Rabbit At Rest

"Too bad. I miss playing with old Ro

"Why? You can't stand him, Harry."

"I like beating him."

Thelma nods, as if acknowledging her own contribution to Harry's beating Ro

She goes into the kitchen for the soft drinks. Rabbit roams quietly in the living room; in preparation for his visit she has pulled not only the narrow shade on the front door but the wide one on the picture window. He pities the room – its darkness as if even weak windowlight would penetrate her skin and accelerate the destruction of her cells, its hushed funereal fussiness. Wild though she can be, with a streak of defiance as though daring to be damned, Thelma maintains a conventional local decor. Stuffed flowered chairs with broad wooden arms, plush chocolate-brown sofa with needlepointed scatter pillows and yellowing lace antimacassars, varnished little knickknack stands and taborets, a footstool on which an old watermill is depicted, symmetrical lamps whose porcelain bases show English hunting dogs in gilded ovals, an oppressively patterned muddy neo-Colonial wallpaper, and on every flat surface, fringed ru

"So tell me about it," Thelma says, returning with a round painted tray holding along with the two tall glasses of sparkling dark soft drink two matching small bowls of nuts. She sets the tray down on a glass-topped coffee table like an empty long picture frame.

He tells her, "For one thing, I'm not supposed to have stuff like that – salted nuts. Macadamia nuts yet! The worst thing for me, and they cost a fortune. Thel, you're wicked."

He has embarrassed her; her jaundiced skin tries to blush. Her basically thin face today looks swollen, perhaps from the cortisone she takes. "Ro

"A couple won't kill me," he reassures her, and to be polite takes a few macadamia nuts into his fingers. Nuggets, they are like small lightweight nuggets with a fur of salt. He especially loves the way, when he holds one in his mouth a few seconds and then gently works it between his crowned molars, it breaks into two halves, the surface of the fissure as smooth to the tongue as glass, as baby skin. "And cashews, too," he says. "The second-worst thing for me. Dry-roasted yet."

"I seem to remember you like dry-roasted."

"There's a lot I bet you seem to remember," he says, taking a tasteless sip of his Diet Coke. First they take the cocaine out, then the caffeine, and now the sugar. He settles back with a small handful of cashews; dry-roasted, they have a little acid sting to them, the tang of poison that he likes. He has taken the rocking chair, painted black with stencilled red designs and a red-and-yellow flat pillow tied in place, to sit in, and she the plush brown sofa, not sinking into it but perching on the edge, her knees together and touching the raised edge of the coffee table. They have made love on that sofa, which was not long enough to stretch out on but long enough if both parties kept their knees bent. In a way he preferred it to one of the beds, since she seemed to feel guiltier and less free with herself in a real bed, a bed her family used, and her unease would spread to him. Moving the table, he could kneel beside the sofa and have the perfect angle for kissing her cunt. On and on, deeper into her darkness where things began to shudder and respond, it got to be an end in itself. He loved it when she would clamp his face between her damp thighs like a nut in a nutcracker and come. He wondered if a man ever got his neck broken that way.

A shadow has crossed Thelma's face, a flinching as if he has consigned her to merely remembering, to the sealed and unrepeatable past like the photographs on the silent television set. But he had meant it more comfortably, settling in his rocker opposite the one person who for these last ten years has given him nothing but what he needed. Sex. Soul food.

"You too," she says, her eyes lowered to the items on the tray, which she hasn't touched, "have things to remember, I hope."

"I just was. Remembering. You seem sad," he says, accusing, for his presence should make her glad, in spite of all.

"You don't seem quite you yet. You seem – more careful."

"Jesus, you'd be too. I'll have some more macadamia nuts, if that'll please you." He eats them one by one and between bouts of chewing and feeling their furry nuggets part so smoothly in his mouth tells her about his heart attack – the boat, the Gulf, little Judy, the lying on the beach feeling like a jellyfish, the hospital, the doctors, their advice, his attempts to follow it. "They're dying to cut into me and do a bypass. But there's this less radical option they can do first and I'm supposed to see a guy up here at St. Joseph's about having it done this spring. It's called an angioplasty. There's a balloon on the end of a catheter a yard long at least they thread up into your heart from a cut they make just under your groin, the artery there. I had it done kind of in Florida but instead of a balloon it was a bunch of dyes they put in to see what my poor old ticker actually looked like. It's a fu

"How do I look?" She sips the Coke but leaves all the nuts in their twin bowls for him. The pattern imitates sampler stitch, squarish flowers in blue and pink.

"Good to me," he lies. "A little pale and puffy but we all do at the end of winter."

"I'm losing it, Harry," Thelma tells him, looking up until he meets her eyes. Eyes muddier than Pru's but also what they call hazel, eyes that have seen him all over, that know him as well as a woman's can. A wife fumbles around with you in the dark; a mistress you meet in broad daylight, right on the sofa. She used to tease him about his prick wearing a bo