Solstice Page 7
Monica felt the prick, the lightest pinprick, of coercion. But she only murmured a vague reply, neutral and near-inaudible.
James said with a droll smile that the artists he and Jill had known—and they’d known quite a few, beginning back in college—this was in Columbus, Ohio—Ohio State, where they’d met—the artists they had known were really colorful and eccentric personalities—unpredictable—rather childlike, in fact. Difficult to get along with but sometimes very likable. Lovable. “It never surprised me,” James said expansively, “the things we’d hear from time to time about the Flaxmans, and it never made me feel there was anything, you know, immoral about them. They simply abide by a different set of standards than the rest of us, and in God’s creation each individual only has to account for himself—no matter what the Pharisees preach.”
James Starkie was a burly good-natured man in his early forties who looked and behaved like a man in his late twenties. At Ohio State he had been a football star—so Monica had been told, many times—and it was considered quite a coup for Glenkill, that their much-admired chaplain was an athlete and a companion of young athletes, his name well-known to alumni. All the boys adored him, it was said—or nearly all: perhaps his relentless good nature and his white-toothed smile failed to charm the more “problematic” of the boys.
Monica liked him. She wanted to like him. She could see clearly that both James Starkie and his wife were genuine Christians, forthright, sunny, not at all hypocritical, possessed of the good news of salvation, the Good News of the Gospels—they were old-fashioned, unembarrassed, the real thing. Certainly they meant well. They meant good. And if she hadn’t Sheila Trask she would have been grateful for their frequent invitations to dinner and their general solicitude. (Early in the fall Jill had invited her to lunch to tell her that she shouldn’t worry about being lonely in Glenkill because it was impossible to be lonely—the Glenkill faculty and students were all one family. “I mean we really are,” Jill said. “It’s only that new instructors sometimes feel a little left out—excluded—simply because they’re new to the family, and worried, you know, worried—” here she flailed about for a moment, clearly in awkward waters, “—about being kept on, that sort of thing. But it’s just because they’re new.” She had reached out to squeeze Monica’s hand, as if impulsively; she was leaning so close, and smiling so happily, Monica halfway worried that she would suddenly embrace her. But she only said: “I know that won’t be the case with you, Maura, I mean Monica, because you’re basically not the type at all, I mean to be excluded and lonely, to stand off to the side making critical judgments; you’re more like me—I could see from the first that you’re more like me.”)
Monica was hoping that the subject of Sheila Trask would be dropped but Brian Farley, the chairman of her department, persisted. He was a bull-necked solid man in his midfifties, handsome in a somewhat pocked and battered way, known on campus for his wit, his “remarkable erudition,” his admiration for Evelyn Waugh. He sometimes affected a slightly British drawl and he had begun to resemble Waugh about the eyes. He asked Monica pointedly what Edgemont looked like on the inside: was Sheila Trask keeping things up, or letting things go, as rumor had it?—after all, the woman had a certain responsibility as “mistress” of a house like that.
Monica said quietly that she wasn’t a judge of such matters but so far as she knew Edgemont was in excellent condition. Of course Sheila had her own work, her energies were channeled almost exclusively into her own work—“she isn’t a museum curator, after all, or the priestess at a shrine.”
Farley replied with a semblance of affability that he had always admired Morton Flaxman’s work—it was strong, unsentimental, unmannered. As for Sheila Trask’s “work”—he’d seen a feature on her in one of the newsmagazines—Time, or Newsweek, he couldn’t remember—this must have been five years ago—and he didn’t know whether to be appalled or amused by the attention paid to such trash. All swirls and wildness and arbitrary color, no coherence to it, another joke played on the public—“the insatiably asinine public”—as comical as, what were their names, Jasper Johns?—Pollock?—and the Frenchman who assembled collages out of garbage dumps—what was his name—
The Starkies’ guests laughed though they were rather embarrassed for Monica. Jill shook a scolding forefinger at Farley and told him that he just didn’t understand, he hadn’t made any effort, had he?—to understand?
