“I did, some perfectly harmless thing with Barbra Streisand-God, what a voice that woman has, it goes through you like a knife! – and she got so angry at the violence in one of the previews she went back and spent half the movie complaining to the manager. Then she came back for the last half and got angry because she thought they showed too much of Streisand's tits when she bent over, in one of these turn-of-the-century gowns. I mean, this wasn't even a PG movie, it was a G! It was all people singing on old trolley cars!” Clyde tried to laugh but his lips had lost the habit and the resultant expression of his face was so pitiful to look at, that Sukie had an impulse to give this dying man her perky breasts to suck; but she already had Ed Parsley in her life and one wry intelligent sufferer at a time was enough. Every night she was shrinking Ed Parsley in her mind, so that when the call came she could travel light to Darryl Van Horne's island. That's where the action was, not here in town, where the wan citizens of Eastwick trudged through their civic and Christian duties.

Sukie left the Word offices and stepped out onto Dock Street and walked to Nemo's for lunch. At the south end of the street, at Landing Square, the huge old beeches around the little granite war memorial formed a transparent wall of yellow, losing leaves to every zephyr. The water as it turned toward winter cold became a steelier blue, against which the white clapboard houses on the Bay side of the street looked dazzlingly chalky. Such beauty! Sukie thought, and felt frightened that her own beauty and vitality would not always be part of it, that some day she would be gone like a lost piece from the center of a picture puzzle.

Jane Smart was practicing Bach's Second Suite for unaccompanied cello, in D Minor, and suddenly she felt anger at it, at these notes, so black and certain and masculine, and at him, this dead square-faced old Lutheran with his wig and his Lord and his genius and two wives and seventeen children, for the hurt of the tips of her fingers. Suddenly she rebelled, put down the bow, poured herself a little dry vermouth, and went to the phone.

“We must do something about getting Alexandra over to Darryl's place,” – Jane told Sukie. “When I visited her on Wednesday, she looked just terribly down, sick with jealousy, first me and the Brahms and then your article. I couldn't get her to say a word about it and I didn't dare press the topic myself, why she hasn't been invited.”

“But darling, she has been, as much as you and I were. When he was showing me his art works for the article he even pulled out an expensive-looking catalogue for a show this Niki Whatever had had in Paris and said he was saving it for Lexa to see.”

“Well she won't go now until she's formally asked and I can tell it's eating the poor thing alive. I thought maybe you could say something.”

“Sweetie, why me? You're the one who knows him better, you're over there all the time now with all this music.”

“I've been there twice,” Jane said, hissing the last word. “You just have that way about you, you can get away with saying things to a man. I'm too definite somehow; it would come out as meaning too much.”

Sukie promised to think about it and hung up. She had to go out to an emergency session of the Highway Department, and she hoped to be able to leave early for a secret romantic meeting with Ed Parsley at Point Judith lighthouse. She went upstairs, already foreseeing Ed Parsley, his dark parked car, the accusatory beam of the Point Judith lighthouse, the dirty damp motel room he would have already paid eighteen dollars for, and the storms of his guilt she would have to endure after he was sexually satisfied.

On a cold afternoon Alexandra thought East Beach might be too windy so she stopped the Subaru on a shoulder of the beach road not far from the Lenox driveway. Here Coal could have a run. While she stood gazing in the direction of the old symmetrical house, its owner pulled up behind her silently in his old Mercedes.

“You've come at last,” he called, grinning. Beside him on the front seat sat a conical figure – a collie, but one in whose tricolor hair the black was unusually dominant. The collie yapped loudly when loyal Coal returned from his far-ranging carrion-sniffing to his mistress's side.

She gripped her pet's collar and lifted her voice to make it heard above the dogs' noise. “I was just parking here, I wasn't…” Her voice sounded weaker and younger than her own; she had been caught.

“I know, I know,” Van Horne said impatiently. “Come on over anyway and have a drink. You haven't had your tour yet.”

“I have to get back in a minute. The children will be coming home from school.” But even as she said it Alexandra was dragging Coal, suspicious and resisting, toward her car. His run wasn't over, he wanted to say.

“Better hop in my jalopy with me,” the man shouted. “The tide's coming in and you don't want to get stranded.”

