The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike Page B

me off with your tongue. There isn't much blood, it's the tag end."
    Joe grimaced. "How's about I give you a rain check on that?" he said, and looked around for clothes to put on under his hat. Though growing pudgy, his body had a neatness; he had been a schoolboy athlete, deft with every ball, though too short to star. His bullocks were taut, even if his abdomen had developed a swag. A big butterfly of fine black hair rested on his back, the top edge of its wings along his shoulders and its feet feathering into the dimples flanking the low part of his spine. "I gotta check in at that Van Home job," he said, tucking in a pink slice of testicle tha i had peeped through one leghole of his elasticized shorts. They were bikini-style and tinted purple, a new thing, to go with the new androgyny. Among Joe's loyalties was one to changes of male fashion. He had been one of the first men around Eastwick to wear a denim leisure suit, and to sense that hats were making a comeback.
    "How's that going, by the way?" Alexandra asked lazily, not wanting him to go. A desolation had descended to her from the ceiling.
    "We're still waiting on this silver-plated faucet unit that had to be ordered from West Germany, and I had to send up to Cranston for a copper sheet big enough to fit under the tub and not have a seam. I'll be glad when it's done. There's something not right about that set-up. The guy sleeps past noon usually, and sometimes you go and there's nobody there at all, just this long-haired cat rubbing around. I hate cats."
    "They're disgusting," Alexandra said. "Like me."
    "No, listen, Al. You're mia vacca. Mia vacca bianca. You're my big plate of ice cream. What else can a poor guy say? Every attempt I make to get serious you turn me off."
    "Seriousness scares me," she said seriously. "Anyway in your case I know it's just a tease."
    But it was she who teased him, by making the laces of his shoes, oxblood cordovans like college men wear, come loose as fast as he tied them in bows; finally Joe had to shuffle out, defeated in his vanity and tidiness, with the laces dragging. His steps diminished on the stairs, one within the other, smaller and smaller, and the slam of the door was like the solid little nub, a mere peg of painted wood, innermost in a set of nested Russian dolls. Starling song scraped at the windows toward the yard; wild blackberries drew them to the bog by the hundreds. Abandoned and unsatisfied in the middle of a bed suddenly huge again, Alexandra tried to recapture, by staring at the blank ceiling, that strangely sharp and architectural vision of the Lenox place; but she could only produce a ghostly afterimage, a rectangle of extra pallor as on an envelope so long stored in the attic that the stamp has flaked off without being touched.
    Inventor Musician, Art Fancier Busy Renovating Old Lenox Manse
    by suzanne rougemont
    Courtly, deep-voiced, handsome in a casual, bearish way, Mr. Darryl Van Home, recently of Manhattan and now a contented Eastwick taxpayer, welcomed your reporter to his island.
    Yes, his island, for the famous "Lenox Manse" that this newcomer has purchased sits surrounded by marsh and at high tide by sheer sheets of water!
    Constructed circa 1895 in a brick English style, with a symmetrical facade and massive chimneys at either end, the new proprietor hopes to convert his acquisition to m ultiple usages—as laboratory for his fabulous experiments with chemistry and solar energy, as a concert hall containing no less than three pianos (which he plays expertly, believe me), and as a large gallery upon whose walls hang startling works by such contemporary masters as Robert Rauschenburg, Claus Oldenberg, Bob Indiana, and James Van Dine.
    An elaborate solarium-cum-greenhouse, a Japanese bath that will be a luxurious vision of exposed copper piping and polished teakwood, and an AsPhlex composition tennis court are all under construction as the privately owned island rings with the sound of hammer and saw and