by John Updike
“Oh, Jane, we’ve been here only for a week. To have fun, we’ve got to try. We should pretend Eastwick is a foreign capital we’re visiting. What kind of things would we do?”
“We’d visit the cathedral and the palace. But who wants to go sstare at the Unitarian church and that squat cinder-block Town Hall with its fake-rustic veneer of clinker bricks?”
“Don’t be so negative! You wouldn’t even go down to the beach the other night for the fireworks.”
“Lexa agreed with me. Who wants to go mill around on the wet sand with a lot of beered-up riffraff?”
“Listen to you! With that attitude you’ll never go anywhere. You’ll just crouch indoors, complaining about riffraff. We’re riffraff! America is riffraff—that’s its beauty!”
Sulkily Jane tried to defend herself. “I thought the fireworks were lovely from up here, the three of us standing in the parking lot.”
“They were hidden by the trees.”
“Half-hidden. It made them look bigger—these giant jellyfish appearing and fading through the oaks, above the cypresses. It was like being invaded from space.”
“Yes, except you kept complaining about the mosquitoes and made us come back inside to these stuffy rooms. You couldn’t see a thing from our windows, just the shadows of the cypresses leaping up and fading back.”
“They felt bigger than mosquitoes. They felt like sparks when you stand too close to the fire. Anyway, Lexa was bored, too. Fireworks go on too long. It’s really a sscandal, like most government sspending. The fireworks companies sell these little towns more than they can afford. So then they cut music and art from the school curriculum.”
“You made us come inside before the climax. Fireworks have a plot, they mount up to a climax.”
“We’d had enough.”
“I hadn’t had enough,” Sukie said. “I missed the climax.”
“We heard it. It was just a lot of noise. Bang-bang-bang-bang-BOOM. There. Now you’ve had your climax.”
The conversation felt dangerously close to becoming a quarrel. Where was Lexa? They both needed her, for a stable triangle. After a silence, Sukie told Jane, “I bumped into an old lover downtown just now.”
“Oh? Unlucky you. Mine are all dead, I hope.”
“Tommy Gorton. I didn’t know him at first—he had gotten fat and run-down, with a scruffy beard and ponytail to establish some kind of identity for himself as a local character. He had wrecked his hand hauling in cod, and has no real job, just a drudge of a wife to support him. But—you would have liked this—he hinted he was ready to sin. He said he hoped he’d see me again. He seemed such a boy when I, you know, had to do with him, but then in the car driving back I was doing the numbers—he was only eleven years younger than I! That doesn’t seem much at all, at our age now. He looked so beautiful to me then, everything newly made and perfect. This fuzzy firm ass. Abs like a washboard.”
Jane said sourly, “No wonder you write romances.”
“I’m trying to get some momentum on one, now that we’re more or less settled. All I need is an hour a day, right after breakfast, with the second cup of coffee; it pours right out.”
“You don’t think that’s somewhat ssselfish and boring of you? While Lexa and I do what? Tiptoe around and speak in whispers?”
“You don’t need to, just don’t come into my room.”
“Have you looked at my room? It’s like a prison cell. No—it’s like a gas chamber.”
“Widows need interests, Jane. What ever happened to you and your cello?”
“Oh, that. It never had the right timbre after that odious Doberman of mine chewed it up in one of his jealous fits. And then Nat’s dreadful mother hated the sound of my practicing, though in that enormous house I don’t see how she could hear it. She was deaf only when it ssuited her.”
“There are summer concerts around here. I see posters in the window of the Superette.”
“I’m scared to go out,” Jane suddenly confessed. “There’s something unfriendly out there. The other side. I can feel it. We shouldn’t have come back. Sukie, it’s a terrible mistake!”
“Jane, this is so unworthy of you! You’re imagining things.” Sukie needed help, lest Jane’s panic spread to her. She listened to the sound of a car on the gravel driveway below, thinking it might be Alexandra. She hoped so. Hostile space and time loomed around her. One of the sensations of being a widow was of the world being much too big—of her having misplaced whatever it was that would make it small enough to control.
