by John Updike
“What do we need?” Sukie asked, having swerved into a lucky parking spot near the Superette.
“Milk?” Alexandra answered. “Cranberry juice. Yogurt?” It seemed they had been away such a long time, burying Jane in Boston’s precincts, that everything perishable in their refrigerator would have spoiled. They dreaded returning to the condo, just two of them.
“How about a frozen pizza to warm up in the microwave?” Receiving no answer, Sukie decided, “I’ll go in and see if I get any inspiration.” She slid out of the BMW and slammed its expensive-sounding door. She loved displaying herself on Dock Street.
Alexandra let her go into the Superette alone, feeling safer sitting in the car, letting the downtown bustle flow over her. The shop lights, fluorescent and neon, played eerily on the teen-age faces flashing by—Eastwick’s children, flaunting their growing power, ignoring the old woman sitting in a parked car, vying for attention from their peers with female shrieks and boisterous boyish jokes, testing freedom’s depths, licking and brandishing ice-cream cones from the Ben & Jerry’s that had replaced, in the row of merchants, LaRue’s Barbershop. Little do they know, Alexandra thought, what lies ahead of them. Sex, entrapment, weariness, death. She wished Sukie would stop parading her charms (her orange hair with its sheen, her big curved teeth with their shine) in the garishly bright interior of the Superette and come drive them, the lonely two of them, down the beach road, the same road, minus about ten seaview McMansions, that, thirty years younger, she used to speed down in her pumpkin-colored Subaru to the beach or, her heart racing in tune with the engine, to the Lenox mansion, in the days when Darryl Van Horne lived there and every night was a party night whose opportunities might crack open the jammed combination-lock of her life.
Eastwick, like partly pretty towns all over New England, in attempting to attract tourists and keep residents entertained, crammed manufactured festivities into August, as if to make up for the month’s lack of any festal holidays. The dropping of the two atomic bombs and the consequent end of World War II had never quite earned red numbers on the calendar. Instead, there were heavily promoted tours of the abandoned woolen mills, equipped as museums, amid the ranks of stilled machinery, with exhibit cases and enlarged photographs of the industrial past. In former farming communities, there were early harvest suppers and agricultural fairs, though the numbers of contenders for the Biggest Squash or Sleekest Hog dwindled every year, along with the entrants in the sheep-shearing contest and the mule pull. In once-Puritan settlements, first-period—pre-1725—houses were thrown open for a paid tour, and local spinsters and crones donned long skirts, lace-trimmed aprons, and linen caps to act as docents in their own antique homes. Antique fairs, book fairs, art fairs filled village greens with hopeful stalls and a friendly shuffle of bargain-hunters, trampling underfoot grass already flattened and brown. In Eastwick, there were days of boat races, in a range of classes from manfully rowed double dories to wheel-steered yachts under full sail. On shore, to console children and landlubbers, a merry little travelling carnival had been set up in the piece of land owned by the Congregational, now the Union, Church; the church trustees had acquired the land for expanded facilities that were never built. It was challenge enough, every five years, to give the grandiose existing edifice a coat of white paint and, every twenty, to repair its rotting steeple, battens, and sills.
There was no keeping Sukie away from bustle and bright lights, though Alexandra had returned from Jane’s memorial service averse to both. The appliances in the condo, as she walked past them, gave her, if not a distinct shock, a tingling unease that reached deep into the depressed circuits of her being. Standing next to the telephone pole in front of the post office one day on Dock Street, trying to remember what errands, other than mailing a birthday card and small check to her Seattle grandson, had brought her downtown—such lapses of short-term memory were more and more frequent, alarming her with the sudden blanks in her mind, obliterating what a half-hour ago had been glaringly obvious and absurdly banal—she had been nearly knocked flat by an unseen spark that scooped out all the muscles on that side of her. Though none of the several people around, intent on their own errands, noticed the phenomenon, it penetrated her like a shouted insult, and left her infected with the nausea of a sudden swerve. The mundane sunny scene around her—glaring sidewalk, fleshy people in summer shorts casting squat self-important shadows, wilting zinnias in beds next to the concrete post-office steps, the American flag hanging limp on its pole overhead—seemed abruptly distasteful, like a rich dessert being offered up for breakfast. This distaste stayed with her the rest of the day. She was shaken. Her appetite had already been declining. When food was set before her, her body had trouble remembering what purpose it served. Her saliva glands were phasing out.
