Solstice Page 10

  So the men let them go.

  But followed after them in their car: tires screeching in the gravel, horn blaring, a terrifying twelve-mile run ahead from Edgarsville to the village of Glenkill: Sheila, white-faced, forced to drive at speeds varying from forty miles an hour to eighty-five, in her desperation to escape: and Monica, Monica limp with the conviction they would both die, hunched beside her, quietly sobbing, whispering, Why oh why why the hell, why. . . . Fitch was too drunk to drive so one of his buddies drove, pulling up alongside Sheila, edging toward Sheila as if to force her car off the road, roaring ahead, threatening to cut in front of her, while Fitch leaned out the window of the passenger’s seat, shouting obscenities, gesticulating, a raised third finger jabbed into the air, a clenched fist shaken, at several points the two cars were so close that Fitch very nearly smashed Sheila’s window, flailing at it with his fist, all drunken high spirits, all in good fun, just teasing the girls, just joking around, but the girls were cock-teasers themselves they were asking for it one of these days they were going to get it they hadn’t better show their faces in Edgarsville again. . . .

  The chase ended at the Glenkill village limits; the men dropped back; Sheila sped ahead.

  At Monica’s house Sheila said, putting her hand on Monica’s arm, “Look—we’re all right and we weren’t in any real danger but if you’re upset, I mean if you’re really upset, I can stay the night here, or”—and here her voice wavered, here, she sounded frightened, herself, “you could come home with me, I feel responsible for this, I feel like hell.”

  Yes, Monica thought, in anger, you should feel responsible: you—!

  Aloud she told Sheila that she was really all right; she was grateful to be alive; she only wanted the evening to come to an end.

  “You’re not angry . . . ?” Sheila said.

  “I’m too exhausted to be angry,” Monica said, opening her door, wanting only to be alone, gone, away from Sheila.

  6

  Sheila said carelessly that suicide, in her family, wasn’t all that “significant” an act.

  “The thought is—when you’ve had quite enough you’ve had quite enough,” she told Monica.

  She had fallen by degrees into the habit of telephoning Monica every evening around seven, when Monica was certain to be back from school. (Unless of course she was out for the evening: which Sheila would want to know.) Just to say hello, just to see how Monica was. As for herself, why things were going well, things were going as well as one might expect, perhaps it was best not to inquire. . . . Sometimes, unlocking the door of her house, Monica heard the telephone ringing and felt an immediate pang of dread; of apprehension. She was exhausted from her day at the school and she was exhausted by the thoughts that spun about in her head and she was exhausted, exhausted by . . . But she couldn’t not answer the phone: Sheila might know: Sheila might understand.

  Perhaps because she wasn’t working very steadily now—Monica gathered that was the case—Sheila had become unnaturally sensitive to nuances of meanings, to slights. If she asked Monica politely whether Monica was too tired to speak at the moment, her pose was misleading, for Monica didn’t dare admit to being tired, on the contrary Monica was obliged to assure Sheila that she wasn’t at all tired, not at all: in fact she was delighted to hear from her since she had intended to call Sheila herself, in another ten minutes.

  “Are you certain?” Sheila asked doubtfully. “I can call back another time. I can call back tomorrow.”

  “Not at all,” Monica said, “—let’s talk now,” leaning her forehead against the cold metal of one of the cupboard doors, closing her eyes, feeling an old headache resume. It was almost comforting, that old dull ache.

  Sheila was in zestful high spirits, Sheila was moody, depressed, “down.” She’d heard from a friend but it was bad news; or, perhaps, good news—with the promise of changing her life. (“But only after I get my exhibit hung,” she said mysteriously.) How was her work going?—well, how was Monica’s work going? (This said with an air of innocent malice.) Most of the time she fended off Monica’s concern with a flippant reply but occasionally she said, flatly, quietly, that things were not moving along as she had hoped, not at all as she had hoped, in the early morning, before dawn, she lay in bed paralyzed with dread at getting up and going across to her studio and beginning another morning. “Still, suicide requires magnanimity of spirit, don’t you think?” she said. She extended her hands—stretched out her fingers—contemplated them—glanced at Monica.

