Solstice Page 8

  “Morocco?” Monica said. “Tangier?—of course I can’t go, Sheila. My spring break is one week, not six.”

  Sheila didn’t seem to hear. “If it’s money you’re worrying about,” she said carelessly, “I’ll take care of the plane tickets and expenses. All the expenses. In any case we’ll be staying with friends of mine, not at a hotel. You’ll love their villa on the water—it’s primitive but beautiful.”

  “It isn’t money,” Monica said, hurt. “You must know it isn’t money.”

  Sheila was bullying, Sheila was apprehensive. She fell into the habit of pacing about in Monica’s company, restless, joking, telling long convoluted anecdotes, her monologues pitched high enough to be funny—often supremely funny—so that it was easy to overlook their underlying despair.

  What was wrong? why wasn’t she working? wasn’t she working?

  She never quite heard Monica’s questions.

  She would drop by at Monica’s house with a surprise gift of food, gourmet food, from an Olcottsville store—a lovely caviar pie, a great hefty wedge of Stilton cheese, a French country pâté worth its weight in gold—and two bottles of Algerian wine (bought, as Sheila happily boasted, at a remarkable discount): ignoring Monica’s smiling protestations that she had a great deal of work to prepare for the following day, and she hoped to get to bed early.

  No matter, no matter: Sheila was lonely, Sheila was restless, Sheila was hilarious: in one of her exuberant moods.

  She could be funny about virtually everything, even suicide—the subject, the theory. (“As Nietzsche says, the thought of suicide can get a person through many a long night—don’t you agree?”) She was certainly funny about men. (“If a man doesn’t betray you it’s probably because he can’t.”) She smoked, she fell into fits of coughing, she was clearly drinking too much, and very likely (so Monica guessed: she didn’t dare ask) taking amphetamines. Her black eyes had acquired an unnatural glisten and her skin gave off a whitely radiant heat. Speaking, speaking rather too rapidly for Monica’s taste, she ran her hands nervously through her hair, and gestured far too flamboyantly. It was tiring, Monica thought, simply to watch: she would have liked to take hold of Sheila’s hands and make them still.

  One of Sheila’s new subjects was the phenomenon of aging.

  A reverse miracle, she called it.

  Yes it was banal and, yes, it was tragic—the tragedy being that it was banal.

  At a certain age, Sheila said, trying to be amusing, mirror-selves—“mirror-ghouls”—begin to appear. “You discover that you really were vain all along,” she said. “You were so supremely vain you never had to look—! But now you do look, more and more frequently. Because of course you can’t anticipate what you’ll see. How ravaged—that face of yours. How estranged. How terrifying.”

  But Sheila didn’t sound as if she were terrified, chatting away in Monica’s presence, crossing and uncrossing her long legs, eating most of the food she had brought for Monica; draining glass after glass of wine. Monica had the idea that Sheila had stopped eating at home—that she only ate in Monica’s house, or seated across from Monica in a restaurant—and that the act of eating had become a queer little ritual to her: she ate quickly, greedily, yet in a way shamefully, as if she resented Monica watching, if Monica were not eating. (“Aren’t you hungry?—have some of this,” Sheila would say, and Monica would say, embarrassed, “Sheila, I’ve had dinner,” and Sheila would say, as if not having heard, “This stuff is so fucking expensive, somebody has to eat it: come on.”)

  She spoke of getting older, always older.

  The clock, she said, ran in one direction only: that was its subtle trick.

  Her eyes were black, blackly moist, and the veins showed faintly blue at her temples: how strange she has become, Monica thought, staring: how beautiful!

  She began to speak of her mother’s death—and then stopped.

  And Monica did not dare take her up on the subject, knowing, from past experience, that Sheila could not be interrogated.

  “. . . She too was terrified of it, the mirror-ghoul,” Sheila said, raising her glass in a mock toast. “‘I don’t know who that woman is,’ she’d tell us, ‘—I don’t know who that thing is and I’m not going to look again.’ But she knew, she knew.”

  Monica licked her lips and said softly that she was sorry.

  “Sorry? Why?” Sheila said irritably. “The mirror-ghoul is waiting for you too—even if you are a golden girl.”

