Дж. Апдейк
The Witches of Eastwick / Иствикские ведьмы

© Берестова А. И., адаптация, сокращение, словарь, 2019

© ООО «Издательство «Антология», 2019

The Coven

“That man was like a black rock, and very cold.”

– Isabel Gowdxe, in 1662

“Now after the devil had ended his admonitions, he came down out of the pulpit, and made all the company come and kiss his arse, which they said was cold like ice; his body was hard like rock, as those who touched him thought.”

– Agnes Sampson, in 1590

“Sukie said a man has bought the Lenox mansion,” Jane Smart said in her hasty but resolute manner.

“A man?” Alexandra Spofford asked, her peaceful aura that morning disturbed by the assertive word.

“From New York,” Jane hurried on, dropping the r in Massachusetts style. “No wife and family, evidently.”

“Oh. One of those,” Alexandra said. Hearing this rumor about a homosexual that had come up from Manhattan to invade them, delivered in Jane's northern voice, she felt intersected where she was, in this mysterious sullen state of Rhode Island. She had been born in the West, where white and violet mountains lift in pursuit of the fluffy clouds, and tumbleweed rolls in pursuit of the horizon.

“Sukie isn't so sure,” Jane said swiftly. “He appears quite sturdy, and the backs of his hands are so hairy, she says. He told the people at Perley Realty he needed large space because he was an inventor with a lab. And he's got a number of pianos.”

Alexandra giggled. The sound of her laughter little changed since her Colorado girlhood; it seemed it was produced not out of her throat but by a little bird perched on her shoulder. “How many pianos can a man have?”

This seemed to offend Jane. Her voice bristled like a black cat's fur, iridescent. She said defensively, “Well, it's just what Marge Perley told Sukie at last night's meeting of the Horse Trough Committee.” This committee supervised the planting and, after vandalism, the replanting of a big blue marble trough for watering horses that historically stood at the center of Eastwick, where the two main streets met. The town was shaped like an L, fitted around Narragansett Bay. Dock Street held the downtown businesses, and Oak Street at right angles to it was where the lovely big old homes were. Marge Perley, whose horrid canary-yellow For Sale signs jumped up and down on trees and fences according to the tides of economics and fashion (Eastwick had for decades been semi-depressed and semi-fashionable) and people moved in or out of the town, was a heavily made-up, energetic woman who, if one at all, was a witch of a different type from Jane, Alexandra, and Sukie. There was a husband, a tiny fussy Homer Perley always trimming their hedge, and this made a difference. “The papers were passed in Providence,” Jane continued.

“And with hairy backs to his hands,” Alexandra mused. As if in a crystal ball she saw that she would meet and fall in love with this man and that little good would come of it. “Didn't he have a name?” she asked.

Jane only remembered that it was one of those names with a 'van' or a 'von' or a 'de' in it.”

“When is he going to move in?”

“He said soon. He could be in there now!” Jane sounded alarmed. Alexandra visualized the other woman's rather too thick (for the rest of her thin face) eyebrows lifting in halfcircles above her dark resentful eyes. If Alexandra was the large type of witch, always spreading herself thin, trying to merge with the landscape, and in her heart rather lazy and cool, Jane was hot, short, concentrated like a pencil point, and Sukie Rougemont, busy downtown all day long gathering news and smiling hello, had an oscillating nature. So Alexandra mused, hanging up. Things fall into threes. And magic occurs all around us when nature finds the predestined forms, and things crystalline and organic fall together at angles of sixty degrees, the equilateral triangle being the mother of structure.

She returned to putting jars of spaghetti sauce on the shelf, sauce for more spaghetti than she and her children could consume in a hundred years. It was, she vaguely felt, some kind of ridiculous tribute to her present lover, a plumber of Italian ancestry. She made that sauce of her own tomatoes. Ever since, two summers ago, Joe Marino had begun to come into her bed, an extravagant fecundity had overtaken the plants, out in the side garden where the southwestern sun shone through the line of willows each long afternoon. The little tomato branches broke under the weight of so much fruit. Tomatoes seemed the most human of all plants, eager and fragile and prone to rot. Picking the watery orange-red balls, Alexandra felt she was cupping a giant lover's testicles in her hand. She recognized as she worked in her kitchen the something sadly menstrual in all this, the bloodlike sauce that will be poured upon the white spaghetti. The fat white strings would become her own white fat. This female struggle of hers against her own weight: at the age of thirty-eight she found it increasingly unnatural. In order to attract love must she deny her own body, like a neurotic saint of the past? Nature is the index and context of all health and if we have an appetite it must be satisfied, satisfying thereby the cosmic order. Yet she sometimes despised herself as lazy, in taking a lover of a race so tolerant of stoutness.

Alexandra's lovers in a few years since her divorce had been husbands let stray by the women who owned them. Her own former husband, Oswald Spofford, rested on a high kitchen shelf in a jar, reduced to multi-colored dust, the cap screwed on tight. Thus she had reduced him as her abilities unfolded after their move to Eastwick from Norwich, Connecticut. Ozzie had known all about chrome and had transferred from a Fixture factory in that hilly city to a rival manufacturer in a plant south of Providence, amid the strange industrial vastness of this small state. They had moved seven years ago. Here in Rhode Island her powers had expanded like gas in a vacuum. He quite lost touch with the expanding universe within her. He had become much involved with their sons' Little League activities, and with the Fixture company's bowling team. As Alexandra accepted at first one and then several lovers, her cuckolded husband shrank to the dimensions and dryness of a doll, lying beside her in her great wide b ed at night like a painted log or a stuffed baby alligator. By the time of their actual divorce her former lord and master had become just dirt – matter in the wrong place, as her mother had briskly defined it long ago – some polychrome dust she swept up and kept in a jar as a souvenir.

The other witches had experienced similar transformations in their marriages; Jane Smart's ex-husband, Sam, hung in the cellar of her ranch house among the dried herbs and was occasionally added to a love-philter, for piquancy; and Sukie Rougemont had reduced hers to plastic and used him as a place mat. This last had happened rather recently; Alexandra could still visualize Monty standing at cocktail parties in his Madras jacket and parsley-green slacks, relating the details of the day's golf round. Monty had had wonderful teeth, long and very even but not false, and, undressed, rather touching, thin bluish legs, much less muscular than his brown golfer's forearms. He had been one of Alexandra's first lovers. Now, it felt queer and queerly satisfying to set a mug of Sukie's tarry coffee upon a glossy plastic Madras, leaving a dirty ring.

This air of Eastwick empowered women. Eastwick in its turn was at every moment kissed by the sea. Dock Street in part was built upon culverts and pilings, and saltwater slipped and slapped and slopped against them, so that an unsteady veiny aqua sea-glare shimmered and shuddered on the faces of the local matrons as they carried orange juice and low-fat milk, luncheon meat and whole-meal bread and filtered cigarettes out of the Bay Superette. The real supermarket, where one did a week's shopping, lay inland, in the part of Eastwick that had been farmland in the eighteenth century. Aristocratic planters, rich in slaves and cattle, had paid social calls on horseback here. Where corn, that remarkable agricultural artifact of the Indians, had flourished for generations, windowless little plants with names like Dataprobe and Computech manufactured tiny electro-mechanical works.

Rhode Island is the smallest of the fifty states, but it contains some American vastnesses, tracts hardly explored amid industrial sprawl, heathlike marshes and desert shores on either side of the Bay. Through such a stretch Alexandra now drove to have a look again at the old Lenox mansion. She took her black Labrador, Coal, with her. She had left the last of the sterilized jars of sauce on the kitchen counter and had pinned a note to the refrigerator door for her four children:

Milk in frig. Oreos in breadbox.

Back in one hour. Love.

The Lenox family in the days when Roger Williams was still alive had tricked the chiefs of the Narragansett tribe out of land enough to form a European barony, but with years the family had taken a generally downward trend. When Alexandra arrived in Eastwick there was only one Lenox left in South County, an old widow, Abigail, in the stagnant village of Old Wick; she went about the village muttering, and children threw pebbles at her. Stopped by the local constable, they said that they were defending themselves against her evil eye. The vast Lenox lands had long been broken up. The Lenox mansion had been built of brick on an island the family still owned, in the tracts of salt marsh behind East Beach. It was a diminished but locally striking imitation of the palatial summer “cottages” erected in Newport during the Gilded Age.[1] There was a causeway between the shore and the island, but the mansion was always cut off during the high tide. It had been occupied by a succession of owners since 1920, and had been allowed by them to slip into disrepair. Yet, from afar, the mansion still looked rather grand, Alexandra thought. She had parked on the shoulder of the beach road to gaze across the quarter-mile of marsh.

