“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?”