Rabbit, Run (Rabbit Angstrom, #1)

by John Updike

Club Castanet was named during the war when the South American craze was on and occupies a triangular building where Warren Avenue crosses Running Horse Street at an acute angle. It’s in the south side of Brewer, the Italian-Negro-Polish side, and Rabbit distrusts it. With its glass-brick windows grinning back from the ridge of its face it looks like a fortress of death; the interior is furnished in the glossy low-lit style of an up-to-date funeral parlor, potted green plants here and there, music piped soothingly, and the same smell of strip rugs and fluorescent tubes and Venetian-blind slats and, the most inner secretive smell, of alcohol. You drink it and then you’re embalmed in it. Ever since a man down from them on Jackson Road lost his job as an undertaker’s assistant and became a bartender, Rabbit thinks of the two professions as related; men in both talk softly and are always seen standing up. He and Ruth sit at a booth near the front, where they get through the window a faint fluctuation of red light as the neon castanet on the sign outside flickers back and forth between its two positions, that imitate clicking.