Harry1 watches what is left of Tom Brokaw and is settling into a seven?o'clock show on life in Antarctica when, of all people, the Harrisons come visiting. Not just Thelma ? she's brought Ron along, or Ron has brought her, since she is thinner and sallower than he has ever seen her, and moves as if every step might break a bone. She smiles regretfully; her eyes apologize for the shape she's in, for Ronnie's being with her, for her being unable to stay away. "We were here in the hospital seeing my doctor," she explains, "and Ron junior had heard you were in."
"For what they call a little procedure," he says, and gestures toward the chair Janice has pulled up to the bed and that's probably still warm from her broad beam. "Ron, there's that big padded chair over in the corner if you want to pull it over; it's on wheels."
"I'll stand," he says. "We can only stay a minute."
He is sullen2, but Rabbit didn't ask the Harrisons to come visit and doesn't see why he should be bullied3. "Suit yourself." He asks Thelma, "How are you?"
Thelma sighs elaborately. "You know doctors. They never admit they don't have an answer. I'm on home dialysis twice a week, Ronnie's a saint to put up with me. He took a course on how to cope with the machine."
"Ronnie always was a saint," Harry tells her, everybody in the room knowing that Ronnie Harrison was just about his least favorite person in the world, though he had known him from kindergarten. A dirty?mouthed plug?ugly even at the age of five, and now bald as a prick4's tip, with wisps above his big droopy ears. Ronnie in high school and afterward5 had a certain chunkiness, but the approach of old age has pulled the chunks6 like taffy, leaving hollows in his face and lumps and a painful stringiness around the throat. Harry says, as if she doesn't already know, "Janice is taking courses too, to learn how to sell real estate. I guess so she has a trade in case I pop off."
Thelma's eyelids7 flutter, a bony hand wearing a wedding ring gestures the possibility away. The sicker she gets, the more driedout and schoolteacherish she looks. That was one of the jokes of her being his mistress, her looking so prim8 and being so wild in bed, but maybe the real her was the schoolteacher and the other was put on purely9 for him. "Harry, you're not going to pop off" she tells him urgently, afraid for him. That strange way women have, of really caring about somebody beyond themselves. "They do wonderful things with hearts now, they stitch and mend them just like rag dolls." She manages a thin smile. "Want to see what I have?"
He thinks he knows what she has, all of it, but she unbuttons her sleeve and with that matter?of?fact baring which was her style Thelma shows him the underside of her bared arm. Two purple bruised10 patches on her slender wrist are connected by a translucent11 U of some plastic tubing taped flat against the jaundiced skin. "That's called my shunt," she says, pronouncing the last word carefully. "It connects an artery12 and vein13 and when I have the dialysis we take it off and connect me to the machine."
"Pretty," seems all he can say. He tells them about his angioplasty, but is already tired of describing it, and trying to convey the creepy business of seeing the dark shadow of the catheter like a snaky forefinger14 inch ever more intimately into his heart's paler, trembling shades. "My coronary artery could have occluded15 and I would have gone into CA. Cardiac arrest."
"But you didn't, you jerk," Ronnie says, standing16 erect17 and abandoning his shadow on the wall. "The Old Master," he says, a sardonic18 phrase he used to kid Harry with in their basketball?playing days. Funny, all of his life Harrison has been shadowing Harry with his ugly flesh, a reminder19 of everything sweaty and effortful in life Rabbit squeamishly hoped to glide20 over and avoid. "Nobody lays a finger on the Old Master. He makes it all look easy." Ronnie used to resent how Marty Tothero would put him, Ronnie, into the game when the bruisers on the other side were roughing Harry up, to give rough stuff back. An enforcer, they call it now.
"It was never as easy as I made it look," Rabbit tells him. He turns to Thelma, wanting to be tender, since she had braved her husband's anger by bringing him here. She had never balked21 at humiliating Ronnie to give Harry her gift of love, and indeed, sick as the two lovers are, her nearness does give him that socketed22 feeling you have with certain women, that graceful23 feeling you can do no wrong. "How about you, Thel? Your docs think they're licking it?"
