"I'm not sure the Unitarians care that much about God," he mildly answered, still hoping to read. Quasars, pulsars, stars emitting every millisecond jets of more matter than is contained in all the planets: perhaps in such cosmic madness he himself was looking for the old-fashioned heavenly God. Back in those innocent days when he had been "brainy" he had written for special credit in biology a long paper called "The Supposed Conflict Between Science and Religion," concluding that there was none. Though the paper had been given an A +, thirty-five years ago, by pie-faced, effeminate Mr. Thurmann, Clyde saw now that he had lied. The conflict was open and implacable and science was winning.
"Whatever they care about it's more than staying young forever, which is what drove Ed Parsley into the arms of that pathetic little tramp," Felicia announced. "He must have taken a good look one day at that perfectly deplorable Sukie Rougemont you're so fond of and realized that she was over thirty and he better find a younger mistress or he'd be dragged into growing up himself. That saint Brenda Parsley, why she put up with it I have no idea."
"Why? Why not? What options did she have?" Clyde hated to hear her rant yet he could not resist replying now and then.
"Well, she'll kill him. This new one will absolutely kill him. He'll be dead inside of a year in some hovel where she's led him, his arms full of needle marks, and Ed Parsley will get none of my sympathy. I'll spit on his grave. Clyde, you must stop reading that magazine. What did I just say?"
"You'll spit on his grave."
Semiconsciously he had imitated a slight strangeness in her diction. He looked up in time to see her remove a piece of tinted fuzz from between her lips. She rolled the fuzz into a tight pellet with rapid nervous fingers at her side while she talked on. "Brenda Parsley was telling Marge Perley it might have been that your friend Sukie gave him a push so she could give this Van Home creature her undivided attention, though from what I hear around town his attention is divided... three ways every... Thursday night."
The uncharacteristic hesitation in her phrasing led him to look up from the jagged graphs of pulsar flashes; she had removed something else from her mouth and was making another pellet, staring him down as if daring him to notice. When she had been a high-school girl she had had shining round eyes, but now her face, without growing fat, with every year was pressing in upon these lamps of her soul; her eyes had become piggy, with a vengeful piggy glitter.
"Sukie's not a friend," he said mildly, determined not to fight. Just this once, not a fight, he Godlessly prayed. "She's an employee. We have no friends."
"You better tell her she's an employee because from the way she acts down there she's the veritable queen of the place. Walks up and down Dock Street as if she owns it, swinging her hips and in all that junk jewelry, everybody laughing at her behind her back. Leaving her was the smartest thing Monty ever did, about the only smart thing he ever did, I don't know why those women bother to go on living, whores to half the town and not even getting paid. And those poor neglected children of theirs, it's a positive crime."
At a certain point, which she invariably pressed through to reach, he couldn't bear it any more: the mellowing anaesthetic effect of the Scotch was abruptly catalyzed into rage. "And the reason we have no friends," he growled, letting the magazine with its monstrous celestial news drop to the carpet, "is you talk too Goddamn much."
"Whores and neurotics and a disgrace to the community. And you, when the Word is supposed to give some voice to the community and its legitimate concerns, instead give employment to this, this person who can't even write a decent English sentence, and allow her space to drip her ridiculous poison into everybody's ears and let her have that much of a hold over the people of the town, the few good people that are left, frightened as they are into the corners by all this vice and shamelessness everywhere."
"Divorced women have to work," Clyde said, sighing, slowing his breathing, fighting to keep reasonable, though there was no reasoning with Felicia when her indignation started to flow, it was like a chemical, a kind of chemical reaction. Her eyes shrank to diamond points, her face became frozen, paler and paler, and her invisible audience grew larger, so she had to raise her voice. "Married women," he explained to her, "don't have to do anything and can fart around with liberal causes."
She didn't seem to hear him. "That dreadful man," she- called to the multitudes, "building a tennis court right into the wetlandth, they thay"—she swallowed— "they say he uses the island to smuggle drugs, they row it in in dorieth when the tide ith high—"
This time there was no hiding it; she pulled a small feather, striped blue as from a blue jay, out of her mouth, and quickly made a fist around it at her side.
Clyde stood up, his feelings quite changed. Anger and the sense of entrapment fell from him; her old pet name emerged from his mouth. "Lishy, what on earth...?" He doubted his eyes; saturated with galactic strangeness, they might be playing tricks. He pried open her unresisting fist. A bent wet feather lay upon her palm.
Felicia's tense pallor relaxed into a blush. She was embarrassed. "It's been happening lately," she told him. "1 have no idea why. This scummy taste, and then these things. Some mornings I feel as if I'm choking, and pieces like straw, dirty straw, come out when I'm brushing my teeth. But I know I've not eaten anything. My breath is terrible. Clyde! I don't know what's happening to me!"
As this cry escaped her, Felicia's body was given an anxious twist, a look of being about to fly off somewhere, that reminded Clyde of Sukie: both women had fair dry skin and an ectomorphic frame. In high school Felicia had been drenched in freckles and her "pep" had been something like his favorite reporter's nimble, impudent carriage. Yet one woman was heaven and the other hell. He took his wife into his arms. She sobbed. It was true; her breath smelled like the bottom of a chicken coop. "Maybe we should get you to a doctor," he suggested. This flash of husbandly emotion, in which he enfolded her frightened soul in a cape of concern, burned away much of the alcohol clouding his mind.
But after her moment of wifely surrender Felicia stiffened and struggled. "No. They'll make out I'm crazy and tell you to put me away. Don't think I don't know your thoughts. You wish I was dead. You bastard, you do. You're just like Ed Parsley. You're all bastards. Pitiful, corrupt...all you care about ith awful
women " She writhed out of his arms; in the corner of his eye her hand snatched at her mouth. She tried to hide this hand behind her but, furious above all at the way that truth, for which men die, was mixed in with her frantic irrelevant self-satisfaction, he gripped her wrist and forced her clenched fingers open. Her skin felt cold, clammy. In her unclenched palm lay curled a wet pinfeather, as from a chick, but an Easter chick, for the little soft feather had been dyed lavender.
"He sends me letters," Sukie told Darryl Van Home, "with no return address, saying he's gone underground. They've let him and Dawn into a group that's learning how to make bombs out of alarm clocks and cordite. The System doesn't stand a chance." She grinned monkeyishly.
"How does that make you feel?" the big man smoothly asked, in a hollow psychiatric voice. They were having lunch at a restaurant in Newport, where no one else from Eastwick was likely to be. Elderly waitresses in starchy brown miniskirts, with taffeta aprons tied behind in big bows evocative of Playboy bunny tails, brought them large menus, printed brown on beige, full of low-cal things on toast. Her weight was not among Sukie's worries: all that nervous energy, it burned everything up.