Read Online The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike - Free Book Online Page B

little things or love with Joe Marino, Alexandra thought: that was what Franny Lovecraft was implying. In a town like Eastwick there were no secrets, just areas of avoidance. 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 dreary amusements they represented.
    "I'll come to some meetings this winter, when there's nothing else to do," Alexandra said, relenting. "When I'm homesick for nature," she added, though knowing she would never go, she was far beyond such tame delights. "I like the slide shows on English gardens; are you having any of them?"
    "You must come next Thursday," Franny Lovecraft insisted, overplay ing her hand as people of minor distinction—vice-pres idents of savings banks, grand- daughters of cli pper-ship captains—will. "Daisy Robeson's son Warwick has just got back from three years in Iran, where he and his lovely little family had such a nice time, he w as working as an adviser there, it somehow has all to d o with oil, he says the Shah is performing miracles, all this splendid modern archi tecture right in their capital city—oh, what is its name, I want to say New Delhi"
    Alexandra offered no help though she knew the name Tehran; the devil was getting into her.
    "At any rate, Wicky is going to give a slide show on Oriental rugs. 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, collapsed upon itself in folds and gulleys like those of an eroded roadside embankment, with a strand of artificial pearls of which the centerpiece was an antique mother-of-pearl egg in which a tiny gold cross had been tediously inlaid. With an irritated psychic effort, Alexandra willed the frayed old string to break; fake pearls slipped down the old lady's sunken front and cascaded in constellations to the floor.
    The floor of the church parlor was covered with industrial carpeting the dull green of goose scat; it muffled the patter of pearls. The crowd was slow to detect the disaster, and at first only those in the immediate vicinity stooped to collect them. Mrs. Lovecraft, her face blanched with shock beneath the patches of rouge, was herself too arthritic and brittle to stoop. Alexandra, while kneeling at the old lady's dropsical feet, wickedly willed the narrow strained straps of her once-fashionable lizardskin shoes to come undone. Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more. Alexandra straightened up and set a half-dozen retrieved pearls in her victim's trembling, blue-knuckled, greedily cupped hand. Then she backed away, through the widening circle of squatting searchers. These bodies squatting seemed grotesque giant cabbages of muscle and avidity and cloth; their auras were all confused like watercolors running together to make gray. Her way to the door was blocked by Reverend Parsley, his handsome waxy face with that Peer Gynt tweak of doom to it. Like many a man who shaves in the morning, he sported a visible stubble by nighttime.
    "Alexandra," he began, his voice deliberately forced into its most searching, low-pitched register. "I was so much hoping to see you here tonight." He wanted her. He was tired of fucking Sukie. In the nervousness of his overture he reached up to scratch his quaintly combed head, and his intended victim took the opportunity to snap the cheap expansion band of his important-looking gold-plated watch, an Omega. He felt it release and grabbed the expensive accessory where it was entangled in his shirt cuff before it had time to drop. This gave Alexandra a second to slip past