Rabbit is Rich

"I hit the ball ok," Rabbit Angstrom says, "but damned if I could score." It is the great weekend of gas drought, June 1979. He is sitting in green bathing trunks at a white outdoor table at the Flying Eagle Tee and Racquet Club with the partners of his round and their wives and, in the case of Buddy Ingle-finger, girlfriend. Buddy had once had a wife, too, but she left him for a telephone lineman down near West Chester. You could see how that might happen, because Buddy's girlfriends are sure a sorry lot.

"When did you ever score?" Ronnie Harrison asks him so loudly heads in the swimming pool turn around. Rabbit has known Ronnie for 30 years and never liked him, one of those locker-room show-offs always soaping himself for everybody to see and giving the J.V.s redbellies and out on the basketball court barging around all sweat and elbows trying to make up in muscle what he lacked in style. Yet when Harry and Janice joined Flying Eagle, there old Ronnie was, with a respectable job at Schuylkill Mutual and this quiet, proper wife who taught third grade and must be great in bed, because that's all Ronnie ever used to talk about, he was like crazy on the subject, in the locker room. He's gone completely bald on top, which doesn't change him that much, since his hair was always very fine and kind of pink anyway. Rabbit likes playing golf with him because he loves beating him, which isn't too hard: He has one of those herky-jerky punch swings short guys gravitate toward and when he gets excited he tends to roundhouse a big banana right into the woods.

"I heard Harry was a big scorer," Ronnie's wife, Thelma, says softly. She has a narrow forgettable face and still wears that quaint old-fashioned kind of one-piece bathing suit with a little pleated skirt. Often she has a towel across her shoulders or around her ankles, as if to protect her skin from the sun; except for her sunburned nose, she is the same sallow color all over. Her wavy mousy hair is going gray strand by strand. Rabbit can never look at her without wondering what wild things this biddy must do to keep Harrison happy. He senses intelligence in her, but intelligence in women has never much interested him.

"I set the B-league county scoring record in 1951," he says, to defend himself, and to defend (continued on page 114) Rabbit is Rich (continued from page 111) himself further adds, "Big deal."

"It's been broken long since," Ronnie feels he has to explain. "By blacks."

"Every record has," Webb Murkett interposes, being tactful. "I don't know, it seems like the miles these kids run now have shrunk. In swimming they can't keep the record books up to date." Webb is the oldest man of their regular foursome, 50 and then some—a lean, thoughtful gentleman in roofing-and-siding contracting and supply with a calming gravel voice, his long face broken into longitudinal strips by creases and his hazel eyes almost lost under an amber tangle of eyebrows. He is the steadiest golfer, too. The one unsteady thing about him, he is on his third wife; this is Cindy, a plump brown-backed honey still smelling of high school, though they have two little ones, a boy and a girl, ages five and three. Her hair is cut short and lies wet in one direction, as if surfacing from a dive, and when she smiles her teeth look unnaturally even and white in her tan face, with pink spots of peeling on the roundest part of her cheeks; she has an exciting sexually neutral look, though her boobs slosh and shiver in the triangular little hammocks of her bra. The suit is one of those minimal black ones with open sides and only a string or two between the nape of her neck and where her ass begins to divide, a cleft more or less visible, depending on the sag of her black diaper. Harry admires Webb. Webb always swings within himself and gets good roll.

"Better nutrition, don't you think that's it?" Buddy Inglefinger's girl pipes up, in a little-girl reedy voice that doesn't go with her pushed-in face. She is some kind of physical therapist, though her own shape isn't too great. Flabby. The girls Buddy brings around are a good lesson to Harry in the limits of being single—restaurant hostesses whose smirks won't come off their lips, witchy-looking former flower children with grizzled ponytails and a chestful of Indian jewelry, overweight assistant heads of personnel in one of those grim brick office buildings a block back from Weiser where they spend all day putting computer print-outs in the wastebasket, scrawny co-owners of progressive boutiques struggling for life in some suburban mall. Women pickled in limbo, their legs chalky and their faces slightly twisted, as if they had been knocked into their 30s by a sideways blow. They remind Harry somehow of pirates, jaunty and maimed, though without the eye patches. What the hell was this one's name? She had been introduced around not a half hour ago, but when everybody was still drunk on golf.

Buddy brought her, so he can't let her two cents hang up there while the silence gets painful. He fills in, "My guess is it's mostly in the training. Coaches at even the secondary level have all these techniques that in the old days only the outstanding athlete would discover, you know, pragmatically. Nowadays the outstanding isn't that outstanding, there's a dozen right behind him. Or her." He glances at each of the women in a kind of dutiful tag. Feminism won't catch him off guard, he's traded jabs in too many singles bars. "And in countries like East Germany or China, they're pumping these athletes full of steroids, like beef cattle, they're hardly human." Buddy wears steel-rimmed glasses of a style that only lathe operators used to employ, to keep shavings out of their eyes. Buddy does something with electronics and has a mind like that, too precise. He goes on, to bring it home, "Even golf. Palmer and now Nicklaus have been trampled out of sight by these kids nobody has heard of, the colleges down South clone 'em, you can't keep their names straight from one tournament to the next."

Harry always tries to take an overview. "The records fall because they're there," he says. "Aaron shouldn't have been playing, they kept him in there just so he could break Ruth's record. I can remember when a five-minute mile in high school was a miracle. Now girls are doing it."

"It is amazing," Buddy's girl puts in, this being her conversation, "what the human body can do. Any one of us women here could go out now and pick up a car by the front bumper, if we were motivated. If, say, there was a child of ours under the tires. You read about incidents like that all the time, and at the hospital where I trained, the doctors could lay the statistics of it right out on paper. We don't use half the muscle power we have."

Webb Murkett kids, "Hear that, Cin? Gas stations all closed down, you can carry the Audi home. Seriously, though. I've always marveled at these men who know a dozen languages. If the brain is a computer, think of all the gray cells this entails. There seems to be lots more room in there, though."

His young wife silently lifts her hands to twist some water from her hair, which is almost too short to grab. This action gently lifts her tits in their sopping black small slings and reveals the shape of each erect nipple. A white towel is laid across her lap as if to relieve Harry from having to think about her crotch. What turns him off about Buddy's girl, he realizes, is that she has pimples not only on her chin and forehead but on her thighs, high on the inside, like something venereal. Georgene? Geraldine? She is going on in that reedy too-eager voice, "Or the way these yogas can lift themselves off the ground or go back in time for thousands of years. Edgar Cayce has example after example. It's nothing supernatural, I can't believe in God, there's too much suffering, they're just using human powers we all have and never develop. You should all read The Tibetan Book of the Dead."

"Really?" Thelma Harrison says dryly.

Now silence does invade their group. A greenish reflective wobble from the pool washes ghostly and uneasy across their faces and a child gasping as he swims can be heard. Then Webb kindly says, "Closer to home now, we've had a spooky experience lately. I bought one of these Polaroid SX-70 Land Cameras as kind of a novelty, to give the kids a charge, and all of us can't stop being fascinated, it is supernatural, to watch that image develop right under your eyes."

"The kind," Cindy says, "that spits it out at you like this." She makes a cross-eyed face and thrusts out her tongue with a thrrupping noise. All the men laugh and laugh.

"Consumer Reports had something on it," Harry says.

"It's magical," Cindy says. "Webb gets really turned on." When she grins, her teeth look stubby, the healthy gums come so babyishly low.

"Why is my glass empty?" Janice asks.

"Losers buy," Harry virtually shouts. Such loudness years ago would have been special to male groups, but now both sexes have watched enough beer commercials on television to know that this is how to act, jolly and loud, on weekends, in the bar, beside the barbecue grill, on beaches and sun decks and mountainside. "Winners bought the first round," he calls needlessly, as if among strangers or men without memories, while several arms flail for the waitress.

