John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

But the old hostile devil lights up in Harrison's face, once meaty and now drawn and hollowed-out and stringy. With a glance at his sons and a small over-there jab of his head, he takes Harry's arm in a grip purposely too hard and leads him out of earshot, a few steps away on the rutted dried mud. He says to him, in the hurried confidential voice of men together in an athletic huddle, "You think I don't know you were banging Thel for years?"

"I – I've never much thought about what you know or don't know, Ronnie."

"You son of a bitch. That night we swapped down in the islands was just the beginning, wasn't it? You kept seeing her up here."

"Ron, I thought you said you knew. You should have asked Thelma if you were curious."

"I didn't want to hassle her. She was fighting to live and I loved her. Toward the end, we talked about it."

"So you did hassle her?"

"She wanted to clear the slate. You son of a bitch. The Old Master. You're the coldest most selfish bastard I ever met."

"Why? What makes me so bad? Maybe she wanted me. Maybe the favors were mutual." Over Ronnie's shoulder, Harry sees mourners waiting to say goodbye, hesitant, conscious of the heat of this hurried conversation. Harrison has become pink in the face and perhaps Rabbit has too. He says, "Ronnie, people are watching. This isn't the time."

"There won't be another time. I don't ever want to see you again as long as I live. You disgust me."

"Yeah, and you disgust me. You always have, Ron. You got a prick where your head ought to be. Who can blame her, if Thel gave herself a little vacation from eating your shit now and then?"

Ronnie's face is quite pink and his eyes are watering; he has never let go of Harry's forearm, as if this hold is his last warm contact with his dead wife. His voice lowers into a new intensity; Harry has to bend his head to hear. "I don't give a fuck you banged her, what kills me is you did it without giving a shit. She was crazy for you and you just lapped it up. You narcissistic cocksucker. She wasted herself on you. She went against everything she wanted to believe in and you didn't even appreciate it, you didn't love her and she knew it, she told me herself. She told me in the hospital asking my forgiveness." Ronnie takes breath to go on, but tears block his throat.

Rabbit's own throat aches, thinking of Thelma and Ronnie at the last, her betraying her lover when her body had no more love left in it. "Ronnie," he whispers. "I did appreciate her. I did. She was a fantastic lay."

"You cocksucker" is all Ronnie can get out, repetitively, and then they both turn to face the mourners waiting to pay their respects and climb into their cars and salvage what is left of this hot hazy Saturday, with lawns to mow and gardens to weed all across Diamond County. Janice and Webb are among those staring. They must guess what the conversation has been about; in fact, most of those here must guess, even the three sons. Though he had always been discreet on his visits to Arrowdale, hiding his Toyota in her garage and never getting caught in bed with her by a sick child returning early from school or a repairman letting himself in an unlocked door, these things have a way of getting out into the air. Like a tire, it needs only a pinhole of a leak. People sense it. Word has got around, or it will now. Well, fuck 'em, like Georgie said. Fuck 'em all, including Webb's child bride, who from the shape of her might be pregnant. That Webb, what a character.

A nice thing happens. Ronnie and Harry, Harrison and Angstrom, with a precision as if practiced, execute a crisscross. They smile, despite their pink eyelids and raw throats, at the little watching crowd and neatly cross paths as they move toward their kin, Harry toward Janice in her navy-blue suit with white trim and wide shoulders, and Ronnie back to his sons and the center of his sad occasion. Once teammates, always teammates. Rabbit, remembering how Ronnie once screwed Ruth a whole weekend in Atlantic City and then bragged to him about it, can't feel sorry for him at all.

I Love What You Do for Me, Toyota. That is the new paper banner the company has sent down to hang in the big display window. At times, standing at the window, when a cloud dense with moisture darkens the atmosphere or an occluding truck pulls up past the yew hedge for some business at the service doors, Harry catches a sudden reflection of himself and is startled by how big he is, by how much space he is taking up on the planet. Stepping out on the empty roadway as Uncle Sam last month he had felt so eerily tall, as if his head were a giant balloon floating above the marching music. Though his inner sense of himself is of an innocuous passive spirit, a steady small voice, that doesn't want to do any harm, get trapped anywhere, or ever die, there is this other self seen from outside, a six-foot-three ex-athlete weighing two-thirty at the least, an apparition wearing a sleek gray summer suit shining all over as if waxed and a big head whose fluffy shadowy hair was trimmed at Shear Joy Hair Styling (unisex, fifteen bucks minimum) to rest exactly on the ears, a fearsome bulk with eyes that see and hands that grab and teeth that bite, a body eating enough at one meal to feed three Ethiopians for a day, a shameless consumer of gasoline, electricity, newspapers, hydrocarbons, carbohydrates. A boss, in a shiny suit. His recent heart troubles have become, like his painfully and expensively crowned back teeth, part of his respectability's full-blown equipage.

Harry needs a good self-image today, for the lot is going to be visited at eleven by a representative of the Toyota Corporation, a Mr. Natsume Shimada, hitherto manifested only as a careful signature, each letter individually formed, on creamy stiff stationery from the American Toyota Motor Sales headquarters in Torrance, California. Word of the financial irregularities anatomized by the two accountants Janice hired under Charlie's direction has filtered upward, higher and higher, as letters from Mid-Atlantic Toyota in Glen Burnie, Maryland, were succeeded by mail from the Toyota Motor Credit Corporation's offices in Baltimore and then by courteous but implacable communications from Torrance itself, signed with what seems an old-fashioned stub-tipped fountain pen by Mr. Shimada, in sky-blue ink.

"Nervous?" Elvira asks, sidling up beside him in a slim seersucker suit. For the hot weather she had her hair cut short behind, exposing sexy dark down at the back of her neck. Did Nelson used to boff her? If Pru wasn't putting out, he had to buff somebody. Unless coke whores were enough, or the kid was secretly gay. Insofar as he can bear to contemplate his son's sex life, Elvira seems a little too classy, too neuter to go along with it. But maybe Harry is underestimating the amount of energy in the world: he tends to do that, now that his own is sagging.

"Not too," he answers. "How do I look?"

"Very imposing. I like the new suit."

"It's kind of a gray metallic. They developed the fabric while doing the moon shots."

Benny is doing a dance of door-opening and hood-popping out on the lot with a couple so young they keep looking at each other for confirmation, both talking at once and then falling silent simultaneously, paralyzed by their wish not to be tricked out of a single dollar. August sales are on and Toyota is offering thousanddollar rebates. In the old days you sold only at their list price, no haggling, take it or leave it, a quality product. Their old purity has been corrupted by American methods. Toyota has stooped to the scramble. "You know," he tells Elvira, "in all the years the lot has been selling these cars I don't recall it ever being visited by an actual Japanese. I thought they all stayed over there in Toyota City enjoying the tea ceremony."

"And the geisha girls," Elvira says slyly. "Like Mr. Uno."