The Afterlife by John Updike Page B

my happiness. It freaked out.”
    Fredericks laughed, trying to push up out of his soft, unresisting chair. “Remember how they used to tell us smokingstunted 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 anklesand 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,” Arlenesaid, and sipped her weak cold tea, and made a small thrusting gesture with her lips as if to register an unquenchable dryness of