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  Am I envious, Monica wondered.

  Am I going to be bitter, Monica wondered.

  Then, closely watching Sheila and Hen together, noting the high gay insistent tone of Sheila’s voice, and Hen’s studied gallantry, his somewhat too affable flirtatious air, Monica decided that the relationship was only superficial.

  Hen and Sheila, superficial.

  Superficial if lovers; if “old dear friends.”

  Still, Monica was impressed by Sheila in her role of hostess: the mistress of Edgemont.

  Of course the woman was under an incalculable strain—of course she had dosed herself with therapeutic drinks, beforehand—but her performance was controlled, polished—she gave little hint of unease—she was mistress of Edgemont after all, and quite looked the part.

  Monica thought Sheila unnaturally beautiful, more beautiful, indeed, than she’d ever seen her before. She wore a long dress of crimson crushed velvet in a wrap-over style that casually, but very casually, revealed a good deal of the luminous-pale skin of her chest; gold chains of varying degrees of weight and splendor were looped about her neck; gold earrings—not unlike Monica’s silver Moroccan earrings—fell gracefully, in coils, to brush against her shoulders. Painting a face, Sheila once said, a face overlaid upon one’s own, was a cheerful sort of challenge if one didn’t take it seriously; she quite enjoyed the task, bringing to it her artist’s penchant for stylish legerdemain, making of distinctly faded and flawed skin a ceramic-smooth surface—coloring in the lips brightly, slyly—applying with a tiny brush several shades of eye shadow (mauve, beige, dark brown)—shaping the brows so that they were not quite so savage but might be seen as exotic. Such beauty is sheer trumpery, Sheila said, therefore the sport of it, that, for a few giddy hours at least, one is what one seems: one “is” beautiful if one “seems” beautiful. And it was all very innocent, wasn’t it?

  Though thin, nearly gaunt, Sheila managed to suggest a lanky sort of luxuriance, with her springy black hair, her crushed velvet dress, the earrings, the gold chains, the rings on her fingers that flashed and glittered. (She had scrubbed her hands clean with turpentine that very morning and had done, to Monica’s surprise, a creditable job.) She managed to suggest too a childlike gaiety, a virginal chasteness, even as she and Hen kept up their flirtatious banter, and, from time to time, swaying on her feet in imitation of drunkenness (for of course she was drunk) Sheila slipped an arm around his neck to steady herself.

  When Sheila’s gaze locked with hers Monica believed she could sense her friend’s slight embarrassment—for this was all such a sham, wasn’t it—a masquerade, a sustained deception—but in the next instant Sheila smiled, showing her teeth, and called out aggressively so that all her guests heard, “Aren’t you lovely tonight, Monica—!”

  “Don’t tell me, please, that you’re an artist too, like Sheila,” the man seated beside Monica said, staring at her. “You could be an artist’s model.”

  “Really?” said Monica, greatly amused. “What sort of artist?”

  She was looking uncommonly good, she knew; and it did not hurt her prospects that she was the youngest woman seated at Sheila Trask’s dining room table.

  The man—his name was Win—“Winthrop”—smiled at her as if she’d said something witty, which perhaps she had.

  Monica in her black muslin dress with the fringed hem, long sleeves, a sash tied tight to emphasize her narrow waist—Monica with gold studs in her earlobes and the Moroccan necklace heavy about her neck—looked rather more Bohemian than Sheila Trask herself; and behaved with nearly as much abandon. She wasn’t drunk but she was high: and what of it? The unusual necklace elicited a good deal of admiration from Sheila’s guests, and compliments Monica deflected in Sheila’s direction. (“Tell Sheila,” she said. “It was her gift to me.”) She had brushed her hair until it gleamed; fastened it with a clip; and, inspired, feeling playful, she had pinned a small white orchid the size of a daisy above her left ear, bought that afternoon in Olcottsville. It did her spirit good, Monica had thought, regarding herself critically in her bedroom mirror, to look striking once in a while; to appear as that golden girl of old whose promise and whose good luck had so mysteriously drained away.

