John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

This has not been the best day for Harry. The sounds of traffic and work resuming on the street outside reminded him of how out of it he still is. Janice didn't visit, and now her evening class has begun. All day gray clouds packed the sky, in long rolls of nimbus, and trailed black wisps above the brick chimneys, but no rain has actually fallen. The view from his window consists of several intricately notched bands of ornamental brickwork capping the third stories of narrow buildings that hold at street level a coffee shop, a dry cleaner's, an office-supplies store. The corner building is painted gray, the middle one blue, and the third, with the most ornate window framing, beige. It has slowly dawned upon the people of Brewer that you can paint over brick with any color you choose, not just brick red. People live behind the upper windows across the street, but though Harry faithfully stares he has not yet been rewarded with the sight of a woman undressing, or even of anyone coming to the window to look out. Further depressing him, he has not been able to have a bowel movement since entering St. Joseph's three days ago. The first day, he blamed the awkwardness of the bedpan and his solicitude for the nurses who would have to carry what he produced away, and the second day, the change of diet from what he usually eats – the food the hospital dieticians conjure up looks pretty good but tastes like wet cardboard and chews like chaff, so bland as to shut down his salivary glands – but on the third day, when he can wander the halls and use the bathroom behind a closed door in his room, he blames himself, his decrepitude, his drying up, the running down of his inner processes. Running out of even gas.

It is strange that this girl (hardly that, she would be only three years younger than Nelson) should offer to bring him her mother, for last night he dreamed about Ruth. As the world around him goes gray, his dreams have taken on intense color. Ruth – Ruth as she had been, the spring they lived and slept together, both of them twenty-six, she fleshy, cocky, pretty in a coarse heavy careless way – was wearing a sea-blue dress, with small white polka dots, and he was pressing his body against it, with her body inside it, and telling her how lovely a color it was on her, while the hair on her head glistened red, brown, and gold, close to his eyes. Ruth had turned her head not, he felt, in aversion from him but in natural embarrassment at the situation, for she seemed to be living with him and Janice, all together, and Janice was somewhere near them -upstairs, though the furniture around them was sunstruck floral-patterned wicker, as from their Florida condo, which has no upstairs. His embrace of Ruth felt semi-permitted, like an embrace of a legal relation, and his praise of her vivid dress was meant to urge her into his own sense of well-being, of their love being at last all right. He hid his face beside her throat, in the curtain of her many-colored hair, and knew he could fuck her forever, on and on, bottomlessly spilling himself into her solid beauty. When he awoke it was with the kind of absolute hard-on he almost never has while awake, what with the anti-hypertensive medicine and his generally gray mood. He saw while the dream still freshly clung to him in sky-blue shreds that the white polka dots were the confettilike bits of blossom that littered the sidewalk a month ago on that street of Bradford pear trees up near Summer, where he had once lived with Ruth, and that the splashy sunlight was what used to pour in on Ma Springer's iron table of ferns and African violets, in the little sunroom across the foyer from the gloomy living room. For though the furniture of the dream was Florida, the house they were all sharing had certainly been the old Springer manse.

Harry asks the round-faced nurse, "How much do you know about me and your mother?"

The blush deepens a shade. "Oh, nothing. She never lets on about the time before she settled down with my father." It now sounds rather conventional, Ruth's time as a single woman; but at the time she was beyond the pale, a lost soul scandalous to the narrow world of Mt. Judge. "I figure you were a special friend."

"Maybe not that special," Harry tells her.

He feels bad, because there is nothing much she can say to that, his lie, just stand there polite with her puffy upper lip, a nurse being patient with a patient. He is leaving her out on a limb. He loves her; love flows through him like a blind outpouring, an anesthesia. He tells his possible daughter, "Look, it's a cute idea, but if she came up it would be because you asked her to rather than she wanted to on her own, and, frankly, Annabelle" – he has never called her by her name before – "I'd just as soon she didn't see me like this. You say she's lost weight and looks snappy. I'm fat and a medical mess. Maybe she'd be too much for me."

The girl's face returns to being pale and prim. Boundaries have been restored, just as he's getting to feel paternal. "Very well," Annabelle says. "I'll tell her you've been released, if she asks."

"Might she ask? Wait. Don't get prissy. Tell me, why did you want to get us together?"

"You seem so interested in her. Your face comes to life when I mention her."

"It does? Maybe it's looking at you that does it." He dares go on, "I've been wondering, though, if you should still be living with her. Maybe you ought to get out from under her wing."

"I did, for a while. I didn't like it. Living alone is tough. Men can get nasty."

"Can we really? I'm sorry to hear it."

Her face softens into a dear smile, that curls her upper lip at the edges and buckles the plump part in the middle. "Anyway, she says just what you say. But I like it, for now. It's not like she's my mother any more, she's a roommate. Believe me, bad things can happen to women who live alone in this city. Brewer isn't New York but it isn't Penn Park, either."

Of course. She can read his address right off the chart at the foot of the bed. To her he is one of those Penn Park snobs he himself has always resented. "Brewer's a rugged town," he agrees, sinking back into his pillow. "Always was. Coal and steel. Bars and cathouses all along the railroad tracks right through the middle of the city, when I was young." He glances away, at the ornamental brickwork, the hurrying dry dark clouds. He tells his nurse, "You know best how to live your own life. Tell your mother, if she asks, that maybe we'll meet some other time." Under the pear trees, in Paradise.

Lying there these days, Harry thinks fondly of those dead bricklayers who bothered to vary their rows at the top of the three buildings across the street with such festive patterns of recess and protrusion, diagonal and upright, casting shadows in different ways at different times of the day, these men of another century up on their scaffold, talking Pennsylvania Dutch among themselves, or were Italians doing all the masonry even then? Lying here thinking of all the bricks that have been piled up and knocked down and piled up again on the snug square streets that lift toward Mt. Judge, he tries to view his life as a brick of sorts, set in place with a slap in 1933 and hardening ever since, just one life in rows and walls and blocks of lives. There is a satisfaction in such an overview, a faint far-off communal thrill, but hard to sustain over against his original and continuing impression that Brewer and all the world beyond are just frills on himself, like the lace around a plump satin valentine, himself the heart of the universe, like the Dalai Lama, who in the news lately – Tibet is still restless, after nearly forty years of Chinese rule – was reported to have offered to resign. But the offer was greeted with horror by his followers, for whom the Dalai Lama can no more resign godhood than Harry can resign selfhood.