Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike
“Oh of course, but words don’t mean anything to a woman in love.”
“Who? You with Webb?”
“No, you goon. Thelma. With you.”
“She told me, she loves Ronnie. Though I don’t see how she can.”
“He’s her bread and butter. You’re her dream man. You really turn her on.”
“You sound amazed,” he said accusingly.
“Oh, you don’t not turn me on, I can see what she sees, it’s just…” She turned away to hide her tears. Everywhere he looked, women were crying. “… . the intrusion. To know that that was her that sent that other thing way back then, to think of her watching us all the time, waiting to pounce … They’re evil people, Harry. I don’t want to see any of them anymore.”
“Oh come on.” He had to hug her, there in the hollow hall. He likes it now when she gets all flustered and frowny, her breath hot and somehow narrow with grief she seems most his then, the keystone of his wealth. Once when she got like this, her fear contaminated him and he ran; but in these middle years it is so clear to him that he will never run that he can laugh at her, his stubborn prize. “They’re just like us. That was a holiday. In real life they’re very square.”
Janice was vehement. “I’m furious with her, doing such a flirtatious thing, so soon after. They’ll never let us alone, never, now that we have a house. As long as we were at Mother’s we were protected.”
And it was true, the Harrisons and the Murketts and Buddy Inglefinger and the tall new girlfriend with her frizzy hair now up in corn rows and juju beads like the woman in “10” did come over last night, the Angstroms’ first night in their new house, bearing bottles of champagne and brandy, and stayed until two, so Sunday feels sour and guilty. Harry has no habits yet in this house; without habits and Ma Springer’s old furniture to cushion him, his life stretches emptily on all sides, and it seems that moving in any direction he’s bound to take a fall.
The other piece of mail that came Saturday, the postcard, was from Nelson.
Hi Mom & Dad -
Spring Semester begins the 28th so am in good shape. Need certified check for $1087 (397 instrucional fee, 90 general fee, 600 surcharge for non Ohio students) plus living expenses. $2000-2500 slid. be enuff. Will call when you have phone. Melanie says Hi. Love, Nelson
On the other side of the card was a modern brick building topped by big slatted things like hot air vents, identified as Business
Administration Building, Kent State University. Harry asked, “What about Pru? The kid’s a father and doesn’t seem to know it.”
“He knows it. He just can’t do everything at once. He’s told
Pru over the phone he’ll drive back as soon as he’s registered and look at the baby and leave us the car he took. Though maybe,
Harry, we could just let him use it for now.”
“That’s my Corona!”
“He’s doing what you wanted him to do, go back to college.
Pru understands.”
“She understands she’s linked up with a hopeless loser,” Harry said, but his heart wasn’t in it. The kid was no threat to him for now. Harry was king of the castle.
And today is Super Sunday. Janice tries to get him up for church, she is driving Mother, but he is far too hungover and wants to return to the warm pocket of a dream he had been having, a dream involving a girl, a young woman, he has never met before, with darkish hair, they have met somehow at a party and are in a little bathroom together, not speaking but with a rapport, as if just having had sex or about to have sex, between them, sex very certain and casual between them but not exactly happening, the floor of many small square tiles at an angle beneath them, the small space of the bathroom cupped around them like the little chrome bowl around the flame of the perpetual cigar lighter at the old tobacco store downtown, the bliss of a new relationship, he wants it to go on and on but is awake and can’t get back. This bed room, its bright slanted ceiling, is strange. They must get curtains soon. Is Janice up to this? Poor mutt, she’s never had to do much. He makes what breakfast he can of a single orange in the nearly empty refrigerator, plus some salted nuts left over from the party last night, plus a cup of instant coffee dissolved with hot water straight from the tap. This house too, like Webb’s, has those single-lever faucets shaped like a slender prick stung on the tip by a bee. The refrigerator went with the place and, one of the things that sold him, has an automatic ice-maker that turns out crescent shaped cubes by the bushel. Even though the old Mixmaster works he hasn’t forgotten his promise to Janice to buy her a Cuisinart. Maybe the trouble she has getting meals on the table related to its being Ma Springer’s old-fashioned kitchen. He roams through his house warily exulting in the cast-iron radiators, the brass window catches, the classy little octagonal bathroom tiles, and the doors with key-lock knobs; these details of what he has bought shine out in the absence of furniture and will soon sink from view as the days here clutter them over. Now they are naked and pristine.
