The Witches of Eastwick

'She really did seem unaware,' Sukie said, 'that we might be offended by her stealing Darryl right out from under our noses that way.'

'Once you've established in your own mind that you're innocent,' Jane said, 'you can get away with anything. How did she look?'

Now the pause was on Sukie's side. In the old days their conversations had bubbled along, their sentences braiding, flowing one on top of the other, each antic­ipating what the other was going to say and delighting in it nonetheless, as confirmation of a pooled identity.

'Not great,' Sukie pronounced at last. 'Her skin seemed ... transparent, somehow.'

'She was always pale,' Jane said.

'But this wasn't just pale. Anyway, baby, it's May. Everybody should have a little color by now. We went down to Moonstone last Sunday and just soaked in the dunes. My nose looks like a strawberry; Toby kids me about it.'

'Toby?'

'You know, Toby Bergman: he took over at the Word after poor Clyde and broke his leg on the ice this winter? His leg is all healed now, though it's smaller than the other. He never does these exercises with a lead shoe you're supposed to do.'

'I thought you hated him.'

'That was before I got to know him, when I was still all hysterical about Clyde. Toby's a lot of fun, actually. He makes me laugh.'

'Isn't he a lot... younger?'

'We talk about that. He'll be two whole years out of Brown this June. He says I'm the youngest person at heart he's ever met, he kids me about how I'm always eating junk food and wanting to do crazy things like stay up all night listening to talk shows. I guess he's very typical of his generation, they don't have all the hangups about age and race and all that that we were brought up on. Believe me, darling, he's a big improvement on Ed and Clyde in a number of ways, including some I won't go into. It's not com­plicated, we just have fun.'

'Super,' Jane said in dismissal, dropping the r. 'Did her... spirit seem the same?'

'She came on a little less shy,' Sukie said thought­fully. 'You know, the married woman and all. Pale, like I said, but maybe it was the time of day. We had a cup of coffee in Nemo's, only she had cocoa because she hasn't been sleeping well and is trying to do with­out caffeine. Rebecca was all over her, insisted we try these blueberry muffins that are part of Nemo's cam­paign to get some of the nice-people luncheon busi­ness back from the Bakery. She hardly gave me the time of day. Rebecca. She just took one bite of hers, Jenny this is, and asked if I could finish it for her, she didn't want to hurt Rebecca's feelings. Actually, 1 was happy to, I've been ravenous lately, I can't imagine what it is, I can't be pregnant, can I? These Jews are real potent. She said she didn't know why, but she just hadn't had much of an appetite lately. Jenny. I wondered if she was fishing, to see if I knew why by any chance. She may know in her tones about the... the thing we did, I don't know. I felt sorry for her, the way she seemed so apologetic, about not having an appetite.'

'It really is true, isn't it?' Jane observed. 'You pay for every sin.'

There were so many sins in the world it took Sukie a second to figure out that Jane meant Jenny's sin of marrying Darryl.

Joe had been there that morning and they had had their worst scene yet. Gina was in her fourth month by now and it was starting to show; the whole town could see. And Alexandra's children were about to be let out of school and would make these weekday trysts in her home impossible. Which was a relief to her; it would be a great relief, frankly, for her not to have to listen any more to his irresponsible and really rather presumptuous talk of leaving Gina. She was sick of hearing it, it meant nothing, and she wouldn't want it to mean anything, the whole idea upset and insulted her. He was her lover, wasn't that enough? Had been her lover, after today. Things end. Things begin, and things end. All grown-ups know that, why didn't he? Caught as he was so severely, rotated on the point of her tongue as on a spit, Joe became hot, and walloped her shoulder a few times with a fist kept loose enough not to hurt, and ran around the room naked, his body stocky and white and two dark swirls of hair on his back suggesting to her eyes butterfly wings (his spine its body) or a veneer of thin marble slices set so the molten splash of grain within made a symmetrical pattern. There was something delicate and organic about the hair on Joe's body, whereas Darryl's had been a rough mat. Joe wept; he took off his hat to beat his head on a doorframe: it was parody and yet real grief, actual loss. The room, the Williamsburg-green of its old woodwork and the big peonies of its curtains with their concealed clown faces and the cracked ceiling that had mutely and conspiratorially watched over their naked couplings, was part of their grief, for little is more precious in an affair for a man than being welcomed into a house he has done noth­ing to support, or more momentous for the woman than this welcoming, this considered largesse, her house his, his on the strength of his cock alone, his cock and company, the smell and amusement and weight of him—no buying you with mortgage pay­ments, no blackmailing you with shared children, but welcomed simply, into the walls of yourself, an admis­sion dignified by freedom and equality. Joe couldn't stop thinking of teams and marriage; he wanted his own penates to preside. He had demeaned with 'good' intentions her gracious gift. In his anguish he sur­prised Alexandra by getting erect again, and since his time was short now, their morning wasted in words, she let him take her his favorite way, from behind, she on her knees. What a force of nature his pounding was! How he convulsed, shooting off! The whole epi­sode left her feeling tumbled and cleansed, like a towel from the dryer needing to be folded and stacked on some airy shelf of her sunny, empty home.

The house, too, seemed happier for his visit, in this interval before the eternity of their parting sank in. The beams and floorboards of this windy, moistening time of the year chatted among themselves, creaking, and a window sash when her back was turned would give a swift rattle like a sudden bird cry.

She lunched on last night's salad, the lettuce limp in its chilled bath of oil. She must lose weight or she couldn't wear a bathing suit all summer. Another fail­ing of Joe's was his forgivingness of her fat—like those primitive men who turn their wives into captives of obesity, mountains of black flesh waiting in their thatched huts. Already Alexandra felt slimmer, light­ened of her lover. Her intuition told her the phone would ring. It did. It would be Jane or Sukie, lively with malice. But from the grid pressed against her ear emerged a younger, lighter voice, with a tension of timidity in it, a pocket of fear over which a mem­brane pulsed as at a frog's throat.

'Alexandra, you're all avoiding me.' It was the voice Alexandra least in the world wanted to hear.

'Well, Jenny, we want to give you and Darryl pri­vacy. Also we hear you have other friends.'

'Yes, we do, Darryl loves what he calls input. But it's not like... we were.'

'Nothing's ever quite the same,' Alexandra told her. 'The stream flows; the little bird hatches and breaks the