Rabbit At Rest

"Grandpa, don't joke," the dear child scolds.

The cardiologist is a big red-ski

"What's wrong with his heart, exactly?" Janice asks.

"The usual thing, ma'am. It's tired and stiff and full of crud. It's a typical American heart, for his age and economic status et cetera."

That strangely intense and slightly embarrassing Gallo-wine commercial, about the guy who has a blind date with a girl who turns out to be the very liquor saleswoman who advised him what bottle to take the date as a present, comes on.

"As best we can tell without cardiac catheterization," Dr. Olman is saying, "the principal narrowing is the standard one, the left anterior descending, the workhorse of the system. Luckily, he appears to have fairly well-developed collaterals, which have kept him going. You see, ma'am, whenever the heart's been starving for oxygen, it tries to develop alternative routes to get blood to the muscle. Also, from the murmur we think we hear there may be a fair bit of stenosis around the aortic valve. Not a pretty picture, but by no means the worst we've ever seen."

Janice looks at her husband almost with pride. "Oh, Harry! You would mention the little aches and breathing problems, and I never took you seriously. You didn't complain hard enough."

"It was perfect," the girl in the commercial sighingly says, at the end of their date, starry-eyed and in soft focus; you can see they will fuck, if not this date the next, and marry and live happily ever after, all by the grace of Gallo.

Dr. Olman has sized Janice up as educable and moves into a heavier sell. "Now, if his luck holds and the lesion isn't located at a bifurcation and there's not too much calcification a lot of doctors would advise you to begin modestly, with an angioplasty, and wait and see. To my own way of thinking, though, you have to offset the relative lack of trauma and expense – we can't forget expense, now can we, what with Medicare's pulling in its horns and this new chappie's promising no new taxes? – we have to offset those psychological pluses against the minus kicker, the likelihood of recurrent stenosis and having to do it all over again, the odds of which, to be honest about it, are on the shady side of fifty per cent. For my money, not to keep beating about the bush, the artery bypass is the sucker that does the job. What do you say in the States, never send a boy when you can send a man? Now, ma'am, how much do you want to know about the heart?"

"Everything," Janice says, adoring of this man willing to explain things to her, her tongue peeking through as she prepares to concentrate.

"Way to go," Dr. Olman gamely says, and makes a big fist with one hand and with the fingers ofthe other begins to show her how the coronary arteries he on the heart's surface, their branches burrowing into the hardworking muscle. Harry has seen this demonstration earlier in the day and signals Judy to come closer to his bed. She is wearing the pink party dress she came down on the airplane in, and the stiff white ribbon around her braided pigtail. Yesterday's experience at sea has given her a sunburn on her nostril wings and beneath her clear green eyes, where her freckles are thi

"What do you see?" he asks her huskily.

"It's like a little twitchy worm, that just goes and goes."

"That's life," he tells her. "That's your granddad."

Judy yields to an impulse: leaning against the bed, she tries to embrace the old man, disarraying and tugging at the tubes and wires attached to his upper body. "Oh Grandpa," she confesses, "it's all my fault!"

Her breath feels hot on his neck. He hugs her, as best he can, with the arm not pierced by the IV. "Don't be silly. What's your fault?"

"Yesterday. I scared you out there."

"You didn't scare me, sweetie. The Gulf of Mexico scared me. You weren't scared?"

Tearily she shakes her head No.

This seems another wonder to him. "Why not?" he asks.

Her smooth little face gets that tiptoe look which in a mature woman signals that she is about to lie. She says, a bit mincingly, "Yon were out there with me, Grandpa. And there were lots of other boats around."

He renews his trammelled hug and her slender little body is unresisting, something has gone out of it; he feels a roughness in his throat, perhaps from yesterday's gulps of saltwater. His eyes film over with the hot relief of tears. On television, men with wide shoulders and narrow hips move like gods on Olympus among the clouds. You can't even see any more who is white and who is black. Blinded though they are, the a

"Want to change the cha

Bruce Lee kicks out, once, twice, thrice, and three handsomely costumed thugs slowly fly toward the corners of the room, furniture shattering like fortune cookies, and suddenly Judy has switched cha