Synopsis   ¦  The Widows of Eastwick

After traveling the world to exotic lands, Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie--now widowed but still witches--return to the Rhode Island seaside town of Eastwick, "the scene of their primes," site of their enchanted mischief more than three decades ago.

Diabolical Darryl Van Horne is gone, and what was once a center of license and liberation is now a "haven of wholesomeness" populated by hockey moms and househusbands acting out against the old ways of their own absent, experimenting parents.

With spirits still willing but flesh weaker, the three women must confront a powerful new counterspell of conformity. In this wicked and wonderful novel, John Updike is at his very best--a legendary master of literary magic up to his old delightful tricks.

THE WIDOWS OF EASTWICK

A Novel by

John Updike

Book Two of the Eastwick Series

Copyright © 2008 by John Updike

And then (they say) no Spirit can walke abroad,
The nights are wholsome, then no Planets strike,
No Faiery talkes, nor Witch hath power to Charme:
So hallow’d, and so gracious is the time.

—Hamlet, ACT I, SCENE I

i.   The Coven Reconstituted

THOSE OF US acquainted with their sordid and scandalous story were not surprised to hear, by way of rumors from the various localities where the sorceresses had settled after fleeing our pleasant town of Eastwick, Rhode Island, that the husbands whom the three Godforsaken women had by their dark arts concocted for themselves did not prove durable. Wicked methods make weak products. Satan counterfeits Creation, yes, but with inferior goods.

Alexandra, the oldest in age, the broadest in body, and the nearest in character to normal, generous-spirited humanity, was the first to become a widow. Her instinct, as with so many a wife suddenly liberated into solitude, was to travel—as if the world at large, by way of flimsy boarding cards and tedious airport delays and the faint but undeniable risk of flight in a time of rising fuel costs, airline bankruptcy, suicidal terrorists, and accumulating metal fatigue, could be compelled to yield the fruitful aggravation of having a mate. Jim Farlander, the husband she had conjured for herself from a hollowed pumpkin, a cowboy hat, and a pinch of Western soil scraped from inside the back fender of a pickup truck with Colorado plates that she had seen parked, looking eerily out of place, on Oak Street in the early 1970s, had, as their marriage settled and hardened, proved difficult to budge from his ceramics studio and little-frequented pottery shop on a side street in Taos, New Mexico.

Jim’s idea of a trip had been the hour’s drive south to Santa Fe; his idea of a holiday was spending a day in one of the Indian reservations—Navajo, Zuni, Apache, Acoma, Isleta Pueblo—spying out what the Native American potters were offering in the reservation souvenir shops, and hoping to pick up cheap in some dusty Indian Bureau commissary an authentic old black-and-white geometric Pueblo jar or a red-on-buff Hohokam storage jar, with its spiral-and-maze pattern, which he could peddle for a small fortune to a newly endowed museum in one of the burgeoning resort cities of the Southwest. Jim liked where he was, and Alexandra liked that in him, since she as his wife was part of where he was. She liked his lean build (a flat stomach to the day he died, and never performed a sit-up in his life) and the saddle smell of his sweat and the scent of clay that clung, like a sepia aura, to his strong and knowing hands. They had met, on the natural plane, when she, for some time divorced, had taken a course at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he had been enlisted as a fill-in instructor. The four stepchildren—Marcy, Ben, Linda, Eric—that she saddled him with couldn’t have asked for a calmer, more soothingly taciturn father-substitute. He was easier for her children—half out of the nest in any case, Marcy being all of eighteen—to relate to than their own father, Oswald Spofford, a small manufacturer of kitchen fixtures from Norwich, Connecticut. Poor Ozzie had become so earnestly involved in Little League baseball and company bowling that no one, not even his children, could take him seriously.

People had taken Jim Farlander seriously, women and children especially, giving him back his own poised silence. His level gray eyes had the glint of a gun from within the shade of his wide-brimmed hat, its crown darkened where his thumb and fingers pinched it. When he was at the pottery wheel he tied a faded blue bandana around his head to keep his long hair—gray but still streaked with its original sun-bleached auburn and gathered behind into an eightinch ponytail—out of the clay, wet and spinning on the foot-powered wheel. A fall in his teens from a horse had left him with a limp, and the wheel, which he refused to electrify, limped with him, while out of the spinning his masculine hands shaped blobs upward into graceful vessels with slender waists and swelling bottoms.

It was in bed she first felt his death coming. His erections began to wilt just as she might have come if he had held on; instead, in his body upon hers, there was a palpable loosening in the knit of his sinews. There had been a challenging nicety in the taut way Jim dressed himself—pointy vanilla-colored boots, butt-hugging jeans with rivet-bordered pockets, and crisp checked shirts double-buttoned at the cuff. Once a dandy of his type, he began to wear the same shirt two and even three days in a row. His jaw showed shadows of white whisker underneath, from careless shaving or troubled eyesight. When the ominous blood counts began to arrive from the hospital, and the shadows in the X-rays were visible to even her untrained eyes, he greeted the news with stoic lassitude; Alexandra had to fight to get him out of his crusty work clothes into something decent. They had joined the legion of elderly couples who fill hospital waiting rooms, as quiet with nervousness as parents and children before a recital. She felt the other couples idly pawing at them with their eyes, trying to guess which of the two was the sick one, the doomed one; she didn’t want it to be obvious. She wanted to present Jim as a mother presents a child going to school for the first time: as a credit to her. They had lived, these thirty-plus years since she had lived in Eastwick, by their own rules, up in Taos; there the free spirits of the Lawrences and Mabel Dodge Luhan still cast a sheltering cachet over the remnant tribe of artistic wannabes, a harddrinking, New Age–superstitious, artsy-craftsy crowd who aimed their artifacts, in their shop-window displays, more and more plaintively at scrimping, low-brow tourists rather than the well-heeled local collectors of Southwestern art. Alexandra for a time had revived her manufacture of little ceramic “bubbies”—faceless, footless little female figures, pleasant to hold in the hand and roughly painted in clothes worn as close to the skin as tattoos—but Jim, jealous and dictatorial in his art as true artists are, had been less than gracious about sharing his kiln. In any case, the miniature women, their vulval cleft boldly dented into the clay with a toothpick or nail file held sideways, belonged to an uncomfortable prior period of her life, when she had practiced, with two other Rhode Island divorcées, a half-baked suburban variety of witchcraft.

Jim’s illness drove her and Jim down from safe, arty Taos into the wider society, the valleys of the ailing, a vast herd moving like stampeded bison toward the killing cliff. The socialization forced upon her—interviews with doctors, most of them unsettlingly young; encounters with nurses, demanding merciful attentions the hospitalized patient was too manly and depressed to ask for himself; commiseration with others in her condition, soon-to-be widows and widowers she would have shunned on the street but now, in these antiseptic hallways, embraced with shared tears—prepared her for travel in the company of strangers.

She could not believe it—how totally Jim was gone, his morning absence as vivid as a rooster’s wake-up crow, his evening non-appearance a refusal bound, she felt, to be cancelled, any moment, by the scuffling sound of his boots limping across the entry hall or the squeak, two rooms away, of his potter’s wheel. Three months after his death, she signed up for a ten-day tour of the Canadian Rockies. Her old, married, cosseted self, a bohemian snob proud of her careless, mannish clothes and high-desert privacy, would have sneered at the feigned camaraderie of an organized group tour. She foresaw the daily duty to rise and gorge on cafeteria-style hotel breakfasts en route to the day’s marvel, and the resisted but irresistible naps in the swaying bus in clammy proximity to an alien body, usually that of another plucky widow, overweight and remorselessly talkative. Then there would be the sleepless hours, amid worrisome small noises and mysterious tiny red lights, in a king-size bed built for a couple. Hotel pillows were always too stuffed, too full, and lifted her head too high, so she would wake, groggily dumfounded to have slept at all, with a stiff neck. The pillow next to hers would be undented. It would dawn on her that she would never be one of a couple again.

But, born in Colorado, she thought it an amusing idea to follow the Rockies north into another country, where a dramatic landscape did not flatter the rapacious vanity of the United States. And Canada, she discovered, did have its good points: airports not bribed to install television sets pouring forth an inescapable babble, and voices whose familiar North American accent was braced by a few leftover Scots vowels, and a gray imperial gravity of public architecture. This national identity had been created by the sensible spirit of business enterprise, linking the provinces like great beads on an iron railroad line, rather than by any evangelical preachment of a Manifest Destiny—manifest only to its Anglo perpetrators—that had hurled the agglutinated United States westwards and then outwards, across all the oceans, where its boy soldiers lost limbs and died. The daily death-tolls from Iraq were worth escaping.

On the other hand, Canadian hotel restaurants seemed to think Frank Sinatra and Nat “King” Cole were the latest thing in background music, and the giant cruise ships docked in Vancouver were headed off to dreary cold Alaska. Canada, its tundra and icefields and miles of forest pressing its population down tight against the forty-ninth parallel, had in self-defense embraced Green-ness, trying to make a pet of it, mining for tourist dollars the nostalgia and righteousness inherent in its cause. Bring Back Nature—who could object to that? But for Alexandra, totem poles and moose had a basic boringness. She felt, up here, trapped in an attic full of stuffed animals. Nature had been her ally in witchcraft, but still she distrusted it, as a conscienceless killer, spendthrift and blind.

After a day in Vancouver, and another in determinedly quaint Victoria, the tour—forty travellers, none of them young and eight of them Australian—boarded a sleeper train and were dragged northwards through the dark. They woke amid mountains dazzling with the yellow of turning aspens. The tour had reserved a viewing car for their party, and Alexandra, hesitantly entering, after a heavy breakfast fetched by lurching waiters in the dining car, was greeted with hesitant smiles from the already seated couples. She took one of the few seats left and was conscious of the vacancy at her side, as if of a monstrous wen throwing her face out of symmetry.

But, then, she could never have talked Jim into coming on such an adventure. He hated foreign countries, even the Virgin Islands, where, a few times early in their marriage, she had persuaded him to take her, as a break from the long Taos winter and the ski-season traffic jams along Route 522. They had arrived in St. Thomas, as it turned out, in the late afternoon, and were caught, in their rented Volkswagen Beetle, in the evening rush hour, Jim trying to drive for the first time in his life on the wrong side of the road. More unfortunately still, they were surrounded by black drivers who took a racist pleasure in tailgating them and in rebuking every sign of automotive uncertainty with prolonged, indignant honking. Though eventually they found the resort, at the end of a poorly marked road, Jim got sunburned the first day, having scorned her repeated offer of sunscreen, and then got deadly sick on some conch salad. Whenever, ever after, he felt bested in an exchange of accusations, he would remind her, in detail, of that week that almost—twenty-five years before he really died—killed him.

Now, in Canada, there was not a road or car in sight, just the tracks and tunnels ahead as the train bored upward through mountains splashed with quaking golden leaves. “There’s Mount Robson!” a woman behind Alexandra excitedly told her husband.

An Australian across the aisle, in an attempt at friendliness, said to Alexandra, “Mount Robson ahead,” as if she were deaf as well as alone.

From behind this speaker, another voice—not Australian, less peppy, with a tinge of the American South—explained to her, everybody around her suddenly solicitous, as if of a defective in their midst, “The tallest peak in the Canadian Rockies.”

“Really? Already?” Alexandra asked, knowing she sounded stupid and covering herself with “I mean, shouldn’t they have saved it for later in the tour?”

Nobody laughed, perhaps not hearing, or understanding, her little joke. The train was taking a long curve, and the gleaming mountain-tip sank from view behind the aspens; the peak had been oddly regular, like a pyramid in a set of child’s blocks, but white. “How high is it?” she asked aloud, determined to combat her sense of non-existence.

Again, she had struck a silencing note. “Nearly four thousand meters,” an Australian voice volunteered.

She had trouble translating out of the metric system, and, borrowing a bit of her late husband’s xenophobia, refused to try. The slightly Southern voice understood, and explained, “Nearly thirteen thousand feet, ma’am.”

“My goodness!” Alexandra said, beginning to enjoy her own inanity. She turned her head to look at her informant. He was lanky, like Jim, and lean-faced, with deep creases and a mustache just long enough to droop. His costume, too—faded tight blue jeans and a long-sleeved red-checked shirt—reminded her of Jim. “Thank you,” she said, with more warmth than she had strictly intended. Perhaps this man with his air of dignified sorrow was a widower. Or was waiting for some slow-moving wife to join him here in the viewing car.

“Mount Robson isn’t on the tour,” the wife behind Alexandra was saying in her ear, in a penetrating, slightly vexed voice. “It’s in a separate national park from Jasper.”

“I really haven’t done my homework,” Alexandra apologized, backwards, experiencing a flash of hatred—the old impatient, witchy, bug-zapping kind of hate she thought she had long outgrown. Why should this woman, common and shrewish from the sound of her voice, have a live husband, when she, Alexandra, did not, sitting here exposed on all sides to these well-meant interventions from strangers?

“That’s my style, too,” a male Australian reassured her. “Learn as you go. It’s my wife reads the books ahead.”

“And sees to the tickets and passports, you lazy sod,” the wife said, in the humorous tone of a practiced complaint.

The train, smoother-running than American trains, on Canadian National Railway tracks welded and upheld by the government, continued to nose skyward. Mount Robson again appeared above the trees, its whiteness marked now by black striations—by snow-striped patches, faceted as if the peak had been carved to a point like a flint weapon. The hard cobalt of a picture-postcard sky pressed on these concave contours until the peak disappeared again behind the waves of yellow leaves. “It says here,” the Australian wife loudly announced, holding a guidebook, “it was first climbed in 1913, by an Austrian bloke named Kain. K-A-I-N. It says the Canadian mountain men didn’t like it when foreigners were the first to climb their mountains to the top. Got their ruddy noses out of joint.”

Alexandra sighed and closed her lids, excusing herself from hearing any more. She wanted to relieve them all of having to pay her any further attention. Being a big woman, tall and somewhat broad, her full head of chestnut-brown hair still only half white, had given her a presence when she was younger but now that she was old and mateless made her conspicuous, an embarrassment to herself. Kain, Cain, she thought. The first man to do a truly wicked deed, worse even than eating the apple of knowledge. Slew his brother, Abel. Thirty years ago Alexandra had slain a sister witch: she and Sukie Rougemont and Jane Smart had killed little Jenny Gabriel, though the death certificate blamed metastasized malignancy of the ovaries. The curse of it was always there, inside Alexandra, even when she didn’t close her eyes, a sour gnawing. As negligible as a worm in the earth during the daylight hours, at night in her dreams the curse grew large and threatened to eat her alive. Again and again her dreams returned her to that hectic period, when Darryl Van Horne had taken as wife not one of the three of them but a younger woman, fair and ivory-skinned, with innocent, ice-blue eyes—too damned innocent, the older witches had felt. Had Jenny been less innocent, had she been as corrupt as they were, they would have accepted her besting them as part of a game among equals, marrying a man who after all hadn’t cared for women, it turned out, and was not even rich, as they had been led to believe. They had imagined him, conjured him out of their own needs.

In her dreams Alexandra often searched, in a thicket of brambles—swampy tufty earth yielding and treacherous beneath her cold feet—for something deadly, a tinfoil egg of death, whose discovery would reverse Jenny’s death. She had never found it, though sometimes she dreamed of discovering a golf ball stained half-brown by Nature’s chemicals, and sometimes a tiny skeleton, that of a human infant, dead of starvation and the cold. She woke then with a start, recalled to her children, remembering how casually she had treated them, neglected them, though all four were still alive, living far away, in four different states, with children of their own and middle-aged complaints. They were beyond any help or harm from her, far from whatever imperfect nurture she could extend to them. Her sins kept her awake. Jim used to be there, warm and long-limbed beside her, his tobacco-roughened breath rasping in the dark, his musty male smell tinting the square space of the bedroom, where moonlight blanched the rectangular window shades. The homey reality of him would anchor her senses after the fluid nonsensical terror of her dream, her younger self battered by guilt as if by water pouring into a sealed ship cabin, the circumstances of that time jumbled but unmistakable, her frantic wish to undo denied, her soul forever suspended, like a staring fetus in formaldehyde, in guilt.

As her pupils dilated to take in the patches of light in the room, she would realize that those circumstances had been long shed. Jenny Gabriel was dead—a little skeleton, as in the dream—and the man gently snoring beside her was her man, her husband, who in his abstracted fashion loved her, with what love he had left over from his precious pots and vases, their soft-lipped mouths and pliant waists. No man can love like a woman can, they don’t have the internal organs for it. Rescued from Eastwick, she had resolved to be a good wife, better than she had ever been for poor Ozzie. When Jim in those first years of their marriage, not broken to it yet, would come back from Eagle Nest or Tres Piedras radiating the smell of liquor and showing a cockiness in the face of her questions that betrayed an encounter with another woman, she suppressed her feelings, having had prior experience of what a poison possessive jealousy can be. And his evenings away from her slowly grew fewer in number; he knew she had made the effort, difficult for her, of forgiving, and grudgingly granted her in turn more respect and tamer behavior.

Now the dreams of Eastwick still recurred, but Jim’s leathery long body was not there when they ended, and reality was a hotel room where an elderly woman had hung up her old-fashioned XL underwear to dry on the bathroom cord. Red lights like little dragon eyes blinked at her from the corners, meaning she didn’t know what. Fire protection, she guessed. Or a run-down battery. Or an unexplained emergency. She felt shapeless in her nightie, a pale cloud in the mirror. Her body in its gown gave off that sweetish stale smell, like cooking cauliflower or the underside of oilcloth, which she remembered from standing close to her grandmother with a child’s sensitive nose. Ruddy noses out of joint, that Australian bitch had said.

As the tour moved south, by bus, from Jasper to Calgary, through a series of huge old resort hotels thrown up by Canadian ambition and painstaking Scots craftsmen, Alexandra kept her eye on the lanky mustached man with the Southern accent. The group’s sole loners, they could not help winding up walking side by side to scenic vistas and thunderous gorges, and sharing a table at some meals, though always in the company of others. A short Asian couple, he a Taiwanese and she a Malay, both of them eagerly conversational but hard to understand, were easy to join at a table—easier than the other Americans, who sensed something occult and off-putting about Alexandra and whose smugly mundane mind-set and demotic lingo did rouse, as they suspected, her snobbish distaste, and easier than the eight Australians, handsome and prosperous and bumptiously happy to have escaped, if only for some weeks, Down Under. Once the Australians had eaten and drunk their way through the Rockies, they were going on to devour Texas, its steak and rodeos, and then to New England, its lobsters and leaves. “But,” Alexandra pointed out to one couple—a bloke and his sheila, gendered aspects of a single rugged Australian identity—“the prime leaf season may be by.”

“A bit or two’s bound to be left,” the male said cheerfully. “We’ll extrapolate.”

“Our guidebook,” the wife said, “says it lasts to the middle of November. It’s the lovely village greens with their white Puritan churches we’re dying to see.”