“I don't? she wondered, obeying like an automaton, betraying her best friend by shutting Coal alone in the Subaru.

“The tide won't be in for hours,” she said, opening his car door, trying to return her voice to its womanly register.

“The bastard can fool you,” he said. “How have you been, anyway? You look depressed.”

“I do? How can you tell?”

“I can tell. Some people find fall depressing, others hate spring. I've always been a spring person myself. All that growth, you can feel Nature groaning; she doesn't want to do it, not again, no, anything but that, but she has to. It's a real torture, all that budding and pushing, the sap up the tree trunks, the weeds and the insects getting ready to fight it out once again, the seeds trying to remember how the hell the DNA is supposed to go, all that competition for a little bit of nitrogen; Christ, it's cruel. Maybe I'm too sensitive. I bet you revel in it. Women aren't that sensitive to things like that. Women take pain in their stride pretty much. Me, I can't stand it. I can't even bring myself to swat a housefly. The poor thing'll be dead in a couple days anyway.”

“I like May,” Alexandra admitted. “Except every year it does feel, as you say, more of an effort. For gardeners, anyway.”

As they drove past the nearly finished tennis court, Van Horne said, “It'll be ready in a couple of days; I think with you and your two friends we might have a foursome.”

“My goodness, are we up to such an honor? I'm really in no shape – ” she began, meaning her game. Ozzie and she for a time had played a lot of doubles with other couples, but in the years since, she had really played hardly at all.

“Then get in shape,” Van Horne said, misunderstanding. “Move around, get rid of that flub. Hell, thirty-eight is young.”

He knows my age, Alexandra thought, more relieved than offended. It was nice to have yourself known by a man; it was getting to be known that was embarrassing: all that shy verbalization over too many drinks, and then the bodies exposed with the hidden marks and sags like disappointing presents at Christmastime. But how much about love was not about the other but about yourself naked in his eyes: of shedding your clothes, and being you at last. With this domineering strange man she felt known, essentially, already. His being awful rather helped.

He stopped the car at the front door. Two steps led up to a paved, pillared porch. He opened the massive door, freshly painted black, and ushered her in. Inside the foyer, a sulfurous chemical smell greeted her; Van Horne didn't notice it, it was his element. He was not wearing baggy tweed today but a dark three-piece suit as if he had been somewhere on business. He showed her round the house, talking nonstop and widely gesturing right and left with his arms. He explained that the former ballroom would serve as his laboratories; there was nothing in that room as the equipment was still in crates. The room on the other side he called the study; he found it pretty, but again said that half his books would be in cartons in the basement till he got an air-control unit installed. In the dining room with a mahogany table he informed Alexandra that he preferred dinners on the intimate side, four, six people, where everybody had a chance to shine, instead of inviting a mob when mob psychology took over, a few leaders and a lot of sheep. He also boasted that he had some super vintage candelabra of the eighteenth-century, still packed; he wasn't going to get it up in full view until he had a burglar alarm installed.

Alexandra responded by polite noises and held herself a distance behind him in fear of being accidentally struck as the big man wheeled and gestured. And she noticed that in spite of all his talk of glories still to be unpacked, the rooms were badly underfurnished; Van Horne had the strong instincts of a creator but with only, it seemed, half the needed raw materials. Alexandra found this touching and saw in him something of herself, her monumental statues that could be held in the hand.

“Now,” he announced, booming as if to drown out these thoughts in her head, “here's the room I wanted you to see. ” It was a long living room, with an extraordinary fireplace pillared like the facade of a temple with a great mirror above the mantel, in which the lordly space of the room reflected. She looked at her own image and took off the bandanna, shaking down her hair, not fixed in a braid today. She looked younger in this antique, forgiving mirror. She looked up into it, pleased that the flesh beneath her chin did not show. In the bathroom mirror at home she looked terrible, and in the rear-view mirror in the Subaru, she looked worse yet, corpse-like in color, the eyes quite wild. As a little girl Alexandra had imagined that behind every mirror a different person waited to look back out, a different soul. Like so much of what we fear as a child, it turned out to be in a certain sense true.

