by John Updike
"Dig this, ladies," Van Home called, boyish in his boasting and also in the look of his white behind, for he had gotten out of the water and was fiddling with some dials at the far black wall. There was a greased rumble and, overhead, the ceiling, not perforated here but of dull corrugated metal as in a tool shed, rolled back to disclose the inky sky and its thin splash of stars. Alexandra recognized the sticky web of the Pleiades and giant red Aldebaran. These preposterously far bodies and the unseasonably warm but still sharp autumn air and the Nevelson intricacies of the black walls and the surreal Arp shapes of her own bulbous body all fitted around her sensory self exactly, as tangible as the steaming bath and the chilled glass stem pinched between her fingertips, so that she was as it were interlocked with a multitude of ethereal bodies. These stars condensed as tears and cupped her warm eyes. Idly she turned the stem in her hand to the stem of a fat yellow rose and inhaled its aroma. It smelled of lime juice. Her lips came away loaded with salt crystals fat as dewdrops. A thorn in the stem had pricked one finger and she watched a single drop of blood well up at the center of the whorl of a fingerprint. Darryl Van Home was bending over to fuss at some more of his controls and his white bottom glowingly seemed the one part of him that was not hairy or repellently sheathed by a kind of exoskeleton but authentically his self, as we take in most people the head to be their true self. She wanted to kiss it, his glossy innocent unseeing ass. Jane passed her something burning which she obediently put to her lips. The burning inside Alexandra's trachea mingled with the hot angry look of Jane's stare as under the water her friend's hand fishlike nibbled and slid across her belly, around those buoyant breasts she had said she coveted.
"Hey don't leave me out," Van Home begged, and splashed back into the water, shattering the moment, for Jane's little hand, with its callused fingertips like fish teeth, floated away. They resumed their conversing, but the words drifted free of meaning, the talk was like touching, and time fell in lazy loops through the holes in Alexandra's caressed consciousness until Sukie did come back, bringing time back with her.
In she hurried with autumn caught in the suede skirt with its frontal ties of rawhide and her tweed jacket nipped at the waist and double-pleated at the back like a huntswoman's, her peach tennis dress left at home in a hamper. "Your kids are fine," she informed Jane Smart, and did not seem nonplussed to find them all in the tub, as if she knew this room already, with its slates, its bright serpents of copper, the jagged piece of illumined green jungle beyond, and the ceiling with its cold rectangle of sky and stars. With her wonderful matter-of-fact quickness, first setting down a leather pocketbook big as a saddlebag on a chair Alexandra had not noticed before—there was furniture in the room, chairs and mattresses, black so they blended in—Sukie undressed, first slipping off her low-heeled square-toed shoes, and then removing the hunting jacket, and then pushing the untied suede skirt down over her hips, and then unbuttoning the silk blouse of palest beige, the tint of an engraved invitation, and pushing down her half-slip, the pink-brown of a tea rose, and her white panties with it, and lastly uncoupling her bra and leaning forward with extended arms so the two emptied cups fell down her arms and into her hands, lightly; her exposed breasts swayed outward with this motion. Sukie's breasts were small enough to keep firm in air, rounded cones whose tips had been dipped in a deeper pink without there being any aggressive jut of button-like nipple. Her body seemed a flame, a flame of soft white fire to Alexandra, who watched as Sukie calmly stooped to pick her underthings up from the floor and drop them onto the chair that was like a shadow materialized and then matter-of-factly rummaged in her big loose-flapped pocketbook for some pins to put up her hair of that pale yet plangent color called red but that lies between apricot and the blush at the heart of yew-wood. Her hair was this color wherever it was, and her pinning gesture bared the two tufts, double in shape like two moths alighted sideways, in her armpits. This was progressive of her; Alexandra and Jane had not yet broken with the patriarchal command to shave laid upon them when they were young and learning to be women. In the Biblical desert women had been made to scrape their armpits with flint; female hair challenged men, and Sukie as the youngest of the witches felt least obliged to trim and temper her natural flourishing. Her slim body, freckled the length of her forearms and shins, was yet ample enough for her outline to undulate as she walked toward them, into the sallow floor lights that guarded the rim of the tub, out of the black background of this place, its artificial dark monotone like that of a recording studio; the edge of the apparition of her naked beauty undulated as when in a movie a series of stills are successively imposed upon the viewer to give an effect of fluttering motion, disturbing and spectral, in silence. Then Sukie was close to them and restored to three dimensions, her so lovely long bare side marred endearingly by a pink wart and a livid bruise (Ed Parsley in a fit of radical guilt?) and not only her limbs freckled but her forehead too, and a band across her nose, and even, a distinct constellation, on the flat of her chin, a little triangular chin crinkled in determination as she sat on the tub edge and, taking a breath, with arched back and tensed buttocks eased herself into the smoking, healing water. "Holy Mo," Sukie said.
