"It's not my cello, of course," Jane explained, unsticking black hair from her brow.
"Just an old Strad I had lying around," Van Home joked and then, seeing that Alexandra would believe him—for there was coming to be in her lovelorn state nothing she did not believe within his powers and possessions—amended this to: "Actually, it's a Ceruti. He was Cremona too, but later. Still, an O.K. old fiddlemaker. Ask the man who owns one." Suddenly he shouted as loudly as he had made the harp of the piano resound, so that the thin black windowpanes in their seats of cracked putty vibrated in sympathy. "Fidel!" he called into the emptiness of the vast house. "¡Margaritas! ¡Tres! Bring them into the bath! ¡Trái-galas al bano! ¡Rapidamente!"
So the moment of divestment was at hand. To embolden Jane, Alexandra rose and followed Van Home at once; but perhaps Jane needed no emboldening after her private musical sessions in this house. It was the ambiguous essence of Alexandra's relation with Jane and Sukie that she was the leader, the profoundest witch of the three, and yet also the slowest, a bit in the dark, a bit—yes—innocent. The other two were younger and therefore slightly more modern and less beholden to nature with its massive patience, its infinite care and imperious cruelty, its ancient implication of a slow-grinding, anthropocentric order.
The procession of three passed through the long room of dusty modern art and then a small chamber hastily crammed with stacked lawn furniture and unopened cardboard boxes. New double doors, the inner side padded with black vinyl quilting, sealed off the heat and damp of the rooms Van Home had added where the old copper-roofed conservatory used to be. The bathing space was floored in Tennessee slate and lit by overhead lights sunk in the ceiling, itself a dark pegboardy substance. "Rheostatted," Van Home explained in his hollow, rasping voice. He twisted a luminous knob inside the double doors so these upside-down ribbed cups brimmed into a brightness photographs could have been taken by and then ebbed back to the dimness of a developing room. These lights were sunk above not in rows but scattered at random like stars. He left them at dim, in deference perhaps to their puckers and blemishes and the telltale false teats that mark a witch. Beyond this darkness, behind a wall of plate glass, vegetation was underlit green by buried bulbs and lit from above by violet growing lamps that fed spiky, exotic shapes—plants from afar, selected and harbored for their poisons. A row of dressing cubicles and two shower stalls, all black like the boxes in a Nevelson sculpture, occupied another wall of the space, which was dominated as by a massive musky sleeping animal by the pool itself, a circle of water with burnished teak rim, an element opposite from that icy tide Alexandra had braved some weeks ago: this water was so warm the very air in here started sweat on her face. A small squat console with burning red eyes at the tub's near edge contained, she supposed, the controls.
"Take a shower first if you feel so dirty," Van Home told her, but himself made no move in that direction. Instead he went to a cabinet on another wall, a wall like a Mondrian but devoid of color, cut up in doors and panels that must all conceal a secret, and took out a white box, not a box but a long white skull, perhaps a goat's or a deer's, with a hinged silver lid. Out of this he produced some shredded something and a packet of old-fashioned cigarette papers at which he began clumsily fiddling like a bear worrying a fragment of beehive.
Alexandra's eyes were adjusting to the gloom. She went into a cubicle and slipped out of her gritty clothes and, wrapping herself in a purple towel she found folded there, ducked into the shower. Tennis sweat, guilt about the children, a misplaced bridal timidity— all sluiced from her. She held her face up into the spray as if to wash it away, that face given to you at birth like a fingerprint or Social Security number. Her head felt luxuriously heavier as her hair got wet. Her heart felt light like a small motor skimming on an aluminum track toward its inevitable connection with her rough strange host. Drying herself, she noticed that the monogram stitched into the nap of the towel seemed to be an M, but perhaps h was V and H merged. She stepped back into the shadowy room with the towel wrapped around her. The slate presented a fine reptilian roughness to the soles of her feet. The caustic pungence of marijuana scraped her nose like a friendly fur. Van Home and Jane Smart, shoulders gleaming, were already in the tub, sharing the joint. Alexandra walked to the tub edge, saw the water was about four feet deep, let her towel drop, and slipped in. Hot. Scalding. In the old days, before burning her completely at the stake they would pull pieces of flesh from a witch's flesh with red-hot tongs; this was a window into that, that furnace of suffering.
"Too hot?" Van Home asked, his voice even hollower, more mock-manly, amid these sequestered, steamy acoustics.
"I'll get used," she said grimly, seeing that Jane had. Jane looked furious that Alexandra was here at all, making waves, gently though she had tried to lower herself into the agonizing water. Alexandra felt her breasts tug upwards, buoyant. She had slipped in up to her neck and so had no dry hand to accept the joint; Van Home placed it between her lips. She drew deep and held in the smoke. Her submerged trachea burned. The water's temperature was becoming one with her skin and, looking down, she saw how they had all been dwindled, Jane's body distorted with wedge-shaped wavering legs and Van Home's penis floating like a pale torpedo, uncircumcised and curiously smooth, like one of those vanilla plastic vibrators that have appeared in city drugstore display windows now that the revolution is on and the sky is the limit.
Alexandra reached up and behind her to the towel she had dropped and dried her hands and wrists enough to accept in her turn the little reefer, fragile as a chrysalis, as it was passed among the three of them. She had had pot before; her older boy, Ben, in fact grew it in their back yard, in a patch past the tomato plants, which it superficially resembled. But it had never been part of their Thursdays: alcohol, calorie-rich goodies, and gossip had been transporting enough. After several deep tokes amid this steam Alexandra imagined she felt herself changing, growing weightless in the water and in the tub of her skull. As when a sock comes through the wash turned inside out and needs to be briskly reached into and pulled, so the universe; she had been looking at it as at the back side of a tapestry. This dark room with its just barely discernible seams and wires was the other side of the tapestry, the consoling reverse to nature's sunny fierce weave. She felt clean of worry. Jane's face still expressed worry, but her mannish brows and that smudge of insistence in her voice no longer intimidated Alexandra, seeing their source in the thick black pubic bush which beneath the water seemed to sway back and forth almost like a penis.
"God," Darryl Van Home announced aloud, "I'd love to be a woman."
"For heaven's sake, why?" Jane sensibly asked.
"Think what a female body can do—make a baby and then make milk to feed it."
"Well think of your own body," Jane said, "the way it can turn food into shit."
"Jane," Alexandra scolded, shocked by the analogy, which seemed despairing, though shit too was a kind of miracle if you thought about it. To Van Home she confirmed, "It is wonderful. At the moment of birth there's nothing left of your ego, you're just a channel for this effort that comes from beyond."
"Must be," he said, dragging, "a fantastic high."
"You're so drugged you don't notice," the other woman said, sourly.
"Jane, that isn't true. It wasn't true for me. Ozzie and I did the whole natural-childbirth thing, with him in the room giving me ice chips to suck, I got so dehydrated, and helping me breathe. With the last two babies we didn't even have a doctor, we had a monitrice."