“A lot of them have burned down, over the years,” Alexandra told the couple, with a vehemence that surprised her, too, “and they get replaced by hideous cut-rate glass-and-steel bubbles, or by pre-fab A-frames. Or are not rebuilt at all. New England isn’t as religious as the rest of the country.”

The two faces glazed over, trying to picture these disappointments, and penitently Alexandra assured them, as they turned their backs, “You’ll have a wonderful time. Be sure to try fried clams.”

The Asian couple, too, impressed her with their appetites. Little and trim as they were, they heaped up sausages, pancakes, and unnamable Oriental delicacies (Canada catered to Asia, its Pacific near-neighbor) from the breakfast buffet on their plates, their smiling lips bright with oily intake. They ran through roll after roll of film, and never missed an optional mountain hike or an arranged opportunity to shop. At Jasper, bravely embarking to walk by herself around the little lake the hotel faced, Alexandra took a turning that led her onto a golf course, groomed for play but without a player on it. It was eerie; but then she saw the Asian couple, small in the tapering green distance, coming merrily toward her, crying a mysterious word that sounded like “Rost! Rost!”

As they drew close, the Malay woman, who had the better English, explained: “We made same mistake. Very tricky turn back there. We met worker. He told us, not very poritely, this private golf course. He said go back to dirt road to go around rake.”

“You rost, too!” her husband summed up, his grin triumphant.

Alexandra found herself, unaccountably, blushing, feeling herself stupidly torpid as she loomed above this bustling, undiscourageable pair. Together the three of them strolled back up the deserted fairway, past a green still pale with the morning’s dew, and deep sand bunkers without a footprint, and a fresh-mowed tee whose markers were water-smoothed stones taken from the lake shore and painted different colors for different abilities. Banished from this artificial paradise, they came back to the unmarked dirt road; Alexandra turned right, and the couple hurried to the left, to return to the lodge in time to take a bus to a tram to some celebrated outlook miles away. Alone again, she reflected upon the appetite for life, and wondered if her own relative lack of it, and the stab of nausea she now and then felt in the midst of the ordinary, were symptoms of disease. She had always dreaded cancer, and had given her cells more than seventy years in which to scramble their code and percolate through her veins with a deranged passion to multiply.

The road became a path in woods—white spruce, Douglas fir, paper birch, quivering aspen, a froth of nameless undergrowth, and, in a passage of sunlight, a thick stand of lodgepole pines, straight and slender and some of them, suffocated by their own shade, fallen into the lake, littering the edge where small waves cast nets of refracted sunlight across a shallow bottom of rounded stones. Huffing plump girl joggers and a couple on the tour, gnarled Québecois even more elderly than she, passed her coming the other way, counterclockwise. For stretches she was quite alone. If you meet a grizzly bear, their group had been advised by their tour guide, hold utterly still; if it’s a brown bear—smaller, without a hump—fight like hell. Alexandra listened for wildlife and heard nothing, not even a bird. But the lake shimmered companionably, reflecting as in a lightly corrugated mirror the aspens’ trembling gold. Beyond the trees across the lake, the Rockies bared themselves; they were a pleasing dove-gray, a giant geological sample of Canadian understatement. The mountains were made of limestone, laid down by unthinkably many small aquatic creatures armored in delicate shells. Their tour guide, Heidi, an ebullient former airline stewardess, had explained that a billion and a half years ago this part of the globe was just off the western shore of what is now North America, on the sloping edge of the continental plate. Sediments transported by vanished Mesozoic rivers accumulated and were compressed, and a change of direction in plate drift about two hundred million years ago crumpled and folded the great sheets of solidified sediment, thrust them upward, and piled them into the tilted layers and sharp peaks, honed and whittled by wind and abrasive glaciers, of the apparently motionless mountains around her. It was all—the continental drift reversing direction, the folding of rocks like ribbon pasta in the earth’s warm ovens—as challenging to belief as the most fantastic dogmas of religion, but accepted by everybody sane in the modern world. The weight of evidence accumulated all the time, like all those protective shells contributed by tiny creatures as keen to live, as self-important and ultimately insignificant as she. Alexandra’s relation to Nature had always puzzled her; she leaned on Nature, she learned from it, she was it, and yet there was something in her, something else, that feared and hated it.

At an exceptionally lonely section of the road, another presence, large, strode toward her. As quickly as her heart skipped, her mind hoped it was a grizzly and not a brown bear, and all she had to do was remain still. She was too old and feeble to fight like hell. The presence metamorphosed into a tall, erect-striding man, the melancholy-mustached semi-Southerner, wearing a blue-checked long-sleeved shirt. His name was Willard McHugh, and he came from the Nashville area: he had told her this much about himself. But now, intent on keeping his pace, he merely nodded, in a formally friendly way, and kept striding.

She, too, had not been tempted to stop. They were too much out in Nature, it would have felt indecent. He was shy, and so was she. Nature had burned them, somehow. Heidi had explained how lodgepole pines need fire, to crack open their resin-sealed cones. It was horrifying, really, how complacently Nature accommodates violence; Nature loves it and needs it to such an extent that the wardens of Canada’s national parks, in the absence, these last seventy years, of enough natural forest fires, had taken to setting them, to initiate regeneration and encourage biodiversity. Diversity—why do we all assume it’s so good, when it is uniformity that makes us comfortable?

Thinking of such basic things, and of how uncannily fate had presented her on this trip with Jim’s physical doppelgänger, Alexandra missed the short cut back to the lodge through a parking lot. She worked up such a sweat of annoyance and panic, walking the long way around the serpentine shore, with its picnic tables and trash barrels unctuously urging her not to pollute—to be kind to Nature instead—that she had to take her second shower of the morning just to make herself presentable for lunch.

The next morning, at around eleven, she was standing with cold feet on the Athabasca Glacier, confronting Nature again. The bus, heading south toward Lake Louise, had made a planned stop. The Columbia Icefields, trapped in a bowl of peaks along the Continental Divide, pushed outwards through the mountain passes broad glacial arms, of which the Athabasca was the handiest to the highway. Fat-wheeled big vehicles, driven by youngsters and called Snocoaches, took tourists down a precipice—“the steepest grade drivable,” the boy’s miked voice claimed—onto the ice. Alexandra and her fellow-tourists dutifully extracted their bulks from their seats and clambered down, expecting something wondrous. She was prepared for a world of inhuman purity, but the glacier was as grimy as a city street, only harder to stand on. It was dirty, and pitted, and hollowed. It gurgled beneath its slick skin. Though summer was over, melting was still in progress, and made footing treacherous. She didn’t know much about being an old lady—just think, every second you live, you have never been this old before—but knew that she shouldn’t break a hip. Years ago she had seen a male taxi dancer interviewed on television and he had said, of his customers, “Once they fall and break a hip, they come back to the dance hall all right, for the company, for the memories; but the dears don’t ever dance again.” Not that she had done much dancing with Jim—just a weekend square dance now and then, when they were new to their marriage and game for most anything. She had liked the patterning, the weaving in and out and the flickering quick touch of other hands as in a sabbat orgy, but the New Mexico women with their bouffant hairdos and twirling, ballooning skirts and the men in their two-tone boots and bolo ties threaded through jade or turquoise slides, frowning in their concentration on the voice of the caller twanging above the fiddles, came to disgust her. They were bankers and feed merchants disguised as cowhands; they exuded the glossy falsity of the bourgeoisie at play. And Jim’s game leg would complain for days afterwards. So they gave up square dances. Giving things up agreed with Alexandra—appealed to her inner witch. There was so much unnecessary and superfluous clutter connected with living. Living itself, all that eating and propagating, was a study in superfluity. A cancer.

The boy driving the bus had been given an ingratiating patter to recite: “Folks, these special glacier buses, called Snocoaches, cost a hundred thousand dollars each. Relax—we calculate that more than half of them return intact, with many of their passengers still aboard.” There was unanimous nervous laughter. Down the precipice they plunged, and then coasted on the level ice to a stop beside some other Snocoaches. The driver recited into his mike, “One of the commonest questions we get is ‘Why is the ice so dirty?’ Well, glacier ice is made of snow, meters of it compressed to a centimeter or two of ice. As you may already know, every snowflake and raindrop has to form around a tiny piece of dirt in the air. The snow melts, but the dirt stays there.”

Had Alexandra known that? That snowflakes and raindrops each need a germ of dirt? Does the sky hold enough dirt to supply them all? Suppose the heavenly dirt runs out? And this Canadian theme of compression—was that what kept pressing on her chest at night? If everything—snow, sediment, rock—keeps compressing, why doesn’t the world get heavier and smaller, until it becomes a black hole? This was the kind of question she used to ask Jim, who never laughed at her, and always tried to give an answer, out of his practical knowledge. Men for all their hidden rage did have that—a plain sense of cause and effect, a practical desire to be reasonable. Women love them for that.

She looked around for the lanky, morose man from Nashville, but their tour had been scrambled up with several others, and everybody around her looked strange, silhouetted against the glare like those space creatures emerging from the light in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The glacier sloped upward, and in the distance she could see a ridge, a murky wall, a long frozen waterfall. The herd instinct of the apparitions on the glacier was to shuffle toward it, fish moving blindly upstream, until they met a row of red traffic cones and a sign prohibiting further progress. Thus confined, the tourists milled about, treading cautiously, dark blots on the ice like restless aggregates of dirt. Groups of Japanese on other tours coagulated to have their photographs taken.

A familiar couple, the short Asians, came up smiling to Alexandra and offered to take her picture. “The grare is terrible,” the woman said, pointing her camera experimentally.

“Code feet!” her husband cried, pointing downward and grinning.

Alexandra posed with first one of the couple, and then the other. Holding these compact bodies, with their low centers of gravity, under her arm eased her sensation of tippiness, of endangered balance. To their left, a long crevasse held a running stream of meltwater that had carved its channel down and down, into perilous curved spaces tinted a luminous lime-green. If she were in a mad moment to walk a few paces and let herself slide and slip into this purling crevasse, no one nearby would have the wit or strength to fish her out. That was why people don’t travel alone: to be protected from their own craziness. Companions however incidental keep us focused on the fretful nag of living. We all are swaying on the makeshift rope bridge that society suspends above the crevasse.

Back on the special bus with its giant balloon tires, the dutiful tourists and their fear of death were teased by the boy driver: “O.K., now, folks, we are going to endeavor to steer this device back up this impossible grade. Like I said before, the odds are close to fifty-fifty. You can all help me by holding your breath. Think light, light.” Idiotically, they all, Alexandra included, inhaled with a loud gasp and didn’t breathe again until the bus had swooped up the slope and swung into the pebbly, muddy parking lot. “Folks, we made it,” the boy announced in his almost-American accent. “Upon disembarking, look to your right across the Icefields Parkway to a small stone cairn in the considerable distance. That marks the spot the Athabasca Glacier had reached by 1870. Since then it has retreated by one-point-six kilometers. For our good friends from south of the border, where they haven’t yet managed to sign on to the metric system, that’s pretty much all of a mile. Come back in another hundred thirty years, ladies and gentlemen, you’ll be lucky to find a snowball here.”

Alexandra entertained a vision of a world without glaciers: all mountain slopes stony, and a ruinous leaking and weeping in the valleys, and all coastal cities drowned by risen sea levels, and wheat flourishing in northern Canada’s tundra, and the American Midwest a desert lightly etched, from the air, with its old farm roads.

In the lobby of the hotel at Lake Louise hung framed photographs of the region as it had looked around 1900, when the Canadian Pacific had replaced the first log chalets with a timbered château, Victorian Tudor in style, housing hundreds of guests. The view as then photographed from the front terrace across the lake showed a sprawling glacier on Mount Victoria, of which the present glacier was a nibbled remnant. Alexandra discovered she could not walk around the lake as she had in Jasper; here, after a mile’s stroll along the shoreline, she met a dead end of rocks and fallen timber and could have followed an upward path to “a cosy teahouse” and “tiny and picturesque Mirror Lake” or else turned back toward the immense château. She turned back, keeping an eye out for advertised beavers, which she did not see. The walk was crowded with the hotel guests, including children and people in wheelchairs. It did not unduly startle her when, in the gloaming, the man from Nashville crept up behind her and shortened his stride to fall in with hers. Here it comes, she thought, without quite knowing what “it” was. She knew that people being noticed always notice it. Auras in a state of matched vibration compel the bodies to collide.

His voice in her ear was sugary with Southern courtesy, the mournful music of losers. “Isn’t the blue of the lake remarkable,” Willard asked, “even in this dying light?”

“It is,” she responded cautiously. “Except all the glacier lakes are this color, more or less. Heidi explained why in the bus, but I didn’t understand it.” Heidi was always twittering away into her little bud microphone, as if she were still soothing passengers in an airplane.

“Rock flour,” Willard stated, “scraped from the mountains by the glaciers as they rub along. Minute mineral particles.” He drew the word out: “mine-ute.”

His pedantic possessiveness made her restive; she felt obliged to quarrel. “It’s not a process I find easy to picture,” she told him. “I mean, why would rock flour make water bluer? And that glacier we saw yesterday, it didn’t look like it was rubbing anything. It looked stuck.”

He silently pondered, as if chastised. “The flow is slow,” he at last pointed out.

“I know,” she conceded. She had adapted her own forward motion to his stride. Then she startled them both with a sudden exclamation: she had thought she spotted a beaver. But it was only a detached piece of brown turf, jutting out in silhouette against the lake’s unreal, glacier-enriched blue.

“Is anything the matter?” he asked, gently alarmed.

“No. Sorry. I thought I saw a beaver. The guidebook said they were here. It promised. In abundance, it said.”

“In certain seasons, I believe.” His smooth, deferential tone was irritating her. Perhaps sensing this, he asked, “Of all we have seen, Alexandra, what has impressed you the most so far?”

It was a tough question. Throughout this trip she had been most conscious of all the isolating space around her. Jim’s absence formed a transparent shield over what she was seeing, like the sneeze guard at a salad bar. “I think, Willard,” she said, matching his cautious deliberation, “the antlers on the bull elk beside the highway yesterday, right after the stop at the Athabasca Falls. I had no idea how big they could be—the rack, Heidi called it. The rack seemed to stretch all the way down his back, and tipped his head way back, as if it might break his neck.” Ack—ack—ack—eck—her tongue was playing tricks. Perhaps this doppelganger was a wizard. He said nothing, so she added, prattling the way men’s silence forces women to do, “Imagine, carrying all that just so you can fend off other bulls and keep your harem. What did Heidi say—up to a hundred does?”

How much fucking does Nature need? The topic had excited Heidi, making her dimple; the shadows in her cheeks were visible from the middle of the bus, where Alexandra sat with another widow. Heidi had gone on, in her soothing stewardess manner, to describe how all that fighting and “servicing their ladies” wore the old bulls out and left them to face the winter exhausted and half-starved. They died, letting the young bachelor elks skulking on the edge of the harem move in. They died of Nature’s furious will to propagate.

The train of Alexandra’s thoughts, expressed and unexpressed, had led her companion into a parallel intimacy, for out of the blue Willard McHugh pronounced, “Alexandra, I was truly moved to hear of your recent sorrow.” So: he knew her name, and now her sorrow. He had been gossiping, in his solemn way, his long head cocked as if to favor a good ear.

“My sorrow?”

“Your husband’s recent passing. One of your lady friends confided that to me.”

Lady friends? Alexandra tried to remember whom she had talked to, among the boring, overfed human does herded onto this tour. She had tried to avoid conversations, and the other women sensed in her an electric aloofness—a negative charge of potential social disruption, a witch’s scorn of normal, tame order. “Whoever she was, she was right. Jim died three months ago.”

“I’m very sorry, Alexandra.”

“Thank you, Willard.”

But he had more to say. With a widow’s clumsiness, her thanks had interrupted him. He went on, in his sugary, melancholy voice, to tell her, “I know what you’re suffering. My partner passed last year. We’d been together for thirty-seven years.”

Partner. One of the new code words, usefully bland. Willard was one of those. She’d been fooled before. She felt some relief and some resentment. This fag had been wasting her time. But, then, what was her time worth? Less and less: she was an old lady, post-menopausal, on Nature’s trash-heap, having outlasted her Biblical span of seventy years. “That’s a long time,” Alexandra said. She did not add, for a pair of fairies. Who notoriously flit around, breaking each other’s hearts with their infidelities, their unchecked attraction to younger fairies.

“He was a beautiful person,” this intruder into her solitude solemnly avowed. He would have gone on, detailing the beauty, had not Alexandra curtly said, “I don’t doubt it. Thank you for your company, Willard. Don’t the hotel lights look cozy, now that it’s dark?”

“Shall we share a drink, inside the château?”

So, with his orientation out in the open, he felt free to be socially aggressive. “Thank you, Willard,” she said. “You’re kind. But I think I’d better go lie down before dinner. I’ve not been sleeping very well on this trip. It’s more work than I expected. The altitude, I suppose, and all the packing and unpacking. And so much Nature!” Hoping that whatever wound her refusal had given him was stanched by this wad of hurried words, she added more: “And it never lets up! Tomorrow, Heidi tells us, we must get up before dawn, to see the sunrise on Mount Victoria. They must think we’re all spring chickens! I might just skip it.”

But, betraying him, she asked the desk to call her room at five-thirty. The shrill ring shattered a dream she was having, about Eastwick—a misty morning, sea fog beaded in the window screens, the children off at school, she trying to do housework but tensely expecting Joe Marino to come calling. In the dream he had brought her a present of a chicken, a live chicken but wrapped, in stiff pink-striped wrapping paper. She had to thank him but was secretly appalled; what could she do with a chicken? Even if she could bear to wring its neck she didn’t know how to pluck its feathers. What was dear Joe thinking of? His ridiculous middle-class guilt lay behind this. Why can’t men just fuck you and not bother with useless presents? The bird’s angry eye, above its collar of wrapping paper, transfixed her. A scraping, terrible noise came from its throat: the telephone shrilling with her wake-up call. This was her chance, the day that has been given thee. Alexandra would never see Lake Louise again.

She threw on clothes and went out, unshowered and sleepy, into the dark, to join the tourist throngs already present on the paved tiers and hedged paths between the hotel and the lake. It was like a square in some European city, where the tourist, inconveniently awake early, is startled by the numbers of people hurrying diagonally to work, revealing the secret life of labor behind the stage scenery of palaces and cathedrals, museums and overpriced restaurants that have beguiled the days of vacation. The Asian couple was there, and the eight Australians, all taking one another’s pictures with the lake and mountain in the background, and jollily including Alexandra in shot after shot, which they promised to send her. Already a mood of farewell had infiltrated the tour, though two days in Banff and a day in Calgary remained.

