"Yes he was saying to me when 1 lose my job at the Word I should try a novel. I can't imagine sitting down day after day to the same story. And the people's names—people just don't exist without their real names."
"Well," Alexandra sighed, "he's challenging us. He's stretching us."
Over the phone she did sound stretched—more diffuse and distant every second, sinking into a translucent quicksand of estrangement. Sukie had come back to her house after the Gabriels' funeral, and no child was home from school yet, yet the little old house was sighing and muttering to itself, full of memories and mice. There were no nuts or munchies in the kitchen and as the next best consolation she had reached for the phone. "I miss our Thursdays," she abruptly confessed, childlike.
"I know, baby, but we have our tennis parties instead. Our baths."
"They frighten me sometimes. They're not as cozy as we used to be by ourselves."
"Are you going to lose your job? What's happening with that?"
"Oh I don't know, there are so many rumors. They say the owner rather than find a new editor is going to sell out to a chain of small-town weeklies the gangsters operate out of Providence. Everything is printed in Pawtucket and the only local news is what a correspondent phones in from her home and the rest is statewide feature articles and things they buy from a syndicate and they give them away to everybody like supermarket fliers."
"Nothing is as cozy as it used to be, is it?"
"No," Sukie blurted, but could not quite, like a child, cry.
A pause occurred, where in the old days they could hardly stop talking. Now each woman had her share, her third, of Van Home to be secretive about, their solitary undiscussed visits to the island which in stark soft gray December had become more beautiful than ever; the ocean's silver-tinged horizon was visible now from those upstairs Arguslike windows behind which Van Home had his black-walled bedroom, visible through the leafless beeches and oaks and swaying larches surrounding the elephantine canvas bubble that held the tennis court, where the snowy egrets used to nest. "How was the funeral?" Alexandra at last asked.
"Well, you know how they are. Sad and gauche at the same time. They were cremated, and it seemed so strange, burying these little rounded boxes like Styrofoam coolers, only brown, and smaller. Brenda Parsley said the prayer at the undertaker's, because they haven't found a replacement for Ed yet, and the Gabriels weren't anything really, though Felicia was always going on about everybody else's Godlessness. But the daughter wanted I guess some kind of religious touch. Very few people came, actually, considering all the publicity. Mostly Word employees putting in an appearance hoping to keep their jobs, and a few people who had been on committees with Felicia, but she had quarrelled you know with almost everybody. The people at Town Hall are delighted to have her off their backs, they all called her a witch."
"Did you speak to Brenda?"
"Just a bit, out at the cemetery. There were so few of us."
"How did she act toward you?"
"Oh, very polished and cool. She owes me one and she knows it. She wore a navy-blue suit with a ruffled silk blouse that did look sort of wonderfully ministerial. And her hair done in a different way, swept back quite severely and without those bangs like the woman in Peter, Paul, and Mary that used to make her look, you know, puppyish. An improvement, really. It was Ed used to make her wear those miniskirts, so he'd feel more like a hippie, which was really rather humiliating, if you have Brenda's piano legs. She spoke quite well, especially at the graveside. This lovely fluting voice floating out over the headstones. She talked about how much into community service both the deceased were and tried to make some connection between their deaths and Vietnam, the moral confusion of our times, I couldn't quite follow it."
"Did you ask her if she hears from Ed?"
"Oh I wouldn't dare. Anyway I doubt it, since I never do any more. But she did bring him up. Afterwards, when the men were tugging the plastic grass around, she looked me very levelly in the eye and said his leaving was the best thing ever happened to her."
"Well, what else can she say? What else can any of us say?"
"Lexa sweet, whatever do you mean? You sound as though you're weakening."
"Well, one does get weary. Carrying everything alone. The bed is so cold this time of year."
"You should get an electric blanket."
"I have one. But I don't like the feeling of electricity on top of me. Suppose Felicia's ghost comes in and pours a bucket of cold water all over the bed, I'd be electrocuted."
"Alexandra, don't. Don't scare me by sounding so depressed. We all look to you for whatever it is. Mother-strength."
"Yes, and that's depressing too."
"Don't you believe in any of it any more?"
In freedom, in witchcraft. Their powers, their ecstasy.
"Of course I do, poops. Were the children there? What do they look like?"
"Well," Sukie said, her voice regaining animation, giving the news, "rather remarkable. They both look like Greek statues in a way, very stately and pale and perfect. And they suck together like twins even though the girl is a good bit older. Jennifer, her name is, is in her late twenties and the boy is college-age, though he's not in college; he wants to be something in show business and spends all his time getting rides back and forth between Los Angeles and New York. He was a stagehand at a summer-theatre place in Connecticut and the girl flew in from Chicago where she's taken a leave from her job as an X-ray technician. Marge Perley says they're going to stay here in the house a while to get the estate settled; I was thinking maybe we should do something with them. They seem such babes in the woods, I hate to think of their falling into Brenda's clutches."
"Baby, they've surely heard all about you and Clyde and blame you for everything."
"Really? How could they? I was being nothing but kind."
"You upset his internal balances. His ecology."
Sukie confessed, "I don't like feeling guilty."
"Who does? How do you think I feel, poor dear quite unsuitable Joe keeps offering to leave Gina and that swarm of fat children for me."
"But he never will. He's too Mediterranean. Catholics never get conflicted like us poor lapsed Protestants do."
"Lapsed," Alexandra said. "Is that how you think of yourself? I'm not sure I ever had anything to lapse from."
There entered into Sukie's mind, broadcast from Alexandra's, a picture of a western wooden church with a squat weatherbeaten steeple, high in the mountains and unvisited. "Monty was very religious," Sukie said. "He was always talking about his ancestors." And on the same wavelength the image of Monty's drooping milk-smooth buttocks came to her and she knew at last for certain that he and Alexandra had had an affair. She yawned, and said, "I think I'll go over to Darryl's and unwind. Fidel is developing some wonderful new concoction he calls a Rum Mystique."
"Are you sure it isn't Jane's day?"
"I think she was having her day the clay I talked to her. Her talk was really excited."
"It burns."
"Exactly. Oh, Lexa, you really should see Jennifer Gabriel, she's delicious. She makes me look like a tired old hag. This pale round face and these pale blue eyes like Clyde had and a pointy chin like Felicia had and the most delicate little nose, with a fine straight edge like something you would sculpture with a butter knife but slightly dented into her face, like a cat's if you can picture it. And such skin!"