The tonic bottle fizzed in Sukie's fingers as if scolding. Perhaps cancer cells were more like bubbles of carbonation, penetrating through the bloodstream, Alexandra thought. She must stop thinking about it. “Where's Jane?” she asked.

“She said she'd be a little late. She's rehearsing for that concert at the church'.”

“With that awful Neff,” Alexandra said.

Raymond Neff taught music at the high school, a roly-poly womanish man who however had fathered five children upon his untidy, sallow, steel-bespectacled, German-born wife. He wanted to sleep with everybody. Jane was sleeping with him these days. Alexandra had slept with him a few times in the past but the episode had moved her so little – Sukie was perhaps unaware of its afterimage. Sukie herself seemed to be chaste vis-a-vis Neff, but then she had been available least long. Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly: sooner or later you land on all the properties. The two friends wanted to save Jane because they disapproved of Neff's hideous wife Greta. When you sleep with a married man, you in a sense sleep with the wife as well, so she should not be an absolute shame.

Laughingly discussing Greta Neff's various imperfections, the women took their drinks into the “den,” a little room with peeling wallpaper and a sharply slanting ceiling because the room was half tucked under the stairs that went up to the attic-like second floor.

“She doesn't even wash herself, have you ever noticed her smell?” Alexandra asked.

“And those granny glasses!” Sukie agreed. “She looks like John Lennon.” She made a kind of solemn sad-eyed thin-lipped John Lennon face.

“A cabbagy smell,” Alexandra continued. “He carries it on his clothes,” she said, thinking simultaneously that this was a little like Monty and the zucchini and that this intimate detail would show Sukie that she had slept with Neff. Well, she had slept with Monty, too; and had never smelled zucchini. One interesting aspect of sleeping with husbands was the viewpoint they gave you on their wives: they saw them as nobody else did. Neff saw poor dreadful Greta as a kind of a sweet bit of edelweiss he had brought from a dangerous romantic height (they had met in a Frankfurt beer hall while he was stationed in West Germany instead of fighting in Korea), and Monty… Alexandra tried to remember what Monty had said about Sukie. He had said little, being such a would-be gentleman. But once he had come to Alexandra's bed from some awkward consultation at the bank, and his words had been: “She's a lovely girl, but bad luck, somehow. Bad luck for others, I mean. I think she's fairly good luck for herself.” And it was true, Monty had lost a lot of his family's money while married to Suki, though everyone had blamed his own calm stupidity for this.

“Greta must be great in the sack,” Sukie was saying. “All those Kinder.”

“We must be nice to her,” Alexandra said, back to the subject of Jane. “Speaking to her on the phone yesterday, I was struck by how angry she sounded. That lady is burning up.”

Sukie glanced over at her friend, since this seemed a slightly false note. Some intrigue had begun for Alexandra, some new man.

“Angrier than anybody else?” Sukie asked, meaning themselves.

“Oh yes. We're in lovely shape,” the older woman answered, her mind drifting from this irony toward the subject of that conversation with Jane – the new man in town, in the Lenox mansion.

“Oh I know about him!” Sukie exclaimed, having read Alexandra's mind. “I have such tons to tell, but I wanted to wait until Jane got here.”

The kitchen doorbell rang, and Jane let herself in. She was not physically radiant like Sukie, yet an appeal shone from her as light from a filament lamp.

“That Neff is so awful,” Jane said. “He had us do the Haydn over and over. He said my intonation was prissy. Prissy. I burst into tears and told him he was a disgusting male chauvinist.”

“They can't help it,” Sukie said lightly. “It's just their way of asking for more love.”

“Hi there, you gorgeous creature,” Jane addressed Alexandra. “Tell me, though – was that thunderstorm the other day yours?”

Alexandra confessed that she had driven to the beach and seen smoke from the chimney.

“Greta came into the church,” Jane said, “right after he called my Haydn prissy, and laughed.”

Sukie did a German laugh: “Ho hoho.”

“Do they still have sex, I wonder?” asked Alexandra. “How could he stand it? It must be like excited sauerkraut.”

“No,” Jane said firmly. “It's like – what's that pale white stuff they like so? – sauerbraten.”

“They marinate it,” Alexandra said. “In vinegar, with garlic, onions, and bay leaves. And I think peppercorns.”

“Is that what he tells you?” Sukie asked Jane mischievously.

