The Afterlife by John Updike Read Free Book Online

chemical fluids. This firm went bust, but not before Carlyle fell in fatal love with California—its spaghetti of flowing thruways, its pink and palmy sprawl, its endless sunshine and perilous sense of being on the edge. He moved his growing family there in 1965. As his children grew and his hair thinned, Carlyle himself seemed increasingly on the edge—on the edge of the stock market, on the edge of the movie industry, on the edge of some unspecified breakthrough. His clothes became cheerfully bizarre—bell-bottom pants, jackets of fringed buckskin, a beret. His name appeared as co-producer of a low-budget film about runaway adolescents (seen romantically, roving against the night lights of Hollywood and sleeping in colorful shacks up in the canyons) that received favorable reviews back east and even turned up in the Coolidge Corner movie complex not far from where Fred and Betsy lived in Brookline.
    Fred, unromantically, worked in real estate. After splitting off from the management company that trained him, he bet his life on the future of drab, run-down inner-city neighborhoods that, by the sheer laws of demographics and transportation, had to come up in the world. His bet was working, but slowly, and in the meantime the Emmet Realty Corporation absorbed his days in thankless maintenance and squabbleswith tenants and the meticulous game, which Fred rather enjoyed, of maximizing the bank’s investment and thereby increasing his own leverage. That is, twenty thousand of his own equity, plus a hundred-thousand-dollar mortgage, meant a profit of two hundred percent if the building’s worth climbed by a third. He was, like many only children, naturally meticulous and secretive, and it warmed him to think that his growing personal wealth was cunningly hidden, annually amplified by perfectly legal depreciation write-offs, in these drab holdings—in Dorchester three-deckers and South End brick bowfronts, in asphalt-shingled Somerville duplexes and in Allston apartment buildings so anonymous and plain as to seem ownerless. He was the patient ant, he felt, and Carlyle more and more the foolish grasshopper.
    Yet, when, ten years into his marriage, Fred found himself swept up in a reckless romance, it was his brother-in-law that he confessed to. The seethe of his predicament—Betsy’s innocence, and the children’s, and the other woman’s; glittering detached details of her, her eyes and mouth, her voice and tears, her breasts and hair—foamed in him like champagne overflowing a glass. It was delicious, terrible; Fred had never felt so alive. One muggy July afternoon he found himself alone with Carlyle in the ramshackle Chatham house that the Saughterfields and the Emmets were jointly renting. The wives and children were at the beach. Carlyle came into the living room, where Fred was working up some figures, and sat himself stolidly down opposite the desk, on the sandy, briny green foldout sofa that came with the house. Carlyle had put weight on his big bones, and moved now with the deliberation of someone considerably older than his brother-in-law. Tennis and worry had trimmed Fred down, given him an edge—for the first time in his life, he felt handsome. Carlyle was wearing akind of southern-California safari suit, a loose cotton jacket with matching pants, suggesting pajamas or a doctor’s antiseptic outfit when he operates. He sat there benignly, immovably. To relieve the oppressive silence, Fred began to talk.
    As Carlyle listened, his eyes went watery with the gravity of the crisis; yet his remarks were gracefully light, even casual. “Well, Freddy—if I could see you with the woman, I might say, ‘What the hell, go to it,’ ” he pronounced at one point in his reedy voice, and at another point he likened the sexual drive to an automobile, volunteering of himself, “I know it’s in there, in the garage, just raring to be revved up.”
    Though Carlyle seemed, if anything, to advise that Fred follow his heart