"Kind of cute names," Sukie was saying. "Arthur and Rose. I don't know if you'd like them or not, they seemed practical more than artistic."
One of the reasons for Alexandra's depression was that Darryl had some weeks ago returned from New York with the word that the manager of the gallery on Fifty-seventh Street had thought her sculptures were too much like those of Niki de Saint-Phalle. Furthermore, two of the three had returned damaged; Van Home had taken Chris Gabriel along to help with the driving (Darryl became hysterical on the Connecticut Turnpike: the trucks tailgating him, hissing and knocking on ail sides of him, these repulsive obese drivers glaring down at his Mercedes from their high dirty cabs) and on the way home they had picked up a hitchhiker in the Bronx, so the pseudo-Nanas riding in the back were shoved over to make room. When Alexandra had pointed out to Van Home the bent limbs, the creases in the fragile papier-mache, and the one totally torn-off thumb, his face had gone into its patchy look, his eyes and mouth too disparate to focus, the glassy left eye drifting outward toward his ear and saliva escaping the corners of his lips. "Well Christ," he had said, "the poor kid was standing out there on the Deegan a couple blocks from the worst slum in the fucking country, he coulda got mugged and killed if we hadn't picked him up." He thought like a taxi driver, Alexandra realized. Later he asked her, "Why don'tcha try working in wood at least? You think Michelangelo ever wasted his time with gluey old newspapers?"
"But where will Chris and Jenny go?" she mustered the wit to ask. Also on her mind uncomfortably was Joe Marino, who even while admitting that Gina was in a family way again was increasingly tender and husbandly toward his former mistress, coming by at odd hours and tossing sticks at her windows and talking in all seriousness down in her kitchen (she wouldn't let him into the bedroom any more) about his leaving Gina and their setting themselves up with Alexandra's four children in a house somewhere in the vicinity but out of Eastwick, perhaps in Coddington Junction. He was a shy decent man with no thought of finding another mistress; that would have been disloyal to the team he had assembled. Alexandra kept biting back the truth that she would rather lie single than a plumber's wife; it had been bad enough with Oz and his chrome. But just thinking a thought so snobbish and unkind made her feel guilty enough to relent and take Joe upstairs to her bed. She had put on seven pounds during the winter and that little extra layer of fat may have been making it harder for her to have an orgasm; Joe's naked body felt like an incubus and when she opened her eyes it seemed his hat was still on his head, that absurd checked wool hat with the tiny brim and little iridescent brown feather.
Or it may have been that somewhere someone had tied an aiguillette attached to Alexandra's sexuality.
"Who knows?" Sukie asked in turn. "I don't think they know. They don't want to go back where they came from, I know that. Jenny is so sure Darryl’s close to making a breakthrough in the lab she wants to put all her share of the house money into his project."
This did shock Alexandra, and drew her full attention, either because any talk of money is magical, or because it had not occurred to her that Darryl Van Home needed money. That they all needed money— the child-support checks ever later and later, and dividends down because of the war and the overheated economy, and the parents resisting even a dollar raise in the price of a half-hour's piano lesson by Jane Smart, and Alexandra's new sculptures worth less than the newspapers shredded to make them, and Sukie having to stretch her smile over the weeks between commissions—was assumed, and gave a threadbare gallantry to their little festivities, the extravagance of a fresh bottle of Wild Turkey or ajar of whole cashews or a can of anchovies. And in these times of national riot, with an entire generation given over to the marketing and consumption of drugs, ever more rarely came the furtive wife knocking on the back door for a gram of dried orchis to stir into an aphrodisiac broth for her flagging husband, or the bird-loving widow wanting henbane with which to poison her neighbor's cat, or the timid teen-ager hoping to deal for an ounce of distilled moonwort or woadwaxen so as to work his will upon a world still huge in possibilities and packed like a honeycomb with untasted treasure. Nightclad and giggling, in the innocent days when they were freshly liberated from the wraps of housewifery, the witches used to sally out beneath the crescent moon to gather such herbs where they needed at the rare and delicate starlit junction of suitable soil and moisture and shade. The market for all their magic was drying up, so common and multiform had sorcery become; but if they were poor, Van Home was rich, and his wealth theirs to enjoy for their dark hours of holiday from their shabby sunlit days. That Jenny Gabriel might offer him money of her own, and he accept, was a transaction Alexandra had never envisioned. "Did you talk to her about this?"
"I told her I thought it would be crazy. Arthur Hallybread teaches physics and he says there is absolutely no foundation in electromagnetic reality for what Darryl is trying to do."
"Isn't that the sort of thing professors always say, to anybody with an idea?"
"Don't be so defensive, darling. I didn't know you cared."
"I don't care, really," Alexandra said, "what Jenny does with her money. Except she is another woman. How did she react when you said this to her?"
"Oh, you know. Her eyes got bigger and stared and her chin turned a little more pointy and it was as if she hadn't heard me. She has this stubborn streak underneath all the docility. She's too good for this world."
"Yes, that is the message she gives off, I suppose," Alexandra said slowly, sorry to feel that they were turning on her, their own fair creature, their ingenué.
Jane Smart called a week or so later, furious. "Couldn't you have guessed? Alexandra, you do seem abstracted these days." Her s's hurt, stinging like match tips. "She's moving in! He's invited her and that foul little brother to move in!"
"Into Toad Hall?"
"Into the old Lenox place," Jane said, discarding the pet name they had once given it as if Alexandra were stupidly babbling. "It's what she's been angling for all along, if we'd just opened our foolish eyes. We were so nice to that vapid girl, taking her in, doing our thing, though she always did hold back as if really she were above it all and time would tell, like some smug little Cinderella squatting in the ashes knowing there was this glass slipper in her future—oh, the prissiness of her now is what gets me, swishing about in her cute little white lab coat and getting paid for it, when he owes everybody in town and the bank is thinking of foreclosing but it doesn't want to get stuck with the property, the upkeep is a nightmare. Do you know what a new slate roof for that pile would run to?"
"Baby," Alexandra said, "you sound so financial. Where did you learn all this?"