Upstairs, in a slanting closet off of what once must have been a boys’ bedroom - its walls pricked with dozens of thumbtack holes and marred with ends of Scotch tape used to hold posters - he finds stacks of Playboys and Penthouses from the early Seventies. He fetches from out beside the kitchen steps, under the slowly revolving electric meter, one of the big green plastic trash barrels he and Janice bought yesterday at Shur Valu; but before disposing of each magazine Rabbit leafs through it, searching out the center spreads month after month, year after year, as the airbrushing recedes and the pubic hair first peeks and then froths boldly forth and these young women perfect as automobile bodies let their negligees fall open frontally and revolve upon their couches of leopard skin so subscribers’ eyes at last can feast upon their full shame and treasure. An invisible force month after month through each year’s seasons forces gently wider open their flawless thighs until somewhere around the bicentennial issues the Constitutional triumph of open beaver is attained, and the buxom boldly gazing girls from Texas and Hawaii and South Dakota yield up to the lights and lens a vertical rosy aperture that seems to stare back, out of a blood-flushed nether world, scarcely pretty, an ultimate of disclosure which yet acts as a barrier to some secret beyond, within, still undisclosed as the winter light diminishes at the silent window. Outside, a squirrel is watching, its gray back arched, its black eye alert. Nature, Harry sees, is everywhere. This tree that comes so close to the house he thinks is a cherry, its bark in rings. The squirrel, itself spied, scurries on. The full load of magazines makes the trash barrel almost too heavy to lift. A ton of cunt. He lugs it downstairs. Janice comes back after two, having had lunch with her mother and Pru and the baby.
“Everybody seemed cheerful,” she reports, “including Baby.”
“Baby have a name yet?”
“Pru asked Nelson about Rebecca and he said absolutely not. Now she’s thinking of Judith. That’s her mother’s name. I told them to forget Janice, I never much liked it for myself.”
“I thought she hated her mother.”
“She doesn’t hate her, she doesn’t much respect her. It’s her father she hates. But he’s been on the phone to her a couple of times and been very, what’s the word, conciliatory.”
“Oh great. Maybe he can come and help run the lot. He can do our steam fitting. How does Pru feel about Nelson’s running off, just on the eve?”
Janice takes off her hat, a fuzzy violet loose-knit beret she wears in winter and that makes her look with the sheepskin coat like some brown-faced boy of a little soldier off to the wars. Her hair stands up with static electricity. In the empty living room she has nowhere to drop her hat, and throws it onto a white windowsill. “Well,” she says, “she’s interesting about it. For just now she says she’s just as glad he isn’t around, it would be one more thing to cope with. In general she feels it’s something he had to do, to get his shit together -that’s her expression. I think she knows she pushed him. Once he gets his degree, she thinks, he’ll be much more
“Huh. Whaddeya have to do to get blamed for something these days?”
“They’re very tolerant of each other,” Janice says, “and I think that’s nice.” She heads upstairs, and Harry follows her up, closely, afraid of losing her in the vast newness of their house.
He asks, “She gonna go out there and live with him in an apartment or what?”
“She thinks her going out there with the baby would panic him right now. And of course for Mother it’d be much nicer if she stayed.”
“Isn’t Pru at all miffed about Melanie?”
“No, she says Melanie will watch after him for her. They don’t have this jealousy thing the way we do, if you can believe them.”
“If.”
“Speaking of which.” Janice drops her coat on the bed and bends over, ass high, to unzip her boots. “Thelma had left a message with Mother about whether or not you and I wanted to come over to their house for a light supper and watch the Super Bowl. I guess the Murketts will be there.”
“And you said?”
“I said No. Don’t worry, I was quite sweet. I said we were having Mother and Pru over here to watch the game on our brand-new Sony. It’s true. I invited them.” In stocking feet she stands and puts her hands on the hips of her black church suit as if daring him to admit he would rather go out and be with that racy crowd than stay home with his family.
“Fine,” he says. “I haven’t really seen -“
“Oh, and quite a sad thing. Mother got it from Grace Stuhl, who’s good friends apparently with Peggy Fosnacht’s aunt. While we were down there Peggy went into her doctor’s for a check-up and by nighttime he had her in the hospital and a breast taken off.”
“My God.” Breast he had sucked. Poor old Peggy. Flicked away by God’s fmgemail. Life is too big for us, in the end.
“They of course said they got it all but then they always say that.
“She seemed lately headed for something unfortunate.”
“She’s been grotesque. I should call her, but not today.”
Janice is changing into dungarees to do housecleaning. She says the people have left the place filthy but he can’t see it, except for the Playboys. She has never been much of a neatness freak wherever they have lived before. Uncurtained winter light bouncing off the bare floors and blank walls turns her underwear to silver and gives her shoulders and arms a quick life as of darting fish before they disappear into an old shirt of his and a moth-eaten sweater. Behind her their new bed, unmade, hasn’t been fucked on yet, they were too drunk and exhausted last night. In fact they haven’t since that night on the island. He asks her irritably what about his lunch.
Janice asks, “Oh, didn’t you find something in the fridge?”
“There was one orange. I ate it for breakfast.”
“I know I bought eggs and sliced ham but I guess Buddy and what’s-her-name -“
“Valerie.”
“Wasn’t her hair wild? do you think she takes drugs? - ate it all up in that omelette they made after midnight. Isn’t that a sign of drugs, an abnormal appetite for food? I know there’s some cheese left, Harry. Couldn’t you make do with cheese and crackers until I go out and buy something for Mother later? I don’t know what’s open Sundays around here, I can’t keep running back to the Mt. Judge Superette and using up gas.”