  Win repeated his question more seriously—was Monica an artist?—how had she and Sheila become acquainted?—and Monica heard herself reply in a vague charming silken voice, for, suddenly, it seemed that she too was caught up in a flirtation. Win was clearly attracted to her; he was alone at the party (unmarried? divorced?); the wine she was drinking rushed wonderfully to her head. (To all the parts of her body, in fact. Warming and consoling. In such delightful secrecy.) Win regarded her with such interest—such flattering interest—it scarcely mattered what Monica said, only the way in which she said it; the intonations she gave to her voice, the smiles she smiled, the movements of her eyes—the old trickery of flirtation, which she had forgotten. (Or was she simply out of practice, Monica wondered, amused.) Others at the table were talking of horses—dear God, at such length, of horses!—and there was a great deal of fuss over Sheila’s paella (which Hen graciously if almost too solemnly served, calling out the ingredients as he spooned them onto plates: chicken, shrimp, sausage, clams, squid: there seemed to be some silly joke about the squid, which one of the women at the table professed to fear); so Monica and Win were able to speak together at some length, uninterrupted, about—but what had they talked about, Monica wondered afterward—and they were able to establish the fact that they liked each other, they liked each other very much.

  The man’s name was Jackson Winthrop, Win to his friends (“You’re all Wins and Hens, aren’t you?” Monica said. “Is it a code?”); he owned a farm on the far side of Olcottsville; he was in his late forties; divorced three years before. He described himself with a self-congratulatory sort of irony as a Bucks County gentleman farmer though he no longer farmed and if he was gentle it was surely not by choice. “Just genes, heredity, Anglican schools,” he said. With a meaty sigh, leaning close, he told Monica that he was “your standard divorced man: embittered, impoverished, but still optimistic.”

  Monica decided not to tell him that she was a divorced woman.

  Most of their exchange would have struck Monica, by day, and in the impartial light of sobriety, as insincere, even dangerous. But, in Sheila’s elegant dining room, amidst tall candles and quivering flames and long-stemmed Venetian glasses and Monica’s heightened sense of herself (she could see her blond image floating diaphanous and lovely, a ghost-beauty in a mirror above Sheila’s antique Spanish sideboard) it all seemed highly significant; intriguing. And it was certainly flattering.

  Win was attractive, Monica thought, though rather too self-assured, his smile too nudging, his manner overly familiar. He poured wine into Monica’s glass, he leaned toward her, he brushed, by accident, surely, the back of his hand against her breast; his eyes were nearly lashless though alert, mirthful. How very unlike poor Keith Renwick, Monica thought. (She felt a stab of guilt; and some apprehension. When she telephoned Keith to break off their engagement for the evening—with the most feeble of excuses: Sheila Trask needed help out at Edgemont, her upcoming show, etc.—Keith had replied in short clipped sentences, and had not asked when he might see her again. I’m sorry, Monica told him, feeling, suddenly, truly sorry, but it was too late, perhaps; she had hurt him for the final time; she would not be hearing from him again.)

  “I’m relieved that you aren’t an artist like Sheila,” Win said in a lowered voice. “It’s so difficult to know what to make of her, isn’t it!—they say she’s very, very good—they say her paintings sell for a lot of money—but I just can’t see it, you know—I mean I’ve tried—all of us around here have tried—but we just can’t see it. Flaxman made more sense, I think—you could see he’d done a lot of work on his sculptures—but Sheila’s things, Sheila’s art, it’s all so mysterious. Don’t you think? What do you think? One night at this table Flaxman got into an argument with someone about Jackson Pol
lock—you know who he is, of course—all the squiggles and heavy looping strands of paint, raw paint—Flaxman said Pollock was one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century and one of his guests—I forgot who, it wasn’t me!—said ‘Bullshit’—‘Bullshit and I can prove it’—and things were pretty hot for a while, let me tell you.”

  Monica glanced up at Sheila, who was busily absorbed in a chafing dish, with Hen’s help—the dessert was an exquisite soufflé au rhum—and took no notice of Monica’s conversation. “Well—how did he prove it?” Monica asked.

  “Prove what?” asked Win.

  “He said: ‘Bullshit and I can prove it,’ and I’m wondering how he proved it,” Monica said.

  Win smiled at her, his cheeks creasing, dimpling. He must have thought she had said something especially witty because he made no reply at all.

  At midnight Monica disappointed Win, and Sheila as well, by saying she had to leave.

