The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike Read Free Book Online Page B

Sheep, two doors the other side of the little barbershop, if you ever get a haircut."
    "Never if I can help it. Saps my strength. My mother used to call me Samson. But yeah, one of those. I bought all they had to show to a pal of mine, a really relaxed terrific guy who runs a gallery in New York, right there on Fifty-seventh Street. It's not for me to promise you anything, Alexandra—O.K. if I call you that?—but if you could bring yourself to create on a bigger scale, I bel we could get you a show. Maybe you'll never be Marisol but you could sure as hell be another Niki de Saint-Phalle. You know, those 'Nanas.' Now those have scale. I mean, she's really let go, she's not just futzin' around."
    With some relief Alexandra decided she quite disliked this man. He was pushy, coarse, and a blabbermouth. His buying her out at the Hungry Sheep felt like a rape, and she would have to run another batch through the kiln now earlier than she had planned. The pressure his personality set up had intensified her cramps, which she had woken with that morning, days ahead of schedule; that was one of the signs of cancer, irregularities in your cycle. Also, she had brought with her from the West a regrettable trace of the regional prej udice against Indians and Chica nos, and to her eyes Darryl Van Home didn't look washed. You could almost see little specks of black in his skin, as if he were a halftone reproduction. He wiped his lips with the hairy back of a hand, and his lips twitched with impatience while she searched her heart for an honest but polite response. Dealing with men was work, a chore she had become lazy at. "I don't want to be another Niki de Saint-Phalle," she said. "I want to be me. The potency, as you put it, comes from their being small enough to hold in the hand." Hastening blood made the capillaries in her face burn; she smiled at herself for being excited, when intellectually she had decided the man was a fraud, an apparition. Except for his money; that had to be real.
    His eyes were small and watery, and looked rubbed. "Yeah, Alexandra, but what is you? Think small, you'll wind up small. You're not giving you a chance, with this old-giftie- shoppie mentality. I couldn't b elicve how little they were charging—a lousy t wenty bucks, when you should be thinking five figures."
    He was New York vulgar, she perceived, and felt sorry for him, landed in this
    subtle province. She remembered the wisp of smoke, how fragile and brave it had looked. She asked him forgivingly, "How do you like your new house? Are you pretty well settled in?"
    With enthusiasm, he said, "It's hell. I work late, my ideas come to me at night, and every morning around seven-fifteen these fucking workmen show up! With their fucking radios! Pardon my Latin."
    He seemed aware of his need for forgiveness; the need surrounded him, and rippled out from every clumsy, too-urgent gesture.
    "You gott a come over and see the place," he said. "I need advice all over the lot. All my life I've lived in apartments where they decide everything for you, and the contractor I've got's an asshole."
    "Joe?"
    "You know him?"
    "Everybody knows him," Alexandra said; this stranger should be told that insulting local people was not the way to win friends in Eastwick.
    But his loose tongue and mouth tumbled on unabashed. "Little funny hat all the time?"
    She had to nod, but perhaps not to smile. She sometimes hallucinated that Joe was still wearing his hat while making love to her.
    "He's out to lunch every meal of the day," Van Home said. "All he wants to talk about is how the Red Sox pitching collapsed again and how the Pats still don't have any pass defense. Not that the old guy doing the floor is any wizard either; this priceless slate, practically marble, up from Tennessee, and he lays it half with the rough side up, where you can see the marks of the quarry saw. These butchers you call workmen up here wouldn't last one day on a union job in Manhattan. No offense, I can