Harry's team lost the Nassau, but he feels it was his partner's fault. Buddy is such a flub artist, even when he hits two good shots he skulls the chip and takes three putts to get down. Whereas Harry, as he has said, hit the ball well, if not (continued on page 136) Rabbit is Rich (continued from page 114) always straight: arms like ropes, start down slow, and look at the ball until it seems to swell. He ended with a birdie, on the long par-five that winds in around the brook with its water cress and sandy orange bottom almost to the clubhouse lawn, and that triumph (the wooden gobbling sound the cup makes when a long putt falls) eclipses many double bogeys and suffuses with limpid certainty of his own omnipotence and immortality the sight of the scintillating chlorinated water, the sun-struck faces and torsos of his companions and the golden shadow-pitted flank of Mt. Pemaquid where its forest begins above the shaven bright stripes of the fairways. The developers of the Flying Eagle (its name plucked from a bird, probably a sparrow hawk, the first surveyor spotted and took as an omen) bought 300 acres of the lower slopes cheap; as the bulldozers ground the second-growth ash, poplar, hickory and dogwood into muddy troughs that would become fairways and terraced tennis courts, people said the club would fail, the county already had the Brewer Country Club south of the city for the doctors and the Jews and ten miles north the Tulpehocken Club behind its fieldstone walls and tall wrought-iron fencing for the old mill-owning families and their lawyers and for the peasantry several nine-hole public courses tucked around in the farmland. But there was a class of the young middle-aged that had arisen in the retail businesses and service industries and software end of the new technology and that did not expect liveried barmen and secluded cardrooms, that did not mind the prefab clubhouse and sweep-it-yourself tennis courts of the Flying Eagle; to them the polyester wall-to-wall carpeting of the locker rooms were luxury and a Coke machine in a cement corridor a friendly sight. They were happy to play winter rules all summer long on the immature sparse fairways and to pay for their modest privilege the $500, now risen to $650, in annual dues, plus a small fortune in chits. At the Flying Eagle Harry feels exercised, cleansed, cherished; the biggest man at the table, he lifts his hand and a girl in Flying Eagle white and green comes and without asking his name takes his order for more drinks on this Sunday of widespread gas dearth.

"Do you believe in astrology?" Buddy's girl abruptly asks Cindy Murkett. Maybe she's a lesbian, is why Harry can't remember her name. It was a name soft around the edges, not Gertrude.

"I don't know," Cindy says, the widened eyes of her surprise showing very white in the mask of her tan. "I look at the horoscope in the papers sometimes. Some of the things they say ring so true, but isn't there a trick to that?"

"It's no trick, it's ancient science. It's the most ancient science there is."

This assault on Cindy's repose agitates Harry, so he turns to Webb and asks if he watched the Phillies game last night.

"The Phillies are dead," Ronnie Harrison interrupts.

Buddy comes up with the statistic that they've lost 23 of their last 34 games.

"I was brought up a Catholic," Cindy is saying to Buddy's girl in a voice so lowered Harry has to strain to hear. "And the priests said such things are the work of the Devil." She fingers as she confides this the small crucifix she wears about her throat on a chain so fine it has left no trace in her tan.

"Bowa's being out has hurt them quite a lot," Webb says judiciously, and pokes another cigarette into his creased face, lifting his rubbery upper lip automatically like a camel. He shot an 84 this afternoon, with one ball in the water.

Janice is asking Thelma where she bought that lovely bathing suit. She must be drunk. "You can't find that kind at all in Kroll's anymore," Rabbit hears her say. She is wearing an elastic blue one-piece that holds her in, with a white sweater bought to go with her tennis whites hung capelike over her shoulders. She holds a cigarette in her hand and Webb Murkett leans over to light it with his turquoise propane lighter. She's not so bad, Harry thinks. Compared with Thelma's sallow limbs Janice's figure has energy, edge, the bones of the knees pressing their shape against the skin as she leans forward to accept his light. She does this easily, Webb respects her, as Fred Springer's daughter. The drinks come. Grateful cries, like on the beer commercials, and Cindy Murkett decides to earn hers by going for another swim. When she stands, the backs of her thighs are printed in squares and her skimpy black bathing-suit bottom, still wet, clings in two arcs a width of skin below two dimples symmetrically set in her fat; the sight dizzies Harry. The mountain is drawing closer. Sun reddening beyond the city dusts with gold the tips of trees high like a mane on the crest of Pemaquid and deepens the pockets of dark between each tree in the undulating forest that covers like deep-piled carpet the acreage between crest and course. Along the far 11th fairway men are still picking their way, insect-sized. As his eyes are given to these distances, Cindy flat-dives and a few drops of the splash prick Harry's naked chest, that feels broad as the basking mountain. He frames in his mind the words I heard a funny story on the radio yesterday driving home....

"If I had your nice legs," Ronnie's plain wife is concluding to Janice.

"Oh, but you still have a waist. Creeping middle-itis, that's what I've got. Harry says I'm shaped like a pickle." Giggle. First she giggles, then she begins to lurch.

"He looks asleep."

He opens his eyes and announces to the air, "I heard a funny story on the radio yesterday driving home."

"Fire Ozark," Ronnie is insisting loudly. "He's lost their respect, he's demoralizing. Until they can Ozark and trade Rose away, the Phillies are D-E-A-D, dead."

"I'm listening," Buddy's awful girlfriend tells Harry, so he has to go on.

"Oh, just some doctor down in Baltimore, the radio announcer said he was hauled into court for killing a goose on the course with a golf club."

"Course on the golf with a goose club," Janice giggles. Someday what would give him great pleasure would be to take a large round rock and crush her skull in with it.

"Where'd you hear this, Harry?" Webb Murkett asks him, coming in late but politely tilting his long head, one eye shut against the smoke of his cigarette.

"On the radio yesterday, driving home," Harry answers, sorry he has begun.

"Speaking of yesterday," Buddy has to interrupt, "I saw a gas line five blocks long. That Sunoco at the corner of Ash and Fourth, it went down Fourth to Buttonwood, Buttonwood to Fifth, Fifth back to Ash, and then a new line beginning the other side of Ash. They had guys directing and everything. I couldn't believe it, and cars were still getting into it. Five fucking blocks long."

"Big heating-oil dealer who's one of our clients," Ronnie says, "says they have plenty of crude, it's just they've decided to put the squeeze on gasoline and make more heating oil out of it. The crude. In their books winter's already here. I asked the guy what was going to happen to the average motorist and he looked at me funny and said, 'He can (continued on page 190) Rabbit is Rich (continued from page 136) go screw himself instead of driving every weekend to the Jersey shore.' "

"Ronnie, Harry's trying to tell a story," Thelma says.

"It hardly seems worth it," he says, enjoying now the prolonged focus on him, the comedy of delay. Sunshine on the mountain. The second gin is percolating through his system and elevating his spirits. He loves this crowd, his crowd, and the crowds at the other tables, too, that are free to send delegates over and mingle with theirs, everybody knowing everybody else, and the kids in the pool, that somebody would save even if that caramel-colored lifeguard-girl weren't on duty, and loves the fact that this is all on credit, the club not taking its bite until the tenth of every month.

Now they coax him. "Come on, Harry, don't be a prick," Buddy's girl says. She's using his name now, he has to find hers. Gretchen. Ginger. Maybe those aren't actually pimples on her thighs, just a rash from chocolate or poison oak. She looks allergic, that slightly pushed-in face. Defects come in clusters.

"So this doctor," he concedes, "is hauled into court for killing a goose on the course with a golf club."

"What club?" Ronnie asks.

"I knew you'd ask that," Harry says. "If not you, some other jerk."

"I'd think a sand wedge," Buddy says, "right at the throat. 'D clip the head right off."

"Too short in the handle, you couldn't get close enough," Ronnie argues. He squints as if to judge a distance. "I'd say a five or even an easy four would be the right stick. Hey, Harry, how about that five-iron I put within a gimme on the fifteenth from way out on the other side of the sand trap? In deep rough, yet."

"You nudged it," Harry says.

"Heh?"

"I saw you nudge the ball up to give yourself a lie."

"Let's get this straight. You're saying I cheated."

"Something like that."

"Let's hear the story, Harry," Webb Murkett says, lighting another cigarette to dramatize his patience.

Ginger was in the ball park. Thelma Harrison is staring at him through big brown sunglasses tinted darker at the top like a windshield. "So the doctor's defense evidently was that he had hit the goose with a golf ball and injured it badly enough he had to put it out of its misery. Then this announcer said, it seemed cute at the time——"

"Wait a minute, sweetie, I don't understand," Janice says. "You mean he threw a golf ball at this goose?"

"Oh, my God," Rabbit says, "am I ever sorry I got started on this. Let's go home."

"No, tell me," Janice says, looking panicked.

"He didn't throw the ball, the goose was on the fairway probably by some pond and the guy's drive or whatever it was——"

"Could have been his second shot and he shanked it," Buddy offers.

His nameless girlfriend looks around and in that fake little-girl voice asks, "Are geese allowed on golf courses? I mean, that may be stupid, Buddy's the first golfer I've gone out with——"

"You call that a golfer?" Ronnie interrupts.

Buddy tells them, "I've read somewhere about a course in Alaska where these caribou wander. Maybe it's Sweden."

