John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

Outside, in the embarrassing sunlight, Webb Murkett, his face smilingly creased more deeply than ever, a cigarette still dangling from his long upper lip like a camel's, goes from group to group introducing his new wife, a shy girl in her twenties, younger than Nelson, younger than Annabelle, a fluffy small blonde dressed in dark ruffles and shaped like a seal, like a teenaged swimming champ, with no pronounced indentations. Webb does like them zaftig. Harry feels sorry for her, dragged up to this religious warehouse to bury the wife of an old golf partner of her husband's. Cindy, Webb's last wife, whom Harry adored not so many years ago, is also here, alone, looking dumpy and irritated and unsteady on black heels skimpy as sandals, as she takes a pose on the thickly grassed ruts of red earth that do for a church parking lot. While Janice sticks with Webb and his bride, Harry gallantly goes over to Cindy standing there like a lump, squinting in the hot hazed sun.

"Hi," he says, wondering how she could let herself go so badly. She has taken on the standard Diamond County female build bosom like a shelf and ass like you're carrying your own bench around with you. Her dear little precise-featured face, in the old days enigmatic in its boyish pertness, with its snub nose and wideapart eyes, is framed by fat and underlined by chins; she has no neck, like those Russian dolls that nest one inside the other. Her hair that used to be cut short has been teased and permed into that big-headed look young women favor now. It adds to her bulk.

"Harry. How are you?" Her voice has a funereal caution and she extends a soft hand, wide as a bear's paw, for him to shake; he takes it in his but also under cover of the sad occasion bends down and plants a kiss on her damp and ample cheek. Her look of irritated lumpiness slightly eases. "Isn't it awful about Thel?" she asks.

"Yeah," he agrees. "But it was coming a long time. She saw it coming." He figures it's all right to suggest he knew the dead woman's mind; Cindy was there in the Caribbean the night they swapped. He had wanted Cindy and wound up with Thelma. Now both are beyond desiring.

"You know, don't you?" Cindy says. "I mean, you sense when the time is near if you're sick like that. You sense everything." Rabbit remembers a little cross in the hollow of her throat you could see when she wore a bathing suit, and how, like a lot of people of her generation, she was into spookiness -astrology, premonitions – though not as bad as Buddy Inglefinger's girlfriend Valerie, a real old-style hippie, six feet tall and dripping beads.

"Maybe women more than men," he says to Cindy tactfully. He lurches a bit deeper into frankness. "I've had some physical problems lately and they give me the feeling I've walked through my entire life in a daze."

This is too deep for her, too confessional. There was always in his relations with Cindy a wall, just behind her bright butterscotch-brown eyes, a barrier where the signals stopped. Silly Cindy, Thelma called her.

"Somebody told me," he tells her, "you're with a boutique over in that new mall near Oriole."

"I'm thinking of quitting, actually. Whatever I earn is taken off Webb's alimony so why should I bother? You can see how welfare mothers get that way."

"Well," he says, "a job gets you out in the world. Meet people." Meet a guy, get married again, is his unspoken thought. But who would want to hitch up with such a slab of beef? She'd sink any Sunfish you'd try to sail with her now.

"I'm thinking of maybe becoming a physical therapist. Another girl at the boutique is learning to do holistic massage."

"Sounds nice," Harry says. "Which holes?"

This is crude enough that she dares begin, "You and Thelma -" But she stops and looks at the ground.

"Yeah?" That old barrier keeps him from encouraging her. She is not the audience for which he wants to play the part of Thelma's bereft lover.

"You'll miss her, I know," Cindy says weakly.

He feigns innocence. "Frankly, Janice and I haven't been seeing that much of the Harrisons lately – Ronnie's resigned from the club, too much money he says, and I've hardly had a chance this summer to get over there myself. It's not the same, the old gang is gone. A lot of young twerps. They hit the ball a mile and win all the weekend sweeps. My daughter-in-law uses the pool, with the kids."

"I hear you're back at the lot."

"Yeah," he says, in case she knows anyway, "Nelson screwed up. I'm just holding the fort."

He wonders if he is saying too much, but she is looking past him. "I must go, Harry. I can't stand another second of watching Webb cavort with that simpering ridiculous baby doll of his. He's over sixty!"

The lucky stiff. He made it to sixty. In the little silence that her indignant remark imposes on the air, an airplane goes over, dragging its high dull roar behind it. With a smile not fully friendly he tells her, "You've all kept him young." A woman you've endured such a gnawing of desire for, you can't help bearing a little grudge against, when the ache is gone.

A number of people are making their escapes and Harry thinks he should go over and say a word to Ronnie. His old nemesis is standing in a loose group with his three sons and their women. Alex, the computer whiz, has a close haircut and a nerdy nearsighted look. Georgie has a would-be actor's long pampered hair and the coat and tie he put on for his mother's funeral look like a costume. Ron junior has the pleasantest face – Thelma's smile and the muscle and tan of an outdoor worker. Shaking their hands, Harry startles them by knowing their names. When you're sexually involved with a woman, some of the magic spills down into her children, that she also spread her legs for.

"How's Nelson doing?" Ron junior asks him, from the look on his face not trying to be nasty. It must have been this boy, around Brewer as he is, who told Thelma about Nelson's habit.

Harry answers him man to man. "Good, Ron. He went through the detox treatment for a month and now he's living with about twenty other, what do they say, substance abusers, at what they call a `concept house,' a halfway house in North Philly. He's got a volunteer job working with inner-city kids at a playground."

"That's great, Mr. Angstrom. Nelson's a great guy, basically."

"I don't go visit him any more, I couldn't stand this family therapy they try to give you, but his mother and Pru swear he loves it, working with these tough black kids."

Georgie, the prettiest boy and Thelma's favorite, has been overhearing and volunteers, "The only trouble with Nelson, he's too sensitive. He lets things get to him. In show business you learn to let it slide off your back. You know, fuck'em. Otherwise you'd kill yourself." He pats the back of his hairdo.

Alex, the oldest, adds in his nerdy prim way, "Well I tell you, the drugs out in California were getting to me, that's why I was happy when this job in Fairfax came through. I mean, everybody does it. All weekend they do it, on the beaches, on the thruways; everybody's stoned. How can you raise a family? Or save any money?"

Her boys are men now, with flecks of gray hair and little wise wrinkles around their mouths, with wives and small children, Thelma's grandchildren, looking to their fathers for shelter in the weedy tangle of the world. Her boys look more mature in Harry's eyes than Ronnie, in whom he must always see the obnoxious brat from Wenrich Alley, and the loud-mouthed locker-room showoff of high-school days. People he once loved slide from him but Ronnie is always there, like the smelly underside of his own body, like the jockey underpants that get dirty every day.

Ronnie is playing the grieving widower to a T; he looks like he's been through a washer, his eyelashes poking white from his tear-reddened lids, his kinky brass-colored hair reduced to gray wisps above his droopy ears. Rabbit tries to overcome his old aversion, their old rivalry, by giving the other man's hand an expressive squeeze and saying, "Really sorry."