Free The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike

the smear of his starded face—a pathetic smear, as she was to remember it guiltily; as if by sleeping with him she could have saved him—into the open air, the grateful black air.
    The night was m oonless. The crickets stridulate d their everlasting monotonous meaningful note. Car headlights swept by on Cocumscussoc Way, and the bushes by the church door, nearly stripped of leaves, sprang up sharp in the illumination like the complicated mandibles and jointed feelers and legs of insects magnified. The air smelled faintly of apples making cider by themselves, in their own skins where these apples fell uncollected and rotting in the neglected orchards that backed up onto the church property, empty land waiting for its developer. The sheltering humped shapes of cars waited in the gravel parking lot. Her own little Subaru figured in her mind as a pumpkin-colored tunnel at whose far end glowed the silence of her rustic kitchen, Coal's tail-thumping welcome, the breathing of her children as they lay asleep or feigning in their rooms, having turned off television the instant her headlights glared at the windows. She would check them, their bodies each in its room and bed, and then take twenty of her baked bubbies, cunningly stacked so that no two had touched and married, out of the Swedish kiln, which would st ill be ticking, cooling, ta lking to her as of the events in the house in the time in which she had been away—for time flowed everywhere, not just in the rivulet of the delta in which we have been drifting. Then, duty done to her bubbies, and to her bladder, and to her teeth, she would enter upon the spacious queendom of her bed, a kingdom without a king, all hers. Alexandra was reading an endless novel by a woman with three names and an airbrushed photograph of herself on the shiny jacket; a few pages of its interminable woolly adventures among cliffs and castles served each night to smooth the border-crossing into unconsciousness. In her dreams she ranged far and wide, above the housetops, visiting rooms carved confusedly from the jumble of her past but seemingly solid as her oneiric self stood in each one, a ghost brimming with obscure mourning as she picked up an apple-shaped pincushion from her mother's sewing basket or waited while staring out at the snow-capped mountains for a playmate long dead to telephone. In her dreams omens cavorted around her as gaudily as papier-mache advertisements beckoning innocents this way and that at an amusement park. Yet we never look forward to dreams, any more than to the fabled adventures that follow death.
    Gravel crackled at her back. A dark man touched the soft flesh above her elbow; his touch was icy, or perhaps she was feverish. She jumped, frightened. He was chuckling. "The damnedest thing happened back in there just now. The old dame whose pearls let loose a minute ago tripped over her own shoes in her excitement and everybody's scared she broke her hip."
    "How sad," Alexandra said, sincerely but absent-mindedly, her spirit drifting, her heart still thumping from the scare he gave her.
    Darryl Van Home leaned close and thrust words into her ear. "Don't forget, sweetheart. Think bigger. I'll check into that gallery. We'll be in touch. Nitey-nite."
    "You actually went?" Alexandra asked Jane with a dull thrill of pleasure, over the phone.
    "Why not?" Jane said firmly. "He really did have the music for the Brahms Sonata in E Minor, and plays amazingly. Like Liberace, only without all that smiling. You wouldn't think it; his hands don't look like they could do anything, somehow."
    "You were alone? I keep pict uring that perfume ad." The one which showed a young male violinist seducing his accompanist in her low-cut gown.
    "Don't be vulgar, Alexandra. He feels quite asexual to me. And there are all these workmen around, including your friend Joe Marino, all dressed up in his little checked hat with a feather in it. And there's this constant rumbling from the back hoes moving