"You'll get used," Alexandra reassured her. "It's heavenly once you make your mind up."
"You kids think this is hot?" Darryl Van Home bragged anxiously. "I set the thermostat twenty degrees higher when it's just me. For a hangover it's great. All those poisons, they bake right out."
"What were they doing?" Jane Smart asked. Her head and throat looked shrivelled, Alexandra's eyes having dwelt so long and fondly on Sukie.
"Oh," Sukie answered her, "the usual. Watching old movies on Channel Fifty-six and getting themselves sick on the candy they'd begged."
"You didn't by any chance swing by my house?" Alexandra asked, feeling shy, Sukie was so lovely and now beside her in the water; waves she made laved Alexandra's skin.
"Baby, Marcy is seventeen," Sukie said. "She's a big girl. She can cope. Wake up." And she touched Alexandra on the shoulder, a playful push. Reaching the little distance to give the push lifted one of Sukie's rose-tipped breasts out of the water; Alexandra wanted to suck it, even more than she had wanted to kiss Van Home's bottom. She suffered a prevision of the experience, her face laid sideways in the water, her hair streaming loose and drifting into her lips as they shaped their receptive O. Her left cheek felt hot, and Sukie's green glance showed she was reading Alexandra's mind. The auras of the three witches merged beneath the skylight, pink and violet and tawny, with Van Home's stiff brown collapsible thing over his head like a clumsy wooden halo on a saint in an impoverished Mexican church.
The girl Sukie had spoken of, Marcy, had been born when Alexandra was only twenty-one, having dropped out of college at Oz's entreaties to be his wife, and she was reminded now of her four babies, how as they came one by one it was the female infants suckling that tugged at her insides more poignantly, the boys already a bit like men, that aggressive vacuum, the hurt of the sudden suction, the oblong blue skulls bulging and bullying above the clusters of frowning muscles where their masculine eyebrows would some day sprout. The girls were daintier, even those first days, such hopeful thirsty sweet clinging sugar-sacks destined to become beauties and slaves. Babies: their dear rubbery bowlegs as if they were riding tiny horses in their sleep, the lovable swaddled crotch the diaper makes, their flexible violet feet, their skin everywhere fine as the skin of a penis, their grave indigo stares and their curly mouths so forthrightly drooling. The way they ride your left hip, clinging lightly as vines to a wall to your side, the side where your heart is. The ammonia of their diapers. Alexandra began to cry, thinking of her lost babies, babies swallowed by the children they had become, babies sliced into bits and fed to the days, the years. Tears slid warm and then by contrast to her hot face cool down the sides of her nose, finding the wrinkles hinged at her nostril wings, salting the corners of her mouth and dribbling down her chin, making a runnel
of the little cleft there. Amid all these thoughts Jane's hands had never left her; Jane intensified her caresses, massaging now the back of Alexandra's neck, then the musculus trapezius and on to the deltoids and the pectorals, oh, that did ease sorrow, Jane's strong hand, that pressure now above, now below the water, below even the waist, the little red eyes of the thermal controls keeping poolside watch, the margarita and marijuana mixing their absolving poisons in the sensitive hungry black realm beneath her skin, her poor neglected children sacrificed so she could have her powers, her silly powers, and only Jane understanding, Jane and Sukie, Sukie lithe and young next to her, touching her, being touched, her body woven not of aching muscle but of a kind of osier, supple and gently speckled, the nape beneath her pinned-up hair of a whiteness that never sees the sun, a piece of pliant alabaster beneath the amber wisps. As Jane was doing to Alexandra Alexandra did to Sukie, caressed her. Sukie's body in her hands seemed silk, seemed heavy slick fruit, Alexandra so dissolved in melancholy triumphant affectionate feelings there was no telling the difference between caresses given and caresses received; shoulders and arms and breasts emergent, the three women drew closer to form, like graces in a print, a knot, while their hairy swarthy host, out of the water, scrabbled through his black cabinets. Sukie in a strange practical voice that Alexandra heard as if relayed from a great distance into this recording studio was discussing with this Van Home man what music to put on his expensive and steam-resistant stereo system. He was naked and his swinging gabbling pallid genitals had the sweetness of a dog's tail curled tight above the harmless button of its anus.
