Джон Апдайк – The Witches of Eastwick / Иствикские ведьмы (страница 7)

“I hope you didn't climb to the cupola with him on your first date?”

“It wasn't a date; it was a task.”

“What sort of questions did he ask about us? And what did you find permissible to tell him?”

“I told him we are happy together and prefer female company to males, and so on.”

“Did he take offence?”

“No. He said he also preferred women to men. Women are by far more perfect mechanisms.”

“Did he really say mechanisms?”

“Something like that. Oh dear! I must fly! I've got to interview the Harvest Festival Committee organizers at the Unitarian church.”

“May I ask what are you feeling towards Ed Parsley these days?”

“Just as always. Aloof tenderness. Brenda is such an unbearable kibitzer.”

“Didn't he tell you in what way she is such an unbearable kibitzer?”

Usually, the witches were reserved as to talking about their sexual experiences. But Sukie, feeling Alexandra's annoyance, decided to break that rule and started explaining.

“Lexa, she doesn't do anything for him. And he, before entering the seminary, played up quite a lot, so he knows what he is deprived of. I can't reject him all the time, he is so pitiful.”

Healing was in their nature, and if society accused them of breaking emotionally cold and impotent but seemingly unbreakable unions between husbands and wives and burnt them alive by their malignant slander, then it was the price they had to pay. The wish to cure, to apply a healing lotion of an unwillingly giving in flesh to the wound of male lust, to allow the flaming male spirit to be thrilled by the sight of a naked witch gliding around a tastelessly furnished motel room was the basic and instinctive, purely feminine characteristic. So Alexandra let Sukie go and didn't reproach her young friend further for taking care of Ed Parsley.

In the silence of the house which was yet to be child free for over more than two hours, Alexandra was fighting depression. She was choking from her own uselessness. To cheer herself up she decided to eat something. She made a sandwich from cereals with a slice of turkey breast and lettuce. She was amazed at how many tiring movements it takes to prepare lunch: to get the meat from the fridge, to take off the scotch from the paper wrapping, to find mayonnaise among the jam and salad oil bottles on the shelf; with nails, to tear off the film from the lettuce head, to put it all on the kitchen counter-top, to get a plate and a knife for mayonnaise, to find a fork for fishing a long thin pickle from a wide jar, and then to make coffee in order to wash down the taste of the turkey and pickle.

Alexandra took away the ingredients of her lunch and the instruments used to satisfy her hunger, tidied up the house after a fashion. Why is it so necessary to sleep in beds, which are to be made, and to eat from plates, which you have to wash up? Did Inca women live harder? Van Horne was right – she really felt like a mechanism, a robot, cruelly doomed to be aware of every routine movement.

In the mountain town in the west where she was born, Alexandra was a tenderly loved daughter, the center her family life. Then her mother died, and her father sent her to a college in the east. There, in New London, in the course of four postcard beautiful academic seasons, as the captain of the grass hockey team and a student of fine arts, she had changed many colorful costumes, and in June of her undergraduate year she found herself all in white, after which various wife uniforms filled her wardrobe. She met Oz during a sailing trip on Long Island. While putting plastic glasses to his lips with a steady hand, he didn't show any signs of intoxication or fear, whereas she felt both. And that impressed her greatly. Oz was also delighted with her full figure and a masculine gate, characteristic of western women. The wind changed, the yacht began to roam. A cheering smile flashed on his red face, burnt by the sun and the gin consumed. He smiled shyly, with one corner of his mouth, like her father. And Alexandra fell right into his hands, vaguely expecting upward flight in life to follow: strength to strength. She shouldered motherhood burden, gardeners' club membership, carpooling and cocktail parties. In the morning she drank coffee with a visiting domestic help; in the evening it was brandy with her husband; she took drunken lust for a family well-being. The world around Alexandra grew – children jumped out from between her legs one after another; a story had to be added to the house; Oz got rises in step with inflation – and she went on feeding that world somehow, but it didn't feed her any longer. Her depressions became more frequent. The doctor prescribed some medicine and visits to a psychotherapist and/or spiritual director. From their house the church bells could be heard, and in the early winter dusk, before school returned her children to her, Alexandra, who was weakened and knocked out by the slightest movement, lay down on the bed, feeling shapeless and awfully smelling like an old boot or a squirrel hit on the highway a few days before.

