Rabbit at rest (25 page)

Bruce Lee kicks out, once, twice, thrice, and three handsomely
costumed thugs slowly fly toward the corners of the room, furniture
shattering like fortune cookies, and suddenly Judy has switched
channels again, coming upon a commercial Harry loves, for some skin
moisturizer whose name he can never remember, but he could never
forget the look on the model's face, the way she smiles over her
naked shoulder as she slinks behind the bathroom door, and then
when she comes out the satisfied wicked purr in her expression, her
wet hair turbanned in a bulky soft towel, her breasts showing
cleavage but the nipples just off the screen, if only the screen
were a little wider, if he could only slow the action down like in
a kung-fu movie, for a thirtieth of a second there might have
been a nipple, and the way she relaxes into a blue velvet sofa as
if ever so profoundly satisfied, lovely eyes closed with their
greasy lids, her eyebrows slightly thick like Cindy Murkett's, and
then the part coming up where she is dressed to go out for the
evening, all moisturized still beneath her gold lam& .... "No,
wait, honey": he senses that Judy is about to change channels and
reaches out to stop her but fails, it's back to the werewolf, the
boy's face is growing fur as he crouches in a telephone booth, and
then the ice skaters, the woman sliding backward at you with her
little skirt flipped up; and then the back of Harry's wrist stings
from the tug he gave the IV, and a flirtatious ghost of yesterday's
pain plays across his chest. The Demerol must be wearing off. They
gave him a little brown bottle of nitroglycerin on his bedside
table next to the telephone and a glass of stale water and he
shakes one out shakily and puts it beneath his tongue as they have
taught him. It burns under his tongue and then, the funny thing, a
minute or two later, his asshole tingles.

"How much junk food does he eat?" Dr. Olman is asking.

"Oh," Janice says, with enthusiasm, "he's a real addict." His
wife is, it occurs to Harry, a channel that can't be switched. The
same slightly too-high forehead, the same dumb stubborn slot
of a mouth, day after day, same time, same station. She looks up
into the doctor's big red blond face as if at an instructively
beautiful sunset. The two of them make a duo, dividing him up. One
takes the inside, the other the outside.

Now a turquoise Subaru is spinning along one of those steep
spiky Western landscapes that the makers of automobile commercials
love. A shimmery model, skinny as a rail, dimpled and squarejawed
like a taller Audrey Hepburn from the
Breakfast at
Tiffany's
days, steps out of the car, smiling slyly and
wearing a racing driver's egg-helmet with her gown made up it
seems of ropes of shimmering light. Maybe Nelson is right, Toyota
is a dull company. Its commercials show people jumping into the air
because they're saving a nickel. The channel jumps back to the
Fiesta Bowl Parade. Youth, flowers, a giant Garfield the cat
jiggling majestically along. Harry's internal climate of drugs and
their afterwash seems to be undergoing a distant storm, like
sunspots or those faint far hurricanes on Jupiter. Along with
history, Harry has a superstitious interest in astronomy. Our
Father, Who art in Heaven . . .

". . . tons of fat through his system," Dr. Olman is saying,
"rivers of it, some of it
has
to stick. Marbled meats,
pork sausage, liverwurst, baloney, hot dogs, peanut butter, salted
nuts ..."

"He loves all that stuff, he's a terrible nibbler," Janice
chimes in, anxious to please, courting, betraying her husband. "He
loves nuts."

"Worst thing for him, absolutely the worst," Dr. Olman responds,
his voice speeding up, losing its drawl, `full of fat, not to
mention sodium, and cashews, macadamia nuts, they're the worst,
macadamia nuts, but it's all bad, bad." In his intensity he has
begun to crouch above her, as if over a slippery putt. "Anything
made with hydrogenated vegetable shortenings, coconut oil, palm
oil, butter, lard, egg yolk, whole milk, ice cream, cream cheese,
cottage cheese, any organ meats, all these frozen TV dinners,
commercial baked goods, almost anything you buy in a package, in a
waxpaper bag, any of it, ma'am, is poison, bloody poison. I'll give
you a list you can take home."

"You can, but my daughter-in-law is studying
nutrition. She has a lot of lists already." On cue, Pru appears,
hesitantly filling the doorway with her womanly-wide frame in
its nappy travelling suit of three-dimensional checks.
Unawares, Janice goes on buttering up Dr. Olman. "She's been saying
everything you've been saying for years to Harry, but he just won't
listen. He think's he's above it all, he thinks he's still a
teenager."

