The Afterlife (39 page)

Andy was sitting in the room’s one leather chair, reading a prim little book from the Oxford University Press, with a
sewn-in bookmark. He was wearing gold half-glasses and looked up like a skeptical schoolmaster. Richard told him, “Keep reading, Andy. I’ll just cower over here in the corner.” Joan hovered uneasily, her hands held out from her body as if she were in a chain dance with invisible partners.

“Dick,” she said, pointing, “there’s a chair that looks at least half comfortable.”

Andy looked up over his glasses again. “Would you like the chair I’m sitting in, Richard? It’s all one to me.”

“Absolutely not, Andy. Survival of the fittest. To the victor belong the spoils, or something. What’s that cute little book you’re reading?
The Book of Common Prayer
?”

It amused him that Joan, a clergyman’s daughter to whom the concept of God seemed not only dim but oppressive, had married such a keen churchman. Andy was an Episcopalian the way a Chinese mandarin was a Confucian, to keep his ancestors happy. He showed Richard the little anthology’s jacket:
West African Explorers
. “But astonishing,” he said, “the faith some of these poor devils had. They were all walking straight into malaria, of course.”

“You two will be all right, then?” Joan asked.

Her husband didn’t respond, so Richard took it upon himself to reassure her. “Happy as clams. Let us know when the baby comes or dinner is served, whichever comes first.”

After listening to Andy turn pages and sniff for a while, and staring out the window at a paved, snow-dusted space crossed now and then by a human shadow hunched against the cold, he asked the other man, “Mind if I turn on the TV? We’re missing some great commercials.”

“That football game? You watch such things?”

“The Super Bowl, I generally do. Andy, how can you call yourself an American and not watch the Super Bowl?”

“I don’t call myself an American,” Andy said, and sniffed, “very often.”

Richard laughed. This was fun, he had decided. If he were at home, Ruth would have him watching
Nature
on PBS.

One team wore white helmets, and the other helmets were bronze in color. One quarterback threw passes like darts, neat and diagrammatic, and the other kept scrambling out of his crumbling pocket of protection to toss high wobbling balls, butterflies up for grabs. “What a catch!” Richard cried out. “Did you see that, Andy? One-handed, six inches off the Astroturf!”

“No, I didn’t see it.”

“It was a miracle,” Richard assured him. “A once-in-a-lifetime miracle. There—you can see it on replay!”

Joan kept checking on them every half-hour or so. On one trip, she brought them doughnuts, and on another, Styrofoam bowls of chicken-noodle soup on a tray of nubbly recycled cardboard. “The cafeteria is closing,” she explained.

“Crackers, did you remember crackers for me?” Richard asked.

“Salt and starch, Dicky boy,” Andy said. “You still eat that crap?”

Joan blushed. “As a matter of fact, I did,” she said to her former husband, and produced two packets of saltines from a pocket of her shapeless dress with its little yellow flowers. “I wasn’t going to give them to you unless you asked.”

Andy explained to him, “Already, there’s enough sodium in this canned soup to add five points to your blood pressure.”

“Go!
Go!
” Richard yelled at the screen, where a running back, his bronze helmet lowered, his brown calves pumping, was driving three tacklers backward to gain the yard needed for a first down.

Andy eventually stopped trying to read his book, and put on his distance glasses, the better to follow his ad-hoc roommate’s football commentary. Richard found himself wildly partisan for the bronze helmets—the more Eastern of the two teams, and the one with the scrambling quarterback and some butter-fingered ends. They were down by ten points at the half. The half-time show seemed very long and overpopulated and was based on nostalgia for a brand of Seventies rock that both men had been too old to appreciate the first time around. Richard went out and found a vending machine and brought back four dollars’ worth of candy bars and snacks in little waxed-paper bags. Andy ate a few cheese curls, wiping his fingers on his handkerchief afterwards. Joan came in, her eyes the electric blue they used to be after a bath, and told them, “They’re coming faster now.” The contractions.

“How many points is that?” Andy asked when the bronze-helmeted quarterback was sacked behind his own goal line.

“Just two. Last chance at the cheese curls.”

“No thanks. All yours.”

“How about a strawberry-flavored Twizzler?”

“God, no.”

