The Witches of Eastwick

teased.

'It wasn't that so much as Jenny's manner. Still, I can't believe it. I know it but I can't believe it.'

'You better believe it, ladies. The kid here and I were married as of yesterday afternoon at three-thirty p.m. The craziest little justice of the peace up in Apponaug. He stuttered. I never thought you could have a stutter and still get the license. D-d-d-do you, D-D-D-D-D—'

'Oh Darryl, you didn't!' Sukie cried, her lips pulled so far back in a mirthless grin that the hollows at the top of her upper gums showed.

Jane Smart hissed at Alexandra's side.

'How could you two do that to us?' Sukie asked.

The word 'us' surprised Alexandra, who felt this announcement as a sudden sore place in her abdomen alone.

'So sneakily,' Sukie went on, her cheerful party manner slightly stiff on her face. 'We would at least have given her a shower.'

'Or some casserole dishes,' Alexandra said bravely.

'She did it,' Jane was saying seemingly to herself but of course for Alexandra and the others to over­hear. 'She actually managed to pull it off.'

Jenny defended herself; the color in her cheeks was high. 'It wasn't so much managing, it just came to seem natural, me here all the time anyway, and naturally...'

'Naturally nature took its nasty natural course,' Jane spit out.

'Darryl, what's in it for you?' Sukie asked him, in her frank and manly reporter's voice.

'Oh, you know,' he said sheepishly. 'The standard stuff. Settle down. Security. Look at her. She's beau­ tiful.'

'Bullshit,' Jane Smart said slowly, the word sim­mering.

'With all respect, Darryl, and I am fond of our little Jenny,' Sukie said, 'she is a bit of a blah.'

'Come on, cut it out, what sort of reception is this?' the big man said helplessly, while his robed bride beside him didn't flinch, taking shelter as she always had behind the brittle shield of innocence, the snobbery of ignorance. It was not that her brain was less effi­cient than theirs, within its limits it was more so; but it was like the keyboard of an adding machine as opposed to that of typewriters. Van Home was trying to collect his dignity. 'Listen, you bitches,' he said. 'What's this attitude that I owe you anything? I took you in, I gave you eats and a little relief from your lousy lives—'

'Who made them lousy?' Jane Smart swiftly asked. 'Not me. I'm new in town.'

Fidel brought in a tray of long-stemmed glasses of champagne. Alexandra took one and tossed its con­tents at Van Home's face; the rarefied liquid fell short, wetting only the area of his fly and one pants leg. All she had achieved was to make him seem the victim and not herself. She threw the glass vehemently at the sculpture of intertwined automobile bumpers; here her aim was better, but the glass in mid-flight turned into a barn swallow, and flicked itself away. Thumbkin, who had been licking herself on the satin love seat, worrying with avid tongue the tiny pink gap in her raiment of long white fur, perked up and gave chase; with that comical deadly solemnity of cats, green eyes flattened across the lop, she stalked along the back of the curved four-cushion sofa and batted in frustration at the air when she reached the edge. The bird took shelter by perching upon a hanging Styrofoam cloud by Marjorie Strider.

'Hey, this isn't at all the way I pictured it,' Van Home complained.

'How did you picture it, Darryl?' Sukie asked.

'As a blast. We thought you'd be pleased as hell. You brought us together. You're like Cupids. You're like the maids of honor.'

'I never thought they'd be pleased,' Jenny cor­rected. 'I just didn't think they'd be quite so ill-mannered.'

'Why wouldn't they be pleased?' Van Home held his rubbery strange hands open in a supplicatory fash­ion, arguing with Jenny, and they did look the very tableau of a married couple. 'We'd be pleased for them,' he said, 'if some schnook came along and took 'em off the market. I mean, what's this jealousy bag, with the whole damn world going up in napalm? How fucking bourgeois can you get?'

Sukie was the first to soften. Perhaps she just wanted to nibble something. 'All right,' she said. 'Let's eat the cake. It better have hash in it.'

'The best. Orinoco beige.'

Alexandra had to laugh, Darryl was so funny and hopeful and discombobulated. 'There is no such thing.'

'Sure there is, if you know the right people. Rebecca knows the guys who drive that crazy-painted van down from south Providence. La crime de la crooks, honest. You'll fly out of here. Wonder what the tide's doing?'

So he did remember: her braving the ice-cold tide that day, and him standing on the far shore shouting 'You can fly!'

The cake was set on the table-like back of the crouching nude. The marzipan figures were removed and broken and passed around for them to eat in a circle. Alexandra got the prick—tribute of a sort. Dar­ryl mumbled 'Hoc est enim corpus meum' as he did the distribution; over the champagne he intoned, 'Hie est enim calyx sanguines mea.' Across from Alexandra, Jen­ny's face had turned a radiant pink; she was allowing her joy to show, she was dyed clear through by the blood of triumph. Alexandra's heart went out to her, as if to a younger self. They all fed cake to one another with their fingers; soon its tiered cylinders looked eviscerated by jackals. Then they linked dirty hands and, their backs to the crouching statue, upon whose left buttock Sukie with lipstick and frosting had painted a grinning snaggle-toothed face, they danced in a ring, chanting in the ancient fashion, 'Emen hatan, Emen hetan' and 'Har, har,