The Witches of Eastwick

just into his thir­ties, he was too old to be a window-trashing LSD-imbibing soldier in the Movement and this added to his sense of displacement and inadequacy, though he was always organizing peace marches and vigils and read- ins and proposing to his parish of dry as dust duti­ful souls that they let their pretty old church become a sanctuary, with cots and hot plates and chemical toilet facilities, for the hordes of draft evaders. Instead, tasteful cultural events were sheltered here, where the acoustics were accidentally marvellous; those old builders perhaps did have secrets. But Alexandra, having been raised in the stark land mined for a thou­sand cowboy movies, was inclined to think that the past is often romanticized, that when it was the present it had that same curious hollowness we all feel now.

Ed looked up—he was not tall; this was another of his disappointments—at Darryl Van Home quizzi­cally. Then he addressed Jane Smart with a sharp shouldering-aside note in his voice: 'Beautiful, Jane. Just a damn beautiful job all four of you did. As I was saying to Clyde Gabriel just now, I wish there had been a better way to advertise, to get more of the Newport crowd over here, though I know his paper did all it could, he took it that I was criticizing; he seems a lot on edge lately.' Sukie was sleeping with Ed, Alexandra knew, and perhaps Jane had slept with him in the past. There was a quality men's voices had when you had slept with them, even years ago: the grain came up, like that of unpainted wood left out in the weather. Ed's aura—Alexandra couldn't stop seeing auras, it went with menstrual cramps—ema­nated in sickly chartreuse waves of anxiety and nar­cissism from his hair, which was combed away from an inflexible part and was somehow colorless without being gray. Jane was still fighting back tears and in the awkwardness Alexandra had become the intro­ducer, this strange outsider's sponsor.

'Reverend Parsley—'

'Come on, Alexandra. We're better friends than that. The name's Ed, please.' Sukie must talk about her a little while sleeping with him, so he felt this familiarity. Everywhere you turn people know you better than you know them; there is all this human spying. Alexandra could not make herself say 'Ed,' his aura of doom was so repulsive to her.

'—this is Mr. Van Home, who's just moved into the Lenox place, you've probably heard.'

'Indeed I have heard, and it's a delightful surprise to have you here, sir. Nobody had said you were a music- lover.'

'In a half-ass way, you could say that. My pleasure. Reverend.' They shook hands and the minister flinched.

'No 'Reverend,' please. Everybody, friend or foe, calls me Ed.'

'Ed, this is a swell old building you have here. It must cost you a bundle in fire insurance.'

'The Lord is our carrier,' Ed Parsley joked, and his sickly aura widened in pleasure at this blasphemy. 'To be serious, you can't rebuild this kind of plant, and the older members complain about all the steps. We've had people drop out of the choir because they can't make it up into the loft. Also, to my mind, an opulent building like this, with all its traditional asso­ciations, gets in the way of the message the modern-day Unitarian-Universalists are trying to bring. What I'd like to see is us open a storefront church right down there on Dock Street; that's where the young people gather, that's where business and commerce do their dirty work.'

'What's dirty about it?'

'I'm sorry, I didn't catch your first name.'

'Darryl.'

'Darryl, I see you like to pull people's legs. You're a man of sophistication and know as well as I do thai the connection between the present atrocities in Southeast Asia and that new little drive-in branch Old Stone Bank has next to the Superette is direct and immediate; I don't need to belabor the point.'

'You're right, fella, you don't,' Van Home said.

'When Mammon talks, Uncle Sam jumps.'

'Amen,' said Van Home.

How nice it was, Alexandra thought, when men talked to one another. All that aggression: the clash of shirt fronts. Eavesdropping, she felt herself thrilled as when on a walk in the Cove woods she came upon traces in some sandy patch of a flurry of claws, and a feather or two, signifying a murderous encounter. Ed Parsley had sized Van Home up as a banker type, an implementer of the System, and was fighting dis­missal in the bigger man's eyes as a shrill and inef­fectual liberal, the feckless agent of a nonexistent God. Ed wanted to be the agent of another System, equally fierce and far-flung. As if to torment himself he wore a clergyman's collar, in which his neck looked both babyish and scrawny; for his denomination such a collar was so unusual as to be, in its way, a protest.

'Did I hear,' he said now, his voice gravelly in its insinuating sonority, 'you offering a critique of Jane's cello- playing?'

'Just her bowing,' Van Home said, suddenly a bashful shambles, his jaw slipping and drooling. 'I said the rest of it was great, her bowing just seemed a little choppy. Christ, you have to watch yourself around here, stepping on everybody's toes. I men­tioned to sweet old Alexandra here about my plumb­ing contractor being none too swift and it turns out he's her best friend.'

'Not best friend, just a friend,' she felt obliged to intercede. The man, Alexandra saw even amid the confusions of this encounter, had the brute gift of bringing a woman out, of getting her to say more than she had intended. Here he had insulted Jane and she was gazing up at him with the moist mute fascination of a whipped dog.

'The Beethoven was especially splendid, don't you agree?' Parsley was still after Van Home, to wring some concession out of him, the start of a pact, a basis they could meet on next time.

'Beethoven,' the big man said with bored author­ity, 'sold his soul to write those last quartets; he was stone deaf. All those nineteenth-century types sold their souls. Liszt. Paganini. What they did wasn't human.'

Jane found her voice. 'I practiced till my fingers bled,' she said, gazing straight up at Van Home's lips, which he had just rubbed with his sleeve. 'All those terrible sixteenth-notes in the second andante.'

'You keep practicing, little Jane. It's five-sixths muscle memory, as you know. When muscle memory takes over, the heart can start to sing its song. Until then, you're stymied. You're just going through the motions. Listen. Whyncha come over some lime to my place and we'll fool around with a bit of old Ludwig's piano and cello stuff? That Sonata in A is an absolute honey, if you don't panic on the legato. Or that E Minor of Brahms: fabuloso. Quel schmaltz! I think it's still in the old fingers.' He wiggled them, his fingers, at all of their faces. Van Home's hands were eerily white-skinned beneath the hair, like tight surgical gloves.