The Widows of Eastwick

by John Updike

  Veronica began to laugh again, and checked herself; her lips sealed shut a lovely smile, bashful but proud, adorably smug, like Joe’s after he had fucked Alexandra and gotten his clothes back on and escaped out her door to the brightness of Orchard Road, wet with snow melt and the friction of traffic. Veronica awkwardly felt her guest deserved a little more conversation. “How has it been for you?” she asked. “Being back in Eastwick this summer?”

  “It was . . . useful,” Alexandra decided. “It confirmed my suspicion that I belong elsewhere. There was less here than I remembered.”

  “I guess those of us who never left already know that. But isn’t that true of all places?”

  “Yes. It’s in us. How we look at things. A certain place, a time of life—they seem magical. Mostly looking back.”

  Veronica half-turned, back toward her ironing, back toward a life less lonely now by one more family member, a dependent adoring friend her body was creating.

  Alexandra said, in a voice firm enough to halt the other woman’s turning away, “I know it’s time for me to go. I know you’re dying to rush downstairs and tell your mother. But something occurred to me. You were married the same year your father died, yes?”

  “That’s right. Nineteen ninety-nine.”

  “I knew him, you know.”

  The innocent woman blinked. “I guess I knew.”

  The wicked old witch could not stop herself from bringing Joe into it, giving herself the satisfaction of conjuring him up, at this great distance, in his vanished force, a force that had moved her, and that she had welcomed, without enough valuing it in the greedy haste of those days, into herself, into the dark side of herself, the fertile, natural side, where her IUD had been inserted to annul Joe’s seed. She needed to bring Joe up onto her tongue, in exchange for the favor she had done this aging girl. “I think,” she told Veronica, “if Joe had lived a year or two longer—if he had been around to give his blessing to you and Mike—you would have gotten pregnant right away. He had a green thumb.” She gave the mother-to-be a kiss on her cheek, and turned to negotiate on infirm feet the steep downward stairs.

  Georgiana du Pelletier luxuriantly stretched her pale and curvaceously rounded arms outward as if to seize the transparent air of this fine Caribbean morning. Her exquisitely shaped lips, rosy without any application of lip paint [ck anachr. early 19th cent.?], stretched in a dainty feline yawn, exposing a coquettishly arched tongue the same vital tint as her lips, whose corners turned upward in a smile that deepened with remembered pleasure the piquant twin dents of her dimples and brought a light blush to her fair but sun-kissed [cut?] cheeks.

  Her eyes—sky-blue, with a shadow of the deep marine blue where the coral shoal drops off—strove to focus on the present and its many claims. Yet her outstretched hand, each finger finely tapered, came into inadvertent contact with gauzy mosquito netting, triggering in her mind a different texture—oilier, swarthier, underlaid with powerful musculature—that she had caressed on the far shore of last night’s sea of dreams.

  Sukie considered writing, “She had dug her meticulously buffed and shaped fingernails ecstatically deep into Hercule’s broad, heaving back,” then admonished herself that a proper romance never dwells on sexual details, lest it slip over into pornography and lose its targeted demographic of dreamy, dissatisfied women. Specifics might scare off female readers. Women know the facts but don’t like them spelled out. On the ledge outside Sukie’s apartment window, filthy pigeons cooed and preened and bobbed their little beady-eyed heads. They mated in an angry flurry of feathers and stiffened spread wings that was alarming to observe close up, twenty stories in the air. The avenue far below, a river of reflected sun glitter and misty car exhaust, squawked and bleated with frustrated traffic. It was September, and the great city still held a summery languor and heat.

  The songs of tropical birds—the demure chirping of the busy little yellow birds [ck correct name], the raucous cries of the paired, great-beaked lapas—sifted through the bedroom louvers. The field slaves, up since dawn, were moaning rhythmic folk songs in their musical patois, out in the white hectares of sea-island cotton. Nearer to hand, her female house slaves were exchanging murmurs of gossip as they hung up wash in the drying yard—gossip very possibly concerning the affairs of heart of their comely mistress. Georgiana’s late husband, the dashing and ruthless planter Pierre du Pelletier, had, as if in premonition of his apparent death by shipwreck en route to Jamaica, admonished his bride that, were she by any Heaven-sent misfortune to become a widow, she must run the plantation with an iron, unflinching hand. Though slender of flesh and delicate of bone, she had ridden herd on the two hundred enslaved blacks with a cool efficiency that had astonished the white foreman, Irish-born Jerome “Blaggart” Maloney—he of unkempt raven locks and sneering crimson lips and green eyes that followed her figure with a baffled would-be possessiveness that sometimes sent a shiver up and down Geor giana’s straight yet pliant spine [run-on sent.?]. Profits had swelled under her punctilious yet humane management. She had forbidden use of the lash, and the ponderous iron manacles that chafed the very skin from anguished ankles were left to rust in the empty disciplinary dungeons and oubliettes. The slaves gratefully flourished. They would become insolent and rebellious, Blaggart Maloney warned, and their uprising would bathe their island in such blood as had bathed Santo Domingo. In mockery she had tapped her folded fan on the tip of his pock-marked nose. Until that dire day, she had spiritedly informed him, her word was law. Even the burros with their long-lashed soulful eyes and the paper-colored humped Brahma cattle imported from Ceylon [ck] seemed to know and to rejoice that a woman was in charge.

