The Afterlife (9 page)

At the hour when he drove to Arlene’s address, cars were leaving the streets to return to the suburbs, and he had no trouble finding an empty space at a meter. Every day, the sunlight clung to the city a few minutes longer. Her house was a bowfront brownstone, handsomer than his brick tenement, and faced not the downtown’s little knot of skyscrapers but a strip of old-fashioned park, part of the Fens, with iron lamp standards and a stone footbridge arched over a marshy creek dotted with beer cans and snow-white Styrofoam takeout boxes. A wide-spreading beech tree whose roots drank at the edge of the creek was coming into bud.
The time of life is shown plain
.

Arlene greeted him at the elevator, unexpectedly, so that he nearly bumped into her. As he kissed her cheek, she stayed hunched over, so it was awkward to plant his lips. Her cheek felt dry and a bit too warm.

She was wearing a kind of navy-blue running suit, and looked much thinner. The sallow skin of her face had tightened, and her eyes—a surprising light brown, a flecked candy color—peered out of their deepened sockets suspiciously, around a phantom corner. Hunched and shuffling her feet, she led him toward the front room and its view of the park. From her windows he could see through the budding beech a diagonal path and, in the middle distance, an iron bandstand. Her apartment was on a higher floor than his own, though not so high as the artist’s loft, and abundantly furnished with surprisingly expensive furniture: loot from her marriage, he
thought. She let Fredericks make himself a drink while she lay on a brocaded sofa, with her feet up, and sipped Perrier water. “What a
love
ly place,” he said, and then feared that his emphasis betrayed his assumption that she lived shabbily, in bohemian style.

“I missed it those weeks I was away. My plants were so happy to see me. A cyclamen died, though I had asked the super’s wife to come in twice a week and water.”

“Has Harriet ever been here?”

“Oh yes—a number of times. She likes it. She says she hates being stuck out there in that big rambling place of yours. I mean, that the two of you had.”

“The children aren’t quite flown. And if she moves into town, too, we’ll have an overpopulation problem.”

“Oh, Marty, you know she never will. Harriet needs all that showy country space. She needs animals.”

The conversation began to excite him. He sat in a chair so unexpectedly soft he nearly spilled his drink. From the low angle, Arlene’s front windows were full of sky, sky only, with white spring clouds set close as flagstones and hurrying thus close-packed in a direction that made the room itself seem to be travelling, smoothly pulling its walls and furniture and late-afternoon shadows backward, toward the past, toward the time when they were all in college and young and freshly acquainted, and the elms weren’t blighted and cars were enormous and the Army-McCarthy hearings fascinatingly droned over the radio into the spring afternoons when they should have been studying Chaucer. And then later, still keeping in touch, Arlene and Sherman and Harriet and Martin shared the astounding feat of making babies—creating new people, citizens, out of nothing but their own bodies—and the scarcely less marvellous accomplishments of owning houses, and tending them, and having friends who were sometimes
wicked, and giving cocktail parties. Though they lived in different towns, in different circles, they had occasionally entertained each other. The Quints had installed a pool, and Fredericks remembered Sunday cookouts on the patchy lawn where the recent excavation had left scars, beneath a sky marred by charcoal smoke and the lazy
bop-pop
of tennis drifting in from their neighbor’s clay court. The sun of youth dappled their reminiscences, as Arlene stiffly adjusted her legs on the sofa from time to time and Fredericks sank lower into the chair and into alcoholic benignity, and the sky with its travelling clouds sank into evening blue. Arlene’s voice had a high distant quality as if she were reading words from a card held almost out of eyesight. “Harriet took a shine to our minister,” she said, Fredericks having recalled the cookouts.

“She did?” Though he had become adept at receiving the signals women sent out, he had never thought of Harriet as sending out any.

Arlene laughed, on a high thin prolonged note, and then her lips closed slowly over her prominent teeth. She said, “Reverend Propper—not that he
was
so proper, it turned out. He was a Unitarian, of course. Harriet even in college liked that kind of boy—a
serious
boy. You weren’t
serious
enough for her, Marty.”

“She did? I wasn’t?” He blamed himself for their breakup, and was pleasantly startled to hear that the rejection hadn’t been all on his side.