  Win immediately offered to drive her home but Monica, prepared, said she had her own car; she’d come to Edgemont under her own powers and she intended to return home under her own powers. “A point of honor,” she said, winking.

  “Please stay,” Sheila said. “You can’t mean to leave now.”

  “I should have left an hour ago,” Monica said. “I’m drunk.”

  “You aren’t drunk—is she, Win?” Sheila cried, taking hold of Monica’s arm. “And if you are, that’s all the more reason not to drive home alone.”

  But Monica was adamant, Monica was on her way.

  Sheila and Win both saw her to her car. Win shook hands with her, and Sheila surprised her by embracing her rather roughly, and kissing her on the mouth—this kiss, too, rough and hurried, scarcely affectionate.

  “Then, if you insist, good night!” Sheila said in playful bitterness, adjusting the little orchid above Monica’s ear.

  Driving home, slowly, luxuriously, Monica kept her mind blank. She was awash, it seemed, in a remarkable erotic warmth; a pulsing erotic warmth; concentrated in her loins but radiating out, wonderfully out, to all the parts of her body.

  That night she dreamt of the most extraordinary painting, fluid, three-dimensional, throbbing with life: Sheila’s painting, perhaps, but only partly imagined, still in the process of being transcribed. Monica was staring at the painting yet at the same time she was in it; swimming in its sweet radiant warmth, in its fleshy-sweet erotic warmth; scarcely daring to breath because the sensation was so exquisite, so precarious, so forbidding.

  And, ah!—if someone were to kiss her, harshly, impatiently, on the lips, what then—!

  10

  A triumph of a party!—so Monica telephoned Sheila next day, to exclaim.

  “Was it?” Sheila said indifferently.

  She had no interest in talking about the party, evidently; she seemed to have very nearly forgotten it.

  Before they broke off their conversation Sheila asked, suddenly, if Jack Winthrop had telephoned her yet. “No,” Monica said. “He will,” Sheila said, “—and if I were you, I wouldn’t see him.”

  11

  Ariadne’s thread, the secrets of the labyrinth, the convolutions of the human brain. . . .

  The canvases were to be completed and taken away, by van, in twelve days. Monica was on the telephone a half-dozen times in a single morning, making arrangements; her throat was hoarse with arguing.

  One Sunday an assistant from the Laurence James Gallery came out to Edgemont, to meet with Sheila; and Sheila insisted that Monica be present; she couldn’t get through the visit by herself, she said. (The young man, thin, blond, nervously handsome, a chain-smoker as addicted as Sheila Trask herself, stayed and stayed and stayed . . . until there was nothing to do, Monica realized, but invite him to dinner: she would prepare something in Sheila’s kitchen for the three of them.) Since the night of the party Sheila had lost a good deal of her spirit and energy. At Monica’s insistence she was no longer taking drugs—she moved slowly, lethargically, with a sort of bodily irony that Monica thought unnerving.

  (She isn’t really sick, Monica told herself carefully. It’s a stratagem of some kind, a way of making art.)

  As to the paintings themselves—Monica saw them so often, so obsessively, even, it appeared, in her sleep, she no longer “saw” them at all. There was a distinct internal logic to the series which one began to feel but it would have been impossible for Monica to talk of it. To murmur that the canvases were beautiful—powerful—compelling—lyric—or “lyrically violent” (as the young man from the Laurence James Gallery said)—seemed quite beside the point. All that was significant about them was interior, secret, indefinable; they possessed their own integrity; they were. Monica began to understand her friend’s almost fanatical interest in technique since “idea” could only be embodied by way of technique; Sheila detested the very notion of a conceptualist art—words were an admission of failure. So, in the studio, hour upon hour passed in absolute silence. It was a place where language did not determine action. It was a place, Monica sometimes thought, prior to language. To enter it—to dare to enter it—was to surrender the power of words, and to submit to another sort of power altogether.

  The paintings were succeeding, however. They were beautiful in their own oblique intransigent way. Of that Monica felt morally certain.

  “Yes, fine, but the thing is,” the young blond man said, lighting up another of his cigarettes, and fixing Monica with a look—intimate, slightly reproachful—she didn’t at all like, “—will she get them out of here on time? They’re finished now but of course you can’t tell her that—you dare not tell the woman anything. Frankly, Monica, this is the worst I’ve seen Sheila in ages. We’d all been led to believe, you know, from talking with you on the phone, that you had things in control—I mean, my dear, a little more in control.”

