by John Updike
Back home, where the snow had all melted, Parrish stepped from the car and glanced toward the sky, and could find neither Mars nor Jupiter. They had parted and lost themselves among the less wandering stars. He could not believe it, and searched for minutes. His wife had taken the keys and gone into the house, turning on the switches, filling window after window with artificial light. Conscious of his breath, conscious of his heartbeat, he followed her in.
The Journey to the Dead
Living alone after nearly thirty married years, Martin Fredericks was beset with occasional importunities. A college friend of his former wife’s—a jaunty, sturdy comp.-lit. major named Arlene Quint—telephoned him one early-spring day and asked him to drive her to the hospital. He wasn’t sure he understood. “Now?”
“Pretty soon, yeah, if you could.” The plea in her voice was braced by something firm and ceremonious he remembered from college days. “I thought, you have that little car parked out behind your building, and in this city when you call a taxi it takes hours and then they drive like maniacs. I need to be driven gently.”
“You do?”
“Yes, Marty,” she said. “None of your sudden stops and starts.”
They had recently remet, after many years, at a party in an artist’s loft a few blocks away in town; she was less surprised to see him than he her, since she had been in touch with his former wife, Harriet, and knew he had moved in from the suburbs. She, too, lived in town now. She and Sherman Quint—a chem. major—had been divorced for several years. She loved being in the city, and free, Arlene told Fredericks. She looked sallow, and her pulled-back black hair had gone gray in strange distinct bands, but she seemed much as he remembered her, solid and energetic, with a certain air of benign defiance. Like his former wife, she had been a collegiate artsy type, in a pony tail and peasant skirt. Now, still pony-tailed, she sat up on a table swinging her plump legs in sheer happiness, it seemed, at being alive and single and here.
The table was a heavy harvest table that the artist, a small goateed man, worked on; it was peppered with thumbtack holes and covered with accidents of ink and paint. At Arlene’s back hung tacked-up charcoal sketches of idealized male nudes. At her side, space fell away through a big steel-mullioned industrial window onto the lights of the city, amber and platinum and blurred dabs of neon red, stretching far away; the city was not New York but Boston, and nothing in this direction looked higher than their own windows, the streets and brick rows streaming beneath them like the lights of an airport during takeoff. Her happiness glowed through her not quite healthy skin and her legs kept kicking friskily—the drumstick-shaped calves, the little round-toed Capezio flats. Those shoes dated her; Fredericks’ former wife, too, had worn ballerina shoes in all weathers, in rain or snow, as if life at any moment might become a dance.
The crowd at this party seemed young—young would-be artists with ugly punk haircuts, shaved above the ears and tinted in pastel tufts, boys and girls alike, wearing baggy sweaters and getting louder and shriller as they sipped wine from cheap plastic glasses. One boy took a flexible stack of these glasses and pretended to play it like an accordion. Their host’s voice, nasal and gleeful, cut through the noise. Only the host, and his Japanese boy friend, seemed close to Fredericks’ age, and though this troubled him the youthfulness of the gathering seemed to add to Arlene’s happiness, her aimless, kicking happiness like that of a little girl perched up on a high wall. “Hey. I think I’ll, as they say, split,” he said at last to her, in slight parody of her own eager assimilation to this youthful scene. “Want to be walked home?”
Her eyes abruptly focused on him. Shadows beneath them betrayed fatigue. “Oh no, Marty, it’s much too early!” Her voice came out high and as if from far away. Her lips were slow to close back over her teeth, which protruded a bit and were stained like a smoker’s, though she no longer smoked. “You’re sweet, but I can walk alone. This section of town is quite safe.”
He was glad to be rejected; he was involved with another woman and had made the offer in a truly protective spirit, and as an obscure gesture toward his former wife. Because the two girls had been close, a taboo as of incest had come between him and Arlene in college; it was strange to feel that taboo lifted, and a queasy freedom fallen over them all, relatively late in life. Freedom—that was what her plump kicking legs expressed. But Americans are oversold on freedom, Fredericks thought, and availability does not equal attractiveness. There was a glaze of unhealth on Arlene, and she had grown thick around the middle.
When he described the encounter to Harriet over the phone, she told him that Arlene had had a cancer scare but the chemotherapy seemed to have worked. The disease figured in his mind as another reason to let Arlene alone. She was taken. It slowly ebbed from his mind that she lived a half-mile away, working part-time in an art-supplies store near the local university, until this sudden phone call.
It was late afternoon, becoming evening. The downtown skyscrapers visible from his window were broken into great blocks of shadow and orange glare as the sun sank over the Fens. By the time he had made his way to his automobile—a decrepit Karmann-Ghia convertible, its left fender dented, its canvas top slashed one night by a thief looking for drugs or an expensive radio—it was dark enough to use his headlights. Irritated and flattered, he inched through the rush-hour traffic to the address Arlene had given him.
