Look, the guy lives with his mother who's getting to be more and more of a drag, he's never married, he's always talking about his nieces and nephews but I don't think they give him shit actually -" "All right, you don't have to sell it. I like seeing Charlie. I must say I think it's creepy that you encourage it." "Why shouldn't I? Because of that old business? I don't hold a grudge. It made you a better person." "Thanks," Janice says dryly. Guiltily he tries to count up how many nights since he's given her an orgasm. These July nights, you get thirsty for one more beer as the Phillies struggle and then in bed feel a terrific weariness, a bliss of inactivity that leads you to understand how men can die willingly, gladly, into an eternal release from the hell of having to perform. When Janice hasn't been fucked for a while, her gestures speed up, and the thought of Charlie's coming intensifies this agitation. "What night?" she asks. "Whenever. What's Melanie's schedule this week?" "What does that have to do with it?" "He might as well meet her properly. I took him over to the crépe place for lunch and though she tried to be pleasant she was rushed and it didn't really work out." "What would `work out' mean, if it did?" "Don't give me a hard time, it's too fucking humid. I've been thinking of asking Ma to go halves with us on a new air‑conditioner, I read where a make called Friedrich is best. I mean `work out' just as ordinary human interchange. He kept asking me embarrassing questions about Nelson." "Like what? What's so embarrassing about Nelson?" "Like whether or not he was going to go back to college and why he kept showing up at the lot." "Why shouldn't he show up at the lot? It was his grandfather's. And Nelson's always loved cars." "Loves to bounce 'em around, at least. The Mustang has a whole new set of rattles, have you noticed?" "I hadn't noticed," Janice says primly, pouring herself more Campari. In an attempt to cut down her alcohol intake, to slow down creeping middle‑itis, she has appointed Campari‑and‑soda her summer drink; but keeps forgetting to put in the soda. She adds, "He's used to those flat Ohio roads." Out at Kent Nelson had bought some graduating senior's old Thunderbird and then when he decided to go to Colorado sold it for half what he paid. Remembering this adds to Rabbit's suffocating sensation of being put upon. He tells her, "They have the fifty‑five‑mile‑an‑hour speed limit out there too. The poor country is trying to save gas before the Arabs turn our dollars into zinc pennies and that baby boy of yours does fifty‑five in second gear." Janice knows he is trying to get her goat now, and turns her back with that electric swiftness, as of speeded‑up film, and heads toward the dining‑room phone. "I'll ask him for next week," she says. "If that'll make you less bitchy." Charlie always brings flowers, in a stapled green cone of paper, that he hands to Ma Springer. After all those years of kissing Springer's ass he knows his way around the widow. Bessie takes them without much of a smile; her maiden name was Koerner and she never wholly approved of Fred's taking on a Greek, and then her foreboding came true when Charlie had an affair with Janice with such disastrous consequences, around the time of the moon landing. Well, nobody is going to the moon much these days. The flowers, unwrapped, are roses the color of a palomino horse. Janice puts them in a vase, cooing. She has dolled up in a perky daisy‑patterned sundress for the occasion, that shows off her brown shoulders, and wears her long hair up in the heat, to remind them all of her slender neck and to display the gold necklace of tiny overlapping fish scales that Harry gave her for their twentieth wedding anniversary three years ago. Paid nine hundred dollars for it then, and it must be worth fifteen hundred now, gold going crazy the way it is. She leans forward to give Charlie a kiss, on the mouth and not the cheek, thus effortlessly reminding those who watch of how these two bodies have travelled within one another. "Charlie, you look too thin," Janice says. "Don't you know how to feed yourself?" "I pack it in, Jan, but it doesn't stick to the ribs anymore. You look terrific, on the other hand." "Melanie's got us all on a health kick. Isn't that right, Mother? Wheat germ and alfalfa sprouts and I don't know what all. Yogurt." "I feel better, honest to God," Bessie pronounces. "I don't know though if it's the diet or just having a little more life around the house." Charlie's square fingertips are still resting on Janice's brown arm. Rabbit sees the phenomenon as he would something else in nature ‑ a Japanese beetle on a leaf, or two limbs of a tree rubbing together in the wind. Then he remembers, descending into the molecules, what love feels like: huge, skin on skin, planets impinging. "We all eat too much sugar and sodium," Melanie says, in that happy uplifted voice of hers, that seems unconnected to what is below, like a blessing no one has asked for. Charlie's hand has snapped away from Janice's skin; he is all warrior attention; his profile in the gloom of this front room through which all visitors to this household must pass shines, low‑browed and jut jawed, the muscles around the hollow of his jaw pulsing. He looks younger than at the lot, maybe because the light is poorer. "Melanie," Harry says, "you remember Charlie from lunch the other day, doncha?" "Of course. He had the mushrooms and capers."

