by John Updike
Alexandra felt Sukie stiffen at her side. The younger widow drew closer to say, “He’s here, too.”
“Who? Where?”
“Don’t turn your head. Just casually slide your eyes to your left, to about two o’clock.”
“I see him, I guess. He looks out of place, and nobody is talking to him. Who is he?”
“Lexa, it’s obvious. Like Jane said. It’s Chris Gabriel.”
“Who? Oh. The brother. I can hardly remember what he looked like.”
“He was never with us,” said Sukie, whispering with a conspiratorial urgency to which Alexandra, older and weighted down with the glossed-over horror of Jane’s eternal absence, found it difficult to respond. “He never used the hot tub, or danced to Darryl’s music, or even ate with us.”
“Those lovely fiery meals of Fidel’s,” Alexandra musingly recalled. “Hot tamales, and enchiladas, and that salsa that made your eyes water.”
“He was a lazy late adolescent then,” Sukie went on. Her breathing was affected by a draft from this door that had excitingly opened, showing deep stairs down into the past. “Not so much insolent as bored, reading magazines and watching Laugh-In in another room. Now he’s here. The nerve. I’m going to talk to him.”
“Oh, don’t,” Alexandra instinctively said. “Let’s let it alone.” This ill-fated attempt to relive what was gone, to dig up its mostly imaginary magic—wouldn’t they both be better off just taking the little bit that was left of their lives, their widow’s mite, and retiring with it to their corners of Connecticut and New Mexico?
But Sukie had already aimed herself toward the intruder, dodging around knots of Tinker acquaintances to stand in his presence. The boy, as she still thought of him, had grown taller, or else she had slightly shrunk, her bones eroding as well as her lungs. She tipped her face up toward his like a sunbather determined to catch the day’s last rays. “Don’t I know you?” she asked.
“It’s possible,” he said. His voice had the hollow ring of a man who has found for his life’s rationale no deeper basis than his own attractiveness, rather than any self-forgetful passion or profession. In this he reminded her of Darryl Van Horne, in the same way that this parish hall echoed the showy architecture of a church.
“You’re Christopher Gabriel.”
“Actually, Mrs. Rougemont, I use my stage name now—Christopher Grant.”
“How nice. After Cary, or Ulysses S.?”
“Neither. A long first name goes better with a monosyllable, and I got sick of people saying ‘Blow, Gabriel, blow.’ ”
“My name isn’t Rougemont, either—not for over thirty years. I married a man called Lennie Mitchell.”
“What happened to him?”
“He died, Christopher.”
“People do. Hey, I’m sorry about your friend Jane, by the way.”
She took in a gulp of breath to say, “I don’t think you are. In fact, I think you killed her.”
He blinked—his eyelashes were as pale as his curly, silvery hair—but otherwise registered no reaction. “How would I have done that?”
“I don’t exactly know. But she felt it. Some kind of a spell. She kept getting shocks.”
He smiled, without cracking the glaze of his studied, self-congratulatory diffidence. “How curious,” he said. His lips had a pouting, bee-stung quality more appropriate to a pampered female. The sky-pure blue of his eyes was clouded by their being deep-set and a bit close together, under silvery-blond eyebrows beginning to grow bushy and tangled in the way of middle-aged men. He would be about Tommy Gorton’s age—no, a bit younger. He had nothing of Tommy’s inflamed, sun-battered complexion. Rather, he had a pristine indoor pallor, as of one whose plunge into life had still to be taken. He had retained the smooth imperviousness, the untouchable hostility, of youth. He could not resist showing off, volunteering, “Mr. Van Horne, before he pulled one of his disappearing acts, taught me some spooky stuff about electricity. But you’d never get the cops to listen. As far as they’re concerned, your old pal died of natural causes. So will you. So will I.”
It was as if there were, Sukie felt, a long icicle within him which came over into her body, thrilling her, steeling her, instilling in her the recklessness of a war to the death. “Will I be next?” An onlooker among the mourners, seeing her eager smile and rapt expression, and the flirtatious angle at which she held her unnaturally red head, would have imagined her excitement to be amorous.