At the carnival, the false excitement—the shrieks from the Whirlabout, as the circular cages at the end of their long tilting arms flung the willing captives this way and that; the more sedate frights occasioned by the spasmodic rotation of the Ferris wheel, stopping at the bottom to change passengers while all the other seats swung, springing panicky cries from those hoisted topmost into the cool night—pressed on her, dazed her, chewed and nibbled to nothing the still core that had always before confidently welcomed surprise and fresh sensation. She felt local eyes flicking toward her with suspicion; people sensed her estrangement now or recalled her evil reputation from decades ago.
Sukie chided her: “Get with it, Gorgeous. This is meant to be fun.”
“Fun. I wonder if I’m not beyond fun.”
“Don’t say that. Look at all the happy children.”
“They look ghastly to me. They shouldn’t be up so late, and they know it.” Children were burying their faces in paper cones of cotton candy, and trying to open their mouths wide enough to bite through the thick glaze of candy apples. Grown-ups were barking at them, urging them to take some death-defying ride, to take a gamble on some cruelly rigged game of ring toss, denying them the safety and silence of their own beds, bewitching them with ridiculous hopes of something happening if they stayed up late enough. Alexandra used to feel that way, in this very town, but that was ages ago. Another person, some other woman, with a sounder stomach and more buoyant attitude, had partaken of nocturnal expectations.
“Look!” Sukie exclaimed. “There’s Chris Gabriel!”
“Quick! Let’s hide.”
“Why? There’s no hiding now. You yourself said, ‘Screw him.’ ”
“Did I say that? It was you, being Jane.”
The apparition, in white painter pants and a T-shirt bearing a slogan, came toward them, beckoned by Sukie. He looked young in the carnival lights, his face angelically smooth, his lips plump and pouty, his curly platinum hair thinning only in the back and in two gleaming swaths at his temples, framing a widow’s peak from which a single trained lock hung limp. He suggested a taller James Dean, if Dean had lived into middle age. With that movie star’s slant half-smile, he asked, “How’s it going, ladies?” Though his waist had thickened over the years and his face had coarsened, his voice was light and lazy, like that of the teen-ager they dimly remembered. The lettering on his T-shirt said in two lines, the first green and the second black, BURN CORN, NOT OIL. His presence had an odd reflective quality, it seemed to Alexandra, as if from an opaque coating of vaporized mercury. It was hard for her to see in him a purpose as earthy as seriously intending her death. Yet the rumor of it gave them a sort of erotic connection, a potential for affectionate teasing which Sukie short-circuited with an anxious, jealous voice.
“We’re doing quite well,” she answered, tucking her hair behind her ears and tilting back her face to look him in the eye.
“Great,” he said, slightly startled by her engaged tone.
“What are you doing here?” Sukie went on. “Are you still staying with that odious Greta Neff?”
“Yeah. Kind of.”
Meaning, Alexandra supposed, that Greta was only “kind of” odious. She sp
oke up, in a gentler tone: “Mr. Grant, are you staying in Eastwick for the rest of the summer?”
The young-old man, this lean boy turned flabby avenger, gazed upon her through irises of an electric pallor, rimmed in a darker blue. She saw that he could indeed do her serious harm, the way an innocent creature like a bear might, or a machine in operation, or a law of blind Nature. “I have some business I want to finish,” he said, mildly enough. “It may take a while.”
“You don’t seem,” she said, hoping to smile away how shaken his deadly, soulless gaze had left her, “to be getting out into the sun much. By August here, you should have a tan.”
“I use a number-forty-five sunblock,” he told her. “You should, too. Skin cancer is no joke.”
“At my age,” Alexandra said, quite gaily, considering how she hated this topic, “it almost is, there are so many worse kinds.”
He got serious with her, assuming a professional air. “For television work, they give you the amount of tan they want. Directors hate it if you show up sunburned on Monday. It doesn’t cover. If you want a tan, buy it in a bottle, they tell you, especially the actresses. In porn shoots, out in the Valley, the feeling was that bikini shadows on the actresses would get the viewer thinking about what they looked like in bathing suits, who they had gone to the beach with, what they had in the lunch hamper, what normal women they were, all of which tends to kill the fantasy.”
