John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

"She didn't think so."

"Well screw her, then. From my look at her she can take care of herself. What's your big huff for – you boffing her?"

"Dad, when are you going to get your mind off boffing? You're what, fifty-seven? -"

"Fifty-six."

"- and you're so damn adolescent. There's more things in the world than who's boffing who."

"Tell me about it. Tell me about how the me generation has a bender. You can't keep snorting this stuff every half-hour to keep high, your nose'd burn out. Yours looks sort of shot already. What do you do with crack? How do you take it in? It's just little crystals, isn't it? Do you need all that fancy burning stuff and tubes they show on TV? Where do you do it, then? You can't just haul all that paraphernalia into the Laid-Back or whatever they call it now, or can you?"

"Harry, please," Janice says.

Judy contributes, bright-eyed at three in the morning, "Daddy has lots of funny little pipes."

"Shut up honey, would you mind?" Nelson says. "Go find Mommy and she'll put you to bed."

Harry turns on Janice. "Let me ask him. Why should we all go around on tiptoe forever pretending the kid's not a hophead? Face it, Nellie, you're a mess. You're a mess and you're a menace. You need help."

Self-pity focuses the boy's features for a second. "People keep telling me I need help but they're no help is what I notice. A wife who doesn't give me shit, a father who's no kind of father at all and never was, a mother…" He trails off, not daring offend his one ally.

"A mother," Harry finishes for him, "who's letting you rob her blind."

This gets to him a little, burns through the jittery buzz in his eyes. "I'm not robbing anybody," he says, numbly, as though a voice in his head told him to say it. "Everything's been worked out. Hey, I feel sick. I think I have to throw up."

Harry raises his hand in lofty blessing. "Go to it. You know where the bathroom is."

The bathroom door is to the right of the dresser with the color snapshots of the kids at various stages of growing and the tinted one of Harry and Janice looking embalmed, mistily staring at the same point in space. Looking in, Harry sees all sorts of litter on the floor. Prell, Crest, pills. Luckily most things come in plastic containers these days so there isn't much breakage. The door closes.

Janice tells him, "Harry, you're coming on too strong."

"Well, hell, nobody else is coming on at all. You expect it to go away by itself. It won't. The kid is hooked."

"Let's just not talk about the money," she begs.

"Why not? Just what is so fucking sacred about money, that everybody's scared to talk about it?"

The tip of her tongue peeks from between her worried lips. "With money you get into legal things."

Judy is still with them and has been listening: her clear young eyes with their bluish whites, her reddish-blonde eyebrows with their little cowlick, her little face pale as a clock's face and as precise pluck at Harry's anger, undermine his necessary indignation. Retching noises from behind the bathroom door now frighten her. Harry explains, "It'll make your daddy feel better. He's getting rid of poison." But the thought of Nelson being sick upsets him too, and those bands of constriction around his chest, the playful malevolent singeing deep within, reassert their threat. He fishes in his pants pocket for the precious brown vial. Thank God he remembered to bring it. He unscrews the top and shakes out a small white Nitrostat and places it, as debonairly as he used to light a cigarette, beneath his tongue.

Judy smiles upward. "Those pills fix that bad heart I gave you."

"You didn't give me my bad heart, honey, I wish you'd get that out of your mind." He is bothered by Janice's remark about money and legal things and the implication that they are getting in over their heads. ANGSTROM, SON INCARCERATED. Joint Scam Sinks Family Concern. The lights in the neighbor's upstairs windows have gone off and that relieves some pressure. He could feel Ma Springer turning in her grave at the possibility that her old house has become a bother to the neighborhood. Nelson comes out of the bathroom looking shaken, wide-eyed. The poor kid has seen some terrible things in his day: Jill's body carried from the burned-out house in a rubber bag, his mother hugging the little dead body of his baby sister. You can't really blame him for anything. He has washed his face and combed his hair so his pallor has this gleam. He lets a shudder run from his head down into his body, like a dog shaking itself dry after running in a ditch.

For all his merciful thoughts Harry goes back on the attack. "Yeah," he says, even as the kid is closing the bathroom door, "and another new development over there I wasn't crazy about is this fat Italian you've hired. What are you letting the Mafia into the lot for?"

"Dad, you are incredibly prejudiced."

"I don't have prejudices, just facts. The Mafia is a fact. It's being scared out of the drug trade, too violent, and is getting into more and more legitimate businesses. It was all on 60 Minutes."

"Mom, get him off me."

Janice gets up her courage and says, "Nelson, your father's right. You need some help."

"I'm fine," he whines. "I need some sleep, is what I need. You have any idea what time it is? – it's after three. Judy, you should go back to bed."

"I'm too wired," the child says, smiling, showing her perfect oval teeth.

Harry asks her, "Where'd you learn that word?"

"I'm too jazzed," she says. "Kids at school say that."

Harry asks Nelson, "And who're these guys keep calling our house at all hours asking for money?"

"They think I owe them money," Nelson answers. "Maybe I do. It's temporary, Dad. It'll all work out. Come, Judy. I'll put you to bed."

"Not so fast," Harry says. "How much do you owe, and how're you going to pay 'em?"

"Like I said, I'll work it out. They shouldn't be calling your number, but they're crude guys. They don't understand term financing. Go back to Florida if you don't like your phone ringing. Change your number, that's what I did."

"Nelson, when will it end?" Janice asks, tears making her voice crack, just from looking at him. In his white shirt with his electric movements Nelson has the frailty and doomed alertness of a cornered animal. "You must get off this stuff"

"I am, Mom. I am off. Starting_tonight."

"Ha," Harry says.

Nelson insists to her, "I can handle it. I'm no addict. I'm a recreational user."

"Yeah," Harry says, "like Hitler was a recreational killer." It must be the mustache made him think of Hitler. If the kid would just shave it off, and chuck the earring, he maybe could feel some compassion, and they could make a fresh start.

But, then, Harry thinks, how many fresh starts for him are left? This room, where he spent ten years sleeping beside Janice, listening to her snore, smelling her nice little womanly sweat, her unconscious releases of gas, making some great love sometimes, that time with the Krugerrands, and other times disgustedly watching her stumble in tipsy from a night downstairs sipping sherry or Campan, this room with the copper beech outside the window leafing in and changing the light and then losing its leaves and giving the light back and the beech nuts popping like little firecrackers and Ma Springer's television mumbling on and making the bedside lamp vibrate when a certain pitch was reached on the program-ending surge of music, Ma sound asleep and never hearing it, this room soaked in his life, how many more times will he see it? He hadn't expected to see it tonight. Now all at once, as happens at his age, fatigue like an inner overflowing makes him feel soggy, dirty, distracted. Little sparks are going off and on in the corners of his eyes. Avoid aggravation. He'd better sit down. Janice has sat down on the bed, their old bed, and Nelson has pulled up the padded stool patterned with yellow roses Pru must use to perch on in her underwear when she sits putting on makeup at her dresser mirror before going out with him to the LaidBack or some yuppie buddies' party in northeast Brewer. How sorry is he supposed to feel for his son when the kid has a big tall hippy dish like that to boff?