The Witches of Eastwick / Иствикские ведьмы. Джон Апдайк
year she found herself all in white, after which various wife uniforms filled her wardrobe. She met Oz during a sailing trip on Long Island. While putting plastic glasses to his lips with a steady hand, he didn't show any signs of intoxication or fear, whereas she felt both. And that impressed her greatly. Oz was also delighted with her full figure and a masculine gate, characteristic of western women. The wind changed, the yacht began to roam. A cheering smile flashed on his red face, burnt by the sun and the gin consumed. He smiled shyly, with one corner of his mouth, like her father. And Alexandra fell right into his hands, vaguely expecting upward flight in life to follow: strength to strength. She shouldered motherhood burden, gardeners' club membership, carpooling and cocktail parties. In the morning she drank coffee with a visiting domestic help; in the evening it was brandy with her husband; she took drunken lust for a family well-being. The world around Alexandra grew – children jumped out from between her legs one after another; a story had to be added to the house; Oz got rises in step with inflation – and she went on feeding that world somehow, but it didn't feed her any longer. Her depressions became more frequent. The doctor prescribed some medicine and visits to a psychotherapist and/or spiritual director. From their house the church bells could be heard, and in the early winter dusk, before school returned her children to her, Alexandra, who was weakened and knocked out by the slightest movement, lay down on the bed, feeling shapeless and awfully smelling like an old boot or a squirrel hit on the highway a few days before.
In childhood, in their innocent mountain town, she would laze about in bed, excited by the feeling of her body – a stranger from nowhere that had arrived to hold her spirit inside. She would scrutinize herself in the mirror and had decided to be friends with her body: she might have got a worse body, mightn't she? Later, at the height of her marital life, Alexandra experienced disgust to her body, and her husband's marital proclivities seemed cruel mocking. Her body existed somewhere outside, beyond the windows – the flesh of her essence overgrown with leaves, to which the world still snuggled up. After the divorce she felt as if she had at last sailed outside through the window. On the morning after the court's decision Alexandra got up at four a.m. and pulled out the withered pea stems, singing in the light of the moon and the dawn starting in the east. This other body of hers also had a soul.
Alexandra lay in bed; in her imagination pink and white peonies of the window curtains looked like clown faces. They were devils; they encouraged her depression. She remembered the clay figurines that were waiting that her witchcraft would turn them into hand-made fantasies. A small glass of alcohol or a pill could raise her spirits and cheer her up, but she knew the price she would have to pay: in two hours she would feel even worse. In her imagination Alexandra heard the racket of machinery in the old Lenox mansion, and its inhabitant, the dark prince, who had taken away her two sisters, as if wished to insult her. But there was something in his insultingness and villainy that might help find food for spiritual exercises. Alexandra stayed in bed staring at the ceiling. She was waiting for something to happen.
Sukie brought her story of the Harvest Festival to Clyde Gabriel in his narrow office and found him slumped at his desk with his head in his arms. He heard her come in and looked up. His eyes were red-rimmed but whether from crying or sleep or hangover or last night's sleeplessness she could not tell. Without much raising his head off the desk he squinted at her pages. “This item doesn't deserve a two-line head. How about 'Peacenik Parson Plans Poppycock'?”
“I didn't talk to Ed; it was his committee chairpersons.”
“Oops, pardon me. I forgot you think Parsley's a great man.”
“That isn't altogether what I think,” Sukie said, standing extra erect. It was her fate to be attracted to unhappy or unlucky men, but they were not above pulling you down with them if you allowed it and didn't stand tall. When young, Clyde must have been quite good-looking, but his handsomeness – high square forehead, eyes a most delicate icy blue and framed by long lashes – was fading; he was getting that dried-out starving look of the steady drinker.
Clyde was a little over fifty. On the wall behind his desk, he had hung photographs of his daughter and son but none of his wife, though he was not divorced. Felicia Gabriel, the wife not honored with a photo on the wall, must have been lively and bright once but had developed into a sharp-featured little woman who could not stop talking. She was in this day and age outraged by everything: by the government and by the protesters, by the war, by the drugs, by dirty songs, by Playboy's being sold openly at the local drugstores, by the summer people scandalous in both costume and deed, by nothing's being quite as it would be if she were running everything. “Felicia was just on the phone,” Clyde volunteered, in indirect apology for the sad posture in which Sukie had found him, “furious about this Van Horne man's violation of the wetlands regulations. Also she says your story about him was too flattering; she says she's heard rumors about his past in New York that are pretty revolting.”
“Who'd she hear them from?”
“She won't say. She's protecting her sources. Maybe she got the poop straight from J. Edgar Hoover.” Such anti-wifely irony added little expression to his face, he had been ironical at Felicia's expense so often before. Something had died behind those long-lashed eyes. Sukie had never slept with Clyde. But she had this mothering feeling that she could give him health. He seemed to be sinking, gripping his steel desk like an overturned boat.
“You look exhausted,” she told him.
“I am. Suzanne, I really am. Felicia gets on the phone every night to one or another of her agents and leaves me to drink too much.”
“Take her to the movies,” Sukie suggested.
“I did, some perfectly harmless thing with Barbra Streisand-God, what a voice that woman has, it goes through you like a knife! – and she got so angry at the violence in one of the previews she went back and spent half the movie complaining to the manager. Then she came back for the last half and got angry because she thought they showed too much of Streisand's tits when she bent over, in one of these turn-of-the-century gowns. I mean, this wasn't even a PG movie, it was a G! It was all people singing on old trolley cars!” Clyde tried to laugh but his lips had lost the habit and the resultant expression of his face was so pitiful to look at, that Sukie had an impulse to give this dying man her perky breasts to suck; but she already had Ed Parsley in her life and one wry intelligent sufferer at a time was enough. Every night she was shrinking Ed Parsley in her mind, so that when the call came she could travel light to Darryl Van Horne's island. That's where the action was, not here in town, where the wan citizens of Eastwick trudged through their civic and Christian duties.
Sukie left the Word offices and stepped out onto Dock Street and walked to Nemo's for lunch. At the south end of the street, at Landing Square, the huge old beeches around the little granite war memorial formed a transparent wall of yellow, losing leaves to every zephyr. The water as it turned toward winter cold became a steelier blue, against which the white clapboard houses on the Bay side of the street looked dazzlingly chalky. Such beauty! Sukie thought, and felt frightened that her own beauty and vitality would not always be part of it, that some day she would be gone like a lost piece from the center of a picture puzzle.
Jane Smart was practicing Bach's Second Suite for unaccompanied cello, in D Minor, and suddenly she felt anger at it, at these notes, so black and certain and masculine, and at him, this dead square-faced old Lutheran with his wig and his Lord and his genius and two wives and seventeen children, for the hurt of the tips of her fingers. Suddenly she rebelled, put down the bow, poured herself a little dry vermouth, and went to the phone.
“We must do something about getting Alexandra over to Darryl's place,” – Jane told Sukie. “When I visited her on Wednesday, she looked just terribly down, sick with jealousy, first me and the Brahms and then your article. I couldn't get her to say a word about it and I didn't dare press the topic myself, why she hasn't been invited.”
“But darling, she has been, as much as you and I were. When he was showing me his art works for the article he even pulled out an expensive-looking catalogue for a show this Niki Whatever had had in Paris and said he was saving it for Lexa to see.”
“Well she won't go now until she's formally asked and I can tell it's eating the poor thing alive. I thought maybe you could say something.”
“Sweetie,