The Witches of Eastwick

Jane Smart in her pleated whites tossed up the tennis ball. It became in mid-air a bat, its wings circled in small circumference at first and, next instant, snapped open like an umbrella as the creature flicked away with its pink, blind face. Jane shrieked, dropped her racket and called across the net, "That was not funny."

The other witches laughed, and Darryl Van Horne, who was their fourth, belatedly, halfheartedly enjoyed the joke. He had powerful, educated strokes but did seem to have trouble seeing the ball in the slant late-afternoon light that came in rays through the sheltering stand of larches here at the back end of his island. The larches were dropping their needles and they had to be swept from the court. Jane's own eyes were excellent, preternaturally sharp. Bats' faces looked to her like flattened miniature versions of children pressing their noses against a candy-store window, and Van Horne, who played incongruously dressed in basketball sneakers and a Malcolm X T-shirt and the trousers of an old dark suit, had something of this same childish greed on his bewildered, glassy-eyed face. He coveted their wombs, was Jane's belief. She prepared to toss and serve again, but even as she weighed the ball in her hand, it took on a liquid heft and a squirming wartiness. Another transformation had been wrought. With a theatrical sigh of patience, she set the toad down on the composition surface over by the bright-green fence and watched it wriggle through. Van Horne's feeble-minded and wry-necked collie, Needlenose, raced around the outside of the fence to inspect; but he lost the toad in the tumble of earth and blasted rocks the bulldozers had left here.

"Once more and I quit," Jane called across the net. She and Alexandra Spofford had been pitted against Sukie Rougemont and their host. "The three of you can play Canadian doubles," she threatened. With the bespectacled gesturing face on Van Horne's T-shirt, it seemed there were five of them present, anyway. The next tennis ball in her hand went through some rapid textural changes, first slimy like a gizzard then prickly like a sea urchin, but she resolutely refused to look at it, to cede it that reality, and when it appeared against the blue sky above her head, it was a fuzzy yellow Wilson, which, following instruction books she had read, she imagined as a clockface to be struck at two o'clock. She brought the strings smartly through this phantom and felt from the surge of follow-through that the serve would be good. The ball kicked toward Sukie's throat and she awkwardly defended her breasts with the racket held in the backhand position. As if the strings had become noodles, the ball plopped at her feet and rolled to the side line.

"Super," Alexandra muttered to Jane. Jane knew her partner loved, in different erotic keys, both their opponents, and their partnering, which Sukie had arranged at the outset of the match with a suspect twirl of her racket, must give Alexandra some jealous pain. The other two were a mesmerizing team, Sukie with her coppery hair tied in a bouncing ponytail and her slender freckled limbs swinging from a little peach tennis dress, and Van Horne with his machinelike swiftness, animated as when playing the piano by a kind of demon. His effectiveness was only limited by moments of dimsighted uncoordination in which he missed the ball entirely. Also, his demon tended to play at a constant forte that sent some of his shots skimming out past the base line, when a subtle pianissimo chop into a vacant space would have won the point.

As Jane prepared to serve to him, Sukie called gaily, "Foot fault!" Jane looked down to see not her sneaker toe across the line but the line itself, though a painted one, across the front of her sneaker and holding it fast like a bear trap. She shook off the illusion and served to Van Horne, who returned the ball with a sharp forehand that Alexandra alertly poached, directing the ball at Sukie's feet; Sukie managed to scoop it on the short hop into a lob that Jane, having come to the net at her partner's adroit and aggressive poach, just reached in time to turn it into another lob, which Van Horne, eyes flashing fire, set himself to smash with a grunting overhead and which he would have smashed, had not a magical small sparkling storm, what they call in many parts of the world a dust devil, arisen and caused him to snap a sheltering right hand to his brow with a curse. He was left-handed and wore contact lenses. The ball remained suspended at the level of his waist while he blinked away the pain; then he stroked it with a forehand so firm the orb changed color from optical yellow to a chameleon green that Jane could hardly see against the background of green court and green fence. She swung where she sensed the ball to be and the contact felt sweet; Sukie had to scramble to make a weak return, which Alexandra volleyed down into the opponents' forecourt so vehemently it bounced impossibly high, higher than the setting sun. But Van Horne skittered back quicker than a crab underwater and tossed his metal racket toward the stratosphere, slowly twirling, silvery. The disembodied racket returned the ball without power but within the base lines, and the point continued, the players interlacing, round and round, now clockwise, now wither-shins, the music of it all enthralling, Jane Smart felt: The counterpoint of their four bodies, eight eyes and 16 extended limbs scored upon the now nearly horizontal bars of sunset red filtered through the larches, whose falling needles pattered like distant applause. When the rally and with it the match was at last over, Sukie complained, "My racket kept feeling dead."