In childhood, in their innocent mountain town, she would laze about in bed, excited by the feeling of her body – a stranger from nowhere that had arrived to hold her spirit inside. She would scrutinize herself in the mirror and had decided to be friends with her body: she might have got a worse body, mightn't she? Later, at the height of her marital life, Alexandra experienced disgust to her body, and her husband's marital proclivities seemed cruel mocking. Her body existed somewhere outside, beyond the windows – the flesh of her essence overgrown with leaves, to which the world still snuggled up. After the divorce she felt as if she had at last sailed outside through the window. On the morning after the court's decision Alexandra got up at four a.m. and pulled out the withered pea stems, singing in the light of the moon and the dawn starting in the east. This other body of hers also had a soul.

Alexandra lay in bed; in her imagination pink and white peonies of the window curtains looked like clown faces. They were devils; they encouraged her depression. She remembered the clay figurines that were waiting that her witchcraft would turn them into hand-made fantasies. A small glass of alcohol or a pill could raise her spirits and cheer her up, but she knew the price she would have to pay: in two hours she would feel even worse. In her imagination Alexandra heard the racket of machinery in the old Lenox mansion, and its inhabitant, the dark prince, who had taken away her two sisters, as if wished to insult her. But there was something in his insultingness and villainy that might help find food for spiritual exercises. Alexandra stayed in bed staring at the ceiling. She was waiting for something to happen.

Sukie brought her story of the Harvest Festival to Clyde Gabriel in his narrow office and found him slumped at his desk with his head in his arms. He heard her come in and looked up. His eyes were red-rimmed but whether from crying or sleep or hangover or last night's sleeplessness she could not tell. Without much raising his head off the desk he squinted at her pages. “This item doesn't deserve a two-line head. How about 'Peacenik Parson Plans Poppycock'?”

“I didn't talk to Ed; it was his committee chairpersons.”

“Oops, pardon me. I forgot you think Parsley's a great man.”

“That isn't altogether what I think,” Sukie said, standing extra erect. It was her fate to be attracted to unhappy or unlucky men, but they were not above pulling you down with them if you allowed it and didn't stand tall. When young, Clyde must have been quite good-looking, but his handsomeness – high square forehead, eyes a most delicate icy blue and framed by long lashes – was fading; he was getting that dried-out starving look of the steady drinker.

Clyde was a little over fifty. On the wall behind his desk, he had hung photographs of his daughter and son but none of his wife, though he was not divorced. Felicia Gabriel, the wife not honored with a photo on the wall, must have been lively and bright once but had developed into a sharp-featured little woman who could not stop talking. She was in this day and age outraged by everything: by the government and by the protesters, by the war, by the drugs, by dirty songs, by Playboy's being sold openly at the local drugstores, by the summer people scandalous in both costume and deed, by nothing's being quite as it would be if she were running everything. “Felicia was just on the phone,” Clyde volunteered, in indirect apology for the sad posture in which Sukie had found him, “furious about this Van Horne man's violation of the wetlands regulations. Also she says your story about him was too flattering; she says she's heard rumors about his past in New York that are pretty revolting.”

“Who'd she hear them from?”

“She won't say. She's protecting her sources. Maybe she got the poop straight from J. Edgar Hoover.” Such anti-wifely irony added little expression to his face, he had been ironical at Felicia's expense so often before. Something had died behind those long-lashed eyes. Sukie had never slept with Clyde. But she had this mothering feeling that she could give him health. He seemed to be sinking, gripping his steel desk like an overturned boat.