The Widows of Eastwick

by John Updike

  “I don’t want to tell you too much,” their guest said. He sipped his Scotch. “Darryl—Mr. Van Horne—”

  “We know who you mean, Mr. Grant,” said Alexandra, with a touch of asperity. She could see the Scotch affecting the man’s manner, increasing his confidence, his arrogance, his lazy male ease. They had only promised him tea, tea that she alone was drinking, even though it had no taste and was rapidly turning tepid.

  Christopher’s eyebrows, coarser than the silvery-blond pencil-lines of his teen years, bobbed up and down snobbishly. His plump lips crinkled as if to express, to a phantom other male presence in the room, his painfully felt superiority to their female company. He continued, “So, given the ubiquity and practically infinite number of electrons, they are not hard to play with. You don’t even need wires to contain electromagnetic fields; Maxwell theorized as early as 1864 that the field around a displacement current is as valid and measurable as the ones around a wire, and Hertz and his oscillator in the 1880s measured the speed and length of the waves. The speed was the same as the speed of light, which showed that they were a form of light, or vice versa. The length, well, as even you probably know, where the waves were long enough, not just millimeters between crests but meters and kilometers, you get radio waves; you get the wireless telegraph and radio, you get radar and television. Now,” he went on emphatically, seeing the women about to raise questions or change the subject, “our old friend Darryl Van Horne was fascinated by Maxwell’s central intellectual maneuver of considering electricity an incompressible fluid, which is a fantastic premise. It cannot be. But the equations worked out on this imaginary basis fitted perfectly the actualities of electromagnetic fields. This looping out of reality into fantasy”—he used his hands, in the wide way Darryl did, to render the trajectory—“and back again fascinated him. Another thing that seemed hopeful to him was the spookiness of quantum theory. The wave-particle duality, the uncertainty principle, and the co-dependent polarization of two entangled particles, electrons or photons, so that measuring the spin of one ensures that the spin of the other will be complementary, instantly, even if they are light-years apart, raising the delicious possibility of teleportation transcending the speed of light—to Darryl these illogical apparent facts were like rough seams left on the underside of the fabric of, pardon the expression, Creation. They were gaps God couldn’t cover. They could be exploited just as the defects of human perception and intuition could be exploited for the illusions of stage magic. But the magic would be real, just as wireless electricity is real. The quantum reality of particulate entanglement over a distance could be extended to the supra-particulate world as well. A cathode-ray oscilloscope, for example, can project a beam of electrons by means of horizontal and vertical metal deflecting plates. It can make a fluorescent material glow; it can also saturate a substance, including that of a human being, with excess electrons, giving it a negative charge, so it goes around like a wire with the insulation rubbed off.”

  Both women broke in with irrelevancies, as he knew they would. Sukie exclaimed, “Cathode, Cathar! The heresy at the root of romantic love! You’re still talking about love!”

  And Alexandra: “That’s what you did to Jane somehow! And now to us!”

  Christopher blushed. “Not at all,” he lied. To Alexandra he said, “There are technical difficulties I won’t take your time explaining. Mr. Van Horne ran into them and wandered away, the way he did. He had so many ideas he could never see any of them through. And he kept moving, from one borrowed apartment to another, so he was always leaving equipment behind. That’s why I broke with him, eventually —I needed stability. I was getting calls from producers, I was in my early twenties and what they call telegenic, I couldn’t show up on the set after a night of his lousy carousing. He was always inviting people in—useless people, street people, vicious hangers-on and total phonies. When I’d complain, he’d say, ‘They have souls,’ as if that made it worthwhile. A lot I cared if they did or didn’t. I just wanted some regular meals and the same bed to sleep in every night. He was restless. He wanted to go everywhere, the more outlandish the better—Albania, Uzbekistan, Zimbabwe, Fiji. Sudan. Iraq. He loved the names; he was good at learning languages, a smattering. The numbers, ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ China—he loved the idea of China. ‘A billion and a quarter souls!’ he’d say. ‘On the verge of all the evils of capitalism, and not a god left to protect them!’ ”

  “We all went there,” Sukie told him. “It was fun, but still very innocent. Darryl will be bored silly.”

  “When we knew him,” Alexandra pointed out, “he was so bored that we amused him. And then even the Neffs and the Hallybreads amused him.”

