“Don’t try it,” Rabbit advises.
“Her upbringing” – emphasis on the “ging” – “was orthodox enough – sailing and dancing classes and français and all that stuff.”
“Keep rhyming, Jill,” Nelson begs.
“Menstruation set in at age fourteen, but even with her braces off Jill was no queen. Her knowledge of boys was confined to boys who played tennis and whose parents with her parents dined. Which suited her perfectly well, since having observed her parents drinking and chatting and getting and spending she was in no great hurry to become old and fat and swell. Ooh, that was a stretch.”
“Don’t rhyme on my account,” Rabbit says. “I’m getting a beer, anybody else want one?”
Nelson calls, “I’ll share yours, Dad.”
“Get your own. I’ll get it for you.”
Jill strums to reclaim their attention. “Well, to make a boring story short, one summer” – she searches ahead for a rhyme, then adds, “after her daddy died.”
“Uh-oh,” Rabbit says, tiptoeing back with two beers.
“She met a boy who became her psycho-physical guide.”
Rabbit pulls his tab and tries to hush the pff.
“His name was Freddy –”
He sees there is nothing to do but yank it, which he does so quickly the beer foams through the keyhole.
“And the nicest thing about him was that she was ready.” Strum. “He had nice brown shoulders from being a lifeguard, and his bathing suit held something sometimes soft and sometimes hard. He came from far away, from romantic Rhode Island across Narragansett Bay.”
“Hey,” Rabbit olés.
“The only bad thing was, inside, the nice brown lifeguard had already died. Inside there was an old man with a dreadful need, for pot and hash and LSD and speed.” Now her strumming takes a different rhythm, breaking into the middle on the offbeat.
“He was a born loser, though his race was white, and he fucked sweet virgin Jill throughout one sandy night. She fell for him” – strum – “and got deep into his bag of being stoned: she freaked out nearly every time the bastard telephoned. She went from popping pills to dropping acid, then” – she halts and leans forward staring at Nelson so hard the boy softly cries, “Yes?”
“He lovingly suggested shooting heroin.”
Nelson looks as if he will cry: the way his eyes sink in and his chin develops another bump. He looks, Rabbit thinks, like a sulky girl. He can’t see much of himself in the boy, beyond the small straight nose.
The music runs on.
“Poor Jill got scared; the other kids at school would tell her not to be a self-destructive fool. Her mother, still in mourning, was being kept bus-ee, by a divorced tax lawyer from nearby Westerlee. Bad Freddy was promising her Heaven above, when all Jill wanted was his mundane love. She wanted the feel of his prick, not the prick of the needle; but Freddy would beg her, and stroke her, and sweet-talk and wheedle.”
And Rabbit begins to wonder if she has done this before, that rhyme was so slick. What hasn’t, this kid done before?
“She was afraid to die” – strum, strum, pale orange hair thrashing – “he asked her why. He said the world was rotten and insane; she said she had no cause to complain. He said racism was rampant, hold out your arm; she said no white man but him had ever done her any harm. He said the first shot will just be beneath the skin; she said okay, lover, put that shit right in.” Strum strum strum. Face lifted toward them, she is a banshee, totally bled. She speaks the next line. “It was hell.”
St-r-r-um. “He kept holding her head and patting her ass, and saying relax, he’d been to life-saving class. He asked her, hadn’t he shown her the face of God? She said, Yes, thank you, but she would have been happy to settle for less. She saw that her lover with his tan skin and white smile was death; she feared him and loved him with every frightened breath. So what did Jill do?”
Silence hangs on the upbeat.
Nelson blurts, “What?”
Jill smiles. “She ran to the Stonington savings bank and generously withdrew. She hopped inside her Porsche and drove away, and that is how come she is living with you two creeps today.”
Both father and son applaud. Jill drinks deep of the beer as a reward to herself. In their bedroom, she is still in the mood, artistic elation, to be rewarded. Rabbit says to her, “Great song. But you know what I didn’t like about it?”
“What?”
“Nostalgia. You miss it. Getting stoned with Freddy.”