  The bleached-teak double doors to her coffer-ceilinged chambre à coucher were gently pushed open, and Hercule, the young underbutler, entered in the absurd yet charming fern-green costume of a male domestic—tightly fitted knee-length breeches, lapel-less [lapel-free?] high-collared coat with white piping and claw-hammer tail, gold-buttoned vest with white cambric neckcloth, the elegant whole resolving to, where a European servant would have worn narrow black pumps and clocked silk stockings, ebony bare calves and broad bare feet, the more silently (Georgiana playfully reflected) to pad across the subtly creaking floors of precious purpleheart wood from the cloud-capped forests of northern Brazil. Silently, but for the whisper of foot-sole on wood that she had to hold her breath to hear, Hercule came to her bed and lay across her lightly blanketed lap, tingling with its secret need to urinate [omit?], an ample bed-tray holding, like a lush Dutch still life, a polychrome breakfast of

  Though the romance formula did not admit of sexual specifics, it did permit and even encourage detailed accounts of food. Yet Sukie had never been much of a cook. This had been something of a pity, since both Monty and Lennie had had images of themselves as worldly men who knew how to live well, and they would have appreciated a wife whose gourmet cooking relieved them of the expense of resorting to restaurants, with their pomp of coat and necktie, pretentious and inattentive waiters, and generous, undeserved tips. For romance readers, food description took the place of explicit sex, and it strained Sukie’s imagination. The tip of her tongue poked from between her lovely lips as if to attract gustatory inspiration with a stubby pink antenna.

  guava juice in a champagne flute, thin slices of hummingbird breast served on coin-size fritters of pounded maize, a fresh-caught butterfly fish filleted and poached in its black-striped skin. On a side dish, strips of banana were sliced longitudinally and soaked in honey as palely dark as a varnished violin. There was no way to eat them but to pick them up and then suck her fingers clean one by one. Two miniature croissants, called by slaves les cornes du diable, waited to be broken and spread with unctuous mango butter the orange of a hurricane sunset. A chased silver pot, the surface of its round-bottomed body and rod of a handle alike thick with stylized vegetation, had descended down the du Pelletier line from the time of the Sun King and now in Hercule’s steady grip poured, into Georgiana’s expec
tant cup of eggshell-thin Sèvres porcelain, coffee enriched by the addition of crumbs of raw cane sugar to the consistency of tar. Only now, after three scalding sips, could her eyes open to take in the majestic presence of her graceful, opaque black servitor.

  He had held her in his arms last night. He had penetrated her to her very soul. Yet there was a strangeness to him, as he lowered his lids to keep from spilling a drop of her refill. Nothing in his face, not so much as a twitching nerve, acknowledged last night’s raptures, her total bestowal of herself. What did she know of his thoughts? He was of another race, from another continent, which might be another planet. Their bodies spoke the language of love across a great gulf of taboo. Even as her loins tightened around the convulsive expulsion of his seminal essence [cut?], the thought welled up in her, He wants to kill me. He could slay her in the garish morning of a slave rebellion without a moment’s hesitation, though the night before he had availed himself of her tenderness and had lavished kisses of hand and tongue upon her dulcet alabaster epidermis. In his eyes, did her skin glare with the hideous pallor of a disease to be wiped from the face of the earth? Even now, the deference with which he served her might be a murderous irony. His dark presence in her white room was as alien as metal in flesh.

  Georgiana suppressed these disquieting thoughts. Shifting her legs under the pinioning bed-tray, she made the china and silver crowded upon it chuckle. As Hercule bent low above her to remove the laden encumbrance, she was assailed by his masculine aroma, and dared ask aloud, “Did you enjoy last night, mon bel esclave?”

