by John Updike
The crowd inside Nemo's—the cop on duty, the postman taking a breather, the three or four burly types collecting unemployment against the spring rebirth of construction and fishing—became as winter wore on so well known to one another and the waitresses that even ritual remarks about the weather and the war dried up, and Rebecca filled their orders without asking, knowing what they wanted. Sukie Rougemont, no longer needing gossip to fuel her column "Eastwick Eyes and Ears" in the Word, preferred to take her clients and prospective buyers into the more refined and feminine atmosphere of the Bakery Coffee Nook a few doors away, between the framer's shop run by two fags originally from Stonington and the hardware store run by a seemingly endless family of Armenians; different Armenians, in different sizes but all with intelligent liquid eyes and kinky hair glistening low on their foreheads, waited on you each time. Alma Sifton, the proprietress of the Bakery Coffee Nook, had begun in what had been an old clam shack, with simply a coffee urn and two tables where shoppers who didn't want to run the gauntlet of stares in Nemo's might have a pastry and rest their feet; then more tables were added, and a line of sandwiches, mostly salad spreads (egg, ham, chicken), easily dished up. By her second summer Alma had to build an addition to the Nook twice the size of the original and put in a griddle and microwave oven; the Nemo's kind of greasy spoon was becoming a thing of the past.
Sukie loved her new job: getting into other people's houses, even the attics and cellars and laundry rooms and back halls, was like sleeping with men, a succession of subdy different flavors. No two homes had quite the same style or smell. The energetic bustling in and out of doors and up and down stairs and saying hello and good-bye constantly to people who were themselves on the move, and the gamble of it all appealed to the adventuress in her, and challenged her charm. Her sitting hunched over at a typewriter inhaling other people's cigarette smoke all day had not been healthy. She took a night course in Westerly and passed her exam and got her real-estate license by March.
Jane Smart continued to give lessons and fill in on the organ at South County churches and to practice her cello. There were certain of the Bach unaccompanied suites—the Third, with its lovely bourree, and the Fourth, with that opening page of octaves and descending thirds which becomes a whirling, inconsolable outcry, and even the almost impossible Sixth, composed for an instrument with five strings—where she felt for measures at a time utterly with Bach, his mind exactly coterminous with hers, his vanished passion, lesser even than dust dispersed, stretching her fingers and flooding her cerebral lobes with triumph, his insistent questioning of the harmonics an operation of her own perilous soul. So this was the immortality men had built their pyramids and rendered their blood sacrifices for, this rebirth of a drudging old wife-fucking Lutheran Kapellmeister in the nervous system of a late-twentieth-century bachelor girl past her prime. Small comfort it must bring to his bones. But the music did talk, in its syntax of variation and reprise, reprise and variation; the mechanical procedures accumulated to form a spirit, a breath that rippled the rapid mathematics of it all like those footsteps wind makes on still, black water. It was communion. Jane did not see much of the Neffs, now that they were involved in the circle Brenda Parsley had gathered around her, and would have been endlessly solitary but for the crowd at Darryl Van Home's.
