by John Updike
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 lovely 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 little 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 wea
k 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.
The door was ajar. He pushed it open lightly, and saw first an empty bed and a big metal-framed window overlooking the city from a height even greater than that of the artist’s loft many months ago. But the prospect was dominated by a great ugly iron bridge spotted with red rustproofing paint and crawling with cars.
She was around the edge of the door, sitting in a chair by the bed. Her close-cut hair seemed mostly white, and a catastrophe had overtaken her face: one side of it, eyelid and mouth-corner, had been pulled sharply down. Her Macedonian eyes burned at him from within a startled, stony fury. She could not speak. The stroke had taken away her nimble power of speech. In her lap and scattered on the bed were a number of children’s books and some handmade cards each holding a letter of the alphabet.
Fredericks understood. She was trying to learn to read, to express herself. Her children—parents, now, with children of their own—had lovingly made the alphabet cards, and provided the books. He understood all this but he could not speak, either. His tongue froze after a few words, much too loud, of greeting, and when she held up some of the letters as if to indicate words, he could not make out what she was spelling.
Frantically he tried to make conversation for them both. “Harriet told me you were here. I’m so sorry. It must be—it must be hard. When will you be getting out? You have a terrific view.”
In an attempt to respond to his question—he blushed at his own stupidity in asking a question she must try to answer—she pointed at the clock on her bedside table, and then shuffled the cards in her lap, looking for one she could not find. She held one up the wrong way around, and then with a grimace on the side of her mouth that was not dead she flipped it away. He remembered the gesture. Phooey.
In a virtual panic, blushing and stammering, he talked inanely, finding, when he reached into himself for a subject that he and Arlene had in common, only the hospital itself, its complexity and strangeness to him, and the grim comedy of being crushed in the elevator by the wheelchair and the pushing fat man. “We all could have been squeezed to death. One girl had a cardboard tray full of coffee cups and had to hold it up toward the ceiling.” He imitated the heroic, Statue of Liberty–like pose, and then lowered his arm, shamed by the shining unblinking fury of Arlene’s eyes, one eye half shut. The dead hate us, and we hate the dead. I went pale with fear, lest awful Persephone send me from Hades the Gorgon’s head, that fabulous horror. Standing, he felt some liquid otherworldly element spill
from him rapidly, cooling the skin of his legs. “I’m afraid I have to, as they say, split.” Fredericks wondered if she would remember his saying that long ago, with faint sarcasm, and try to smile. Arlene unsmilingly stared. None of your sudden stops and starts. He promised, insincerely, to come again, and, like heroes before him, fled.
The Man Who Became a Soprano
All things have a beginning and an end. The recorder group began in the domestic warmth of the Weisses’ marriage, a model marriage of dark and light, firmness and delicacy, shining on top of their little hill as if for all the town to see. Andrea was a slightly skinny blonde with ironed-looking long straight hair both before and after such hair was the fashion, and pale-blue eyes that developed pink lids when she was tired or emotionally stimulated. Fritz was a dark, almost heavy man with wide hairy-backed hands that, like his tenacious scientist’s mind, took up everything in a grip of steel. From a musical family of physicists, he had played the bass recorder since childhood, having been trained in this instrument to round out a quartet consisting of his father (tenor), mother (soprano), and sister (alto). But the bass was a doleful mumbly instrument played alone, and for their seventh anniversary he bought Andrea a quality soprano recorder, of dark-striped pale pearwood—a Moeck. Slowly, obediently, she learned to play it, her hesitant piping echoing through the boxy bare rooms of their white, clapboarded house—rooms rather underfurnished, their friends thought, with an austere mix of glass tables and Danish modern (Fritz’s taste) and imitation-Shaker chairs and handwoven wool rugs (Andrea’s). She owned a loom as big as a small room, and spent afternoons at it, before the three children (girl, boy, girl) came home from school. There was a shy and stubborn expertise to all she did, though on the soprano recorder she tended to panic at any note higher than the G at the top of the staff, and when a trill involved moving more than one finger on the stops, she fluttered off into blushing silence. When she blushed, her cheeks suddenly matched the tint of her lids and lips, and the rose color sank into her throat and the décolletage of her peasant blouse.