“At least,” she says, “I wasn’t just playing, what did you call it, happy cunt?”
“Sorry I blew my stack.”
“Still want me to go?”
Rabbit, having sensed this would come, hangs up his pants, his shirt, puts his underclothes in the hamper. The dress she has dropped on the floor he drapes on a hook in her half of the closet, her dirty panties he puts in the hamper. “No. Stay.”
“Beg me.”
He turns, a big tired man, slack-muscled, who has to rise and set type in eight hours. “I beg you to stay.”
“Take back those slaps.”
“How can I?”
“Kiss my feet.”
He kneels to comply. Annoyed at such ready compliance, which implies pleasure, she stiffens her feet and kicks so her toenails stab his cheek, dangerously near his eyes. He pins her ankles to continue his kissing. Slightly doughy, matronly ankles. Green veins on her insteps. Nice remembered locker room taste. Vanilla going rancid.
“Your tongue between my toes,” she says; her voice cracks timidly, issuing the command. When again he complies, she edges forward on the bed and spreads her legs. “Now here.” She knows he enjoys this, but asks it anyway, to see what she can make of him, this alien man. His head, with its stubborn old-fashioned short haircut – the enemy’s uniform, athlete and soldier; bone above the ears, dingy blond silk thinning on top – feels large as a boulder between her thighs. The excitement of singing her song, ebbing, unites with the insistent warmth of his tongue lapping. A spark kindles, a green sprig lengthens in the barren space between her legs. “A little higher,” Jill says, then, her voice quite softened and crumbling, “Faster. Lovely. Lovely.”
One day after work as he and his father are walking down Pine Street toward their before-bus drink at the Phoenix Bar, a dapper thickset man with sideburns and hornrims intercepts them. “Hey, Angstrom.” Both father and son halt, blink. In the tunnel of sunshine, after their day of work, they generally feel hidden.
Harry recognizes Stavros. He is wearing a suit of little beige checks on a ground of greenish threads. He looks a touch thinner, more brittle, his composure more of an effort. Maybe he is just tense for this encounter. Harry says, “Dad, I’d like you to meet a friend of mine. Charlie Stavros, Earl Angstrom.”
“Pleased to meet you, Earl.”
The old man ignores the extended square hand and speaks to Harry. “Not the same that’s ruined my daughter-in-law?”
Stavros tries for a quick sale. “Ruined. That’s pretty strong. Humored is more how I’d put it.” His try for a smile ignored, Stavros turns to Harry. “Can we talk a minute? Maybe have a drink down at the corner. Sorry to butt in like this, Mr. Angstrom.”
“Harry, what is your preference? You want to be left alone with this scum or shall we brush him off?”
“Come on, Dad, what’s the point?”
“You young people may have your own ways of working things out, but I’m too old to change. I’ll get on the next bus. Don’t let yourself be talked into anything. This son of a bitch looks slick.”
“Give my love to Mom. I’ll try to get over this weekend.”
“If you can, you can. She keeps dreaming about you and Mim.”
“Yeah, some time could you give me Mim’s address?”
“She doesn’t have an address, just care of some agent in Los Angeles, that’s the way they do it now. You were thinking of writing her?”
“Maybe send her a postcard. See you tomorrow.”
br />
“Terrible dreams,” the old man says, and slopes to the curb to wait for the 16A bus, cheated of his beer, the thin disappointed back of his neck reminding Harry of Nelson.
Inside the Phoenix it is dark and cold; Rabbit feels a sneeze gathering between his eyes. Stavros leads the way to a booth and folds his hands on the Formica tabletop. Hairy hands that have held her breasts. Harry asks, “How is she?”
“She? Oh hell, in fine form.”
Rabbit wonders if this means what it seems. The tip of his tongue freezes on his palate, unable to think of a delicate way to probe. He says, “They don’t have a waitress in the afternoon. I’ll get a Daiquiri for myself, what for you?”
“Just soda water. Lots of ice.”
“No hootch?”
“Never touch it.” Stavros clears his throat, smooths back the hair above his sideburns with a flat hand that is, nevertheless, slightly trembling. He explains, “The medicos tell me it’s a no-no.”