"You should use catgut instead of nylon," Alexandra suggested benignly, her side having won.

"It felt absolutely leaden; I kept having shooting pains in my forearm trying to lift it. Which one of you hussies was doing that? Absolutely no fair."

Van Horne also pleaded in defeat. "Damn contact lenses," he said. "Get even a speck of dust behind them, it's like a fucking razor blade."

"It was lovely tennis," Jane pronounced with finality. Often she was cast, it seemed to her, in this role of peacemaking parent, of maiden aunt devoid of passion, when in fact she was seething.

The end of daylight-saving time had been declared and darkness came swiftly as they filed up the path to the many lit windows of the house. Inside, the three women sat in a row on the curved sofa in Van Horne's long, art-filled, yet somehow barren living room, drinking the potions he brought them. Darryl Van Horne was a master of exotic drinks, drinks alchemically concocted of tequila and grenadine and crème de cassis and triple sec and Seltzer water and cranberry juice and apple brandy and additives even more arcane, all kept in a tall 17th Century Dutch cabinet topped by two startled angels' heads, their faces split, right through the blank eyeballs, by the aging of the wood. The sea seen through his Palladian windows turned the color of wine, of dogwood leaves before they fall. Fidel brought hors d'oeuvres, pastes and dips of crushed sea creatures, empanadillas, calamares en su tinta that were consumed, with squeals of disgust, with fingers that turned the same muddy sepia as the blood of these succulent baby squids. Now and then one of the witches, like a log fire suddenly settling on its andirons with a gentle crash, or like the becalmed beds of a hospital ward suddenly emitting a moan, would exclaim that she must do something about the children, either go home to make their suppers or at least phone the house to put the oldest daughter officially in charge. Tonight was already deranged: It was the night of trick or treat, and some of the children would be at parties and others out on the shadowy intimate streets of downtown Eastwick begging. Toddling in rustling groups along the fences and hedges would be little pirates and Cinderellas wearing masks with fixed grimaces and live moist eyes darting in papery eyeholes; there would be ghosts in pillowcases carrying shopping bags rattling with chocolate bars. Doorbells would be constantly ringing. Sukie on the sofa arched her back inward, stretching in her scant peach dress so that her white underpants showed, and said with a yawn, "I really should go home. The poor darlings. That house right in the middle of town, it must be besieged."

Van Horne was sitting opposite her in his corduroy armchair; he had been perspiring glowingly and had put on an Irish knit sweater, of natural wool still smelling oilily of sheep, over the stenciled image of gesticulating Malcolm X. "Don't go, my friend," he said. "Stay and have a bath. That's what I'm going to do. I stink."

"Bath?" Sukie said. "I can take one at home."

"Not in an eight-foot teak hot tub you can't," the man said, twisting his big head with such violent roguishness that his bushy white cat, called Thumbkin, jumped off his lap. "While we're all having a good long soak, Fidel can cook up some paella or tamales or something."

"Tamale and tamale and tamale," Jane Smart said compulsively. She was sitting on the end of the sofa beyond Sukie and her profile had an angry precision, Alexandra thought. The smallest of them physically, she got the most drunk, trying to keep up. Jane sensed she was being thought about; her hot eyes locked onto Alexandra's. "What about you, Lexa? What's your thought?"

"Well," was the drifting answer, "I do feel dirty, and I ache. Three sets is too much for this old lady."

"You'll feel like a million after this experience," her host assured her. "Tell you what," he said to Sukie. "Run on home, check on your brats and come back here soon as you can."

"Swing by my house and check on (continued on page 174) Witches of Eastwick (continued from page 94) mine, too, could you, sweetie?" in chimed Jane Smart.

"Well, I'll see," Sukie said, stretching again. Her long freckled legs displayed at their tips dainty sneakerless feet in little tasseled Peds like lucky rabbit's feet. There was no telling, from the way she snatched up her racket and flung her fawn sweater around her neck, whether she would return or not. They all heard her car, a pale-gray Corvair convertible with front-wheel drive and her ex-husband's vanity plate Rouge still on the back, start up and spin out and crackle away down the drive. The tide was low tonight, low under a new moon, so low ancient anchors and rotten dory ribs jutted into starlight where water covered them all but a few hours of each month.

