The Witches of Eastwick

'Buenos noches, senora,' Fidel said. 'Es muy agradable tenerla nuevamente en esta casa.'

'The mister have all sort of gay party planned,' Rebecca said behind him. 'Oh there big changes afoot.'

Jane and Sukie were already in the music room, where some oval-backed chairs with a flaking silvery finish had been set out; Chris Gabriel slouched in a corner near a lamp, reading Rolling Stone. The rest of the room was candlelit; candles in all the colors of jellybeans had been found for the cobwebbed sconces along the wall, each draft-tormented little flame dou­bled by a tin mirror. The aura of the flames was an acrid complementary color: green eating into the orange glow yet constantly repelled, like the viscid contention amid unmixing chemicals. Darryl, wearing a tuxedo of an old-fashioned double-breasted cut, its black dull as soot but for the broad lapels, came up and gave her his cold kiss. Even his spit on her cheek was cold. Jane's aura was slightly muddy with anger and Sukie's rosy and amused, as usual. They had all, in their sweaters and dungarees, evidently under-dressed for the occasion.

The tuxedo did give Darryl a less patchy and sham­bling air than usual. He cleared his froggy throat and announced, 'Howzabout a little concert? I've been working up some ideas here and I want to get you girls' feedback. The first number is entitled'—he froze in mid-gesture, his sharp little greenish teeth gleam­ing, his spectacles for the night so small that the pale-plastic frames seemed to have his eyes trapped—'The A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square Boogie.''

Masses of notes were struck off as if more than two hands were playing, the left hand setting up a deep cloudy stride rhythm, airy but dark like a thunder-head growing closer above the treetops, and then the right hand picking out, in halting broken phrases so that the tune only gradually emerged, the rainbow of the melody. You could see it, the misty English park, the pearly London sky, the dancing cheek-to-cheek, and at the same time feel the American rumble, the good gritty whorehouse tinkling only this continent could have cooked up, in the tasselled brothels of a southern river town. The melody drew closer to the bass, the bass moved up and swallowed the nightin­gale, a wonderfully complicated flurry ensued while Van Home's pasty seamed face dripped sweat onto the keyboard and his grunts of effort smudged the music; Alexandra pictured his hands as white waxy machines, the phalanges and flexor tendons tugging and flattening and directly connected to the rods and felts and strings of the piano, this immense plangent voice one hyperdeveloped fingernail. The themes drew apart, the rainbow reappeared, the thunderhead faded into harmless air, the melody was resulted in an odd high minor key reached through an askew series of six descending, fading chords struck across the col­lapsing syncopation.

Silence, but for the hum of the piano's pounded harp.

'Fantastic,' Jane Smart said dryly.

'Really, baby,' Sukie urged upon their host, exposed and blinking now that his exertion was over. 'I've never heard anything like it.'

'I could cry,' Alexandra said sincerely, he had stirred such memories within her, and such inklings of her future; music lights up with its pulsing lamp the cave of our being.

Darryl seemed disconcerted by their praise, as if he might be dissolved in it. He shook his shaggy head like a dog drying itself, and then seemed to press his jaw back into place with the same two fingers that wiped the corners of his mouth. 'That one mixed pretty well,' he admitted. 'O.K., let's try this one now. It's called 'The How High the Moon March.'' This mix went less well, though the same wizardry was in operation. A wizardry, Alexandra thought, of theft and transformation, with nothing of guileless creative engendering about it, only a boldness of monstrous combination. The third offering was the Beatles' tender 'Yesterday,' broken into the stutter-rhythms of a samba; it made them all laugh, which hadn't been the effect of the first and which wasn't perhaps the intention. 'So,' Van Home said, rising from the bench. 'That's the idea. If I could work up a dozen or so of these a friend of mine in New York says he has an in with a recording executive and maybe we can raise a modicum of moolah to keep this establishment afloat. So what's your input?'

'It may be a bit... special,' Sukie offered, her plump upper lip closing upon her lower in a solemn way that looked nevertheless amused.

'What's special?' Van Home asked, pain showing, his face about to fly apart. 'Tiny Tim was special. Liberace was special. Lee Harvey Oswald was special.

To get any attention at all in this day and age you got to be way out.'

'This establishment needs moolah?' Jane Smart asked sharply.

'So I'm told, toots.'

'Honey, by whom?' Sukie asked.

'Oh,' he said, embarrassed, squinting out through the candlelight as if he could see nothing but reflec­tions, 'a bunch of people. Banker types. Prospective partners.' Abruptly, in tune perhaps with the old tux­edo, he ducked into horror-movie clowning, (jobbing in his black outfit as if crippled, his legs hinged the wrong way. 'That's enough business,' he said. 'Let's go into the living room. Let's get smashed.'

Something was up. Alexandra fell a sliding start within her; an immense slick slope of depression was revealed as if by the sliding upwards of an automatic garage door, the door activated by a kind of electric eye of her own internal sensing and giving on a wide underground ramp whose downward trend there was no reversing, not by pills or sunshine or a good night's sleep. Her life had been built on sand and she knew that everything she saw tonight was going to strike her as sad.

The dusty ugly works of Pop Art in the living room were sad, and the way several fluorescent tubes in the track lighting overhead were out or flickered, buzz­ing. The great long room needed more people to fill it with the revelry it had been designed for; it seemed to Alexandra suddenly an ill-attended church, like those that Colorado pioneers had built along the mountain roads and where no one came any more, an ebbing more than a renunciation, everybody too busy changing the plugs in their pickup truck or recovering from Saturday night, the parking places outside gone over to grass, the pews with their racks still stocked with hymnals visible inside. 'Where's Jenny?' she asked aloud.

'The lady still cleaning up in de laboratory,' Rebecca said. 'She work so hard, I worry sickness take her.'

'How's it all going?' Sukie asked Darryl. 'When can I paint my roof with kilowatts? People still stop me on the street and ask about that because of the story I wrote on you.'

'Yeah,' he snarled, ventriloquistically, so the voice emerged from well beside his head, 'and those old fogies you sold the Gabriel dump to bad-mouthing the whole idea, I hear. Fuck 'em. They laughed at Leonardo. They laughed at Leibniz. They laughed at the guy who invented the zipper, what the hell was his name? One of invention's unsung greats. Actually, I've been wondering if microorganisms aren't the way to go—use a mechanism that's already set in place and self-replicates. Btogas technology: you know who's way ahead in that department? The Chinese, can you believe it?'