The Witches of Eastwick

But her voice, it seemed to Alexandra, was slowing, softening, as the water worked upon them from with­out and the cannabis from within. 'But baby you're not even wearing underpants,' Alexandra pointed out. It seemed an illumination of some merit. The room was growing blighter, with nobody touching a dial.

'I'm not kidding,' Van Home pursued, that myopic little boy-scholar still in him, worming to understand. His face was set on the water's surface as on a platter; his hair was long as John the Baptist's and merged with the curls licked flat on his shoulders. 'It comes from the heart, can't you girls tell? I love women. My mother was a brick, smart and pretty, Christ. I used to watch her slave around the house all day and around six-thirty in wanders this little guy in a business suit and I think to myself, 'What's this wimp butting in for?' My old dad, the hard-working wimp. Tell me honest, how does it feel when the milk flows?'

'How does it feel,' Jane asked irritably, 'when you come?'

'Hey come on, let's not get ugly.'

Alexandra perceived genuine alarm on the man's heavy, seamed face; for some reason coming was a tender area in his mind.

'I don't see what's ugly,' Jane was saying. 'You want to talk physiology, I'm just offering a physio­logical sensation that women can't have. I mean, we don't come that way. Quite. Don't you love that word they have for the clitoris, 'homologous'?'

Alexandra offered, apropos of giving milk, 'It feels like when you have to go pee and can't and then suddenly you can.'

'That's what I love about women,' Van Home said. 'Their homely similes. There's no such word as 'ugly' in your vocabulary. Men, Christ, they're so squeamish about everything—blood, spiders, blow jobs. You know, in a lot of species the bitch or sow or whatever eats the afterbirth?'

'I don't think you realize,' Jane said, striving for a dry tone, 'what a chauvinistic thing that is to say.' But her dryness took a strange turn as she stood on tiptoe in the tub, so her breasts lifted silvery from the water; one was a little higher and smaller than the other. She held them in her two hands and explained to a point in space between the man and the other woman, as if to the invisible witness of her life, a witness we all carry with us and seldom address aloud, 'I always wanted my breasts to be bigger. Like Lexa's. She has lovely big boobs. Show him, sweet.'

'Jane, please. You're making me blush. I don't think it's the size that matters so much to men, it's the, it's the tilt, and the way they go with the whole body. And what you yourself think of them. If you're pleased, others will be. Am I right or wrong?' she asked Van Home.

But he would not be held to the role of male spokes­man. He too stood up out of the water and cupped his hairy-backed palms over his vestigial male nipples, tiny warts surrounded by wet black snakes. 'Think of volving all that,' he beseeched. 'The machinery, all that plumbing, of the body of one sex to make food, food more exactly suited to the baby than any formula you can cook up in a lab. Think of evolving sexual pleasure. Do squids have it? What about plankton? With them, they don't have to think, but we, we think. To keep us in the game, what a bait they had to rig up! There's more built into it than one of these crazy reconnaissance planes that costs the taxpayers a zillion before it gets shot down. Suppose they left it out, nobody would fuck anybody and the species would stop dead with everybody admiring sunsets and the Pythagorean theorem.'

Alexandra liked the way his mind worked; she had no trouble following it. 'I adore this room,' she announced dreamily. 'At first I didn't think I would. All the black, except for the nice copper tubing Joe put in. Joe can be sweet, when he takes off his hat.'

'Who's Joe?' Van Home asked.

'This conversation,' Jane said, so the s's in her words slightly burned, 'seems to have descended to a rather primitive level.'

'I could put on some music,' Van Home said, touchingly anxious that they not be bored. 'We're all wired up for four-track stereo.'

'Shh,' Jane said. 'I heard a car on the driveway.'

'Trick-or-treaters,' Van Home suggested. 'Fidel'll give 'em some razor-blade apples we've been cooking up.'

'Maybe Sukie's come back,' Alexandra said. 'I love you, Jane; you have such good ears.'

'Aren't they nice?' the other woman agreed. 'I do have pretty ears, even my father always said. Look.' She held her hair back from one and then, turning her head, the other. 'The only trouble is, one's a little higher than the other, so any glasses I wear sit cock­eyed on my nose.'

'They're rather square,' Alexandra said.

Taking it as a compliment, Jane added, 'And nice and flat to the skull. Sukie's are cupped out like a monkey's, have you ever noticed?' 'Often.'

'Her eyes are too close together, too, and her over­bite should have been corrected when she was young. And her nose, just a little blob really. I honestly don't know how she makes it all work as well as she does.'

'I don't think Sukie will be coming back,' Van Home said. 'She's too tied up with these neurotic creeps that run this town.'

'She is and she isn't,' someone said; Alexandra thought it had to be Jane but it sounded like her own voice.

'Isn't this cozy and nice?' she said, to test her own voice. It sounded deep, a man's voice.

'Our home away from home,' Jane said, sarcasti­cally, Alexandra supposed. It was really by no means easy to attain etheric harmony with Jane.

The sound Jane had heard was not Sukie, it was Fidel, bringing margaritas, on the enormous engraved silver tray Sukie had once mentioned to Alexandra admiringly, each broad wineglass on its thin stem rimmed with chunky sea-salt. It looked odd to Alex­andra, so at home in her nudity had she already become, that Fidel was not naked too, but wearing a pajamalike uniform the color of army chinos.

'Dig this, ladies,' Van Home called, boyish in his boasting and also in the look of his white behind, for he had