“Look, the guy lives with his mother who’s getting to be more and more of a drag, he’s never married, he’s always talking about his nieces and nephews but I don’t think they give him shit actually -“
“All right, you don’t have to sell it. I like seeing Charlie. I must say I think it’s creepy that you encourage it.”
“Why shouldn’t I? Because of that old business? I don’t hold a grudge. It made you a better person.”
“Thanks,” Janice says dryly. Guiltily he tries to count up how many nights since he’s given her an orgasm. These July nights, you get thirsty for one more beer as the Phillies struggle and then in bed feel a terrific weariness, a bliss of inactivity that leads you to understand how men can die willingly, gladly, into an eternal release from the hell of having to perform. When Janice hasn’t been fucked for a while, her gestures speed up, and the thought of Charlie’s coming intensifies this agitation. “What night?” she asks.
“Whenever. What’s Melanie’s schedule this week?”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“He might as well meet her properly. I took him over to the crépe place for lunch and though she tried to be pleasant she was rushed and it didn’t really work out.”
“What would `work out’ mean, if it did?”
“Don’t give me a hard time, it’s too fucking humid. I’ve been thinking of asking Ma to go halves with us on a new air-conditioner, I read where a make called Friedrich is best. I mean `work out’ just as ordinary human interchange. He kept asking me embarrassing questions about Nelson.”
“Like what? What’s so embarrassing about Nelson?”
“Like whether or not he was going to go back to college and why he kept showing up at the lot.”
“Why shouldn’t he show up at the lot? It was his grandfather’s. And Nelson’s always loved cars.”
“Loves to bounce ‘em around, at least. The Mustang has a whole new set of rattles, have you noticed?”
“I hadn’t noticed,” Janice says primly, pouring herself more Campari. In an attempt to cut down her alcohol intake, to slow down creeping middle-itis, she has appointed Campari-and-soda her summer drink; but keeps forgetting to put in the soda. She adds, “He’s used to those flat Ohio roads.”
Out at Kent Nelson had bought some graduating senior’s old Thunderbird and then when he decided to go to Colorado sold it for half what he paid. Remembering this adds to Rabbit’s suffocating sensation of being put upon. He tells her, “They have the fifty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit out there too. The poor country is trying to save gas before the Arabs turn our dollars into zinc pennies and that baby boy of yours does fifty-five in second gear.”
Janice knows he is trying to get her goat now, and turns her back with that electric swiftness, as of speeded-up film, and heads toward the dining-room phone. “I’ll ask him for next week,” she says. “If that’ll make you less bitchy.”
Charlie always brings flowers, in a stapled green cone of paper, that he hands to Ma Springer. After all those years of kissing Springer’s ass he knows his way around the widow. Bessie takes them without much of a smile; her maiden name was Koerner and she never wholly approved of Fred’s taking on a Greek, and then her foreboding came true when Charlie had an affair with Janice with such disastrous consequences, around the time of the moon landing. Well, nobody is going to the moon much these days.
The flowers, unwrapped, are roses the color of a palomino horse. Janice puts them in a vase, cooing. She has dolled up in a perky daisy-patterned sundress for the occasion, that shows off her brown shoulders, and wears her long hair up in the heat, to remind them all of her slender neck and to display the gold necklace of tiny overlapping fish scales that Harry gave her for their twentieth wedding anniversary three years ago. Paid nine hundred dollars for it then, and it must be worth fifteen hundred now, gold going crazy the way it is. She leans forward to give Charlie a kiss, on the mouth and not the cheek, thus effortlessly reminding those who watch of how these two bodies have travelled within one another. “Charlie, you look too thin,” Janice says. “Don’t you know how to feed yourself?”
“I pack it in, Jan, but it doesn’t stick to the ribs anymore. You look terrific, on the other hand.”
“Melanie’s got us all on a health kick. Isn’t that right, Mother? Wheat germ and alfalfa sprouts and I don’t know what all. Yogurt.”
“I feel better, honest to God,” Bessie pronounces. “I don’t know though if it’s the diet or just having a little more life around the house.”
Charlie’s square fingertips are still resting on Janice’s brown arm. Rabbit sees the phenomenon as he would something else in nature - a Japanese beetle on a leaf, or two limbs of a tree rubbing together in the wind. Then he remembers, descending into the molecules, what love feels like: huge, skin on skin, planets impinging.
“We all eat too much sugar and sodium,” Melanie says, in that happy uplifted voice of hers, that seems unconnected to what is below, like a blessing no one has asked for. Charlie’s hand has snapped away from Janice’s skin; he is all warrior attention; his profile in the gloom of this front room through which all visitors to this household must pass shines, low-browed and jut jawed, the muscles around the hollow of his jaw pulsing. He looks younger than at the lot, maybe because the light is poorer.
“Melanie,” Harry says, “you remember Charlie from lunch the other day, doncha?”
“Of course. He had the mushrooms and capers.”
“Onions,” Charlie says, his hand still poised to take hers.
“Charlie’s my right-hand man over there, or I’m his is I guess how he’d put it. He’s been moving cars for Springer Motors since -” He can’t think of a joke.