Inch by inch, a rosy tinge on the snowbound upper edge of Mount Victoria enlarged, expanding down the surface of the peak. Its horizontal strata, underlying the snow, calibrated the descent. The rosy tinge slowly broadened and turned golden; daylight came to reign over the glassy surface of the uncannily blue lake, where the burning apparition of the dawn-struck peak hung suspended, upside down, like a chunk of gold in a New World’s cerulean Rhine.

The little male Asian, taking a stance beside her, asked with his unquenchable grin, “Worth earry gerring up?”

“The sunrise? Oh yes—beautiful.” A beautiful person. Though, against her own advice to herself, she glanced through the sunrise crowd for Willard, alert to spot his violet aura and coolly snub him. But he was evidently not a morning person. She felt, after all, rejected, which was unreasonable, since she, with Nature’s concurrence, had rejected him. More than thirty years ago, in Eastwick, she had been sucked into the orbit of a homosexual man, seduced by his love of fun and art—he made her laugh, he fed her pot, he loosened her up. He gave her, in his ridiculous mansion, a setting that flattered her fantasies of her own glamour. Then he had betrayed her, and Sukie and Jane as well. They had extracted a revenge. The memory of it all was shameful but invigorating, reviving a younger self with a healthy, anarchic appetite and arcane powers. Arriving, after a short bus trip, in Banff, she felt renewed.

Jasper had been an upland settlement, with lonely wide streets and a single business block; whereas Banff was a city, with an art museum and a First People museum and many coffee shops and a downtown bustle and hot springs and a conference center and, spreading downhill from the Banff Springs Hotel, curving neighborhoods of expensive homes. She walked into the town, cruised the local watercolors and old photographs at the Whyte Museum, and had lunch in a coffee nook where the Australians were eating. They invited her to join them, at their two tables pushed together, but she declined and ate her turkey roll-up staring at a blank wall. The time had come, its blankness told her, to take stock, to gather herself for this last life stage, a sprint to the grave in widow’s weeds.

The tour had scheduled a gondola ride up Sulphur Mountain at two o’clock. The bus took them to the base, and then the gondola ascended. At the top, there were souvenirs and snacks and warm air inside and, outside, cold air and viewing telescopes that accepted Canadian dollar coins, called “loonies” for the waterfowl on them, on the side opposite from the profile of an aging queen. Two-dollar coins were called “toonies.” Alexandra wondered why the United States couldn’t come up with a dollar coin that people would use. The Canadians made it look so easy, such fun. American men hated to have heavy pockets, she supposed; they’re afraid of being dragged down. They love freedom.

Hundreds of meters down, two rivers met and a golf course had been fitted alongside one of them. Banff was a bent grid between a mountain and two lakes. A flight of wooden stairs descended from the viewing porch, and a boardwalk headed off toward another, slightly higher peak. Other tourists were coming back along this reverberating boardwalk, including some Australian couples.

“How was it?” Alexandra asked them.

“Wonderful, love. Worth the trek.”

Still she hesitated, dawdling in the gift shop, wondering which of her seven grandchildren might like a toy moose. But give to one, they all should get something of equal value, age-appropriate. Their ages varied from sixteen to one. It was too hard to calculate. In the corner of her eye she sensed a tall man approaching, a tall man with a mustache, and rather than cope with Willard any more she went out into the high cold and down the wooden steps.

The planks levelled and then, upheld above gray rocks on thick posts, they climbed to fit the ridge, several steps at a time. Other people were moving back and forth around her, yet Alexandra felt more and more alone as the walk beneath her feet changed direction and then again levelled into a straightaway. Treetops fell away around her, and all but a few rock outcroppings. She didn’t usually like heights but was determined to experience this. She felt she was treading air, as in all directions gray mountains, range upon range, slate and ash and dove in color, streaked with avalanches and littered with scraps of snow, opened under her. Alexandra was flying. She was above and among endless gentle mountains; they were her friends, a grand Other holding her in Its hand. Nature was within her and around her and infinite.

The boardwalk with its solid steps turned, and turned again, narrowing its purchase on Sanson Peak, and brought her up to a shack, a sturdy shack with a glass window through which she could see a desk and papers but no human being, no weatherman, for that is what this had been, a weather station to which—an explanatory signboard explained—Norman Sanson had climbed more than a thousand times, in the course of his life, to record weather observations. Having looked in and seen the shack as empty of Norman Sanson as her bed was of Jim Farlander, and feeling dizzy and fragile among the pushy young hikers, Japanese and Caucasian, crowding around to peer with her into this Canadian holy site, Alexandra retraced her steps, down and around, and down some more, and then on the echoing straight stretch, hurrying in a panic, fearing that the tour would leave her behind, in all those glorious, impassive gray mountains. But Willard McHugh was there, at the head of the last set of stairs, lanky and trim in a green-checked shirt. His studied lumberjack costumes seemed, in retrospect, faggy. “The others have pretty much gone down already,” he drawled.

His lugubrious, proprietary manner made her glad, for a second, that she had no husband. She turned to Heidi, their bright-eyed, frizzy-haired tour mother, who stood a few feet away. It was to her that Alexandra said, “I’m so sorry. Was I keeping everybody waiting?”

“Not at all,” Heidi said. Her smile was a stewardess’s; no jolt, no ominous rumble, no sudden drop in an air pocket could shake it. “How was the view up there?”

“Stupendous. Breathtaking,” Alexandra gasped, her heart still thumping from the last panicky stretch of boardwalk.

Heidi’s smile broadened, deepening her dimples. “I can see it was. Now, you get your breath back, Lexa, and we’ll all get on the bus together.”

. . .

Once they had abandoned the venerable coastal town where they had done their vile mischief, the three witches had hardly kept in touch, geographically scattered as they were, and busy concocting their new married lives. Dirty hands shouldn’t fold fresh linen. Early in the post-Eastwick years they did sometimes meet again, Sukie in Connecticut and Jane in Massachusetts managing more visits between them than Alexandra in far-off New Mexico. But conversation would run dry with their husbands sitting restlessly in the same room, and without the coven of all three there was no cone of power to lend them a strength beyond their own. In each awkward silence the prickings of conscience would trouble them and thicken their tongues. So the contacts were slowly reduced to telephone calls and then token notes of remembrance at Christmastime. The December of the year after her fall trip to the Canadian Rockies, Alexandra received a religiously neutral—pine cones, an elfin squirrel in red hat with white trim—holiday card from New England, the anodyne Season’s Greetings printed inside wreathed in a scrawled note that rather frantically spilled, sideways and even upside down, into available spaces. Jane Smart’s handwriting had always been vehement, gouging the paper, driving itself into slanting lines whose closeness caused loops to entwine and overlap.

Lexa darling—

You will be sorry to hear that my dear Nat died, after years of suffering, in and out of Mass. General—all these treatments—chemo, radiation, laser burns, platelet infusions, a hundred expensive drugs—what did they do but prolong everybody’s agony? Better to sit in the inglenook and waste away with an ague [a word that took Alexandra minutes to decipher] the way our ancestors did. Mass. General tormented him to give the residents practical experience and fatten up the Medicare payment. He was so docile, too, the sweet old thing, believing everything these white-coated con men with their beauty-parlor haircuts told him. The look on his face when the nurses found him dead in the bed finally was pure astonishment—he couldn’t believe they would let this happen to him. Death, I mean. Me, I’d rather be burned at the stake when the time comes and go out at least with a flare. I’ve read in one of the old books that the way to cope, which all the savvy so-called heretics used, was to inhale the smoke—it knocked you right out. Sorry to be so grim, on a Christmas card yet. He “passed,” as the ridiculous undertakers say now—as if life is a game of bridge—last month, and it’s been a lot of hours with the lawyers to settle that his mother—she’s still alive, at over a hundred, isn’t that pathetic?—will let me stay on in the house, this enormous brick ark they claim is by H. H. Richardson but was only by a younger partner, an imitator —“from the school of,” as they say in art museums, labelling their fakes. Everybody in Brookline is from the school of. Tweed skirts, square-toed shoes, and thinned bloodlines. Sorry you never knew Nat—the enclosed clipping tells you the meager basics but not how he talked, ate, slept, fucked, etc. Will we ever meet again? Call me, far beauty, sometime.

Yours ever, Jane

The enclosed obituary from the Boston Globe—Nathaniel Tinker III, 79, antiquarian, benefactor—was only four or five inches long and, even so, groped for things to say. His profession was given as investment adviser, which was a way, Alexandra surmised, of saying that he dabbled with his own money and that of some trusting friends. His memberships were many: the Somerset Club, the Country Club, the Harvard Club of Boston, the New England Historical Society, societies for the preservation of this and that, and boards of the New England Conservatory, the Museum of Fine Arts, Mount Auburn Hospital, McLean Hospital, the New England Home for Little Wanderers, and the Pine Street Inn shelter. He had done everything right, everything his social and geographic circumstances dictated, and then, in his mid-forties, married Jane Pain, as Lexa and Sukie used to call her when she especially annoyed them. They had known her as Jane Smart, the divorced wife of Sam Smart, who had been hung up to dry in the basement of her ranch house in Eastwick and occasionally sprinkled into a magic philter, for piquancy. Jane had seemed emotionally attached to only two things—her cello, which she played with a frenzied concentration that was frightening to behold, a vortex that might suck you in, and her young Doberman pinscher, a hideous orange-spotted black drooler and rung-chewer named Randolph. The smallest and lightest of the three witches, and the only one to have mastered the art of flight, Jane had taken with some verve to the elevated life that Nat’s birth and wealth opened to her, the upper circles of Brookline and Boston and Cambridge. Her acid accent, her sharp-nosed profile, and her angry eyes the bright brown of tortoiseshell blended into these polite circles like the vein of brandy in a rich, sluggish gravy; and then there was, for piquancy as it were, her unseen underside, the darkness she sat on, the heat and dirtiness that roused dear androgynous Nat Tinker out of his mother-smothered torpor to marry a divorcée with children whose number local gossip lost track of, they were so quickly bundled off to proper boarding schools.

When Sukie, at first once or twice a year and then less and less, had visited Jane in the brick-and-exposed-timber ark on Clyde Street, she had been awed out of her usual sauciness by the height of the ceilings, the Gothic spikiness and wax-glazed redolence of the glass-fronted bookcases and near-churchly furniture, and the breadth of the dark stairs that led up—their flight accompanied, stair by stair, by murky small framed prints that ascended on the wall opposite the banister—to landings and bedrooms of a privacy so intense that trying to imagine it left her short of breath. Sukie, whose descriptive gifts had been developed by her stint as a reporter with the Eastwick Word, had amusingly planted, over the telephone, these images in Alexandra’s mind years ago, before this pair of friends, too, fell out of touch. When, accepting Jane’s invitation, Alexandra dialed the number alphabetized under “S” for “Smart” in her address book—a decades-old red booklet falling apart with its burden of undeleted dead, moved, and forgotten—the distant ring was like a glow of embers in an abandoned cave.

It was not Jane who answered the ring. “Tinker residence,” a pretentious voice, young and male, responded.

“Hello!” Alexandra exclaimed, taken aback. “Could I speak with”—“Jane” seemed too familiar, and “the lady of the house” could mean the mother as well as the widow—“Jane Tinker?”

The frosty voice answered her question with another: “And whom shall I say is calling?”

“Tell her Alexandra.” She added needlessly, “We’re very old friends.” What business was it of this snotty boy’s?

“I will see if Mrs. Tinker is available.” As if being in the house and being available were two different things. Alexandra tried to picture Jane at the head of those broad dark stairs, sequestered in her grief, protected by thicknesses of old money. She had risen a long way from that little ill-kept ranch house on a damp quarter-acre of the Cove region, its bleak Fifties modernism overlaid with a dilapidating coat of faux-Puritan cabinets, mock cobbler’s benches, and light switches carved like pump handles by the previous owner, an unemployed mechanical engineer. It was in that kitchen, with her dirty-faced children coming in and out, that the three of them had put the fatal spell on Jenny Gabriel.

Though those days seemed forever away, Jane’s voice, when she came to the telephone, was little changed—it still had that old accusatory sting, delivered with a bit more of a whiskey rasp. “Lexa! Can it be really you?”

“Dearie, who else? You told me on your card to call you. I was sorry to hear your sad news. Nat must have been a lovely man; I’m sorry I never met him.” She had prepared this much to say.

“But I wrote you two months ago,” Jane accused.

“We Westerners move slow. I wasn’t sure you meant it.”

“Of course I meant it. There hasn’t been a day in thirty years you haven’t walked through my mind, lightly clad and quite majestic.”

“How nice, Jane. You haven’t seen me lately. My face is crackled like an old squaw’s with too much sun, and I’ve gained weight.”

“Listen, doll: we’re ancient. It’s the inner woman that matters now.”

“Well, I’m an inner woman wrapped in too much outer. I have twinges all over my body.”

“That sounds rather ssseductive,” Jane said. Her “s”s still hissed. “Come east. I know a wonderful spa, and an acupuncturist who takes off years. The more the needles hurt going in, the better you feel lying there. I fall asleep right on the table, bristling like a porcupine.”

How like Jane Pain, Alexandra thought, smiling into the receiver. She told her old friend, “I’m a widow now, too. It’ll be two years this July. Jim, his name was. I think you met him a few times, back in Eastwick.”

“Yess. I did, toward the end, after Darryl’s pathetic charade had fallen apart. Jim Ssomething. I hated him, because he was taking you away from usss. As to my ‘lovely man,’ well, yes, you could say that. It was a deal. He did nice things for me, and I did nice things for him. He gave me money, I gave him ass. He needed a lot of special attention. Only certain things turned him on. Weird things.” The husky acid voice hovered close to something—indignation, or tears. “Well, shit, sssweetie,” she said, closing the door on that closet. “It all worked out.”

Alexandra tried to picture the working out—the implied intimate details beyond the dark head of those broad stairs. “It worked out for us, too,” she offered. “I loved Jim.” She waited for Jane Tinker to echo this conventional sentiment, but in vain. So she added, defiantly, “And I think he loved me. You know, as much as a man can. Loving makes them feel helpless.”

At this Jane, with one of her alarming shifts of direction, plunged into suggestive and possibly sardonic flattery. “Lexa, nobody could help loving you. You’re so open. You’re a force of Nature.”

“I’m not sure I like Nature any more. She’s too cruel. As to not loving me, I think my children are managing that.” She thinks of the impervious Mr. McHugh, on last year’s Canadian trip, but doesn’t mention him. Such confiding with Jane would take physical proximity, and drinks and snacks on a little table between their knees. “How are yours?” Alexandra asked instead.

“Oh, they’re ssurviving somewhere,” Jane said. “All four, here and there; I keep losing track of exactly where, along with the grandchildren’s birthdays. I never believed they could, somehow—sssurvive. I couldn’t picture them handling jobs, and houses, and marriages to strangers, and getting raises and catching the right airplanes, but they do, amazingly. I never could fathom how until I realized that it wasn’t our world they had to survive in, competing with the people of our generation, but their world, competing against the sssame little people they went to kindergarten with. And growing up with the same idiotic technology. That’s where you feel old, I find. The technology. I can’t do computers and hate dialing ten digits. At my grandfather’s big old place in Maine the phone was one of the first in the region and the number was two digits—two! I still remember them: one, eight. Only seventeen phones ahead of ours on the island. And I hate talking to these sugary automated voices that only when you make a mistake act like machines, repeating themselves absurdly. Though Nat made me carry a cell phone for my own protection, so he said, I never think to turn it on and can’t believe anyway my voice is getting through, with this little grid thing you talk into halfway up to your ear. Now you see these self-important kids just out of business school wearing them clipped to their heads and talking out loud as if in a trance. And the things take photos and videos, too, as well as being cell phones. I can’t ssstand it, all these tiny circuits crammed in there making everything digital, it’s worse than our brains, which are bad enough. They liked coming to this house, though,” she continued, lurching back to the subject of her children, “hanging out and filling the third floor with the smell of hashish or whatever the controlled substance of the week was, until they all got houses and children of their own—amazingly, as I said. They liked Nat. They thought he was cool; they used the word ‘cool’ of this utterly uncool little stuffed shirt. That did hurt, I confesss. And he loved having them around, having been too infantile to get married before and have any children of his own.”

“Mine, too!” Alexandra had to interject. She’d forgotten how insistent Jane could be, how possessed she could be by her own harsh tongue, her complaints against the world. “My children were crazy about Jim, and he seemed to enjoy them until they got weird or went off to college. Somehow their not being his helped. Did you ever think, Jane, the men we had children by, that that was all they were good for? A kind of specialized function, like parasites and sea anemones have? And then we really married, the second time.”

“A specialized fucktion,” Jane said. That was another of her deficits, a weakness for puns, dragging them out in the middle of anybody else’s thought. And yet, talking to Jane, Alexandra felt warmed as by no other female intercourse in the thirty years since the three divorcées went their separate ways. “Oh, Jane!” she exclaimed in a spurt of irrational gratitude. “We must get together now, now that we’re widows.”

“You come here, darling. The house is huge, and my mother-in-law keeps to her room, surrounded day and night with nurses giving her breast milk and mushed-up monkey glands or whatever. I’ve hardly seen her since Nat’s memorial service. She’s over a hundred, it’s monstrous—like having a two-headed mother-in-law; people laugh at me. I’d like to say she hated my guts and made life here next to impossible for me, but in fact she was secretly relieved that I took Nat off her hands; he was one of those men with so little ssubstance to him that he needed not just one but two strong women behind him. He was her only child, and I think to her generation having children was rather unnatural and very odd, something you felt obliged to do only because your parents and their parents before them had obviously done it; otherwise there wouldn’t be ancestors. Before she became quite so batty she used to say these uncanny things that made me laugh. In fact”—Jane’s voice lowered into a virtual rustle; Alexandra strained to hear it—“I used to wonder if she wasn’t another—” The word stopped her tongue.

“Witch?” Alexandra asked.

Jane didn’t answer, saying, “I used to avoid seeing her undressed, for fear I’d spot a false teat.”

“Jane!” Alexandra had to exclaim, shocked and thrilled. “You still believe all that horrible, medieval nonsense!”

“I believe in what is,” came the answer, in a voice still low, but sizzling at its sibilant edges, “and if that’s horrible, so be it. But sseriously—do come see me, sssweetheart.”

A dark old house, a dark old friend. “It’s so far,” Alexandra fended. “It’s so sunny where I am. You have more money—why not come see me? We have wonderful Indian reservations, and Georgia O’Keeffe’s home in Abiquiu, and the Continental Divide. Santa Fe hosts spectacular opera in the summer.”

“Yes, I have some money now, but it’s New England money. It hates being sspent, except for educational purposes. Nat was always giving to Harvard, which doesn’t need it, and Roxbury Community College, which does, I suppose, though the politicians will never let it go under. I made him give to Berklee and the Conservatory, despite Ssymphony not agreeing with him. He would get quite rigid in his seat listening to it, especially after intermission, so I’d take his hand to see if he still had a pulse. It would be icy cold, especially during Brahms and Mahler. With Mozart and Bach he hovered nearer room temperature; you would even see his fingers twitch when the beat picked up.”

