The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike

see you're thinking, 'What a snob,' and I guess the hicks don't get much practice, putting up chicken coops; but no wonder it's such a weird-looking state. Hey, Alexandra, between us: I'm crazy about that huffy frozen look you get on your face when you get defensive and can't think what to say. And the tip of your nose is cute." Astonishingly, he reached out and touched it, the little cleft tip she was sensitive about, a touch so quick and improper she wouldn't have believed it happened but for the chilly tingle it left.
    She didn't just dislike him, she hated him; yet still she stood there smiling, feeling trapped and faint and wondering what her irregular inside s were trying to tell her.
    Jane Smart came up to them. For the performance she had had to spread her legs and therefore was the only woman at the gathering in a full-length gown, a shimmering concoction of aqua silk and lace trim perhaps a touch too bridal. "Ah, la artiste," Van Home exclaimed, and he seized her hand not in a handshake but like a manicurist inspecting, taking her hand upon his wide palm and then rejecting it, since it was the left he wanted, the tendony fingering hand with its glazed calluses where she pressed the strings. The man made a tender sandwich of it between his own hairy two. "What intonation," he said. "What vibrato and stretch. Really. You think I'm an obnoxious madman but I do know music. It's the one thing makes me humble."
    Jane's dark eyes lightened, indeed glowed. "Not prissy, you think," she said. "Our leader keeps saying my intonation is prissy."
    "What an asshole," pronounced Van Home, wiping spit from the corners of his mouth. "You have precision but that's not prissy necessarily; precision is where passion begins. Without precision, beaucoup de rien, huh? Even your thumb, on your thumb position: you really keep that pressure on, where a lot of men crump out, it hurts too much." He pulled her left hand closer to his face and caressed the side of her thumb. "See that?" he said to Alexandra, brandishing Jane's hand as if it w ere detached, a dead thing to b e admired. "That is one beautiful callus."
    Jane tugged her hand back, feeling eyes gathering upon them. The Unitarian minister, Ed Parsley, was taking notice of the scene. Van Home perhaps relished an audience, for he dramatically let Jane's left hand drop and seized the unguarded right, as it hung at Jane's side, to shake it in her own astonished face. "It's th is hand," he almost shouted. "It's this hand's the fly in the ointment. Your lowing. God! Your spic cato sounds like marcato, your legato like ditachi. Honey, string those phrases together, you're not playing just notes, one after the other, biddledy um-um-um, you're playing phrases, you're playing human out cries!"
    As if in silent outcry Jane's prim thin mouth dropped open and Alexandra saw tears form second lenses upon her eyes, whose brown was always a little lighter in color than you remembered, a tortoiseshell color.
    Reverend Parsley joined them. He was a youngish man with a slippery air of doom about him; his face was like a handsome face distorted in a slightly warped mirror—too long from sideburn to nostril, as if perpetually being tugged forward, and the too full and expressive lips caught in the relentless smile of one who knows he is in the wrong place, on the wrong platform of the bus station in a country where no known language is spoken. Though just into his thirties, he was too old to be a window-trashing LSD-imbibing soldier in the Movement and this added to his sense of displacement and inadequacy, though he was always organizing peace marches and vigils and read-ins and proposing to his parish of dry as dust dutiful souls that they let their pretty old church become a sanctuary, with cots and hot plates and chemical toilet facilities, for the hordes of draft evaders. Instead, tasteful cultural events were sheltered here, where the acoustics were accidentally marvellous; those old builders perhaps