The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike Page A

moved her focus these latter drifted like animalcules in a pond, like cancer cells in our lymph. Joe's rounded shoulder and the side of his neck were as indifferent and pale as the ceiling, and as smoothly traversed by these optical impurities, which were not usually part of her universe but when they did intrude were hard to shake, hard not to see. A sign of old age. Like snowballs rolling downhill we accumulate grit.
    She felt her front, breasts and belly, swimming in Joe's sweat and by this circuitous route her mind was returning to enjoyment of his body, its spongy texture and weight and confiding male aroma and rather miraculous, in a world of minor miracles, thereness. He was usually not there. Usually he was with Gina. He rolled off Alexandra with a wounded sigh. She had wounded his Mediterranean vanity. He was tan and bald on top, his shiny skull somewhat rippled, like the pages of a book we have left out in the dew, and it was part of his vanity to put back on, first thing, his hat. He said he felt cold without it. Hat in place, he showed a youngish profile, with the sharply hooked nose we see in Bellini portraits and with liverish deep dents beneath his eyes. She had been attracted to that sluggish debauched look, that hint of the leaden-eyed barone or doge or Mafioso who deals life and death with a contemptuous snick of his tongue and teeth. But Joe, wh om she had seduced when he came to repair a toilet that murmured all night, proved to be toothless in this sense, a devout bourgeois honest down to the last brass washer, an infatuated father of five children under eleven, and an in-law to half the state. Gina's family had packed this coast from New Bedford to Bridgeport with kin. Joe was a glutton for loyalties; his heart belonged to more sports teams— Celtics, Bruins, Whalers. Red Sox, Pawtucket Sox, Pat s, Teamen, Lobsters, Minuteme n—than she had dreamed existed. Once a week he came and pumped away at her with much that same faithfulness. Adultery had been a step toward damnation for him, and he was honoring one more obligation, a satanic one. Also, it was something of a contraceptive measure; his fertility had begun to be frightening to him, and the more seed of his that Alexandra with her IUD absorbed, the less there was for Gina to work with. The affair was in its third summer and Alexandra should be ending it, but she liked Joe's taste—salty-sugary, like nougat—and the way the air shimmered about an inch above the gentle ridges of his skull. His aura had no malice or bad color to it; his thoughts, like his plumber's hands, were always seeking a certain fittingness. Fate had passed her from a maker of chrome fixtures to their installer.
    To see the Lenox mansion as it had been in her vision, distinct in its bricks, its granite sills and quoins and Arguslike windows, so frontally, one would have to be hover ing in midair above the marsh, Fl ying. Rapidly the vision had diminished in size, as if receding in space, beckoning her. It became the size of a postage stamp and had she not closed her eyes it might have vanished like a pea down the drain. It was when her eyes were closed that he had come. Now she felt dazed, and splayed, as if the orgasm had been partly hers.
    "Maybe I shoul d cash it in with Gina and start up fresh somewhere with you," Joe was saying.
    "Don't be silly. You don't want to do anything of the kind," Alexandra told him. High unseen in the windy day above her ceiling, geese in a V straggled south, honking to reassure one another: I'm here, you're here. "You're a good Roman Catholic with five bambini and a thriving business."
    "Yeah, what am I doing here then?"
    "You're bewitched. It's easy. I tore your picture out of the Eastwick Word when you'd been to a Planning Board meeting and smeared my menstrual fluid all over it."
    "Jesus, you can be disgusting."
    "You like that, don't you? Gina is never disgusting. Gina is as sweet as Our Lady. If you were any kind of a gentleman you'd finish