of being an American? Still,
we held them off. We creamed those oafs. Hitler, Stalin, and now
Gorby. History will remember that, if not thank us. There is very
little thanks in history. Dog eat dog. It becomes hard now to find
stations on the radio that are not country music or religion. "Pray
for difficult marriages," one preacher says, his grainy
molasses-brown voice digging so deep into himself you can
picture his shut eyes, the sweat on his temples, "pray for
Christian husbands under stress, for Christian wives worried about
their men; pray for all hostages, for prisoners in prison, for
victims of the ghetto, for all those with AIDS." Rabbit switches
the station and resolves to call home when he stops for lunch.

How many rivers there are! After the Potomac, the Accotink, the
Pohick, the Occoquan, the Rappahannock, the Pamunkey, the Ni, the
Po, the Matta, the South Anna. The bridges thus marked are mere
moments of the highway. Unseen towns are named: Massaponax,
Ladysmith, Cedar Forks. North of Richmond, shacks in a thickening
scatter mark the beginning of the true South, of rural blacks.
Harry pulls into a Howard Johnson's on the Richmond outskirts. His
ears ring, the ankle of his accelerator foot aches, his neck is
stiff; the heat has gone up several notches since the motel parking
lot this morning. Inside the air-conditioned restaurant,
salesmen with briefcases are at all the pay phones. He eats too
much lunch, consuming the last French fry that came with his
tasteless hamburger, mopping up salt with it in his fingers like
his grandson Roy does, and then ordering apple pie to see if it's
any different in Virginia. It's sweeter and gluier; it lacks that
cinnamon they sprinkle on in Pennsylvania. A phone is available
after he pays the check and with three dollars' worth of quarters
ready he dials not the gray limestone house on Franklin Drive but
the house where he used to live, the Springer house in Mt.
Judge.

A little girl answers. The operator breaks in and Rabbit inserts
three n-linutes' worth of quarters. He says, "Hi, Judy. It's
Grandpa."

"Hi, Grandpa," she says, very calmly. Perhaps nothing of last
night's revelation has filtered down to her yet. Or perhaps
children this young are so innocent of what adulthood involves that
nothing surprises them.

"How's it going?" he asks.

"O.K."

"You looking forward to school starting next week?"

"Kind of. Summer gets kind of boring."

"How's Roy? Is he bored by summer too?"

"He's so stupid he doesn't know what boring is. He's been put
down for his nap now but is still bawling. Mommy's flipping out."
Since Harry seems stuck for a response, she volunteers, "Daddy's
not here, he's over at the lot."

"That's O.K., I'd just as soon talk to your mommy actually.
Could you get her for me? Judy," he impulsively adds, before the
child can leave the phone.

"Yeah?"

"You study hard, now. Don't you worry about those kids who think
they're so much. You're a very lovely girl and everything will come
to you if you wait. Don't force it. Don't force growing up.
Everything will be fine."

This is too much to try to cram into her. She is only nine. Ten
more years before she can go west like Mim and break out. "I know,"
Judy says, with a sigh, and perhaps she does. After a rattle of
thereceiver on wood and voices in the background and footsteps
hastily enlarging, Pru arrives at the telephone, breathless.

"Harry! "

"Hi there, Teresa. How's it going?" This seductive nonchalant
tone, all wrong, but it just came out.

"Not so good," she says. "Where on earth are you?"

"Far away, where everybody wants me. Hey. Whajou tell for?"

"Oh Harry, I
had
to." She starts to cry. "I couldn't
let Nelson not know, he's trying to be so straight. It's pathetic.
He's been confessing all this dreadful stuff to me, I can't tell
you or anybody the half of it, and at night we pray together, pray
aloud kneeling by the bed, he's just so desperate to lick the drugs
and be a decent father and husband, just be normal."

"He is, huh? Well, great. Still, you didn't need to turn us in,
it only happened once, and there wasn't any follow-up, in
fact I thought you'd totally forgotten about it."

"How could you think I'd forgotten? You must think I'm a real
slut."

"Well, no, but, you know, you've been having a lot on your mind.
For me, it was almost like I'd dreamed it." He means this as a
compliment.

But Pru's voice hardens. "Well, it meant a little more to me
than
that."
Women: you never know which side they want to
dance on. "It was a terrible betrayal of my husband," she
pronounces solemnly.

"Well," Rabbit says, "he hasn't been all that great a husband,
as far as I can see. Hey, is Judy listening to all this?"

"I'm on the upstairs phone. I asked her to hang up
downstairs."

"And did she?
Judy!"
Harry shouts. "I see you
there!"

There is a fumbling soft rattle and a new clarity in the
connection. Pru says, "Shit."

Rabbit reassures her. "I forget exactly what we said but I doubt
if she understood much."

"She understands more than she lets on. Girls do."