Coming back with their drinks, Rabbit asks, “You sick?”
Stavros says, “Nothing new, the same old ticker. Janice must have told you, heart murmur since I was a kid.”
What does this guy think, he and Janice sat around discussing him like he was their favorite child? He does remember Janice crying out he couldn’t marry, expecting him, Harry, her husband, to sympathize. Oddly, he had. “She mentioned something.”
“Rheumatic fever. Thank God they’ve got those things licked now, when I was a kid I caught every bug they made.” Stavros shrugs. “They tell me I can live to be a hundred, if I take care of the physical plant. You know,” he says, “these doctors. There’s still a lot they don’t know.”
“I know. They’re putting my mother through the wringer right now.”
“Jesus, you ought to hear Janice go on about your mother.”
“Not so enthusiastic, huh?”
“Not so at all. She needs some gripe, though, to keep herself justified. She’s all torn up about the kid.”
“She left him with me and there he stays.”
“In court, you know, you’d lose him.”
“We’d see.”
Stavros makes a small chopping motion around his glass full of soda bubbles (poor Peggy Fosnacht; Rabbit should call her) to indicate a new angle in their conversation. “Hell,” he says, “I can’t take him in. I don’t have the room. As it is now, I have to send Janice out to the movies or over to her parents when my family visits. You know I just don’t have a mother, I have a grandmother. She’s ninety-three, speaking of living forever.”
Rabbit tries to imagine Stavros’s room, which Janice described as full of tinted photographs, and instead imagines Janice nude, tinted, Playmate of the month, posed on a nappy Greek sofa olive green in color, with scrolling arms, her body twisted at the hips just enough to hide her gorgeous big black bush. The crease of the centerfold cuts across her navel and one hand dangles a rose. The vision makes Rabbit for the first time hostile. He asks Stavros, “How do you see this all coming out?”
“That’s what I wanted to ask you.”
Rabbit asks, “She going sour on you?”
“No, Jesus, au contraire. She’s balling me ragged.”
Rabbit sips, swallows that, probes for another nerve. “She miss the kid?”
“Nelson, he comes over to the lot some days and she sees him weekends anyhow, I don’t know that she saw much more of him before. I don’t know as how motherhood is Janice’s best bag anyway. What she doesn’t much care for is the idea of her baby just out of diapers shacking up with this hippie.”
“She’s not a hippie, especially; unless everybody that age is. And I’m the one shacking up.”
“How is she at it?”
“She’s balling me ragged,” Rabbit tells him. He is beginning to get Stavros’s measure. At first, meeting him on the street so suddenly, he felt toward him like a friend, met through Janice’s body. Then first coming into the Phoenix he felt him as a sick man, a man holding himself together against odds. Now he sees him as a competitor, one of those brainy cute close-set little playmakers. O.K. So Rabbit is competing again. What he has to do is hang loose and let Stavros make the move.
Stavros hunches his square shoulders infinitesimally, has some soda, and asks, “What do you see yourself doing with this hippie?”
“She has a name. Jill.”
“What’s Jill’s big picture, do you know?”
“No. She has a dead father and a mother she doesn’t like, I guess she’ll go back to Connecticut when her luck runs thin.”
“Aren’t you being, so to speak, her luck?”
“I’m part of her picture right now, yeah.”
“And she of yours. You know, your living with this girl gives Janice an open-and-shut divorce case.”
“You don’t scare me, somehow.”
“Do I understand that you’ve assured Janice that all she has to do is come back and the girl will go?”
Rabbit begins to feel it, where Stavros is pressing for the opening. The tickle above his nose is beginning up again. “No,” he says, praying not to sneeze, “you don’t understand that.” He sneezes. Six faces at the bar look around; the little Schlitz spinner seems to hesitate. They are giving away refrigerators and ski weekends in Chile on the TV.
“You don’t want Janice back now?”
“I don’t know.”
“You would like a divorce so you can keep living the good life? Or marry the girl, maybe, even? Jill. She’ll break your balls, Sport.”