  “He had no discrimination,” Christopher complained, looking down into his glass, empty but for two half-melted ice cubes. “Is there any more Scotch?”

  “I’ll give you the rest,” Sukie said, selflessly pouring. “I’ll switch to wine.”

  “So will I,” Alexandra said. “Herbal tea is a delusion.”

  Christopher cocked an eye at this. “How’s your appetite these days?”

  “Not good,” she admitted. “I feel a little queasy, especially in the morning and night. Are you doing it to me?”

  He pulled at his drink before answering, thoughtfully licking his wet lips. “You’re doing it to yourself,” he said. “You feel guilty about my sister.”

  “And about my daughter, too,” she agreed. “The one who lives right here in Eastwick. She never got away, poor thing. She got stuck here, looking for whatever it was I didn’t give her.”

  “Attention,” he proposed. “And rules to live by.”

  “Oh, please,” Sukie protested. “Let’s not be morbid. I’m getting hungry. There’s no more seaweed crackers for the dip. I’ll bring some from the kitchen. Stale Ritz will have to do.” She left the room.

  “People give themselves cancer,” Christopher solemnly told Alexandra.

  “I know,” Alexandra said. “Out of guilt or stress.”

  “It’s a proven physiological mechanism,” he pontificated.

  “Think of what Darryl would do if he were here!” Sukie called from the kitchen. “He’d play the piano!”

  “We don’t have a piano,” said Alexandra. “We don’t even have a record player.” The very expression dated her, she realized.

  “We have a radio,” Sukie called. “For the weather, and the dreary news.” She returned, bringing in her toothy bright smile and a rearranged platter. “Try WCTD,” she directed. “Ninety-six-point-nine FM. They do jazz classics toward dinnertime.”

  It is curious, Alexandra reflected as the party changed gear, how much harder women work, when there are two of them, to please and flatter a man—even this man, a poor specimen by most standards, an overweight poof trying to wreak vengeance on elderly women on behalf of an insipid little sister long dead. Long dead: Jenny was a hollow husk, in her coffin in the new section of Cocumscussoc Cemetery, and a pale sly thing ever dimmer in Alexandra’s memory: sly, shy, a bride of eternal night. For less than a second, like the quick opening of the circular leaves of a giant camera, or of the retractable ceiling that used to be up here, Alexandra looked into the depths of her own death, the pure everlasting nothingness of it. Then, mercifully, the shutter sucked shut again, tight as an anus. She was still in this brightly lit room.

  Sukie had found WCTD, the signal from Ashaway strong enough to infuse the tinny small radio, whose primary service to the temporary tenants of the condo was to tell the time in large red numbers to anyone who, awakened by urinary pressure or the stirrings of a guilty conscience, shuffled bewildered through the living room in the hours after midnight. The music, smudged with static, tumbled out—the deep-voiced stride piano, the soaring clarinet, the rousing cornet, the drums romping through the insistent brass beat of the high-hat cymbal, each instrument, with a courtesy from an older era, taking its solo turn and then sinking back, to a spatter of applause, into the ensemble’s jubilant restatement of the
tune. Yes, yes, yes, the massed instruments kept chanting, until the last bar thudded to its end.

  “Remember Darryl and his ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square Boogie’?” Sukie said in the moment’s silence. “He was awful but could be so wonderful.”

  The radio spoke, not with the youthful voice of a university student but with the growl of an elderly jazz aficionado, a professor or janitor allowed to play disk jockey for a few evening hours. He gave the provenance (New Orleans, 1923, or Chicago, 1929, or Manhattan, 1935) and the band and soloists (King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Benny Good-man) with a mournful gravity befitting a beautiful but bygone mode.

  Christopher asked, “How did people ever dance to this stuff?”

  “You Lindied,” Sukie answered. “You jitterbugged. Shall I show you how?”

  “No, thanks.”

  But another classic disk—“now, folks, for a change of pace, a honey-smooth swing number that topped the charts back in 1940, the great Glenn Miller’s ‘In the Mood’!”—was placed on the turntable twenty miles away, on the Connecticut line, and, by the miracle of electromagnetic waves, crackled irresistibly out of the tiny brown radio in Eastwick. Sukie stood close to the plaid recliner where the Gabriel boy sprawled, trying to ignore her.