This was September, season of full tides; the time now was after four; it would be an hour or two before the causeway in and out became passable. Thin white smoke was lifting from one of the chimneys of the mansion. Someone was inside.

That man with hairy backs to his hands. Alexandra's future lover.

She decided it might be a workman or watchman he had hired. Her eyes smarted from trying to see so far, so intensely. She felt dark inside, a sense of herself as a pathetic onlooker. Female yearning was in all the papers and magazines now; the sexual equation had become reversed as girls of good family flung themselves toward brutish rock stars, green unshaven guitarists from the slums of Liverpool or Memphis who were somehow granted indecent power, dark suns turning these children of sheltered upbringing into suicidal orgiasts. Alexandra thought of her tomatoes, the juice of violence beneath the plump complacent skin. She thought of her own older daughter, alone in her room with those Monkees and Beatles… one thing for Marcy, another for her mother to be mooning so, straining her eyes. She got back into the car with Coal and drove the half-mile of straight black road to the beach.

In September, if no one was on the beach, you could walk with a dog unleashed. But it was unusually warm, and the narrow parking lot was filled by cars; many young people wearing bathing suits lay on the sand with their radios as if summer and youth would never end. Acting according to beach regulations, Alexandra fixed a length of clothesline she kept on the backseat floor to Coal studded collar. He pulled her along through the resisting sand. She tugged off her beige espadrilles and dropped the shoes behind a tuft of beach grass near the end of the boardwalk. Coal pulled her on, past a heap of square-cut rocks that had been part of a jetty built when this beach was the toy of rich men and not an overused public playground. Rock from the young people's radios washed around her as she walked along aware of her heaviness, of the witchy figure she must present with her bare feet and men's baggy denims and worn-out green brocaded jacket, something from Algeria she and Ozzie had bought in Paris on their honeymoon seventeen years ago. Though she turned a gypsyish olive in summer, Alexandra was of northern blood; her maiden name had been Sorensen. She wore her hair in a single thick braid down her back; sometimes she pinned the braid up to the back of her head. Her hair had never been a true Viking blond but of a muddy pallor now further dirtied by gray. Most of the gray hair had appeared in front; the nape was still as fine as those of the girls that lay here basking in the sun.

Coal ran on, snorting, imagining some animal scent in the ocean air. His desire to run burned the rope in her hand. She was drawing near to where a concrete wall topped by rusted barbed wire marked the end of public beach; still there were groups of youth and seekers of youth and she did not feel free to set loose poor Coal. Three young men were playing Frisbee, and as she passed through their triangle it seemed to her she heard the word “hag”. The beach narrowed here and became intimate, as you could see from cans and bottles and burnt driftwood and the condoms like small dried jellyfish corpses. The cement wall had been spray-painted with linked names. Everywhere, desecration had set its hand and only footsteps were washed away by the ocean.

Alexandra felt irritated and revengeful. She resented the overheard insult “hag” and the general vast insult of all this youth preventing her from letting her dog, her friend, run free. She decided to clear the beach for herself and Coal by willing a thunderstorm. One's inner weather was always related to the outer; it was simply a question of reversing the current, which occurred rather easily if power had been given to the primary pole, that is, to oneself as a woman. So many of Alexandra's remarkable powers had flowed from this mere return to herself. Only in her midlife did she truly believe that she had a right to exist, that the forces of nature had created her not as an afterthought and companion – a rib, as the notorious Malleus Maleficarum had it – but as the mainstay of the continuing Creation, as the daughter of a daughter and a woman whose daughters in turn would bear daughters. Alexandra closed her eyes and willed this vast interior of herself – this continuum reaching back through the generations of humanity and primates and beyond them through the lizards and the fish to the algae that produced the planet's first DNA, a continuum that in the other direction led to the end of all life – she willed these depths of herself to darken, to condense, to generate an interface of lightning between tall walls of air. And the sky in the north did rumble, so faintly only Coal could hear. His ears came alive. Mertalia, Musalia, Dophatia: silently she spoke the forbidden names. Onemalia, Zitanseia, Goldaphaira, Dedulsaira. A blast of cold air hit from the north. A collective sigh of surprise arose from the youthful naked crowd at the other end of the beach. The air blackened. The offending youths had seen their Frisbee sail away from their hands like a kite and were hurrying to gather up their portable radios and their six-packs, their sneakers and jeans and tops. Coal barked at nothing, in one direction and then the other, as the drop in barometric pressure maddened his ears.

Now the ocean, so recently calm all the way to Block Island, sensed the change. Its surface rippled, the waves grew higher. The sails hurried toward harbor. Then the rain began, great icy drops that hurt like hailstones. Footsteps pounded past Alexandra as honey-colored lovers raced toward cars parked at the far end, by the bathhouses. Thunder rumbled, the large hurtful drops broke up into a finer, thicker rain. Alexandra stood still; through veils of rain she saw that the beach was empty. She undid the rope leash and set the dog free.

But Coal was frightened by the storm and stayed at her feet. Tiny speckled sand crabs were emerging now from their holes and scurrying sideways toward the frothing sea. The color of their shells was so sandy they seemed transparent. Alexandra steeled herself and crushed one with her bare foot. Sacrifice. There must always be sacrifice. It was one of nature's rules. She danced from crab to crab, crushing them. Her face from hairline to chin streamed and all the colors of the rainbow were in this liquid film, because of the agitation of her aura. Lightning kept taking her photograph. She had a cleft in her chin and a tiny one in the tip of her nose; her handsomeness derived from the candor of her broad forehead beneath the gray-edged wings of hair swept symmetrically back to form her braid, and from the clairvoyance of her eyes. The form of her mouth had the appearance of a smile. She had attained her height of five-eight by the age of fourteen and had weighed one-twenty at the age of twenty; she was somewhere around one hundred sixty pounds now. One of the liberations of becoming a witch had been that she had stopped constantly weighing herself.

As the little sand crabs were transparent on the speckled sand, so Alexandra, wet through and through, felt transparent to the rain, one with it, its temperature and that of her blood brought into harmony. The short storm was coming to an end. Coal, his terror passed at last, ran in circles, wider and wider. Alexandra strode to the end of the purged public beach, to the wire-topped wall, and back. She reached the parking lot and picked up her espadrilles where she had left them.

She opened the door of her Subaru and called loudly for Coal, who had disappeared into the dunes. “Come, doggie!” this stately plump woman sang out. “Come, baby! Come, angel!” To the eyes of the young people hiding with their wet towels and goose bumps inside the bathhouse and underneath the pizza shack's striped awning, Alexandra seemed miraculously dry, not a hair of her massive braid out of place, not a patch of her brocaded green jacket damp. It was these unverifiable impressions that spread among us in Eastwick the rumor of witchcraft.

Alexandra was an artist. Using simple tools like toothpicks and a stainless-steel butter knife, she made little lying or sitting figurines, always of women in colorful costumes painted over naked contours; they sold for fifteen or twenty dollars in two local boutiques called the Yapping Fox and the Hungry Sheep. Alexandra had no clear idea of who bought them, or why, or exactly why she made them, or who was directing her hand. The power of sculpture had appeared with her other powers, in the period when Ozzie turned into colored dust. The impulse had visited her one morning as she sat at the kitchen table, the children off at school, the dishes washed up. That first morning, she had used one of her children's Play-Doh, but later she began to buy extraordinarily pure kaolin clay she dug herself in an old widow's back yard. She paid the widow twelve dollars a sack. If the sacks were too heavy she helped her lift them; like Alexandra she was strong. The widow was at least sixty-five, but she dyed her hair a glittering brass color and wore very tight pants suits of turquoise or magenta. This was nice. Alexandra read a message for herself here: Getting old could be jolly, if you stayed strong. She always returned from these trips heartened and joyful, full of the belief that a league of women upholds the world.

Self-taught, Alexandra had been at sculpture for five years – since before the divorce, to which it, like most manifestations of her blossoming selfhood, had contributed.

Jane Smart, too, was an artistic person – a musician. She gave piano lessons to make ends meet, and substituted as choir director in local churches sometimes, but her love was the cello; its vibratory melancholy tones would at some moonlit hours on warm nights come out of the windows of her low little ranch house where it stood amid many like it on the curved roads of the Fifties development called Cove Homes. Her neighbors on their quarter-acre lots, husband and wife, child and dog, would move about, awakened, and discuss whether or not to call the police. They seldom did, confused and, it may be, frightened by something naked, a splendor and sadness, in Jane's playing. It seemed easier to fall back to sleep, lulled by the sad sounds of the cello.

