The Afterlife by John Updike

Musical Jessie, confidently warbling on her alto, rarely slipped and tried to keep the tempo up, and Fritz in his steely way persevered on the bass, which made so low and indistinct a noise that it scarcely mattered if he was in time with the others or not. But Terry, as he had admitted, was a musical novice,and sometimes intently went along measure after measure on his tenor without realizing that he was a beat behind and generating dissonance on every chord. Andrea, though more practiced than he, was almost too sensitive to play the soprano, which by virtue of its pitch had to carry the melody, and yet whose high notes she heard as painfully shrill, a wet strained squeaking she preferred to put out of its misery, lowering her recorder to her lap and enfolding it with her long, pale, pink-knuckled hands. Terry loved her in those moments, grateful that someone else was causing the quartet to founder. They had become the clumsy children, and their spouses the formidable parents.
    The group needed more players; and, magically, more did appear, like dewdrops on a spider web. Carolyn Homer, a tall auburn-haired woman who held aerobics classes in the parish hall of the Congregational church, turned out to have taught herself the recorder while enrolled, years ago, in a course at the New England Conservatory in Renaissance music; she brought a well-exercised alto instrument, the color worn from its mouthpiece and finger-holes, to the group. Dick McHoagland, the squat and scowling leader of the local high-school band (and the typing instructor as well), brought a tenor instrument; he and Fritz, both being martinets, hit it off well and played side by side, leaving Terry next to the alto section. Both Dick and Carolyn were married, to unmusical spouses, but the town was rich in divorcées and men on the loose, and now these began to adhere. Alice Arsenault, a nervous little rounded thing who for some reason had been married to Skip Arsenault, an uproarious town fireman, former athlete, and hard drinker, showed up one night in Carolyn’s shadow with a soprano recorder and an earnestly annotated copy of the Trapp Family Singers’ instruction manual. MaurySutherland, a stooping, sexually undecided country gentleman (whom Terry had always supposed, from the way he tilted his head and spoke in cautious fragmented sentences, to be hard of hearing), produced from his inherited treasures an alto recorder acquired by his great-aunt Esther—on the Jekyll side—while sightseeing in Austria and northern Italy before the First World War. “Do tell,” he would say in response to a lengthy disquisition, with an expression of amiable bafflement. “Beats me.”
    This made three altos, and soon there were three sopranos, since somehow in Maury’s orbit there materialized, one bitterly cold night just before Christmas, a vivid woman newly escaped from Boston, propelled into this far suburb by the repulsive force of the crack-up of her long-term relationship with an anchorperson whose handsome ochre visage was known from Provincetown to Pittsfield, from Salisbury to South Dartmouth. Toula Jaxon, as she presently called herself, had emerged with a cathode-ray glow from her discontinued relationship—a luminosity that made the men of the group stare and the women squint. She was a study in high contrast; her white forehead flashed between her eyebrows and hairline, her eyes were black lights encircled by ink, even the parting in her blue-black hair seemed incandescent. Her lips and fingernails were painted in slashes of purple. Her clothes, though she tried to tone them down as the sessions ensued through the drab winter, were city-slick—tight skirts well above the knee, and rippling silk blouses, and Hermès scarves swirled at the throat. As if colorized, she jarred among the earth-tones of the suburban women, and although there was something chastened and shyly willing to please about her social manner, she played the recorder the way she