The Afterlife (11 page)

“Darling,” he said to Jessie, of Maury, “he’s just a small-town conservative—a good old boy, Yankee-style.”

She looked at him warily; ever since meeting at a Seabrook sit-in, they had always been in perfect political agreement. Now Terry found her, he was implying, priggishly liberal. And he had noticed that as they all played together he could distinguish the three sopranos—iridescently warbling Toula, fumbling Alice, and Andrea dropping away on the high notes, receding and vanishing into her seductive distance—and even hear Carolyn steadfastly keeping the alto beat amid Maury’s oblivious wandering, but he could never quite hear Jessie, his own wife, playing. He could see her lips prehensile on the fipple, her slightly protruding chocolate-colored eyes intent on the sheet music, her slightly thick coarse eyebrows arched in concentration, her stubby-nailed, practical fingers twitching on the stops, and not hear her. The effect was mysterious but not unpleasant. Caught between Maury’s alto and Dick McHoagland’s onrolling tenor, Terry felt inaudible himself. However, it was comforting to know that he could lose his place and Dick would march on; and when a third tenor joined them, a divorced accountant named Jim Keel, with a port-wine stain on the side of his face that Terry couldn’t see, Terry felt his own notes blending into an ecstatic whole, a kind of blessed nonexistence such as Buddhists talk about.

For what bliss, when all is said and done, and after its musical inadequacies are all confessed, the recorder group was! Arrival was bliss, especially on winter nights when it had been a slippery battle to get the car up the Weisses’ snowy driveway, and an exciting uncertainty obtained whether or not one could get safely down at midnight. Scarves, mittens, down vests piled up on the Shaker settee in the front hall; boots accumulated under it. Cold fingers unfolded the steel music stands and assembled the wooden flutes. Cork joints were rubbed with a dainty ointment kept in cannisters smaller than
pillboxes; chilled mouthpieces were tenderly warmed, held in an armpit or against open lips. In a bliss of anticipation the players would settle into the arranged arc of dining-room chairs, while the Weisses’ wood stove cracklingly digested another log in its belly and the black night pressed on the frost-feathered panes and the footsteps of the Weisses’ three children scurried overhead, on the other side of the ceiling. Preliminarily, there were scales and little abortive riffs, impudent snatches of jazz tune and hymn picked out by ear; then, when all were in place, a fidgety cough, the crushing of a last cigarette, a nervous giggle, and a premature toot. Finally, at Fritz’s firmly whispered “
One
, two, three, four,” there was a unified intake of breath and the astounding manifestation, the mellow exclamatory blended upwelling, of the first note. They were off, stumbling, weaving, squinting, blowing, tapping time with feet no two of which tapped alike.

If you looked (and Terry, often lost and dropped out, did look), some feet kept time just by flexing the big toe (Carolyn, who wore sandals to minimize her height, favored this method), some by snapping the ankle sideways (gangly Jim Keel, right under Terry’s left eye), and some by stoutly, thumpingly bouncing the heel (Maury, and also, in her insecurity, Alice). During the universal rests that came in some dramatic codas, you could hear tapping feet like a shuffling of soldiers breaking stride across a bridge.

Rarely they made it to the end of a piece without falling apart and collapsing, as Toula, Carolyn, Fritz, and Dick, the last to give up, fluttered on for another stubborn, show-offy few measures. With Jim Keel’s arrival that second winter, they had become ten in number, and unwieldy; yet no one seemed disposed to drop out or even to miss a single evening. They met even though the day’s news had brought disasters (a Beirut massacre, the Challenger blow-up); they met during
the seventh game of a Red Sox World Series, whose progress the men periodically checked on a television set chattering to itself in the kitchen. Once they convened on the fringes of a hurricane called Gayle; her winds stripped leaves from trees and lifted doghouses while the group generated its own breeze this side of the shuddering windows. Andrea, cleaning up afterwards, complained to Fritz of the fortnightly intrusion: “It’s become a brawl, and the beer and potato chips cost us twenty dollars every time.”

“Perhaps we could say different people should be the host. The group should rotate.”

“That’ll make it even more of a social brawl. I know
just
when the music stopped being the point. When Maury brought Toula, without even asking any of us first!”