Sukie had nothing of what Alexandra would call an artistic talent but she loved social existence and had been made by the financial difficulties that follow divorce to write for the local weekly newspaper, the Eastwick Word. She loved her two friends, and they her. Today, after typing up her account of last night's meetings at Town Hall, Sukie looked forward hungrily to Alexandra's and Jane's coming over to her house for a drink. They usually gathered on Thursdays, in one of their three houses. Sukie lived in the middle of town, which was convenient for her work, though her small house was a great step down from the farmhouse – six bedrooms, thirty acres, a station wagon, a sports car, a Jeep, four dogs – that she and Monty had shared. But her girlfriends made it seem fun; they usually chose some colorful bit of costume for their gatherings. In a gold-threaded shawl Alexandra entered, stooping, at the side door to the kitchen; in her hands were two jars of her tomato sauce.

The witches kissed, cheek to cheek. “Here sweetie, I know you like nutty dry things best but,” Alexandra said, in her thrilling contralto. Sukie took the twin gifts into her own, more slender hands. “The tomatoes came on like a plague this year for some reason,” Alexandra continued. “I put about a hundred jars of this up and then the other night I went out in the garden in the dark and shouted, 'Fuck you, the rest of you can all rot!'”

“I remember one year with the zucchini,” Sukie responded, putting the jars dutifully on a cupboard shelf from which she would never take them down. As Alexandra said, Sukie loved dry nutty things – celery, cashews, pilaf, pretzel sticks. When alone, she never sat down to eat,just dipped into some yoghurt with a Wheat Thin while standing at the kitchen sink or carrying a bag of onion-flavored chips into her TV den with a stiff bourbon. “I did everything,” she said to Alexandra, “Zucchini bread, zucchini soup, salad, zucchini stuffed with hamburger and baked, cut into slices and fried, cut into sticks to use with a dip, it was wild. I even threw a lot into the blender and told the children to put it on their bread instead of peanut butter. Monty was desperate; he said even his shit smelled of zucchini.”

Alexandra almost laughed at this pleasurable reminiscence of Sukie's married days and prosperity, but mention of an old husband stopped her. Sukie was the most recently divorced and the youngest of the three. She was a slender redhead, her hair down her back trimmed straight across and her long arms covered with freckles. She wore copper bracelets and a pentagram on a cheap thin chain around her throat. What Alexandra, with her heavily Hellenic, twice-dimpled features, loved about Sukie's looks was the cheerful simian thrust: Sukie's big teeth pushed her profile below the short nose out in a curve, a protrusion especially of her upper lip, which was longer and more complex in shape than her lower, with a plumpness on either side of the center that made even her silences seem puckish. Her eyes were hazel and round and rather close together. Sukie moved easily in her miniature kitchen, everything crowded together. With one hand, she pulled a can of Planter's Beer Nuts from a cupboard shelf and with the other took from the drainer on the sink a little dish to hold them. She strewed crackers on a platter around a wedge of red-coated Gouda cheese. The pattern on the platter resembled a crab. Cancer. Alexandra feared it, and saw its emblem everywhere in nature. “Your usual?” Sukie asked tenderly, for Alexandra, as if older than she was, had with a sigh dropped her body, without removing her shawl, into an old blue easy chair.

“I guess it's still tonic time,” Alexandra decided. ”How's your vodka supply?” Someone had once told her that vodka was less fattening and irritated the lining of your stomach less than gin. Irritation, psychic as well as physical, was the source of cancer. Those get it who leave themselves open to the idea of it; all it takes is one single cell gone crazy. Nature is always waiting, watching for you to lose faith so she can insert her fatal stitch.

Sukie smiled, broader. “I knew you were coming.” She produced a bottle.

The tonic bottle fizzed in Sukie's fingers as if scolding. Perhaps cancer cells were more like bubbles of carbonation, penetrating through the bloodstream, Alexandra thought. She must stop thinking about it. “Where's Jane?” she asked.

“She said she'd be a little late. She's rehearsing for that concert at the church'.”

“With that awful Neff,” Alexandra said.

Raymond Neff taught music at the high school, a roly-poly womanish man who however had fathered five children upon his untidy, sallow, steel-bespectacled, German-born wife. He wanted to sleep with everybody. Jane was sleeping with him these days. Alexandra had slept with him a few times in the past but the episode had moved her so little – Sukie was perhaps unaware of its afterimage. Sukie herself seemed to be chaste vis-a-vis Neff, but then she had been available least long. Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly: sooner or later you land on all the properties. The two friends wanted to save Jane because they disapproved of Neff's hideous wife Greta. When you sleep with a married man, you in a sense sleep with the wife as well, so she should not be an absolute shame.

Laughingly discussing Greta Neff's various imperfections, the women took their drinks into the “den,” a little room with peeling wallpaper and a sharply slanting ceiling because the room was half tucked under the stairs that went up to the attic-like second floor.

“She doesn't even wash herself, have you ever noticed her smell?” Alexandra asked.

“And those granny glasses!” Sukie agreed. “She looks like John Lennon.” She made a kind of solemn sad-eyed thin-lipped John Lennon face.

“A cabbagy smell,” Alexandra continued. “He carries it on his clothes,” she said, thinking simultaneously that this was a little like Monty and the zucchini and that this intimate detail would show Sukie that she had slept with Neff. Well, she had slept with Monty, too; and had never smelled zucchini. One interesting aspect of sleeping with husbands was the viewpoint they gave you on their wives: they saw them as nobody else did. Neff saw poor dreadful Greta as a kind of a sweet bit of edelweiss he had brought from a dangerous romantic height (they had met in a Frankfurt beer hall while he was stationed in West Germany instead of fighting in Korea), and Monty… Alexandra tried to remember what Monty had said about Sukie. He had said little, being such a would-be gentleman. But once he had come to Alexandra's bed from some awkward consultation at the bank, and his words had been: “She's a lovely girl, but bad luck, somehow. Bad luck for others, I mean. I think she's fairly good luck for herself.” And it was true, Monty had lost a lot of his family's money while married to Suki, though everyone had blamed his own calm stupidity for this.

“Greta must be great in the sack,” Sukie was saying. “All those Kinder.”

“We must be nice to her,” Alexandra said, back to the subject of Jane. “Speaking to her on the phone yesterday, I was struck by how angry she sounded. That lady is burning up.”

Sukie glanced over at her friend, since this seemed a slightly false note. Some intrigue had begun for Alexandra, some new man.

“Angrier than anybody else?” Sukie asked, meaning themselves.

“Oh yes. We're in lovely shape,” the older woman answered, her mind drifting from this irony toward the subject of that conversation with Jane – the new man in town, in the Lenox mansion.

“Oh I know about him!” Sukie exclaimed, having read Alexandra's mind. “I have such tons to tell, but I wanted to wait until Jane got here.”

The kitchen doorbell rang, and Jane let herself in. She was not physically radiant like Sukie, yet an appeal shone from her as light from a filament lamp.

“That Neff is so awful,” Jane said. “He had us do the Haydn over and over. He said my intonation was prissy. Prissy. I burst into tears and told him he was a disgusting male chauvinist.”

“They can't help it,” Sukie said lightly. “It's just their way of asking for more love.”

“Hi there, you gorgeous creature,” Jane addressed Alexandra. “Tell me, though – was that thunderstorm the other day yours?”

Alexandra confessed that she had driven to the beach and seen smoke from the chimney.

“Greta came into the church,” Jane said, “right after he called my Haydn prissy, and laughed.”

Sukie did a German laugh: “Ho hoho.”

“Do they still have sex, I wonder?” asked Alexandra. “How could he stand it? It must be like excited sauerkraut.”

“No,” Jane said firmly. “It's like – what's that pale white stuff they like so? – sauerbraten.”

“They marinate it,” Alexandra said. “In vinegar, with garlic, onions, and bay leaves. And I think peppercorns.”

“Is that what he tells you?” Sukie asked Jane mischievously.

“We never talk about it, even at our most intimate,” Jane prissily said. “All he ever confessed on the subject was that she had to have it once a week or she began to throw things.”

“A poltergeist,” Sukie said, delighted. “A polter-frau.”

“Really,” Jane said, not seeing the humor of it, “you're right. She is an impossibly awful woman. So pedantic; so smug; such a Nazi. Ray is the only one who doesn't see it, poor soul.”

“I wonder how much she guesses,” Alexandra mused.

“She doesn't want to guess,” Jane said. “If she guessed she might have to do something about it.”

“Like turn him loose,” Sukie suggested.

“Then we'd all have to cope with him,” Alexandra said, visualizing this plump dank man as a tornado, an insatiable natural reservoir, of desire.

“Hang on, Greta!” Jane chimed in, seeing the humor at last.

All three giggled.

