The Witches of Eastwick (28 page)

"It may be a bit... special," Sukie offered, her plump upper lip closing upon her lower in a solemn way that looked nevertheless amused.

"What's special?" Van Home asked, pain showing, his face about to fly apart. "Tiny Tim was special. Liberace was special. Lee Harvey Oswald was special.

To get any attention at all in this day and age you got to be way out."

"This establishment needs moolah?" Jane Smart asked sharply.

"So I'm told, toots."

"Honey, by whom?" Sukie asked.

"Oh," he said, embarrassed, squinting out through the candlelight as if he could see nothing but reflections, "a bunch of people. Banker types. Prospective partners." Abruptly, in tune perhaps with the old tuxedo, he ducked into horror-movie clowning, (jobbing in his black outfit as if crippled, his legs hinged the wrong way. "That's enough business," he said. "Let's go into the living room. Let's get
smashed."

Something was up. Alexandra fell a sliding start within her; an immense slick slope of depression was revealed as if by the sliding upwards of an automatic garage door, the door activated by a kind of electric eye of her own internal sensing and giving on a wide underground ramp whose downward trend there was no reversing, not by pills or sunshine or a good night's sleep. Her life had been built on sand and she knew that everything she saw tonight was going to strike her as sad.

The dusty ugly works of Pop Art in the living room were sad, and the way several fluorescent tubes in the track lighting overhead were out or flickered, buzzing. The great long room needed more people to fill it with the revelry it had been designed for; it seemed to Alexandra suddenly an ill-attended church, like those that Colorado pioneers had built along the mountain roads and where no one came any more, an ebbing more than a renunciation, everybody too busy changing the plugs in their pickup truck or recovering from Saturday night, the parking places outside gone over to grass, the pews with their racks still stocked with hymnals visible inside. "Where's Jenny?" she asked aloud.

"The lady still cleaning up in de laboratory," Rebecca said. "She work so hard, I worry sickness take her."

"How's it all going?" Sukie asked Darryl. "When can I paint my roof with kilowatts? People still stop me on the street and ask about that because of the story I wrote on you."

"Yeah," he snarled, ventriloquistically, so the voice emerged from well beside his head, "and those old fogies you sold the Gabriel dump to bad-mouthing the whole idea, I hear. Fuck 'em. They laughed at Leonardo. They laughed at Leibniz. They laughed at the guy who invented the zipper, what the hell was his name? One of invention's unsung greats. Actually, I've been wondering if microorganisms aren't the way to go—use a mechanism that's already set in place and self-replicates. Btogas technology: you know who's way ahead in that department? The Chinese, can you believe it?"

"Couldn't we just use less electricity?" Sukie asked, interviewing out of habit. "And use our bodies more? Nobody needs an electric carving knife."

"You need one if your neighbor has one," Van Home said. "And then you need another to replace the one you get. And another. And another. Fidel!
Deseo beber!"

The servant in his khaki pajamas, abje
ctly shapeless and yet also with
a whisper of military menace, brought drinks, and a tray of
huevos picantes
and palm hearts. Without Jenny here, surprisingly, conversation lagged; they had grown used to her, as someone to display themselves to, to amuse and shock and instruct. Her wide-eyed silence was missed. Alexandra, hoping that art, any art, might staunch the internal bleeding of her melancholy, moved among the giant hamburgers and ceramic dartboards as if she had never seen them before; and indeed some of them she hadn't. On a four-foot plinth of plywood painted black, beneath a plastic pastry bell, rested an ironically realistic replica—a three-dimensional Wayne Thiebaud—of a white-frosted wedding cake. Instead of the conventional bride and groom, however, two nude figures stood on the topmost tier, the female pink and blonde and rounded and the black-haired man a darker pink, but for the dead-white centimeter of his semi-erect penis. Alexandra wondered what the material of this fabrication was: the cake lacked the scoring of cast bronze and also the glaze of enamelled ceramic. Acryl-icked plaster was her guess. Seeing that no one but Rebecca, passing a tray of tiny crabs stuffed with
xu-xu
paste, was observing her, Alexandra lifted the bell and touched the frostinglike rim of the object. A tender dab of it came away on her finger. She put the finger in her mouth. Sugar. It was real frosting, a real cake, and fresh.