  She felt him stiffen; the contents of the bed-tray momentarily chattered. Birdsong and unintelligible gossip filtered through the louvers, then stopped, as if at the approach of a predator. Hercule’s shaved round skull, and the smooth pillar of arteries and tapering neck muscles that supported it, loomed close above her. “Don’t know what you mean, missy,” he said, his eyes brimming with fear. His irises were as black as his coffee; the whites of his eyes had the yellow bloodshot tinge peculiar to his tropical race. She felt the gulf between them as suddenly impossible to cross. He murmured, “Mistah Blaggart, he watchin’.”

  Sukie stopped her typing—keyboarding, they called it now—in a daze of suspended disbelief. Her eyes burned from focusing on the screen, without blinking. Blink more, her ophthalmologist had told her. The sounds of the Upper East Side, transmuted into the background noise of a treacherous Caribbean island, reasserted themselves as what they were—the auditory detritus on the dirty floor of a desperately crowded metropolis. Subconsciously, while cooking up an erotically charged breakfast on an island where the slaves are bound to revolt, she had heard the elevator door open and close on this floor. She waited to hear Christopher’s key in the lock, and his slithering stealthy footsteps in the front hall.

  “It’s me,” he called out, as little boys do back from school or play. His soundless feet, cushioned in the most expensive of new New Balances, passed through the living room and halted at the threshold of the tiny room, a maid’s room originally, where she had established her writing equipment. On Sukie’s imaginary island of Santa Magdalena, it was morning; here in reality it was late afternoon, the hour when skyscraper shadows swamped the streets and commuters filled the sidewalks like termites fleeing a burning building. The fire was over in New Jersey, a red sun at the western end of the cross-streets. It was the Manhattan hour to change gears, to start thinking about the restaurant to eat out in or else to face the kitchen and a refrigerator low on leftovers. Yet Christopher appeared in her doorway with a matinal radiance, that of a messenger from another world, with such hopeful news for her as Magdalene received at the disturbed cave, or as Mary, at the other end of a divine life, had received as she was reading in virginal solitude. Fear not, Christopher seemed to be saying. Chill out.

  “How’s it going?” he asked, leaning against one side of the doorframe. He had lost some weight. Returning to the city, no longer spoiled by Greta Neff’s Germanic cooking, he had put himself on an exercise regimen, and had taken on, in self-defense against excessive restaurant portions and Sukie’s refusal to cook, shopping and kitchen duties himself, along slimming lines of fish and brown rice and fresh vegetables al dente. He also had taken to doing housework, making the washing machine and the vacuum cleaner roar into life while Sukie was trying to concentrate. She had acquired, in a sense, a wife.

  “O.K.,” she answered. “It’s trash, I guess, but when I’m into it it seems something else. Truth, maybe. Where have you been all afternoon?”

  “Oh . . . you know. Checked in with Max—he has a couple feelers out for me, in sitcoms in development. Worked out at the club for an hour, StairMaster. Walked along the river as far as Ninety-sixth. Saw some guys I used to know and we sat on a bench and talked. They were saying there’s going to be skyscrapers going up in Queens, besides the green one that says Citi. We decided we liked Queens the way it is, low and dingy, so real working people can afford to live there, instead of the phonies and rich foreigners in Manhattan.”

  He was telling her too much; he was hiding something. Usually he responded, “Oh . . . nowhere special,” or, if her question had concerned where he was going, the curt word “Out,” sometimes adding, “For some air,” or even, “I don’t know how you stand it, cooping yourself up all day.”

  Max was his agent, by whose agency any acting work would arrive. Christopher was at an awkward age, still a bit young-looking for roles as a father or a business heavy, yet far too old and plump for the kind of romantic role that, now and then, twenty-five years ago, he had filled for the cameras. After viewing some of his old tapes, Sukie had asked him how he had liked doing kissing scenes. He had answered that he didn’t mind; most sex was acting anyway. And this had made her think. She had always considered herself a sexual enthusiast, a fool for a pretty cock, able to rise out of herself in the act, the acts as they unfolded first in the dusty plush interior of pre-war family sedans that her dates had borrowed for the evening, or on the sofas and carpets and beds of furtively utilized homes in that fingernail of an upstate city, and then, as she aged, legally rented hotel rooms and vacation cottages. Not that it was always easy for even the freest and healthiest woman to get with it. Sex was an art and could be like the earliest, those cave paintings of bison and furry elk and spindly-legged antelope in ochre paint on oozing walls, the depicted beasts scored by the scratches of actual flint spear-tips inflicting wounds meant to be magically transferred to the actual hunt, becoming real kills. The paintings were not as easy to reach as art books made them seem: the cave painter had to wriggle through a series of tight and anfractuous passageways, slippery and stifling, before dropping down into the utmost secret chamber, where he could attack, or create, the potent images. So sex and its climax were reached; thinking back upon the contortions and humiliations exacted from her over the years, Sukie wondered, if this had been acting, who had been the audience? The answer was herself, herself the stage and the performer as well as the audience. Her sex with Christopher—and it was not always she who initiated it— was a charade but knowingly so, enacted sometimes with cross-dressing costumes and comical plastic gadgets, against perhaps the deep grain of their given natures but stealing strength from perversity, from a sensation of trespass and a mechanical persistence that substituted for youth’s sentimental excitement and illusion of discovery a cool knowingness itself exciting.

