John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

"Pig valves." Rabbit tries to hide his revulsion. "Was it terrible? They split your chest open and ran your blood through a machine?"

"Piece of cake. You're knocked out cold. What's wrong with running your blood through a machine? What else you think you are, champ?"

A God-made one-of-a-kind with an immortal soul breathed in. A vehicle of grace. A battlefield of good and evil. An apprentice angel. All those things they tried to teach you in Sunday school, or really didn't try very hard to teach you, just let them drift in out of the pamphlets, back there in that church basement buried deeper in his mind than an air-raid shelter.

"You're just a soft machine," Charlie maintains, and lifts his squarish hands, with their white cuffs and rectangular gold links, to let Jennifer set his salad before him. He saw her coming with eyes in the back of his head. She circles the table gingerly – these men are doing something to her, she doesn't know what – and puts in front of Harry a bacon-flecked green mound bigger than a big breast. It looks rich, and more than he should eat. The tall awkward girl with her strange white rooster-comb trembling in the air still hovers, the roundnesses in her green uniform pressing on Rabbit's awareness as he sits at the square tiled table trying to frame his dilemmas.

"Is there anything more I can get you gentlemen?" Jennifer asks, her lips gently struggling to articulate. It's not a lisp she has, quite; it's like her tongue is too big. "Something to drink?"

Charlie asks her for a Perrier with lime. She says that San Pellegrino is what they have. He says it's all the same to him. Fancy water is fancy water.

Harry after an internal struggle asks what kinds of beer they have. Jennifer sighs, feeling they are putting her on, and recites, "Schlitz, Miller, Miller Lite, Bud, Bud Light, Michelob, Lowenbrau, Corona, Coors, Coors Light, and Ballantine ale on draft." All these names have an added magic from being tumbled a bit in her mouth. Not looking Charlie in the eye, Harry opts for a Mick. Jennifer nods unsmiling and goes away. If she doesn't want to excite middle-aged men, she shouldn't wear all those earrings and go so heavy on the makeup.

"Piece of cake, you were saying," he says to Charlie.

"They freeze you. You don't know a thing."

"Guy I know down in Florida, not much older than we are, had an open-heart and he says it was hell, the recuperation took forever, and furthermore he doesn't look so great even so. He swings a golf club like a cripple."

Charlie does one of his tidy small shrugs. "You got to have the basics to work with. Maybe the guy was too far gone. But you, you're in good shape. Could lose a few pounds, but you're young – what, Fifty-five?"

"Wish I was. Fifty-six last February."

"That's young, Champ. I'm getting there myself." Charlie is Janice's age.

"The way I'm going l'll be happy to hit sixty. I look at all these old crocks down in Florida, shrivelled-up mummies toddling right into their nineties in their shorts and orthopedic sneakers, perky as bejesus, and I want to ask 'em, `What makes you so great? How did you do it?' "

"A day at a time," Charlie suggests. "One day at a time, and don't look down." Harry can tell he's getting bored with issuing reassurances, but Charlie's all he's got, now that he and Thelma are on hold. He's embarrassed to call her, now that he can't seem to deliver. He says:

"There's this other thing they can do now. An angioplasty. They cut open an artery in your groin -"

"Hey. I'm eating."

"- and poke it up all the way to your heart, would you believe. Then they pop out this balloon in the narrow place of the coronary artery and blow the damn thing up. Not with air, with saltwater somehow. It cracks the plaque. It stretches the artery back to the way it was."

"With a lot of luck it does," Charlie says. "And a year later you're back in the same boat, plugged up with macadamia nuts and beer yet."

Beer has come on the end of Jennifer's lean arm, in a frosted glass mug, golden and foam-topped and sizzling with its own excited bubbles. "If I can't have a single beer now and then, I'd just as soon be dead," Harry lies. He sips, and with a bent forefinger wipes the foam from under his nose. That gesture of Nelson's. He wonders when she fucks how protective Jennifer has to be of that wobbly Mohawk. Some punk girls, he's read, put safety pins through their nipples.

"Coronary bypass is what you want," Charlie is telling him. "These balloons, they can only do one artery at a time. Bypass grafts, they can do four, five, six once they get in there. Whaddeyou care if they pull open your rib cage? You won't be there. You'll be way out of it, dreaming away. Actually, you don't dream. It's too deep for that. It's a big nothing, like being dead."

"I don't want it," Harry hears himself say sharply. He softens this to, "Not yet anyway." Charlie's word pull has upset him, made it too real, the physical exertion, pulling open these resistant bone gates so his spirit will fly out and men in pale-green masks will fish in this soupy red puddle with their hooks and clamps and bright knives. Once on television watching by mistake over Janice's shoulder one of these PBS programs on childbirth – they wouldn't put such raunchy stuff on the networks – he saw them start to cut open a woman's belly for a Caesarean. The knife in the rubber-gloved hand made a straight line and on either side yellow fat curled up and away like two strips of foam rubber. This woman's abdomen, with a baby inside, was lined in a material, just like foam rubber. "Down in Florida," he says, "I had a catheterization" – the word makes trouble in his mouth, as if he's become the waitress – "and it wasn't so bad, more boring than anything else. You're wide awake, and then they put like this big bowl over your chest to see what's going on inside. Where the dye is being pumped through, it's hot, so hot you can hardly stand it." He feels he's disappointing Charlie, being so cowardly about bypasses, and to deepen his contact with the frowning, chewing other man confides, "The worst thing of it, Charlie, is I feel half dead already. This waitress is the first girl I've wanted to fuck for months."

"Boobs," Charlie says. "Great boobs. On a skinny body. That's sexy. Like Bo Derek after her implant."

"Her hair is what gets me. Tall as she is, she adds six inches with that hairdo."

"Tall isn't bad. The tall ones don't get the play the cute little short ones do, and do more for you. Also, being skinny has its advantages, there's not all that fat to come between you and the clitoris."

This may be more male bonding than Rabbit needs. He says, "But all those earrings, don't they look painful? And is it true some punk girls -"

Charlie interrupts impatiently, "Pain is where it's at for punks. Mutilation, self-hatred, slam dancing. For these kids today, ugly is beautiful. That's their way of saying what a lousy world we're giving them. No more rain forests. Toxic waste. You know the drill."

"When I came back this spring, I went driving around the city, all the sections. Some of these Hispanics were practically screwing on the street."

"Drugs," Charlie says. "They don't know what they're doing four-fifths of the time."

"Did you see in the Standard, some spic truck driver from West Miami was caught over near Maiden Springs with they estimate seventy-five million dollars' worth of cocaine, five hundred kilos packed in orange crates marked `Fragile'?"

"They can't stop dope," Charlie says, aligning his knife and fork on the edge of his empty plate, "as long as people are willing to pay a fortune for it."

"The guy was a Cuban refugee evidently, one of those we let in."

"These countries go Communist, they let us have all their crooks and crackpots." Charlie's tone is level and authoritative, but Harry feels he's losing him. It's not quite like the old days, when they had all day to kill, over in the showroom. Charlie has finished his Spinach and Crab and Rabbit has barely made a dent in his own heaping salad, he's so anxious to get advice. He gets a slippery forkful into his mouth and finds among the oily lettuce and alfalfa sprouts a whole macadamia nut, and delicately splits it with his teeth, so his tongue feels the texture of the fissure, miraculously smooth, like a young woman's body, like a marble tabletop.