"Well, anyway," he says. "Did he confess to affairs with men as
well as women? Nelson."

"I can't possibly answer that question," she says, in a flat dry
voice forever closed to him. Another woman's voice, warmer,
courteous, faintly lazy, probably black, breaks in, saying, "Sir,
yore three minutes are u-up. Please deposit a dollar ten
saints if you wish continuation."

"Maybe I'm done," he says, to both women.

Pru shouts, over their imperilled connection, "Harry, where are
you?"

"On the road!" he shouts back. He still has a little stack of
change in front of him and inserts four quarters and a dime. As
they gong away, he sings a snatch of a song he just heard on the
radio, Willie Nelson's signature: "On the road again. . ."

This makes Pru sob; it's as bad as talking to Janice. "Oh
don't,"
she cries. "Don't
tease us
all, we can't
help it we're all tied down back here."

Pity touches him, with the memory of her beauty naked like
blossoms that night in the narrow musty room as the rain
intensified. She is stuck back there, she is saying, with the
living. "I'm tied down too," he tells her. "I'm tied to my
carcass."

"What shall I tell Janice?"

"Tell her I'm on the way to the condo. Tell her she can come
join me whenever she wants. I just didn't like the squeeze you all
put on me last night. I get claustrophobic in my old age."

"I
never should
have slept with you, it's just at the
time . . ."

"It was," he says. "It was a great idea at the time. Tell me
how'd you think I did, looking back on it? For an old guy."

She hesitates, then says, "That's it, that's the trouble. I
don't see you as an old guy, Harry. I never did."

O.K., he has won this from her. This woman-to-man
voice. Who could ask for anything more? Let her go. He says, "Don't
you fret, Pru. You're a great dish. Tell Nelson to loosen up. Just
because he got over crack he doesn't have to turn into Billy
Graham." Or Jim Bakker. Harry hangs up, and the telephone startles
him by returning, with a pang and clatter, the dime and four
quarters. That operator with the Southern voice must have been
listening and taken a shine to him.

As the afternoon wears on toward Fayetteville, North Carolina,
where there is a Comfort Inn he and Janice have stayed at in years
past, he hears an amazing thing on the car radio. They interrupt a
string of Forties swing classics to announce that Bartlett
Giamatti, Commissioner of Baseball and former president of Yale
University, died of a heart attack on the island of Martha's
Vineyard, Massachusetts, late this afternoon.
Pete Rose strikes
back,
Rabbit thinks. Professor Giamatti, who was only
fifty-one years of age, retired after lunch in his summer
home in Edgartown, and at three o'clock was found by his wife and
son in full cardiac arrest.
Only fifty-one,
Rabbit
thinks. Police took Giamatti to the Martha's Vineyard Hospital
where he was worked upon for an hour and a half, the emergency team
several times succeeded in restoring the electric mechanism of the
heartbeat, but Giamatti was at last pronounced dead. That little
electric twitch: without it we're so much rotting meat. One of the
first things he ought to do in Florida is make an appointment with
Dr. Morris, to keep himself out of the hands of that
hawk-faced Australian, Dr. Olman.
Dying to sink hú
knife into me.
Giamatti had been an English instructor at
Yale, the news says, and became the youngest president in the
history of the university, and in eleven years reversed that
institution's trend into red ink and academic mediocrity. As
president of the National League, he had aroused some players' ire
by tampering with the strike zone and the balk rule. As
commissioner, his brief tenure was dominated by the painful Rose
affair, whose settlement a week ago left Giamatti in an apparently
strong position. He was a heavy man and a heavy smoker.
At
least I'm no smoker.
And now, a tune our listeners never get
tired of requesting, "In the Mood."

Fayetteville used to be a hot town, with all the soldiers from
Fort Bragg, Rabbit remembers from a segment of
60 Minutes
he once watched. The downtown had some blocks of triple-X
movies and sleazy hotels the city fathers finally in despair tore
down entirely and made into a park. After a dinner of
deep-fried shrimp, with onion rings and white bread fried on
one side, a Southern delicacy he guesses, at the Comfort Inn
- one of those restaurants with a salad bar big as a little
cafeteria, so you wonder as you sit there waiting for the waitress
if you're missing the boat - Harry cruises in the
slate-gray Celica, his private Batmobile, toward the center
of wicked Fayetteville. He can find for a hot spot only a shadowy
broad street of blacks loitering in doorways here and there,
waiting for some message, some event from beyond. No hookers in
hotpants or spandex exercise tights, just a big red-bearded
white man in studded black leather who keeps revving his
motorcycle, twisting the throttle and producing a tremendous noise.
The blacks don't blink. They keep waiting. Even at evening the
shadowy air is hot, they move through it languidly like sick fish,
their hands flapping at the wrists in that angled black way.