Sukie cut in, her voice edgy. “And not enrich the fantasy? Make the girl realer?” She shouldn’t keep trying to protect me, Alexandra thought. I can protect myself, if I think it’s worth doing.
Christopher seemed dubious. “The guys who watch this stuff on video are pretty simple. They don’t want a ton of reality.”
“Do you know a lot of porn actresses?” asked Sukie.
“A couple. They’re nicer and more average than you’d think. A lot of them are into yoga. It’s slimming, and uplifts their spiritual side. It helps them relax between sessions. Everybody says how hard it is for men doing porn—unhard, I should say—but it’s not a piece of cake for women, either. Those hot lights, all these jaded grips and assistants watching. The women who get ahead in the business are those who don’t let their boredom dominate them.”
Alexandra asked him, flirting to keep down her terror—for the eternity of death had come out from behind the wan bustle and inane scratchy music of the fair to confront her with its endless leaden reality —“Is this one of the kinds of acting you’ve done?”
His sullied skyey gaze, as he turned it upon her again, seemed gentler this time, contemplating her like a deed already done, achieved in his mind. “Maybe,” he said. “If it was, I wasn’t very good at it. You got to like pussy a lot. And the jobs that weren’t fly-by-night, done in a motel room with a handheld videocam, are out on the West Coast, like I said, in the Valley. I didn’t want to leave New York. You get brainless if you do.”
With one of her little gasps, catching at Alexandra’s heart, Sukie asked, “You don’t like women at all?”
“I said a lot. To do porn you either like them a lot or hate them. Hate isn’t bad, for the purpose. They’re the stars, you’re the meat. I didn’t feel strongly either way. The directors have told me that’s my limitation. I’m not talking just porn now. I’m talking acting in general. All the women are so narcissistic and pushy, compared with my sister.”
“She was lovely,” Sukie said quickly.
“So bright and sweet,” Alexandra agreed. “That was so unfortunate, what happened to her.”
“Yeah,” he said, a little stunned by so much agreement.
“Listen,” Sukie said. “Chris. Why don’t you come by for a drink sometime?” Now Alexandra was stunned. Sukie hurried on, “I bet you’d love seeing what they’ve done to the Lenox place, inside. Love it,” she qualified, “or hate it.”
“I don’t know,” he began.
“We’ll lay in champagne. It’ll be like the old days, with Darryl.”
“I don’t drink,” he said. “Hangovers aren’t worth it for me. They get into your skin tone. You begin to look slack.”
“Then come for tea!” Sukie cried, becoming, in Alexandra’s view, something of an embarrassment, her voice gone strangely small and high, as if she were shrinking back into a girl inside her elderly body. “We’ll make some wonderful herbal teas, won’t we, Alexandra?”
“If you say so,” she said, the intractable fact of death still stuck at the back of her throat.
“Next Tuesday,” Sukie pursued. “Tea for three, at four. Four-thirty. You know where we are, don’t you? Second floor, the entrance at the parking lot out behind.”
“Yeah, but,” Chris began.
“No buts,” Sukie insisted. “Be honest—it’s very boring over there at Greta Neff’s, isn’t it? How much sauerkraut can you eat?”
“O.K.,” he said to Sukie, giving in in the graceless limp way of a teen-ager. His gaze returned once more to Alexandra. “You know,” he told her, “in a set-up like this”— he gestured to include the Whirlabout, the inflatable funhouse, the merry-go-round with its electric calliope and burden of groggy children, the naked colored bulbs strung from stall to stall—“taken apart and dragged to the next town and slapped back together by a bunch of rummies and drug addicts, there’s a lot of loose connections. Have you felt any shocks yet?”
“A few small ones,” Alexandra admitted. “I try to ignore them.”
“There you are,” he said, and forced a grin from those frozen pretty-boy lips, and repeated his sweeping gesture, expansive yet clumsy in a manner that brought back to the two women the spectre of his vanished mentor, Darryl Van Horne. “Electrons,” he said. “They’re everywhere. They’re existence.”