"I've heard of moose on courses in Maine," Webb Murkett says. Lowering sun flames in his twisted eyebrows. He seems sad. Maybe he's feeling the liquor, too, for he rambles on, "Wonder why you never hear of a Swedish golfer. You hear of Bjorn Borg and this fella Stenmark."

Rabbit decides to ride it through. "So the announcer says, 'A mercy killing, or murder most foul?' "

"Ouch," someone says.

Ronnie is pretending to ruminate, "Maybe you'd be better off with a four wood, and play the goose off your left foot."

"Nobody heard the punch line," Harry protests.

"I heard it," Thelma Harrison says.

"We all heard it," Buddy says. "It's just very distressing to me," he goes on, and looks very severe in his steel-rimmed glasses, so the women at first take him seriously, "that nobody here, I mean nobody, has shown any sympathy for the goose."

"Somebody sympathized enough to bring the man to court," Webb Murkett points out.

"I discover myself," Buddy complains sternly, "in the midst of a crowd of people who while pretending to be liberal and tolerant are really antigoose."

"Who, me?" Ronnie says, making his voice high as if goosed. Rabbit hates this kind of humor, but the others seem to enjoy it, including the women.

Cindy has returned glistening from her swim. Standing there with her bathing suit slightly awry, she tugs it straight and blushes in the face of their laughter. "Are you talking about me?" The little cross glints beneath the hollow of her throat. Her feet look pale on the pool-side flagstones. Funny how pale the tops of feet stay.

Webb gives his wife's wide hips a sideways hug. "No, honey. Harry was telling us a shaggy-goose story."

"Tell me, Harry."

"Not now. Nobody liked it. Webb will tell you."

The waitress in her green-and-white uniform comes up to them. "Mrs. Angstrom."

The words shock Harry, as if his mother has been resurrected.

"Yes," Janice answers matter-of-factly.

"Your mother is on the phone."

"Oh, lordy, what now?" Janice stands, lurches slightly, composes herself. She sets her mouth primly to match her prim little dark bangs. She takes her beach towel from the back of her chair and wraps it around her hips rather than walk in mere bathing suit past dozens of people into the clubhouse. "What do you think it is?" she asks Harry.

He shrugs. "Maybe she's wondering why there's no food in the fridge."

A dig in that, delivered openly. The awful girlfriend titters. Harry is ashamed of himself, thinking in contrast of Webb's sideways hug of Cindy's hips. This kind of company will do a marriage in if you let it. He doesn't want to get sloppy.

In defiance Janice asks, "Honey, could you order me another vod and ton while I'm gone?"

"No." He softens this to "I'll think about it," but the chill has been put on the party.

The Murketts consult and conclude it may be time to go, they have a 13-year-old baby sitter, a neighbor's child. The same sunlight that ignited his eyebrows lights the halo of fine hairs standing up from the goose bumps on her thighs. Not bothering with any towel around her, she saunters to the ladies' locker room to change, her pale feet gripping the tiles. Wait, leaving black prints on the gray flagstones. Wait, wait, the Sunday, the weekend cannot be by, a golden sip remains in the glass. On the transparent tabletop among the wire chairs drinks have left a ghostly clockwork of rings refracted into visibility by the declining light. A cool touch suddenly in the air. She has called out to them from a darker older world he remembers but wants to stay buried, a world of constant clothing and airless front parlors, of coalbins and narrow houses with spitefully drawn shades, where the farmer's drudgery and the millworker's lowered like twin clouds over land and city. Here, clean children shivering with their sudden emergence into the thinner element are handed towels by their mothers. Cindy's towel hangs on her empty chair. To be Cindy's towel and to be sat upon by her: The thought dries Harry's mouth. To stick your tongue in just as far as it would go while her pussy tickles your nose. No pimples in that crotch. Heaven. He looks up and sees the shaggy mountain shouldering into the sun still, though the chairs are making long shadows, lozenge checkerboards. Buddy Inglefinger is saying to Webb Murkett in a low voice whose vehemence is not ironical, "Ask yourself sometime who benefits from inflation. The people in debt benefit, society's losers. The Government benefits because it collects more in taxes without raising the rates. Who doesn't benefit? The man with money in his pocket, the man who's paid his bills. That's why"—Buddy's voice drops to a conspiratorial hiss—"that man is vanishing like the red Indian. Why should I work," he asks Webb, "when the money is taken right out of my pocket for the benefit of those who don't?"

Harry is thinking his way along the mountain ridge, where clouds are lifting like a form of steam. As if in motion Mt. Pemaquid cleaves the summer sky and sun, though poolside is in shadow now. Thelma is saying cheerfully to the girlfriend, "Astrology, palm reading, psychiatry—I'm for all of it. Anything that helps get you through." Harry is thinking of his own parents. They should have belonged to a club. Living embattled, Mom feuding with the neighbors, Pop and his union hating the men who owned the printing plant where he worked his life away, both of them scorning the few kin that tried to keep in touch, the four of them, Pop and Mom and Hassy and Mim, against the world and a certain guilt attaching to any reaching up and outside for a friend. Don't trust anybody: Andy Mellon doesn't and I don't. Dear Pop. He never got out from under. Rabbit basks above that old remembered world, rich, at rest.

Buddy's voice nags on, aggrieved. "Money that goes out of one pocket goes into somebody else's, it doesn't just evaporate. The big boys are getting rich out of this."

A chair scrapes and Rabbit feels Webb stand. His voice comes from a height, gravelly, humorously placating. "Become a big boy yourself I guess is the only answer."

"Oh, sure," Buddy says, knowing he is being put off.

A tiny speck, a bird, the fabled eagle it might be, no, from the motionlessness of its wings a buzzard, is flirting in flight with the ragged golden-green edge of the mountain, now above it like a speck on a Kodak slide, now below it out of sight, while a blue-bellied cloud unscrolls, endlessly, endlessly. Another chair is scraped on the flagstones. His name, "Harry," is sharply called, in Janice's voice.

He lowers his gaze at last out of glory and as his eyes adjust, his forehead momentarily hurts, a small arterial pain; perhaps with such a negligible unexplained ache do men begin their deaths, some slow as being tumbled by a cat and some fast as being struck by a hawk. Cancer, coronary. "What did Bessie want?"

Janice's tone is breathless, faintly stricken. "She says Nelson's come. With this girl."

"Teresa," Harry says, pleased to have remembered his son's girlfriend's name. And his remembering brings along with it Buddy's girlfriend's name. Joanne. "It was nice to have met you, Joanne," he says in parting, shaking her hand. "Don't overdo the astrology," he warns her. Maybe that's what's behind her pimples. Like candy.

•

Webb Murkett is handy about the house; he has a cellar full of expensive power tools and subscribes to magazines with titles like Fine Woodworking and Homecraft. In every corner of the gray Colonial he and Cindy have lived in for the seven years of their marriage there are handmade refinements of rounded, stained and varnished wood—shelves, cabinets, built-in Lazy Susans with as many compartments as a sea shell—expressing the patience and homelovingness of the house's master. When Webb and Cindy entertain, built-in speakers bathe the downstairs rooms in a continuous sweetness of string music and spineless arrangements, of old show tunes or mollified rock classics, voiceless and seamless and with nagging dental associations for Harry. Behind a mahogany bar Webb bought from the tavern of a farmer's hotel being demolished in Brewer and then cut down and transported with its brass rail to a corner of his living room, he has constructed a kind of altar to booze, two high doors with rounded tops that meet in a point and shelves that come forward on a lazy-tongs principle with not only the basics of whiskey, gin and vodka but exotic drinks like rum and tequila and sake and all the extras you could want from bitters to powdered old fashioned mix in little envelopes. And the bar has its own small refrigerator, built in. Much as he admires Webb, Harry thinks when he gets his own dream house he will do without the piped music and such elaborate housing for the liquor.

