The Witches of Eastwick

by John Updike

  Jane's dark eyes lightened, indeed glowed. "Not prissy, you think," she said. "Our leader keeps saying my intonation is prissy."

  "What an asshole," pronounced Van Home, wip­ing spit from the corners of his mouth. "You have precision but that's not prissy necessarily; precision is where passion begins. Without precision, beaucoup de rien, huh? Even your thumb, on your thumb position: you really keep that pressure on, where a lot of men crump out, it hurts too much." He pulled her left hand closer to his face and caressed the side of her thumb. "See that?" he said to Alexandra, brandishing Jane's hand as if it were detached, a dead thing to be admired. "That is one beautiful callus."

  Jane tugged her hand back, feeling eyes gathering upon them. The Unitarian minister, Ed Parsley, was taking notice of the scene. Van Home perhaps relished an audience, for he dramatically let Jane's left hand drop and seized the unguarded right, as it hung at Jane's side, to shake it in her own astonished face. "It's this hand," he almost shouted. "It's this hand's the fly in the ointment. Your lowing. God! Your spiccato sounds like marcato, your legato like ditachi. Honey, string those phrases together, you're not playing just notes, one after the other, biddledy um-um-um, you're playing phrases, you're playing human outcries!"

  As if in silent outcry Jane's prim thin mouth dropped open and Alexandra saw tears form second lenses upon her eyes, whose brown was always a little lighter in color than you remembered, a tortoiseshell color.

  Reverend Parsley joined them. He was a youngish man with a slippery air of doom about him; his face was like a handsome face distorted in a slightly warped mirror—too long from sideburn to nostril, as if per­petually being tugged forward, and the too full and expressive lips caught in the relentless smile of one who knows he is in the wrong place, on the wrong platform of the bus station in a country where no known language is spoken. Though just into his thir­ties, he was too old to be a window-trashing LSD-imbibing soldier in the Movement and this added to his sense of displacement and inadequacy, though he was always organizing peace marches and vigils and read-ins and proposing to his parish of dry as dust duti­ful souls that they let their pretty old church become a sanctuary, with cots and hot plates and chemical toilet facilities, for the hordes of draft evaders. Instead, tasteful cultural events were sheltered here, where the acoustics were accidentally marvellous; those old builders perhaps did have secrets. But Alexandra, having been raised in the stark land mined for a thou­sand cowboy movies, was inclined to think that the past is often romanticized, that when it was the present it had that same curious hollowness we all feel now.

  Ed looked up—he was not tall; this was another of his disappointments—at Darryl Van Home quizzi­cally. Then he addressed Jane Smart with a sharp shouldering-aside note in his voice: "Beautiful, Jane. Just a damn beautiful job all four of you did. As I was saying to Clyde Gabriel just now, I wish there had been a better way to advertise, to get more of the Newport crowd over here, though I know his paper did all it could, he took it that I was criticizing; he seems a lot on edge lately." Sukie was sleeping with Ed, Alexandra knew, and perhaps Jane had slept with him in the past. There was a quality men's voices had when you had slept with them, even years ago: the grain came up, like that of unpainted wood left out in the weather. Ed's aura—Alexandra couldn't stop seeing auras, it went with menstrual cramps—ema­nated in sickly chartreuse waves of anxiety and nar­cissism from his hair, which was combed away from an inflexible part and was somehow colorless without being gray. Jane was still fighting back tears and in the awkwardness Alexandra had become the intro­ducer, this strange outsider's sponsor.

  "Reverend Parsley—"

  "Come on, Alexandra. We're better friends than that. The name's Ed, please." Sukie must talk about her a little while sleeping with him, so he felt this familiarity. Everywhere you turn people know you better than you know them; there is all this human spying. Alexandra could not make herself say "Ed," his aura of doom was so repulsive to her.

  "—this is Mr. Van Home, who's just moved into the Lenox place, you've probably heard."

  "Indeed I have heard, and it's a delightful surprise to have you here, sir. Nobody had said you were a music-lover."

  "In a half-ass way, you could say that. My pleasure. Reverend." They shook hands and the minister flinched.

  "No 'Reverend,' please. Everybody, friend or foe, calls me Ed."

  "Ed, this is a swell old building you have here. It must cost you a bundle in fire insurance."

  "The Lord is our carrier," Ed Parsley joked, and his sickly aura widened in pleasure at this blasphemy. "To be serious, you can't rebuild this kind of plant, and the older members complain about all the steps. We've had people drop out of the choir because they can't make it up into the loft. Also, to my mind, an opulent building like this, with all its traditional asso­ciations, gets in the way of the message the modern-day Unitarian-Universalists are trying to bring. What I'd like to see is us open a storefront church right down there on Dock Street; that's where the young people gather, that's where business and commerce do their dirty work."

  "What's dirty about it?"

  "I'm sorry, I didn't catch your first name."

  "Darryl."

  "Darryl, I see you like to pull people's legs. You're a man of sophistication and know as well as I do thai the connection between the present atrocities in Southeast Asia and that new little drive-in branch Old Stone Bank has next to the Superette is direct and immediate; I don't need to belabor the point."