Chris hesitated, and lowered his eyelids as if in shame. “No,” he said. “The fat one will be next. Of the three of you, you were nicest to me. You talked to me sometimes, instead of just rushing into Darryl’s party mode. And you were nice to my sister. You used to take her to Nemo’s for coffee.”
“I’m not sure I was nicer, I’m just more extroverted than Alexandra. It was my habit, from being a reporter, to talk to people.”
“You were nicer,” he said stubbornly. He was still a young man in the way his conversation didn’t branch, didn’t send out probes and amusing side shoots, but stuck to the same few thoughts, the same limited asexual agenda. He couldn’t have lived with Darryl, that ramshackle magus of jubilant digression, very long.
“Tell me about you and Darryl,” Sukie commanded, in her perky, shameless interviewer’s manner, with a grin that exposed her prominent front teeth up to the gums. “Where did you both go, after Eastwick?”
“New York, where else? He had a place up on the West Side, a block from the river. Kind of crummy. I thought at least he’d be on the East Side. Most of the art he had in the Eastwick house wasn’t even his, he had it on trial.”
“What did you do all day?”
Christopher Gabriel shrugged and reluctantly moved his bee-stung lips. “Oh, you know. Chilled out. Smoked dope. He was out a lot. He had a lot of creepy friends. I hung around the apartment at first, scared to go out, watching TV. Then I got the idea from watching the soaps of being an actor. I had turned eighteen, and back then that was old enough to handle liquor, so I got jobs waitering and with catering services so I could pay for acting school.”
“You poor thing. You did this without Darryl’s help?”
“He put me on to a few guys. But they just mostly wanted me to hustle. Nobody knew about AIDS yet, but I didn’t want to be a hustler. I could see that was the way straight down. Darryl’s way of loving somebody was to see them go to Hell. He had a lot of ideas about acting and would spiel on about the demonic side of it, all this theory, but I stuck pretty much to my own plan. The acting school I went to was very practical—hold your head like this, project from the diaphragm. Once I began to get jobs he’d try to hit me up to help with the rent. I moved out finally. He was a leech.”
“Where is he now?”
“Who knows? All over the map. We lost touch.”
“So you’ve been hexing us all on your own?”
Christopher knew he was being led on; his lips did not want to move at all. “Who says I’m hexing you?”
“You did. Just now.”
“Well, maybe so.”
“Well, congratulations.”
“Darryl showed me the general approach on electromagnetism, but I did some refining on my own. He was full of ideas, but not so hot at seeing things through.”
“Tell me,” Sukie teased, “the antidote. How to reverse it.”
“Come on. I wouldn’t give you that, even if there was one. There isn’t one. It’s like life. One-way.” He was looking around now, guiltily, like a boy getting bored and restless in the grip of an inquisitive adult. For immature people, Sukie thought, it’s a kind of magic not to tell about themselves. Like savages and being photographed. Anything you let out, the world will use against you.
“Why do you hate us so?” she asked. “All these years later.”
She had side-stepped, to make him look her in the eye; sky-blue rays shot from his deep sockets, from beneath eyebrows beginning to be shaggy. The hair of his head, curly soft blond as she remembered it, had become t
hick stiff waves dyed platinum. “There was nobody for me,” he brought out, in a voice at last with emotion in it, “like Jenny. From when I was a baby on. She was nine years older than me. She was a perfect person. Once our parents began to fight and get estranged, she was my mother.” His bee-stung lips trembled.
“She died, Chris,” Sukie said, “like you said, a natural death. What makes you think we had anything to do with it?”
“I know you did,” he said stubbornly, looking away from her ardent gaze. “There are ways to direct Nature. The currents of it.”
The mourners around them were beginning to drift away, toward the exits and the liberating out-of-doors. Alexandra came up to Sukie, blurting, “I’ve just been entangled with the most impossible man, that pompous snob who eulogized Jane, if that’s what you call it. He was telling me all about his and the Tinkers’ joint ancestry; he was Nat’s second cousin, and the old lady’s step-nephew, as if that would turn me on. He had the crust to invite me out to dinner, having just shit all over Jane with his innuendo, but I told him we had to get back to Rhode Island. Don’t we?”
