The Afterlife Read Online Free PDF

shouting.
    “A big job,” he sighed to his son. In August, there came a scratching in the air, an unlocatable buzzing undercurrentthat people called crickets or cicadas but that Ferris associated with the sound that a bedside electric clock makes beside an insomniac’s head in the night.
    “And the dumb pear trees,” his son went on, in that affronted voice children use, “keep producing all these pears to drop into the grass to gum up the mower.” His tone was a child’s but his timbre adult, an aggrieved baritone that went with the black whiskers, the thick powerful legs, the big-boned wrists and hands. Ferris had trouble understanding the sex lives of his adult children. He had met some of this son’s girlfriends; they were presentable young women with well-conditioned figures, oily bleached ringlets, bright eyes, relaxed and sympathetic manners, and mouths curved in expectation of being amused. Yet, no sooner had Ferris mastered the name of one, and the rudiments of her geographical and educational background, than she was gone. None of them lasted, none of them apparently excited that romantic wish so common to men of Ferris’s generation, the wish to marry—to claim in the sight of church and state this female body, to enter into formalized intimacy as if into a territory to be conquered, tamed, sown, and harvested. The wife at the kitchen sink, the wife at the cocktail party or the entr’acte buffet, the wife showering to go out or coming back from shopping with sore feet, the wife docile on one’s arm or excitingly quarrelsome in the back of a taxi: the romance that, for Ferris, had attached to these images and made him want to marry not once but repeatedly had quite vanished from American culture—a casualty, perhaps, of co-ed dormitories or the impossible prices of starter housing. His deep-voiced son, for example, lived here for months at a time, with his lonely mother and her overgrown peony beds.
    Dogs bounded around the two men as they crossed thelank brown lawn to the kitchen door. Inside, the animals clattered and slid about on the linoleum in hope of being fed. There were three dogs, disparate mongrels acquired by Ferris’s former family at various impulsive moments and now collected here, along with a neighbor’s dog that had attached itself to the pack. Their hair was everywhere, on rugs and sofas and in little balls collected along the baseboards like tumbleweed along a barbed-wire fence. The furniture, much of it once joint property, seemed to float in temporary arrangement, not rooted in place but at rest—Fifties modern grown old and worn. The teak arms of the Danish chairs were cracked; the glass tabletops looked permanently smeared. His ex-wife had scattered garish throw pillows and squares of Indian cloth about as if to distract the eye, and these many festive patches intensified the air of dishevelment, of carefree improvisation, an air that made the shirt on Ferris’s chest and the very trousers on his legs caress his skin with an excited slither.
    His son at his side fetched a weary sigh. “I was going to paint the woodwork for a project but just keeping it halfways tidy in here and the kitchen seems to take all my time.”
    Ferris asked, “What did you want to show me?”
    “Oh yeah. I, er, have to lower my britches.”
    “Really? Well, do, I guess. Don’t be shy. I used to change your diapers.” Ferris’s blood raced with the mystery of it.
    Beneath his khaki pants his son wore boxer shorts, such as Ferris associated with old men. His father had worn such baggy underpants. Ferris wore Jockeys, the snugger the better. “On the back of my right thigh, Dad. Up high. See it?”
    “A big round red spot. How long have you had it?”
    “A while. I remember, about two weeks ago, this little critter bit me. A tiny tick—smaller than a dog tick. I didn’t thinkmuch about it but now this terrible itching and this
hot
feeling are there, where I can’t quite see it even with the