“You sound quite fond of him,” Alexandra told her, trying to infect the other woman with her own generous-spirited humanity.

Jane’s response was testy, betraying after all the fury of bereavement. “What if I were—what good would it do now?”

“What would he want you to do? Not stay in his house with a moribund mother, I bet.”

“Sweetie, I don’t want to come to New Mexico, I’m sorry. It’s all too American, everything from the Hudson west, like something you’d switch off if it were television. But you can’t, it’s too big to flip off, growing all that boring wheat and corn and cattle, full of fat religious people flying flags on their pickup trucks with their shotgun racks. It’s frightening to me, Lexa, like a foreign country, only worse, because you can understand the language.”

In this spiky, inviting discourse Alexandra glimpsed a possibility of breaking out of her widow’s monotonous life: pushing through her book club’s monthly choice of “literary fiction,” having drinks and Dutch-treat dinners with her Taos “girlfriends,” leaving querulous messages on the telephones of her evasive children, fighting her weight with cheek-stinging hikes in the high ranch country north toward Wheeler Peak, her only companion the arthritic old black Lab she and Jim had raised from a puppy they had called Cinder because of his ash-gray fuzziness, his eyes the wonder-struck white glass of a husky’s. In Eastwick her Lab had been called Coal. Cinder and she tugged each other along through the tall tan fescue, united by a leash meant less to protect the small game from the dog than to protect him from the coyotes. She carried Jim’s Colt .45 in case a pack attacked. But suburban tracts were climbing higher into the hills, and an old woman in jeans and leather jacket with a half-gray head of hair and a decrepit dog and a holstered .45 was viewed by these tract-dwelling strangers as strange herself, and suspect. You live, she saw, surrounded by more and more strangers, to whom you are a disposable apparition cluttering the view. Only someone like Jane who knew her when she was in her handsome, questing prime could forgive her now for becoming ancient. She grasped at this straw of connection. “We could travel to a real foreign country,” she suggested to Jane. “Together.”

“Widows on the road. Widows on the world,” Jane said, punning as only a very heartless person would on the name of a well-patronized restaurant on the top floor of a Manhattan skyscraper infamously felled not many years before.

“I went to Canada the year Jim died,” Alexandra pursued, sounding craven in her own ears.

“Canada,” Jane rasped dismissively. “What a sstupid country to go to.”

“Their Rockies are quite beautiful,” Alexandra weakly protested. “The other people on the trip were nice enough to me, especially the Australians, but I felt queasy being alone. Queasy and timid. Two of us might be braver, and could share a room. Couldn’t we at least think about it?”

Ensconced in her posh dark house, Jane resisted being coaxed. “I don’t want to go to any place as dreary as Canada.”

“Of course not.”

“The whole North American continent is dreary.”

“Even Mexico?”

“People get the runs. And now there’s social breakdown. An American isn’t safe in the middle of Mexico City. In fact, Americans aren’t safe anywhere. The world hates us, face it. They’re jealous and they hate us and blame us for their own stupidity and corruption and misery.”

“Oh, surely not the hotel concierges. And the people who run tour buses. I can’t believe there isn’t anywhere you want to go. Did you and Nat ever go to the Nile and see the Pyramids? Or to China and see the Wall? Don’t you want to see the world, before we leave it? Once we break a hip and can’t walk, we can’t travel.”

“I don’t intend to break a hip.”

“Nobody intends to. But it happens. They just snap. As you just said, horrible things happen.”

“Did I say that? I don’t think so.”

“That was your sense. About the world not being safe any more for Americans.” Alexandra surprised herself, being so aggressive. Just having Jane back in her life to push against got her blood flowing. She heard herself pleading, “You don’t have to decide now. We’re in touch again, and I love it. Think about a trip together, and call me. I’ll go anywhere you want to go, if I can afford it. Not the South Pole or North Korea.”

“Nat always said the Communist countries were the safest in the world. The state had all the guns, and kept a good tight lid on things. Not that he ever went. He got as far as England, which was sssocialist enough.”

If they talked any more about travel, the subject might grow stale in their mouths. Alexandra, her wrist aching from holding the phone against her ear, changed the subject. “Tinker,” she said. “Tell me about the name. Were there Tinkers on the Mayflower?”

“They greeted the Mayflower. The Tinkers had come over years before, rowing a dinghy.”

“Oh, Jane. It’s so good to hear you joke. The people my age I know down here are all so solemn, talking about nothing but their medications and real estate and the sad state of government support for the arts.”

. . .

But when Jane called her back, enough time had passed that Alexandra didn’t recognize the menacing voice. Sounding like a man’s, it pronounced one word: “Egypt.”

Alexandra was so taken aback that she stammered: “B-beg your pardon?”

“Egypt is where we ought to go, you ssilly thing,” the voice explained, with a twist of impatience that made it clear Jane Smart was speaking. Alexandra had trouble thinking of her as Jane Tinker.

“But, Jane, isn’t it dangerous? Aren’t all the Arab countries dangerous for American tourists?”

“For one thing, Lexa, the Egyptians aren’t Arabs. They think of Arabs as scary crazy people just as much as we do. They are Muslims, most of them, it’s true, though the upper classes are agnostics just like ours, and there are still some Coptic Christians.”

“But wasn’t Mohamed Atta an Egyptian? And haven’t there been massacres of tourists?”

“I asked about that at the travel agency,” Jane said in her stoniest, steadiest voice. “They gave me a pamphlet. I have it right here. There have been ‘incidents’—sseventeen Greek tourists at a Cairo hotel in 1996, nine Germans at the main museum in 1997. Later that year, the worst of all—fifty-eight foreign tourists, including thirty-five Sswisss, plus four Egyptians killed outside some ancient queen’s quite lovely temple in Luxor. But there don’t seem to have been any Americans, and the Egyptian police acted very efficiently, killing all six of the terrorists quite quickly. If tourists stay away, Lexa, then you’re letting the terrorists win. The Egyptian economy will suffer, which is what the Islamic Jihad or whatever wants. It wants poverty, ignorance, and desperation, because they make people more religious. What it doesn’t want is the peaceful operation of the global marketplace and its modernizing influence. What it very much doesn’t want is the education of women, which is the key to everything good and progressive happening in the world, from lowering the birthrate to combatting AIDS. I can’t believe that you are against these things, darling, you and Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar.”

“Oh, Jane, of course I’m not against the idea of going to Egypt; in fact, I think I mentioned it to you originally. It’s just the fact of going there, right at this unsettled time, that’s worrisome.”

“Things will never not be unsettled, not for a long time,” Jane said, with a certain relish, bred of malice and fatalism.

As she listened to this far-off voice from a distant, sinister house, a hissing harsh voice from the past, Alexandra’s eyes rested on the straight-edged splashes of Southwestern sun on her glass-topped coffee table, its shiny stack of art books, and the stripes—black, red, green, and tan—of the tough wool Navajo rug underneath it, with a fringe throwing tiny fuzzy shadows on the earth-colored floor tiles. Her heart resisted the idea of leaving this safe island of known satisfactions. Jim’s pots, delicate in tint and silhouette, sat on shelves and sills in the sunny large room, and each fabric and piece of solid, sensible furniture had been chosen by her, after thought and discussion with Jim and leisurely shopping. Back east, the furniture had just grown around her, like a fungus, inherited and cast-off and stop-gap all jumbled together; her home had been a way-station like the stages of the children’s growth, needing to be supplied with new clothes, toys, equipment, and lessons only to demand at the next stage totally different equipment. Here, in high, dry, precious Taos, she had settled for good, until nothing needed to be changed. But then Jim had died, leaving her with the need to keep reinventing the motions of living. “Jane,” she said, fending for time in which to frame a refusal that would not irrevocably break this link with her old self, when she was less afraid of fresh possibilities, “you’re sweeping me off my feet.”

“That’s how you always were, Alexandra. Always. You hated to take any initiative. Look how long you let that ridiculous fat Italian plumber ssscrew you. I forget his name, he always wore that hat with the stupid little brim, as if to say he wasn’t really a plumber but a country ssquire.”

“Joe Marino,” Alexandra reminded her, and the very name warmed her with the memory of his body, the butterfly shape of dark hair on his back, the salty-sweet taste, like nougat, of his abundant sweat. She pictured his fleshy face when he would furtively arrive and then when, sated but still furtive, he would leave—though what was wrong, in the eyes of the town, with his plumber’s truck parked in front of her old house on Orchard Road, with all its decrepit pipes and fixtures? His face had the hook nose and debauched eyes of a Renaissance prince but wore a slightly baffled look, whether he was plumbing the mysteries of an antique shutoff valve or trying to fit her, his bewitching mistress, into the web of family loyalties that dogged his Catholic conscience. She would tell him not to bother, just enjoy her: she was a gift, Nature was full of gifts, enjoying her took nothing away from Gina, his wife and the mother of five children; but he couldn’t quite let go of the Christian baggage, the great No spoken to our conscienceless appetites. “I always thought the brim was cute,” she said, defending Joe.

“You would. Let’s face it, Gorgeous—you were a pushover. Not as bad as Sukie, but ssleeping around for her was a kind of news-gathering. For you, you put yourself on the line, and it kept breaking your heart. Darryl broke your heart, by never popping the question.”

“I never expected him to.”

“My heart, too. He never popped the question to me, either. Then it turned out he wasn’t a popper gentleman.”

“Ha. Just thinking about those days—aren’t you glad all that’s behind us? Sex, and all that lost sleep, all that hardhearted scheming that went with it.”

“Is it?” Jane asked ominously.

“Jane, we’re old. Nobody wants us, except our grandchildren for the first half-hour of a visit. It’s very freeing, I find.”

“We’re not free. You’re never free of wanting. Sam Smart used to tell me, the cunt is very sensitive, but not very smart. It doesn’t know enough to quit.”

“Oh, that Sam. Frankly—forgive me, Jane—I never could take to him. He was—”

“A ssmarty-pants,” Jane inserted.

“But Sukie—I’m so glad you mentioned her. How is she doing? You must see her now and then, Connecticut being so close.”

“Not as close as you’d think. We have Rhode Island in between. She and I had ssocial differences that were awkward. That clown from Stamford she married—he was in computers when they came in big boxes and nobody but the government could afford them, and then they got smaller and cheaper and he made a fortune in the early Eighties with one of the first word-processors, but then IBM moved in with dirt-cheap PC’s and he was struggling again. Anyway, he was too nouveau and pushy for Nat, and the few times we got together as couples fizzled—upstairs at the Ritz on Arlington Street, when it still served upstairs, I remember as very stilted—and in New York City once when Nat had one of his pompous board meetings, eating up the stockholders’ money with fancy meals and travel tickets. Lennie—that was his name—struck us as cocky and nouveau and I don’t think bothers to be faithful to Sukie. As an escape for herself she’s taken to writing these romances I just can’t believe, they are beyond awful, pornography really, an utter embarrassment, though she keeps sending me copies. So we’ve let each other drop, ever so sssubtly.”

“Is her husband still alive?”

“Why wouldn’t he be? He wasn’t, frankly, classy enough to die.”

This remark stung, implying that Jim’s dying had been, like Nat’s, a tactful withdrawal. Jane didn’t want Alexandra to love anybody. Out of loyalty to Jim, then, and to Joe, she found courage to say bluntly, “Jane dear, I just can’t see going to Egypt with you. It’s too scary and, frankly, too expensive.”

“Oh, but it’s not expensive. Cruises on the Nile, they’re almost giving them away to keep Westerners coming. Think of it, Lexa, floating through the Sahara when it’s below zero in Boston and Taos is all noisy sskiers and ssnowboarders. Snowboarders drove us right out of our ski lodge at Loon Mountain. Nat was doing one of his slow traverses when two boys made him the meat in a snowboard sandwich. He survived, but that was it for skiing at Loon. The ski patrol took him down in one of those toboggans, all swaddled like a baby or a mummy—it was the affront to his dignity that I think he couldn’t get over. Oh, please, Lexa, be a pushover for me. You mustn’t abandon me; I’ve been virtually living at the travel agency. They said if we sign up now we can get there in time for Ramadan. Egypt is most romantic during Ramadan. What with that terrorist nest exposed in Canada, or was it New Jersey, there’ve apparently been cancellations.”

“I bet,” Alexandra said. “Jane, what’s there for us? Why don’t we go to Italy and look at art and little hill towns for ten days?”

“Myssstery,” Jane answered in a travelogue baritone. “The Sssphinx, and the meaning of the Pyramids. Don’t they fascinate you—the biggest buildings ever built, right there at the beginning of civilization, and how and why?”

“I thought those weren’t mysteries so much any more. Stone by stone dragged from quarries is how, and to get the pharaoh into the afterlife was why.”

“Really, Lexa, you’re such a sscoffer. The purpose was to preserve the dead person’s body from damage or disturbance, and to house all the supplies that he, or to be exact his ka, would need.”

“His what?”

“His ka. His soul, you could say, although it’s rather more practical and complicated than that. There’s also a ba. If you’re an ancient Egyptian, your ka is created at the same time you are, on a different potter’s wheel, by the god Khnum—I think I’m pronouncing it right. It’s not exactly the same as the ba, your spirit, which is pictured as a bird, a stork. The ka appears in the hieroglyphs as a bearded human figure wearing a crown consisting of two bent arms. Sometimes it’s represented simply as the two arms.”

“It sounds very depressing, Jane. Other people’s religions tend to be, don’t you think? Other people’s make even your own seem ridiculous.”

“I’m just answering your question, not trying to convert you. You don’t have to know or do anything, just sit on the boat and watch the scenery go by, getting off at various temples, one or two a day. The climate will be divine, and the food, if you absolutely don’t eat ssalad or any raw vegetables and brush your teeth in only bottled water.”

The more Jane said, the realer this un-asked-for trip became. Alexandra liked the idea of our being created on a potter’s wheel, spinning wetly away in its brown juices. The pull of this other woman’s need, when nobody else needed her as much—not even her enchanting little granddaughters, with their long lashes, bright eyes, amusingly expanding vocabularies, and powder-soft, silky warm cheeks—moved her to consider Jane’s plea. The cruise part, sharing a cabin, only cost $795. Jim’s dealings in more or less authentic Native American jars and bowls had generated more savings than she had realized while he was alive. He had tucked money away. He would want her to be comfortable—to have enough room in her widow’s pinched life for a whim now and then.

So there Alexandra sat, she and Jane Tinker, having tea in a British-style hotel behind a large pane of glass in which loomed a huge triangular shadow, the Great Pyramid of Cheops. This august view was vertically sliced by vaguely Arabic strands of colored glass capturing the bright sun outside. Silverware and cups clattered around the two women as they tried to remember what they had just learned. Jane said, “Let’s ssee. The greatest, and earliest, was by Cheops, and the slightly lesser, with its cap of surviving limestone facing, by Chephren, and the much lesser, begun in granite but finished in crude brick, by Mycerinus. What did the guide say?” Jane asked. “His was the smallest pyramid but he was the nicest pharaoh.”

Alexandra responded, “Niceness wasn’t I think paramount for the pharoahs. The guide said, if I heard him right, that the other two, Mycerinus’s father and grandfather, were tyrants, but the gods had decreed that Egypt would have tyrannical rulers for a hundred fifty years, and the quota hadn’t quite been reached, so an oracle told him he would only rule for six years. So they would feel like more to him, he spent them drinking and eating all night, every night. It makes you tired, doesn’t it?” she went on. “All this superstition and oppression, and so long ago, when the world should have been still innocent.”

For the Pyramids, the two women had learned, had been erected near the outset of Egyptian civilization, in the Fourth Dynasty, twenty-five hundred years before Christ. “I don’t see why that would make you tired,” Jane said, faithfully contrarian. “You could just as easily be cheered up by the fact that the Pyramids are still here. Think of it. What in the United States is going to still be there forty-five hundred years from now?”

The two women, jet-lagged, felt transparent and weary in their clothes. It was hot, with a gritty desert wind hard to breathe in. Yesterday, the Cairo airport, to their sleepless senses, had been a nightmare of haggling and shouting, and the tour representative who greeted them seemed suspect, his large dark eyes and sharp small smile darting everywhere but directly at their faces. Even when he had busily corralled a few others belonging to the tour, these were French speakers, boarded at Paris and full of unintelligible questions and complaints, and no comfort to the two American widows. Warned of chicanery in third-world airports, Alexandra and Jane exasperated their hurried escort by being reluctant to part with their passports and return tickets. They were slow to obey his command to follow him, as he threaded a devious path, marked by furtive donations of pastel paper currency, to the baggage belt and the bus waiting, engine noisomely racing, outside in a dusty jumble of traffic. The bus stopped and started, breaking the jammed streets into a sepia album of exotica, of biscuit-colored buildings either delapidated or unfinished.

In the hotel room, the pair of women discovered that they had different philosophies concerning jet lag: Alexandra longed to sleep, if only for an hour, in her bed, whereas Jane insisted that you should be ruthless with yourself, pretending that Egyptian time is now your body’s time. Groggily Alexandra wandered with her on the streets outside. There was something delicious in the air of the foreign metropolis, scented with cooking odors and engine exhaust and a spicy tang like that of mesquite smoke, but she felt helplessly more conspicuous, large and foreign and female, than petite, quick, impervious Jane. Alexandra attracted stares, and felt them cling, where Jane crossly brushed them aside and plowed on. Thus far, Alexandra had been grateful for the other woman’s company: Jane relieved her of the constant decisions and calculations incumbent upon a lone woman. Now she felt, instead, the fear of desertion and betrayal that linking yourself with another person brings. Jane was hard to keep up with as she pushed through the afternoon crowds, a bobbing mass in caftans and galabiyahs, burqas and veils out of which lively liquid eyes glared like the bright backs of captured beetles. The streets narrowed, more tightly lined with assorted wares—intricately worked copper pots and platters, dried herbs in glassine envelopes, miniature Sphinxes and Pyramids in lustrous lightweight metal and lurid plastic, scarabs carved from gray-green soapstone, and, in several successive stalls, in the full flat rainbow of tinted plastics, utilitarian household equipment such as tubs and buckets, dustpans and scrub brushes, scouring pads and wash baskets whose mold imitated the flattened weave of organic wicker. The humbleness of these domestic items, much as one would see gathering dust in a failing small-town hardware store in New Mexico, stirred in Alexandra a sense of common humanity but with it, too, a heightened sense of herself as a blundering, conspicuous alien. Out of these swathed and veiled multitudes around her a knife might flash, as it did years ago for that Nobel Prize–winner one of whose novels she had begun to read for her book club in Taos but never finished. Or a bomb planted to some obscure fanatic purpose might erupt, flattening and scattering all these packed and fragile stalls, her poor body, shredded by steel fragments, exploded with them.