The doctor snorts. "Even the teenagers with their supercharged
metabolism aren't burning up the fats and sugars this country's
food industry is pumping into them. We're having adolescent heart
attacks all over" - his voice softens to Southerliness again
- "God's green creation."

Pru steps forward, in her three dimensions. ` Janice, I'm
sorry," she says, still shy of using her
mother-in-law's name, "I know he shouldn't have so many
visitors at once but Nelson is getting frantic, he's afraid we're
going to miss the plane."

Janice stands, so briskly the wheelchair recoils under her. She
staggers but keeps her feet. "I'll leave. You say hello and bring
Judy when you come. Harry, I'll drop by on my way back when I've
put them on the plane. But there's an origami demonstration tonight
at the Village I don't want to miss. The man has come all the way
from Japan." She exits, and Judy switches off the television in the
middle of an especially amusing slapstick commercial for Midas
mufflers, and exits with her.

Dr. Olman shakes Pru's hand fiercely and tells her, baring his
shark-white teeth, "Ma'am, teach this stubborn bastard to
eat."
He turns and punches Harry with a loosened fist on
the shoulder. "For half a century, my friend," he says, "you've
been pouring sludge through your gut." Then he, too, is gone.

He and Pru, suddenly alone together, feel shy. "That guy," Harry
says, "keeps attacking America. If he doesn't like the food here,
why doesn't he go back where he came from and eat kangaroos?"

His tall daughter-in-law fiddles with her long red
hands, twisting at her wedding ring, yet moves forward, to the foot
of the bed. "Harry," she says. "Listen. We're
stricken
at
what's happened to you."

"You and who else?" he asks, determined to be debonair Bogie at
the airport in Casablanca, Flynn at Little Big Horn, George Sanders
in the collapsing temple to Dagon, Victor Mature having pushed
apart the pillars.

"Nelson, obviously. I don't think he slept a wink last night,
you were so much on his mind. He can't say it, but he loves
you."

Harry laughs, gently, since there is this valentine inside him
that might rip. "The kid and I have something going between us. Not
sure love is what you'd call it." Since she hesitates in replying,
looking at him with those staring mud-flecked greenish eyes
that Judy's clearer paler eyes were distilled from, he goes on, "I
love him all right, but maybe it's a him that's long gone. A little
tiny kid, looking right up to you while you're letting him down
- you never forget it."

"It's still there, under it all," Pru assures him, without
saying what '`it all" is. Her Sphinx-do hair is slightly
wild, Harry sees in the brilliant hospital light -colorless
stray filaments stand out all around her head. He feels there is a
lot she wants to say but doesn't dare. He remembers how she
appeared hovering above him as he lay breathless on the beach, in
her white suit with its spandex crotch, anxious and womanly, her
face in shadow, unlookable at, and right beside it like a
thunder-head the face of Ed Silberstein's son, his
salt-stiffened black curls, his butternut skin, his prick
making its bump in his tight black trunks, beside the
five-sided Omni logo - a smoothie, on the make, on the
rise. Hi-ho, Silvers.

"Tell me about you, Pru," Rabbit says, the words gliding out of
his hoarse throat as if his being in bed and chemically relaxed has
moved them to a new level of intimacy. "How's it going for you,
with the kid? With Nelson."

People do respond, surprisingly, to the direct approach, as if
we're all just waiting in our burrows to be ferreted out. She says
without hesitation, "He's a wonderful father to the children. That
I can say sincerely. Protective and concerned and involved. When he
can focus."

"Why can't he always focus?"

Now she hesitates, unthinkingly revolving the ring on her
finger.

As if all of Florida is made up of interchangeable parts, a
Norfolk pine stands outside his hospital window and holds an
invisible bird that makes the sound of wet wood squeaking. He heard
it this morning and he hears it now. His chest seems to echo with a
twinge. Just to be on the safe side he takes another
nitroglycerin.

Pru blurts out, "The lot worries him, I think. Sales have been
off these last years with the weaker dollar and all, and what he
says are boring models, and I think he's afraid Toyota might lift
the dealership."

