The Witches of Eastwick

'Couldn't we just use less electricity?' Sukie asked, interviewing out of habit. 'And use our bodies more? Nobody needs an electric carving knife.'

'You need one if your neighbor has one,' Van Home said. 'And then you need another to replace the one you get. And another. And another. Fidel! Deseo beber!'

The servant in his khaki pajamas, abjectly shapeless and yet also with a whisper of military menace, brought drinks, and a tray of huevos picantes and palm hearts. Without Jenny here, surprisingly, conversation lagged; they had grown used to her, as someone to display themselves to, to amuse and shock and instruct. Her wide-eyed silence was missed. Alexandra, hoping that art, any art, might staunch the internal bleeding of her melancholy, moved among the giant hamburgers and ceramic dartboards as if she had never seen them before; and indeed some of them she hadn't. On a four-foot plinth of plywood painted black, beneath a plastic pastry bell, rested an ironically realistic rep­lica—a three-dimensional Wayne Thiebaud—of a white-frosted wedding cake. Instead of the conven­tional bride and groom, however, two nude figures stood on the topmost tier, the female pink and blonde and rounded and the black-haired man a darker pink, but for the dead-white centimeter of his semi-erect penis. Alexandra wondered what the material of this fabrication was: the cake lacked the scoring of cast bronze and also the glaze of enamelled ceramic. Acryl-icked plaster was her guess. Seeing that no one but Rebecca, passing a tray of tiny crabs stuffed with xu-xu paste, was observing her, Alexandra lifted the bell and touched the frostinglike rim of the object. A tender dab of it came away on her finger. She put the finger in her mouth. Sugar. It was real frosting, a real cake, and fresh.

Darryl, with wide splaying gestures, was outlining another energy approach to Sukie and Jane. 'With geothermal, once you get the shaft dug—and why the hell not? they make tunnels twenty miles long over in the Alps every day of the week—your only problem is keeping the energy from burning up the converter. Metal will melt like lead soldiers on Venus. You know what the answer is? Unbelievably simple. Stone. You got to make all your machinery, all the gearing and turbines, out of stone. They can do it! They can chisel granite now as fine as they can mill steel. They can make springs out of poured cement, would you believe?—particle size is what it all boils down to. Metal has had it, just like flint when the Bronze Age came in.'

Another work of art Alexandra hadn't noticed before was a glossy female nude, a mannequin without the usual matte skin and the hinged limbs, a Kienholz in its assaultiveness but smooth and minimally defined in the manner of Tom Wesselmann, crouching as if to be fucked from behind, her face blank and bland, her back flat enough to be a tabletop. The indentation of her spine was straight as the groove for blood in a butcher's block. The buttocks suggested two white motorcycle helmets welded together. The statue stirred Alexandra with its blasphemous simplification of her own, female form. She took another margarita from Fidel's tray, savored the salt (it is a myth and absurd slander that witches abhor salt; saltpeter and cod liver oil, both associated with Christian virtue, are what they cannot abide), and sauntered up to their host. 'I feel sexy and sad,' she said. 'I want to take my bath and smoke my joint and get home. I swore to the babysitter I’d be home by ten-thirty; she was the fifth girl I tried and I could hear her mother shouting at her in the background. These parents don't want them to come near us.'

'You're breaking my heart,' Van Home said, look­ing sweaty and confused after his gaze into the geo-thermal furnace. 'Don't rush things. I don't feel smashed yet. There's a schedule here. Jenny's about to come down.'

Alexandra saw a new light in Van Home's glassy bloodshot eyes; he looked scared. But what could scare him?

Jenny's tread was silent on the carpeted curved front staircase; she came into the long room with her hair pulled back like Eva Peron's and wearing a powder-blue bathrobe that swept the floor. Above each of her breasts the robe bore as decoration three embroidered cuts like large buttonholes, which reminded Alexandra of military chevrons. Jenny's face, with its wide round brow and firm triangular chin, was shiny-clean and devoid of make-up; nor did a smile adorn it. 'Darryl, don't get drunk,' she said. 'You make even less sense when you're drunk than when you're sober.'

'But he gets inspired,' Sukie said with her practiced sauciness, feeling her way with this new woman, in residence and somehow in charge.

Jenny ignored her, looking around, past their heads. 'Where's dear Chris?'

From the corner Rebecca said, 'Young man in de liberry reading his magazines.'

Jenny took two steps forward and said, 'Alexandra. Look.' She untied her cloth belt and spread the robe's wings wide, revealing her white body with its round­nesses, its rings of baby fat, its cloud of soft hair smaller than a man's hand. She asked Alexandra to look at that translucent wart under her breast. 'Do you think it's getting bigger or am I imagining it? And up here,' she said, guiding the other woman's fingers into her armpit. 'Do you feel a little lump?'

'It's hard to say,' Alexandra said, flustered, for such touching occurred in the steamy dark of the tub room but not in the bald fluorescent light here. 'We're all so full of little lumps just naturally. I don't feel anything.'

'You aren't concentrating,' Jenny said, and with a gesture that in another context would have seemed loving took Alexandra's wrist in her fingers and led her right hand to the other armpit. 'There's sort of the same thing there too. Please, Lexa. Concentrate.'

A faint bristle of shaven hair. A silkiness of applied powder. Underneath, lumps, veins, glands, nodules. Nothing in nature is quite homogeneous; the universe was tossed off freehand. 'Hurt?' she asked.

'I'm not sure. I feel something.'

'I don't think it's anything,' Alexandra pro­nounced.

'Could it be connected with this somehow?' Jenny lifted her firm conical breast to further expose her transparent wart, a tiny cauliflower or pug face of pink flesh gone awry.

'I don't think so. We all get those.'

Suddenly impatient, Jenny closed her bathrobe and pulled the belt tight. She turned to Van Home. 'Have you told them?'

'My dear, my dear,' he said, wiping the corners of his smiling mouth with a trembling thumb and finger. 'We must make a ceremony of it.'

'The fumes today have given me a headache and I think we've all had enough ceremonies. Fidel, just bring me a glass of soda water, aqua gaseosa, o horchata, por favor. Pronto, gracias.'

'The wedding cake,' exclaimed Alexandra, with an icy thrill of clairvoyance.

'Now you're cooking, little Sandy,' Van Home said. 'You've got it. I saw you poke and lick that finger,' he