Solstice Read online

  What is she like, what is she really like?—is she as eccentric as everyone says? And what does Edgemont look like on the inside?

  And why does she drive that beaten-up old station wagon—?

  And why, for God’s sake, does she dress the way she does—!

  Monica made no attempt to disguise her irritation, even with her older colleagues. She told them that Sheila Trask was a “complex” person. And “very private.” Trembling with anger, she composed a dignified little speech which, one day in the faculty dining room, she delivered to Brian Farley himself: “Sheila loathes the fact that people here gossip about her, people who know nothing about her—who’ve never set foot in Edgemont.”

  Monica would not have minded—she would in fact have felt it a challenge—if they had made inquiries about Sheila’s art: what sort of thing was she working on now, did she belong to any “school” or “style,” how did Monica respond to it—? But no one, with the exception of Jill Starkie (who “expressed her religious awe of her Maker” by doing watercolors of barns and covered bridges) mentioned the work at all. If they spoke of Sheila Trask in any professional sense it was only to speak of Morton Flaxman, who had been one of the “big names” in the area for years. He had sold work to museums and collections all over the world, he’d been written about in national magazines, been given awards, declined awards, accepted commissions, declined commissions, been mentioned alongside Moore, Calder, Lipchitz, David Smith. . . . He had been controversial in his time; he had been outspoken. There was even an early piece of his, a figure of sorts in stone, aluminum, and bronze, displayed proudly in front of the school library: Solstice was its enigmatic name.

  Flaxman had been given the imprimatur of a publicized fame, but his wife, his widow, though said to have a decent reputation in the world of art, was an untabulated quantity.

  It was rumored that she might have to declare bankruptcy—the entire estate was going to be seized for taxes.

  It was rumored that she was making a fortune—and not a small fortune—selling her husband’s work.

  It was rumored that she would remarry—a much younger man.

  (In fact—hadn’t he been a protégé of her husband’s? Hadn’t they been traveling together in the Orient when Flaxman died?)

  It was rumored—

  But one thing was certain, Sheila Trask led a self-destructive life. She had affairs, as everyone knew, with other artists—“people like herself.”

  Sheila’s studio was on the second floor of a converted carriage house set a little distance behind the main house. It was spacious, airy, attractive in its design—the skylight overhead, one wall made of plate glass and brick—but singularly cluttered, really messy, to Monica’s way of thinking. Painting equipment, old canvases, sheets of newspaper underfoot, dirty cups and plates and silverware, ashtrays unemptied for days, trash cartons unemptied for weeks, soiled articles of clothing and paint-stained towels hanging from the backs of chairs. . . . The place smelled harshly of paint, turpentine, cigarette smoke, sweat, Sheila’s frank undisguised sweat: and fresh-brewed coffee: and something else, something sweet, slightly rancid, which Monica could not define. Though she had been rather shocked by her initial visit to the studio she soon came to like it very much. The mess, the odors, Sheila Trask standing or crouching before one of her canvases . . . Sheila Trask allowing her entrance, allowing her the privilege of being a witness. . . .

  Even her friend’s moods interested her. (Sometimes Sheila was excited, almost wildly elated—sometimes she was irritable, angry with herself, contemptuous at the “progress” she was making.) Even the fact, disconcerting at first, that Sheila could ignore her, look through her, forget her for minutes at a time. They might have been old, intimate companions, even sisters. . . . In the final wretched year of her marriage Monica and her husband had moved through their lives like sleepwalkers, systematically ignoring each other, courteous, cautious, ceaselessly apprehensive. They shared a common space and a span of precisely calibrated time. Monica had not existed for her husband, nor had he existed for her: and by degrees Monica had slipped into a near-perpetual trance of hatred, knowing herself invisible, obliterated, no longer there. . . . But it was different with Sheila Trask. It was entirely different. In fact it seemed to Monica an undeserved privilege, a gift of sorts, that she might be, though physically present, physically forgotten.

  But if she sometimes whispered that she’d leave, she’d call a little later that day, Sheila often turned and said: “No. Wait. I’m almost finished.” Her voice might be strident and peremptory, it might be almost apologetic, even pleading. “No wait—I’m almost finished.”