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Little she knows, the poison Mom talked about her. "Mom was like me," Harry says. "She didn't like being crowded." New people at either end of the house and old man Springer's ghost sittirig downstairs on his Barcalounger. "They don't act very lovey," he says. "Or is that how people are now? Hands off." "I think they don't want to shock us. They know they must get around Mother." "Join the crowd." Janice ponders this. The bed creaks and heavy footsteps slither on the other side of the wall, and the excited cries of the television set are silenced with a click. Burt Lancaster just getting warmed up. Those teeth: can they be his own? All the stars have them crowned. Even Harry, he used to have a lot of trouble with his molars and now they're snug, safe and painless, in little jackets of gold alloy costing four hundred fifty each. "She's still up," Janice says. "She won't sleep. She's stewing." In the positive way she pronounces her s's she sounds more and more like her mother. We carry our heredity concealed for a while and then it pushes through. Out of those narrow DNA coils. In a stir of wind as before a sudden rain the shadows of the copper‑beech leaves surge and fling their ragged interstices of streetlight back and forth across the surfaces where the ceiling meets the far wall. Three cars pass, one after the other, and Harry's sense of the active world outside sliding by as he lies here safe wells up within him to merge with the bed's nebulous ease. He is in his bed, his molars are in their crowns. "She's a pretty good old sport," he says. "She rolls with the punches." "She's waiting and watching," Janice says in an ominous voice that shows she is more awake than he. She asks, "When do I get my turn?" "Turn?" The bed is gently turning, Stavros is waiting for him by the great display window that brims with dusty morning light. You asked for it. "You came last night, from the state I was in this morning. Me and the sheet." The wind stirs again. Damn. The convertible is still out there with the top down. "Honey, it's been a long day." Running out of gas. "Sorry." "You're forgiven," Janice says. "Just." She has to add, "I might think I don't turn you on much anymore." "No, actually, over at the club today I was thinking how much sassier you look than most of those broads, old Thelma in her little skirt and the awful girlfriend of Buddy's." "And Cindy?" "Not my type. Too pudgy." "Liar." You got it. He is dead tired yet something holds him from the black surface of sleep, and in that half‑state just before or after he sinks he imagines he hears lighter, younger footsteps slither outside in the hall, going somewhere in a hurry. Melanie is as good as her word, she gets a job waitressing at a new restaurant downtown right on Weiser Street, an old restaurant with a new name, The Crepe House. Before that it was the Café Barcelona, painted tiles and paella, iron grillwork and gazpacho; Harry ate lunch there once in a while but in the evening it had attracted the wrong element, hippies and Hispanic families from the south side instead of the white‑collar types from West Brewer and the heights along Locust Boulevard, that you need to make a restaurant go in this city. Brewer never has been much for Latin touches, not since Carmen Miranda and all those Walt Disney Saludos Amigos movies. Rabbit remembers there used to be a Club Castanet over on Warren Avenue but the only thing Spanish had been the name and the frills on the waitresses' uniforms, which had been orange. Before the Crepe House had been the Barcelona it had been for many years Johnny Frye's Chophouse, good solid food day and night for the big old‑fashioned German eaters, who have eaten themselves pretty well into the grave by now, taking with them tons of pork chops and sauerkraut and a river of Sunflower Beer. Under its newest name, Johnny Frye's is a success; the lean new race of downtown office workers comes out of the banks and the federal offices and the deserted department stores and makes its way at noon through the woods the city planners have inflicted on Weiser Square and sits at the little tile tables left over from the Café Barcelona and dabbles at glorified pancakes wrapped around minced whatever. Even driving through after a movie at one of the malls you can see them in there by candlelight, two by two, bending toward each other over the crepes earnest as hell, on the make, the guys in leisure suits with flared open collars and the girls in slinky dresses that cling to their bodies as if by static electricity, and a dozen more just like them standing in the foyer waiting to be seated. It has to do with diet, Harry figures ‑ people now want to feel they're eating less, and a crepe sounds like hardly a snack whereas if they called it a pancake they would have scared everybody away but kids and two‑ton Katrinkas. Harry marvels that this new tribe of customers exists, on the make, and with money. The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started. The Crepe House is such a hit they've bought the decrepit brick building next door and expanded into the storerooms, leaving the old cigar store, that still has a little gas pilot to light up by by the cash register, intact and doing business. To staff their new space the Crepe House needed more waitresses. Melanie works some days the lunch shift from ten to six and other days she goes from five to near one in the morning. One day Harry took Charlie over to lunch for him to see this new woman in the Angstrom life, but it didn't work out very well: having Nelson's father