The Afterlife Read online

  “I can’t stand it another night,” she told Terry in the privacy of their home. “Every time he blasts in my ear I think of his position on the Contras and I could scream.”

  “He wouldn’t hurt a fly, really,” Terry said, ostensibly by way of comfort but really to irritate her, to provoke her to greater, more alienating fury.

  “Pfou,” she said, expelling smoke; she had taken up smoking again, claiming she was becoming too fat without it. “He has this complacent image of himself as a New England gentleman but in fact he’s a lowbrow klutz who if he hadn’t been born with money would have no idea how to make it. He can’t even talk in complete sentences. ‘That so?’ he says, and ‘Do tell?’ The whole recorder group irritates me, in fact. Everybody’s gotten silly and full of secrets, somehow.”

  “What’s your secret?” Terry innocently asked.

  “I just told you. I don’t like anybody.”

  “Not even me?”

  “Less and less,” Jessie rather surprisingly confessed, bringing tears to her eyes and a twinkle of gratification to his.

  He drew her closer to him on the sofa where they had been talking. “Tell you what,” he said, letting his voice, largo, deepen and resonate. “I’ll give you my tenor. Come join the boys.”

  “You’ll swap for my alto?” she asked. “There’re already too many, with Maury playing loud enough for two.”

  “Carolyn has the alto part under control, and anyway I’m not musical enough to go from a C-instrument to an F-one. I’ve been thinking of becoming a soprano. They need rescuing.”

  From within his accustomed arms Jessie looked up askance out of her slightly protuberant chocolate eyes, from beneath her long bangs and thick brows, and asked, perhaps innocently, “You sure you’re up to it?”

  Terry bought himself not a Moeck but, less expensively, an Adler, a smooth small instrument that felt in his hands like his tenor transposed to a daintier scale. It responded much more readily to his breath, with what seemed a certain excitement, especially when he set his nail in the thumb-hole and attacked a note above G, where Andrea tended to give out, and shy Alice never aspired. He became a specialist in high notes. The secret was to pinch the thumb-hole truly small, as if closing it with the back of the thumbnail, and to blow into the mouthpiece quickly and sharply, like checking when skiing on ice. Hit it, and ski on. Don’t panic or look too far ahead. It also helped to pronounce tu instead of du into the mouthpiece, and to think of your mouth as tiny and dry. The high A was easy, involving only two closed finger-holes, and the B not too bad, since to these two the right hand merely added two more, and the C possible, subtracting merely one, but the high D, using four fingers spaced apart, was a note he had never struck to his own satisfaction. Nor had he ever seen it called for in a piece of recorder music.

  Alice or Andrea would turn to him afterwards and say, “You’re wonderful.” “Wonderful” was not in their leader’s vocabulary, but when the treble part began to move above the staff Miss Hart’s neckless, many-chinned head turned with a touching expectancy toward the end of the arc where Terry sat, on the extreme right, and in the lower left corner of his vision he could see Andrea’s blurred white hands docilely lower to her lap. Only a maestro could have hit the high notes softly, so Terry’s single instrument had volume enough for these dizzying moments when he strained alone at the top of the scale. For all his androgynous name and diffident slouching slenderness, there was a sharp passion in him, which the high notes now expressed. As they rang in the drum of his skull his senses were besieged by the shine of Andrea’s fair hair in the side of his vision, the scent of her shampoo and bath gel in his nostrils, the rustle of her sheet music and scuffle of her feet in his ears. In the summer, that third summer after the summer of the group’s beginning, he was aware of the scent of her sun-tan lotion, of the salt and chlorine dried in her hair, of an ice-creamy, cottony, dusty essence of summer rising from her, even of the musk from between her legs. Perhaps her musk was on his fingers as they twiddled on the stops; by August he and she had become lovers, and sometimes on the day of a recorder session would have met at a beach or motel halfway to Boston, in a storm of bodily fluids, including tears. But long before her surrender he had felt her body beside him like an immense word on the verge of being spoken, while they played in unison or whisperingly compared trill fingerings. When they went to bed together the first time, she instinctively lay on his left, and he on her right. Ever since he had taken up the soprano, he had felt her peripheral presence pull at him like a vacuum. Men and women in need distort the space around them, and Terry near Andrea in any circumstance, even at a May town meeting or accidentally met in the gourmet section of the supermarket on Saturday with their children in tow, felt marvellously enlarged—his voice resonant, his aura extended as if in a wavy mirror.