The bathroom, though, rather enchants him, with its little enameled dishes of rosebud-shaped soap and furry blue toilet-seat covers and dazzling mirror rimmed with naked light bulbs like actors have in their dressing rooms. Everything in here that doesn't shine is tinted and scented. The toilet paper, very dulcet, is printed with old comic strips, each piece a panel. Poor Popeye, eating shit instead of spinach. And the towels have W and M and L for Lucinda intertwined in such a crusty big monogram he hates to think what it would do to Cindy's delicate underparts if she forgot and rubbed herself vigorously. Harry feels sexy. In the mirror that makes things too vivid, his eyes stare with a pallor almost white like the little frost flowers that appear on the skin of a car in the morning and his lips look bluish; he is drunk. He has had two tequila fizzes before dinner, as much Gallo Chablis as he could grab during the meal and a brandy and a half afterward. In the middle of the second brandy, the need to urinate came upon him like yet another pressure of happiness. He has an urge to look into the medicine cabinet framed by the rim of showbiz bulbs and waits until a gale of laughter from the drunken bunch in the living room arises to drown out any possible click. Besides himself and Janice, the Murketts have invited the Harrisons and for a new thrill the moronic Fosnachts, whom they just met at Harry's house two weeks ago but who must have turned them on somehow, God knows how. Harry opens the mirror door. Click. The cabinet has more in it than he would have supposed: thick milk-glass jars of skin cream and flesh-tint squeeze bottles of lotion and brown tubes of suntan lotion, Parepectolin for diarrhea, Debrox for earwax control, menthol Chloraseptic, that mouthwash called Cepacol, several kinds of aspirin, both Bayer and Anacin, and Tylenol, which doesn't make your stomach burn, and a large chalky bottle of liquid Maalox. He wonders which of the Murketts needs Maalox, they both always look so relaxed and at peace. The pink poison-ivy goo would be downstairs, handy for the kids, and the Band-Aids, but how about the little flat yellow box of Preparation H for hemorrhoids? Carter, of course, has hemorrhoids, that grim overmotivated type who wants to do everything on schedule, ready or not, pushing, pushing, but old Webb Murkett, with that gravelly voice and easy swing, like the swing you see crooners use at celebrity tournaments, unwrapping one of those little wax bullets and poking it up his own asshole? And what of these amber pill bottles with Lucinda K. Murkett typed in pale-blue script face on the prescription labels? White pills, lethally small. He should have brought his reading glasses. Harry is tempted to lift one of these containers off its shelf in hopes of deciphering what illness might have ever found its way into that plump and supple babyish body, but a superstitious fear of fingerprints restrains him. Medicine cabinets are tragic, he sees by this hard light, and closes the door so gently no one will hear the click. He returns to the living room.

They are discussing the Pope's visit, loudly. "Did you see," Peggy Fosnacht is shouting, "what he said in Chicago yesterday about sex!" Harry knew Peggy in high school and had a little affair with her ten years ago; the decade since has freed her to stop wearing dark glasses to hide her walleye and to be sloppy in her person and opinions both. She's become the kind of woman who looks permanently out of press, as a gesture of protest. "He said everything outside marriage was wrong. Not just if you're married but before you're married, too. What does that man know? He doesn't know anything about life, life as she is lived."

Webb Murkett offers in a soft voice, trying to calm his guest down, "I liked what Earl Butz said some years ago. 'He no play-a the game, he no make-a the rules.' " Webb is wearing a maroon turtleneck under a coarse yarny gray sweater that has something to do, Rabbit thinks, with Scandinavian fishermen. The way the neck is cut. Harry and Ronnie came in suits; Ollie was with it enough to know you don't wear suits out even on a Saturday night anymore. He came in tight faded jeans and an embroidered shirt that made him look like a cowboy too runty to be out on the range.

"No play-a the game!" Peggy Fosnacht yells. "See if you're a pregnant slum mother and can't get an abortion legally if you think it's such a game."

Rabbit says to her, "Webb's agreeing with you," but she doesn't hear him, babbling on headlong, her broad mooncalf face flushed by wine and the exciting class of company, her puffy hairdo coming uncurled like taffy softening in the sun.

"Did any of you watch except me—I can't stop watching, I get so furious—the performance he put on in Philly where he said absolutely no to women priests? And he kept smiling, what really got my goat, he kept smiling while spouting all this sexist crap about only men in the priesthood and how it was the conviction of the Church and God's decision and all that, so solly. He's so smooth about it, I think is what gets to me; at least somebody like Nixon or Hitler had the decency to be frantic."

"He is one smooth old Polack," Ollie says, uneasy at this outburst by his wife. He is into cool, you can see. Music, dope. Just on the fringes, but enough to give you the right pitch.

"He sure can kiss those nigger babies," Ronnie Harrison comes in with, maybe trying to help. It's fascinating to Rabbit how long those strands of hair are Ronnie is combing over his bald spot these days; if you pulled one the other way, it would go below his ear. In this day and age, why fight it? There's a bald look, go for it. Blank and pink and curved, like an ass. Everybody loves an ass. Those wax bullets in the yellow box—could they have been for Cindy? Sore there from, but would Webb? Harry has read somewhere that male homosexuals have a lot of trouble with hemorrhoids. Amazing the things they try to put up—fists, light bulbs. He squirms on his cushion.

"I think he's very sexy," Thelma Harrison states firmly. Everything she says sounds like a schoolteacher, enunciated. "He is a beautiful man," Thelma insists. Her eyes are watery. She's had a glass or two too many herself. Her throat rises absolutely straight, like a person trying not to hiccup.

Janice is saying, she, too, has known Peggy for ages and is trying to save her from herself, "What I liked today, I don't know if you were watching, Peggy, was when he came out on the balcony of that cathedral in Washington, before he went to the White House, to this crowd that was shouting, 'We want the Pope, we want the Pope,' and he came out on the balcony waving and shouted, 'John Paul Two, he wants you!' Actually."

"Actually" because the men had laughed, it was news to them. Three of them had been out on the Flying Eagle course today, summer had made one last loop back to Diamond County, bringing out fat buds on the magnolias by the sixth tee.

"I'd like to find it amusing," Peggy says, hoisting her voice above the laughter, "but to me the issues he's trampling on are too damn serious."

Cindy Murkett unexpectedly speaks. "He's been a priest in a Communist country; he's used to taking a stand. The American liberals in the Church talk about this sensus fidelium, but I never heard of it; it's been magisterium for two thousand years. What is it that offends you, Peggy, if you're not a Catholic and don't have to listen?"

A hush has surrounded her words because they all except the Fosnachts know that she was Catholic until she married Webb. Peggy senses this now but like a white sad heifer cannot turn herself around, having charged. "You're really a Catholic?" she bluntly asks.

Cindy tips her chin up, not used to this kind of spotlight, the baby of their group." I was raised as one," she says.

"So was my daughter-in-law, it turns out," Harry volunteers. He is amused by the idea of his having a daughter-in-law at all, a new branch of his wealth. And he hopes to be distracting. He doesn't like to see women fight, he'd like to get these two off the spot. Cindy comes up from that swimming pool like a wet dream, and Peggy was kind enough to lay him when he was down.

But no one is distracted.

"When I married a divorced man," Cindy explains to Peggy, her voice softened, for she is the hostess, younger though she is, "I couldn't take Communion anymore. But I still go to Mass sometimes. I still believe."

"And do you use birth control?" Peggy asks.

Back to nowhere, Fosnachts. Harry is just as pleased; he liked his little crowd the way it was.

Cindy hesitates. She can go all girlish and slide and giggle away from the question, or she can sit still and get dignified. With just the smallest of dignified smiles she says, "I'm not sure that's any of your business."

"Nor the Pope's either, that's my point," Peggy pounces, in triumph, while the battle, even she must be feeling, slips away. She will not be invited here again.

Webb, always the gentleman, perches on the arm of the easy chair in which fat Peggy has set herself up as anti-Pope and leans down a deft inch to say to his guest alone, "I think Cindy's point, as I understand it, is that John Paul is addressing the doctrinal issues for his fellow Catholics while bringing good will to every American."

"He can keep his good will along with the doctrine as far as I'm concerned," Peggy says, trying to shut up but unable.

Cindy attacks a little now, "But he sees the trouble the Church has got into since Vatican Two. The priests——"

"The Church is in trouble because it's a monument to a lie, run by a bunch of antiquated chauvinists who don't know anything. I'm sorry," Peggy says, "I'm talking too much."

"Well, this is America," Harry says, coming to her rescue somewhat.

Webb Murkett also seeks to change the subject, asking Ronnie and Ollie, "Did either of you see in the paper today where Nixon finally bought a house in Manhattan? Right next to David Rockefeller. I'm no great admirer of tricky Dick's, but I must say the way he's been excluded from apartment houses in a great city is a disgrace to the Constitution."

"If he'd been a jigaboo," Ronnie begins.

"Well, how would you like," Peggy Fosnacht has to say, "a lot of Secret Service men checking your handbag every time you came back from the store?"