“Doesn't anybody want to hear about this new man?” Sukie asked still laughing.

“Not especially,” Alexandra said. “Men aren't the answer, isn't that what we've decided?”

“They're not the answer,” Jane Smart said. “But maybe they're the question.”

Sukie stood to make her announcement. “He's rich,” she said, “and forty-two. Never married, and from New York, one of the old Dutch families. He was evidently a child prodigy at the piano, and invents things besides. The whole big room in the east wing and the laundry area under it are to be his laboratory, and on the west side, he wants to install a big sunken tub, with the walls wired for stereo.” Her round eyes, quite green in the late light, shone with the madness of it. “Joe Marino has the plumbing contract: no estimate asked for, everything the best, price be damned. A teak tub eight feet in diameter, and the man doesn't like the feel of tile under his feet so the whole floor is going to be some special fine-grained slate you have to order from Tennessee.”

“He sounds pompous,” Jane told them.

“Does this big spender have a name?” Alexandra asked. She was jealous of this man because he so excited her two friends. On other Thursdays they were excited by her powers. On those Thursdays, in the right mood and into their third drinks, the three friends could erect a cone of power above them like a tent and know who of the Eastwick's inhabitants was sick, who was falling into debt, who was loved, who was frenzied, who was vehement, who was asleep in a respite from life's bad luck; but this wouldn't happen today. They were disturbed, and the curious thing was that they couldn't remember the man's name. The three witches realized that they were themselves under a spell, of a greater sorcerer.

Darryl Van Horne came to the chamber-music concert in the Unitarian Church on Sunday night, a bearish dark man with greasy curly hair half-hiding his ears and gathered at the back so that his head from the side looked like a beer mug with a monstrously thick handle. He wore gray flannels bagged at the backs of his knees somehow and an elbow-patched jacket of Harris Tweed in a curious pattern of green and black. A pink Oxford button-down shirt of the type fashionable in the Fifties and, on his feet, absurdly small and pointy black loafers completed the costume. He was out to make an impression.

“So you're our local sculptress,” he told Alexandra at the reception afterwards, which was held in the church parlor, for the players and their friends. The category of “players and their friends” included everyone except Van Horne, who came into the parlor anyway. People knew who he was; it added to the excitement. When he spoke, his voice resounded in a strange way as if there was an artificial element somewhere in his speech apparatus, and he produced so much spittle that he occasionally paused to wipe his jacket sleeve across the corners of his mouth. Yet he had the confidence of the cultured and well-to-do, condescending low to achieve intimacy with Alexandra.

“They're just little things,” Alexandra said, feeling suddenly little and shy, confronted by this brooding dark bulk. It was that time of the month when she was especially sensitive to auras. This stranger's aura was the shiny black-brown of a wet beaver pelt.

“Little things,” Van Horne echoed. “But so powerful,” he said, wiping his lips. “So full of psychic juice, you know, when you pick one up. They knocked me out. I bought all they had at, what's that shop? – the Noisy Sheep —”

“The Yapping Fox,” she said, “or the Hungry Sheep, two doors the other side of the little barbershop, if you ever get a haircut.”

“Never if I can help it. Takes away my strength. My mother used to call me Samson. But your figurines. I bought all they had to show to a pal of mine, who runs a gallery in New York, right there on Fifty-seventh Street. It's not for me to promise you anything, Alexandra – O.K. if I call you that? – but if you could create on a bigger scale, I believe we could get you a show. Maybe you'll never be Marisol but you could sure as hell be another Niki de Saint-Phalle. You know, those 'Nanas.' Now those have scale. I mean, she's not just futzing around.”

With some relief Alexandra decided she quite disliked this man. He was pushing, vulgar, and a blabbermouth, and to her eyes Darryl Van Horne didn't look washed. You could almost see little specks of black in his skin. He wiped his lips with the hairy back of a hand, and his lips twitched with impatience while she searched her heart for an honest but polite response. Dealing with men was work, a chore she had become lazy at. “I don't want to be another Niki de Saint-Phalle,” she said. “I want to be me. The power, as you put it, comes from their being small enough to hold in the hand.” She felt the capillaries in her face burn; she smiled at herself for being excited, when intellectually she had decided the man was a fraud, an apparition. Except for his money; that had to be real.

His eyes were small and watery, and looked rubbed. “Yeah, Alexandra, but what is you? Think small, and you'll end up small. You're not giving yourself a chance, with this old-giftie-shoppie mentality. I couldn't believe how little they were charging – a lousy twenty bucks, when you should be thinking five figures.”

He was New York vulgar, she concluded, and felt sorry for him, landed in this delicate province. She remembered the wisp of smoke, how fragile and brave it had looked. She asked him forgivingly, “How do you like your new house? Are you pretty well settled in?”

With enthusiasm, he said, “It's hell. I work late, my ideas come to me at night, and every morning around seven-fifteen these fucking workmen come! With their fucking radios! Pardon my Latin.”

It seemed he felt his need for forgiveness; the need surrounded him; every clumsy, too energetic gesture of his was full of that need.

“You must come over and see the place,” he said. “I need advice all over the lot. All my life I've lived in apartments where they decide everything for you, and the contractor I've got is an asshole.”

“Joe?”

“You know him?”

“Everybody knows him,” Alexandra said; this stranger should be told that insulting local people was not the way to win friends in Eastwick.

But his loose tongue went on. “Little funny hat all the time?”

She had to nod, but perhaps not to smile. She sometimes hallucinated that Joe was still wearing his hat while making love to her.

“These butchers you call workmen up here wouldn't last one day on a union job in Manhattan,” Van Horne said. “No offense, I can see you're thinking, 'What a snob,' and I guess these workers don't get much practice, building chicken coops; but no wonder it's such a weird-looking state. Hey, Alexandra, between us: I'm crazy about that frozen look you get on your face when you get defensive and don't know what to say. And the tip of your nose is cute.” Surprisingly, he put out his hand and touched it, a touch so quick and inappropriate she wouldn't have believed it happened but for the chilly tingle it left.

She felt she hated him, but stood there smiling, unable to understand what her insides were trying to tell her.

Jane Smart came up to them. “Ah, la artiste,” Van Horne exclaimed. He praised Jane's manner of playing. He said she had precision. “Precision is where passion begins.” But then he criticized her. “Honey, you're not playing just notes, one after the other! You're playing phrases, you're playing human outcries! So, string those phrases!”

Jane's dark eyes glowed. As if in silent outcry her thin mouth dropped open and tears formed second lenses upon her eyes.

The Unitarian minister, Ed Parsley, joined them. He looked up at Darryl Van Horne quizzically. Then he turned to Jane Smart and started praising the concert. Sukie was sleeping with Ed, Alexandra knew, and perhaps Jane had slept with him in the past. There was a special quality men's voices had when you had slept with them, even years ago. Ed's aura – Alexandra couldn't stop seeing auras – flowed in sickly yellowish green waves of anxiety and narcissism from his hair, which was somehow colorless without being gray. Jane was still fighting back tears and Alexandra had to introduce this strange outsider.

After the introduction was made, the men exchanged some controversial remarks, which delighted Alexandra.

How nice it was, she thought, when men talked to one another. All that aggression: the clash of shirt fronts.

“Didi hear,”Ed Parsley said now, “you offering a critique of Jane's cello-playing?”

“Just her bowing,” Van Horne said, suddenly shy. “I said the rest of it was great, her bowing just seemed a little choppy. Christ, you have to watch yourself around here, stepping on everybody's toes. I mentioned to sweet old Alexandra here about my plumbing contractor being none too swift and it turns out he's her best friend.”

“Not best friend,just a friend,” she felt it necessary to put in. The man, Alexandra saw even amid the confusions of this meeting, had the brute gift of getting a woman to say more than she had intended. He now insulted Jane, but she just looked up at him in silent fascination of a whipped dog.

“The Beethoven was especially splendid, don't you agree?” Parsley insisted.

“Beethoven,” the big man said with bored authority, “sold his soul to write those last quartets. All those nineteenth-century types sold their souls. What they did wasn't human.”

“I practiced till my fingers bled,” Jane said, gazing straight up at Van Horne's lips, which he had just rubbed with his sleeve.

“You keep practicing, little Jane. It's mostly muscle memory, as you know. When muscle memory takes over, the heart can start to sing its song. Until then, you're just going through the motions. Listen. Why don't you come over some time to my place and we'll fool around with a bit of old Ludwig's piano and cello stuff? That Sonata in A is an absolute honey. Or that E Minor of Brahms: so fabulous. What schmaltz.! I think it's still in the old fingers.” He wiggled his fingers at all of their faces. Van Horne's hands were eerily white-skinned beneath the hair, like tight surgical gloves.

