iii.   Guilt Assuaged

THE WOMAN at the other end of the line assured Alexandra that the Emergency Medical Technicians knew just where the Lenox Mansion Seaview Apartments were—“Off the beach road, up there hidden on the left,” the dispatcher stated, dropping into chattiness. Yet an agonizing fifteen minutes passed before the ambulance siren sounded, first in the distance and then enormously close, its cry cut short in a screech of brakes and the crackle of driveway gravel. At first, in those minutes, Sukie chafed Jane’s cooling hands while Alexandra tried, with humiliating incompetence and revulsion, to breathe life into Jane’s wet, slack mouth and to thump action back into her heart. Her maneuvers felt ungainly and panicky and futile, even as she tried to remember, from episodes of idly watched hospital dramas on television years ago, what else she might do to keep Jane from slipping deeper down into the chasm that had abruptly opened beneath them. There was still, it seemed to her, a subterranean stream gurgling in Alexandra’s ear when she pressed it to her friend’s scrawny breast. Jane’s eyes had closed and her body no longer resisted its invisible tormentor.

The first high wave of the crisis had washed away the women’s awareness that they were in the condition of Eve, but then as with the couple in the Garden they knew, and were afraid. “They’re on the way?” Sukie asked, her face stretched so smooth by panic that she looked to Alexandra young, a near-girl again. “My God, Lexa, we must get dressed! We must dress Jane! Where did she put her clothes?”

“She showered on her own, they must be in her room.” A great thickness of circumstance clogged Alexandra’s brain; the faster her heart beat, the slower she seemed to move, her knees and hands jutting into view like the camera operator’s in an inept video. She had to push herself to enter Jane’s little windowless room, which already had a crypt’s stillness. Black slacks and a tan jersey, with underwear on top, were primly folded on her narrow single bed. Her shoes, simple severe Boston-style low heels, were tidily toed in under the bed. How innocent and defenseless they suddenly seemed, useless! The other two renters had stuck her back here as if she were a maiden aunt, or a troublesome child, in this room where sunshine entered only through a clouded plastic skylight. By sharp electric illumination Alexandra caught sight of herself in the big mirror on the back of Jane’s door, her arms holding Jane’s clothes, her shoulders and lower body bare. Her mouth shocked her by being smeared with bright red: Jane’s blood, from the moments when she had tried to lend her her breath.

Dressing the unresisting body brought back the unpleasant sensations of dressing a child—the sulky refusal of limbs to bend the right way, the little surges of obstinate dead weight. Sukie, tugging and pushing with her, said, “Remember the girdles they still made us wear in the Fifties? With the snaps for long stockings? Wasn’t that barbaric?”

“Atrocious,” Alexandra agreed. “Your hips got stinking hot.”

“Thank God for pantyhose.”

“Thank the Goddess, I would think.”

“Boy, after this, keep that Goddess away from me.”

As they together tugged up the slacks, Alexandra asked, “Would you have guessed Jane would wear such low-slung underpants? Lace-edged yet.”

“She had that funny little husband to keep interested. It took a lot to arouse him, Jane told me.”

“And me.”

“And, then, it’s so hard to throw underwear away. You think, Oh, it’ll go through the wash once more, what the hell.”

As they lifted Jane up to do the bra and jersey, Alexandra timorously asked, “Does she feel warm enough to you?”

“Well,” Sukie responded, “I don’t notice blood pooling in the fingertips. That’s often a clue, in murder mysteries.”

“Could you reach me the portable shaving mirror from the altar? I’ll hold it in front of her mouth.”

“Oh, please, Lexa. What can we do in any case but what we are doing? Make her presentable.”

“I know, I know. Damn it, I know there’s something else we could be doing, if we were doctors or better witches.”

“If we were better witches this wouldn’t have happened at all,” Sukie said. Fetching the mirror, she hesitated at the entrance to the magic circle, then scrupulously moved the broom, or besom, aside, rather than step over it as if its magic were null. Held to Jane’s mouth, the mirror, meant a few minutes ago to serve as a window into the other world, sent magnified reflections of Jane’s features skidding; Alexandra’s hand shook, but even so the mirror caught bits of mist, of life-breath.

“What do you think it was?” Sukie mused. “She just sort of exploded.”

“She kept blaming electricity,” Alexandra recalled. “There. How does she look?”

The third woman’s body lay stretched on the carpet with a strangely bridal air, having been dressed by others. A corner of her lips tucked in as when she had made a pun she was pleased with. Her hands were crossed on her chest; they looked too large and veiny for so petite a woman.

“Wedding rings,” Alexandra remembered. “Get them.”

As she obeyed, Sukie said, “We better pick up all this stuff before the paramedics get here.”

“Don’t call it ‘stuff.’ Call it ‘tools.’ Or ‘energy channellers.’ ”

“And vacuum up the circle on the carpet.”

“Our magic circle,” Alexandra said, “short-circuited.”

“You sound like Jane. This is all too terrible. I can’t believe it’s happened.” Sukie squatted down, her thighs fattening, her breasts lightly swinging, to put Jane’s wedding ring back on the unfeeling hand.

“The left hand,” Alexandra reminded her.

“Of course, sweetie. The one with the calluses.”

Alexandra’s ring was no less reluctant to squeeze past her second knuckle on the way on than it had been on the way off. “We must get dressed ourselves,” she said.

“I keep forgetting I’m naked. Isn’t that crazy?”

“You look darling.” Alexandra guiltily gazed down at their unconscious partner in sin. She felt a need for some kind of ceremony. “We love you, Jane,” she called, over a widening gulf.

Sukie repeated, “We love you, Jane. Hang in there.”

And the two of them hastened to retrieve their clothes and neaten their hair and, in Alexandra’s case, wash her face and apply fresh lipstick. The siren of rescue was heard a mile away, halfway up the beach road where the old apple orchard had blossomed and borne fruit before being turned into tract houses, and grew louder approaching the causeway, and wound its whooping bleat around the mansion before braking on the gravel below the windows. Sukie hastily gathered up the cards, the bell, the mirror, the candles, the breadboard, and the brass bowl holding the flaky ashes of the two fiery invasions of the astral plane; she carried these things all into the kitchen and slammed cabinet doors while Alexandra pushed a roaring Electrolux over the sacred ring. The Cascade pellets rattled in the extender wand and pelted in the flexible hose, windblown into a netherworld populated by dust mites.

The downstairs doorbell rasped. Sukie buzzed the visitors in. The stairs shook with a thunder of footsteps; the EMT team rushed through the open door, in their lime-green scrubs. There were three of them, two men and a woman, all younger than any of the widows’ children. The man with the most equipment attached to him said breathlessly, “We had a hard time finding this place. Nobody in town wanted to tell us.”

The woman, who carried the least equipment, wrinkled her nose, smelling the sweet candle smoke and noticing the freshly vacuumed swaths on the carpet. But the emergency lay stretched out before them; within ten minutes they took Jane away on a stretcher, still alive, they promised, but swaddled to her chin in a silver thermal blanket and hooked up to colorless drips that fed into both her wrists.

She died in the Westwick Hospital that night, or, rather, early the next morning, when the waning moon, like a wafer being dunked, was surrendering its glow to dawn’s first tea-colored tinge. Her abdominal aorta had burst and there was no repairing the rupture. Blood had swamped her insides. Doc Pat was to have read the X-rays next morning, and his son in Providence had been going to propose a preëmptive operation, which for a woman her age, with her recent history of uncertain health, carried significant hazards. No one, the medical establishment assured her two stricken friends, was at fault. As deaths go, Jane’s had been quick and easy—among friends, not painless but the pain lasting only a few seconds before her consciousness closed down.

Of these three, Jane had been the only witch to truly fly, and in death she lifted the other two out of Eastwick. After a mere month the town had re-exerted the spell that had mired the unfortunate trio decades before—the curious sense that at the town’s borders meaningful reality ceased. Their plans, discussed by phone and e-mail all spring, to use Eastwick as a springboard for improving trips elsewhere—up to Providence and its museums, down the coast to New London, over to Newport—had proved too ambitious. Beneath the seductive sun of daily habit, of meals and errands and the threefold pursuit of various threads of local interest, inertia had set in.

Now, with Jane’s death and the social arrangements it compelled, the outer world pounced, exhilarating and confusing the two survivors with its color and variety. Brookline, that seceded civic entity fastened to Commonwealth Avenue like a big tick sucking vitality from Boston’s body politic, was, between Beacon Street and Route 9, all curving streets and multi-million-dollar homes of brick and stucco set on small, earnestly green lush lawns overloaded with manicured shrubs and select trees. The Tinker house had a deeper front yard than most, and a higher, darker profile, crowned by a dormered third story with a turret as empty as a church belfry.

Sukie had already met the mistress of this mansion, but Alexandra was unprepared for the shock of magic imparted, with a gleam of mischief, by a century’s longevity. Death had apparently chosen to overlook this woman—evidence, Alexandra conjectured, remembering the trip she and Jane had taken together, that the Egyptian hope of eternally prolonged ankh had a possible practical basis. The remarkably old lady was the size of a thirteen-year-old, or a carefully packed mummy. She met them in her entrance hall, at the foot of a great wide walnut staircase that diminished upward into a gloom of darkening wallpaper. She had descended to her daughter-in-law’s funeral party by means of a cage elevator whose shaft was installed beside the staircase and rose through its turns like a staff through the snakes of Mercury’s caduceus; since its spindly frame offered no substantial obstacle to the eye, Mrs. Tinker’s descent, that of a veritable dea ex machina, was observed with wonder by the mourners gathered on the terrazzo first floor. As gently as if entrusting to Alexandra’s broad hand the delicate treasure of a stuffed extinct bird, she laid four dry fingers in the younger old woman’s palm, which was moist in the humid heat of early August in the East.

“So you’re Alexandra,” Mrs. Tinker said in a creaky, rustling, but distinctly articulated voice. “Jane adored you.” The creases in her cheeks were so deep they suggested streaks of warpaint on the face of an Indian brave; her face overall was the parched yellow-brown that cheap books turn at the edges of each page, without being directly touched by sunlight. Her lower eyelids had sagged, exposing the palest of pinks on their inner sides.

Adored me? Alexandra asked herself. Could it be true, when her own adoration tended toward Sukie, and both she and Sukie were slightly repelled by Jane’s livid aura of rage and doom? “We loved her,” Alexandra said, speaking softly, as if the slightest gust of air would shatter the apparition before her. Even the black folds of Mrs. Tinker’s silk mourning outfit looked perilously brittle.

“I’m so glad, then,” she brought out in her husk of a voice, “she was with the two of you when her end came.”

Her end—no euphemism here, no talk of “passing,” and yet no terror, no noisy modern nihilism. The phrase made death seem comfortable and limpid and natural, the fruit of year upon year, decade upon decade, its fall finally met with a vanished era’s stoic upper-class manners. Detecting Alexandra’s interest in the topic, Mrs. Tinker told her, “We must all come to the end.” Yet she said this with the lightness of one to whom it did not apply, and with a smile of startling elasticity in the mummified brown face—a stretch that tugged her scored cheeks with a darting, almost girlish tension. Her lips were no ruddier than the skin around them, but fleshier. She had been a beauty, Alexandra suddenly saw.

As suddenly, she confessed to the ancient woman, “I haven’t quite assimilated that yet. I’m not sure Jane had, either. Her last look at me—do you want to know?”

“Yes. Of course. One must always know whatever there is to know.”

“—seemed indignant.”

“Jane was vexed,” Mrs. Tinker pronounced. “And in a hurry. Like a metronome. Have you ever tried to play a musical instrument to a metronome?”

“No,” Alexandra said, nervously, for she felt more guests behind her, coming in at the great front door. “I’m a musical dunce. I always envied Jane her talent.”

“She was a metronome set too fast for my son’s and my taste,” the old woman resumed, blinking away the other’s interjection. “We had set a largo pace in this household, and I fear it chafed my daughter-in-law’s patience. And here is the lovely Suzanne,” she continued, turning just the small amount needed to change the angle of her attention, like a calibrated figure on a clock. Sukie had joined them, bringing her warmth and curiosity and determination to be noticed. “Hello again, my dear. What a sadness, since last we welcomed you to this house.”

She is one of us, Alexandra saw. A heartless sharp-eyed witch. She is small and incisive and witty and wicked, like Jane. Men marry their mothers. Nat had married his mother, and of course the two women had hated being duplicated in the same house. The entire spiritual architecture of their household—the two women as mutually repellent as the like poles of two magnets, and suspended between them the little son-husband, taking shelter in his antiques, his clubs, his feckless good works—was bared to Alexandra in an instant of closing her eyes; she felt the tension still in the air, in the weight borne by the slanting, polish-soaked dark woodwork.

Sukie, too, was experiencing second sight: she blurted to the widow Tinker, “I can’t believe Jane is really gone. I expect her to pop up at any second.”

“And spoil my party,” the old lady rasped, giving another of her unexpectedly wide-lipped smiles; the girl she had once been shone through, from deep in the last century.

The party was assembling, milling about awkwardly in the shadowy high hall. Jane’s mother-in-law turned and introduced Alexandra and Sukie to a bulky middle-aged man with a sloping back to his head, which was heavily thrust forward, like an American buffalo’s, and a gaunt woman wearing a desperate amount of makeup. “I’m sure you remember Jane’s wonderful children,” Mrs. Tinker said and, with a senile lack of ceremony, turned away.

Thus confronted, Alexandra apologized to the two. “I didn’t recognize you. It’s been so long. You’re all grown up.”

“And then some,” the fat-necked man said without smiling. “We remember you, though.”

Of course. A fat boy and a skinny girl. They had been obtrusively present in Jane’s ranch house, running in and out of the kitchen begging for attention and for dinner, the night the three women had concocted Jenny’s fatal spell. Exploring their liberated powers, they had had little patience with their children. They had felt that stupid women since Eve had been docile, loving mothers—perhaps not Eve, considering how Abel and Cain turned out. At any rate, motherhood had been thoroughly tried, in sorrow and out of it, and it hadn’t been enough.

There was a tense, resentful silence, which Sukie tried to fill, dredging up these children’s names with her reporter’s trained memory. “Roscoe and Mary Grace, right? And there were two others, younger or older, I forget which.”

“Younger,” said the sullenly staring hulk, in his double-breasted black suit. It was he, Sukie realized, who was the Internet bridge player, his huge head thrust forward toward the four-sided computer screen, the dummy imaged for all to see. “We were four. The four little Smarts.” Unexpectedly, his lips flicked back in a mirthless smile, revealing small, stained teeth.

“Everybody had four children back then,” Sukie gamely offered.

Alexandra asked, “Your father. Sam Smart. Is he still alive?”

“No” was the monosyllabic answer.

The gaunt woman, her eyelids loaded with turquoise tint, decided to join in. “Dad died,” she explained, exposing her own teeth; they were long and unnaturally straight.

“I’m so sorry,” Alexandra said.

“He and Mom are together again now,” the man said.