Sukie's departure left the three remaining more comfortable with themselves, at ease in their relatively imperfect skins. Still in their sweaty tennis clothes, their fingers dyed by squid ink, their throats and stomachs roughened by the peppery sauces of Fidel's tamales and enchiladas, they walked with fresh drinks into the music room and the two musicians showed Alexandra how far they had proceeded with the Brahms sonata in E minor for piano and cello. How the man's ten fingers thundered on the helpless keys! As if he were playing with hands more than human, stronger and wide as hayrakes, and never fumbling, folding trills and arpeggios into the rhythm, gobbling them up. Only his softer passages lacked something of expressiveness, as if there were no notch in his system low enough for the tender touch necessary. Dear Jane, brows knitted, struggled to keep up, her face turning paler and paler as concentration drained it, the pain in her bowing arm evident, her other hand scuttling up and down, pressing the strings as if they were too hot to pause upon. It was Alexandra's motherly duty to applaud when the tense and tumultuous performance was over.

"It's not my cello, of course," Jane explained, unsticking black hair from her brow.

"Just an old Strad I had lying around," Van Horne joked and then, seeing that Alexandra would believe him, for there was coming to be in her lovelorn state nothing she did not believe within his powers and possessions, amended this to: "Actually, it's a Ceruti. He was Cremona, too, but later. Still, an OK old fiddle maker. Ask the man who owns one." Suddenly he shouted as loudly as he had made the harp of the piano resound, so that the thin black windowpanes in their seats of cracked putty vibrated in sympathy. "Fidel!" he called into the emptiness of the vast house. "Margaritas! ¡Tres! Bring them into the bath! ¡Tráiga las al baño! ¡Rápidamente!"

So the moment of divestment was at hand. To embolden Jane, Alexandra rose and followed Van Horne at once; but perhaps Jane needed no emboldening after her private musical sessions in this house. It was the ambiguous essence of Alexandra's relation with Jane and Sukie that she was the leader, the profoundest witch of the three, and yet also the slowest, a bit in the dark, a bit--yes--innocent. The other two were younger and therefore slightly more modern and less beholden to nature with its massive patience, its infinite care and imperious cruelty, its ancient implication of a slow-grinding, man-centered order.

The procession of three passed through the long living room of decaying, dusty modern art and then a small chamber hastily crammed with stacked lawn furniture and unopened cardboard boxes. New double doors, the inner side padded with black-vinyl quilting, sealed off the heat and damp of the rooms Van Horne had added where the old copper-roofed conservatory used to be. The bathing space was floored in Tennessee slate and lit by overhead lights sunk in the ceiling, itself a dark pegboardy substance. "Rheostatted," Van Horne explained in his hollow, rasping voice. He twisted a luminous knob inside the double doors so these upside-down ribbed cups brimmed into a brightness photographs could have been taken by and then ebbed back to the dimness of a developing room. These lights were sunk above not in rows but scattered at random like stars. He left them at dim, in deference perhaps to their puckers and blemishes and the telltale false teats that mark a witch. Beyond this darkness, behind a wall of plate glass, vegetation was underlit green by buried bulbs and lit from above by violet growing lamps that fed spiky, exotic shapes--plants from afar, selected and harbored for their poisons. A row of dressing cubicles and two shower stalls, all black, like the boxes in a Nevelson sculpture, occupied another wall of the space, which was dominated as by a massive, musky sleeping animal by the pool itself, a circle of water with burnished teak rim, an element so warm the very air in here started sweat on Alexandra's face. A small squat console with burning red eyes at the tub's near edge contained, she supposed, the controls.

"Take a shower first if you feel so dirty," Van Horne told her but himself made no move in that direction. Instead, he went to a cabinet on another wall, a wall like a Mondriaan but devoid of color, cut up in doors and panels that must all conceal a secret, and took out a white box, not a box but a long skull, perhaps a goat's or a deer's, with a hinged silver lid. Out of this he produced some shredded something and a packet of old-fashioned cigarette papers at which he began clumsily fiddling like a bear worrying a fragment of beehive.

