Rabbit Remembered

They agree to meet downtown, at the restaurant on Weiser Square that was Johnny Frye's Chophouse many years ago and then became the Café Barcelona and then the Crêpe House and then Salad Binge and now under new management has been revived as Casa della Pasta, pasta supposed to be good for your arteries while having a little more substance than salads or crêpes. The day they meet, as it turns out, is the one after the day when Charles Schulz announced he was ending Peanuts and Jimmy Carter went down to Panama to give them the Canal.

"He got to give it away twice," Billy points out. "Once when he was President and now when he's a has-been. You notice Clinton's too smart to show his face. In ten years the Red Chinese will control it, just you watch. Those spics'll sell it off."

Nelson's father within him winces when anyone threatens to disparage Clinton or any sitting President. Dad had never much liked Billy, complaining about the boy's fat lips. Yet, seeing him, Nelson cannot but warm: here is a partner in his childish dreams, the conspiracy of imagined speed and triumphant violence that boys erect around themselves like a tent in the back yard under the scary stars. Billy, who used to be heavy like his wall-eyed, doomed mother, has become weedy like his father, though taller. His hair, a curly black like neither of his parents', has thinned back from his brow even more decidedly than Nelson's straight hair, its convict cut. Billy has a bald spot at the back of his head the size of a yarmulke. There was always something about Billy that kept people from taking him absolutely seriously, and that light something has become Jewish, quick-tongued and self-mocking and hypochondriac, caught from his teachers and colleagues in prosthetic dentistry. Yes, he says, his dad is still alive, filling in on clarinet in so-called Dixieland bands, though being white is a big disadvantage, and making ends meet in various fishy ways. Yes, he, Billy, has been married-twice, in fact, once to a nice girl from Newton he met up there in New England and then to one of his assistants in his practice down here. The second marriage broke up the first and then developed its own twinges. She was twelve years younger and he didn't want to go out as much as she did and she got tired of his night sweats and yelling out in his sleep and his moods.

"Moods?" Nelson asks.

"Depressed, irritable, could't sleep. Weekends I'd be so beat and bored I'd pray for an emergency to call. Tooth-structure loss I could handle. Wives," he goes on. "They shut down without even knowing they're doing it. The fancy stuff goes and then even the basics are cut back to once a week, then twice a month, and then just holidays and trips abroad. Portugal, Austria, Acapulco-all that way just to get a little nooky from my lawful wedded."

"Well, in my case," Nelson begins, but Billy overrides him: "And then when you suggest maybe this marriage isn't working, they act stunned and tell their lawyers to go for all they can get, this isn't their idea."

Years of dealing with people with their mouths immobilized has made Billy an easy conversational partner, needing very little prompting. "Yelling out in your sleep?" Nelson asks.

The waitress, who looks just a little like the sweaty olive-skinned beauty in the Secret Platinum commercial, interrupts with the day's specials. Billy orders bowties with diced shrimp, and Nelson the mushroom ravioli. Both decline wine in favor of water. "Have the sparkling Pellegrino, it's hyper expensive," Billy says. "This is on me, remember." He tells Nelson, "Yeah, awful dreams. In one of them I'm crammed into the trunk of a car, my face right up against the jack, and I can see the car-you know how in dreams you can see things from inside and out both-being slid into a river, like that mother did to those kids in South Carolina years ago. In another dream I'm in one place and my house is burning in another, and I can't get to it, even though I can see the flames burning through the floor right at my feet." He pauses. "So-what do you think?"

So-this is why he's asked Nelson to lunch, to get free therapy. It wasn't just those good old days tenting out in the back yard. Nelson grudges being a wise man outside the treatment center. He says, "We don't do dreams much in therapy any more. There's no time. The insurance companies want fast action-in because of some crisis, 'Here, take these pills,' out. The second dream, though, has an obvious reference. The night I was staying over at your apartment with your mother and puppy and our house burned down in Penn Villas a mile away."

Billy puffs his lips out suspiciously, and his eyes pop a little, too. "When was that? How old were we?"

"Twelve, maybe you were thirteen. Are you serious, you've forgotten it?"