Solstice Page 15

  “Still, I grew to like it. I saw that that was why I’d come—not to be alone with myself but to be alone,” Sheila said.

  Monica, eyeing her closely, felt a prick of annoyance; perhaps of jealousy.

  And was Sheila telling the truth?—did the woman ever speak truthfully, or only improvisationally? She had mentioned earlier, with a childlike sort of boastfulness, that, in Morocco, she’d gained back the eight or ten pounds she had lost before Christmas; she had gained back some of her “muscle tone”—this said while playfully gripping her upper arm, and then her thigh. But Monica did not see any significant change in Sheila other than the faintly golden tan, the olive-golden tan, which was already beginning to fade.

  “But weren’t you in a circle of some sort,” Monica asked skeptically, “—expatriated Americans, Parisians?—artists? Weren’t you staying in a friend’s villa on the Mediterranean?”

  Sheila made an impatient dismissive gesture as if such factors, mere people, counted not at all. “Some of the time, yes,” she said. “And I quite liked them—most of them. I like people, you know. But I went away by myself too, after the second week. They warned me it was dangerous—a woman, alone, there—a ‘Christian’ woman—a heretic—but it wasn’t precisely as a woman I traveled; and nothing serious ever happened.”

  Monica stared at her. “Nothing serious—? But what did happen?”

  “I’ll tell you another time,” Sheila said. “In any case it isn’t important. What mattered to me was being alone; being there; seeing something in the landscape, in the light, I’d never seen before.” She spoke slowly, meditatively. “Yes, it was new. I don’t think I’m deceiving myself. A way of seeing, an angle of . . . vision, you could say; a certain rhythm to seeing, as you acquire, in a foreign country, a rhythm of hearing. And now that I’m back home I don’t intend to lose it.”

  2

  Sheila was back at work; hard at work; and meant to be a recluse, until the paintings were finished.

  But she telephoned Monica at least once a day, usually in the early evening, to inquire how things were going for Monica. (She had no news at all—nothing to report.)

  So Monica was obliged to speak of committee meetings, lunches with colleagues, classes that went unusually well, or disappointed (“Now they’ve got it into their heads that Mark Twain was a racist”); an awkward hour-long conference with the parents of one of her poorer students. Matters that could not possibly be of interest to another person became, at such times, highly significant; even emblematic; for all that Monica did and said and thought seemed to represent, in Sheila’s imagination, the actions of a person of supreme though mysterious importance.

  “Why are you asking me this—?” Monica broke off one evening, in embarrassment, and Sheila must have been so startled she couldn’t reply at first; then she said, “I suppose—because—if I don’t ask—you won’t tell.”

  Nothing has changed, Monica thought—except my control.

  For she meant, this time, to be in control.

  She was already, was she not?—in control.

  Yes: in control.

  Control.

  She quite liked the word, its classy air.

  Control. Control.

  “This time,” she said, “—mine.”

  3

  Then it was mentioned, as if casually, incidentally, that Sheila might postpone her show another time.

  She couldn’t bear the pressure, she said.

  She hated all she’d done. And there was no time to remedy it.

  “I’m at an impasse,” she said, lightly mocking. (Monica having told her of Keith Renwick’s use of the word.) “I’m about to have a ‘crisis.’”

  “Go back to work,” Monica might say, breezily, to disguise the concern she felt; or, variously, “Take off a few hours, for God’s sake—go for a ride on Parsifal—come over here for a drink.”

  Sheila resumed the subject, not altogether enthusiastically, of Sherrill Ann and Mary Beth: their pals out at the Swedesboro Inn and Walt’s must be wondering where they are, right? and where are they?

  Monica thought of herself in that filthy restroom, squatting over a stained toilet seat, urinating in hot shamed splashes while the bartender and “Sherrill Ann” stood guard a few feet away, on the other side of a door that wouldn’t lock. The tastes of draft beer, stale potato chips, pizza . . . the sound of country-and-western music blaring from the jukebox . . . the smell of cigarette smoke, hair oil. And there was Fitch’s face raw with hatred: an emotion Monica had well understood at the time.