Alexandra's eyes were adjusting to the gloom. She went into a cubicle and slipped out of her gritty clothes and, wrapping herself in a purple towel she found folded there, ducked into the shower. Tennis sweat, guilt about the children, a misplaced bridal timidity--all sluiced from her. She held her face up into the spray as if to wash it away, that face given to you at birth like a fingerprint or Social Security number. Her head felt luxuriously heavier as her hair got wet. Her heart felt light like a small motor skimming on an aluminum track toward its inevitable connection with her rough strange host. She stepped back into the shadowy room with the towel wrapped around her. The slate had a fine reptilian roughness to the soles of her feet. The caustic pungence of marijuana scraped her nose like a friendly fur. Van Horne and Jane Smart, shoulders gleaming, were already in the tub, sharing the joint. Alexandra walked to the tub edge, saw the water was about four feet deep, let her towel drop and slipped in. Hot. Scalding. In the old days before burning her completely at the stake they would pull pieces of flesh from a witch's flesh with red-hot tongs; this was a window into that furnace of suffering.

"Too hot?" Van Horne asked, his voice even hollower, more mock manly, amid these sequestered, steamy acoustics.

"I'll get used," she said grimly, seeing that Jane had. Jane looked furious that Alexandra was here at all, making waves, gently though she had tried to lower herself into the agonizing water. Alexandra felt her breasts tug upward, buoyant. She had slipped in up to her neck and thence had no dry hand to accept the joint, so Van Horne had to place it between her lips. She drew deep and held the smoke in. Her submerged trachea burned. The water's temperature was becoming one with her skin and looking down she saw how they had all been dwindled, Jane's body distorted with wedge-shaped wavering legs and Van Horne's penis floating like a pale torpedo, uncircumcised and curiously smooth, like one of those vanilla-plastic vibrators that have appeared in city drugstore display windows now that the sky is the limit.

Alexandra reached up and behind her to the towel she had dropped and dried her hands and wrists enough to accept in her turn the little reefer, fragile as a chrysalis, as it was passed among the three of them. After several deep tokes amid this steam, she imagined she felt herself changing, growing weightless in the water and in the tub of her skull, and a new life beginning. As when a sock comes through the wash turned inside out and needs to be briskly reached into and pulled, so the universe; she had been looking at it as at the back side of a tapestry. This dark room with its just barely discernible seams and wires was the other side of the tapestry, the consoling reverse to nature's sunny fierce weave. Alexandra felt clean of worry. Jane's face still expressed worry, but her mannish brows and that smudge of insistence in her voice no longer intimidated Alexandra, seeing their source in the thick black pubic bush that beneath the water seemed to sway back and forth almost like a penis.

"God," Darryl Van Horne announced aloud, "I'd love to be a woman."

"For heaven's sake, why?" Jane asked sensibly.

"Think what a female body can do--make a baby, then make milk to feed it."

"Well, think of your own body," Jane said, "the way it can turn food into shit."

"Jane" Alexandra scolded, shocked by the analogy, which seemed despairing, though shit, too, was a miracle, if you thought about it. To Van Horne she confirmed, "It is wonderful. At the moment of birth there's nothing left of your ego, you're just a channel for this effort that comes from beyond."

"Must be," he said, dragging, "a fantastic high."

"You're so drugged you don't notice," the other woman said sourly.

"Jane, that isn't true. It wasn't true for me. Ozzie and I did the whole natural-childbirth thing, with him in the room giving me ice chips to suck, I got so dehydrated, and helping me breathe. With the last two babies we didn't even have a doctor, we had a monitrice."

"Do you know," Van Horne stated, going into that pedantic ponderous squint that Lexa instinctively loved, as a glimpse of the shy clumsy boy he must have been, "the whole witchcraft scare was an attempt--successful, as it turned out--on the part of the newly arising male-dominated medical profession, beginning in the Fourteenth Century, to get the childbirth business out of the hands of midwives. A tremendous number of the women burned were midwives. They had the ergot and atropine and probably a lot of right instincts even without germ theory. When the male doctors took over they worked blind, with a sheet around their necks, and brought all the diseases in the world with them. The poor cunts died in droves."

"Typical," said Jane abrasively. She had evidently decided that being nasty would keep her in the forefront of Van Horne's attention. "If there's one thing that infuriates me more than male chauvs," she told him now, "it's creeps who take up feminism just to work their way into women's underpants."

