Solstice Page 4

  Morton Flaxman had been twenty-three years older than Sheila Trask at the time of their wedding: forty-two to her nineteen, and already a sculptor of national prominence. He had stood six feet four inches tall and had weighed perhaps two hundred forty pounds. The words invariably applied to him in print—“Gargantuan,” “Rabelaisian,” “Falstaffian”—quite appealed to Monica, who was nevertheless grateful not to have to meet the man. (Flaxman was said to have been, like many male sculptors, an “avid connoisseur” of women; but he hadn’t been nearly so promiscuous as his legends would have it. In fact in some quarters he was considered a “remarkably loyal” husband . . . he had stayed married, after all, for seventeen years.)

  Studying a photograph of Flaxman taken a year or two before his death, Monica was struck by his massive yet courtly—kindly—appearance. He was a visibly aging man, but not yet old, bearded, near-bald, contemplative, paternal. His shoulders were broad and muscular, his wrists thick, but the position of the part-clasped hands was graceful, with an Oriental delicacy and hesitation. Monica saw with a thrill of envy why a young woman like Sheila Trask might have fallen in love with him—at one time in her life, at least.

  According to Monica’s Glenkill informants Flaxman had died of a cerebral hemorrhage in a distant city—Tokyo, or perhaps Calcutta—in what were said to be “ambiguous circumstances.” (In a brothel of some kind? Monica couldn’t help but wonder. Or had he been with a traveling companion Sheila knew nothing of?) He had died intestate but since he hadn’t any surviving children from his two previous marriages, and no close relatives, Sheila Trask must have inherited his entire estate—property in Bucks County and elsewhere, art holdings, investments. It was locally assumed that Sheila Trask was a millionairess several times over, despite the way in which she dressed (considered willfully slovenly by some, merely casual and “Bohemian” by others), and the condition of the battered Honda station wagon she drove, and her rumored frugality at Edgemont. (It was whispered that Sheila had become criminally negligent since her husband’s death—she was letting the old house go simply because she couldn’t be bothered with it.) The twenty-room stone-and-stucco house, impressive rather than beautiful, but decidedly impressive, had been built in 1830 by a Glenkill squire, and there were numerous parties, including the Bucks County Historical Society, keen on buying it: but Sheila Trask showed no inclination to sell. She was stubborn, she was indifferent, she was coy, she was simply waiting for a very high bid? . . . though perhaps she was sentimentally attached to the property and couldn’t bring herself to part with it at any cost. She was said to have insulted a Glenkill woman when asked about her “plans” for the future and for the house: “‘Plans’? What do you mean by ‘plans’? Why should I have any ‘plans’ about anything? Why should you be concerned—?” And all in response to an utterly innocent question.

  Monica knew that Sheila’s words were literal—merely literal. She had no plans for the future or for Edgemont, she had no plans for herself, because her mind didn’t operate that way. Her mind operated in far different and far more fascinating ways.

  She may have been a millionairess technically speaking, but she worried a great deal about money in the way that persons with a primitive sense of economics and Fate worry about money: helplessly, despairingly, in frenzied bouts unrelated to actions or decisions. She was superstitious as well: she told Monica in all seriousness that a “good” year for her art always signaled a “bad” year for her life, and vice versa; and if her paintings sold well in a specific year it simply meant that, the following year, Internal Revenue would demand a costly audit. (“They hated my husband and they hate me,” she told Monica, white-lipped with passion. “They want to destroy artists because they hate art—they want to drain us all dry.”) Morton had died six years before and his financial affairs were only now being sorted out. It was all hell, it was sheer chaos, she kept from running berserk only by tossing things into drawers, not opening envelopes with certain return addresses, handing everything over to her accountants in Philadelphia two or three times a year. (But she couldn’t trust her accountants either. She had inherited them from Morton who hadn’t trusted them but had resigned himself to their tricks.) So far as Edgemont was concerned—the house was one hundred fifty years old, many of the outbuildings were a century old, everything was in continual need of repair, not only actual repair but the contemplation of repairs to come, and she didn’t have the time to think about such petty things, she didn’t have the energy, the spirit, nor could she trust local contractors—they were notorious for gouging widows. Morton had quarreled with virtually every contractor in the area anyway, so if she wanted work done—if she even wanted estimates made—she would have to find someone a considerable distance away. But she couldn’t trust strangers either. . . . (Monica said, laughingly, “But who can you trust, Sheila?” and Sheila said, unsmiling, seeing no joke in the question, “I really don’t know.”)

