The Witches of Eastwick

game was over. 'That was bliss,' Sukie announced, to whoever was there.

Van Home's voice scraped and rumbled forward, saying, 'I was a pal to you, how's about being a pal to me?'

'O.K.,' Sukie said. 'What do I do?'

'Kiss my ass,' he said huskily. He offered it to her over the net. It was hairy, or downy, depending on how you felt about men. Left, right...

'And in the middle,' he demanded.

The smell seemed to be a message he must deliver, a word brought from afar, not entirely unsweet, a whiff of camel essence coming through the flaps of the silken tents of the Dragon Throne's encampment in the Gobi Desert.

'Thanks,' Van Home said, pulling up his pants. In the dark he sounded like a New York taxi driver, raspy. 'Seems silly to you, I know, but it gives me a helluva boost.'

They walked together up the hill, Sukie's sweat caking on her skin. She wondered how they would manage the hot tub with Jennifer Gabriel there and showing no disposition to leave. Back in the house, the loutish brother was alone in the library, reading a big blue volume that Sukie in a glance over his shoulder saw to be bound comic books. A caped man in a blue hood with pointed ears: Batman. 'The com­plete fucking set,' Van Home boasted. 'It cost me a bundle, some of those old ones, going back to the war, that if I'd had the sense to save as a kid 1 could have made a fortune on. Christ I wasted my childhood waiting for next month's issue. Loved The Joker. Loved The Penguin. Loved the Batmobile in its underground garage. You're both too young to have gotten the bug.'

The boy uttered a complete sentence. 'They used to be on TV.'

'Yeah, but they camped it up. They didn't have to do that. They made it all a joke, that was damn poor taste. The old comic books, there's real evil there. That white face used to haunt my dreams, I'm not kidding. How do you feel about Captain Marvel?' Van Home pulled from the shelves a volume from another set, bound in red rather than blue, and with a comic fervor boomed, 'Sha-ZAM!' To Sukie's surprise he settled himself in a wing chair and began to leaf through, his big face skidding with pleasure.

Sukie followed the faint sound of female voices through the long room of moldering Pop Art, the small room of unpacked boxes, and the double doors leading to the slate-lined bath. The lights in their round ribbed wells had been rheostatted to low. The stereo's red eye was watching over the gentle successions of a Schubert sonata. Three heads of pinned-up hair were disposed upon the surface of steaming water. The voices murmured on, and no head turned to watch Sukie undress. She slid from her many stiff layers of tennis clothes and walked through the humid air naked, sat on the stone edge, and arched her back to give herself to the water, at first too fiery to bear but then not, not. Oh. Slowly she became a new self. Water like sleep sucks our natural heaviness away. Alexan­ dra's and Jane's familiar bodies bobbed about her; their waves and hers merged in one healing agitation. Jennifer Gabriel's round head and round shoulders rested in the center of her vision; the girl's round breasts floated just beneath the surface of the trans­parent black water and in it her hips and feet were foreshortened like a misbegotten fetus's. 'Isn't this lovely?' Sukie asked her.

'It is.'

'He has all these controls,' Sukie explained. 'Is he going to come in with us?' Jennifer asked, afraid.

'I think not,' Jane Smart said, 'this time.' 'Out of deference to you, dear,' Alexandra added. 'I feel so safe. Should I?' 'Why not?' one of the witches asked. 'Feel safe while you can,' another advised. 'The lights are like stars, aren't they? Random, I mean.'

'Watch this.' They all knew the controls now. At the push of a Finger the roof rumbled back. The first pale piercings—planets, red giants—showed early evening's mothering turquoise dome to be an illusion, a nothing. There were spheres beyond spheres, each transparent or opaque as the day and year turned.

'My goodness. The outdoors.'

'Yess.'

'Yet I don't feel cold.' 'Heat rises.'

'How much money do you think he put into all this?'

'Thousands.'

'But why? For what purpose?' 'For us.' 'He loves us.' 'Only us?'

'We don't really know.' 'It's not a useful question.' 'Aren't you content?'

'Yes.' 'Yess.'

'But I'm thinking Chris and I should be getting back. The pets should be fed.' 'What pets?'

'Felicia Gabriel used to say we shouldn't waste pro­tein on pets when everybody in Asia was starving.'

'I didn't know Clyde and Felicia had pets.'

'They didn't. But shortly after we got here some­body put a puppy in the Volvo one night. And a cat came to the door a little later.'

'Think of us. We have children.'

'Poor neglected little scruffy things,' Jane Smart said in a mocking tone that indicated she was imitating another voice, a voice 'out there' raised in hostile gossip against them.

'Well I was raised very protectively,' Sukie offered, 'and it got to be oppressive. Looking back on it I don't think my parents were doing me any favors, they were working out some problems of their own.'

'You can't live others' lives for them,' said Alex­andra driftingly.

'Women must stop serving everybody and then getting even psychologically. That's been our politics up to now.'

'Oh. That does feel good,' Jenny said.