The chair Peggy sits in is squared-off ponderous modern with a fabric thick as plywood; it matches another chair and a long sofa set around that kind of table with no overhang to the top they call a Parsons table, which is put together in alternating blocks of light and dark wood with a curly knotty grain such as they make golf-club heads of. The entire deep space of the room, which Webb added on when he and Cindy acquired this house in the pacesetting development of Brewer Heights, brims with appointments chosen all to harmonize. Its tawny wallpaper has vertical threads of texture in it like the vertical folds of the slightly darker pull drapes, and reproductions of Wyeth water colors lit by spots on track lighting overhead echo with scratchy strokes the same tints, and the same lighting reveals little sparkles, like mica on a beach, in the overlapping arcs of the rough-plastered ceiling. When Harry moves his head these sparkles in the ceiling change location, wave upon wave of hidden silver. He announces, "I heard a kind of funny story at Rotary the other day involving Kissinger. Webb, I don't think you were there. There were these five guys in an airplane that was about to crash—a priest, a hippie, a policeman, somebody else and Henry Kissinger. And only four parachutes."

Ronnie says, "And at the end the hippie turns to the priest and says, 'Don't worry, Father. The Smartest Man in the World just jumped out with my knapsack.' We've all heard it. Speaking of which, Thel and I were wondering if you'd seen this." He hands him a newspaper clipping, from an Ann Landers column printed in the Brewer Standard, the respectable paper, not the Vat. The second paragraph is marked in tidy pen. "Read it aloud," Ronnie demands.

Harry doesn't like being given orders by sweaty skinheads like Harrison when he's come out for a pleasant low-key time with the Murketts, but all eyes are on him and at least it gets them off the Pope. He explains, more to the Fosnachts than the others, since the Murketts seem to be in on the joke already, "It's a letter to Ann Landers from somebody. The first paragraph tells about a news story about some guy whose pet python bit him in the stomach and wouldn't let go, and when the paramedics came he yelled at them to get out of his apartment if they're going to hurt his snake." There is a little laughter at that and the Fosnachts, puzzled, try to join in. The next paragraph goes:

The other news story was about a Washington, D.C., physician who beat a Canadian goose to death with his putter on the 16th green of a country club. (The goose honked just as he was about to sink one.) The reason for printing those letters was to demonstrate that truth is stranger than fiction.

Having read this aloud, he explains to the Fosnachts, "The reason they're razzing me with this is last summer I heard about the same incident on the radio and when I tried to tell them about it at the club, they wouldn't listen, nobody believed me. Now here's proof it happened."

"You chump, that's not the point," Ronnie Harrison says.

"The point is, Harry," Thelma says, "it's so different. You said he was from Baltimore and this says he was from Washington. You said the ball hit the goose accidentally and the doctor put him out of his misery."

Webb says, "Remember—'A mercy killing, or murder most foul?' That really broke me up."

"You didn't show it at the time," Harry says, pleased, however.

"According to Ann Landers, then, it was murder most foul," Thelma says.

"Who cares?" Ronnie says, getting ugly. This clipping was clearly her idea. Her touch on the ballpoint, too.

Janice has been listening with that glazed dark look she gets when deep enough into the booze. She and Webb have been trying some new imported Irish liqueur called Greensleeves. "Well, not if the goose honked," she says.

Ollie Fosnacht says, "I can't believe a goose honking would make that much difference on a putt."

All the golfers there assure him it would.

"Shit," he says, "in music, you do your best work at two in the morning, stoned half out of your mind and a lot of drunks acting up besides."

His mention of music reminds them all that in the background Webb's hidden speakers are incessantly performing; a Hawaiian melody at the moment, with Vibra-Harp.

"Maybe it wasn't a goose at all," Harry says. "Maybe it was a very little caddie with feathers."

"That's music," Ronnie sneers at Ollie's observation. "Hey, Webb, how come there isn't any beer in this place?"

"There's beer, there's beer. Miller Lite and Heineken. What can I get everybody?"

Webb acts a little jumpy, and Rabbit worries that the party is in danger of flattening out. He misses, whom he never thought he would, Buddy Ingle-finger, and tries to say the kind of thing Buddy would if he were here. "Speaking of dead geese," he says, "I noticed in the paper the other day where some anthropologist or something says about a fourth of the animal species on earth right now will be extinct by the year 2000."

"Oh, don't," Peggy Fosnacht protests loudly, shaking herself ostentatiously, so the fat on the drumstick joint of her arms trembles. "Don't mention the year 2000; just the thought of it gives me the creeps."

Nobody asks her why.

The heated flush the papal argument roused in Cindy still warms her throat and upper chest, which with its tiny gold cross sits half-exposed by the unbuttoned two top buttons or string latches of the Arab-looking thing she is wearing, her tapering forearms looking childishly fragile within its wide sleeves, her feet bare but for the thinnest golden sandals below the embroidered hem. In the commotion as Webb takes drink orders and Janice wobbles up to go to the John, Harry goes over and sits on a straight chair beside their young hostess. "Hey," he says, "I think the Pope's pretty great. He really knows how to use TV."

Cindy says, with a sharp quick shake of her face, as if stung, "I don't like a lot of what he says either, but he's got to draw the line somewhere. That's his job."

"He's running scared," Rabbit offers. "Like everybody else."

She looks at him, her eyes smallish, the fatty pouches of her lower lids giving her a kind of squint, as if she's been beaten or is suffering from ragweed, so she looks merry even as she's being solemn, her pupils dilated in this shadowy center of the room, away from the track lighting. "Oh, I can't think of him that way, though you're probably right. I've still too much parochial school in me." The ring of brown around her pupils is smooth chocolate, without flecks or fire. "Webb's so gentle, he never pushes me. After Betsey was born, and we agreed he's been father enough, Webb, I couldn't make myself use a diaphragm, it seemed so evil, and he didn't want me on the pill, what he'd read about it, so he offered to get himself fixed, you know, like the men are paid to do in India—what do they call it?—a vasectomy. Rather than have him do that and do God knows what to his psyche, I went impulsively one day and got myself fitted for the diaphragm. I still don't know if I'm putting it in right when I do it, but poor Webb. You know he had five other children by his other wives, and they're both after his money constantly. Neither has married, though they're living with men. That's what I would call immoral, to keep bleeding him that way."

This is more than Harry had bargained for. He tries to confess back at her. "Janice had her tubes cauterized the other year, and I must say, it's great not to have to worry about it, whenever you want it, night or day, no creams or crap or anything. Still, sometimes she starts crying, for no reason. At being sterile."

"Well, of course, Harry. I would, too." Cindy's lips are long and in their lipstick lie together with a wised-up closeness of fit, a downward tug at the end of sentences, he has never noticed before tonight.

"But you're a baby," he tells her.

Cindy gives him a wise slanting look and almost toughly says, "I'm getting there, Harry. I'll be thirty this February."

Twenty-nine, she must have been 22 when Webb started fucking her, what a sly goat, he pictures her body all brown with its little silken slopes and rolls of slight excess inside the rough loose garment, shadowy spaces you could put your hand in, for the body to breathe in that desert heat, it goes with the gold threads on her feet and the bangles around her wrists, still small and round as a child's, veinless. The keenness of his lust dries his mouth. He stands to go after his brandy but loses his balance so his knee knocks against Peggy Fosnacht's ponderous square chair. She is not in it, she is standing at the top of the two steps that lead upward out of the living room, with the dull green loden coat she came in draped around her shoulders, looking down at them like one placed above and beyond, driven away.

Ollie, though, is seated around the Parsons table waiting for Webb to bring the beer and oblivious of his wife's withdrawal. Ronnie Harrison, so drunk the long hair he brushes across his bald spot stands up in a loop, is asking Ollie, "How goes the music racket these days? I hear the guitar craze is over, now that there's no more revolution."

"They're into flutes now; it's weird. Not just the girls but guys, too, who want to play 'jazz. A lot of spades. A spade came in the other day, wanted to buy a platinum flute for his daughter's eighteenth birthday, he said he read about some Frenchman who had one. I said, 'Man, you're crazy. I can't begin to guess what a flute like that would cost.' He said, 'I don't give a flying fuck, man,' and showed me this roll of bills, there must have been an inch of hundred-dollar bills in it. At least those on top were hundreds."

Any more talk with Cindy would be too much for now; Harry sits down heavily on the sofa and joins the male conversation. "Like those gold-headed putters a few years ago. Boy, I bet they've gone up in value."

Like Peggy, he is ignored. Harrison is boring in. These insurance salesmen have that way, of putting down their heads and just boring in, until it's either scream or say, sure, you'll take out another $50,000 of renewable life.