  Sheila disappeared, spent the day in Philadelphia, flew to Boston, flew to San Francisco . . . then suddenly she dropped by at Monica’s without telephoning . . . or left scribbled notes stuck in Monica’s door (her handwriting was virtually indecipherable, Monica spent long anxious minutes trying to read it: suppose the message were important?). She returned several times, nagging, insistent, to the subject of Morocco; six weeks in Morocco; a villa on the sea; and perhaps a visit to Egypt as well; had Monica ever been to Egypt? (“Of course not,” Monica said, laughing, “—you know I haven’t been anywhere.” “Then we’ll find you a Moslem lover,” Sheila said zestfully, “—and maybe you’ll never want to come back to Pennsylvania.”)

  Once Monica came home to find Sheila lounging in her station wagon, smoking a cigarette and examining Monica’s mail. She had not torn open any of the envelopes—so far as Monica knew she had not slipped any in her pockets—but she behaved rather guiltily when Monica confronted her. “In case your husband, your former husband, is harassing you,” Sheila said. “I thought I’d better check. I don’t want you to be upset, Monica—you know you get easily upset.”

  One windy Sunday afternoon Sheila rode her chestnut gelding Parsifal (“Would any other name do?”) across the fields from Edgemont, arriving disheveled and flushed at Monica’s house; and, unfortunately, at a supremely awkward hour. Monica had student themes to correct, lessons to prepare, letters to write (“Really? letters? to whom?” Sheila asked suspiciously); and, though she hesitated to tell Sheila, she had a dinner engagement that evening with a man from town—one of the Academy’s attorneys, to whom she had been introduced by Jill Starkie.

  (“This very nice man,” Jill had said, “—this very, very nice, lonely, civilized man!—oh I know you will like him.” And Monica did like him, to a degree.)

  So she explained to her friend that she was busy; desperately busy; and Sheila was offended at once. “In fact I’m rather busy too,” Sheila said. “I only rode over on a whim since we haven’t talked for a day or two. I just wondered how you are—I really don’t intend to stay.”

  “Will you have a drink, at least?” Monica said guiltily.

  Sheila paused, as if to punish Monica. Yes, she would have a cup of coffee, black. No: make that a glass of white wine—if Monica had any of the Algerian left.

  She sat, she crossed her legs, lit a cigarette, brought up yet again, as if out of habit, the subject of Morocco, Tangier, a trip along the Nile—she and Morton had taken the river cruise once, early on in their marriage, it had been a profound experience, Monica would certainly enjoy it. After the pressure of Sheila’s show was over she would need a change of scene, at least.

  “That’s true,” Monica said uneasily. “But I can’t join you.”

  Sheila stayed less than twenty minutes and had only a single glass of wine. She looked tired and confused; she looked her age. On her way out, zipping up her grimy quilted jacket, winding a blood-red mohair scarf around her neck (one of the few gifts of Monica’s she had condescended to find a use for), she said, suddenly, that Monica should be aware of the fact that the Academy was exploiting her. Did she know? Or didn’t she want to know? “The world is filled with people eager to drain your blood from you if you allow them,” Sheila said mysteriously. “And you’re the kind of woman, Monica—I saw this from the start—who isn’t capable of protecting herself.”

  Monica managed a reply, half irritated, half amused.

  She was quite capable of protecting herself, she said.

 
Sheila strode out to her horse, her handsome burnished Parsifal, she mounted him, too proud, or too indifferent, suddenly, to glance back at Monica. And Monica stood in the doorway, shivering, stubborn, refusing to call out good-bye. (Yet it would be no trouble, in fact it would be a delight, to cancel her evening with Keith, to prepare a casserole dinner for Sheila and herself, or some chili—Sheila was inordinately fond of chili—and set her alarm for six in the morning so she could finish her work then. It would be no trouble, in fact it would be a delight. . . .)

  She said nothing. She stood in the doorway, shivering, watching, as soft wet clumps of snow fell, blossom-sized clumps, in utter silence. Precisely when horse and rider disappeared into the falling snow—along the lane, by the edge of the woods—she could not have said.

