by John Updike
“The thing of it is,” he was saying to Sukie, fixing her wandering gaze with his eyes, their whites reddened by age and drink and self-pity, “it had to be you. You and those others did something.”
“What could we have done?” she asked. Images came to her from the far-off time when Jane was still alive—the three of them sky-clad at the summoning of the Goddess that Alexandra had arranged, in the circle of Cascade granules that formed the base of the cone of power; the tarot cards reluctantly turning to ash in the brass bowl; her choice of the Page of Coins, a simple-minded, conceited, beautiful yokel, and for lack of a better idea hastily asking Her to perform the impossible, a minute before Jane’s mouth filled with blood and she whispered, “Shit. It hurts.” Sukie stammered, semi-retracting: “Of course, I felt terrible it had happened to you, but—”
“I know you can’t talk about it,” Tommy said. “It’s dark stuff. But —I hang around the fire station and hear the latest scuttlebutt—the paramedics who responded said the place had a funny smell to it, and the rug had just been vacuumed, and the victim’s underpants were put on backwards. When I put two and two together, I damn near cried. In fact, I did cry. You were always so great to me.”
“It was selfish pleasure, Tommy. You were beautiful.”
Rather horribly, he took a step closer to her, there in broad daylight, dropping his voice so that no one passing would hear. “I still could be. After your doing this for me, forget what I said about Jean. She’ll understand. And if she doesn’t, she can stuff it. She’s a cold bitch. She says everything I want in bed is against her religion.”
He was offering himself, and his effrontery touched her, but even with two hands—and how complete could the healing be, bought with one tacky tarot card?—he was old news. She’d rather go down on Debbie Larcom, the black triangle where her white thighs joined. “No, Tommy, don’t even say any more. We did our thing ages ago. It was a different time, a time for a lot of things. Now is a different time. I’m an old lady.”
“You’re still a knockout. I bet you’re still—what did we used to call it?— crazy.”
Somehow this allusion insulted her. Perhaps she was looking for an insult. “Not crazy enough to keep talking to you smack in the middle of town,” she said. “Good-bye, Tommy. You and your lady doctor, take care of that hand.”
Rebuffed, he shrank in her sight as if she had swooped into the air and were looking down from the height of a flagpole at this pathetic balding fisherman abandoned on a sidewalk bright with foreshortened summer people in skimpy play clothes.
Sukie and Alexandra were both so nervous getting ready for having Chris Gabriel to tea that they kept crossing paths in the condo, bumping into each other more than once. “Are you going to accuse him?” Alexandra asked, after one near-miss in the tiny kitchen, Sukie carrying a plate of carefully arranged Pepperidge Farm cookies, lemon-flavor and gingerbread men in artful alternation, and Alexandra moving in the other direction with a little Japanese bowl of dip, chopped mussels and crabmeat in mayonnaise, to be served with seaweed-flavored rice crackers available only in the under-patronized gourmet section of the Stop & Shop.
“I already did,” Sukie replied. “After Jane’s memorial service. He didn’t deny it. He just didn’t say how.” She had suppressed Chris’s telling her that “the fat one” was next; in suppressing this during the car ride home, she had begun to build a structure of thoughts and intentions hidden from her sister witch, as she had once hidden her masturbation and her determination to leave home from her parents, back in that stuffy brick semi-detached house in the little city like a dull-red nail at the end of a Finger Lake in west-central New York State. Holding back a growing part of herself made her parents seem contemptibly stupid, and though she could never allow herself to feel superior to Alexandra, it was true that, as her visions of virtue and self-sacrifice developed, the older witch seemed increasingly sleepy, absent-minded, and passive. She was like a big white grub paralyzed by a spider’s sting. She was being eaten alive from within by tiny hatching spider babies.
“Don’t ask how,” Alexandra told her. “I can’t bear to think of it. If we can visualize the method, we’ll start doing it to ourselves.”
This thought sounded bizarre enough to prompt Sukie to ask, “How are you, anyway?”
