Rabbit, Run - John Updike [77]
But it seems long ago, and every second Harrison stands there smirking it seems longer. He is wearing a narrow-shouldered summer suit of some linen imitation and having this nifty self-satisfied cloth hanging beside his ear annoys Rabbit. He feels hemmed in. The problem is, who shall sit where? He and Ruth have gotten on opposite sides of the table, which was the mistake. Harrison decides, and ducks down to sit beside Ruth, with a little catch in the movement that betrays the old limp from his football injury. Rabbit becomes obsessed by Harrison’s imperfections. He’s ruined the effect of his Ivy League suit by wearing a black wool tie like a wop. When he opens his mouth the two false teeth don’t quite match the others.
“Well, how’s life treating the old Master?” he says. “The word is you got it made.” His eyes make his meaning by flicking sideways to Ruth, who sits there like a lump, her hands folded around the Daiquiri. Her knuckles are red from washing dishes. When she lifts the glass to drink, her chin shows through distorted.
Margaret wriggles at Rabbit’s side. She feels somehow like Janice: jumpy. Her presence in the left corner of his vision feels like a dark damp cloth approaching that side of his face.
“Where’s Tothero?” he asks her.
“Totherwho?”
Ruth giggles, damn her. Harrison bends his head toward her, pink showing, and whispers a remark. Her lips tuck up in a smile; it’s just like that night in the Chinese place, anything he says will please her, except that tonight he is Harrison and Rabbit sits across from them married to this girl he hates. He’s sure what Harrison whispers is about him, “the old Master.” From the second there were four of them it was clear he was going to be the goat. Like Tothero that night.
“You know damn well who,” he tells Margaret. “Tothero.”
“Our old coach, Harry!” Harrison cries, and reaches across the table to touch Rabbit’s fingertips. “The man who made us immortal!”
Rabbit curls his fingers an inch beyond Harrison’s reach and Harrison, with a satisfied smirk, draws back, pulling his palms along the slick-top table so they make a slippery screech of friction.
“Me, you mean,” Rabbit says. “You were nothing.”
“Nothing. That seems a little stern. That seems a little stern, Harry old bunny. Let’s cast our minds back. When Tothero wanted a guy roughed up, who did he send in to do it? When he wanted a hot shot like you guarded nice and close, who was his boy?” He slaps his chest. “You were too much of a queen to dirty your hands. No, you never touched anybody, did you? You didn’t play football either, and get your knee scrambled, either, did you? No sir, not Harry the bird; he was on wings. Feed him the ball and watch it go in.”
“It went in, you noticed.”
“Sometimes. Sometimes it did. Harry now don’t wrinkle your nose. Don’t think we all don’t appreciate your ability.” From the way he’s using his hands, chopping and lifting with practiced understatement, getting a quiet symphony of sarcasm and patience and emphasis out of the play of his palms, Rabbit thinks he must do a lot of talking around a table. Yet there’s a tremor; and in seeing that Harrison is afraid of him, Rabbit loses interest. The waitress comes—Harrison orders Bourbon-on-the-Rocks for himself and Margaret and another Daiquiri for Ruth—and Rabbit watches her back recede as if it is the one real thing in the world: the thick notched rope of her spine between two blue-brown pillows of muscle. He wants Ruth to see him looking.
Harrison is losing his salesman’s composure. “Did I ever tell you what Tothero once said to me about you? Ace, are you listening?”
“What did Tothero say?” God this guy is a middle-aged bore.
“He said to me, ‘This is in confidence, Ronnie, but I depend on you to spark the team. Harry is not a team player.’ ”
Rabbit looks down at Margaret and over at Ruth. “Now I’ll tell ya what really happened,” he says to them. “Old Harrison