"I don't want it," Harry hears himself say sharply. He softens this to, "Not yet anyway." Charlie's word pull has upset him, made it too real, the physical exertion, pulling open these resistant bone gates so his spirit will fly out and men in pale-green masks will fish in this soupy red puddle with their hooks and clamps and bright knives. Once on television watching by mistake over Janice's shoulder one of these PBS programs on childbirth – they wouldn't put such raunchy stuff on the networks – he saw them start to cut open a woman's belly for a Caesarean. The knife in the rubber-gloved hand made a straight line and on either side yellow fat curled up and away like two strips of foam rubber. This woman's abdomen, with a baby inside, was lined in a material, just like foam rubber. "Down in Florida," he says, "I had a catheterization" – the word makes trouble in his mouth, as if he's become the waitress – "and it wasn't so bad, more boring than anything else. You're wide awake, and then they put like this big bowl over your chest to see what's going on inside. Where the dye is being pumped through, it's hot, so hot you can hardly stand it." He feels he's disappointing Charlie, being so cowardly about bypasses, and to deepen his contact with the frowning, chewing other man confides, "The worst thing of it, Charlie, is I feel half dead already. This waitress is the first girl I've wanted to fuck for months."
"Boobs," Charlie says. "Great boobs. On a skinny body. That's sexy. Like Bo Derek after her implant."
"Her hair is what gets me. Tall as she is, she adds six inches with that hairdo."
"Tall isn't bad. The tall ones don't get the play the cute little short ones do, and do more for you. Also, being skinny has its advantages, there's not all that fat to come between you and the clitoris."
This may be more male bonding than Rabbit needs. He says, "But all those earrings, don't they look painful? And is it true some punk girls -"
Charlie interrupts impatiently, "Pain is where it's at for punks. Mutilation, self-hatred, slam dancing. For these kids today, ugly is beautiful. That's their way of saying what a lousy world we're giving them. No more rain forests. Toxic waste. You know the drill."
"When I came back this spring, I went driving around the city, all the sections. Some of these Hispanics were practically screwing on the street."
"Drugs," Charlie says. "They don't know what they're doing four-fifths of the time."
"Did you see in the Standard, some spic truck driver from West Miami was caught over near Maiden Springs with they estimate seventy-five million dollars' worth of cocaine, five hundred kilos packed in orange crates marked `Fragile'?"
"They can't stop dope," Charlie says, aligning his knife and fork on the edge of his empty plate, "as long as people are willing to pay a fortune for it."
"The guy was a Cuban refugee evidently, one of those we let in."
"These countries go Communist, they let us have all their crooks and crackpots." Charlie's tone is level and authoritative, but Harry feels he's losing him. It's not quite like the old days, when they had all day to kill, over in the showroom. Charlie has finished his Spinach and Crab and Rabbit has barely made a dent in his own heaping salad, he's so anxious to get advice. He gets a slippery forkful into his mouth and finds among the oily lettuce and alfalfa sprouts a whole macadamia nut, and delicately splits it with his teeth, so his tongue feels the texture of the fissure, miraculously smooth, like a young woman's body, like a marble tabletop.
When he swallows, he gets out, "That's the other thing preying on my mind. I think Nelson is into cocaine."
Charlie nods and says, "So I hear." He picks up the fork he's just aligned and reaches over with it toward Harry's big breast of bacon-garnished greenery. "Let me help you out with all that, champ."
"You've heard he's into cocaine?"
"Mm. Yeah. He's like his granddad, jumpy. He needs crutches. I never found the kid easy to deal with."
"Me neither," Harry says eagerly, and it comes tumbling out. "I went over there last week to have it out with him about cocaine, I'd just got wind of it, and he was off somewhere, he usually is, but this accountant he's hired, a guy dying of AIDS would you believe, was there and when I asked to look at the books just about gave me the up-yours sign and said I had to get Janice's sayso. And she, the dumb mutt, doesn't want to give it. I think she's scared ofwhat she'll find out. Her own kid robbing her blind. The used sales are down, the monthly stat sheets have been looking fishy to me for months."
"You'd know. Doesn't sound good," Charlie agrees, reaching again with his fork. A macadamia nut – each one nowadays costs about a quarter – escapes in Harry's direction and only his quick reflexes prevent it from falling into his lap and staining with salad oil the russet slacks he took out of the cleaner's bag and put on for the first time today, the first spring day that's felt really warm. The sudden motion gives him a burning pang behind his rib cage. That evil child is still playing with matches in there.
He tries to ignore the pain and goes on, "And now we get these phone calls at funny hours, guys with funny voices asking for Nelson or even telling me they want money."
"They play rough," Charlie says. "Dope is big business." He reaches once more.
"Hey, leave me something. How do you stay so skinny? So what shall I do?"
"Maybe Janice should talk to Nelson."
"That's just what I told her."
"Well then."
"But the bitch won't. At least she hasn't so far that I know of."
"This is good," Charlie says, "this health stuff, but it's all like Chinese food, it doesn't fill you up."
"So what did you say your verdict was?"
"Sometimes, between a husband and wife, all the history gets in the way. Want me to sound old Jan Jan out, see where's she's coming from?"
Harry hesitates hardly at all before saying, "Charlie, if you could, that would be super."
"Would you gentlemen like some dessert?"
Jennifer has materialized. Turning his head in surprise at the sound of her sweetly impeded voice, Harry sees, inches from his eyes, that Charlie as usual is right: great boobs, gawky and selfhating as the rest of her is. Her parents must have put a lot of protein, a lot of Cheenos and vitamin-enriched bread, into those boobs. In his fragile freighted mood they seem two more burdens on his brain. The stretched chest of her green jumper lifts as she takes in breath to say, "Today our special is a cheesecake made from low-fat goat's milk topped with delicious creamed gooseberries."
Rabbit, his eyebrows still raised by the waitress's breasts, looks over at Charlie. "Whaddeyou think?"
Charlie shrugs unhelpfully. "It's your funeral."
The phone is ringing, ringing, like thrilling cold water poured into the mossy warm crevices of his dream. He was dreaming of snuggling into something, of having found an aperture that just fit. The phone is on Janice's side; he gropes for it across her stubbornly sleeping body and, with a throat dry from mouthbreathing, croaks, "Hello?" The bedside clock seems to have only one hand until he figures out it's ten minutes after two. He expects one of those men's voices and tells himself they should take the phone off the hook downstairs whenever they go to bed. His heart's pounding seems to fill the dark room to its corners, suffocatingly.
A tremulous young woman's voice says, "Harry? It's Pru.
Forgive me for waking you up, but I -" Shame, fear trip her voice into silence. She feels exposed.
"Yeah, go on," he urges softly.
"I'm desperate. Nelson has gone crazy, he's already hit me and I'm afraid he'll start in on the children!"
"Really?" he says stupidly. "Nelson wouldn't do that." But people do it, it's in the papers, all the time.
"Who on earth is it?" Janice asks irritably, yanked from her own dreams. "Tell them you have no money. Just hang up."