John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

"Now comes the tricky part," Dr. Breit breathes, like a golf commentator into the mike as a crucial putt is addressed. Harry feels and then sees on the monitor his heart beat faster, twist as if to escape, twist in that convulsive spiral motion Dr. Olman in Florida demonstrated with his fist; the shadowy fist is angry, again and again, seventy times a minute; the anger is his life, his soul, mind over matter, electricity over muscle. The mechanically precise dark ghost of the catheter is the worm of death within him. Godless technology is fucking the pulsing wet tubes we inherited from the squid, the boneless sea-cunts. He feels again that feathery touch of nausea. Can he possibly throw up? It would jar and jam the works, disrupt the concentrating green tummocks he is buried beneath. He mustn't. He must be still.

He sees, on the monitor, behind the inquisitive tip, a segment of the worm thicken and swell, pressing the pallid Rice Krispies together against the outlines of the filmy crimped river descending down his heart, and stay inflated, pressing, filling; it has been explained to him that if the LAD has not developed any collateral arteries the blood flow will cease and another heart attack begin, right on camera. You are there.

"Thirty seconds," Dr. Breit breathes, and Dr. Raymond deflates the balloon. "Looking good, Ray." Harry feels no pain beyond the knifelike sweet pressure in his bladder and a soreness in the far back of his throat as if from swallowing all that saltwater out on the Gulf. "Once more, Harold, and we'll call it a day."

"How're ya doing?" Dr. Raymond asks him, in one of those marbles-in-the-mouth voices muscular men sometimes have, Pennsylvanians especially.

"Still here," Harry says, in a brave voice that sounds high in his ears, as if out of a woman's throat.

The tense insufflation repeats, and so do the images on the TV screen, silent like the bumping of molecules under the microscope on a nature program, or like computer graphics in an insurance commercial, where fragments flickeringly form the logo. It seems as remote from his body as the records of his sins that angels are keeping. Were his heart to stop, it would be mere shadowplay. He sees, when the catheter's bulge subsides a second time, that the Rice Krispies have been pushed to the sides of his LAD. He feels blood flowing more freely into his heart, rich in combustible oxygen; his head in gratitude and ecstasy grows faint.

"Looking good," Dr. Breit says, sounding nervous.

"Whaddya mean?" Dr. Raymond responds – "looking great," like those voices on television that argue about the virtues of Miller Lite.

The nurse who that evening comes into his room (a private room, $160 more a day, but it's worth it to him; in Florida the guy in the bed next to him finally died, gurgling and moaning all day and then shitting all over himself as a last pronouncement) and takes Harry's temperature and blood pressure and brings his allotment of pills in a little paper cup has a round kind face. She is a bit overweight but it's packed on firm. She looks familiar. She has pale-blue eyes in sockets that make a dent above the cheekbones in the three-quarters view, and her upper lip has that kind of puffy look he likes, like Michelle Pfeiffer. Her hair shows under her nurse's cap as browny-red, many-colored, with even a little gray, though she is young enough to be his daughter.

She lifts the strange plastic rocket-shaped thermometer that gives its reading in red segmented numbers from his mouth and enwraps his left arm with the Velcro-fastened blood-pressure cuff. As she inflates it she asks, "How's the Toyota business?"

"Not bad. The weak dollar doesn't help. My son runs the place now, basically. How'd you know I sold Toyotas?"

"My boyfriend then and I bought a car from you about ten years ago." She lifts those bleached blue eyes mockingly. "Don't you remember?"

"It's you! Yes. Of course. Of course I remember. An orange Corolla." She is his daughter; or at least he imagines she is, though Ruth out of spite would never admit it to him. As the girl stands close to his bed, he reads her badge: ANNABELLE BYER; R.N. She still has her maiden name.

Annabelle frowns, and deflates the blood-pressure cuff, as tight around his arm as a policeman's grip. "Let's try that again in a minute. It shot up while we were talking."

He asks her, "How'd the Corolla work out? How'd the boyfriend work out, for that matter? What the hell was his name? Big red-eared country kid."

"Don't talk, please, until I've got my reading. I'll be quiet. Try to think of something soothing."

He thinks of Ruth's farm, the Byer place, the slope down through the orchard from the line of scrub trees he used to spy behind – the little square stone house, the yellow shells of the abandoned school buses, the dark collie that tried to herd him down there, as though he knew Harry belonged there with the others. Fritzie, that was that dog's name. Sharp teeth, black gums. Oo boy, scary. Calm down. Think of the big sky of Texas, above the hot low barracks at Fort Larson, himself in fresh khaki, with a pass for the evening. Freedom, a soft breeze, a green sunset on the low horizon. Think of playing basketball against Oriole High, that little country gym, the backboards flush against the walls, before all the high schools merged into big colorless regionals and shopping malls began eating up the farmland. Think of sledding with Mim in her furry hood, in Mt. Judge behind the hat factory, on a winter's day so short the streetlights come on an hour before suppertime calls you home.

"That's better," the nurse says. "One forty over ninety-five. Not great, but not bad. In answer to your questions: the car lasted longer than the boyfriend. I traded in the car after eight years; it had a hundred twenty thousand miles on the speedometer. Jamie moved out about a year after we moved into town. He went back to Galilee. Brewer was too tough for him."

"And you? Is it too tough for you?"

"No, I like it. I like the action."

Action like her mother used to get? You were a real hooer? Dusk and May's fully arrived leafiness soften his private room; it is a quiet time on the hospital floor, after dinner and the post-work surge of visitors. Harry dares ask, "You married now? Or live with a guy?"

She smiles, her natural kindness contending a moment with surprise at his curiosity, his presumption, and then smoothing her face into calm again. The dusk seems to be gathering it closer, the pale round glimmer of her face. But her voice discloses a city dryness, a guardedness that might rise up. "No, as a matter of fact I live with my mother. She sold the farm we inherited from my father and moved in with me after Jamie moved out."

"I think I know that farm. I've passed it on the road." Harry's violated, tired heart feels weighted by so much information, as his groin had been weighted down, literally sandbagged, in the hours after the angioplasty. To think of that other world, with all its bushes and seasons and green days and brown, where this child's life had passed without him. "Does Ruth -" he begins, and ends, "What does she do? Your mother."

The girl gives him a look but then answers readily, as if the question passed some test. "She works for one of these investment companies from out of state, money markets and mutual funds and all that, that have branch offices in the new glass building downtown, across from where Kroll's used to be."

"A stenographer," Rabbit remembers. "She could take dictation and type."

The girl actually laughs, in surprise at his groping command of the truth. She is beginning to be pert, to drop her nurse's manner. She has backed off a step from his bed, and her full thighs press against the crisp front of her white uniform so that even standing up she has a lap. Why is Ruth turning this girl into a spinster? She tells him, "She was hired for that but being so much older than the other women they've let her have some more responsibility. She's a kind of junior exec now. Did you know my mother, ever?"