The Widows of Eastwick

by John Updike

  “Well . . . not really. But I thought he might. I intended to point out to him that at my age there was of course no question of resuming our relationship.”

  “Darling, how sweet of you to think even that that might need to be said.”

  “He wanted me, Lexa. I could feel it when we were a block away from each other and his face was just a little pale dot above this blur of a beard. You know how you know. The psychic electricity, it flew between us. But then, in Nemo’s, he became very unmagical—a big sad maimed lummox whose life had amounted to nothing. I had to coax even the littlest compliment out of him.”

  “I’m sure,” Alexandra said, sighing with ostentatious patience, as if dealing with a child full of questions. “It was a long time ago, sweetheart. He wanted you, if it would make him twenty-two again.”

  “You know,” Sukie said, “we can change these people.”

  “Oh? How?”

  “The way we used to. Erect the cone of power.” Her upper lip, plump as if bruised, flattened slightly against the lower in a kind of smirk, daring Alexandra to contradict her.

  “Oh, my. Do we still have what it takes for that? Do we want anything badly enough?”

  “We can want for others. And for Jane. Where is Jane?”

  “Off at the doctor’s, she told me.”

  “What doctor? My God, she found one in the Yellow Pages?”

  “No. She looked up Doc Paterson in the White Pages, and he was still there. He’s still practicing.”

  “That’s incredible,” Sukie said. “He has to be dead.”

  “Why? He wasn’t that much older than we were. People just make doctors older in their minds, because they need to believe in them.” Henry L. Paterson, “Doc Pat” to the town, had been a plump bald man with hands that seemed inflated, they were so broad and soft, so cleanly scrubbed. He was a pre-pharm practitioner, whose folding black bag held mostly sugar pills. He healed with a bland smile of patient understanding and a dulcet laying-on of those hands. If no healing resulted, he prescribed stoic resignation.

  “He shouldn’t be still practicing,” Sukie pronounced, declaring her relative youth in her immunity to Doc Pat’s passive magic. “If Jenny Gabriel had had a decent up-to-date doctor, she’d be alive and wouldn’t be weighing on all our consciences.”

  “He can refer Jane if needs be. He has a son, a surgeon in Providence.”

  “I remember the son, a pudgy brat I suspected of getting his rocks off looking through our files.”

  “He’s not a brat now. He’s a guy who takes your life in his hands.”

  “It’s incredible.” Sukie flounced, shaking the raindrops from her hair and kicking her damp shoes toward the sofa. “It makes you realize that all the people we’ve gone through life trusting, doctors and policemen and stock analysts, don’t know any more than we do.”

  “That seems an unjustified conclusion.”

  “I mean, they’re just grown-up children.”

  “You seem indignant, chérie. How else would you do it?”

  “I don’t know,” Sukie admitted. “Maybe robots,” she suggested. “They’re getting more and more sophisticated.”

  Alexandra didn’t deign to answer, but picked up the Travel section of the Times again. In Arizona, she was reading, an Indian tribe that felt neglected because the section of the Grand Canyon they controlled wasn’t visited as much as the white man’s section was going to build a U-shaped “skywalk” out over the edge. It had a glass floor and would give you a one-hundred-forty-foot walk for seventy-five dollars. If you could stand it, you could look straight down, nearly a mile down to the canyon floor. Alexandra would like to go try it when she got home. She was sure it would terrify her, even though looking out the little plastic window in the airplane for some reason didn’t. Reading about the skywalk, and looking out her window here at the sullen wet day, with its sooty purplish wisps travelling sideways across a backdrop of dirty-white rolls of nimbus cloud, made her miss the West—its dryness, its bisque color, like a landscape all of pottery. She wanted to say some of this to Sukie, but the other widow, having kicked off her shoes, had gone into the next room barefoot and was sitting at her tiny table with her HP laptop. Her fingers made a pattering sound very like rain on the roof as she raced along, rarely stopping or even hesitating, through one of her romance novels, perhaps a new episode based on her recent heartbreak. The hurrying, scrabbling noise of her keyboarding coated the air of the room with a furtive film of panic; it persisted even after the sound of the rain overhead entered a lull.

  When Jane, finally, preceded by the grinding of her Jaguar tires on the gravel drive below, and the dragging scuffle of her footsteps climbing the uncarpeted concrete stairs of the Lenox Mansion Seaview Apartments, came in through the door, she looked as if she had seen a ghost. Her face was as gray as the day, her once-black hair showed white roots, and her body looked shrunken, as if, already petite, she had been photocopied at a reduced size. She had taken a hit.