Where once there had been three and then four, now there were six, and sometimes eight, when Fidel and Rebecca were enlisted in the fun—in the game of touch football, for instance, that they played with a beanbag in the echoing length of the big living room, the giant vinyl hamburger and silkscreened Brillo boxes and neon rainbow all pushed to one side, jumbled beneath the paintings like junk in an attic. A certain contempt for the physical world, a voracious appetite for immaterial souls, prevented Van Home from being an adequate caretaker of his possessions. The parqueted floor of the music room, which he had had sanded and polyurethaned at significant expense, already held a number of pits gouged by the endpin of Jane Smart's cello. The stereo equipment in the hot-tub room had been soaked so often there were pops and crackles in every record played. Most spectacularly, a puncture had mysteriously deflated the tennis-court dome one icy night, and the gray canvas lay sprawled there in the cold and snow like the hide of a butchered brontosaurus, waiting for spring to come, since Darryl saw no point in bothering with it until the court could be used as an outdoor court again. In the touch-football games, he was always one of the quarterbacks, his nearsighted bloodshot eyes rolling as he faded back to pass, the corners of his mouth flecked with a foam of concentration. He kept crying out, "The pocket, the pocket!" —begging for protection, wanting Sukie and Alexandra, say, to block out Rebecca and Jenny moving in for the tag, while Fidel circled out for the bomb and Jane Smart cut back for the escape-hatch buttonhook. The women laughed and bumbled at the game, unable to take it seriously. Chris Gabriel languidly went through the motions, like a disbelieving angel, misplaced in all this adult foolishness. Yet he usually came along, having made no friends his own age; the small towns of America are generally empty of people his age, at college as they are, or in the armed forces, or beginning their careers amid the temptations and hardships of a city. Jennifer worked many afternoons with Van Home in his lab, measuring out grams and deciliters of colored powders and liquids, deploying large copper sheets coated with this or that doped compound under batteries of overhead sunlamps while tiny wires led to meters monitoring electrical current. One sharp jump of the needle, Alexandra was led to understand, and more than the riches of the Orient would pour in upon Van Home; in the meantime, there was an acrid and desolate chemical stink dragged up from the dungeons of the universe, and a mess of un-scrubbed aluminum sinks and spilled and scattered elements, and plastic siphons clouded and melted as if by sulphurous combustion, and glass beakers and alembics with hardened black sediments crusted to the bottoms and sides. Jenny Gabriel, in a stained white smock and the clunky big sunglasses she and Van Home wore in the perpetual blue glare, moved through this hopeful chaos with a curious authority, sure-fingered and quietly decisive. Here, as in their orgies, the girl—more than a girl, of course; indeed, only ten years younger than Alexandra—moved uncontaminable and in a sense untouched and yet among them, seeing, submitting, amused, unjudging, as if nothing were quite new to her, though her previous life seemed to have been one of exceptional innocence, the very barbarity of the times serving, in Chicago, to keep her within her citadel. Sukie had told the others how the girl had all but confided, in Nemo's, that she was still a virgin. Yet the girl disclosed her body to them with a certain shameless simplicity during the baths and the dances and submitted to their caresses not insensitively, and not without reciprocating. The touch of her hands, neither brusquely powerful like that of Jane's callused tips nor rapid and insinuating as with Sukie, had a penetration of its own, a gentle lingering as if in farewell, a forgiving slithering inquisitive something, ever less tentative, that pushed through to the bone. Alexandra loved being oiled by Jennifer, oiled while lying stretched on the black cushions or on several thicknesses of towels spread on the slates, the dampness of the bath enfolded and lifted up amid essences of aloe and coconut and almond, of sodium lactate and valerian extract, of aconite and cannabis indica. In the misted mirrors that Van Home had installed on the outside of the shower doors, folds and waves of flesh glistened, and the younger woman, pale and perfect as a china figurine, could be seen kneeling in those angled deep distances mirrors create. The women developed a game called Serve Me, a sort of charade, though nothing like the charades Van Home tried to organize in his living room when they were drunk but which collapsed beneath their detonations of mental telepathy and the clumsy fervor of his own mimicry, which disdained word-by-word enactments but sought to concentrate in one ferocious facial expression such full titles as The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and The Sorrows of Young Werther and The Origin of Species. Serve me, the thirsty skins and spirits clamored, and patiently Jennifer oiled
each witch, easing the transforming oils into the frowning creases, across the spots, around the bulges, rubbing against the grain of time, dropping small birdlike coos of sympathy and exfoliation. "You have a lovely neck."
"I've always thought it was too short. Stubby. I've always hated my neck."
"Oh, you shouldn't have. Long necks are grotesque, except on black people."
"Brenda Parsley has an Adam's apple."
"Let's not be unkind. Let's think serene-making thoughts."
"Do me. Do me next, Jenny," Sukie nagged in a piping child's voice; she reverted quite dramatically, and while stoned was not above sucking her thumb.
Alexandra groaned. "What indecent bliss. I feel like a big sow rolling around."
"Thank God you don't smell that way," Jane Smart said. "Or does she, Jenny?"