  In the women’s lounge of the Olcottsville Inn, some hours later, Monica dropped coin into a pay telephone and dialed Sheila’s number. Urgently she listened to the ringing at the other end of the line—the ringing, ringing—in the emptiness of Sheila’s kitchen, in that long drafty living room—in the glassed-in porch piled high with books and old magazines—in the upstairs rooms (which Monica had never seen)—and in the studio: ringing and ringing, defiantly unanswered. (If Sheila were in her studio, and surely she was, the telephone would be disconnected. And no one, no one, could connect with her.)

  Monica hung up, received her dime back, tried again. Perhaps she had dialed the wrong number out of nervousness.

  Again, the ringing. A forlorn sound. Tinged just slightly with anger.

  The women’s lounge of the Olcottsville Inn was in fact the Ladies Lounge, fleshy-pink like the inside of a candy box or a womb; ruffled organdy curtains, a deep-pile crimson carpet, the unromantic odor of disinfectant overlaid by a perfumy air spray, lily of the valley perhaps. Two mirrors framed in simulated antique gold reflected each other, and a brass chandelier, endlessly—“Dear God it’s the old Versailles effect,” Sheila had once said, snorting in amusement, “right here at home!”

  Monica listened, listened.

  And still the telephone rang. And no one was going to answer.

  When she returned at last to Keith (her “date” for the “evening”: the vocabulary couldn’t be denied) he would greet her with an air of gentlemanly warmth and expectation, a pleasant smile, no doubt he would rise from his chair as she approached the table, he was a gentleman, very nice as Jill had promised, very civilized, and quite clearly lonely; not the sort of man to feel, or to express, annoyance, that his “date” had been away so long, making a telephone call.

  Fortunately they were not—“Keith” and “Monica”—at the stage where Keith might say, Are you worried about something, Monica? distracted? What are you thinking of, Monica, if not of me? us?

  4

  To whom was Monica writing, Sheila had asked.

  Not meaning of course to be rude: for Sheila never meant to be rude.

  (Sheila was a very poor correspondent, she confessed. Perhaps it had something to do with her temperamental inability to believe in the existence, the ontological existence, of people who were not immediately present, in the flesh; not, in a manner of speaking, in the room with her. “Then you forget very easily, do you,” Monica had said lightly, and Sheila had replied, “Well—I try.”)

  But Monica made the effort, Monica certainly tried.

  Romance is ephemeral, friendships can be permanent—so Monica came to understand, during the heady years of high school and college when she’d been, certainly it was pointless to deny it, an extremely popular girl . . . or, at the very least, an extremely popular personality. Even then Monica had seen that her friends, her girl friends, might well mean more to her in the future than her boy friends; and had not a thoughtful aunt warned her she would never have the opportunity to make such intense friendships again, once adolescence was past? So Monica wrote letters; dutifully, zealously, Monica wrote letters; though it hurt her unreasonably when one of her friends failed to respond to a second or even a third letter. . . . Harold had pretended to admire Monica for her faithfulness but in truth he’d thought her effort rather naive. He carried on no friendly correspondence at all; he simply hadn’t the time; nor had he (if it came to that) the friends with whom to correspond.

  “Women are different, I suppose,” Monica had said doubtfully.

  So she wrote her letters. By hand. Curled up on the sofa or propped up in bed, writing slowly, with deliberate slowness, hearing her own interior voice, imagining a one-way conversation: which is better, Monica thought, than no conversation at all.

  Then it happened, to Monica’s chagrin, that a letter she had mailed off to her friend Rebecca in Boston was returned—Rebecca had moved, no forwarding address—and Monica, disappointed, opened her own letter, and, reading it, was astonished at what she found: for was this voice, this smug little boastful voice, her own . . . ? It was not simply that the Monica of the letter spoke with a false ebullient air of her work and the “amicability” of her divorce, but that she managed, not once but several times, to drop the name of Sheila Trask. And so casually, as if inadvertently. Sheila Trask the well-known painter. . . . Sheila Trask who is a neighbor. . . . Sheila Trask the widow of Morton Flaxman, famous for his . . .

  Sickened, Monica thrust the letter away; sat huddled, for a long time, her head in her arms.

  Sheila Trask my neighbor, Sheila Trask my closest friend, Sheila Trask whom I see nearly every day and who is (or so it seems) wonderfully fond of me.

  5

  Monica was learning never to make inquiries, even sympathetic inquiries, about Sheila’s work.

  Monica was learning never to make inquiries at all.

