John Updike - Rabbit Remembered

"It's great, Mr. Nosy," says Pru. "Actually, I've given Gekopoulos notice, beginning next year. I'd like something more having to do with people, maybe in public relations. Slapping up injury claims and divorce settlements out of glossarized boilerplate isn't exactly non-repetitive."

He suppresses the insight that life as a whole isn't exactly non-repetitive. "It doesn't sound as if the job uses all your abilities."

"Well, thanks, but what abilities? somebody might ask. Still I have this crazy idea I must be good for something. I mean, I can be pleasant. People like me, at least at first. Maybe I should enlist with Judy in stewardess school. Except my palms get all sweaty whenever I fly. I hate how long it takes to land, skimming in over all these highways and cemeteries."

She is spending Christmas with her mother and siblings and then driving to him, all the way across the great Commonwealth, its mountains and quarries, its mills and farms, along the Turnpike for eight or nine hours, Judy spelling her at the wheel, Roy playing video games at every rest stop. "When you come here after Christmas, where do you all want to sleep?" he asks. "I have only this one room. You could stay with Mom and Ronnie and I'll have the kids here in sleeping bags. Or is Judy too old for that?"

"Let's think about it," Pru says. "The basic thing is they see their father."

"Right. But can I say something? It'll be nice for me to see you, too."

"Uh-huh," she says, her tone Akron tough-girl flat.

"Let's try to have some fun when you come," he urges. "Life is too short."

"I'll put on Roy," she says. "Judy's out."

"How's it going?" he asks his son.

"O.K., good," is the guarded answer. Roy has always had this strange deep voice that takes Nelson by surprise. Judy he had no trouble loving from the start-her solemn hazel gaze, little square feet, her ankles flexible as wrists, the little split bun between her legs. Roy with his stern stare and upjutting button of a penis had a touch of the alien invader, the relentless rival demanding space, food, attention.

"You got my e-mail, I guess."

"Yeah. Thanks."

"How's school going?"

"Good."

"Are you learning anything exciting?"

"Not really. The teacher in Computer Skills showed us some faulty programming in Windows 98. He thinks Bill Gates is holding the Net-surfing technology back at this point and the government is right."

This may have been the longest utterance he has ever heard from Roy. He says, "Well, you're way ahead of me. You're more at home with this stuff than I'll ever be."

"It's easy. It's all Boolean logic."

"Is there anything you want to do in Diamond County? Shop at the outlets? Eat at the restaurant on top of Mt. Judge? Go visit that limestone cave again? They may close it in the winter, actually." As he runs through this bleak list it occurs to him that there is nothing to do in Diamond County-just be born, live, and die.

But Roy's grave, resonant voice has picked up speed and purpose. "Dad, you may not know this but one of the greatest new biotech companies in the world is in Diamond County. In Hemmigtown, you know where that is?"

"Yes, I know." Nelson is wearying of being an attentive father. His son is a nerd, he realizes, a bore to his classmates and a nag to his teachers.

"Genomics dot com. They're famous on the Internet. They're learning how to transplant genes so you can make viruses that will eat people's diseases. And counteract the parts of a cell that cause aging. And all this neat stuff."

"Roy, it sounds horrible, frankly. If nobody dies, where will all the new bodies go? But I'll check into it. You want to visit?"

"Well, I'd like at least to go look at the outside of the building."

"If you go inside, you might catch a virus."

"They wouldn't let you into that part of it."

"As I say, I'll look into it. I'm thrilled they're doing something here that you've heard of."

The boy is warming up. "Dad, did you know that eventually computer chips won't be manufactured at all, they'll be grown, like bacilli in a petri dish? Single ions will act as transistors."

"Roy, I don't want to keep you from your homework."

"Yeah. O.K. Goodbye." And the receiver rattles down before Nelson has time to say, "I love you."

Christmas lights are up in Brewer, from a string of multicolored miniature twinkle-bulbs swagged in the window of the 7-Eleven on Almond Street to the green-and-red-floodlit concrete eagles at the top of the twenty-story county courthouse. Nelson can see this top, with its red-lipped flagpole, from his apartment's side window if he presses his face against the glass. In the commercial area around the Center, Discount Office Supplies has arranged conical stacks of reams of paper and automatic pencils and boxes of computer disks in its display window and drenched them with tinsel and confetti, and PrintSmart has duplicated a picture of a wreath on one sheet each of all the colored papers it can supply and hung these on a long string like wash, like laundry for a rainbow world. Within the Center, the clients, under staff supervision, have made a brave attempt to keep the holiday blues away with cotton snow and lo-glo electric candles in the windows and a seven-foot tree as overloaded with handmade decorations as a disturbed mind is with inappropriate thoughts.