"She smells very sweet and clean," Jenny primly said. From within that transparent bell of innocence or unknowing her slightly nasal voice came from as if far away, though distinctly; in the mirrors she was, kneeling, the shape and size and luster of one of those hollow porcelain birds, with holes at either end, from which children produce a few whistled notes.
"Jenny, the backs of my thighs," Sukie begged. "Just slowly along the backs, incredibly slowly. And use your fingernails. Don't be afraid of the insides of the thighs. The backs of the knees are wonderful. Wonderful. Oh my God." Her thumb slid into her mouth.
"We're going to wear Jenny out," Alexandra warned in a considerate, drifting, indifferent voice.
"No, I like it," the girl said. "You're all so appreciative."
"We'll do you," Alexandra promised. "As soon as we get over this drugged feeling."
"I don't really care about being rubbed that much," Jenny confessed. "I'd rather do it than have it done to me, isn't that perverse?"
"It works out very well for us," Jane said, hissing the last word.
"Yes it does," Jenny agreed politely.
Van Home, out of respect perhaps for the delicate initiate, seldom bathed with them now, or if he did he left the room swiftly, his hairy body wrapped from waist to knees in a towel, to keep Chris entertained with a game of chess or backgammon in the library.
He made himself available afterwards, however, wearing clothes of increasing foppishness—a silk paisley strawberry-colored bathrobe, for instance, with bell-bottom slacks of a fine green vertical stripe protruding below, and a mauve foulard stuffed about his throat— and affecting an ever-more-preening manner of magisterial benevolence, to preside over tea or drinks or a quick supper of Dominican sancocho or Cuban mondongo, of Mexican polio picado con tocino or Colombian souffle de sesos. Van Home watched his female guests gobble these spicy delicacies rather ruefully, puffing tinted cigarettes through a curious twisted horn holder he lately brandished; he had himself lost weight and seemed feverish with hopes for his selenium-based solution to the problem of energy. Away from this topic, he often fell apathetically silent, and sometimes left the room abruptly. In retrospect, Alexandra and Sukie and Jane Smart might have concluded that he was bored with them; but they were themselves so far from bored with him that boredom did not enter their imaginations. His vast home, which they had nicknamed Toad Hall, expanded their meagre domiciles; in Van Home's realm they left their children behind and became children themselves.
Jane came faithfully for her sessions of Hindemith and Brahms and, most recently attempted, Dvorak's swirling, dizzying Concerto for cello in B Minor. Sukie as that winter slowly melted away began to trip back and forth with notes and diagrams for her novel, which she and her mentor believed could be pre-planned and engineered, a simple verbal machine for the arousal and then the relief of tension. And Alexandra timidly invited Van Home to come view the large, weightless, enamelled statues of floating women she had patted together with gluey hands and putty knives and wooden salad spoons. She felt shy, having him to her house, which needed fresh paint in all the downstairs rooms and new linoleum on the kitchen floor; and between her walls he did seem diminished and aged, his jaw blue and the collar of his button-down Oxford frayed, as if shabbiness were infectious. He was wearing that baggy green-and-black tweed jacket with leather elbow-patches in which she had first met him, and he seemed so much an unemployed professor, or one of those sad men who as eternal graduate students haunt every university town, that she wondered how she had ever read into him so much magic and power. But he praised her work: "Baby, I think you've found your shtik!’ That sort of corny carny quality Lindner has, but with you there's not that metallic hardness, more of a Miró feeling, and sexy—sex-ee, hoo boy!" With an alarming speed and clumsiness, he loaded three of her papier-maché- figures into the back seat of his Mercedes, where they looked to Alexandra like gaudy little hitchhikers, corky bright limbs tangled and the wires that would suspend them from a ceiling snarled. "I'm driving to New York day after tomorrow more or less, and I'll show these to my guy on Fifty-seventh Street. He'll nibble, I'll bet my bottom buck; you've really caught something in the cultural works now, a sort of end-of-the-party feel. That unreality. Even the clips of the war on TV look unreal, we've all seen too many war movies."
