The Widows of Eastwick

by John Updike

  But, then, the town, which dated back to the days when the colony was called, under the parliamentary patent of 1644, Providence Plantations, was full of occultations: graceful early-eighteenth-century houses were invisible from the road, all but swallowed by hemlocks whose droopy limbs had never been trimmed; in certain rambling Victorian mansions, steep staircases lurked behind library panels, and cellars opened onto tunnels of raw rock that led to moonlit water; rotting piers once used by bootleggers waited tucked out of sight on a pebbled beach hidden from the main harbor by craggy outcroppings. Rhode Island was settled, it was said in Massachusetts and Connecticut, as a haven for apostasy and piracy. Roger Williams welcomed Quakers, Jews, and antinomians because he believed not that salvation was extended to all but that there were not enough true believers to populate a community. Off Oak Street, as it wound beyond the village limits, long driveways sloped up to no visible domicile. It was oddly impossible to see, from the Eastwick downtown, the old Lenox mansion on its hill, though in aerial maps the distance between them did not appear great. Even the downtown shop fronts concealed: just behind them the waters of an estuary sparkled and purled their way to Narragansett Bay and thence to the sea. Scintillations flashed in the narrow spaces between the shingled mercantile buildings. Saltwater was in the air in a way it wasn’t in sprawling, overpriced Stamford, and Sukie inhaled through her narrow nostrils, feeling a lusty old self seeping back.

  “Mrs. Rougemont!” a voice called behind her.

  She turned as if stabbed, wondering who would use a name long shed. A man she didn’t seem to know came toward her, a beefy, bearded, barrel-chested man, middle-aged, his grizzled hair caught up in a dirty ponytail behind, his cheeks and nose burned red by a life of exposure to the elements. Seeing her puzzled and wary, he grinned, showing a missing upper tooth, quickening her repugnance. “Tom Gorton, ma’am. You interviewed me when I’d become the youngest ever harbormaster, remember?”

  “Tommy! Of course.” At the time he had struck her as pompous and immature, but that had not prevented her from sleeping with him later, the summer before she conjured up a husband for herself and left town, the last of the three enchantresses to leave. She carried a plastic bag holding a few staples from the Superette, so she had to switch hands to offer her right for a chaste handshake. “How are you?” she said perhaps too heartily, and bravely grinned, exposing her gums.

  With a smile sadder than hers he took her right hand in his left. For a second she mistook this for a former lover’s presumptuous gesture of tenderness, but then she saw that his right hand, held curled close to his chest, had been cruelly mangled, missing a finger and the rest crushed to a kind of knotted paw. He saw where her eyes had darted and explained, with a boyishly shy smile that gave her a pang of remembering him as he had been, too sure of himself and yet timid and abashed when she offered herself, “An accident. I was helping crew a trawler out on the cod banks in winter ice. Slipped in my borrowed boots, and the right hand got caught between the rope and pulley hauling in a full load. They thought to amputate but decided to leave me something. Not good for much, though.” He brought it a few inches away from his chest, to show her.

  “Oh, Tom!” she exclaimed, using the name he seemed to prefer now. “You poor thing. How can you work with that?”

  “With difficulty, as they say.” The shyness of his smile was yielding to another quality of his, which she had taken for arrogance at their initial interview, but which as they became lovers she felt as his proper appreciation of himself as a male beauty—a sensual self-regard that a boy of his social class would not have come to a generation or even a half-generation earlier. Permission for male sexual vanity needed the Sixties, flower-power and the Beatles and big-screen pornography. She had been thirty-three as the Sixties became the Seventies and her lovers had been older men—some of them, like Clyde Gabriel and Arthur Hallybread, distinctly older, rank in their creases and erratic in arousal—until she slept with Toby Bergman, the young new editor of the Word, replacing tragically dead Clyde. Toby soon left town, having broken his leg in another accident involving winter ice. But he had introduced her to the body of a young man and a new power relation to sex: she as the instigator, the admirer, the predator, the worshipper. She would crouch naked like a ravenous she-wolf over first Toby’s and then Tommy’s body, marvelling at the perfect skin, the clean scent, the fat-smoothed interlace of muscles, the beautiful, fresh-furred, unfailingly responsive genitals. They were so beautiful and monstrous, these glossy erect pricks—Toby’s circumcised, Tommy’s not—that she had to take them into her mouth. She would command these young men to lie utterly still and with a teasing, tormenting deliberation, amid flurries of her little kisses and murmurs, the left hand gripping the taut member at the root and the right hand rapidly brushing her long falling hair away from her lips, swallow their semen when, with a live throb in her hand like that of a captured bird, Toby or Tommy came, pumping out a viscid, ropey, semi-transparent white substance, the ambrosial, eggy-tasting food of a savage goddess, gobs of it, so that it embarrassed these boys to look at her smeared, dazed face as she crouched there, hungry for more.

