Rabbit Redux

"You mean with Ollie?"

"Others. Guys I meet at work. Ollie minds. That may be why he wants back in."

"If Ollie minds, you must be telling him. So you must want him back in too."

She looks into the bottom of her glass; there is nothing there but ice. "And how about you and Janice?"

"Janice who? Let me get you another drink."

"Wow. You've become a gentleman."

"Slightly."

As he puts her gin-and-tonic into her hand, he says, "Tell me about those other guys."

"They're O.K. I'm not that proud of them. They're human. I'm human."

"You do it but don't fall in love?"

"Apparently. Is that terrible?"

"No," he says. "I think it's nice."

"You think a lot of things are nice lately."

"Yeah. I'm not so uptight. Sistah Peggeh, I'se seen de light."

The boys come back upstairs. They complain the new headlight they bought doesn't fit. Peggy feeds them, a casserole of chicken legs and breasts, poor dismembered creatures simmering. Rabbit wonders how many animals have died to keep his life going, how many more will die. A barnyard full, a farmful of thumping hearts, seeing eyes, racing legs, all stuffed squawking into him as into a black sack. No avoiding it: life does want death. To be alive is to kill. Di

Harry and Peggy return to the living room and watch the week's news roundup. The weekend commentator is fairer-haired and less severe in expression than the weekday one. He says there has been some good news this week. American deaths in Vietnam were reported the lowest in three years, and one twenty-fourhour period saw no American battle deaths at all. The Soviet Union made headlines this week, agreeing with the U.S. to ban atomic weapons from the world's ocean floors, agreeing with Red China to hold talks concerning their sometimes bloody border disputes, and launching Soyuz 6, a linked three-stage space spectacular bringing closer the day of permanent space stations. In Washington, Hubert Humphrey endorsed Richard Nixon's handling of the Vietnam war and Lieutenant General Lewis B. Hershey, crusty and controversial head for twenty-eight years of this nation's selective service system, was relieved of his post and promoted to four-star general. In Chicago, riots outside the courtroom and riotous behavior within continued to characterize the trial of the so-called Chicago Eight. In Belfast, Protestants and British troops clashed. In Prague, Czechoslovakia's revisionist government, in one of its sternest moves, ba

The television off, they stand rimmed by borrowed light: the bathroom door down the hall left ajar for the boys, the apartment-house corridor a bright slit beneath the door leading out, the phosphorescence of Brewer through the windows. Peggy's body, transected and rimmed by those remote fires, does not quite fit together; her arm jerks up from darkness and brushes indifferently at her hair and seems to miss. She shrugs, or shudders, and shadows slip from her. "Wouldn't you like," she asks, in a voice not quite hers, originating in the dim charged space between them, and lighter, breathier, "to cash me in?"

Yes, it turns out, yes he would, and they bump, and fumble, and unzip, and she is gumdrops everywhere, yet stately as a statue, planetary in her breadth, a contour map of some snowy land where he has never been; not since Ruth has he had a woman this big. Naked, she makes him naked, even kneeling to unlace his shoes, and then kneeling to him in the pose of Jill to Skeeter, so he has glided across a gulf, and stands where last night he stared. He gently unlinks her, lowers her to the floor, and tastes a salty swamp between her legs. Her thighs part easily, she grows wet readily, she is sadly unclumsy at this, she has indeed been to bed with many men. In the knowing way she handles his prick he feels their presences, feels himself competing, is put off, goes soft. She leaves off and comes up and presses the gumdrop of her tongue between his lips. Puddled on the floor, they keep knocking skulls and ankle bones on the furniture legs. The puppy, hearing their commotion, thinks they want to play and thrusts his cold nose and scrabbling paws among their sensitive flesh; his fern-furry busy bustlingness tickles and hurts. This third animal among them re-excites Rabbit; observing this, Peggy leads him down her hall, the dark crease between her buttocks snapping tick-tock with her walk. Holding her rumpled dress in front of her like a pad, she pauses at the boys' door, listens, and nods. Her hair has gone loose. The puppy for a while whimpers at their door and claws the floor as if to dig there; then he is eclipsed by the inflammation of their senses and falls silent beneath the thunder of their blood. Harry is afraid with this unknown woman, of timing her wrong, but she tells him, "One sec." Him inside her, she does something imperceptible, relaxing and tensing the muscles of her vagina, and a

"Thank you yourself," Peggy Fosnacht says, and, what he doesn't especially like, grabs his bottom to give her one more deep thrust before he softens. Both Jill and Janice too ladylike for that. Still, he is at home.

Until she says, "Would you mind rolling off? You're squeezing the breath out of me."

"Am I so heavy?"

"After a while."

"Actually, I better go."

"Why? It's only midnight."

"I'm worried about what they're doing back at the house."

"Nelson's here. The others, what do you care?"

"I don't know. I care."

"Well they don't care about you and you're in bed with someone who does."

He accuses her: "You're taking Ollie back."

"Have any better ideas? He's the father of my child."

"Well that's not my fault."

"No, nothing's your fault," and she tumbles around him, and they make solid sadly skillful love again, and they talk and he dozes a little, and the phone rings. It shrills right beside his ear.

A woman's arm, plump and elastic and warm, reaches across his face to pluck it silent. Peggy Gring's. She listens, and hands it to him with an expression he ca

"Skeeter?" His throat hurts, just speaking. Fucking Peggy has left him dry.

The voice at the other end hangs up.

Rabbit kicks out of the bedcovers and hunts in the dark for his clothes. He remembers. The living room. The boys' door opens as he runs down the hall naked. Nelson's astonished face takes in his father's nakedness. He asks, "Was it Mom?"