But no Islamic violence disrupted their exploratory walk, which ended where the stalls thinned, and when the city lights dimmed to a few bluish streetlamps, not so much illuminating the pavement below as adding a lighter shadow, as it were, to a darkness of bricks and cobbles and crumbling stucco wherein a few sallow windows glowed with hints of occupancy and pedestrians in pale robes quickly and silently sidled past. The two American women found their way back to the hotel and, squandering one of the few, carefully contemplated “dressy” outfits they had packed, attended the tour’s get-acquainted cocktail party and Western-style welcoming dinner. The other tourists, it turned out, were mostly European—French and German and Scandinavian, plus a cluster of Japanese. Some of the Germans with mannerly stiffness came forward to offer pleasantries in their very adequate English, and several English couples, occupying the same snug niche of insular jollity that the Australians had filled in Canada, did introduce themselves. But the few Americans present, Jane confided with a hiss, were all “assholes.” Their compatriots’ overheard conversation, full of barking, lewd laughter from both sexes, seemed to be mostly about their own crazy bravery in being here, in this hostile Muslim world, at all.

Safe in their own room, Jane and Alexandra agreed they were on their own and would ignore everybody else. Jane swiftly undressed and inserted herself in the bed away from the room’s one window, and five minutes later Alexandra discovered something she had never known about her old friend, for all the hours, at parties and committee meetings and sabbats, over coffee and tea and cocktails, they had spent together in Eastwick: Jane snored. In Alexandra’s experience, Ozzie Spofford, a seasonal hay-fever sufferer, had snuffled in his sleep, and Jim Farlander, especially when loaded for slumber with whiskey and beer, could descend into a snort so loud it would wake him before she resorted to an exasperated poke that would produce, within his cocoon of dreams, a muting change of position. Husbands you could poke; lovers left you before falling asleep. Jane, out of reach in her own twin bed, deep-breathed with an audible friction of inner membranes that knew no let-up. Each long intake arrived at a place of reverberation, a dip into nasal resonance at the exact same insistent pitch, it seemed to Alexandra, as her daytime conversation. Awake or asleep, Jane insisted, with a relentless, unforgiving will, on being heard; there had always been something unstoppable about her, whether she was playing the cello or making a pun or casting an evil spell. As Jane slept, she sucked the oxygen from the air in the inflexible rhythm of a mechanical pump, monotonous and insatiable, each breath attaining a kind of abrasive wall where it scraped and dipped before turning back in the shape of a hook, tugging Alexandra’s brain another notch wider awake; she tried putting herself to sleep by counting these breaths, and then by focusing on the ceiling floating above her as it received, ever fewer, the flickering, wheeling traces of taxi lights on the streets below. But nothing distracted her enough from the sibilant insult of each emphatic snore as Jane’s body steadily rowed its way through the night, storing up energy for the coming day’s strenuous, once-in-a-lifetime sights. Such unconscious self-assertion betrayed, it seemed to Alexandra, a ruthless animus; it came clear to her, in her woozy and infuriated state, that Jane had murdered her husband, by keeping him awake listening to her snore year after year. Remorselessly she had ground little Nat Tinker, with his carefully assembled antiques and memberships, into the dust of the grave.

At last, at an unknowable pitch-black hour, Jane’s sheets rustled and her bare feet padded on the floor. Her elderly bladder had roused her to empty it of the night’s cocktails and wine, and Alexandra, like a naughty child in the mere moment when the teacher is not looking her way, sneaked, as the toilet distantly flushed, into healing oblivion.

Nevertheless, it was not with a fully rested brain that she tried to confront the riddle of the Great Pyramid through the intervening glass and dust. She had already ridden around it. Their bus had parked, and the group had made its way across flat terrain, part stone and part sand, that reminded her of the alien surface of the Athabasca glacier. Boy peddlers kept snapping accordion-folded chains of postcards at her; blond camels in a weary finery of blankets and tassels were offered to her by hungry men in dirty gowns. Thinking in her daze to escape this inhospitable environment and perhaps relive her exalting stroll on the boardwalk to Sanson Peak, triumphantly treading the air above a vast spread of dove-gray mountains, she had opted, when pressed by an especially piteous camel-driver, to take, for a number of Egyptian pounds amounting to less than thirty American dollars, a camel ride around the Pyramid.

But sitting on a camel, in the crude carpeted wooden seat that did for a saddle, was nothing like striding along a broad boardwalk on her own two feet, and the four-footed creature beneath her felt a world removed from the thoroughly broken and tractable horses she had ridden as a girl in Colorado and then as a second wife in New Mexico. The camel’s knobby knock-kneed legs lifted Alexandra up too high, with no reins to grip. She was pitched back and forth as if the beast wanted to throw her off, to snap her into space with his hump’s catapult. This camel had too many joints, and his brain, like hers, was only half on the job. She felt mounted, while Jane’s tiny white face far below mirrored her alarm, on pure, pungent, hairy turbulence—the rapids of evolution as it swung around a corner to cast up a quadruped that could cope with the desert. Yet out of politeness and pity toward the camel driver, whose missing teeth possibly made him look more pitiable than he really was, she held on unprotesting as the horizon pitched like an enraged sea, and sand got into her eyes, and the giant cubical stones of the Great Pyramid as they lunged closer seemed about to burst the bonds of gravity and tumble down upon her.

At last, the Pyramid circumnavigated, the driver with a few guttural commands and cursory gestures of his switch signalled the camel to kneel. Alexandra fought toppling forward and losing the last particles of her dignity; she stepped onto the stable earth with legs trembling as if they had been packed in ice. The camel, his segmented, velour-soft face suddenly next to hers, exposed long corn-yellow teeth and, batting his double eyelashes superciliously, produced the sound of flatulence with his absurdly flexible lips, as glad to be rid of her as she of him. The driver received his payment with a salaam so deep that she realized she had overtipped him. Groping for some international form of disclaimer, she murmured “Pas de quoi” and, feeling overheated and tousled, simpered like a maiden flirt; but the man was already looking beyond her, hungrily scanning the camel-shy other tourists for his next victim.

Jane did not flatter her courage or applaud her survival. She greeted her saying, “Don’t you feel filthy? How many fleas and germy little things do you think live in a camel’s coat?”

After her sleepless hours of torment by Jane’s snore, Alexandra was in no mood for further insult. “No more than in most places, I would think. If you’re going to be obsessed with germs, Jane, you shouldn’t have come to Africa.” To soften this scolding, she asked, “How did I look?”

“You didn’t look like Lawrence of Arabia, if that’s what you wanted.”

“Did you get a picture of me?” Before entrusting herself to the camel, she had given Jane her camera, a little predigital Canon. “With the Pyramid in the background?”

“Yes, I think I did, though I hate other people’s cameras. Things snapped and whirred inside. I’m not so sure about the Pyramid. The angle wasn’t easy, and you never held ssstill.”

“Don’t I know it? I do hope you didn’t mess up, Jane. It would have made an amusing print to send my grandchildren. But without the Pyramid it could be in some zoo.”

“Oh, grandchildren. They don’t care about us, face it, dear. They find us boring and embarrassing. Only we care about us.”

It was a desire to smooth away the negativity from Jane that had so soon entered their joint adventure that led her to ask the other, as they sat together over their tea looking out through glittering beads upon the Great Pyramid, “What do you think of it? What does it say to you?”

“It ssays to me,” Jane said, “what idiots people are and always have been. Imagine all that labor and engineering so one man could imagine he was going to cheat his own death.”

“But hasn’t he? We know his name, all these years later. Cheops. Or Khufu. Jane, you must admit, the thing itself is stupendous. What did the guide in the bus say—over two million blocks, ranging from two to fifteen tons in weight? Archaeologists still don’t know how they got the stones up there.”

“Very simple. A ramp.” When Alexandra became enthusiastic, Jane tended to sulk.

“But think of it—all the material a ramp would have used, where would they have put it afterwards? And the effect is so simple, so elegant—so modest, really. And the other one, by his son, nearly as big. And the little one, like Baby Bear, built by the grandson. I love them. I’m so glad we’re here. I feel wiser. How can you not?”

“I don’t know,” Jane confessed. “I often fail to be moved by what moves other people. It frightens me. Like those people born with missing nerves, who chew up their own tongues because they feel no pain.”

Alexandra was moved to touch the other woman, quickly, on the exposed skin of the back of her hand. They had been asked by the tour to cover their arms and wear long skirts; it was not yet necessary for female tourists to conceal the hair on the heads. A revived religious faith as monolithic as the Pyramids was still held at partial bay by the government’s military. “Don’t say that, dear,” Alexandra urged. “You have all the nerves the rest of us do. You don’t have to like the Great Pyramid, just try to respect it. It was your idea to come to Egypt, remember?”

Jane looked aged in the harsh desert light, shrunken. Blue veins writhed on the backs of her hands. “There’s this sstink to the past,” she said, “of magic that stopped working. It never really did work, of course. Just gave the priests more power than was good for them.”

“If they believed it worked, maybe it did. It made them less anxious. As I remember us in Eastwick, we used to believe that there was an old religion, before men came in and took it over just like they took over midwifing and haute couture. It was a nature religion that never died—women carried it on even when they were tortured and killed.”

“What are you saying? That women built the Pyramids?”

“No, but they went along with it, the queens at least. There’s something delicate and gentle about the ancient Egyptians. They loved Nature—look at the tomb paintings that are on all the postcards they keep trying to sell us, the reeds and flowers and food they wanted the dead to have. To them the afterlife was this life, going on forever. That’s what the Pyramids say: Give us more life. More, more, please. They made them enormous so everybody could see them—could see that the Pharaoh had believed in another life, and would take them all with him into it.”

“I don’t think that was part of the bargain,” Jane said dryly. “The Pharaoh was a special case. He sailed on alone.”

“They were like our Presidents,” Alexandra urged. “We won’t elect people who don’t believe in God, or pretend they do. They believe on behalf of everybody. They make us all feel better, the way even an awful Pope used to do.”

Jane sighed and said, “I’ll be all right, Lexa. Once we get on the river. Nat loved being on the water. I hated it, and discouraged his sailing. That’s on my conscience, with everything else.”

But before they caught the plane to Luxor, where they would board their sightseeing vessel, the Horus, another day in dismal vast decaying Cairo was scheduled; their bus carried them through the clogged streets to the bustling forecourt of the great museum of pharaonic antiquities. Their group of tourists, dwarfed, shuffled docilely through security gates and then room after room of colossal doorways, entablatures, sarcophagi. Pharaohs, broad-faced and bare-shouldered, with high cheekbones and slight feline smiles, were bodied forth in granite, some of it mottled pink and gray, some of it pure black, all quarried and carried and carved and painstakingly polished by men whose eyes and hands and even bones had long since evaporated in the cauldron of time. Life’s airy spell, asking more, more, was silenced by the solemn ponderosity of death. The first floor had the highest ceilings and the biggest statues. A huge Ramses II stood near the entrance, a colossus with arms frozen at his sides, his gaze locked in the stark sky of his divinity. Elsewhere, a wide-hipped, long-faced Akhenaten bodied forth with a spectacular and repulsive androgeny a momentary lapse, in the rustling procession of pharaohs and dynasties and deities, into monotheism and sun-worship. His wide hips, sagging fat lips, and lack of male genitals made Alexandra ponder gender—sex’s monstrous, ecstatic gene-swapping, now found to exist in even the bacteria. Nature’s deep sweet secret, a dimming memory for her now. Upstairs, detached from the group, she yielded to the low temptation, as if to a country fair’s freak show, of the well-guarded mummy room. Placards in English and Arabic urged respect for the dead. Little brown dried bodies, the hands and facial muscles forever snagged on their final contraction, were swaddled like babies, their tiny feet exposed—as stringy as beef jerky, as dark as if charred. Alexandra’s eyes rested on the label of an especially shriveled, pathetic one, its lips pulled back in a snarl and its skull snapped back like a stargazer’s. The label read RAMSES II. The great statue downstairs. The same person. The god-man couldn’t save himself. History’s depths, she saw, were as sickeningly precipitous as Nature’s.

On the museum’s upper floor the leg-weary, eye-weary tourists and their semi-intelligible, slightly crippled guide came to the treasures of the teen-aged king Tutankhamun, whose tomb, almost uniquely in the Valley of the Kings, escaped plunder until modern times. There were life-size ebony statues that stood guard in the king’s burial chamber as well as the king’s ostrich-feather fan and his gameboards and hunting equipment—boomerangs, staves, a buckler—and model hoes, baskets, and other amulets intended to give the boy, dead so young, all he needed in the afterlife.

“Don’t you hate stuff?” Jane asked at Alexandra’s side.

“You think you need it at the time,” Alexandra whispered.

The limping guide explained in stiff, high-pitched English, “Tutankhamun’s entombed priceless treasures were discovered by the Englishman Howard Carter in 1922. He found them in a jumbled state, left as if by tomb robbers whose crime was interrupted, or by priests fulfilling their duties in unseemly haste.”

Room after airless room held young King Tut’s possessions: ebony statues, plain and gilded; various thrones and stools, all beautifully designed, including the famous golden throne; alabaster vases; model boats containing mummified food and magical emblems; various beds, including a folding camp bed and two large beds used in the embalming, a process supervised by the modelled heads of the goddess Hathor’s cow and the hippopotamus goddess, Tawaret. In yet another high-ceilinged chamber, the two American women paused at an alabaster canopic chest with its four cavities for the boy-king’s embalmed viscera. Dusty cases held crumbling textiles; the numbed tourists viewed a realistic bust in wood and stucco of Tutankhamun, and an “Osiris bed” shaped like the pharaoh’s profile and filled with earth, on a linen bed, sewn with grain and moistened so that it would germinate in his tomb, symbolizing resurrection. Late rooms sequestered the pharaoh’s solid-gold sarcophagus and the famous and gorgeous gold mask that covered the mummy’s head, and scarabs and red-gold buckles and earrings and rings and, invading from another, crueler, future world, a knife with a blade of iron. Final rooms held spells for the dead king’s guidance from the Book of the Dead and depicted figures of various deities to be encountered in the Underworld. Like spectres viewing their own corpses, the women inspected the detritus of a magical system as elaborate as it was useless. “They believed,” the guide explained, his voice growing thin and irritated, “each person had five selves: your name, your ka, your ba, your heart, and your shadow. At the gateway of the afterlife, your heart was weighed against a feather, the feather of truth and justice. If it failed to balance, it fell to the Devourer—part hippo, part crocodile.”

“How are you doing, doll?” Alexandra solicitously asked Jane. Last night her snoring had been not so bad—less a succession of infuriating hooks than a steady, rasping background noise, and Alexandra was so exhausted, the nervous shocks of travel ebbing from her system and being gradually replaced by habituation and acceptance, that she accepted this flaw in the room’s silence, reflecting that at least she was not troubled, as she had been in Canada, by small noises and red safety lights in the room. In Egypt, there seemed to be no safety lights.

Jane answered, “I’m numb. How much more crap can there be in this attic?”

“Jane, so much of it is so beautifully made. So tender. To them, death was a journey to the Field of Reeds.”

“Yess? If so, why did they put the corpse in so many stone boxes within boxes? They didn’t want him ever to get out.”

“They were tucking him in,” Alexandra fantasized. “They wanted his ba to be able to use his body. Or was it his ka?” She had become the one who cared about Egypt, who wanted to rescue these fragile ancients from themselves, though Egypt had been Jane’s idea. But Alexandra had been a widow for over two years and Jane had only had ten months to adjust. She kept mentioning Nat Tinker, as if she could bring him back with incantation. But he, too, was encased in stone boxes within boxes.

Once they had flown, next day, to Luxor and transferred to the Horus, it was, as Nat could have predicted, bliss. Each night, as the boat prowled to the next docking, the next temple, the thrumming of the engine absorbed much of Jane’s snore, though the beds were close together in the little cabin. By day, the banks of the Nile passed as if an endless scroll was being unrolled. Oxen plodding in circles and shadoofs lifting and falling like wooden oil rigs ministered to the green fields with irrigation, under a sky as smoothly blue as a painted dome, while on board the Horus the tourists, smiling and nodding at one another through the many language barriers, swam in the little pool, a square no more than two strokes across, and basked on deck chairs, drank alcoholic drinks, nibbled peanuts called soudani, and gradually turned brown in the strengthening sun.

“Why are Egyptians so happy?” Jane asked Alexandra from her adjacent deck chair.

“I don’t know. Why?”

“They’re in de-Nile.”

“Ouch.”

The cruise first took them south from Luxor, to Esna in its sunken site beside a market where unappetizing parts of butchered oxen like the roofs of their mouths were displayed. Their guide was now a woman, a chic, unveiled Muslim in flared black silk slacks and broad silver bracelets and necklaces that flattered her olive skin. “The great dam at Aswan,” she explained, “has raised the water levels in the Nile valley. Esna’s foundations have become a set of wet cookies.” It was true, the ground beneath their feet was soft, almost mud. Next day, they disembarked at sunstruck Edfu on its precipice, the best preserved of all the Late Dynasty temples. “The three B’s,” the guide told them, her heavily ringed fingers flicking toward the delicate reliefs. “Butts, boobs, and belly buttons—that is how we recognize the Graeco-Roman style. The sculptors tried to follow the old conventions but their hands and eyes wouldn’t let them. They rounded limbs, they showed knees and little toes. The older style, always seeking the ideal, put the same feet on both legs, with the big toe toward the viewer. The Graeco-Romans couldn’t do that, it was too ridiculous. They showed one foot with the little toe toward the viewer, the way it is. Heresy!” She laughed with dazzling teeth, beneath her big sunglasses and the straw hat with its curled brim that sat strictly level on her head. The next day brought them to lovable Kom Ombo, a double temple to the crocodile god Sobek and the late Horus—Haroeris, the falcon-headed, out to kill his uncle Seth, who had slain his father, Osiris. The guide, with her gleaming wristlets and flexible silver collar, led them to a room whose ceiling held the image of the sky-goddess Nut stretched across the sky, one end of her giving birth to baby Horus, Harpakhrad. Next day, the good ship Horus came to the temple of Philae, moved stone by stone to an island out of the reach of the rising waters of Lake Nasser. “This,” their Muslim guide told them, in the hushed halls of transplanted stone, “was the last place the old religion was practiced. It lasted until the sixth century A.D., for two hundred years after the Christian edict of Theodosius the First in 378 A.D. Then, it became a church. Here”—she pointed with her aubergine fingernails at a nearly illegible small carving—“Isis suckling Horus became the Virgin Mary suckling Jesus. The cult of Isis spread widely through the Roman empire. She was the perfect widow, collecting fourteen pieces of the fifteen of her husband’s body which the evil Seth had hidden in sarcophagi sunk in the Nile. The fifteenth piece she never found. You ladies can guess what it was.”

