Solstice Page 12

  How wonderful to see Monica again, when was the last time she was here?—ran the voices.

  The handsome gift Monica had originally bought for Sheila Trask was received with much enthusiasm by Monica’s sister-in-law. (“Why, this is beautiful, Monica,” Esther said softly, drawing the turquoise Peruvian shawl out of its wrapping, “—wherever did you find anything so beautiful,” she said, as if sensing the shawl’s high worth and the unlikelihood that it was truly meant for her.)

  In all, the second wave of Monica’s presents went over well. Though there may have been some bewilderment among her family about why, so very suddenly, she had grown lavish, bountiful, nervously eager to please.

  How happy how very happy she was to be home, and how very happy they were to see her: except, on the second day, Monica’s mother ventured the opinion that she looked “just a little tired,” “a little pale,” and wondered if perhaps she was working too hard; and Monica said, hurt, annoyed, that she wasn’t at all tired, she was feeling exceptionally well, she was so happy to be home how could she possibly look tired!

  “Only about the eyes, dear,” Monica’s mother said.

  A six-day visit, and five days to go.

  A sweaty disagreeable sleep, a body pressed upon hers, the sensation in her loins as sharply acute as if a man were entering her—penetrating her—an erect penis jamming itself into her body.

  But they were not in Monica’s girlhood room, in her bed, they were (suddenly) dancing: grinding their bodies against each other: trying to kiss with bared teeth.

  Angry. Greedy.

  And what shame: for people were watching, it was in a public place, a ring of strangers formed to stare.

  Monica woke and the sensation in her loins vanished at once.

  She could have wept, she wanted it to remain; wanted it to flower into something yet more keen, more powerful. Her heart was racing unpleasantly, a trickle of perspiration ran down her side. No, she didn’t want sexual excitation, she didn’t want even to think of it, not now. She didn’t want the memory of her husband or of any other man, defiling her now.

  You see I am happy here, Monica thought, in this place where you have never been, and where no one knows your name.

  She made her way like a sleepwalker through her old life, through the rooms of her old life, hardly daring to breathe, feeling her heart go faint with . . . was it love? . . . surely it was love . . . love for her parents, and a sense of precariousness, doom. Her father’s face was deeply creased, he had aged visibly since Monica last saw him; she supposed she was partly responsible. (The breakup of Monica’s marriage, the surprise of her divorce, the mystery of her “current situation,” the problem of her “future.” How had it happened, Monica’s father demanded, that she was teaching in a preparatory school in Glenkill, Pennsylvania?—why had it happened? Why didn’t she receive alimony payments from Harold? And if it was a teaching career Monica wanted, surely she could teach elsewhere, in Indiana, perhaps, in Indianapolis, why not here in Wrightsville where she needn’t live alone . . . ?) Several years ago Monica’s mother had been hospitalized with a severe bladder infection, from which she had never entirely recovered. At the time of the diagnosis Monica had thought at once: Cancer. She had thought: Now we will all be punished. But it wasn’t cancer, Monica’s mother had not died. (Because she hadn’t died, however, Monica was obsessed with the idea that something in the universe was wrong, their good fortune was undeserved, she herself was indebted to God, in whom she had been incapable of believing since the age of fourteen . . . which fact even now endangered her mother’s life. Confessing this curious reasoning to Sheila, Monica had wondered if, in her soul, she was still a child; still infantile in her expectations. Sheila had said, Of course, aren’t we all . . . ?)

  Six days at home, in the old house on Arlington Boulevard, overlooking the Lutheran cemetery. Six days’ grace. She pleased her mother by working with her in the kitchen and by eating heartily at meals; she pleased her father by being pretty, vivacious, uncomplicated, as he remembered her. Why, she even played some of her old piano pieces for them, out of her battered Piano Classics book—a Mozart minuet, several short preludes of Chopin, Schumann’s “Träumerei”—the long-forgotten notes leaping, it seemed, out of her very fingertips. She played haltingly, stiffly, yet she did remember the pieces, it was remarkable how she did remember, while she had forgotten so much else.