  Here on Dock Street she felt this memory of a younger self betrayed by a blush as Tommy Gorton’s cracked lips, moving like pale worms within his beard, continued the oft-told tale of his misfortune: “They eased me out of harbormaster—it’s hard to row a dinghy to a mooring one-handed—but they take me on as extra hand, so to speak, out to the Banks, for a half-share. It was harder when the kids were little—Jean couldn’t let go of her job at the bank, though at the level they kept her at she wasn’t earning anything like what she was worth. Now they’re off our dole—two boys and a girl, all grown up and married on their own.”

  Was this some kind of a taunt, saying that despite her having been such a whore for him he had come through respectably? Sukie wondered, did Jean do for him what she used to, or just earn money at the bank? Sukie would bite Tommy’s shoulder in orgasm sometimes, and he took to imitating her, and would bite to hurt, it seemed. She didn’t totally mind: the marks went away in two or three days, and the pain sharpened her sensations. Looking at this overfed, wind-burned lout, ripe for cardiac trouble, Sukie marvelled at the contortions she had gone through in a few months of courting him, loving him, abasing herself before him. It happens: men get the benefit of a woman’s madness, and conceitedly take it as their due. “That sounds like a happy ending, Tom,” she said, intending to conclude. “I’m glad for you.”

  But he wasn’t done with her; he had joined her in remembering, right there on Dock Street, in the sunshine. “Happy may not be the word,” he told her. “What you and I had, that was happy.”

  “Crazy,” she said, wondering if he would block the sidewalk if she tried to step around. “Crazy’s the word I would use.”

  “I used to think you were crazy. But after you left town I thought we should all be so crazy. Jean’s a more practical sort. She loves numbers. She says they put limits on things.”

  “She sounds very intelligent.” Sukie took a step to the right, his weak side.

  He sidestepped, to remain in front of her. “What brings you back to these parts anyway?” Other people on the sidewalk were noticing.

  “Summer vacation,” she said curtly. “I’m here with two old friends, renting.” She stopped herself from saying where.

  “With those other two,” he said. “I heard.” His manner had ceased to be so friendly.

  “So you remember them.”

  “Yeah, they’re remembered.”

  “Kindly, I hope.”

  “They’re remembered.”

  Sukie took a further step diagonally, so that to block her he would have sent her crashing into the display window of the Christian Science Reading Room, which held a sun-parched copy of the Bible, propped open to Matthew, chapter 8, with a little plastic arrow on the verse, And Jesus put forth his hand, and touched him, saying, I will; be thou clean. And immediately his leprosy was cleansed
.

  “What do you do all day?” Tommy asked. The question was belligerent; out of an old instinct of intimacy he had raised his hand to prevent her passing, but it was the bad, mutilated hand, and he let it drop.

  “Much what we do all day at home. Shop. Eat. Go out for a drive. It was good to see you, Tommy.”

  “Maybe you’ll see me again.”

  That hand, with no muscle in it, no grip: horrible. His heavy, hairy belly, his gnarly nest of a beard. She remembered his pubic hair as blondish, as if sun-bleached. It would tickle her nose. “I don’t know how long we’ll be staying,” she told him. ”It depends on the other two.”

  “Don’t depend on those two,” he presumed to warn her, backing off, moving heavily to one side. “You used to do your own thing, pretty much.”