The Nile boat had floated them to Aswan, site of the great dam the Russians had built, and of the Aga Khan’s tomb and Lord Kitchener’s gardens, reached by picturesque felucca, its crude sail tilting, on its return, in the sunset’s blood-red light. As the two widows sat on the Horus’s cooling deck, waiting for the chimed summons to dinner to sound, bats flickered through the darkening sky. Jane extended her arm toward them and pronounced in an even harsher, deeper voice than her usual one the lethal words “Mortibus, mortibus, necesse est. Tzabaoth, Elchim, Messiach, and Yod: audite!”

Against the sanguine blush of the western sky—the eastern sky was already black and sprinkled with emerging stars —Alexandra saw one of the tiny black shapes, flicking back and forth above the river harvesting insects, cease its darting motion and plummet like a small broken umbrella into the river’s lingering sheen.

“Jane!” Alexandra exclaimed. “Why did you do that?”

“To see if I still could. All those phony spells on the temple walls pissed me off, a little.”

“The poor innocent bat—it wasn’t ‘a little’ to him.”

“Don’t be sentimental, Angel. You know what a heartless stew Nature is. Think of the dragonflies I just saved from being crunched by nasty sharp bat teeth.”

“Oh, Jane. After what we did to poor Jenny, I can’t bear to think there’s anything to it. Hexes and curses and so on. I want to believe we didn’t do anything.”

“She trespasssed,” Jane decreed, with the same malevolent sibilance with which she had pronounced, Necesse est. “She went beyond her bounds.”

“All she did was say yes when Darryl asked her to marry him. And the way he fell apart later should make us glad he didn’t ask us.”

“If he’d asked one of us, maybe he wouldn’t have fallen apart.”

“I say fallen apart, but really he never looked quite put together. He was a hoax,” Alexandra concluded, a bit smugly.

“Darryl was, and Horus wasn’t? Really, ssweetie, those old Egyptian priests must have laughed themselves silly, thinking of the nonsense they put over on everybody, not for a day or a week but for millennia! What did the guide at Edfu tell us? The Temple of Amun at Thebes was given fifteen hundred square kilometers by Ramses III alone? Ten percent of all the cultivatable land at the time? No wonder the Nubians and Hyksos and whoever kept pushing in. It was a very ssick situation.”

The thought hung there, in air so still Alexandra imagined she could hear the wiry high peeping of the remaining bats, frantically working their sonar. Black-haired Jane had taken a deep tan these days on the Nile, and her face blended into the dark. Her smile, and a glint of jewelry at her neck, and a crescent gleam from her Daiquiri glass betrayed her presence in the shadows of the afterdeck. To break the silence, Alexandra said, “I wonder how the bartenders and waiters feel, feeding us alcoholic drinks all the time?”

“Disgusted,” Jane agreed. “Yet they do it very well. My Daiquiri is excellent. How’s your whiskey sour?”

“Fine, actually. It’s interesting—there’s a whole population, of Muslims catering to Westerners, that’s going to be thrown out of work when Al Qaeda takes over. Or will they be executed, as hopelessly impure?”

“Al Qaeda won’t take over. Who on earth would want what they have to offer?”

“Not you and me, but . . . the people? The poor and miserable and so on. They need religion, whatever it costs. That’s why I wonder if you aren’t hard on the old Egyptian priesthood.”

“It makes me wonder about the Jews,” Jane said, her tongue rambling as the rum took hold. “How did they ever get mixed up in religion? They’re too smart, usually. Abraham about to sslit his own ssson’s throat because God told him to—what an idiot!”

Alexandra offered, placatingly, “I’ve read somewhere the whole Captivity and Exodus wasn’t historical. There’s no Egyptian record of it—Moses and the bulrushes and ‘let my people go.’ ”

“I never believed it,” Jane said. “Any of it. Even as a tiny child. Nat was a churchgoer—Episcopalian, high church like his ridiculous mother—but I never went with him except to weddings and funerals. The whole fraud made me furious. I want to be cremated and stuck in the ground and everybody else walk away glad it’s not them. No mumbo-jumbo, Lexa. Promise.”

“Jane,” her friend said. “You’re too hard on us. All of us.” Jane might have replied, but the dinner chime broadcast its pretty tune, which sounded like the first six notes of “Oh Come, All You Faithful” but probably wasn’t.

That night, with a throttling of engines and churning of water that woke Alexandra in her bunk from her first solid sleep in ages, the boat undocked and turned around and headed back to Luxor and the pointed obelisks and rounded temple pillars of Karnak, from which the cult of the ithyphallic Amun, “the great god,” had extended tentacles throughout the Nile’s fertile valley. The tourists on the Horus had already paid some homage to the outdoor wonders of the east bank. Alexandra had coiled in her little predigital Canon many images of the massive ruins, of the deep-carved hieroglyphs and royal cartouches that, however long bombarded by photons sent from the blank blue sky, held their knife-sharp relief and decisive shadows in the sere air. The tourists’ turn had come to visit the opposite side of the Nile, the western side, death’s side, the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Queens, the Colossi of Memnon, and the lovely memorial temple of Queen Hatshepsut, widow of her half brother Thutmose II; upon his death she became regent for her infant half nephew and stepson, Thutmose III, and reigned with full pharaonic authority, wearing in her monuments masculine attire even to the beard, though she was still labelled with the feminine gender in her inscriptions. After her death a reaction, led by her ungrateful nephew, set in; her cartouches were defaced and her monuments eclipsed, and her peaceful, intelligent reign was stricken from the official lists. “Poor old witch,” said Jane.

Building pyramids lapsed from favor after the Old and Middle Kingdoms. Monarchs of the New, for four centuries, sought safety while their kas journeyed to the Field of Reeds by digging their tombs into the limestone cliffs of the The-ban hills, by the bay of Deir el-Bahri. Illumination into their depths had been provided by linseed-oil lamps and by mirrors held to ricochet sunlight into what had been solid limestone; the excavators chipped and tunnelled and carted away the rubble by this borrowed light. The artists who followed them painted processions—head and legs in profile, chest seen frontally—of servants carrying, to the immured, supplies of fruit and drink and fresh candles to sustain their journey through the netherworld. Scenes of banquets and harvests and fishing parties illustrated the life they had left behind and the similar life they would reach. These scenes have been likened to music scores that only the dead have the instruments to play. The first mural on the left, traditionally, depicted offerings to Amun in his aspect as Re, the falcon-headed sun-god, who reappeared further along in both his aged and nascent form—ram and beetle—within the solar disc, circumscribed between two of his enemies, the serpent and the crocodile.

The tourists shuffled downward by the light not of mirrors but of wan electric bulbs strung from a ceiling of limestone bearing countless chisel marks, down at a gentle slant on boardwalks that took them over pits dug to entrap tomb robbers and sealed false portals meant to bewilder them, down corridors adorned with scenes of priests performing the mouth-opening ceremony before the pharaoh’s statue, into the pillared hall that led to the burial chamber itself, where the sarcophagus was sunk in its rectangular recess. “Amusingly,” their guide—a goateed man in a tattered dusty suit and wire-rimmed glasses, an archaeology scholar hunched and desiccated by a life spent in tombs—announced to them, “Merneptah’s anthropoid granite sarcophagus evidently proved too massive to carry all the way into the burial chamber, so here it sits at an angle, cockeyed, abandoned for three thousand years!” He managed a dry chuckle, took off his glasses, wiped the dust from their lenses with a handkerchief, restored the handkerchief to his hip pocket and the spectacles (their curved earpieces sheathed in flesh-colored sleeves) nicely to his nose, and confided to his stifling little audience, “The gravediggers were not superhuman but human—lazy and corrupt and distractible. Look, here in this side chamber—the murals were sketched in gray ink, but never finished, never colored in! I think they are charming, unfinished. You can feel the painter’s hand, you can see his impatient strokes, made millennia ago. Even with so much time before him, he was in a hurry. He didn’t know we would come and critique his work!”

Alexandra was fighting for breath. As if in a misstep, in the gloomy tilted space, she deliberately brushed against Jane, to feel another warm, still-living body. No escape, everything around her proclaimed. No escape, however energetically and luxuriously religions make a show of rescuing us from death. There is no magic, the world is solid, clear through, like the depths of limestone above her.

After emerging from the tomb of Merneptah, the tour group, blind as bats in the oppressive sun, trooped to the tomb of Ramses VI, one of the biggest, and to that of Tutankhamun, one of the smallest, its entrance lost for three thousand years under the rubble created by the excavation of the former. “They are touching, are they not?” their guide asked. “These small bare chambers hastily devoted to the dead boy-king. They seem too small for a king. It is thought that they might have been created for his chief minister, Ay, who succeeded him as pharaoh and may have poisoned him. Adding insult to injury, as you English say, Ay then may have taken over for himself the tomb intended for Tutankhamun in the Western Valley, near that of his grandfather Amen-hotep III—who may have been, in fact, his father. This is said, but to the serious scholar it is merely gossip. It seems beyond dispute, however, that Tutankhamun was the instrument, if not the instigator, of the restoration of the cult of Amun, undoing the revolution of Amenhotep IV, who called himself Akhenaten. You have heard enough, from other guides no doubt, about Akhenaten, a religious radical, perhaps a crazy man, who wished to abolish the cult of Amun and many gods in favor of Aton, the solar disk. He transferred the capital of Egypt from Thebes to a city he built and called Akhetaton. Tutankhamun, his successor after his son-in-law Smenkhkare—Tutankhamun was also his son-in-law, having married Akhenaten’s third daughter when both were children. Tutankhamun was a sad small boy of ten when he ascended the throne and nineteen when he died. He was originally called Tutankhaton, after the solar disk. But he then turned coattails—is that a phrase?— and restored the priesthood of Amun, whose name means ‘the hidden god,’ to its old domination. Had he not turned his coat, who knows? Egypt might have embraced monotheism before the invasion of Islam. I believe you have all seen the Tutankhamun treasures, the glory of the Cairo museum. Can you imagine them crammed and jumbled into these little chambers? It makes us sad, no? The little fellow was used by the priests to bring back Amun and then was bundled off to the afterlife, possibly poisoned. The ancient politics was no more edifying than politics now.”

This earned him a polite, tired, mystified titter. If he was alluding to Mubarak, he was playing with fire. If he meant Bush and Sharon, it was a cheap shot. In any case, the entombed tourists were thirsty, and it was time to return to the boat, return to the bar for soudani and iced arrack, and fly back next morning to Cairo, to Paris, Frankfurt, Tokyo, New York. At Kennedy, that shabby old port on the ocean of the air, Jane and Alexandra, having been together without remission for twelve days, having shared bathrooms and the dark of the night, all talked out, rather sick of each other if truth be known, were ready to part—Alexandra to Fort Worth–Dallas and then Albuquerque, and Jane to La Guardia and a shuttle flight to Boston. “That was great fun,” Jane purred in a voice that didn’t seem greatly to mean it. “Such fun to be with you, Gorgeous.”

“I loved every minute,” Alexandra lied. “The Nile, the heat, the boat, the pyramids and tombs. The paintings on the walls of the brown people with straight hair and long eyes doing their daily things. Squatting, eating, carrying, gathering papyrus. Playing the harp, remember that one? They loved life. Ankh, isn’t that the word?”

“It was. Let’s do another trip soon.”

“How soon? I’m not like you. I have to save up, and rest up.”

“A year or two?”

“Wouldn’t it be fun,” Alexandra shyly wondered, “if Sukie could come along? You and I both tend to be depressive. One’s up, the other’s down. Not Sukie. She’s steady. But she’s still married,” she reminded herself.

Jane gave a strange look, askance, from her bright-brown tortoiseshell eyes. “Is she, though?” she asked. She tucked the hint of a smile into her left cheek, and there, in the ramshackle international airport, the two wicked women, not quite kissing each other on the lips, embraced and parted.

Suzanne Mitchell, as she had become with her marriage to jaunty, sandy-haired Lennie Mitchell, was a writer of a lowly sort—small-town journalism, paperback romance novels—but a writer nevertheless, married furthermore to a fast-talking computer salesman, so it was second nature to her to sit down before a humming, glaring screen and type out her thoughts as they darted through her brain. Alexandra unfolded the several smooth, laser-printed pages and read:

Dear, dear Lexa:

Jane, whom I’ve seen a fair amount of since the sad event I will describe in a minute, has been after me to phone you, but it’s been so long since we’ve been in touch obviously I’ve felt shy. The kind of closeness the three of us had in East-wick depends really on being there every day, and bumping into one another by accident on Dock Street where you could spontaneously say “Let’s duck into Nemo’s for a cup of coffee,” and having children in the same local schools with the same teachers to bitch to each other about, and all experiencing the same wretched weather and the same tedious cocktail parties, and hearing without even knowing you’re hearing it the same town fire siren go off at every noon, cutting the day in two, and sharing the same sense of cozy isolation, Boston and New York way over the horizon in different directions and Providence though closer always somehow, maybe because of the repulsive religious name, a place you stayed away from.

Connecticut turned out not to be like that. The towns are closer together, though not crammed together so one runs right into the next as in northern New Jersey—that is really repulsive—and have a more monied look (I hate to write it, it sounds so snobby), even the sections where the handymen and babysitters live. There aren’t any of those delicious lost corners, marshy waste spaces with abandoned duck blinds and rotting striped mattresses somebody dumped, that you find in Rhode Island, small as it is. The dumps, speaking of dumps, are terribly well organized for recycling—paper in one Dumpster and glass in another and colored glass in a third and cans in a fourth, all of it arranged so you just drive up and drop your nicely sorted trash down from above—and even the woods they set aside as natural Nature places seem weeded, with the fallen timber taken away and the underbrush cleared so they have that carpeted look of English beech woods in those movies about Robin Hood that even we could see as credulous children were Hollywood sets. The little downtowns all have uniform antique signage (love that word, like “dotage”) and the school grounds and children’s playgrounds are tended right to the edges. For that wasteland look you have to go to Bridgeport, which nobody does. As you may remember I came from upstate New York where everything had the look of not belonging to this century, by which I mean of course the century that’s dead and gone by now, the good old twentieth. Upstate was all nineteenth. When Lennie Mitchell brought me down here to live I couldn’t believe how self-conscious everything was, everybody facing New York City in their minds, even in Stamford when it was just Greenwich’s poor cousin, before all the companies getting away from city taxes opened branches here and put up one blue glass skyscraper after another, almost as bad as Hartford. Our section, on the edge closest to the Merritt, hasn’t been too affected yet—that “our” is a slip, Lennie’s and mine, I must get a grip. I’ve started to sniffle and get that raw-throat feeling, thinking about him. But the thing about all these suburbs is that having such a big city, the big city as far as the U.S. is concerned, keeps us on our toes and at the same time is rather demoralizing, because we don’t quite live there, we just live in its aura, so to speak. The restaurants and shops and beauty parlors aren’t quite up to Manhattan standards but they try, and even all those who don’t commute in and out, the local tradesmen and so on, share a certain New York attitude, chip on the shoulder and gritting it out and standing tall and so on, like I imagine the English when they had an Empire and then the Blitz. But people don’t know each other the way they did in Eastwick; they come and go, moving to more upscale houses or towns, and everybody terribly competitive underneath, measuring each other by the standards of New York. It was a lesson to me and I couldn’t have had the success with my writing that I have had living anywhere else. My agent lives right next door in South Norwalk and without him I’d be still doing small-town gossip columns, except all those little local newspapers are dying off, killed by blogs and e-mails, and in a strange way there aren’t any small towns any more, just malls and commercial strips and assisted-living developments between them, and there isn’t even gossip any more, the way there was when everybody was more sexually repressed. I think repression was the key to the kind of energy people used to have, we weren’t burnt-out the way people are in their twenties now, all this hooking up the young people do. Now don’t I sound prudish? And you know I’m not.

My news, in case you’re wondering why I’m writing after all these years, is that Lennie died two months ago, quite suddenly, and Jane thought you should know. She’s come back into my life almost as if she foresaw it coming. But how could she have?—he was in lovely health, never fat, always active, and gave up smoking about the time I met him, while I stupidly puffed on, though mostly only at parties and when trying to write, so they tell me my lung function is less than fifty percent. He still liked to do the organized dancing when we went to Florida for January, and tennis, just doubles, and jogged on the town paths (the local town boards plan for everything) and played squash and paddleball all winter. He dropped over in a squash court after making what the other man in there with him said was a marvellous retrieve. Just dropped there, against this wall full of dirty ball marks, and even though the other man was a doctor he was a gynecologist and couldn’t even do resuscitation properly. By the time the paramedics came Lennie was quite gone. After eight minutes, they told me, there’s bound to be brain damage, and I wouldn’t have wanted to live with that. I suppose so but I wish they had let me decide. I still didn’t like hearing it from them after the fact and can’t help resenting that Lennie’s so-called friend, being an M.D. with a cell phone right on him, didn’t get help sooner. The squash courts are in the sub-basement of a big brassy new corporate building and hard to find if you haven’t been there before.

Jane and I have been back-and-forthing a bit lately—I drive up more to her house than she to mine. Her ancient mother-in-law is rather a dear, though Jane thinks the old lady ruined her marriage to Nat Tinker. She also thinks it would do me good in my grief if I took a trip with her. With the two of you, ideally, if the trip to Egypt with just Jane Pain didn’t do you in. It sounds terribly dry and educational and brave with all those Muslims giving you dirty looks for not wearing a veil, but I don’t see how you stood all that death the Egyptians dwelt on. Those long deep passageways, I doubt I could have stood it and don’t know how you did, being such an outdoors person. Jane said you rode a camel and got a sunburn on the boat where she got a great tan. I don’t know how many steps you had to climb but I can’t do many with my emphysema. Steps were where I first noticed that I wasn’t my girlish self any more. If we ever were to go anywhere together—and I’m not sure it’s a good idea, maybe we all had our fun in life —I think it should be China. It seemed everybody we knew socially in Stamford had been to China but when I’d suggest it Lennie would say he’d rather go have a Chinese meal and pay for it and leave. He didn’t like Communists even if we had won the Cold War, as if everybody didn’t know that the Chinese are only Communists in name anymore. I picture it as a wide-open sort of place, with a big sky and huge open city squares and people eating noodles in the little alleys. The hutongs, aren’t they called? I’ve had a romantic thing about China ever since seeing Ingrid Bergman in that movie about leading a pack of children to safety in some kind of an inn. Of the sixth happiness, it just came to me. Think about it, dearest. Jane will be in touch with you also. She seems to want to devour the whole world before she leaves it, or else she just wants to stay away from her mother-in-law, who ancient or not doesn’t miss much. She has Jane’s number, is my impression when we talk (the old lady and I) briefly.

