The Witches of Eastwick (11 page)

On this afternoon of cold low silver sky Alexandra thought East Beach might be too windy and raw so she stopped the Subaru on a shoulder of the beach road not far from the Lenox causeway. Here was a wide stretch of marsh, the grass now bleached and pressed fiat in patches by the action of the tides, where Coal could have a run. Between the speckled boulders that were the causeway's huge bones the sea deposited dead gulls and empty crab shells the dog loved to sniff and rummage among. Here also stood what was left of an entrance gate: two brick pillars capped by cement bowls of fruit and holding the rusting pivot pins for an iron gate that h
ad vanished. While she stood gaz
ing in the direction of the glowering symmetrical house, its owner pulled up behind her silently in his Mercedes. The car was an off-white that looked dirty; one front fender had been dented and the other repaired and repainted in an ivory that did not quite match. Alexandra was wearing a red bandanna against the wind, so when she turned she saw her face in the smiling dark man's eye as a startled oval, framed in red against the silver streaks over the sea, her hair covered like a nun's.

His car window had slid smoothly down on a motor. "You've come at last," he called, less with that prying clownish edge of the post-concert party than as a simple factual declaration by a busy man. His seamed face grinned. Beside him on the front seat sat a shadowy conical shape—a collie, but one in whose tricolor hair the black was unusually dominant. This creature yapped mercilessly when loyal Coal rallied from his far-ranging carrion-sniffing to his mistress's side.

She gripped her pet's collar to restrain him as he bristled and gagged, and lifted her voice to make it heard above the dogs' din. "I was just parking here, I wasn't..." Her voice came out frailer and younger than her own; she had been caught.

"I know, I know," Van Home said impatiently. "Come on over anyway and have a drink. You haven't had your tour yet."

"I have to get back in a minute. The children will be coming home from school." But even as she said it Alexandra was dragging Coal, suspicious and resisting, toward her car. His run wasn't over, he wanted to say.

"Better hop in my jalopy with me," the man shouted. "The tide's coming in and you don't want to get stranded."

“I
don't?
she wondered, obeying like an automaton, betraying her best friend by shutting Coal alone in the Subaru. He had expected her to join him and drive home. She cranked the driver's window down an inch, for air, and punched the locks on the doors. The dog's black face rumpled with incredulity. His ears were thrust out as far from his skull as their crimped inner folds would bear their floppy weight. These velvety pink folds she had often fondled by the fireside, examining them for ticks. She turned away. "Really just a minute," she stammered to Van Home, torn, awkward, years fallen from her with their poise and powers.

The collie, whom Sukie's article had not mentioned, shed all ferocity and slunk gracefully into the back seat as she opened the Mercedes door. The car's interior was red leather; the front seats had been dressed in sheep hides, woolly side up. With an expensive punky sound the door closed at her side.

"Say howdy-do, Needlenose," Van Home said, twisting his big head, like an ill-fitting helmet, toward the back seat. The dog did indeed have a very pointed nose, which he pushed into Alexandra's palm when she offered it. Pointed, moist, and shocking—the tip of an icicle. She pulled her hand back quickly.

"The tide won't be in for hours," she said, trying to return her voice to its womanly register. The causeway was dry and full of potholes. His renovations had not extended this far.

"The bastard can
fool
you," h
e said. "How the hell've you been, anyway? You look depressed."

"
I
do? How can you tell?"

"I can tell. Some people find fall depressing, others hate spring. I've always been a spring person myself. All that growth, you can feel Nature groaning, the old bitch; she doesn't want to do it, not again, no, anything but
that,
but she
has
to. It's a fucking torture-rack, all that budding and pushing, the sap up the tree trunks, the weeds and the insects getting set to fight it out once again, the seeds trying to remember how the hell the DNA is supposed to go, all that competition for a little bit of nitrogen; Christ, it's cruel. Maybe I'm too sensitive. I bet you revel in it. Women aren't that sensitive to things like that."

