John Updike - Rabbit Remembered

"Moods?" Nelson asks.

"Depressed, irritable, could't sleep. Weekends I'd be so beat and bored I'd pray for an emergency to call. Tooth-structure loss I could handle. Wives," he goes on. "They shut down without even knowing they're doing it. The fancy stuff goes and then even the basics are cut back to once a week, then twice a month, and then just holidays and trips abroad. Portugal, Austria, Acapulco-all that way just to get a little nooky from my lawful wedded."

"Well, in my case," Nelson begins, but Billy overrides him: "And then when you suggest maybe this marriage isn't working, they act stunned and tell their lawyers to go for all they can get, this isn't their idea."

Years of dealing with people with their mouths immobilized has made Billy an easy conversational partner, needing very little prompting. "Yelling out in your sleep?" Nelson asks.

The waitress, who looks just a little like the sweaty olive-skinned beauty in the Secret Platinum commercial, interrupts with the day's specials. Billy orders bowties with diced shrimp, and Nelson the mushroom ravioli. Both decline wine in favor of water. "Have the sparkling Pellegrino, it's hyper expensive," Billy says. "This is on me, remember." He tells Nelson, "Yeah, awful dreams. In one of them I'm crammed into the trunk of a car, my face right up against the jack, and I can see the car-you know how in dreams you can see things from inside and out both-being slid into a river, like that mother did to those kids in South Carolina years ago. In another dream I'm in one place and my house is burning in another, and I can't get to it, even though I can see the flames burning through the floor right at my feet." He pauses. "So-what do you think?"

So-this is why he's asked Nelson to lunch, to get free therapy. It wasn't just those good old days tenting out in the back yard. Nelson grudges being a wise man outside the treatment center. He says, "We don't do dreams much in therapy any more. There's no time. The insurance companies want fast action-in because of some crisis, 'Here, take these pills,' out. The second dream, though, has an obvious reference. The night I was staying over at your apartment with your mother and puppy and our house burned down in Penn Villas a mile away."

Billy puffs his lips out suspiciously, and his eyes pop a little, too. "When was that? How old were we?"

"Twelve, maybe you were thirteen. Are you serious, you've forgotten it?"

"Well, when you mention it, it kind of comes back, but as a news item mostly. Listen, Nelson. Forget the dreams. I have attacks in the middle of the day. I break out in a sweat like I'm on a treadmill, I can feel my heart doing double time. I think about death, about being sealed in a little lead box and the whole universe going on, rotating, exploding, whatever the hell all it does, on and on and eventually pooping out while I'm still in there, totally forgotten. I'm going to die, I can't get it out of my head. You have to wear these latex gloves now and I have the fantasy a little drop of blood is going to seep through from some gay guy's gums and give me AIDS. All it takes is one little drop from a micro-abrasion. It's taking the pleasure out of doing implants."

Nelson has to laugh, his old friend is so self-obsessed, so solemn in his mental misery. Does he want his fingernails, his nostril-hairs, to last forever? "By our age, Billy, we should have come to terms with this stuff."

"Have you?"

"I think so. It's like a nap, only you don't wake up and have to find your shoes." He is being hard-hearted; there is agony here, even if Billy is a comical old friend. Not only are his lips fat, his nose has gotten fat; it sits there in the middle of his face like something added, its flesh faintly off-color. Nelson advises, more compassionately, "Believe in God and the afterlife if that would help. There's some evidence-people who've gone through an NDE are absolutely convinced and can hardly wait to get back to the other side."

"God," Billy sneers. "How can you believe in God after the Holocaust? What did God do to help my mother? They cut off her tits and she still died."

Nelson remembers Mrs. Fosnacht, her helpless outward-turned eye, her wide-open look and big friendly untidy body with a slip usually showing and shoes that bulged at the sides as if they hurt. She had been nice; she had thought Nelson was a good influence on Billy. "Anxiety disorders," he offers, "level off, usually. The human organism gets tired of sustaining them and finds a distraction."

