The Witches of Eastwick

Ed Parsley coped with his unease by turning to Alexandra and saying in sickly conspiracy, 'Your friend appears to know whereof he speaks.'

'Don't look at me, I just met the gentleman,' Alex­andra said.

'He was a child prodigy,' Jane Smart told them, become somehow angry and defensive. Her aura, usu­ally a rather dull mauve, had undergone a streaked orchid surge, betokening arousal, though by which man was not clear. The whole parlor to Alexandra's eyes was clouded by merged and pulsating auras, sick­ening as cigarette smoke. She felt dizzy, disenchanted; she longed to be home with Coal and her quietly tick­ing kiln and the expectant cold wet plasticity of clay in its burlap sacks hauled from Coventry. She closed her eyes and wished that this particular nexus around her—of arousal, dislike, radical insecurity, and a sin­ister will to dominate emanating not only from the dark stranger—would dissolve.

Several elderly parishioners were nudging forward for their share of Reverend Parsley's attention, and he turned to flatter them. The white hair of the women was touched in the caves of the curls of their perms with the tenderest golds and blues. Raymond Neff, profusely sweating and aglow with the triumph of the concert, came up to them all and, enduring in the deafness of celebrity their simultaneous compliments, jollily bore away Jane, his mistress and comrade in musical battle. She, too, had been glazed, shoulders and neck, by the exertions of the performance. Alex­andra noticed this and was touched. What did Jane see in Raymond Neff? For that matter what did Sukie see in Ed Parsley? The smells of the two men when they had stood close had been, to Alexandra's nostrils, rank—whereas Joe Marino's skin had a certain sweet sourness, like the stale-milk aroma that arises from a baby's pate when you settle your cheek against its fuzzy bony warmth. Suddenly she was alone with Van Home again, and feared she would have to bear again upon her breast the imploring inchoate weight of his conversation; but Sukie, who feared nothing, all rus­set and crisp and glimmering in her reportorial role, edged through the crowd and conducted an inter­view.

'What brings you to this concert, Mr. Van Home?' she asked, after Alexandra had shyly performed introductions.

'My TV set's on the blink' was his sullen answer. Alexandra saw that he preferred to make the approaches himself; but there was no denying Sukie in her interrogating mood, her little pushy monkey-face bright as a new penny.

'And what has brought you to this part of the world?' was her next question.

'Seems time I got out of Gotham,' he said. 'Too much mugging, rent going sky-high. The price up here seemed right. This going into some paper?'

Sukie licked her lips and admitted, '1 might put a mention in a column I write for the Word called 'East­wick Eyes and Ears.''

'Jesus, don't do that,' the big man said, in his baggy tweed coat. 'I came up here to cool the publicity.'

'What kind of publicity were you receiving, may I ask?'

'If I told you, that'd be more publicity, wouldn't it?'

'Could be.'

Alexandra marvelled at her friend, so cheerfully bold. Sukie's brazen ochre aura merged with the sheen of her hair. She asked, as Van Home made as if to turn away, 'People are saying you're an inventor. What sort of thing do you invent?'

'Toots, even if I took all night to explain it to ya, ya wouldn't understand. It mostly deals with chemi­ cals.'

'Try me,' Sukie urged. 'See if I understand.'

'Put it in your 'Eyes and Ears' and I might as well write a circular letter to my competition.'

'Nobody who doesn't live in Eastwick reads the Word, I promise. Even in Eastwick nobody reads it, they just look at the ads and for their own names.'

'Listen, Miss—'

'Rougemont. Ms. I was married.'

'What was he, a French Canuck?'

'Monty always said his ancestors were Swiss. He acted Swiss. Don't the Swiss have square heads, sup­ posedly?'

'Beats me. I thought that was the Manchurians. They have skulls like cement blocks, that's how Genghis Khan could stack 'em up so neatly.'

'Do you feel we've wandered rather far from the subject?'

'About the inventions, listen, I can't talk. I am watched.'

'How exciting! For all of us,' Sukie said, and she let her smile push her upper lip, creasing deliciously, up so far her nose wrinkled and a band of healthy gum showed. 'How about for my eyes and ears only? And Lexa's here. Isn't she gorgeous?'

Van Home turned his big head stiffly as if to check; Alexandra saw herself through his bloodshot blinking eyes as if at the end of a reversed telescope, a figure frighteningly small, cleft here and there and with wisps of gray hair. He decided to answer Sukie's earlier question: 'I've been doing a fair amount lately with protective coatings—a floor finish you can't scratch with even a steak knife after it hardens, a coating you can spray on the red-hot steel as it's cooling so it bonds with the carbon molecules; your car body'll get metal fatigue before oxidization sets in. Synthetic poly­mers—that's the name of your brave new world, honeybunch, and it's just getting rolling. Bakelitc was invented around 1907, synthetic rubber in 1910, nylon around 1930. Better check those dates if you use any of this. The point is, this century's just the infancy; synthetic polymers're going to be with us to the year one million or until we blow ourselves up, whichever comes sooner, and the beauty of it is, you can grow the raw materials, and when you run out of land you can grow 'em in the ocean. Move over, Mother Nature, we've got you beat. Also I'm working on the Big Inter­face.'

'What interface is that?' Sukie was not ashamed to ask. Alexandra would just have nodded as if she knew; she had a lot still to learn about overcoming accul-turated female recessiveness.