  So far as the art world was concerned—Sheila lapsed into a furious monologue one night at Monica’s house, drunk on Moët Chandon she had brought for them to have with dinner, saying that her husband had been cheated during his lifetime as a consequence of his indifference—his Olympian contempt—for dealers, publicity, critics, collectors: and now that he was dead, and his sculpture was worth a great deal, things were in such a muddle that she couldn’t cope with them and get on with her own work. “He was being cheated and now I’m being cheated and why should I make myself sick with worry?” she said. “But I do worry—I can’t help it—then suddenly I find myself not giving a damn—weeks go by and I don’t even think about it—it’s as if I hadn’t even known Morton Flaxman, let alone slept with him for seventeen years.” She paused, rubbing a fist into her rather bruised-looking eye. “Ultimately—I suppose I don’t give a damn. I could walk away from Edgemont tomorrow and never give it a second thought as long as I could keep on working somewhere else. I don’t feel like the widow of a famous man. I don’t feel like anyone’s widow—I’m simply too selfish.”

  Monica volunteered to help Sheila with her bookkeeping, or with checking for needed repairs on the house, whatever—even typing up forms and labels for her artwork—and Sheila stared at her as if she were mad. “With your teaching schedule, with all you have to do, where could you possibly get the time?—you’re being ridiculous,” she said, “you’re begging to be exploited. Morton would have said yes, yes at once, yes sweetheart, do climb aboard, but I’ll say No thank you.” Then she added, as if she couldn’t resist detaching herself, distancing herself, from Monica’s solicitude: “Also—I value my privacy.”

  Another day, however, she would come up with the sudden idea that she should lend Monica money so that Monica could make repairs and improvements of her house; perhaps she should even lend Monica enough money to make a down payment toward buying the house . . . ? “Or I might buy it myself,” she said vaguely, excitedly, “and you could rent it from me for a hundred dollars a month. Or would that be too much?”

  She acquired a credit card and insisted upon using it when she and Monica were together. (Occasionally the two women met for lunch at the pretentious Olcottsville Inn, where Sheila was deferred to as “Mrs. Flaxman” and treated with a solemnity she found amusing; at other times, dressed in jeans and sweaters, they drove out to a country tavern on Highway 29. Early on in their friendship they fell into the custom of meeting in Glenkill’s sole Chinese restaurant on Wednesday evenings, since Wednesday was Monica’s most arduous day at school: she began teaching at seven forty-five in the morning and wasn’t finished with various extracurricular duties until nearly six in the evening.) Impulsively, Sheila bought Monica presents—a beautiful Shetland sweater, a pair of hand-tooled leather boots, a four-foot-high orange tree in a wooden tub. (“It would look so beautiful in that alcove in your dining room.”) Monica was embarrassed to accept these gifts, more embarrassed to refuse them, and it seemed virtually impossible to make Sheila understand that her charity was patronizing. “Don
’t you know,” Monica said, hesitantly, painfully, “—it’s impolite to suggest that I’m so much poorer than you are?”

  “I don’t see that it’s either ‘impolite’ or ‘polite,’” Sheila said stiffly. “It happens to be true, doesn’t it?”

  But if Monica countered by giving Sheila something it was invariably the wrong thing: a pair of hand-knit gloves from Turkey which turned out to be so crudely fashioned that Sheila couldn’t force them on her hands, a Scarlatti recording that interested her so little she scarcely glanced at it, and would have left it behind in Monica’s kitchen if Monica hadn’t called after her. And Monica’s most ambitious—and expensive—purchase, a book of photographs of Antarctica by Eliot Porter, must have been similarly unappreciated: Monica noted it lying on a table in Sheila’s studio, week after week, always in the same position, untouched.