Farley continued in the same falsely amiable tone, speaking, it seemed, to Monica: he said he’d heard rather remarkable things about her friend. It was commonly known that she took drugs—amphetamines; she was a binge drinker; probably an alcoholic. She’d been known to show up at country taverns unescorted, as far away as Edgarsville and Bethany. She formed “passionate attachments” to women and men both, sometimes very young men, painters, and all sorts of odd things happened. . . . Then there was the famous Dorr case, Farley said, now smiling broadly, the man had been having an affair with Sheila Trask, or the woman—the wife—that actress with all the red hair?—she’d been having an affair with Flaxman—and one night they tried to kill each other—he didn’t have the details quite in order but he remembered that the Dorr woman had shot her husband’s ear off with his own revolver—and afterward they’d tried to blame it on a burglar?—wasn’t that the story?—
Farley appeared to be asking Monica so she said, stiffly, barely able to control her hatred of him: “I really wouldn’t know. I’ve only lived in the house since September.”
Farley clapped his hand to his forehead in what seemed to be a genuine expression of surprise; and even some regret. “I’d forgotten that you live in the Dorrs’ old house,” he said, in an apologetic voice. He really did seem quite embarrassed suddenly. “Well—it’s just a story,” he said, glancing up and down the table at his audience, “—just a local legend, I wouldn’t want to swear to the truth of any of it. Or even,” he said, with an abrupt puckish grin, “—that it was the gentleman’s ear that was shot off. That may well have been a euphemism for a more offensive member.”
That night, undressing in her rather chilly bedroom, with a single light burning, Monica caught sight of her wavering image in the bureau mirror and wondered that it was so altered. Her fading “golden” hair now looked bleached of all color; her eyes were unnaturally bright; her face was flushed, animated—as beautiful as it had ever been. And there was no one to see.
Her color was so high, she supposed, her eyes so glittering, because she was still trembling with rage. She wanted to telephone Sheila to warn her—she wanted to protect her, commiserate with her—how she hated such people, such petty smirking envious people!—Farley with his smug bulldog face and British drawl—Farley who had seemed for the first time in their acquaintance an enemy of hers, of hers and Sheila’s—
She lay in bed, sleepless, wretched, hearing again the prattle at the dinner table, hearing Farley’s mocking voice and her own thin cold reply. Had she betrayed Sheila, she wondered, by speaking so calmly?—so without passion? Without telling them how contemptible they all were—how irremediably shallow—set beside a woman like Sheila Trask?
She found herself stroking the invisible scar. For comfort, perhaps. For angry solace. It seemed to leap to her fingertips, pulsing warmly, hotly, stitched like memory into her flesh, a delicious secret. Though it was, she remembered, no longer a secret, strictly speaking.
2
And suddenly, in the first week of December, there was a mystery—a minor mystery—puzzling rather than frightening—in her life: someone had been “making inquiries” about her in Glenkill. A man of no particular age, no distinctive features, soft-voiced, unemphatic, discreet in his questions and even more discreet in giving explanations of his own. The drugstore, the grocery store, the variety store, even the real estate agency—even the Glenkill Academy!—he’d managed to visit them all, asking for information about Miss Monica Jensen.
“But what sort of questions did he ask?” Monica demanded. “—Who
could it have been? What did he look like? What did you tell him?”
On all sides Monica was assured, perhaps too vigorously, that of course the man had been told nothing.
Dazed, sickened, Monica had a vision of her former husband in a state of breakdown, turned suddenly against her; spying on her; hoping to ruin her new life. It was unbelievable, but who else cared enough about her to visit Glenkill . . . ? To question people about her? Yet Harold had seemed to feel little emotion for her, just as, at the end, she felt such little emotion for him. Their last telephone exchange, months ago, had been brief, perfunctory, even hurried; not at all embittered. “Good-bye,” Harold had said, and Monica had said, “Good-bye,” and that was that—eight years put to rest.