“We never talk about it, even at our most intimate,” Jane prissily said. “All he ever confessed on the subject was that she had to have it once a week or she began to throw things.”

“A poltergeist,” Sukie said, delighted. “A polter-frau.”

“Really,” Jane said, not seeing the humor of it, “you're right. She is an impossibly awful woman. So pedantic; so smug; such a Nazi. Ray is the only one who doesn't see it, poor soul.”

“I wonder how much she guesses,” Alexandra mused.

“She doesn't want to guess,” Jane said. “If she guessed she might have to do something about it.”

“Like turn him loose,” Sukie suggested.

“Then we'd all have to cope with him,” Alexandra said, visualizing this plump dank man as a tornado, an insatiable natural reservoir, of desire.

“Hang on, Greta!” Jane chimed in, seeing the humor at last.

All three giggled.

“Doesn't anybody want to hear about this new man?” Sukie asked still laughing.

“Not especially,” Alexandra said. “Men aren't the answer, isn't that what we've decided?”

“They're not the answer,” Jane Smart said. “But maybe they're the question.”

Sukie stood to make her announcement. “He's rich,” she said, “and forty-two. Never married, and from New York, one of the old Dutch families. He was evidently a child prodigy at the piano, and invents things besides. The whole big room in the east wing and the laundry area under it are to be his laboratory, and on the west side, he wants to install a big sunken tub, with the walls wired for stereo.” Her round eyes, quite green in the late light, shone with the madness of it. “Joe Marino has the plumbing contract: no estimate asked for, everything the best, price be damned. A teak tub eight feet in diameter, and the man doesn't like the feel of tile under his feet so the whole floor is going to be some special fine-grained slate you have to order from Tennessee.”

“He sounds pompous,” Jane told them.

“Does this big spender have a name?” Alexandra asked. She was jealous of this man because he so excited her two friends. On other Thursdays they were excited by her powers. On those Thursdays, in the right mood and into their third drinks, the three friends could erect a cone of power above them like a tent and know who of the Eastwick's inhabitants was sick, who was falling into debt, who was loved, who was frenzied, who was vehement, who was asleep in a respite from life's bad luck; but this wouldn't happen today. They were disturbed, and the curious thing was that they couldn't remember the man's name. The three witches realized that they were themselves under a spell, of a greater sorcerer.

Darryl Van Horne came to the chamber-music concert in the Unitarian Church on Sunday night, a bearish dark man with greasy curly hair half-hiding his ears and gathered at the back so that his head from the side looked like a beer mug with a monstrously thick handle. He wore gray flannels bagged at the backs of his knees somehow and an elbow-patched jacket of Harris Tweed in a curious pattern of green and black. A pink Oxford button-down shirt of the type fashionable in the Fifties and, on his feet, absurdly small and pointy black loafers completed the costume. He was out to make an impression.

“So you're our local sculptress,” he told Alexandra at the reception afterwards, which was held in the church parlor, for the players and their friends. The category of “players and their friends” included everyone except Van Horne, who came into the parlor anyway. People knew who he was; it added to the excitement. When he spoke, his voice resounded in a strange way as if there was an artificial element somewhere in his speech apparatus, and he produced so much spittle that he occasionally paused to wipe his jacket sleeve across the corners of his mouth. Yet he had the confidence of the cultured and well-to-do, condescending low to achieve intimacy with Alexandra.

“They're just little things,” Alexandra said, feeling suddenly little and shy, confronted by this brooding dark bulk. It was that time of the month when she was especially sensitive to auras. This stranger's aura was the shiny black-brown of a wet beaver pelt.

“Little things,” Van Horne echoed. “But so powerful,” he said, wiping his lips. “So full of psychic juice, you know, when you pick one up. They knocked me out. I bought all they had at, what's that shop? – the Noisy Sheep —”

“The Yapping Fox,” she said, “or the Hungry Sheep, two doors the other side of the little barbershop, if you ever get a haircut.”

“Never if I can help it. Takes away my strength. My mother used to call me Samson. But your figurines. I bought all they had to show to a pal of mine, who runs a gallery in New York, right there on Fifty-seventh Street. It's not for me to promise you anything, Alexandra – O.K. if I call you that? – but if you could create on a bigger scale, I believe we could get you a show. Maybe you'll never be Marisol but you could sure as hell be another Niki de Saint-Phalle. You know, those 'Nanas.' Now those have scale. I mean, she's not just futzing around.”