“He was a child prodigy.” Jane Smart became suddenly angry and defensive. Her aura, usually a rather dull mauve, had turned purple, showing arousal, though by which man was not clear. The whole parlor to Alexandra's eyes was clouded by pulsating auras. She felt dizzy, disenchanted; she longed to be home. She closed her eyes and wished that this particular combination of feelings around her – of arousal, dislike, radical insecurity, and an evil will to dominate flowing not only from the dark stranger – would disintegrate.

And suddenly she was alone with Van Horne again, since Ed Parsley was distracted by some parishioners, and Raymond Neff took Jane away. She feared she would have to bear his conversation again. But Sukie, who feared nothing, glimmering in her reportorial role, came up and conducted an interview.

“What brings you to this concert, Mr. Van Horne?” she asked, after Alexandra had shyly performed introductions.

“My TV set is out of order” was his sullen answer. Alexandra saw that he preferred to make the approaches himself; but nobody could stop Sukie in her interrogating mood.

“And what has brought you to this part of the world?” was her next question.

“Seems it's time I got out of Gotham,”[2] he said. “Too much mugging, rent going sky-high. The price up here seemed right. This going into some paper?”

Sukie licked her lips and admitted, “I might mention it in a column I write for the Word called 'Eastwick Eyes and Ears.'”

“Jesus, don't do that,” the big man said, in his baggy tweed coat. “I came up here to cool the publicity.”

As Van Horne started to turn away, she asked, “People are saying you're an inventor. What sort of thing do you invent?” “Even if I took all night to explain it to you, you wouldn't understand. It mostly deals with chemicals.”

“Try me,” Sukie insisted. “See if I understand.”

“And my competition will see it in your 'Eyes and Ears'?”

“Nobody who doesn't live in Eastwick reads the Word, I promise. Even in Eastwick nobody reads it, they just look at the ads and for their own names.”

“Listen, Miss —”

“Rougemont. Mrs. I was married.”

“What was he, a French Canuck?”

“Monty always said his ancestors were Swiss. He acted Swiss. Shall we return to the subject?”

“I can't talk about the inventions, I am watched.”

“How exciting! How about for my eyes and ears only? And Lexa's here. Isn't she gorgeous?” Sukie said and smiled broadly.

Van Horne turned his big head stiffly as if to check; Alexandra saw herself through his bloodshot blinking eyes as if at the end of a reversed telescope, a very small figure with wisps of gray hair. He decided to answer Sukie's earlier question and said that lately he had been doing a lot with synthetic polymers.

“I'm also working on the Big Interface.”

“What interface is that?” Sukie was not ashamed to ask. Alexandra would just have nodded as if she knew.

“The interface between solar energy and electrical energy,” Van Horne told Sukie. “There has to be one, and when we find the combination you can operate every appliance in your house right off the roof and have enough left over to recharge your electric car in the night. Clean, plentiful, and free. It's coming, honey-bunch, it's coming!”

“Those panels look so ugly,” Sukie said. “There's a hippie in town who's put them over an old garage so he can heat his water, I have no idea why, he never takes a bath.”

“I'm not talking about collectors,” Van Horne said. “I'm talking about a paint.”

“A paint?” Alexandra said, feeling she should join the interview. At least this man was giving her something new to think about, beyond tomato sauce.

“A paint,” he solemnly assured her. “A simple paint you brush on with a brush and that turns the entire epidermis of your lovely home into an enormous low-voltaic cell.”

“There's only one word for that,” Sukie said.

“Yeah, what's that?”

“Electrifying.”

Van Horne pretended to be offended. “Shit, if I'd known that's the kind of flirtatious featherbrained thing you like to say I wouldn't have wasted my time spilling my guts. You play tennis?”

Sukie stood up a little taller. She was just so nicely built. “A bit,” she said, touching her upper lip with the tip of her tongue.

“You've got to come over in a couple weeks or so, I'm having a court put in.”

Alexandra interrupted. “You can't fill wetlands,” she said.

This big stranger wiped his lips and repulsively eyed her. “Once they're filled,” he said in his slightly slurring voice, “they're not wet.”

“The snowy egrets like to nest there, in the dead elms out back.”

“T, O, U, G, H,” Van Horne said. “Tough.”

“Oh,” Alexandra said, and she noticed now that his aura had disappeared. He had absolutely none above his head of greasy hair.

The auras of all the others at the party were blinding now. And very stupidly she felt infatuation growing within herself. The big man was a bundle of needs; he was a crater that sucked her heart out of her chest.

Old Mrs. Lovecraft, her aura the showy magenta of those who are well pleased with their lives and fully expect to go to Heaven, came up to Alexandra telling her in her bleating voice that the Garden Club members wanted to see her more at their meetings. Alexandra said she would come to some meetings in winter when there was nothing else to do, but she knew she would never go.

When she and Oz were still together and new in town they had spent a number of evenings in the company of sweet old bores like the Lovecrafts; now Alexandra felt infinitely fallen from the world of decent and dull entertainments they represented.

Now listening to Mrs. Lovecraft's bleating voice she felt the devil was getting into her.

“We're going to have a slide show on Oriental rugs next Thursday. You see, Sandy dear, in the Arab mind, the rug is a garden, it's an indoor garden in their tents and palaces in the middle of all that desert, and there's all manner of real flowers in the design, that to casual eyes looks so abstract. Now doesn't that sound fascinating?”

“It does,” Alexandra said. Mrs. Lovecraft had adorned her wrinkled throat with a string of artificial pearls. With an irritated psychic effort, Alexandra willed the old string to break; fake pearls cascaded to the floor.

While kneeling at the old lady's feet and collecting pearls, Alexandra wickedly willed the narrow straps of her shoes to come undone. Wickedness was like food: after you got started it was hard to stop. Alexandra straightened up and put a half-dozen pearls in her victim's trembling hand. Then she backed away, through the widening circle of people helping to pick up the scattered pearls. Her way to the door was blocked by Reverend Parsley.

“Alexandra,” he said in a low-pitched, probing voice. “I was so much hoping to see you here tonight.” He wanted her. He was tired of his affair with Sukie. In the nervousness of his overture he scratched his head, and Alexandra used that moment and willed the cheap band of his important looking gold-plated watch, an Omega, to snap. He grabbed the expensive accessory before it had time to drop. This gave Alexandra a second to slip past him into the open air, the grateful black air.

The night was moonless. Gravel crackled at her back. A dark man touched her arm above the elbow; his touch was icy, or perhaps she was feverish. She jumped, frightened. He was chuckling. “The damnedest thing happened back in there just now. The old lady whose pearls let loose a minute ago stumbled over her own shoes in her excitement and everybody's afraid she broke her hip.”

“How sad,” Alexandra said, sincerely but absentmindedly: her heart was still beating from the fright he gave her.

Darryl Van Horne leaned close and pushed words into her ear. “Don't forget, sweetheart. Think bigger. I'll check into that gallery. We'll be in touch. Nitey-nite.”

“You actually went?” Alexandra asked Jane with excited pleasure, over the phone.

“Why not?” Jane said firmly. “He really did have the music for the Brahms Sonata in E Minor, and plays wonderfully.”

“You were alone? I keep picturing that perfume ad. The one which showed a young male violinist seducing his accompanist in her low-cut dress.”

“Don't be vulgar, Alexandra. He feels quite asexual to me. And there are all these workmen around, including your friend Joe Marino in his little hat with a feather in it. And there's this constant rumbling from the excavators moving boulders for the tennis court.”

“How long did you stay?”

“Oh,” Jane drawled, lying. “About an hour. Maybe an hour and a half. He really does have some feeling for music and his manner when you're alone with him isn't as clownish as it may have seemed at the concert. He said being in a church, even a Unitarian one, gave him the creeps. I think behind all that bluffing he's really rather shy.”

“Darling. You never give up, do you?”

“I don't see it's a question of giving up or not, it's a question of doing your thing. You do your thing cooking up your little figurines, but to make music you must have people. Other people.”

“They're not figurines.”

Jane was going on, “You and Sukie are always making fun of my being with Ray Neff and yet until this other man has shown up the only music I could make in town was with Ray.”

Alexandra was going on, “They're sculptures, just because they're not on a big scale like a Calder or Moore, you sound as vulgar as What's his name did, saying I should do something bigger so that some expensive New York gallery can take fifty percent, even if they were to sell, which I very much doubt.”

“Is that what he said? So he had a proposition for you too.”

“I wouldn't call it a proposition,just typical New York pushiness, sticking your nose in where it doesn't belong.”

“He's fascinated by us,” Jane Smart asserted. “Why we all live up here wasting our sweetness on the desert air.”