“Tired,” Alexandra confessed.
“Don’t you sleep?”
“I can hardly keep awake. Except at night. I get a few solid hours, and then am bolt awake. The peepers are so noisy, down by the pond. What do they find to say to each other all night? The moon overexcites them. It’s so bright lately, the birds start chirping at three. I get up and look out the window and there it is, high above the trees, like some horrible white eye filling a peephole. All the world trying to sleep, and it’s shining on and on, idiotically. It shows how little we matter.”
“The moon is almost new now. Remember how it was just beginning to wane when we—”
“Let’s not talk about it, please,” Alexandra begged.
“—when we prayed to the Goddess,” Sukie insisted on finishing, as if the Goddess had been Alexandra’s own, unfortunate idea.
“What a bitch She turned out to be,” the older woman admitted. “We’ll never know what Jane’s prayer was, that she got such an answer.”
“Mine got an answer,” Sukie confided. “I saw Tommy Gorton downtown last week, and his awful hand seems to be healing. He has feeling in it, and some motion. I don’t know how much better it can get, but he was so full of beans about it he offered to fuck me.”
“Really! Why didn’t you tell me this before? It’s thrilling!”
She had kept it to herself, Sukie supposed, because she had woven it into her private visions. The sorceresses still had hallucinatory powers of some sort. Sukie didn’t want to remind Alexandra of her weakness for younger males, which might reveal her shadowy intention, her secret dream. She had a vision of an ideal young male, Actaeon or Hyacinthus, baring to the moon his pure naked chest, with its lovely, purely ornamental nipples. “I don’t know,” she answered evasively. “I didn’t want to jinx it, and Tommy seemed so hopeful. I’m afraid the miracle won’t go any further, like so many of them.” Numbed, as if ever so slightly drunk, by her mythic vision, she moved to a window overlooking the parking lot and changed the subject: “I worry that the tide will be too high for Chris to get across the causeway.”
“Chris, is it? Darling, the bank raised the causeway. Nobody would buy a condo they can’t get to.”
“There’ve been all these floods in the papers. Global warming, don’t you hate it?” By pressing her cheek against the glass she can see the far corner of the causeway. Yes, steel-blue floodwaters appear to have covered it, but outspreading ripples, making the marsh grass sway, suggest that a car has just passed.
“What did you say when Tom offered to fuck you?”
“I said ‘no dice,’ of course.” Sukie regretted having let this other woman any distance whatsoever into her privacy; it embarrassed her that they had been sky-clad together a few weeks ago.
“Do you miss sex?” Alexandra abruptly asked from the sofa, where she had set herself, half-reclining like a Roman at a feast, before the carefully arranged hors d’oeuvres. “I find I don’t. All that mess. Between me and Jim, it had gotten pretty perfunctory, though, bless his sweet soul, he tried to make it still interesting for me.”
“Me neither,” Sukie lied.
Both of them started from their poses when the buzzer from the lobby at the base of the stairwell rasped. It was an unduly loud rasp, rude as a burglar alarm, but they had never learned how to moderate it; the bank, their landlord, cashed their checks, but dialing its number never uncovered a person, just a recording that offered a number of routes to an eventual non-responsive silence. The footsteps coming up the stairs were so bounding and youthful that it was another shock when the door opened on a city-soft, androgynous, middle-aged man, breathing hard.
“Sorry, sorry,” he panted.
“You’re not late,” Sukie reassured him, though by Alexandra’s wristwatch he plainly was.
“The causeway had water on it, the way it always used to,” he continued, getting his breath back, “and I had to decide if I dared push through. I didn’t want to drown that rattletrap Honda of Greta’s she let me borrow.”
“That poor car must be on its last legs,” Sukie said.
“All the more reason to be tender with it,” he said, affecting a tone of gallantry, crossing to Alexandra as if moving through a stage direction, handing her a can of Planters salted cashews. “A hostess present.”
“Hostesses,” Sukie jealously hissed.
“Of course. Hostesses.”