“We need to get out,” Sukie resumed, “and start doing things. There’s a chamber-music concert Saturday night, in the auditorium in the new wing of the public library. The boy in the Superette was telling me the new wing ran a million dollars over budget.”
The two women listened, hearing someone who must be Alexandra climb the stairs, her footsteps heavier and slower than they used to be. Her key scraped and fumbled at the door; she brought into the low-ceilinged room a pink face and hair damp and straggled from the breeze at the beach. Outdoor air ballooned from her broad body like the kelpy scent of a crashing wave. “It was lovely,” she said. “I walked today to the right for a change, toward the public end. There’s a kind of lagoon now, where there used to be just a slope of hard sand. Children can dabble in it without the mothers and babysitters worrying about a wave carrying them off.” Sensing that the two others had been talking and had something to propose to her, she flung her weight in its flowing beach wrap down in a big plaid armchair and asked rhetorically, “How could I have spent so much of my life away from the ocean?”
“Disscontentedly,” Jane suggested.
Sukie said, “Jane and I have an idea.”
“I can feel that,” said Alexandra. “Good. This group needs ideas.”
The new wing of the Eastwick Public Library was larger than the original, a nineteenth-century benefaction of lumpy brownstone that had sat with a certain touching self-importance at the center of a gentle dome of public green. The glass-and-concrete addition took up again as much space and had caused a new driveway and a generous parking lot to pave over swathes of grass where children and dogs used to play. The much-vaunted auditorium, with its lobby and an adjacent function room, extended beneath a main floor devoted, table after table, to computers where town idlers played video games and ingeniously searched for pornography. The section of children’s books, once a modest nook of colorful slim volumes presumed to be transitional to adult reading, had greatly expanded, into tall cases of inch-thick walnut, as if to memorialize the end of reading for all but a few of the library’s patrons. The concert-and-lecture hall, optimistically conceived to hold improving events almost every night, betrayed its subterranean condition with stifled acoustics that to spectators in the back corners gave tonight’s concert a spectral, mimed aspect. The chamber group was divided between aspiring music majors in the nearby community college and elder adepts whose skills had plateaued at a level of complacent competence. Jane, whose own playing had once formed the fiery center, the furious inner resort, of her emotive life, listened with a seething impatience as the figures on the stage insistently sawed and swayed through Vivaldi with his sugary whine, Beethoven’s surly tangle of near-dissonance, and a bit of Ravel like a wispy handkerchief disappearing up a wide-cuffed sleeve.
Then, after a brief intermission during which the narrow lobby loudly overflowed with all the exciting things that small-town people manage to find to say to one another, day after day, get-together after get-together, while only a sneaky remnant of former addicted multitudes ventured outdoors to pollute with cigarette smoke the night air above the drastically diminished green, one of Bach’s great cat’s cradles was essayed, an arrangement for strings from Die Kunst der Fuge, its themes crisscrossing and lifting a third and then a fifth between his giant ghostly fingers, hoary formulae like e f e f, d e d e brought to the last and highest paroxysm of the Baroque, the thrilling counterpoint snapped shut at last as the Lutheran fist, ritard
ando, emphatically closed. Jane had once played this fugue under Ray Neff’s direction, and her left hand’s fingers twitched on her knee in the familiar motions, though the calluses given the tips by pressing in earnest on the strings had over the years become vestigial.
