The Witches of Eastwick (27 page)

"Whatever happened to you and those nice Neffs?" Alexandra asked maliciously.

Harshly Jane laughed, as it were hawked into the mouthpiece of the telephone.
"He
can't get it up at all these days; Greta has reached the point where she tells anybody in town who'll listen, and she practically asked the boy doing checkout at the Superette to come back to the house and fuck her."

The
aiguillette
had been tied; but who had tied it? Witchcraft, once engendered in a community, has a way of running wild, out of control of those who have called it into being, running so freely as to
confound victim and victimize!’
.

"Poor Greta," Alexandra heard herself mumble. Little devils were gnawing at her stomach; she felt uneasy, she wanted to get back to her bubbies and then, once they were snug in the Swedish kiln, to raking the winter-fallen twigs out of her lawn, and attacking the thatch with a pitchfork.

But Jane was on her own attack. "Don't give me that pitying earth-mother crap," she said, shockingly. "What are we going to
do
about Jennifer's moving in?"

"But sweetest, what can we do? Except show how hurt we are and have everybody laughing at us. Don't you think the town won't be amused enough anyway? Joe tells me some of the things people whisper. Gina calls us the
streghe
and is afraid we're going to turn the baby in her tummy into a little pig or a thalidomide case or something."

"Now you're talking," Jane Smart said.

Alexandra read her mind. "Some sort of spell. But what difference would it make? Jenny's there, you say. She has
his
protection."

"Oh it will make a difference believe you me," Jane Smart pronounced in one long shaking utterance of warning like a tremulous phrase drawn from a single swoop of her bow.

"What does Sukie think?"

"Sukie thinks just as I do. That it's an outrage. That we've been betrayed. We've nursed a viper, my dear, in our
boso
oms.
And I don't mean the vindow viper."

This allusion did make Alexandra nostalgic for the nights, which in truth had become rarer as winter wore on, when they would all listen, nude and soaking and languid with pot and California Chablis, to Tiny Tim's many voices surrounding them in the stereophonic darkness, warbling and booming and massaging their interiors; the stereophonic vibrations brought into relief their hearts and lungs and livers, slippery fatty presences within that purple inner space for which the dim-lit tub room with its asymmetrical cushions was a kind of amplification. "I would think things will go on much as before," she reassured Jane. "He loves
us,
after all. And it's not as if Jenny does half the things we do for him; it was us she liked to cater to. The way that upstairs rambles, it's not as if they'll all be sharing quarters or anything."

"Oh Lexa," Jane sighed, fond in despair. "It's really
you
who're
the innocent."

Having hung
-
up, Alexandra found herself less than reassured. The hope that the dark stranger would eventually claim her cowered in its corner of her imagining; could it be that her queenly patience would earn itself no more reward than being used and discarded? The October day when he had driven her up to the front door as to something they mutually possessed, and when she had to wade away through the tide as if the very elements were begging her to stay: could such treasured auguries be empty? How short life is, how quickly its signs exhaust their meaning. She caressed the underside of her left breast and seemed to detect a small lump there. Vexed, frightened, she met the bright beady gaze of a gray squirrel that had stolen into the feeder to rummage amid the sunflower-seed husks. He was a plump little gentleman in a gray suit with white shirtfront, come bright-eyed to dine. The effrontery, the greed. His tiny gray hands, mindless and dry as bird feet, were arrested halfway to his chest by sudden awareness of her gaze, her psyche's impingement; his eyes were set sideways in the oval skull so as to seem in their convexity opaque turrets, slanted and gleaming. The spark of life inside the tiny skull wanted to flee, to twitch away to safety, but Alexandra's sudden focus froze the spark even through glass. A dim little spirit, programmed for feeding and evasion and seasonal copulation, was meeting a greater.
Morte, morte, morte,
Alexandra said firmly in her mind, and the squirrel dropped like an instantly emptied sack. One last spasm of his limbs flipped a few husks over the edge of the plastic feeder tray, and the luxuriant frosty plume of a tail flickered back and forth a few more seconds; then the animal was still, the dead weight making the feeder with its conical green plastic roof swing on the wire strung between two posts of an arbor. The program was cancelled.