With some relief Alexandra decided she quite disliked this man. He was pushing, vulgar, and a blabbermouth, and to her eyes Darryl Van Horne didn't look washed. You could almost see little specks of black in his skin. He wiped his lips with the hairy back of a hand, and his lips twitched with impatience while she searched her heart for an honest but polite response. Dealing with men was work, a chore she had become lazy at. “I don't want to be another Niki de Saint-Phalle,” she said. “I want to be me. The power, as you put it, comes from their being small enough to hold in the hand.” She felt the capillaries in her face burn; she smiled at herself for being excited, when intellectually she had decided the man was a fraud, an apparition. Except for his money; that had to be real.

His eyes were small and watery, and looked rubbed. “Yeah, Alexandra, but what is you? Think small, and you'll end up small. You're not giving yourself a chance, with this old-giftie-shoppie mentality. I couldn't believe how little they were charging – a lousy twenty bucks, when you should be thinking five figures.”

He was New York vulgar, she concluded, and felt sorry for him, landed in this delicate province. She remembered the wisp of smoke, how fragile and brave it had looked. She asked him forgivingly, “How do you like your new house? Are you pretty well settled in?”

With enthusiasm, he said, “It's hell. I work late, my ideas come to me at night, and every morning around seven-fifteen these fucking workmen come! With their fucking radios! Pardon my Latin.”

It seemed he felt his need for forgiveness; the need surrounded him; every clumsy, too energetic gesture of his was full of that need.

“You must come over and see the place,” he said. “I need advice all over the lot. All my life I've lived in apartments where they decide everything for you, and the contractor I've got is an asshole.”

“Joe?”

“You know him?”

“Everybody knows him,” Alexandra said; this stranger should be told that insulting local people was not the way to win friends in Eastwick.

But his loose tongue went on. “Little funny hat all the time?”

She had to nod, but perhaps not to smile. She sometimes hallucinated that Joe was still wearing his hat while making love to her.

“These butchers you call workmen up here wouldn't last one day on a union job in Manhattan,” Van Horne said. “No offense, I can see you're thinking, 'What a snob,' and I guess these workers don't get much practice, building chicken coops; but no wonder it's such a weird-looking state. Hey, Alexandra, between us: I'm crazy about that frozen look you get on your face when you get defensive and don't know what to say. And the tip of your nose is cute.” Surprisingly, he put out his hand and touched it, a touch so quick and inappropriate she wouldn't have believed it happened but for the chilly tingle it left.

She felt she hated him, but stood there smiling, unable to understand what her insides were trying to tell her.

Jane Smart came up to them. “Ah, la artiste,” Van Horne exclaimed. He praised Jane's manner of playing. He said she had precision. “Precision is where passion begins.” But then he criticized her. “Honey, you're not playing just notes, one after the other! You're playing phrases, you're playing human outcries! So, string those phrases!”

Jane's dark eyes glowed. As if in silent outcry her thin mouth dropped open and tears formed second lenses upon her eyes.

The Unitarian minister, Ed Parsley, joined them. He looked up at Darryl Van Horne quizzically. Then he turned to Jane Smart and started praising the concert. Sukie was sleeping with Ed, Alexandra knew, and perhaps Jane had slept with him in the past. There was a special quality men's voices had when you had slept with them, even years ago. Ed's aura – Alexandra couldn't stop seeing auras – flowed in sickly yellowish green waves of anxiety and narcissism from his hair, which was somehow colorless without being gray. Jane was still fighting back tears and Alexandra had to introduce this strange outsider.

After the introduction was made, the men exchanged some controversial remarks, which delighted Alexandra.

How nice it was, she thought, when men talked to one another. All that aggression: the clash of shirt fronts.

“Didi hear,”Ed Parsley said now, “you offering a critique of Jane's cello-playing?”

“Just her bowing,” Van Horne said, suddenly shy. “I said the rest of it was great, her bowing just seemed a little choppy. Christ, you have to watch yourself around here, stepping on everybody's toes. I mentioned to sweet old Alexandra here about my plumbing contractor being none too swift and it turns out he's her best friend.”

