John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

"Well, my goodness, Harry – I've known you to act selfishly in your life."

"Yeah, but not for a little white powder."

"They can't help it. It becomes their life. Anyway, evidently they were buying drugs for Lyle, too. I mean drugs for his illness – medicines for AIDS you can't buy yet in this country and are terribly expensive, they have to be smuggled."

"It's a sad story," Rabbit says, after a pause. Inky depression circulates in his veins. He's been in the hospital too long. He's forgotten what life is like. He asks Janice, "Where are you going now, in that snappy blouse?"

She rolls her eyes upward at him, from the mirror of her purse as she fixes her face, and then her face goes wooden and stubborn, bluffing it through. "Charlie said he'd take me out to dinner. He's worried I'm going to crash, psychologically, after all this trauma. I need to process."

"Process?"

"Talk thins through."

"You can talk them through with me. I'm just lying here with nothing to do, I've already missed the sports section of the news."

She makes that mmmm mouth women make after putting on lipstick, rolling her lips together in a complacent serious way, and tells him, "You're not impartial. You have your own agenda with Nelson, and with me for that matter."

"What's so impartial about Charlie, he wants to get into your pants again. If he hasn't already."

She pops the lipstick back into her bomb-shaped pocketbook and touches up her new hairdo with her fingers, glancing from several angles at herself in the mirror, and snaps the lid shut. She says, "That's sweet of you, Harry, to pretend to think I'm still interesting to anybody in that way, but in fact I'm not, except maybe once in a while to my own husband, I hope."

He says, embarrassed, for he knows he's been letting her down in that department lately, "Sure, but you know, for a man, it's all a matter of blood pressure, and -"

"We'll talk about it when you're home. I told Charlie I'd meet him at seven -"

"Where? The salad bar that used to be Johnny Frye's? It's only two blocks from here. You can walk."

"No, actually. There's a new Vietnamese place out near Maiden Springs he wanted to try. It's a bit of a drive and, you know me, I'll probably get lost. And then on top of everything I have fifty pages of a book on British realty law, full of all these funny old obsolete words, I have to read before class tomorrow night."

"You won't be home tomorrow night? My first night home?" He is making a complaint of it, scoring points, but he wishes she'd go and leave him alone with the television screen.

"We'll see," Janice says, rising. "I have an idea." Then she asks, "Aren't you proud of me?" She bends forward to press her hot busy face against his. "Managing everything the way I am?"

"Yeah," he lies. He preferred her incompetent. She leaves with her jonquil-yellow new coat over her arm and he thinks she is gaining weight behind, she has that broad-beamed look women of the county wear when they come into their own.

Harry watches what is left of Tom Brokaw and is settling into a seven-o'clock show on life in Antarctica when, of all people, the Harrisons come visiting. Not just Thelma – she's brought Ron along, or Ron has brought her, since she is thinner and sallower than he has ever seen her, and moves as if every step might break a bone. She smiles regretfully; her eyes apologize for the shape she's in, for Ronnie's being with her, for her being unable to stay away. "We were here in the hospital seeing my doctor," she explains, "and Ron junior had heard you were in."

"For what they call a little procedure," he says, and gestures toward the chair Janice has pulled up to the bed and that's probably still warm from her broad beam. "Ron, there's that big padded chair over in the corner if you want to pull it over; it's on wheels."

"I'll stand," he says. "We can only stay a minute."

He is sullen, but Rabbit didn't ask the Harrisons to come visit and doesn't see why he should be bullied. "Suit yourself." He asks Thelma, "How are you?"

Thelma sighs elaborately. "You know doctors. They never admit they don't have an answer. I'm on home dialysis twice a week, Ronnie's a saint to put up with me. He took a course on how to cope with the machine."

"Ronnie always was a saint," Harry tells her, everybody in the room knowing that Ronnie Harrison was just about his least favorite person in the world, though he had known him from kindergarten. A dirty-mouthed plug-ugly even at the age of five, and now bald as a prick's tip, with wisps above his big droopy ears. Ronnie in high school and afterward had a certain chunkiness, but the approach of old age has pulled the chunks like taffy, leaving hollows in his face and lumps and a painful stringiness around the throat. Harry says, as if she doesn't already know, "Janice is taking courses too, to learn how to sell real estate. I guess so she has a trade in case I pop off."

Thelma's eyelids flutter, a bony hand wearing a wedding ring gestures the possibility away. The sicker she gets, the more driedout and schoolteacherish she looks. That was one of the jokes of her being his mistress, her looking so prim and being so wild in bed, but maybe the real her was the schoolteacher and the other was put on purely for him. "Harry, you're not going to pop off" she tells him urgently, afraid for him. That strange way women have, of really caring about somebody beyond themselves. "They do wonderful things with hearts now, they stitch and mend them just like rag dolls." She manages a thin smile. "Want to see what I have?"

He thinks he knows what she has, all of it, but she unbuttons her sleeve and with that matter-of-fact baring which was her style Thelma shows him the underside of her bared arm. Two purple bruised patches on her slender wrist are connected by a translucent U of some plastic tubing taped flat against the jaundiced skin. "That's called my shunt," she says, pronouncing the last word carefully. "It connects an artery and vein and when I have the dialysis we take it off and connect me to the machine."

"Pretty," seems all he can say. He tells them about his angioplasty, but is already tired of describing it, and trying to convey the creepy business of seeing the dark shadow of the catheter like a snaky forefinger inch ever more intimately into his heart's paler, trembling shades. "My coronary artery could have occluded and I would have gone into CA. Cardiac arrest."

"But you didn't, you jerk," Ronnie says, standing erect and abandoning his shadow on the wall. "The Old Master," he says, a sardonic phrase he used to kid Harry with in their basketball-playing days. Funny, all of his life Harrison has been shadowing Harry with his ugly flesh, a reminder of everything sweaty and effortful in life Rabbit squeamishly hoped to glide over and avoid. "Nobody lays a finger on the Old Master. He makes it all look easy." Ronnie used to resent how Marty Tothero would put him, Ronnie, into the game when the bruisers on the other side were roughing Harry up, to give rough stuff back. An enforcer, they call it now.

"It was never as easy as I made it look," Rabbit tells him. He turns to Thelma, wanting to be tender, since she had braved her husband's anger by bringing him here. She had never balked at humiliating Ronnie to give Harry her gift of love, and indeed, sick as the two lovers are, her nearness does give him that socketed feeling you have with certain women, that graceful feeling you can do no wrong. "How about you, Thel? Your docs think they're licking it?"

"Oh, they never say die, but a body gets tired. You can fight only so long. The pains I can live with, and the weakness all the time, but the kidneys going is really demoralizing. It takes away your pleasure in life if you can't take such things for granted. Harry, you know that part of the Bible they used to read to us in assembly, before the Bible got outlawed, about a time for everything? A time to gather up stones, a time to cast them away? I'm beginning to think there's a time to give up."