"At least it hasn't been so terribly hot like it was the summer before," Elvira says, "when everybody kept talking about the greenhouse effect. Maybe there is no greenhouse effect."
"Oh, there is," Rabbit tells her, with a conviction he didn't know he had. Across Route 111, above the red hat-shaped roof of the Pizza Hut, a flock of starlings, already migrating south, speckle the telephone wires like a bar of musical notation. "I won't live to see it," he says, "but you will, and my grandchildren. New York, Philly, their docks will be underwater, once Antarctica starts melting. All of the Jersey Shore." Ronnie Harrison and Ruth: what a shit, that guy.
"How is he doing, have you heard much? Nelson."
"He's dropped us a couple of cards of the Liberty Bell. He sounded cheerful. In a way, the kid's been always looking for more structure than we could ever give him, and I guess a rehab program is big on structure. He talks to Pru on the phone, but they don't encourage too much outside contact at this point."
"What does Pru think about everything?" Does Harry imagine it, an edge of heightened interest here, as if the sound on the TV set clicked back in?
"Hard to know what Pru thinks," he says. "I have the impression she was about ready to pack it in, the marriage, before he sent himself off. She and Janice and the kids have been up at the Poconos."
"That makes it lonely for you," Elvira Ollenbach says.
Could this be a feeler? Is he supposed to have her come on over? Have a couple daiquiris in the den, stroke the dark nape of her neck, see if her pussy matches up, up in that slanty spare bedroom where all the old Playboys were stashed in the closet when they moved in – the thought of that wiry young female body seeking to slake its appetites on his affects him like the thought of an avalanche. It would make a wreck of his routine. "At my age I don't mind it," he says. "I can watch the TV shows I want. National Geographic, Disney, World of Nature. When Janice is there she makes us watch all these family situation shows with everybody clowning around in the living room. This Roseanne, I asked her what the hell she sees in it, she told me, `I like her. She's fat and messy and mean, like most of the women in America.' I watch less and less. I try to have just one beer and go to bed early."
The young woman silently offers to move away, back to her cubicle in the direction of Paraguay. But he likes her near him, and abruptly asks, "You know who I'm sick of hearing about?"
"Who?"
"Pete Rose. 'Djou read in the Standard the other day how he's been in hot water before, in 1980 when he and a lot of the other Phils were caught taking amphetamines and the club traded away Randy Leach, the only player who admitted to it, and the rest of 'em just brazened it through?"
"I glanced at it. It was a Brewer doctor supplying the prescriptions."
"That's right, our own little burg. So that's why he thinks he can bluff it through now. Nobody else has to pay for what they do, everybody else gets away with everything. Ollie North, drug dealers, what with the jails being full and everybody such a bleeding heart anyway. Break the law, burn the flag, who the fuck cares?"
"Don't get yourself upset, Harry," she says, in her maternal, retreating mode. "The world is full of cheaters."
"Yeah, we should know."
She makes no response at all, having turned her back. Maybe she had been balling Nelson after all.
"I always thought he was an ugly ballplayer, anyway," he feels compelled to say, concerning Rose. "If you have to do it all with hustle and grit, you shouldn't be out there."
Out there, in the dog-days outdoors whose muggy alternation of light and shadow flickeringly gives him back his own ominous reflection, Harry notices that the refurbished yew hedge – he had a lawn service replace the dead bushes and renew the bark mulch – has collected a number of waxpaper pizza wrappers and Styrofoam coffee cups that have blown in from Route 111. He can't have their Japanese visitor see a mess like that. He goes outside, and the hot polluted air, bouncing off the asphalt, takes his breath away. The left side of his ribs gives a squeeze. He puts a Nitrostat to melt beneath his tongue before he begins to stoop. The more wastepaper he gathers, the more it seems there is candy wrappers, cigarette-pack cellophane, advertising fliers and whole pages of newspaper wrinkled by rain and browned by the sun, big soft-drink cups with the plastic lid still on and the straw still in and the dirty water from melted ice still sloshing around. There is no end of crud in the world. He should have brought out a garbage bag, he has both hands full and can feel his face getting red as he tries to hold yet one more piece of crumpled sticky cardboard in his fanned fingers. A limousine cracklingly pulls into the lot while Harry is still picking up the trash, and he has to run inside to cram it all into the wastebasket in his office. Puffing, his heart thudding, his metallic-gray suit coat pulling at the buttons, he rushes back across the showroom to greet Mr. Shimada at the entrance, shaking his hand with a hand unwashed of street grit, dried sugar, and still-sticky pizza topping.
Mr. Shimada is an impeccable compact man of about five six, carrying an amazingly thin oxblood-red briefcase and wearing a smoke-blue suit with an almost invisible pinstripe, tailored to display a dapper breadth of his gold-linked French cuffs and high white collar, on a shirt with a pale-blue body. He looks dense, like a beanbag filled to the corners with buckshot, and in good physical trim, though stocky, with a burnish of California tan on his not unfriendly face. "Is very nice meeting you," he says. "Area most nice." He speaks English easily, but with enough of an accent to cost Harry a second's response time answering him.
"Well, not around here exactly," he answers, instantly thinking that this is tactless, for why would Toyota want to locate its franchise in an ugly area? "I mean, the farm country is what we're famous for, barns with hex signs and all that." He wonders if he should explain "hex sign" and decides it's not worth it. "Would you like to look around the facility? At the setup?" In case "facility" didn't register. Talking to foreigners really makes you think about the language.
Mr. Shimada slowly, stiffly turns his head and shoulders together, one way and then the other, to take in the showroom. "I see," he smiles. "Also in Torrance I study many photos and froor pran. Oh! Rovely rady!"
Elvira has left her desk and sashays toward their visitor, sucking in her cheeks to make herself look more glamorous. "Miss Olshima, I mean Mr. Shimada" -Harry had been practicing the name, telling himself it was like Ramada with shit at the beginning, only to botch it in the crunch – "this is Miss Ollenbach, one of our best sales reps. Representatives."
Mr. Shimada first gives her an instinctive little hands-at-the-sides bow. When they shake hands, it's like both of them are trying to knock each other out with their smiles, they hold them so long. "Is good idea, to have both sexes serring," he says to Harry. "More and more common thing."
"I don't know why it took us all so long to think of it," Harry admits.
"Good idea take time," the other man says, curbing his smile a little, letting an admonitory sternness tug downward his rather full yet flat lips. Harry remembers from his boyhood in World War II how very cruel the Japanese were to their prisoners on Bataan. The first thing you heard about them, after Pearl Harbor, was that they were ridiculously small, manning tiny submarines and planes called Zeros, and then, as those early Pacific defeats rolled in, that they were fanatic in the service of their Emperor, robot-monkeys that had to be torched out of their caves with flame-throwers. What a long way we've come since then. Harry feels one of his surges of benevolence, of approval of a world that isn't asking for it. Mr. Shimada seems to be asking Elvira if she prays.