The Axeman's Jazz

her altar the way it said you were supposed to do it in the voodoo book she had bought last May and finally gotten around to. And then she had taken a purple bath for power, adding mustard seed and washing with two whole eggs. She hadn’t been able to find the recommended dragon’s blood incense and instead had substituted lavender, which seemed purplish enough.
    Now she was naked—all the books said you should practice magic in the nude, and she adored being naked. She had smudged her living room with sage. (She could have used tobacco, the book said, but how gross.) She had done the door, then the corners, clockwise, and then herself. She had lit rose incense, her favorite. (The book had recommended only a “nice” one.)
    She had sprinkled the comers with “spirit water,” in which she had had to use her Giorgio perfume. (She could have used a “spirit” like rum or Pernod, but since she didn’t drink she didn’t have any. And the book had been very specific—if you used perfume, it had to be good perfume.) Actually, she hated the Giorgio in its original strength—it had been given to her by a hopeful who hadn’t realized his hopes. But it was certainly “good,” and didn’t smell too bad diluted down to spirit water.
    She didn’t have a chalice, so she held a wine glass of spirit water, about to invoke the powers of the four directions. She was loving the mingled scents of sage and rose and Giorgio florals, reveling in her nakedness, her beauty, knowing how lovely she looked, arms outstretched with the chalice so that her breasts lifted, so involved, so powerful she could almost forget her hideous scar and the lump that marred her smoothness.
    She was starting to feel a strange ache in her pelvis, the beginnings of desire, but she wasn’t sure why. Was her own naked body turning her on? Or was it the energy of the magic she was creating? She began to chant, calling the East, making it up as she went along.
    O Santana dawn ozone, scirocco zephyr khamsin, blow! Blow like a dragon’s breath at first light, powerful and stirring….
    She was loving it, feeling herself truly talented at this, a great priestess genuinely inspired, when someone hollered, “Di, for Christ’s sake! What the hell are you yelling in there? You all right?”
    You couldn’t be nude in air conditioning. She had had to open one of the French doors, the ones in the bedroom. Apparently someone was standing underneath the balcony there.
    Furious, she threw on the caftan she had doffed for her ritual, strode into the bedroom, leaving the spirits of the East blowing lonesome through her circle.
    “Who’s down there?”
    “It’s me. Alex. I thought you might like some company.”
    There had been a time when she hadn’t been able to resist, when he had come nearly every afternoon and they had sweated together in her fairy-tale bed. But that was before she’d found out how many other women he was sleeping with. Well, actually not how many—there was no way to know how many—just that she was one of a vast, panting crowd. She’d never said what was wrong, had just stopped being available.
    No. Now that she thought of it, it hadn’t been quite like that. Before she’d started seeing Sonny, she was seeing a gorgeous young black from Al-Anon, in fact still saw him now and then. She’d forgotten about Alex, but she’d never said a word to him. He’d just stopped coming around. Damn him! She hated being the rejected one.
    “I’m busy,” she said, her voice icy.
    “It’s three o’clock. Time for one of our three o’clock specials.”
    She hiked the caftan up, showing as much leg as possible, and stepped out onto the balcony.
    “I’m sorry, Alex. I’m otherwise engaged.”
    “Wait. Di…”
    But she had stepped back in and closed the French door. Even if she had to turn on the air conditioner, which meant she had to keep the caftan on, she wasn’t opening the damn thing again. Alex could go find another afternoon delight.
    Damn! Now he was leaning on her doorbell. What did it take to make him understand he wasn’t welcome?
    She put on a tape of Tibetan temple bells, turned it up loud, let the buzzer become part of the music. If that didn’t get her into a trance fast, nothing would.
    Then she smudged again, sprinkled again, called the quarers, and sat in a half-lotus. Leon Wheatley had been scheduled to speak at the inner-child group that night, but he had a summer cold. She’d spent the morning on the phone,