But her voice, it seemed to Alexandra, was slowing, softening, as the water worked upon them from without and the Cannabis from within. "But you're not even wearing underpants," Alexandra pointed out. It seemed an illumination of some merit. The room was growing brighter, with nobody touching a dial.

"I'm not kidding," Van Horne pursued, that myopic little boy scholar still in him, worming to understand. His face was set on the water's surface as on a platter; his hair was long as John the Baptist's and merged with the curls licked flat on his shoulders. "It comes from the heart, can't you girls tell? I love women. My mother was a brick, smart and pretty, Christ. I used to watch her slave around the house all day and around six-thirty in wanders this little guy in a business suit and I think to myself, What's this wimp butting in for? My old dad, the hard-working wimp. Tell me honest, how does it feel when the milk flows?"

"How does it feel," Jane asked irritably, "when you come?"

"Hey, come on, let's not get ugly."

"I don't see what's ugly," Jane said. "You want to talk physiology, I'm just offering a physiological sensation that women can't have. I mean, we don't come that way. Quite. Don't you love that word they have for the clitoris, homologous?"

Alexandra offered apropos of giving milk, "It feels like when you have to go pee and can't and then suddenly you can."

"That's what I love about women," Van Horne said. "Their homely similes. There's no such word as ugly in your vocabulary. Men, Christ, they're so squeamish about everything--blood, spiders, blow jobs. You know, in a lot of species the bitch or sow or whatever eats the afterbirth?"

"I don't think you realize," Jane said, striving for a dry tone, "what a chauvinistic thing that is to say." But her dryness took a strange turn as she stood on tiptoe in the tub, so her breasts lifted silvery from the water. One was a little higher and smaller than the other. She held them in her two hands and explained to a point in space between the man and the other woman, as if to the invisible witness of her life, a witness we all carry with us and seldom address aloud, "I always wanted my breasts to be bigger. Like Lexa's. She has lovely big boobs. Show him, sweet."

"Jane, please. You're making me blush. I don't think it's the size that matters so much to men, it's the, it's the tilt and the way they go with the whole body. And what you yourself think of them. If you're pleased, others will be. Am I right or wrong?" she asked Van Horne.

But he would not be held to the role of male spokesman. He, too, stood up out of the water and cupped his hairy-backed palms over his vestigial male nipples, tiny warts surrounded by wet black snakes. "Think of evolving all that," he beseeched. "The machinery, all that plumbing, of the body of one sex to make food, food more exactly suited to the baby than any formula you can cook up in a lab. Think of evolving sexual pleasure. Do squids have it? What about plankton? With them, they don't have to think, but we, we think. To keep us in the game, what a bait they had to rig up. There's more built into it than one of these crazy reconnaissance planes that costs the taxpayers a zillion before it gets shot down. Suppose they left it out; nobody would fuck anybody and the species would stop dead with everybody admiring sunsets and the Pythagorean theorem."

Alexandra liked the way his mind worked; she had no trouble following it. "I adore this room," she announced dreamily. "At first I didn't think I would. All the black, except for the nice copper tubing and the little red lights."

"I could put on some music," Van Horne said, touchingly anxious that they not be bored. "We're all wired up for four-track stereo."

"Shh," Jane said. "I heard a car on the driveway."

"Trick-or-treaters," Van Horne suggested. "Fidel'll give 'em some razor-blade apples we've been cooking up."

"Maybe Sukie's come back," Alexandra said. "I love you, Jane; you have such good ears."

"Aren't they nice?" the other woman agreed. "I do have pretty ears, even my father always said. Look." She held her hair back from one and then, turning her head, the other. "The only trouble is, one's a little higher than the other, so any glasses I wear sit cockeyed on my nose."

"They're rather square," Alexandra said.

Taking it as a compliment, Jane added, "And nice and flat to the skull. Sukie's are cupped out like a monkey's, have you ever noticed?"

"Often."

"Her eyes are too close together, too, and her overbite should have been corrected when she was young. And her nose, just a little blob really. I honestly don't know how she makes it all work as well as she does."

"I don't think Sukie will be coming back," Van Horne said. "She's too involved with these neurotic kids of hers."

"She is and she isn't," someone said; Alexandra thought it had to be Jane, but it sounded like her own voice.

"Isn't this cozy and nice?" she said, to test her own voice. It sounded deep, a man's voice.

"Our home away from home," Jane said, sarcastically, Alexandra supposed. It was really by no means easy to get in harmony with Jane.