Alexandra felt no remorse; it was a delicious power she had. But now she would have to put on her Wellingtons and go outside and with her own hand lift the verminous body by its tail and walk to the edge of her yard and throw it into the bushes over the stone wall, where the bog began. There was so much dirt in life, so many eraser crumbs and stray coffee grounds and dead wasps trapped inside the storm windows, that it seemed all of a person's time—all of a woman's time, at any rate—was spent in reallocation, taking things from one place to another, dirt being as her mother had said simply matter in the wrong place.

Comfortingly, that very night, while the children were lurking around Alexandra demanding, depending upon their ages, the car, help with their homework, or to be put to bed, Van Home called her, which was unusual, since his sabbats usually arose as if spontaneously, without the deigning of his personal invitation, but through a telepathic, or telephonic, merge of the desires of his devotees. They would find themselves there without quite knowing how they came to be there. Their cars—Alexandra's pumpkin-colored Subaru, Sukie's gray Corvair, Jane's moss-green Valiant—would take them, pulled by a tide of psychic forces. "Come on over Sunday night," Darryl growled, in that New York taxi-driver rasp of his. "It's a helluva depressing day, and I got some stuff I want to try out on the gang."

"It's not easy," Alexandra said, "to get a sitter on a Sunday night. They've got to get up for school in the morning and want to stay home and watch Archie Bunker." In her unprecedented resistance she heard resentment, an anger that Jane Smart had planted but whose growth was being fed now with her own veins.

"Ah come on. Those kids of yours are ancient, how come they still need sitters?"

"I can't saddle Marcy with the three younger, they don't accept her discipline. Also she may want to drive over to a friend's house and I don't want her not to be able to; it's not fair to burden a child with your own responsibilities."

"What gender friend the kid seeing?"

"It's none of your business. A girlfriend, as it happens."

"Christ, don't snap at
me,
it wasn't me conned you into having those little twerps."

"They're
not
twerps, Darryl. And I do neglect
the
m."

Interestingly, he did not seem to mind being talked back to, which she had not done before: perhaps it was the way to his heart. "Who's to say," he responded mildly, "what's neglect? If m
y mother had neglected me a littl
e more I might be a better all-round guy."

"You're an O.K. guy." It felt forced from her, but she liked it that he had bothered to seek reassurance.

'Thanks a fuck of a lot," he answered with a jolting coarseness. "We'll see you when you get here."

"Don't be huffy."

"Who's huffy? Take it or leave it. Sunday around seven. Dress informal."

She wondered why next Sunday should be depressing to him. She looked at the kitchen calendar. The numerals were interlaced with lilies.

Easter evening turned out to be a warm spring night with a south wind pulling the moon backwards through wild, blanched clouds. The tide had left silver puddles on the causeway. New green marsh grass was starting up in the spaces between the rocks; Alexandra's headlights swung shadows among the boulders and across the tree-intertwined entrance gate. The driveway curved past where the egrets used to nest and now the collapsed tennis-court bubble lay creased and hardened like a lava flow; then her car climbed, circling the mall lined by noseless statues. As the stately silhouette of the house loomed, the grid of its windows all alight, her heart lifted into its holiday flutter; always, coming here, night or day, she expected to meet the momentous someone who was, she realized, herself, herself unadorned and untrammelled, forgiven and nude, erect and perfect in weight and open to any courteous offer: the beautiful stranger, her secret self. Not all the next day's weariness could cure her of the exalted expectation that the Lenox place aroused. Your cares evaporated in the entry hall, where the sulphurous scents greeted you, and an apparent elephant's-foot umbrella stand holding a cluster of old-fashioned knobs and handles on second glance turned out to be a single painted casting, even to the little strap and snap button holding the umbrella furled—one more mocking work of art.