  “This way,” she said, shifting her weight invitingly from foot to foot. “Watch what I do. Sidestep with the left foot, one-two, and then step in place with the right foot, three-four, toes and heel, and then swing the left behind the right, quick, and step in place with the right, and do it all again. Dig it. Feel it. Hear those trombones! In the mood! Do-dee-dahduh! In the mood! Do-dee-dada!” Sukie stood there, shimmying and snapping her fingers opposite a nonexistent partner. Embarrassed for her, Christopher at last, as if hoisted by an invisible magnetic force, stood, and let her take his one hand and put the other behind her back in foxtrot position. “Yes,” she said, when he began stiffly to imitate her weight-shifts. “Don’t be afraid of stepping on my feet, I won’t let you. When I give your hand a little squeeze, push me away, and then let me come back to you. Remember, two beats on one foot, then quick with the left foot behind. Wonderful! You’re getting it!”

  Alexandra was numbed by too much Nature—the spectacle of a stiff man being captured by an animated, flexible older woman. Sukie was having a high old time, perspiring freely in the low-ceilinged room; Christopher was being led, not altogether against his inclinations, into a realm full of pitfalls, on the very area of burgundy carpet where Jane’s plea to the Goddess, whatever it had been, had been answered by a burst of blood.

  The record stopped. “There you have it, guys and gals,” the gravelly old voice said, “ ‘In the Mood,’ with that fantastic ending. The tune was originally a twelve-bar blues composed by Joe Garland and Andy Razaf. The main theme previously appeared under the title ‘Tar Paper Stomp,’ credited to trumpeter and bandleader Wingy Manone. One story goes that after the Miller recording became a big hit, Manone was paid off not to sue. Rocker Jerry Lee Lewis did a later, non-big-band version, and those of you with rabbit ears can hear a few phrases from the intro in the background of the coda of the Beatles’ ‘All You Need Is Love.’ ” The disc jockey, Alexandra decided, was no janitor; he sounded more and more professorial. “And now another sentimental treat,” he growled, “a platter to bring tears to the rheumy eyes of those of us over a certain age—Bunny Berigan, who played in the Miller band as well as for Paul Whiteman, the Dorseys, Benny Goodman, and his own short-lived aggregation—Rowland Bernard Berigan, born in Hilbert, Wisconsin, and dead at thirty-three in New York City, of cirrhosis of the liver, favoring us with his singing voice as well as his moody, stuttering trumpet work, doing his signature rendering of ‘I Can’t Get Started,’ melody by the great Vernon Duke, lyrics by the ditto Ira Gershwin, recorded in 1937. Listen up, all you out there.”

  The song began at a languid tempo that could only be slow-danced to, close. “Enough,” Sukie decided, after trying in vain to budge Christopher into a few paired steps. They parted, both of them pink-faced and moist. Christopher’s Mets T-shirt bore sweat-stains in the center of his chest and in two wing-shapes at the back, where his shoulder blades made contact with the cloth.

  Sukie, slightly panting, presumed on their new relationship and said to him, “Tell us about New York. Would I like to live there?”

  “No,” he told her. “What they get for rentals now is ridiculous.”

  “My husband didn’t leave me poor. The city was always expensive.”

  “It’s worse now. Arabs. All the rich Arabs and South Americans are buying up apartments in case their countries blow up. The U.S. is everybody’s escape hatch.”

  Alexandra broke into this tête-à-tête, saying to Christopher, “Didn’t Greta Neff want you back in two hours? You can make it, assuming the causeway has dried out.”

  “Oh, Lexa,” Sukie reproached. “Christopher is telling us things. He’s getting to like us.” She poured some red wine from the glass jug into his empty Scotch glass, and turned down the clock-radio, which was still rustling with immortal jazz. The red numbers said 8:47 when he finally left. His thanks and farewell were those of a portly, deep-voiced gentleman, but his pale-blue eyes had the glaze of a befuddled youth.

  “I didn’t think he told us a thing,” Alexandra complained to Sukie when his car had crackled away over the gravel on the lot below. “You and he seemed to be greatly amusing each other, but the evening didn’t do much for me. It came to me for a hideous instant in the middle of it all that he wants me dead, and you’re giving him jitterbug lessons and the last of Jane’s Scotch.”

  “He needed them; he’s been repressed by his gay theatrical crowd. They have all these impossible hopes of being rich and famous and live hand to mouth in cold-water flats, the poor dears.”

  “Poor dears—he’s out there pumping us full of electrons somehow.”