Through her haze of irritation and nostalgia it slowly dawned on her that the person she had taken for a male first violinist, who counted the first measure audibly and with a silent lunge gave the downbeat—a stout, somewhat hunchbacked figure with steel-rimmed glasses and effeminate bangs, straw-dull hair cut short—was in fact a woman, in baggy black slacks, and not just any woman but one she knew, whose choppy dictatorial gestures and pedantic, metronomic nodding rang a disagreeable bell: it was Greta Neff, not only still alive but less changed by three decades than she had any right to be. Jane looked again at the little photocopied program they had been handed by a teen-aged girl at the door—a round-faced girl with a dewy pink complexion, who didn’t look as though she should be wearing, as she was, several thumb rings and a tiny silver dumbbell piercing an eyebrow—and satisfied herself that Greta Neff’s name was not listed. But there was a G. Kaltenborn, violin. Greta’s German maiden name. Jane knew her story. She and Raymond Neff had met when he was in the Army and stationed in Stuttgart. Jane had heard the story in bed with Ray. Her heart, remembering Ray in bed, skipped a beat. Whatever had happened to him, Eastwick High’s bandmaster and the leader of the plucky chamber-music group in which Jane had played cello? A fussy little man with a soft body and the high nasal voice of a small-town dominator, he had seemed effeminate but had fathered six children on Greta and had leftover sex drive enough to perform for a time as Jane’s lover and, before that, as Alexandra’s. It had been a minor episode for Alexandra but for Jane something more: with all his failings, including his horrible, laughable German wife, he knew his way around a woman’s body. He had had a musical touch. People laughed at Ray, but under his hands and tongue there was bliss for Jane. And he was by no means as meagerly endowed as his shrewish voice suggested.
Her dark blood simmering, Jane went right up to Greta at the reception in the function room afterwards. Sukie and Alexandra, bewildered by her sudden purposeful animation, warily tagged after her into the heated little hubbub of townspeople voicing congratulations that were at bottom self-congratulations: classical music, Beethoven and Bach, right here in Eastwick! The crowd gave way before the trio of strangers, who were not strangers to everyone, and who had been preceded by rumors of their reappearance. “Greta Neff,” Jane said in a voice that, after two hours of silent listening, came out as a croak. “Do you remember me?”
“Haoew,” the other woman said, her first language peeping through the twisted diphthong, “coot I forget, Chane? I hurt you were all pack in taown, but I cootn’t belief it.” Her pale-lashed eyes, a dishwater blue behind the thick lenses of her steel-rimmed spectacles, had taken in Sukie and Alexandra, standing behind Jane like embarrassed bodyguards.
Sukie spoke up: “Greta, we were sorry to hear about Raymond.”
What had there been to hear? Jane asked herself. Sukie had been out gathering news but not sharing all of it. Raymond must be dead. Just that past week Jane had joked about hoping all her old lovers were dead, but it was different to learn that one of them really was. Poor Ray, trying to bring culture to this backwater, where all people cared about was games and sex and the tax rates and the cod catch.
“Yes, vell,” Greta said impatiently, “it was a mercy in the ent. He had pin suffering a lonk time. It was cancer,” she explained, “of the powel.”
“How terrible!” Alexandra exclaimed. Her worst fears were of cancer—your own cells turning evil, multiplying, blocking your organs with senseless scarlet cauliflowers of flesh, attacking even the intestines that had kept your excrement out of sight and smell, adding shame to pain, an artificial exterior bag to the rotting body. “Poor dear Ray.” The “dear” must have sprung from those moments years and years ago when, new to radical marital discontent and to the radical sexual possibilities proclaimed by the youthful prophets of the Sixties, she had shared a furtive horizontality with Ray for some frightening moments, scarcely able to believe that this was really happening, this betrayal, this clumsy release, this renewal of primary energy. She and Ray were new to it and not expert and quickly gave each other up as more enduring affairs pushed their timid start aside. Soon, from Eastwick to the golden coast where the stars had long assumed the freer, more privileged life-styles of gods and goddesses, the American middle class gave up puritanism and stampeded into restless adventuring and mutual exploration. The spontaneously dropped “dear” fell strangely on the ears of these women, igniting among them, amid the communal hubbub, a flare of recognition that they were all of them widows, undefended women startled here into remembrance of a man, keepers of his flame, a rather ridiculous man but one heroically devoted to music and beauty where he found them, and one whose feats of local organization and promotion had won admiration from even Sukie, who had never seen Ray naked and spectacularly aroused. “It was a very impressive concert,” Alexandra told Greta, in acknowledgment of this warmth surreptitiously kindled among them, and in polite cover-up of the tactless word “dear.”