  "You're right, fella, you don't," Van Home said.

  "When Mammon talks, Uncle Sam jumps."

  "Amen," said Van Home.

  How nice it was, Alexandra thought, when men talked to one another. All that aggression: the clash of shirt fronts. Eavesdropping, she felt herself thrilled as when on a walk in the Cove woods she came upon traces in some sandy patch of a flurry of claws, and a feather or two, signifying a murderous encounter. Ed Parsley had sized Van Home up as a banker type, an implementer of the System, and was fighting dis­missal in the bigger man's eyes as a shrill and inef­fectual liberal, the feckless agent of a nonexistent God. Ed wanted to be the agent of another System, equally fierce and far-flung. As if to torment himself he wore a clergyman's collar, in which his neck looked both babyish and scrawny; for his denomination such a collar was so unusual as to be, in its way, a protest.

  "Did I hear," he said now, his voice gravelly in its insinuating sonority, "you offering a critique of Jane's cello-playing?"

  "Just her bowing," Van Home said, suddenly a bashful shambles, his jaw slipping and drooling. "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 obliged to intercede. The man, Alexandra saw even amid the confusions of this encounter, had the brute gift of bringing a woman out, of getting her to say more than she had intended. Here he had insulted Jane and she was gazing up at him with the moist mute fascination of a whipped dog.

  "The Beethoven was especially splendid, don't you agree?" Parsley was still after Van Home, to wring some concession out of him, the start of a pact, a basis they could meet on next time.

  "Beethoven," the big man said with bored author­ity, "sold his soul to write those last quartets; he was stone deaf. All those nineteenth-century types sold their souls. Liszt. Paganini. What they did wasn't human."

  Jane found her voice. "I practiced till my fingers bled," she said, gazing straight up at Van Home's lips, which he had just rubbed with his sleeve. "All those terrible sixteenth-notes in the second andante."

  "You keep practicing, little Jane. It's five-sixths muscle memory, as you know. When muscle memory takes over, the heart can start to sing its song. Until then, you're stymied. You're just going through the motions. Listen. Whyncha come over some lime to my place and we'l
l fool around with a bit of old Ludwig's piano and cello stuff? That Sonata in A is an absolute honey, if you don't panic on the legato. Or that E Minor of Brahms: fabuloso. Quel schmaltz! I think it's still in the old fingers." He wiggled them, his fingers, at all of their faces. Van Home's hands were eerily white-skinned beneath the hair, like tight surgical gloves.

  Ed Parsley coped with his unease by turning to Alexandra and saying in sickly conspiracy, "Your friend appears to know whereof he speaks."

  "Don't look at me, I just met the gentleman," Alex­andra said.

  "He was a child prodigy," Jane Smart told them, become somehow angry and defensive. Her aura, usu­ally a rather dull mauve, had undergone a streaked orchid surge, betokening arousal, though by which man was not clear. The whole parlor to Alexandra's eyes was clouded by merged and pulsating auras, sick­ening as cigarette smoke. She felt dizzy, disenchanted; she longed to be home with Coal and her quietly tick­ing kiln and the expectant cold wet plasticity of clay in its burlap sacks hauled from Coventry. She closed her eyes and wished that this particular nexus around her—of arousal, dislike, radical insecurity, and a sin­ister will to dominate emanating not only from the dark stranger—would dissolve.

  Several elderly parishioners were nudging forward for their share of Reverend Parsley's attention, and he turned to flatter them. The white hair of the women was touched in the caves of the curls of their perms with the tenderest golds and blues. Raymond Neff, profusely sweating and aglow with the triumph of the concert, came up to them all and, enduring in the deafness of celebrity their simultaneous compliments, jollily bore away Jane, his mistress and comrade in musical battle. She, too, had been glazed, shoulders and neck, by the exertions of the performance. Alex­andra noticed this and was touched. What did Jane see in Raymond Neff? For that matter what did Sukie see in Ed Parsley? The smells of the two men when they had stood close had been, to Alexandra's nostrils, rank—whereas Joe Marino's skin had a certain sweet sourness, like the stale-milk aroma that arises from a baby's pate when you settle your cheek against its fuzzy bony warmth. Suddenly she was alone with Van Home again, and feared she would have to bear again upon her breast the imploring inchoate weight of his conversation; but Sukie, who feared nothing, all rus­set and crisp and glimmering in her reportorial role, edged through the crowd and conducted an inter­view.

  "What brings you to this concert, Mr. Van Home?" she asked, after Alexandra had shyly performed introductions.

  "My TV set's on the blink" was his sullen answer. Alexandra saw that he preferred to make the approaches himself; but there was no denying Sukie in her interrogating mood, her little pushy monkey-face bright as a new penny.

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

  "Seems time I got out of Gotham," 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, "1 might put a mention 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."

  "What kind of publicity were you receiving, may I ask?"

  "If I told you, that'd be more publicity, wouldn't it?"

  "Could be."

