“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.

In childhood, in their innocent mountain town, she would laze about in bed, excited by the feeling of her body – a stranger from nowhere that had arrived to hold her spirit inside. She would scrutinize herself in the mirror and had decided to be friends with her body: she might have got a worse body, mightn't she? Later, at the height of her marital life, Alexandra experienced disgust to her body, and her husband's marital proclivities seemed cruel mocking. Her body existed somewhere outside, beyond the windows – the flesh of her essence overgrown with leaves, to which the world still snuggled up. After the divorce she felt as if she had at last sailed outside through the window. On the morning after the court's decision Alexandra got up at four a.m. and pulled out the withered pea stems, singing in the light of the moon and the dawn starting in the east. This other body of hers also had a soul.

Alexandra lay in bed; in her imagination pink and white peonies of the window curtains looked like clown faces. They were devils; they encouraged her depression. She remembered the clay figurines that were waiting that her witchcraft would turn them into hand-made fantasies. A small glass of alcohol or a pill could raise her spirits and cheer her up, but she knew the price she would have to pay: in two hours she would feel even worse. In her imagination Alexandra heard the racket of machinery in the old Lenox mansion, and its inhabitant, the dark prince, who had taken away her two sisters, as if wished to insult her. But there was something in his insultingness and villainy that might help find food for spiritual exercises. Alexandra stayed in bed staring at the ceiling. She was waiting for something to happen.

Sukie brought her story of the Harvest Festival to Clyde Gabriel in his narrow office and found him slumped at his desk with his head in his arms. He heard her come in and looked up. His eyes were red-rimmed but whether from crying or sleep or hangover or last night's sleeplessness she could not tell. Without much raising his head off the desk he squinted at her pages. “This item doesn't deserve a two-line head. How about 'Peacenik Parson Plans Poppycock'?”

“I didn't talk to Ed; it was his committee chairpersons.”

“Oops, pardon me. I forgot you think Parsley's a great man.”

“That isn't altogether what I think,” Sukie said, standing extra erect. It was her fate to be attracted to unhappy or unlucky men, but they were not above pulling you down with them if you allowed it and didn't stand tall. When young, Clyde must have been quite good-looking, but his handsomeness – high square forehead, eyes a most delicate icy blue and framed by long lashes – was fading; he was getting that dried-out starving look of the steady drinker.

Clyde was a little over fifty. On the wall behind his desk, he had hung photographs of his daughter and son but none of his wife, though he was not divorced. Felicia Gabriel, the wife not honored with a photo on the wall, must have been lively and bright once but had developed into a sharp-featured little woman who could not stop talking. She was in this day and age outraged by everything: by the government and by the protesters, by the war, by the drugs, by dirty songs, by Playboy's being sold openly at the local drugstores, by the summer people scandalous in both costume and deed, by nothing's being quite as it would be if she were running everything. “Felicia was just on the phone,” Clyde volunteered, in indirect apology for the sad posture in which Sukie had found him, “furious about this Van Horne man's violation of the wetlands regulations. Also she says your story about him was too flattering; she says she's heard rumors about his past in New York that are pretty revolting.”

“Who'd she hear them from?”

“She won't say. She's protecting her sources. Maybe she got the poop straight from J. Edgar Hoover.” Such anti-wifely irony added little expression to his face, he had been ironical at Felicia's expense so often before. Something had died behind those long-lashed eyes. Sukie had never slept with Clyde. But she had this mothering feeling that she could give him health. He seemed to be sinking, gripping his steel desk like an overturned boat.

“You look exhausted,” she told him.

“I am. Suzanne, I really am. Felicia gets on the phone every night to one or another of her agents and leaves me to drink too much.”

“Take her to the movies,” Sukie suggested.