Rabbit Remembered

Nelson finds TV stupid but likes the technicolor fire of it, the way it flares up within a few seconds of his coming in the door and punching the remote. A genie when you rub a lamp, a multitude of genies. He watches until he feels his intelligence being too rudely insulted or his patience being too arrogantly tested by the commercials, which interrupt at an ever-greedier ratio whenever the program gets interesting. Yet some commercials he waits for eagerly. There is the Nicoderm commercial that features this neat-looking woman about his age, with a slight crimp in her chin indicating maturity and experience, in a straight-shouldered dress, telling you what a sensible, efficient method this patch provides for quitting smoking. He loves the level, not-quite-smiling way she looks at you, implying that once you quit she and you will go on together on a purified basis. And he loves even more the younger woman advertising Secret Platinum, "the strongest deodorizer you can buy without a prescription." She is dark-complected and with utterly no fat on her except in her quite full lips, and as her pitch progresses, and her body jigs and jags across the screen, she sweats in growing torrents and at the commercial's climax pops a muscle, cocking her arm with a devilish sideways look right out at him. She works out hard and would fuck hard, the implication is. He needs a woman, Christ. Some nights, like in the joke his son e-mailed him, there isn't enough skin left to close his eyes. He tries to analyze himself: why do these two women in the commercials get to him? Both are strong, he sees. He wants a woman who will take over. The possibilities at work for him are poor: clients are off-bounds and your colleagues should be, even if they were more appealing than plain, earnest Katie Shirk, or pouty, snotty Andrea, the art therapist, or Elenita, the Dominican receptionist, with her hair dyed orange and heaped on her head in woolly skeins like Sideshow Bob in The Simpsons, or Esther, who is Jewish and older than he and married to a downtown lawyer and too strong. In the bars he used to go to, the girls have gotten too much younger than he, so young they seem silly, like those two on the other side of the wall. They really do say "like" and "you know" and come down funny on the ends of their words like Valley Girls, tucking the "r"s down deep into their throats. He thinks they are putting him on, imitating Lisa Kudrow, but it's just the way they naturally talk. When one of the two girls on the other side of his wall stops giggling and her voice and the rumbly one of a date entwine with fewer and fewer words into silence and animal sounds, he cannot feel too jealous; it's like undressing a Barbie doll in his mind, and finding her smooth and stiff, no nipples and the legs don't bend.

He is waiting for some woman to call. Mom calls, to check on how he is, but there is more and more space between her calls. Local real estate is lively, as if at the end of the year-the century, the millennium, the world as we've known it-people are agitated and looking for some sort of renewal by changing shelter. She herself is looking forward to Florida, where she still has the condo in Deleon, once Christmas and the visit from her grandchildren is over. "To be frank, Nelson, I almost dread it, it will seem so peculiar, with you not in the house."

He is firm. "Ronnie acted like a prick to my sister, and those other Harrisons weren't much better. You were O.K., but just barely. After all, you were married to Dad for thirty-three years."

"Well, his having a love child doesn't sweeten my memories necessarily."

He smiles at the quaint phrase "love child." Nelson has always been close to his mother. It was drummed into him that he took after the Springers-little and dark-eyed, and something of a smooth operator like his grandfather, and he wonders now if he shouldn't let go of that. This sudden sister, this love child, is a chance to draw closer to Dad, the Angstrom side within him.

Yet his third lunch with Annabelle at The Greenery feels like a pullback. Elm Street is bleak in December, and part of the bleakness is the uncanny warmth, over sixty today, wiping out any anticipation of a white Christmas and rousing the same fear of global warming as this summer's drought. The planet is being cooked. The oceans will rise, the croplands will become deserts. The Greenery seems demoralized. The only Christmas decorations up are some flattened white spheroids of a glimmering ersatz material in the window and against the mirrors behind the counter: not round real Christmas balls but ones in two-and-a-half dimensions, like some computer graphic. Once again he apologizes to Annabelle for his extended family's bad behavior.

"It was bound to be awkward," she says. "I never should have gone."

"My mistake. I couldn't imagine anybody's not seeing you as I do."

"And how is that, Nelson?"