“Since they were called horseless buggies,” Charlie says, and takes her hand in his. Watching, Harry marvels at her young hand’s narrowness. We broaden all over. Old ladies’ feet: they look like little veiny loaves of bread, rising. Away from her spacey stare Melanie is knit as tight together as a new sock. Charlie is moving in on her. “How are you, Melanie? How’re you liking these parts?”
“They’re nice,” she smiles. “Quaint, almost.”
“Harry tells me you’re a West Coast baby.”
Her eyes lift, so the whites beneath the irises show, as she looks toward her distant origins. “Oh yes. I was born in Marin County. My mother lives now in a place called Carmel. That’s to the south.”
“I’ve heard of it,” Charlie says. “You’ve got some rock stars there.”
“Not really, I don’t think … . Joan Baez, but she’s more what you’d call traditional. We live in what used to be our summer place.”
“How’d that happen?”
Startled, she tells him. “My father used to work in San Francisco as a corporation lawyer. Then he and my mother broke up and we had to sell the house on Pacific Avenue. Now he’s in Oregon learning to be a forester.”
“That’s a sad story, you could say,” Harry says.
“Daddy doesn’t think so,” Melanie tells him. “He’s living with a lovely girl who’s part Yakima Indian.”
“Back to Nature,” Charlie says.
“It’s the only way to go,” Rabbit says. “Have some soybeans.”
This is a joke, for he is passing them Planter’s dry-roasted cashews in a breakfast bowl, nuts that he bought on impulse at the grocery next to the state liquor store fifteen minutes ago, running out in the rattling Mustang to stoke up for tonight’s company. He had been almost scared off by the price on the jar, $2.89, up 30¢ from the last time he’d noticed, and reached for the dry-roasted peanuts instead. Even these, though, were over a dollar, $1.09, peanuts that you used to buy a big sack of unshelled for a quarter when he was a boy, so he thought, What the hell’s the point of being rich, and took the cashews after all.
He is offended when Charlie glances down and holds up a fastidious palm, not taking any. “No salt,” Harry urges. “Loaded with protein.”
“Never touch
junk,” Charlie says. “Doc says it’s a no-no.”
“Junk!” he begins to argue.
But Charlie is keeping the pressure on Melanie. “Every winter, I head down to Florida for a month. Sarasota, on the Gulf side.”
“What’s that got to do with California?” Janice asks, cutting in.
“Same type of Paradise,” Charlie says, turning a shoulder so as to keep speaking directly to Melanie. “It’s my meat. Sand in your shoes, that’s the feeling, wearing the same ragged cut-offs day after day. This is over on the Gulf side. I hate the Miami side. The only way you’d get me over on the Miami side would —be inside an alligator. They have ‘em, too: come up out of these canals right onto your lawn and eat your pet dog. It happens a lot.
“I’ve never been to Florida,” Melanie says, looking a little glazed, even for her.
“You should give it a try,” Charlie says. “It’s where the real people are.”
“You mean we’re not real people?” Rabbit asks, egging him on, helping Janice out. This must hurt her. He takes a cashew between his molars and delicately cracks it, prolonging the bliss. That first fracture, in there with tongue and spit and teeth. He loves nuts. Clean eating, not like meat. In the Garden of Eden they ate nuts and fruit. Dry-roasted, the cashew bums a little. He prefers them salted, soaked in sodium, but got this kind in deference to Melanie; he’s being brainwashed about chemicals. Still, some chemical must have entered into this dry-roasting too, there’s nothing you can eat won’t hurt you down here on earth. Janice must just hate this.
“It’s not just all old people either,” Charlie is telling Melanie. “You see plenty of young people down there too, just living in their skins. Gorgeous.”
“Janice,” Mrs. Springer says, pronouncing it Chaniss. “We should go on the porch and you should offer people drinks.” To Charlie she says, “Melanie made a lovely fruit punch.”
j “How much gin can it absorb?” Charlie asks.
Harry loves this guy, even if he is putting the make on Melanie in front of Janice. On the porch, when they’ve settled on the aluminum furniture with their drinks and Janice is in the kitchen stirring at the dinner, he asks him, to show him off, “How’d you like Carter’s energy speech?”
Charlie cocks his head toward the rosy-cheeked girl and says, “I thought it was pathetic. The man was right. I’m suffering from a crisis in confidence. In him.”
Nobody laughs, except Harry. Charlie passes the ball. “What did you think of it, Mrs. Springer?”
The old lady, called onto the stage, smooths the cloth of her lap and looks down as if for crumbs. “He seems a well-intentioned Christian man, though Fred always used to say the Democrats were just a tool for the unions. Still and all. Some businessman in there might have a better idea what to do with the inflation.”
“He is a businessman, Bessie,” Harry says. “He grows peanuts. His warehouse down there grosses more than we do.”
“I thought it was sad,” Melanie unexpectedly says, leaning forward so her loose gypsyish blouse reveals cleavage, a tube of air between her braless breasts, “the way he said people for the first time think things are going to get worse instead of better.”
“Sad if you’re a chick like you,” Charlie says. “For old crocks like us, things are going to get worse in any case.”
