Solstice Read online

  Monica, staring at her, could not decide whether she disliked Sheila Trask intensely and wished her gone, or whether she felt the tug of a powerful attraction.

  Sheila began to muse aloud, saying she envied Monica her books, these particular books (orange-spined Penguin copies of the Brontës, Dickens, George Eliot, Trollope), they were so dog-eared and worn, so marked with underlinings and annotations, it was obvious their reader had not simply read the novels but had lived through them. Of what value was a novel, Sheila asked, if one couldn’t live through it?—if it were only a matter of words skillfully arranged? She was herself so caught up in her work, not trapped, exactly, but caught up, immersed, for years she had been obsessed with “figuring certain problems out visually,” she had all but abandoned reading; she had certainly abandoned these leisurely, massive, world-embracing Victorian novels. And she envied the form itself. She envied a profession that concerned itself with books, pages, print. The printed line, after all, is so orderly and chaste, so chronologically determined—that is, the reader is obliged to read line by line, page by page, in sequence; very unlike the visual image, which assaults the eye out of nowhere, in a manner of speaking, with no preparation, and no power over the viewer to demand from him more than a moment’s casual contemplation. How it sickened her, how it drove her wild, to observe patrons of art museums as they drifted and dallied along, their eyes brushing against masterpieces, skimming a row of paintings by Vermeer or Monet or Mondrian, it scarcely mattered, the human eye is so unintelligent, so uninformed. . . . And of course being present when her own paintings were on display was torture. . . .

  Monica ventured timidly to agree. She could imagine the strain, she doubted that she herself would ever have had the courage to risk such exposure. Even if, she added, she had faith in her talent. That is—if she had talent.

  Sheila chose to ignore this haphazard remark. She was musing, thinking aloud: “. . . Morton used to say there was something wholly sane about a book . . . because there is something finite about it. The book, no matter its length, encompasses a complete world. It is a world. But it displaces virtually no space in this world. Consider its size, its weight . . . set beside a massive piece of sculpture or a large canvas. God, how I envy that. The compression, the modesty . . . the sanity. . . .”

  She rose rather unsteadily to her feet and fumbled in her jodhpurs pocket for something—a package of cigarettes, most likely—which wasn’t there. Her fingers came away vexed, stymied. She said suddenly that she had better be going, a houseguest was expected at Edgemont that evening, she hadn’t prepared anything, in any case she had intruded upon Monica long enough. . . . Monica naturally protested that she had not intruded at all. She had only arrived, really; wouldn’t she care to sit down for five minutes and rest? . . . wouldn’t she like another glass of iced tea?

  Sheila appeared gratified by the invitation but declined it. She had only ridden over, she said, on a whim, a kind of glimmering of . . . but she didn’t know what: was Monica interested in horses? Somehow she had had the erroneous idea that . . . hadn’t someone told her . . .

  Monica said hesitantly that she did have an interest in horses, in learning to ride. But she’d never had lessons. And she was probably rather uncoordinated and out of condition. . . .

  Sheila smiled one of her brusque ticlike smiles and said, not altogether tactfully, that Monica was past the age for riding lessons, for any kind of serious commitment to riding. “You should be a young adolescent,” she said. “Twelve, thirteen years old. That’s when it begins. That’s when the urge starts. You find that you want to grip a horse between your legs and it’s a passion, a sudden passion, chaste, exquisite, almost religious. All the horses are stallions—even the mares. You could ride and ride all day and at night you dream about riding, about the horse, your horse. A few years later it starts to fade, this passion. It gradually disappears in most girls. With some of us, with me, for instance, it becomes a lifelong preoccupation, but you’re the kind of girl, I suspect, in which it would have faded long ago.”

  Monica, faintly shocked, laughed at her guest’s outspoken manner—this peculiar combination of rudeness and solicitude. “I see. I see,” she said. “I didn’t know.”