Our town of Eastwick was to gossip that winter— for here as in Washington and Saigon there were leaks; Fidel made friends with a woman in town, a waitress at Nemo's, a sly black woman from Antigua called Rebecca—about the evil doings at the old Lenox place, but what struck Alexandra this first night and ever after was the amiable human awkwardness of it all, controlled as it was by the awkwardness of their eager and subtly ill-made host, who not only fed them and gave them shelter and music and darkly suitable furniture but provided the blessing without which courage of our contemporary sort fails and trickles away into ditches others have dug, those old ministers and naysayers and proponents of heroic constipation who sent lovely Anne Hutchinson, a woman ministering to women, off into the wilderness to be scalped by redmen in their way as fanatic and unforgiving as Puritan divines. Like all men Van Home demanded the women call him king, but his system of taxation at least dealt in assets—bodies, personal liveliness— they did have and not in spiritual goods laid up in some nonexistent Heaven. It was Van Home's kindness to subsume their love for one another into a kind of love for himself. There was something a little abstract about his love for them and something therefore formal and merely courteous in the obeisances and favors they granted him—wearing the oddments of costume he provided, the catskin gloves and green leather garters, or binding him with the cingulum, the nine-foot cord of plaited red wool. He stood, often, as at that first night, above and beyond them, adjusting his elaborate and (his proud claims notwithstanding) moisture-sensitive equipment.
He pressed a button and the corrugated roof rumbled back across the section of night sky. He put on records—first Joplin, yelling and squawking herself hoarse on "Piece of My Heart" and "Get It While You Can" and "Summertime" and "Down on Me," the very voice of joyful defiant female despair, and then Tiny Tim, tiptoeing through the tulips with a thrilling androgynous warbling that Van Home couldn't get enough of, returning the needle to the beginning grooves over and over, until the witches clamorously demanded Joplin again. On his acoustical system the music surrounded them, arising in all four comers of the room; they danced, the four clad in only their auras and hair, with shy and minimal motions, keeping within the music, often turning their backs, letting the titanic ghostly presences of the singers soak them through and through. When Joplin croaked "Summertime" at that broken tempo, remembering the words in impassioned spasms as if repeatedly getting up off the canvas in some internal drug-hazed prizefight, Sukie and Alexandra swayed in each other's arms without their feet moving, their fallen hair stringy and tangled with tears, their breasts touching, nuzzling, fumbling in pale pillow fight lubricated by drops of sweat worn on their chests like the broad bead necklaces of ancient Egypt. And when Joplin with that deceptively light-voiced opening drifted into the whirlpool of "Me and Bobby McGee," Van Home, his empurpled penis rendered hideously erect by a service Jane had performed for him on her knees, pantomimed with his uncanny hands—encased it seemed in white rubber gloves with wigs of hair and wide at the tips like the digits of a tree toad or lemur—in the dark above her bobbing head the tumultuous solo provided by the inspired pianist of the Full Tilt Boogie band.