About widowhood, what can I tell you? You’ve been through it. I still keep expecting Lennie to come home at night and when he doesn’t it’s like he’s willfully refusing or up to some mischief and it makes me mad. I’m free of course of a lot of annoying male habits and laziness—the kitchen floor over by the toaster doesn’t have English-muffin crumbs all over it, for instance—but what good is freedom if nobody’s watching you have it? Lennie was a salesman and a wife can get tired of being sold things she doesn’t want much. For instance, he had to have this ski place in southern Vermont though once the children began to rebel at being herded into the station wagon every weekend we hardly ever used it, and as the mountain lost cachet—they do, you know, just like restaurants—real-estate values went way down. For another instance, he bought me one of these fashionable new stoves with smooth black tops and the burners under it just barely visible, so I kept burning myself and setting vegetables in the wrong place where they stayed raw. As his computer business picked up again what with so many companies coming out from NYC to Stamford, he bought me a heavyweight navy-blue BMW because when he met me I was still driving that gray Corvair with the top you pulled down and locked by hand. I loved that car, remember? Like sitting in a bathtub going all over town with my hair streaming behind me and Hank (my beautiful Weimaraner, remember?) sitting up in the front seat beside me with his ears flattened pink inside out. Lennie thought the Corvair was tinny and unsafe for me to be driving. The BMW, which I still have, always feels to me like a man’s fantasy car—it has this phallic stick shift on the floor I’m always jamming into the wrong gear, and it rides so you feel every bump on the road. That was manly right there. At first in Stamford—not exactly Stamford but a village on the northern edge called Rocky Ridge—I had a comfy old red Taurus that I just loved, its trunk took a week’s worth of groceries plus a golf bag. But Lennie had to buy me that expensive BMW, just to let people know we had money again. And he would make me buy flashy clothes—a “fun fur” that made me look like a stupid puffball, and backless party dresses that would give me a cold for weeks. The reason, it turned out, was that his girlfriend at the office, who kept getting younger of course, one after another, wore clothes like that. Once, we turned up at the same business party on his boss’s lawn in Old Greenwich in the same exact clingy silk print, with a sash instead of a belt. We hugged each other at the end, it was so humiliating. He would sell me his affairs, too, after I discovered them, convincing me they were my fault. But that push of his, that salesman’s constant aggravating engaging push—it’s gone, dear Lexa. The way the dead vanish is almost enough to make you believe they go somewhere else. Going from room to room in our useless oversize house here I feel like that girl in the palace where the Beast never shows himself. That silence in the hour he used to pull into the driveway—do you ever get used to it? I’m so glad you met him that time in Manhattan at the Roosevelt Grill, in case I ever forget that he really existed or come to believe he was a perfect saint.

Now that I have a little distance on him I can see he was a lot like Monty—a spiffy dresser and a male chauvinist. Sexual attraction keeps making the same mistakes. But less sardonic—he never made me feel stupid the way Monty sometimes tried to do. But, then, I was so young, just twenty, when I married him (Monty). The children have taken his death (Lennie’s) rather too much in stride, it seems to me. But why not, they’re all middle-aged, even little Bob, our one joint product (Lennie and me), on top of the three I brought with me from Monty. To the children his death is just part of Nature’s natural cycle, but to me it’s the end of my life of being important to anybody.

Give me a call if you can’t be bothered to write. I know it’s more work for most people than it is for me. The trouble with these word processors is it’s too easy to go and on, and once they’ve perfected voice recognition and transcription, won’t that be a horror of sheer unhampered babble?— just the way the world used to be when it was all tribes and shamans and oral literature. I’d love to come visit you in sunny Taos but where I used to freckle charmingly I now get a hideous blotchy sun rash. O the joys of these sunset years! Does the sun ever shine in China? I hope not. You never see shadows in the scenes on their teapots and room-divider screens, I know that.

Mucho love, long overdue,

Sukie

So, the next September, Alexandra joined the two others in the San Francisco airport, and together they flew for eleven and a half hours to Narita Airport in Japan, suspended within the engines’ giant hum. Flying in the same direction as the planet’s rotation, they arrived three and a half hours later the next day. Their inner clocks thoroughly deranged, they rose from a few hours’ attempted sleep in a transit hotel and were ushered onto an Air China flight to Beijing. After the hyper-modernity of the Narita facility, the Chinese airport seemed barny and crude, floored in uneven linoleum and echoing with the coarse, hooting laughter of the baggage handlers in their baggy clothes. China, the three exhausted women apprehended, was a jolly place, where the past was in the present tense and visitors who obeyed all the rules would come to no harm.

Sukie’s being along greatly helped Alexandra’s sense of well-being. She hadn’t seen her, the youngest and most cheerful of their little coven, since before the millennium, back when Bill Clinton was President and wriggling pitifully in the grip of the Lewinsky scandal. Jim Farlander had grudgingly consented to their last winter trip to the Caribbean, and the bargain flight came back through Kennedy, so Alexandra had suggested they take two extra nights and visit some museums, not just the Met and the Modern and the Guggenheim but the Cooper-Hewitt with its fantastic collection of American ceramics. To cement her inspiration she had called a number in Connecticut—it still rang!—and invited her old friend from Eastwick to come into Manhattan for dinner. She and Jim couldn’t get a reservation at “21,” where the famous ate, so they met the Mitchells at the grill in the Roosevelt.

Lennie had seemed a bit preoccupied and jumpy at first but on the second round of drinks began to reveal himself as a blowhard, loud like the double-breasted Harris tweed suit he had on. By the second bottle of wine with the meal, while Jim waxed more and more silent, Lennie got confiding, as though he had successfully sold them whatever it was he was selling, fuller and fuller of little twinkles and winks as he told a few stories illustrating what a lovable featherhead Sukie was, churning out these little romance novels for frustrated lamebrain women. He was that type of sandy-haired man, with even teeth, small ears, and blue eyes, who early in life got the idea, probably from his infatuated mother, that he was irresistible. He kept putting his hand on Alexandra’s forearm when the punch line of a story was approaching, and by the time they were into dessert and Irish coffee his hand, dropping casually out of sight behind the table edge, had migrated to her thigh, resting there like a heavier napkin. What she especially didn’t like about Lennie Mitchell was how mousy Sukie seemed in his presence, cowed even, with a trace of a stammer and a defensive bluestocking drabness. Her carrot-colored hair, that she used to grow as long as a flower child’s, was cut shorter and showing gray; her plump lips nibbled at each other as if she were trying to remember something, or perhaps this was just her nearsighted squint when she wasn’t wearing contacts. Her attempts to reinforce her husband and revive a conspiratorial gaiety with Alexandra seemed forced efforts, from a stressed and washed-out version of the blithe oversexed Sukie of old.

Afterwards, in their room at the Roosevelt, after the other couple had rushed off to catch the ten-seventeen, in such a flurry that they put up the feeblest token resistance to Jim’s gallant insistence on signing for the check, her husband said to Alexandra, “That’s some slick con man there. But Suzanne’s a little honey.”

His words were still cut into his memorial chamber in her mind: Suzanne’s a little honey. She had replied, “I’m glad you saw that. She was our beauty, back then. But she seemed a ghost tonight.”

Now, by a trick of lesser expectations or of fresh context, Sukie seemed her old self, giddy and crisp and even shiny, to match Chinese décor. Her hair was tinted its former color, her lipstick was glossily applied. Her body, to Alexandra’s eye, was a few pounds leaner in her late sixties than the glimmering soft shape, lithe and freckled and firm-breasted, that she presented in her thirties, filmed with droplets of condensed steam, in Darryl Van Horne’s dark-panelled hot-tub room. Alexandra had caressed this apparition with not only fingertips but a thirsty mouth. Sukie’s own lips, though now less plump with natural collagen, still had a habit of remaining parted, in a wondering way, on her face, in a lingering afterglow of astonishment.

Everything in China was more or less astonishing, beginning with their being here at all, on the other side of the world, in a country the size of the United States, with four times as many people. China within their memory-span had taken various forms: a fabled land of starving children, Pearl Buck peasants, dragon ladies, rickshaws, and comic-strip pirates; a friendly democracy ably led by Chiang Kai-shek and his glamorous Soong-sister wife; a suffering victim of the vicious Japanese and a staunch ally of President Roosevelt; a post-war, Cold War field of civil conflict wherein President Truman cannily declined to intervene and wherein the staunch Nationalists lost to the Communists; a tightly closed bastion of inimical political creed; a source of hordes of enemy “volunteers” pouring southward in Korea; a ponderous mass of robotized humanity that might swallow us if prodded at Quemoy or Matsu or Formosa; a mob of Mao-chanting Red Guards in a Cultural Revolution brutally parodying the West’s Sixties counterculture; then, after Nixon’s trip and gawky dinner toasts, an ally again, against the Soviet Union; after Mao’s death and the Gang of Four’s overthrow, a tender seedbed of budding free enterprise; after Deng Xiaoping’s triumph of pragmatism, a voracious consumer of American jobs and receiver of American dollars; and now the twenty-first century’s impending superpower, a billion three hundred million factory workers and consumers, a creditor of sagging American capitalism and competitor for the dwindling global supply of oil. There in the airport Sukie cried in her high, faintly breathless voice, “We’re going to have such fun!”

Their baggage was still to emerge on the creaky belts. Other Americans, like frogs whose eyes and nostrils emerge from the muck rimming a shallow pond, began to be visible to them. Deeper into the turmoil of arrival, their tour escort, a sallow small New Zealander whose parents had been medical missionaries in Taiwan and who had taken in Mandarin, Cantonese, and Japanese with his daily rice, appeared beyond a certain gate, and, hurling scraps of language right and left to clear a path, led the group he had collected to a waiting bus. The three women inhaled the exciting, dim-lit air, the air of China, peppered with indecipherable aromas and unintelligible announcements, a vast underworld surfacing into tourism. The bus was almost too cozy, full of contented babble all too easily understood—those languid on-rolling American voices, the drawled flirtatious “kidding,” the self-pleasing accent of the last century’s superpower, its retirees complacently settling into their seats as if at the dark start of a long movie.

The road from the airport felt lightly trafficked; young trees lined it, miles of it, and flickering low lights, like stage footlights. The city gradually enclosed the bus with illumined alleyways and low buildings roofed in red tile. “Hutongs,” Sukie pronounced, from the seat ahead.

Under a streetlight a man sat in a straight chair having a haircut, a sheet tucked around his chin just as if he were in a barbershop indoors. To Alexandra the sight, so calm and stark, seemed magical: the simplicity of using an alley as a room. The rent-free economy of it, your professional equipment pared down to a sheet and a pair of scissors.

It must have been after midnight. Jane, seated beside her, had fallen asleep, her breath rasping in a pale echo of her snores in Egypt, like a small caged animal that has given up any real hope of escape. Of the three of them, Jane, being the richest widow, had arranged for a single room, leaving the other two to share a second room. Jane’s wish to be alone made Alexandra wonder if she also had snored; it was a disconcerting thought. Jim had never complained, but, then, he was often deaf to her, sitting at his singing wheel, thinking his monotonous masculine thoughts. What a curious test Nature sets us, surrendering consciousness every day, baring ourselves to who knows what oneiric assaults and embarrassments.

The hotel loomed above its neighborhood of dark low houses like a great ship showing rows of burning lights above sullen waves. In the towering atrium a pianist, late as the hour must be, was playing Broadway show tunes for a scattering of Asian bar customers: a meditative “Blue Moon,” a bouncy “Mountain Greenery.” “Oh, I do love this crazy place!” Sukie exclaimed. “Lexa, let’s be happy here!” She had replaced Jane at Alexandra’s side. Jane had drifted off and slumped into a bloated lobby chair, thus detaching herself at a moment that should have been shared three ways.

Sharing: that was what China let them do that was harder to do in their own country, with all its private property and enlightened self-interest. They ate lunch and dinner at round tables with plates of food on great lazy Susans laden with platters that bustling waitresses replaced by the armful. Twelve or fourteen Americans at each table had to attack mounds of noodles, vegetables, pieces of meat, dumplings (especially delicious and slippery, the dumplings), and even grains of rice with nothing more acquisitive than chopsticks. The morning’s sightseeing, and then the afternoon’s, with no snacking possible, left them hungry, and there was a spiritual gain in seizing, with acquired patience and deftness, a portion as the swiftly dwindling dishes rotated by. Alexandra shared with Sukie the hour or two of recapitulation, reading, and underwear-washing in the hotel room before sleep seized them as if they were innocent children who had played hard all day. Sukie’s breathing, on her fifty percent of lung function, was not noisy; rather, it was so quiet that on the first nights Alexandra would climb out of bed and bend over and listen to make sure her friend was inhaling oxygen and expelling carbon dioxide. She resisted the temptation to caress the other woman’s hair, or touch a gleaming piece of exposed shoulder, though she did sometimes adjust the covers where Sukie, cuddling herself, had tangled them. Any more contact than that, and Jane in the next room would sense it, and wax jealous, and their precious trinity would be broken. The flaw in a threesome is that two can gang up on one.

The Great Wall, which they had come all this way to see, was their first sight, the first day, when they were all still jetlagged. The bus containing the three widows lurched and swayed on the small, twisting roads that led through the hills that climbed for an hour toward the Great Wall, nearer the capital than they had imagined. The tour was provided with not only the Taiwan-educated guide and two smiling though generally silent young Party escorts but with an American lecturer, who stood up front and fought for balance as he talked into his hand-held microphone. “Whenever there’s a problem in China,” he said, staggering sideways as the bus swung around a hairpin curve, “the government says, ‘Let’s throw a party!’ ” He went on to say, as best as Alexandra could hear him, “The first emperor of a unified China, spelled Q-I-N but pronounced ‘Ch’in,’ a man we’re going to hear a lot about on this trip, conscripted an estimated one million people, about one-fifth of China’s total workforce, to erect a continuous wall along the entire northern frontier of his newly assembled empire. Some walls already existed, built as long ago as the seventh century B.C. In the [she didn’t catch the name] desert you can find sections dating back to the second century B.C. made of twigs, straw, rice, and sand. In most other sections, rammed earth was the preferred material. The substantial section you’re going to see, of bricks and mortar, broad enough on the top for five horsemen to ride abreast, with garrisoned beacon towers equipped to set off smoke signals or fireworks in case of enemy attack, was built that way in the Ming Dynasty, fourteenth to seventeenth century, and restored to its excellent present condition twenty-five years ago by a team of German masons, engineers, archaeologists, and existentialists.”

There was laughter in the bus, a few damp firecrackers of nervous, anxious-to-please laughter, and Alexandra wondered if the word had truly been “existentialists.” Her hearing was not improving with age. But the lecturer, learning to flex his knees to cushion the swerves of the bus, frowned and persisted in what she thought might be an existential, despairing style. He frowned and brought the little microphone closer to his lips. “The fact is, it never worked. Not for Ch’in, not for the Mings. The Manchus came right in over the wall, or right through the gaps, and formed the next dynasty. Ch’in threw an entire generation into the Wall—think of it as stuck together with blood, and broken backs, and long nights trying to sleep in the cold on a dirt floor. Nevertheless, his empire crumbled anyway. His son succeeded him but couldn’t hold it together for more than four years. Ch’in was like Cromwell, a one-man dynasty. He took the title ‘First Emperor’ when he was thirty-eight and died eleven years later. But he gave China its enduring shape. He standardized its script, its weights and measures, its coinage—that little square in the center of a coin was his—and the width of chariot axles. He organized the empire into administrative units and brought under his thumb the powerful families in the capital. He wasn’t a Confucian or a Taoist but a legalist—he believed people were basically evil or at least stupid and had to be restrained by written laws, ruthlessly enforced. He was a totalitarian, not as a matter of contingency but of dogma, of doctrine. No individual counted, except himself. It was a beautiful absolutism, broken up, after his death, into warring states. We’ll see the clay army he was buried with later in this tour. He was a murderous megalomaniac, but it wasn’t enough to secure China’s borders. As history makes clear, there is no keeping barbarians out. They always eventually win. Energy comes from below, from the excluded and oppressed, from those with nothing to lose. It’s like water in a pot on a stove: the hottest, on the bottom, rises to the top.”

“He means the Arabs,” Jane muttered into Alexandra’s ear. The Chinese bus driver, perhaps losing patience with this American’s unintelligible, amplified voice, took a curve especially fast, without braking. The lecturer staggered and nearly fell down the steps where passengers boarded and disembarked. “We’ll be there in half an hour,” he announced into the microphone, and sat down in the front row.

The day had begun under a pearly overcast, but by the time the buses parked and the tourists trudged up the steep dirt slope, the sun had worked its way through and infected all things visible with dazzle. The path up to the Wall was lined on both sides by stalls selling silk scarves, cotton T-shirts lettered in Chinese characters or Roman characters, and trinkets—painted tops, toy acrobats, birds of plastic and wood that fluttered and chirped at the end of a stick, carved balls within balls, miniature pagodas, images of the Great Wall painted on porcelain ovals or stamped on round medallions—that glittered in the sun. Oppressively, the proprietors of each stall called out to the shuffling tourists, and a few intruded into the roadway, desperately thrusting some gaudy useless thing into a likely-looking Western face. Alexandra kept moving, spurning importunities with a regretful half-smile. Jane didn’t bother with a smile but kept making a sharp hand motion as if brushing away midges hovering in front of her face. Sukie smiled tentatively, with a round-eyed look of piqued curiosity, so the vendors congregated around her, shouting and upholding their wares. Her two companions thought it most politic to keep moving upward, to the Wall’s top. When Sukie, puffing slightly, caught up with them, she was wearing a conical straw hat, tied beneath her chin with a soft red string. Further, she had two more such hats in her hand, and held them out for her friends to don.

“Sssuzanne Mitchell,” Jane admonished her, emphasizing each syllable. “Think of all the germs and filth that have been breathed on it. You shouldn’t touch it, let alone buy it. They still have tuberculosis here. People sspit everywhere; I saw them doing it in the airport.”

“Oh, Jane, don’t be such a pain,” Sukie said breezily. “How often are we going to be in China? Lexa, here, take yours. They were asking fifty each but gave me three for a hundred yuan. That’s about twelve dollars. And they’re so classic. Don’t you like it on me?” She flirted her head this way and that, and tipped the hat back. Her long hair, pulled back over her tidy small ears, was a brassier imitation of its old orange color; her bangs flashed in the sun, on the edge of the shadow of the Great Wall.

“Very much, Sukie,” Alexandra said. “But maybe it’s you more than the hat.” She set her own on her head—one size fit all—and tied the crimson cord beneath her chin. She felt safer in the hat’s weightless shade. Floating motes of sunshine filtered through. Jane doubtfully followed suit, slightly out of step with her sisters in mischief.

Sukie told them, a little breathlessly, “Once I put it on, the other vendors stopped pestering me. It was magic.” Alexandra saw her lips tense, to get more air, after that little climb. They stayed open, expelling breath, trying to clear her lungs for the next breath. Pity squeezed her friend’s heart.

