John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

"Is a cute little thing," she finishes, but looks angry saying it. Her hair sticks up in wisps as if it was moussed and abandoned.

"She'll be down soon," he almost shouts, embarrassed as much by his secrets, his hopeful lies, as by her dwarfish warped craziness. This is the kind of woman he's ended up with, after Mary Ann and then Janice and Ruth's silky-sack heaviness and Peggy Fosnacht's splayed eyes and Jill's adolescent breasts and stoned compliance and Thelma with her black casket and Pru glowing dimly in the dark like a tough street in blossom, not to mention that tired whore in Texas with the gritty sugar in her voice and that other paid lay in his life, a girl he once in a great while remembers, at a Verity Press outing in the Brewer Polish-American Club, she was skinny and had a cold and kept her bra and sweater on, there in this room off to the side, where she was waiting on a mattress like a kind of prisoner, young, her belly and thighs sweaty from the cold she had but pure and pale, a few baby-blue veins where the skin molded around the pelvic bones, her pussy an oldfashioned natural dark ferny triangle, flourishing, not shaved at the sides to suit a bathing suit the way you see in the skin magazines. You paid the guy who stood outside the door, ten dollars for ten minutes, he hadn't shaved very recently, Rabbit assumed he was her brother, or maybe her father. He assumed the girl was Polish because of the name of the club, she might have been eighteen, Mrs. Zabritski would have been that age after getting out of the concentration camp, smooth-skinned, lithe, a young survivor. What time does to people; her face is broken into furrows that crisscross each other like a checkerboard of skin.

"She should wait," Mrs. Zabritski says.

"I'll tell her you said so," he says loudly, fighting the magnetism sucking at him out of the unspoken fact that she is a woman and he is a man and both are alone and crazy, a few doors apart in this corridor like a long peach-colored chute glinting with silver lines in the embossed wallpaper. All his life seems to have been a journey into the bodies of women, why should his journey end now? Say she was eighteen when the war ended, he was twelve, she is only six years older. Sixty-two. Not so bad, can still work up some juice. Beu Gold is older, and sexy.

He tries to watch TV but it makes him restless. The last of the summer reruns are mixed in with previews of new shows that don't look that much different: families, laugh tracks, zany dropins, those three-sided living-room sets with the stairs coming down in the background like in Cosby, and front doors on the right through which the comical good-natured grandparents appear, bearing presents and presenting problems. The door is on the right in Cosby and on the left in Roseanne. That fat husband's going to have his cardiovascular problems too. TV families and your own are hard to tell apart, except yours isn't interrupted every six minutes by commercials and theirs don't get bogged down into nothingness, a state where nothing happens, no skit, no zany visitors, no outburst on the laugh track, nothing at all but boredom and a lost feeling, especially when you get up in the morning and the moon is still shining and men are making noisy bets on the first tee.

At first he thinks Janice has tried so hard to reach him those four days before the phone got connected on Thursday that she's lost faith in their old number. Then he begins to accept her silence as a definite statement. I'll never forgive you. O.K., he'll be damned if he'll call her. Dumb mutt. Rich bitch. Working girl yet. Thinks she's so fucking hot running everybody's lives with those accountants and lawyers Charlie put her on to, he's known her so drunk she couldn't get herself to the bathroom to pee. The few times Harry has weakened, impulsively, usually around four or five when he can't stand the sound of the golf games beginning up again and it's still hours to dinner, the telephone in the little limestone house in Penn Park rings and rings without an answer. He hangs up in a way relieved. Nothingness has a purity. Like running. He showed her he still had some kick in his legs and now she's showing him she can still be stubborn. Her silence frightens him. He fights off images of some accident she might have, slipping in the bathtub or driving the Camry off the road, having had too much to drink over at Nelson's or at some Vietnamese restaurant with Charlie, without him knowing. Police frogmen finding her drowned in the back seat like that girl from Wilkes-Barre twenty years ago. But no, he'd be notified, if anything were to happen, somebody would call him, Nelson or Charlie or Benny at the lot, if there still is a lot. Each day down here, events in Pennsylvania seem more remote. His whole life seems, as he rotates through the empty condo rooms, each with its view across the parallel fairways to a wilderness of Spanish-tile roofs, to have been unreal, or no realer than the lives on TV shows, and now it's too late to make it real, to be serious, to reach down into the earth's iron core and fetch up a real life for himself.