On the black velour mattresses Van Home had provided, the three women played with him together, using the parts of his body as a vocabulary with which to speak to one another; he showed supernatural control, and when he did come his semen, all agreed later, was marvellously cold. Dressing after midnight, in the first hour of November, Alexandra felt as if she were filling her clothes—she played tennis in slacks, to hide somewhat her heavy legs—with a weightless gas, her flesh had been so rarefied by its long immersion and assimilated poisons. Driving home in her Subaru, whose interior smelled of dog, she saw the full moon with its blotchy mournful face in the top of her tinted windshield and irrationally thought for a second that astronauts had landed and in an act of imperial atrocity had spray-painted that vast sere surface green.
ii. Malefica
"I will not be other than I am; I find too much content in my condition; I am always caressed."
— a young French witch, c. 1660
He has?" Alexandra asked over the phone. At her kitchen windows the Puritan hues of November prevailed, the arbor a tangle of peeling vines, the bird-feeder hung up and filled now that the first frosts had shrivelled the berries of the woods and bog.
"That's what Sukie says," said Jane, herd's burning. "She says she saw it long coming but didn't want to say anything to betray him. Not that telling just us would be betraying anybody, if you ask me."
"But how long has Ed known the girl?" A row of Alexandra's teacups, hung on brass hooks beneath a pantry shelf, swayed as if an invisible hand had caressed them in the manner of a harpist.
"Some months. Sukie thought he seemed different with her. He just wanted mostly to talk, to use her as a sounding board. She's glad: think of the venereal diseases she might have gotten. All these flower children have crabs at the least, you know."
The Reverend Ed Parsley had run off with a local teen-ager, was the long and short of it. "Have I ever seen this girl?" Alexandra asked.
"Oh certainly," Jane said. "She was always in that gang in front of the Superette after about eight at night, waiting for a drug pusher I suppose. A pale smudgy face wider than it was high, somehow, with dirty flaxen hair just hanging down any old how, and dressed like a little female lumberjack."
"No love beads?"
Jane answered seriously. "Well, no doubt she owned some, to wear when she wanted to go to a debutante party. Can't you picture her? She was one of those picketing the town meeting last March and threw sheep's blood they got at the slaughterhouse all over the war memorial."
"I can't, honey, maybe because I don't want to. These kids in front of the Superette always frighten me, I just hustle out between them without looking to the right or the left."
"You shouldn't be frightened, they're not even seeing you. To them you're just part of the landscape, like a tree."
"Poor Ed. He did look so harassed lately. When I saw him at the concert, he even seemed to want to cling to me. I thought that was being disloyal to Sukie, so I shook him off."
"The girl isn't even from Eastwick, she was always hanging around here but she lived up in Coddington Junction, some perfectly awful broken home in a trailer there, living with her common-law stepfather because her mother was alw
ays on the road doing something in a carnival, they call it acrobatics."
Jane sounded so prim, you would think she was a virgin spinster if you hadn't seen her functioning with Darryl Van Home. "Her name is Dawn Polanski," Jane was going on. "I don't know if her parents called her Dawn or she called herself that, people like that do give themselves names now, like Lotus Blossom and Heavenly Avatar or whatever."
Her toughened little hands had been incredibly busy, and when the cold semen had spurted out, it was Jane who had appropriated most of it. Other women's sexual styles are something you are left mostly to guess at and perhaps wisely, for it can be too fascinating. Alexandra tried to blink the pictures out of her mind and asked, "But what are they going to do?"
"I daresay they have no idea, after they go to some motel and screw till they're sick of it. Really, it is pathetic." It was Jane who had stroked her first, not Sukie. Picturing Sukie, the soft white flame her body had been, posing on the slates, opened a little hollow space in Alexandra's abdomen, near her left ovary. Her poor insides: she was sure one day she'd have an operation, and they'd open it all too late, just crawling with black cancer cells. Except they probably weren't black but a brighter red, and shiny, like cauliflower of a bloody sort. "Then I suppose," Jane was saying, "they'll head for some big city and try to join the Movement. I think Ed thinks it's like joining the army: you find a recruitment center and they give you a physical and if you pass they take you in."
"It seems so deluded, doesn't it? He's too old. As long as he stayed around here he seemed rather young and dashing, or at least interesting, and he had his church, it gave him a forum of sorts"
"He hated being respectable," Jane broke in sharply. "He thought it was a sellout."
