Rabbit, Run - John Updike [27]
“Doing what?”
“Serving Uncle.”
“Oh, in the Army; well that doesn’t count. Everybody’s been to Texas with the Army.”
“You order whatever you think is good,” Rabbit tells Tothero. He is irritated by all these Army veterans Ruth seems to know, and strains to hear the final bars of the song he spent a dime to play. In this Chinese place he can just make out a hint, coming it seems from the kitchen, of the jangling melody that exhilarated him last night in the car.
Tothero gives the waiter the order and when he goes away tries to give Ruth the word. The old man’s thin lips are wet with whisky, and saliva keeps trying to sneak out of the corner of his mouth. “The coach,” he says, “the coach is concerned with developing the three tools we are given in life; the head, the body, and the heart.”
“And the crotch,” Ruth says. Margaret, of all people, laughs. She really gives Rabbit the creeps.
“Young woman, you’ve challenged me, and I deserve the respect of your attention.” He speaks with grave weight.
“Shit,” she says softly, and looks down. “Don’t sob on me.” He has hurt her. The wings of her nostrils whiten; her coarse make-up darkens.
“One. The head. Strategy. Most boys come to a basketball coach from alley games and have no conception of the, of the elegance of the game played on a court with two baskets. Won’t you bear me out, Harry?”
“Yea, sure. Just yesterday—”
“Second—let me finish, Harry, and then you can talk—second, the body. Work the boys into condition. Make their legs hard.” He clenches his fist on the slick table. “Hard. Run, run, run. Run every minute their feet are on the floor. You can’t run enough. Thirdly”—he puts the index finger and thumb of one hand to the corners of his mouth and flicks away the moisture—“the heart. And here the good coach, which I, young lady, certainly tried to be and some say was, has his most solemn opportunity. Give the boys the will to achieve. I’ve always liked that better than the will to win, for there can be achievement even in defeat. Make them feel the, yes, I think the word is good, the sacredness of achievement, in the form of giving our best.” He dares a pause now, and wins through it, glancing at each of them in turn to freeze their tongues. “A boy who has had his heart enlarged by an inspiring coach,” he concludes, “can never become, in the deepest sense, a failure in the greater game of life.” Confident that he has sold them, he draws on his glass, which is mostly ice cubes. As he tilts it up they ride forward and rattle against his lips.
Ruth turns to Rabbit and asks quietly, as if to change the subject, “What do you do?”
He laughs. “Well I’m not sure I do anything any more. I should have gone to work this morning. I uh, it’s kind of hard to describe, I demonstrate something called the MagiPeel Kitchen Peeler.”
“And I’m sure he does it well,” Tothero says. “I’m sure that when the MagiPeel Corporation board sits down at their annual meeting, and ask themselves ‘Now who has done the most to further our cause with the American public?’ the name of Harry Rabbit Angstrom leads the list.”
“What do you do?” Rabbit asks her in turn.
“Nothing,” Ruth answers. “Nothing.” And her eyelids make a greasy blue curtain as she sips her Daiquiri. Her chin takes something of the liquid’s green light.
The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn’t had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch, a hen’s sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of insensate vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite’s innocent gusto. Candy. Heaped on a smoking breast of rice. Each is given such a tidy hot breast, and Margaret is in a special hurry to muddle hers with glazed chunks; all eat well. Their faces take color and strength from the oval plates of dark pork, sugar peas, chicken, stiff sweet sauce, shrimp, water chestnuts, who knows what else. Their talk grows hearty.
“He was terrific,” Rabbit says of Tothero.