  Monica thought about Sheila. She thought about “Sheila Trask.”

  She wanted to be honest with herself—she had always prided herself on being honest, even ruthless, with herself if not with others. What she felt for Sheila Trask was more than simple affection: it had to do with admiration, awe, even—perhaps—envy. (Though envy was not a very attractive impulse. One might more readily confess being filled with sheer hatred, Monica thought, than with envy.) But she could see that Sheila Trask differed significantly from herself and from anyone with whom she had ever been in close contact.

  It set her teeth on edge, as Sheila so frequently said, to enter that studio in the morning. It was sheer hell and it was getting worse. She hated the mornings, she hated herself in the mornings, wound up so tight, every muscle quivering, her heartbeat unnaturally rapid, as if she were a child, as if she’d never proved herself at anything! . . . every movement in question, every brush stroke, every decision. Monica asked if Morton Flaxman had been sympathetic with her, if his counsel had helped, and Sheila said, amused, somewhat irritated: “But of course he was the same way—most of the time he was much worse.”

  She said, grinning, her eyes narrowing slyly: “Most of the time he was crazy and I knew enough to stay out of his way.”

  She was envious, oh yes she was a little jealous, though she couldn’t have said why, could she have said why?—shaken for hours after a near-quarrel with Sheila, one rainy November Sunday, when she discovered the woman working in her drafty studio though she was sick with flu and obviously running a temperature. (In fact her appearance shocked Monica, who hadn’t seen her for several days. Eyes bloodshot, lips pale and slack, breasts swaying loose inside a thin cotton T-shirt. And that ravaged skin. And that smell—that rancid smell—of illness.)

  Go to bed Monica advised, call a doctor, better yet let me drive you to a doctor—you have to take care of your health.

  Sheila said contemptuously: “What’s called ‘health’ doesn’t interest me if nothing is accomplished.”

  Monica said, with a sharpness that surprised her: “That’s a childish attitude. It’s a selfish attitude.”

  She was slightly jealous, perhaps. But she hid it well.

  There was nothing in her life, she came by degrees to see, that corresponded to Sheila’s work and to her monomaniacal faith in her work. Even Sheila’s marriage, turbulent as it probably had been, was a far more fruitful and significant marriage than Monica’s. (She fairly writhed with shame to think of “Harold Bell” set beside “Morton Flaxman.” Dear God, if Sheila had ever met Harold—! Self-important and industrious as a bright undergraduate, quick, clever, intermittently “brilliant”—as his professors in Bloomington had praised him—but conventional in imagination, even in ambition. Monica remembered him frowning and squinting at himself in the mirror while shaving, as if he were gravely displeased by what he saw, an ordinary handsome face, his hair already thinning by the age of twenty-seven, eyes set too close together. “Do you think my eyes are set too close together?” he had asked Monica once, in an odd, vulnerable mood, and Monica had said, amused, “Of course not—what a peculiar thing to ask.”)

  Sheila’s passion, Sheila’s mercurial moods. . . . Nothing in Monica’s life corresponded: nothing that was Jensen made any claim for the extraordinary. Yet Sheila queried her, nearly interrogat
ed her, what sort of childhood had she had, was her family religious, what was it like to grow up in Wrightsville, Indiana, what was her first experience with death?—with sex? And how had she known she was “in love” with the man she eventually married? (Monica drew her forefinger unconsciously along her jaw, stroking the scar, thinking, thinking very hard, feeling her cheeks burn with the incongruity of her friend’s interest and her own meager resources. She heard herself saying things she wasn’t certain were altogether true: yes she had thought her body ugly in early adolescence, yes she had been frightened and humiliated by menstruation, yes she had feared she might bleed to death. . . . Yes she did sometimes think of madness: doesn’t everyone? And death. Madness and death. Doesn’t everyone?)