The sound Jane had heard was not Sukie, it was Fidel, bringing margaritas, on the elegant elongate silver tray Sukie had once mentioned to Alexandra admiringly, each broad wineglass on its slender stem rimmed with chunky sea salt. It looked odd to Alexandra, so at home in her nudity she had already become, that Fidel was not naked, too, but wearing a pajamalike uniform the color of Army chinos.

"Dig this, ladies," Van Horne called, boyish in his boasting and also in the look of his white behind, for he had gotten out of the water and was fiddling with some dials at the far black wall. There was an oiled rumble and above the tub the perforated ceiling, not perforated here but of dull corrugated metal as in a tool shed, rolled back to disclose the inky sky and its thin splash of stars. Alexandra recognized the sticky web of the Pleiades and giant red Aldebaran. These preposterously far stars and the unseasonably warm but still sharp autumn air and the Nevelson intricacies of the black walls and the surreal Arp shapes of her own bulbous body all fitted around her sensory self exactly, as tangible as the steaming bath and the chilled glass stem pinched between her finger tips, so that she was as it were interlocked with a multitude of ethereal bodies. These stars condensed as tears and cupped her warm eyes. Idly she transformed the stem in her hand to the stem of a fat yellow rose and inhaled its aroma. It smelled of lime juice. Her lips came away loaded with salt crystals fat as dewdrops. A thorn in the stem had pricked one finger and she watched a single drop of blood well up at the center of the whorl of a fingerprint. Darryl Van Horne was bending over to fuss at some more of his controls and his white bottom glowingly seemed the one part of him that was not hairy or repellently sheathed by a kind of exoskeleton but authentically his self, as we take in most people the head to be their true self. She wanted to kiss it, his glossy innocent unseeing ass. Jane passed her something burning she obediently put to her lips and the burning inside Alexandra's trachea mingled with the hot angry look of Jane's stare as under the water her friend's hand fishlike nibbled and slid across her belly, around those buoyant breasts she had said she coveted.

"Hey, don't leave me out," Van Horne begged and splashed back into the water, shattering the moment, for Jane's little hand with its callused finger tips like fish teeth floated away. This was her left hand, that pressed on the strings of the cello. Van Horne and the two women made conversation, but the words drifted free of meaning, the talk was like touching, and time fell in lazy loops through the holes in Alexandra's caressed consciousness until Sukie did come back, bringing time back with her.

In she hurried with autumn caught in the suede skirt with its frontal ties of rawhide and her tweed jacket nipped at the waist and double pleated at the back like a huntswoman's, her peach tennis dress left at home in a hamper. "Your kids are fine," she informed Jane Smart, and did not seem nonplused to find them all in the tub, as if she knew this room already, with its slates, its bright serpents of copper, the jagged piece of illumined green jungle beyond and the ceiling with its cold rectangle of sky and stars. With her wonderful matter-of-fact quickness, first setting down a leather pocketbook big as a saddlebag on a chair Alexandra had not noticed before--there was furniture in the room, chairs and mattresses, black so they blended in--Sukie undressed, first slipping off her low-heeled, square-toed shoes, and then the hunting jacket and pushing the untied suede skirt down over her hips, and then unbuttoning the silk blouse of palest beige, the tint of an engraved invitation, and pushing down her half-slip, the pink-brown of a tea rose, and her white underpants with it and lastly uncoupling her bra and leaning forward with extended arms so the two limp cups fell down her arms and into her hands, lightly; her exposed breasts bobbled with this motion. Sukie's breasts were hemispheres, firm, unsupported, rounded cones whose tips had been dipped in a deeper pink without there being any aggressive jut of buttonlike nipple. Her body seemed a flame, a flame of soft white fire to Alexandra, who watched as Sukie calmly stooped to pick her underthings up from the floor and drop them onto the chair that was like a shadow materialized and then matter-of-factly rummage in her big loose-flapped pocketbook for some pins to put up her hair of that pale yet plangent color called red but that lies between apricot and the blush at the heart of yew wood. Her hair was this color wherever it was, and her pinning gesture bared the two tufts, double in shape like two moths alighted sideways, in her armpits. This was progressive of her; Alexandra and Jane had not yet broken with the patriarchal command to shave laid upon them when young and learning to be women. In the Biblical desert women had been made to scrape their armpits with flint; female hair challenged men and Sukie as the youngest of the witches felt least obliged to trim and temper her natural flourishing. Her slim body, freckled the length of her forearms and shins, was yet ample enough for her outline to undulate as she walked toward them, into the sallow floor lights that guarded the rim of the tub, out of the black background of this place, its artificial dark monotone like that of a recording studio; the edge of the apparition of her naked beauty undulated as when in a movie a series of stills is successively imposed upon the viewer to give an effect of fluttering motion, disturbing and spectral, in silence. Then Sukie was close to them and restored to three dimensions, her so lovely long bare side marred endearingly by a pink wart and not only her limbs freckled but her forehead, too, and a band across her nose, and even, a distinct constellation, on the flat of her chin, a little triangular chin crinkled in determination as she sat on the tub edge and, taking a breath, with arched back and tensed buttocks eased herself into the smoking healing water. "Holy mo," Sukie said.