The local air down here this time of year is full of violence, as if the natives are on good behavior during the winter season. Hurricane alarms (Gabrielle packs punch), head-on car crashes, masked holdups at Publix. The day after Labor Day, lightning kills a young football player leaving the field after practice; the story says Florida has more deaths by lightning than any other state. In Cape Coral, a Hispanic police officer is charged with beating his cocker spaniel to death with a crowbar. Sea turtles are dying by the thousands in shrimp nets. A killer called Petit whose own mother says he looks like Charles Manson is pronounced mentally fit to stand trial. That Deion Sanders is still making the front page of the Fort Myers News-Press: one day he knocks in four runs and a homer playing baseball for the Yankees, the next he signs for millions to play football for the Atlanta Falcons, and the very next he's being sued by the auxiliary cop he hit last Christmas at that shopping mall, and on Sunday he bobbles a punt return for the Falcons but runs it back for a touchdown anyway, the only man in human history to hit a home run and score a touchdown in pro ball the same week.

Deion has right stuff

Enjoy it while he can. He calls himself Prime Time and is always on the TV news wearing sunglasses and gold chains. Rabbit watches that big kid Becker beat Lendl in the U.S. Tennis Open final and gets depressed, Lendl seemed old and tired and stringy, though he's only twenty-eight.

He talks to nobody, except for Mrs. Zabritski when she catches him in the hall, and the teenage Florida-cracker salesclerks when he buys his food and razor blades and toilet paper, and the people who feel obliged to make chitchat, the other retirees, in the Valhalla dining room; they always ask about Janice so it gets to be embarrassing and he more and more just heats up something frozen and stays in the condo, ransacking the cable channels for something worthy to kill time with. In his solitude, his heart becomes his companion. He listens to it, tries to decipher its messages. It has different rhythms at different times of the day, a thorrumph thorrumph sluggish slightly underwater beat in the morning, and toward evening, when the organism gets tired and excited at once, a more skittish thudding, with the accent on the first beat and grace notes added, little trips and pauses now and then. It twinges when he gets up out of bed and then again when he lies down and whenever he thinks too hard about his situation, having set himself adrift like this. He could have gone over that night and faced the music but how much music is a man supposed to face? So he and Pru did fuck, once. What are we put here in the first place for? These women complain about men seeing nothing but tits and ass when they look at them but what are we supposed to see? We've been programmed to tits and ass. Except guys like Slim and Lyle, the tits got left out of their program. One thing he knows is if he had to give parts of his life back the last thing he'd give back is the fucking, even that sniffly girl in the PolishAmerican Club, she hardly said two words, and wiped her nose with a handkerchief while he was on top of her, but nevertheless she showed him something, a flourishing bush, and took him in, where it mattered. A lot of this other stuff you're supposed to be grateful for isn't where it matters. When he gets up from the deep wicker chair indignantly – he can't stand Cheers now that Shelley Long is gone, that guy with the Cro-Magnon brow he never did like – and goes into the kitchen to refill his bowl of Keystone Corn Chips, which not all of the stores down here carry but you can get over at the Winn Dixie on Pindo Palm Boulevard, Harry's heart confides to him a dainty little gallop, the kind of lacy riff the old swing drummers used to do, hitting the rims as well as the skins and ending with a tingling pop off the high hat, the music of his life. When this happens he gets an excited, hurried, full feeling in his chest. It doesn't hurt, it's just there, muffled inside that mess inside himself he doesn't like to think about, just like he never cared for rare roast beef, as it used to come on the take-out subs from the Chuck Wagon across Route 111 before it became the Pizza Hut. Any sudden motion now, he feels a surge of circulation, a tilt of surprise in the head that makes one leg feel shorter than the other for a second. And the pains, maybe he imagines it, but the contractions of the bands across his ribs, the feeling of something having been sewn there from the inside, seems to cut deeper, more burningly, as though the thread the patch was sewn with is growing thicker, and red hot. When he turns off the light at night, he doesn't like feeling his head sink back onto a single pillow, his head seems sunk in a hole then, it's not that he can't breathe exactly, he just feels more comfortable, less full, if he has his head up on the two pillows and lies facing the ceiling. He can turn on his side but his old way of sleeping, flat on his stomach with his feet pointing down over the edge, has become impossible; there is a nest of purple slithering half-dead thoughts he cannot bear to put his face in. There is a whole host of goblins, it turns out, that Janice's warm little tightly knit body, even snoring and farting as it sometimes did, protected him from. In her absence he sleeps with his heart, listening to it race and skip when his rest is disturbed, when kids who have climbed the fence yell on the empty moonlit golf course, when a siren bleats somewhere in downtown Deleon, when a big jet from the north heads in especially low to the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, churning the air. He awakes in lavender light and then lets his heart's slowing beat drag him back under.