The Afterlife by John Updike Page B

thanpillboxes; chilled mouthpieces were tenderly warmed, held in an armpit or against open lips. In a bliss of anticipation the players would settle into the arranged arc of dining-room chairs, while the Weisses’ wood stove cracklingly digested another log in its belly and the black night pressed on the frost-feathered panes and the footsteps of the Weisses’ three children scurried overhead, on the other side of the ceiling. Preliminarily, there were scales and little abortive riffs, impudent snatches of jazz tune and hymn picked out by ear; then, when all were in place, a fidgety cough, the crushing of a last cigarette, a nervous giggle, and a premature toot. Finally, at Fritz’s firmly whispered “
One
, two, three, four,” there was a unified intake of breath and the astounding manifestation, the mellow exclamatory blended upwelling, of the first note. They were off, stumbling, weaving, squinting, blowing, tapping time with feet no two of which tapped alike.
    If you looked (and Terry, often lost and dropped out, did look), some feet kept time just by flexing the big toe (Carolyn, who wore sandals to minimize her height, favored this method), some by snapping the ankle sideways (gangly Jim Keel, right under Terry’s left eye), and some by stoutly, thumpingly bouncing the heel (Maury, and also, in her insecurity, Alice). During the universal rests that came in some dramatic codas, you could hear tapping feet like a shuffling of soldiers breaking stride across a bridge.
    Rarely they made it to the end of a piece without falling apart and collapsing, as Toula, Carolyn, Fritz, and Dick, the last to give up, fluttered on for another stubborn, show-offy few measures. With Jim Keel’s arrival that second winter, they had become ten in number, and unwieldy; yet no one seemed disposed to drop out or even to miss a single evening. They met even though the day’s news had brought disasters (a Beirut massacre, the Challenger blow-up); they met duringthe seventh game of a Red Sox World Series, whose progress the men periodically checked on a television set chattering to itself in the kitchen. Once they convened on the fringes of a hurricane called Gayle; her winds stripped leaves from trees and lifted doghouses while the group generated its own breeze this side of the shuddering windows. Andrea, cleaning up afterwards, complained to Fritz of the fortnightly intrusion: “It’s become a brawl, and the beer and potato chips cost us twenty dollars every time.”
    “Perhaps we could say different people should be the host. The group should rotate.”
    “That’ll make it even more of a social brawl. I know
just
when the music stopped being the point. When Maury brought Toula, without even asking any of us first!”
    “But Toula’s the only one of you sopranos willing to attack the high notes. If she’d just get rid of that futuristic Japanese piece of plastic—”
    “No. It’s not that. She plays everything like a solo. I don’t feel I can
grow
, as long as she’s there, doing everything so flashily. And you love her. All the men love her.”
    “
Liebchen
. Don’t cry. Recorders were meant to be
fun
.”
    “They’re
not
fun and never were. They’re your attempt to make me something I’m not. I’ve never been an aural person, I’ve always been visual. You know that.”
    He was abashed, by an unexpected emotion that seemed less a matter of cause and effect than of a simultaneous wave and particle, a single photon passing through two slits at once. “You didn’t have to try to learn to play,” he said.
    “How could I
not?
” Andrea cried. “It was such a lovely anniversary present. So
visually
lovely. The sweet little phallic shape of it, and the stripes of the pearwood grain.”
    Judging the curve of her tears to have peaked, Fritz’s mind slid off on a practical tack. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, “thesessions might go better if somebody could stand up to lead. The tempo tends to drag. Sometimes by