The headmaster’s assistant was an impeccably tailored and well-groomed young man of approximately Monica’s age, who spoke confidently to Monica, yet with some little embarrassment, about the unidentified man who had been asking about her. “He was a private investigator, Miss Jensen—I knew that immediately,” he said. “But please be assured, no one cooperated with him. We never do, with people like that.”
A private investigator?—a private detective? Monica stared, unable to speak for what seemed a very long time.
“He said—or, rather, hinted—just barely hinted—that he was a government agent of some kind, Internal Revenue, maybe—but he had no credentials to show, no badge, it was all a sham,” the headmaster’s assistant said. Clearly, he felt sorry for Monica, but the sordidness of the situation did not escape him. “In any case, Miss Jensen, we didn’t cooperate. When these things happen—occasionally a boy’s father will try to investigate him, if there has been a divorce, if there’s a child custody suit—when these things happen, no one cooperates; it’s Mr. Greene’s customary procedure.”
But Monica was still staring, speechless.
She began to apologize. She couldn’t understand, she said, why anyone would be interested in her—that interested!—but she was sorry, very sorry, and rather ashamed, and she hoped he would explain to Mr. Greene—if he thought Mr. Greene might be upset—
“Not at all,” the young man said, a trifle stiffly, bringing the interview to an end, “—it isn’t necessary for you to apologize. As I said, when these things happen no one at the school or in the community cooperates; it’s Glenkill policy.”
“. . . policy?” Monica said faintly.
Monica would have telephoned Sheila with the news, the amazing incredible sickening news, but Sheila was away in Washington on what she called “Flaxman business” (selling art? making arrangements for a museum or gallery exhibit of her late husband’s work?—Sheila was always rather oblique) and by the time she returned Monica had decided against telling her. It was sickening, it was sordid. And there was something unhealthy too about the thrill of self-importance the episode gave Monica.
After all, as everyone insisted, the “investigator” had been told nothing.
On the very day of Sheila’s return from Washington Monica happened to receive a letter, at school, from her husband.
There it was, in her mailbox—a quite ordinary and innocent-appearing letter in a plain white envelope, Harold Bell typed out neatly above the return address; all very explicit; no subterfuge about it. Surely a letter sent in such a way contained no madness, no accusations or threats . . . ? But, seeing it, Monica felt frightened; and thrust it into her handbag at once, as if fearful that someone was watching. Receiving a letter from such a man seemed almost a kind of complicity.
She would open it later, she told herself, when she felt a little stronger.
In the end, however, there was no need for Monica to open the letter at all: Sheila spared her.
Monica gave it to her, explaining that she felt too weak, too shaky, to hear from Harold at the present time. “I don’t want to read what he has to say to me, yet I don’t want to throw it away,” Monica said, her voice trembling. She looked at Sheila with a queer faint hopeful smile. They were seated across from each other in their usual booth in the Chinese restaurant; Sheila was pouring their tea. “I don’t dare throw it away,” Monica said.
“But I’d feel like a voyeur, opening it,” Sheila said, frowning.
Monica pressed her cool hands against her face to calm herself. The subtle perfumy scent of the tea both pleased and excited her. She said: “My predicament is, I don’t want to read it and I don’t want to throw it away without reading it. . . .”
Sheila turned the envelope in her fingers. She said: “The odd thing is, I wanted to write you a letter from Washington. From this dismal antiseptic overpriced hotel in Washington. I wanted to write you a long, long letter . . . but it terrified me, you know, that if I began I wouldn’t be able to stop . . . and I’m not good at writing, my nature is too crude and blunt for language. So I didn’t write to you, Monica; and now I see that someone else did.”
“What were you going to write to me?” Monica asked, surprised.
“How would I know?—if I had written,” Sheila said, licking her lips nervously, “I’d know: doing is knowing, after all.” She turned the envelope again in her fingers as if weighing it; then, almost impulsively, she ripped it open; skimmed the letter; her eyes narrowed, a flicker of something like distaste, or repugnance, passing over her face. “Nothing,” she said in a neutral voice. Then, before Monica could draw breath to speak (she really was frightened, her breath came quick and shallow), Sheila added quickly: “But I see no reason for you to read it, Monica. Certain words, once heard, or read, insinuate themselves in our memories forever; it becomes impossible to dislodge them.”
