"Well, she died," Sukie told Alexandra over the phone. "At about four this morning. Only Chris was with her, and he had dozed off. It was the night nurse coming in realized she had no pulse."
"Where was Darryl?"
"He'd gone home for some sleep. Poor guy, he really had tried to be a dutiful husband, night after night. It had been coming for weeks, and the doctors were surprised she had hung on so long. She was tougher than anybody thought."
"She was," Alexandra said, in simple salute. Her own heart with its burden of guilt had moved on, into an autumn mood, a calm of abdication. It was past Labor Day, and all along the edges of her yard spindly wild asters competed with goldenrod and the dark-leaved, burr-heavy thistles. The purple grapes in her arbor had ripened and what the grackles didn't get fell to form a pulp on the bricks; they were really too sour to eat, and this year Alexandra didn't feel up to making jelly: the steam, the straining, the little jars too hot to touch. As she groped for the next thing to say to Sukie, Alexandra was visited by a sensation more and more common to her: she felt outside her body, seeing it from not far away, in its pathetic specificity, its mortal length and breadth. Another March, and she would be forty. Her mysterious aches and itches continued in the night, though Doc Paterson had found nothing to diagnose. He was a plump bald man with hands that seemed inflated, they were so broad and soft, so pink and clean. "I feel rotten," she announced.
"Oh don't bother," Sukie sighed, herself sounding tired. "People die all the time."
"I just want to be held," Alexandra surprisingly said.
"Honey, who doesn't?" "That's all she wanted too." "And that's what she got." "You mean by Darryl." "Yes. The worst thing is—" "There's worse?"
"I really shouldn't be telling even you, I got it from Jane in absolute secrecy; you know she's been seeing Bob Osgood, who got it from Doc Pat—"
"She was pregnant," Alexandra told her.
"How did you know?"
"What else could the worst thing be? So sad," she said.
"Oh I don't know. I'd hate to have been that kid. I don't see Darryl as cut out for fatherhood somehow."
"What's he going to do?" The fetus hung disgustingly in Alexandra's mind's eye—a blunt-headed fish, curled over like an ornamental door knocker.
"Oh, I guess go on much as before. He has his new crowd now. I told you about church."
"I read your squib in 'Eyes and Ears.' You made it sound like a biology lecture."
"It was. It was a wonderful spoof. The kind of thing he loves to do. Remember 'The A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square Boogie'? I couldn't put anything in about Rose and Dawn and Greta, but honestly, when they put their heads together the cone of power that goes up is absolutely electric, it's like the aurora borealis."
"I wonder what they look like skyclad," Alexandra said. When she had this immediate detached vision of her own body it was always clothed, though not always clothed in what she was wearing at the time.
"Awful," Sukie supplied. "Greta like one of those lumpy rumpled engravings by the German, you know the one—"
"Diirer."
"Right. And Rose skinny as a broom, and Dawn just a little smoochy waif with a big smooth baby tummy sticking out and no breasts. Brenda—Brenda I could go for," Sukie confessed. "I wonder now if Ed was just my way of communicating with Brenda."
"I went back to the spot," Alexandra confessed in turn, "and picked up all the rusty pins, and stuck them in myself at various points. It still didn't do any good. Doc Pat says he can't find even a benign tumor."
"Oh sweetie pie," Sukie exclaimed, and Alexandra realized she had frightened her, the other woman wanted to hang up. "You're really getting weird, aren't you?"
Some days later Jane Smart said over the phone, her voice piercing with its indignation, "You can't mean you haven't already heard!"
More and more, Alexandra had the sensation that Jane and Sukie talked and then one or the other of them called her out of duty, the next day or later. Maybe they flipped a coin over who got the chore.
"Not even from Joe Marino?" Jane was going on. "He's one of the principal creditors."
"Joe and I don't see each other any more. Really."
"What a shame," Jane said. "He was so dear. If you like Italian pixies."
"He loved me," Alexandra said, helplessly, knowing how stupid the other woman felt her to be. "But I couldn't let him leave Gina for me."
"Well," Jane said, "that's a rather face-saving way of putting it."
"Maybe so, Jane Pain. Anyway. Tell me your news."
"Not just my news, the whole town's news. He's left. He's skipped, sugar pie. Il est disparu." Her s's hurt, but they seemed to be stinging that other body, which Alexandra could get back into only when she slept.
From the wrathfully personal way Jane was taking it Alexandra could only think, "Bob Osgood?"
"Darryl, darling. Please, wake up. Our dear Darryl. Our leader. Our redeemer from Eastwick ennui. And he's taken Chris Gabriel with him."
"Chris?"
"You were right in the first place. He was one of those."
"But he—"
"Some of them can. But it isn't real to them. They don't bring to it the illusions that normal men do."
Har, liar, diable, diable, saute ici, saute là. There she had been, Alexandra remembered, a year ago, mooning over that mansion from a distance, then worrying about her thighs looking too fat and white when she had to wade. "Well," she said now. "Weren't we silly?"
"'Naive' is the way I'd rather put it. How could we not be, living in a ridiculous backwater like this? Why are we here, did you ever ask yourself that? Because our husbands planted us here, and we like dumb daisies just stay."
"So you think it was little Chris—"
"All along. Obviously. He married Jenny just to cinch his hold. I could kill them both, frankly." "Oh Jane, don't even say it."
"And her money, of course. He needed that pathetic little money she got from the house to keep his creditors at bay. And now there's all the hospital bills. Bob says it's a terrible mess, the bank is hearing from everybody because they're stuck with the mortgage on the Lenox place. He did admit there may be just enough equity if they can find the right developers; the place would be ideal for condominiums, if they can get it by the Planning Board. Bob thinks Herbie Prinz might be persuadable; he takes these expensive winter vacations."
"But did he leave all his laboratory behind? The paint that would make solar energy—"
"Lexa, don't you understand? There was never anything there. We imagined him."
"But the pianos. And the art."
"We have no idea how much of that was paid for. Obviously there are some assets. But a lot of that art surely has depreciated dreadfully; I mean, really, stuffed penguins spattered with car paint—"
"He loved it," Alexandra said, still loyal. "He didn't fake that, I'm sure. He was an artist, and he wanted to give us all an artistic experience. And he did. Look at your music, all that Brahms you used to play with him until your awful Doberman ate your cello and you began to talk just like some unctuous banker."