  A machine needs adjustments, and these can be fine enough to be called tender. As a whole their cohabitation needed tact—from him to avoid making her feel her age, and from her to avoid comment on his poverty, his pathetic financial dependence. They were both adepts at duplicity. Among the world’s journeyers, they travelled light. Unlike heterosexual men fully weighted with the social imperatives of jealous rage and possessive bullying, he would never harm her physically. Side by side, they attended concerts and plays, movies and museums, as freshly attentive as children to the concoctions that go by the name of Culture. They both enjoyed shoppin
g and followed, at a distance, turns of fashion. He was, it turned out, sincerely a Mets fan, and she found she liked, their first month in town, sitting in a great bowl of shouting people on a sunny September day, as passenger jets glinted overhead on the descent path to La Guardia. She loved, after so many suburban years, riding the subway, the unobstructed speed and the economy and racial mingling of it; she regretted that she had come to it so late that admission required a paper ticket rather than a substantial metal token.

  Nevertheless, for all their light-heartedly companionable moments and undemanding mutual tolerance, their charade of marriage wore to Sukie a hellish aspect, not a hell of fire but the one of ice. Apartment buildings were stacked stories high with cubes of ice, and she and Christopher Grant were one more frozen unit of phonies and foreigners. They were zombies; there was a rotten-egg smell of damnation. Sukie had settled for less than perfect, and this, in her romantic imagination, was a sin. There was punishment—revolt and conflagration—ahead for their island. But not yet. Georgiana and Hercule will come through. They will wind up in each other’s arms forever; that was the kind of book she was writing.

  Halloween, more or less

  Dear old Gorgeous—

  I’ve been bad about writing, I know, I know, but I bought a new computer so I could submit this new novel I’m working on on a single disk, that’s the way the penny-pinching publishers expect it now. It’s a laptop to carry with me if Chris and I do any travelling, and Microsoft has put a lot of clever new deviltry into the program, so instead of a mouse you have one of those infuriating little mouse substitutes, a square of magic metal in the middle of the keyboard bigger than a match folder but smaller than a pack of cigarettes (I still miss smoking, especially when at parties and when I’m writing, though it’s been years since my emphysema was diagnosed in stern enough terms so that my choice seemed to quit or die) that you stroke with your finger though just the merest touch sends the arrow on the screen skidding right into some icon or other that changes the typeface or goes triple column or turns everything a hideous color you can’t figure out how to change back. Really I want to cry and smash the damn machine some days, I’m too old for all the technology it takes to do anything these days, even drive a car. I’ve traded in the BMW for a more compact and environmentally sensitive Toyota hybrid so I can get around the city and not have it stolen—who would steal a hybrid?— and its dashboard is like some stealth bomber, all little cutesy international pictures and code words. I can’t figure out what it wants from me. I can’t even change the FM radio station without getting some blabbermouth sports talk show, guys phoning in to shout at a host who shouts right back, on AM, full of static from all the wires in this wired town. Electricity—who needs it? Chris says electricity is a misnomer, strictly speaking there isn’t any, there are electrons but electricity is a lazy catchall term. There are just particles with charges, and some without. Also, New York is a lot more distracting than Stamford, I suppose that’s why young people keep flocking here though they have to live in packing cases under the bridges practically, and Chris is always at me to go to this and that meaningless event with him, like art happenings where the woman keeps cutting herself in the arms and touching her own pussy. Monty and Lennie had the virtue of leaving me alone once in a while so I could daydream but then they had jobs. Funny, isn’t it, how the merest detail of these dead husbands becomes precious? I thought both of their jobs were bullshit at the time. Selling people stuff they don’t really need—that’s all capitalism has come to. That, and using up irreplaceable natural resources while Africa starves.