  Nor was theirs the only warping within the group. The spectacular and able Toula, shining among them like an electronic wraith, had imperceptibly turned from Fritz, whose hairy, metallic nature did indeed have something repulsive about it, to the vividly stained face on her other side; both she and Jim Keel were excessively vivid, out of sync, singled out. And Jessie, guilty Terry observed, now that Carolyn had abandoned her to be next to Dick McHoagland (both of them married and doomed to respectability but nevertheless touching elbows and interpenetrated by their alto/tenor harmonies), was trying with a certain maternal breadth to suffer Maury’s primitive political views during the beer-and-chitchat part of the evening, when his musical squalling had died down; she seemed to look upon him a bit tenderly, her wounded dark eyes shining, as on some rough beast who was nevertheless there, as Terry was never there for her any more. But Maury, deaf to this change of emotional tune, was tipping his big, primly combed head with old-fashioned gallantry to catch what soft-voiced little Alice Arsenault, beaten and abandoned by one of the town’s agents of protective order, was shyly offering to say. “Do tell? That so?” They were all trying to listen to one another. It seemed to Terry—inflamed by love and distress as his psyche was—that they were making music even without the recorders and in their interaction catching at something splendid, just as individual notes, bare of nuance, in combination gain meaning and mount to an expression of otherwise inexpressible completeness and resolve. He hated to go home and face the tired babysitter, and the poor children lying sprawled in the muss of sleep, and Jessie in her ghastly aggrieved silence.

  Whichever house they played in now, the trees at the windows were blood and brass; New England’s autumnal climax swelled and faded. Miss Hart was excited and proud; the Golden Agers of her church had invited the group to give a Christmas concert. They must do it, they all agreed in furtive phone conversations; she had been so kind. Andrea and Jessie, Terry and Fritz had stopped speaking but communicated through others. The affair, which had burned through to common knowledge, cast over their rehearsals a pall of which only their stout leader was oblivious; her stubby arms lifted again and again in a flurry of yellowed lace as the group repeatedly flubbed the difficult time-change into 9/8 and then 6/4 toward the end of “The Leaves Be Green.” Adson’s “Courtly Masquing Ayres” had two soprano parts, and Alice was in a panic over holding down the second descant line by herself while the lovers clung to the same part. Her former husband, the fireman and athlete, was paying her ardent attentions again and had expressed nothing but blazing scorn for the recorder group and its snobs like Maury Sutherland; drunk, Skip Arsenault once with a contemptuous laugh tossed her instrument into the fireplace, and the acrid taste of char wouldn’t leave the fipple. Every time she put it in her mouth, Alice felt a sexual shudder of ambivalence.

  Toula was moving back to the city, where Jim was also thinking of getting an apartment, and they began to miss rehearsals. Maury went off on a two-week sailing trip to Bermuda, and Dick became preoccupied by the football season and the needs of marching bands. The Weisses had considered themselves a perfect couple and held true to their perfectionism to the end. The idea that they were no
w flawed and must be divorced had been taken up by Fritz’s mind in a grip of steel. No legal steps were to be initiated until after the concert. Since the other players were nervously shying away, the Weisses steadfastly hosted the meetings, as they had at the beginning. On these terminal evenings, before the other players arrived, Andrea would try, across the chaste space of their underfurnished living room, as Fritz fetched in the dining-room chairs, to punish herself by feeling some tenderness for her husband; but the very rigor with which he arranged the chairs in a mathematical arc, and the grim ironic courtesy he had shown her ever since the night when she had revealed her secret in a flood of tears, merely confirmed her in her bleak coldness. “Stop acting so righteous,” she might blurt out, maddened by his calm. “You began it, enticing Toula into the basses. I was so insulted and upset, and you never noticed.”

  “That was a sound move,” Fritz would insist. “It gave us much better balance.”

  “It meant Terry had to become a soprano, for everybody’s good.”

  “He didn’t at all. You could have carried the section if you’d tried.”

  “I did try,” she said, “I did,” happy to feel tears coming again—her eyelids were always pink these days—for their blinding action seemed to absolve her. On recorder evenings, Fritz always changed out of his professorial clothes into corduroy pants, the same cardigan sweater with elbow patches, and a pair of green espadrilles such as old European men wear; the sight of these espadrilles senilely shuffling on the striped carpet her young fingers had once woven seemed to absolve her further.