  “How was Doc Pat?” Alexandra asked her, in a casual voice meant to minimize any dramatics.

  Jane opened her mouth to answer but waited until Sukie had stopped her tapping in the next room. Then she dramatically told the other two, “The sssilly man doesn’t know what’s wrong with me. He listened to my heart and breathing and looked into my ears and the backs of my eyes and it all seemed normal to him.”

  “Well, that sounds good,” Sukie said, still eyeing the glowing small word-processor screen, where some ghostly action had been taking place. Her hand sneaked up from her lap and tapped out a quick correction.

  Alexandra decreed, “That’s lovely, Jane. You must be very relieved.” In fact, she was, in that buried quadrant of our beings that relishes others’ bad news, disappointed. Jane had been looking awful, and behaving so self-centeredly.

  “I mentioned my abdominal sensations and he wants me to have an X-ray with his son, up in Providence,” Jane said, looking around. “Is there any coffee left, or did you two pigs drink it all?”

  “I never touch it after noon,” Sukie said.

  “I need it black,” Jane said. “Black, black. Maybe with a little Jack Daniel’ss, after what I’ve been through.”

  “Are the X-rays looking for cancer?” Alexandra dared ask, even though she hated even to pronounce the word. Your own body cells, out of control, little machines going berserk.

  “I suppose,” Jane answered, “but not only. He said everybody over sixty should be checked for, what was the phrase, an abdominal aortic aneurysm. Something when he tapped my tummy with the stethoscope in his ears made him listen twice.”

  “Isn’t it funny,” Sukie said, coming into their main room, returning from the cave of make-believe, “that doctors still do that? Tap and listen. It seems so primitive. An internist I had in Stamford was always copping a feel.”

  “Good cop, bad cop,” Jane said.

  “Ha ha. Then when I’d look at him,” Sukie persisted, making a pained mouth, “he’d put on this solemn righteous face as though he hadn’t touched a thing. Doctors—really. I do hope we get national health service and put them all out of work.”

  “X-rays scare me,” said Alexandra. “They say they add up in your body.”

  “They do, I don’t doubt it,” Jane concurred. “But that’s not why I need a drink. A bizarre thing just happened to me. You both remember where Doc Pat’s office is, on Vane Street, a block back from Oak?”

  “Sure,” Alexandra said. “When Oz and I moved here, I remember Vane Street had the town’s few surviving Dutch elms. They had green boxes attached to them, like invalids on oxygen.” Guiltily she glanced at Sukie, remembering that this was the direction in which Sukie’s emphysematous lungs would be taking her.

  But Sukie hadn’t apparently noticed anything personal in the simile. “They cast such a nice soft feathery shade,” she remembered aloud. “When they finally died the town replaced them with those dismal Norway maples, with those big dull leaves the light can’t get throug
h. At the time the story was Herbie Prinz and Ed Arsenault’s nursery had cut a deal.”

  “Anyway,” Jane said, determined not to yield the stage, “I was leaving Doc Pat’s office, walking to where I had parked the Jag up at the corner of Dock, and there in the thick shadows, the rain had just about stopped, the trees were dripping, the shape of this man came toward me and just as we passsed he said, ‘Hello, Jane!’ ”

  She paused for effect, having deepened her voice to a man’s.

  “What’s so bizarre about that?” Sukie asked. “He recognized you—they recognize me downtown all the time.”

  “I’m not you. Nobody knows me except my old music students.”

  “What did he look like?” Alexandra asked.

  “Young,” Jane slowly answered, having closed her eyes. “I mean, at least younger than me. I wasn’t looking at him, thinking about the X-ray and wondering what Doc Pat thought he’d noticed with the sstethoscope. Until this man spoke my name in this horrifying way I wasn’t paying any attention. I saw this shape coming toward me and must have moved over on the sidewalk so we wouldn’t bump.” She closed her eyes again. “Tallish, and a little heavy—filled-out, more, not obese—and, I don’t know, sssilvery, somehow.”

  “Silvery?” Sukie echoed in surprise.

  “That isn’t quite the word, but ssmooth, with a sheen like a sort of statue, and—what’s that word?—androgynous.”

  “Androgynous!” Alexandra exclaimed. She was not always able to restrain an impulse to tease Jane; if we all took ourselves so intensely, the world would be at constant war. “My goodness, Jane, it sounds as if you got quite a good look.”