  12

  Monica was beginning to get sick, Monica felt at times a veering light-headed sensation as of unreality . . . not that the world about her (walls, ceilings, floors, windows, students’ attentive faces) was unreal but that she herself, passing uncertainly through it, was unreal.

  She had missed a few classes this spring. Nothing extraordinary—just a few classes.

  She was forced to miss (“unavoidably”) one or another meeting—a general faculty meeting, an English Department curriculum meeting—since she was needed elsewhere. Of course she made her excuses; she was careful to make her excuses; and to be sincerely sorry, sorry.

  And if she slipped away from her office in the afternoon—her office hours being 4:00–5:00—with a note taped to the door cancelling her conferences for the day—if she hurried across the lush greening lawn (bordered by tulips, daffodils, jonquils set fastidiously in place) to get to her car, and to freedom, escape—for she was needed, badly needed, at Edgemont: the knowledge weighed upon her obsessively—if she disappointed a boy or two, or three: surely they would not be vindictive, and complain of her to her chairman?—for after all they liked her, they admired her, she was reasonably certain of that.

  “I will make up for it,” Monica thought, “—after the show opens. Once the show opens. Then—”

  Sheila was saying in a small flat voice that she couldn’t allow the canvases out of the studio. Not that she was thinking of destroying them but it was clear to her now that she had months of work before her: the show would be premature: she would be exposed: her life would be over.

  “I made a miscalculation,” Sheila said. “Going to North Africa when I did.” She paused; she stared hard at Monica, quite clearly hating her. “Going to North Africa when I did, because of you. And my head was prized off. Too much light—external light. External fucking light when that has nothing to do with anything here.”

  Monica was stung by these words, yet, oddly, not very surprised. She was losing her capacity to be surprised: as drained of energy, in truth, as Sheila Trask herself, and not nearly so strong.

  Monica said calmly, even briskly, that the arrangements with the gallery were a
ll made. The van; the driver; the invitations; the plans for the champagne reception and the dinner afterward; the small press conference. (“Don’t worry, I’ll be with you,” Monica said. “I’ve promised, and I will.”)

  Sheila seemed to be listening, yet, a minute later, she repeated that the paintings weren’t ready to be hung. If Morton were here he would know: he’d give his judgment and that would be that. He never humored her, Sheila said. She was sitting slouched on the edge of a windowsill, beneath what seemed very nearly a blast of warm white humid sunshine, unflattering to her sallow skin, her pouched eyes. She dragged a hand slowly across her mouth. He never exploited or manipulated her, she said. Again she looked hard at Monica, her mouth twisting as if she were about to cry; or utter a violent epithet.

  “No one is exploiting or manipulating you,” Monica said carefully. “You know that.”

  “Do I? Do I? What do I know!—only what you fuckers tell me,” Sheila said.

  “Sheila, you don’t mean that,” Monica said, going to lay a hand lightly on Sheila’s shoulder. She would quiet her, Monica thought, she would stroke her into submission, as one might a frightened child or an animal.

  But Sheila slapped her hand away. “Don’t touch me!” she said.

  Monica will long remember:

  In the Founders Room at the Glenkill Academy—enormous fieldstone fireplace, bay windows of leaded glass, walnut paneling on the walls, comfortably weathered Oriental carpets—in a place of brown leather couches, also comfortably weathered, and folding chairs, and spring flowers in clay vases spaced about the room—in the late, late afternoon of a rainy May day—one of Monica’s interminable days—a day so very long, so very convoluted and ambagious, she could not have said, in her state of dazed exhaustion, when it began, or how, or why—in this place (but why is she here?) Monica sits listening to boys between the ages of fifteen and seventeen reading their “recent work” (poetry, prose, other). The audience consists of thirty-six boys (Monica has counted them) and a scattering of faculty members (eight at first, but now two or three have slipped away) and of course the chaplain’s wife, Jill Starkie: Jill in a bright blue velour smock over blue jeans, Jill seated on the floor in front of the fireplace, hugging her knees, her head turned to one side in an attitude of intense ecstatic concentration.