“Really? How will Mr. Tinker like that arrangement?”

Roscoe’s impressive brow lowered in her direction. “It’s all explained in the Bible.” His face was doleful and gray.

“Is it really? I must look up the passage.” Alexandra revised her opinion; it wasn’t that Jane had been neglectful, it was that her children, fat or skinny, were odious.

Sukie politely intervened. “The other two. Are they here, too?”

“No,” came the reluctant answer. “Jed’s in Hawaii. Nora married a Frenchman and they can’t be reached in August.

They’re skin-diving and doing dope in Mozambique.”

“How extraordinary the world is!” Sukie desperately exclaimed. “Everything coming closer. We’re widows now, and we love travelling. Your mother travelled with us.”

“Roscoe hates travelling,” his sister said. “He gets claustrophobia in the airplane and then agoraphobia when it lands.”

“You think about it too much,” Sukie advised him, as pert as a maiden facing up to the Minotaur. “Take two drinks at the airport bar and you’ll wake up wherever you’re going.”

The conversation was mercifully cut short by the sharp thump, three times, of the ancient hostess’s cane on the foyer floor. With one paper-brown hand bunched on the cane’s handle and the other clinging to the bent arm of a broad-backed African-American in a driver’s uniform, Mrs. Tinker led the assembled mourners out into the sticky white sunshine. A line of cars glared and sparkled blindingly in the driveway, stretching from the porte cochere back to the curb and out along the street. The mourning mother-in-law was settled into the lead Cadillac, behind black windows; next came the two dreary children and their spouses, who for this family observance had demurely donned cloaks of invisibility. Sukie and Alexandra followed far down the line, in Lennie Mitchell’s navy-blue BMW. Nat Tinker’s pet Jaguar had been swiftly reclaimed, along with Jane’s pathetic leavings of clothes and toiletries, as part of her estate.

In the privacy of the car, Sukie urgently announced, “I saw him.”

“Saw who?”

“Him. The man Jane saw on Vane Street, outside Doc Pat’s.”

“Really?”

“Really. He looks just like she said, like an angel gone a little heavy and seedy. He was at the back of the crowd in the foyer, coming out of the other room as we shuffled out. I saw him just for a second, but he stood out. He wasn’t wearing the proper sober kind of clothes.”

The church was not far away in the twisting, tree-shaded streets—a modestly posh structure, half-timbered in requisite Episcopal style, of iron-tinged fieldstone. This was a memorial, not a burial, service. Jane’s body, that flat-chested round-assed little body that had tempted Sam Smart and Raymond Neff and Arthur Hallybread and Nat Tinker into coitus, was a canister of ashes now, no more than would fill a saucepan: all those bones and tendons and bodily fluids, that agile tongue and insistent sibilant voice and the glittering wet light of her tortoiseshell-brown eyes reduced to gray powder and calcite chips and already slipped into a small square hole in Mount Auburn Cemetery two miles away across the Charles. This had been her world, and her two companions in bygone mischief listened as a Jane they had scarcely known was exposed to public view.

The pair of adult children present read aloud excerpts from letters Jane had written to Samuel Smart when he was in the Army waiting to be shipped to Korea—a different Jane, more kittenish and collegiate than the one Sukie and Alexandra had met in Eastwick, by which time Sam Smart had become a comic memory, a pinch of the dead past sprinkled into the conversation for piquancy. She missed him, the letters declared, she prayed for his safe return, she lived in hopes of bearing his children, knowing they would be beautiful and precious.

Then, striking a balance between the husbands, a tall, square-shouldered, ostentatiously lean gentleman in a blazer and close haircut stiffly climbed up into the pulpit. He spoke at first with a diffident hesitancy that made the congregation nervously shift in their pews. Then, warming as he adjusted to the height and sacrosanct strangeness of the pulpit, he assumed the sonorous ease of a well-practiced toastmaster; he leaned out toward his audience and confidentially shared his impression of how his old friend Nat Tinker, whom he had known since they had been shy, puny first-graders together at Browne & Nichols School, and with whom in the years since he had golfed and sailed and shot quail in South Carolina and elk in Alaska and sat on many worthy boards—how dear old Nat had bloomed, had “come out of himself” once married to the late, “far-from-plain” Jane. He had never, he asserted, while his lean, white-capped head tilted this way and that like a hungry gull’s, seen such a transformation as had overtaken his beloved friend upon his marriage, on the far side of forty—when he should have been, by all actuarial charts, beyond redemption—his marriage to this “ineffable soulmate,” dear departed Jane.

“Not even on the occasion,” he amplified, “of his getting a hole-in-one at the twelfth at the Country Club—a short but testing, as I need not explain to many of this congregation, par-three on a platform green from an elevated tee—did Nat radiate the satisfaction and, can I say, the primal joy which his bride mysteriously inspired in him.” What an old chauvinist pig this fancy talker is, Alexandra was thinking. There was nothing mysterious: Jane knew how to be dirty, and men need dirty, especially class-bound cases of delayed development and excess propriety like poor little Nat Tinker, pussy-whipped by a mother who even now didn’t deign to die. The eulogist archly suggested as much: “Jane rescued him, it seems not too much to say, from his cherished antiques; she brought into his life of bachelor connoisseurship and conscientious altruism a beautiful object—a ‘piece,’ as they say in the trade—he could touch without fear of its breaking.” Shock muffled the responsive tittering from the pews; old-fashioned decorum regained some of its lost force in an Episcopal church—the Gothic arches and crock-ets in sombre dark woodwork, the Gospel illustrations in leaded stained glass, the brass cross suspended overhead like a giant draftsman’s tool, a pattern of rectitude. The Yankee eulogist winced, swallowing his disappointment at his jest’s miscarrying. He hurried on: “Jane brought to the marriage an ease with Boston ways, an impudent wit, a dazzling smile, and a wicked sense of humor—her puns!—that swept into the well-stocked chambers of my old friend’s staid life like a gust of April air when in the days of our youth the maids would energetically throw open the windows for spring cleaning.” He reared back in the pulpit, tucking back his shoulders, to gauge the reaction to this sally. It fascinated Alexandra to see how the courtly oldster, with his long beak and crest of fresh-cut white hair, preened on the fact of his own continuing survival as he gaily danced on the edge of gossip and scandal. In a gentler tone, confidingly leaning into a patent untruth, he told the congregation, “The harmony and affection instantly kindled between Jane and her mother-in-law was beautiful to behold and to feel in their shared home, as within a castle doubly secured by the rule of two magnificent queens.” He bowed his head to the front pew. “We all unite in sympathy, Iona, with you in your recent double loss—a beloved only son and a daughter-in-law who came to be loved as a daughter—knowing that in your century of gracing this Earth you have acquired strength and wisdom enough to sustain not only your own soul in this needful hour but that of your kin as well. Bless you, my dear treasured friend.”

Iona Tinker, whose antique first name Alexandra had not heard before, sat unflinching in the front pew, rigidly enduring this stately tirade, in her weeds of faded, brittle silk, beside Jane’s two neglected children and their self-effacing spouses and a few youthful samples of the third generation and even some restless infants from the fourth. The tribe continues, though its individual members fall.

And as to Jane, their wicked witchy Jane, the more she was extolled, the more absent she seemed—a little square hole in the church’s atmosphere, suspended above their heads like the rectilinear cross. The ideally unnoticed suspension wires stretching from its arms to the dark-stained ceiling beams caught accidental bits of light like the brief streaks of shooting stars. The suave eulogist reluctantly wound up, searching in vain for the perfect word to close Jane’s case. He had not liked her, it was clear to Alexandra. Nobody here had. She was of their sort and yet not, and that was worse than being a raw outsider, anxious to conform, easy to excuse. Only other witches could have liked Jane, in their collusion of rebellion against the oppressions of respectability. And the eulogist had failed to mention the one passion that had lifted her into selflessness—her music, her cello, the pain in her left, fingering hand.

With relief the congregation fell back into the Book of Common Prayer. The voices rose in petition, a monotonously growling beast snapping up each morsel of the martyred Cranmer’s phrasing. The Prayers of the People were led by Roscoe’s pale, frail wife, hitherto invisible. Her reedy voice bored in with the insistence of a weevil’s jaws: “Lord, who consoled Martha and Mary in their distress; draw nearer to us who mourn for Jane, and dry the tears of those who weep.”

“Hear us, Lord.”

“You wept at the grave of Lazarus your friend; comfort us in our sorrow.”

“Hear us, Lord.”

“You raised the dead to life; give to our sister Jane eternal life.”

“Hear us, Lord.”

“You promised Paradise to the thief who repented; bring our sister Jane to the joys of Heaven.”

“Hear us, Lord.”

Alexandra’s eyes burned and watered as her tongue and throat joined in the huge, futile chorus. Jane was gone; she, Alexandra, would be next. Already, from the remote provinces of her body, her numb feet and the disused interior of her womb, bulletins foretelling her death kept arriving; fits of dizziness and nausea signalled that her organic fabric was rubbing thin; the wall between inner and outer had become permeable. Tears broke down her face.

At her side, Sukie asked in a whisper, “What does going ‘from strength to strength’ mean? ‘In the life of perfect service’?”

Sukie had never had a churchgoing husband; both Monty Rougemont and Lennie Mitchell had been modern men, dapper scoffers at otherworldly consolations. Whereas Alexandra’s Oswald Spofford had been dutifully devout, serving on church councils and bribing the children to go to Sunday school, and Jim Farlander had some supernatural inklings left over from his days as a peyote-smoking hippie. “It’s about the levels of Heaven,” she answered, as the first line of the concluding hymn, “Morning Is Breaking,” surged on all sides in the uplifted voices of elder Brookline. “Life goes on,” she quickly continued to explain. “Change goes on. Heaven is not static. It’s a place where things continue to happen, like Earth.”

At the service’s conclusion, as they filed out, Sukie asked, like an annoying child, “What does it mean, ‘The peace that passeth human understanding’?”

“Obviously, dear, it means it’s beyond understanding. Use your head, for Heaven’s sake.” Was this to be their new relationship, mother and querulous child? Embarrassment over her tears for Jane, which Sukie must have noticed, had shortened Alexandra’s temper.

“There’s a reception afterwards, in the parish house,” the younger, rebuked woman said. “Do you want to go to it?”

“No. Do you?”

“Yes,” Sukie said.

“Why? Haven’t you had enough of this scene?”

“No.” She tried to explain: “Churches interest me. They’re so fantastic. And suppose the silver man comes?”

“Silver man?”

“That Jane saw, outside Doc Pat’s.”

“Sweetie, please don’t go crazy on me.” Yet Alexandra allowed Sukie to follow the drift of the crowd, not down the aisle to the narthex but through a double swinging door to one side of the chancel, down a linoleum-floored hall past the choir-robing room and some ministerial offices, on into the parish hall, already a sociable hubbub. There were more people than had been privileged to gather at the Tinker mansion. Mrs. Tinker, closely tended by the dapper paid minion whose snotty telephone voice offended Alexandra years ago, formed a reception line with Roscoe Smart and his skeletal sister Mary Grace. Again, Alexandra thrilled to the touch of the old lady’s warm brown hand, the four fingers laid parallel into her palm like pretzel sticks. Beyond, a long table covered with a white cloth held plates of cookies and watercress and pimiento-spread sandwiches from which the bread crust had been trimmed, and a crystal bowl filled with a punch the chemical color of lemon Jell-O. The parish hall extended, in subdued form, the ecclesiastical mode of the church itself: dark-stained beams crisscrossed overhead, creating triangular cobweb sites.

Alexandra felt Sukie stiffen at her side. The younger widow drew closer to say, “He’s here, too.”

“Who? Where?”

“Don’t turn your head. Just casually slide your eyes to your left, to about two o’clock.”

“I see him, I guess. He looks out of place, and nobody is talking to him. Who is he?”

“Lexa, it’s obvious. Like Jane said. It’s Chris Gabriel.”

“Who? Oh. The brother. I can hardly remember what he looked like.”

“He was never with us,” said Sukie, whispering with a conspiratorial urgency to which Alexandra, older and weighted down with the glossed-over horror of Jane’s eternal absence, found it difficult to respond. “He never used the hot tub, or danced to Darryl’s music, or even ate with us.”

“Those lovely fiery meals of Fidel’s,” Alexandra musingly recalled. “Hot tamales, and enchiladas, and that salsa that made your eyes water.”

“He was a lazy late adolescent then,” Sukie went on. Her breathing was affected by a draft from this door that had excitingly opened, showing deep stairs down into the past. “Not so much insolent as bored, reading magazines and watching Laugh-In in another room. Now he’s here. The nerve. I’m going to talk to him.”

“Oh, don’t,” Alexandra instinctively said. “Let’s let it alone.” This ill-fated attempt to relive what was gone, to dig up its mostly imaginary magic—wouldn’t they both be better off just taking the little bit that was left of their lives, their widow’s mite, and retiring with it to their corners of Connecticut and New Mexico?

But Sukie had already aimed herself toward the intruder, dodging around knots of Tinker acquaintances to stand in his presence. The boy, as she still thought of him, had grown taller, or else she had slightly shrunk, her bones eroding as well as her lungs. She tipped her face up toward his like a sunbather determined to catch the day’s last rays. “Don’t I know you?” she asked.

“It’s possible,” he said. His voice had the hollow ring of a man who has found for his life’s rationale no deeper basis than his own attractiveness, rather than any self-forgetful passion or profession. In this he reminded her of Darryl Van Horne, in the same way that this parish hall echoed the showy architecture of a church.

“You’re Christopher Gabriel.”

“Actually, Mrs. Rougemont, I use my stage name now—Christopher Grant.”

“How nice. After Cary, or Ulysses S.?”

“Neither. A long first name goes better with a monosyllable, and I got sick of people saying ‘Blow, Gabriel, blow.’ ”

“My name isn’t Rougemont, either—not for over thirty years. I married a man called Lennie Mitchell.”

“What happened to him?”

“He died, Christopher.”

“People do. Hey, I’m sorry about your friend Jane, by the way.”

She took in a gulp of breath to say, “I don’t think you are. In fact, I think you killed her.”

He blinked—his eyelashes were as pale as his curly, silvery hair—but otherwise registered no reaction. “How would I have done that?”

“I don’t exactly know. But she felt it. Some kind of a spell. She kept getting shocks.”

He smiled, without cracking the glaze of his studied, self-congratulatory diffidence. “How curious,” he said. His lips had a pouting, bee-stung quality more appropriate to a pampered female. The sky-pure blue of his eyes was clouded by their being deep-set and a bit close together, under silvery-blond eyebrows beginning to grow bushy and tangled in the way of middle-aged men. He would be about Tommy Gorton’s age—no, a bit younger. He had nothing of Tommy’s inflamed, sun-battered complexion. Rather, he had a pristine indoor pallor, as of one whose plunge into life had still to be taken. He had retained the smooth imperviousness, the untouchable hostility, of youth. He could not resist showing off, volunteering, “Mr. Van Horne, before he pulled one of his disappearing acts, taught me some spooky stuff about electricity. But you’d never get the cops to listen. As far as they’re concerned, your old pal died of natural causes. So will you. So will I.”