Ronnie says to Ollie, "How about electric stuff? You see this guy on television even has an electric violin. That stuff must cost."

"An arm and a leg," Ollie says, looking up gratefully as Webb sets a Heineken on a light square of the table in front of him. "Just the amplifiers take you into the thousands," he says, pleased to be talking, pleased to sound rich. Poor sap, when most of his business is selling 13-year-old dumplings records to make them wet their pants. What do the kids nowadays call it? Lollipop music.

Ronnie has tilted his head to bore in at a different angle. "You know I'm in client service at Schuylkill Mutual and my boss told me the other day, you cost this company twelve thousand seven hundred last year. That's not salary, that's benefits. Retirement, health insurance, participation options. How do you handle that in your operation? If you don't have employer-financed insurance in this day and age, you're in the soup. People expect it and without it they won't perform."

Ollie is thinking this beer may be one free drink too many. He says, "Well, I'm my own employer, in a way. Me and my partners——"

"How about Keogh? You gotta have Keogh."

"We try to keep it simple. When we started out——"

"You gotta be kidding, Ollie. You're just robbing yourself. Schuylkill Mutual offers a super deal on Keogh, and we could plug you in; in fact, we advise plugging you in, on the corporate end so not a nickel comes out of your personal pocket, it comes out of the corporate pocket and there's that much less for Uncle to tax. These poor saps carrying their own premiums with no company input are living in the dark ages. There's nothing shady about rigging it this way, we're just using the laws the Government has put there. They want people to take advantage, it all works to up the gross national product. You know what I mean by Keogh, don't you? You're looking kind of blank."

"It's something like Social Security."

"A thousand times better. Social Security's just a rip-off to benefit the freeloaders now; you'll never see a penny of what you put in. In the Keogh plan, up to seventy-five hundred goes untaxed, every year; you just set it aside, with our help. Our usual suggestion is, depending on circumstances—how many dependents you got?"

"Two, if you count the wife. My son Billy's out of college and up in Massachusetts studying specialized dentistry."

Ronnie whistles. "Boy, you were smart. Limiting yourself to one offspring. I saddled myself with three and only these last few years am I feeling out of the woods. The older boy, Alex, has taken to electronics, but the middle boy, Georgie, needed special schools from the start. Dyslexia. I'd never heard of it, but I'll tell you I've heard of it now. Couldn't make any goddamn sense at all out of anything written, and you'd never know it from his conversation. He could out-talk me at this job, that's for certain, but he can't see it. He wants to be an artist, Jesus. There's no money there, Ollie, you know that better than I do. But even with just the one kid, you don't want him to starve if you were suddenly out of the picture, or the good woman, either. Any man in this day and age carrying less than a hundred, a hundred fifty thousand dollars straight life just isn't being realistic. A decent funeral alone costs four, five grand."

"Yeah, well——"

"Lemme get back to the Keogh a minute. We generally recommend a forty-sixty split, take the forty percent of seventy-five hundred in straight life premiums, which generally comes to close to the hundred thou, assuming you pass the exam, that is. You smoke?"

"Off and on."

"Uh-oh. Well, lemme give you the name of a doctor who gives an exam everybody can live with."

Ollie says, "I think my wife wants to go."

"You're kidding, Foster."

"Fosnacht."

"You're kidding. This is Saturday night, man. You got a gig or something?"

"No, my wife—she needs to go to some antinuclear meeting tomorrow morning at some Universalist church."

"No wonder she's down on the Pope, then. I hear the Vatican and Three Mile Island are hand in glove; just ask friend Harry here. Ollie, here's my card. Could I have one of yours?"

"Uh——"

"That's OK. I know where you are. Up there next to the fuck movies. I'll come by. No bullshit, you really owe it yourself to listen to some of these opportunities. People keep saying the economy is shot, but from where I'm sitting it isn't shot at all, from where I sit it's booming. People are begging for shelters."

Harry says, "Come on, Ron. Ollie wants to go."

"Well, I don't exactly, but Peggy——"

"Go. Go in peace, man." Ronnie stands and makes a ham-handed blessing gesture. "Got pless Ameri-ca," he pronounces in a thick, slow foreign accent, loud, so that Peggy, who has been conferring with the Murketts, patching things up, turns her back. She, too, went to high school with Ronnie and knows him for the obnoxious jerk he is.

"Jesus, Ronnie," Rabbit says to him when the Fosnachts have gone. "What a snow job."

"Ahh," Ronnie says. "I wanted to see if he could eat garbage."

"I've never been that crazy about him, either," Harry confesses. "He treats old Peggy like dirt."

Janice, who has been consulting with Thelma Harrison about something, God knows what, their lousy children, overhears this and tells Ronnie, "Harry screwed her years ago, that's why he minds Ollie." Nothing like a little booze to freshen up old sore points.

Ronnie laughs to attract attention and slaps Harry's knee. "You screwed that big pig, funny eyes and all?"

Rabbit pictures that heavy glass egg with the interior teardrop of air back in Ma Springer's living room, its smooth heft in his hand, and imagines himself making the pivot from pounding it into Janice's stubborn dumb drunken face to finishing up with a one-handed stuff straight down into Harrison's brain pan. "It seemed a good idea at the time," he has to admit, uncrossing his legs and stretching them in preparation for an extended night. The Fosnachts' leaving is felt as a relief throughout the room. Cindy is tittering to Webb, clings briefly to his coarse gray sweater in her rough, loose Arab thing, like a loving pair advertising vacations abroad.

"This is what I like," Webb Murkett says in his gravelly voice above them. "Old friends." He and Cindy side by side stand presiding above their circle as the hour settles toward midnight. "What can I get anybody? More beer? How about a light highball? Scotch? Irish? A C.C. and Seven?" Cindy's tits jut out in that caftan or burnoose or whatever like the angle of a tent. Desert silence. Crescent moon. Put the camel to bed. "We-ell," Webb exhales with such pleasure he must be feeling that Greensleeves, "and what did we think of the Fosnachts?"

"They won't do," Thelma says. Harry is startled to hear her speak, she has been so silent. If you close your eyes and pretend you're blind, Thelma has a pretty voice. He feels melancholy and mellow, now that the invasion from the pathetic world beyond the Flying Eagle has been repelled.

"Ollie's been a sap from day one," he says, "but she didn't used to be such a blabbermouth. Did she, Janice?"

Janice is cautious, defending her old friend. "She always had a tendency," she says." Peggy never thought of herself as attractive, and that was a problem."

"You did, huh?" Harry accuses.

She stares at him, having not followed, her face moistened as by a fine spray.

"Of course she did," Webb gallantly intervenes, "she is attractive," and goes around behind her chair and puts his hands on her shoulders, close to her neck, so she hunches her shoulders.

Cindy says, "She was a lot pleasanter just chatting with me and Webb at the door. She said she sometimes just gets carried away."

Ronnie says, "Harry and Janice, I guess, see a lot of 'em. I'll have a brew as long as you're up, Webb."

"We don't at all. Webb, could you make that two?"

Thelma asks Harry, her voice softly pitched for him alone, "How is Nelson? Have you heard from him in his married state?"

"A postcard. Janice has talked to them on the phone a couple times. She thinks they're bored."

Janice interrupts, "I don't think, Harry. He told me they're bored."

Ronnie offers, "If you've done all your fucking before marriage, I guess a honeymoon can be a drag. Thanks, Webb."

Janice says, "He said it's been chilly in the cabin."

"Too lazy, no doubt, to carry the wood in from the stack outside," Harry says. "Yeah, thanks." The pffft of opening a can isn't near as satisfying since they put that safety tab on to keep idiots from choking themselves.

"Harry, he told us they've been having a fire in the wood stove all day long."

"Burning it all up so somebody else can chop. He's his momma's boy."

Thelma, tired perhaps of the tone the Angstroms keep setting, lifts her voice and bends her face far back, exposing a startling length of sallow throat. "Speaking of the cold, Webb. Are you and Cindy going away at all this winter?" They usually go to an island in the Caribbean. The Harrisons once went with them, years ago. Harry and Janice have never been.

Webb has been circling behind Thelma getting highballs for someone. "We've talked about it," he tells Thelma. Through Harry's buzz of beer laid over brandy there seems an enchanting conspiracy between her bent-back throat and his arched and lowered voice. Old friends, Harry thinks. Fit like pieces of a puzzle. Webb bends down and reaches over Thelma's shoulder to put a weak tall Scotch and soda on a dark square in front of her. "I'd like to go," he is going on, "where they have a golf course. You can get a pretty fair deal, if you shop around for a package."

