You didn’t play football either, and get your knee scrambled, either, did you? No sir, not Harry the bird; he was on wings. Feed him the ball and watch it go in.”
“It went in, you noticed.”
“Sometimes. Sometimes it did. Harry now don’t wrinkle your nose. Don’t think we all don’t appreciate your ability.” From the way he’s using his hands, chopping and lifting with practiced understatement, getting a quiet symphony of sarcasm and patience and emphasis out of the play of his palms, Rabbit thinks he must do a lot of talking around a table. Yet there’s a tremor; and in seeing that Harrison is afraid of him, Rabbit loses interest. The waitress comes—Harrison orders Bourbon-on-the-Rocks for himself and Margaret and another Daiquiri for Ruth—and Rabbit watches her back recede as if it is the one real thing in the world: the thick notched rope of her spine between two blue-brown pillows of muscle. He wants Ruth to see him looking.
Harrison is losing his salesman’s composure. “Did I ever tell you what Tothero once said to me about you? Ace, are you listening?”
“What did Tothero say?” God this guy is a middle-aged bore.
“He said to me, ‘This is in confidence, Ronnie, but I depend on you to spark the team. Harry is not a team player.’ ”
Rabbit looks down at Margaret and over at Ruth. “Now I’ll tell ya what really happened,” he says to them. “Old Harrison here went in to Tothero and he said, ‘Hey, I’m a real spark plug, ain’t I coach? A real play-maker, huh? Not like that lousy showboat Angstrom, huh?’ And Tothero was probably asleep and didn’t answer, so Harrison goes through the rest of his life thinking, ‘Gee, I’m a real hero. A real playmaker.’ On a basketball team, you see, whenever you have a little runty clumsy guy that can’t do anything he’s called the play-maker. I don’t know where he’s supposed to be making all these plays. In his bedroom I guess.” Ruth laughs; he’s not sure he wanted her to.
“That’s not true.” Harrison’s practiced palms flicker more hastily. “He volunteered it to me. Not that it was anything I didn’t know; the whole school knew it.”
Did it? Nobody ever told him.
Ruth says, “God, let’s not talk basketball. Every time I go out with this bastard we talk nothing but.”
He wonders, Did doubt show on his face, and she say that to reassure him? Does she in any part of her pity him?
Harrison perhaps thinks he’s been uglier than befits his sales-conference suavity. He takes out a cigarette and a lizard-skin Ronson.
Rabbit turns to Margaret—something in the way this arranges the nerves in his neck rings a bell, makes him think he turned to her exactly like this a million years ago—and says, “You never answered me.”
“Nuts, I don’t know where he is. I guess he went home. He was sick.”
“Just sick, or—” Harrison’s mouth does a funny thing, smiling and pursing both, as if he is introducing, with deference, this bit of Manhattan cleverness to his rural friends for the first time, and taps his head to make sure they will “get it”—sick, sick, sick?”
“All ways,” Margaret says. A serious shadow crosses her face that seems to remove her and Harry, who sees it, from the others, and takes them into that strange area of a million years ago from which they have wandered; a strange guilt pierces Harry at being here, instead of there, where he never was. Ruth and Harrison across from them, touched by staccato red light, seem specters glimpsed from the heart of damnation.
“Dear Ruth,” Harrison says, “how have you been? I often worry about you.”
“Don’t worry about me,” she says, yet seems pleased. The Negress brings their drinks and Harrison sets his lizard-skin Ronson beside his glass, as if suggesting it’s for sale. “Did you know,” he asks Harry, with a sweet smile, as if he’s chatting with a child, “that Ruth and I once went to Atlantic City together?”
“There was another couple,” she tells Harry.
“A disgusting pair,” Harrison says, “who preferred the shabby privacy of their own bungalow to the golden sunshine outdoors. The male of this twosome later confided to me, with ill-concealed pride, that he had enjoyed the orgasmatic climax eleven times in the all-too-short period of thirty-six hours.”
Margaret laughs. “Honestly, Ronnie, to hear you talk sometimes you’d think you went to Harvard.”
“Princeton,” he corrects. “Princeton is the effect I want to give. Harvard is suspect around here.”