  Shorty before Monica boarded her plane at the Indianapolis airport her mother embraced her impulsively, and rather hard; leaned back to stare at her; and said in a lowered voice that she was holding up well—far better than she would have done, under the circumstances. “You’re a strong woman,” Mrs. Jensen said, regarding her critically, “—though you don’t look it.”

  Monica laughed, though she felt obscurely insulted. “Why should it mean that much?” she said carelessly, stepping away from her mother. “It was only a friendship, after all.”

  2

  And it had ended, simply and irrevocably; it had burnt itself out. And that was that.

  Amen, Monica thought.

  She was free to make other friends—free to not make other friends—to do whatever she wished.

  In Wrightsville she’d gone with her sister-in-law Esther to get her hair cut and blown dry in a style that lifted airily from her forehead and made her eyes look larger, more exotic. In Wrightsville, sequestered away in her old room, she had spent several intoxicating—and exhausting—hours poring through scrapbooks she’d kept in high school, seeking out Monica the golden girl, Monica the prom queen (her junior year: had that been the dizzying height of her social life?), so that she might take heart from these early successes. She had known how to smile, then, as these snapshots suggested—she had known how to express happiness even if she hadn’t always felt it. So, thought Monica, inspired, I will try again: I will be that girl.

  To a degree, that is. For, after all, she would be thirty years old in a few months.

  She postponed telephoning Keith Renwick as she’d promised. Then, one day, seeing him walking along Main Street of Olcottsville with a woman—an attractive young woman in a fur coat, wearing oversized stylish glasses—she reasoned that perhaps there was no longer any purpose in telephoning.

  If he wants to talk with me, he will, Monica thought. If not, not.

  Still, she felt the ignoble pang of mimetic desire: wanting someone hitherto unwanted, because, or so it appears, that person is wanted by another party.

  And isn’t there always something ignoble about desire, Monica thought. Mimetic—or otherwise.

  Sheila Trask’s watercolor, in its bamboo frame, set inside a beige matting: the delicate little painting Sheila had claimed to be unable now to “see.”

  That work of art . . . which Monica halfway wanted to return to the artist (so her spiteful pride urged her); but which, in calmer moments, she knew she must keep. Returning it to Sheila would mean its immediate—unsentimental—destruction. And though she no longer had any feeling for Sheila Trask (she didn’t hate the woman—not at all) she felt a curious attraction for the watercolor itself.

  She stood before it, studying it. A remarkable technique, watercolor: it has to be executed so swiftly, in a matter of minutes, with a very few felicitous strokes of a brush: no margin for error, for second thoughts, for blotting out and beginning again. In this case the artist captured (ah, “captured”!—how Sheila would scorn such jargon) a winter scene—early winter—pale earth colors mixed with the slightly soiled cast of the snow—trees that were of no distinctive beauty, and nearly leafless—outcroppings of rock—the ruins of an old stone building, perhaps a barn: and all that was mysterious about the painting, all that it was, seemed to have virtually nothing to do with its object, and only to do with the intensity of feeling in the artist; in the eye and the hand that had so skillfully “captured” the scene, the mood, that passing moment. So Monica stared. So Monica brooded. It was a pity, she finally decided, that she had never known the woman who h
ad painted the watercolor—she had only known the Sheila Trask of the present, who not only detested such calendar art, as she called it, but was incapable of seeing it.

  Now, art must be filtered through “mind”—whatever that means—and contaminated by it.

  One Saturday in January, after the exhausting start of the new semester, it happened that Jill Starkie and her ten-year-old daughter dropped unexpectedly by Monica’s house; Jill was driving her daughter home from ballet class in Olcottsville, and couldn’t resist, as she said, paying an impromptu—“unpremeditated”—visit. She hoped Monica didn’t mind: “I always dread interrupting anyone as busy as you,” Jill said with a happy sort of apprehension, her eyes darting rapidly about as if to gather evidence of Monica’s especial busyness. “But Molly and I will only stay a minute. We promise. Won’t we, Molly?”

  Monica smiled, smiled hard, and assured mother and daughter that they were very much welcome. Would they come inside, take off their coats, have something warm to drink? . . . it was so bitterly cold outside.