Darryl, with wide splaying gestures, was outlining another energy approach to Sukie and Jane. "With geothermal, once you get the shaft dug—and why the hell not? they make tunnels twenty miles long over in the Alps every day of the week—your only problem is keeping the energy from burning up the converter. Metal will melt like lead soldiers on Venus. You know what the answer is? Unbelievably simple. Stone. You got to make all your machinery, all the gearing and turbines, out of stone. They can do it! They can chisel granite now as fine as they can mill steel. They can make springs out of poured cement, would you believe?—particle size is what it all boils down to. Metal has had it, just like flint when the Bronze Age came in."

Another work of art Alexandra hadn't noticed before was a glossy female nude, a mannequin without the usual matte skin and the hinged limbs, a Kienholz in its assaultiveness but smooth and minimally defined in the manner of Tom Wesselmann, crouching as if to be fucked from behind, her face blank and bland, her back flat enough to be a tabletop. The indentation of her spine was straight as
the
groove for blood in a butcher's block. The buttocks suggested two white motorcycle helmets welded together. The statue stirred Alexandra with its blasphemous simplification of her own, female form. She took another margarita from Fidel's tray, savored the salt (it is a myth and absurd slander that witches abhor salt; saltpeter and cod liver oil, both associated with Christian virtue, are what they cannot abide), and sauntered up to their host. "I feel sexy and sad," she said. "I want to take my bath and smoke my joint and get h
ome. I swore to the babysitter I’
d be home by ten-thirty; she was the fifth girl I tried and I could hear her mother shouting at her in the background. These parents don't want them to come near us."

"You're breaking my heart," Van Home said, looking sweaty and confused after his gaze into the geo-thermal furnace. "Don't rush things. I don't feel smashed yet. There's a schedule here. Jenny's about to come down."

Alexandra saw a new light in Van Home's glassy bloodshot eyes; he looked scared. But what could scare
him?

Jenny's tread was silent on the carpeted curved front staircase; she came into the long room with he
r hair pulled back like Eva Pero
n's and w
earing a powder-blue bathrobe th
at swept the floor. Above each of her breasts the robe bore as decoration three embroidered cuts like large buttonholes, which reminded Alexandra of military chevrons. Jenny's face, with its wide round brow and firm triangular chin, was shiny-clean and devoid of make-up; nor did a smile adorn it. "Darryl, don't get drunk," she said. "You make even less sense when you're drunk than when you're sober."

"But he gets
inspired,"
Sukie said with her practiced sauciness, feeling her way with this new woman, in residence and somehow in charge.

Jenny ignored her, looking around, past their heads. "Where's dear Chris?"

From the corner Rebecca said, "Young man in de liberry reading his magazines."

Jenny took two steps forward and said, "Alexandra. Look." She untied her cloth belt and spread the robe's wings wide, revealing her white body with its roundnesses, its rings of baby fat, its cloud of soft hair smaller than a man's hand. She asked Alexandra to look at that translucent wart under her breast. "Do you think it's getting bigger or am I imagining it? And up here," she said, guiding the other woman's fingers into her armpit. "Do you feel a little lump?"

"It's hard to say," Alexandra said, flustered, for such touching occurred in the steamy dark of the tub room but not in the bald fluorescent light here. "We're all so full of little lumps just naturally. I don't feel anything."

"You aren't concentrating," Jenny said, and with a gesture that in another context would have seemed loving took Alexandra's wrist in her fingers and led her right hand to the other armpit. "There's sort of the same thing there too. Please, Lexa. Concentrate."

A faint bristle of shaven hair. A silkiness of applied powder. Underneath, lumps, veins, glands, nodules. Nothing in nature is quite homogeneous; the universe was tossed off freehand. "Hurt?" she asked.

