"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?"
Alexandra felt Jane Smart's lips move an inch back from the mouthpiece in indignation. Bakelite, the first of the synthetic polymers, that man had said. Jane-was saying hissingly, "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 moping around in your garden in men's pants and then cooking up your little figurines, but to make music you must have people. Other peo-ple."
"They're not figurines and I don't mope around."
Jane was going on, "You and Sukie are always poking fun of my being with Ray Neff ever 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 Whatsisname did, insinuating I should do something bigger so some expensive New York gallery can take fifty percent, even if they were to sell, which I very much doubt. Everything now is so trendy and violent."
"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. They all have to be in on the action, any action."
"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 fie was. And he does love all the space in the big house. He owns three pianos, honestly, though one of them is an upright that he keeps in his library; he has all these beautiful old books, with leather bindings and titles in Latin."
"Did he give you anything to drink?"
"Just tea. This manservant he has, that he talks Spanish to, brought it on a huge tray with a lot of liqueurs in funny old bottles that had that air, you know, of coming 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 I don't feel like I have any magic. Anyway, other people have magic too." She was thinking of Gina, Joe's wife. Gina must hate her. The Italian word for witch was strega. All over Sicily, Joe had told her, they give each other the evil eye. "Some days my insides feel all lied in knots."
"See Doc Pat, if you're seriously worried," said Jane, not quite unsympathetically. Dr. Henry Paterson, a plump pink man their age, with wounded wide watery eyes and a beautiful gentle Firm touch when he palpated. His wife had left him years ago. He had never grasped why or remarried.
"He makes me feel strange," Alexandra said. "The way he drapes you with a sheet and does everything under that."
"The poor man, what is he supposed to do?"
"Not be so sly. I have a body. He knows it. I know it. Why do we have to pretend with this sheet?"
"They all get sued," Jane said, "if there isn't any nurse in the room." Her voice had a double to it, like a television signal when a truck goes by. This wasn't what she had called to talk about. Something else was on her mind.
"What else did you learn at Van Home's?" Alexandra asked.
"Well—promise you won't tell anybody."
"Not even Sukie?"
"Especially not Sukie. It's about her. Darryl is really rather remarkable, he picks everything up. He stayed at the reception later than we did, I went off to have a beer with the rest of the quartet at the Bronze Barrel—"
"Greta along?"
"Oh God yes. She told us all about Hitler, how her parents couldn't stand him because his German was so uncouth. Apparently on the radio he didn't always end his sentences with the verb."
"How awful for them."
"—and I guess you faded into the night after playing that dreadful trick with poor Franny Lovecraft's pearls—"
"What pearls?"
"Don't pretend, Lexa. You were naughty. I know your style. And then the shoes, she's been in bed ever since but I guess she didn't break anything; they were worried about her hip. Do you know a woman's bones shrink to about half by the time she gets old? That's why everything snaps. She was lucky: just contusions."
"1 don't know, looking at her made me wonder if
I was going to be so sweet and boring and bullying when I got to be that age, if I do get to be, which I doubt. It was like looking into a mirror at my own dreary future, and I'm sorry, it drove me wild."
"All right, sweetie; it's no skin off my nose. As I was trying to say, Darryl hung around to help clean up and noticed while Brenda Parsley was in the church kitchen putting the plastic cups and paper plates into the Trashmaster 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; there was a point here she was supposed to grasp and express,np2057He collapsed into the curve her grief-drugged body made on the bed. The big dog, sleeping, snored with a noise like moisture in a straw. Alexandra stared at the ceiling, waiting for something to happen. The watery skins of her eyes felt hot, and dry as cactus skins. Her pupils were two black thorns turned inwards.
Sukie turned in her story of the Harvest Festival ("Rummage Sale, Duck-the-Clown / Part of Unitarian Plans") to Clyde Gabriel in his narrow office and discovered him, disconcertingly, slumped at his desk with his head in his arms. He heard the sheets of her copy rustle in his wire basket 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. She knew from rumor that he not only was a drinker but owned a telescope he would sometimes sit at for hours on his back porch, examining the stars. His oak-pale hair, thin on top, was mussed; he had puffy blue welts below his eyes and the rest of his face was faintly gray like newsprint. "Sorry," she said, "I thought you'd want to pop this in."
Without much raising his head off the desk he squinted at her pages. "Pop, schnop," he said, embarrassed by being found slumped over. "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 dunk," Sukie said, standing extra erect. These unhappy or unlucky men it was her fate to be attracted to were not above pulling you down with them if you allowed it and didn't stand tall. His nasty sardonic side, which made some others of the staff cringe and which had soured his reputation around town, Sukie saw as a masked apology, a plea turned upside down. At a point earlier in his life he must have been beautiful with promise, but his handsomeness—high square forehead, broad could-be passionate mouth, and eyes a most delicate icy blue and framed by starry long lashes—was caving in; he was getting that dried-out starving look of the persistent drinker.