The Witches of Eastwick

His car window had slid smoothly down on a motor. 'You've come at last,' he called, less with that prying clownish edge of the post-concert party than as a sim­ple factual declaration by a busy man. His seamed face grinned. Beside him on the front seat sat a shad­owy conical shape—a collie, but one in whose tricolor hair the black was unusually dominant. This creature yapped mercilessly when loyal Coal rallied from his far-ranging carrion-sniffing to his mistress's side.

She gripped her pet's collar to restrain him as he bristled and gagged, and lifted her voice to make it heard above the dogs' din. 'I was just parking here, I wasn't...' Her voice came out frailer and younger than her own; she had been caught.

'I know, I know,' Van Home said impatiently. 'Come on over anyway and have a drink. You haven't had your tour yet.'

'I have to get back in a minute. The children will be coming home from school.' But even as she said it Alexandra was dragging Coal, suspicious and resist­ing, toward her car. His run wasn't over, he wanted to say.

'Better hop in my jalopy with me,' the man shouted. 'The tide's coming in and you don't want to get stranded.'

“I don't? she wondered, obeying like an automaton, betraying her best friend by shutting Coal alone in the Subaru. He had expected her to join him and drive home. She cranked the driver's window down an inch, for air, and punched the locks on the doors. The dog's black face rumpled with incredulity. His ears were thrust out as far from his skull as their crimped inner folds would bear their floppy weight. These velvety pink folds she had often fondled by the fireside, examining them for ticks. She turned away. 'Really just a minute,' she stammered to Van Home, torn, awkward, years fallen from her with their poise and powers.

The collie, whom Sukie's article had not men­tioned, shed all ferocity and slunk gracefully into the back seat as she opened the Mercedes door. The car's interior was red leather; the front seats had been dressed in sheep hides, woolly side up. With an expen­sive punky sound the door closed at her side.

'Say howdy-do, Needlenose,' Van Home said, twisting his big head, like an ill-fitting helmet, toward the back seat. The dog did indeed have a very pointed nose, which he pushed into Alexandra's palm when she offered it. Pointed, moist, and shocking—the tip of an icicle. She pulled her hand back quickly.

'The tide won't be in for hours,' she said, trying to return her voice to its womanly register. The cause­way was dry and full of potholes. His renovations had not extended this far.

'The bastard can fool you,' he said. 'How the hell've you been, anyway? You look depressed.'

'I do? How can you tell?'

'I can tell. Some people find fall depressing, others hate spring. I've always been a spring person myself. All that growth, you can feel Nature groaning, the old bitch; she doesn't want to do it, not again, no, anything but that, but she has to. It's a fucking torture-rack, all that budding and pushing, the sap up the tree trunks, the weeds and the insects getting set to fight it out once again, the seeds trying to remember how the hell the DNA is supposed to go, all that com­petition for a little bit of nitrogen; Christ, it's cruel. Maybe I'm too sensitive. I bet you revel in it. Women aren't that sensitive to things like that.'

She nodded, hypnotized by the bumpy road dimin­ishing under her, growing at her back. Brick pillars twin to those at the far end stood at the entrance to the island, and these still had their gate, its iron wings flung wide for years and the rusted scrolls become a lattice for wild grapevines and poison ivy and even interpenetrated by young trees, swamp maples, their little leaves turning the tenderest red, almost a rose. One of the pillars had lost its crown of mock fruit.

'Women take pain in their stride pretty much,' Van Home was going on. 'Me, I can't stand it. I can't even bring myself to swat a housefly. The poor thing'll be dead in a couple days anyway.'

Alexandra shuddered, remembering houseflies landing on her lips as she slept, their feathery tiny feet, the electric touch of their energy, like touching a frayed cord while ironing. 'I like May,' she admitted lamely. 'Except every year it docs feel, as you say, more of an effort. For gardeners, anyway.'

Joe Marino's green truck, to her relief, was not parked anywhere out front of the mansion. The heavy work on the tennis court seemed to have been done; instead of the golden earthmovers Sukie had described, a few shirtless young men were with dainty pinging noises fastening wide swatches of green plastic-coated fencing to upright metal posts all around what at the distance, as she looked down from a curve of the driveway to where the snowy egrets used to nest in the dead elms, seemed a big playing card in two flat colors imitating grass and earth; the grid of white lines looked sharp with signification, as compulsively pre­cise as a Wiccan diagram. Van Home had stopped the car so she could admire. 'I looked into that HarTrue and even if you see your way past the initial expense the maintenance of any kind of clay is one hell of a headache. With this AsPhlex composition all you need do is sweep the leaves off it now and then and with any luck you can play right into December. Couple of days more it'll be ready to baptize; my thought was with you and your two buddies we might have a foursome.'

'My goodness, are we up to such an honor? I'm really in no shape—' she began, meaning her game. Ozzie and she for a time had played a lot of doubles with other couples, but in the years since, though Sukie once or twice a summer got her out for some Saturday singles on the battered public courts toward Southwick, she had really played hardly at all.

'Then get in shape,' Van Home said, misunder­standing, spitting in his enthusiasm. 'Move around, get rid of that flub. Hell, thirty-eight is young.'

He knows my age, Alexandra thought, more relieved than offended. It was nice to have yourself known by a man; it was getting to be known that was embar­rassing: all that self-conscious verbalization over too many drinks, and then the bodies revealed with the hidden marks and sags like disappointing presents at Christmastime. But how much of love, when you thought about it, was not of the other but of yourself naked in his eyes: of that rush, that little flight, of shedding your clothes, and being you at last. With this overbearing strange man she felt known, essentially, already. His being awful rather helped.

He put the car into motion and coasted around the crackling driveway circle and halted at the front door. Two steps led up to a paved, pillared porch holding in tesserae of green marble the inlaid initial L. The door itself, freshly painted black, was so massive Alex­andra feared it would pull its hinges loose when the owner swung it open. Inside the foyer, a sulphurous chemical smell greeted her; Van Home seemed obliv­ious of it, it was his element. He ushered her in, past a stuffed hollow elephant foot full of knobbed and curved canes and one umbrella. He was not wearing baggy tweed today but a dark three-piece suit as if he had been somewhere on business. He gestured right and left with excited stiff arms that returned to his sides like collapsed levers. 'Lab's over there, past the pianos, used to be the ballroom, nothing in there but a ton of equipment half of it still in crates, we've hardly begun to roll yet, but when we do, boy, we're going to make dynamite look like