  Sheila was pacing again about the room, her hands on her hips, her stride loping, boyish. She examined the lighting fixtures which, she said, the Dorrs had had installed: but neither of them had much taste. She examined the ornate plaster moldings, the marble mantel (cracked in two places) above the fireplace, and the aluminum-framed print from the Museum of Modern Art above that, a brightly colored, airy, shadowless Bonnard for which, suddenly, Monica felt some subtle shame. It was a poor choice, surely? But what would Sheila Trask have suggested?

  Monica watched her, fascinated, amused. She had tracked dirt onto the carpet without noticing, she’d left the row of paperback books disturbed. Her insolence was remarkable; but one couldn’t take offense—for there she was, simply and defiantly herself. She displaced a great deal of air. She was assuredly not modest. Soiled jodhpurs, unshaven underarms, horsey scent, the sloe eyes quick-darting and shamelessly inquisitive. . . . In the slanted light from one of the high windows, however, rose-tinted by damask curtains Monica had hung only the day before, she looked quite beautiful: even gravely and uncannily beautiful.

  But it was only for an instant. Immediately she turned, continued her pacing, her disjointed remarks.

  (Indeed, as Monica was to remember afterward, Sheila’s conversation became increasingly directionless and antic at this point.)

  She expressed the hope, rather vaguely and hurriedly, that Monica would visit her at Edgemont soon. For dinner perhaps.

  She made the observation that Monica must be an object of unusual interest at the Glenkill school: being one of no more than a half-dozen women, and certainly the youngest and most attractive, teaching at an all-boys school.

  She apologized for having been so dogmatic about riding lessons: of course women Monica’s age, and older, did take lessons: and no doubt enjoyed them thoroughly. So if Monica was sincerely interested and wanted to know the names of some reliable riding instructors in the area . . .

  They might even go out riding together sometime, she said. (But in a vague trailing voice that carried with it very little conviction.)

  She shifted back to the subject of the Dorrs, the house’s previous owners. She and her husband had known them slightly, hadn’t entirely approved of them—they were summer people primarily, connected with the Olcottsville Playhouse, histrionic, hard drinkers, dilettantes, rather gaudy and glamorous, famous for telling cruel but uproarious stories about people behind their backs. But there was nothing significant to tell Monica about them. They were cruel and careless and shallow—all surfaces. The only “event” connected with their tenancy of the house—if Sheila remembered correctly—was a shooting accident. Mrs. Dorr had snatched up a revolver and fired several shots at a bird—a starling, most likely—that had blundered down through the chimney and was flying panicked through the house, but of course the shots went wild, she nicked her husband in the ear, broke a windowpane or two, of course the idiotic woman was drunk, both the Dorrs were drunk, as it turned out. “It’s the kind of malicious tale they liked to invent about other people,” Sheila said. She was edging toward the door; clearly it was time to leave. She lifted her eyes—bright, suddenly smiling—to Monica’s face. “At least you can’t be haunted by them,” she said. “They weren’t evil or profound. And as far as I know they’re still living—in Europe, I think.”

  As they walked out Monica expressed some humorous disappointment that the house had been owned by such people. She had had a romantic idea that . . . she didn’t entirely know what. . . . The house, the old barns, the countryside . . .

  Sheila pointed out that the Dorrs were very recent, scarcely worth mentioning, in fact: the house had probably been built just after the Civil War and had been lived in by a great many people. If it was “haunted” Monica hoped to be
. . .

  Monica protested that she didn’t hope to be “haunted”: she wasn’t that sort. Only inspired, perhaps. Drawn a bit out of herself and her own time. Her own history.

  Sheila observed that Monica didn’t have the appearance of a superstitious person in any case. Blond, healthy, forthright. A daylight personality.

  “‘Daylight’ and not ‘nocturnal,’ you mean?” Monica asked. She tried to smile to disguise the queer hurt and annoyance she felt; the corners of her mouth ached. “But is it that easy to judge other people?—by appearances?”

  Sheila’s lips stretched from her teeth in a semblance of a grin. “You forget who you’re speaking to,” she said.