“You think too fast. I’m just living day by day, trying to forget my sorrow. I’ve been left, don’t forget. Some slick-talking kinky-haired peacenik-type Japanese-car salesman lured her away, I forget the son-of-a-bitch’s name.”
“That isn’t exactly the way it was. She came pounding on my door.”
“You let her in.”
Stavros looks surprised. “What else? She had put herself out on a limb. Where could she go? My taking her in made the least trouble for everybody.”
“And now it’s trouble?”
Stavros fiddles his fingertips as if cards are in them; if he loses this trick, can he take the rest? “Her staying on with me gives her expectations we can’t fulfill. Marriage isn’t my thing, sorry. With anybody.”
“Don’t try to be polite. So now you’ve tried her in all positions and want to ship her back. Poor old Jan. So dumb.”
“I don’t find her dumb. I find her – unsure of herself. She wants what every normal chick wants. To be Helen of Troy. There’ve been hours when I gave her some of that. I can’t keep giving it to her. It doesn’t hold up.” He becomes angry; his square brow darkens. “What do you want? You’re sitting there twitching your whiskers, so how about it? If I kick her out, will you pick her up?”
“Kick her out and see. She can always go live with her parents.”
“Her mother drives her crazy.”
“That’s what mothers are for.” Rabbit pictures his own. His bladder gets a touch of that guilty sweetness it had when as a child he was running to school late, beside the slime-rimmed gutter water that ran down from the ice plant. He tries to explain. “Listen, Stavros. You’re the one in the wrong. You’re the one screwing another man’s wife. If you want to pull out, pull out. Don’t try to commit me to one of your fucking coalition governments.”
“Back to that,” Stavros says.
“Right. You intervened, not me.”
“I didn’t intervene, I performed a rescue.”
“That’s what all you hawks say.” He is eager to argue about Vietnam, but Stavros keeps to the less passionate subject.
“She was desperate, fella. Christ, hadn’t you taken her to bed in ten years?”
“I resent that.”
“Go ahead. Resent it.”
“She was no worse off than a million wives.” A billion cunts, how many wives? Five hundred million? “We had relations. They didn’t seem so bad to me.”
“All I’m saying is, I didn’t c
ook this up, it was delivered to me hot. I didn’t have to talk her into anything, she was pushing all the way. I was the first chance she had. If I’d been a one-legged milkman, I would have done.”
“You’re too modest.”
Stavros shakes his head. “She’s some tiger.”
“Stop it, you’re giving me a hard-on.”
Stavros studies him squarely. “You’re a funny guy.”
“Tell me what it is you don’t like about her now.”
His merely interested tone relaxes Stavros’s shoulders an inch. The man measures off a little cage in front of his lapels. “It’s just too – confining. It’s weight I don’t need. I got to keep light, on an even keel. I got to avoid stress. Between you and me, I’m not going to live forever.”
“You just told me you might.”
“The odds are not.”
“You know, you’re just like me, the way I used to be. Everybody now is like the way I used to be.”
“She’s had her kicks for the summer, let her come back. Tell the hippie to move on, that’s what a kid like that wants to hear anyway.”
Rabbit sips the dregs of his second Daiquiri. It is delicious, to let this silence lengthen, widen: he will not promise to take Janice back. The game is on ice. He says at last, because continued silence would have been unbearably rude, “Just don’t know. Sorry to be so vague.”
Stavros takes it up quickly. “She on anything?”
“Who?”
“This nympho of yours.”
“On something?”
“You know. Pills. Acid. She can’t be on horse or you wouldn’t have any furniture left.”
“Jill? No, she’s kicked that stuff.”
“Don’t you believe it. They never do. These flower babies, dope is their milk.”
“She’s fanatic against. She’s been there and back. Not that this is any of your business.” Rabbit doesn’t like the way the game has started to slide; there is a hole he is trying to plug and can’t.
Stavros minutely shrugs. “How about Nelson? Is he acting different?”
“He’s growing up.” The answer sounds evasive. Stavros brushes it aside.