"They've asked him, but he didn't seem too enthusiastic. As a kid he was always lonely up there. Jesus, it'd be hell, in that little space. Even around the house every time you come into a room it seems he's sitting there with a beer."
"Right. Well how about buying him a suit and tie and letting him come in here? Give him the minimum wage, no commission and no draw. He wouldn't be getting on your nerves, or you on his."
"How could I be getting on his nerves? He walks all over me. He takes the car all the time and tries to make me feel guilty besides."
Charlie doesn't dignify this with an answer; he knows too much of the story.
Harry admits, "Well, it's an idea. Then he'd be going back to college?"
Charlie shrugs. "Let's hope. Maybe you can make that part of the bargain."
Looking down upon the top of Charlie's fragile wavy-haired skull, Rabbit cannot avoid awareness of his own belly, an extensive; suit-straining slope; he has become a person and a half, where the same years have pared Charlie's shape, once stocky, bit by bit. He asks him, "You really want to do this for Nelson?"
"I like the kid. To me, he's just another basket case. At his age now they're all basket cases."
A couple has parked out in the glare and is heading for the showroom doors, a well-dressed Penn Park sort of pair that will probably collect the literature and sneak off to buy a Mercedes, as an investment. "Well, it's your funeral," Harry tells Charlie. Actually it might be nice all around. Melanie wouldn't be left alone in that big house all by herself. And it occurs to him that this all may be Melanie's idea, and Charlie's way of keeping his move on her alive.
In bed Melanie asks Nelson, "What are you learning?"
"Oh, stuff." They have decided upon her bed in the front room for these weeks when the old people are in the Poconos. Melanie in the month and more of her tenancy here has gradually moved the headless dress dummy to a comer and hidden some of the Springers' other ugly possessions – slid some rolled-up hall carpeting beneath the bed, tucked a trunkful of old curtains and a broken foot-pedalled Singer into the back of the closet, already crammed with outgrown and outmoded clothes in polyethylene cleaner bags. She has Scotch-taped a few Peter Max posters to the walls and made the room her own. They have used Nelson's room up to now, but his childhood bed is single and in truth he feels inhibited there. They had not intended to sleep together at all in this house but out of their long and necessary conversations it had been inevitable they sink into it. Melanie's breasts are indeed, as Charlie had noticed at a glance, large; their laden warm sway sometimes sickens Nelson, reminding him of a more shallowbreasted other, whom he has abandoned. He elaborates: "Lots of things. There's all these pressures that don't show, like between the agency and the manufacturer. You got to buy sets of their special tools, for thousands of dollars, and they keep loading their base models with what used to be extras, where the dealer used to make a lot of his profit. Charlie told me a radio used to cost the dealer about thirty-five dollars and he'd add about one-eighty on to the sales price. See then by the manufacturer getting greedy and taking these options away from the dealer the dealers have to think up more gimmicks. Like undercoating. And rustproofing. There's even a treatment they'll give the vinyl upholstery to keep it from wearing supposedly. All that stuff. It's all cutthroat but kind ofjolly at the same time, all these little pep talks people keep giving each other. My grandfather used to have a performance board but Dad's let it drop. You can tell Charlie thinks Dad's really lazy and sloppy the way he runs things."
She pushes herself more upright in the bed, her breasts sluggish and luminous in the half-light the maples filter from the sodium lamps on Joseph Street. There is that something heavy and maternal and mystical in her he cannot escape. "Charlie's asked me out on another date," she says.
"Go," Nelson advises, enjoying the altered feeling of the bed, Melanie's lifting her torso above him deepening the rumpled trough in which he lies. When he was a little child and Mom and Dad were living in that apartment high on Wilbur Street and they would come visit here he would be put to bed in this very room, his grandmother's hair all black then but the patterns of light carved on the ceiling by the window mullions just the same as they are now. Mom-mom would sing him songs, he remembers, but he can't remember what they were. In Pennsylvania Dutch, some of them. Reide, reide, Geile…
Melanie pulls a hairpin from the back of her head and fishes with it in the ashtray for a dead roach that may have a hit or two left in it. She holds it to her red lips and lights it; the paper flares. When she lifted her arm to pull the hairpin, the hair in her armpit, unshaved, has flared in Nelson's field of vision. Despite himself, to no purpose, his prick with little knocks of blood begins to harden down in the trough of childish warmth. "I don't know," Melanie says. "I think with them away, he's psyched to score."
"How do you feel about that?"
"Not so great."
"He's a pretty nice guy," Nelson says, snuggling deeper beside her abstracted body, enjoying the furtive growth of his erection. "Even if he did screw Mom."
"Suppose it kills him, how would I feel then? I mean, one of the reasons for my coming with you was to clean my head of all this father-figure shit."
"You came along because Pru told you to." Saying the other's name is delicious, a cool stab in the warmth. "So I wouldn't get away."
"Well, yeah, but I wouldn't have if I hadn't had reasons of my own. I'm glad I came. I like it here. It's like America used to be. All these brick houses built so solid, one against the other."
"I hate it. Everything's so humid and stuffy and, so closed."
"You really feel that Nelson?" He likes it when she kind of purrs his name. "I thought you acted frightened, in Colorado. There was too much space. Or maybe it was the situation."
Nelson loses Colorado in awareness of his erection, like a piece of round-ended ridged ivory down there, and of the womanly thick cords in her throat swelling as she sucks one last hit from the tiny butt held tight against her painted lips. Melanie always wears makeup, lipstick and touches of red to her cheeks to make her complexion less olive, where Pru never wore any, her lips pale as her brow, and everything about her face precise and dry as a photograph. Pru: the thought of her is a gnawing in his stomach, like somebody rolling a marble around over grits of sand. He says, "Maybe what I mind about around here is Dad." At the thought of Dad the abrasion intensifies. "I can't stand him, the way he sits there in the living room hogging the Barcalounger. He" – he can hardly find words, the discomfort is so great – "just sits there in the middle of the whole fucking world, taking and taking. He doesn't know anything the way Charlie does. What did he ever do, to build up the lot? My granddad was grubbing his way up while my father wasn't doing anything but being a lousy husband to my mother. That's all he's done to deserve all this money: be too lazy and shiftless to leave my mother like he wanted to. I think he's queer. You should have seen him with this black guy I told you about."
"You loved your granddad, didn't you Nelson?" When she's high on pot her voice gets husky and kind of trancy, like one of these oracles sitting over her tripod they talked about in anthro at Kent. Kent: more sand rubbing in his stomach.
"He liked me," Nelson insists, writhing a little and noticing with his hand that his erection has slightly wilted, possessing no longer the purity of ivory but the compromised texture of flesh and blood. "He wasn't always criticizing me because I wasn't some great shakes athlete and ten feet tall."