She nodded, hypnotized by the bumpy road diminishing under her, growing at her back. Brick pillars twin to those at the far end stood at the entrance to the island, and these still had their gate, its iron wings flung wide for years and the rusted scrolls become a lattice for wild grapevines and poison ivy and even interpenetrated by young trees, swamp maples, their little leaves turning the tenderest red, almost a rose. One of the pillars had lost its crown of mock fruit.

"Women take pain in their stride pretty much," Van Home was going on. "Me, I can't stand it. I can't even bring myself to swat a housefly. The poor thing'll be dead in a couple days anyway."

Alexandra shuddered, remembering houseflies landing on her lips as she slept, their feathery tiny feet, the electric touch of their energy, like touching a frayed cord while ironing. "I like May," she admitted lamely. "Except every year it docs feel, as you say, more of an effort. For gardeners, anyway."

Joe Marino's green truck, to her relief, was not parked anywhere out front of the mansion. The heavy work on the tennis court seemed to have been
done; instead of the golden earthm
overs Sukie had described, a few shirtless young men were with dainty pinging noises fastening wide swatches of green plastic-coated fencing to upright metal posts all around what at the distance, as she looked down from a curve of the driveway to where the snowy egrets used to nest in the dead elms, seemed a big playing card in two flat colors imitating grass and earth; the grid of white lines looked sharp with signification, as compulsively precise as a Wiccan diagram. Van Home had stopped the car so she could admire.
"
I
looked into that HarTrue and even if you see your way past the initial expense the maintenance of any kind of clay is one hell of a headache. With this AsPhlex composition all you need do is sweep the leaves off it now and then and with any luck you can play right into December. Couple of days more it'll be ready to baptize; my thought was with you and your two buddies we might have a foursome."

"My goodness, are we up to such an honor? I'm really in no shape—" she began, meaning her game. Ozzie and she for a time had played a lot of doubles with other couples, but in the years since, though Sukie once or twice a summer got her out for some Saturday singles on the battered public courts toward Southwick, she had really played hardly at all.

"Then
get
in shape," Van Home said, misunderstanding, spitting in his enthusiasm. "Move around, get rid of that flub. Hell, thirty-eight is
young."

He
kn
ow
s my age,
Alexandra thought, more relieved than offended. It was nice to have yourself known by a man; it was getting to be known that was embarrassing: all that self-conscious verbalization over too many drinks, and then the bodies revealed with the hidden marks and sags like disappointing presents at Christmastime. But how much of love, when you thought about it, was not of the other but of yourself
naked in hi
s eyes: of that rush, that little flight, of shedding your clothes, and being you at last. With this overbearing strange man she felt known, essentially, already. His being awful rather helped.

He put the car into motion and coasted around the crackling driveway circle and halted at the front door. Two steps led up to a paved, pillared porch holding in tesserae of green marble the inlaid initial
L.
The door itself, freshly painted black, was so massive Alexandra feared it would pull its hinges loose when the owner swung it open. Inside the foyer, a sulphurous chemical smell greeted her; Van Home seemed oblivious of it, it was his element. He ushered her in, past a stuffed hollow elephant foot full of knobbed and curved canes and one umbrella. He was not wearing baggy tweed today but a dark three-piece suit as if he had been somewhere on business. He gestured right and left with excited stiff arms that returned to his sides like collapsed levers. "Lab's over there, past the pianos, used to be the ballroom, nothing in there but a ton of equipment half of it still in crates, we've hardly begun to roll yet, but when we do, boy, we're going to make dynamite look like firecrackers. Here on the other side, let's call it the study, half my books still in cartons in the basement, some of the old sets I don't want to put out in the light till I can get an air-control unit set up, these old bindings, you know, and even the threads hold 'em together turn into dust like m
ummies when you lift the lid -
cute room, though, isn't it? The antlers were here, and the heads. I'm no hunter myself, get up at four in the morning go out and blast some big-eyed doe never did anybody any harm in the world in the face with a shotgun, crazy. People are crazy. People are really wicked, you have to believe it. Here's the dining room. The table's mahogany, six leaves if I want to give a banquet, myself