  “What?” Monica said, half-frightened. “I don’t understand.”

  “You’re speaking to an artist—a painter,” Sheila said. She flexed her long supple fingers mockingly. “I put my faith only in appearances. In paint. On canvas. In two dimensions.”

  As soon as the woman left Monica poured herself a glass of red wine, hurriedly, and carried it upstairs, to the room at the rear of the house she was using as a bedroom. Her footsteps echoed with a surprising urgency beneath the high ceilings; the floorboards creaked. Monica knew that Sheila Trask expected her to watch her ride away, trotting briskly along the edge of the neighboring cornfield, back to the lane by the woods. She knew, whether or not she did watch, Sheila would assume she had.

  She was nearly faint with exhaustion. The visit had lasted less than half an hour—she herself had said very little—but she was as drained of energy as if she had been teaching all day. How odd, how alarming, was she actually going to faint . . . ? She leaned weakly against the windowsill and pressed her warm forehead against the pane, watching the horse and rider, noting with envy Sheila Trask’s posture, her absolute naturalness and grace, every motion of hers perfectly coordinated with her mount’s. Ease, confidence, bravado, a kind of self-mockery in the very effortlessness of her performance. . . . “She knows she is being watched,” Monica thought. “It has been her life.”

  She watched the chestnut gelding trot out of sight. It was a remarkable thing, really, if you considered it—a human being, a woman, astride an animal of that size: the animal’s spirit brought under control, its powerful muscles subordinate to a human will. One must either master his horse or be mastered by him, Monica had once been told. Neither prospect greatly appealed to her.

  She drained the glass of wine; her head was throbbing. Sheila Trask was gone and now the house seemed inordinately quiet. Monica felt so exhausted she had an impulse to lie down fully clothed on her bed and surrender to sleep, to a groggy afternoon nap. . . . Instead she went into her bathroom and turned on the cold water faucet and splashed cold water fiercely onto her face. She slapped her warm cheeks: she was angry with herself for being so fatigued.

  Her image in the mirror was subtly blurred and discolored by the old glass. Unnaturally bright eyes of no discernible color, flushed cheeks, a forehead raised in small anxious creases. The three-inch scar that ran along her lower jaw, which she had once believed would alter her life, had faded over the months and was now nearly invisible. She often found herself stroking it unconsciously, however, though she hated the sensation. She wondered if she had been touching it during Sheila Trask’s visit. And whether the woman had noticed. She stared so hard at everything.

  They would probably not meet again, Monica thought.

  Early the following week Monica happened to encounter Sheila in Glenkill as one woman was leaving the post office and the other entering. Sheila, wearing an old belted sweater and paint-splattered jeans, was studying something in her hand, frowning at a slip of paper, and when she glanced up at Monica her black stare was piercing and ungiving: then she smiled: and the two women found themselves greeting each other with the happy avidity of friends—whose mutual feeling, whose mutual affection, had evidently grown in their absence. “Monica, what are you doing here?” Sheila asked, as if they had met in a remote spot, and Monica, laughing, said: “What are you doing here?”

  It was a heady, disorienting sensation, a very odd development—a friendship that had taken root and grown in secret, without their conscious knowledge or guidance. Monica had never experienced anything quite so remarkable before. She warmly accepted Sheila’s invitation to come to dinner the following night—if she could find Edgemont. “You’ll find it,” Sheila said. She added: “I’ll come by at seven and pick you up.”

  3

  So it began.

  In the weeks that followed the two women saw each other frequently, except when Sheila was away (in New York City? in Philadelphia? elsewhere?)—rarely less than once a week, often as many as three or four times. They spoke very little on the telephone since Sheila hated the telephone—she felt crippled, she said, she felt aphasic, if she couldn’t gesture with her hands as she spoke—but they had lengthy and immensely absorbing conversations in one or the other of their houses, or in Sheila’s studio. There was so much to say, so much that suddenly demanded to be said. . . . Monica realized she had been desperately lonely without knowing it. And she was a little dazed, and certainly flattered, by Sheila Trask’s interest in her.