Alexandra said, “If you listened to the lecturer, the whole Wall is magic—a ten-thousand-mile charm against barbarian invaders.” On its top, attained by stone steps, the view of it—a broad brown-brick dragon snaking its way along a ridge from one squat tower to the next—excited in Alexandra the same sensation of lightness, of being on high, that she had felt in Canada on the boardwalk to Sanson Peak. The Great Wall, she had once read as a child in Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, is the only work of Man that could be seen by observers on the moon.

A little distance away, the Wall’s broad top held a pay-telephone booth with a sign advertising in many languages and scripts that from here you could call anywhere in the world. Though the vicinity was thronged, the booth was empty. “We could call some of our children,” Alexandra suggested.

“They wouldn’t get the wonder of it,” Sukie said. “They live in a world where when you dial the local airport for information you get somebody in India reading from a card in an accent you can’t understand.”

Jane told them, “My older son plays bridge on the Internet with a group that includes a man from Ulan Bator and a woman from Albania. They talk entirely in cards.” Alexandra tried to recall Jane’s children—there had been an obese boy and a scrawny girl and two others. The girl had a dirty face with food always stuck in her braces. They had, none of the three witches, been ideal mothers—not by the standards of today’s obsessive parents, who never let their children out of their sight, even at a bus stop just across the street—but even by the laxer standards of their less careful era Jane had been scandalously neglectful.

“But we’re not them,” Sukie insisted, trying to keep their party spirits up. “We’re pre-electronic, and thrilled to actually be here. To us the Earth is still enormous, right?” She took each companion by one hand and dragged them with her, walking and then racing, downhill, three abreast, on the top of the Wall, to the next tower, where the emperor’s soldiers had kept watch and slept and cooked, leaving smoke stains that could still be seen, centuries later. Beyond that tower, the German restorers had lost interest, and the Wall was more loosely repaired, and in another hundred yards, they could see ahead, it turned upward into an untraversable rubble, guarded by barriers. Out of breath with running and giggling, having flown on pattering feet through the askance glances of other tourists and stony-faced guards, the widows took time to peer out through the Wall’s battlements at the territory beyond, the terrain of the dreaded nomadic barbarians. Blue mountain ranges, each dimmer than the one before it, receded into the hazed sky without yielding a speck of visible habitation or a patch of cultivation. On the other side, the side to the east and south that they had come from, every slope had been terraced and flooded, every valley cupped a village, and a gaudy mess of shops and quick eateries spilled downhill from the Wall’s foundations. This was China, teeming under Heaven’s mandate.

Exhilarated by their romp along the edge of the civilized world, Sukie asked a plump American, a grotesque barbarian in Bermuda shorts, billed baseball cap, and running shoes, to take their photograph on her little digital Nikon, the newest thing, bought specially for this trip; he rapidly took several and showed them on the viewing screen what they looked like in China, their three coolie hats tipped back to show their gamely grinning elderly faces. Three magi, framed in preposterous oversize haloes of straw. “That will be our Christmas card,” Sukie promised, laughing.

How quickly, Alexandra thought, they had slipped back into being a trio, a trinity coming together to form a cone of power. It was not that she liked the other two women better than her leathery, bohemian, long-haired, jeans-clad female friends in Taos—comparatively, Sukie and Jane had narrow, Northeastern horizons—but in their company she felt more powerful, more deeply appreciated, more positively enjoyed. They had known her at the height of her desirability, in a society that, isolated from urban narcissism and yet partaking of the sex-centered excitement of the times, had valued desirability above all else. Compared with Sukie she had not been promiscuous—rather, lazily loyal to her hopeless husband and her long-term lover, the would-be husbandly Joe Marino. Compared with Jane she had been motherly and conventionally observant of traditional decencies. Yet she somehow reigned over the others, as a broader conduit into the subterranean flow of Nature, that dark countercurrent to patriarchal tyranny which witchcraft drew upon. It was chemistry: without her as catalyst, the dangerous, empowering reaction did not occur.

The next day was allotted for a bus tour of Beijing. Cleansed by setting foot on the Wall and viewing from its parapets the unpeopled blue majesty of the barbarian realms, which no wall was able to exclude, and refreshed by a night of solid sleep (Sukie did not snore, drawing breath into her damaged lungs with the lightness of a kitten, a near-inaudible sound that merged with the Western-style hotel’s fan-driven ministrations of thermal comfort; yet having another person in the room with her relaxed Alexandra, as if this other weak widow could protect her), the three tourists were led through the stately labyrinth of the Forbidden City. It was built, their lecturer told them in the lurching bus, by the third Ming emperor, to strengthen the always vulnerable northern frontier nearby. “Talk about giving a party!” he said into his microphone. “Two hundred thousand laborers slapped it up in just fourteen years, ending in 1420. It was first named the Purple Forbidden City. The North Star was called ‘the purple palace’ and thought to be the center of the universe. The emperor by association was meant to be a divine instrument of universal power. The emperors of two dynasties ruled from here until 1911, when the boy-emperor Pun-yi abdicated—poor little Pun-yi. No doubt a number of you have seen the movie, some of it filmed right here. The Forbidden City is quite a survivor. It has survived fire, war, civil war, and the Cultural Revolution, which not much else historical did. Mao thought China’s past was a dead weight on the country and had been for ages. The Forbidden City was laid out on principles first devised in the Shang Dynasty, three millennia ago, at which time our own Caucasian ancestors were painting themselves blue and chipping away at flint arrowheads.”

The bus driver, having failed, through many abrupt turns in the city streets, to throw the lecturer off his feet, braked to a stop next to Tiananmen Square. The tourists dismounted. The lecturer stood his ground in a flood of other tourist groups at the Tianan Gate, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, and shouted, “Everything is symmetrical, as you can see. All the courts and ceremonial halls are built on a north-south axis. The marble walkway is for only the emperor’s sedan chair. Everybody else, no matter how important—ministers, scribes, concubines, the empress herself—walked through side passages and doorways. Now look at us—tourists, barbarians, jengin—standing in the dead middle, where only the emperor’s sedan chair used to go! When Starbucks applied for a permit to build right next to the Gate of Heavenly Purity, Starbucks got it! Good-bye feng shui; hello, half-caf latté!”

Alexandra studied the lecturer: a short, soft-bellied, pasty man in rimless glasses, his thinning hair standing up in dry clumps, a dishevelled academic on semi-vacation, tieless and coatless and the cuffs of his white shirt rolled up in the late-summer heat, yet with something passionate and even defiant in his loud, insistently instructive voice and his beetling black eyebrows. She liked to look at men and ask herself if, when she was nubile, she would have been attracted enough to this one, that one, to go to bed with them. Sex had faded from her life years ago; even when Jim was still there it had ceased to make urgent claims; yet the reflexes, the frame of reference, remained.

Gates, courtyards, halls—of Supreme Harmony, of Preserving Harmony, of Mental Cultivation, of Complete Harmony, of Clocks and Watches—succeeded one another stupefyingly. Double eaves tiled in shiny imperial yellow curved up at the ends, against the sky. At the Gate of Heavenly Purity, even the emperor’s most trusted ministers could not pass, but had to gather outside at dawn to deliver a report. Could he hear it? Could he act upon it? Who heard his edicts, read with ultimate pomp at the Gate of Heavenly Peace? Boxes within boxes, a paralysis of harmony. Life must have collected, Alexandra sensed, in little pockets, in murmurous furtive drifts. The little wooden rooms, almost cages, in which the concubines passed their lives, made her smile in a sort of recognition: captive women, bored, filling the interminable minutes with jealous quarrels and desperate spells, their small hearts trembling in fearful hope of the emperor’s fickle favor alighting at last.

The long morning became afternoon. The lecturer led them back out, past the two-hundred-ton marble relief of nine dragons, past bronze cranes symbolizing longevity, sandalwood thrones cushioned in pale silk, and cloisonné screens, through musty treasuries of candleholders, wine vessels, tea sets, imperial seals, carved jade and coral, across floor after floor of golden tiles, and released them back at the Gate of Heavenly Peace, to the vastness of Tiananmen Square, the largest such public space in the world. The lecturer pointed out that the huge portrait of Mao hung above the gate was squarely on the imperial axis; even the Great Helmsman’s asymmetrical facial mole had been realigned. Their trip’s own helmsman, whose name was Mr. Muir, looked at his wristwatch, a big cheap one, and shouted out, “Be back at the bus in one hour. Don’t do anything barbaric.”

While Chinese children and peddlers of gimcrack souvenirs stared at them as if at exotic, human-size animals, Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie debated whether or not to get into line for Mao’s Mausoleum, at the far end of the square. “Do they still adore him?” Alexandra asked. “I thought that other one, Deng somebody, had overthrown him.”

“Not quite,” Jane snapped. “Honeymooners come, and other people in from the country. The poor, yes, still adore him. Like Sstalin in Russia—the losers under the new system sstill adore him.”

“Oh, we must do it!” Sukie said. “We’ll never have the chance again. I want to see honeymooners!”

Young newlyweds, touchingly well dressed and discreetly touching hands, did indeed compose an element of the two long lines. But also there were children, one each per pair of parents, and elderly people in pajamas, and Taiwanese businessmen in sleek dark suits, joking and smoking among themselves. The lines, kept in order by uniformed guards, moved swiftly; before she could quite believe it, Alexandra was in the hushed hall, her eyes actually resting on the globally famous face, the implacable Other, absolute ruler for twenty-seven years of a quarter of the world’s population, an emperor at last accessible to his people. The body lay in a crystal coffin, blanketed by a red flag. The face was smaller than she had expected it to be, and didn’t look like him. For all his cult of personality, Mao looked impersonal, evenly coated with orange makeup not quite the color of living skin, his face deflated and generic: it could have been anybody, at least any stolid Chinese man immobilized by taxidermy, his hair combed straight back. As Alexandra stared at the orange profile, Mao’s eye opened; its black iris seemingly slid sideways as if to see her, and then shut again, quick as a wink, the eyelid sealed like glued paper.

Her heart leaped in her chest; a soft high-pitched grunt escaped her, and the young couple behind her glanced at her resentfully, their sacred moment with the corpse marred by a female barbarian. Don’t do anything barbaric. Visible on the other side of the crystal coffin, Sukie and Jane, in the other line, were already moving by, with set respectful expressions. The lines passed through the official souvenir shop and into the clamor outside, of vendors hawking obsolete Little Red Books and paperweights preserving Mao’s image. Alexandra asked her two companions, “Did you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Make Mao wink at me. I nearly died of fright, right on the spot. If I’d fainted or screamed we all would have been clapped into jail for disturbing the peace.”

Sukie laughed gaily. Jane seemed determined not to apologize. She said without smiling, “We couldn’t ssee if it worked or not. Nothing happened on our sside of his profile.”

Sukie tried to soften the trick, explaining, “It was just that we could see you wearing this look of fake solemnity, like an atheist taking mass, so we cooked up a little tease.”

Alexandra protested: “I was just blending in. They can see I’m not Chinese, but maybe they can think I’m a fellow traveller.”

“Lexa,” said Sukie fondly, “you’re such a darling goody-goody. And so conceited, really. Why would he wink at you, especially? He’s been lying there for years, with millions going by.”

Jane added, rather angrily, “They know why you’re in line. Ssimple, sstupid curiosity. You don’t give these people credit for being as sophisticated as they are. They have the Internet now—they know all about the West. They know how childlike we are, wanting to see Mao’s body. They know how we used to have his picture up in all the college dorms, even though he’d promised to bury us.”

“That was somebody else,” Sukie said. “That funny bald Russian with all the consonants in his name. I loved him when he was in Hollywood, acting up. Remember?”

Alexandra continued to protest. “But he did wink,” she said. “I wondered if the couple behind me saw it, but I didn’t know how to ask them. They acted a little annoyed.” She was jealous, in truth, that the other two women had ganged up on her, bewitching her, if only for a second.

And the other two sensed that they had trespassed, however playfully, against their trinity. With their reunion their powers were returning as prickings, foreshadowings, a girlish relish in malice, in maleficia. They agreed, over dizzying plum brandy in the hotel bar, that their next illusory projection—this faintest, flimsiest exercise, scarcely more supernatural than hypnosis and female intuition—would come from all three, united under their cone of power, against an outsider.

Next day, the tour flew in two hours to ancient Xian, the emperor Ch’in’s capital city, site of matriarchal neolithic settlements dating back to 4500 B.C.: Xian, birthplace of Chinese pottery and, much later, of Chinese Communism. North and west of the city lay many imperial tombs, including Ch’in’s, not yet excavated, though it held such rumored wonders as rivers of mercury. His buried army of terra-cotta warriors was discovered, a mile away, in 1974, when farmers digging a well unearthed some sculpture. Mr. Muir (“Not D. Muir,” Jane punned), swaying and nearly toppling at the front of the bus, told them all this. Then he led them into the great shed, equipped with touch-screen computer displays and a 360-degree movie, erected over the pits containing ranks of terra-cotta soldiers, numbering in the thousands, though only a thousand or so had been completely pieced together by archaeologists. “Pit One,” Mr. Muir told them, as they clustered tightly around to hear him above the noise of other tourists and other lecturers on the walkway around the pits, “consists of eleven parallel sunken corridors. They were originally roofed with wood covered in straw matting and clay. The roof collapsed over the years, and the soldiers were crushed. Their legs are solid, but their torsos are hollow. Hands and heads were added later, with features like ears and beards sculpted last. No two faces are said to be alike, but I doubt this. I think there were four or so basic types and the system was mix-and-match. A range of ethnic types is indicated—perhaps the emperor’s boast of his empire’s diversity. The infantrymen have no armor or helmets; it was more to the point militarily that they could move fast. Bowmen had chariots. Queen Elizabeth II, one of the few Westerners ever allowed to stand down there with the army, was given a replica of a chariot as a souvenir. Well, what else can I say? The attempt at individualization is interesting, isn’t it, coming from a legalist tyrant? Compare it, those of you who have been, with the art on Egyptian tombs—everybody but the pharaoh and his queen is interchangeable, standardized. The thing about these soldiers, that makes them such a hit, is how natural they look. I’ve had women, widows, who tell me they’d like to take one home as a husband. He wouldn’t snore, I promise you that.”

Widows, snoring—Alexandra’s scalp and the back of her neck tingled. It was as if Mr. Muir had invaded her head before they could invade his. They had settled upon him as their victim, if a prank was to be pulled. At this moment, obliging laughter from his circle of close listeners made him feel he should produce another joke; his face slightly bulged as he tried to think of one and failed. As if to push everybody away, Mr. Muir said loudly, “Walk around. Don’t just hang here. Go to the back, where the soldiers are still being dug up. Bits and pieces, it’s not easy. In Pit Two you can see excavations in progress—ant work, the way it’s always been in China. You can take pictures now. Ten years ago, you couldn’t; they’d snatch the camera right out of your hand. If you come to China as often as I do, you can feel the paranoia getting less, a little less every time. Soon we’ll be more paranoid than they. Move around, look and learn. We’ll meet at the chariot pavilion in forty minutes.”

Though Mr. Muir—Eric, she had learned, was his first name—wanted to be alone, Alexandra and some others, including Sukie and Jane, stayed by his side, there at the railing, looking down upon the slightly irregular ranks of clay soldiers advancing toward them, in battle order, facing east, whence the emperor Ch’in thought his enemies in the hereafter might come. The soldiers’ impassive silence and stillness took on a tinge of menace. In Eric Muir’s eyes, they began to move—a particle of motion on the periphery of his vision, a warp like a bubble in old glass. A distortion of transparency, an elusive twitch. His eyes stung, as if with too many hours of reading, and he removed his rimless glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose to clear his brain.

Alexandra inhaled the smell of clay from the great pit; with it came an odor from the chunky lecturer’s body, from his armpits and those hidden creases where sweat congeals. Some men, even unbathed, are odorless, like her first husband, Oswald Spofford, and others strengthen their masculine presence with a tangy blend of leather and horse and tobacco and whiskey and clay, like Jim Farlander. Mr. Muir was one whose flesh, forgotten in his cerebral pursuits, had about it the scent of stale secretions and midnight oil gone rancid. It was a distasteful but a male smell, recalling her to the lost demimonde of physical intimacy, of grateful shamelessness and interpenetration.

Eric Muir replaced his glasses and, there was no doubt, the terra-cotta soldiers were moving, not swinging their arms and legs and shouting out a marching song but advancing like oceanic waves that crested and fell forward and sucked back without altering the underlying volume of cold, submarine depths. Their weapons, bronze scythes whose wooden handles had ages ago rotted away, shook as if being brandished, and now he could hear their chant as they marched toward slaughter, slaughtering others and being slaughtered, rhythmic corrugations in the crowd noise caught beneath the roof of the great modern shed erected above the uncovered pits. The chant went: Da, sha, xie, si. Fight, kill, blood, death. That was China, he perceived— millennia of slaughter, war, famine, floods, torture, of being buried alive, being skinned alive, being worked to death, but there was never enough death to relieve the land of its burden of people. The army kept coming, advancing, epitomizing the atrocious history of mankind.

He wondered if he was going mad, by himself or in the grip of a group hallucination. He turned to the person who happened to be nearest him, the biggest and broadest of the three old gals, widows, who clung together with a somewhat sinister closeness. This one might have been a beauty once; there was something self-satisfied about her mouth, which was teased by a smile between her curiously cleft chin and the tip, more subtly cleft, of her nose. She appeared intent upon the sight of the army below, and her two friends, not far behind her, actually had their eyes shut, as if concentrating upon an inner vision.

Noticing his questioning stare, his air of agitation, the woman asked, “Is something the matter, Mr. Muir?”

He lied, “No,” but croaked on the monosyllable.

She took pity. “Did you see them move? I did.”

“You did?”

“I thought so, for a moment. They’re quiet now. It must be something they’re working on—you know, holograms.” “Oh, yes,” he agreed, relieved. “The new Chinese. They love high-tech toys.”

And the tour went on, to four days on the Yangtze, through picturesque gorges soon to be flooded by the people’s inexorable progress, then to Chungking, where Vinegar Joe Stilwell’s headquarters was eerily preserved in its honorable wartime drabness and modesty, and on to the River Li, where giant rock-faces seemed to hold in their wrinkles columns of ancient inscription and where emaciated fishermen squatting on their haunches poled their delicate boats skimmingly along, and finally to Shanghai and Hong Kong, congested soaring cities of the future, the future when the world shall be nothing but cities, cities and deserts making the air tremble and melting the glaciers and the poles in the devastating global warming.

China delighted the three women. Each day dawned with a new bauble, a fresh sight or two to see, in colors as fresh as wet paint. The vast land felt corrupted by time and suffering but—save for a few controlled churches left behind by centuries of spurned mission effort—innocent of Christianity, the Christianity that had persecuted witches with the fury of its own denied desires. Here, the air felt clear of that particular history, of those tyrannical ghosts preaching sin and salvation, and the Godforsaken women in their impudent tourism felt free.