Richard wondered if Andy was this fastidious in bed. Perhaps that was what Joan had needed—a man to draw her out, to make her feel relatively liberated. “No matter where I go,” she had once complained to Richard, not only of their sex, “you’re there ahead of me.”

“Wow,” Andy said, of a long, fluttering pass that found the receiver’s fingertips, and stayed in his grip despite a lethal blind-side hit.

“That seems to be the name of the game now,” Richard explained. “Trying to strip the ball. It’s amazing, what passes for legal with the pros. Watch what happens
after
the tackle.”
For how long, he wondered, had Joan and Andy been sleeping together before he had known? Saying she needed interests outside the home, she had joined the Episcopal choir, and would come back from Thursday-night rehearsals later and later, creeping between the sheets with a stealthy rustle as loud as a thunderclap. Even if he was asleep, her sudden warm body, with its cold toes and beery breath, would waken him. Andy sang bass, though you would have taken him for a tenor.

“Survival of the fittest,” Andy said now, smiling to himself.

A quick slant, another fluttering pass completed, a brilliant cut-back through a hole opened for a nanosecond by an all-pro offensive tackle, and then that big fullback tucking his head down and writhing over the goal line: the Eastern underdogs were back in the game. An interception early in the fourth quarter, by a lineman who almost lumbered off in the wrong direction, and the score was tied. Andy, who was well into it by now, cheered, and Richard offered him a palm-up hand for a slapped five. “My goodness,” Joan said, once more entering the room. “Sorry to interrupt the fun, guys, but I have news.”

“No!” Richard said, suddenly terrified, as when sometimes in the movie theater a vast pit of reality and eventual death opened underneath him, showing the flickering adventure on the screen to be a mere idle distraction from his life, a waste of minutes while his final minute was rapidly approaching.

“Yes,” Joan said, complacently.

“What sex?”

“Paul wants to give you the particulars himself.”

“What a tease she is, huh, Andy? Tell me at least the weight.”

“Big. The whole process was big—amazing, seeing it from that side. The afterbirth!” Her eyes rolled up, picturing it;
then she gave her nervous clergyman’s-daughter laugh, to recall herself from so intimate a sharing, and said sharply to her present husband, “Andy, you must be starving.”

Paul came in a minute later, looking so tall he seemed stretched by a transcendent pull from the ceiling. His pale face and lank woman’s-length hair were damp with the exertions of vicarious labor. He stabbed at Richard’s chest with a recklessly extended hand, and, when Richard took it, said in his soulful troubadour manner, “Your dear, brave daughter has given birth to Richard Leo Wysocki.”

It was one of those prepared sentences, like Armstrong’s when setting foot on the moon, that came out stilted and hard to understand. They had named his grandson after him. Paul and Judith must have planned this ahead of time, in the event that it was a boy. “My God. You didn’t have to do that,” Richard said, he feared ungraciously.

Visiting hours were long over. Out of sight, medical procedures had closed protectively around the mother and baby. Paul would stay, to see his wife settled into her room, but he gave the grandparent-figures permission to go. “The Super Bowl is still tied,” Richard protested.

Andy said curtly, “It’ll be in all the papers tomorrow. Joan and I are leaving.”

Richard had to admire how carefully Andy wrapped his gray wool scarf around his neck, holding it in place with his chin while he inch by inch shrugged his overcoat up to his shoulders. Joan reached out as if to help her husband, and then, sensing Richard’s watching, suppressed the wifely gesture. “Don’t forget your book,” she told Andy instead. “And your
Wall Street Journal
.”

Paul said, “Mr. Maple, we’ll be moving Jude”—he called Judith “Jude,” as in “Hey Jude,” rather than
Jude the Obscure—
“in here, but if you wanted to finish watching the Super Bowl I bet it’s on in the lobby downstairs. I don’t think they want you to stay on this floor.” Already, he seemed more mature, and slightly stooped.

“That’s fine, Paul—the party’s over. I’ll go with the other old folks. Tell Judith I’ll try to swing by tomorrow morning, before I head back to Boston. Think that would be O.K.?”