show up as a customer with a strange man put roses of embarrassment in Melanie's cheeks as she served them in the midst of the lunchtime mob. "Not a bad looker," Charlie said on that awkward occasion, gazing after the young woman as she flounced away. The Crepe House dresses its waitresses in a kind of purple colonial mini, with a big bow in back that switches as they walk. "You can see that?" Harry said. "I can't. It bothers me, actually. That I'm not turned on. The kid's been living with us two weeks now and I should be climbing the walls." "A little old for wall‑climbing, aren't you, chief? Anyway there are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models." "As you say she has all the equipment. Big knockers, ifyou look." "I looked." "The funny thing is, she doesn't seem to turn Nelson on either, that I can see. They're buddies all right; when she's home they spend hours in his room together playing his old records and talking about God knows what, sometimes they come out of there it looks like he's been crying, but as far as Jan and I can tell she sleeps in the front room, where we put her as a sop to old lady Springer that first night, never thinking it would stick. Actually Bessie's kind of taken with her by now, she helps with the housework more than Janice does for one thing; so at this point wherever Melanie sleeps I think she'd look the other way." "They've got to be fucking," Stavros insisted, setting his hands on the table in that defining, faintly menacing way he has: palms facing, thumbs up. "You'd think so," Rabbit agreed. "But these kids now are spooky. These letters in long white envelopes keep arriving from Colorado and they spend a lot of time answering. The postmark's Colorado but the return address printed on is some dean's office at Kent. Maybe he's flunked out." Charlie scarcely listened. "Maybe I should give her a buzz, if Nelson's not ringing her bell." "Come on, Charlie. I didn't say he's not, I just don't get that vibe around the house. I don't think they do it in the back of the Mustang, the seats are vinyl and these kids today are too spoiled." He sipped his Margarita and wiped the salt from his lips. The bartender here was left over from the Barcelona days, they must have a cellarful of tequila. "To tell you the truth I can't imagine Nelson screwing anybody, he's such a sourpussed little punk." "Got his grandfather's frame. Fred was sexy, don't kid yourself. Couldn't keep his hands off the clerical help, that's why so many of them left. Where'd you say she's from?" "California. Her father sounds like a bum, he lives in Oregon after being a lawyer. Her parents split a time ago." "So she's a long way from home. Probably needs a friend, along more mature lines." "Well I'm right there across the hall from her." "You're family, champ. That doesn't count. Also you don't appreciate this chick and no doubt she twigs to that. Women do." "Charlie, you're old enough to be her father." "Aah. These Mediterranean types, they like to see a little gray hair on the chest. The old mastoras." "What about your lousy ticker?" Charlie smiled and put his spoon into the cold spinach soup that Melanie had brought. "Good a way to go as any." "Charlie, you're crazy," Rabbit said admiringly, admiring yet once again in their long relationship what he fancies as the other man's superior grip upon the basic elements of life, elements that Harry can never settle in his mind. "Being crazy's what keeps us alive," Charlie said, and sipped, closing his eyes behind his tinted glasses to taste the soup better. "Too much nutmeg. Maybe Janice'd like to have me over, it's been a while. So I can feel things out." "Listen, I can't have you over so you can seduce my son's girlfriend." "You said she wasn't a girlfriend." "I said they didn't act like it, but then what do I know?" "You have a pretty good nose. I trust you, champ." He changed the subject slightly. "How come Nelson keeps showing up at the lot?" "I don't know, with Melanie off at work he doesn't have much to do, hanging around the house with Bessie, going over to the club with Janice swimming till his eyes get pink from the chlorine. He shopped around town a little for a job but no luck. I don't think he tried too hard." "Maybe we could fit him in at the lot." "I don't want that. Things are cozy enough around here for him already." "He going back to college?" "I don't know. I'm scared to ask." Stavros put down his soup spoon carefully. "Scared to ask," he repeated. "And you're paying the bills. If my father had ever said to anybody he was scared of anything to do with me, I think the roof would have come off the house." "Maybe scared isn't the word." "Scared is the word you used." He looked up squinting in what seemed to be pain through his thick glasses to perceive Melanie more clearly as, in a flurry of purple colonial flounces, she set before Harry a Crépe con Zucchini and before Charlie a Crépe aux Champignons et Oignons. The scent of their vegetable steam remained like a cloud of perfume she had released from the frills of her costume before flying away. "Nice," Charlie said, not of the food. "Very nice." Rabbit still couldn't see it. He thought of her body without the frills and got nothing in the way of feeling except a certain fear, as if seeing a weapon unsheathed, or gazing upon an inflexible machine with which his soft body should not become involved. But he feels obliged one night to say to Janice, "We haven't had Charlie over for a while." She looks at him curiously. "You want to? Don't you see enough of him at the lot?"

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