John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

You think 29 will never end, between its ditches of swamp water, its stiff gray vegetation, but it finally comes into 80, at La Belle, streaming west just south of the Caloosahatchee, and then you're almost home, there are signs to the Southwest Florida Regional Airport and planes roaring low overhead, he could shoot them down through his windshield if he were the Vincennes. For nostalgia's sake, to get back into it, the Florida thing, he pushes on past Interstate 75 to Route 41. Starvin' Marvin. Universal Prosthetics. Superteller. STARLITE MOTEL. That time he and Janice wound up in a motel like they were an illicit couple when in fact they'd been married for thirteen years. Unlucky number but they survived it. Thirty-three years married this year. Thirtyfour since they first fucked. Back in Kroll's he never realized she'd come into money eventually. She just seemed a pathetic little mutt behind the nuts counter, "Jan" stitched to her brown smock, something insecure and sexy about her, a secure independent woman like Elvira probably isn't so much into sex, Jan was, she was amazed when he went down on her like he used to for Mary Ann in the car, only now on a bed. Mom didn't take to Jan; standing in the kitchen with soapy hands she would say Fred Springer was a con artist with his used cars. Now Springer Motors is kaput, finito. Down the tubes just like Kroll's. Nothing is sacred.

Harry comes to his turning off 41. The plumes of pampas grass, the flowering shrubs along the curving streets look different this time of year, more florid. He has never been down here at this time of year before. It seems emptier, fewer cars in the driveways, more curtains drawn, the sidewalks looking less walked-on than ever, the traffic thinner even though this is rush hour, with that late-afternoon pall in the air, like tarnish on silver. He doesn't see a single squashed armadillo on Pindo Palm Boulevard. The guard at the security gate of Valhalla Village, a lean bespectacled black Harry hasn't seen before, doesn't know him, but finds his name on the list of tenants and waves him through without a smile, all efficiency, probably college-educated, over-qualified.

The code on the inner entrance door of Building B doesn't work. So many numbers in his life, he may be getting it wrong. But after the third time it fails to click him in, he figures it's not him, the code has been changed. And so, limping from a stiffness in his right leg from pushing on the accelerator for over three days, Harry has to hobble over across the carpeted traffic island and the asphalt, in the dazing heat, through the rush of half-forgotten tropical aromas, hibiscus, bougainvillea, dry palm thatch, crunchy broad-bladed St. Augustine grass, to the management office in Building C to get it, the new code.

They say they sent the notice to his summer address up north; he tells them, "My wife must have torn it up or lost it or something." His voice talking to people again sounds odd and croaky, coming from several feet outside himself, like the to-one-side echo or chorus that sometimes startles you on the car stereo system. He feels awkward and vulnerable out of the car: a sea snail without its shell. On his way by, he looks into Club Nineteen and is surprised to see nobody at the tables, inside or out, though a couple of foursomes are waiting on the first tee, in the lengthening shadows. You don't play, he guesses, in the middle of the day this time of year.

The elevator has a different color inspection card in the slip-in frame, the peach-colored corridor smells of a different air freshener, with a faint nostalgic tang of lemonade. The door of 413 opens easily, his two keys scratch into their wiggly slots and turn, there are no cobwebs to brush against his face, no big brown hairy spiders scuttling away on the carpet. He imagines all sorts of spooky things lately. The condo is like it always was, as absolutely still as a reconstruction of itself- the see-through shelves, the birds and flowers Janice made of small white shells, the big green glass egg that used to sit in Ma Springer's living room, the blond square sofa, the fake-bamboo desk, the green-gray dead television screen. Nobody bothered to disturb or rob the place: kind of a snub. He carries his two bags into the bedroom and opens the sliding door onto the balcony. The sound of his footsteps makes deep dents in the silence of the place. An electric charge of reproach hangs in the stagnant air. The condo hadn't expected him, he is early. Having arrived at it after such a distance makes everything appear magnified, like the pitted head of a pin under a microscope. The whole apartment-its furniture, its aqua cabinets and Formica countertop, its angles of fitted door frame and baseboard – seems to Rabbit a tight structure carefully hammered together to hold a brimming amount of fear.

A white telephone sits waiting to ring. He picks it up. There is no buzz. God on the line. Disconnected for the season. Today is Sunday, tomorrow is Labor Day. The old familiar riddle: how do you telephone the phone company without a telephone?

But the phone, once it is connected, still doesn't ring. The days go by empty. The Golds next door are back in Framingham. Bernie and Fern Drechsel are up north bouncing between their two daughters' houses, one in Westchester County and the other still in Queens, and their son's lovely home in Princeton and a cottage he has in Manahawkin. The Silbersteins have a place in North Carolina they go to from April to November. Once when Harry asked Ed why they didn't go back to Toledo, Ed looked at him with that smartass squint and asked, "You ever been to Toledo?" The Valhalla dining room is spooky – empty tables and an echoing click of silver on china and Bingo only once a week. The golf course has noisy foursomes on it early in the morning, waking Harry up with the moon still bright in the sky – younger men, local Deleon business types who buy cut-rate off-season memberships – and then the fairways from ten to about four bake in the mid-nineties heat, deserted but for the stray dog cutting diagonally across or the cats scratching in the sand traps. When Harry one morning gets up his nerve for a round by himself, planning to take a cart, he discovers the pro shop has lost his golf shoes. The kid at the counter – the pro and assistant pro are both still up north at country clubs that don't close down until late October says he's sure they're somewhere, it's just that this time of year there's a different system.

The only other person in the fourth-floor corridor who seems to be here is the crazy woman in 402, Mrs. Zabritski, a widow with wild white hair, pinned up by two old tortoise-shell combs that just add to the confusion. The Golds have told him she survived one of the concentration camps when a girl. She looks at Harry as if he's crazy too, to be here.

He explains to her one day, since they meet at the elevator and she looks at him funny, "I had this sudden impulse to come down early this year. My wife's just starting up in the real-estate business and I got bored hanging around the house."

Mrs. Zabritski's little neckless head is screwed around at an angle on her shoulder, as if she's bracing an invisible telephone against her ear. She stares up at him furiously, her lips baring her long false teeth in a taut oval that reminds him of that Batman logo you saw everywhere this summer. Her eyes have veiny reds to them, stuck hot and round in their skeletal sockets, that wasting-away look Lyle had. "It's hell," the tiny old lady seems to pronounce, her lips moving stiffly, trying to keep her teeth in.

"It's what? What is?"

"This weather," she says. "Your wife -" She halts, her lips working.

"My wife what?" Rabbit tries to curb his tendency to shout, since hearing doesn't seem to be one of her problems, regardless of that pained way her head is cocked.