Джон Апдайк – The Witches of Eastwick / Иствикские ведьмы (страница 6)

“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.”

“How long did you stay?”

“Oh,” Jane drawled, lying. “About an hour. Maybe an hour and a half. He really does have some feeling for music and his manner when you're alone with him isn't as clownish as it may have seemed at the concert. He said being in a church, even a Unitarian one, gave him the creeps. I think behind all that bluffing he's really rather shy.”

“Darling. You never give up, do you?”

“I don't see it's a question of giving up or not, it's a question of doing your thing. You do your thing cooking up your little figurines, but to make music you must have people. Other people.”

“They're not figurines.”

Jane was going on, “You and Sukie are always making fun of my being with Ray Neff and yet until this other man has shown up the only music I could make in town was with Ray.”

Alexandra was going on, “They're sculptures, just because they're not on a big scale like a Calder or Moore, you sound as vulgar as What's his name did, saying I should do something bigger so that some expensive New York gallery can take fifty percent, even if they were to sell, which I very much doubt.”

“Is that what he said? So he had a proposition for you too.”

“I wouldn't call it a proposition,just typical New York pushiness, sticking your nose in where it doesn't belong.”

“He's fascinated by us,” Jane Smart asserted. “Why we all live up here wasting our sweetness on the desert air.”

“Tell him Narragansett Bay has always taken oddballs in and what's he doing up here himself?”

“I wonder.” In her flat Massachusetts Bay style Jane slighted the r. “He almost gives the impression that things got too hot for him where he was. And he does love all the space in the big house. He owns three pianos, honestly; he has all these beautiful old books, with leather bindings and titles in Latin.”

“Did he give you anything to drink?”

“Just tea. Fidel, his manservant, that he talks Spanish to, brought it on a huge tray with a lot of liqueurs in funny old bottles looking as if they came out of a cellar full of cobwebs.”

“I thought you said you just had tea.”

“Well really, Lexa, maybe I did have a sip of blackberry cordial or something Fidel was very enthusiastic about called mescal; if I'd known I was going to have to make such a complete report I'd have written the name down. You're worse than the CIA.”

“I'm sorry, Jane. I'm very jealous, I suppose. And my period. It's lasted five days now, ever since the concert, and the ovary on the left side hurts. Do you think it could be menopause?”

“At thirty-eight? Honey, really.”

“Well then it must be cancer.”

“It couldn't be cancer.”

“Why couldn't it be?”

“Because you're you. You have too much magic to have cancer.”

“Some days my insides feel all in knots.”

“See Doc Pat, if you're seriously worried,” said Jane.

“What else did you learn at Van Horne's?” Alexandra asked.

“Well – promise you won't tell anybody.”

“Not even Sukie?”

“Especially not Sukie. It's about her. Darryl stayed at the reception later than we did. He helped clean up and noticed that while Brenda Parsley was in the church kitchen putting the plastic cups and paper plates into the trash bin, Ed and Sukie had both disappeared! Leaving poor Brenda to put the best face on it she could – but imagine, the humiliation!”

“They really should be more discreet.”

Jane paused, waiting for Alexandra to say something more, but Alexandra was preoccupied with thoughts of cancer cells spreading in her body like lethal stars.

“Ed Parsley is actually such a fumbler,” Jane finally said. “Why does she always hint that she has finished with him?”

“I think Sukie's attachment to Ed can be partly explained by her professional need to feel in the thick of things here,” Alexandra suggested. “But what is interesting is not that she continues to see Ed, but that this Van Horne was so quick to notice it. It's flattering. It's worth thinking about.”

“My dear, you're awfully not free about some things. You know, a man can be just human.”

“I know this theory, but I've never met one. In the end, they all turn out to be just male, even gays.”

“Remember, we thought him to be gay? And now he is chasing the three of us.”

“I didn't know he was chasing you. I thought you both were hunting for Brahms.”

“And so it is. Really, Alexandra, you're frightfully obsessed.”

“I'm a hopeless fool. I'll feel better tomorrow. Now it's my turn to gather you all, don't forget.”

“Oh dear, I've nearly forgotten. That's why I've called you. I won't be able to come.”

“Can't make it on Thursday? What's the matter?”

“Well, you'll get suspicious again. It's Darryl again. He's got these wonderful bagatelles by Weber, and he wants us to play them together. I suggested Friday, but he said he was expecting some important Japanese investors on Friday.”

“I thought Thursdays were sacred, but as there's nothing sacred in the world, there's no point in organizing Thursdays,” Alexandra said, and added that she had no more time to talk.

An hour later, when Joe Marino was making love to her, Alexandra looked absent-mindedly over his naked shoulder and suddenly, with her inner sight, she saw Lenox mansion, clearly as a calendar picture, with a wisp of smoke, as she saw it on that day on the beach. As a result, she was not very responsive to Joe's efforts, and he came awkwardly, which offended his Mediterranean pride. Alexandra assured him that he was wonderful, that it was all her fault. It was the third summer since their affair started, and it was time for Alexandra to stop it, but she liked Joe's taste – sweetly salty like nougat. His aura was devoid of malice; its color was good. His thoughts as well as his hands always searched certain fitness. Her fate brought Alexandra from chrome-plated fittings producer to their installer.

After Joe left, Alexandra read Sukie's article in the Word “Inventor, musician, arts lover is renovating the old Lenox Mansion.” Driven by jealousy, she called her friend.

“So you went there,” – she reproached.

“My dear, it was my task.”

“Who was the author of the task?”

“I was,” – Sukie admitted. “Clyde wasn't sure it was important news. Moreover, it sometimes happened that after an article about some wonderful house that house was burgled and the newspaper was sued.”

Clyde Gabriel, a tired sinewy man, married to a revolting philanthropist, was the editor of the Word. Sukie asked Alexandra's opinion about the article. Her friend praised it but remarked that it was a bit too long, and then asked how Van Horne had behaved. Sukie said he had gabbled on nonstop. The tennis court was nearly made, and he wanted the three of them to come and play tennis while the weather still held.

“He seems to take a great interest in us, and I've told him something about us, just what everybody knows: our divorces and what comfort we are to each other, especially you. I can't say Jane has been a great comfort lately. Something tells me, behind our backs, she's been looking for a husband.”

“Have you told him something dirty about us?”

“And is there anything dirty? No, of course I told him no such thing. But then, he isn't that curious. It seems to me that it's you he really likes.”

“But I don't like him. I hate such dark faces. And I can't stand New York impertinence.”

“And I like his manner of swift change of topics. Now he shows you his paintings, now – his laboratories, now he plays the piano. And then suddenly he started running around the house and kept asking if I would like to have a look at the environs from the cupola.”