I prefer dinners on the intimate side, four, six people, give everybody a chance to shine, strut their stuff. You invite a mob a
nd mob psychology takes ov
er, a few leaders and a lot of sheep. I have some super candelabra still packed, eighteenth-century, expert I know says positively from the workshop of Robert Joseph Auguste though it doesn't have the hallmark, the French were never into hallma
rks like the English, the detail
on it you wouldn't believe, imitation grapevines down to the tiniest little curlicue tendril, you can even see a little bug or two on 'em, you can even see where insects chewed the leaves, everything done two-thirds scale; I hate to get it up here in plain view until I have a foolproof burglar alarm installed, though burglars generally don't like to tackle a place like this, only one way in and out, they like to have an escape hatch. Not that that's any insurance policy, they're getting bolder, the drugs make the bastards desperate, the drugs and the general breakdown in respect for any damn thing at all; I've heard of people gone for only half an hour and cleaned out, they keep track of your routines, your every move, you're watched, that's one thing you can be sure of in this society, baby: you are
watched."

Of Alexandra's responses to this outpouring she had no consciousness: polite noises, no doubt, as she held herself a distance behind him in fear of being accidentally struck as the big man wheeled and gestured. She was aware of, beyond his excited dark shape as he lavishly bragged, a certain penetrating bareness: a shabbiness of empty corners and rugless scratched floors, of ceilings whose cracks and buckled patches had gone untouched for decades, of woodwork whose once-white paint had yellowed and chipped and of elegant hand-printed panoramic wallpapers drooping loose in the corners and along the dried-out seams;

vanished paintings and mirrors were remembered by rectangular and oval ghosts of lesser discoloration. For all his talk of glories still to be unpacked, the rooms were badly underfurnished; Van Home had the robust instincts of a creator but with only, it seemed, half the needed raw materials. Alexandra found this touching and saw in him something of herself, her monumental statues that could be held in the hand.

"Now,"
he announced, booming as if to drown out these thoughts in her head, "here's the room I wanted you to see.
La chambre de resistance."
It was a long living room, with a portentous fireplace pillared like the facade of a temple—leafy Ionic pillars carved to support a mantel above which a great bevelled mirror gave back the room a speckled version of its lordly space. She looked at her own image and removed the bandanna, shaking down her hair, not fixed in a braid today but with a sticky twistiness still in it. As her voice had come out of her startled mouth younger than she was, so she looked younger in this antique, forgiving mirror. It was slightly tipped; she looked up into it, pleased that the flesh beneath her chin did not show. In the bathroom mirror at home she looked terrible, a hag with cracked lips and a dented nose and with broken veins in her septum, and when, driving in the Subaru, she stole a peek at herself in the rearview mirror, she looked worse yet, corpselike in color, the eyes quite wild and a single stray lash laid like a beetle-leg across one lower lid. As a tiny girl Alexandra had imagined that behind every mirror a different person waited to peek back out, a different soul. Like so much of what we fear as a child, it turned out to be in a sense true.

Van Home had put around the fireplace some boxy modern stuffed chairs and a curved four-cushioned sofa, refugees from a New York apartment obviously, and well worn; but the room was mostly furnished with works of art, including several that took up floor space. A giant hamburger of violently colored, semi-inflated vinyl. A white plaster woman at a real ironing board, with an actual dead cat from a taxidermist's rubbing at her ankles. A vertical stack of Brillo cartons that close inspection revealed to be not airy stamped cardboard but meticulously silk-screened sheets mounted on great cubes of something substantial and immovable. A neon rai
nbow, unplugged and needing a d
usting.