Alexandra asked, "Jane, don't you ever get scared?"
"Not since I accepted myself for what I am. A fair cellist, a dreadful mother, and a boring lay."
Both the other women protested this last, gallantly, but Jane was firm: "I give good enough head, but when the man is on top and in me something resentful takes over."
"Just try imagining it's your own hand," Sukie suggested. "That's what I do sometimes."
"Or think of it that you're fucking him," Alexandra said. "That he's just something you're toying with."
"It's too late for all that. I like what I am by now.
If I were happier I'd be less effective. Here's what I've done for a start. When Darryl was passing the marzipan figures around I bit off the head of the one representing Jenny but didn't swallow it, and spit it out when I could in my handkerchief. Here." She went to her piano bench, lifted the lid, and brought out a crumpled handkerchief; gloatingly she unfolded the handkerchief for their eyes.
The little smooth candy head, further smoothed by those solvent seconds in Jane's mouth, did have a relation to Jenny's round face—the washed-out blue eyes with their steady gaze, the blond hair so fine it lay flat on her head like paint, a certain blankness of expression that had something faintly challenging and defiant and, yes, galling about it.
"That's good," Alexandra said, "but you also need something more inumate. Blood is best. The old recipes used to call for sang de menstrues. And hair, of course. Fingernail clippings."
"Belly-button lint," chimed in Sukie, silly on two bourbons.
"Excrement," Alexandra solemnly continued, "though if you're not in Africa or China that's hard to come by."
"Hold on. Don't go away," Jane said, and left the room.
Sukie laughed. "I should write a story for the Providence Journal-Bulletin, 'The Flush Toilet and the Demise of Witchcraft.' They said I could submit features as a free-lancer to them if I wanted to get back into writing." She had kicked off her shoes and curled her legs under her as she leaned on one arm of Jane's acid-green sofa. In this era even women well into middle age wore miniskirts, and Sukie's kittenish posture exposed almost all the thigh she had, plus her freckled, gleaming knees, perfect as eggs. She was in a wool pullover dress scarcely longer than a sweater, sharp orange in color; this color made with the sofa's vile green the arresting clash one finds everywhere in Cezanne's landscapes and that would be ugly were it not so oddly, boldly beautiful. Sukie's face wore that tipsy slurred look—eyes too moist and sparkling, lipstick rubbed away but for the rims by too much smiling and chattering—that Alexandra found sexy. She even found sexy Sukie's least successful feature, her short, fat, and rather unchiselled nose. There was no doubt, Alexandra thought to herself dispassionately, that since Van Home's marriage her heart had slipped its moorings, and that away from the shared unhappiness of these two friends there was little but desolation. She could pay no attention to her children; she could see their mouths move but the sounds that came out were jabber in a foreign language.
"Aren't you still doing real estate?" she asked Sukie.
"Oh I am, honey. But it's such thin pickings. There are these hundreds of other divorcees running around in the mud showing houses."
"You made that sale to the Hallybreads."
"I know I did, but that just about brought me even with my debts. Now I'm slipping back into the red again and I'm getting desperate." Sukie smiled broadly, her lips spreading like cushions sat on. She patted the empty place beside her. "Gorgeous, come over and sit by me. I feel I'm shouting. The acoustics in this hideous little house, I don't know how she can stand hearing herself."
Jane had gone up the little half-flight of stairs to where the bedrooms were in this split-level, and now returned with a linen hand towel folded to hold some delicate treasure. Her aura was the incandescent purple of Siberian iris, and pulsed in excitement. "Last night," she said, "I was so upset and angry about all this I couldn't sleep and finally got up and rubbed myself all over with aconite and Noxema hand cream, with just a little bit of that fine gray ash you get after you put the oven on automatic cleaner, and flew to the Lenox place. It was wonderful! The spring peepers are all out, and the higher you get in the air the better you can hear them for some reason. At Darryl's, they were all still downstairs, though it was after midnight. There was this kind of Caribbean music that they make on oil drums pouring full blast out of the stereo, and some cars in the driveway I didn't recognize. I found a bedroom window open a couple of inches and slid it up, ever so carefully—"
"Janie, this is so thrilling!" Sukie cried. "Suppose Needlenose had smelled you! Or Thumbkin!"
For Thumbkin, Van Home had solemnly assured them, beneath her fluffy shape was the incarnate soul of an eighteenth-century Newport barrister who had embezzled from his firm to feed his opium habit (he had been hooked during spells of the terrible toothaches and abscesses common to all ages before ours) and, to save himself from prison and his family from disgrace, had pledged his spirit after death to the dark powers. The little cat could assume at will the form of a panther, a ferret, or a hippogriff.
"A dab of Ivory detergent in the ointment quite kills the scent, I find," Jane said, displeased by the interruption.
"Go on, go on," Sukie begged. "You opened the window—do you think they sleep in the same bed? How can she stand it? That body so cold and clammy under the fur. He was like opening the door of a refrigerator with something spoiling in it."
"Let Jane tell her story," Alexandra said, a mother to them both. The last time she had attempted flight, her astral body had lifted off and her material body had been left behind in the bed, looking so small and pathetic she had felt a terrible rush of shame in midair, and had fled back into her heavy shell.
"I could hear the party downstairs," Jane said. "I think I heard Ray Neff's voice, trying to lead some singing. I found a bathroom, the one that she uses."
"How could you be sure?" Sukie asked.
"I know her style by now. Prim on the outside, messy on the inside. Lipsticky Kleenexes everywhere, one of those cardboard circles that hold the Pill so you don't forget the right day lying around all punched out, combs full of long hair. She dyes it, by the way. A whole bottle of pale Clairol right there on the sink. And pancake make-up and blusher, things I'd die before ever using. I'm a hag and I know it and a hag is what I want to look like."
"Baby, you're beautiful," Sukie told her. "You have raven hair. And naturally tortoiseshell eyes. And you take a tan. I wish I did. Nobody can take a freckled person quite seriously, for some reason. People think I'm being funny even when I feel lousy."
"What did you bring back in that sweetly folded towel?" Alexandra asked Jane.
"That's his towel. I stole it," Jane told them. Yet the delicate script monogram seemed to be a P or a Q. "Look. I went through the wastebasket under the bathroom sink." Carefully Jane unfolded the rose-colored hand towel upon a spidery jumble of discarded intimate matter: long hairs pulled in billowing snarls from a comb, a Kleenex bearing a tawny stain in its crumpled center, a square of toilet paper holding the vulval image of freshly lipsticked lips being blotted, a tail of cotton from a pill bottle, the scarlet pull thread of a Band-Aid, strands of used dental floss. "Best of all," Jane said, "these little specks—can you see them? Look close. Those were in the bathtub, on the bottom and stuck in the ring—she doesn't even have the decency to wash out a tub when she uses it. I dampened the towel and wiped them up. They're leg hairs. She shaved her legs in the bath."