Kitabı oku: «The Witches of Eastwick / Иствикские ведьмы», sayfa 2

“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.”

“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.”

“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.