  The concert consisted of the well-worn Byrd; two surefire Bach fugues; “My Robin Is to the Greenwood Gone” and “And Will He Not Come Again?” from Kenneth Meek’s contemporary setting of Ophelia’s songs; “Patourelles Joliettes” and “Je l’Ay, Je l’Ay la Gente Fleur,” by Claude Le Jeune (1528–1601); three of the “ayres” by John Adson (b. ?, d. 1640); a bit of Bartók and Hindemith to wake the crowd up; and, perhaps ill-advisedly, some Purcell “Music to Dioclesian,” chock-full of flats and dotted sixteenths. The program was too ambitious; Miss Hart flailed away at the spottily attended rehearsals sensing that the glue had gone out of her group but not knowing why. Jessie, catching a glimpse of, just beyond Alice, Andrea’s pink-and-white profile next to her animatedly bobbing husband’s, would find her lips trembling and her breath raw in her throat like vomit. Grimly Fritz clamped down on the stops and puffed wind into his metal mouthpiece as if pinching curses from the side of his mouth. By unspoken agreement, the Bridgetons would leave the Weisses’ house early, before the beer, even before Miss Hart had downed her diet cherry Coke.

  Yet the concert was a success. The elderly crowd in the Congregational church’s parish hall didn’t know what recorders were supposed to sound like, and accepted the dissonance and awry counterpoint as one more proof that music, like everything else in this world, has progressed. What they heard was what the group itself had heard on all those evenings of gathering: the sudden stunning beauty of the first note, blown through a little forest of wooden flutes. And the players, the men in gray suits and the women in formal dresses, looked so relatively young, so handsome and vital and pretty, and were so obliging to be here, under poor dear Eleanor’s direction, that the applause thundered in. The group played all the encores it had prepared—“Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes,” a saucy Handel bourrée, and, finally, “Silent Night.”

  Infected by the warmth of the audience, the ten members of the group joined their sweaty hands and bowed. In front of these old faces, and amid the crowd afterwards, they felt cherished as children are cherished, just for being themselves. Jessie gave Andrea, over by the bowl of pink punch, a curious hysterical kiss; neither had slept much last night. In their crisis Andrea had become skinnier and Jessie plumper. Terry felt hot and exhausted and exalted, on the eve of a new life. Nobody peeking in the tall parish-hall windows at the performers and listeners mingling in a steamy atmosphere of congratulation and relief beneath the mistletoe and red and green streamers would have guessed that the recorder group was dead.

  Short Easter

  Fogel could not remember its ever happening before—the advent of Daylight Saving Time clipping an hour off Easter. Church bells rang in the dark; the pious would be scrambling about in their topcoats and hats turning the clocks ahead. All day, the reluctantly budding earth would wear its crown of cloudy firmament a bit awry. Easter had always struck Fogel as a holiday without real punch, though there was, among the more vivid of his childhood memories, a magical peep into a big sugar egg; it had been at his aunt’s house, in Connecticut, where the houses seemed cleaner than in New Jersey, the people wealthier, the daffodils a brighter yellow. Inside the egg, paper silhouettes spelled out a kind of landscape—a thatch-roofed cottage, a rabbit wearing a vest, a fringe of purple flowers, a receding path and paper mountains—all bathed in an unexpectedly brilliant light. Where had the light come from? There must have been a hole in the egg besides the one he peeped into, a kind of skylight, admitting to this miniature world a celestial illumination.

  But, generally, the festivity that should attend the day had fallen rather flat: quarrelsome and embarrassed family church attendances, with nobody quite comfortable in pristine Easter clothes; melancholy egg hunts in some muddy back yard, the smallest child confused and victimized; headachy brunches where the champagne punch tasted sour and conversation lagged. Perhaps if Fogel had not been led to live north of Boston, where at Eastertide croci and daffodils poked up through dead lawns like consciously brave thoughts and even forsythia was shy of blooming, nature might have encouraged the ostensible mood of hope and beginning again. But the day was usually raw, and today was no exception—a day of drizzle and chill, only an hour less of it.

