by John Updike
Widows, snoring—Alexandra’s scalp and the back of her neck tingled. It was as if Mr. Muir had invaded her head before they could invade his. They had settled upon him as their victim, if a prank was to be pulled. At this moment, obliging laughter from his circle of close listeners made him feel he should produce another joke; his face slightly bulged as he tried to think of one and failed. As if to push everybody away, Mr. Muir said loudly, “Walk around. Don’t just hang here. Go to the back, where the soldiers are still being dug up. Bits and pieces, it’s not easy. In Pit Two you can see excavations in progress—ant work, the way it’s always been in China. You can take pictures now. Ten years ago, you couldn’t; they’d snatch the camera right out of your hand. If you come to China as often as I do, you can feel the paranoia getting less, a little less every time. Soon we’ll be more paranoid than they. Move around, look and learn. We’ll meet at the chariot pavilion in forty minutes.”
Though Mr. Muir—Eric, she had learned, was his first name—wanted to be alone, Alexandra and some others, including Sukie and Jane, stayed by his side, there at the railing, looking down upon the slightly irregular ranks of clay soldiers advancing toward them, in battle order, facing east, whence the emperor Ch’in thought his enemies in the hereafter might come. The soldiers’ impassive silence and stillness took on a tinge of menace. In Eric Muir’s eyes, they began to move—a particle of motion on the periphery of his vision, a warp like a bubble in old glass. A distortion of transparency, an elusive twitch. His eyes stung, as if with too many hours of reading, and he removed his rimless glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose to clear his brain.
Alexandra inhaled the smell of clay from the great pit; with it came an odor from the chunky lecturer’s body, from his armpits and those hidden creases where sweat congeals. Some men, even unbathed, are odorless, like her first husband, Oswald Spofford, and others strengthen their masculine presence with a tangy blend of leather and horse and tobacco and whiskey and clay, like Jim Farlander. Mr. Muir was one whose flesh, forgotten in his cerebral pursuits, had about it the scent of stale secretions and midnight oil gone rancid. It was a distasteful but a male smell, recalling her to the lost demimonde of physical intimacy, of grateful shamelessness and interpenetration.
Eric Muir replaced his glasses and, there was no doubt, the terra-cotta soldiers were moving, not swinging their arms and legs and shouting out a marching song but advancing like oceanic waves that crested and fell forward and sucked back without altering the underlying volume of cold, submarine depths. Their weapons, bronze scythes whose wooden handles had ages ago rotted away, shook as if being brandished, and now he could hear their chant as they marched toward slaughter, slaughtering others and being slaughtered, rhythmic corrugations in the crowd noise caught beneath the roof of the great modern shed erected above the uncovered pits. The chant went: Da, sha, xie, si. Fight, kill, blood, death. That was China, he perceived— millennia of slaughter, war, famine, floods, torture, of being buried alive, being skinned alive, being worked to death, but there was never enough death to relieve the land of its burden of people. The army kept coming, advancing, epitomizing the atrocious history of mankind.
He wondered if he was going mad, by himself or in the grip of a group hallucination. He turned to the person who happened to be nearest him, the biggest and broadest of the three old gals, widows, who clung together with a somewhat sinister closeness. This one might have been a beauty once; there was something self-satisfied about her mouth, which was teased by a smile between her curiously cleft chin and the tip, more subtly cleft, of her nose. She appeared intent upon the sight of the army below, and her two friends, not far behind her, actually had their eyes shut, as if concentrating upon an inner vision.
Noticing his questioning stare, his air of agitation, the woman asked, “Is something the matter, Mr. Muir?”
He lied, “No,” but croaked on the monosyllable.
She took pity. “Did you see them move? I did.”
“You did?”
“I thought so, for a moment. They’re quiet now. It must be something they’re working on—you know, holograms.” “Oh, yes,” he agreed, relieved. “The new Chinese. They love high-tech toys.”
And the tour went on, to four days on the Yangtze, through picturesque gorges soon to be flooded by the people’s inexorable progress, then to Chungking, where Vinegar Joe Stilwell’s headquarters was eerily preserved in its honorable wartime drabness and modesty, and on to the River Li, where giant rock-faces seemed to hold in their wrinkles columns of ancient inscription and where emaciated fishermen squatting on their haunches poled their delicate boats skimmingly along, and finally to Shanghai and Hong Kong, congested soaring cities of the future, the future when the world shall be nothing but cities, cities and deserts making the air tremble and melting the glaciers and the poles in the devastating global warming.
China delighted the three women. Each day dawned with a new bauble, a fresh sight or two to see, in colors as fresh as wet paint. The vast land felt corrupted by time and suffering but—save for a few controlled churches left behind by centuries of spurned mission effort—innocent of Christianity, the Christianity that had persecuted witches with the fury of its own denied desires. Here, the air felt clear of that particular history, of those tyrannical ghosts preaching sin and salvation, and the Godforsaken women in their impudent tourism felt free.