It was as if there were, Sukie felt, a long icicle within him which came over into her body, thrilling her, steeling her, instilling in her the recklessness of a war to the death. “Will I be next?” An onlooker among the mourners, seeing her eager smile and rapt expression, and the flirtatious angle at which she held her unnaturally red head, would have imagined her excitement to be amorous.

Chris hesitated, and lowered his eyelids as if in shame. “No,” he said. “The fat one will be next. Of the three of you, you were nicest to me. You talked to me sometimes, instead of just rushing into Darryl’s party mode. And you were nice to my sister. You used to take her to Nemo’s for coffee.”

“I’m not sure I was nicer, I’m just more extroverted than Alexandra. It was my habit, from being a reporter, to talk to people.”

“You were nicer,” he said stubbornly. He was still a young man in the way his conversation didn’t branch, didn’t send out probes and amusing side shoots, but stuck to the same few thoughts, the same limited asexual agenda. He couldn’t have lived with Darryl, that ramshackle magus of jubilant digression, very long.

“Tell me about you and Darryl,” Sukie commanded, in her perky, shameless interviewer’s manner, with a grin that exposed her prominent front teeth up to the gums. “Where did you both go, after Eastwick?”

“New York, where else? He had a place up on the West Side, a block from the river. Kind of crummy. I thought at least he’d be on the East Side. Most of the art he had in the Eastwick house wasn’t even his, he had it on trial.”

“What did you do all day?”

Christopher Gabriel shrugged and reluctantly moved his bee-stung lips. “Oh, you know. Chilled out. Smoked dope. He was out a lot. He had a lot of creepy friends. I hung around the apartment at first, scared to go out, watching TV. Then I got the idea from watching the soaps of being an actor. I had turned eighteen, and back then that was old enough to handle liquor, so I got jobs waitering and with catering services so I could pay for acting school.”

“You poor thing. You did this without Darryl’s help?”

“He put me on to a few guys. But they just mostly wanted me to hustle. Nobody knew about AIDS yet, but I didn’t want to be a hustler. I could see that was the way straight down. Darryl’s way of loving somebody was to see them go to Hell. He had a lot of ideas about acting and would spiel on about the demonic side of it, all this theory, but I stuck pretty much to my own plan. The acting school I went to was very practical—hold your head like this, project from the diaphragm. Once I began to get jobs he’d try to hit me up to help with the rent. I moved out finally. He was a leech.”

“Where is he now?”

“Who knows? All over the map. We lost touch.”

“So you’ve been hexing us all on your own?”

Christopher knew he was being led on; his lips did not want to move at all. “Who says I’m hexing you?”

“You did. Just now.”

“Well, maybe so.”

“Well, congratulations.”

“Darryl showed me the general approach on electromagnetism, but I did some refining on my own. He was full of ideas, but not so hot at seeing things through.”

“Tell me,” Sukie teased, “the antidote. How to reverse it.”

“Come on. I wouldn’t give you that, even if there was one. There isn’t one. It’s like life. One-way.” He was looking around now, guiltily, like a boy getting bored and restless in the grip of an inquisitive adult. For immature people, Sukie thought, it’s a kind of magic not to tell about themselves. Like savages and being photographed. Anything you let out, the world will use against you.

“Why do you hate us so?” she asked. “All these years later.”

She had side-stepped, to make him look her in the eye; sky-blue rays shot from his deep sockets, from beneath eyebrows beginning to be shaggy. The hair of his head, curly soft blond as she remembered it, had become thick stiff waves dyed platinum. “There was nobody for me,” he brought out, in a voice at last with emotion in it, “like Jenny. From when I was a baby on. She was nine years older than me. She was a perfect person. Once our parents began to fight and get estranged, she was my mother.” His bee-stung lips trembled.

“She died, Chris,” Sukie said, “like you said, a natural death. What makes you think we had anything to do with it?”

“I know you did,” he said stubbornly, looking away from her ardent gaze. “There are ways to direct Nature. The currents of it.”

The mourners around them were beginning to drift away, toward the exits and the liberating out-of-doors. Alexandra came up to Sukie, blurting, “I’ve just been entangled with the most impossible man, that pompous snob who eulogized Jane, if that’s what you call it. He was telling me all about his and the Tinkers’ joint ancestry; he was Nat’s second cousin, and the old lady’s step-nephew, as if that would turn me on. He had the crust to invite me out to dinner, having just shit all over Jane with his innuendo, but I told him we had to get back to Rhode Island. Don’t we?”

She had not seen, or had chosen to ignore, the silvery man standing there. When Sukie turned back to him to make introductions, and to make the conversation a three-cornered inquisition, he was not there; he had melted away.

On the drive south to Eastwick—Route 9 to 128, 128 to 95, 95 through Providence to Route One and the western shore of Narragansett Bay—Sukie described her conversation with Christopher Gabriel, omitting only his announcement that the next victim was “the fat one.” But Alexandra seemed to sense it, and the gap in Sukie’s story hung between them as one roadway slid into the next, concrete into asphalt and back.

“Electromagnetism?” she did ask.

“He said Darryl showed him some stuff about it, through which I guess he was giving Jane those shocks she complained about. But to be realistic it wasn’t those that killed her; it was her aneurysm.”

“A spell utilizes a tendency the body already has,” Alexandra suggested.

“He did say something about taking Nature and altering the current of it.”

Alexandra said to herself as much as to Sukie, “I know what in my body he’d use.”

Sukie didn’t want to know, but had out of courtesy to ask, “What, honey?”

“Cancer. My fear of it. Fear of something makes it happen. Like when a person afraid of heights walks a narrow plank he tenses up so much he makes a misstep and falls off. Your body is cooking up cancer cells all the time. With so many cells, some are bound to go bad, but our defenses—antibodies and macrophages—surround them and eat them up, for a while. Then the body gets tired of fighting, and the cancer gets ahead. You try to stop thinking about it, but you can’t—your whole system bubbling up with these evil cells. Skin cancer. Breast cancer. Liver cancer, brain cancer. Cancer of the eyeball, of the lower lip if you’re a pipe smoker. It can happen anywhere. The whole thing is like an enormous computer: one bit, one microscopic transistor, goes offline and takes the whole computer with it. Tumors have the ability to create their own veins and arteries, to commandeer more and more blood!”

Sukie felt Alexandra’s monologue growing under her, a monstrous damp growth penetrating the orifices she sat on. “Lexa, please,” she said. “You’re venting. You’re talking yourself into hysteria.”

“Hysteria,” the other lightly mocked. “You sound like a man, putting women down because we have wombs. The most horrible thing about cancer is how much like having a baby it is, growing inside you whether you like it or not. Remember how it felt—throwing up, needing so desperately to sleep? The baby’s body was fighting with ours for nutrients. The baby was a parasite, just like a cancer.”

Sukie was silent, absorbing this ugly parallel. “I’m wondering,” she said, “if you shouldn’t go back to New Mexico, to be safe from us. Us Easterners.” The idea was beginning to grow inside her of saving Alexandra, even at the cost of sacrificing herself.

Alexandra laughed, showing her reckless side. “I’m not going to let some queer kid scare me away. We’ve paid two months’ rent, and I let some old friends from Denver have my place for August. They love the opera in Santa Fe.”

“He’s not a kid,” Sukie objected. “And I’m not sure how queer he is, or was. What I do know is that he has it in for us, and wants to kill us. He told me himself.”

“Let him try. Men have had it in for women since time began, and we’re still around. You could say he’s right, we shouldn’t have done that to his sister. All Jenny did was marry the man who asked her. That’s all that most of us do.” She fell silent while Sukie concentrated on getting off 95 and heading south. “Anyway,” she resumed, “I can’t leave Eastwick until I’ve made things better with Marcy. When I’m with her I turn into a supercilious nag. She accuses me of not caring enough about her and the children. She’s right. I’m selfish. I cared more about those little clay bubbies I used to make than I did about my own flesh-and-blood children. The bubbies were mine; the babies were something Oz and Nature made me have. Right from the beginning, nursing the helpless little dear things, the flesh-and-blood babies, I felt taken advantage of. Used. I didn’t want to be somebody else’s milk wagon.”

“You’re too hard on yourself,” Sukie said, closing her lips on the assertion in that adorable way she had, as if something delicious was dissolving in her mouth. “I watched you being a mother. You were quite loving. Giving your sandy children a hug at the beach and so on. Much better than Jane.”

“That’s one of the reasons I liked Jane—she was so bad she made me feel good about myself. She hated those kids of hers. You saw why—the two that showed up today.”

“I thought they were very touching, really. They were repulsive, but unlike the two younger ones they did at least show up and go through the motions. Burying your mother: what a strange obligation. Society expects us to do it; we don’t know exactly why, but the undertakers and clergyper-sons see us through it. We can’t wrap our minds around what happens to us—these milestones. Weddings and funerals. Graduations and divorces. Endings. Ceremonies get us through. They’re like blindfolds for people being shot by a firing squad.”

Even Sukie, Alexandra thought, is aging. She studied the younger woman’s profile as she drove the car; when she squinted at the road ahead, a fan of curving wrinkles reached back into the hairline above her ears. Her eyes had grown permanent lilac-tinted welts below them, and her teeth when she grinned revealed tiny dark gaps where her gums had receded from her eye-tooth crowns. Still, Alexandra loved her enough to touch her slender hand, bearing on its back not only freckles but blotchy liver spots as it rested lightly on the steering wheel. “What about you?” she asked. “Wouldn’t you like to leave Eastwick and go back to Stamford? Jane’s death casts a pall, doesn’t it? To a Westerner like me, Eastwick is a kind of lark, but to you it’s more of the same, just farther up the coast.”

“No,” Sukie said, grimacing into the blinding splash the sun, lowering in the west, threw onto the dirty windshield. “We’ll both stay. I have nothing at home except Lennie’s suits hanging in the closet. I haven’t had the heart to take them to the Salvation Army. I’m thinking of eventually moving to New York. It’s stupid for a single woman to be suburban. What would Jane want? She’d want us to stay. She’d say, Ssscrew that sssilly Chriss. He always was a brat.”

In the moment of mimicry Jane’s voice had entered Sukie’s mouth with an illusion of channelling that made both women snicker in alarm. Sukie’s hand on the wheel flipped over to caress Alexandra’s—a gesture of comfort confessing how vulnerable, how helpless in their bravado, the two damned souls were. Sukie said, “I didn’t realize you had rented the house in Taos. Are you that hard up for money?”

“Jim left enough, but not much more. Everything costs more than it used to. Even clay.”

Soon Sukie turned the BMW off Route One onto 1A. They passed through Coddington Junction and then picturesque Old Wick, a collection of Federalist houses clustered, as if to seek protection from their inexorable deterioration, around a rambling crossroads inn under brave new management, sporting fresh white paint, croquet wickets and lawn chairs on the lawn, and a grouted signboard promising in golden letters FINE DINING; then came East-wick, and outer Orchard Road, and the crasser commercial note of the Stop & Shop in its struggling mall, a scatter of unappealing stores—picture frames, videos, health foods—inadequate to the vast, presumptuous imposition of asphalt on acres of land that can never grow sweet corn, potatoes, or strawberries again. The Unitarian church, with its squat octagonal tower topped by a copper weathervane of a cantering horse and top-hatted rider, appeared on the left, and on the right glimpses of saltwater—a luminous bile color—flickered between the trees, beyond the breakwater’s rusty boulders. The backyards of Oak Street materialized, with their swing sets and beached dories. The blue marble horse trough lay ahead, sporting its tiny forest. Alexandra’s weary heart quickened among the familiar shop fronts and clapboarded houses from earlier centuries; she had lived here, fully lived, with children and a husband and lovers and friends, although the plod of duties and errands and monthly bills to pay had in part concealed from her the bliss of those departed days. Here, now, the long daylight of June and July was giving way to August’s gradual closing-down. It was after seven o’clock, dinnertime, and already the lamps behind the house windows seemed to burn from deeper within, more intensely. Long shadows crossed Dock Street from curb to curb. A more determined summertime mood animated the teen-agers in their scanty pale clothes; they clustered and chattered along the stretch of storefronts, under the spindly trees wound with white Christmas lights, a little more loudly, more defiantly, squeezing the last allotments of fun from the strengthening dusk. Along Oak and Vane Streets, older citizens and visitors moved singly or in couples with a deliberate, self-conscious leisure on the dark Victorian lawns and the sidewalks, whose daytime pattern of shade was, when the streetlamps came on, abruptly recast into electric fragments and patches whose webby pattern of leaf and branch trembled and swayed in the evening breeze rising off the water.

“What do we need?” Sukie asked, having swerved into a lucky parking spot near the Superette.

“Milk?” Alexandra answered. “Cranberry juice. Yogurt?” It seemed they had been away such a long time, burying Jane in Boston’s precincts, that everything perishable in their refrigerator would have spoiled. They dreaded returning to the condo, just two of them.

“How about a frozen pizza to warm up in the microwave?” Receiving no answer, Sukie decided, “I’ll go in and see if I get any inspiration.” She slid out of the BMW and slammed its expensive-sounding door. She loved displaying herself on Dock Street.

Alexandra let her go into the Superette alone, feeling safer sitting in the car, letting the downtown bustle flow over her. The shop lights, fluorescent and neon, played eerily on the teen-age faces flashing by—Eastwick’s children, flaunting their growing power, ignoring the old woman sitting in a parked car, vying for attention from their peers with female shrieks and boisterous boyish jokes, testing freedom’s depths, licking and brandishing ice-cream cones from the Ben & Jerry’s that had replaced, in the row of merchants, LaRue’s Barbershop. Little do they know, Alexandra thought, what lies ahead of them. Sex, entrapment, weariness, death. She wished Sukie would stop parading her charms (her orange hair with its sheen, her big curved teeth with their shine) in the garishly bright interior of the Superette and come drive them, the lonely two of them, down the beach road, the same road, minus about ten seaview McMansions, that, thirty years younger, she used to speed down in her pumpkin-colored Subaru to the beach or, her heart racing in tune with the engine, to the Lenox mansion, in the days when Darryl Van Horne lived there and every night was a party night whose opportunities might crack open the jammed combination-lock of her life.