“Tell us about it Tuesday,” Sukie said. “We’re making a scene.” The crowd was thinning, revealing sorely trodden grass—a flat salad of footprints in the garish electric light. The back of Christopher’s T-shirt, they saw as he walked away into the melancholy last hour of the carnival, was lettered, in two lines, one green and one black, ELECT AL, DUMP W. It was an old T-shirt.
The two women huddled some moments, consulting, beside the cotton-candy stand. Above a streaked plastic tub a lanky mechanical arm kept twirling into being paper cones of spun sugar for which there were no more customers. The children had at last been taken home to bed; only bored high-school students remained, and grease-stained workmen furtively beginning to pack up. Alexandra asked Sukie, “What possessed you?”
“Well, why not? Get him close up, look him over. It’s our only chance.” She spoke in her reporter’s voice, incisive yet dismissive, and her pursed mouth looked smug.
“He wants to murder us.”
“I know. So he says. It could be just hot air, and Jane was a coincidence.”
“I really should tell you, dearie, that I found you very irritating, the way you kept making up to him. You were much too cozy. What’s up with you?”
Sukie’s hazel eyes innocently widened; the reflected carnival lights swam in microcosm among the gold specks within her irises. She avowed, “Nothing but your best interests, darling.”
“Mrs. Rougemont!”
This may have been the second time the voice had called out, but Sukie had been walking along Dock Street brooding upon the possibility of virtue and self-sacrifice (can there be such things? or is it all hypocrisy, self-serving in dis-guise?) and holding in her mind’s eye the image of Debbie Larcom, her compact, precise white body inside the plain gray dress like a pale flame swathed in smoke.
Annoyed at being interrupted, she turned, expecting to see Tommy Gorton, overweight and borderline disreputable, bearing down upon her with hippie-length hair and unkempt beard, his missing tooth and maimed hand. But his beard and hair had been trimmed, and his bearing had become more erect. She caught a whiff of the arrogant youth she had known, in love with her but beyond that with his own beauty, which she had revealed to him.
“Tom,” she said, with a carefully measured warmth.
“How nice. How are you?”
He couldn’t contain his good news; his red face was bursting with it. “Look,” he said, and held up his poor wrecked hand. A few fingers of it slowly wriggled. “I have movement in it! There’s some feeling.”
“Why, that’s lovely!” she said, taken aback. “What does your doctor say?”
“She says it’s a miracle. She says to keep exercising it.”
Sukie was distracted by the unexpected pronoun—but of course; many doctors now were women, including her own in Stamford. In the Middle Ages men had wrested the healing arts from witches, and now they were giving them back, since, as Nat Tinker had observed, the real money was no longer in medicine. Her own doctor, though taller and older, had the same smiling calm as Debbie Larcom, a self-contained ardor, as if the practice of virtue provided a sensual reward, like suckling a baby. Women were at last inheriting the world, leaving men to sink ever more abjectly into their fantasies of violence and domination.
Sukie said, “I’m so happy for you, Tommy.” But her heart had long moved on from hopes of happiness with Tommy Gorton; he was, like the rather desperately beckoning shops on Dock Street and the glitter of saltwater sliding seawards at their backs, a remnant of past adventures, dear to her primarily because she had survived them, her basic bright pure self unscarred. “When did this start to happen?” she asked, to be polite, since Tommy clearly wanted much to be made of this development.
“That’s the thing. About two weeks ago. I was sitting at home, watching some idiot celebrity game show on the boob tube while Jean was finishing up in the kitchen, when my hand began to tingle. It brought me right out of the chair; I hadn’t felt anything in it for twenty-some years. Then, that night, there was this ferocious itching. It kept me from sleeping, but I didn’t give a fuck. Something was happening. In the morning, I stared at it and thought I could make the fingers move, a little. And it seemed to me the alignment of the bones was better—more normal. And that’s been the story every day since; every day, a little better. Yeah, there’s pain. But it’s a pain going somewhere. Already I can hold a fork with it. Look.” He made a pinching motion, with his still-repulsive, purplish lumpy hand. Sukie was embarrassed by this interview, in the middle of a busy morning on Dock Street; but she had the impression that the passersby were deliberately ignoring them, having each heard Tommy tell his story before.
