The Witches Of Eastwick by Updike John

Author:Updike, John [Updike, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Magic, Classic, Horror, Contemporary, Paranormal, Fantasy
ISBN: 9780449912102
Amazon: 0449912108
Barnesnoble: 0449912108
Goodreads: 217518
Publisher: Ballantine
Published: 1832-01-01T23:00:00+00:00

“Oh baby, how horrible for you,” Jane Smart said to Sukie, over the phone.

“Well it’s not as if I’d had to see any of it myself. But the guys down at the police station were plenty vivid. Apparently she didn’t have any face left.” Sukie was not crying but her voice had that wrinkled quality of paper that has been damp and though dry will never lie flat again.

“Well she was a vile woman,” Jane said firmly, comforting, though her head with its eyes and ears was still back in tte suite of Bach unaccompanieds—the exhilarating, somehow malevolently onrushing Fourth, in E-flat Major. “So boring, so self-righteous,” she hissed. Her eyes rested on the bare floor of her living room, splintered by repeated heedless socketing of her cello’s pointed steel foot.

Sukie’s voice faded in and out, as though she were letting the telephone drop away from her chin. “I’ve never known a man,” she said, a bit huskily, “gentler than Clyde.”

“Men are violent,” Jane said, her patience wearing thin. “Even the mildest of them. It’s biological. They’re full of rage because they’re just accessories to reproduction.”

“He hated even to correct anybody at work,” Sukie went on, as the sublime music—its diabolical rhythms, its wonderfully cruel demands upon her dexterity— slowly faded from Jane’s mind, and the sting from the side of her left thumb, where she had been ardently pressing the strings. “Though once in a while he would blow up at some proofreader who had let just oodles of things slip through.”

“Well darling, it’s obvious. That’s why. He was keeping it all inside. When he blew up at Felicia he had thirty years’ worth of rage, no wonder he took off her head.”

“It’s not fair to say he took off her head,” Sukie said. “He just kind of—what’s that phrase everybody’s using these days?—wasted it.”

“And then wasted himself,” prompted Jane, hoping by such efficient summary to hasten this conversation along so she could return to her music; she liked to practice two hours in the mornings, from ten to noon, and then give herself a tidy lunch of cottage cheese or tuna salad spooned into a single large curved lettuce leaf. This afternoon she had set up a matinee with Darryl Van Home at one-thirty. They would work for an hour on one of the two Brahmses or an amusing little Kodaly Darryl had unearthed in a music shop tucked in the basement of a granite building on Weybosset Street just beyond the Arcade, and then have, their custom was, Asti Spumante, or some tequila milk Fidel would do in the blender, and a bath. Jane still ached, at both ends of her perineum, from their last time together. But most of the good things that come to a woman come through pain and she had been flattered that he would want her without an audience, unless you counted Fidel and Rebecca padding in and out with trays and towels; there was something precarious about Darryl’s lust that was

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