John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

Harry smiles at the topical allusion. This girl – woman – keeps up. "Yeah, he wasn't Numero Uno very long, was he?"

Her earrings today are like temple bells, little curved lids of dull silver wired together in trembling oblongs the size of butterfly cocoons. They shiver with a touch of indignation when she tells him, "It's really Nelson and Lyle should be facing Mr. Shimada."

He shrugs. "What can you do? The lawyer got Lyle on the phone finally and the guy just laughed at him. Said he was taking oxygen just to get out of bed and go to the toilet and could die any time. Furthermore he said the disease had spread to his brain and he had no idea what the lawyer was talking about. And he'd had to sell his computer and didn't keep any of the disks. In other words he told the lawyer to – to go jump in the lake." Suppressing "fuck himself" like that was maybe a way of courting Elvira, he doesn't know. Late in the game as it is, you keep trying. He likes her being so thin -she makes Pru and even Janice look thick and there is something cool and quiet about her he finds comforting, like a television screen when you can't hear the words, just see the flicker. "I had to laugh," he says, of Lyle's last communications. "Dying has its advantages."

She asks at his side, "Won't Nelson be home in a week or so?"

"That's the schedule," Harry says. "Summer flies by, doesn't it? You notice it in the evening now. It's still warm but gets dark earlier and earlier. It's a thing you forget from year to year, that latesummer darkness. The cicadas. That smell of baked-out lawns. Except this summer's been so damn rainy – in my little garden, God, the weeds won't stop growing, and the lettuce and broccoli are so leggy they're falling over. And the pea vines have spread like Virginia creeper, up over the fence and into the neighbor's yard."

"At least it hasn't been so terribly hot like it was the summer before," Elvira says, "when everybody kept talking about the greenhouse effect. Maybe there is no greenhouse effect."

"Oh, there is," Rabbit tells her, with a conviction he didn't know he had. Across Route 111, above the red hat-shaped roof of the Pizza Hut, a flock of starlings, already migrating south, speckle the telephone wires like a bar of musical notation. "I won't live to see it," he says, "but you will, and my grandchildren. New York, Philly, their docks will be underwater, once Antarctica starts melting. All of the Jersey Shore." Ronnie Harrison and Ruth: what a shit, that guy.

"How is he doing, have you heard much? Nelson."

"He's dropped us a couple of cards of the Liberty Bell. He sounded cheerful. In a way, the kid's been always looking for more structure than we could ever give him, and I guess a rehab program is big on structure. He talks to Pru on the phone, but they don't encourage too much outside contact at this point."

"What does Pru think about everything?" Does Harry imagine it, an edge of heightened interest here, as if the sound on the TV set clicked back in?

"Hard to know what Pru thinks," he says. "I have the impression she was about ready to pack it in, the marriage, before he sent himself off. She and Janice and the kids have been up at the Poconos."

"That makes it lonely for you," Elvira Ollenbach says.

Could this be a feeler? Is he supposed to have her come on over? Have a couple daiquiris in the den, stroke the dark nape of her neck, see if her pussy matches up, up in that slanty spare bedroom where all the old Playboys were stashed in the closet when they moved in – the thought of that wiry young female body seeking to slake its appetites on his affects him like the thought of an avalanche. It would make a wreck of his routine. "At my age I don't mind it," he says. "I can watch the TV shows I want. National Geographic, Disney, World of Nature. When Janice is there she makes us watch all these family situation shows with everybody clowning around in the living room. This Roseanne, I asked her what the hell she sees in it, she told me, `I like her. She's fat and messy and mean, like most of the women in America.' I watch less and less. I try to have just one beer and go to bed early."

The young woman silently offers to move away, back to her cubicle in the direction of Paraguay. But he likes her near him, and abruptly asks, "You know who I'm sick of hearing about?"

"Who?"

"Pete Rose. 'Djou read in the Standard the other day how he's been in hot water before, in 1980 when he and a lot of the other Phils were caught taking amphetamines and the club traded away Randy Leach, the only player who admitted to it, and the rest of 'em just brazened it through?"

"I glanced at it. It was a Brewer doctor supplying the prescriptions."

"That's right, our own little burg. So that's why he thinks he can bluff it through now. Nobody else has to pay for what they do, everybody else gets away with everything. Ollie North, drug dealers, what with the jails being full and everybody such a bleeding heart anyway. Break the law, burn the flag, who the fuck cares?"

"Don't get yourself upset, Harry," she says, in her maternal, retreating mode. "The world is full of cheaters."

"Yeah, we should know."

She makes no response at all, having turned her back. Maybe she had been balling Nelson after all.

"I always thought he was an ugly ballplayer, anyway," he feels compelled to say, concerning Rose. "If you have to do it all with hustle and grit, you shouldn't be out there."

Out there, in the dog-days outdoors whose muggy alternation of light and shadow flickeringly gives him back his own ominous reflection, Harry notices that the refurbished yew hedge – he had a lawn service replace the dead bushes and renew the bark mulch – has collected a number of waxpaper pizza wrappers and Styrofoam coffee cups that have blown in from Route 111. He can't have their Japanese visitor see a mess like that. He goes outside, and the hot polluted air, bouncing off the asphalt, takes his breath away. The left side of his ribs gives a squeeze. He puts a Nitrostat to melt beneath his tongue before he begins to stoop. The more wastepaper he gathers, the more it seems there is candy wrappers, cigarette-pack cellophane, advertising fliers and whole pages of newspaper wrinkled by rain and browned by the sun, big soft-drink cups with the plastic lid still on and the straw still in and the dirty water from melted ice still sloshing around. There is no end of crud in the world. He should have brought out a garbage bag, he has both hands full and can feel his face getting red as he tries to hold yet one more piece of crumpled sticky cardboard in his fanned fingers. A limousine cracklingly pulls into the lot while Harry is still picking up the trash, and he has to run inside to cram it all into the wastebasket in his office. Puffing, his heart thudding, his metallic-gray suit coat pulling at the buttons, he rushes back across the showroom to greet Mr. Shimada at the entrance, shaking his hand with a hand unwashed of street grit, dried sugar, and still-sticky pizza topping.

Mr. Shimada is an impeccable compact man of about five six, carrying an amazingly thin oxblood-red briefcase and wearing a smoke-blue suit with an almost invisible pinstripe, tailored to display a dapper breadth of his gold-linked French cuffs and high white collar, on a shirt with a pale-blue body. He looks dense, like a beanbag filled to the corners with buckshot, and in good physical trim, though stocky, with a burnish of California tan on his not unfriendly face. "Is very nice meeting you," he says. "Area most nice." He speaks English easily, but with enough of an accent to cost Harry a second's response time answering him.

"Well, not around here exactly," he answers, instantly thinking that this is tactless, for why would Toyota want to locate its franchise in an ugly area? "I mean, the farm country is what we're famous for, barns with hex signs and all that." He wonders if he should explain "hex sign" and decides it's not worth it. "Would you like to look around the facility? At the setup?" In case "facility" didn't register. Talking to foreigners really makes you think about the language.