"Maybe Pru could lend you one."

"It would fall off me," she says. But she goes upstairs to where Pru is putting Roy to bed and after a conversation Harry can't hear comes down in a cherry-red waterproof plastic coat, with wide lapels and a belt too long and gleaming zigzags under the light. "Do I look ridiculous?"

"Not exactly," he tells her. It excites him, this transposition: you follow the zigzagging creases up expecting to see red-haired Pru staring back and instead it's Janice's middle-aged face, framed in a splashy bandanna not hers either.

"Also, damn, I'm so mad at myself, I left my lucky pen on the upstairs table back home. And there's no time to drive back for it, in all this rain."

"Maybe you're taking all this too seriously," he says. "What're you trying to prove to the teacher?"

"I'm trying to prove something to myself," she says. "Tell Pru I've left and that I'll be back at ten-thirty, maybe eleven if we decide to go out for beers afterward. You go to bed and rest. You look tired, honey." She gives him in parting a pointed little fingering kiss, grateful for something. Glad to go. All these other male advisers she suddenly has – Charlie, Mr. Lister, the new accountant – seem an invasion as devious as that televised catheter nudging forward into his shadowy webbed heart.

The murmur around the house sounds louder after Janice's footsteps on the porch and the sound of the Camry starting up. She has a panicky way of racing the engine before she puts a car in gear, and usually jumps off like a drag-racer. Janice is wrapped in Pru's cherry raincoat, and he is the man of Pru's house.

On the set in the living room, he and Judy watch the end of ABC news on Channel 6 (that Peter Jennings: here he is telling Americans all about America and he still says "aboot" for "about," he's so Canadian) and then, with Judy punching the remote control, they skip back and forth between jeopardy! and Simon and Simon and the seven-o'clock syndicated reruns of Cosby and Cheers. Pru drifts downstairs, having put Roy down, and into the kitchen to tidy up totally after Janice's half-ass job and then through the dining room checking that all the windows are shut against the rain and into the sun room where she picks a few dead leaves off the plants on Ma Springer's old iron table there. Finally she comes into the living room and sits on the old sofa beside him, while Judy in the Barcalounger channel-surfs. On the Cosby Show rerun, the Huxtables are having one of those child-rearing crises bound to dissolve like a lump of sugar in their warm good humor, their mutual lovingness: Vanessa and her friends get all excited about entering a local dance contest, with lip synching, and get instruction from an old black nightclub pianist and when the time comes to demonstrate for their parents in their living room they bump and grind with a sexuality so startling and premature that Mrs. Huxtable, Claire, in real life the terrific Phylicia Rashad, married to the frog-eyed black sports commentator, restores decency, stopping the record and sending the girls back upstairs, yet with that smile of hers, that wide white slightly lippy black woman's smile, implying that indecency is all right, in its place, its wise time, as in one of those mutually ogling Huxtable snuggles that end many a Cosby Show. Beside him on the sofa Pru is staring at the screen with a jewel, a tear glittering in a comer of the eye toward him. From the Barcalounger Judy snaps the channel to a shot of tropical sky and a huge mottled turtle turning its head slowly while a Godlike voiceover intones, "… determined to defend its breeding grounds."

"Goddamn it, Judy, put it back to the Cosbys right now," Harry says, furious less for himself than for Pru, to whom the show seemed to be a vision of lost possibilities.

Judy, startled just like the girls on the show, does put it back, but by now it's a commercial, and she cries, as the insult sinks in, "I want Daddy back! Everybody else is mean to me!"

She starts to cry, Pru rises to comfort her, Rabbit retreats in disgrace. He circles the house, listening to the rain, marvelling that he once lived here, remembering the dead and the dead versions of the living who lived here with him, finding a half-full jar of dry-roasted cashews on a high kitchen shelf and, on the kitchen television set, a cable rerun of last night's playoff game between the Knicks and the Bulls. He hates the way Michael Jordan's pink tongue rolls around in his mouth as he goes up for a dunk. He has seen Jordan interviewed, he's an intelligent guy, why does he swing his tongue around like an imbecile? The few white players there are on the floor look pathetically naked, their pasty sweat, their fuzzy armpit hair; it seems incredible to Harry that he himself was ever out there in this naked game, though in those days the shorts were a little longer and the tank-top armholes not quite so big. He has finished off the jar of cashews without noticing and suddenly the basketball-Jordan changing direction in midair not once but twice and sinking an awkward fall-back jumper with Ewing's giant hand square in his face -pains him with its rubbery activity, an extreme of bodily motion his nerves but not his muscles can remember. He needs a Nitrostat from the little bottle in the coat jacket in that shallow closet upstairs. The hauntedness of the downstairs is getting to him. He turns off the kitchen light and holds his breath passing Ma Springer's old breakfront in the darkened dining room, where the wallpaper crawls with the streetlight projections of rain running down the windows.

In the upstairs hall, he hears from Ma's old room, now Judy's, the murmur of a television set, and dares tap the door and push in. The little girl has been put into a sleeveless nightie and, holding her stuffed dolphin, sits propped up on two pillows while her mother sits on the bed beside her. The TV set flickering at the foot of the bed picks out pale patches – the whites of Judy's eyes, her bare shoulders, the dolphin's belly, Pru's long forearms laid across the child's flat chest. He clears his throat and says, "Hey, Judy sorry if I got a bit mean down there."

With a hushing impatient hand motion she indicates that her grandfather is forgiven and ought to come in and watch with them. In the blue unsteady light, he picks out a child's straight chair and brings it close to the bed and lowers himself to it; he virtually squats. Raindrops glint on the panes in the light from Joseph Street. He looks at Pru's profile for the glint of a tear but her face is composed. Her nose comes to a sharp point, her lips are clamped together. They are watching Unsolved Mysteries: pale, overweight American faces float into the camera's range, earnestly telling of UFOs seen over sugar-beet fields, above shopping malls, in Navajo reservations, while their homely rooms and furniture, exposed to the glaring lights the cameras require, have the detailed hard weirdness of diatoms seen under a microscope. Harry is struck by how well, really, these small-town sheriffs and trailercamp housewives, and even the drifters and dropouts who just happened to be tripping out on a deserted picnic grounds when the geniuses commanding the UFOs decided to land and sample the terrestrial fauna, speak – a nation of performers, of smoothly talking heads, has sprung up under the lights, everybody rehearsed for their thirty seconds of nationwide attention. During the commercials, Judy skips to other channels, to Jacques Cousteau in a diving suit, to Porky Pig in his big-buttoned blue vest (odd, those old cartoon animals all going around with bare bottoms), to a stringy-haired rock singer mouthing his mike in a lathered-up agony like a female porn star approaching a blow job, to a courtroom scene where the judge's shifty eyes in a second show that he is in on a deal, a hummingbird beating its surprisingly flexible wings in slow motion, Angela Lansbury looking shocked, Greer Garson looking gently out of focus in black and white, and back to Unsolved Mysteries, now about an infant who disappeared from a New York hospital, making Robert Stack, in his mystical raincoat, extra quizzical. Having been rude before, Rabbit holds his tongue. He feels fragile. The flickering images bear down upon him, relentless as heartbeats. With the mystery of the vanished baby still unsolved, he rises and kisses Judy goodnight, his face gliding past the bigger one next to hers. "Love you, Grandpa," the child mechanically says, forgiving or forgetful.