  “Like we said, Tommy, I was crazy. Now I’m an old lady. It was good to see you. Be well.”

  She was glad to get away. But as she walked the rest of Dock Street, to the great purplish, ridiculously overplanted horse trough, with the old wooden dock and the gently heaving boat landing beyond it, intending to turn left onto Oak Street to retrieve from its parking space, in this L-shaped town bent to fit the shore of Narragansett Bay, the powerful navy-blue BMW her late husband had insisted on her having, Sukie was aware, joyfully, of the saltwater flashing in the narrow spaces between the commercial buildings, as if the reflected light tracked some flow bright within herself. Her old house, a tiny 1760 saltbox, on a curved little alley off Oak called Hemlock Lane, was not far from here; she had lived as well as worked downtown. In these streets and houses she had loved and been loved; she was known here as nowhere else, not in her birthplace—a dirty nail at the end of a Finger Lake in New York State, where she had been an invisible child—or in the tidy Connecticut satellite city where she had been a second wife and where thirty years had gone by like a game of Pretend.

  “Did you remember cream cheese?” Jane asked her sharply when she returned, having steered the BMW down the beach road and across the causeway, puddled from last night’s high tide, and up the sweep of driveway around Darryl Van Horne’s old house, to whose side entrance she now had a little brass key. “With my sstomach the way it is, cream cheese on a toasted bagel is the only thing that gets my ssaliva going. Everything else tastes like sssawdust,” Jane complained.

  “The Superette doesn’t stock cream cheese,” Sukie said. “Not the Philadelphia brand, which is the only good one. I got you some blueberry yogurt instead. I’m sorry, sweetnips, you don’t feel better.” The pet name was one Alexandra had given to Sukie back in the days of Darryl Van Horne’s hot tub, and had just sprung to her lips, warmed as they were by encountering Tommy. More sternly, she said to Jane, “You should get out and do your own shopping—it’s a gorgeous day. Where’s Lexa? I didn’t see your car on the lot.”

  The three women had two cars between them—Sukie’s BMW, and Jane’s old Racing Green Jaguar. Nat Tinker had been very vain of that car—an antique classic, a 1963 XKE convertible with sleek low lines, spoked hubcaps, and a grille like a shark mouth open to gather in oxygen. Its color was a Racing Green so dark that by night it looked black, and when Jane drove it with the top down her black hair whipped every which way behind her. The two Eastern women had easily driven their automobiles to Rhode Island but Alexandra could not be expected to bring her white Ford pickup, dented and dirty from its years of Jim’s rough use, all the way from New Mexico. So they shared. They shared their four rented rooms, two small condos carved from the old hot-tub-and-hi-fi room, adapted in turn by Darryl Van Horne from the Lenox family’s glass-walled conservatory, heated by encircling steampipes and stocked not only with orchids and forced bulbs but with tropical trees, great ferns and palms and ficus and a single fragrant lemon tree. The bank’s construction crew, in remodelling the foreclosed property, had sliced the high space horizontally in two. The ceiling, which once was retractable, displaying the stars to the lulled gazers immersed in the hot tub, was eighteen feet high, which meant, losing space to the flooring and dropped ceilings, that the upper rooms had the cozy closeness of college dorms. Alexandra, the tallest, could reach up and touch the ceiling. It felt larky, at first—old girls on their own, making do—but as July’s temperatures rose these small rooms were sweltering, especially at night, as the sea breeze caressed the other side of the building, not theirs.