  Sometimes it happened that though Sheila invited Monica to Edgemont for dinner she found that she couldn’t stop work—she needed just another hour, another two hours—but she begged Monica not to go away: she’d be terribly lonely if she went away: couldn’t she wander about the house or the property, couldn’t she find a quiet place somewhere to read, or even do a little work of her own . . . ? Sheila’s nerves were at so high a pitch, her color so flushed, Monica was rather more flattered than hurt: it struck her as extraordinary, that this remarkable woman should have taken an interest in her.

  She was even responsible—so Sheila said—for “lightening” the tone of one of her canvases, the last in a thematic series she was preparing for a show. “It’s your influence—your blond aura,” Sheila said. “It really has made a significant difference.”

  Before Monica visited Sheila’s studio for the first time, in early October, she felt a clutch of apprehension. She was worried that she might be forced to lie about Sheila’s work—and she knew herself to be, as her husband had called her, an “insultingly unconvincing” liar. But the paintings were most unusual, most striking. There were nine of them, six large triptychs and three smaller canvases, in a style she would have characterized as Abstract, though she knew very little about contemporary art theory. The prejudices she had had before meeting Sheila Trask—the smug little bigotries and affectations—had long since dissolved; she was ashamed to have imagined she knew anything at all. (“But surely you know what you like?” Sheila said, winking, “—or what you suspect you should like?”)

  Sheila was in the midst of completing the series for a show in late February. She had more than enough time, she said—she wouldn’t be caught up in the usual frenzy and anxiety of the final weeks—she wouldn’t make the same tactical error she had made the last time. (“What do you mean by the ‘last time’? What happened?” Monica asked. “Nothing I want to talk about,” Sheila said curtly.) The sequence of paintings had been started years ago, before Morton’s death, and afterward she had put the canvases away to work on other things, less ambitious things, simply to keep her mind occupied and her nervous energy flowing so that it wouldn’t back up on her. (“If I don’t work I get sick, and when I’m sick I can’t work—I’ve never known which comes first,” Sheila said.)

  Sunshine fell so blindingly through the skylight that Monica had to shield her eyes. She studied the canvases, aware of Sheila’s close presence, Sheila’s scent, the bright black slightly derisive eyes, the cigarette slanted in the lips, the posture of self-mockery, self-consciousness, apprehension. Monica looked from one canvas to another to another. She felt an instant’s sensation of alarm—vertigo. Were the paintings as remarkable as she thought?—as beautiful?—or was her eye simply befuddled by the privilege of the occasion?—Sheila Trask’s affection for her, Sheila Trask’s intense and unwavering interest in her.

  Sheila said: “If you’re trying to ‘like’ it, Monica—if you’re trying to think of some appropriate adjectives—please don’t: I didn’t bring you up here for that.”

  The series was called Ariadne’s Thread. It had to do, Sheila explained, with the idea or memory of a labyrinth, not the actual labyrinth—“in which,” Sheila said mysteriously, “we don’t always believe.” Of the nine canvases only three appeared to be completed and were propped up against the rear wall. The others were ranged haphazardly about the studio, several laid flat on the rather filthy floor. Their colors were muted, subtle—grays shading into mauve, mauve into filmy white—intimations of clouds, a network of nerves, the brain’s secret convolutions. A grid of some sort, not altogether geometrical, appeared to be the organizing structure behind the rough-textured surface paints, but it was visible only in patches. Monica, staring, her senses almost too painfully alert, supposed she could see a progression of sorts from the earliest canvas to the last, which was indeed the lightest and the most buoyant of the nine. It was also the least convoluted: did that mean the labyrinth had been overcome—?

  Monica murmured a few things—she did like the paintings very much or, at least, she felt disturbed and provoked by them—they seemed to her extraordinary—but of course she couldn’t explain—she felt so impoverished—her vocabulary, her emotions—

  “Not at all,” Sheila said, laying a hand on her arm, “you’re not the impoverished one.”