Greta, who had begun to turn away to greet other well-wishers, was arrested by this pleasantry, taking it literally in her single-track Teutonic style. “Dit you sink so? Chane, do you agree?”
Jane, who had endured the concert in a daze of hypercritical tension, looked her old enemy in the eye and said, purringly, with the two-edged courtesy of Boston gentry, “I took it as a cccivic experience—a lesson in democracy, the ssenior players bringing the babies along.”
Greta blinked behind her glasses, uncertain how deeply this jabbed. In her slow, relentless way, she pronounced, “You must haff youth. Usserweisse, a group dies.” And with that she did turn away, leaving the pernicious trio to ponder whether or not this dark saying had been meant to apply to them. They had included a younger member in their own group once, and had killed her.
Except for Greta’s, this Eastwick crowd contained no face familiar to Alexandra, though for a moment she thought she glimpsed old Franny Lovecraft on the far side of the room, blue-haired and shrunken, laying down the law to some unseen auditor, her head twitching with the motions of her tongue like a lightweight bell being rung by a ponderous clapper. But Franny had been old when Alexandra was not yet forty and still full of juice; by now the crone would be laid in her grave, her chirpy little body in its coffin as brittle and dry as a flower pressed in a Bible. Franny had courted Alexandra in a fashion, trying to enlist her in respectable local circles, stopping now and then in her old black Buick, with its grille like a harrow, pretending to be interested in her flower beds, inviting her to come to this or that Garden Club lecture or church supper with a fascinating speaker, a missionary for years in the South Seas, or even, at one importunate visit, to be a junior member of the Horse Trough Committee, the highest such honor the town could bestow on a woman—trying to keep Alexandra in touch, the bothersome old thing, with Eastwick’s core of public decency, the hum of blameless activity sublimating the dark anarchic instincts an unattached divorcée might fall prey to. For Franny was a woman, and knew what women were, dirty and yearning and in need of being controlled. Sweet old bores, is how Alexandra had thought of Franny and her husband. What had been his name? It came to her: Horace. A fussy little sly man, driving his boat-size, well-preserved Buick with a maddening care, especially when you were behind him trying to get a child to a dental appointment or baseball practice, and watering his weedless lawn on West Oak Street with the sly air and sideways twinkle of a man daydreaming. The Lovecrafts were absent from the concert, dissolved by time as if they had never existed, a pinch of pollen lost on the wind—they had been childless—and Alexandra might as well have been the same, for not one person came up to her or Sukie or Jane in the chattering gathering, as if a circle of taboo had been drawn around them. They huddled there holding their paper cups of
saccharine raspberry punch, talking to one another.
“Well!” Jane said. “What did you make of that?”
“Greta?” Alexandra asked. “She tried. She wasn’t as sinister as I remembered.”
“You don’t remember her very well,” Jane said. “She was worse. Ray somehow intimidated her—her GI in shining armor, bringing her out of Hitler’s nightmare Europe to the Land of Gold—and now nothing intimidates her. She’s lethal.”
“I thought she took your slap pretty well, about the young and the senile mixed in together in the chamber group.”
“I never said sssenile,” Jane said, “though that cellist several times in the largo had no idea where she was. She was off by a full measure.”
Sukie spoke up. “I felt Greta was holding something back. Jane’s right. She’s surer of herself. She’s never remarried—while we sank back into being housewives, she was consolidating her powers.”
“Why, Sukie!” Alexandra exclaimed, startled, as when they were naked side by side in Darryl’s hot tub, by how moving she found the pagan simplicity of this younger woman. Her sweet nipples had been rosy and erect amid the droplets of steam condensing on the organic Teflon of her skin. “Are you saying marriage makes a woman powerless?”