“Tell him Narragansett Bay has always taken oddballs in and what's he doing up here himself?”

“I wonder.” In her flat Massachusetts Bay style Jane slighted the r. “He almost gives the impression that things got too hot for him where he was. And he does love all the space in the big house. He owns three pianos, honestly; he has all these beautiful old books, with leather bindings and titles in Latin.”

“Did he give you anything to drink?”

“Just tea. Fidel, his manservant, that he talks Spanish to, brought it on a huge tray with a lot of liqueurs in funny old bottles looking as if they came out of a cellar full of cobwebs.”

“I thought you said you just had tea.”

“Well really, Lexa, maybe I did have a sip of blackberry cordial or something Fidel was very enthusiastic about called mescal; if I'd known I was going to have to make such a complete report I'd have written the name down. You're worse than the CIA.”

“I'm sorry, Jane. I'm very jealous, I suppose. And my period. It's lasted five days now, ever since the concert, and the ovary on the left side hurts. Do you think it could be menopause?”

“At thirty-eight? Honey, really.”

“Well then it must be cancer.”

“It couldn't be cancer.”

“Why couldn't it be?”

“Because you're you. You have too much magic to have cancer.”

“Some days my insides feel all in knots.”

“See Doc Pat, if you're seriously worried,” said Jane.

“What else did you learn at Van Horne's?” Alexandra asked.

“Well – promise you won't tell anybody.”

“Not even Sukie?”

“Especially not Sukie. It's about her. Darryl stayed at the reception later than we did. He helped clean up and noticed that while Brenda Parsley was in the church kitchen putting the plastic cups and paper plates into the trash bin, Ed and Sukie had both disappeared! Leaving poor Brenda to put the best face on it she could – but imagine, the humiliation!”

“They really should be more discreet.”

Jane paused, waiting for Alexandra to say something more, but Alexandra was preoccupied with thoughts of cancer cells spreading in her body like lethal stars.

“Ed Parsley is actually such a fumbler,” Jane finally said. “Why does she always hint that she has finished with him?”

“I think Sukie's attachment to Ed can be partly explained by her professional need to feel in the thick of things here,” Alexandra suggested. “But what is interesting is not that she continues to see Ed, but that this Van Horne was so quick to notice it. It's flattering. It's worth thinking about.”

“My dear, you're awfully not free about some things. You know, a man can be just human.”

“I know this theory, but I've never met one. In the end, they all turn out to be just male, even gays.”

“Remember, we thought him to be gay? And now he is chasing the three of us.”

“I didn't know he was chasing you. I thought you both were hunting for Brahms.”

“And so it is. Really, Alexandra, you're frightfully obsessed.”

“I'm a hopeless fool. I'll feel better tomorrow. Now it's my turn to gather you all, don't forget.”

“Oh dear, I've nearly forgotten. That's why I've called you. I won't be able to come.”

“Can't make it on Thursday? What's the matter?”

“Well, you'll get suspicious again. It's Darryl again. He's got these wonderful bagatelles by Weber, and he wants us to play them together. I suggested Friday, but he said he was expecting some important Japanese investors on Friday.”

“I thought Thursdays were sacred, but as there's nothing sacred in the world, there's no point in organizing Thursdays,” Alexandra said, and added that she had no more time to talk.

An hour later, when Joe Marino was making love to her, Alexandra looked absent-mindedly over his naked shoulder and suddenly, with her inner sight, she saw Lenox mansion, clearly as a calendar picture, with a wisp of smoke, as she saw it on that day on the beach. As a result, she was not very responsive to Joe's efforts, and he came awkwardly, which offended his Mediterranean pride. Alexandra assured him that he was wonderful, that it was all her fault. It was the third summer since their affair started, and it was time for Alexandra to stop it, but she liked Joe's taste – sweetly salty like nougat. His aura was devoid of malice; its color was good. His thoughts as well as his hands always searched certain fitness. Her fate brought Alexandra from chrome-plated fittings producer to their installer.

After Joe left, Alexandra read Sukie's article in the Word “Inventor, musician, arts lover is renovating the old Lenox Mansion.” Driven by jealousy, she called her friend.

“So you went there,” – she reproached.

“My dear, it was my task.”

“Who was the author of the task?”

“I was,” – Sukie admitted. “Clyde wasn't sure it was important news. Moreover, it sometimes happened that after an article about some wonderful house that house was burgled and the newspaper was sued.”

Clyde Gabriel, a tired sinewy man, married to a revolting philanthropist, was the editor of the Word. Sukie asked Alexandra's opinion about the article. Her friend praised it but remarked that it was a bit too long, and then asked how Van Horne had behaved. Sukie said he had gabbled on nonstop. The tennis court was nearly made, and he wanted the three of them to come and play tennis while the weather still held.

“He seems to take a great interest in us, and I've told him something about us, just what everybody knows: our divorces and what comfort we are to each other, especially you. I can't say Jane has been a great comfort lately. Something tells me, behind our backs, she's been looking for a husband.”

“Have you told him something dirty about us?”

“And is there anything dirty? No, of course I told him no such thing. But then, he isn't that curious. It seems to me that it's you he really likes.”

“But I don't like him. I hate such dark faces. And I can't stand New York impertinence.”

“And I like his manner of swift change of topics. Now he shows you his paintings, now – his laboratories, now he plays the piano. And then suddenly he started running around the house and kept asking if I would like to have a look at the environs from the cupola.”

“I hope you didn't climb to the cupola with him on your first date?”

“It wasn't a date; it was a task.”

“What sort of questions did he ask about us? And what did you find permissible to tell him?”

“I told him we are happy together and prefer female company to males, and so on.”

“Did he take offence?”

“No. He said he also preferred women to men. Women are by far more perfect mechanisms.”

“Did he really say mechanisms?”

“Something like that. Oh dear! I must fly! I've got to interview the Harvest Festival Committee organizers at the Unitarian church.”

“May I ask what are you feeling towards Ed Parsley these days?”

“Just as always. Aloof tenderness. Brenda is such an unbearable kibitzer.”

“Didn't he tell you in what way she is such an unbearable kibitzer?”

Usually, the witches were reserved as to talking about their sexual experiences. But Sukie, feeling Alexandra's annoyance, decided to break that rule and started explaining.

“Lexa, she doesn't do anything for him. And he, before entering the seminary, played up quite a lot, so he knows what he is deprived of. I can't reject him all the time, he is so pitiful.”

Healing was in their nature, and if society accused them of breaking emotionally cold and impotent but seemingly unbreakable unions between husbands and wives and burnt them alive by their malignant slander, then it was the price they had to pay. The wish to cure, to apply a healing lotion of an unwillingly giving in flesh to the wound of male lust, to allow the flaming male spirit to be thrilled by the sight of a naked witch gliding around a tastelessly furnished motel room was the basic and instinctive, purely feminine characteristic. So Alexandra let Sukie go and didn't reproach her young friend further for taking care of Ed Parsley.

In the silence of the house which was yet to be child free for over more than two hours, Alexandra was fighting depression. She was choking from her own uselessness. To cheer herself up she decided to eat something. She made a sandwich from cereals with a slice of turkey breast and lettuce. She was amazed at how many tiring movements it takes to prepare lunch: to get the meat from the fridge, to take off the scotch from the paper wrapping, to find mayonnaise among the jam and salad oil bottles on the shelf; with nails, to tear off the film from the lettuce head, to put it all on the kitchen counter-top, to get a plate and a knife for mayonnaise, to find a fork for fishing a long thin pickle from a wide jar, and then to make coffee in order to wash down the taste of the turkey and pickle.

Alexandra took away the ingredients of her lunch and the instruments used to satisfy her hunger, tidied up the house after a fashion. Why is it so necessary to sleep in beds, which are to be made, and to eat from plates, which you have to wash up? Did Inca women live harder? Van Horne was right – she really felt like a mechanism, a robot, cruelly doomed to be aware of every routine movement.