  Sheila stamped out her cigarette in a coffee mug but almost immediately lit another. She mentioned, as if casually, that since Morton’s death and since something that had happened to her—to her body—at about that time, she had lost the desire, and most likely the ability as well, to paint subjects head-on. She hadn’t the faith, probably, that the subject existed; that her perception of it existed in any absolute way; that its inner being (spiritual, structural) corresponded at all to its surface. “We are all contained inside our bodies—trapped, if you think of it,” Sheila said nervously. She felt no contempt, she said, for her fellow artists who counted themselves realists, in fact she envied them, they seemed so young, so untouched, there was something childlike and belligerent in their art. But she could no longer paint that way because she could no longer think that way. Even her eye “thought”—that is, it “saw”—differently.

  “Now everything seems to me refracted through mind,” Sheila said strangely.

  “‘Mind’? But why do you say ‘mind’?” Monica asked. “Why so general a term, when surely you mean your own—?”

  Sheila appeared to be surprised and a little vexed by the question. “No, of course I don’t mean my own,” she said impatiently, “—of what possible interest would that be to me?”

  Sheila was much more at ease showing Monica photographs of Morton Flaxman’s work—there were pieces by him in virtually every art museum and collection of distinction in the country—and canvases by other artists, many of them friends of her husband’s, artists who had come to prominence in the fifties: Milton Avery, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline. Hanging in Sheila’s living room, and drawing the eye helplessly to it, was one of de Kooning’s Woman paintings: so barbaric, so angry, so crazy in its swirls and swaths of paint, Monica laughed aloud in sheer nervousness when she first saw it: “My God, do you live with that every day—?” she asked. Sheila, however, said coldly that it was one of the most beautiful paintings ever painted.

  One afternoon she took Monica into a storage space below her studio and showed her earlier things she had done herself, sketches, watercolors, oil paintings, everything unframed and much of it, Monica saw with dismay, in battered condition. Some of the work dated back to Sheila’s student days at the New York Academy of Art, much of it to the early years of her marriage. Monica flinched as Sheila, squatting awkwardly, pawed through a pile of large, soiled, dog-eared sheets of sketching paper, drawings she had done so long ago, she said, she couldn’t remember a single one—horses, trees, outcroppings of rock, uncompleted still lifes, numberless human figures, nude, male and female (including several, Monica thought, of her husband—though perhaps she was mistaken, Sheila paid them so little heed). She drew a forearm roughly across her perspiring face and said she couldn’t imagine why she kept so muc
h junk: if she had any shame—if she had enough energy to waste—she would heap those things together and burn them.

  Monica was shocked. “But these are extremely interesting things—don’t you think they’re valuable?”

  “. . . Geological strata, old dead days, days and weeks and years in fact,” Sheila said, her face flushed. “So much hope and expectation . . . and sheer diligence. . . . Now I’m forced to see these things through your eyes, and my mind is absolutely blank. It’s as if a hose had swept everything clean. I don’t know what to think—I don’t even know what I’m seeing.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Monica said warmly. “Anything you do, Sheila—anything you’ve done—is of value. And some of these things are extremely good.”

  Sheila squinted up at her, smiling uncertainly. Her heavy eyebrows nearly met above her nose in an expression of quizzical mockery, an expression Monica particularly disliked—it made her friend look ugly.

  “Are they?” Sheila said. “But why? Because someone who is well-intentioned says so?—because you say so?”

  The question was not insolent, Monica realized, or even, coming from Sheila, tactless: it was asked in all sincerity: but how to reply—?

  4

  Gradually it came about, Monica scarcely knew how, that everyone at the Glenkill Academy knew of her friendship with Sheila Trask. Sheila Trask the painter, Sheila Trask the widow of Morton Flaxman, Sheila Trask who owns—is it Edgemont?—that enormous old house on the Poor Farm Road? If they wondered how, or why, Monica Jensen had been taken up by Sheila Trask, and taken up with such zest (was she an artist herself? had she an interest in art?) they made no inquiries, at least to Monica: their questions were solely about Sheila Trask.