  “I don’t think I’m capable of ‘magnanimity of spirit,’ do you, dear little Mary Beth?”

  “I can’t answer that,” Monica said, suddenly helpless. “I don’t really know you that well.”

  “Oh, as to ‘knowing’—!” Sheila said. “I think we all ‘know’ one another only too well.”

  “Sherrill Ann” and “Mary Beth” were never resumed; as if by mutual consent, the names weren’t mentioned for some time after the Edgarsville incident. Then, abruptly, Sheila began to make allusions to the highway, the “pub crawling,” and how lonely Sherrill Ann was going to be without Mary Beth. . . .

  Monica stared at her, and asked what she meant. Surely, after their narrow escape, Sheila didn’t want to go back?

  “We wouldn’t return to Edgarsville, of course,” Sheila said. “There are plenty of other places. . . . Look: nothing like that would ever happen again. I can guarantee it.”

  Monica said ironically, “I can guarantee it too.”

  Sheila laughed; allowed the subject to drop; but, from time to time, resumed it, as if to needle Monica. She hinted that “Mary Beth” was overly timid and puritanical; and had become, of late, obsessively concerned about her professional image.

  Monica said stiffly that she didn’t feel obliged to defend herself.

  Sheila said that there was no need for her to defend herself—she wasn’t being attacked.

  Monica said she’d lost her taste for country taverns, for bowling, for draft beer—the very smell of it would nauseate her—and, in any case, she’d only gone to keep Sheila company, to accommodate Sheila, there never had been any “Mary Beth” at all.

  Speaking quickly, rather defiantly, Monica broke off in embarrassment, while Sheila regarded her with bright, black, amused eyes. “. . . There never was any ‘Mary Beth’ at all, you say?” she murmured. “Oh but I don’t quite believe that: you’ve just packed her away somewhere.”

  Sheila didn’t ask Monica to accompany her again, though, from time to time—always casually—she alluded to being “lonely,” and to finding it “even a bit of a bore”—Sherrill Ann without her pal. But Monica, forewarned, refused to be drawn out. She had had all that, she thought, with a thrill of elation—that was behind her.

  7

  She can hear the telephone ringing as she unlocks the door, ringing, ringing, that forlorn reproachful note, sounding through the empty house. Keith murmurs something to the effect that he hopes—given the lateness of the hour: midnight—it isn’t bad news and Monica doesn’t trouble to reply, she feels her heart beating slow and hard and resolute, no her fingers are not shaking, no she is not even annoyed, when, snatching up the receiver, saying hello, repeating hello, hello, yes, hello? she discovers that there is no one on the line: that her caller has (perhaps) simply dialed her number, laid the receiver down, walked away, forgotten the entire transaction.

  Lately Sheila has been calling at odd, wayward hours.

  In all fairness it might be said she doesn’t know the hour: she has been working round the clock in her studio; and/or, she has been drinking.

  “I hope it isn’t anything . . . ?” Keith says. A tactful man, a gentleman, he keeps his distance; stands in the doorway; allows Monica her privacy.

  Monica says, “It’s a wrong number. It’s nothing.”

  She breaks the connection; dials Sheila Trask’s number; discovers that the line is busy, indeed the line is busy, the receiver is off the hook at Edgemont as she had suspected. . . .<
br />
  “Nothing,” says Monica lightly. “A prank.”

  Next morning, early, before seven, Monica telephones Sheila.

  The receiver is raised at once, on the first ring, but Sheila explains—swiftly, rather coldly—that she can’t talk at the moment: there has been a minor household emergency: poor Siegmund was out all night and now he’s sick, vomiting, very likely someone poisoned him, one of Morton’s old enemies in the neighborhood, she’ll have to drive him to the vet’s.

  “I’ll call you later,” she tells Monica, then, about to hang up, adds, “I hope it wasn’t anything crucial—?”

  8

  Ariadne’s thread has snapped, and now the poor creature is wandering in the labyrinth,” Sheila said, yawning and stretching. “But she’ll emerge. One day soon. She always has in the past.—Otherwise she’ll starve, she’ll suffocate, to hell with her.”

