Джон Апдайк – The Witches of Eastwick / Иствикские ведьмы (страница 5)

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.