  “Was the name ‘Mary Beth’?” Monica asked suddenly. “Wasn’t it— ‘Marie Beth’?— ‘Merrill Beth’? I can’t remember.”

  “God,” Sheila said, puzzled, “I don’t know. I thought it was ‘Mary Beth’—wasn’t it?”

  “I remember your name, ‘Sherrill Ann,’ but I don’t remember my own,” Monica said.

  “‘Mary Beth,’ I think.”

  “‘Mary Beth’?—if you say so.”

  She would not consent to go drinking with Sheila, even to the most innocuous of the taverns; she was finished, she said, with that sort of thing forever. “Then I’ll be obliged to go alone,” Sheila said.

  Monica said: “No.”

  But Sheila evidently did go out drinking, alone, once or twice, perhaps more, hinting the day after that she’d had quite an adventure, quite . . . an interesting adventure; complaining half-humorously of being hung over. One night, she woke Monica from a sound sleep by telephoning at two in the morning from Hedy’s Café, where, she said, she’d met an extremely interesting man who had an extremely interesting buddy, both of them state troopers (off-duty), both good-looking in their own way. Wouldn’t Mary Beth like to come join them? “You’re drunk,” Monica said angrily, banging down the receiver.

  Next day when Monica returned from Glenkill she found in her mailbox a skillful little crayon and charcoal drawing, an act of contrition on Sheila’s part, evidently. It was a highly stylized likeness of Monica herself, all suggestive smudges and blurs and cryptic shadows; an unsmiling likeness, indeed. La Belle Dame Sans . . . was the inscription.

  4

  As if nothing had changed, Sheila began to drop by Monica’s house, always with the happy excuse of being in the neighborhood; driving to Glenkill on an errand, perhaps. She even appeared once or twice at school, to see if Monica might happen to be free for lunch: no? yes? At a reception at the Greenes’ in early April—held to honor a visiting alumnus, a wealthy Boston manufacturer—Sheila showed up late, but made a strong impression, giving no quarter to the guest of honor in his good-natured denunciation of modern art. (For naturally it turned out that the gentleman knew nothing apart from a few names—Pollock, Rothko, Warhol?—Mondrian?) Another evening, in a small group gathered for dinner at the Chinese restaurant, Sheila dominated the conversation, speaking of ways of seeing that were conditioned by ways of political thinking. “If you don’t think well you can’t see well—it’s as simple as that,” Sheila said. The men in the party, Monica’s colleagues, were quite clearly attracted by Sheila without knowing how to talk to her. Did one challenge her, head-on?—or listen closely, and agree? How was it possible to get her unqualified attention?—her respect?

  One of the young men asked Monica the next day if Sheila Trask was always like that.

  “Always like what?” Monica said coldly.

  To Sheila she said she thought it unwise, imprudent, for her to say such things—such wild vehement visionary things—in front of people who weren’t artists and who weren’t even intellectuals, but who would repeat her remarks, muddle them, even make fun of them. “Christ,” said Sheila, blinking as if dazed, “—what did I say? I don’t remember.” She ran her hands through her hair, squinting at Monica. “Morton used to be like that—he talked too much when he was talking at all—the rest of the time, he couldn’t be bothered, he’d just sit. I know I say the most contemptible sort of bullshit if I’m a little high—why don’t you kick me under the ta
ble, shut me up—I’m fucking sorry if I embarrassed you.”

  Monica was touched, moved. She said, relenting: “You don’t embarrass me at all, Sheila. You know that. It’s just that these other people don’t understand you and they’re alerted to listening for things they can repeat, to add a cubit or two to their height, bragging that they know you.”

  “Yes. Right. Just kick me under the table,” Sheila said, “if it happens again.”

  Again, suddenly, Sheila was drinking; again, smoking too heavily.

  And taking amphetamines—or so Monica gathered.

  (In Tangier, Sheila said, she’d had some marvelous hashish—it had done her head good. But she’d been too cowardly to smuggle any back with her and unless she wanted to make a trip to New York City she couldn’t get anything of that quality again.)