Eastwick, like partly pretty towns all over New England, in attempting to attract tourists and keep residents entertained, crammed manufactured festivities into August, as if to make up for the month’s lack of any festal holidays. The dropping of the two atomic bombs and the consequent end of World War II had never quite earned red numbers on the calendar. Instead, there were heavily promoted tours of the abandoned woolen mills, equipped as museums, amid the ranks of stilled machinery, with exhibit cases and enlarged photographs of the industrial past. In former farming communities, there were early harvest suppers and agricultural fairs, though the numbers of contenders for the Biggest Squash or Sleekest Hog dwindled every year, along with the entrants in the sheep-shearing contest and the mule pull. In once-Puritan settlements, first-period—pre-1725—houses were thrown open for a paid tour, and local spinsters and crones donned long skirts, lace-trimmed aprons, and linen caps to act as docents in their own antique homes. Antique fairs, book fairs, art fairs filled village greens with hopeful stalls and a friendly shuffle of bargain-hunters, trampling underfoot grass already flattened and brown. In Eastwick, there were days of boat races, in a range of classes from manfully rowed double dories to wheel-steered yachts under full sail. On shore, to console children and landlubbers, a merry little travelling carnival had been set up in the piece of land owned by the Congregational, now the Union, Church; the church trustees had acquired the land for expanded facilities that were never built. It was challenge enough, every five years, to give the grandiose existing edifice a coat of white paint and, every twenty, to repair its rotting steeple, battens, and sills.

There was no keeping Sukie away from bustle and bright lights, though Alexandra had returned from Jane’s memorial service averse to both. The appliances in the condo, as she walked past them, gave her, if not a distinct shock, a tingling unease that reached deep into the depressed circuits of her being. Standing next to the telephone pole in front of the post office one day on Dock Street, trying to remember what errands, other than mailing a birthday card and small check to her Seattle grandson, had brought her downtown—such lapses of short-term memory were more and more frequent, alarming her with the sudden blanks in her mind, obliterating what a half-hour ago had been glaringly obvious and absurdly banal—she had been nearly knocked flat by an unseen spark that scooped out all the muscles on that side of her. Though none of the several people around, intent on their own errands, noticed the phenomenon, it penetrated her like a shouted insult, and left her infected with the nausea of a sudden swerve. The mundane sunny scene around her—glaring sidewalk, fleshy people in summer shorts casting squat self-important shadows, wilting zinnias in beds next to the concrete post-office steps, the American flag hanging limp on its pole overhead—seemed abruptly distasteful, like a rich dessert being offered up for breakfast. This distaste stayed with her the rest of the day. She was shaken. Her appetite had already been declining. When food was set before her, her body had trouble remembering what purpose it served. Her saliva glands were phasing out.

At the carnival, the false excitement—the shrieks from the Whirlabout, as the circular cages at the end of their long tilting arms flung the willing captives this way and that; the more sedate frights occasioned by the spasmodic rotation of the Ferris wheel, stopping at the bottom to change passengers while all the other seats swung, springing panicky cries from those hoisted topmost into the cool night—pressed on her, dazed her, chewed and nibbled to nothing the still core that had always before confidently welcomed surprise and fresh sensation. She felt local eyes flicking toward her with suspicion; people sensed her estrangement now or recalled her evil reputation from decades ago.

Sukie chided her: “Get with it, Gorgeous. This is meant to be fun.”

“Fun. I wonder if I’m not beyond fun.”

“Don’t say that. Look at all the happy children.”

“They look ghastly to me. They shouldn’t be up so late, and they know it.” Children were burying their faces in paper cones of cotton candy, and trying to open their mouths wide enough to bite through the thick glaze of candy apples. Grown-ups were barking at them, urging them to take some death-defying ride, to take a gamble on some cruelly rigged game of ring toss, denying them the safety and silence of their own beds, bewitching them with ridiculous hopes of something happening if they stayed up late enough. Alexandra used to feel that way, in this very town, but that was ages ago. Another person, some other woman, with a sounder stomach and more buoyant attitude, had partaken of nocturnal expectations.

“Look!” Sukie exclaimed. “There’s Chris Gabriel!”

“Quick! Let’s hide.”

“Why? There’s no hiding now. You yourself said, ‘Screw him.’ ”

“Did I say that? It was you, being Jane.”

The apparition, in white painter pants and a T-shirt bearing a slogan, came toward them, beckoned by Sukie. He looked young in the carnival lights, his face angelically smooth, his lips plump and pouty, his curly platinum hair thinning only in the back and in two gleaming swaths at his temples, framing a widow’s peak from which a single trained lock hung limp. He suggested a taller James Dean, if Dean had lived into middle age. With that movie star’s slant half-smile, he asked, “How’s it going, ladies?” Though his waist had thickened over the years and his face had coarsened, his voice was light and lazy, like that of the teen-ager they dimly remembered. The lettering on his T-shirt said in two lines, the first green and the second black, BURN CORN, NOT OIL. His presence had an odd reflective quality, it seemed to Alexandra, as if from an opaque coating of vaporized mercury. It was hard for her to see in him a purpose as earthy as seriously intending her death. Yet the rumor of it gave them a sort of erotic connection, a potential for affectionate teasing which Sukie short-circuited with an anxious, jealous voice.

“We’re doing quite well,” she answered, tucking her hair behind her ears and tilting back her face to look him in the eye.

“Great,” he said, slightly startled by her engaged tone.

“What are you doing here?” Sukie went on. “Are you still staying with that odious Greta Neff?”

“Yeah. Kind of.”

Meaning, Alexandra supposed, that Greta was only “kind of” odious. She spoke up, in a gentler tone: “Mr. Grant, are you staying in Eastwick for the rest of the summer?”

The young-old man, this lean boy turned flabby avenger, gazed upon her through irises of an electric pallor, rimmed in a darker blue. She saw that he could indeed do her serious harm, the way an innocent creature like a bear might, or a machine in operation, or a law of blind Nature. “I have some business I want to finish,” he said, mildly enough. “It may take a while.”

“You don’t seem,” she said, hoping to smile away how shaken his deadly, soulless gaze had left her, “to be getting out into the sun much. By August here, you should have a tan.”

“I use a number-forty-five sunblock,” he told her. “You should, too. Skin cancer is no joke.”

“At my age,” Alexandra said, quite gaily, considering how she hated this topic, “it almost is, there are so many worse kinds.”

He got serious with her, assuming a professional air. “For television work, they give you the amount of tan they want. Directors hate it if you show up sunburned on Monday. It doesn’t cover. If you want a tan, buy it in a bottle, they tell you, especially the actresses. In porn shoots, out in the Valley, the feeling was that bikini shadows on the actresses would get the viewer thinking about what they looked like in bathing suits, who they had gone to the beach with, what they had in the lunch hamper, what normal women they were, all of which tends to kill the fantasy.”

Sukie cut in, her voice edgy. “And not enrich the fantasy? Make the girl realer?” She shouldn’t keep trying to protect me, Alexandra thought. I can protect myself, if I think it’s worth doing.

Christopher seemed dubious. “The guys who watch this stuff on video are pretty simple. They don’t want a ton of reality.”

“Do you know a lot of porn actresses?” asked Sukie.

“A couple. They’re nicer and more average than you’d think. A lot of them are into yoga. It’s slimming, and uplifts their spiritual side. It helps them relax between sessions. Everybody says how hard it is for men doing porn—unhard, I should say—but it’s not a piece of cake for women, either. Those hot lights, all these jaded grips and assistants watching. The women who get ahead in the business are those who don’t let their boredom dominate them.”

Alexandra asked him, flirting to keep down her terror—for the eternity of death had come out from behind the wan bustle and inane scratchy music of the fair to confront her with its endless leaden reality —“Is this one of the kinds of acting you’ve done?”

His sullied skyey gaze, as he turned it upon her again, seemed gentler this time, contemplating her like a deed already done, achieved in his mind. “Maybe,” he said. “If it was, I wasn’t very good at it. You got to like pussy a lot. And the jobs that weren’t fly-by-night, done in a motel room with a handheld videocam, are out on the West Coast, like I said, in the Valley. I didn’t want to leave New York. You get brainless if you do.”

With one of her little gasps, catching at Alexandra’s heart, Sukie asked, “You don’t like women at all?”

“I said a lot. To do porn you either like them a lot or hate them. Hate isn’t bad, for the purpose. They’re the stars, you’re the meat. I didn’t feel strongly either way. The directors have told me that’s my limitation. I’m not talking just porn now. I’m talking acting in general. All the women are so narcissistic and pushy, compared with my sister.”

“She was lovely,” Sukie said quickly.

“So bright and sweet,” Alexandra agreed. “That was so unfortunate, what happened to her.”

“Yeah,” he said, a little stunned by so much agreement.

“Listen,” Sukie said. “Chris. Why don’t you come by for a drink sometime?” Now Alexandra was stunned. Sukie hurried on, “I bet you’d love seeing what they’ve done to the Lenox place, inside. Love it,” she qualified, “or hate it.”

“I don’t know,” he began.

“We’ll lay in champagne. It’ll be like the old days, with Darryl.”

“I don’t drink,” he said. “Hangovers aren’t worth it for me. They get into your skin tone. You begin to look slack.”

“Then come for tea!” Sukie cried, becoming, in Alexandra’s view, something of an embarrassment, her voice gone strangely small and high, as if she were shrinking back into a girl inside her elderly body. “We’ll make some wonderful herbal teas, won’t we, Alexandra?”

“If you say so,” she said, the intractable fact of death still stuck at the back of her throat.

“Next Tuesday,” Sukie pursued. “Tea for three, at four. Four-thirty. You know where we are, don’t you? Second floor, the entrance at the parking lot out behind.”

“Yeah, but,” Chris began.

“No buts,” Sukie insisted. “Be honest—it’s very boring over there at Greta Neff’s, isn’t it? How much sauerkraut can you eat?”

“O.K.,” he said to Sukie, giving in in the graceless limp way of a teen-ager. His gaze returned once more to Alexandra. “You know,” he told her, “in a set-up like this”— he gestured to include the Whirlabout, the inflatable funhouse, the merry-go-round with its electric calliope and burden of groggy children, the naked colored bulbs strung from stall to stall—“taken apart and dragged to the next town and slapped back together by a bunch of rummies and drug addicts, there’s a lot of loose connections. Have you felt any shocks yet?”

“A few small ones,” Alexandra admitted. “I try to ignore them.”

“There you are,” he said, and forced a grin from those frozen pretty-boy lips, and repeated his sweeping gesture, expansive yet clumsy in a manner that brought back to the two women the spectre of his vanished mentor, Darryl Van Horne. “Electrons,” he said. “They’re everywhere. They’re existence.”

“Tell us about it Tuesday,” Sukie said. “We’re making a scene.” The crowd was thinning, revealing sorely trodden grass—a flat salad of footprints in the garish electric light. The back of Christopher’s T-shirt, they saw as he walked away into the melancholy last hour of the carnival, was lettered, in two lines, one green and one black, ELECT AL, DUMP W. It was an old T-shirt.

The two women huddled some moments, consulting, beside the cotton-candy stand. Above a streaked plastic tub a lanky mechanical arm kept twirling into being paper cones of spun sugar for which there were no more customers. The children had at last been taken home to bed; only bored high-school students remained, and grease-stained workmen furtively beginning to pack up. Alexandra asked Sukie, “What possessed you?”

“Well, why not? Get him close up, look him over. It’s our only chance.” She spoke in her reporter’s voice, incisive yet dismissive, and her pursed mouth looked smug.

“He wants to murder us.”

“I know. So he says. It could be just hot air, and Jane was a coincidence.”

“I really should tell you, dearie, that I found you very irritating, the way you kept making up to him. You were much too cozy. What’s up with you?”

Sukie’s hazel eyes innocently widened; the reflected carnival lights swam in microcosm among the gold specks within her irises. She avowed, “Nothing but your best interests, darling.”

“Mrs. Rougemont!”

This may have been the second time the voice had called out, but Sukie had been walking along Dock Street brooding upon the possibility of virtue and self-sacrifice (can there be such things? or is it all hypocrisy, self-serving in dis-guise?) and holding in her mind’s eye the image of Debbie Larcom, her compact, precise white body inside the plain gray dress like a pale flame swathed in smoke.

Annoyed at being interrupted, she turned, expecting to see Tommy Gorton, overweight and borderline disreputable, bearing down upon her with hippie-length hair and unkempt beard, his missing tooth and maimed hand. But his beard and hair had been trimmed, and his bearing had become more erect. She caught a whiff of the arrogant youth she had known, in love with her but beyond that with his own beauty, which she had revealed to him.

“Tom,” she said, with a carefully measured warmth. “How nice. How are you?”

He couldn’t contain his good news; his red face was bursting with it. “Look,” he said, and held up his poor wrecked hand. A few fingers of it slowly wriggled. “I have movement in it! There’s some feeling.”

“Why, that’s lovely!” she said, taken aback. “What does your doctor say?”

“She says it’s a miracle. She says to keep exercising it.”

Sukie was distracted by the unexpected pronoun—but of course; many doctors now were women, including her own in Stamford. In the Middle Ages men had wrested the healing arts from witches, and now they were giving them back, since, as Nat Tinker had observed, the real money was no longer in medicine. Her own doctor, though taller and older, had the same smiling calm as Debbie Larcom, a self-contained ardor, as if the practice of virtue provided a sensual reward, like suckling a baby. Women were at last inheriting the world, leaving men to sink ever more abjectly into their fantasies of violence and domination.

Sukie said, “I’m so happy for you, Tommy.” But her heart had long moved on from hopes of happiness with Tommy Gorton; he was, like the rather desperately beckoning shops on Dock Street and the glitter of saltwater sliding seawards at their backs, a remnant of past adventures, dear to her primarily because she had survived them, her basic bright pure self unscarred. “When did this start to happen?” she asked, to be polite, since Tommy clearly wanted much to be made of this development.

“That’s the thing. About two weeks ago. I was sitting at home, watching some idiot celebrity game show on the boob tube while Jean was finishing up in the kitchen, when my hand began to tingle. It brought me right out of the chair; I hadn’t felt anything in it for twenty-some years. Then, that night, there was this ferocious itching. It kept me from sleeping, but I didn’t give a fuck. Something was happening. In the morning, I stared at it and thought I could make the fingers move, a little. And it seemed to me the alignment of the bones was better—more normal. And that’s been the story every day since; every day, a little better. Yeah, there’s pain. But it’s a pain going somewhere. Already I can hold a fork with it. Look.” He made a pinching motion, with his still-repulsive, purplish lumpy hand. Sukie was embarrassed by this interview, in the middle of a busy morning on Dock Street; but she had the impression that the passersby were deliberately ignoring them, having each heard Tommy tell his story before.

“The thing of it is,” he was saying to Sukie, fixing her wandering gaze with his eyes, their whites reddened by age and drink and self-pity, “it had to be you. You and those others did something.”

“What could we have done?” she asked. Images came to her from the far-off time when Jane was still alive—the three of them sky-clad at the summoning of the Goddess that Alexandra had arranged, in the circle of Cascade granules that formed the base of the cone of power; the tarot cards reluctantly turning to ash in the brass bowl; her choice of the Page of Coins, a simple-minded, conceited, beautiful yokel, and for lack of a better idea hastily asking Her to perform the impossible, a minute before Jane’s mouth filled with blood and she whispered, “Shit. It hurts.” Sukie stammered, semi-retracting: “Of course, I felt terrible it had happened to you, but—”

“I know you can’t talk about it,” Tommy said. “It’s dark stuff. But —I hang around the fire station and hear the latest scuttlebutt—the paramedics who responded said the place had a funny smell to it, and the rug had just been vacuumed, and the victim’s underpants were put on backwards. When I put two and two together, I damn near cried. In fact, I did cry. You were always so great to me.”