"Nellie, I can't do tunnels. I'm not that crazy about bridges, either, especially the Running Horse, the way it arches up. But how can I go to conferences in New York if I can't do a tunnel? I have to go all the way up to Fort Lee and sweat it out on the George Washington."

"You're lucky," Nelson tells him. "There aren't any tunnels around Brewer."

"No, but there are underpasses. I have to force myself to drive through that one at Eisenhower and Seventh. I have zero tolerance for being enclosed. Even here, you notice, I had to get the chair nearer the exit. Airplanes-I haven't been on one since Moira and I split up. They're tin tunnels that go five miles high."

"How did you handle these fears," Nelson asks, "when you were married?"

Billy lifts his hands, superclean and with wrinkled tips from being so much in latex gloves, to let the waitress put his mound of bowties and diced shrimp in front of him. "Shoshana," he answers, "was kind of jittery herself, and I was the stabilizer. With Moira, like I said, we flew all these places to get her to put out, and I would take a couple of stiff belts in the airport lounge."

The waitress sets down Nelson's hot ravioli, the steam fragrant of mushrooms, of secretive gray-black fungoid growth, of damp earth, of greenhouses.

Billy talks on: "Maybe I was too young in my married period to think I was really going to die. I mean really, totally-zip-zero. You will be nada. I can't eat." He puts his fork down.

Nelson picks up his own fork, saying, "It's a concept the mind isn't constructed to accept. So stop trying to force it to. Come on, eat. Enjoy. Have I told you, Billy, I've discovered I have a sister? No, I'm not kidding."

Christmas for Nelson feels least phony at the Center. These unsettled psyches and unwashed bodies, burdens to society and to their families, who in many cases have abandoned them to a life of shelters and halfway houses, respond to the dim old tale-the homeless couple tainted by a mysterious pregnancy, the child born amid straw and dung, the secret splendor sensed by shepherds and donkeys and oxen standing mute in their stalls. Glenn, he of the blue eyelids and glittering nostril-stud, can play the piano, a skill left over from a closeted adolescence; he extracts the sturdy standard carols from the out-of-tune upright's keyboard while obese Shirley displays a small silvery voice and Dr. Howard Wu a brassy, enthusiastic baritone. The doctor's joining in, with Esther Bloom a conspicuous good sport beside him, singing the Christian words, emboldens the clients: the substance-dependent and delusional, the phobic and borderline, Rosa with her new friend the compulsive nail-biter, whose name is Josephine Foote, and Jim the lusty, swag-bellied addict, who belts out every first line from memory, but then his brain lets go. Nelson is pleased to see Michael DiLorenzo here, letting his cool be thawed, sharing a song sheet with little black Bethleen, a bipolar. The boy's lips move but his ale-dark eyes beneath their handsome brows are elsewhere, muddled and shuttling out of rhythm; he has not shaved this morning, which Nelson takes as a good sign, that his mother's nagging is letting up. All in their ragged fashion get with it, taking comfort in the organized noise, the approach to melodic unison, the illusion of a happy family here before the tree crammed with artifacts produced in Andrea's art sessions. There are cookies and cake and ice cream after the sing, and little presents from the staff, all bought at Discount Office Supplies-phallic four-color ballpoint pens for the men and vaginal pocket diaries for the women. In turn there filters up from the clients to this and that staff member shy tokens, enigmatic thanks for care given. Nelson receives from Josephine an intricate collage, mounted on a lacquered black board, of smiling faces cut from magazine advertisements and arranged, bodiless, as thick as flowers in a bouquet. Or is it more of a snowflake scissored together of smiles? Dr. Wu receives a pagoda made of matchsticks, and a lumpy arch of colored clays which Jim explains is a rainbow, pointing to the "pot" at one end. Everyone, onlooking, laughs. The basement floods with the warm faith that the world beyond these old elementary-school walls is friendly, remembers them, wants them to be well and to rejoice.