Ronnie and Thelma Harrison moved to one of these modest new houses when their three boys grew up and went off. Alex, the oldest, is an electronics engineer somewhere south of San Francisco; the middle boy, Georgie, who had had reading problems in school, is trying to be a dancer and musician in New York City; and their youngest, Ron junior, has stayed in the county, as a part-time construction worker, though he put in two years of college at Lehigh. Thelma doesn't complain about her sons or her house, though to Harry they seem disappointing, disappointingly ordinary, for a woman of Thelma's intelligence and, in his experience of her, passion.
Thelma's disease, systemic lupus erythematosus, has cost a fortune over the years, even with the benefits from Ronnie's insurance company's health plan. And it has meant that she has not been able to go back to teaching elementary school when her boys were gone, as she had hoped. Her health has been too erratic; it has kept her at home, where Harry could usually find her. This noon when he called from a pay phone in Brewer he expected her to answer and she did. He asked ifhe might drive over and she said he might. She didn't sound happy to hear from him, but not distressed either: resigned, merely. He leaves the Celica out front at the curving curb, though usually over the years she opened the garage for him and closed the door electronically from within the kitchen, to hide the evidence. But now that he is as sick as if not sicker than she, he doesn't know how much they still have to conceal. The neighborhood is empty during the midday, until the buses bring the children home from school. A single whining engine is at work somewhere out of sight in Arrowdale, and the air holds a pervasive vibration and hum of traffic from the Maiden Springs Pike. Also out of sight, some birds are chirping, raucous in their nesting frenzy, though the development is skimpy on trees. A robin hops on the bit of lawn beside Thelma's cement walk, and thrashes into the air as Harry approaches. He doesn't remember robins as seeming such big fierce birds; this one looked the size of a crow. He climbs two flagstone steps and crosses a little porch; Thelma opens the front door before he can ring the bell.
She seems smaller, and her hair grayer. Her prim, rather plain face always had a sallow tinge, and this jaundice has deepened, he can observe through the makeup she uses to soften her butterfly rash, a reddening the disease has placed like a soreness across her nose and beneath her eyes. Nevertheless, her deeply known presence stirs him. They lightly kiss, when she has closed the door, a long light-blocking green shade pulled down over its central pane of bevelled glass. Her lips are cool, and faintly greasy. She stays a time within his embrace, as if expecting something more to happen, her body relaxed against his in unspeakable confession.
"You're thin," she says, drawing at last away.
"A little less fat," he tells her. "I've a long way to go before I satisfy the doctors and Janice." It seems only natural to mention Janice, though he had to make his tongue do it. Thelma knows the score, and did from the start. The whole affair was her idea, though he grew used to it over the years, and built it in. Her walk as she moves away from him into the living room seems stiff, a bit of a waddle; arthritis is part of the lupus.
"Janice," she repeats. "How is Wonder Woman?" Once he confided that he called Janice that and Thelma has never forgotten. Women don't forget, especially what you wish they would.
"Oh, no different. She keeps busy in Florida with all these different groups, she's kind of the baby of our condo, and a shiksa besides. You'd hardly know her, she's so on the ball. Her tennis is terrific, the people who play tell me." He is getting too enthusiastic, he realizes. "But we were happy to leave. It got cold. March was miserable. At least up here you expect it and have the clothes."
"You never told us about your heart attack." That "us" is a little payback for his mentioning Janice right off: You trail your spouses after you like shadows, right into bed; they becloud the sheets.
"It didn't seem worth bragging about."
"We heard about it from little Ron, who knows a boy who knows Nelson. The kiddie network. Imagine how I felt, learning about it that way. My lover nearly dies and never tells me."
"How would we, I, whoever, tell you? It's not the kind of thing they have cards for in the drugstore."
In recent years he and Janice have seen less and less of the Harrisons. Rabbit and Ron were Mt. Judge boys together and played on the high-school basketball varsities that, coached by Marty Tothero, were league champions for two out of their three years in senior high. But he has never liked Ronnie: loudmouthed, pushy, physically crude, always playing with himself in the locker room, flicking towels, giving redbellies, terrorizing the JVs. Women don't mind this kind of prick as much as Harry does. Part of Thelma's fascination for him has been that she could stand the guy, put up with his sexual tricks and remain outwardly such a prim, plain schoolteacher-type. Not really plain: with her clothes off her body is somehow better than her clothes have led you to expect. The first time they ever slept together, her breasts seemed like a girl's in Playboy – nipples like perfect little doorbells.
"What can I offer you?" Thelma asks. "Coffee. A beer?"
"Both are no-nos for the new me. Do you have anything like a Diet Coke or Pepsi?" He remembers Judy's little quavering voice singing Coke is it on that long zigzag ride into shore.
"Sure. We don't drink much any more ourselves, now that we've resigned from the Flying Eagle."
"You ever coming back?"
"I don't think so. We heard the fees went up again, as you maybe didn't notice, you're so rich, plus the assessment for repairs to the two greens close to the road that are always being vandalized. Even three years ago Ronnie figured it was costing him over eighty dollars a round, it wasn't worth it. There's a whole new younger crowd out at the Eagle now that dominates everything. They've changed the tone. It's gotten too yuppie."
"Too bad. I miss playing with old Ronnie."
"Why? You can't stand him, Harry."
"I like beating him."
Thelma nods, as if acknowledging her own contribution to Harry's beating Ronnie. But she can't help it, she loves this man, his soft pale bemusement and cool hard heart, his uncircumcised prick, his offhand style, and in her slow dying has not denied herself the pleasure of expressing this love, as much as Harry has been able to bear it. She has kept her strongest feelings contained, and the affair has enriched her transactions with God, giving her something to feel sinful about, to discuss with Him. It seems to explain her lupus, if she's an adulteress. It makes it easier on Him, if she deserves to be punished.
She goes into the kitchen for the soft drinks. Rabbit roams quietly in the living room; in preparation for his visit she has pulled not only the narrow shade on the front door but the wide one on the picture window. He pities the room – its darkness as if even weak windowlight would penetrate her skin and accelerate the destruction of her cells, its hushed funereal fussiness. Wild though she can be, with a streak of defiance as though daring to be damned, Thelma maintains a conventional local decor. Stuffed flowered chairs with broad wooden arms, plush chocolate-brown sofa with needlepointed scatter pillows and yellowing lace antimacassars, varnished little knickknack stands and taborets, a footstool on which an old watermill is depicted, symmetrical lamps whose porcelain bases show English hunting dogs in gilded ovals, an oppressively patterned muddy neo-Colonial wallpaper, and on every flat surface, fringed runners and semi-precious glass and porcelain elves and parrots and framed photographs of babies and graduating sons and small plates and kettles of hammered copper and pewter, objects to dust around but never to rearrange. This front room, but for the television set hulking in its walnut cabinet with its powdery gray-green face wearing a toupee of doilies and doodads, could have come out of Harry's adolescence, when he was gingerly paying calls on girls whose mothers came forward from the kitchen, drying their hands on their aprons, to greet him in motionless stuffed rooms such as this. The houses he has kept with Janice have had in comparison a dishevelled, gappy quality that has nevertheless given him room to breathe. This room is so finished, he feels in it he should be dead. It smells of all the insurance policies Ron sold to buy its furnishings.