In the mountain town in the west where she was born, Alexandra was a tenderly loved daughter, the center her family life. Then her mother died, and her father sent her to a college in the east. There, in New London, in the course of four postcard beautiful academic seasons, as the captain of the grass hockey team and a student of fine arts, she had changed many colorful costumes, and in June of her undergraduate year she found herself all in white, after which various wife uniforms filled her wardrobe. She met Oz during a sailing trip on Long Island. While putting plastic glasses to his lips with a steady hand, he didn't show any signs of intoxication or fear, whereas she felt both. And that impressed her greatly. Oz was also delighted with her full figure and a masculine gate, characteristic of western women. The wind changed, the yacht began to roam. A cheering smile flashed on his red face, burnt by the sun and the gin consumed. He smiled shyly, with one corner of his mouth, like her father. And Alexandra fell right into his hands, vaguely expecting upward flight in life to follow: strength to strength. She shouldered motherhood burden, gardeners' club membership, carpooling and cocktail parties. In the morning she drank coffee with a visiting domestic help; in the evening it was brandy with her husband; she took drunken lust for a family well-being. The world around Alexandra grew – children jumped out from between her legs one after another; a story had to be added to the house; Oz got rises in step with inflation – and she went on feeding that world somehow, but it didn't feed her any longer. Her depressions became more frequent. The doctor prescribed some medicine and visits to a psychotherapist and/or spiritual director. From their house the church bells could be heard, and in the early winter dusk, before school returned her children to her, Alexandra, who was weakened and knocked out by the slightest movement, lay down on the bed, feeling shapeless and awfully smelling like an old boot or a squirrel hit on the highway a few days before.

In childhood, in their innocent mountain town, she would laze about in bed, excited by the feeling of her body – a stranger from nowhere that had arrived to hold her spirit inside. She would scrutinize herself in the mirror and had decided to be friends with her body: she might have got a worse body, mightn't she? Later, at the height of her marital life, Alexandra experienced disgust to her body, and her husband's marital proclivities seemed cruel mocking. Her body existed somewhere outside, beyond the windows – the flesh of her essence overgrown with leaves, to which the world still snuggled up. After the divorce she felt as if she had at last sailed outside through the window. On the morning after the court's decision Alexandra got up at four a.m. and pulled out the withered pea stems, singing in the light of the moon and the dawn starting in the east. This other body of hers also had a soul.

Alexandra lay in bed; in her imagination pink and white peonies of the window curtains looked like clown faces. They were devils; they encouraged her depression. She remembered the clay figurines that were waiting that her witchcraft would turn them into hand-made fantasies. A small glass of alcohol or a pill could raise her spirits and cheer her up, but she knew the price she would have to pay: in two hours she would feel even worse. In her imagination Alexandra heard the racket of machinery in the old Lenox mansion, and its inhabitant, the dark prince, who had taken away her two sisters, as if wished to insult her. But there was something in his insultingness and villainy that might help find food for spiritual exercises. Alexandra stayed in bed staring at the ceiling. She was waiting for something to happen.

Sukie brought her story of the Harvest Festival to Clyde Gabriel in his narrow office and found him slumped at his desk with his head in his arms. He heard her come in and looked up. His eyes were red-rimmed but whether from crying or sleep or hangover or last night's sleeplessness she could not tell. Without much raising his head off the desk he squinted at her pages. “This item doesn't deserve a two-line head. How about 'Peacenik Parson Plans Poppycock'?”

“I didn't talk to Ed; it was his committee chairpersons.”

“Oops, pardon me. I forgot you think Parsley's a great man.”

“That isn't altogether what I think,” Sukie said, standing extra erect. It was her fate to be attracted to unhappy or unlucky men, but they were not above pulling you down with them if you allowed it and didn't stand tall. When young, Clyde must have been quite good-looking, but his handsomeness – high square forehead, eyes a most delicate icy blue and framed by long lashes – was fading; he was getting that dried-out starving look of the steady drinker.

Clyde was a little over fifty. On the wall behind his desk, he had hung photographs of his daughter and son but none of his wife, though he was not divorced. Felicia Gabriel, the wife not honored with a photo on the wall, must have been lively and bright once but had developed into a sharp-featured little woman who could not stop talking. She was in this day and age outraged by everything: by the government and by the protesters, by the war, by the drugs, by dirty songs, by Playboy's being sold openly at the local drugstores, by the summer people scandalous in both costume and deed, by nothing's being quite as it would be if she were running everything. “Felicia was just on the phone,” Clyde volunteered, in indirect apology for the sad posture in which Sukie had found him, “furious about this Van Horne man's violation of the wetlands regulations. Also she says your story about him was too flattering; she says she's heard rumors about his past in New York that are pretty revolting.”

“Who'd she hear them from?”

“She won't say. She's protecting her sources. Maybe she got the poop straight from J. Edgar Hoover.” Such anti-wifely irony added little expression to his face, he had been ironical at Felicia's expense so often before. Something had died behind those long-lashed eyes. Sukie had never slept with Clyde. But she had this mothering feeling that she could give him health. He seemed to be sinking, gripping his steel desk like an overturned boat.

“You look exhausted,” she told him.

“I am. Suzanne, I really am. Felicia gets on the phone every night to one or another of her agents and leaves me to drink too much.”

“Take her to the movies,” Sukie suggested.

“I did, some perfectly harmless thing with Barbra Streisand-God, what a voice that woman has, it goes through you like a knife! – and she got so angry at the violence in one of the previews she went back and spent half the movie complaining to the manager. Then she came back for the last half and got angry because she thought they showed too much of Streisand's tits when she bent over, in one of these turn-of-the-century gowns. I mean, this wasn't even a PG movie, it was a G! It was all people singing on old trolley cars!” Clyde tried to laugh but his lips had lost the habit and the resultant expression of his face was so pitiful to look at, that Sukie had an impulse to give this dying man her perky breasts to suck; but she already had Ed Parsley in her life and one wry intelligent sufferer at a time was enough. Every night she was shrinking Ed Parsley in her mind, so that when the call came she could travel light to Darryl Van Horne's island. That's where the action was, not here in town, where the wan citizens of Eastwick trudged through their civic and Christian duties.

Sukie left the Word offices and stepped out onto Dock Street and walked to Nemo's for lunch. At the south end of the street, at Landing Square, the huge old beeches around the little granite war memorial formed a transparent wall of yellow, losing leaves to every zephyr. The water as it turned toward winter cold became a steelier blue, against which the white clapboard houses on the Bay side of the street looked dazzlingly chalky. Such beauty! Sukie thought, and felt frightened that her own beauty and vitality would not always be part of it, that some day she would be gone like a lost piece from the center of a picture puzzle.

Jane Smart was practicing Bach's Second Suite for unaccompanied cello, in D Minor, and suddenly she felt anger at it, at these notes, so black and certain and masculine, and at him, this dead square-faced old Lutheran with his wig and his Lord and his genius and two wives and seventeen children, for the hurt of the tips of her fingers. Suddenly she rebelled, put down the bow, poured herself a little dry vermouth, and went to the phone.

“We must do something about getting Alexandra over to Darryl's place,” – Jane told Sukie. “When I visited her on Wednesday, she looked just terribly down, sick with jealousy, first me and the Brahms and then your article. I couldn't get her to say a word about it and I didn't dare press the topic myself, why she hasn't been invited.”

“But darling, she has been, as much as you and I were. When he was showing me his art works for the article he even pulled out an expensive-looking catalogue for a show this Niki Whatever had had in Paris and said he was saving it for Lexa to see.”

“Well she won't go now until she's formally asked and I can tell it's eating the poor thing alive. I thought maybe you could say something.”

“Sweetie, why me? You're the one who knows him better, you're over there all the time now with all this music.”

“I've been there twice,” Jane said, hissing the last word. “You just have that way about you, you can get away with saying things to a man. I'm too definite somehow; it would come out as meaning too much.”

Sukie promised to think about it and hung up. She had to go out to an emergency session of the Highway Department, and she hoped to be able to leave early for a secret romantic meeting with Ed Parsley at Point Judith lighthouse. She went upstairs, already foreseeing Ed Parsley, his dark parked car, the accusatory beam of the Point Judith lighthouse, the dirty damp motel room he would have already paid eighteen dollars for, and the storms of his guilt she would have to endure after he was sexually satisfied.

On a cold afternoon Alexandra thought East Beach might be too windy so she stopped the Subaru on a shoulder of the beach road not far from the Lenox driveway. Here Coal could have a run. While she stood gazing in the direction of the old symmetrical house, its owner pulled up behind her silently in his old Mercedes.

“You've come at last,” he called, grinning. Beside him on the front seat sat a conical figure – a collie, but one in whose tricolor hair the black was unusually dominant. The collie yapped loudly when loyal Coal returned from his far-ranging carrion-sniffing to his mistress's side.

She gripped her pet's collar and lifted her voice to make it heard above the dogs' noise. “I was just parking here, I wasn't…” Her voice sounded weaker and younger than her own; she had been caught.

“I know, I know,” Van Horne said impatiently. “Come on over anyway and have a drink. You haven't had your tour yet.”

“I have to get back in a minute. The children will be coming home from school.” But even as she said it Alexandra was dragging Coal, suspicious and resisting, toward her car. His run wasn't over, he wanted to say.

“Better hop in my jalopy with me,” the man shouted. “The tide's coming in and you don't want to get stranded.”

