“Look at this! It’s amazing—” yelled Hasel.
I peered into the deep slate sink, the water sluicing down a small hole in the middle. “Isn’t there running water?”
Hasel looked at me, red-faced and grinning. “Yeah, sure there is, but isn’t this amazing? I’ve been doing this for fifteen minutes, and it never stops!”
I laughed. “Wow. That really is great, Hasel. Maybe later you’ll invent the wheel.”
I crossed to where Oliver and Baby Joe and Angelica stood before one of the big gas ranges. Oliver was poking thoughtfully at an immense steaming pot with a wooden spoon. Baby Joe was smoking a cigarette, occasionally leaning over to tap his ashes into the pot. Angelica was watching Oliver, her brow furrowed.
“You want it to be just barely al dente,” she said primly. “Do you know how to tell when it’s done?”
“Yes.” Oliver leaned forward on the balls of his feet and dipped his utensil into the roiling water. He backed up, shaking his head to clear the steam from his glasses, then dramatically flicked the wooden spoon and sent several long streamers of spaghetti sailing toward the ceiling. Baby Joe and Angelica ducked as a few of them sailed back down, but Oliver nodded.
“It’s done when it sticks,” he said. I looked up and saw the ceiling mapped with dozens of darkened threads of dried pasta, and among them several fresh and glistening strands. “And it’s done.”
We ate in the dining room, a big open space with raftered ceiling and chandeliers made of antlers. I counted thirty-two of us, students and grad students and Balthazar Warnick, the only genuine adult present although I assumed the housekeeper was brooding elsewhere. The room was dark and drafty. There were citronella candles in little red glasses at every table, and spongy Italian bread from the Safeway back in D.C., and gallon bottles of Gallo Burgundy. I sat at a long table with Annie and Angelica and Oliver. Behind us Baby Joe and Hasel talked and laughed loudly, watching the rest of us, but especially Angelica, as they passed around bowls of spaghetti and iceberg lettuce drenched with bottled dressing.
“Hey, we’re having a party later. You want to come?”
“Keep it down, man.” Hasel tilted his head across the room to where Balthazar Warnick sat with half a dozen well-behaved graduate students.
Baby Joe lowered his voice. “Upstairs. Oliver knows which room it is.”
Angelica smiled and looked at Oliver. “Oliver knows where everything is.”
Annie stuck her finger in her throat and made a gagging noise. “I’m out of here. It’s either help with the dishes tonight or do breakfast in the morning.” She grabbed her plate and stood. “Later, guys.”
Oliver grinned as he watched her leave. He leaned back in his chair, and Angelica turned sideways in her seat so that she could lean against him. “There goes Jiminy Cricket,” he said.
Angelica closed her eyes and nestled closer to him. “This is wonderful. Isn’t it wonderful, Sweeney?”
“Absolutely, it’s wonderful.” I stacked our dishes and left them what remained of the bottle of wine. “I guess I’ll see you later, then.”
“I’ll find you,” Angelica called. “Oliver says they’ll make a fire later in the big room down here.”
In the kitchen I dumped the dishes into the sink and hoisted myself onto a counter. “I’m a morning person,” I said to Annie. “I’ll watch you clean and I’ll do breakfast tomorrow.”
A few other people straggled in, dropping off plates, drying a few glasses and dishes before wandering off again. Hasel bounded through, eyeing the slate sink and pump longingly, but Annie yelled at him to leave. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his torn jeans and sauntered out the door.
“Now don’t you all forget to come to our party,” he yelled.
“Maybe if he had two brain cells to rub together, he could start a fire,” Annie said, and sighed. “You know, the only reason I came along was to keep an eye on Angelica. And now look at me.”
“It seems kind of laid-back,” I said at last. “I mean, nothing weird is going on. It all seems pretty quiet. Kind of boring, actually.”
Annie swiped at her sweating face with a dish towel and nodded. “Yeah, I know. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I’m just paranoid.”
“Well, you’ve got some reason to be paranoid. I mean we all do, I guess, you and me and Angelica, at least.”
“If I were you, I’d be worried about Oliver.”
“Oliver? How come?”
Annie stared out one of the black windows. “Look at him! He’s wasted all the time. And he hangs out at those places in Southeast—”
“So do I.”
“Yeah, but it’s different for you, Sweeney. I mean, no offense, but underneath all that black eye makeup and stuff, you’re kind of—well, kind of normal. But Oliver just seems to be too unstable to be doing all this stuff—”
“Oliver is brilliant,” I said hotly. “He says he wants to be a visionary, a—”
Annie put on her best long-suffering expression. “Boy, no one can tell you anything, can they?” She squeezed a stream of grungy water from her sponge and wiped her hands on her fatigues. “Well, I’m done. Tell Hasel Bright he can come back now and pump all he wants.”
After she left I sat there for a long time, chatting with whoever happened through. Somebody brought in a half-empty bottle of red wine and I drank most of that, filling and discarding paper cups as they disintegrated into a soggy red mass. After an hour or so I left, taking the rest of the wine with me. When I got to our room the light was on. Angelica stood in front of the bathroom mirror, curling her eyelashes. She smiled at me and waved her mascara wand.
“Hi! I was hoping you’d come back up—I couldn’t find you downstairs.”
I flopped onto the bed nearest her, the wine bottle at my feet. It was dark. She hadn’t turned on the lights in the rest of the room, but I saw a hurricane lantern on the windowsill behind me. I picked it up and slid open the metal hatch on the side, where a box of matches was stored. “I figured you and O wanted some time alone together.”
“Well, we did.” She turned back to the mirror and wiped a smudge of mascara from beneath one eye. “But you could have come with us, Sweeney…
“I kind of felt like a third wheel.”
“Fifth wheel.”
“Whatever. I felt like a wheel.” I cupped the hurricane lantern in my hands, and asked, “Listen, Angelica—you mind telling me a little bit about what’s going on here?”
She dotted carmine gloss on her lower lip and rubbed it in very slowly. When she was finished she looked at me. “You mean with Oliver and me?”
“I mean with everything.”
“Sweeney.” She tilted her head and smiled with maddening sweetness. “My dear soul mate. Are you jealous?”
“No, I’m not jealous. I’m just—I guess I don’t know what I am,” I sighed. I gulped a mouthful of wine from the bottle and grimaced. “Gah. This stuff is awful.”
Angelica regarded me shrewdly. “Perhaps it would taste better if you didn’t drink so much of it. But okay. Twenty questions. What do you want to know?”
“The Benandanti.”
She said nothing.
“Who they are,” I said. “What they are.”
“We—ell.” She took a deep breath. “They’re sort of a sacred priesthood.” She said it matter-of-factly, as though she’d announced “They all went to Harvard” or “They play in a foursome every weekend at Burning Tree.”
“What does it mean?”