John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

She sees hope in his face and touches his cheek a third time. At night now, Harry, having to arise at least once and sometimes, if there's been more than one beer with television, twice, has learned to touch his way across the bedroom in the pitch dark, touching the glass top of the bedside table and then with an outreached arm after a few blind steps the slick varnished edge of the high bureau and from there to the knob of the bathroom door. Each touch, it occurs to him every night, leaves a little deposit of sweat and oil from the skin of his fingertips; eventually it will darken the varnished bureau edge as the hems of his golf-pants pockets have been rendered grimy by his reaching in and out for tees and ball markers, round after round, over the years; and that accumulated deposit of his groping touch, he sometimes thinks when the safety of the bathroom and its luminescent light switch has been attained, will still be there, a shadow on the varnish, a microscopic cloud of his body oils, when he is gone.

"Don't push me, honey," Janice says, in a rare tone of direct appeal that makes his hard old heart accelerate with revived husbandly feeling. "This horrible thing with Nelson really has been a stress, though I may not always show it. I'm his mother, I'm humiliated, I don't know what's going to happen, exactly. Everything's in flux."

His chest feels full; his left ribs cage a twinge. His vision of working side by side with Nelson has fled, a pipe dream. He tries to make Janice, so frighteningly, unusually somber and frontal, smile with a tired joke. "I'm too old for flux," he tells her.

Nelson is scheduled to return from rehab the same day that the second U.S. Congressman in two weeks, a white Republican this time, is killed in a plane crash. One in Ethiopia, one in Louisiana; one a former Black Panther, and this one a former sheriff. You don't think of being a politician as being such a hazardous profession; but it makes you fly. Pru drives to get her husband at the halfway house in North Philadelphia while Janice babysits. Soon after they arrive, Janice comes home to Penn Park. "I thought they should be alone with each other, the four of them," she explains to Harry.

"How did he seem?"

She thoughtfully touches her upper lip with the tip of her tongue. "He seemed… serious. Very focused and calm. Not at all jittery like he was. I don't know how much Pru told him about Toyota withdrawing the franchise and the hundred forty-five thousand you promised we'd pay so soon. I didn't want to fling it at him right off the bat."

"What did you say, then?"

"I said he looked wonderful – he looks a little heavy, actually – and told him you and I were very proud of him for sticking it out."

"Huh. Did he ask about me? My health?"

"Not exactly, Harry – but he knows we'd have said something if anything more was wrong with you. He seemed mostly interested in the children. It was really very touching – he took them both off with him into the room where Mother used to have all the plants, what we called the sun parlor, and apologized for having been a bad father to them and explained about the drugs and how he had been to a place where they taught him how to never take drugs again."

"Did he apologize to you for having been a bad son? To Pru for being a crappy husband?"

"I have no idea what he and Pru said to each other – they had hours in the car together, the traffic around Philadelphia is getting worse and worse, what with all the work on the Expressway. All the roads and bridges are falling apart at once."

"He didn't ask about me at all?"

"He did, of course he did, honey. You and I are supposed to go over there for dinner tomorrow night."

"Oh. So I can admire the drugless wonder. Great."

"You mustn't talk like that. He needs all of our support. Returning to your milieu is the hardest part of recovery."

"Milieu, huh? So that's what we are."

"That's what they call it. He's going to have to stay away from that druggy young people's crowd that meets at the Laid-Back. So his immediate family must work very hard to fill in the gap."

"Oh my God, don't sound so fucking goody-goody," he says. Resentment churns within him. He resents Nelson's getting all this attention for being a prodigal son. He resents Janice's learning new words and pushing outward into new fields, away from him. He resents the fact that the world is so full of debt and nobody has to pay – not Mexico or Brazil, not the sleazy S and L banks, not Nelson. Rabbit never had much use for old-fashioned ethics but their dissolution eats at him.

The night and the next day pass, in bed and at the lot. He tells Benny and Elvira that Nelson is back and he looked fat to his mother but didn't announce any plans. Elvira has received a call from Rudy Krauss asking if she wanted to come over to Route 422 and sell for him. A Mr. Shimada spoke very highly of her. Also she hears that Jake is leaving the Volvo-Olds in Oriole and heading up a Lexus agency toward Pottstown. For now though she would rather hang loose here and see what Nelson has in mind. Benny's been asking around at other agencies and isn't too worried. "What happens happens, you know what I mean? As long as I got my health and my family – those are my priorities." Harry has asked them not to tell anyone in Service yet about Mr. Shimada's surprise attack. He feels increasingly detached; as he walks the plastic-tiled display floor, his head seems to float above it as dizzily high as his top-hatted head above the pitted, striped asphalt that day of the parade. He is growing. He drives home, catches the beginning of Brokaw on 10 (he may have a kind of hare lip, but at least he doesn't say "aboot") before Janice insists he get back in the Celica with her and drive across Brewer to Mt. Judge for the zillionth time in his life.

Nelson has shaved his mustache and taken off his earring. His face has a playground tan and he does look plump. His upper lip, exposed again, seems long and pufy and bulging outward, like Ma Springer's used to. That's who it turns out he resembles; she had a tight stuffed-skin sausage look that Harry can see now developing in Nelson. The boy moves with a certain old-lady stiffness, as if the rehab has squeezed the drugs and the jitters out of him but also his natural nervous quickness. For the first time, he seems to his father middle-aged, and his thinning hair and patches of exposed scalp part of him and not just a condition that will heal. He reminds Harry of a minister, a slightly sleek and portly representative of some no-name sect like that lamebrain who buried Thelma. A certain acquired formality extends to his clothes: though the evening is seasonably humid and warm, he wears a striped necktie with a white shirt, making Harry feel falsely youthful in his soft-collared polo shirt with the Flying Eagle emblem.

Nelson met his parents at the door and after embracing his mother attempted to do the same with his father, awkwardly wrapping both arms around the much taller man and pulling him down to rub scratchy cheeks. Harry was taken by surprise and not pleased: the embrace felt showy and queer and forced, the kind of thing these TV evangelists tell you to do to one another, before they run off screen and get their secretaries to lay them. He and Nelson have hardly touched since the boy's age hit double digits. Some kind of reconciliation or amends was no doubt intended but to Harry it felt like a rite his son has learned elsewhere and that has nothing to do with being an Angstrom.

Pru in her turn seems bewildered by suddenly having a minister for a husband; when Harry bends down expecting the soft warn push of her lips on his, he gets instead her dry cheek, averted with a fearful quickness. He is hurt but can't believe he has done anything wrong. Since their episode that wild and windy night, the silence from her side has indicated a wish to pretend it never happened, and with his silence he has indicated that he is willing. He hasn't the strength any more, the excess vitality, for an affair – its danger, its demand performances, the secrecy added like a filigree to your normal life, your gnawing preoccupation with it and with the constant threat of its being discovered and ended. He can't bear to think of Nelson's knowing, whereas Ronnie's knowing he didn't much mind. He even enjoyed it, like a sharp elbow given under the basket. Thelma and he had been two of a kind, each able to gauge the risks and benefits, able to construct together a stolen space in which they could feel free for an hour, free of everything but each other. Within your own generation – the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air – you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire. So he doesn't like to feel even this small alteration in Pru's temperature, this coolness like a rebuke.