  Drunk, or high, loquacious, bright and brittle and unnervingly cheerful, Sheila sometimes said that she knew she was an artist—a genuine artist; and sometimes said that she was “probably finished.” At such times she spoke in a flat elegiac voice. She was through with her career; finished, burnt out, dead. Monica challenged her at once, Monica tried to laugh her out of her moods, but Sheila was adamant. “Careers die just like people,” she said. “Yet the wheels keep spinning. The cogs keep moving, locking and grinding in place. The old wheezing heart.”

  And Monica would protest; and Sheila would fall stubbornly silent.

  They were shy of touching each other, even of drawing close by accident. Monica recalled that hissed admonition of Sheila’s—I don’t care to be touched—and stiffened, herself, if, in one of her more effusive states, Sheila drew too close. She was conscious of Sheila’s warm breath, Sheila’s scent. The fact that Sheila took up so much more space than her fairly thin frame required.

  Weeks passed before Sheila made any reference to Christmas; to Monica’s visit home. “How was your family?” she asked guardedly.

  “Very well,” Monica said. “Very well indeed.”

  “I thought that was where you’d gone—to Indiana.”

  “Yes,” said Monica.

  She was waiting for Sheila to apologize; but even as she waited (thinking with an angry beating heart of her pleas to Sheila through that door—her pathetic attempts at humor, coercion) she knew that Sheila would never say a word. Sheila, hiding on the other side of a locked door, slightly crouched, head bowed, breathing hoarsely through her mouth. Sheila listening to her and saying not a word.

  “Yes,” said Monica, “the visit went very well indeed. Except they put pressure on me to come back to Indiana, to teach there.”

  “I don’t blame them,” Sheila said neutrally. “If they love you they must want you closer. It’s a long distance away, after all.”

  Monica said nothing, nor did she look directly at Sheila.

  “Suppose you’d died. . . .” she said suddenly, in a whisper. “Suppose I’d come too late and you had . . .”

  Sheila turned away; Sheila said in a vague drifting voice, “Yes, I thought that was where you’d gone, home to visit your family. It was Christmas after all. . . .”

  “Yes,” Monica said angrily. “Christmas.”

  And the subject was never mentioned again.

  5

  Monica’s teaching was going well, Monica’s first year was quite a success, or would surely be, at the end of the term; yet she worried; wondered; calculated. What sort of future did she have at Glenkill? why hadn’t she been offered a three-year contract instead of a one-year renewable (as it was called)?—the rumor being that one of her young male colleagues had been offered a contract of this sort, and had signed up gratefully.

  Was her status as a divorced woman a mark against her, she wondered.

  Was there something perhaps unwise—imprudent—naive—about her very enthusiasm for teaching? She recalled an admonition of Harold’s that one’s colleagues invariably objected to too much enthusiasm: it put them in a bad light.

  Sheila suggested that Monica was being exploited at the Glenkill Academy, by Greene and his “gang.” He was notorious, Sheila said. Pushing his junior faculty to the limit, expecting them to work for virtually nothing, paying them in school camaraderie, dinner parties, free tickets to basketball games. One big happy family, the Glenkill staff. One big happy family with Daddy at the head.

  “You could almost do as well, penny by penny and hour by hour, working as a barmaid,” Sheila said, not very tactfully.

  “But where else could I go,” Monica said lightly, “—where else could I be exploited in such congenial surroundings? By such attractive well-bred people?”

  Another time, Sheila told Monica that she owed it to herself to take sick days off, now and then. As everyone else did. She was foolish to teach week after week without a break, as if it were to her credit, a measure of her stoicism. Also, Sheila had to drive to New York City on business and couldn’t bear the thought of driving alone and wouldn’t Monica like to join her. . . .

  “No thank you,” Monica said.

  Then, reconsidering: “Why don’t you wait until Saturday? I could leave by nine-thirty. I could never forgive myself if you had an accident, driving all that distance alone.”