"You'll get used," Alexandra reassured her. "It's heavenly once you make your mind up."

"You kids think this is hot?" Darryl Van Horne bragged anxiously. "I set the thermostat twenty degrees higher when it's just me. For a hangover it's great. All those poisons, they bake right out."

"What were they doing?" Jane Smart asked. Her head and throat looked shriveled, Alexandra's eyes having dwelt so long and fondly on Sukie.

"Oh," Sukie answered her, "the usual. Watching old movies on channel fifty-six and getting themselves sick on the candy they'd begged."

"You didn't by any chance swing by my house?" Alexandra asked, feeling shy. Sukie was so lovely and now beside her in the water; waves she made laved Alexandra's skin.

"Baby, Marcy is seventeen," Sukie said. "She's a big girl. She can cope. Wake up." And she touched Alexandra on the shoulder, a playful push. Reaching the little distance to give the push lifted one of Sukie's rose-tipped breasts out of the water; Alexandra wanted to suck it, even more than she had wanted to kiss Van Horne's bottom. She suffered a prevision of the experience, her face laid sideways in the water, her hair streaming loose and drifting into her lips as they shaped their receptive O. Her left cheek felt hot, and Sukie's green glance showed she was reading Alexandra's mind. The auras of the three witches merged beneath the skylight, pink and violet and tawny, with Van Horne's stiff brown collapsible thing over his head like a clumsy wooden halo on a saint in an impoverished Mexican church.

The girl Sukie had spoken of, Marcy, had been born when Alexandra was only 21, having dropped out of college at Oz's entreaties to be his wife, and she was reminded now of her four babies as they came one by one how it was the female infants' suckling that tugged at her insides more poignantly, the boys already a bit like men, that aggressive vacuum, the hurt of the sudden suction, the oblong blue skulls bulging and bullying above the clusters of frowning muscles where their masculine eyebrows would someday sprout. The girls were daintier, even those first days, such hopeful thirsty sweet clinging sugar sacks destined to become beauties and slaves. Babies: their dear rubbery bowlegs as if they were riding tiny horses in their sleep, the lovable swaddled crotch the diaper makes, their flexible violet feet, their skin everywhere fine as the skin of a penis, their grave indigo stares and their curly mouths so forthrightly drooling. The way they ride your left hip, clinging lightly as vines to a wall to your side, the side where your heart is. The ammonia of their diapers. Alexandra began to cry, thinking of her lost babies, babies swallowed by the children they had become, babies sliced into bits and fed to the days, the years. Tears slid warm and then by contrast to her hot face cool down the sides of her nose, finding the wrinkles hinged at her nostril wings, salting the corners of her mouth and dribbling down her chin, making a runnel of the little cleft there. Amid all these thoughts Jane's hands had never left her; Jane intensified her caresses, massaging now the back of Alexandra's neck, then the musculus trapezius and on to the deltoids and the pectorals; oh, that did ease sorrow, Jane's strong hands, that pressure now above, now below the water, below even the waist, the little red eyes of the thermal controls keeping poolside watch, the margarita and marijuana mixing their absolving poisons in the sensitive hungry black realm beneath her skin, her poor neglected children sacrificed so she could have her powers, her silly powers, and only Jane understanding, Jane and Sukie, Sukie lithe and young next to her, touching her, being touched, her body woven not of aching muscle but of a kind of osier, supple and gently speckled, the nape beneath her pinned-up hair of a whiteness that never sees the sun, a piece of pliant alabaster beneath the amber wisps. As Jane was doing to Alexandra, Alexandra did to Sukie, caressed her. Sukie's body in her hands seemed silk, seemed heavy slick fruit, Alexandra so dissolved in melancholy triumphant affectionate feelings there was no telling the difference between caresses given and caresses received; the three women drew closer to form, like graces in a print, shoulders and arms and breasts emergent, a knot, while their hairy swarthy host, out of the water, scrabbled through his black cabinets. Sukie in a strange practical voice that Alexandra heard as if relayed from a great distance into this recording studio was discussing with this Van Horne man what music to put on his expensive and steam-resistant stereo system. He was naked and his swinging gabbling pallid genitals had the sweetness of a dog's tail curled tight above the innocent button of its anus.

