He thinks this over and decides upon counteraggression. "Where the hell had he been?" he asks.
She rolls over, giving up. Her breath has stale tobacco in it. She has given up smoking supposedly but whenever she's around Nelson with his Camels and Pru with her Pall Malls she takes it up again. "He didn't know exactly. Just driving around. He said he needed to get out, Florida is so claustrophobic."
The kid is right: life down here is confined to the narrow paths you make. To Winn Dixie, to the Loew's cineplex and the shops in the Palmetto Palm Mall, to the doctor's, to the pro shop and back. Between these paths there's somehow nothing, a lot of identical palm trees and cactus and thirsty lawn and empty sunshine, hotels you're not staying at and beaches you're not admitted to and inland areas where there's never any reason to go. In Pennsylvania, at least in Diamond County, everything has been paved solid by memory and in any direction you go you've already been there.
Licking her lips and making a face as if her throat aches, Janice goes on, "He drove on 41 as far as what sounds like Naples and stopped at a restaurant when he got hungry and called us but the phone didn't answer, I wondered at the time if we shouldn't have waited to go over but you said you were starving -'
"That's right. Blame me."
"I wasn't, honey. It wasn't just you. The children were antsy and worried and I thought, Life must go on, dinner will distract us; but then he says he did call just about when we were heading out the door and where he was one beer led to another and on the way back he got a little lost, you know yourself how if you miss the Pindo Palm turnoff everything looks identical, for miles."
"I can't believe it," Harry says. He feels rage coming to boil in his chest and sits up in bed to relieve the pressure. "Without so much as a fucking word to anybody he disappears for, what, eight hours? He is really becoming crazy. He's always been moody but this is crazy behavior. The kid needs help."
Janice says, "He was perfectly sober when he came back and brought a bunch of those little tiny stuffed alligators they make for souvenirs; Pru and I had to laugh. One for each of the children and even one for you, where they've made it stand and put a golf club in its little feet." She flicks the blanket back from his lap and touches his drowsy penis in his open pajama fly. "How're we doing down there? We never make love any more."
But now he is out of the mood. He slaps her hand primly and tugs up the blanket and says, "We just did make love. Before Christmas."
"Way before Christmas," Janice says, not moving her head, and for a second he has the mad hope she will turn the blanket down again and simply, quickly, take his prick in her mouth, like Thelma used to do almost first thing when they would secretly meet in this last decade; but blowing has never been Janice's style. She has to be very drunk, and he never did like her drunk, a kind of chaos wells up within her that threatens him, that threatens to swamp the whole world. She says, "O.K. for you, buster," to register with him that she's been rejected, in case he wants her later, and pushes out of her side of the bed. Her damp nightie is stuck up above her waist and before she tugs it down he admires the taut pale buttocks above the tan backs of her thighs. Guiltily he hears her flush the toilet in the bathroom and with an angry rattle and rush of water start to run the shower. He pictures exactly how she looks stepping out of the shower, with her hair in a transparent shower cap and her bottom rosy and her pussy all whitened with dew, and regrets that they must live, he and his little dark woman, his stubborn shy mutt of a Springer, in a world of mostly missed signals. Down here they have been thrown together more than at any time of their lives and they have coped by turning their backs and growing thicker skins. He plays golf three or four times a week and she has her tennis and her groups and her errands. When she comes back from the bathroom, in a terrycloth robe, he is still in the bed, reading in his book about British interference with Dutch merchant ships and France needing to build up her decayed fleet with Baltic timber delivered by Dutch vessels, in case Janice wants to try at sex again, but now from the other end of the condo the sounds of children can be heard, and of Pru hushing them in her burdened maternal voice.
Harry says to jamce, "Let's try to concentrate on Judy and Roy today. They seem sort of woebegone, don't they?"
She doesn't answer, guardedly. She takes his remark as a slam at Nelson's parenting. Maybe it is. Nelson's the one who needs parenting; he always did and never got enough. When you don't get enough of something at the right biological moment, Rabbit has read somewhere, you keep after it until you die. He asks, "What do you and Pru talk about all the time?"
She answers, thin-upped, "Oh, women things. You'd find them boring."Janice always gets a funny intense frowny look on her face when she's dressing herself. Even if it's just slacks and a blouse to go to Winn Dixie in, she pinches off an accusatory stare into the mirror, to face down the worst.
"Maybe so," he agrees, ending the conversation, and knowing this will make Janice want to continue it.
Sure enough, she volunteers, "She's worried about Nelson," and falters for the next words, the tip of her tongue sneaking out and pressing on her upper lip in the effort of thought.
But Rabbit says curtly, "Who wouldn't be?" He turns his back to put on his underpants. He still wears Jockey shorts. Ruth was amused by them that night ages ago, and he always thinks of it. Today he wants to be a grandfather and tries to dress for the role. Long eggshell-colored linen pants with cuffs, instead of his dirty old plaid bell-bottom golf slacks, and instead of a polo knit a real shirt, 100-per-cent cotton, with blue pinstripes and short sleeves. He looks at himself in the mirror that Janice's image has vacated and is stunned, deep inside, by the bulk of what he sees – face swollen to a kind of moon, with his little sunburned nose and icy eyes and nibbly small mouth bunched in the center, above the jowls, boneless jowls that come up and put a pad of fat even in front of his ears, where Judy has a silky shine. Talk about Nelson – Harry's own hair, its blondness dirtied and dulled by gray, is thinning back from his temples. Tall as he is, there is no carrying the slope under his shirt as anything other than a loose gut, a paunch that in itself must weigh as much as a starving Ethiopian child. He must start to cut down. He can feel, every motion he makes, his weight tugging at his heart – that singeing sensation he gets as if a child inside him is playing with lighted matches.
On the breakfast table, today's News-Press has the color photograph of a tiny sickly one-year-old girl who died last night for lack of a liver transplant. Her name was Amber. Also a headline saying that according to Scotland Yard Pan Am Flight 103 was definitely bombed, just like Ed Silberstein and Judy say. Fragments of metal. Luggage compartment. Plastic explosive, can be molded into any form, probably a high-performance Czech type called Semtex: Harry can hardly bear to read about it, the thought of all those conscious bodies suddenly with nothing all around them, freezing, Ber-nie, Ber-nie, and Lockerbie a faint spatter of stars below, everything in one split second upside-down and void of merry. Also the mayor of Fort Myers now thinks his police acted properly in the arrest of Deion Sanders. Also Deadly pollution infects Lake Okeechobee. Also Partly cloudy, Highs in low to mid-80s. "Today's the day," he announces, "Grandpa's going to take you to amazing places!"
Judy and Roy look doubtful but not entirely.
Janice says, "Harry, have another of these cherry Danishes before they go stale. We bought them thinking mostly of the children but they both say they hate red runny things."
"Why do you want to kill me with carbos?" he asks, but eats the Danish anyway, and cleans up the sweet sugary crumbs with his fingertips.