"Let's all go," Harry announces. "Let's get the hell out of here, go to the Caribbean and play golf. I hate the winter around here—there's no snow, you can't ice-skate, it's just boring and raw, month after month. When I was a kid, there was snow all the time, whatever happened to it?"

"We had a ton of snow in '78," Webb observes.

"Harry, maybe it's time to go home," Janice tells him. Her mouth has thinned to a slot, her high forehead shines with sweating out her liquor.

"I don't want to go home. I want to go to the Caribbean. But first I want to go to the bathroom. Bathroom, home, Caribbean, in that order." He wonders if a wife like that ever dies of natural causes. Never, those dark wiry types, look at her mother, still running the show. Buried poor old Fred and never looked back.

Cindy says, "Harry, the downstairs john is plugged, Webb just noticed. Somebody must have used too much toilet paper."

"Peggy Gring, that's who," Harry says, standing and wondering why the wall-to-wall carpeting has a curve to it, like the deck of a ship falling away on all sides. "First she attacks the Pope, then she abuses the plumbing."

"Use the one in our bedroom," Webb says to him. "At the head of the stairs, turn left, past the two closet doors with the slats."

"Wiping away her tears...." Rabbit hears Thelma Harrison saying dryly as he leaves. Up the two carpeted steps, his head floating far above his feet. Then down a hall and up stairs in different-colored carpeting, a dirty lime, more wear, older part of the house. Someone else's upstairs always has that hush. Tired nights, a couple talking softly to themselves. The voices below him fade. Turn left, Webb had said. Slatted doors. He stops and peeks in. Female clothes, strips of many colors, fragrant of her. Get Cindy down there in that sand, who can say, talking to him about her diaphragm already. He finds the bathroom. Every light in it is lit. What a waste of energy. Going down with all her lights blazing, the great ship America. This bathroom is smaller than the one downstairs. He undoes his fly and in a stream of bliss fills one of this room's gleaming bowls with gold. Because he was never circumcised, he tends to retain a drop or two, and pats his tip with a piece of lemon-yellow toilet paper, plain, the comic strips were to amuse guests. Who was Thelma saying would wipe away her tears? The shocking flash of long white throat, muscular, the swallowing muscles developed, she must have something, to hold Harrison. Maybe she meant Peggy using toilet paper to wipe away her tears had clogged the toilet. Cindy's eyes had had a glisten, too shy to like arguing like that with poor Peggy, telling him instead about her diaphragm, Jesus, inviting him to think about it, her sweet red dark deep, could she mean it? Getting there, Harry, her voice more wised up and throaty than he ever noticed before, her eyes pouchy, sexy when women's lower lids are like that, up a little like eggcups. All around in here are surfaces that have seen Cindy stark-naked.

He washes his hands. The faucet is one of those single-handled Lavomaster mixers with a knob on the end of the handle like a clown's nose or big pimple, he can never remember which way is hot and which cold, what was wrong with the old two faucets that said H and c? The basin, though, is good, with a wide lip of several ledges to hold soap without its riding off, these little ridges most basins have now don't hold anything, dinky cheap pseudo marble, he supposes if you're in the roofing industry you know plumbing suppliers who can still provide the good stuff, even though there's not much market for it. The curved lavender bar he has right in his hands must have lost its lettering making lather for Cindy's suntanned skin, suds in her crotch, her hair must, be jet-black there, her eyebrows are: You should look at a woman's eyebrows not the hair on her head for the color of her pussy. This bathroom has not been so cleaned up for guests as the downstairs one, Popular Mechanics on the straw hamper next to the toilet, the towels slung crooked on the plastic towel holders and a touch of damp to them, the Murketts showering just a few hours ago for this party. Harry considers opening this bathroom cabinet as he did the other one but, thinking of fingerprints, notices the chrome rim and refrains. Nor does he dry his hands, for fear of touching the towel Webb used. He has seen that long yellow body in the Flying Eagle locker room. The man has moles all across his back and shoulders that probably aren't contagious, but still.

He can't return downstairs with wet hands. That shit Harrison would make some crack. Ya still got scum on your hands, ya jerk-off. Rabbit stands a moment in the hall, listening to the noise of the party rise, a wordless clatter of voices happy without him, the women's the most distinct, a kind of throbbing in it like the melody you sometimes hear in a ragged engine idling, a song so distinct you expect to hear words. The hall is carpeted here not in lime but in sensuous plum, and he moves to follow its color to the threshold of the Murketts' bedroom. Here it happens. It hollows out Harry's stomach, makes him faintly sick, to think what a lucky stiff Webb is. The bed is low in modern style, a kind of tray with sides of reddish wood, and the covers had been pulled up hastily rather than made. Had it just happened? Just before the showers before the party that left the towels in the bathroom damp? In midair above the low bed he imagines in afterimage her damp and perfect toes, those sucky little dab-toes whose print he has often spied on the Flying Eagle flagstones, here lifted high to lay her cunt open, their baby dots mingling with the moles on Webb's back. It hurts.

Where do the Murketts put their kids? Harry twists his head to see a closed white door at the far other end of the plum carpet. There. Asleep. He is safe. The carpet absorbs his footsteps as, silent as a ghost, he follows its color into the bedroom. A cavernous space, forbidden. Another shadowy presence jars his heart: a man in blue suit, trousers and rumpled white shirt with cuffs folded back and a loosened necktie, looking overweight and dangerous, is watching him stonily. It is himself, his own full-length reflection in a large mirror placed between two matching bureaus of wood bleached so that the grain shows through as through powder. The mirror faces the foot of the bed. Hey. These two. It hasn't been just his imagination. They fuck in front of a mirror. Harry, dressed, looks queer in the mirror reflected; he rarely sees himself head to toe except when he's buying a suit at Kroll's or that little tailor on Pine Street. Even there you stand close in to the three-way mirrors and there's not this dizzying surround of space, so he's meeting himself halfway across the room. He looks mussed and criminal, a burglar too old and fat for this line of work.

Doubled in the mirror, the calm room holds few traces of the Murketts' living warmth. No little lacy bits of underwear lying around smelling of Cindycunt. The curtains are a thick red striped material like a giant clown's pants ballooning, and they have window shades of that room-darkening kind that he keeps asking Janice to get. The far window with its shade drawn for a nap must overlook the pool and the stand of woods everybody has up here in this development between the houses, but Harry doesn't want to get himself that deep into the room, already he's betraying hospitality. His hands have dried, he should go down. He is standing near a corner of the bed, its mute plane lower than his knees, the satiny peach bedspread tugged smooth in haste, and he impulsively, remembering the condoms he used to keep in a parallel place, steps to the curly maple bedside table and ever so stealthily pulls out the small drawer. It was open an inch, anyway. No diaphragm, that would be in the bathroom. A ballpoint pen, an unlabeled box of pills, some match folders, a few receipts tossed in, one of those rubber-tipped plastic handles dentists give you to stimulate your gums with, a little yellow memo pad with the roofing-company logo on it and a diagonally scrawled phone number, a nail clippers, some paper clips and golf tees and—his thumping heart drowns out the mumble of the party beneath his feet. At the back of the drawer are tucked some black-backed Polaroid instant photos. That SX-70 Webb was bragging about. Harry lifts the little stack out delicately, turns it over and studies the photos one by one. Shit. He should have brought his reading glasses; they're downstairs in his coat pocket.

