"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.
His reprieve is only just beginning. It will take weeks and months and years of whittling at it. With her new business sense Janice won't give anything away cheap. "We want you over here, Harry," she says.
"Me? Why? It's late," he says. "I'm bushed from all those bushes."
"Don't think you're out of this and can be cute. This is a hideous thing. None of us will ever be the same."
"We never are," he dares say.
"Think of how Nelson feels."
This hurts. He hadn't wanted to think about it.
She tells him, "Nelson is being very calm and using all that good psychological work they did at the treatment center. He says this will need a lot of processing and we must begin right now. If we don't start right in we'll all harden in our positions."
Rabbit tries to conspire again, to elicit another wifely description. "Yeah -how did the kid take it?"
But she only says, "I think he's in shock. He himself said he hasn't begun to get in touch with his real feelings."
Harry says, "He can't be on too high a horse after all the stunts he's been pulling all these years. Coke whores all over Brewer, and if you ask me that Elvira over at the lot is more than just a token skirt. When she's around he sounds like he's been given a shot of joy juice."
But Janice doesn't relent. "You have hurt Nelson incredibly much," she says. "Anything he does from now on you can't blame him. I mean, Harry, what you've done is the kind of perverted thing that makes the newspapers. It was monstrous."
"Honey -"
"Quit it with the 'honey."'
"What's this `perverted'? We aren't at all blood-related. It was just like a normal one-night stand. She was hard-up and I was at death's door. It was her way of playing nurse."
More sobbing, he never knows what will trigger it. "Harry, you can't make jokes."
"Those weren't jokes." But he feels chastised, dry-mouthed, spanked.
"You get right over here and help undo some of the damage you've done for once in your life." And she hangs up, having sounded comically like her mother in the juicy way she pronounced "for once."
A life knows few revelations; these must be followed when they come. Rabbit sees clearly what to do. His acts take on a decisive haste. He goes upstairs and packs. The brown canvas suit bag. The big yellow rigid Tourister with the dent in one corner where an airline handler slung it. Jockey shorts, T-shirts, socks, polo shirts in their pastel tints, dress shirts in their plastic envelopes, golf slacks, Bermuda shorts. A few ties though he has never liked ties. All his clothes are summer clothes these days; the wool suits and sweaters wait in mothproof bags for fall days, October into November, that will not come this year, for him. He takes four lightweight sports coats and two suits, one a putty-colored and the other the shiny gray like armor. In case there's a wedding or a funeral. A raincoat, a couple of sweaters. A pair of black laced shoes tucks into two pockets of his folding suit bag and blue-and-white Nikes into the sides of the suitcase. He should start jogging again. His toothbrush and shaving stuff. His pills, buckets of them. What else? Oh yes. He grabs The First Salute from his bedside table and tucks it in, he'll finish it if it kills him. He leaves a light burning in the upstairs hall to discourage burglars, and the carriage lamp beside the front door numbered 14 1/2. He loads the car in two trips, feeling the weight of the suitcases in his chest. He looks around the bare hall. He goes into the den, his feet silent on the Antron wall-to-wall carpeting, and looks out the lozenge panes at the glowing night-time silhouette of the weeping cherry. He plumps the pillow and straightens the arm guards on the wing chair he fell asleep in, not long ago but on the far side of a gulf: The he who fell asleep was somebody else, a pathetic somebody. At the front door again, he feels a night breeze on his face, hears the muffled rush of traffic over on Penn Boulevard. He sets the latch and softly slams the door. Janice has her key. He thinks of her over there in the Springers' big stucco house that always reminded him of an abandoned enormous ice-cream stand. Forgive me.
Rabbit gets into the Celica. Take a Ride in the Great Indoors: one of the new slogans they'd been trying to push. You can have too many slogans, they begin to cancel out. The engine starts up; reverse gear carries him smoothly backwards. 1 Love When You Set Me Free, Toyota. The digital clock says 10:07. Traffic on Penn Boulevard is starting to thin, the diners and gas stations are beginning to darken. He turns right at the blinking red light and then right again at the Brewer bypass along the Running Horse River. The road lifts above the trees at a point near the elephant-gray gas tanks and the bypassed old city shows a certain grandeur. Its twentystory courthouse built in the beginning of the Depression is still the tallest building, the concrete eagles with flared wings at each corner lit by spotlights, and the sweeping shadow of Mt. Judge, crowned by the star-spatter of the Pinnacle Hotel, hangs behind everything like an unmoving tidal wave. The streetlamps show Brewer's brick tint like matches cupped in ruddy hands. Then, quite quickly, the city and all it holds are snatched from view. Groves of weed trees half-hide the empty factories along the river, and one might be anywhere in the United States on a four-lane divided highway.
He and Janice have done this Southward drive so often he knows the options: he can get off at 222 and proceed directly but pokily toward Lancaster through a string of stoplight-ridden Brewer suburbs, or he can stay on 422 a few miles to 176 and head directly south and then cut west to Lancaster and York. The first time he tried this trip, thirty years ago last spring come to think of it, he made the mistake of heading south too soon, toward Wilmington and a vision ofbarefoot du Pont women. But the East slants west, and the trick is to bear west until 83, which didn't exist in those days, and then drive south right into the maw of that two-headed monster, Baltimore-Washington. Monstrous, she said. Well, in a way, you could say, being alive is monstrous. Those crazy molecules. All by themselves? Never.