“It was selfish pleasure, Tommy. You were beautiful.”

Rather horribly, he took a step closer to her, there in broad daylight, dropping his voice so that no one passing would hear. “I still could be. After your doing this for me, forget what I said about Jean. She’ll understand. And if she doesn’t, she can stuff it. She’s a cold bitch. She says everything I want in bed is against her religion.”

He was offering himself, and his effrontery touched her, but even with two hands—and how complete could the healing be, bought with one tacky tarot card?—he was old news. She’d rather go down on Debbie Larcom, the black triangle where her white thighs joined. “No, Tommy, don’t even say any more. We did our thing ages ago. It was a different time, a time for a lot of things. Now is a different time. I’m an old lady.”

“You’re still a knockout. I bet you’re still—what did we used to call it?— crazy.”

Somehow this allusion insulted her. Perhaps she was looking for an insult. “Not crazy enough to keep talking to you smack in the middle of town,” she said. “Good-bye, Tommy. You and your lady doctor, take care of that hand.”

Rebuffed, he shrank in her sight as if she had swooped into the air and were looking down from the height of a flagpole at this pathetic balding fisherman abandoned on a sidewalk bright with foreshortened summer people in skimpy play clothes.

Sukie and Alexandra were both so nervous getting ready for having Chris Gabriel to tea that they kept crossing paths in the condo, bumping into each other more than once. “Are you going to accuse him?” Alexandra asked, after one near-miss in the tiny kitchen, Sukie carrying a plate of carefully arranged Pepperidge Farm cookies, lemon-flavor and gingerbread men in artful alternation, and Alexandra moving in the other direction with a little Japanese bowl of dip, chopped mussels and crabmeat in mayonnaise, to be served with seaweed-flavored rice crackers available only in the under-patronized gourmet section of the Stop & Shop.

“I already did,” Sukie replied. “After Jane’s memorial service. He didn’t deny it. He just didn’t say how.” She had suppressed Chris’s telling her that “the fat one” was next; in suppressing this during the car ride home, she had begun to build a structure of thoughts and intentions hidden from her sister witch, as she had once hidden her masturbation and her determination to leave home from her parents, back in that stuffy brick semi-detached house in the little city like a dull-red nail at the end of a Finger Lake in west-central New York State. Holding back a growing part of herself made her parents seem contemptibly stupid, and though she could never allow herself to feel superior to Alexandra, it was true that, as her visions of virtue and self-sacrifice developed, the older witch seemed increasingly sleepy, absent-minded, and passive. She was like a big white grub paralyzed by a spider’s sting. She was being eaten alive from within by tiny hatching spider babies.

“Don’t ask how,” Alexandra told her. “I can’t bear to think of it. If we can visualize the method, we’ll start doing it to ourselves.”

This thought sounded bizarre enough to prompt Sukie to ask, “How are you, anyway?”

“Tired,” Alexandra confessed.

“Don’t you sleep?”

“I can hardly keep awake. Except at night. I get a few solid hours, and then am bolt awake. The peepers are so noisy, down by the pond. What do they find to say to each other all night? The moon overexcites them. It’s so bright lately, the birds start chirping at three. I get up and look out the window and there it is, high above the trees, like some horrible white eye filling a peephole. All the world trying to sleep, and it’s shining on and on, idiotically. It shows how little we matter.”

“The moon is almost new now. Remember how it was just beginning to wane when we—”

“Let’s not talk about it, please,” Alexandra begged.

“—when we prayed to the Goddess,” Sukie insisted on finishing, as if the Goddess had been Alexandra’s own, unfortunate idea.

“What a bitch She turned out to be,” the older woman admitted. “We’ll never know what Jane’s prayer was, that she got such an answer.”

“Mine got an answer,” Sukie confided. “I saw Tommy Gorton downtown last week, and his awful hand seems to be healing. He has feeling in it, and some motion. I don’t know how much better it can get, but he was so full of beans about it he offered to fuck me.”

“Really! Why didn’t you tell me this before? It’s thrilling!”

She had kept it to herself, Sukie supposed, because she had woven it into her private visions. The sorceresses still had hallucinatory powers of some sort. Sukie didn’t want to remind Alexandra of her weakness for younger males, which might reveal her shadowy intention, her secret dream. She had a vision of an ideal young male, Actaeon or Hyacinthus, baring to the moon his pure naked chest, with its lovely, purely ornamental nipples. “I don’t know,” she answered evasively. “I didn’t want to jinx it, and Tommy seemed so hopeful. I’m afraid the miracle won’t go any further, like so many of them.” Numbed, as if ever so slightly drunk, by her mythic vision, she moved to a window overlooking the parking lot and changed the subject: “I worry that the tide will be too high for Chris to get across the causeway.”

“Chris, is it? Darling, the bank raised the causeway. Nobody would buy a condo they can’t get to.”

“There’ve been all these floods in the papers. Global warming, don’t you hate it?” By pressing her cheek against the glass she can see the far corner of the causeway. Yes, steel-blue floodwaters appear to have covered it, but outspreading ripples, making the marsh grass sway, suggest that a car has just passed.

“What did you say when Tom offered to fuck you?”

“I said ‘no dice,’ of course.” Sukie regretted having let this other woman any distance whatsoever into her privacy; it embarrassed her that they had been sky-clad together a few weeks ago.

“Do you miss sex?” Alexandra abruptly asked from the sofa, where she had set herself, half-reclining like a Roman at a feast, before the carefully arranged hors d’oeuvres. “I find I don’t. All that mess. Between me and Jim, it had gotten pretty perfunctory, though, bless his sweet soul, he tried to make it still interesting for me.”

“Me neither,” Sukie lied.

Both of them started from their poses when the buzzer from the lobby at the base of the stairwell rasped. It was an unduly loud rasp, rude as a burglar alarm, but they had never learned how to moderate it; the bank, their landlord, cashed their checks, but dialing its number never uncovered a person, just a recording that offered a number of routes to an eventual non-responsive silence. The footsteps coming up the stairs were so bounding and youthful that it was another shock when the door opened on a city-soft, androgynous, middle-aged man, breathing hard.

“Sorry, sorry,” he panted.

“You’re not late,” Sukie reassured him, though by Alexandra’s wristwatch he plainly was.

“The causeway had water on it, the way it always used to,” he continued, getting his breath back, “and I had to decide if I dared push through. I didn’t want to drown that rattletrap Honda of Greta’s she let me borrow.”

“That poor car must be on its last legs,” Sukie said.

“All the more reason to be tender with it,” he said, affecting a tone of gallantry, crossing to Alexandra as if moving through a stage direction, handing her a can of Planters salted cashews. “A hostess present.”

“Hostesses,” Sukie jealously hissed.

“Of course. Hostesses.”

Alexandra asked from the sofa, “Did Greta know you’re coming here?”

“She did. She does. And if I’m not back in two hours, she said she’ll call the police. The dear girl feared I might come to harm.” He had exchanged, momentarily, the surly, laconic bad manners of adolescence for a stagier diction left over, no doubt, from his stints in afternoon soaps, with their airless studio acoustics and meticulously groomed versions of everyday costume. He had donned for this occasion white, brass-studded jeans, L.L. Bean boat moccasins, a Listerine-blue T-shirt saying Mets in an ornate script, and a yellow cashmere V-neck sweater draped around his shoulders, the sleeves lightly knotted at his throat. He looked around him and, reverting to boyishness, exclaimed, “Weird! This used to be just space, where Darryl had his high loudspeakers in the big hot-tub room, with the skylight that rolled back to show the stars.”

Sukie said, “You can still see some of the hardware, in what was Jane’s room. They just painted it the same color as the walls.”

Mentioning Jane changed the tone of the occasion. Sukie stopped herself from chattering on, her lips ajar as if stuck on a thought, and Christopher looked down at the wine-colored carpet and actually blushed.

“Tea,” Alexandra reminded them, seeing that she was in charge of these two children. “Christopher: regular tea with caffeine—we have Lipton and English Breakfast—or herbal? We have chamomile, Sweet Dreams, or Good Earth green tea, with lemongrass.”

He said, “I don’t do herbal, thanks—too funky—and I can’t take caffeine after two in the afternoon. Even a nibble of chocolate keeps me up all night.”

“So much for tea, then,” Alexandra concluded.

“What else have you got to drink?” Christopher asked.

“Wine?” Sukie’s voice sounded shy, tentative. “It’s been opened, but has a screw-top.”

“What color?” he asked Sukie.

“Red. Chianti.”

“What brand?”

“Something Californian. Carlo Rossi.”

“Oh boy. Giant economy size.”

“Alexandra picked it out.”

“You ladies don’t exactly pamper yourselves, do you?”

Alexandra intervened, speaking to Sukie as if this man weren’t here. “Why are you knocking yourself out for this brat? We said tea; tea is what I’m going to have. He can have a glass of water if he’s so fussy.”

“A spot of Scotch with the water would be even nicer,” Christopher conceded, in the more carrying voice he must use on television.

When has he last acted? Alexandra asked herself. This is a pathetic has-been, or never-has-been. Yet here he was, a guest of sorts. His announced intention to kill them had created an intimacy.

“I’ll look for some,” Sukie said, servilely.

While she was heard opening drawers and closet doors in Jane’s windowless back room, politeness compelled Alexandra to make small talk: “We don’t drink much any more. I know we used to, when you knew us before.”

“It was horrible,” he petulantly told her, “listening to the bunch of you, getting sillier and louder and then starting to shriek. The shrieking, the horrible laughter. How could I sleep?”

“I’m sorry—thinking about you wasn’t on our agenda. But now, no, drinking can be a trap for widows. We’re trying to prolong our lives.”

“Good luck,” he said, giving her a theatrical sidelong glance—as if in a zoom-lens close-up, while the background organ music lifts and shudders to emphasize a portent.

Sukie triumphantly, looking flushed and overeager and adorable, brought back a pint bottle of Dewar’s Scotch. “Found it! That sneaky Jane, it’s almost all drunk! She never offered any to us!”

In a mutter of terse inquiries—“Ice? Water? How much? That enough?”—Sukie with a heavy hand concocted two Scotches-on-the-rocks, while Alexandra stubbornly, disapprovingly poured herself tea. She had decided on Sweet Dreams, wondering what it would taste of. It tasted of nothing. It tasted of water too hot to drink.

“Have a cookie,” she urged Christopher, holding out the carefully arranged plate.

“Please. Carbos and sugar. I should lose ten pounds even so.”

“I think a flat stomach on a man is repulsive, past a certain age,” Sukie said. “In Stamford you see all these exercise-conscious guys who think they have to look trim in business suits, and after a certain age they begin to look preserved, like mummies. They haven’t let the male body do its natural evolution.”

Alexandra, irritated by Sukie’s anxious-to-please chatter, addressed Christopher: “You were going to tell us about electrons.”

The topic lit him up; the man shed his stagy inertia and made jerky, excited gestures to go with his exposition. As he talked, he more and more resembled Darryl Van Horne—the explosive, ill-coördinated gestures, the tumbling words, the yearning for a theory that would let him master the universe, wresting it from the Creator’s hands. “They’re amazing, ” he said. “They’re everything, just about. Take a current of one ampere—guess the number of electrons flowing past a given point in one second. One measly second. Come on—guess.”

“A hundred,” Alexandra said truculently.

“Ten thousand,” said Sukie, trying harder to play the game.

“Hold on to your hats, ladies—six-point-two-four-two-oh to the eighteenth power—that is, over six quintillion! In a cubic inch of copper, there are one-point-three-eight-five to the twenty-fourth—that is, one and a third, more or less, septillion. Now take hydrogen, the simplest atom, one proton and one electron, in perfect balance, though the electron is only one-thousand-eight-hundred-thirty-seventh as heavy. But boy, are they strong! Their negative electrostatic force would instantly tear apart any piece of copper big enough to be seen, if it weren’t for the equal positive charge of the proton in the atom.” His hands, plump and unmuscular but more human—skin and wrinkles and hair—than Darryl Van Horne’s had been, enacted in air the violent tearing motion. “How about that? That crummy old brass bowl on the table there wouldn’t last a nanosecond without its protons and neutrons. Neither would we. That’s what I’m saying. We’re all full of electrons, chock-a-block full. We’re dynamite, potentially.”

Sukie and Alexandra had been so forcefully struck by his demonic resemblance to Darryl Van Horne that they had hardly heard what he said. Quintillions, septillions, super-super-zillions—what did such numbers mean, when there was only one of each of them? One life, one soul, one go.

“The proton happens, electrostatically,” Christopher went on, wiping with his thumb and middle finger some saliva from the corners of his lips, “to attract an electron exactly as much as electrons repel each other. Exactly. Otherwise, there would be no universe. Not a particle, not a shred of matter, just a chaotic high-energy seethe—the Big Bang needn’t have bothered to happen. God could have just kept sitting on His hands. What it adds up to is, if there’s an excess of electrons in a body, or of protons, they need to go elsewhere, and there’s an electric charge. If there’s less electrons than there should be, there’s a positive charge. If it’s protons, there’s a negative. In air, the readjustment is called a spark; when you’re one of the bodies, there’s a shock. Not a pleasant feeling, I hear. Over time it does things to you. You run on electricity; your brain runs on it, your heart, your muscle responses. All matter consists of electrons and atomic nuclei—protons and neutrons, made up of up and down quarks. Neutrinos, yes, they exist, but just barely, and muons and tau particles even less so—they’re unstable. That’s all, folks. Electrons are everywhere—currents and potential currents are everywhere. So, if you get my drift, it takes very little to nudge the currents one way or another.”

He looked at them expectantly. “It’s like love,” Sukie suddenly announced. “A force that permeates the universe.”

“She’s such a romantic,” Alexandra apologized.

Christopher frowned, the flow of his discourse impeded by these female interventions. “Love’s something else. It doesn’t exist the way electrons do. It doesn’t exist independent of our animal behavior, with the sex drive.”

“You loved your sister, Jenny,” Sukie pointed out.

It seemed to Alexandra that he blushed, as when Jane had been mentioned and he looked bashfully down at the carpet the color of wine. “I was dependent on her,” he said. “We had lousy parents.”

“Your father was a sweet man. So naïve. So needy.”

“Sukie.” Alexandra’s tone rebuked the younger woman for sentimentally displaying her intimate knowledge of a lover, Christopher’s father, unhappily driven to his death. “Let him finish. About electrons,” Alexandra said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, thanks.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He’s not that little.”

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

“Us? Me, too?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alexandra’s life felt so insubstantial and precarious to her that she did not press the other for an explanation but silently turned away, a rejected lover hoping with silence to wound in turn.