Our town of Eastwick was to gossip that winter--for here as in Washington there were leaks; Fidel made friends with a woman in town, a waitress at Nemo's, a sly black woman from Antigua called Rebecca--about the evil doings at the old Lenox place, but what struck Alexandra this first night and ever after was the amiable human awkwardness of it all, controlled as it was by the awkwardness of their eager and subtly ill-made host, who not only fed them and gave them shelter and music and darkly suitable furniture but provided the blessing without which courage of the contemporary sort fails and trickles away into ditches others have dug, those old ministers and naysayers and proponents of heroic constipation who sent lovely Anne Hutchinson, a woman ministering to women, off into the wilderness to be scalped by red men in their way as fanatic and unforgiving as Puritan divines. Like all men, Van Horne demanded they call him king, but his system of taxation at least dealt in assets--bodies, personal liveliness--they did have and not in spiritual goods laid up in some nonexistent heaven. It was Van Horne's kindness to subsume their love for each other into a kind of love for himself. There was something a little abstract about his love for them and something therefore formal and merely courteous in the obeisances and favors they granted him--wearing the oddments of costume he provided, the cat-skin gloves and green-leather garters, or binding him with the cingulum, the nine-foot cord of plaited red wool. He stood, often, as at that first night, above and beyond them, adjusting his elaborate and (his proud claims notwithstanding) moisture-sensitive equipment.

He pressed a button and the corrugated roof rumbled back across the section of night sky. He put on records--first Joplin, yelling and squawking herself hoarse on Piece of My Heart and Get It While You Can and Summertime and Down on Me, the very voice of joyful defiant female despair, and then Tiny Tim, tiptoeing through the tulips and with a thrilling androgynous warbling that Van Horne couldn't get enough of, returning the needle to the beginning grooves over and over, until the witches clamorously demanded Joplin again. On his acoustical system the music surrounded them, arising in all four corners of the room; they danced, the four clad in only their auras and hair, with shy and minimal motions, keeping within the music, often turning their backs, letting the titanic ghostly presences of the singers soak them through and through. When Joplin croaked Summertime at that broken tempo, remembering the words in impassioned spasms as if repeatedly getting up off the canvas in some internal drug-hazed prize fight, Sukie and Alexandra swayed in each other's arms without their feet moving, their fallen hair stringy and tangled with tears, their breasts touching, nuzzling, fumbling in pale pillow fight lubricated by drops of sweat worn on their chests like the broad bead necklaces of ancient Egypt. And when Joplin with that deceptively light-voiced opening drifted into the whirlpool of Me and Bobby McGee, Van Horne, his empurpled penis rendered hideously erect by a service Jane had performed for him on her knees, pantomimed with his uncanny hands--encased it seemed in white rubber gloves with wigs of hair and wide at the tips like the digits of a tree toad or lemur--in the dark above her bobbing head the tumultuous solo provided by the inspired pianist of The Full Tilt Boogie Band.

On the black-velour mattresses Van Horne had provided, the three women played with him together, using the parts of his body as a vocabulary with which to speak to each other; he showed supernatural control, and when he did come, his semen, all agreed later, was marvelously cold. Thus it is ever with the Devil. Dressing after midnight, in the first hour of November, Alexandra felt as if she were filling her clothes with a weightless gas, her flesh had been so rarefied by its long immersion and assimilated poisons. Driving home in her Subaru, whose interior smelled of dog and children's candy wrappers, she saw the full moon with its blotchy mournful face in the top of her tinted windshield and irrationally thought for a second that astronauts had landed and in an act of imperial atrocity had spray-painted that vast sere surface green.

"He left the lights at dim, in deference perhaps to the telltale false teats that mark a witch."