The Witches of Eastwick

'With that awful Neff,' Sukie echoed, licking qui­nine water from her fingers and looking in her bare refrigerator for a lime. Raymond Neff taught music at the high school, a pudgy effeminate man who yet had fathered five children upon his slovenly, sallow, steel-bespectacled, German-born wife. Like most good schoolteachers he was a tyrant, unctuous and insis­tent; in his dank way he wanted to sleep with every­body. Jane was sleeping with him these days. Alexandra had succumbed a few times in the past but the episode had moved her so little Sukie was perhaps unaware of its vibrations, its afterimage. Sukie herself appeared to be chaste vis-a-vis Neff, but then she had been available least long. Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly; eventually you land on all the properties. The two friends wanted to res­cue Jane, who in a kind of indignant hurry was always selling herself short. It was the hideous wife, with her strawy dull hair cut short as if with grass clippers and her carefully pronounced malapropisms and her goggle-eyed intent way of listening to every word, whom they disapproved of. When you sleep with a married man you in a sense sleep with the wife as well, so she should not be an utter embarrassment.

'Jane has such beautiful possibilities,' Sukie said a bit automatically, as she scrabbled with a furious monkey-motion in the refrigerator's icemaker to loosen some more cubes. A witch can freeze water at a glance but sometimes unfreezing it is the problem. Of the four dogs she and Monty had supported in their hey­day, two had been loping silvery-brown Weimaraners, and she had kept one, called Hank; he was now lean­ing on her legs in the hope that she was struggling in the refrigerator on his behalf.

'But she wastes herself,' Alexandra said, complet­ing the sentence. 'Wastes in the old-fashioned sense,' she added, since this was during the Vietnam War and the war had given the word an awkward new meaning. 'If she's serious about her music she should go somewhere serious with it, a city. It's a terrible waste, a conservatory graduate playing fiddle for a bunch of deaf old biddies in a dilapidated church.'

'She feels safe here,' Sukie said, as if they didn't.

'She doesn't even wash herself, have you ever noticed her smell?' Alexandra asked, not about Jane but about Greta Neff, by a train of association Sukie had no trouble following, their hearts were so aligned on one wavelength.

'And those granny glasses!' Sukie agreed. 'She looks like John Lennon.' She made a kind of solemn sad-eyed thin-lipped John Lennon face. 'I sink sen we can drink ouur—sprechen Sie mass?—bev- er-aitches neeoauu.' There was an awful un-American diph­thong that came out of Greta Neff's mouth, a kind of twisting of the vowel up against her palate.

Cackling, they took their drinks into the 'den,' a little room with peeling wallpaper in a splashy faded pattern of vines and fruit baskets and a bellied plaster ceiling at a strange sharp slant because the room was half lucked under the stairs that went up to the attic­like second floor. The room's one window, too high for a woman not standing on a stool to peer out of, had lozenge panes of leaded glass, thick glass bubbled and warped like bottle bottoms.

'A cabbagy smell,' Alexandra amplified, lowering herself and her tall silvery drink onto a love seat cov­ered in a crewelwork of flamboyant tattered swirls, stylized vines unravelling. 'He carries it on his clothes,' she said, thinking simultaneously that this was a little like Monty and the zucchini and that she was evidently inviting Sukie with this intimate detail to guess that she had slept with Neff. Why? It was nothing to brag about. And yet, it was. How he had sweated! For that matter she had slept with Monty, too; and had never smelled zucchini. One fascinating aspect of sleeping with husbands was the angle they gave you on their wives: they saw them as nobody else did. Neff saw poor dreadful Greta as a kind of quaint beribboned Heidi, a sweet bit of edelweiss he had fetched from a perilous romantic height (they had met in a Frankfurt beer hall while he was stationed in West Germany instead of fighting in Korea), and Monty... Alexan­dra squinted at Sukie, trying to remember what Monty had said of her. He had said little, being such a would-be gentleman. But once he had let slip, having come to Alexandra's bed from some awkward consultation at the bank, and being still preoccupied, the words 'She's a lovely girl, but bad luck, somehow. Bad luck for others, I mean. I think she's fairly good luck for herself.' And it was true, Monty had lost a great deal of his family's money while married to Sukie, which everyone had blamed simply on his own calm stupid­ ity. He had never sweated. He had suffered from that hormonal deficiency of the wellborn, an inability to relate himself to the possibility of hard labor. His body had been almost hairless, with that feminine soft bot­tom.

'Greta must be great in the sack,' Sukie was saying. 'All those Kinder. Funf, yet.'

Neff had allowed to Alexandra that Greta was ardent but strenuous, very slow to come but deter­mined to do so. She would make a grim witch: those murderous Germans. 'We must be nice to her,' Alex­andra said, back to the subject of Jane. 'Speaking to her on the phone yesterday, I was struck by how angry she sounded. That lady is burning up.'

Sukie glanced over at her friend, since this seemed a slightly false note. Some intrigue had begun for Alexandra, some new man. In the split-second of Sukie's glance, Hank with his lolling gray Weimaraner tongue swept two Wheat Thins off the crab platter, which she had set down on a much-marred pine sea chest refinished by an antique dealer to be used as a coffee table. Sukie loved her shabby old things; there was a kind of blazonry in them, a costume of rags affected by the soprano in the second act of the opera. Hank's tongue was coming back for the cheese when Sukie caught the motion in the corner of her eye and slapped his muzzle; it was rubbery, in the hard way of automobile tires, so the slap hurt her own fingers. 'Ow, you bastard,' she said to the dog, and to her friend, 'Angrier than anybody else?,' meaning them­selves. She took a rasping sip of neat Bourbon. She drank whiskey summer and winter and the reason, which she had forgotten, was that a boyfriend at Cor­nell had once told her that it brought out the gold flecks in her green eyes. For the same vain reason she tended to dress in shades of brown and in suede with its animal shimmer.

'Oh yes. We're in lovely shape,' the bigger, older woman answered, her mind drifting from this irony toward the subject of that conversation with Jane— the new man in town, in the Lenox mansion. But even as it drifted, her mind, like a passenger in an airplane who amidst the life-imperilling sensations of lifting off looks down to marvel at the enamelled precision and glory of the Earth (the houses with their roofs and chimneys so sharp, so Finely made, and the lakes truly mirrors as in the Christmas yards our parents had arranged while we were sleeping; it was all true, and even maps are true!), took note of how lovely Sukie was, bad luck or not, with her vivid hair dishev­elled and even her eyelashes looking a little mussed after her hard day of typing and looking for the right word under the harsh lights, her figure in its milky-green sweater and dark suede skirt so erect and trim, her stomach flat and her breasts perky and high and her bottom firm, and that big broad-lipped mouth on her monkeyish face so mischievous and giving and brave.

'Oh I know about him!' she exclaimed, having read Alexandra's mind. 'I have such tons to tell, but I wanted to wait until Jane got here.'

'I can wait,' Alexandra said, suddenly resenting now, as if suddenly feeling a cool draft, this man and his place in her mind. 'Is that a new skirt?' She wanted to touch it, to stroke it, its doelike texture, the firm lean thigh underneath.

'Resurrected for the fall,' Sukie said. 'It's really too long, the way skirts are going.'

The kitchen doorbell rang: a tittering, ragged sound. 'That connection's going to burn the house down some