Nelson can walk home from work now, and enjoys these ten blocks west from Weiser Street past the old cough-drop factory, deserted but still smelling of menthol after all these years, and through the blocks of row houses put up, a block at a time, by workingmen's savings-and-loans associations in the century before this one, which is down to its last days. Some of the present residents have decorated their little porches and fanlighted doorways and front windows with a Catholic or Pentecostal fervor -doubled and tripled strands of gaudy colored bulbs and thick fringes of tinsel and here and there a plaster creche or an oleograph image of the adult Jesus as if to say this is what the starlit baby came to, the bearded God-Man born to be crucified.

Already they know Nelson at the 7-Eleven, and he knows the people who man the counter and guard the till: the slangy, hefty bleached blonde who sometimes has her little brown boy doing homework over in the corner behind the ten-cent photocopy machine; the frowning white girl with indifferent skin and close-cropped hair and a single tuft dyed green, always reading a fat college textbook and acting annoyed if you say anything friendly; the oldish man with a pleading, watery-eyed look and a very modest command of English, some kind of refugee from Communism's evaporated empire; the alarmingly big black guy, his head shaved, who has a rap and hip-hop station turned loud on the radio and is usually on the phone talking unintelligibly in Caribbean English; the tiny Hispanic girl with frizzy hair and a silver tongue-stud. They hardly notice now when Nelson comes in around five-thirty and buys his microwave dinner for the night and a half-pint carton of milk for his cereal, to sit overnight on the windowsill. The December nights have been so unseasonably warm, the milk quickly sours.

Nelson finds TV stupid but likes the technicolor fire of it, the way it flares up within a few seconds of his coming in the door and punching the remote. A genie when you rub a lamp, a multitude of genies. He watches until he feels his intelligence being too rudely insulted or his patience being too arrogantly tested by the commercials, which interrupt at an ever-greedier ratio whenever the program gets interesting. Yet some commercials he waits for eagerly. There is the Nicoderm commercial that features this neat-looking woman about his age, with a slight crimp in her chin indicating maturity and experience, in a straight-shouldered dress, telling you what a sensible, efficient method this patch provides for quitting smoking. He loves the level, not-quite-smiling way she looks at you, implying that once you quit she and you will go on together on a purified basis. And he loves even more the younger woman advertising Secret Platinum, "the strongest deodorizer you can buy without a prescription." She is dark-complected and with utterly no fat on her except in her quite full lips, and as her pitch progresses, and her body jigs and jags across the screen, she sweats in growing torrents and at the commercial's climax pops a muscle, cocking her arm with a devilish sideways look right out at him. She works out hard and would fuck hard, the implication is. He needs a woman, Christ. Some nights, like in the joke his son e-mailed him, there isn't enough skin left to close his eyes. He tries to analyze himself: why do these two women in the commercials get to him? Both are strong, he sees. He wants a woman who will take over. The possibilities at work for him are poor: clients are off-bounds and your colleagues should be, even if they were more appealing than plain, earnest Katie Shirk, or pouty, snotty Andrea, the art therapist, or Elenita, the Dominican receptionist, with her hair dyed orange and heaped on her head in woolly skeins like Sideshow Bob in The Simpsons, or Esther, who is Jewish and older than he and married to a downtown lawyer and too strong. In the bars he used to go to, the girls have gotten too much younger than he, so young they seem silly, like those two on the other side of the wall. They really do say "like" and "you know" and come down funny on the ends of their words like Valley Girls, tucking the "r"s down deep into their throats. He thinks they are putting him on, imitating Lisa Kudrow, but it's just the way they naturally talk. When one of the two girls on the other side of his wall stops giggling and her voice and the rumbly one of a date entwine with fewer and fewer words into silence and animal sounds, he cannot feel too jealous; it's like undressing a Barbie doll in his mind, and finding her smooth and stiff, no nipples and the legs don't bend.