She was standing in the vestibule of her building, and came out carrying a little suitcase, walking very carefully, with short slow steps. When he jackknifed awkwardly up out of the car and moved around it to take her bag, she lifted a hand in alarm, as if fearful he would bump against her. She wore a loose heavy cloth coat, but, even so, he could see that her shape was not right—her middle was not just thick but swollen. The street lights didn’t help her color; her face looked greenish, waxy, with hollows like thumb-marks in wax beneath her eyes. She smiled at the intensity of his inspection. Arlene, whose mother’s parents had emigrated from Macedonia, had a certain stiff old-world mannerliness, and Fredericks sensed her determination to make this mannerliness see them through. Though his car, double-parked, forced the street’s two lanes of traffic to squeeze into one, with some indignant honking, he made his own movements as unhurried as hers, and set the suitcase in the back seat as gently as if it contained her pain.
She slammed the door on her side but remained a bit hunched forward, her profile silhouetted against the side window, beneath the slashed and taped canvas: her sharp high-bridged nose, her lips’ prim set over her slightly protuberant teeth. He asked, before easing in the clutch, “O.K.?”
“Just fine,” she said, in a voice surprising in its normality. “You’re sweet to do this, Marty.”
“Not at all. Which hospital?”
She named one a mile away. The rush hour was at its worst, as darkness deepened, and there were many stops and starts. She rested a hand on the dashboard at one point, as if to brace herself, then abandoned the posture, as perhaps more uncomfortable than it was worth. The car was rusty and old and gave a jerky ride however delicately he shifted. “Sorry,” he said, more than once.
“You’re doing fine,” she said, almost condescendingly.
He couldn’t believe a taxi wouldn’t have been better. It was as if she had decided to accept, now, his rejected invitation to see her home. “Sorry the car’s cold; the heater should come on any minute.”
“I don’t feel the cold.”
“Is your—is this, ah, a sudden thing?”
“It’s been coming on.”
“They know at the hospital you’re coming?”
“Oh yes. They do.”
“Is it going to be a long stay?”
“That’s up to them. My assignment is to deliver the body.”
The body. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“About what, Marty?” They had broken free of the traffic for a block and were gliding along smoothly, between four-story bowfronts, beneath trees that in a month would have leaves.
The glide ended; a cross street, a principal artery, was jammed solid. “I expect it will all be all right,” Arlene said, after a second of tense silence in which she saw that the stop was not going to be jarring. Her voice had the false, light tempo of someone issuing reassurances to a child.
“I do hope so,” Fredericks said, feeling foolish and puny relative to the immense motions, the revolutions of mortality, taking place inside her, next to him in the shuddering, cold, slashed cave of the car.
She said, more conversationally, “You adjust. You come to terms with it.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes,” Arlene said simply, as if he were in on the secret now—as if he and she were now on the same side of the mystery growing within her. But he couldn’t imagine death’s having a human size, finite enough to come to terms with. The car heater was producing heat at last, as the hospital’s lights came into sight. She directed him to a curved side street that became a ramp. As he gently pulled up at the entrance, Fredericks had the impression of bustling all-hours brightness that an airport gives, or a railroad terminal in the old days—a constant grand liveliness of comings and goings.
He said, scrambling to extricate himself from behind the wheel, “Let me get the door for you.”
“I can manage.” She popped the door latch and was standing at the side of the car when he came around for the suitcase. She had that waistless stiff look women of the Balkans have, in their layered peasant outfits. She was reverting. Her face was turned toward the light pouring through the glass doors of the hospital lobby.
“Shall I walk you in?”
“No.” The answer was so abrupt she tried to soften it. “You can’t park here. I can manage.” Hearing the repetition, she insisted on it: “I want to manage. I’ve chosen to be on my own.” She looked at him quickly, with a suspicious slide of her eyes, and gave him her gracious, buck-toothed, matter-of-fact smile. “Thanks, Marty. That was a nice ride.”
“Do you want visitors?”
“I’ll have plenty, thanks. All those children we had for some reason.”
“Call me up when you’re done and I can come for you.”
Her lips slowly closed over her teeth. “I should be up to a taxi by then.” There was no offer of a pecked kiss goodbye, though he would have been careful not to bump against her. But if her own body was betraying her, Fredericks thought, why should she trust him? She passed through the glass doors and did not look back. From behind, she seemed, with her little suitcase and bulky coat, an immigrant, just arrived.
Arlene was not the first dying woman his own age that Fredericks had known. In the suburb where he and Harriet had lived together, a mutual friend, the merriest wife in their circle, had a breast removed in her early forties. For years, that seemed to have solved the problem; then she raucously confided to them, outside the doors of the local supermarket, “The damn stuff’s come back!” The last time they saw her, it was at a small barbecue lunch that all the guests tacitly knew, though none would admit aloud, to be a farewell to their hostess.