  “Or so he thinks. I’m not sure he has much more to tell, actually. He’s just parroting Darryl’s ideas without fully understanding them.”

  “If they’re understandable. I’m not sure I understand you any more. You get very engaged around this little monster.”

  “He’s not that little.”

  “He is in my sense of him. The kid brother Darryl kidnapped. And now he’s come back determined to kill us, like one of these high-school kids who decide it would be fun to do a Columbine.”

  “Us? Me, too?”

  “Why not? You were there. There were three of us. You were furious with Jenny, too.”

  Sukie considered, with an adorably petulant plump-lipped moue. “It was all so long ago, it’s hard to believe we did it.”

  “That’s what these pederast priests must think, while the church is being sued into bankruptcy. But they get hauled into court. Justice is done. Sukie, I’ll tell you frankly: down deep I’m terrified.”

  “Don’t be terrified, Gorgeous. We still have magic, don’t we?”

  Alexandra looked down at her hands. They resembled two fat lizards. Their backs were roughened and mottled by sun damage—days at the beach, days in the garden, days riding in the desert, her hands holding the reins, days walking Cinder in the high ranch country. Her nails were cracked with dryness; arthritis had taken and twisted some joints so the knobby fingers pointed in slightly different directions. These were the hands of a stranger, someone she wouldn’t regret leaving behind. “You may,” she told Sukie. “I think my magic’s about used up. Just the thought of casting a spell nauseates me.”

  “Mother, you look thin! Is anything the matter?”

  “Don’t I look better thinner?” Alexandra realized this was not the thing to say. Her sickly appearance had been reflected as a flash of dismay on her daughter’s face. We look alike, it occurred to her—on the heavy side, faces a bit too broad to be exactly beautiful. Marcy even had the little cleft at the tip of her nose, though less decisively. The child had inherited her father’s indecisiveness—Oswald Spofford’s pathetic desire to be accepted by others, to be one
of the blameless sheep. Most people, she tried to tell him, weren’t worth being accepted by. Better snub them before they snub you. Be one of the wolves.

  Looking into a mirror, she could have flattered herself—turning her head to smooth out the tension lines, lowering her chin to hide the throat wattles that had become, as the fat beneath her skin ebbed, more prominent—but there was no eluding her oldest child’s stricken gaze.

  August, with its steamy spells and its little green knobs bunched ever thicker on the fruit trees and its fully ripened insect population biting and stinging and eating leaves to lace, was winding down. Alexandra was fulfilling her promise to Marcy to come to dinner when her grandsons Roger and Howard Junior were home from camp. Bring your friends, Marcy had said, but the boys had come home two weeks after Jane had died, and since then Sukie had developed a mysterious attachment in the town that took more and more of her time. It was never clear when she would be eating with Alexandra, or if the BMW would be available for Alexandra to borrow for her own meager errands—walks on the beach when the afternoon sun was too low to burn her skin, visits to the sleepy Eastwick library for books by the Western authors (Cormac McCarthy, Barbara Kingsolver) favored by her reading circle in Taos, visits to the Stop & Shop for meat and fresh vegetables to make a decent meal if she had, for once, persuaded Sukie to have dinner in the condo with her. Sukie had acquired in relation to Alexandra the casual arrogance of the relatively rich, flippantly heedless and distractedly breathless with the unexplained importance of her private arrangements. The three women had begun their summer vacation together full of intentions to explore this little state, to keep track of summer concerts and plays around Narragansett Bay, to go on excursions to the famed opulent “cottages” of Newport, or to take the summer steamer ferry from Galilee to Block Island, or to incorporate a pleasant roadside luncheon into a visit to Gilbert Stuart’s birthplace or—remembered from their witchy days—the touchingly modest, gloomily pastoral so the called Smith’s Castle, a relic of the fabled plantation past. But when Jane became sick and died, such idle jaunts, for the two survivors, became implausible. Alexandra felt herself joining the Eastwick natives in their daze of stuckness—stuck with almost nothing to do, but the days nevertheless passing with an accelerating speed, eating up her lazy life as the insects ate the summer’s leaves. Once, when she complained to Sukie of her elusiveness, the redhead—whose own face in self-forgetful moments seemed to shrivel into itself, suddenly smaller, as if crinkling and withering in an unseen fire—snapped at Alexandra, “Can’t you see, you dope? I’m trying to save your life!”