The Witches of Eastwick

bed he went into the warm cellar (the old fur­nace chewing, chewing fuel) and fetched the alumi­num stepladder. It fell feather-light; the might of angels was descending upon him. He also carried up some lumber scraps and with these set the ladder on the car­peted stairs so that, one pair of plastic feet resting three risers lower than the other on pieces of wood, the step-less crossbraced rails were vertical and the entire tilted shape would topple over at a nudge. The last thing he would see, he estimated, would be the front doorway and the leaded fanlight of stained glass, its vaguely sun­riselike symmetrical pattern lit up by the sodium glow of a distant street lamp. By light nearer to hand, scratches on the aluminum seemed traces left by the swerving flight of atoms in a bubble chamber. Every­ thing was touched with transparency; the many taper­ing, interlocked lines of the staircase were as the architect had dreamed them; it came to Clyde Gabriel, rapturously, that there was nothing to fear, of course our spirits passed through matter like the sparks of divinity they were, of course there would be an afterlife of infinite opportunities, in which he could patch things up with Felicia, and have Sukie too, not once but an infinity of times, just as Nietzsche had conjectured. A lifelong fog was lifting; it was all as clear as rectified type, the meaning that the stars had been singing out to him, Candida sidera, tingeing with light his sluggish spirit sunk in its proud muck.

The aluminum ladder shivered slightly, like a highstrung youthful steed, as he trusted his weight to it. One step, two, then the third. The rope nestled dryly around his neck; the ladder trembled as he reached up and behind to slip the knot tighter, snug against what seemed the correct spot. Now the ladder was swinging violently from side to side; the agitated blood of its jockey was flailing it toward the hurdle, where it lifted, as he had foreseen, at the most delicate urging, and fell away. Clyde heard the clatter and thump. What he had not expected was the burning, as though a hot rasp were being pulled up through his esophagus, and the way the angles of wood and carpet and wallpaper whirled, whirled so widely it seemed for a second he had sprouted eyes in the back of his head. Then a redness in his overstuffed skull was followed by blackness, giving way, with the change of a single letter, to blankness.

'Oh baby, how horrible for you,' Jane Smart said to Sukie, over the phone.

'Well it's not as if I'd had to see any of it myself. But the guys down at the police station were plenty vivid. Apparently she didn't have any face left.' Sukie was not crying but her voice had that wrinkled quality of paper that has been damp and though dry will never lie flat again.

'Well she was a vile woman,' Jane said firmly, com­forting, though her head with its eyes and ears was still back in tte suite of Bach unaccompanieds—the exhilarating, somehow malevolently onrushing Fourth, in E-flat Major. 'So boring, so self-righteous,' she hissed. Her eyes rested on the bare floor of her living room, splintered by repeated heedless socketing of her cello's pointed steel foot.

Sukie's voice faded in and out, as though she were letting the telephone drop away from her chin. 'I've never known a man,' she said, a bit huskily, 'gentler than Clyde.'

'Men are violent,' Jane said, her patience wearing thin. 'Even the mildest of them. It's biological. They're full of rage because they're just accessories to repro­duction.'

'He hated even to correct anybody at work,' Sukie went on, as the sublime music—its diabolical rhythms, its wonderfully cruel demands upon her dexterity— slowly faded from Jane's mind, and the sting from the side of her left thumb, where she had been ardently pressing the strings. 'Though once in a while he would blow up at some proofreader who had let just oodles of things slip through.'

'Well darling, it's obvious. That's why. He was keeping it all inside. When he blew up at Felicia he had thirty years' worth of rage, no wonder he took off her head.'

'It's not fair to say he took off her head,' Sukie said. 'He just kind of—what's that phrase everybody's using these days?—wasted it.'

'And then wasted himself,' prompted Jane, hop­ing by such efficient summary to hasten this conver­sation along so she could return to her music; she liked to practice two hours in the mornings, from ten to noon, and then give herself a tidy lunch of cottage cheese or tuna salad spooned into a single large curved lettuce leaf. This afternoon she had set up a matinee with Darryl Van Home at one-thirty. They would work for an hour on one of the two Brahmses or an amusing little Kodaly Darryl had unearthed in a music shop tucked in the basement of a granite building on Weybosset Street just beyond the Arcade, and then have, their custom was, Asti Spumante, or some tequila milk Fidel would do in the blender, and a bath. Jane still ached, at both ends of her perineum, from their last time together. But most of the good things that come to a woman come through pain and she had been flattered that he would want her without an audience, unless you counted Fidel and Rebecca pad­ding in and out with trays and towels; there was some­thing precarious about Darryl's lust that was flattered and soothed by the three of them being there together and that needed the most extravagant encourage­ments when Jane was with him by herself. She added to Sukie irritably, 'That he was clear-minded enough to carry it through is what I find surprising.'

Sukie defended Clyde. 'Liquor never made him confused unusually, he really drank as a kind of med­icine. I think a lot of his depression must have been metabolic; he once told me his blood pressure was one-ten over seventy, which in a man his age was really wonderful.'

Jane snapped, 'I'm sure a lot of things about him were wonderful for a man of his age. I certainly pre­ferred him to that deplorable Ed Parsley.'

'Oh, Jane, I know you're dying to get me off the phone, but speaking of Ed...'

'Yes?'

'Have you been noticing how close Brenda has grown to the Neffs?'

'I've rather lost track of the Neffs, frankly.'

'I know you have, and good for you,' Sukie said. 'Lexa and I always thought he abused you and you were much too gifted for his little group; it really was just jealousy, his saying your bowing or whatever he said was prissy.'

'Thank you, sweet.'

'Anyway, the two of them and Brenda are appar­ently thick as thieves now, they eat out at the Bronze Barrel or that new French place over toward Pettaquamscutt all the time and evidently Ray and Greta have encouraged her to put in for Ed's position at the church and become the new Unitarian minister. Apparently the Lovecrafts are all for it too and Horace you know is on the church board.'

'But she's not ordained. Don't you have to be ordained? The Episcopalians where I fill in are very strict about things like that; you can't even join as a member unless a bishop has put his hands somewhere, I think on your head.'

'No, but she is in the parsonage with those brats of theirs—absolutely undisciplined, neither Ed or Brenda believed in ever saying No—and making her the new minister might be more graceful than