  Within minutes sharp-eyed Jill had caught sight of the watercolor on the mantel.

  “How beautiful—how exquisitely beautiful,” she said, standing before it, clasping her beringed hands together, “—so very like a Chinese landscape, yet, you know, so unmistakably American. It’s the ruins of the old poor farm, isn’t it? Just a few miles away? The artist must be local,” Jill said, squinting at the painting, “but I don’t recognize the style. Isn’t there any signature?”

  Monica said, “I bought it in Olcottsville, I don’t think there is any signature.”

  “Oh but surely there is, on the reverse?”

  “No.”

  “Have you checked?”

  “Yes—of course I’ve checked.”

  Something in Monica’s voice prompted Jill to glance at her, still smiling, ecstatic with the surprise of the painting, not wanting, it seemed, the moment to end. “The artist must be local because the scene is only a few miles away—do you know, I hate to confess it, but I tried to paint those ruins myself, I tried and tried!—because it’s so poignant, so devastating, I mean the look of it. I’ve seen lithographs of the poor farm, it was built in the early 1800s and modeled after a famous English mental hospital, I’ve forgotten the name, I mean the construction of it—the architecture. So ugly!—massive—yet in its way noble—I can’t explain. But this watercolor captures it all—captures so much. And yet, you know, the implication is always—as it is here—it’s always—with real artists—as if no one tried. As if it just—happened!” Jill said with a despairing sort of gaiety. “Which marks the artist and sets him apart from people like us: for we must try. And try and try. . . .”

  “I bought it quite cheaply,” Monica said. “They said they’d had it for years.”

  “But art doesn’t age,” said Jill, frowning, “—whoever are these people?—they sound so ignorant! Which gallery did you get it in?—or was it an antique shop?”

  Monica murmured that she really didn’t know; she’d forgotten.

  “I wish I’d seen it first,” Jill said. Then, hearing her own words, she added, guiltily: “Of course, the point is, I didn’t—and you did.”

  Yes, Monica murmured.

  Molly was clearly restless, so, sighing, Jill set down her mug of coffee and prepared to leave. She hoped that Monica would drop by to visit her soon—any time. She and James had been so very sorry Monica hadn’t been able to come to dinner on Christmas Eve—but they quite understood—it was such a busy time of year.

  In the doorway, winding her wool scarf around her head, Jill returned suddenly to the subject of the watercolor. The land along the Poor Farm Road was left uncultivated, she said, because the Flaxmans owned it—that is, Sheila Trask owned it. “Everyone else around here rents out land for farming, but she can’t be troubled, you know,” Jill said, looking searchingly at Monica. “She’s so absorbed in her work, evidently, she can’t take time to think about such pragmatic things . . . financial arrangements . . . like the rest of us. Isn’t she fortunate? And so gifted. . . .”

  “Is she?” Monica said.

  After the Starkies left Monica moved the watercolor from her living room upstairs, to her bedroom. A smaller space suited it better, clearly. And now it would not be so needlessly exposed.

  3

  Sheila Trask was, or was not, waiting for Monica to telephone.

  But it made no difference in Monica’s life, in either case.

  She had her own life now, she had her own life, fully, again—her classes, in which she was deeply absorbed; her faculty and committee meetings; luncheons with colleagues, or with newly made acquaintances in town; a dinner party now and then; even an ambitious study-discussion group, informally organized by the younger members of the Glenkill school, that met on alternate Thursday evenings to take up the interpretation of “controversial” new ideas (deconstructionist literary theory, radical French feminism, the ethics of nuclear armament/disarmament, the knotty subtleties of the “biological revolution,” American foreign policy in Latin America, and so forth: they were nothing if not happily eclectic). Monica went to chamber music concerts in the area, where she forced herself to listen, to listen hard, and not merely to hear, or to sit and allow her thoughts to wander where they would—in directions melancholy or otherwise; one bright sunny day she drove to Philadelphia to visit the art museum, alone—and ended up feeling rather too much alone, too emptied of all affect, in its eerie Duchamp wing amidst the iconoclastic images of an era long dead and never, for Monica, sufficiently alive. (“What am I supposed to feel?—am I supposed to feel?” Monica wondered, staring at the totally perplexing work of art, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (Large Glass), 1915–1923. The positioning of the finely cracked glass in the room suggested its mysterious worth—its sacred talismanic value—inaccessible, no doubt, to profane eyes. It was of little aid for Monica to read, in dutiful schoolgirl manner, that, in its perfect balancing of “rational and non-rational elements,” the Large Glass ranked as one of the great works of the twentieth century; nor to be cryptically informed, by Duchamp himself, in a quotation affixed to the wall—“There is no solution because there is no problem.”)

