Rabbit, Run - John Updike [21]
His dreams are shallow, furtive things. His legs switch. His lips move a little against the pillow. The skin of his eyelids shudders as his eyeballs turn, surveying the inner wall of vision. Otherwise be is as dead, beyond harm. The slash of sun on the wall above him slowly knifes down, cuts across his chest, becomes a coin on the floor, and vanishes. In shadow he suddenly awakes, his ghostly blue irises searching the unfamiliar planes for the source of men’s voices. These voices are downstairs, and a rumble suggests that they are moving the furniture, tramping in circles, hunting him. But a familiar bulbous basso rings out, it is Tothero, and around this firm center the noises downstairs crystallize as the sounds of card-playing, drinking, horseplay, companionship. Rabbit rolls in his hot hollow and turns his face to his cool companion, the wall, and through a red cone of consciousness falls asleep again.
“Harry! Harry!” The voice is plucking at his shoulder, rumpling his hair. He rolls away from the wall, squinting upward into vanished sunshine. Tothero sits in the shadows, a hulk of darkness dense with some anxiousness. His dirty-milk face leans forward, scarred by a lopsided smile. There is a smell of whisky. “Harry, I’ve got a girl for you!”
“Great. Bring her in.”
The old man laughs, uneasily? What does he mean?
“You mean Janice?”
“It’s after six o’clock. Get up, get up, Harry; you’ve slept like a beautiful baby. We’re going out.”
“Why?” Rabbit meant to ask “Where?”
“To eat, Harry, to dine. D-I-N-E. Rise my boy. Aren’t you hungry? Hunger. Hunger.” He’s a madman. He jumps off the bed, pivots a few times on his quick man’s little feet, and goes through the motions of bringing things to his mouth. “Oh Harry, you can’t understand an old man’s hunger, you eat and eat and it’s never the right food. You can’t understand that.” He walks to the window and looks down into the alley, his lumpy profile leaden in the dull light.
Rabbit slides back the covers, angles his naked legs over the edge, and holds himself in a sitting position. The sight of his thighs, parallel, pure, aligns his groggy brain. The hair on his legs, once a thin blond fur, is getting dark and whiskery. The odor of his sleep-soaked body rises to him. “Whatsis girl business?” he asks.
“What is it, yes, what is it?” he asks and utters three obscenities in a stream touching a woman in her three parts, and in the gray light by the window his face falls; he seems amazed to hear himself. Yet he’s also watching, as if this was some sort of test. The result determined, he corrects himself, “No. I have an acquaintance, an acquaintance in Brewer, a ladylove perhaps; whom I stand to a meal once in a blue moon. But it’s nothing more than that, little more than that. Harry, you’re so innocent.”
Rabbit begins to be afraid of Tothero, these phrases are so inconsequential, and stands up in his underclothes. “I think I just better run along.” The flour-fluff sticks to the soles of his bare feet.
“Oh Harry, Harry,” Tothero cries in a rich voice mixed of pain and affection, and comes forward and hugs him with one arm. “You and I are two of a kind.” The big lopsided face looks up into his with confidence, but Rabbit sees no resemblance. Yet his memory of the man as his coach still disposes him to listen. “You and I know what the score is, we know—” And right here, arriving at the kernel of his lesson, Tothero is balked, and becomes befuddled. He repeats, “We know,” and removes his arm.
Rabbit says, “I thought we were going to talk about Janice when I woke up.” He picks