Alexandra asked from the sofa, “Did Greta know you’re coming here?”
“She did. She does. And if I’m not back in two hours, she said she’ll call the police. The dear girl feared I might come to harm.” He had exchanged, momentarily, the surly, laconic bad manners of adolescence for a stagier diction left over, no doubt, from his stints in afternoon soaps, with their airless studio acoustics and meticulously groomed versions of everyday costume. He had donned for this occasion white, brass-studded jeans, L.L. Bean boat moccasins, a Listerine-blue T-shirt saying Mets in an ornate script, and a yellow cashmere V-neck sweater draped around his shoulders, the sleeves lightly knotted at his throat. He looked around him and, reverting to boyishness, exclaimed, “Weird! This used to be just space, where Darryl had his high loudspeakers in the big hot-tub room, with the skylight that rolled back to show the stars.”
Sukie said, “You can still see some of the hardware, in what was Jane’s room. They just painted it the same color as the walls.”
Mentioning Jane changed the tone of the occasion. Sukie stopped herself from chattering on, her lips ajar as if stuck on a thought, and Christopher looked down at the wine-colored carpet and actually blushed.
“Tea,” Alexandra reminded them, seeing that she was in charge of these two children. “Christopher: regular tea with caffeine—we have Lipton and English Breakfast—or herbal? We have chamomile, Sweet Dreams, or Good Earth green tea, with lemongrass.”
He said, “I don’t do herbal, thanks—too funky—and I can’t take caffeine after two in the afternoon. Even a nibble of chocolate keeps me up all night.”
“So much for tea, then,” Alexandra concluded.
“What else have you got to drink?” Christopher asked.
“Wine?” Sukie’s voice sounded shy, tentative. “It’s been opened, but has a screw-top.”
“What color?” he asked Sukie.
“Red. Chianti.”
“What brand?”
“Something Californian. Carlo Rossi.”
“Oh boy. Giant economy size.”
“Alexandra picked it out.”
“You ladies don’t exactly pamper yourselves, do you?”
Alexandra intervened, speaking to Sukie as if this man weren’t here. “Why are you knocking yourself out for this brat? We said tea; tea is what I’m going to have. He can have a glass of water if he’s so fussy.”
“A spot of Scotch with the water would be even nicer,” Christopher conceded, in the more carrying voice he must use on television.
When has he last acted? Alexandra asked herself. This is a pathetic has-been, or never-has-been. Yet here he was, a guest of sorts. His announced intention to kill them had created an intimacy.
“I’ll look for some,” Sukie said, servilely.
While she was heard opening drawers and closet doors in Jane’s windowless back room, politeness compelled Alexandra to make small talk: “We don’t drink much any more. I know we used to, when you knew us before.”
“It was horrible,” he petulantly told her, “listening to the bunch of you, getting sillier and louder and then starting to shriek. The shrieking, the horrible laughter. How could I sleep?”
“I’m sorry—thinking about you wasn’t on our agenda. But now, no, drinking can be a trap for widows. We’re trying to prolong our lives.”
“Good luck,” he said, giving her a theatrical sidelong glance—as if in a zoom-lens close-up, while the background organ music lifts and shudders to emphasize a portent.
Sukie triumphantly, looking flushed and overeager and adorable, brought back a pint bottle of Dewar’s Scotch. “Found it! That sneaky Jane, it’s almost all drunk! She never offered any to us!”
In a mutter of terse inquiries—“Ice? Water? How much? That enough?”—Sukie with a heavy hand concocted two Scotches-on-the-rocks, while Alexandra stubbornly, disapprovingly poured herself tea. She had decided on Sweet Dreams, wondering what it would taste of. It tasted of nothing. It tasted of water too hot to drink.
“Have a cookie,” she urged Christopher, holding out the carefully arranged plate.
“Please. Carbos and sugar. I should lose ten pounds even so.”
“I think a flat stomach on a man is repulsive, past a certain age,” Sukie said. “In Stamford you see all these exercise-conscious guys who think they have to look trim in business suits, and after a certain age they begin to look preserved, like mummies. They haven’t let the male body do its natural evolution.”