“I don't? she wondered, obeying like an automaton, betraying her best friend by shutting Coal alone in the Subaru.

“The tide won't be in for hours,” she said, opening his car door, trying to return her voice to its womanly register.

“The bastard can fool you,” he said. “How have you been, anyway? You look depressed.”

“I do? How can you tell?”

“I can tell. Some people find fall depressing, others hate spring. I've always been a spring person myself. All that growth, you can feel Nature groaning; she doesn't want to do it, not again, no, anything but that, but she has to. It's a real torture, all that budding and pushing, the sap up the tree trunks, the weeds and the insects getting ready to fight it out once again, the seeds trying to remember how the hell the DNA is supposed to go, all that competition for a little bit of nitrogen; Christ, it's cruel. Maybe I'm too sensitive. I bet you revel in it. Women aren't that sensitive to things like that. Women take pain in their stride pretty much. Me, I can't stand it. I can't even bring myself to swat a housefly. The poor thing'll be dead in a couple days anyway.”

“I like May,” Alexandra admitted. “Except every year it does feel, as you say, more of an effort. For gardeners, anyway.”

As they drove past the nearly finished tennis court, Van Horne said, “It'll be ready in a couple of days; I think with you and your two friends we might have a foursome.”

“My goodness, are we up to such an honor? I'm really in no shape – ” she began, meaning her game. Ozzie and she for a time had played a lot of doubles with other couples, but in the years since, she had really played hardly at all.

“Then get in shape,” Van Horne said, misunderstanding. “Move around, get rid of that flub. Hell, thirty-eight is young.”

He knows my age, Alexandra thought, more relieved than offended. It was nice to have yourself known by a man; it was getting to be known that was embarrassing: all that shy verbalization over too many drinks, and then the bodies exposed with the hidden marks and sags like disappointing presents at Christmastime. But how much about love was not about the other but about yourself naked in his eyes: of shedding your clothes, and being you at last. With this domineering strange man she felt known, essentially, already. His being awful rather helped.

He stopped the car at the front door. Two steps led up to a paved, pillared porch. He opened the massive door, freshly painted black, and ushered her in. Inside the foyer, a sulfurous chemical smell greeted her; Van Horne didn't notice it, it was his element. He was not wearing baggy tweed today but a dark three-piece suit as if he had been somewhere on business. He showed her round the house, talking nonstop and widely gesturing right and left with his arms. He explained that the former ballroom would serve as his laboratories; there was nothing in that room as the equipment was still in crates. The room on the other side he called the study; he found it pretty, but again said that half his books would be in cartons in the basement till he got an air-control unit installed. In the dining room with a mahogany table he informed Alexandra that he preferred dinners on the intimate side, four, six people, where everybody had a chance to shine, instead of inviting a mob when mob psychology took over, a few leaders and a lot of sheep. He also boasted that he had some super vintage candelabra of the eighteenth-century, still packed; he wasn't going to get it up in full view until he had a burglar alarm installed.

Alexandra responded by polite noises and held herself a distance behind him in fear of being accidentally struck as the big man wheeled and gestured. And she noticed that in spite of all his talk of glories still to be unpacked, the rooms were badly underfurnished; Van Horne had the strong instincts of a creator but with only, it seemed, half the needed raw materials. Alexandra found this touching and saw in him something of herself, her monumental statues that could be held in the hand.

“Now,” he announced, booming as if to drown out these thoughts in her head, “here's the room I wanted you to see. ” It was a long living room, with an extraordinary fireplace pillared like the facade of a temple with a great mirror above the mantel, in which the lordly space of the room reflected. She looked at her own image and took off the bandanna, shaking down her hair, not fixed in a braid today. She looked younger in this antique, forgiving mirror. She looked up into it, pleased that the flesh beneath her chin did not show. In the bathroom mirror at home she looked terrible, and in the rear-view mirror in the Subaru, she looked worse yet, corpse-like in color, the eyes quite wild. As a little girl Alexandra had imagined that behind every mirror a different person waited to look back out, a different soul. Like so much of what we fear as a child, it turned out to be in a certain sense true.

Van Horne had put around the fireplace some modern armchairs and a four-cushioned sofa, brought from a New York apartment. But the room was mostly furnished with works of art, including several that took up floor space: a giant hamburger, made of violently colored vinyl, a white plaster woman at a real ironing board, with a stuffed cat rubbing at her ankles; a neon rainbow, unplugged and needing a dusting.

The man slapped an especially ugly part of the collection, a naked woman on her back with legs spread; she had been made up of chicken wire, flattened beer cans, an old porcelain chamber pot for her belly, pieces of chrome car bumper, items of underwear stiffened with lacquer and glue. Her face, staring straight up at the ceiling, was that of a plaster doll, with china-blue eyes and cherubic pink cheeks, cut off and fixed to a block of wood that had been crayoned to represent hair. “Here's the genius of the bunch for my money,” Van Horne said, wiping the corners of his mouth with a two-finger pinching motion. “That's the kind of thing you should be setting your sights toward. The richness, you know, the ambiguity. No offense, friend Lexa, but you're a Johnny-one-note with those little poppets of yours.”

“They're not poppets, and this statue is rude, a jest against women. My little figurines aren't jokes, they're meant affectionately,” she said. Yet her hand touched the big doll and found there the glossy yet resistant texture of life. On the walls of this long room, where perhaps Lenox family portraits used to hang, there now hung or protruded tasteless parodies of the ordinary – giant pay telephones in soft canvas, American flags duplicated in impasto, oversize dollar bills rendered with deadpan fidelity, plaster eyeglasses with not eyes but parted lips behind the lenses, our movie stars and bottle caps, our candies and newspapers and traffic signs. All that we wish to use and throw away with hardly a glance was here bloated and bright: permanized garbage. Van Horne led Alexandra through his collection, down one wall and back the other; and in truth she saw that he had acquired of this mocking art specimens of good quality. He had money and needed a woman to help him spend it. Across his dark vest curved the gold chain of an antique watch; he was an inheritor, though ill at ease with his inheritance. A wife could put him at ease.

The tea with rum came, but formed a more sedate ceremony than she had imagined from Sukie's description. Fidel materialized with that ideal silence of servants. The long-haired cat called Thumbkin, with the deformed paws mentioned in the Word, jumped onto Alexandra's lap just as she lifted her cup to her lips. She felt at peace here, which she had not expected, here in these rooms almost empty except their overload of sardonic art. Her host seemed pleasanter too. The manner of a man who wants to sleep with you is aggressive, testing, predicting his eventual anger if he succeeds, and there seemed little of that in Van Horne's manner today. He looked tired. She fantasized that the business appointment for which he had put on his solemn three-piece suit had been a disappointment, perhaps a petition for a bank loan that had been refused. He poured extra rum into his tea from the bottle of Mount Gay his butler had put at his elbow. “How did you come to acquire such a large and wonderful collection?” Alexandra asked him.

“My investment adviser” was his disappointing answer. “Smartest thing financially you can ever do except finding oil in your back yard is to buy a name artist before he has the name. And anyway, I love the junk.”

“I see you do,” Alexandra said, trying to help him. How could she ever rouse this heavy rambling man to fall in love with her? He was like a house with too many rooms, and the rooms with too many doors.

“I hated,” he volunteered, “that abstract stuff they were trying to sell us in the Fifties; Christ, it all reminded me of Eisenhower,[3] a big blah. I want art to show me something, to tell me where I'm, even if it's Hell, right?”

“I guess so. I'm really very dilettantish,” Alexandra said, less comfortable now that he did seem to be rousing. What underwear had she put on? When had she last had a bath?

“So when this stuff came along, I thought, Jesus, this is the thing for me. So fucking cheerful, you know – going down but going down with a smile.” He continued talking of the impression those things made on him when he had visited the modern art galleries.

He had felt that Alexandra did not mind his talking dirty. She in fact rather liked it; it had a secret sweetness, like the scent of carrion on Coal's coat. She must go. Her dog's big heart would break in that little locked car.

Van Horne told her about another creation of modern art that had impressed him greatly during his visit to Los Angeles: the entire sawed-off Dodge car sitting on a mat of artificial turf with a couple inside having an intercourse, and a little other mat of turf about the size of a checkerboard, with a single empty beer bottle on it, which showed that they had been drinking and threw it out. He called it a work of genius, and predicted that such works would be Mona Lisas of the future.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «Литрес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на Литрес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

Примечания

1

Gilded Age – ironically for 1870–1898 in the USA

Back

2

Gotham – nickname for New York

Back

3

Eisenhower – the 34th President of the USA (1953–1961) Dwight David Eisenhower

Back