Tonight something suddenly came up—a call on Sukie’s cell phone and a return call, both unexplained—that Sukie needed the BMW for, so she dropped Alexandra off at the Littlefields’ on its seedy stretch of Cocumscussoc Way, peremptorily telling her to apologize on her behalf and to have one of “them” drive her home to the condo. When, considerably embarrassed, Alexandra phoned her daughter to say that Sukie was at the last minute unable to accept the Littlefields’ hospitality, Marcy said firmly, “Good. Better. We’ll have you all to ourselves.”

The boys pried themselves up out of the well-worn, food-stained armchairs, gave their grandmother limp hugs, and let her try to kiss them. Roger turned his face in sharp aversion, but little Howard, the sunnier and younger of the two, held still for a peck on the cheek. Roger had conspicuously grown, along his father’s stringy lines, and seemed to have a shadow on his upper lip, a faint dark echo of the excessive brown hair drooping from his scalp and covering his ears. “How old are you now?” Alexandra asked him.

He looked at her with some surprise. “Thirteen,” he answered.

Marcy intervened. “He just had his first birthday as a teenager.”

Alexandra felt a cold stab of guilt. “Oh, dear—when? I fear I missed it.”

“You did,” Roger told her calmly. His eyes, a surprisingly dark brown, were nearly at the level of hers.

Marcy said, in a tender, forgiving tone, “The day before yesterday, Mother.”

“I’m appalled at myself. I quite forgot that anything at all wonderful happened in August.”

“That’s O.K., Grandma,” the boy gallantly allowed, confronted with the discomfiting sight of an adult in the wrong.

“Now, you mustn’t let me go,” Alexandra pleaded, taking up the feeble role, that of a coy penitent, left to her, “without whispering in my ear what you’d like for a present.” The boy’s expression didn’t show a spark, so she thought to add, “Perhaps you’d prefer, rather than think of a present, a little gift of cash. Though, really, little is what it would be.”

Her sense of what a dollar, or ten dollars, would buy, had frozen somewhere in the Sixties, while standards of expenditure had risen, and billionaires had replaced millionaires as epitomes of good fortune. “You think about it,” she concluded, a bit sharply, and turned to the younger grandson. Howard Junior was fairer and more finely tuned than his brother, and at nine years old his round face, with its gappy front teeth, showed a properly cheerful avidity. Alexandra tried to remember back to when she had the energy to want something wholeheartedly. She had wanted white figure skates like Sonja Henie’s when she was six, and when she was twelve she had wanted to get her ears pierced and fitted with rhinestone studs in the jewelry department of the Denver Dry Goods Company, and when she was seventeen she had wanted a bronze-colored taffeta strapless dress to wear to the junior prom and her father’s permission (her mother was dead by then) to stay out until two with her date, the school’s rangy second-string quarterback. Decades later her desires had settled on the magic word “out”—she had desperately wanted out of her marriage to Oz, dear obliging, well-intentioned Oz, though what her reasons were had become a fading puzzle, a revulsion less against this particular average man, perhaps, than against the deadly limits of a woman’s life.

“How did you like camp?” she asked the smaller boy.

The older one answered for him: “It was O.K.,” he said, dragging the syllables to imply that it hadn’t been. A sullen puzzled shadow passed across his face as if cast by his floppy overabundance of dark-brown hair.

“It was great,” Howard Junior piped up; the gaps between his teeth seemed a kind of reverse sparkle in his sunny face. “A boy in my tent broke his arm falling off the monkey swing!”

“Tell Granny what all you learned at camp,” Marcy prompted.

“How to feather your paddle when you canoe,” the smaller boy brightly supplied.

“To braid gimp,” his brother said. “It was stupid. The counsellors were stupid. They were these teen-agers who just wanted to make out with each other in the woods.”

“And now you’re a teen-ager yourself,” Alexandra reminded him—a reminder that was not, on second thought, very helpful or grandmotherly. Alas, it was her métier to make mischief, even with her humorless daughter tensely listening.

But Marcy was not in her most disapproving mood, and her husband’s returning from a day’s work lightened the atmosphere within the split-level ranch house, with its awkward mix of shabbiness and newness, soiled white carpet and oversize hi-def television. There’s something about a man. Howard was the same lanky, loose-jointed type as Jim Far-lander, confident with his hands; Alexandra and her daughter had a kindred taste in mates. In his clean gray workshirt and trousers, he brought to the household its center of gravity. He ruffled Howard Junior’s summer-blond hair as the boy embraced his father’s legs, and held up a flat palm for his older son to high-five; he startled Marcy with a kiss warmer, Alexandra saw, than she had expected, and even flirted with his mother-in-law, having touched her cheek with his and squeezed her waist at the same time. “You look great, Grandma,” he told her, having scarcely looked.

“Don’t lie to me,” Alexandra said. “When I showed up at the door, your wife looked horrified. I’m old, Howard.” Time treats men so gently, she thought; he could have belonged to either of them, mother or daughter.

“How’s those electric shocks coming?”

“I still get them, but they may be my imagination. They aren’t the worst thing in my life.”

“Oh? What is?”

He paused in his circuit of the domestic bases, having glanced toward the jocular evening-news team on the big flat plasma screen, and stooped to scratch the head of the family familiar, an overweight golden retriever thumping its heavy tail against a chair leg. “The worst thing,” he prompted. He had an unusually wide and flexible mouth for a man, and a prominent nose that looked tweaked sideways, as in a drawing slightly out of perspective. When he smiled in anticipation of her answer, his ragged teeth encouraged exposure of her own imperfections.

“It’s hard to put words to,” she told him and his listening family. “A feeling of discouragement. A sense,” she clarified, “that the cells of my body are getting impatient with me. They’re bored with housing my spirit.”

“Mother!” Marcy cried, in what seemed genuine alarm. “Do you have any pain? Have you seen a local doctor?”

“Jane saw Doc Pat a few weeks ago, and I think it helped kill her. She was the one getting shocked when I asked for your opinion; now I’m the one.”

Marcy, more alert than usual, asked, “What about Mrs. Rougemont, whatever her name is now? How’s her health?”

“Mitchell. Fair. She hasn’t reached my stage of aging yet. She’s younger, by six years. And always was more proactive. You know me, darling—I’ve always been afraid of”—she couldn’t bring herself to name the disease—“Nature. The way it kills you when things inside get just a little bit off. Don’t mind me—I’m an old lady. I should be getting used to dying, it’s very immature not to. But, please, let’s not discuss this any more in front of the boys. Right, boys?”

Roger smiled, with a lopsided tug of his lips like his father’s smile, but the effect was not reassuring. “It’s like the song says, Grandma,” he said. “Life sucks, and then you die. Kurt Cobain wasn’t afraid to die. He wanted to do it. It’s no big deal, the way they do it now. These bombers in Iraq, they commit suicide all the time.” Like the talking head on the too-wide, too-vivid screen, he was just giving the news.

“Hush, baby,” Marcy said.

“Yes,” Alexandra agreed. “I’ve sometimes wondered if there aren’t so many people in the world now—I can’t tell you how many billions, it used to be two when I was a girl—so many people now that young people, more sensitive and less selfish than I can ever be, haven’t taken up a kind of global death-wish. Not just school shootings and these Islamic martyrs, it’s the drug overdoses and car fatalities in the papers every day, teen-agers driving themselves at ninety miles an hour into trees, and then their friends and neighbors telling the television camera what beautiful cheerful perfectly normal girls and boys they were.”

“Mother, please. Don’t encourage him. Even as one of your jokes.”

“Who’s joking? Forgive me, dear. I know how you feel; I didn’t want to see my parents die, either. You don’t even have to like them. Their death makes your own life mean less. They’ve stopped watching.”

Little Howard Junior, following the conversation above his head with round blue eyes, blurted, “We all like you, Grandma.”

“Thank you, Howard. And I like you.”

The older Howard said, paternally levelling with her, “There’s other doctors in town than Doc Pat, Alexandra. He keeps his shingle out just to feed patients up to his son in Providence. A bright young doc from Sloan-Kettering in New York City has opened up two doors down from me on Dock Street, beyond the P.O. He’s young—up on all the latest bells and whistles. But he told me he doesn’t want to spend his whole life scraping by in the Big Apple, paying triple taxes and those tremendous rents. Small-town life—the green space, nobody locking their doors at night—suits him just fine. A fine little family, too. Two girls, cute as buttons. He wants to keep them in the public schools until the ninth grade and the hormones kick in. He’d be somebody for you to see. I could put in a word and get you an appointment before Labor Day.”

Marcy intervened: “Howie, I think Mother needs less Eastwick, not more. She and her friends thought returning here would make them younger, but of course it hasn’t. Is that unfair to say, Mother? You’re disappointed. The magic you thought would happen hasn’t. Am I being too psychological?”

That pink wart on the side of her nose, Alexandra thought. Why doesn’t she have it removed? Warts become cancerous. A month ago, she would have been dismissive of her daughter’s attempt at analysis, but today she felt worn down and only said, submissively, “No, it’s not unfair to say. I’m not sure it’s true. I don’t know exactly why we came. Perhaps it was to face what we did here. To make it right, or less wrong, before we—”

“Die!” little Howard piped up, showing his gappy teeth in a gleeful grin. He must be a joy to his teachers.

“Howard!” Marcy scolded. She called her child Howard and her husband Howie.

But in the child’s saying the unsayable Alexandra saw that right here, in front of her, was one answer to death—her genes living on. The tussle of family life, the clumsy accommodations and forgivingness of it, the comedy of membership in a club that has to take you in at the moment of birth. As they shuffled to seat themselves around the table, moving into the warmth of the meal that Marcy—dear, lumpy, modest Marcy—had prepared, Alexandra pictured levels and layers of inheritance and affinity invisibly ramifying, cards dealt out to absent and dead and yet-to-be-born players. Everybody gets a hand. They seated themselves, husband Howard and mother Marcy at opposite ends of the dining table and the grandmother facing the boys from the sides like a third child, with a child’s potential for misbehavior. The chair beside hers had been left there, though the place setting for Sukie had been taken away.

The table, a rather heavy-footed old mahogany, seemed faintly but profoundly familiar. Had it come from the Denver household, as part of Alexandra’s inheritance, and been left with Marcy when her mother abandoned Eastwick for the West? Alexandra couldn’t quite tell, with an embroidered tablecloth covering it, and a healthy, calorie-light meal being served upon it: chicken with bow-tie pasta in a thin sour-cream sauce, broccoli with raisins and diced carrots, and a tomato-rich salad from their own garden. She thought of her other children—Linda a willowy imitation Southern belle in Atlanta, Ben bullish and Republican in Montclair, and Eric, her baby, a graying hippie making do in Seattle at a murky intersection of music and electronics, managing a store called Good Vibes. Eric had repaid his being her favorite by becoming most like her, cultivating a slight talent within a bohemian enclave located where America thinned out into Never-Never land. He had pacified his brain with drugs while she had been wantonly seeking self-fulfillment in witchcraft. Nature, behind her back, in spite of her, had been bringing to ripeness her true self-fulfillment, her offspring and their offspring, those who amid the globe’s billions owed her their being, as she owed them her genetic perpetuation. Families were stupid, but less stupid and selfish than individuals. Still, in the midst of her kin, she missed the friend, the peer in wickedness and unconventionality, who was to have been seated beside her.

. . .

“Do you like this?”

“I do,” he said, his sometimes boyish voice under some tension.

“Can you tell it’s a woman and not another man doing it?”

“Not really. Sort of.”

“Is it a bad difference?”

She couldn’t tell from his silence if he was concentrating on what to answer or letting his mind drift somewhere else. She hoped not the latter, though in fact it is a familiar female problem, your attention wandering just as the other person is getting interested. What you think about gets so interesting it drops your body and its sensations away. She was having no such problem now; her attention was fully engaged by the intellectual, psychological-somatic problem before her, there in the motel darkness dimly lit by the moon, which had been new and now was swelling toward full again. Outside, in the salt air, they had noticed the moon before opening the door to their numbered room there in the decaying motel beyond the shuttered-up pizza shack, its tipped oval face hanging sad and stark above the pillar of its reflection in the still Bay, beyond the crescent of pallor where East Beach, two miles from the broad public section in the view from the Lenox mansion, became pebbly and narrow. Earlier in this tryst, before it became so interesting to her, she had knelt on the bed and tugged back the rough curtain, as coarse as burlap, and peeked. Shadows of young people could be made out against the moonlit stripes of the shallow breakers cresting. Young, heedless voices could be heard, rising above the rhythmic whisper of crests collapsing, when the curtain closed. Its weave was coarse enough to let through pinpricks of the radiant air outside, from which they were as sealed off as if underground. She had begun by kissing, even sucking, his beautiful, purely ornamental male nipples, with their tickly haloes of hair. The sensations had made him laugh, but they were not funny to her.

“No,” he said, after thought. “Not bad. Nice. Your perfume reminds me of my mother’s.” Her head had slipped to the base of his torso; a sweet fragrance had floated across his chest to his nose. “Maybe it’s just your shampoo. She didn’t use perfume, at least by the time I knew her. It wasn’t natural, she thought it wasted the environment.”

“Don’t think about your mother. It distracts you.”

“You can tell.”

“Oh, yes. It tells me.”

“Do you want me to come?”

“I wouldn’t mind. But I don’t want to waste it. If you do, can you come again?”

“How soon? How long do we have?”

“We both should get back, eventually.”

“Does she—?”

“Care? Yes. She loves me. Not like this, but loves me. And I her.”

“Did you ever—?”

“Touch? Yes. We may have brought each other off once in a while.”

“You don’t remember?”

“We were high. And sleepy from the hot tub. It was like we were all mixed up with each other.”

“I should have come out and joined you.”

“You were too young. It would have made it entirely different.”

Both realized they were drifting away, and they concentrated for a minute. “Can you—?”

“What? Ask me.”

“Get down a little farther?”

“My God! I’ll gag.”

“Get down as far as the freckle.”

“What freckle?”

“I thought you were nearsighted. That freckle.” His indicating finger seemed the nose of a fish, nudging a stalk of coral.

“How did you get a freckle there?”

“Sunbathing. On Long Island.”

“And the guys you were with could do the freckle without gagging?”

He was silent, offended at her invasion of his privacy. She watched to see if he would wilt and begin to tilt. He did not. She flicked with her tongue, enjoying the perversity, competing with all those guys from the beaches of youth.

He read her mind, there in the filtered moonlight. “Is that how you think of your own lovers, as a mob of ‘guys’? There weren’t that many. There’s a jealousy factor, and you had to be careful, once AIDS was out in the open. I’m HIV negative, you should know. I got the rep of being chicken. But Darryl set the example. He was very careful, that way.”

“I know. With us, too. He didn’t like losing control.”

“And you do.”

“I’m not afraid of it. It’s like dreaming. You can come out the other side, still being you. Hey. You’re ready. Yummy. Let me drink at the fountain of youth.” She tightened all over, knees and feet together, going into a purposeful crouch there on the dank bed.