* * *
ii. Maleficia Revisited
SATAN’S MARK is upon our pleasures; else we would not be driven to repeat them, even when sated, until they devour us. China should have left the widows ready to knit up the loose ends of their formerly married lives and to prepare themselves with repentance for their graves and the judgment beyond, but, excited by whatever rediscovery of their powers the foreign excursion had provoked, and unwilling to let their seasoned accomplices in evildoing become again estranged and distant, the three remained in contact, by e-mail and letter but primarily by the quaint means they chiefly used when living in the same small town, the telephone. Thirty years had shrunk those solid Seventies instruments of Bakelite and soldered color-coded wires down to silver cell phones, with a ring that could be programmed to be a favorite tune or a silent vibration within an apron pocket. The steep long-distance rates that not long ago compelled AT&T customers closely to monitor the minutes of gab had shrivelled to negligible Verizon or Sprint charges and even less, as free minutes became part of every cell-phone user’s agreement. New Mexico had become as cheap to call, by punching in a string of numbers with a newly agile opposable thumb, as New York.
“Lexa?” Sukie’s voice had a tentative lilt to it, as if she expected a refusal to a question she had not yet asked.
“Yes, sweetie, what is it?”
It was not as if Alexandra’s life here in Taos were utterly empty. She had begun to use Jim’s wheel, making pots of her own to replenish the shop’s supply, which slowly but surely dwindled through the winter, as the Eastern and Midwestern snowbirds decorated their new homes in what they imagined was authentic Western fashion. She tried to capture Jim’s style, but something female in her touch thinned the pots’ walls of clay and subdued the painted stripes to softer colors than Jim had used. Also, her social life was picking up: she had been asked to join the advisory board of the Mabel Dodge Luhan House, and one of the other members, a ruddy-faced widower, Ward Linklater, a sculptor of big bronzes of Western wildlife, coyotes and jackrabbits and wild mustangs mostly, a large man with a white mustache and a dandified bit of cultivated stubble under his lower lip, had been giving her the eye. He had invited her out to dinner a few times, and she had liked it that they talked lovingly of their dead spouses deep into the red wine, and then went to their separate homes too tired to do anything else. Sex after seventy—she didn’t even want to know if it existed. When she asked him, playfully, if the stubble under his lip had a name, he had blushed and said, “I think the young folks call it a ‘love brush,’ ” but that had been the end of it.
&n
bsp; Sukie said, “Jane and I were wondering, how would you feel about Machu Picchu?”
“Machu Picchu in the Andes?”
“Yes, since you seemed to like the Canadian Rockies so much. And it wouldn’t be just the ruins—there’s Lima, and Cusco, the tour takes in Bolivia and Ecuador as well. One charm of it, Jane wanted me to emphasize, was there’s no jet lag—it’s all right under our own time zones.”
“Why doesn’t Jane call me herself, if she’s so keen on this?”
“She thinks you’ll take it better from me. She thinks you’re sore at her for something that happened in Egypt, she doesn’t know what.”
“How ridiculous. She was fine in Egypt, though she did snore. But I can’t possibly go on another big excursion so soon after China. The Wall and the Pyramids are about it for me, as far as wonders of the world go. I can’t afford another wonder, frankly. You and Jane were left very comfortable, it would seem, but Jim and I just scraped along, and now I’m doing the scraping by myself. I’m sorry, dearest.”
“Don’t be sorry. I figured you’d say something of the sort. I’m relieved, actually. I wasn’t sure how my emphysema would do at that altitude, though the travel agent thought it would be no problem.”
“Well, she would think that. No problem for her.”
“Exactly.” A pause, while they savored their rapport. “Still,” Sukie went on wistfully, “it would be nice to go somewhere together, before we get too much older. Jane has some health problems, though she doesn’t like to talk about them.”
“What kind of problems?”
“Inside, somewhere. She won’t talk about them. Could you afford Mexico?”
“Jim and I did Mexico. More than once. Now they say some of the highways we drove, with my poor children, still new to the marriage, hot and complaining in back, and then just the two of us, on a second honeymoon, are full of bandits who kidnap Americans for ransom. The world is a less and less friendly place for us, isn’t it?”
“How about Ireland? They’re still friendly, though I hear it’s not as cheap as it used to be, before they got into the EU and became the Celtic Tiger. The men in Rocky Ridge were always running over to Ireland for a week of golf. Wouldn’t you love to see the Western Isles, and the Ring of Kerry? The monks used to live in little stone beehives. Wasn’t Lennie kind of Irish?”
“Oh, Sukie. You’re so young. Just thinking about getting on an airplane makes me tired. Isn’t it nice where you are? It is where I am.” Dry desert sun fell at a dusky five o’clock slant on the glass-topped coffee table, and the shiny art books about American pottery ancient and modern, and the thick Navajo rug. The floor tiles were the same pale tint as the sandy earth sustaining her cactus garden outside the patio doors—comical mouse-eared prickly pear and wand-like ocotillo, making the best of their deprivations.
