The Witches of Eastwick / Иствикские ведьмы. Джон Апдайк
clean up and noticed that while Brenda Parsley was in the church kitchen putting the plastic cups and paper plates into the trash bin, Ed and Sukie had both disappeared! Leaving poor Brenda to put the best face on it she could – but imagine, the humiliation!”
“They really should be more discreet.”
Jane paused, waiting for Alexandra to say something more, but Alexandra was preoccupied with thoughts of cancer cells spreading in her body like lethal stars.
“Ed Parsley is actually such a fumbler,” Jane finally said. “Why does she always hint that she has finished with him?”
“I think Sukie's attachment to Ed can be partly explained by her professional need to feel in the thick of things here,” Alexandra suggested. “But what is interesting is not that she continues to see Ed, but that this Van Horne was so quick to notice it. It's flattering. It's worth thinking about.”
“My dear, you're awfully not free about some things. You know, a man can be just human.”
“I know this theory, but I've never met one. In the end, they all turn out to be just male, even gays.”
“Remember, we thought him to be gay? And now he is chasing the three of us.”
“I didn't know he was chasing you. I thought you both were hunting for Brahms.”
“And so it is. Really, Alexandra, you're frightfully obsessed.”
“I'm a hopeless fool. I'll feel better tomorrow. Now it's my turn to gather you all, don't forget.”
“Oh dear, I've nearly forgotten. That's why I've called you. I won't be able to come.”
“Can't make it on Thursday? What's the matter?”
“Well, you'll get suspicious again. It's Darryl again. He's got these wonderful bagatelles by Weber, and he wants us to play them together. I suggested Friday, but he said he was expecting some important Japanese investors on Friday.”
“I thought Thursdays were sacred, but as there's nothing sacred in the world, there's no point in organizing Thursdays,” Alexandra said, and added that she had no more time to talk.
An hour later, when Joe Marino was making love to her, Alexandra looked absent-mindedly over his naked shoulder and suddenly, with her inner sight, she saw Lenox mansion, clearly as a calendar picture, with a wisp of smoke, as she saw it on that day on the beach. As a result, she was not very responsive to Joe's efforts, and he came awkwardly, which offended his Mediterranean pride. Alexandra assured him that he was wonderful, that it was all her fault. It was the third summer since their affair started, and it was time for Alexandra to stop it, but she liked Joe's taste – sweetly salty like nougat. His aura was devoid of malice; its color was good. His thoughts as well as his hands always searched certain fitness. Her fate brought Alexandra from chrome-plated fittings producer to their installer.
After Joe left, Alexandra read Sukie's article in the Word “Inventor, musician, arts lover is renovating the old Lenox Mansion.” Driven by jealousy, she called her friend.
“So you went there,” – she reproached.
“My dear, it was my task.”
“Who was the author of the task?”
“I was,” – Sukie admitted. “Clyde wasn't sure it was important news. Moreover, it sometimes happened that after an article about some wonderful house that house was burgled and the newspaper was sued.”
Clyde Gabriel, a tired sinewy man, married to a revolting philanthropist, was the editor of the Word. Sukie asked Alexandra's opinion about the article. Her friend praised it but remarked that it was a bit too long, and then asked how Van Horne had behaved. Sukie said he had gabbled on nonstop. The tennis court was nearly made, and he wanted the three of them to come and play tennis while the weather still held.
“He seems to take a great interest in us, and I've told him something about us, just what everybody knows: our divorces and what comfort we are to each other, especially you. I can't say Jane has been a great comfort lately. Something tells me, behind our backs, she's been looking for a husband.”
“Have you told him something dirty about us?”
“And is there anything dirty? No, of course I told him no such thing. But then, he isn't that curious. It seems to me that it's you he really likes.”
“But I don't like him. I hate such dark faces. And I can't stand New York impertinence.”
“And I like his manner of swift change of topics. Now he shows you his paintings, now – his laboratories, now he plays the piano. And then suddenly he started running around the house and kept asking if I would like to have a look at the environs from the cupola.”
“I hope you didn't climb to the cupola with him on your first date?”
“It wasn't a date; it was a task.”
“What sort of questions did he ask about us? And what did you find permissible to tell him?”
“I told him we are happy together and prefer female company to males, and so on.”
“Did he take offence?”
“No. He said he also preferred women to men. Women are by far more perfect mechanisms.”
“Did he really say mechanisms?”
“Something like that. Oh dear! I must fly! I've got to interview the Harvest Festival Committee organizers at the Unitarian church.”
“May I ask what are you feeling towards Ed Parsley these days?”
“Just as always. Aloof tenderness. Brenda is such an unbearable kibitzer.”
“Didn't he tell you in what way she is such an unbearable kibitzer?”
Usually, the witches were reserved as to talking about their sexual experiences. But Sukie, feeling Alexandra's annoyance, decided to break that rule and started explaining.
“Lexa, she doesn't do anything for him. And he, before entering the seminary, played up quite a lot, so he knows what he is deprived of. I can't reject him all the time, he is so pitiful.”
Healing was in their nature, and if society accused them of breaking emotionally cold and impotent but seemingly unbreakable unions between husbands and wives and burnt them alive by their malignant slander, then it was the price they had to pay. The wish to cure, to apply a healing lotion of an unwillingly giving in flesh to the wound of male lust, to allow the flaming male spirit to be thrilled by the sight of a naked witch gliding around a tastelessly furnished motel room was the basic and instinctive, purely feminine characteristic. So Alexandra let Sukie go and didn't reproach her young friend further for taking care of Ed Parsley.
In the silence of the house which was yet to be child free for over more than two hours, Alexandra was fighting depression. She was choking from her own uselessness. To cheer herself up she decided to eat something. She made a sandwich from cereals with a slice of turkey breast and lettuce. She was amazed at how many tiring movements it takes to prepare lunch: to get the meat from the fridge, to take off the scotch from the paper wrapping, to find mayonnaise among the jam and salad oil bottles on the shelf; with nails, to tear off the film from the lettuce head, to put it all on the kitchen counter-top, to get a plate and a knife for mayonnaise, to find a fork for fishing a long thin pickle from a wide jar, and then to make coffee in order to wash down the taste of the turkey and pickle.
Alexandra took away the ingredients of her lunch and the instruments used to satisfy her hunger, tidied up the house after a fashion. Why is it so necessary to sleep in beds, which are to be made, and to eat from plates, which you have to wash up? Did Inca women live harder? Van Horne was right – she really felt like a mechanism, a robot, cruelly doomed to be aware of every routine movement.
In the mountain town in the west where she was born, Alexandra was a tenderly loved daughter, the center her family life. Then her mother died, and her father sent her to a college in the east. There, in New London, in the course of four postcard beautiful academic seasons, as the captain of the grass hockey team and a student of