  “I don’t intend to have an accident of any kind,” Sheila said stiffly. “But I’d certainly appreciate your company.”

  “It’s a long drive,” Monica said.

  “A long dull drive,” Sheila said, “—alone.”

  In the car Sheila spoke of her Tangier adventures, her “two or three” Arab lovers, her meeting with her old friend Henri.

  “Ah— ‘Henri’!” Monica said in a neutral voice.

  “Henri’s secret—which isn’t of course a secret to me—is that he’s gay, masquerading as straight, and women exist soley to prove to him that he is straight when in fact—as Henri well knows—he isn’t.” Sheila glanced at Monica, as if Monica might be drawn into sympathetic laughter; but Monica stared ahead at the turnpike traffic. “Still, he always wants to try; and he always fools me; he’s so sincere. And so attractive. The son of a bitch is attractive, don’t you think?—you saw his picture. But it was all very disappointing—very frustrating—and afterward he showed me a snapshot of a baby—his baby!—olivish skin but very fair hair and eyes. Henri’s baby! But the joke, Monica, is,” Sheila said, speaking now rapidly, excitedly, and paying very little attention to her driving, “—you won’t believe it but the joke is, Henri wasn’t involved at all, not involved with any woman, I mean not as such, the mother is a French lesbian, a poet, she’s well-known evidently but I had never heard of her, she’d been impregnated by a lesbian ‘midwife,’ as they call them, using Henri’s sperm—semen—isn’t it wild?—freaky-wild?—he told me proudly he masturbated into a bottle and gave the bottle to the midwife and she prepared a spray solution or a syringe solution, or whatever—I was laughing so hard by then I couldn’t hear—isn’t it funny!—Henri, a father!—and anyway, Monica, they squirt it up into themselves and if it connects, it connects, and they have their babies sans men, and they’re ‘married’ most of the time—the women, the lesbians—and they’re said to be devoted mothers. Can you believe it! Isn’t it wild! Can you believe it!”

  Monica was watching the turnpike; Monica’s teeth were on edge.

  “Jesus, can you believe it!” Sheila said, thumping the steering wheel. She was laughing in short soundless spasms. “And poor Henri was so proud, he kept boasting, ‘My son, look,’ and I thought of him masturbating into a bottle, and I couldn’t stop laughing. . . .”

  “Watch where you’re going,” Monica said sharply.

  Sheila jerked the wheel and eased her car back into her own lane; it had been drifting to the left. “I am watching,” she said. But it seemed that she really couldn’t stop laughing—tears were streaming down her face, her expression was pained, contorted—and in the end Monica had to insist upon taking over. “I’m all right, I’m perfectly all right,” Sheila said, choking, sobbing, wiping at her eyes, but she surrendered the car rea
dily enough to Monica.

  Afterward Monica said: “I don’t know that it’s all that funny. It seems rather touching. As long as the child never knows. . . .”

  But this set Sheila off into peals of laughter again. She pounded at her knees, yelped and choked with hilarity. And after a while Monica joined in, Monica couldn’t help herself. It was funny, somehow.

  6

  Now I am in control, Monica thought cautiously.

  Now I know precisely what I am doing; what the perimeters of friendship must be.

  By degrees, however, Monica found herself spending more and more time at Edgemont. For a while Sheila wanted her to visit her studio every afternoon; not to praise, or to make suggestions, but simply to look, in silence. (“It makes a tremendous difference to me,” Sheila admitted, “—to think that you’ll be dropping by. Just, you know, to look. To register that I exist and the paintings exist.”) Often Monica drove there directly from school, to have supper with Sheila, then to return home to her own work. Saturdays, she spent most of the afternoon at Sheila’s. And Sundays were unofficially set aside as one of their days together: she had to explain to Keith that she was never free, Sundays.

  She never stayed the night at Edgemont, however. No matter how late she was in getting home, she never gave in to Sheila’s repeated invitation to spend the night. (“I have a place of my own, Sheila,” she said; and Sheila said, making a joke of it, “Why not have two places of your own . . . ?”)