“Not really. She adored idealists. Union leaders and renegade priests and Erik Erikson—these healer types. That’s what drew her to Sherm, before she discovered he was just one more chem. nerd. I guess we didn’t have the word ‘nerd’ then, did we?”

“I had forgotten that she went out with him for a little while.”

“A
lit
tle while! The whole sophomore year. That’s how I met him, through her.”

“Did I know that?”

“You must have, Marty. She used to say she loved the way his hair was going thin even in college. She thought that was a sign of seriousness. It showed his brain was working to save mankind. All those soc.-rel. majors wanted to save the world.”

He had even forgotten that Harriet had majored in social relations—not forgotten, exactly, but not had the fact brought back to life. There had been a time, in those Fifties, when sociology, combining psychology, anthropology, history, and statistics, seemed likely to save the world from those shaggy old beasts tribalism and religion. Harriet had been, with her pearly shy smile and pony tail and tatty tennis sneakers, an apostle of light, in those unfocused pre-protest days. “I hadn’t realized that she and Sherm had been that serious.”

“
Serious
. You said it. He never smiled, unless you told him something was a joke. God, it was good to get away at last. It was
such
bliss, Marty—and yet there really was almost nothing to complain of about the man.”

He didn’t want to talk about Sherman. “Did you ever notice,” he asked, “how white Harriet’s teeth were?”

“I
did
. She knew it, too. She used to tell me I was staining my teeth with my cigarettes. Maybe I should have listened. Nobody believed in cancer in those days.”

The word was especially shocking, coming from her. He said, “But it isn’t your lungs …”

“Oh, it’s all related, don’t you think?” Arlene said breezily. “And probably basically psychosomatic. I was too happy, being out from under Sherm. My body couldn’t handle my happiness. It freaked out.”

Fredericks laughed, trying to push up out of his soft, unresisting chair. “Remember how they used to tell us smoking
stunted your growth? Listen, Arlene, I must run. Somebody’s expecting me to check in. This has been lovely, though. Maybe I could swing by again.”

“Please do,” the woman said, squinting off as if to read an especially distant prompt card. “I’ll be here.”

But sometimes when he called she was absent—at the art-supplies store, perhaps, or visiting her children, who were adult, and living within a fifty-mile radius. Or else she was too sick to answer the phone. She had ups and downs, but the trend seemed down. Perhaps he saw her six or seven times in the course of the summer; each time, there was something of the initial enchantment—the day changing tone through the big windows, her thin and distant but agile voice evoking those old days, those Fifties and early Sixties when you moved toward your life with an unstressed freedom no one could understand, now, who had not been young then. There was less outside to that world—less money, fewer cars and people and buildings—and more inside, more blood and hopefulness. Nothing, really, had cost much, relative to now, and nothing, not love or politics, was half so hyped as now. There was a look, of Capezios in the slush, that summed up for Fredericks a careless and unpremeditated something, a bland grace, from those years. There were names he had all but forgotten, until Arlene would casually mention them. “And then Brett Helmerich, the section man in Chaucer, he was another Harriet had her eye on.…”

“She did? Brett … Helmerich. Wait. I
do
remember him. Leather elbow patches, and always wore a long red muffler wrapped a couple times around his neck, and a red nose like Punch’s, sort of.”

She softly nodded, looking off in her far-gazing way, her jaundiced face half in window light. Her feet, in thick, striped athletic socks, rested on a pillow, her knees up. Her ankles
and wrists and face had been swollen at one phase of her body’s struggles with its invader, and then her frame had subsided toward emaciation. She moved more and more stiffly, hunched over. While he drank whiskey or gin, she sipped at a cup of tea so weak as to be mere water turning tepid. But her mention of Brett Helmerich would conjure up the vanished throngs that once stampeded in and out of the Chaucer lectures, given by a wall-eyed professor who over the decades of teaching this course had become more and more medieval, more gruff and scatological and visionary. “You really think she had her eye on Brett? But he was ten years older than we were, with a wife and babies.”

“Other people’s babies aren’t very real to you, until you’ve had some of your own. Or wives, even, until you’ve been one. Even then … Ex-wives are the worst, the way they hang on to the men’s heads.”

