The Afterlife by John Updike Page A

looked—loud and too expressive. Much defter than onewould have thought possible from the length of her fingernails, Toula had no fear of high fast notes; her flair, mounted between Andrea’s perfectionist reserve and Alice’s novice awkwardness, seemed all too
displayed
. Her recorder, a stylish artifact of high-density plastic produced in Japan, didn’t sound like the other instruments and glistened above their resonant merge like oil making its rainbows on water.
    In the alto section, tweedy Maury Sutherland did indeed prove to be hard of hearing, or blunderingly insensitive, for his alto, fed out of his large male lungs, arrhythmically overpowered the instruments of the two females; Jessie had to sit next to him, since Carolyn from the start assumed the position of priority, next to the sopranos. Terry, glancing over past Maury, saw an expression of suppressed wincing on his wife’s usually cheerful face, with its long bangs and gypsy complexion. In the privacy of their home Jessie almost wept. “He just
blows
,” she complained, “every note, as loud as he can. Tonight, on the little Purcell, I
very
tactfully pointed out to him all the pianissimos and diminuendos, and he nodded, that obtuse handsome way he has of nodding, and then when the time came blasted away as if he was pouring buckshot into some poor trembling quail. And on top of everything else he’s a disgusting racist fascist!” During the beer and cigarettes tonight they had discussed politics; these after-sessions, as they all got to know each other, were getting longer and longer, so that sometimes they broke up not short of midnight, even though the recorder playing always ended on the stroke of ten, as chimed by the clock in the hall—a tall case clock of walnut and pine, with a pewter face, that Terry associated with Andrea’s half of the furnishings, and that he loved for having her quiet elegance and soft severity.
    “Darling,” he said to Jessie, of Maury, “he’s just a small-town conservative—a good old boy, Yankee-style.”
    She looked at him warily; ever since meeting at a Seabrook sit-in, they had always been in perfect political agreement. Now Terry found her, he was implying, priggishly liberal. And he had noticed that as they all played together he could distinguish the three sopranos—iridescently warbling Toula, fumbling Alice, and Andrea dropping away on the high notes, receding and vanishing into her seductive distance—and even hear Carolyn steadfastly keeping the alto beat amid Maury’s oblivious wandering, but he could never quite hear Jessie, his own wife, playing. He could see her lips prehensile on the fipple, her slightly protruding chocolate-colored eyes intent on the sheet music, her slightly thick coarse eyebrows arched in concentration, her stubby-nailed, practical fingers twitching on the stops, and not hear her. The effect was mysterious but not unpleasant. Caught between Maury’s alto and Dick McHoagland’s onrolling tenor, Terry felt inaudible himself. However, it was comforting to know that he could lose his place and Dick would march on; and when a third tenor joined them, a divorced accountant named Jim Keel, with a port-wine stain on the side of his face that Terry couldn’t see, Terry felt his own notes blending into an ecstatic whole, a kind of blessed nonexistence such as Buddhists talk about.
    For what bliss, when all is said and done, and after its musical inadequacies are all confessed, the recorder group was! Arrival was bliss, especially on winter nights when it had been a slippery battle to get the car up the Weisses’ snowy driveway, and an exciting uncertainty obtained whether or not one could get safely down at midnight. Scarves, mittens, down vests piled up on the Shaker settee in the front hall; boots accumulated under it. Cold fingers unfolded the steel music stands and assembled the wooden flutes. Cork joints were rubbed with a dainty ointment kept in cannisters smaller