“But,” the remote voice—bounced into her ear, for all Alexandra knew, off the belly of a satellite many miles above the world and its wonders—persisted, “you’re not where I am. I feel so alone since Lennie passed.”
“You mean ‘died.’ ”
“Whatever. ‘Passed’ feels less final. He had his limitations, but he was company. All our old friends try to stay still friendly, but I can tell my presence pains them. I just don’t fit any more. Except for my books and the fan letters these screwed-up, over-identifying people write me, I’m utterly unimportant to everybody. I can see why the Indians—the Asian ones, not ours—invented suttee.”
“What about your children? And grandchildren? Surely you’re important to them.” She heard herself getting sharp with Sukie, like a harassed mother. She preferred to concentrate upon the fuzz on the miniature cactus in the square bowl, how incandescent it looked in the sun, a veritable halo. From there her mind wandered to why Ward, who had such a handsome genial mouth really, affected that silly little patch of bristle just under his lip. She was afraid, with enough red wine some evening, she would come out against it, and if he defied her and kept it or complied and shaved it off, it would push them either way into an intimacy she wasn’t ready for. She didn’t want to get into keeping score with a man again, the unspoken tussle of favors given or withheld, of largesse and revenge.
“Well, they’re polite,” Sukie said, of her children, “but they don’t go overboard. There are all these things you think of you might have done better when they were little, things you regret and would love to undo, but they move on; they must. You try to apologize and they look at you with this blank stare: they’ve forgotten. I saw from Lennie’s passing—excuse me, his death—how they’d take mine in stride. Good old Mom, they’d say. Rest in peace. If they’d say even that much. Don’t you have one that stayed in Eastwick?”
This last turn of Sukie’s stream of consciousness took Alexandra aback. “Marcy,” she said. “The oldest. She didn’t stay west with us when Jim and I married. She had a boyfriend in Eastwick High she was very involved with, and when she graduated said she wanted to go to Rizdee and become a real artist—real in contrast to me, I suppose. She was determined to get away from me. She earned her keep waitressing at the Bakery Coffee Nook and after dropping out of Rizdee—she didn’t like being an artist after all, she said, it was too egocentric—she switched to waitressing at Nemo’s, since she had gotten old enough to serve liquor. Eventually, after doing some sleeping around I suppose, she married a local, a man some years older—an electrician, would you believe, after her father had owned an entire fixture factory in Norwich.”
“Nemo’s,” Sukie repeated in a betranced voice. “What a cozy place that was—those buttery johnnycakes. That roast beef on a bun. I used to eat lunch there every day when I was with the Word. Remember the Word?”
“Of course. In the beginning was the Word. Nemo’s may be being sold, to Dunkin’ Donuts, Marcy told me a while or so ago. She doesn’t tell me much; I think we’re semi-estranged. She doesn’t want people to know she’s my daughter; they still remember us a bit.”
“How lovely. Being remembered,” said Sukie dreamily.
“It can be, or not. Sweetie, there’s somebody at the door. I’ll think about places we could go together. Is the Caribbean too ordinary? I used to love St. Croix, even after those radicals shot that foursome on the golf course.”
“The sun, darling. You’ve forgotten. I’m dreadfully allergic. I break out in blotches.” As if offended, Sukie hung up without another utterance. Even she was getting cranky in old age.
Time enough went by for Alexandra to imagine that the two other witches had faded back into the past. She had had a good enough life without them, and was still having it. Her pots were improving, she thought. When a couple came into the shop it was often the woman whose curiosity had been piqued by the window display, and who made the purchase. Away from the wheel, Alexandra began to make again the little figurines, with legs and arms but not hands or feet, that when she made them in Eastwick she called her “bubbies.” One woman who came into the shop looked them over and told her, “They’re charming, but not especially Southwest, are they?” Alexandra agreed; but she liked shaping them with leftover clay, their blank faces turned on their small heads as if sunbathing, or confronting a surprise visitation, their heavy hips good to heft in her hand and to make a solid base on a shelf. Men were amused by them; women, something more—charmed, or touched, recognizing themselves.
Ward Linklater kept asking her to dinner now and then, but their moment to crest had somehow slid by, and he never made a sexual move, so the gracious rebuff she had framed in her mind stayed coiled within her. The summer sun beat mercilessly on the roof; the cacti cried out for a November thunderstorm that never came, though translucent sharp-edged clouds towered in the west, and the desert rats made nests in the dead prickly pears. She drove north into Colorado for a sentimental visit. The open country she had known as a girl was unrecognizable, unfenced grassy acres where she used to ride given over to tract houses and a nine-hole golf course sucking irrigation from an artificial lake. In December, th
e telephone rang, and it was Jane Smart Tinker, picking up on the conversation with Sukie as if it had been yesterday. “Ssaint Croix is a sssilly suggestion,” she hissed. “The Caribbean is for Club Med types, who want to do drugs and fornicate by moonlight on a snow-white coral beach.”