  Returning from Philadelphia Monica drove some miles out of her way, to pass Black Billy’s Tavern on Highway 29: a tawdry little place by day, hardly worth a second glance. In contempt she saw that a half-dozen cars were parked in the lot, nosed up close to the building; and it was only midafternoon. For the first time she noticed that Black Billy’s was windowless—or, rather, the old windows had been paneled over, covered in what appeared to be aluminum foil.

  But it wasn’t worth a second glance, really. Or a second thought.

  Monica also: prescribed for herself a swimming regimen, half an hour at the Olcottsville YWCA on alternate days, in the late afternoon or the very early morning; prescribed for herself a reading/research regimen, in connection with the books of classic American literature she was teaching in her advanced English classes—The Scarlet Letter, Walden, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Leaves of Grass, Huckleberry Finn. Of her own accord she initiated a Friday afternoon student reading hour, at which student writers read, with varying degrees of spirit, their own fiction, poetry, and journal notes. It was all very rewarding, very . . . exhausting. But very rewarding.

  I can’t talk at the moment, Monica would tell Sheila Trask politely when Sheila telephoned.

  Thank you for calling, I’d been wondering how you were, Monica would say carefully—but I can’t talk at the moment, perhaps I can call you back tomorrow. Will you be home?

  Out of curiosity, however, sheerly out of curiosity, Monica telephoned Sheila’s gallery in Manhattan—the Laurence James Gallery, Fifty-seventh Street—to inquire about the upcoming Trask show. She had been reading about it, she said, vaguely, wasn’t it scheduled for sometime in February?

  No, the receptionist told her: the show was scheduled for late April.

  “I thought it was Feb
ruary,” Monica repeated.

  It had been February, yes, but now it was rescheduled for April—April 27 was the opening. If Monica would like to leave her name and address, the gallery would be happy to send her an announcement.

  Monica asked why the show had been rescheduled and was told, after a moment’s pause, that the artist was out of the country.

  “Out of the country! . . . she wouldn’t,” Monica said.

  You can’t manipulate me, Monica thought. God damn you.

  By accident, a few days later, Monica learned that Sheila Trask had gone to Morocco after all, for one reason or another. Painting?—friends?—vacation?

  As Betty Connor chattily explained in the A & P, where she and Monica had met, it wasn’t that unusual for Sheila Trask suddenly to “pick up and go” at a minute’s notice: and usually to somewhere exotic: she and Flaxman both. New Guinea, Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa—once to Afghanistan, Betty thought (hadn’t it been written up in the local paper?—Morton Flaxman had come down with hepatitis). During Flaxman’s last years it was generally known that he’d grown rather odd, eccentric, there was invariably an entourage of sorts that accompanied him on his trips, and camped out at Edgemont; “colorful” personalities; artists or would-be artists themselves. So far as Betty knew, however, Sheila Trask had gone off to Morocco by herself, and had told her housekeeper she wouldn’t be back for a very long time—possibly not until the fall.

  “The fall!” Monica said softly. “But doesn’t she have a show this spring? . . . in New York?”

  “Does she?” Betty Connor said, looking at Monica. “I really wouldn’t know.”

  “A major exhibition, I’d thought. . . .”

  Judging from Betty Connor’s tone she knew nothing of the connection between Sheila Trask and Monica, and Monica felt both relieved and obscurely angered; but rather more relieved; so it was important for her to keep her questions casual.

  “Yes,” she said, “a major exhibition, or so I’d been told. . . .”