Arlene on the subject of Harriet fascinated Fredericks, as if his former wife could be displayed to him in a whole new light—resurrected, as it were, by a fresh perspective. She who had seemed to him so shy and sexually clumsy in fact had juggled a number of relationships and flirtations in those college years, and in the years of their young marriage had not been entirely preoccupied by him and their dear babies. Fredericks asked, “There really was something between her and Reverend Propper?”

Arlene’s mouth opened wide but her laugh was inaudible, like a bat’s cry. “Oh, I don’t know if it ever got to the physical stage, but didn’t you ever wonder why she would drive twenty-five miles each way to sing in our little off-key choir?”

“I thought it was because of her friendship for you—it gave her a chance to keep in touch with you.”

“She kept in touch with me when it suited her,” Arlene
said, and sipped her weak cold tea, and made a small thrusting gesture with her lips as if to register an unquenchable dryness of mouth. “And still does.”

“Harriet’s in touch?”

“She calls. Often enough.”

“Often enough for what?”

“To hear about you.”

“Me? No!”

“Yes.”

“But she’s so happily remarried.”

“I suppose. But a woman is like a spider, Marty. She has her web. She likes to feel the different threads vibrate.”

Her phone rang, on the table a few feet from her head, but Arlene let it ring until, at last, the ringing stopped. He wondered how often he had been the person on the other end, assuming she was out or too sick to reach for the phone. Several times when she did answer, her voice croaked and dragged, and he knew that he had pulled her from a narcotic sleep. He would apologize and offer to call again, but she would say it was
cheery
to hear from him, and her voice would slowly clear into animation.

Just before Labor Day, though, she answered on the ring when he had been about to hang up, and he could hear her gasp for breath after each phrase. The medicine she had been taking had “gone crazy.” Two days ago her daughter had driven in from a far suburb and gotten her to the hospital just in time. “Scary.” Arlene had never before mentioned fear to Fredericks. He asked her if she would like him to swing around for a quick visit.

She said, almost scoldingly, “Marty, I just can’t do Harriet for you today. I’m too tired and full of pills. I’m worn out.”

Do
Harriet? Hanging up, he marvelled that that was what
he had been having her do. Harriet when young, and that whole vast kingdom of the dead, including himself when young. His face felt hot with embarrassment, and a certain anger at Arlene’s rebuff and its tone. It was not as if he had nothing else to do but pay sick calls.

It was Harriet who told him, over the phone, that Arlene had had a stroke and was in the hospital.

“For good?”

“It looks like for that.”

“Have you seen her?”

“Once. I should go in more, but …” She didn’t need to explain; he understood. She lived too far away, the living are busier than the dying, it was scary.

He, too, did not want to visit Arlene in the hospital; her apartment—its air of shadowy expectant luxury, like a theatre where a performance was arranged for him—had been one of the attractions. But Harriet urged him to go, “for the both of us,” and so he found himself making his way out of a great damp concrete edifice full of inclined ramps and parked cars. He rode down in an elevator whose interior was painted red, and followed yellow arrows through murky corridors of cement and tile. Emerging briefly aboveground, he recognized that curved stretch of side street to which, six months ago, Arlene had guided his Karmann-Ghia. The car since then had fallen apart, its body so rusted he could see the asphalt skimming by beneath his feet, but the cavernous hospital lobby still radiated its look of sanitary furor, of well-lit comings and goings, of immigrants arriving on a bustling shore.

Fredericks pushed through the glass doors, made inquiries, and tried to follow directions. He threaded his way through corridors milling with pale spectres—white-clad nurses in thick-soled shoes, doctors with cotton lab coats flapping, unconscious
patients pushed on gurneys like boats with IV poles for masts, stricken visitors clinging to one another in family clumps and looking lost and pasty in the harsh fluorescent light.
There beset me ten thousand seely ghosts, crying inhumanly
. Though the hospital was twelve stories tall, it all felt underground, mazelike. He passed flower shops, stores stocking magazines and candy and droll get-well cards, a cafeteria entrance, endless numbered doors, and several sighing, clanking elevator banks. He entered an elevator, and was crushed against his fellow-passengers by the entry, at the next floor, of a person in a wheelchair, a shrivelled man with a tube in his nose, pushed by an obese orderly. On the eleventh floor, stepping into a bewildering confusion of desks, he asked for Arlene. He was told a number and pointed in a direction.