“But Toula’s the only one of you sopranos willing to attack the high notes. If she’d just get rid of that futuristic Japanese piece of plastic—”

“No. It’s not that. She plays everything like a solo. I don’t feel I can
grow
, as long as she’s there, doing everything so flashily. And you love her. All the men love her.”

“
Liebchen
. Don’t cry. Recorders were meant to be
fun
.”

“They’re
not
fun and never were. They’re your attempt to make me something I’m not. I’ve never been an aural person, I’ve always been visual. You know that.”

He was abashed, by an unexpected emotion that seemed less a matter of cause and effect than of a simultaneous wave and particle, a single photon passing through two slits at once. “You didn’t have to try to learn to play,” he said.

“How could I
not?
” Andrea cried. “It was such a lovely anniversary present. So
visually
lovely. The sweet little phallic shape of it, and the stripes of the pearwood grain.”

Judging the curve of her tears to have peaked, Fritz’s mind slid off on a practical tack. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, “the
sessions might go better if somebody could stand up to lead. The tempo tends to drag. Sometimes by the end of a piece it feels like the Doppler effect, we’ve all slowed down so.”

“You
can’t
stand up to lead. You’re the only bass.”

“Maybe we could convert another player to the bass.”

Andrea stared at her husband with narrowed blue eyes; her eyelids were pink. “Who?”

Fritz shrugged. “Toula might enjoy the challenge.”

Her eyelids flared open. “Darling!” she exclaimed. “You’re brilliant! Get her away from me!”

By the third winter, they were rotating houses and had acquired a leader—a barrel-shaped little spinster, Miss Eleanor Hart, whom Carolyn knew from the Congregational church. Also, Toula acquired a bass. She said, with her brave brightness, “It will suit me better, at this low time of my life,” and was undaunted by either the change of clef, from G to F, or the change of fingering system, from C to F. She took the chair next to Fritz, leaving him on the end in his traditional position of leadership, and separating Fritz and Dick. Miss Hart, scarcely five feet tall and quite waistless, and dolled up in lace-trimmed layers of velvet, would lift her stubby arms and the chattering row of players would grow silent; a curt clenched hand—she conducted with her fists—would descend, and that first marvellous upwelling note would be born, and another, and then many overlapping others. She kept a clear beat and seemed curiously engaged, like a mother with secret plans for her children. She had taught the piano for decades and for a mysterious period long ago had lived in Cairo—perhaps, Terry speculated one evening over beer after she had gone, as a member of King Farouk’s harem. “What does she see in us?” he asked aloud.

“An evening out,” said Andrea, after a silence. Terry had noticed that she often seemed the only one in the group listening
to him. “Anything’s better than sitting home,” she added, she who had always seemed so ideally domestic. “Most people, when you come down to it, are lonely.”

Miss Hart always left after one drink of diet cherry Coke, a lone stray can of which the Weisses had found in the back of the refrigerator when she refused beer, the first time she came to lead them. This became, then, her drink, and as the group rotated from house to house each host or hostess went to the trouble of buying a six-pack of diet cherry Coke, of which only one can was drunk until Miss Hart came round again, in four months, and drank another.

Toula’s brilliance was suitably muffled in the bass section, though she had found an eccentric instrument of bleached mahogany with aluminum fittings. She and Fritz became a musical pair; their hands in synchrony roamed the length of the romantic instruments, and with identical vigorous gestures, between numbers, they shook the spit from their tubular curved mouthpieces. Without Toula, Andrea and Alice did not quite blossom, however; their timidity of attack truncated, as it were, the rising climaxes that Bach and Pachelbel had so methodically arranged, and drained some of the Renaissance dances of lilt and verve. And now that they had a leader—an authority figure, a focus for their arc of chairs—a restless chemistry possessed the group. As it met in one house after another (even Jim Keel played host when his turn came, in his bachelor condo on the river, with its purple shag rug, triangular kitchenette, and bedroom that his surprisingly ambitious bed, a four-poster, entirely filled) the old chair arrangements seemed no longer sacred. Dick McHoagland, his he-man, can-do solidarity with Fritz broken by Toula’s appearing at their end of the arc, moved around Terry and Jim in the tenor section (leaving Jim next to Toula, on the side with his port-wine stain) to sit next to Carolyn, who in an
answering move had jumped over Jessie and Maury, rendering Jessie even less audible to Terry and her pained expression even richer in accumulating grievance against male afflatus.

“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.