The Witches of Eastwick

'The interface between solar energy and electrical energy,' Van Home told Sukie. 'There has to be one, and once we find the combination you can run every appliance in your house right off the roof and have enough left over to recharge your electric car in the night. Clean, abundant, and free. It's coming, honey-bunch, it's coming!'

'Those panels look so ugly,' Sukie said. 'There's a hippie in town who's done over an old garage so he can heat his water, 1 have no idea why, he never takes a bath.'

'I'm not talking about collectors,' Van Home said. 'Thai's Model T stuff.' He looked about him; his head turned like a barrel being rolled on its edge. 'I'm talking about a paint.'

'A paint?' Alexandra said, feeling she should make a contribution. At least this man was giving her some­thing new to think about, beyond tomato sauce.

'A paint,' he solemnly assured her. 'A simple paint you brush on with a brush and that turns the entire epidermis of your lovely home into an enormous low-voltaic cell.'

'There's only one word for that,' Sukie said.

'Yeah, what's that?'

'Electrifying.'

Van Home aped being offended. 'Shit, if I'd known that's the kind of flirtatious featherheaded thing you like to say I wouldn't have wasted my time spilling my guts. You play tennis?'

Sukie stood up a little taller. Alexandra experi­enced a wish to stroke that long flat stretch from the other woman's breasts to below her waist, the way one longs to dart out a hand and stroke the belly a cat on its back elongates in stretching, the toes of its hind paws a-tremble in this moment of muscular ecstasy. Sukie was just so nicely made. 'A bit,' she said, her tongue peeking through her smile and adhering for a moment to her upper lip.

'You gotta come over in a couple weeks or so, I'm having a court put in.'

Alexandra interrupted. 'You can't fill wetlands,' she said.

This big stranger wiped his lips and repulsively eyed her. 'Once they're filled,' he said in his imper­fectly synchronized, slightly slurring voice, 'they're not wet.'

'The snowy egrets like to nest there, in the dead elms out back.'

'T, O, U, G, F,' Van Home said. 'Tough.'

From the sudden stariness of his eyes she wondered if he was wearing contact lenses. His conversation did seem distracted by a constant slipshod effort to keep himself together. 'Oh,' she said, and what Alexandra noticed now gave her, already slightly dizzy, the sen­sation of looking down a deep hole. His aura was gone. He had absolutely none, like a dead man or a wooden idol, above his head of greasy hair.

Sukie laughed, pealingly; her dainty round belly pumped under the waistband of her suede skirt in sympathy with her diaphragm. 'I love that. May I quote you, Mr. Van Home? Filled Wetlands No Longer Wet, Declares Intriguing New Citizen.'

Disgusted by this mating dance, Alexandra turned away. The auras of all the others at the party were blinding now, like the peripheral lights along a high­way as raindrops collect on the windshield. And very stupidly she felt within herself the obscuring moisture of an unwanted infatuation condensing. The big man was a bundle of needs; he was a chasm that sucked her heart out of her chest.

Old Mrs. Lovecraft, her aura the tawdry magenta of those who are well pleased with their lives and fully expect to go to Heaven, came up to Alexandra bleat­ing, 'Sandy dear, we miss you at the Garden Club. You mustn't keep so to yourself.'

'Do I keep to myself? I feel busy. I've been putting up tomatoes, it's just incredible the way they kept coming this fall.'

'I know you've been gardening; Horace and I admire your house every time we drive down Orchard Road: that cunning little bed you have by your doorway, chock-a-block full of button mums. I've several times said to him, 'Let's do drop in,' but then I think, No, she might be making her litde things, and we don't want to disrurfc her inspiration.'

Making her little things or love with Joe Marino, Alexandra thought: that was what Franny Lovecraft was implying. In a town like Eastwick there were no secrets, just areas of avoidance. When she and Oz were still together and new in town they had spent a num­ber of evenings in the company of sweet old bores like the Lovecrafts; now Alexandra felt infinitely fallen from the world of decent and dreary amusements they represented.

'I'll come to some meetings this winter, when there's nothing else to do,' Alexandra said, relenting. 'When I'm homesick for nature,' she added, though knowing she would never go, she was far beyond such tame delights. 'I like the slide shows on English gardens; are you having any of them?'

'You must come next Thursday,' Franny Lovecraft insisted, overplaying her hand as people of minor distinction—vice-presidents of savings banks, grand-daughters of clipper-ship captains—will. 'Daisy Robeson's son Warwick has just got back from three years in Iran, where he and his lovely little family had such a nice time, he was working as an adviser there, it somehow has all to do with oil, he says the Shah is performing miracles, all this splendid modern architecture right in their capital city—oh, what is its name,

I want to say New Delhi '

Alexandra offered no help though she knew the name Tehran; the devil was getting into her.

'At any rate, Wicky is going to give a slide show on Oriental rugs. You see, Sandy dear, in the Arab mind, the rug is a garden, it's an indoor garden in their tents and palaces in the middle of all that desert, and there's all manner of real flowers in the design, that to casual eyes looks so abstract. Now doesn't that sound fasci­nating?'

'It does,' Alexandra said. Mrs. Lovecraft had adorned her wrinkled throat, collapsed upon itself in folds and gulleys like those of an eroded roadside embankment, with a strand of artificial pearls of which the centerpiece was an antique mother-of-pearl egg in which a tiny gold cross had been tediously inlaid. With an irritated psychic effort, Alexandra willed the frayed old string to break; fake pearls slipped down the old lady's sunken front and cascaded in constel­lations to the floor.