"I'm not sure. I feel something."

"I don't think it's anything," Alexandra pronounced.

"Could it be connected with this somehow?" Jenny lifted her firm conical breast to further expose her transparent wart, a tiny cauliflower or pug face of pink flesh gone awry.

"I don't think so. We all get those."

Suddenly impatient, Jenny closed her bathrobe and pulled the belt tight. She turned to Van Home. "Have you told them?"

"My dear, my dear," he said, wiping the corners of his smiling mouth with a trembling thumb and finger. "We must make a ceremony of it."

"The fumes today have given me a headache and I think we've all had enough ceremonies. Fidel, just bring me a glass of soda water,
aqua gaseosa, o horchata, por favor. Pronto, gracias."

"The wedding cake," exclaimed Alexandra, with an icy thrill of clairvoyance.

"Now you're cooking, little Sandy," Van Home said. "You've got it. I saw you poke and lick that finger," he teased.

"It wasn't that so much as Jenny's manner. Still, I can't believe it. I know it but I can't believe it."

"You better believe it, ladies. The kid here and I were married as of yesterday afternoon at three-thirty p.m. The craziest little justice of the peace up in Apponaug. He stuttered. I never thought you could have a stutter and still get the license. D-d-d-do you, D-D-D-D-D—"

"Oh Darryl, you didn't!" Sukie cried, her lips pulled so far back in a mirthless grin that the hollows at the top of her upper gums showed.

Jane Smart hissed at Alexandra's side.

"How could you two do that to us?" Sukie asked.

The word "us" surprised Alexandra, who felt this announcement as a sudden sore place in her abdomen alone.

"So sneakily," Sukie went on, her c
heerful party manner slightly sti
ff on her face. "We would at least have given her a shower."

"Or some casserole dishes," Alexandra said bravely.

"She did it," Jane was saying seemingly to herself but of course for Alexandra and the others to overhear. "She actually managed to pull it off."

Jenny defended herself; the color in her cheeks was high. "It wasn't so much managing, it just came to seem natural, me here all the time anyway, and naturally..."

"Naturally nature took its nasty natural course," Jane spit out.

"Darryl, what's in it for you?" Sukie asked him, in her frank and manly reporter's voice.

"Oh, you know," he said sheepishly. "The standard stuff. Settle down. Security. Look at her. She's beautiful."

"Bullshit," Jane Smart said slowly, the word simmering.

"With all respect, Darryl, and I
am
fond of our little Jenny," Sukie said, "she is a bit of a blah."

"Come on, cut it out, what sort of reception is this?" the big man said helplessly, while his robed bride beside him didn't flinch, taking shelter as she always had behind the brittle shield of innocence, the snobbery of ignorance. It was not that her brain was less efficient than theirs, within its limits it was more so; but it was like the keyboard of an adding machine as opposed to that of typewriters. Van Home was trying to collect his dignity. "Listen, you bitches," he said. "What's this attitude that I owe you anything? I took you in, I gave you eats and a little relief from your lousy lives—"

"Who made them lousy?" Jane Smart swiftly asked. "Not me. I'm new in town."

Fidel brought in a tray of long-stemmed glasses of champagne. Alexandra took one and tossed its contents at Van Home's face; the rarefied liquid fell short, wetting only the area of his fly and one pants leg. All she had achieved was to make him seem the victim and not herself. She threw the glass vehemently at
the
sculpture of intertwined automobile bumpers; here her aim was better, but the glass in mid-flight turned into a barn swallow,
and flicked itself away. Thumb
kin, who had been licking herself on the satin love seat, worrying with avid tongue the tiny pink gap in her raiment of long white fur, perked up and gave chase; with that comical deadly solemnity of cats, green eyes flattened across the lop, she stalked along the back of the curved four-cushion sofa and batted in frustration at the air when she reached the edge. The bird took shelter b
y perching upon a hanging Styro
foam cloud by Marjorie Strider.

"Hey, this isn't at all the way I pictured it," Van Home complained.