Carefully, yet unobtrusively, as if she were performing a private little ceremony, Sheila tore Harold’s letter into several pieces. And Monica, watching, felt an extraordinary sensation of relief and pain—and hilarity as well—as if the tearing sounds had something to do with her nerves, her very soul.
The remainder of the meal, the evening, was characterized by a good deal of laughter and frivolity. Sheila told marvelous seriocomic stories about Washington, Monica interrupted with childish comments and breathless laughter. If only, Monica thought, the evening could go on, and on . . .
3
Monica wondered what Harold’s letter had contained. Still more, she wondered what Sheila’s letter would have contained.
Now it began to seem that Sheila was absent from her studio more often; that she was markedly less absorbed in her work, and unwilling to talk about it. What she did talk about was fragmentary and jumbled. One day she said contemptuously that money engenders money—“the wheels keep on turning, ever more frantically, after you die”—but the next day she spoke of financial worries, her old anxieties, redoubled. Evidently (so Monica gathered) there was another tax audit. Or a gallery owner was suspected (by Sheila? by Sheila’s lawyer?) of cheating her. Or a friend, a former friend, wanted to borrow more money, and neglected to specify what sort of interest he would pay.
“Do people borrow money from you regularly?” Monica asked.
“Not regularly,” Sheila said, laughing. “I’m not a bank, after all.”
But, yes, there were friends, former friends, artist acquaintances, people from the old days, the early years, Morton had oscillated between helping them out (“He was enormously generous, it was a form of his contempt”) and telling them to go to hell; and Sheila of course had inherited them.
“It isn’t in my nature to say ‘no,’” Sheila said. “But it makes me ill to keep on saying ‘yes.’”
If Monica questioned her more closely, however, or offered to deal with one or another of these “friends” for Sheila, Sheila abruptly changed the subject.
Was she restless, edgy, ill-tempered?—cursed with a perpetual headache? It had nothing to do with her work, she said defensively, or with her private life: it was just December: the approach of the solstice: the malaise of relentlessly darkening days and relentlessly lengthening nights. Too many gunmetal-gray skies boring a hole in the top of her skull.
“Yes,” Sheila said, narrowing her eyes, wiping at her nose with the back of her hand, “—you’ve got it, friend.”
Now she had time, a great deal of time, it seemed, to spend with Monica.
Time for sudden lunches in the village (at the tiny pretentious Soup du Jour, at the Glenkill Diner where workingmen ate) when Monica had barely an hour between classes, and was breathless, exhilarated, gratified (ah, she couldn’t deny it!) to be seen about town, so companionably, and, as it were, casually, with Sheila Trask. They no longer met in the Academy faculty club, however, because Monica was rather jealous of her friend’s attention: she didn’t want her colleagues joining them, or overhearing their conversations and repeating them elsewhere. And Sheila liked to dress in old paint-splattered clothes much of the time. And she laughed loudly if something struck her as amusing. And of course Monica could never tell beforehand what sort of mood Sheila might be in.
Time weighed so . . . curiously on Sheila’s hands now, she fell into the habit of telephoning Monica at odd hours. Just to say hello. Just to hear Monica’s voice. (She was lonely, she confessed—“in fact greedy”—for a human voice.) Or she drove to New York City on business . . . but returned that very day, late at night. Her nerves were worn raw, she said, by the city: she simply couldn’t take the excitement and she refused, she categorically refused, to tranquilize herself the way her friends did. Then again she planned to spend ten days in Puerto Rico with an old dear friend, but never managed to book a flight; she spoke vaguely but with a nagging persistence of taking Monica with her to Morocco, to Tangier, for six weeks. That was a place to see, Sheila claimed. And what people she knew there!—not the sort Monica spent her days with, at the Academy.