Out in the open air, next to her car, dressed in a sheepskin coat with grimy cuffs and elbows, the matching sheepskin hat too small for his bushy head, he looked to Alexandra beyond capture, a lost cause; but, with an unpredictable lurch, he yielded to the bend of her mind and came back into the house with her and, breathing wheezily, up to her bedroom, to the bed she had lately denied to Joe Marino. Gina was pregnant again and that made it just too heavy. Darry’s potency had something infallible and unfeeling about it, and his cold penis hurt, as if it were covered with tiny little scales; but today, his taking her poor creations so readily with him to sell, and his stitched-together, slightly withered appearance, and the grotesque peaked sheepskin hat on his head, all had melted her heart and turned her vulva super-receptive. She could have mated with an elephant, thinking of becoming the next Niki de Saint-Phalle.
The three women, meeting downtown on Dock Street, checking in with one another by telephone, silendy shared the sorority of pain that went with being the dark man's lover. Whether Jenny too carried this pain her aura did not reveal. When discovered by an afternoon visitor in the house, she always was wearing her lab coat and a frontal, formal attitude of efficiency. Van Home used her, in part, because she was opaque, with her slightly brittle, deferential manner, her trait of letting certain vibrations and insinuations pass right through her, the somehow schematic roundness to her body. Within a group each member falls into a slot of special usefulness, and Jenny's was to be condescended to, to be "brought along," to be treasured as a version of each mature, divorced, disillusioned, empowered woman's younger self, though none had been quite like Jenny, or had lived alone with her younger brother in a house where her parents had met violent deaths. They loved her on their own terms, and, in fairness, she never indicated what terms she would have preferred. The most painful aspect of the afterimage the girl left, at least in Alexandra's mind, was the impression that she had trusted them, had confided herself to them as a woman usually first confides herself to a man, risking destruction in the determination to know. She had knelt among them like a docile slave and let her white round body shed the glow of its perfection upon their darkened imperfect forms sprawled wet on black cushions, under a roof that never slid back after, one icebound night, Van Home had pushed the button and a flash made a glove of blue fire around his hairy hand.
Insofar as they were witches, they were phantoms in the communal mind. One smiled, as a citizen, to greet Sukie's cheerful pert face as it breezed along the crooked sidewalk; one saluted a certain grandeur in Alexandra as in her sandy riding boots and old green brocaded jacket she stood chatting with the proprietress of the Yapping Fox—Mavis Jessup, herself divorced, and hectic in complexion, and her dyed red hair hanging loose in Medusa ringlets. One credited to Jane Smart's angry dark brow, as she slammed herself into her old moss-green Plymouth Va
liant, with its worn door latch, a certain distinction, an inner boiling such as had in other cloistral towns produced Emily Dickinson's verses and Emily Bronte's inspired novel. The women returned hellos, paid bills, and in the Armenians' hardware store tried, like everybody else, to describe with finger sketches in the air the peculiar thingamajiggy needed to repair a decaying home, to combat entropy; but we all knew there was something else about them, something as monstrous and obscene as what went on in the bedroom of even the assistant high-school principal and his wife, who both looked so blinky and tame as they sat in the bleachers chaperoning a record hop with its bloodcurdling throbbing.
We all dream, and we all stand aghast at the mouth of the caves of our deaths; and this is our way in. Into the nether world. Before plumbing, in the old outhouses, in winter, the accreted shit of the family would mount up in a spiky frozen stalagmite, and such phenomena help us to believe that there is more to life than the airbrushed ads at the front of magazines, the Platonic forms of perfume bottles and nylon nightgowns and Rolls-Royce fenders. Perhaps in the passageways of our dreams we meet, more than we know: one white lamplit face astonished by another. Certainly the fact of witchcraft hung in the consciousness of Eastwick; a lump, a cloudy density generated by a thousand translucent overlays, a sort of heavenly body, it was rarely breathed of and, though dreadful, offered the consolation of completeness, of rounding out the picture, like the gas mains underneath Oak Street and the television aerials scraping Kojak and Pepsi commercials out of the sky. It had the uncertain outlines of something seen through a shower door and was viscid, slow to evaporate: for years after the events gropingly and even reluctantly related here, the rumor of witchcraft stained this corner of Rhode Island, so that a prickliness of embarrassment and unease entered the atmosphere with the most innocent mention of Eastwick.