  “Really—!” Sheila would say, staring at Monica. “How odd. How fascinating. But could you explain—?”

  And Monica saw that—perhaps—she was fascinating.

  Their conversations were invariably intense, even strained, lasting well past midnight even on weeknights, and leaving Monica as depleted of energy and as nervously invigorated as if she had been exercising in the fresh air. Her senses alert, her attitude somewhat combative. . . . Waking the next morning in her bed, sleep-dazed, groggy, her energy not fully restored, Monica could remember vividly Sheila Trask’s flashing dark eyes and animated features, her laughter, her somewhat strident voice—she could remember the way things looked in Sheila’s wildly cluttered studio, or the delicate blue and white designs of the French ceramic tiles in Sheila’s kitchen, which Sheila had inlaid herself: she could remember these things clearly but she often had difficulty recalling what she and Sheila had discussed for so many hours. Sheila asked questions and Monica answered and sometimes Sheila questioned her more closely and sometimes Sheila spoke passionately. . . . The very intensity of their conversations and their occasional disagreements seemed to consume their actual words, as if such dreamlike agitation had to be surrendered by day.

  Monica was to remember, however, objecting one evening to a pattern that had developed in their relationship: while she spoke freely enough, confiding to Sheila a number of things she had never told another person, Sheila invariably stiffened whenever Monica asked her about herself—about her marriage, her childhood, her family. Sheila would rub her face vigorously and mutter that Monica couldn’t possibly want to know such things—she hadn’t lived a very interesting life—she had put everything of significance into her painting—and there was nothing left over. Also, Sheila really didn’t remember very much of her life. “I’m a wheel moving along the ground,” she said, making a playful flamboyant gesture, “—I’m the present tense—where I touch the ground—only where I touch the ground—only in motion.” When she was slightly drunk she spoke in a singsong voice that was both childlike and belligerent.

  Monica said sharply: “And the rest of us aren’t, in your opinion?”

  “The rest of you aren’t required to be,” Sheila said.

  Monica felt at this instant the woman’s sense of her natural superiority, as casually revealed as if she had tossed a coin on the table between them. But she had no reply, no declaration of her own—she sat mute, staring.

  Sheila wondered if it didn’t strike Monica, from time to time, as—well, slightly inappropriate: her position as a young and very attractive woman instructor at a boy’s school? Of course the Glenkill students were highly motivated and competitive—they were said to be unusually well-behaved for boys of that age—but they were adolescents, after all, they could hardly control the drift of their thoughts,
the contents of their dreams and fantasies. And, certainly, Monica must figure predominantly in their fantasies.

  So Sheila observed, eying her shrewdly.

  Monica blushed with irritation. But she didn’t inquire what sort of fantasies Sheila meant.

  The subject might have been dropped, but Sheila said, after a moment: “Though perhaps you don’t mind. It’s a species of romance, after all.”

  From acquaintances in Glenkill Monica learned that the Flaxmans, as they were locally known, were an “unusual” couple; had had a “somewhat experimental” marriage. They traveled a good deal, not only to Europe but to distant, exotic parts of the world—Afghanistan, New Guinea, Patagonia. Sometimes they disappeared for months and no one knew where they had gone. Sometimes one of them would disappear and the other—why, the other would behave as if nothing at all were wrong. Or be consoled—openly and unashamedly—by an alliance of his or her own. There were houseguests of an “eccentric” sort who stayed for months, there were reports of wild parties, drinking, drug taking, fights, very bizarre behavior—hadn’t a cast-off mistress of Morton Flaxman’s once showed up at Edgemont with a gun?—hadn’t a Jamaican lover of Sheila Trask’s once gone berserk with a poker? (“Of course,” Monica was cautioned, “this is all second- or thirdhand gossip and can’t be entirely credited.”)