  “I tried to reconstruct, after he had passed me. It went right through me, the way he said ‘Hello, Jane!’ in this fake actor’s voice.”

  “An androgynous fake actor’s voice,” Alexandra mocked, deadpan.

  “All right, laugh if you want to,” Jane said, her lips tightened as if to spit, “but you’ll really laugh at the next thing I tell you.” She paused again, demanding they look at her, her intense little face yellow-gray, almost a mummy’s, under its tiara of white hair-roots.

  “Spit it out, Jane Pain,” Sukie said as the silence stretched uncomfortably. She thought of her laptop in the other room, its screen still flipped up, its little toothpick cursor pulsing beside her last word.

  “When I turned my head to look after him, I felt a shock.”

  “A shock?” Alexandra asked. “Like the one up by the telephone pole at the post office?”

  “Not that bad. That one nearly knocked me over. This one was smaller, almost a tease. There have been others, too, at least one or two a day, but I know you both already think I’m being a nuisance, so I haven’t been saying anything.”

  “We don’t think you’re being a nuisance at all,” Alexandra protested. “You’re just naturally high-strung.”

  “Absolutely,” Sukie agreed. Lest her participation seem too detached, she asked, “Did he remind you of anyone you knew?”

  “Yesss,” Jane hissed, glad to have been asked. “Somebody. Dimly. But I can’t think who.”

  “Why not?” Alexandra asked, rather lazily. Really, Jane could be tiresome. All these mysteries and shadows—the silvery flicker of a half-recognized visage, the big drops of absorbed rain released one by one from the dense maple leaves in the midday gloom. So New England, so Scarlet Letter.

  “It’s as if a sspell is hiding him. When I try to think who, I get sscared.”

  The other two, long consecrated to evil and its callous self-absorption, chose not to press Jane and give her the satisfaction of being coaxed.

  Sukie did muse aloud, “I wonder where he came from. Nobody just goes walking along Vane. It’s too far from the shops.”

  Jane brightened. “I think I know where,” she said. She needed no coaxing. “After the shock—it felt like a sarcastic nudge in my gut—I didn’t dare look around again for a minute, but, getting back in my car, parked up at the corner, I did look back, and the man had disappeared! I drove down Dock to Oak and then up to the Union Church and back to Vane and he was nowhere to be seen! It fit with my sense, somehow, the way he was walking, that he belonged to the neighborhood. As you say, why would anybody be walking? It’s all private homes up there.”

  “What was he wearing?” Sukie asked, joining in, a bit breathlessly.

  “White pants, like painter pants,” Jane promptly responded. “And a pale T-shirt with some lettering on it I didn’t have time to read.”

  “He sounds like a kid.”

  “He was a kid,” Jane said. “Grown old.”

  Alexandra tried to clarify: “And he disappeared into thin air.”

  “Into the neighborhood,” Jane insisted. “Think. You know how the backyards on the lower side of Vane abut those on the upper side of Oak. And who lives on Oak, about the middle of the first block, in that mansard-roof Victorian that needs paint and has that crappy-looking outside staircase for the apartments she’s had to put in upstairs?” She paused, luxuriating in the attention boring in upon her from the other two. She answered herself: “Greta Neff!”

  “Greta Neff,” said Sukie.

  “Yess! She hangs on there, in that drafty decrepit barn Ray never should have bought in the first place, it was way beyond his means, I told him so at the time and I remember him telling me grandiosely he needed it because he had six children and he wanted each to be able to practice his or her instrument without distracting the others. Greta hangs on there out of spite. It’s an unpainted eyesore, dragging the neighborhood down with it; it’s ruining Oak Street property values; everybody ssays sso.” Jane was working herself up into a trance, a frenzy. “Oh, God,” she cried. “When he walked by me, nearer than I am to either of you, I went cold. The way he said it—‘Hello, Jane!’—was as good as him saying, ‘I’m going to get you!’ Cold just rolled off of him, on this hot day. I ssswear it!”

  “Oh, dear.” Alexandra waited in case there was any more outburst, then told Jane, “Sukie and I were saying, before you came in, that we should see if we can still erect the cone of power.”