She had not seen, or had chosen to ignore, the silvery man standing there. When Sukie turned back to him to make introductions, and to make the conversation a three-cornered inquisition, he was not there; he had melted away.
On the drive south to Eastwick—Route 9 to 128, 128 to 95, 95 through Providence to Route One and the western shore of Narragansett Bay—Sukie described her conversation with Christopher Gabriel, omitting only his announcement that the next victim was “the fat one.” But Alexandra seemed to sense it, and the gap in Sukie’s story hung between them as one roadway slid into the next, concrete into asphalt and back.
“Electromagnetism?” she did ask.
“He said Darryl showed him some stuff about it, through which I guess he was giving Jane those shocks she complained about. But to be realistic it wasn’t those that killed her; it was her aneurysm.”
“A spell utilizes a tendency the body already has,” Alexandra suggested.
“He did say something about taking Nature and altering the current of it.”
Alexandra said to herself as much as to Sukie, “I know what in my body he’d use.”
Sukie didn’t want to know, but had out of courtesy to ask, “What, honey?”
“Cancer. My fear of it. Fear of something makes it happen. Like when a person afraid of heights walks a narrow plank he tenses up so much he makes a misstep and falls off. Your body is cooking up cancer cells all the time. With so many cells, some are bound to go bad, but our defenses—antibodies and macrophages—surround them and eat them up, for a while. Then the body gets tired of fighting, and the cancer gets ahead. You try to stop thinking about it, but you can’t—your whole system bubbling up with these evil cells. Skin cancer. Breast cancer. Liver cancer, brain cancer. Cancer of the eyeball, of the lower lip if you’re a pipe smoker. It can happen anywhere. The whole thing is like an enormous computer: one bit, one microscopic transistor, goes offline and takes the whole computer with it. Tumors have the ability to create their own veins and arteries, to commandeer more and more blood!”
Sukie felt Alexandra’s monologue growing under her, a monstrous damp growth penetrating the orifices she sat on. “Lexa, please,” she said. “You’re venting. You’re talking yourself into hysteria.”
“Hysteria,” the other lightly mocked. “You sound like a man, putting women down because we have wombs. The most horrible thing about cancer is how much like having a baby it is, growing inside you whether you like it or not. Remember how it felt—throwing up, needing so desperately to sleep? The baby’s body was fighting with ours for nutrients. The baby was a parasite, just like a cancer.”
Sukie was silent, absorbing this ugly parallel. “I’m wondering,” she said, “if you shouldn’t go back to New Mexico, to be safe from us. Us Easterners.” The idea was beginning to grow inside her of saving Alexandra, even at the cost of sacrificing herself.
Alexandra laughed, showing her reckless side. “I’m not going to let some queer kid scare me away. We’ve paid two months’ rent, and I let some old friends from Denver have my place for August. They love the opera in Santa Fe.”
“He’s not a kid,” Sukie objected. “And I’m not sure how queer he is, or was. What I do know is that he has it in for us, and wants to kill us. He told me himself.”
“Let him try. Men have had it in for women since time began, and we’re still around. You could say he’s right, we shouldn’t have done that to his sister. All Jenny did was marry the man who asked her. That’s all that most of us do.” She fell silent while Sukie concentrated on getting off 95 and heading south. “Anyway,” she resumed, “I can’t leave Eastwick until I’ve made things better with Marcy. When I’m with her I turn into a supercilious nag. She accuses me of not caring enough about her and the children. She’s right. I’m selfish. I cared more about those little clay bubbies I used to make than I did about my own flesh-and-blood children. The bubbies were mine; the babies were something Oz and Nature made me have. Right from the beginning, nursing the helpless little dear things, the flesh-and-blood babies, I felt taken advantage of. Used. I didn’t want to be somebody else’s milk wagon.”
“You’re too hard on yourself,” Sukie said, closing her lips on the assertion in that adorable way she had, as if something delicious was dissolving in her mouth. “I watched you being a mother. You were quite loving. Giving your sandy children a hug at the beach and so on. Much better than Jane.”
“That’s one of the reasons I liked Jane—she was so bad she made me feel good about myself. She hated those kids of hers. You saw why—the two that showed up today.”