Fidel took her jacket, a man's zippered wind-breaker. More and more Alexandra found men's clothes comfortable; First she began to buy their shoes and gloves, then corduroy and chino trousers that weren't so nipped at the waist as women's slacks were, and lately the nice, roomy, efficient jackets men hunt and work in. Why should they have all the comfort while we martyr ourselves with spike heels and all the rest of the slave-fashions sadistic fags wish upon us?

"Buenos noches, senora,"
Fidel said.
"Es muy agradable tenerla nuevamente en esta casa."

"The mister have all sort of gay party planned," Rebecca said behind him. "Oh there big changes afoot."

Jane and Sukie were already in the music room, where some oval-backed chairs with a flaking silvery finish had been set out; Chris Gabriel slouched in a corner near a lamp, reading
Rolling Stone.
The rest of the room was candlelit; candles in all the colors of jellybeans had been found for the cobwebbed sconces along the wall, each draft-tormented little flame doubled by a tin mirror. The aura of the flames was an acrid complementary color: green eating into the orange glow yet constantly repelled, like the viscid contention amid unmixing chemicals. Darryl, wearing a tuxedo of an old-fashioned double-breasted cut, its black dull as soot but for the broad lapels, came up and gave her his cold kiss. Even his spit on her cheek
was cold. Jane's aura was slightl
y muddy with anger and Sukie's rosy and amused, as usual. They had all, in their sweaters and dungarees, evidently under-dressed for the occasion.

The tuxedo did give Darryl a less patchy and shambling air than usual. He cleared his froggy throat and announced, "Howzabout a little concert? I've been working up some ideas here and I want to get you girls' feedback. The first num
ber is entitl
ed"—he froze in mid-gesture, his sharp little greenish teeth gleaming, his spectacles for the night so small that the pale-plastic frames seemed to have his eyes trapped—"The A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square Boogie.'"

Masses of notes were struck off as if more than two hands were playing, the left hand setting up a deep cloudy stride rhythm, airy but dark like a thunder-head growing closer above the treetops, and then the right hand picking out, in halting broken phrases so that the tune only gradually emerged, the rainbow of the melody. You could see it, the misty English park, the pearly London sky, the dancing cheek-to-cheek, and at the same time feel the American rumble, the good gritty whorehouse tinkling only this continent could have cooked up, in the tasselled brothels of a southern river town. The melody drew closer to the bass, the bass moved up and swallowed the nightingale, a wonderfully complicated flurry ensued while Van Home's pasty seamed face dripped sweat onto the keyboard and his grunts of effort smudged the music; Alexandra pictured his hands as white waxy machines, the phalanges and flexor tendons tugging and flattening and directly connected to the rods and felts and strings of the piano, this immense plangent voice one hyperdeveloped fingernail. The
the
mes drew apart,
the rainbow reappeared, the th
underhead faded into harmless air, the melody was resulted in an odd high minor key reached through an askew series of six descending, fading chords struck across the collapsing syncopation.

Silence, but for the hum of the piano's pounded harp.

"Fantastic," Jane Smart said dryly.

"Really, baby," Sukie urged upon their host, exposed and blinking now that his exertion was over. "I've never heard anything like it."

"I could cry," Alexandra said sincerely, he had stirred such memories within her, and such inklings of her future; music lights up with its pulsing lamp the cave of our being.

Darryl seemed disconcerted by their praise, as if he might be dissolved in it. He shook his shaggy head like a dog drying itself, and then seemed to press his jaw back into place with the same two fingers that wiped the corners of his mouth. "That one mixed pretty well," he admitted. "O.K., let's try this one now. It's called 'The How High the Moon March.'" This mix went less well, though the same wizardry was in operation. A wizardry, Alexandra thought, of theft and transformation, with nothing of guileless creative engendering about it, only a boldness of monstrous combination. The third offering was the Beatles' tender "Yesterday," broken into the stutter-rhythms of a samba; it made them all laugh, which hadn't been the effect of the first and which wasn't perhaps the intention. "So," Van Home said, rising from the bench. "That's the idea. If I could work up a dozen or so of these a friend of mine in New York says he has an in with a recording executive and maybe we can raise a modicum of moolah to keep this establishment afloat. So what's your input?"