John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

Something in her wide gleaming face and elaborately braided hair transfixes little Roy; suddenly he begins under the stress of accumulating strangeness to cry. His inky eyes widen and then squeeze shut; his rubbery lips are pulled down as if by a terrible taste. His first cry turns a number of heads in the corridor, where attendants and doctors are busy with the routines of early afternoon.

Pru takes him from Nelson's arms and presses his face into her neck. She tells her husband, "Why don't you take Judy in?"

Nelson's face, too, undergoes a displeased, alarmed stretching. "1 don't want to be the first. Suppose he's delirious or something. Mom, you ought to go in first."

"For heaven's sake," she says, as if Harry's burden of exasperation with their only living child has passed to her. "I talked to him two hours ago over the phone and he was perfectly normal." But she takes the little girl by the hand and they go down the shiny rippled corridor looking for the room number, 326. The number rings a faint bell with Janice. Where before? In what life?

Pru sits on the hard settee – uncushioned perhaps to discourage loiterers – and tries to murmur and joggle Roy into calm again. In five minutes, with a sob like a hiccup, he falls asleep, heavy and hot against her, rumpling and making feel even more oppressive the checked suit which she put on for disembarking into the Northern winter. The air-conditioning in here feels turned off; the local temperature has again climbed into the eighties, ten degrees warmer than normal this time of year. They have brought this morning's News-Press as a present to Harry and while they are waiting on the bench Nelson begins to read it. Reagan, Bush get subpoenas, Pru reads over his shoulder. Regional killings decrease in 1988. Team owner to pay for Amber's funeral. Unlike the Brewer Standard this one always has color on the page and today features a green map of Great Britain with Lockerbie pinpointed and insets of a suitcase and an exploding airplane. Report describes sophisticated bomb. "Nelson," Pru says softly, so as not to wake Roy or have the nurses hear what she wants to say. "There's been something bothering me."

"Yeah? Join the crowd."

"I don't mean you and me, for a change. Do you possibly think -? I can't make myself say it."

"Say what?"

"Shh. Not so loud."

"Goddamn it, I'm trying to read the paper. They think they know now exactly what kind of bomb blew up that Pan Am flight."

"It occurred to me immediately but I kept trying to put it out of my mind and then you fell asleep last night before we could talk."

"I was beat. That's the first good night's sleep I've had in weeks."

"You know why, don't you? Yesterday was the first day in weeks you've gone without cocaine."

"That had nothing to do with it. My body and blow get along fine. I crashed because my father suddenly near-died and it's damn depressing. I mean, if he goes, who's next in line? I'm too young not to have a father."

"You crashed because that chemical was out of your system for a change. You're under terrible neurological tension all the time and it's that drug that's doing it."

"It's my fucking whole neurological life doing it and has been doing it ever since you and I got hitched up; it's having a holierthan-thou wife with the sex drive of a frozen yogurt now that she's got all the babies she wants."

Pru's mouth when she gets angry tenses up so the upper lip stiffens in vertical wrinkles almost like a mustache. You see that she does have a faint gauzy mustache; she is getting whiskery. Her face when she's sore becomes a kind of shield pressing at him, the crépey skin under her eyes as dead white as the parting in her hair, her whisper furious and practiced in its well-worn groove. He has heard this before: "Why should I risk my life sleeping with you, you addict, you think I want to get AIDS from your dirty needles when you're speedballing or from some cheap coke whore you screw when you're gone until two in the morning?"

Roy whimpers against her neck, and two younger nurses behind the counter in the desk area ostentatiously rustle papers as if to avoid overhearing.

"You shitty dumb bitch," Nelson says in a soft voice, lightly smiling as if what he's saying is pleasant, "I don't do needles and I don't fuck coke whores. I don't know what a coke whore is and you don't either."

"Call them what you want, just don't give me their diseases."

His voice stays low, almost caressing. "Where did you get so goddamn high and mighty, that's what I'd love to know. What makes you so fucking pure, you weren't too pure to get yourself knocked up when it suited you. And then to send Melanie back home to Brewer with me to keep putting out ass so I wouldn't run away somehow. That was really the cold-blooded thing, pimping for your own girlfriend."

Nelson finds a certain chronic comfort in his wife's fairskinned, time-widened face, with its mustache of rage crinkles and its anger-creased triangular brow, pressing upon him, limiting his vision. It shuts out all the threatening things at the rim. She says, faltering as if she knows she is being put through a hoop, "We've been through this a million times, Nelson Angstrom, and I had no idea you'd hop into bed with Melanie, I was foolish enough to think you were in love with me and trying to work things out with your parents." This cycle of complaint is stale and hateful yet something familiar he can snuggle into. At night, when both are asleep, it is she who loops her arm, downy and long, around his sweating chest and he who curls closer to the fetal position, pressing his backside into her furry lap.

"I was," he says, plainly teasing now, "I did work them out. So what were you starting to say?"

"About what?"

"What you were going to tell me but couldn't because I fell asleep because according to you I wasn't as wired as usual." He leans his head against the bench's headrest and sighs in this new blood-clean weariness of his. Coming down makes you realize how high up you usually are. "God," he says, "it'll be good to get back to the real world. You're sort of right about yesterday, I was stuck, with Mom grabbing the car as soon as you got back. All you can deal for around Valhalla Village is Geritol."

Her voice in marital sympathy softens. "I like you like this," she confides. "Just yourself. No additives." He looks, with his tidy taut profile sealed upon his tired thoughts, his thinning temples balanced by his jutting little mustache, almost handsome. The scattered gray hairs in his rat's-tail haircut touch her, as if they are her fault.

Wearily in Pru's forgiving tone of voice he hears that she is not yet ready to let this marriage go. He has plenty of margin still. "I'm always the same," he disagrees. "I can take or leave the stuff. Yesterday, maybe you're right, out of respect for the old guy, or something. I just decided to do without. What nobody seems to understand is, it's not addictive."

"Wonderful," Pru says, the softness in her voice ebbing. "My husband the exception that proves the rule."

"Don't we have any other topic?"

"This story," she decides to begin, "of Judy's being trapped under the sail. Aren't the sails awfully small? You know what a good swimmer she is. Do you possibly think -?"

"Think what?"

"That she was just pretending, hiding from your father as a sort of game, and then it got out of hand?"

"So it just about killed him? What a thought. Poor Dad." Nelson's profile smiles; his mustache lifts closer to the underside of his small straight irritated nose. "I don't think so," he says. "She wouldn't be that cool. Think of how far out there it must have seemed to her, surrounded by sharks in her mind. She wouldn't be playing games."

"We don't know really how it was out there, or how many seconds it all took. Children's minds don't work exactly like ours, and your father's way with her is to be teasing, the way he talks to her. It's something she could have done not to be cruel but a child's idea, you know, of teasing back."