"Nothing like that. Your father has never been a drinker, though back in the Murkett days he used to try."
"Those Murkett days – you know what was in them for him, doncha? Getting into Cindy Murkett's pants, that's all he cared about."
Janice stares and almost laughs. How young he is, how long ago that was, and how different from what Nelson thinks. She feels a hollowness spreading inside her. She wishes she had something to sip, a little orange juice glass of blood-red Campari, not weakened by soda the way the women down here like to have spritzers, for luncheon or out by the pool. Her half of the cherryfilled Danish feels heavy on her stomach and now in her nervousness she can't stop picking the sugar icing off Nelson's half. His refusal to eat – his acting so superior to the mild poisons she and Harry like – is the most annoying thing about him. She tells him, stiffly, "Whatever our bill is, we pay it. We have the money and can afford it." She holds out a hand toward him and twiddles two fingers. "Could I bum one cigarette?"
"You don't smoke," he tells her.
"I don't, except when I'm around you and your wife." He shrugs and takes his pack of Camels from the table and tosses it toward her. Their complicity is complete now. The lightness of it all – the cigarette itself, the dry tingling in her nostrils as she exhales – restores matters to a scale that she can manage. She asks, "What do these men do, these dealers, when you don't pay?" She could bite her lips – she has gone over into his territory, where he is an innocent victim.
"Oh," he says, enjoying posing as casually brave, shaping the ash of his cigarette on the edge of a lovely Macoma tellin he uses as an ashtray, "it's mostly talk. They say they'll break your legs. Threaten to kidnap your kids. Maybe that's what makes me so nervous about Judy and Roy. If they threaten you often enough, they have to do something eventually. But, then, they don't like to lose a good customer. It's like the banks. You owe enough, they want to keep you in business."
Janice says, "Nelson. If I gave you the twelve thousand, would you swear off drugs for good?" She strives to make eye contact.
She expects at least an eager vow from him to cinch her gift, but the boy has the audacity, the shamelessness, to sit there and say, without giving her a glance, "I could try, but I can't honestly promise. I've tried before, to please Pru. I love coke, Mom. And it loves me. I can't explain it. It's right for me. It makes me feel right, in a way nothing else does. It's like the bank. You owe enough, they want to keep you in business."
She finds herself crying, without sobs, just the dry-straw ache in the throat and the wetness on her cheeks, as if a husband were calmly confessing his love for another woman. When she gets her voice together enough to speak she says, clearly enough, "Well then I'd be foolish to contribute to your ruining yourself."
He turns his head and looks her full in the face. "I'll give it up, sure. I was just thinking out loud."
"But, baby, can you?"
"Cinchy. I often go days without a hit. There's no withdrawal, is one of the beautiful things – no heaves, no DTs, nothing. It's just a question of making up your mind."
"But is your mind made up? I don't get the feeling it is."
"Sure it is. Like you say, I can't afford it. You and Dad own the lot, and I'm your wage slave."
"That's a way of putting it. Another way might be that we've bent Over backwards to give you a responsible job, heading things up, without our interference. Your father's very bored down here. Even I'm a little bored."
Nelson takes an abrupt new tack. "Pru's no help, you know," he says.
"She isn't?"
"She thinks I'm a wimp. She always did. I was the way out of Akron and now she's out. I get none of the things a man's supposed to get from a wife."
"What are those?" Janice is truly interested; she has never heard a man spell them out.
He makes a cross evasive face. "You know – don't play naive. Reassurance. Affection. Make the guy think he's great even if he isn't. "
"I may be naive, Nelson, but aren't there things we can only do for ourselves? Women have their own egos to keep up, they have their own problems." She hasn't been attending a weekly women's discussion group down here for nothing. She feels indignant enough, independent enough, to get up and march into the kitchen and open the cabinet doors and pull down the Campari bottle and an orange juice glass. The aqua-enamelled clock on the stove says 12:25. The phone right beside her on the wall rings, startling her so that the bottle jumps in her hand and some of the Campari spills, watery red on the Formica counter, like thinned blood.
"Yes… yes… oh my God…" Nelson, sitting in the wicker chair planning his next move and wondering if twelve thou was too little to ask for, it sure as hell is less than he owes, hears his mother's voice make each response with a tightened breathlessness, and sees by her face when she hangs up and hurries toward him that the scale of things has changed; a new order has dawned. His mother's Florida tan has fled, leaving her face a greenish gray. "Nelson," she says, speaking as efficiently as a newscaster, "that was Pru. Your father's had a heart attack. They've taken him to the hospital. They're coming right back so I can have the car. No point in your coming, he isn't allowed any visitors except me, and then for only five minutes every hour. He's in intensive care."
The Deleon Community General Hospital is a modern set of low white buildings added onto a bisque-colored core, dating from the Thirties, with a Spanish-tile roof and curved grillework at the windows. The complex fills two blocks on the southern side of Tamarind Avenue, which runs parallel to Pindo Palm Boulevard about a mile to the north. Janice spent most of yesterday here, so she knows the way into the parking garage, and which arrows painted on the floor to follow out of the parking garage, across a glass-enclosed second-story pedestrian bridge, which takes them above the parking-garage ticket booths and a breadth ofbusy asphalt and a hexagonal-tiled patio with arcs of oleander hedge and of convalescents in glinting steel wheelchairs, and down a halfflight of stairs into a lobby where street-people, multiracial but the whites among them dyed on hands and face a deep outdoorsy brown, doze beside the neatly tied bundles and plastic garbage bags containing all their possessions. The lobby smells of oleander, urine, and air freshener.
Janice, wearing a soft salmon-colored running suit with powder-blue sleeves and pants stripes, leads, and Nelson, Roy, Pru, and Judy, all in their airplane clothes, follow, hurrying to keep up. In just one day Janice has acquired a widow's briskness, the speed afoot of a woman with no man to set the pace for her. Also some remnant of old love – of old animal magnetism revived in this thronged institutional setting not so different from the high-school corridors where she first became aware of Rabbit Angstrom, he a famous senior, tall and blond, and she a lowly ninth-grader, dark and plain – pulls her toward her man, now that his animal fragility has reawakened her awareness of his body. His, and her own. Since his collapse she is proudly, continuously conscious of her body's elastic health, its defiant uprightness, the stubborn miracle of its functioning.
The children are frightened. Roy and Judy don't know what they will see in this visit. Perhaps their grandfather has been monstrously transformed, as by a wicked witch in a fairy story, into a toad or a steaming puddle. Or perhaps a monster is what he has been all along, underneath the friendly kindly pose and high coaxing voice he put on for them like the wolf in grandmother's clothes who wanted to eat Little Red Riding Hood. The sugary antiseptic smells, the multiplicity of elevators and closed doors and directional signs and people in white smocks and white stockings and shoes and plastic badges, the hollow purposeful sound their own crowd of feet makes on the linoleum floors, scrubbed and waxed so shiny they hold moving ripples like water, widens the ominous feeling in their childish stomachs, their suspicion of a maze there is no escaping from, of a polished expensive trap whose doors and valves only open one way. The world that grownups construct for themselves seems such an extravagant creation that malice might well be its motive. Within a hospital you feel there is no other world. The palm trees and jet trails and drooping wires and blue sky you can see through the windows seem part of the panes, part of the trap.