  “Oh, yess—anything.” Jane’s face reddened and underwent a contortion that became sobbing, the gasps of sobbing from a soul too parched to produce tears. Between gasps she produced words: “All these years—with Nat and his dreadful mother—I tried so hard —I’ve kept it so buttoned up—but I was the one—who was hardest on Jenny—who wanted her dead most—for no reason, for that assshole Van Horne—and now she’s come back. That was my feeling—there under those trees. Not her exactly—but somebody just like her—with that same awful glow, of somebody—too perfect. I hated that little weasel for that—being so perfect, so good and innocent, that hateful ssmugness good people have.”

  Alexandra and Sukie exchanged glances. Jane had to make dramatics of everything. She had to be the star, even if a dark star.

  Sukie that same July had sneaked off some Sunday mornings to the Unitarian Fellowship services. She knew the building—a pretty little Greek Revival with a shallow Doric-columned porch, on Cocumscussoc Way off of Elm, beyond Oak, put up by nineteenth-century Congregationalists but gone under to the Unitarians in the 1840s. She knew it from the Johnson-Nixon years, when she was a reporter for the Eastwick Word and bedevilled Ed Parsley and then his officious wife, Brenda, occupied the pulpit, in that tumultuous period of protest and counterculture, of public and private riot. The present days were tamer, just as Debbie Larcom was a tamer, less tormented person than the unfortunate Parsleys. Sukie found her brain nagged by the image of this perfectly formed clergywoman. When Debbie officiated, it was with a strict, sober sweetness, enunciating each hollow phrase as if it were a crystal chalice brimming with meaning; when she preached, it was with utter naturalness and clarity, taking Jesus and Buddha as equivalent embodiments of goodness, citing Doctor Schweitzer and Mohandas Gandhi and Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King as manifestations of the divine in human form. To illustrate her points, she drew upon
her own life—that of a normal upper-middle-class girl from Mount Hebron, outside of Baltimore, her mind full of the usual vanities, until a call (there was no less old-fashioned way to put it, she explained with a flutter of her shapely hands) broke in, a call to be less selfish and vain. The call could not have come at a less convenient time, for its recipient had married and borne two children, both still in diapers; but faith and determination and a saint of a husband helped her through.

  Sukie’s lower lip trembled; the story seemed her own, with some minor differences—lower-middle instead of upper-middle, upstate New York instead of suburban Maryland, witchcraft instead of Unitarianism, a vindictively contested divorce rather than a supportive spouse. But the thrust was the same, of a woman winning through to a career and self-respect against the stacked odds in a patriarchal world. Though Deborah Larcom made a show of turning her head toward different sections of the congregation, Sukie knew she was preaching to her; when the other woman’s eyes paused, in their restless sweep, at Sukie’s place in a pew, her thick black eyelashes flared, her irises sent sparks.

  The next Sunday, the minister preached about selves. She took as her text Matthew 16:25, gender-corrected to “For whosoever will save his or her life shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his or her life for my sake shall find it.” Deborah Larcom began, “We live in a very self-conscious age. There is a magazine called Self. There is a book called Our Bodies, Our Selves. We want to find our selves, and to be true to our selves. My Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary holds two full columns of compound words, beginning with ‘self-abandonment’ and ‘self-abuse’ through ‘self-interest’ and ‘self-reliance’ and ‘self-satisfaction’ down to ‘self-willed’ and ‘self-winding.’ So—what is this self, this precious entity each individual uniquely possesses, be he or she a twin or triplet or a baby just extracted from its mother’s womb?”

  Sukie, sitting at the back of the church, thought of her own children, the three she had with Monty, and little Bob, whom Lennie had fathered to authenticate her second marriage, infants pulled from her pelvis slimy and blue and breathless with astonishment. A warm sword of shame went through her innards as she realized that she had raised them too casually and, now that they were long safely grown up, communicated with them rarely. The small lithe woman in the pulpit, in a white surplice and gold tippet and cream-colored turtleneck, would never be an irritable and diffident mother; she was too good—goodness radiated from her like the sparkle surrounding a candy bar in a commercial on Saturday-morning television. On another Sunday, in a demonstration of Unitarianism’s wide embrace, a mentally and physically defective teen-aged parishioner had recited the concluding words of blessing; he held an arm crooked against his chest and dragged one foot coming to the forefront and spoke in a rolling hollow voice eerily detached from his face; in a kind of paroxysm he began to shake uncontrollably, and Reverend Larcom, though distinctly smaller than he, put an arm around him to quell his shaking. Both called out in unison, “Go, and love one another!” Not only Sukie but the women on either side of her in the pew dabbed at the sides of their noses.