Van Horne had put around the fireplace some modern armchairs and a four-cushioned sofa, brought from a New York apartment. But the room was mostly furnished with works of art, including several that took up floor space: a giant hamburger, made of violently colored vinyl, a white plaster woman at a real ironing board, with a stuffed cat rubbing at her ankles; a neon rainbow, unplugged and needing a dusting.

The man slapped an especially ugly part of the collection, a naked woman on her back with legs spread; she had been made up of chicken wire, flattened beer cans, an old porcelain chamber pot for her belly, pieces of chrome car bumper, items of underwear stiffened with lacquer and glue. Her face, staring straight up at the ceiling, was that of a plaster doll, with china-blue eyes and cherubic pink cheeks, cut off and fixed to a block of wood that had been crayoned to represent hair. “Here's the genius of the bunch for my money,” Van Horne said, wiping the corners of his mouth with a two-finger pinching motion. “That's the kind of thing you should be setting your sights toward. The richness, you know, the ambiguity. No offense, friend Lexa, but you're a Johnny-one-note with those little poppets of yours.”

“They're not poppets, and this statue is rude, a jest against women. My little figurines aren't jokes, they're meant affectionately,” she said. Yet her hand touched the big doll and found there the glossy yet resistant texture of life. On the walls of this long room, where perhaps Lenox family portraits used to hang, there now hung or protruded tasteless parodies of the ordinary – giant pay telephones in soft canvas, American flags duplicated in impasto, oversize dollar bills rendered with deadpan fidelity, plaster eyeglasses with not eyes but parted lips behind the lenses, our movie stars and bottle caps, our candies and newspapers and traffic signs. All that we wish to use and throw away with hardly a glance was here bloated and bright: permanized garbage. Van Horne led Alexandra through his collection, down one wall and back the other; and in truth she saw that he had acquired of this mocking art specimens of good quality. He had money and needed a woman to help him spend it. Across his dark vest curved the gold chain of an antique watch; he was an inheritor, though ill at ease with his inheritance. A wife could put him at ease.

The tea with rum came, but formed a more sedate ceremony than she had imagined from Sukie's description. Fidel materialized with that ideal silence of servants. The long-haired cat called Thumbkin, with the deformed paws mentioned in the Word, jumped onto Alexandra's lap just as she lifted her cup to her lips. She felt at peace here, which she had not expected, here in these rooms almost empty except their overload of sardonic art. Her host seemed pleasanter too. The manner of a man who wants to sleep with you is aggressive, testing, predicting his eventual anger if he succeeds, and there seemed little of that in Van Horne's manner today. He looked tired. She fantasized that the business appointment for which he had put on his solemn three-piece suit had been a disappointment, perhaps a petition for a bank loan that had been refused. He poured extra rum into his tea from the bottle of Mount Gay his butler had put at his elbow. “How did you come to acquire such a large and wonderful collection?” Alexandra asked him.

“My investment adviser” was his disappointing answer. “Smartest thing financially you can ever do except finding oil in your back yard is to buy a name artist before he has the name. And anyway, I love the junk.”

“I see you do,” Alexandra said, trying to help him. How could she ever rouse this heavy rambling man to fall in love with her? He was like a house with too many rooms, and the rooms with too many doors.

“I hated,” he volunteered, “that abstract stuff they were trying to sell us in the Fifties; Christ, it all reminded me of Eisenhower,^[3] a big blah. I want art to show me something, to tell me where I'm, even if it's Hell, right?”

“I guess so. I'm really very dilettantish,” Alexandra said, less comfortable now that he did seem to be rousing. What underwear had she put on? When had she last had a bath?

“So when this stuff came along, I thought, Jesus, this is the thing for me. So fucking cheerful, you know – going down but going down with a smile.” He continued talking of the impression those things made on him when he had visited the modern art galleries.

He had felt that Alexandra did not mind his talking dirty. She in fact rather liked it; it had a secret sweetness, like the scent of carrion on Coal's coat. She must go. Her dog's big heart would break in that little locked car.

Van Horne told her about another creation of modern art that had impressed him greatly during his visit to Los Angeles: the entire sawed-off Dodge car sitting on a mat of artificial turf with a couple inside having an intercourse, and a little other mat of turf about the size of a checkerboard, with a single empty beer bottle on it, which showed that they had been drinking and threw it out. He called it a work of genius, and predicted that such works would be Mona Lisas of the future.