  Monica knew secretly that her capacity for love—for love and what is meant by “passion”—was deficient set beside Sheila Trask’s; she knew that Sheila was exaggerating her warmth, her good nature, her “blond optimism”—the attributes, mysterious and somewhat patronizing, she claimed to find in Monica. Was it flattering, or was it subtly comical, that Sheila Trask of all persons should regard her with awe simply because she navigated a day—a not atypical day—of classes, committee meetings, conferences with students, an obligatory coffee hour in the headmaster’s residence, and so forth: while Sheila had spent these hours in her studio staring at one canvas after another, seeing no connection between them, no logical relationship, visited by no impulse to work, overcome by a sensation of melancholy and paralysis. At such times, Sheila said, she believed she might be on the planet Jupiter: the gravity so much more powerful, murderous.

  “You should remember that I’m paid for what I do,” Monica said. “I enjoy it—it is hard work, but the day consumes itself, almost without my volition—and in any case I wouldn’t be there if I weren’t being paid.”

  “Don’t you think I’m paid too, eventually?” Sheila said, irritated. “Whatever I do at this point in my ‘career,’ it’s something Trask has done—which makes the predicament all the more awful. The gravity.”

  “I don’t understand,” Monica said, perhaps too lightly.

  “Then you don’t,” Sheila said, letting the subject drop.

  Monica told herself that she wasn’t jealous—well, perhaps she was slightly jealous—of Sheila Trask’s talent.

  And her reputation.

  (Monica spent some surreptitious hours in the public library tracking down the elusive artist “Sheila Trask.” Browsing through back issues of Art News, Art in America, American Artist. Turning the pages of these glossy magazines, examining the illustrations and advertisements, Monica felt her old prejudices return in a flood of mild revulsion. Perhaps it was not the art that offended her so much as the seriousness with which it was presented, and the value—clearly monetary—assigned it. Coils of rope on a gallery floor; ungainly white plaster figures of “humanoid” design; black stripes on boards; smashed crockery; American flags dipped in paint; a massive coil of chicken wire; “Action Paintings”; “assemblage sculpture”; “Pop Art.” She stared at photographs of a middle-aged male artist who had systematically burnt himself with cigarettes and made odd little nicks in his skin with a knife—and very subdued and proud the man appeared, as the herald of a “new and revolutionary” approach to art. There was the media-celebrated artist who had “packaged” several Miami islands in fluorescent-pink plastic, and another artist, scarcely less celebrated, who had publicized the idea—simply the idea—of packaging the entire globe in a similar material. . . . In this context it did not surprise Monica to learn that Sheila Trask with her nonrepresentational but highly detailed canvases was considered a “conservative,” even a “traditionalist.” Her work was described as Abstract Expressionism of a sort, in its “lyric” phase; yet it was related too to Minimalism; even to Primary Structuralism—whatever that meant: Monica gathered that it had something to do with sculpture. Trask’s work was “ascetic” . . . and “hedonistic” . . . and “cerebral” . . . and “impulsive.” It quite clearly derived from Cubism; yet there was an element of Action Painting in it, and overtones of German Expressionism. A predecessor was Hans Hofmann—unless it was de Kooning—and of course the influence of Morton Flaxman was never to be underestimated. One lengthy article in American Artist included a photograph of Trask’s studio in which Sheila Trask—somber, down-looking, very young and very thin—stood with her hands in her coverall pockets between two immense paintings propped against a wall; and it seemed to Monica that Sheila Trask herself was far more interesting than her work. Those large canvases, those queer unsettling strands and loops and stains of color, those empty areas—what was one to make of them? what words would do?)

  Of course Monica took pride in her work as well. Yet she hardly wanted to become self-righteous about it: teaching at the Glenkill Academy was not quite like teaching in the South Bronx, for instance, where one’s capacity for inventiveness and energy and moral courage might be tested to the full. Week by week, however, she was becoming more confident; it might be said—perhaps soon it would be said—that Miss Jensen was one of the “popular” teachers. Her students had seemed mistrustful of her at first (because she was a woman?—she rather hoped that was all) but now they were relaxed and congenial, they laughed at her humorous remarks, they appeared to respect her, they were working hard at her assignments and quite clearly learning something. As for the Glenkill community, the adults—they too seemed to like Monica well enough. Even, perhaps, a little more than that.

  (Should popularity matter so much, even in adulthood? Monica worried. But it was a matter of her job, after all.)