"It would take a bomb to make them do that. We've done O.K. by
Toyota over the years. When Fred Springer got that franchise
Japanese products were still considered a joke."

"That was a long time ago, though. Things don't stand still,"
Pru says. "Nelson has trouble being patient, and to tell the truth
I think it scares him to have none of the old-timers around
any more, Charlie and then Manny and now Mildred, even though he
fired her, and you down here half the year, and f Jake gone over to
Volvo-Olds over near that new mall in Oriole, and Rudy
opening his own Toyota-Mazda over on 422. He feels alone, and
all he has for company are these flaky types from north
Brewer."

At the thought of "these flaky types" more of her hairs, glowing
like electric filaments here in Florida's fluorescent light, stand
out from her head in agitation. She is trying to tell him
something, something is slipping, but how can a man tied up
helpless in bed track it down? Rabbit has his heart to nurse. This
is life and death. His drugs must be wearing off. The deadly
awfulness of his situation is beginning to rise in his throat,
burning like an acid regurgitation. His asshole tingles, right on
schedule. He has something evil and weak inside him that might
betray him at any minute into that icy blackness Bernie talked
about.

Pru shrugs her wide shoulders in delayed answer to his question
about how it was going. "What's a life supposed to be? They don't
give you another for comparison. I love the big house, and
Pennsylvania. In Akron we only ever had apartments, and the rent
was always behind, and it seemed like the toilet bowl always
leaked."

Rabbit tries to lift himself onto her level, out of his private
apprehension of darkness, its regurgitated taste. "You're right,"
he says. "We ought to be grateful. But it's hard, being grateful.
It seems like from the start you're put here in a kind of fix,
hungry and scared, and the only way out is no good either. Hey,
listen. Listen to me. You're still young. You're
great-looking. Smile. Smile for me, Teresa."

Pru smiles and comes around the end of the bed and bends down to
give him a kiss, not on the mouth this time like in the airport,
but on the cheek, avoiding the tubes feeding oxygen into his nose.
Her close presence feels huge, checked, clothy, a cloud come over
him like the shadow of that hull on its side out there on the Gulf,
where it was cold and hot both at once. He feels sick; the facts of
his case keep wanting to rise in his throat, burning, on the verge
of making him gag. "You're a sweet man, Harry."

"Yeah, sure. See you in the spring up there."

"It seems terrible, us leaving like this, but there's this party
in Brewer Nelson's determined to go to tonight and changing plane
reservations is impossible anyway, everything's jammed this time of
year, even into Newark."

"What can you do?" he asks her. "I'll be fine. This is probably
a blessing in disguise. Put some sense into my old head. Get me to
lose some weight. Go for walks, eat less crap. The doc says I gotta
become a new man."

"And I'll paint my toenails." Pru, standing tall again, says in
a level low voice he has not exactly heard before, aimed flat at
him as a man, "Don't change too much, Harry." She adds, "I'll send
Nelson in."

"If the kid's wild to go, tell him to just go. I'll catch him
later, up there."

Her mouth pinches down at one corner, her face goes slightly
stiff with the impropriety of his suggestion. "He has to see his
father," she says.

Pru exits; the white clean world around Harry widens. When
everybody leaves, he will give himself the luxury of ringing for
the nurse and asking for more Demerol. And see how the Eagles are
doing in the fog. And close his eyes for a blessed minute.

Nelson comes in carrying little Roy in his arms, though visitors
under six years old aren't supposed to be allowed. The kid wears
the child like defensive armor: as long as he's carrying a kid of
his own, how much can you say against him? Roy stares at Harry
indignantly, as if his grandfather being in bed connected with a
lot of machinery is a threatening trick. When Harry tries to beam
him a smile and a wink, Roy with a snap of his head hides his face
in his father's neck. Nelson too seems shocked; his eyes keep going
up to the monitor, with its orange twitch of onrunning life, and
then gingerly back to his father's face. Cumbersomely keeping his
grip on the leaden, staring child, Nelson steps toward the bed and
sets a folded copy of the
News
Press on the
chrome-edged table already holding the water glass and the
telephone and the little brown bottle of nitroglycerin. "Here's the
paper when you feel like reading. There's a lot in it about that
Pan Am crash you're so interested in. They think they know now
exactly what kind of bomb it was - there's a kind with a
barometric device that activates a timer when a certain altitude is
reached."