The Afterlife by John Updike

you going to work, too?”
    “Yesterday, which was so sunny, I trotted over to the art store, and they were happy to see me, but I’m really not ready yet to be on my feet all day. Some afternoon next week is my goal. You learn to set goals.”
    “Yes.” His firmness seemed to miscarry—a punch at empty air. “Well, take things a day at a time.”
    There was a pause. “I don’t mind visitors,” she said.
    He thought of the artist’s loft and that noisy crowd and how happy she had been to be among them, and felt spiteful. If they were all so great, where were they now? “Well, I could come by some day,” he said. “If it wouldn’t tire you out.”
    “Oh no, Marty,” she said. “It would be cheery.”
    Fredericks felt uncomfortably obliged to set a time, late one afternoon, after his own work. He did not feel, in this single interim of his life, quite free—the woman he was involved with was possessive of his time, and kept watch on it. His life seemed destined to be never wholly his own. By his choice, of course. Arlene had told him,
I’ve chosen to be on my own
.
    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, hethought. 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