Free The Afterlife by John Updike Page B

She elaborated so feelingly on the horrors of a proposed condominium development that they forgot she would not be there to see it or to contend with the parking problems it would pose. When another woman objected that all the movies seemed to be about—with emphasis—
sleaze
, the dying woman quickly joked, “
Gesundheit!
” and then, merrily, added, “I love sleaze. Sleaze,” she said, “is truth. Sleaze,” she went on, excited to a crescendo by the laughter surrounding her, “shall set us free!”
    A season later, attending her funeral, trying to picture her moving somewhere from strength to strength as the service claimed, Fredericks wondered that none of them that afternoon had been able to find a topic more elevated, more affectionately valedictory, than condominiums and sleazy movies, and wondered where that garden hose of which he had been so solicitous now lay coiled.
    The dying, he marvelled, do not seem to inhabit a world much different from ours. His elderly neighbors in this suburb plucked with rakes at the leaves on their lawn, walked their old lame dogs, and talked of this winter’s scheduled trip to Florida as if in death’s very gateway there was nothing to do but keep living, living in the same old rut. They gossiped, they pottered, they watched television. No radical insights heightened their conversation, though Fredericks listened expectantly. In college he had been a classics major, and dimly recalled the section of
The Odyssey
in which the dead stare mutely at Odysseus, unable to speak until they have drunk of the sheep’s blood with which the hero has filled, by Circe’s prescription, a pit a cubit square and a cubit deep. The hero’s own mother, Anticleia, crouches wordless and distraught until he allows her to drink “the storm-dark blood.” The dead in Homer feel themselves inferior, even—in the T. E. Lawrence translation—silly. Dead Achilles tauntingly asks Odysseus, “How will you find some madder adventure to cap this coming down alive to Hades among the silly dead, the worn-out mockeries of men?” And Aeneas, in Virgil’s Avernus, cannot elicit a word from angry Dido, who listens to his entreaties and apologies with fixed eyes and a countenance of stone, and who flees still hating him—
inimica
—back to the shadowy groves where Sychaeus, her former husband, responds to her cares and equals her love
—inimica refugit / in nemus umbriferum coniunx ubi pristinus illi / respondet curis aequatque Sychaeus amorem
. Virgil’s version of the underworld becomes implausibly detailed, with the future of Rome set forth at length by Anchises, and various rings and compartments all laid out as if in anticipation of Dante’s definitive mapping. Whereas Gilgamesh, an older journeyer still, found only, as far as the broken tablets of his tale can be deciphered,confusion and evasion at the end of his passionate quest: “Sorrow has come into my belly. I fear death; I roam over the hills. I will seize the road; quickly I will go to the house of Utnapishtim, offspring of Ubaratutu.…”
    Utnapishtim answers Gilgamesh in broken clay, “Since there is no … There is no word of advice … From the beginning there is no permanence.… As for death, its time is hidden. The time of life is shown plain.”
    Fredericks was shy about calling Arlene, lest it seem to be a kind of courtship. Yet in decency he should ask, after their perilous ride together, how she was doing. For several weeks, her phone didn’t answer; then, one day, it was picked up. “Oh,” she responded, with a thoughtful, chiming, lazy lilt to her voice which seemed new, “not bad. There are good days and bad days. They have me on a mixture of things, and for a while there the mix was all wrong. But it’s settled down now. I feel pretty good, Marty.”
    “You’re home now,” he said, as if to fix a fact in this flux of unimaginable therapy. The wandering drugged sound of her voice awakened firmness in his. “Are