“Visiting hours don’t begin until one, but I would think, sure,” Paul answered—rather grudgingly, Richard felt. He tailed the Vanderhavens out through the hospital corridors. Joan had acquired a mink coat since her marriage to him; its glinting collar set off becomingly her lightly bouncing hair, with its elusive texture between frizzy and wavy. Her hair was tightly curly elsewhere, and in the Sixties she had managed a pretty good Afro, for a white woman. On the other side of the glass hospital doors, the dark civic vacancy of Hartford brimmed with sheer cold. No one else moved on the streets; Richard’s eyes and nostrils stung, and within a minute the tips of his thumbs were aching in their thin leather gloves. Across the street, the hospital parking garage glowed with an aquarium dimness, and the booth where the man took the tickets was empty. To the striped cross-bar was attached a sign that in large red letters stated that the garage closed at nine-thirty.

“Oh,
damn!
” Andy cried, and stamped his foot on the snow-muffled asphalt. Both Richard and Joan laughed aloud, the gesture was so petulant and ineffective. Their laughter rang in the brittle cold as if off the rafters of a deserted church. Andy asked, “Why didn’t anybody
tell
us?”

“I bet they thought you could read,” Richard said. “It’s probably printed right on the ticket.”

Joan said, “I’m sorry, darling. It’s my fault. I was just so excited about becoming a grandmother I wasn’t noticing anything.”

“And I don’t see any taxis anywhere,” Andy said. “Damn,
damn!
” He wore an astrakhan hat that made him look like a toy soldier, and every sentence from his mouth was a streaming white flag.

“Where are you?” Richard asked Joan.

“I think it’s called the Morgan. It’s the only decent hotel downtown.”

That sounded more like Andy than the egalitarian Joan he had known. He said, “Don’t despair. I’ll take you in my car, and you can take a taxi back here in the morning.”

“That’d be lovely,” she said, swinging her body to keep warm, so that her coat shimmered in the faint street light. “Where are
you
?”

“Good question. I parked on the street, but
I
was so excited I didn’t really think where. I remember I had to walk slightly uphill.” He headed down the nearest slant of sidewalk, beside Joan in her mink, while Andy tailed behind them. The street came quickly to a dead end, next to what seemed to be a boiler plant, a windowless brick building housing a muffled roaring of heat, and again Richard had to laugh. Joan did, too.

Andy whined, “Let me go back to the hospital and have them phone for a cab.”

“Don’t be such a sissy. Think of yourself as a West African explorer,” Richard said. His face was blazing in the cold and his thumbs in his thin gloves were quite numb. “It has to be around here somewhere. A gray Taurus, with three bridge stickers on the windshield. I remember noticing a row of boarded-up shops and wondering if kids looking for drugs were going to smash my windows.”

“Great,” Andy said. “Come on, Joan, let’s head back. This is a mugger’s paradise.”

“Nonsense,” Joan pronounced. “Everybody’s too cold to mug.” She was still a liberal at heart. She turned and said,
“Richard,
think
. What kind of shops? Did you cross any big streets? From what angle did you approach the hospital?”

Her hopeful voice, which he had first heard in a seminar on English-language epics—a dozen callow male faces around an oaken conference table, and hers, shining—summoned up in him a younger, student self. Ruth was so much more decisive and clear-headed than he that he rarely had to think. A grid began to build in his mind. “One street over,” he said, pointing, “and then, I think, left.” Joan led the way, he and Andy numbly following; she was the friskiest of the three, perhaps because she had the warmest coat. They had not walked ten minutes before he recognized his car—its three stickers, its pattern of road-salt stains. It had not been broken into. The shops he vaguely remembered were on the
other
side of the street, oddly. He was pleased to hear the door lock click; he had known it to freeze in weather warmer than this.

Joan got into the back, letting Andy have the seat by the heater. The engine started, and as the car rolled along the silent, glazed streets, she put her face up between the two men’s shoulders, talking to Richard. “The baby. When they come out—I’ve never seen this described—they have an expression on their faces, a funny little bunchy look of distaste. He looked just like Judith when we’d try to give her prunes. Then there’s a gush of water, and the rest of the baby slips out like nothing, trailing this enormous spiralled umbilical cord, all purply and yellow.”

“Joanie, please,” Andy said, readjusting his muffler.

She went on, inspired, to Richard, “I mean, the
apparatus
. You think of the womb as a kind of place for transients, but it’s a whole other life in there. It’s a lot to give up.” He understood what she meant; as always, she was groping for the big picture, searching for the hidden secret, in keeping with all
those sermons she had had to sit through as a child. Life is a lesson, a text with a moral.