On that summer Sunday, as Fredericks and his wife in their car pulled into the property, a new green hose, stretched to reach a flower bed, lay across the asphalt driveway, and he braked. Their hostess, in a sun hat and gaudy muu-muu, was standing on her lawn and vigorously waving him forward onto a section of grass set aside for parking. Hesitantly he eased the car—a Volvo station wagon, which felt stiff as a truck to drive—forward into the spot she was marking, fearful his foot might slip and his front bumper strike this woman already stricken by disease.
He got out and kissed her on her upturned face, which in illness had become round and shiny, and explained that he hadn’t wanted to run over the hose. “Ach, the hose!” she exclaimed with startling guttural force and a sweeping, humorous gesture. “Phooey to the hose!”
Nevertheless, Fredericks went back and moved the hose so the next car would not run over it, at the same time trying to imagine how these appurtenances to our daily living, as patiently treasured and stored and coiled and repaired as if their usefulness were eternal, must look to someone whose death is imminent. The hose. The flowers. The abandoned trowel whose canary-yellow handle winks within weeds in the phlox border. The grass itself, and the sun and sky and trees like massive scuffed-up stage flats—phooey to them. Their value was about to undergo a revision so vast and crushing Fredericks could not imagine it. Certainly he could not imagine it in relation to the merry presence who entertained them, sitting with her guests on the screened porch while her husband cooked at the grill outside, in a cloud of gnats. As a concession to her debility she lay on an aluminum chaise longue, her feet in thick wool slipper-socks though the day was warm, and still wearing her sun hat, perhaps to hide her chemotherapy-blasted hair. The party, as the guests drank wine, became ever more relaxed and hilarious, the hostess urging the conversation into mundane channels—local zoning problems, and movies they had seen. She elaborated so feelingly on the horrors of a proposed condominium development that they forgot she would not be there to see it or to contend with the parking problems it would pose. When another woman objected that all the movies seemed to be about—with emphasis—sleaze, the dying woman quickly joked, “Gesundheit!” and then, merrily, added, “I love sleaze. Sleaze,” she said, “is truth. Sleaze,” she went on, excited to a crescendo by the laughter surrounding her, “shall set us free!”
A season later, attending her funeral, trying to picture her moving somewhere from strength to strength as the service claimed, Fredericks wondered that none of them that afternoon had been able to find a topic more elevated, more affectionately valedictory, than condominiums and sleazy movies, and wondered where that garden hose of which he had been so solicitous now lay coiled.
The dying, he marvelled, do not seem to inhabit a world much different from ours. His elderly neighbors in this suburb plucked with rakes at the leaves on their lawn, walked their old lame dogs, and talked of this winter’s scheduled trip to Florida as if in death’s very gateway there was nothing to do but keep living, living in the same old rut. They gossiped, they pottered, they watched television. No radical insights heightened their conversation, though Fredericks listened expectantly. In college he had been a classics major, and dimly recalled the section of The Odyssey in which the dead stare mutely at Odysseus, unable to speak until they have drunk of the sheep’s blood with which the hero has filled, by Circe’s prescription, a pit a cubit square and a cubit deep. The hero’s own mother, Anticleia, crouches wordless and distraught until he allows her to drink “the storm-dark blood.” The dead in Homer feel themselves inferior, even—in the T. E. Lawrence translation—silly. Dead Achilles tauntingly asks Odysseus, “How will you find some madder adventure to cap this coming down alive to Hades among the silly dead, the worn-out mockeries of men?” And Aeneas, in Virgil’s Avernus, cannot elicit a word from angry Dido, who listens to his entreaties and apologies with fixed eyes and a countenance of stone, and who flees still hating him—inimica—back to the shadowy groves where Sychaeus, her former husband, responds to her cares and equals her love—inimica refugit / in nemus umbriferum coniunx ubi pristinus illi / respondet curis aequatque Sychaeus amorem. Virgil’s version of the underworld becomes implausibly detailed, with the future of Rome set forth at length by Anchises, and various rings and compartments all laid out as if in anticipation of Dante’s definitive mapping. Whereas Gilgamesh, an older journeyer still, found only, as far as the broken tablets of his tale can be deciphered, confusion and evasion at the end of his passionate quest: “Sorrow has come into my belly. I fear death; I roam over the hills. I will seize the road; quickly I will go to the house of Utnapishtim, offspring of Ubaratutu.…”
Utnapishtim answers Gilgamesh in broken clay, “Since there is no … There is no word of advice … From the beginning there is no permanence.… As for death, its time is hidden. The time of life is shown plain.”
Frederic
ks was shy about calling Arlene, lest it seem to be a kind of courtship. Yet in decency he should ask, after their perilous ride together, how she was doing. For several weeks, her phone didn’t answer; then, one day, it was picked up. “Oh,” she responded, with a thoughtful, chiming, lazy lilt to her voice which seemed new, “not bad. There are good days and bad days. They have me on a mixture of things, and for a while there the mix was all wrong. But it’s settled down now. I feel pretty good, Marty.”
“You’re home now,” he said, as if to fix a fact in this flux of unimaginable therapy. The wandering drugged sound of her voice awakened firmness in his. “Are 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.