"But some sooner than others, huh?"
A spasm of indignation animates Lyle. "They're developing new drugs. All the time. The French. The Chinese. Trichosanthin. TIBO derivatives. Eventually the FDA will have to let them in, even if they are a bunch of Reaganite fascist homophobes who wouldn't mind seeing us all dead. It's a question of hanging on. I have hope."
"Well, great. More power to you. But medicine can only do so much. That's what I'm learning, the hard way. You know, Lyle, it's not as though I'd never thought about death, or never had people near to me die, but I never, you could say, had the real taste of it in my mouth. I mean, it's not kidding. It wants it all." He wants that pill. He wonders if Nelson keeps a roll of Life Savers in the desk the way he himself used to. Just something to put in your mouth when you get nervous. Harry finds that every time he thinks of his death it makes him want to eat – that's why he hasn't lost more weight.
This other man's attempt to open him up has made Lyle more erect behind the desk, more hostile. He stares at Harry with those eroded-around eyes, beneath eyebrows the same metallic blond as his hair. "One good thing about it," he offers, "is you become harder to frighten. By minor things. By threats like yours, for example."
"I'm not making any threats, Lyle, I'm just trying to find out what the fuck is going on. I'm beginning to think this company is being ripped off. If I'm wrong and it's all on the up and up, you've nothing to be frightened of." Poor guy, he's biting the bullet, and less than half Harry's age. At his age, what was Harry doing? Setting type the old-fashioned way, and dreaming about ass. Ass, one way or another, does us in: membrane's too thin, those little HIVs sneak right through. Black box of nothingness, is what it felt like with Thelma. Funny appetite, for a steady diet. Being queer isn't all roses.
Lyle moves his anns around again with that brittle caution. His body has become a collection of dead sticks. "Don't make allegations, Mr. Angstrom, you wouldn't want to defend in court."
"Well, is it an allegation or a fact that you refuse to let me and an impartial accountant examine your books?"
"Mildred's not impartial. She's furious at me for replacing her. She's furious because I and my computer can do in a few hours what took her all week."
"Mildred's an honest old soul."
"Mildred's senile."
"Mildred's not the point here. The point is you're defying me to protect my son."
"I'm not defying you, Mr. Angstrom
"You can call me Harry."
"I'm not defying you, sir. I'm just telling you I can't accept orders from you. I have to get them from Nelson or Mrs. Angstrom."
"You'll get 'em. Sir." A smiling provocative hovering in Lyle's expression goads Harry to ask, "Do you doubt it?"
"I'll be waiting to hear," Lyle says.
"Listen. You may know about a lot of things I don't but you don't know shit about marriage. My wife will do what I tell her to. Ask her to. In a business like this we're absolutely one."
"We'll see," Lyle says. "My parents were married, as a matter of fact. I was raised in a marriage. I know a lot about marriage."
"Didn't do you much good."
"It showed me something to avoid," Lyle says, and smiles as broadly, as guilelessly, as when Harry came in. All teeth. Now Harry does recall him from the old days at Fiscal Alternatives – the stacks of gold and silver, and flawless cool Marcia with her long red nails. Poor beauty, did herself in. She and Monroe. Rabbit admits to himself the peculiar charm queers have, a boyish lightness, a rising above all that female muck, where life breeds.
"How's Slim?" Harry asks, rising from the chair. "Nelson used to talk a lot about Slim."
"Slim," Lyle says, too weak or rude to stand, "died. Before Christmas."
"Sorry to hear it," Harry lies. He holds out his hand over the desk to be shaken and the other man hesitates to take it, as if fearing contamination. Feverish loose-jointed bones: Rabbit gives them a squeeze and says, "Tell Nelson if you ever see him I like the new decor. Kind of a boutique look. Cute. Goes with the new sales rep. You hang loose, Lyle. Hope China comes through for you. We'll be in touch."
