Janice stops watching the microwave tick down its numbers and comes close to him, unexpectedly, touching his face again with that ghostly searching gesture, tucking her body against his to remind him sexually of her smallness, her smallness fitting his bigness, when they first met and still now. He smells her brushedback salt-and-pepper hair and sees the blood-tinged whites of her dark eyes. "Of course your vote counts, it counts more than anybody's, honey." When did Janice start calling him honey? When they moved to Florida and got in with those Southerners and Jews. The Jewish couples down there had this at-rest quality, matched like pairs of old shoes, the men accepting their life as the only one they were going to get, and pleased enough. It must be a great religion, Rabbit thinks, once you get past the circumcision.
He and Janice let the house issue rest as a silent sore spot between them while they eat. He helps her clear and they add their plates to those already stacked in the dishwasher, waiting to be run through. With just the two of them, and Janice out of the house so much, it takes days for a sufficient load to build up on the racks. She telephones Nelson to see if they're going to be in and puts her white cardigan back on and gets back into the Camry and drives off to Mt. Judge. Wonder Woman. Rabbit catches the tail end of Jennings, a bunch of twitchy old black-and-white clips about World War II beginning with the invasion of Poland fifty years ago tomorrow, tanks versus cavalry, Hitler shrieking, Chamberlain looking worried; then he goes out into the dusk and the mosquitoes to stack the already wilting brush more neatly in the corner behind the cement pond with its fading blue bottom and widening crack. He gets back into the house in time for the last ten minutes of Wheel of Fortune. That Vanna! Can she strut! Can she clap her hands when the wheel turns! Can she turn those big letters around! She makes you proud to be a two-legged mammal.
By the end of the Cosby summer rerun, one of those with too much Theo in it, Harry is feeling sleepy, depressed by the idea of Janice selling the house but soothed by the thought that she'll never do it. She's too scatterbrained, she and the kid will just drift along deeper and deeper into debt like the rest of the world; the bank will play ball as long as the lot has value. The Phillies are out in San Diego and in sixth place anyway. He turns the TV sound way down and by the comforting shudder of the silenced imagery stretches out his feet on the Turkish hassock they brought from Ma Springer's house when they moved and slumps down deeper into the silvery-pink wing chair he and Janice bought at Schaechner's ten years ago. His shoulders ache from all that pruning. He thinks of his history book but it's upstairs by the bed. There is a soft ticking at the lozenge-pane windows: rain, as on that evening at the beginning of summer, when he'd just come out of the hospital, the narrow room with the headless sewing dummy, another world, a dream world. The phone wakes him when it rings. He looks at the thermostat clock as he goes to the hall phone. 9:20. Janice has been over there a long time. He hopes it isn't one of those coke dealers that still now and then call, about money they are owed or a new shipment of fresh "material" that has come in. You wonder how these dealers get so rich, they seem so disorganized and hit-or-miss. He was having a dream in the wing chair, some intense struggle already fading and unintelligible, with an unseen antagonist, but in a vivid domed space, like an old-time railroad terminal only the ceiling was lower and paler, a chapel of some kind, a tight space that clings to his mind, making his hand look ancient and strange – the back swollen and bumpy, the fingers withered – as it reaches for the receiver on the wall.
"Harry." He has never heard Janice's voice sound like this, so stony, so dead.
"Hi. Where are you? I was getting afraid you'd had an accident."
"Harry, I -" Something grabs her throat and will not let her speak.
"Yeah?"
Now she is speaking through tears, staggering over gulps, suppressed sobs, lumps in her throat. "I described my idea to Nelson and Pru, and we all agreed we shouldn't rush into it, we should discuss it thoroughly, he seemed more receptive than she, maybe because he understands the financial problems -"
"Yeah, yeah. Hey, it doesn't sound so bad so far. She's used to considering the house as hers, no woman likes to share a kitchen."
"After she'd put the children to bed, she came down with this look on her face and said there was something then that Nelson and I should know, if we were all going to live together."
"Yeah?" His own voice is still casual but he is no longer sleepy; he can see what is coming like a tiny dot in the distance that becomes a rocket ship in a space movie.
Janice's voice firms up, goes dead and level and lower, as if others might be listening outside the door. She would be in their old bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed, Judy asleep beyond one wall and Roy behind the wall opposite. "She said you and she slept together that night you stayed here your first night out of the hospital."
The spaceship is upon him, with all its rivets and blinking lights. "She said that?"
"Yes she did. She said she doesn't know how it happened, except there'd always been this little attraction between you two and that night everything seemed so desperate."
A little attraction. He supposes that was fair, though tough. It had felt like more than that from his side. It had felt like he was seeing himself reflected, mirrored in a rangy young long-haired left-handed woman.
"Well? Is she telling the truth?"
"Well, honey, what can I say, I guess in a way -"
A big sob: he can picture Janice's face exactly, twisted and helpless and ugly, old age collapsing in upon her.
"- but at the time," Rabbit goes on, "it seemed sort of natural, and we haven't done anything since, not even said a word. We've been pretending it didn't happen."
"Oh, Harry. How could you? Your own daughter-in-law. Nelson's wife."
He feels she is beginning to work from a script, saying standard things, and into the vault of his shocked and shamed consciousness there is admitted a whiff of boredom.
"This is the worst thing you've ever done, ever, ever," Janice tells him. "The absolute worst. That time you ran away, and then Peggy, my best friend, and that poor hippie girl, and Thelma don't think for one moment I didn't know about Thelma – but now you've done something truly unforgivable."
"Really?" The word comes out with an unintended hopeful lilt.
"I will never forgive you. Never," Janice says, returning to a dead-level tone.
"Don't say that," he begs. "It was just a crazy moment that didn't hurt anybody. Whajou put me and her in the same house at night for? Whajou think I was, dead already?"
"I had to go to class, there was a quiz, I wouldn't have gone ordinarily, I felt so guilty. That's a laugh. I felt guilty. I see now why they have gun laws. If I had a gun, I'd shoot you. I'd shoot you both."
"What else did Pru say?" Answering, he figures, will bring her down a bit from this height of murderous rage.
Janice answers, "She didn't say much of anything. Just the flat facts and then folded her hands in her lap and kept giving me and Nelson that defiant stare of hers. She didn't seem repentant, just tough, and obviously not wanting me to come live in the house. That's why she told."
He feels himself being drawn into alignment with Janice, against the others, with a couple's shared vision, squinting this way at Pru. He feels relieved, beginning already to be forgiven, and faintly disappointed.
"She is tough," he agrees, soothingly. "Pru. Whaddeya expect, from an Akron steamfitter's daughter?" He decides against telling Janice, now at least, how in making their love Pru had come twice, and he had faintly felt used, expertly.