John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

Judy continues to stare at the screen and ply her channel changer. "Just the first part of L.A. Law," she promises, but flicks instead to an ABC news special about "American Kids – Their Diet of Danger." In their bedroom Janice is reading Elle, looking at the pictures, of superslim models looking stoned.

` Janice," he says. "I have something to ask you."

"What? Don't get me stirred up, I'm reading to make myself sleepy."

"Today," he says. "In that crowd going through the Edison place: Did I look as though I fit in?"

It takes her a while to shift her focus; then she sees what he wants. "Of course not, Harry. You looked much younger than the other men. You looked like one of their sons, visiting."

He decides this is as much reassurance as he dare ask for. "At least," he agrees with her, "I wasn't in a wheelchair." He reads a few pages of history, about the fight between the Bonhomme Richard and the Serapis, and how when amid the bloody explosions his chief gunner cried out "Quarter! quarter! for God's sake!" John Paul Jones hurled a pistol at the man, felling him. But the cry had been heard by Pearson, the Serapis' commander, who called, "Do you ask for quarter?" Through the clash of battle, gunshot and crackle offire the famous reply came faintly back to him: "I have not yet begun to fight!" The victorious American ship was so damaged it sank the next day, and Jones took the captured Serapis, shorn of its mast, into Holland, exacerbating the British resentment that already existed. All this fury and bravery seems more wasted effort. Rabbit feels as if the human race is a vast colorful jostling bristling parade in which he is limping and falling behind. He settles the book on the night table and switches off the lamp. The bar of light beneath the door transmits distant shots and shouts from some TV show, any TV show. He falls asleep with unusual speed, with scarcely a turn into his pillow. His arms, which usually get in the way, fold themselves up like pieces of blanket. His dreams include one in which he has come to a door, a door with a round top to it, and pushes at it. The glass door at McDonald's except that one you could see the hamburger head through. In his dream he knows there is a presence on the other side, a presence he dreads, hungry and still, but pushes nevertheless, and the dread increases with the pressure, so much that he awakes, his bladder aching to go to the bathroom. He can't get through the night any more. His prostate or his bladder, losing stretch like goldenrod rubber. His mistake was drinking a Schhtz while channel-surfing with Judy. Falling asleep again is not so easy, with Janice's deep breathing now and then dipping into a rasping snore just as he begins to relax and his brain to generate nonsense. The luminous bar beneath the door is gone but a kind of generalized lavender light, the light that owls and other animals of the night see to kill by, picks out the planes and big objects of the bedroom. A square bureau holds the glassy rectangle of Nelson's high-school graduation photo; a fat pale chair holds on one arm Harry's discarded linen trousers, the folds of cloth suggesting a hollow-eyed skull stretched like chewing gum. Air admitted from the balcony under the folds of the drawn curtain grazes his face. A way of going to sleep is to lie on your back and try to remember the dream you were having. Unease seizes him like a great scalyfooted parrot claw and puts him down again on his face. The next thing he knows he is hearing the mowing machines on the golf course, and the stirred-up seagulls weeping.

The lobby of the Omni Bayview, entered from under a wide maroon marquee through sliding glass doors tinted opaque like limousine windows, knocks you out, virtually blinds you with its towering space and light, its great prismatic chandelier and splashing fountain and high rear wall of plate glass flooded with the view of Deleon Bay: beach in the foreground and sea like a scintillating blue-green curtain hung from a horizon line strung between two pegs of land, rich men's islands. "Wow," Judy breathes at Harry's side. Pru and Roy, coming behind them, say nothing; but the shuffle of their sandals slows and hushes. They feel like four trespassers. The woman at the black-marble front desk is an exotic color, her skin mixed of Negro and Indian or Oriental tints and stretched tight over her cheekbones and nosebone; her eyelids have been painted a metallic green and her earlobes covered by ribbed shells of gold.

Harry is so awed he makes a mistake in uttering the magic name of admission, saying "Silberstein."

The woman blinks her amazing metallic lids, then graciously tells him, "You must mean Mr. Silvers. He is this morning's beach supervisor." With merciful disdain she directs them across the lobby, her ringed hand gesturing like a Balinese dancer's, without letting go of a slim gold pen. He leads his little party into the vast air-conditioned space, across a floor of black marble inset with strips of brass that radiate out like rays of the sun from an aluminum fountain suggesting a pipe organ, beneath a remote ceiling of hanging rectangles of gilded metal like those glittering strips farmers hang to-scare away birds. A flight of downward stairs is marked To POOL AND BEACH in solemn letters such as you see on post-office facades. After taking a wrong turn in the milky-green terrazzo corridors on the ground floor and confronting a door marked STAFF ONLY, Harry and his group find Ed Silberstein's son Gregg in a glassed-in, straw-matted area on the way to the hotel swimming pool – pools, since Harry sees there are three, fitted together like the blobs in an intelligence test, one for waders, one for divers, and a long one marked in lanes. Gregg is a curlyhaired man brown as an Arab from being off and on the beach all day. In little black elastic European-style trunks and a hooded sweatshirt bearing the five-sided Omni logo, he stands less tall than his father, and his inherited sharp-chinned accountant's jaw has been softened by a mother's blood and a job of holiday facilitation He smiles, showing teeth as white as Ed's but rounder: Ed's were so square they looked false, but Harry has never seen them slip. When Gregg speaks, his voice seems too young for his age; his curls hold bits of gray and his smile rouses creases in the sunbeaten face. He shouldn't still be horsing around on the 'beach.

"My father said you'd be coming. This is Mrs. Angstrom?" He means Pru, who has come instead of Janice, who after all that tramping around yesterday wanted to stay home and catch up on her errands and go to her aerobics class and bridge group and spend a little time with Nelson before he goes home. Harry is stunned that Ed's son could make this blunder but then thinks he must deal all the time with men in advanced middle age who have younger wives. And anyway Pru is no longer that young. Tall and fairskinned like he is, she might well be his.

"Thanks for the compliment, Gregg," Harry says, pretty smoothly, considering, "but this is my daughter-in-law, Teresa." Teresa, Pru – she is like him even in having two names, an inner and an outer. "And these are my two handsome grandchildren, Judy and Roy."

Gregg tells Judy, "So you're the one who wants to be a sailor girl."

Her eyes when she lifts them to Gregg's face flood here by the pools with a skyey light that washes out their green and makes her pupils small as pencil leads. "Sort of."

Moving and speaking in a relaxed thorough way that suggests his whole day could happily be devoted to them, Ed's son leads them back into the terrazzo corridors and arranges for locker keys for them with a boy at a desk – a young black with his hair shaved into one of those muffin-tops they do now, an ugly style, with bald sides – and then leads them to the locker-room doors, and tells them how to exit directly onto the beach, where he will meet them and manage the Sunfish rentals. "How much do I owe you for all this?" Harry asks, half-expecting it will be free, arranged for by Ed in compensation for the twenty Harry dropped to him at Wednesday's golf.