  Fogel was sixty-two, and felt retirement drawing closer. In the daily rub he discovered all sorts of fresh reasons for irritation. The line at the post office was held up by people buying money orders, and the line at the grocery store by people buying state lottery tickets. It seemed to him sheer willful obstructionism. Why didn’t these people have checking accounts, and do their gambling on the stock market, as he did? Driving to work, on those days when he did not take the commuter train, Fogel resented being tailgated, and especially by young drivers, and very especially by young men in sunglasses, their identity further shielded by tinted windshields and newly fashionable opaque side windows. One morning, the car behind him, a low scarlet sports model, wore a kind of mask or muzzle of dark vinyl over its grille, and this ultra-chic, ultra-protective touch infuriated him, just as did cardboard sunshields in parked cars, and leather-ridged, fingertipless driving gloves, and fuzz-busters blatantly fastened above dashboards, and bumper stickers declaring SHIT HAPPENS or ironically commanding SUPPORT WILDLIFE—THROW A PARTY. The vinyl-faced car was frantic to pass, and nosed toward the right and, finding there an onrolling eighteen-wheeler, nosed back and swerved left, into a lane that in a few hundred yards terminated in a blinking yellow arrow. Fogel pressed on the accelerator, to keep abreast of the boy and hold him out in the doomed lane. Fogel smiled behind the wheel, picturing the other car’s satisfying crash into the great arrow—the raucous grating of metal, the misty explosion of glass, and himself sailing serenely on in his middle lane. But the boy, getting the picture, cut in so sharply that Fogel had to brake or hit him; he chose to hit the brakes, and the youthful driver, steering one-handed, held up the middle finger of the other hand for Fogel to see as the red car, belching, pulled away.

  If Fogel’s stately Mercedes had been equipped with a button that annihilated other vehicles, he would have used it three or four times a mile. Almost every other automobile on the road—those that passed him, those so slow he had to pass them, those going just his speed and hanging in his side mirrors like pursuing furies—seemed a deliberate affront, restricting his freedom and being somehow pretentious about it. What was the point of that sinister Darth Vader–like mask over a grille? No point, just pure intimidation. Which was, he
had come through sixty years to realize, the aim of eighty-five percent of all human behavior.

  His body’s accumulating failures also angered him. His eyelashes kept falling into his eyes, and the presbyopia of late middle age prevented him from seeing, in the mirror, his own eyes well enough to take the lashes out. A tantalizing refusal of focus, like the pressure of water that keeps us from seizing a tempting shell on the sandy bottom of six feet of crystalline sea, frustrated him, and when he put on his reading glasses he could see the dark curved foreign body but not get his fingers and the corner of a handkerchief in behind the lenses to remove it. So he would blink and grimace and curse and wish he had a young wife; his wife’s vision was no better than his own, and dismissingly she said things like “It will work its way out” or “Maybe it just feels like an eyelash.” His mother, he could not help but remember, would deftly stab away with a folded piece of toilet paper a fleck of dirt that was tormenting his sensitive cornea. But his mother, he realized now, at the time had been half his present age, though she had seemed ageless, enormous, and omnipotent.

  Flying back from New York to Boston late one afternoon this past winter, he had sat across the aisle from a young man and woman, both about thirty, who evidently had not known each other before taking seats side by side. The man was a bit beefy, with a reddish-blond mustache and thinning pale hair; the woman, all but eclipsed from Fogel’s angle, held a large cardboard folder and seemed to be in a state of some excitement. Her hands, gesturing and flickering in front of the oval airplane window, appeared ringless and agitated. Her voice, as she explained herself—the advertising agency she was taking the folder to, her mixed feelings about living in New York, her roommate’s sayings and comical attitude toward life—did a penetrating dance, tireless and insistent, though her voice was high and light. Perhaps she was less than thirty—just starting out, testing her powers. She talked incessantly but, as it were, abashedly, throwing her words out in a feathery way, as if to soften their impact. “Yeahhh?” she would add, nonsensically, to a sentence, and she put on a soft quick giggle, a captivating titter, a kind of shimmer of shyness in which she wrapped her unrelenting verbal assault upon her seatmate, who responded—how could he not?—with ever more murmurous and authoritative replies, concerning cities and work and all other areas where he might be supposed to wield male expertise. This man’s chunky pale hands began to gesture, to chop the air; he pompously crossed and recrossed his legs and preeningly lifted his shoe, rotating the tip; his voice grew gravelly and confiding as the feathery, questioning, giggling, excited voice of the other assaulted his ear and, unintentionally, Fogel’s.