  The two youngest and relatively affluent widows agreed that Alexandra, as the oldest and poorest and farthest from home, should have the biggest bedroom, with its queen-size bed. Sukie took an adjacent chamber, with a fold-down wall bed and a round table she could set up her word processor on; she was strict about doing her hour or two of work, with coffee and a bowl of cocktail nibbles in place of the cigarettes she had finally, right after Lennie died, given up. Jane, the latest riser of the three, often was still asleep when Sukie had finished writing and was ready to tackle a boiled egg on toast. With the specious argument that it made up in privacy what it lacked in space and light, Jane had been assigned the narrow windowless bedroom on the far side of the so-called living room, where the three gathered and read and watched television and had their pre-dinner drinks whether they ate dinner out or in. They sometimes reminisced about how they used to erect the cone of power over cocktails, but the rite involved some formal preparation and belonged to vanished times, when they were younger and more engaged in the lives around them, more passionate and more jealous and more persuaded that they could move the material world with sympathetic magic. Their suite held two bathrooms—Sukie and Alexandra shared the larger—and various inadequate closets and built-in bureaus and a small but adequate kitchen fitted with cabinets and shelves and a microwave and a revolving rack for pots and pans and an under-the-sink dishwasher so small it could barely hold three place settings. Their windows overlooked the parking lot and, beyond it to the right, Darryl’s little-used tennis court minus the plastic bubble he used to keep inflated with hot air.

  “She took my car to the beach,” Jane answered, of Alexandra, “even though I warned her it would be crawling with people and she’d have to park it on the public lot. One of us must go up to Town Hall and prove we’re renting so we can have a temporary sticker. I would have thought you’d have done it by now, you’re the one so fond of townies.”

  “You forget, I can’t stand the sun any more. I break out in a rash. I never was the beach rat you and Lexa were.”

  “I don’t blame you for not doing it,” Jane said, as if she hadn’t quite heard. “It’s all gotten so much more sticky and bureaucratic since we lived here. The guys at the gate just knew you and waved you in. Eastwick’s lost its messy charm.”

  “Hasn’t the whole world?” Sukie asked idly, unpacking milk and orange juice and yogurt and ground coffee and cranberry juice and Jewish rye into the refrigerator. “There are more and more people to regulate. I had to park on Oak today, where there always used to be space on Dock. People adjust, is the frightening thing. They forget, generation by generation, what it ever was to be free.”

  “Free,” Jane mused. “What does that mean? You have to be born, you have to die. You’re never in control.”

  “Speaking of control, on another topic: I think we should organize, the three of us, and do more real shopping at the Stop and Shop. There’s no fresh meat or vegetables at the Superette, and we’re running out of places to eat out. And it’s expensive,” she added, a bit scoldingly. As the youngest of the three, she was feeling an obligation to organize her two older roommates. Both Alexandra and Jane were vaguer than she remembered them—deeper into the engulfing indifference that readies us for death.

  “I thought Lexa went to the Sstop and Shop,” Jane said.

  “She did, but she hardly bought anything. She ran into Gina Marino and came back in a trance.”

  “Just the thought of eating,” Jane said. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I used to love food, especially fatty, salty food. The worse it was for me, the more I loved it. There was thi
s dance you did with your own figure, imagining men sizing you up all the time. Chocolate, French fries . . . now just mentioning them makes me sssick. Sukie, help me. I keep forgetting why we came here. Tell me.”

  “To be together,” Sukie reminded her, rather sternly. “To revisit the scene of our primes.”

  “Our prime-crimes,” Jane said, with a flash of her punning old self. Sukie had imagined before turning old that quirks—bad traits and mannerisms—would fall away, once the need to make a sexual impression was removed; without the distraction of sex, a realer, more honest self would be revealed. But it is sex, it turned out, that engages us in society, and keeps us on our toes, and persuades us to retract our rough edges, so we can mix in. Without the sexual need to negotiate, there is little to curb neurotic crankiness. Jane was succumbing to hers.

  “I remember Eastwick as a fun hick place,” Jane complained, “but it’s gotten homogenized, all ssmoothed out—the curbs downtown all fancy granite, and the Old Stone Bank twice the size it was, like some big bland cancer gobbling up everything. And the younger people, the age we were when we were here—ssso tiresome, just from the look of them, toned-up young mothers driving their overweight boys in overweight SUVs to hockey practice twenty miles away, the young fathers castrated namby-pambies helping itty-bitty wifey with the housekeeping, spending all Saturday fussing around the lovely home. It’s the Fifties all over again, without the Russians as an excuse. You wonder how they managed to fuck enough to make their precious children. They probably didn’t—it’s all in vitro now, and every birth is cesarean, so the doctors won’t get sued. People go around mourning the death of God; it’s the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren’t people any more, they’re just ssoul-less sheep.”