  It was Sheila’s belief that most people were fraudulent, hypocritical, shallow, inconsequential. Their souls—as she was fond of saying—were no deeper than dime-store teaspoons. (Hearing this odd remark for the third or fourth time, Monica had wanted to ask whether silver-plated teaspoons were “deeper” than dime-store teaspoons.) Most people, Sheila said, move from one superficial experience to another and prattle about “experience” and what it meant to them; they take up one interest after another; one occupation or preoccupation. But nothing really touches them—they can’t be hurt. “It’s possible to feel affection for such people,” Sheila said, “but you can’t really be friends with them—the bond doesn’t go deeply enough. Somehow you can’t believe in their existence. They’re expendable. They don’t matter.”

  Monica thought, chilled: She’s talking about me. But does she know it?

  One very dark night when Sheila was driving Monica home along the Olcottsville Road, Monica said suddenly: “You think the capacity to be hurt—to be betrayed and hurt—is a sign of depth? Of seriousness?”

  Sheila was driving rather fast considering the narrow road’s numerous curves and the faulty condition of the station wagon’s brakes, about which she often complained. She said, vague, distracted: “—of death? What?—I didn’t hear.”

  5

  One afternoon, having volunteered to sort through an accumulation of years’ work (“work and rubbish,” as Sheila said) in the vast closet in Sheila’s studio, Monica discovered, unframed, an exquisite little watercolor of a winter scene—a “realistic” winter scene. She even recognized the setting, a few miles down the Poor Farm Road, where the ruins of the old poor farm were visible from the road amidst a stand of scrub pine. How beautiful the painting was! How delicate! Her hand trembled faintly as she brought it, in triumph, to show to Sheila.

  “That? What the hell is that?” Sheila said, squinting. There was no date on the painting, no signature or initials. But, surely, it was her own work: and she supposed that Monica could have it if she really wanted it and if she didn’t go out of her way to say who had painted it. “Such a pretty landscape,” she said jeeringly, “—but wintry and craggy too: see that outcropping of rock? Almost as good as Andrew or Jamie Wyeth.”

  Monica said defensively that she did think the painting was beautiful. And it was certainly worth a great deal of money, so she couldn’t accept it as
a present. She had hoped Sheila might sell it to her. . . .

  “For Christ’s sake,” Sheila said, snorting in amusement, “don’t take that tone with me. Please. I mean don’t. If you like it, and if you have the wall space, take it, take it and shut up, see if you can find a decent frame somewhere and I’ll frame it, the transaction will take four and a half minutes and that’s that. It isn’t really worth discussing.”

  Monica repeated that she wanted to buy it. She hadn’t at all meant to angle to be given it: she was a professional woman just as Sheila was a professional woman. And it was an article of faith of hers that—

  “I said don’t take that tone, please,” Sheila said, though less amused now, “—it’s abrasive, it’s pompous, it isn’t necessary. You found it and it’s yours.”

  “But Sheila—”

  “Otherwise I’ll rip it up: do you want me to rip it up?”

  “I don’t think you’re being reasonable. I had wanted—”

  “Look, it’s pointless to argue. I don’t argue. I’m busy at the moment and I don’t have time to argue and the main thing is—I’d actually be very happy to see the painting hanging in your house, if you really like it, if it really appeals to you,” Sheila said. “Here, it doesn’t exist. It has no value. But I suppose it could have another life of sorts with you.”

  Monica’s senses were sharpened, her pulse beat quick, agitated, still combative. How bullying Sheila was!—how purely insufferable, in her self-conceit! But Monica backed down. She said, faltering: “But—are you sure? I mean— I hadn’t intended— It really is so beautiful—”

  Sheila too relented, suddenly. She examined the slightly tattered watercolor from a distance of several feet, her head turned to the side as if she couldn’t force herself to consider it directly. “Well—you’d say it was ‘beautiful’? In your eyes it’s ‘beautiful’?” She stared, she screwed up her face, ran her tongue fiercely across her front teeth. “Jesus, I wish I cared about that kind of thing now. That beauty. That delicacy. I wish I could even see it.”