“No,” he said again, in his deeper, more theatrical voice, touching the top of her head. The broad white parting; the soft mussed abundance dyed the orange-amber tint that had been its true color, more subtly. “If you do me,” he explained, “I’m not sure I can do you.”

“Too gynecological, huh?”

“It’s not like I’ve never been with a woman before, but—”

“I know. We feel it, too. Disgust.”

“Not disgust, please. It’s just strange, until I’m more used to it.”

“You want to get used? Are you saying you want to fuck me?”

He hesitated. A declaration was coming. “I want to be with you. Since you’ve decided you want to be with me, I don’t know exactly why.”

“Why? I’m crazy about younger men.”

“I’m not younger.”

“Than me you are.”

“Yeah, but—”

“I like your fat belly. It’s silky and wobbly, like a puppy’s. I don’t want you fucking Greta Neff.”

“Please. Don’t be grotesque. She’s such a dyke.”

“What’s grotesque? It’s all grotesque, if you look at it in a certain light. We have other things going for us; we just have to work this part of it through. You want to fuck me in the ass? So I’ll be like another boy?”

“It wouldn’t be. And actually, I was usually the catcher.”

“Oh.” She had to think that through. “I see. And I’m not equipped to pitch. Poor me. But I can buy one. One of those things. A dildo. You’ll have to help me strap it on.”

“Listen. Why don’t we just lie here in each other’s arms and talk? And cuddle. Don’t women like cuddling?”

“They like everything except being ignored.” She lifted her face to look into his, across the bulge and fuzz of his abdomen. “I’m game for whatever you want. I like the idea of me having a penis. At last. But I wonder if it wouldn’t be healthier for you, for our relationship, for you to get used to being the other thing. A pitcher.”

“You’re probably right.” His mouth felt dry, parched by the new prospects dawning, here in this underground.

“Couldn’t you imagine me as another boy? I did think to bring Vaseline.”

This dried his throat further, the cold blood of it. “You know,” he warned, “even with it, it sometimes hurts.”

“I do know. I’ve been there, with some of the guys. And I had no idea how big you were.”

“I’m sorry. It’s something you can’t help.”

“Don’t say things like that, Chris. You’re the pitcher now. Say things like ‘There it is, baby, all of it. Take it to the hilt, you cunt. I’m going to womb you, you bitch.’ But that’s with the vagina, and I won’t inflict that on you yet.”

“I’d be happy with just your mouth. You have a nice mouth. And your hand.”

She laughed, wickedly, and flicked his engorged glans with her grainy tongue, keeping her eyes rolled upward toward his face. He could see the half-moons of her eye-whites in the light coming through the rough curtain. “You would, would you?” she teased.

“Tell me,” he said, beginning to act the pitcher, “about these guys you let butt-fuck you.”

“Don’t be jealous,” she continued to tease. “One of them was my first husband. Monty. Montgomery Rougemont. He was latent, I can see now that I’ve lived more. He despised women. If they acted at all uppity, he called them butch. It turns out he was the one who was butch. He tried to sell it to me as a handy method of contraception. It didn’t do a thing for me but sting the next time I took a shit.”

“About my size. Darryl—”

“Let’s not bring Darryl into this, honey. Aren’t we having a nice time, just the two of us?”

“Yes, but he—”

“Let’s concentrate on us. Do you want to see my vagina? Have you ever looked at one?”

“Of course.”

“Why ‘of course’? Many men haven’t. Straight men. They’re scared to. It’s the Medusa’s head, that turns them to stone. Uh-oh. You’re losing your stoniness. I guess you’re not ready to think about vaginas yet.”

“No. I am. I’ll get ready. But—”

“I know, darling. I know.”

She said nothing then, her lovely mouth otherwise engaged, until he came, all over her face. She had gagged, and moved him outside her lips, rubbing his spurting glans across her cheeks and chin. He had wanted to cry out, sitting up as if jolted by electricity as the spurts, the deep throbs rooted in his asshole, continued, but he didn’t know what name to call her. “Mrs. Rougemont” was the name he had always known her by. God, she was antique, but here they were. Her face gleamed with his jism in the spotty light of the motel room, there on the far end of East Beach, within sound of the sea. The rhythmic relentless shushing returned to their ears. She laid her head on his pillow and seemed to want to be kissed. Well, why not? It was his jism. Having got rid of it, there was an aftermath of sorrow in which he needed to be alone; but there was no getting rid of her. “Call me Sukie,” she said, having read his mind. “I sucked your cock.”

“You sure did. Thanks. Wow.” His voice came out boyish. He kissed her shiny face; already the stuff was drying. Her hair where it had strayed onto her face was sticky and stiffening.

“Was I as good as a man?”

“Better.” But there had been a strength, of tongue and ruthless iron finger-grip, that he had missed.

She snuggled deeper into the pillow, not bothering to wash her face, looking at him with one eye. “Tell me about New York. I’ve never lived there, you’ll have to teach me. Lennie loved suburbia, and we went into the city less and less. You must know lots of special private places. Art galleries, off-Broadway shows. Clubs on the far West Side. I still love to dance.”

“Places change. What’s in one year is out the next.”

She read his mind and asked, “Am I too old to dance with? I’m not even seventy yet. Are you afraid I’ll embarrass you in front of your gay friends? Why? They can understand. Nobody is young forever, and every artist needs a patron. I think we’ll look fine together. I don’t look my age, everybody says. And tonight: I won’t ask if you love me, but didn’t you love it?”

“I did. You give great head.”

“And won’t you love living in New York in the nice big apartment you’ll help me choose? Not one of those roachy basements you’re used to, sharing with a bunch of creeps.”

“Sure,” he agreed. “Great.”

“Next time,” she said, with drowsy confidence, “it’ll be my turn to have the orgasm.”

In all those years of his being her lover, Alexandra had never been in Joe’s house. It stood in a section of Eastwick seldom included in her rounds back then, the so-called Polish section, though there were more Portuguese and Italian offspring of immigrants than Poles—tightly packed narrow houses well away from the water, five or six blocks beyond Kazmierczak Square, which the Yankees and summer people still called Landing Square, though the town meeting thirty years ago had passed by a fair majority the official vote renaming it for a fallen Vietnam soldier from this neighborhood. A big red-brick Catholic church, blank-faced but for a double door and some shallow tall pilasters worked into the expanse of brick, lifted its green copper cross above the rows of asphalt-shingled rooftops. Joe’s was one of the better houses, narrow but stretching back into an acre where he had, in the Italian style, laid out a pair of vegetable gardens and built between them a fieldstone arch leading to a half-dozen fruit trees—apple, pear, peach, plum—that he called his orchard. Alexandra remembered driving by, a lovelorn divorcée, and stealthily glancing in and coveting the devotion Joe’s big backyard showed, especially in April, when his trees broke into blossom. She saw his touch everywhere. A grape arbor flourished along the side of the house, the eastern side; it got the morning sun, and the vine leaves gave a cooling shelter to his outdoor table and chairs in the afternoons and early evenings. He had brought a Mediterranean temper to harsh American conditions. As soon as Alexandra had begun to let Joe fuck her, the plants in her own garden, especially the tomatoes and rhubarb, perked up; he had a green thumb, or something similar.

Parking the car at a curb crowded with old Detroit models, venturing up the concrete steps Joe’s hands had poured and his feet so often climbed, she felt her heart thump and flutter in her chest like a moth flinging itself against a hot light. She had lost so much weight Marcy was alarmed, but Doc Pat, quite shinily bald and nearly blind in one eye, assured her that there was nothing wrong with her but the ineluctable course of Nature. That was the advantage of a senile doctor; he discovered nothing that would demand action from him. The electric shocks had seemed to be letting up lately, mysteriously, but her memory lapses were worse—she felt she was sleepwalking from morning to evening, and was often surprised by where she found herself. At night, settling to really sleep, she had pains in her fingers and cramps in her feet and, throughout her body, a sour backwash of dread, as if everything she ate was asking, Why bother? She woke up anxious around four, and dragged through the day. Constipation alternated with diarrhea, and there were pains above the back of her neck as if her skull were softening. Her feet felt like lumps, even without shoes on, so that her contact with the earth lacked precision, and she now and then dizzily lurched. Floaters nagged her vision as tinnitus nagged her hearing. Lying in bed or sitting inert in a chair, she resented the repetitive business of life—rising, pissing, eating, answering the telephone—after seven decades and more wherein these duties had been lightened by a vague expectation of some wonderful eventuality. Now expectations had become a nuisance, and indifference gave her an inverted courage; otherwise she would never have dared ring Gina Marino’s front doorbell.

The widow opened the front door and peered through the screen door warily, an unmistakably hostile dark, squat shadow. “What you want?”

“Actually, Gina, I’ve come to see Veronica. Is she home?”

“Always home. I tell her, get out of the house, but she stay inside. Thirty-nine, and like a child hiding. Mike is giving up—he stay forever at the Barrel.”

“I thought the Bronze Barrel had become something else—what they call a sports bar.”

“Whatever they call it, idea the same—drink to forget.” The shadow of her head tilted behind the aluminum mesh, as her hand lifted toward the handle of the screen door. “You have business with Veronica?”

“I have something to ask her. It will take less than a minute, but I didn’t want to ask it over the phone, it was too personal. If you don’t want me in your home, Gina, perhaps Veronica could come visit me, over at the Lenox Mansion Apartments, at the end of the beach road. I’ll be there another week.”

“How she get way down there? All day Mike has the car. Come in, then. We’re none of us getting younger.” She had to fumble at a hook-and-eye as well as the handle, and the screen door creaked, for want of a man’s lubricating attention. “Ronnie!” Gina called, hardly raising her voice, as if the house had so long held her and her daughter that signals between them flew through the wood.

And Veronica did answer, in a sullen timid voice, from upstairs. “What, Mama?”

“Somebody to see you.” Gina eyed Alexandra and nodded. “Go up,” she said.

Alexandra pushed herself, her unfeeling feet, up the steep carpeted stairs. Penetrating the house and its secrets was startlingly easy, like an unplanned seduction. The house had a smell she couldn’t quite place, stale yet warm—the odor under sofa cushions, along with hairpins and stray coins, the secluded staleness sweetened by whiffs of life, of cleaning fluid and of garlic bread baking in the oven. Joe had brought the odor with him into her house, a trustworthy smell, most vivid on a winter day—the children all at school, black-capped chickadees flickering at the feeder, Orchard Road bright with the previous day’s snow, icicles beginning to drip from the eaves, her own skin tingling and rosy from the bath she had taken in anticipation of his visit. He would park his truck behind the house and come in through the sun porch and shrug off his bulky parka, worn grimy in spots, and let it fall on her braided rag rug, and drop after it his jaunty little bog hat with the narrow brim; the sour-sweet male scent of him would gush from his grubby green wool work sweater and the neck of his shirt collar and the old-fashioned sleeveless undershirt that exposed his frothy armpits as in nothing but her blue bathrobe she hurled herself into his embrace.

The stairs attained a landing and a papered hallway that went in one direction toward the front of the house, where she guessed Joe had slept with Gina, and the other way to the back, where Veronica lived childless with Mike O’Brien. She came into the hall to greet her visitor: “Mrs. Spofford!”

“Farlander,” Alexandra told her, smiling to think how true the name was here in Eastwick. “I was Spofford when you were a little girl, but that was a long time ago. Where shall we talk?”

“In here, I guess,” the younger woman said, standing aside, unsmiling but not unfriendly. She was taller and thinner than Gina, with Joe’s Roman nose and his liverish shadows under the eyes, features unfortunately homely on her female face. Like Marcy, she seemed to have been brought up in the world without sufficient instruction in fundamental graces, so that every motion had to be thought through. Awkwardly she admitted Alexandra into what did the O’Briens for a living room. The room’s closed doors presumably opened into a bedroom and a bathroom. An ironing board had been set up, a basket of laundry fresh from the dryer beside it. The singeing scent of the patient process seemed to arise from the depths of Alexandra’s childhood; her heart cozy and damp with love, she would watch her own mother iron—testing the iron’s hot bottom with a licked finger, poking its hissing nose into the corners around a man’s shirt collar, demonstrating to her girl child a precious fraction of the domestic expertise that made a home.

“Those stairs,” Alexandra said. “I feel weak.” Even had Veronica waved her toward a chair, which she didn’t, Alexandra would have remained standing. She felt herself for the first time a violator of Joe’s domestic arrangements. He had always come to her; she had received him into her home and her body; the rest of his life was his business. “ I’m leaving Eastwick soon, and I have a simple question to ask,” she said. “Simple and personal.”

Veronica stared with something of her mother’s foreign opacity, though her eyes were lighter. “Ask it,” she said.

“Have you missed your period this month?”

The words sank in. The woman’s tired eyes widened. “My God,” she said. “You are a witch. I thought it was just something people said.”

Alexandra blushed in satisfaction, the first time in days she had felt her blood move. “I tried it, for a while,” she admitted. “Before my second marriage. Do I gather that your answer is yes?”

“Yes. I haven’t told anybody, not even Mike. Not even Mama. I’m so frightened I’m imagining it, or that I just skipped the curse this one time. I’m afraid I’ll lose it. I’m too old to have a baby.”

“You’re a year short of forty,” Alexandra told her. “That’s not old for a woman any more. Why would you lose it? Think of all the women in the history of the world who couldn’t lose it, though they desperately prayed to. Nature doesn’t want us to lose babies. It wants us to hang in there. Do you smoke or drink?”

“No. A glass of wine now and then, to keep Mike company.”

“No more wine. Let Mike keep you company. I assume he keeps you enough company to be the father.”

Veronica only slowly understood. Then she blushed “Oh, yes. He still wants me, when he’s had a few. How could it be anybody else?”

“Well, there are ways, but never mind. I see they don’t apply to you. Would you and he want a boy or a girl?”

“I suppose a boy, but we’d be incredibly grateful for either.”

“I had two of each,” Alexandra said, speaking out of a depth of experience she seldom drew upon. “Girls are easier for the first fifteen years, but after that boys are. Girls get secretive. Boys get less bumptious. My guess is you’ll have a boy. Here’s a way to tell the sex, once you’re out of the first trimester: Tie your wedding ring to a length of thread and have your husband hold it suspended over your belly. If it swings in a circle, it’ll be a girl. If it swings back and forth, it’ll be a boy.”

Veronica laughed, an unaccustomed violent sound that embarrassed her. She covered her mouth with her hand and then took the hand, reddened by housework, away. “Why are you doing this for me?” she asked.

“Nature’s doing it; there’s no proof I did anything. There never is. Maybe I made a wish. Offered up a little prayer.” Alexandra hesitated before making the next confession: “Your mother asked me to.”

“My mother? But what did she say? When?”

“She didn’t say. She implied. In front of the Stop and Shop early last month.”

“But why?”

“Why did she ask, or why did I oblige?”

“Both.”

Again, Alexandra hesitated. “I owed her one, as people say. She knew it. I knew she knew it. I’m so happy for you, that it worked out. But don’t give me the credit. Give Mike the credit. Give the Virgin Mary the credit, if she’s still your goddess.”

