Rabbit At Rest

"Maybe Pru could lend you one."

"It would fall off me," she says. But she goes upstairs to where Pru is putting Roy to bed and after a conversation Harry can't hear comes down in a cherry-red waterproof plastic coat, with wide lapels and a belt too long and gleaming zigzags under the light. "Do I look ridiculous?"

"Not exactly," he tells her. It excites him, this transposition: you follow the zigzagging creases up expecting to see red-haired Pru staring back and instead it's Janice's middle-aged face, framed in a splashy banda

"Also, damn, I'm so mad at myself, I left my lucky pen on the upstairs table back home. And there's no time to drive back for it, in all this rain."

"Maybe you're taking all this too seriously," he says. "What're you trying to prove to the teacher?"

"I'm trying to prove something to myself," she says. "Tell Pru I've left and that I'll be back at ten-thirty, maybe eleven if we decide to go out for beers afterward. You go to bed and rest. You look tired, honey." She gives him in parting a pointed little fingering kiss, grateful for something. Glad to go. All these other male advisers she suddenly has – Charlie, Mr. Lister, the new accountant – seem an invasion as devious as that televised catheter nudging forward into his shadowy webbed heart.

The murmur around the house sounds louder after Janice's footsteps on the porch and the sound of the Camry starting up. She has a panicky way of racing the engine before she puts a car in gear, and usually jumps off like a drag-racer. Janice is wrapped in Pru's cherry raincoat, and he is the man of Pru's house.

On the set in the living room, he and Judy watch the end of ABC news on Cha

"Goddamn it, Judy, put it back to the Cosbys right now," Harry says, furious less for himself than for Pru, to whom the show seemed to be a vision of lost possibilities.

Judy, startled just like the girls on the show, does put it back, but by now it's a commercial, and she cries, as the insult sinks in, "I want Daddy back! Everybody else is mean to me!"

She starts to cry, Pru rises to comfort her, Rabbit retreats in disgrace. He circles the house, listening to the rain, marvelling that he once lived here, remembering the dead and the dead versions of the living who lived here with him, finding a half-full jar of dry-roasted cashews on a high kitchen shelf and, on the kitchen television set, a cable rerun of last night's playoff game between the Knicks and the Bulls. He hates the way Michael Jordan's pink tongue rolls around in his mouth as he goes up for a dunk. He has seen Jordan interviewed, he's an intelligent guy, why does he swing his tongue around like an imbecile? The few white players there are on the floor look pathetically naked, their pasty sweat, their fuzzy armpit hair; it seems incredible to Harry that he himself was ever out there in this naked game, though in those days the shorts were a little longer and the tank-top armholes not quite so big. He has finished off the jar of cashews without noticing and suddenly the basketball-Jordan changing direction in midair not once but twice and sinking an awkward fall-back jumper with Ewing's giant hand square in his face -pains him with its rubbery activity, an extreme of bodily motion his nerves but not his muscles can remember. He needs a Nitrostat from the little bottle in the coat jacket in that shallow closet upstairs. The hauntedness of the downstairs is getting to him. He turns off the kitchen light and holds his breath passing Ma Springer's old breakfront in the darkened dining room, where the wallpaper crawls with the streetlight projections of rain ru

In the upstairs hall, he hears from Ma's old room, now Judy's, the murmur of a television set, and dares tap the door and push in. The little girl has been put into a sleeveless nightie and, holding her stuffed dolphin, sits propped up on two pillows while her mother sits on the bed beside her. The TV set flickering at the foot of the bed picks out pale patches – the whites of Judy's eyes, her bare shoulders, the dolphin's belly, Pru's long forearms laid across the child's flat chest. He clears his throat and says, "Hey, Judy sorry if I got a bit mean down there."

With a hushing impatient hand motion she indicates that her grandfather is forgiven and ought to come in and watch with them. In the blue unsteady light, he picks out a child's straight chair and brings it close to the bed and lowers himself to it; he virtually squats. Raindrops glint on the panes in the light from Joseph Street. He looks at Pru's profile for the glint of a tear but her face is composed. Her nose comes to a sharp point, her lips are clamped together. They are watching Unsolved Mysteries: pale, overweight American faces float into the camera's range, earnestly telling of UFOs seen over sugar-beet fields, above shopping malls, in Navajo reservations, while their homely rooms and furniture, exposed to the glaring lights the cameras require, have the detailed hard weirdness of diatoms seen under a microscope. Harry is struck by how well, really, these small-town sheriffs and trailercamp housewives, and even the drifters and dropouts who just happened to be tripping out on a deserted picnic grounds when the geniuses commanding the UFOs decided to land and sample the terrestrial fauna, speak – a nation of performers, of smoothly talking heads, has sprung up under the lights, everybody rehearsed for their thirty seconds of nationwide attention. During the commercials, Judy skips to other cha