  “It isn’t interesting,” Sheila would say coldly, “—it’s boring.”

  Or, fixing Monica with her razorish lopsided smile: “You don’t really want to know, so let’s change the subject.”

  Quite clearly something was wrong in Sheila’s life—the pressure of the upcoming exhibit, perhaps—telephone calls, unexplained, that left her embittered and shaken—but, in the right mood, she was as irresistibly funny as ever. She told droll tales on herself, wildly comic episodes out of the past, or something that had occurred just the other day in New York City (“There was this man, actually he didn’t look like a bum, on Houston Street, urinating a few yards from the sidewalk, absolutely no shyness, certainly no embarrassment”); she was drawn into laughing herself once it seemed that Monica, her uneasy audience of one, would laugh. Monica strained to see the logic of her friend’s humor and fell after a few minutes into her mood—slapdash, wide-eyed, deadpan, funny.

  Morton, Sheila said, had a very peculiar sense of humor: sometimes he laughed exuberantly, wonderfully; sometimes he merely stared in contempt. “I could never depend upon him,” she said casually.

  It was at about this time that Sheila, teasing and cajoling, finally persuaded Monica to join her on one of her pub crawls, as she called them, along the highway, over in Edgarsville and Swedesboro. There were, she claimed, “marvelous” places, never frequented by the genteel residents of Glenkill, bowling alleys, country taverns, dance halls, truckers’ hangouts, that sort of thing, it was precisely what Monica needed, and what Sheila herself needed, as a change of pace. “You’re actually becoming a stiff-backed little prig,” Sheila said, “— ‘Miss Jensen’ of the Glenkill Academy.”

  Monica winced, and laughed, as if the remark were just a joke; as of course it was.

  Smiley’s Place, County Line Tavern, Jake’s Lanes & Barbecue, Hedy’s Café, Swedesboro Inn, Mitch’s Bar & Grill, Buddy’s Circle Café, Black Billy’s . . . Places where you never ran into anyone you knew, Sheila said, and never anyone who knew you.

  So: in remarkably tight shiny-black trousers and a green satin shirt, Sheila was “Sherrill Ann,” a lively divorcée from the Edgarsville area who worked for the telephone company, or was someone’s secretary, or who owned a beauty parlor on a small scale; and Monica was a pretty blond named “Mary Beth,” also a divorcée from
Edgarsville, who wore a red turtleneck sweater, and blue jeans, and a locket on a thin gold chain, and who worked in the same office with Sherrill Ann, or was it in Sherrill Ann’s beauty parlor . . . ? They appeared to be friendly, forthright, uncomplicated girls, good-natured girls who enjoyed draft beer and bowling and casual conversations, standing at the bar side by side with men, but always insisting, always insisting, upon paying for their drinks themselves; and leaving together, as they’d come.

  At this point in their lives, Sherrill Ann allowed it to be known, they didn’t need male escorts no matter how well-intentioned and they didn’t want male solicitude, they’d had enough, God knows, of that—five children between them: they were simply out to have a good time and to get home before their babysitter became impatient.

  Which meant: they did not give out their telephone numbers, they did not even give out their last names, they weren’t being coy and they certainly weren’t playing games, and, yes, they paid for their own drinks. Every time.

  Which meant: they were fun-loving girls who didn’t take themselves too seriously.

  Sherrill Ann in her satin blouses tucked in tight, her funky suede vests and hoop earrings and wide leather belts, Sherrill Ann in high-heeled kidskin boots, chain-smoking, laughing uproariously as she traded witticisms with the men; Sherrill Ann with a midsouthern accent (wasn’t it?) but vague about her background, well you see she and her husband moved around a good deal, he was the restless kind, the kind who couldn’t be trusted, as events subsequently proved. Mary Beth was the quiet one, Mary Beth was blond, and snub-nosed, and sweet, and blushed easily, while Sherrill Ann joked with the men, argued companionably about horses, Irish setters, farming, hunting and fishing, local politicians, cars, pickup trucks, tractors . . . which were good bargains and which were not. Sheila, high after two or three steins of draft beer, laughed without restraint at rather crude remarks—remarks Mary Beth pretended not to understand or didn’t in fact understand—but Sherrill Ann wasn’t the kind to take shit from anyone, should anyone get too forward.