  Alexandra marvelled at her friend, so cheerfully bold. Sukie's brazen ochre aura merged with the sheen of her hair. She asked, as Van Home made as if to turn away, "People are saying you're an inventor. What sort of thing do you invent?"

  "Toots, even if I took all night to explain it to ya, ya wouldn't understand. It mostly deals with chemi­cals."

  "Try me," Sukie urged. "See if I understand."

  "Put it in your 'Eyes and Ears' and I might as well write a circular letter to my competition."

  "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. Ms. I was married."

  "What was he, a French Canuck?"

  "Monty always said his ancestors were Swiss. He acted Swiss. Don't the Swiss have square heads, sup­posedly?"

  "Beats me. I thought that was the Manchurians. They have skulls like cement blocks, that's how Genghis Khan could stack 'em up so neatly."

  "Do you feel we've wandered rather far from the subject?"

  "About the inventions, listen, I can't talk. I am watched."

  "How exciting! For all of us," Sukie said, and she let her smile push her upper lip, creasing deliciously, up so far her nose wrinkled and a band of healthy gum showed. "How about for my eyes and ears only? And Lexa's here. Isn't she gorgeous?"

  Van Home 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 figure frighteningly small, cleft here and there and with wisps of gray hair. He decided to answer Sukie's earlier question: "I've been doing a fair amount lately with protective coatings—a floor finish you can't scratch with even a steak knife after it hardens, a coating you can spray on the red-hot steel as it's cooling so it bonds with the carbon molecules; your car body'll get metal fatigue before oxidization sets in. Synthetic poly­mers—that's the name of your brave new world, honeybunch, and it's just getting rolling. Bakelitc was invented around 1907, synthetic rubber in 1910, nylon around 1930. Better check those dates if you use any of this. The point is, this century's just the infancy; synthetic polymers're going to be with us to the year one million or until we blow ourselves up, whichever comes sooner, and the beauty of it is, you can grow the raw materials, and when you run out of land you can grow 'em in the ocean. Move over, Mother Nature, we've got you beat. Also I'm working on the Big Inter­face."

  "What interface is that?" Sukie was not ashamed to ask. Alexandra would just have nodded as if she knew; she had a lot still to learn about overcoming accul-turated female recessiveness.

  "The interface between solar energy and electrical energy," Van Home told Sukie. "There has to be one, and once we find the combination you can run every appliance in your house right off the roof and have enough left over to recharge your electric car in the night. Clean, abundant, 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 done over an old garage so he can heat his water, 1 have no idea why, he never takes a bath."

  "I'm not talking about collectors," Van Home said. "Thai's Model T stuff." He looked about him; his head turned like a barrel being rolled on its edge. "I'm talking about a paint."

  "A paint?" Alexandra said, feeling she should make a contribution. 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 Home aped being offended. "Shit, if I'd known that's the kind of flirtatious featherheaded thing you like to say I wouldn't have wasted my time spilling my guts. You play tennis?"

  Sukie stood up a little taller. Alexandra experi­enced a wish to stroke that long flat stretch from the other woman's breasts to below her waist, the way one longs to dart out a hand and stroke the belly a cat on its back elongates in stretching, the toes of its hind paws a-tremble in this moment of muscular ecstasy. Sukie was just so nicely made. "A bit," she said, her tongue peeking through her smile and adhering for a moment to her upper lip.

  "You gotta 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 imper­fectly synchronized, slightly slurring voice, "they're not wet."

>   "The snowy egrets like to nest there, in the dead elms out back."

  "T, O, U, G, F," Van Home said. "Tough."

  From the sudden stariness of his eyes she wondered if he was wearing contact lenses. His conversation did seem distracted by a constant slipshod effort to keep himself together. "Oh," she said, and what Alexandra noticed now gave her, already slightly dizzy, the sen­sation of looking down a deep hole. His aura was gone. He had absolutely none, like a dead man or a wooden idol, above his head of greasy hair.

  Sukie laughed, pealingly; her dainty round belly pumped under the waistband of her suede skirt in sympathy with her diaphragm. "I love that. May I quote you, Mr. Van Home? Filled Wetlands No Longer Wet, Declares Intriguing New Citizen."

  Disgusted by this mating dance, Alexandra turned away. The auras of all the others at the party were blinding now, like the peripheral lights along a high­way as raindrops collect on the windshield. And very stupidly she felt within herself the obscuring moisture of an unwanted infatuation condensing. The big man was a bundle of needs; he was a chasm that sucked her heart out of her chest.

  Old Mrs. Lovecraft, her aura the tawdry magenta of those who are well pleased with their lives and fully expect to go to Heaven, came up to Alexandra bleat­ing, "Sandy dear, we miss you at the Garden Club. You mustn't keep so to yourself."

  "Do I keep to myself? I feel busy. I've been putting up tomatoes, it's just incredible the way they kept coming this fall."

  "I know you've been gardening; Horace and I admire your house every time we drive down Orchard Road: that cunning little bed you have by your doorway, chock-a-block full of button mums. I've several times said to him, 'Let's do drop in,' but then I think, No, she might be making her litde things, and we don't want to disrurfc her inspiration."