Veronica’s lips parted, her eyelids flared, but she did not admit the witch to this part of her.

“I should go,” Alexandra said. “Your mother must be wondering.”

Veronica was flustered by the need to be polite, to be grateful, yet not absurd. “You said you’re leaving town?”

The coastal light lasted a few minutes less each afternoon. Pumpkins were ripening in the fields at the end of their writhing vines. The moon was throwing shadows. “Before Labor Day. I began with two roommates; one died, and the other is looking for an apartment in New York.”

“Is that sad for you? You said you felt weak.”

“It’s sad, but that’s life, or Nature, or growth, or death, or something. The weakness may be all in my imagination. Unlike your baby.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s right. Nineteen ninety-nine.”

“I knew him, you know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Halloween, more or less

Dear old Gorgeous—

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

But by now the Mets have stopped playing—Chris is a baseball freak, who would have thought it?—and the perfect fall weather must be arrived in Taos, and your health will be blooming again. You needed to gain weight, dear heart. I’ve never seen you look so peakèd as when we finished up with the condo. (Sorry to stick you with so many of the last-minute details; the bank was a real stinker not to give us our deposit back until the ceiling was repainted, I never noticed any smoke stains, it was kind of yellowy anyway.)

You had your bodily complaints, but then we all do. Women’s bladders get moody, for another thing. Sometimes not a drop though you know you have to go, and other times you laugh or sneeze and there go the underpants. It’s all on television, if you watch the news and peg yourself as a pathetic ancient. Moi, my skin is sun-allergic, my lungs are too smooth inside, my gums recede to the point of periodontia. You were simply depressed, is my diagnosis. Maybe about Jane’s death—she was a pill, a bitter one, but ours to swallow—and maybe just about you being the oldest of us three, and our leader always: the big sister, who is supposed to be wise—the oldest and the most magical, even though Jane could fly, a bit, like a flying squirrel. But I think what the Goddess did to Jane that time made you (you, Lexa) wonder if it wasn’t all nonsense. OK, maybe it is. I live now in the national headquarters of nonsense distribution and don’t let it get to me. I take life as it comes, day by day. If you look straight up, past all the new construction (these fucking double-parked Dumpsters everywhere!) there’s still a slice of blue sky. Somewhere in all this there has to be a reason for existence, there’s so much of it. I mean, all that exists, the billions of light-years’ worth of it.

I wormed out of Chris how he was giving us shocks, I say us though he was saving me for last, I guess. It was based on Darryl’s experiments and what was left of his equipment. In quantum theory, which isn’t so much a theory as a kind of helpless description of the crazy way things really are, it’s been proved time and again—if you split a particle, a photon, say, one half will have clockwise spin and the other counterclockwise, and when you measure the spin of one, even if they’ve travelled a long way from each other, and it spins clockwise, the other will be counterclockwise even though there’s no way they could have communicated. This is called cooperation between separated systems. It’s one of the many ghostly things about particles; they’re not only particles but waves at the same time, and a single photon passing through two slots makes interference patterns with itself, and electrons and their antimatter mates, positrons, appear out of nothingness all the time in space, though only for a billionth of a trillionth of a second, roughly. Honestly. That’s how scientists think the universe got started—some antimatter forgot to cancel out matter. Or some virtual particle slipped over into being non-virtual. Darryl’s idea, when he was still hoping to be a great inventor and make a lot of money, which he needed for his travels and extravagant life-style—he had hoped to sell it to the U.S. Army but it really would kill only one person at a time, and slowly at that—was to combine this cooperation-between-separated-systems principle with electrons. It was like the sympathetic magic we used to do. One of the things about witchcraft was that it only worked for people around you, people you knew, in the village. For electron transfer at a distance you needed the victim to be fairly close, in the same small town at least. Even lightning can’t jump more than a mile or two. And you had to have something with the person’s electronic essence rubbed off. The reason you walk across a room and get a shock when you touch a doorknob is that the friction of your shoes has taken electrons from the carpet and the excess is attracted to the protons in the doorknob. You feel the charge coming into you when in fact it is leaving. The way your slip used to cling to your butt when women still wore slips—you remembered how infuriating that was, though it didn’t make a spark like brushing your hair in the dark does. Those were excess electrons seeking what they call electrostatic equilibrium.

Now—I know, this is exhausting me too—the strange (creepy even, but then he was creepy, but so funny) thing about Darryl is that he had kept from the old tennis-and-hot-tub days up at the Lenox mansion bits of our clothing that we had been too stoned or relaxed or guilty to remember to take with us when we’d at last go home to those poor saintly deserted children of ours. Tennis shorts and shirts, peds, sweatbands, hair bands, combs, underpants and bras even, left I guess in the changing room or on the edge of the hot tub, and he kept them along with other souvenirs of other souls he’d tried to captivate, and when Christopher figured out whose things they were and when Greta Neff, who had been very sympathetic to him when he became an orphan (unlike us, I guess), tipped him off that at long last we’d come back to Eastwick, he dug up this electron gun Darryl had in his lab (they’re almost a dime a dozen, every television set has one, it produces the little dot that moves across the cathode-ray screen, from the back of the cathode-ray tube, shot out by thermionic emission and passed through a hole in the anode —I just looked this up, I’ve never been one of these writers so lazy she gets some lackey to do research for her) and would blast Jane’s and then your little unmentionables, the sweat on them dried for thirty years, shoot them full of electrons and, by extension, in a version of cooperation between separated systems, you. The excess of charge would build up in your body and not only generate shocks but mess up your insides and your general morale. It was diabolical. Chris was really angry about his sister. The method wasn’t precise, but then the quantum world isn’t either, it’s all probabilities, nothing exactly exists, everything’s a ghost until it’s measured, and then the measuring instrument is somehow so intrusive it makes the next measurement impossible. Anyway. Don’t worry about a thing, old love. Christopher swears Darryl’s electron gun is broken—it began to go haywire after popping Jane’s aneurysm—and he has no idea how to repair it and can’t afford to pay a repairman. Money between us is sort of a touchy business, but that’s another topic.

The city as I say is a constant pain and hassle and yet looking back at Eastwick it had its negative side too. (Tommy Gorton sent me some clippings from the cheap Xeroxed sheet that is no substitute for the Word and they did sell Nemo’s, finally, but Dunkin’ Donuts has promised to preserve some of its historical features in their renovation. And the Unitarians put off their anti-Iraq rally until after Labor Day and it pretty much fizzled anyway, there’s not the fury Vietnam aroused, volunteer soldiers and National Guard call-ups are doing the dying and people are more worried about the economy.) But I began to tell you: one night after roaming around with Christopher—I know, I abandoned you those last ten days or so but I was fighting to save your life, seducing a man with a very weak voltage for the fair sex and a cold-hearted murderer to boot—he had to get back to the Neffs’, Greta was always pulling a huge poisonous sulk after twigging that he was seeing me, and all alone in that section between Hemlock and Vane—I was trying to get back to where the BMW was parked on upper Dock Street—I stepped into the most awful darkness, like stepping into a bottomless puddle, I can’t describe it, up near the land next to the Union Church, that used to be Congregational and before that the Puritan meetinghouse with these three-hour sermons and nothing but dying coals in footwarmers to keep you from freezing. There were no streetlights or houselights on, though I was near a house, that of somebody I didn’t know—and how many houses, when you think about it, in Eastwick did belong to people we didn’t know, though we thought we knew everybody—and I was in this antique darkness, just a pocket of it left over from the forest when the forest was everywhere and people would go to bed in these miserable villages terrified of Indians when the sun went down. Suddenly I couldn’t see anything, just the shapes of trees and bushes—tall ones, arborvitae probably—against the slightly paler sky, no stars in it, no moon, and me utterly lost and blind just a few blocks from the Superette pouring light onto the sidewalk and the late sailboats motoring back into the harbor and the drop-out kids hanging out noisily at the Ben & Jerry’s where the barbershop used to be. I could hear the traffic swishing but was as alone as in a desert, it was like being locked into a closet as a child, which is something I can remember my Neanderthal parents threatening to do but I don’t think they ever actually did. I felt then how lightly civilization sits on this continent. There is this darkness waiting to sweep in again.

Chris morbidly liked to visit the graves of Jenny and his parents out in the new section of the Cocumscussoc Cemetery, and there in daylight you could see how the granite markers had aged, darkened with mold and lichen so the names and dates were hard to read. But a lot were recent graves, the edges of the markers still sharp, people I used to know those years in Eastwick, rotting in their long boxes underground but still alive in my head, bright cartoons in my mind down to the way an individual person squinted or laughed or said certain things, their live expressions still in me as if my brain were another sort of cemetery, a floating cemetery, all sparks that will glimmer out like fireflies, like the little volunteer daisies you see on the graves. That was terrifying in another, sunlit kind of way.

But let’s not be terrified, you and I. We’re survivors. So is Chris. He’s been in the apartment and out and in again while I’ve been writing this. I’ve checked a few of the technical terms with him, not that you would care. Among the things he’s taught me is the amazing reason we see anything is that the shell of zipping-around electrons around every atomic nucleus bounces photons back into our eyes. And that electrons are always looking for a gap to fill so it is like love as you all poked fun of me for saying. He says to say hi to you and tell you he’s sorry if you have any lasting discomfort, he was crazy to blame witchcraft for anything real.

   Mucho amor (everybody speaks Spanish here),

“Sukie” was scrawled in red, with that inflated twitchiness of twenty-first-century people unaccustomed to wielding a pen. Beneath it she had written a 212-area telephone number, and an East Side address. Alexandra had skimmed the dense pages of computer type and set the letter down on the glass table, glass that in its horizontal reflection imaged the vertical panes that held her view of tawny, grassy land, high dry prairie from the same dull but beloved Western palette as her spacious living room’s adornments—clay pots, Navajo, Zuni, Isleta Pueblo, and less heavy, less spiritually decorated pots by Jim Farlander, displaying his tactful hands as they caressed spinning clay. Small Navajo rugs played little brother to the bigger one nailed to the adobe wall away from the sun. Chairs covered in leather and deep sofas covered in fabric duplicated the same color or lack of it as the cattle country outside.

Alexandra had returned to absence: the absence of massy green Eastern foliage, and, as vivid each morning as a cock’s crow, Jim’s. She had somehow thought that his absence would repair itself—a wound that would heal, a plant that would rejuvenate. But no, with that tight-lipped manly consistency she had loved, he stayed away, and granted her a silence in which her thoughts could revolve as they would.

There was much to do. His shop, which could afford to languish during the hot months, had to be reopened, and stocked. She must return to the potter’s wheel, offering up her own, more tentative Farlander pots. And she could return to sculpting her little bubbies, her little feminist fetishes, and not have to compete with a husband for space in the kiln. Business had accumulated in her absence, though she had paid her cleaning woman, Maria Graywolf, to check on her house and forward bills and letters that looked important. Among the communications that did not look, to Maria’s far-sighted, Native American sense of priority, important enough to forward were a number of notices of meetings of the Mabel Dodge Luhan Property advisory board, several tax bills now woefully overdue, a letter from Ward Linklater bemoaning her absence and inviting her to dinner as soon as she returned and ominously advising her in a postscript that neither one of them was getting any younger. Another came from a gallery owner in Santa Fe who wanted to talk to her about a retrospective exhibit of Jim Farlander’s “neo-Native” ceramics—she didn’t like that “neo-Native,” but maybe it was like “post-modern.” She would be pleased to see Jim honored, she responded.

She liked having her very own vehicle to drive again, though the hard-used Ford pickup needed transmission work. It was good to be surrounded again by bright yellow-on-red license plates saying LAND OF ENCHANTMENT, rather than Rhode Island’s cool blue-on-white OCEAN STATE. Her resuscitated telephone rang with demands and invitations from her Taos crowd of grousing, hard-drinking artists. Alexandra felt better, more herself. The possibly cancerous unease in her body, the faint seesawing nausea, subsided. Her lack of appetite vanished with her first dip of hot salsa with a dry tortilla, and her first Mexican meal of quesadillas, black beans, and rice. Her feet seemed less numb, though she still stumbled on uneven ground, and struggled to get up from her sofa. She was an old lady, all right; there was no dodging that. Death was around the corner, along with Ward Linklater demanding to share dinner. But back in the West she didn’t feel old. She felt like one of those burstingly white thunderheads that don’t collapse into rain no matter how high they climb above the mountains. Her old black Lab, Cinder, had survived the two months in a kennel, and he and she resumed their walks in the tawny high country, dog and woman alike hobbled by arthritis and tender feet.

What perfidious delusions, you might say, these Godforsaken women permit themselves! Forgiving themselves the unforgivable, shedding guilt as casually as when younger they shed their clothes. One of them forming with her dirty hands plump small idols of clay, the other forming a brittle liaison with one of the Devil’s own party, the third gone to a warranted doom, her last utterance obscene. The Lord keeps strict accounts; He knows to the penny the debts death calls in. There is no revision of the last accounting—no reconstitution, no revisiting, no assuagement. There is at best for the non-elect blessed oblivion, which ends desire and fear and their tormenting agitation. We thanked Heaven to see the unholy wantons flee our abiding seaside hamlet the second time.

Absorbed in the daily happiness of a real life resumed, Alexandra left Sukie’s letter unanswered for months. Christmas season had been coolly sunny and crammed with visiting grandchildren and adult children; all four of them, Marcy, Ben, Linda, and even Eric, had managed to come, in shifts. Marcy, using e-mail and her big-sister prerogatives, had organized it. Alexandra resisted so much conventional attention. Was she really so near to dying, that they all insisted on gathering? She had no Christmas tree but had set up a Peruvian crèche of clay dolls amid her windowsill display of miniature cacti. It fascinated the younger of her grandchildren, who kept pricking their fingers. One of them, Linda’s baby, little Beauregard, dropped and broke the baby Jesus lying in His manger of painted clay. The toddler sobbed in terror, conscious of having committed a blasphemy, until Alexandra, employing the deft touch developed in sculpting bubbies, painstakingly glued the several fragments back together. “Better than new,” she assured the wide-eyed child.

Afterwards, as the new year unfolded around her, Sukie’s letter nagged the lonely matriarch. There had been cheer in it, a reaching out, widow to widow. She could picture her friend’s pert and avid face, its faded freckles and the plump upper lip that gave her expression in rare repose a tentative, bruised vulnerability.

One bleak January day, with a dusting of overnight snow on the oleander and the prickly pear outside her picture window, and with the fresh fall radiant on the Sangre de Cristo Range far in the east, she impulsively telephoned the number that Sukie had penned in red. The distant instrument rang so often that she expected the answering machine to pick up; but the voice was suddenly Sukie’s. It said, “Hello?” Alexandra knew from just the chastened, hollow tone of this one word that Christopher had left her; he had melted back into his half-world, the half he had inherited from Darryl Van Horne. “Lexa?” the wary voice asked, with witchy intuition.

“Well,” Alexandra answered, pleased. “Where shall we go together this year?”

THE END