“Not best friend,just a friend,” she felt it necessary to put in. The man, Alexandra saw even amid the confusions of this meeting, had the brute gift of getting a woman to say more than she had intended. He now insulted Jane, but she just looked up at him in silent fascination of a whipped dog.

“The Beethoven was especially splendid, don't you agree?” Parsley insisted.

“Beethoven,” the big man said with bored authority, “sold his soul to write those last quartets. All those nineteenth-century types sold their souls. What they did wasn't human.”

“I practiced till my fingers bled,” Jane said, gazing straight up at Van Horne's lips, which he had just rubbed with his sleeve.

“You keep practicing, little Jane. It's mostly muscle memory, as you know. When muscle memory takes over, the heart can start to sing its song. Until then, you're just going through the motions. Listen. Why don't you come over some time to my place and we'll fool around with a bit of old Ludwig's piano and cello stuff? That Sonata in A is an absolute honey. Or that E Minor of Brahms: so fabulous. What schmaltz.! I think it's still in the old fingers.” He wiggled his fingers at all of their faces. Van Horne's hands were eerily white-skinned beneath the hair, like tight surgical gloves.

“He was a child prodigy.” Jane Smart became suddenly angry and defensive. Her aura, usually a rather dull mauve, had turned purple, showing arousal, though by which man was not clear. The whole parlor to Alexandra's eyes was clouded by pulsating auras. She felt dizzy, disenchanted; she longed to be home. She closed her eyes and wished that this particular combination of feelings around her – of arousal, dislike, radical insecurity, and an evil will to dominate flowing not only from the dark stranger – would disintegrate.

And suddenly she was alone with Van Horne again, since Ed Parsley was distracted by some parishioners, and Raymond Neff took Jane away. She feared she would have to bear his conversation again. But Sukie, who feared nothing, glimmering in her reportorial role, came up and conducted an interview.

“What brings you to this concert, Mr. Van Horne?” she asked, after Alexandra had shyly performed introductions.

“My TV set is out of order” was his sullen answer. Alexandra saw that he preferred to make the approaches himself; but nobody could stop Sukie in her interrogating mood.

“And what has brought you to this part of the world?” was her next question.

“Seems it's time I got out of Gotham,”[2] he said. “Too much mugging, rent going sky-high. The price up here seemed right. This going into some paper?”

Sukie licked her lips and admitted, “I might mention it in a column I write for the Word called 'Eastwick Eyes and Ears.'”

“Jesus, don't do that,” the big man said, in his baggy tweed coat. “I came up here to cool the publicity.”

As Van Horne started to turn away, she asked, “People are saying you're an inventor. What sort of thing do you invent?” “Even if I took all night to explain it to you, you wouldn't understand. It mostly deals with chemicals.”

“Try me,” Sukie insisted. “See if I understand.”

“And my competition will see it in your 'Eyes and Ears'?”

“Nobody who doesn't live in Eastwick reads the Word, I promise. Even in Eastwick nobody reads it, they just look at the ads and for their own names.”

“Listen, Miss —”

“Rougemont. Mrs. I was married.”

“What was he, a French Canuck?”

“Monty always said his ancestors were Swiss. He acted Swiss. Shall we return to the subject?”

“I can't talk about the inventions, I am watched.”

“How exciting! How about for my eyes and ears only? And Lexa's here. Isn't she gorgeous?” Sukie said and smiled broadly.

Van Horne turned his big head stiffly as if to check; Alexandra saw herself through his bloodshot blinking eyes as if at the end of a reversed telescope, a very small figure with wisps of gray hair. He decided to answer Sukie's earlier question and said that lately he had been doing a lot with synthetic polymers.

“I'm also working on the Big Interface.”

“What interface is that?” Sukie was not ashamed to ask. Alexandra would just have nodded as if she knew.

“The interface between solar energy and electrical energy,” Van Horne told Sukie. “There has to be one, and when we find the combination you can operate every appliance in your house right off the roof and have enough left over to recharge your electric car in the night. Clean, plentiful, and free. It's coming, honey-bunch, it's coming!”

“Those panels look so ugly,” Sukie said. “There's a hippie in town who's put them over an old garage so he can heat his water, I have no idea why, he never takes a bath.”

“I'm not talking about collectors,” Van Horne said. “I'm talking about a paint.”

“A paint?” Alexandra said, feeling she should join the interview. At least this man was giving her something new to think about, beyond tomato sauce.