“You believe that?” Harry asks, genuinely surprised. He sees his life as just beginning, on clear ground at last, now that he has a margin of resources, and the stifled terror that always made him restless has dulled down. He wants less. Freedom, that he always thought was outward motion, turns out to be this inner dwindling.
“I believe it, sure,” Charlie says, “but what does this nice girl here believe? That the show’s over? How can she?”
“I believe,” Melanie begins. “Oh, I don’t know - Bessie, help me.”
Harry didn’t know she calls the old lady by her first name. Took him years of living with her to work up to feeling easy about that, and it wasn’t really until after one day he had accidentally walked in on her in her bathroom, Janice hogging theirs.
“Say what’s on your mind,” the old woman advises the younger. “Everybody else is.”
The luminous orbs of Melanie’s eyes scout their faces in a sweep that ends in an upward roll such as you see in images of saints. “I believe the things we’re running out of we can learn to do without. I don’t need electric carving knives and all that. I’m more upset about the snail darters and the whales than about iron ore and oil.” She lingers on this last word, giving it two syllables, and stares at Harry. As if he’s especially into oil. He decides what he resents about her is she seems always to be trying to hypnotize him. “I mean,” she goes on, “as long as there are growing things, there’s still a world with endless possibilities.”
The hum beneath her words hangs in the darkening space of the porch. Alien. Moonraker.
“One big weed patch,” Harry says. “Where the hell is Nelson, anyway?” He is irked, he figures, because this girl is out of this world and that makes his world feel small. He feels sexier even toward fat old Bessie. At least her voice has a lot of the county, a lot of his life, in it. That time he blundered into the bathroom he didn’t see much; she shouted, sitting on the toilet with her skirt around her knees, and he heard her shout and hardly saw a thing, just a patch of flank as white as a butcher’s marble counter.
Bessie answers him dolefully, “I believe he went out for a reason. Janice would know.”
Janice comes to the doorway of the porch, looking snappy in her daisies and an orange apron. “He went off around six with Billy Fosnacht. They should have been back by now.”
“Which car’d they take?”
“They had to take the Corona. You were at the liquor store with the Mustang.”
“Oh great. What’s Billy Fosnacht doing around anyway? Why isn’t he in the volunteer army?” He feels like making a show, for Charlie and Melanie, of authority.
There is authority, too, in the way Janice is holding a wooden stirring spoon. She says, to the company in general, “They say he’s doing very well. He’s in his first year of dental school up somewhere in New England. He wants to be a, what do they call it -?”
“Ophthalmologist,” Rabbit says.
“Endodontist.”
“My God,” is all Harry can say. Ten years ago, the night his house had burned, Billy had called his mother a bitch. He had seen Billy often since, all the years Nelson was at Mt. Judge High, but had never forgotten that, how Peggy had then slapped him, this little boy just thirteen years old, the marks of her fingers leaping up pink on the child’s delicate cheek. Then he had called her a whore, Harry’s jism warm inside her. Later that night Nelson had vowed to kill his father. You fucking asshole, you’ve let her die. I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you. Harry had put up his hands to fight. The misery of life. It has carried him away from the faces on the porch. In the silence he hears from afar a neighbor woman’s hammer knocking. “How are Ollie and Peggy?” he asks, his voice rough even after clearing it. Billy’s parents have dropped from his sight, as the Toyota business lifted him higher in the social scale.
“About the same,” Janice says. “Ollie’s still at the music store. They say Peggy’s gotten into causes.” She turns back to her stirring.
Charlie tells Melanie, “You should book yourself on a flight to Florida when you get fed up around here.”
“What’s with you and Florida?” Harry asks him loudly. “She says she comes from California and you keep pushing Florida at her. There’s no connection.”
Charlie pulls at his spiked pink punch and looks like a pathetic old guy, the skin pegged ever tighter to the planes of his skull. “We can make a connection.”
Melanie calls toward the kitchen, ` “Janice, can I be of any help?”
“No dear, thanks; it’s all but done. Is everybody starving? Does anybody else want their drink freshened?”
“Why not?” Harry asks, feeling reckless. This bunch isn’t
going to be fun, he’ll have to make his fun inside. “How about you, Charlie?”
“Forget it, champ. One’s my limit. The doctors tell me even that should be a no-no, in my condition.” Of Melanie he asks, “How’s your Kool-Aid holding up?”
“Don’t call it Kool-Aid, that’s rude,” Harry says, pretending to joust. “I admire anybody of this generation who isn’t polluting their system with pills and booze. Ever since Nelson got back, the sixpacks come and go in the fridge like, like coal down a chute.” He feels he has said this before, recently.
“I’ll get you some more,” Melanie sings, and takes Charlie’s glass, and Harry’s too. She has no name for him, he notices. Nelson’s father. Over the hill. Out of this world.
“Make mine weak,” he tells her. “A g-and-t.”
Ma Springer has been sitting there with thoughts of her own. She says to Stavros, “Nelson has been asking me all these questions about how the lot works, how much sales help there is, and how the salesmen are paid, and so on.”