The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike Page A

did have secrets. But Alexandra, having been raised in the stark land mined for a thousand cowboy movies, was inclined to think that the past is often romanticized, that when it was the present it had that same curious hollowness we all feel now.
    Ed looked up—he was not tall; this was another of his disappointments—at Darryl Van Home quizzically. Then he addressed Jane Smart with a sharp sh ouldering-aside note in his voice: "Beautiful, Jane. Just a damn beautiful job all four of you did. As I was saying to Clyde Gabriel just now, I wish there had been a better way to advertise, to get more of the Newport crowd over here, though I know his paper did all it could, he took it that I was criticizing; he seems a lot on edge lately." Sukie was sleeping with Ed, Alexandra knew, and perhaps Jane had slept with him in the past. There was a quality men's voices had when you had slept with them, even years ago: the grain came up, like that of unpainted wood left out in the weather. Ed's aura—Alexandra couldn't stop seeing auras, it went with menstrual cramps—emanated in sickly chartreuse waves of anxiety and narcissism from his hair, which was combed away from an inflexible part and was somehow colorless without being gray. Jane was still fighting back tears and in the awkwardness Alexandra had become the introducer, this strange outsider's sponsor.
    "Reverend Parsley—"
    "Come on, Alexandra. We're better friends than that. The name's Ed, please." Sukie must talk about her a little while sleeping with him, so he felt this familiarity. Everywhere you turn people know you better than you know them; there is all this human spying. Alexandra could not make herself say "Ed," his aura of doom was so repulsive to her.
    "—this is Mr. Van Home, who's just moved into the Lenox place, you've probably heard."
    "Indeed I have heard, and it's a delightful surprise to have you here, sir. Nobody had said you were a music-lover."
    "In a half-ass way, you could say that. My pleasure. Reverend." They shook hands and the minister flinched.
    "No 'Reverend,' please. Everybody, friend or foe, calls me Ed."
    "Ed, this is a swell old building you have here. It must cost you a bundle in fire insurance."
    "The Lord is our carrier," Ed Parsley joked, and his sickly aura widened in pleasure at this blasphemy. "To be serious, you can't rebuild this kind of plant, and the older members complain about all the steps. We've had people drop out of the choir because they can't make it up into the loft. Also, to my mind, an opulent building like this, with all its traditional associations, gets in the way of the message the modern-day Unitarian-Universalists are trying to bring. What I'd like to see is us open a storefront church right down there on Dock Street; that's where the young people gather, that's where business and commerce do their dirty work."
    "What's dirty about it?"
    "I'm sorry, I didn't catch your first name."
    "Darryl."
    "Darryl, I see you like to pull people's legs. You're a man of sophistication and know as well as I do thai the connection between the present atrocities in Southeast Asia and that new little drive-in branch Old Stone Bank has next to the Superette is direct and immediate; I don't need to belabor the point."
    "You're right, fella, you don't," Van Home said.
    "When Mammon talks, Uncle Sam jumps."
    "Amen," said Van Home.
    How nice it was, Alexandra thought, when men talked to one another. All that aggression: the clash of shirt fronts. Eavesdropping, she felt herself thrilled as when on a walk in the Cove woods she came upon traces in some sandy patch of a flurry of claws, and a feather or two, signifying a murderous encounter. Ed Parsley had sized Van Home up as a banker type, an implementer of the System, and was fighting dismissal in the bigger man's eyes as a shrill and ineffectual liberal, the feckless agent of a nonexistent God. Ed wanted to be the agent of another System, equally fierce and far-flung. As if to torment