“‘No,” he agrees, and makes do with cheese and crackers and a Schlitz that is left over from the three sixpacks Ronnie and Thelma brought over. Webb and Cindy brought the brandy and champagne. All afternoon he helps Janice clean, Windexing windows and wiping woodwork while she mops floors and even scours the kitchen and bathroom sinks. They have a downstairs bathroom here but he doesn’t know where to buy toilet paper printed with comic strips. Janice has brought her mother’s waxing machine in the Mustang along with some Butcher’s paste and he wipes the wax on the long blond living-room floor, each whorl of wood grain and slightly popped-up nail and old scuff of a rubber heel his, his house. As he lays the wax on with circular swipes Rabbit keeps chasing the same few thoughts in his brain, stupid as brains are when you do physical work. Last night he kept wondering if the other two couples had gone ahead and swapped, Ronnie and Cindy doing it the second time, after he and Janice had left and they did act cozy, as if the four of them made the innermost circle of the party and the Angstroms and poor Buddy and that hungry Valerie were second echelon or third worlders somehow. Thelma got pretty drunk for her, her sallow skin gleaming to remind him of Vaseline, though when he thanked her for sending the clipping about the goose she stared at him and then sideways at Ronnie and then back at him as if he had rocks in his head. He guesses it’ll all come out, what happened down there afterwards, people can’t keep a good secret, but it pains him to think that Thelma would let Webb do to her everything the two of them did or that Cindy really wanted to go with Ronnie again and would lift up her heavy breast with a motherly hand so that loudmouthed jerk could suck and tell about it, with his scalp bare like that he’s such a baby, Harrison. No point in keeping secrets, we’ll all be dead soon enough, already we’re survivors, the kids are everywhere, making the music, giving the news. Ever since that encounter with Ruth he’s felt amputated, a whole world half-seen in the comer of his eye snuffed out. Janice and the waxing machine are whining and knocking behind him and the way his brain is going on reminds him of some article he read last year in the paper or Time about some professor at Princeton’s theory that in ancient times the gods spoke to people directly through the left or was it the right half of their brains, they were like robots with radios in their heads telling them everything to do, and then somehow around the time of the ancient Greeks or Assyrians the system broke up, the batteries too weak to hear the orders, though there are glimmers still and that is why we go to church, and what with all these jigaboos and fags roller-skating around with transistorized earmuffs on their heads we’re getting back to it. How at night just before drifting off he hears Mom’s voice clear as a whisper from the corner of the room saying Hassy, a name as dead as the boy that was called that is dead. Maybe the dead are gods, there’s certainly something kind about them, the way they give you room. What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand. Mom, Pop, old man Springer, baby Becky, good old Jill (maybe -that dream had to do with the time he took her in so suddenly, except her hair wasn’t dark, it was so intense, the dream, there’s nothing like a new relationship), Skeeter, Mr. Abendroth, Frank Byer, Mamie Eisenhower just recently, John Wayne, LBJ, JFK, Skylab, the goose. With Charlie’s mother and Peggy Fosnacht cooking. And his daughter Annabelle Byer snuffed out with that whole world he was watching in the corner of his eye like those entire planets obliterated in Star Wars. The more dead you know it seems the more living there are you don’t know. Ruth’s tears, when he was leaving: maybe God is in the universe the way salt is in the ocean, giving it a taste. He could never understand why people can’t drink saltwater, it can’t be any worse than mixing Coke and potato chips.
Behind him he hears Janice knocking her waxer clumsily against the baseboards at every sweep and it comes to him why they’re being so busy, they’re trying not to panic here in this house, where they shouldn’t be at all, so far from Joseph Street. Lost in space. Like what souls must feel when they awaken in a baby’s body so far from Heaven: not only scared so they cry but guilty, guilty. A huge hole to fill up. The money it’ll take to fill these rooms with furniture when they had it all free before: he’s ruined himself. And the mortgage payments: $62,400 at 13%2 per cent comes to nearly $8500 interest alone, $700 a month over twenty years nibbling away at the principal until he’s sixty-six. What did Ruth say about her youngest, 6/6/66? Funny about numbers, they don’t lie but do play tricks. Three score and ten, all the things he’ll never get to do now: to have Cindy arrange herself in the pose of one of those Penthouse sluts on a leopar
Last night Buddy turned to him so drunk his silver-rimmed eyeglasses were steamed and said he knew it was crazy, he knew what people would say about her being too tall and having three children and all, but Valerie really did it for him. She is the one, Harry. With tears in his eyes he said that. The big news from over at the Flying Eagle was Doris Kaufmann’s planning to get married again. To a guy Rabbit used to know slightly, Don Eberhardt, who had gotten rich buying up inner-city real estate when nobody wanted it, before the gas crunch. Life is sweet, that’s what they say.
Light still lingers in the windows, along the white windowsills, at five when they finish, the days this time of year lengthening against the grain. The planets keep their courses no matter what we do. In the freshly waxed hall by the foot of the stairs he touches Janice underneath her chin where the flesh is soft but not really repulsive and suggests a little nap upstairs, but she gives him a kiss warm and competent, the competence cancelling out the warmth, and tells him, “Oh Harry, that’s a sweet idea but I have no idea when they might be coming, it’s all mixed up with a hedown Mother was going to have, she really does seem frailer, and the baby’s feeding time, and I haven’t even shopped yet. Isn’t the Super Bowl on?”