"Oh, they never say die, but a body gets tired. You can fight only so long. The pains I can live with, and the weakness all the time, but the kidneys going is really demoralizing. It takes away your pleasure in life if you can't take such things for granted. Harry, you know that part of the Bible they used to read to us in assembly, before the Bible got outlawed24, about a time for everything? A time to gather up stones, a time to cast them away? I'm beginning to think there's a time to give up."
"They don't say that," Ronnie says, with an urgency of his own. He loves this woman too, also calls her Thel. It occurs to Harry that two men for a woman and vice25 versa is about right, just as we need two kinds of days, workdays and holidays, and day and night. Ronnie sounds angry, that she would talk of giving up, but this May evening is slowly melting him into the shadowy wall, so it is beginning to seem that Harry and Thelma are alone together, as in so many stolen afternoons, their hearts beating, the school buses braking outside on the curved street signalling that he must go, and as in that room in the Caribbean, their first time together, when they stayed awake until dawn and then fell asleep as one body as the tropical blue air between the louvers paled and the palm trees ceased their nighttime stirring. Ronnie's disembodied voice says to her angrily, "You have three boys who want to see you grow old."
Thelma smiles slyly at Harry, her face colorless and waxy26 in the May day fading above the fancy brickwork cornices and chimneys visible through the windows. "Why would they want to see that, Ron?" she asks mischievously27, not taking her gaze from Harry's face. "They're grown men. I've done all I can do for them."
Poor Ron has no answer. Maybe he's choked up. Rabbit takes pity and says to him, "How's the insurance business going, Ron?"
"It's levelled out," his voice says gruffly. "Not bad, not good. The S and L mess hurt some companies but not ours. At least people've stopped borrowing against their policies at five per cent and investing at ten the way they were. That was killing28 our figures."
"One of the nice things about getting to be old geezers like us," Harry says, "is people like you stop trying to sell me insurance." Footsteps and tingling29 pans sound from the hall, where the lights seem bright suddenly. Night has come.
"Not necessarily," Ron is saying. "I could get you a pretty fair deal on some twenty?payment straight life, if you and Janice are interested. I know a doctor who doesn't look too close. You've survived one coronary, that's in your favor. Let me work up some figures."
Harry ignores him. To Thelma he says, "Your boys are in good shape?"
"We think so. Good enough. Alex has had an offer from a hightech place in Virginia, outside Washington. Georgie thinks he has a spot with a musical?comedy troupe30 in the Catskills this summer."
"Here's something Janice just told me. She's got Nelson to sign up for a drug rehab."
"That's nice," Thelma says, so softly and sincerely here in the gloom that her voice seems to exist not in the air but already in his blood, inserted intravenously. All the afternoons when their bodies intertwined and exchanged fluids are not gone but safe inside him, his cells remembering.
"You're nice to say so," he says, and dares to grasp her cool hand, the one without the shunt, and move it up from her lap so the back of his own hand brushes a breast.
Ronnie's voice comes forward from the wall. "We gotta go, Thel."
"Ron, thanks for bringing her by."
"Anything for the Old Master. We were in the building."
"Master of nothing at this point."
Ronnie grunts31. "Who's to say?" He's not all bad.
Thelma has stiffly stood and, bending by his bed, asks, right out in front of Ronnie, "Darling, can you manage a little kiss?"
He may imagine it, but Thelma's pale cool departing face, swiftly pressed against his, their lips meeting a bit askew32, gives off a faint far tang of urine. When he is alone in his room again he remembers how sometimes when he kissed Thelma goodbye at her house her mouth would be flavored by the sour?milk taste of his prick, the cheesy smegma secreted33 beneath his foreskin. She would be still all soft and blurred34 by their lovemaking and unaware35, and he would try to conceal36 his revulsion, a revulsion at his own smell on her lips. It was like, another sad thing to remember, the time when Nixon, with Watergate leaking out all around him, during one of the oil crunches37 went on television to tell us so earnestly to turn our thermostats38 down, for not only would it save oil but scientific studies showed that colder houses were healthier for us. That big scowling40 scared face on television, the lips wet and fumbling41. Their President, crook42 or not, going down in disgrace but trying to say what needed to be said; Harry as a loyal American did go and turn his thermostat39 down.
