"And what has brought you to this part of the world?" was her next question.
"Seems time I got out of Gotham," 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, "1 might put a mention 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."
"What kind of publicity were you receiving, may I ask?"
"If I told you, that'd be more publicity, wouldn't it?"
"Could be."
Alexandra marvelled at her friend, so cheerfully bold. Sukie's brazen ochre aura merged with the sheen of her hair. She asked, as Van Home made as if to turn away, "People are saying you're an inventor. What sort of thing do you invent?"
"Toots, even if I took all night to explain it to ya, ya wouldn't understand. It mostly deals with chemicals."
"Try me," Sukie urged. "See if I understand."
"Put it in your 'Eyes and Ears' and I might as well write a circular letter to my competition."
"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. Ms. I was married."
"What was he, a French Canuck?"
"Monty always said his ancestors were Swiss. He acted Swiss. Don't the Swiss have square heads, supposedly?"
"Beats me. I thought that was the Manchurians. They have skulls like cement blocks, that's how Genghis Khan could stack 'em up so neatly."
"Do you feel we've wandered rather far from the subject?"
"About the inventions, listen, I can't talk. I am watched."
"How exciting! For all of us," Sukie said, and she let her smile push her upper lip, creasing deliciously, up so far her nose wrinkled and a band of healthy gum showed. "How about for my eyes and ears only? And Lexa's here. Isn't she gorgeous?"
Van Home 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 figure frighteningly small, cleft here and there and with wisps of gray hair. He decided to answer Sukie's earlier question: "I've been doing a fair amount lately with protective coatings—a floor finish you can't scratch with even a steak knife after it hardens, a coating you can spray on the red-hot steel as it's cooling so it bonds with the carbon molecules; your car body'll get metal fatigue before oxidization sets in. Synthetic polymers—that's the name of your brave new world, honeybunch, and it's just getting rolling. Bakelitc was invented around 1907, synthetic rubber in 1910, nylon around 1930. Better check those dates if you use any of this. The point is, this century's just the infancy; synthetic polymers're going to be with us to the year one million or until we blow ourselves up, whichever comes sooner, and the beauty of it is, you can grow the raw materials, and when you run out of land you can grow 'em in the ocean. Move over, Mother Nature, we've got you beat. Also I'm working on the Big Interface."
"What interface is that?" Sukie was not ashamed to ask. Alexandra would just have nodded as if she knew; she had a lot still to learn about overcoming accul-turated female recessiveness.
"The interface between solar energy and electrical energy," Van Home told Sukie. "There has to be one, and once we find the combination you can run every appliance in your house right off the roof and have enough left over to recharge your electric car in the night. Clean, abundant, 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 done over an old garage so he can heat his water, 1 have no idea why, he never takes a bath."
"I'm not talking about collectors," Van Home said. "Thai's Model T stuff." He looked about him; his head turned like a barrel being rolled on its edge. "I'm talking about a paint."
"A paint?" Alexandra said, feeling she should make a contribution. 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 Home aped being offended. "Shit, if I'd known that's the kind of flirtatious featherheaded thing you like to say I wouldn't have wasted my time spilling my guts. You play tennis?"
Sukie stood up a little taller. Alexandra experienced a wish to stroke that long flat stretch from the other woman's breasts to below her waist, the way one longs to dart out a hand and stroke the belly a cat on its back elongates in stretching, the toes of its hind paws a-tremble in this moment of muscular ecstasy. Sukie was just so nicely made. "A bit," she said, her tongue peeking through her smile and adhering for a moment to her upper lip.
"You gotta 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 imperfectly synchronized, slightly slurring voice, "they're not wet."
"The snowy egrets like to nest there, in the dead elms out back."
"T, O, U, G, F," Van Home said. "Tough."
From the sudden stariness of his eyes she wondered if he was wearing contact lenses. His conversation did seem distracted by a constant slipshod effort to keep himself together. "Oh," she said, and what Alexandra noticed now gave her, already slightly dizzy, the sensation of looking down a deep hole. His aura was gone. He had absolutely none, like a dead man or a wooden idol, above his head of greasy hair.
Sukie laughed, pealingly; her dainty round belly pumped under the waistband of her suede skirt in sympathy with her diaphragm. "I love that. May I quote you, Mr. Van Home? Filled Wetlands No Longer Wet, Declares Intriguing New Citizen."
Disgusted by this mating dance, Alexandra turned away. The auras of all the others at the party were blinding now, like the peripheral lights along a highway as raindrops collect on the windshield. And very stupidly she felt within herself the obscuring moisture of an unwanted infatuation condensing. The big man was a bundle of needs; he was a chasm that sucked her heart out of her chest.
Old Mrs. Lovecraft, her aura the tawdry magenta of those who are well pleased with their lives and fully expect to go to Heaven, came up to Alexandra bleating, "Sandy dear, we miss you at the Garden Club. You mustn't keep so to yourself."
"Do I keep to myself? I feel busy. I've been putting up tomatoes, it's just incredible the way they kept coming this fall."
"I know you've been gardening; Horace and I admire your house every time we drive down Orchard Road: that cunning little bed you have by your doorway, chock-a-block full of button mums. I've several times said to him, 'Let's do drop in,' but then I think, No, she might be making her litde things, and we don't want to disrurfc her inspiration."
Making her little things or love with Joe Marino, Alexandra thought: that was what Franny Lovecraft was implying. In a town like Eastwick there were no secrets, just areas of avoidance. 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 dreary amusements they represented.
"I'll come to some meetings this winter, when there's nothing else to do," Alexandra said, relenting. "When I'm homesick for nature," she added, though knowing she would never go, she was far beyond such tame delights. "I like the slide shows on English gardens; are you having any of them?"