Alexandra, irritated by Sukie’s anxious-to-please chatter, addressed Christopher: “You were going to tell us about electrons.”
The topic lit him up; the man shed his stagy inertia and made jerky, excited gestures to go with his exposition. As he talked, he more and more resembled Darryl Van Horne—the explosive, ill-coördinated gestures, the tumbling words, the yearning for a theory that would let him master the universe, wresting it from the Creator’s hands. “They’re amazing, ” he said. “They’re everything, just about. Take a current of one ampere—guess the number of electrons flowing past a given point in one second. One measly second. Come on—guess.”
“A hundred,” Alexandra said truculently.
“Ten thousand,” said Sukie, trying harder to play the game.
“Hold on to your hats, ladies—six-point-two-four-two-oh to the eighteenth power—that is, over six quintillion! In a cubic inch of copper, there are one-point-three-eight-five to the twenty-fourth—that is, one and a third, more or less, septillion. Now take hydrogen, the simplest atom, one proton and one electron, in perfect balance, though the electron is only one-thousand-eight-hundred-thirty-seventh as heavy. But boy, are they strong! Their negative electrostatic force would instantly tear apart any piece of copper big enough to be seen, if it weren’t for the equal positive charge of the proton in the atom.” His hands, plump and unmuscular but more human—skin and wrinkles and hair—than Darryl Van Horne’s had been, enacted in air the violent tearing motion. “How about that? That crummy old brass bowl on the table there wouldn’t last a nanosecond without its protons and neutrons. Neither would we. That’s what I’m saying. We’re all full of electrons, chock-a-block full. We’re dynamite, potentially.”
Sukie and Alexandra had been so forcefully struck by his demonic resemblance to Darryl Van Horne that they had hardly heard what he said. Quintillions, septillions, super-super-zillions—what did such numbers mean, when there was only one of each of them? One life, one soul, one go.
“The proton happens, electrostatically,” Christopher went on, wiping with his thumb and middle finger some saliva from the corners of his lips, “to attract an electron exactly as much as electrons repel each other. Exactly. Otherwise, there would be no universe. Not a particle, not a shred of matter, just a chaotic high-energy seethe—the Big Bang needn’t have bothered to happen. God could have just kept sitting on His hands. What it adds up to is, if there’s an excess of electrons in a body, or of protons, they need to go elsewhere, and there’s an electric charge. If there’s less electrons than there should be, there’s a positive charge. If it’s protons, there’s a negative. In air, the readjustment is called a spark; when you’re one of the bodies, there’s a shock. Not a pleasant feeling, I hear. Over time it does things to you. You run on electricity; your brain runs on
it, your heart, your muscle responses. All matter consists of electrons and atomic nuclei—protons and neutrons, made up of up and down quarks. Neutrinos, yes, they exist, but just barely, and muons and tau particles even less so—they’re unstable. That’s all, folks. Electrons are everywhere—currents and potential currents are everywhere. So, if you get my drift, it takes very little to nudge the currents one way or another.”
He looked at them expectantly. “It’s like love,” Sukie suddenly announced. “A force that permeates the universe.”
“She’s such a romantic,” Alexandra apologized.
Christopher frowned, the flow of his discourse impeded by these female interventions. “Love’s something else. It doesn’t exist the way electrons do. It doesn’t exist independent of our animal behavior, with the sex drive.”
“You loved your sister, Jenny,” Sukie pointed out.
It seemed to Alexandra that he blushed, as when Jane had been mentioned and he looked bashfully down at the carpet the color of wine. “I was dependent on her,” he said. “We had lousy parents.”
“Your father was a sweet man. So naïve. So needy.”
“Sukie.” Alexandra’s tone rebuked the younger woman for sentimentally displaying her intimate knowledge of a lover, Christopher’s father, unhappily driven to his death. “Let him finish. About electrons,” Alexandra said.