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harry
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| vt.掠夺，蹂躏，使苦恼 | |
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sullen
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| adj.愠怒的，闷闷不乐的，(天气等)阴沉的 | |
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bullied
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| adj.被欺负了v.恐吓，威逼( bully的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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prick
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| v.刺伤，刺痛，刺孔；n.刺伤，刺痛 | |
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afterward
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| adv.后来；以后 | |
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chunks
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| 厚厚的一块( chunk的名词复数 )； （某物）相当大的数量或部分 | |
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eyelids
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| n.眼睑( eyelid的名词复数 )；眼睛也不眨一下；不露声色；面不改色 | |
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prim
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| adj.拘泥形式的，一本正经的；n.循规蹈矩，整洁；adv.循规蹈矩地，整洁地 | |
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purely
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| adv.纯粹地，完全地 | |
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bruised
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| [医]青肿的，瘀紫的 | |
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translucent
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| adj.半透明的；透明的 | |
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artery
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| n.干线，要道；动脉 | |
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vein
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| n.血管，静脉；叶脉，纹理；情绪；vt.使成脉络 | |
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forefinger
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| n.食指 | |
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occluded
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| v.堵塞( occlude的过去式和过去分词 )；阻隔；吸收（气体） | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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erect
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| n./v.树立，建立，使竖立；adj.直立的，垂直的 | |
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sardonic
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| adj.嘲笑的，冷笑的，讥讽的 | |
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reminder
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| n.提醒物，纪念品；暗示，提示 | |
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glide
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| n./v.溜，滑行；(时间)消逝 | |
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balked
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| v.畏缩不前，犹豫( balk的过去式和过去分词 )；（指马）不肯跑 | |
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socketed
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| v.把…装入托座（或插座），给…装上托座（或插座）( socket的过去分词 )；[高尔夫球]用棒头承口部位击（球） | |
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graceful
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| adj.优美的，优雅的；得体的 | |
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outlawed
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| 宣布…为不合法（outlaw的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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vice
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| n.坏事；恶习；[pl.]台钳，老虎钳；adj.副的 | |
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waxy
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| adj.苍白的；光滑的 | |
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mischievously
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| adv.有害地；淘气地 | |
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killing
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| n.巨额利润；突然赚大钱，发大财 | |
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tingling
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| v.有刺痛感( tingle的现在分词 ) | |
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troupe
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| n.剧团，戏班；杂技团；马戏团 | |
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grunts
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| （猪等）作呼噜声( grunt的第三人称单数 )； （指人）发出类似的哼声； 咕哝着说； 石鲈 | |
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askew
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| adv.斜地；adj.歪斜的 | |
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secreted
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| v.（尤指动物或植物器官）分泌( secrete的过去式和过去分词 )；隐匿，隐藏 | |
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blurred
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| v.（使）变模糊( blur的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）难以区分；模模糊糊；迷离 | |
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unaware
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| a.不知道的，未意识到的 | |
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conceal
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| v.隐藏，隐瞒，隐蔽 | |
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crunches
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| n.（突发的）不足( crunch的名词复数 )；需要做出重要决策的困难时刻；紧要关头；嘎吱的响声v.嘎吱嘎吱地咬嚼( crunch的第三人称单数 )；嘎吱作响；（快速大量地）处理信息；数字捣弄 | |
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thermostats
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| n.恒温（调节）器( thermostat的名词复数 ) | |
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thermostat
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| n.恒温器 | |
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40
scowling
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| 怒视，生气地皱眉( scowl的现在分词 ) | |
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fumbling
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| n. 摸索,漏接 v. 摸索,摸弄,笨拙的处理 | |
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crook
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| v.使弯曲；n.小偷，骗子，贼；弯曲(处) | |
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