The Witches of Eastwick / Иствикские ведьмы. Джон Апдайк
male chauvinist.”
“They can't help it,” Sukie said lightly. “It's just their way of asking for more love.”
“Hi there, you gorgeous creature,” Jane addressed Alexandra. “Tell me, though – was that thunderstorm the other day yours?”
Alexandra confessed that she had driven to the beach and seen smoke from the chimney.
“Greta came into the church,” Jane said, “right after he called my Haydn prissy, and laughed.”
Sukie did a German laugh: “Ho hoho.”
“Do they still have sex, I wonder?” asked Alexandra. “How could he stand it? It must be like excited sauerkraut.”
“No,” Jane said firmly. “It's like – what's that pale white stuff they like so? – sauerbraten.”
“They marinate it,” Alexandra said. “In vinegar, with garlic, onions, and bay leaves. And I think peppercorns.”
“Is that what he tells you?” Sukie asked Jane mischievously.
“We never talk about it, even at our most intimate,” Jane prissily said. “All he ever confessed on the subject was that she had to have it once a week or she began to throw things.”
“A poltergeist,” Sukie said, delighted. “A polter-frau.”
“Really,” Jane said, not seeing the humor of it, “you're right. She is an impossibly awful woman. So pedantic; so smug; such a Nazi. Ray is the only one who doesn't see it, poor soul.”
“I wonder how much she guesses,” Alexandra mused.
“She doesn't want to guess,” Jane said. “If she guessed she might have to do something about it.”
“Like turn him loose,” Sukie suggested.
“Then we'd all have to cope with him,” Alexandra said, visualizing this plump dank man as a tornado, an insatiable natural reservoir, of desire.
“Hang on, Greta!” Jane chimed in, seeing the humor at last.
All three giggled.
“Doesn't anybody want to hear about this new man?” Sukie asked still laughing.
“Not especially,” Alexandra said. “Men aren't the answer, isn't that what we've decided?”
“They're not the answer,” Jane Smart said. “But maybe they're the question.”
Sukie stood to make her announcement. “He's rich,” she said, “and forty-two. Never married, and from New York, one of the old Dutch families. He was evidently a child prodigy at the piano, and invents things besides. The whole big room in the east wing and the laundry area under it are to be his laboratory, and on the west side, he wants to install a big sunken tub, with the walls wired for stereo.” Her round eyes, quite green in the late light, shone with the madness of it. “Joe Marino has the plumbing contract: no estimate asked for, everything the best, price be damned. A teak tub eight feet in diameter, and the man doesn't like the feel of tile under his feet so the whole floor is going to be some special fine-grained slate you have to order from Tennessee.”
“He sounds pompous,” Jane told them.
“Does this big spender have a name?” Alexandra asked. She was jealous of this man because he so excited her two friends. On other Thursdays they were excited by her powers. On those Thursdays, in the right mood and into their third drinks, the three friends could erect a cone of power above them like a tent and know who of the Eastwick's inhabitants was sick, who was falling into debt, who was loved, who was frenzied, who was vehement, who was asleep in a respite from life's bad luck; but this wouldn't happen today. They were disturbed, and the curious thing was that they couldn't remember the man's name. The three witches realized that they were themselves under a spell, of a greater sorcerer.
Darryl Van Horne came to the chamber-music concert in the Unitarian Church on Sunday night, a bearish dark man with greasy curly hair half-hiding his ears and gathered at the back so that his head from the side looked like a beer mug with a monstrously thick handle. He wore gray flannels bagged at the backs of his knees somehow and an elbow-patched jacket of Harris Tweed in a curious pattern of green and black. A pink Oxford button-down shirt of the type fashionable in the Fifties and, on his feet, absurdly small and pointy black loafers completed the costume. He was out to make an impression.
“So you're our local sculptress,” he told Alexandra at the reception afterwards, which was held in the church parlor, for the players and their friends. The category of “players and their friends” included everyone except Van Horne, who came into the parlor anyway. People knew who he was; it added to the excitement. When he spoke, his voice resounded in a strange way as if there was an artificial element somewhere in his speech apparatus, and he produced so much spittle that he occasionally paused to wipe his jacket sleeve across the corners of his mouth. Yet he had the confidence of the cultured and well-to-do, condescending low to achieve intimacy with Alexandra.
“They're just little things,” Alexandra said, feeling suddenly little and shy, confronted by this brooding dark bulk. It was that time of the month when she was especially sensitive to auras. This stranger's aura was the shiny black-brown of a wet beaver pelt.
“Little things,” Van Horne echoed. “But so powerful,” he said, wiping his lips. “So full of psychic juice, you know, when you pick one up. They knocked me out. I bought all they had at, what's that shop? – the Noisy Sheep —”
“The Yapping Fox,” she said, “or the Hungry Sheep, two doors the other side of the little barbershop, if you ever get a haircut.”
“Never if I can help it. Takes away my strength. My mother used to call me Samson. But your figurines. I bought all they had to show to a pal of mine, who runs a gallery in New York, right there on Fifty-seventh Street. It's not for me to promise you anything, Alexandra – O.K. if I call you that? – but if you could create on a bigger scale, I believe we could get you a show. Maybe you'll never be Marisol but you could sure as hell be another Niki de Saint-Phalle. You know, those 'Nanas.' Now those have scale. I mean, she's not just futzing around.”
With some relief Alexandra decided she quite disliked this man. He was pushing, vulgar, and a blabbermouth, and to her eyes Darryl Van Horne didn't look washed. You could almost see little specks of black in his skin. He wiped his lips with the hairy back of a hand, and his lips twitched with impatience while she searched her heart for an honest but polite response. Dealing with men was work, a chore she had become lazy at. “I don't want to be another Niki de Saint-Phalle,” she said. “I want to be me. The power, as you put it, comes from their being small enough to hold in the hand.” She felt the capillaries in her face burn; she smiled at herself for being excited, when intellectually she had decided the man was a fraud, an apparition. Except for his money; that had to be real.
His eyes were small and watery, and looked rubbed. “Yeah, Alexandra, but what is you? Think small, and you'll end up small. You're not giving yourself a chance, with this old-giftie-shoppie mentality. I couldn't believe how little they were charging – a lousy twenty bucks, when you should be thinking five figures.”
He was New York vulgar, she concluded, and felt sorry for him, landed in this delicate province. She remembered the wisp of smoke, how fragile and brave it had looked. She asked him forgivingly, “How do you like your new house? Are you pretty well settled in?”
With enthusiasm, he said, “It's hell. I work late, my ideas come to me at night, and every morning around seven-fifteen these fucking workmen come! With their fucking radios! Pardon my Latin.”
It seemed he felt his need for forgiveness; the need surrounded him; every clumsy, too energetic gesture of his was full of that need.
“You must come over and see the place,” he said. “I need advice all over the lot. All my life I've lived in apartments where they decide everything for you, and the contractor I've got is an asshole.”
“Joe?”
“You know him?”
“Everybody