“A paint,” he solemnly assured her. “A simple paint you brush on with a brush and that turns the entire epidermis of your lovely home into an enormous low-voltaic cell.”

“There's only one word for that,” Sukie said.

“Yeah, what's that?”

“Electrifying.”

Van Horne pretended to be offended. “Shit, if I'd known that's the kind of flirtatious featherbrained thing you like to say I wouldn't have wasted my time spilling my guts. You play tennis?”

Sukie stood up a little taller. She was just so nicely built. “A bit,” she said, touching her upper lip with the tip of her tongue.

“You've got to come over in a couple weeks or so, I'm having a court put in.”

Alexandra interrupted. “You can't fill wetlands,” she said.

This big stranger wiped his lips and repulsively eyed her. “Once they're filled,” he said in his slightly slurring voice, “they're not wet.”

“The snowy egrets like to nest there, in the dead elms out back.”

“T, O, U, G, H,” Van Horne said. “Tough.”

“Oh,” Alexandra said, and she noticed now that his aura had disappeared. He had absolutely none above his head of greasy hair.

The auras of all the others at the party were blinding now. And very stupidly she felt infatuation growing within herself. The big man was a bundle of needs; he was a crater that sucked her heart out of her chest.

Old Mrs. Lovecraft, her aura the showy magenta of those who are well pleased with their lives and fully expect to go to Heaven, came up to Alexandra telling her in her bleating voice that the Garden Club members wanted to see her more at their meetings. Alexandra said she would come to some meetings in winter when there was nothing else to do, but she knew she would never go.

When she and Oz were still together and new in town they had spent a number of evenings in the company of sweet old bores like the Lovecrafts; now Alexandra felt infinitely fallen from the world of decent and dull entertainments they represented.

Now listening to Mrs. Lovecraft's bleating voice she felt the devil was getting into her.

“We're going to have a slide show on Oriental rugs next Thursday. You see, Sandy dear, in the Arab mind, the rug is a garden, it's an indoor garden in their tents and palaces in the middle of all that desert, and there's all manner of real flowers in the design, that to casual eyes looks so abstract. Now doesn't that sound fascinating?”

“It does,” Alexandra said. Mrs. Lovecraft had adorned her wrinkled throat with a string of artificial pearls. With an irritated psychic effort, Alexandra willed the old string to break; fake pearls cascaded to the floor.

While kneeling at the old lady's feet and collecting pearls, Alexandra wickedly willed the narrow straps of her shoes to come undone. Wickedness was like food: after you got started it was hard to stop. Alexandra straightened up and put a half-dozen pearls in her victim's trembling hand. Then she backed away, through the widening circle of people helping to pick up the scattered pearls. Her way to the door was blocked by Reverend Parsley.

“Alexandra,” he said in a low-pitched, probing voice. “I was so much hoping to see you here tonight.” He wanted her. He was tired of his affair with Sukie. In the nervousness of his overture he scratched his head, and Alexandra used that moment and willed the cheap band of his important looking gold-plated watch, an Omega, to snap. He grabbed the expensive accessory before it had time to drop. This gave Alexandra a second to slip past him into the open air, the grateful black air.

The night was moonless. Gravel crackled at her back. A dark man touched her arm above the elbow; his touch was icy, or perhaps she was feverish. She jumped, frightened. He was chuckling. “The damnedest thing happened back in there just now. The old lady whose pearls let loose a minute ago stumbled over her own shoes in her excitement and everybody's afraid she broke her hip.”

“How sad,” Alexandra said, sincerely but absentmindedly: her heart was still beating from the fright he gave her.

Darryl Van Horne leaned close and pushed words into her ear. “Don't forget, sweetheart. Think bigger. I'll check into that gallery. We'll be in touch. Nitey-nite.”

“You actually went?” Alexandra asked Jane with excited pleasure, over the phone.

“Why not?” Jane said firmly. “He really did have the music for the Brahms Sonata in E Minor, and plays wonderfully.”

“You were alone? I keep picturing that perfume ad. The one which showed a young male violinist seducing his accompanist in her low-cut dress.”

“Don't be vulgar, Alexandra. He feels quite asexual to me. And there are all these workmen around, including your friend Joe Marino in his little hat with a feather in it. And there's this constant rumbling from the excavators moving boulders for the tennis court.”

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