  “If there’s anything I can do . . .” Monica said hesitantly.

  Sheila laughed. Then she said, soberly: “You’re so kind, Monica. But thank you, no, I don’t believe there is anything you can do. Just be.”

  Sheila was in one of her ecstatic high-flying moods, Sheila was in one of her dull-eyed stupefied moods, exhausted, grainy-skinned, not very attractive. She spent her mornings driving about on country roads, she spent her mornings on the telephone, suddenly there was a houseguest at Edgemont (a relative? a cousin of Sheila’s?), suddenly she turned up at Monica’s, carrying a bag of groceries, goat’s-milk cheese and Norwegian rye crackers, that very same country pâté she loved to gorge on, and two six-packs of imported German beer. God she was hungry!—famished!

  Another thing too: the way the days passed, spun, a sun and a moon and a sun again, zip and it’s through: you get to the point where you sit hypnotized by the clock, any fucking clock, watching the hands move, forgetting to breathe.

  Did Monica understand?

  And there were the mirror-ghouls, the mirror-leeches.

  “Sisters” of a sort. Whom you don’t recognize though they seem to recognize you.

  Did Monica understand?

  Or was it simply subterfuge, like “Mary Beth”?

  Monica had been planning to spend the week after Christmas in Indiana, visiting her family; but now she worried about leaving Sheila alone.

  Not that Sheila wanted to celebrate Christmas with her, or to exchange presents: she detested Christmas, she said, and she detested ceremonial presents.

  She detested the very time of the year . . . the taste of the air, the texture of the light. The old, old eclipse of the soul. . . .

  At her age, Sheila said grimly, cheerily, the seasons spin and you don’t need to be reminded of the “new” year, or forced to realize that it’s the “old” come round again.

  Happy holidays! Safe drinkers make safe drivers!

  Still, she suspected that Monica was the kind of person who innocently thrives on holidays. A secret talent for the domestic, for mulled cider, roast turkey with oyster dressing, emotional bric-a-brac, no? yes? “What of your friend Keith?” Sheila asked carefully.

  “What of him?” Monica said.

  “What are his plans for Christmas? Is he staying here, or going away?”

  Monica tried to think.

  “I don’t know,” she said finally. “Maybe he hasn’t any.”

  Sheila stared hard at her, smiling, critical. “This is the time of year,” she said, “when everyone has plans. Except—those who don’t.”

  “I don’t have any plans,” Monica said.

  Sheila lit a cigarette; yawned again, and stretched, luxuriant as a cat; deliberately spoke of other matters . . . every chimney, every bloody chimney, at Edgemont needed repairs . . . and vandals, neighborhood kids, were driving their snowmobiles through her fences, tearing up her fields . . . and the sable brushes she’d been using since the age of fourteen seemed to be deteriorating in quality in direct proportion to their increase in price. As to Siegmund—the poor dog had been poisoned, Sheila was convinced, though the vet was too cowardly to say so, he wouldn’t have wanted Sheila to go to the police and drag him into it. Poor Siegmund!—it was a mercy when he was finally put to sleep but mercy hadn’t come quick enough, he’d certainly suffered.

  Monica’s eyes stung with tears. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “I was very fond of Siegmund.”

  “Well,” said Sheila, sucking on her cigarette, frowning as if the taste repulsed her, “—Siegmund was very fond of you.”

  Monica invited Sheila and Keith to dinner, so that, at last, they might meet; but though Keith accepted the invitation readily, happily—he is lonely, Monica thought—Sheila made polite vague excuses. She had already met the man, she believed. That is, they’d been introduced, years ago, Keith Renwick wasn’t it?—she had no clear memory of him but she remembered the name.

  Monica felt unreasonably hurt, irritated.

  Sheila said, as if to mollify her friend’s response: “I’m only comfortable with lawyers when they’re in my pay.”