On the radio on the way home, he hears that Mike Schmidt, who exactly two years ago, on April 18, 1987, slugged his five hundredth home run, against the Pittsburgh Pirates in Three Rivers Stadium, is closing in on Richie Ashburn's total of 2,217 hits to become the hittingest Phillie ever. Rabbit remembers Ashburn. One of the Whiz Kids who beat the Dodgers for the pennant the fall Rabbit became a high-school senior. Curt Simmons, Del Ennis, Dick Sisler in center, Andy Semmick behind the plate. Beat the Dodgers the last game of the season, then lost to the Yankees four straight. In 1950 Rabbit was seventeen and had led the county B league with 817 points his junior season. Remembering these statistics helps settle his agitated mood, stirred up by seeing Thelma and Lyle, a mood of stirred-up unsatisfied desire at whose fringes licks the depressing idea that nothing matters very much, we'll all soon be dead.
Janice's idea of a low-sodium diet for him is to get these frozen dinners in plastic pouches called Low-Cal. Most of this precooked chicken and beef is full of chemicals so it doesn't go bad on the shelf. To work it all through his system he usually has a second beer. Janice is distracted these days, full of excitement about taking real-estate courses at the Penn State extension. "I'm not sure I totally understand it, though the woman at the office over on Pine Street – hasn't that neighborhood gone downhill, since you and your father used to work at Verity! – she was very patient with my questions. The classes meet three hours a week for ten weeks, and there are two required and four electives to get this certificate, but I don't think you need the certificate to take the licensing exam, which for a salesperson – that's what I'd be – is given monthly and for a broker, which maybe I'd try to be later, only quarterly. But the gist of it is I could begin with two this April and then take two more from July to September and if all goes well get my license in September and start selling, strictly on a commission basis at first, for this firm that Doris Eberhardt's new brother-in-law is one of the partners in. She says she's told him about me and he's interested. It's in your favor evidently to be middle-aged, the clients assume you're experienced."
"Honey, why do you need to do this? You have the lot."
"I don't have the lot. Nelson has the lot."
"Does he? I dropped over there today and he wasn't there, just these kids he's hired. One fag, one wop, and a skirt."
"Harry. Now who's sounding prejudiced?"
He doesn't push ahead with his story, he wants to save it for when they both can focus. After dinner Janice likes to watch Jeopardy! even though she never knows any of the answers, and then the Phillies are playing the Mets on Channel 11. The little stone house with its fractional number on Franklin Drive draws darkling about them, just them, in the evening as the gradual Northern dusk (in Florida the sun just suddenly shuts down, and the moon takes over) seeps into the still-bare trees, quelling the birdsong, and a lemon tinge of sky in the west beyond the craggy chimneys of the big clinker-brick house deepens to an incendiary orange and then the crimson of last embers. Another few weeks, the trees will leaf in, and there won't be any sunset to see from the lozenge-pane windows of his den, when he turns his eyes aside from watching the television screen.
In the third inning, with two men on, Schmidt hits a home run, his fourth of the young season and the five hundred fortysixth of his career. It puts the Phils ahead five to zero, and Rabbit starts switching channels, finding no basketball playoffs, only Matlock and The Wonder Years. Much as Janice irritates him when she's with him, when she isn't in the room with him, or when he can't hear her knocking around in the kitchen or upstairs above his head, he grows uneasy. He switches off the set and goes looking for her, full of his troubling news as once he was full of gold Krugerrands.
She is already in one of her nighties, upstairs, and those infuriating Florida sandals that go f lip-flop as she walks around when he is still trying to sleep in the morning. Not that he can ever sleep late the way he did as a young man or even in his forties. He wakes around six with a little start and ever since his heart attack there is a gnawing in his stomach whose cause he can't locate until he realizes it is the terror of being trapped inside his perishing body, like being in a prison cell with a madman who might decide to kill him at any moment. She is paddling back and forth, flop-flop, carrying small stacks of folded cloth, laundry she has brought up the back stairs; one square stack he recognizes as folded handkerchiefs, another, less trim, as his jockey shorts with their slowly slackening elastic waists, a third as her own underthings, which still excite him, not so much when they are on her as when empty and laundry-clean. He doesn't know how to begin. He throws his big body across the bed diagonally and lets the nubbles ofits bedspread rub his face. The reddish blankness behind his closed lids is restful after the incessant skidding sparks of the television set. "Harry, is anything the matter?" Janice's voice sounds alarmed. His fragility gives him a new hold over her.