The top photo, flashlit in this same room, on this same satiny bedspread, shows Cindy naked, lying legs spread. Her pubic hair is even darker than he imagined, the shape of it from this angle a kind of T, the upright of the T split by a redness as if sore, the underside of her untanned ass making a pale blob on either side. At arm's length he holds the glazed picture closer to the bedside light; his eyes water with the effort to see everything, every crease, every hair. Cindy's face, out of focus beyond her breasts, which droop more to either side than Harry would have hoped, smiles with nervous indulgence at the camera. Her chin is doubled, looking so sharply down. Her feet look enormous. In the next shot she has turned over, showing a double spread of buttocks, fish-white with an eyelike widening staring from the crack. For the next couple of photos the camera has switched hands, and old Webb, stringy and sheepish, stands as Harry has often seen him after a shower, except without the hard-on, which he is helping with his hand. Not a great hard-on, pointing to ten o'clock, not even ten, more like a little after nine, but then you can't expect a guy over 50 to go for high noon, leave that to the pimply teenagers: when Rabbit was 14 in soc-sci class, a spot of sun, the shadow of Lottie Bingaman's armpit as she raised her hand with a pencil in it, that sweet strain of cloth and zipper against thick blood. Webb has length but not much bulk at the base; still, there he is, game and even with the potbelly and gnarled skinny legs and shit-eating expression somehow debonair, not a hair on his wavy head out of place. The next shots were in the nature of experiments, by natural light, the shades must have all been up, bold to the day, slabby shapes and shelves of flesh interlocked and tipped toward violet by the spectrum of underexposure. Harry deciphers one bulge as Cindy's cheek, and then the puzzle fits, she is blowing him, that purply stalk is his prick rooted in her stretched lips and the fuzzy foreground is his chest hair as he takes the picture. In the next one he has improved the angle and light and the focus is perfect on the demure curve of one eye's black lashes. Beyond the shiny tan tip of her nose her pale fingers, with nails that look bitten, hold the veiny thing as if to control it, her little finger lifted as on a flute. What was Ollie saying about flutes? For the next shot Webb had the idea of using the mirror; he is standing sideways with the camera squarely where his face ought to be and Cindy's own dear face impaled, as she kneels naked, on this ten-o'clock hook of his. Her profile is snub-nosed and her nipples jut out stiff. The old bastard's tricks have turned the little bitch on. But her head seems so small and round and brave, stuck on his prick like a candy apple. Harry wants in the next picture to see come like tooth paste all over her face like in the fuck movies, but Webb has turned her around and is screwing her from behind, his prick vanished in the fish-white curve of her ass; her tits hang down pear-shaped in their heaviness and her legs next to Webb's appear stocky. She's getting there. She will get fatter. She will turn ugly. She is looking into the mirror and laughing. Perhaps in the difficulty of keeping her balance while Webb's one hand operates the camera, Cindy laughed at that moment a big red laugh like a girl on a poster, with this yellow prick in her from behind. The light in the room must have been dying that day, for the flesh of both the Murketts appears golden and the furniture reflected in the mirror is dim in blue shadow as if underwater. This is the last picture; there are eight and a camera like this takes ten. Consumer Reports had a lot to say a while ago about the SX-70 Land Camera but never did explain what the SX stood for. Now Harry knows. His eyes burn.

The party noise below is lessening, perhaps they are listening for a sound from upstairs, wondering what has happened to him. He slips the Polaroids back into the drawer, black backs up, and tries to slide shut the drawer to the exact inch it was open by. The room otherwise is untouched; the mirror will erase his image instantly. As he descends the stairs his head feels to be floating on a six-foot string attached to his big shoes. The gang in the long living room has realigned itself in a tighter circle about the Parsons table. There seems to be no place for him. Ronnie Harrison looks up. "My God, whatcha been doin', jacking off?"

"I'm not feeling so great," Rabbit says, with dignity.

"Your eyes look red," Janice says. "Are you having hay fever?"

They are too excited by the topic among themselves to tease him long. Cindy doesn't even turn around. The nape of her neck is thick and brown, soft and impervious. Treading to them on spongy steps across the endless pale carpeting, he pauses by the fireplace mantel to notice what he had failed to notice before, two Polaroid snaps propped up, one each of the Murketts' little children, the five-year-old boy with an outsize fielder's mitt standing sadly on the bricks of their patio, and the three-year-old girl on this same hazily bright summer afternoon, before the parents took a nap, squinting with an obedient and foolish half-smile up toward some light source that dazzles her. She is wearing both pieces of a play-muddied little bikini and Webb's shadow, arms lifted to his head as if to make horns, fills one corner of the exposed square of film. These are the missing two shots from that pack of ten.

"Hey, Harry, how about the second week of January?" Ronnie hoots at him.

They have all been discussing a shared trip to the Caribbean, and the women are as excited about it as the men.

•

It is after one when he and Janice drive home. Brewer Heights is a development of two-acre lots off the highway to Maiden Springs, a good 20 minutes from Mt. Judge. The road sweeps down in stylish curves; the developer left trees, and six hours ago, when they drove up this road, each house was lit in its bower of unbulldozed woods like displays in the facade of a long gray department store. Now the houses, all but the Murketts', are dark. Dead leaves swirl in their headlights and pour from the trees in the wind as if from bushel baskets. The seasons tell. The sky gets streaky, the trees begin to heave. Harry can think of little to say, intent upon the wheel on these winding streets called drives and boulevards. The stars flickering through the naked treetops of Brewer Heights yield to the lamplit straightaway of the highway. Janice drags on a cigarette; the glow expands in the side of his vision and diminishes. She clears her throat and says, "I suppose I should have stuck up more for Peggy, she being an old friend and all. But she did talk out of turn, I thought."

"Too much women's lib."

"Too much Ollie, maybe. I know she keeps thinking of leaving him."

"Aren't you glad we have all that behind us?"

He says it mischievously, to hear her grapple with whether they did or didn't, but she answers simply, "Yes."

He says nothing. His tongue feels trapped. Even now, Webb is undressing Cindy. Or she him. And kneeling. Harry's tongue seems stuck to the floor of his mouth like those poor kids every winter who insist on touching their tongues to iron railings.

Janice tells him, "Your idea of taking this trip in a bunch sure took hold."

"It'll be fun."

"For you men playing golf. What'll we do all day?"

"Lie in the sun. There'll be things. They'll have tennis courts." This trip is precious to him; he speaks of it gingerly.

Janice drags again. "They keep saying now how sun-bathing leads to cancer."

"No faster than smoking."

"Thelma has this condition where she shouldn't be in the sun at all, it could kill her, she's told me. I'm surprised she's so keen on going."

"Maybe she won't be in the morning on second thought. I don't see how Harrison can afford it, with that kid of theirs in defective school."

"Can we, I wonder? Afford it."

"Honey, of course. We're so poky, we should have taken up traveling years ago."

"You never wanted to go anywhere, with just me." Her cigarette glows once more, and then with that clumsy scrabbling motion that always annoys him, she stubs it out. He hates having the ashtray dirty, it smells for days even after you've emptied it. She sighs. "I wish in a way it was just us going, if we must go."

"We don't know the ropes. Webb does. He's been there before, I think he's been going since long before Cindy, with his other wives."

"You can't mind Webb," she admits. "He's nice. But to tell the truth, I could do without the Harrisons."

"I thought you had a soft spot for Ronnie."

"That's you."

"I hate him," Rabbit says.

"You like him, all that vulgarity. He reminds you of basketball days. Anyway it's not just him. Thelma worries me."

"How can she? She's a mouse."

"There's something about her that another woman can notice. I think she's very fond of you."

"I never noticed. How can she be?" Stay off Cindy, he'll let it all out. He tries to see those photographs again, hair by hair in his mind's eye, and already they are fading. The way their bodies looked golden at the end, like gods.

Janice says with a sudden surprising stiffness, "Well, I don't know what you think's going to happen down there, but we're not going to have any funny stuff. We're too old, Harry."

A pickup truck with its high beams glaring tailgates him blindingly and then roars around him, kids' voices dimly jeering.

"The drunks are out," he says, to change the subject.

"What were you doing up there in the bathroom so long, anyway?" she asks.

He answers primly, "Waiting for something to happen that didn't."

"Oh. Were you sick?"

"Heading toward it, I thought. That brandy. That's why I switched to beer."

Cindy is so much on his mind he cannot understand why Janice fails to mention her, it must be deliberate. All that blowing, Lord. There's birth control. White gobs of it pumping in, being swallowed; those little round teeth and the healthy low baby gums that show when she laughs. Webb on front and him from behind, or the other way around, Harry doesn't care. Ronnie operating the camera. His prick has reawaked, high noon once more in his life, and the steering wheel as they turn into Central Street caresses its swollen tip through the cloth. Janice should appreciate this: If he can get it up to their room intact.

But her mind has wandered far from sex, for as they head down through the cones of limb-raddled light along Wilbur, she says aloud, "Poor Nelson. He seemed so young, didn't he, going off with his bride?"

This town they know so well, every curb, every hydrant, where every mailbox is. It gives way before them like a tearing veil, its houses dark, their headlights low. "Yeah," he agrees. "You sometimes wonder," he hears himself go on, "how badly you yourself fucked up a kid like that."

"We did what we could," Janice says, firm again, sounding like her mother. "We're not God."

"Nobody is," Rabbit says, scaring himself.

"She has an exciting sexually neutral look, though her boobs slosh and shiver in her bra."

"Cindy flat-dives and a few drops of the splash prick Harry's naked chest."

"Standing there with her bathing suit slightly awry, she tugs it straight and blushes."