  As if to counter Monica’s invitation, Sheila telephoned her a few days later to invite her for cocktails at Edgemont—to meet the sculptor Jake Halleron—“of whom I’m sure you’ve heard: his work is everywhere”—an old friend, an old friendly rival, of Morton’s. Halleron turned out to be as striking in his way as Morton Flaxman had been in his: very tall, six feet five or so; with cadaverous cheeks, sunken eyes, a fringe of metallic-gray hair about a gleaming bald pate; long arms, long legs, long blunt-fingered hands and unusually large square nails. He was courtly, flirtatious, leering, yet amiable; well-spoken; given to odd little malicious side-glances at his hostess, as if they shared a good deal—a common past of which it would be indiscreet to speak; given too to a British sort of whimsy, overlaid with sarcasm. He lived in Venice, did he?—no, Monica misunderstood: Vence. But he had a residence, a studio, in Montauk also—Montauk, Long Island, perhaps Monica knew the area?—he was living there with his ménage, or was it a menagerie—the witticisms, the innuendos, came fast, sly, slurred, and were gone by the time Monica thought to smile. She felt intimidated by him, and wondered if perhaps that was the reason for Sheila’s invitation.

  An older man, very nearly an old man, in his late sixties, perhaps, Halleron behaved in a most youthful manner. He wore a pale red silk shirt with white embroidered trim and a white string tie, a Western costume, clearly a costume, but Monica could not make out if it was meant to amuse, on this snowy Sunday afternoon in Pennsylvania, or to impress. Sheila had shampooed her hair, and looked quite the country squire’s wife—tweed skirt that fell to midcalf, black-knit stockings, an oatmeal-colored cashmere sweater Monica had never seen before, a red scarf tied at her neck. Her manner with Halleron was provocative; combative; yet oddly deferential; for of course, as Monica thought, he was of Morton Flaxman’s generation—it was not absurd to imagine him and Sheila as lovers.

  Sheila made an attempt, rather strained, Monica thought, to draw her into the conversation; to interest Halleron in her—in her as a professional woman, a woman of intelligence and taste; but clearly the focus of interest, the excited focus of interest, was Sheila Trask and Jake Halleron, their common—but surely not commonplace—past; the people (living, dead, moribund, “vanished”) they knew; the works of art, seriocomic or tragic adventures, anecdotal episodes, they shared. Scattered on the coffee table before them was a pile of snapshots Halleron had brought, through which they had been sorting before Monica’s arrival; earlier in the day Sheila had shown Halleron her new paintings and was now basking, or smarting, in the aftermath of his response. Which accounted in part for her bright, brittle, nervous, yet elated mood; her air of girlish coquetry; the shrill sound of her laughter and the sudden, abrupt, melancholy cast of her expression. Her glances at Monica—moist, darkly bright, shadowed—were indecipherable, and quite disturbing.

  Are they lovers, Monica thought, suddenly frightened—have they been lovers?

  Then, more calmly: It has nothing to do with me, in any
case.

  The visit lasted no more than an hour yet would be one of those queer undefined experiences—pockets, or vacuums, of experience—common to any life: inexplicable, unsettling because inexplicable, but too troubling to be dismissed. During the course of the hour Sheila drank a great deal but seemed rather more in control than she had been, of late; Halleron could have little idea of the stress she was enduring, the wild fluctuations of mood and temper. Their talk surprised Monica by being so relentlessly specific, even gossipy—they talked not of art but of artists and galleries (Halleron was a mine of droll little anecdotes, some of them quite nasty, all of them amusing: he forbade either Sheila or Monica to repeat a disturbing tale of the last days of Philip Guston, told to him in strictest confidence); and, in regard to Sheila’s work, exclusively of technique, “references” and “allusions” and “tricks” of which Halleron seemed generally to approve. Where Monica had seen beauty of a kind, indefinable, haunting, evanescent, where Monica had supposed she saw meaning, Halleron spoke of a canvas with a visible weave; a diluted pigment soaked into the canvas; staining, puddling, rubbing, blotting, brushing; the use of a turpentine spread; washes; areas of dried paint and “false space”—the influence (elegiac, yet perhaps rather too emphatic) of Hans Hofmann; and one or two other tricks, gimmicks, which, in his opinion, Sheila hadn’t quite mastered. And the hand—the heavy hand!—of Flaxman: that was still a factor, distracting to him, though not perhaps to anyone else.