The Witches of Eastwick

Jane was going on, 'You and Sukie are always pok­ing fun of my being with Ray Neff ever and yet until this other man has shown up the only music I could make in town was with Ray.'

Alexandra was going on, 'They're sculptures, just because they're not on a big scale like a Calder or Moore, you sound as vulgar as Whatsisname did, insinuating I should do something bigger so some expensive New York gallery can take fifty percent, even if they were to sell, which I very much doubt. Everything now is so trendy and violent.'

'Is that what he said? So he had a proposition for you too.'

'I wouldn't call it a proposition, just typical New York pushiness, sticking your nose in where it doesn't belong. They all have to be in on the action, any action.'

'He's fascinated by us,' Jane Smart asserted. 'Why we all live up here wasting our sweetness on the desert air.'

'Tell him Narragansett Bay has always taken odd­balls in and what's he doing up here himself?'

'I wonder.' In her flat Massachusetts Bay style Jane slighted the r. 'He almost gives the impression that things got too hot for him where fie was. And he does love all the space in the big house. He owns three pianos, honestly, though one of them is an upright that he keeps in his library; he has all these beautiful old books, with leather bindings and titles in Latin.'

'Did he give you anything to drink?'

'Just tea. This manservant he has, that he talks Spanish to, brought it on a huge tray with a lot of liqueurs in funny old bottles that had that air, you know, of coming out of a cellar full of cobwebs.'

'I thought you said you just had tea.'

'Well really, Lexa, maybe I did have a sip of black­berry cordial or something Fidel was very enthusiastic about called mescal; if I'd known I was going to have to make such a complete report I'd have written the name down. You're worse than the CIA.'

'I'm sorry, Jane. I'm very jealous, I suppose. And my period. It's lasted five days now, ever since the concert, and the ovary on the left side hurts. Do you think it could be menopause?'

'At thirty-eight? Honey, really.'

'Well then it must be cancer.'

'It couldn't be cancer.'

'Why couldn't it be?'

'Because you're you. You have too much magic to have cancer.'

'Some days I don't feel like I have any magic. Any­way, other people have magic too.' She was thinking of Gina, Joe's wife. Gina must hate her. The Italian word for witch was strega. All over Sicily, Joe had told her, they give each other the evil eye. 'Some days my insides feel all lied in knots.'

'See Doc Pat, if you're seriously worried,' said Jane, not quite unsympathetically. Dr. Henry Paterson, a plump pink man their age, with wounded wide watery eyes and a beautiful gentle Firm touch when he pal­pated. His wife had left him years ago. He had never grasped why or remarried.

'He makes me feel strange,' Alexandra said. 'The way he drapes you with a sheet and does everything under that.'

'The poor man, what is he supposed to do?'

'Not be so sly. I have a body. He knows it. I know it. Why do we have to pretend with this sheet?'

'They all get sued,' Jane said, 'if there isn't any nurse in the room.' Her voice had a double to it, like a television signal when a truck goes by. This wasn't what she had called to talk about. Something else was on her mind.

'What else did you learn at Van Home's?' Alex­andra asked.

'Well—promise you won't tell anybody.'

'Not even Sukie?'

'Especially not Sukie. It's about her. Darryl is really rather remarkable, he picks everything up. He stayed at the reception later than we did, I went off to have a beer with the rest of the quartet at the Bronze Bar­rel—'

'Greta along?'

'Oh God yes. She told us all about Hitler, how her parents couldn't stand him because his German was so uncouth. Apparently on the radio he didn't always end his sentences with the verb.'

'How awful for them.'

'—and I guess you faded into the night after play­ing that dreadful trick with poor Franny Lovecraft's pearls —'

'What pearls?'

'Don't pretend, Lexa. You were naughty. I know your style. And then the shoes, she's been in bed ever since but I guess she didn't break anything; they were worried about her hip. Do you know a woman's bones shrink to about half by the time she gets old? That's why everything snaps. She was lucky: just contusions.'

'1 don't know, looking at her made me wonder if

I was going to be so sweet and boring and bullying when I got to be that age, if I do get to be, which I doubt. It was like looking into a mirror at my own dreary future, and I'm sorry, it drove me wild.'

'All right, sweetie; it's no skin off my nose. As I was trying to say, Darryl hung