“I thought they were very touching, really. They were repulsive, but unlike the two younger ones they did at least show up and go through the motions. Burying your mother: what a strange obligation. Society expects us to do it; we don’t know exactly why, but the undertakers and clergyper-sons see us through it. We can’t wrap our minds around what happens to us—these milestones. Weddings and funerals. Graduations and divorces. Endings. Ceremonies get us through. They’re like blindfolds for people being shot by a firing squad.”
Even Sukie, Alexandra thought, is aging. She studied the younger woman’s profile as she drove the car; when she squinted at the road ahead, a fan of curving wrinkles reached back into the hairline above her ears. Her eyes had grown permanent lilac-tinted welts below them, and her teeth when she grinned revealed tiny dark gaps where her gums had receded from her eye-tooth crowns. Still, Alexandra loved her enough to touch her slender hand, bearing on its back not only freckles but blotchy liver spots as it rested lightly on the steering wheel. “What about you?” she asked. “Wouldn’t you like to leave Eastwick and go back to Stamford? Jane’s death casts a pall, doesn’t it? To a Westerner like me, Eastwick is a kind of lark, but to you it’s more of the same, just farther up the coast.”
“No,” Sukie said, grimacing into the blinding splash the sun, lowering in the west, threw onto the dirty windshield. “We’ll both stay. I have nothing at home except Lennie’s suits hanging in the closet. I haven’t had the heart to take them to the Salvation Army. I’m thinking of eventually moving to New York. It’s stupid for a single woman to be suburban. What would Jane want? She’d want us to stay. She’d say, Ssscrew that sssilly Chriss. He always was a brat.”
In the moment of mimicry Jane’s voice had entered Sukie’s mouth with an illusion of channelling that made both women snicker in alarm. Sukie’s hand on the wheel flipped over to caress Alexandra’s—a gesture of comfort confessing how vulnerable, how helpless in their bravado, the two damned souls were. Sukie said, “I didn’t realize you had rented the house in Taos. Are you that hard up for money?”
“Jim left enough, but not much more. Everything costs more than it used to. Even clay.”
Soon Sukie turned the BMW off Route One onto 1A. They passed through Coddington Junction and then picturesque Old Wick, a collection of Fe
deralist houses clustered, as if to seek protection from their inexorable deterioration, around a rambling crossroads inn under brave new management, sporting fresh white paint, croquet wickets and lawn chairs on the lawn, and a grouted signboard promising in golden letters FINE DINING; then came East-wick, and outer Orchard Road, and the crasser commercial note of the Stop & Shop in its struggling mall, a scatter of unappealing stores—picture frames, videos, health foods—inadequate to the vast, presumptuous imposition of asphalt on acres of land that can never grow sweet corn, potatoes, or strawberries again. The Unitarian church, with its squat octagonal tower topped by a copper weathervane of a cantering horse and top-hatted rider, appeared on the left, and on the right glimpses of saltwater—a luminous bile color—flickered between the trees, beyond the breakwater’s rusty boulders. The backyards of Oak Street materialized, with their swing sets and beached dories. The blue marble horse trough lay ahead, sporting its tiny forest. Alexandra’s weary heart quickened among the familiar shop fronts and clapboarded houses from earlier centuries; she had lived here, fully lived, with children and a husband and lovers and friends, although the plod of duties and errands and monthly bills to pay had in part concealed from her the bliss of those departed days. Here, now, the long daylight of June and July was giving way to August’s gradual closing-down. It was after seven o’clock, dinnertime, and already the lamps behind the house windows seemed to burn from deeper within, more intensely. Long shadows crossed Dock Street from curb to curb. A more determined summertime mood animated the teen-agers in their scanty pale clothes; they clustered and chattered along the stretch of storefronts, under the spindly trees wound with white Christmas lights, a little more loudly, more defiantly, squeezing the last allotments of fun from the strengthening dusk. Along Oak and Vane Streets, older citizens and visitors moved singly or in couples with a deliberate, self-conscious leisure on the dark Victorian lawns and the sidewalks, whose daytime pattern of shade was, when the streetlamps came on, abruptly recast into electric fragments and patches whose webby pattern of leaf and branch trembled and swayed in the evening breeze rising off the water.